Summer reading: From garbage to witchcraft to Moby-Dick's progeny, our critics recommend books for nourishment, instruction & edification.
Gallicho, Grant
Grant Gallicho Grant Gallicho is Commonweal's editorial assistant. Iam not one for beach reading. Or for beaches at all. When I think of summer reading, I think of being cooked in a subway...
...With 101 short stories of 101 words each, Anthropology is built for single-serving reading...
...He leaves his home only to visit dying friends— not to comfort them or their loved ones— but because only during his travels to deathbeds is he inspired to write...
...The remedy...
...Frank Lentricchia, the "Dirty Harry of contemporary literary theory," as the Village Voice dubbed him, has melded the genres of literary criticism and fiction in the rarest of ways—one that works...
...The difficult literary criticism that forms the centerpiece of Lucchesi and the Whale is well worth the effort...
...A good book levels dramatic external changes in temperature by inducing some of its own in the reader...
...Lucchesi practices textual criticism...
...Still others are outrageous: "Petrified at the thought of age withering my boyish good looks, Sundial blinded herself with a soldering iron...
...I am quite pleased to be jolted out of subway catatonia by something other than stench, and even more satisfied knowing I can keep this book in my bag and return to it whenever I want...
...This is more gimmick than art form, but it's a gimmick I'm happy to abide...
...The serious writing here is literary theory...
...Alan Lightman, MIT physicist and now professor of writing, made a splash in 1993 with his first foray into fiction, Einstein's Dreams (Warner Books, $10.95, 181 pp...
...Moby UNHYPHEN Dick, name of the White Commonweal 26 June 15,2001 Whale...
...Reach in...
...falls into the latter category...
...M-D...
...Everything finally depends on time: the assumption of past as informant of the present, and the assumption of future as a possibility...
...If Lucchesi is a book you cannot easily read piecemeal, Dan Rhodes's Anthropology (Random House, $18.95,217 pp...
...Interspersed are snippets of Lucchesi's theories on writing...
...There are two sorts of books that achieve this: Those that can be closed as you enter a train car and returned to, once inside, without much loss of momentum or meaning...
...In one world, time occasionally loops back on itself, and people are carried to the past on rivulets of temporal flow...
...Memoirs, he opines, are "the literary disgrace of our time," little more than forced vulnerability...
...In another world, everyone knows the precise time when the world will end...
...and those that require continual reading even as you navigate the sea of commuters trying to exit the train...
...If you haven't gotten to it yet, put it on your summer reading list...
...What we do with our time is what Lightman wants us to think about, even in the subway, where saving time is everything...
...cause and effect have no meaning...
...When I think of summer reading, I think of being cooked in a subway station, thankful for a book engaging enough to take my mind away from slow roasting until the next refrigerator on rails arrives...
...It's not always clear when the scene is a dream and when a memory—but that's the point, memory often being equal parts authenticity and revision...
...But voyage with Lucchesi and Lentricchia and you'll emerge with a new, broader understanding of Melville, Moby-Dick, and perhaps even the immortality of writing...
...lightman imagines a young Einstein in 1905, patent clerk in Berne, hunched over his desk after another long night composing his theory of time...
...I die...
...is its opposite...
...He knows, in the end, art will win...
...Some of the vignettes are brutally pointed and hilarious: "My girlfriend is so beautiful that she has never had cause to develop any kind of personality...
...In a fragmentary fictional structure, Lentricchia waxes philosophical about language, the act of writing, and Herman Melville's MobyDick...
...By the time you arrive at it, you've been wooed into accepting both the authorial eccentricities of Lentricchia, and those of his fictional counterpart, Thomas Lucchesi...
...Commonweal 27 June 15,2001...
...And Rhodes's single-minded attention to his male narrators' failed relationships yields real insights...
...Others are timely and even touching: "Unable to accept that Celestia was no more than a haphazard cluster of chemicals brought together by chance in a universe out of control, I started to believe...
...The book is largely a portrait of Lucchesi's mind, through which biographical scenes, like that of an unconsummated childhood crush, and Kafkaesque dream sequences run...
...These women and men speak in whispers, try not to act on the past to prevent themselves from destroying the future...
...In yet another, there is no future...
...Lucchesi and the Whale (Duke University Press, $17.95,115 pp...
...A warning to the sensitive: there are some slightly shocking moments of vulgarity...
...hide nothing, so that you'll be freed for serious writing...
...He dreams of other worlds in which time's meaning varies...
...Yes, Lucchesi tells us: "Moby HYPHEN Dick, title of book...
...M-D survives...
...But, at the same time, he indicts himself and the process by which interpretation deprives a literary work of its "shimmer...
...Smear it on the wall...
...Have no shame...
...If all of that sounds a bit cerebral, thaf s because it is...
...Death by criticism...
...While the stories often seem like miniature episodes of "The Twilight Zone," Anthropology manages to convey, with a remarkable economy of words, and in mostly ironic tones, how absurd we can be, how desperate, how obsessed with sex and surfaces and ourselves—often in that order...
...Introduced as a "recessed bachelor," Lucchesi is a one-time college professor, living with his parents...
...His credo: "Cancel all sentiment...
...A world with one month is a world of equality...
...Don't let Melville put you off...
...Lentricchia wedges a brilliant riff on Moby-Dick into the voice of Lucchesi, who asks, "Is this, then, already, the tedious debacle of what they call, in the academy, a reading...
Vol. 128 • June 2001 • No. 12
