And quiet flow the links

Over at the Denver Bibliophile, Adlai Jurek studies the tragic element in Roth’s American Pastoral. He says that Nathan Zuckerman is wrong to conclude that “every man’s tragedy” is that “[n]o one is prepared to face tragedy.” No, “man’s greatest tragedy is his distorted perception, for it creates a world that does not actually exist, creating expectations that can never be met by the true world and the hidden truth of the real people in it.” This is deeply untrue to Roth, but as always, Jurek has interesting things to say, even when he himself is wrong.

Perched On the Seawall, Ron Slate reviews two new poetry anthologies—a gathering of Cuban poetry over the past six decades, and a selection of poems on breaking up, which is intended to be “non-therapeutic yet transformative.” I wouldn’t touch the latter with space-suit gloves, but Slate makes a good case that poetry is the only form of free expression (or as free as anything under Communist tyranny can be) in Cuba. “Although all publishing in Cuba is controlled by the state,” he observes, “the state’s literary powers either don’t see a significant threat in most of the new poetry or just don’t care—so long as the poet avoids open dissent and accepts censorship.“

Taking a Leap in the Dark, Richard Marcus introduces Ruby and the Stone Age Diet, the third novel by the Scottish writer Martin Millar, originally published in 1989 and reissued here by Soft Skull Press. (Despite what Marcus says, the novel is not Millar’s “most recent.” Since 1989 he has written six under his own name and eight fantasies in the Thraxas series under the name of Martin Scott.) Ruby and the Stone Age Diet is the tale of an unlikely friendship in the mode, say, of The Second Coming, but with different sympathies.

Although I am only now getting to it, you should really took a look at Brad Bigelow’s rediscovery of Irvin Faust, a marvelously inventive story writer and novelist, which is up at the Neglected Books Page. Faust is an exception to my usual disdain for short stories. His Roar Lion Roar, named a best book of the year by the New York Times in 1965, offers a glittery mosaic portrait of Manhattan in the ’sixties from the perspective of those on the fringe of the city’s life. Faust downplayed his Jewishness, saying that he did not belong in the same company as Bellow and Malamud, but he is an important neglected American Jewish writer nevertheless.

The Amateur Reader continues his investigations into Robert Louis Stevenson, whom he acknowledges is a “professional writer, a hack, although he lived at some distance from New Grub Street.” Edmund Wilson shared this estimate of Stevenson, and could never understand Nabokov’s relish for him. Reading through the appreciations for him at Wuthering Expectations, which began Monday and persevered into Tuesday and Wednesday, one begins to understand why.

Meanwhile, Tim Davis has reached Part Three of his provocative autobiographical reading of Wise Blood. Anyone who plans to teach O’Connor’s novel any time soon ought to bookmark Davis’s commentary. As usual at Novels, Stores, and More, the criticism is not a finished, magisterial pronouncement, but the adventure of an excellent mind working its way carefully through an excellent literary text. Part One in the sequence is here and Part Two, here. Highly recommended.

Persisting in his return to “white-guy-literature” after a self-imposed year-long absence, Andrew Seal glances at The Big Sleep. This follows quick looks at John Le Carré and J. G. Ballard. Apparently, Seal must ease back into the political hegemony by way of “genre fiction.” Of course, the criticism at Blographia Literaria remains stiff with jargon (“Realistic scene-dressing is the provision of quotidian details which, because of their superfluity or excessiveness, demonstrate at least the authorial intention of anchoring the action in reality”), but at least Seal has given up moral preening for a bit.