Akwaeke Emezi, “Freshwater” (2018) (read aloud by the author) – Readers and reviewers spoke of this book as a revelation. I didn’t find it to be that, entirely, but I have an advantage: I’m a genre fiction reader. The idea of a fractured self expressed through mythological/religious tropes isn’t a new one on me, or the juxtaposition of ancient belief systems and contemporary living. So when Nigerian author Emezi has their autobiographical stand-in, Ada, experience possession by multiple spirits – ogbanje, not exactly friendly, not entirely demonic – as a way of explaining what someone steeped in western psychiatry would call multiple personalities, I wasn’t as blown away as the sort of person who usually reads somewhat-experimental fiction given big pushes by mainstream literary publishers with pastel covers might be.

It’s still a decent idea, though. Ada starts her (the character uses she/her pronouns and mostly identifies as a girl and a woman, even if one of the spirits inside her is a man- Emezi is nonbinary, though doesn’t deny the autobiographical element here) journey with the ogbanje early in her childhood in Nigeria. She’s not just a third culture kid, she might be a fourth or fifth, with an Igbo Nigerian father and a Malaysian mother who raise her in a variety of places, even if Nigeria anchors her childhood and America her young adulthood. She’s sexually assaulted by a boyfriend in college (which she starts at sixteen) and that’s when some of the ogbanje come to more or less take over her body for extended periods of time, putting Ada in the backseat. 

Most of the book is written from the first person perspective of one or another of these spirits. They relate their perspective, the actions they either see Ada perform or foist on Ada, their conversations with Ada and sometimes with rival spirits inside of her. The spirits are insightful, dependent on their human host while somewhat contemptuous of her (but more so of other people), possessed of some virtues, like loyalty, but no morality to speak of- and hungry for blood and suffering. Ada appeases them mostly by cutting herself and by getting into bad relationships with men. Sometimes, Ada tries to destroy the spirits or rout them from her, other times, the spirits try to get Ada to let them loose into the spirit realm, i.e., kill herself. Neither succeed, and Ada eventually learns to live with the ogbanje, as well as other, less identifiable spirits who seem to have her welfare, or a version of it, more in mind. 

At some point, and maybe someone has started already, but someone will have to write about the impact of post-1965 US immigration policy, specifically as it relates to favoring highly-skilled knowledge workers and students, on literature. Immigration, sojourning, exile, etc. have always been themes in literature, and structural aspects of the creation of literary communities. I do think there’s a prominence to immigrant literature, and especially to the literature of immigrants from middle-class (or above) backgrounds today, of third- (fourth-, fifth-) culture kids, in contemporary English-language letters, that’s worth studying. Among other things, this may be the work of a contemporary black author that I’ve read that has the least to say about race, though it has a lot to say about Nigerian and Igbo culture. If anything, the spirits contrast Ada’s experiences and attitudes with those of black American schoolmates more than white people, though Ada does meet plenty of those- though, mostly it seems, international students from Europe, including her main love interest, a dreamy Irish fuck-boy named Ewan. Ada came to America when she was sixteen, and moves across oceans and continents perhaps not in perfect comfort… but her discomfort comes more from being inhabited by spirits and having bad interpersonal relationships than from bigotry, homesickness, dislocation, or the usual woes one associates with immigrant experiences. 

I wrote about this some when I discussed Jhumpa Lahiri a few weeks ago. I feel like foreign students and young professionals have been a part of my life more or less since high school or college, if not before, and are a fixture of life for most Americans who go through higher education, probably most inhabitants of the other rich countries as well. The paradox is that, coming from hundreds of different cultures all over the world, they’re the most heterodox bunch imaginable in some ways… but given the ways that schools and employers select, they tend to be much more homogenous in terms of class background, and of course, the experience of migration, of adaptation to the host country, of embedding in institutions that have now, in some cases decades hence, made adaptations to the presence of immigrants, migrants, guest workers and so on, has a certain group-making effect, too. 

Here’s a trope I see in both the literature and in conversations both had with friends and acquaintances from the sort of international-student/knowledge worker milieu and have overheard them have themselves: Americans are generally blander, less interesting, less emotionally-alive than “internationals.” The internationals live, the Americans (usually, but not always, white) kind of shuffle through life in a cloud of privilege and occasional disaster. This tracks, I’d say. Among other things, you have to have some initiative to bother schlepping all the way over here. Generations of life as the global hegemon will tend to make the upper-middle-class-and-above scions of said hegemony a little dull, I bet. Combine the aftereffects of WASP culture and the hollowness of consumer culture, and you get people who put their surface feelings up front for all to see (and hear!) but who you don’t really get to know, if there’s anything to know, for years or decades. I sometimes wonder if the real divide in the world is between people whose countries have meaningful historical memories of defeat and occupation, and those who don’t. The unflattering emotional depiction of Americans I just painted can be applied to the next most prominent group of people today who haven’t seen a military occupation for almost a millennium, the English, and inhabitants of its other settler colonies. You could paint it positively – people from countries that haven’t experienced that kind of defeat as more optimistic, or whatever – but it’s hard to sell that pretty much any time after 9/11. 

So, Ada lives in America but barely notices Americans. I don’t say this as a complaint, but I do think it’s notable, and I also think it relates to how Ada (and Emezi) treat the ogbanje. Every now and again Ada worries that she’s crazy. But less than you might think! She worries more that she’s in pain, she’s depressed, she has terrible relationships, she can’t find a place in the world. Yes, the ogbanje try to kill her- but they also protect her and give her an odd sort of power. This, whatever else it is supposed to be, is an interesting way to express how a young woman with one foot in a modesty culture and another in hook-up culture might experience her sexual power (and its strict limitations vis-a-vis extracting humane behavior from the men in her life). She doesn’t need to be rid of the ogbanje. That’d be American nonsense, the ogbanje would say, and which it seems Ada, and perhaps Emezi, would accept. Such is life for the alive international versus the dead single-culture and/or Anglo. 

The flip side is, in a story told by quasi-demons with little in the way of consistent framework beyond momentary sating of desire, there’s not a great need for continuity. Characters pop up, one of the ogbanje explain that they are very important to Ada, big stuff happens to them, and then they’re gone, for someone else to come along and reflect the relationship between Ada and the spirits for a chapter or two. On top of this, if you’re expecting anything particularly spectacular, even within Ada’s head, as she and her demons battle it out (including demons battling with each other), you’re going to be disappointed. A snake shows up in her bathroom as a baby, there’s some somewhat distended writing, the spirits and Ada argue in the “marble room” of her brain- a fancy waiting room, essentially, Basically, it does seem like the daring-concept tail wagging the literary-execution dog, at times. In keeping with the point I was making earlier, “international” navel-gazing, even from international rich kids, is generally better than the same produced in the Anglo-American world, but it only ever delivers so much without the injection of something more. ***’

Ben Fountain, “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” (2012) – I came at this one precisely backwards. I saw the Ang Lee adaptation of this Iraq War film – really, more of a movie about surviving the Iraq War – with my roommate. We had heard it was very peculiar and a box office disaster, in part due to Lee’s decision to film at a very high frame rate. My roommate had just gotten a Blu-Ray player, or whichever technology it is, and so the painfully sharp images, which remind me of nothing so much as certain PBS productions, were right there in the living room. I didn’t even know it was based on a novel until I started asking around for good literary depictions of chaotic crowd scenes. A friend recommended this book, I found it used, here I am.

It’s good! The titular Billy Lynn is a nineteen year old private in the Army infantry. He’s there because he got in trouble back home and because he wasn’t sure what else to do with himself- his family isn’t exactly poor, but it’s not very functional. Billy’s squad was involved in a firefight in Iraq that wound up becoming a symbol of American courage (and lethality) as the Iraq war soured, won his squad and himself medals, and killed Billy’s best friend and mentor, Shroom. The Army brings the squad back to the US to be shown off at various events (especially in battleground states- this was 2004). The tour culminates at a Dallas Cowboys thanksgiving day home game, in Billy’s native Texas, where the squad is expected to meet and greet various big wheels and take part in a halftime show with Destiny’s Child.

Fountain weaves numerous threads — the squad’s efforts to get decent pay for selling their story to Hollywood, Billy’s sister (who was the origin point of the trouble that sent him overseas) desperately trying to get Billy out of going back to Iraq in two days, Billy finding unlikely love with a cheerleader, weird fights with roadies — around Billy Lynn. He skillfully keeps the threads wrapped around a central concept- the war sucks, but it also became the squad’s home. They can only really understand and be understood by each other. They’re not “boots” (to borrow a term from Marine, as opposed to Army, culture)- they don’t think the Army is great or civilian life without merits or the war good. They just are what they are — infantry grunts — and they can no more walk away from that than abandon selfhood. It changes their consciousness, not just their loyalties.

It’s not enough to say that Billy and the squad despise civilian America, like 21st century freikorps types. Pretty much all of them want to go back, when their hitch is through- they see themselves as, and are, hardened fighters, but not necessarily as a career. But there is a lot to despise in a 2004 patriotism-themed Dallas Cowboys outing- waste, ugliness, fake piety and endless fairweather patriotism. The aughts were a time when you could see America as a blind giant, monstrously strong but utterly incapable of using its strength in a sensible way, whether in the Middle East or just, maybe, giving the PTSD-suffering infantry squad some hint of what they’re expected to do during a halftime show in front of thousands and broadcast to millions. The halftime show was, presumably, the chaotic mob scene that my friend recommended I look at, and it is a fine scene, all of the endless money, noise, and sex of civilian America turned up to 11 and whirled around a group of confused teenaged soldiers. 

From the cheap seats — mine, and that of Ben Fountain, who does not seem to have been in the military (he thanks people in the acknowledgment for filling him in on service life), it seems that the life of the grunt is the life of a young man, distilled. Put him into a tribe of young men, isolate him from others, and then put the group into extreme situations. There’s power there — who has gained or exercised power in this world without putting young men in isolated groups, putting arms in their hands, and directing them against those who stand in their way? — but that power gets put in the hands of others, who are generally indifferent to the grunts’ fates. Billy and his comrades try to tap into a little bit of it- to sell their story and make some money (typically, just enough money to get their families out of some lousy situation, not enough to be rich), to get laid, to slack off, to drink and gamble and live the life most young men want to lead amongst other young men. But the structures around them — that they take part in, by coercion but also by accepting default — channel most of their power to the structure’s end. 

I guess if I had a criticism of this book, it’s the comparative lack of narrative thrust and, basically, stuff happening. Two fights — including one involving lethal violence — with a bunch of random roadie stagehands forces along the action, and feel wedged in. In general, though, limited agency on the parts of grunts makes a certain degree of sense. Even when offered a way out, there’s a certain extent to which Billy simply can’t take it, can’t be other than what he is. He and his sergeant can spite some money men looking to exploit their story, to finally bite back at a civilian world that has used and confused them, but that’s about it. Still- that seems reflective, of the lot of life of those who serve, and, if I dare make a comparison between (sacred) troops and (profane) civilians, of most of our lots. Fountain deserves a lot of credit for taking risks — setting the story during one day (with flashbacks), playing around with format in some places, having an important character be dead and only exist in Billy’s memory and imagination — and making this story as compelling as it is. ****’

Gore Vidal, “Burr” (1973) – My first Gore Vidal novel! Without quite meaning to, it seems that Gore Vidal set himself up pretty well for posthumous approval. I don’t know how many people my age or younger actually read his work, but plenty of them quote approvingly encounters with his long list of enemies: William Buckley, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Henry Kissinger. He was also on The Simpsons that time! Enough to endear yourself, much more than similar big white chiefs of midcentury American literature have done with twenty-first century literate types.

I got “Burr” from a library free pile, and hence, am violating my usual practice- I like to read series in chronological order. I didn’t know when I picked it up that “Burr” is part of Vidal’s “Chronicles of Empire” series, where he does his thing by following American history and writing scabrous thing about respected patriotic idols. “Burr” is the volume that takes place earliest in American history, but is not the first published. Rats! 

Anyway, as the title implies, Aaron Burr, revolutionary war hero, lawyer, vice-president, guy who shot Alexander Hamilton, alleged would-be conqueror of Mexico and/or the American west, all around scoundrel and bon-vivant, is the central figure in this book. The book takes place in the 1830s, after Burr has returned to the United States after being pseudo-exiled for treason and murder. He’s old, now, and has worked for some time as a lawyer in New York, leveraging his reputation for clever wickedness to his professional advantage. The narrator, Charlie Schuyler, is a young lawyer with literary dreams who is tasked with taking dictation of Burr’s memoirs, but with a hidden agenda. Various political poo-bahs in New York want Charlie to prove that Martin Van Buren, current president Andrew Jackson’s heir apparent, is Aaron Burr’s illegitimate son! Charlie is a somewhat angsty, weak-willed type, so he never quite commits to either Burr or to his handlers, or to the political passions that roil the city, or to anything other than a bad “Captain Save-A-Ho” fantasy in his love life. He’s a good receptacle for Burr’s story. 

Burr details the Revolution, his politicking in New York (he helped found Tammanny Hall, among other deeds), forming the Democratic-Republicans with Jefferson, almost becoming President, fighting the duel with Hamilton, and his shenanigans out west in fine high style. Burr prides himself on being an eighteenth century-style gentleman: urbane, disinterested, something of a scoundrel, adventurous, horny. In this, he sees himself as vastly superior to the rogue’s gallery we call the Founding Fathers: through Burr, Vidal depicts Washington as a vain blunderer with a gigantic ass, Jefferson as a sinister egomaniac who believes his own ever-changing lies, and Hamilton as tragic in large part through his failures to be the upper-class gentleman he desperately aped and sucked up to, despite the talents Burr acknowledged he had. 

In general, Burr and Vidal depict the era of the American founding as less of an epic of genius and more as a rather grubby tale of ego and greed. He reverses most of the conventional valuations of the period, not just about personalities. Burr didn’t mind the Articles of Confederation and saw the Constitution as a scam. Gentlemen as Burr understood them continually lost, and schemers – a class reading would say “proto-bourgeoisie” or vaguely caesarist/ideologue types ala Robespierre and Jefferson – won out. Out of the first five Presidents of the US, Burr has the most time for John Adams, who was at least a straightforward and intelligent opponent, and James Madison, whose brains Burr acknowledges but pities for letting himself become an appendage of Jefferson. 

Jefferson is the heavy for much of the book, and really, he makes a good one. A gentleman is always himself- Jefferson makes himself whatever is convenient for Jefferson. Burr depicts the various twists and turns in Jeffersonian thought — from borderline Rousseauian anarchism when he was in opposition, to interpreting the Constitution to mean he could buy a third of the constitution — as having even less to do with principle than most scholars now, emerging from decades of filiopiety towards the founding fathers, would find in it. Jefferson wanted power, wanted to throw red meat to the mob so they’d approve his tyranny, and only his incompetence — Burr carefully notes his shabby dress, his broken down houses with unworkable “inventions,” his generally ungentlemanly demeanor — kept him from being a Robespierre. 

Burr, for his part, models himself after that other half of the French revolutionary (shitty) outcome coin- Bonaparte. I’ll need to read more of Gore Vidal to really make this call, but in this one, Vidal comes off as squarely an American Bonapartist. It’s not so much that conquering Europe is good. It’s just that out of bad options, a smart dictator is preferable to feeble febrile weirdos like Jefferson. Burr considers himself a gentleman above the democracy- but his honor and good humor doesn’t allow him to despise the people, like Hamilton does openly or Jefferson does on the sly. To the extent Burr had a politics beyond frank (as opposed to secret, hypocritical) self-advancement, it was giving the people what they wanted- glory, conquests and adventures to either participate in or live vicariously through, and beyond that, being allowed to live their little lives in peace and relative prosperity. 

This is where Burr’s western adventures come in. Vidal, contrarian that he is, still can’t quite land on treason as being cool- if nothing else, that would cut across the rep he builds for Burr as being an honest crook. So he doesn’t represent Burr as trying to break off the (then-) western parts of the US as a private empire, or to sell it to Britain or Spain, with which the Jeffersonians accused him. Instead, Burr recounts a somewhat confused but fun tale of trying to gather armies of western pioneer folk to take over Mexico, and make him King or Emperor Aaron. He would have gotten away with it, too, if not for that lousy meddling James Wilkerson! But really, he implies, what gentleman of character wouldn’t want to get out from under Jefferson’s Virginian oligarchy and light out for conquests new?  It’s no coincidence that the major political figure of the time that Vidal paints in a relatively positive light is Andrew Jackson, who, it seems likely, at least paid Burr’s schemes some attention before Burr got pinched. Jackson’s a rougher-hewn, less interesting Burr, as far as Vidal is concerned, the best we’re going to get. But Burr was in Europe for most of Jackson’s career, exiled as a traitor (even if he was cleared by a federal court) and murderer (he argues Hamilton basically set himself up as a martyr for… well, a martyr for the elimination of Aaron Burr from polite society). He can’t get the real Napoleon interested in any schemes, alas, so he slinks back to New York to practice law and romance widows out of their money. 

This book is a little over seven hundred pages in my edition, and quite action packed. Charlie has his own life, involving literary and political intrigue, trying to “redeem” a working girl, and bloody murder, and beyond the political there’s shocking personal revelations about both Charlie and Burr. These are a little less interesting to me, and the big one about Charlie you kind of see coming. Most of these come down to questions of birth legitimacy and illicit love, and you can see why Vidal would incorporate this into his historical vision. The real America, he implies, is the one from the other side of the sheets, not in some Howard Zinn history from below sense (though there’s a soupcon of that), but in the sense of a subversion, sometimes just a plain inversion, of the received story. Burr is a devil figure in the sympathetic version of “Old Nick,” as a gentleman you can rely on to be naughty, and it appears Vidal has taken bits and pieces of old American lore, the Progressive school of history that would have been coming out of favor around the time Vidal was in college, with its emphasis on the venality of the great figures of the American past, some personal grudges (there’s a sort-of funny Buckley pastiche character), and his own interest in transgressive sexuality and behavior to make a sort of devil’s dictionary of American history. I look forward to reading the other installments. ****’