The outsider, a familiar if not always friendly creature, is often little unhinged; she—I take up the feminine pronoun in honor of our most famous poetic outsider, Emily Dickinson—tends to be fixated to the point of obsession with an artistic pursuit, though she may not define it as such; she is reclusive, and in that seclusion comes to invent a deeply personal syntax and vocabulary that seems out of step with contemporary literary practice. A glass pane is the preferred distance separating her from life, though she will steal out into the night, a shadowy figure on the shadowy grass, to admire the moon, or to lament that she doesn’t live on it. Occasionally, the outsider works her way, almost inevitably through the intermediary of a sympathetic and patient admirer, toward the center, though on the rare occasions this happens, it happens posthumously.

The similarities between Dickinson and Alfred Starr Hamilton may go no deeper than their fascination with bees, but both in their own particular and peculiar way are representative of the outsider type. Dickinson’s story is well known, Hamilton’s unknown. He spent the greater part of his adult years living in a boarding house—appropriately called the Walden House—in Montclair, New Jersey. (“He pays $40 a month for a linoleumed cell in a rooming house,” wrote Jonathan Williams in an impassioned plea to raise money to help Hamilton fight a charge of vagrancy brought against him in 1975.) He produced voluminously, displaying the intense focus common to this type: during the 1960s, Hamilton mailed roughly 45 poems a week to the offices of Cornell University’s literary magazine, Epoch—which, under the editorial hand of David Ray, had published a smattering of his poems—and although a collection of his work was published by the Jargon Society in 1970 and he had a brush with modest renown a decade later, he has remained largely unrecognized.

This is partly because Hamilton confounds. Was he a crackpot? A genius unsullied by the academy? A little bit of both? Is he a symbol of a subterranean America—a more modest, less vociferous version of his contemporary Allen Ginsberg? (In one of the few circulated anecdotes about his personal life, we learn that in 1961 Hamilton was fined $25 for sitting in a park during an air raid drill.) Can we see Hamilton as New Jersey’s answer to Robert Walser?

His work, like Walser’s, has been called mystic, naïve, humble. He wrote obsessively of loneliness and the moon and the night: what is lonelier than the moon, what keeps us closer to ourselves than the night? He loved the word “golden”; he asked more questions than he answered—and he asked a lot of questions; his odd syntax is capable of jarring the reader into a sudden shifting awareness of the world: “During Chicago,” he wrote of a stay in that city and of another city, that it is shaped by “the waistline of the river’s end.”

Much of his work, it seems, has been lost. He typed each poem once, without making copies. The poems he mailed off were said to fill shoebox upon shoebox in the homes of his inundated recipients. As can be expected of such fecundity, his work ranges from the inane to the profound. As if aware of this, he kept his poems short. They range from a single line to a page, rarely longer. There is a beguiling simplicity to his verse. He seems at times with his repetitions to verge on the nursery rhyme. “The Cardinal in the Bush” begins with the following stanza:

I wanted to know more about the cardinal

I wanted to know more about what the cardinal did

I wanted to know more about the cardinal in the bush

Despite the sense of curiosity evident in these lines, there is little childlike about Hamilton’s wonder. Even to call him naïve is to miss the point, or at least not to hit it straight on. There is more hard-earned wisdom than naïveté in the couplet that comprises “Even the Deep Sea.”

Even the deep sea

Laughs at a day of despair

Although Hamilton could be fit into the category of the gentle oddball without much damage to his character, there are hints of sharper edges, even if they have been smoothed by time’s melancholy flow. (Time is another of Hamilton’s obsessions.) Unable or unwilling to work, he survived on a modest inheritance. He claimed he lived on a frugal budget of $80 a month, which could not have contributed much to his comfort. Money is, of course, the great Moloch that hounds those who, like Hamilton, find themselves at the mercy of the muse. Is there any wonder that he defines poetry as “the story of the search for freedom”? Poverty need not corrupt a man, but it seldom leaves him unscathed. This is apparent in “Night,” one of the most haunting poems in Dark Dreambox.

I kept a typewriter

I carried a little dark suitcase around

I asked the proprietor for some of a little space

I was a stranger

I was always moving about

I knew there was lightning on the moon

I hammered golden letters against the wilderness

I hammered golden letters against the night

I held this light to myself

I had so little to say to all the rest

Hamilton is an austere figure at the margins of a literary culture that has little room, and even less time, for genuine eccentricities. He stands there, holding his light to himself, illuminating a world that is close to ours and sometimes like it, but nevertheless strange and mysterious. His work, as Geoff Hewitt alludes in his introduction to the Dark Dreambox, is just that: a locked box requiring not a single key but a jangling set. The equivalencies we’re used to in works that constitute the Tradition are largely absent in Hamilton’s poetry. His metaphors are his own, his symbols homemade. (“I live over a stove,” he says in an autobiographical note appended to this volume.) This originality is partly responsible for the distance between the poet and his peers. It’s also what separates him from us. It strands him.

If we’re willing, though, we can find our way to him. His gentleness and compassion provide the most satisfying approach. These qualities are evident in “A Crust of Bread,” a poem that elevates Hamilton above the concern of cash and accolades.

why, I often wondered

why was I a poet,

first of all

most of all, I wanted

to have been a bird

if I could have been a bird

but I wanted the starlings

to have been fed,

first of all

A Dark Dreambox of Another Kind is a testament to the perspicacity and daring of the Song Cave’s editors, Ben Estes and Alan Felsenthal. That Alfred Star Hamilton’s work has been given a second life is an affirmation that poetry exists as much outside as inside of the academy, and that art—as untutored and oblique as it may be—makes no distinction between a boarding house in suburban New Jersey and the hallowed halls of academia.

Stephen Sparks (@rs_sparks) is a buyer at Green Apple Books in San Francisco. He blogs at Invisible Stories and is an editor at Writers No One Reads.

Illustration by Emma Codner

I was twelve years old when I saw a man nearly die.  At the time I lived in downtown Reno, on a city block near a porn theater, pawnshops, boarding houses, and casino lights.  When I wasn’t visiting my mother in the downtown jail—where she worked—I stayed close to home, exploring and inventing and wondering, and claiming that concrete isle as my own.  Everything beyond this immediate zone was foreign, suspicious.

An only child, I sought out things to do.  There was the time I fashioned a string-pulley system in my bedroom.  Whenever I opened the door, the string pulled taut, and the bulb turned on.  Later, I spray painted cryptic messages on the walls in the hidden attic, my ad hoc stronghold, accessed by crawling through a closet.  Late one dull summer night, my friend Ralph called.  Ralph liked to listen to his stepfather’s police-radio scanner.  Something was happening a few blocks away, he told me.  After discussing the situation, we finally decided to venture farther into town.  On the roof of the eighteen-story Sundowner Hotel and Casino stood a man, his arms waving.  The man sat on the ledge, stood, sat again, threatening to leap.  Even though I led a somewhat secretive life away from my mother, I knew I shouldn’t be there.  This was a new kind of danger, an unfiltered glimpse into the adult world.  I decided to stay anyway, and watch.

Ten years later, when I came across The Wasp Factory, I immediately connected with Iain Banks’s world of unsupervised boyhood.  I understood its untamed protagonist, the motherless Frank Cauldhame.  Frank watches over an isolated island in northernScotland, which connects to the mainland via bridge.  Where others might find serenity amid dunes and mist and seaside views, sixteen-year-old Frank has fashioned the place into his own bizarre kingdom.  He’s developed rituals, terminology, even a quasi-religion: “I slowly made myself unchallenged lord of the island and the lands about it.”

In Frank-land, juvenile notions of masculinity run wild.  Frank builds dams and erects toy model towns, only to then flood the towns by blowing up the dams with pipe bombs.  His weaponry stash is impressive: slingshots, knives, an air rifle, a trowel.  As warnings to outsiders, he plants “Sacrifice Poles” around the island, on one “a rat head with two dragonflies, the other a seagull and two mice.”

Reading about Frank’s exploits, I saw flashes on an earlier me.  Frank runs his territory with soldierly precision, like I did on my old block; but he does me one better by crafting his own lingo and island map, zooming about stealthily, from “Silent Running” to “Emergency Speed.”  While I never captured animals for sacrifice, my friends and I did wreak havoc on lizards with fireworks and BB guns.  I, too, had a weapons obsession.  I, too, hid boy-items around my neighborhood: toy guns, nunchucks, et cetera.  I once convinced my mother to buy me a Japanese throwing star, which I carried for protection, even though I didn’t really know how to use it.

Though I felt odd as the child of a single mother, my oddness didn’t hold a candle to Frank’s gothic childhood and adolescence.  For one, he shares a home with his gimpy and ineffectual father, a chemist and bona fide liar.  Father and son are mysteries to each other.  Frank keeps his secret—the Wasp Factory—stored in the loft while his father guards a locked study.  Homeschooled, Frank is literally cut off from the world and has learned to “live without other people,” but with his “unfortunate disability”—mutilated genitals.

Frank creates his own system of symbols to cope with his loneliness and disfigurement.  Central to his beliefs is the Factory, which is really “the face of the old clock which used to hang over the door of the Royal Bank of Scotland in Porteneil.”  Scrounged from the town dump, the boy has transformed the clock into an oracle and torture chamber.  Frank releases wasps inside it.  At each numeral “the wasp can enter one of the twelve corridors through little wasp-sized doors” and “sooner or later they all choose…and their fate is sealed.”  Judging by the names attributed to each trapdoor, these twelve fates aren’t happy ones: Boiling Pond, Spider’s Parlor, Antery, Acid Pit, et cetera.  Each door is a portent, especially Fiery Lake, the corridor one wasp enters when Frank consults the Factory about his half brother, Eric.

At 184 pages, the novel is short and thin on plot.  It’s primarily the tale of why Frank is Frank.  But his half brother, who escapes from a mental institution at the beginning, helps move everything along.  Eric taunts Frank by suggesting, via phone calls, that he’s coming home for some terrible purpose.  Eric sets dogs on fire, among other nasty things—not that Frank is much better.  Did I mention that Frank describes how he once killed people, two cousins and a brother?  Reading Frank’s confession might feel shocking if his methods of execution weren’t so humorously over-the-top, so deliciously macabre, and if he weren’t himself so mischievously self-aware.  Frank goads his youngest brother into repeatedly smacking an old beached German bomb; he renames that section of the island the “Bomb Circle.”  And the moniker he assigns the spot where he once slid a poisonous adder inside his cousin’s prosthetic leg?  “Snake Park,” naturally.  But those shenanigans are all in the past.  “It was just a phase I was going through,” he explains.

Iain Banks isn’t as well known in the United States as he is across the pond, but he should be, if simply for his unparalleled and at times brutal originality.  The Wasp Factory was at first largely met with apoplectic outrage in the United Kingdom—“Rubbish!” claimed the Times of London upon the novel’s 1984 publication—but over a decade or so its reputation grew, and by 1997, British readers, in a highly publicized poll, gave it a place in the top one hundred books of the century.  (Number thirty-two, no less.)  Readers can see from this debut novel where Banks was eventually headed.  As Iain “M.” Banks, he’s written thirteen science-fiction books, plus a dozen or so others as just Iain Banks.  Banks loves world building and has an eye for apocalyptic scenarios, which is certainly true here.  He enjoys undermining expectations and playing games—also true here.  But this first book is singular, exuding a deep, eerie resonance: he nails the inner life of a wayward boy so well.

And Frank Cauldhame is defiantly wayward.  Soon he’s prepping for Eric’s arrival, fearful of what the Factory foretold.  FieryLakesymbolizes inferno; will Eric burn everything?  Banks complicates the denouement when Frank eventually gets a peek inside his father’s locked study, and then the inevitable happens: Eric returns, the father confesses his own startling secret, and the island, and Frank’s weird sorcery over it, loses potency as young Frank must now confront what’s been lurking inside him all along.

We’re shaped by our early lives.  These days, I sometimes think about that man atop the casino’s roof.  And I wonder how, and if, witnessing such an event recalibrated something inside me, if watching someone’s life sway in the balance removed some filter for me—made me a witness, like Frank, to the shadowy nature of humankind.

Don Waters is the author of Desert Gothic, a story collection, and a forthcoming novel, Sunland.

More than a century before I awed my friends with simple muscle reactions, Lulu Hurst, a thirteen-year-old girl in rural Cedartown, Georgia, played a similar prank that made her cousin believe Hurst harnessed the then-mysterious power of electricity. Hurst stuck a hairpin into a mattress beside her sleeping cousin’s head, timed exactly to the spooky noises of a freak lightning storm. While Hurst was probably merely bored and craving escape from the powerlessness that comes with poverty, a small town, and being a girl in 1883, her startled cousin’s belief that Hurst’s hands conveyed electricity–and Hurst’s failure to correct that notion–changed her life.

I learned about Hurst because my mother and I share a minor obsession with vaudeville and “freak show” women who defied limitations through physics, alchemy, luck, and lies. We admire their bravado. Long after my own teen years were past, my mother e-mailed me a digital clipping from Cassier’s Magazine, an obscure engineering periodical from the turn of the nineteenth century. The article, “The Feats of the Magnetic Girl Explained,” introduced me to the stage career of Lulu Hurst, “The Magnetic Girl” and, sometimes, “The Georgia Wonder.” On stage, Hurst turned umbrellas inside out with a touch of her hand. She appeared to lift grown men straddling parlor chairs by bracing her feet, hidden by her long skirt, and tilting the chairs to a forty-five-degree angle. But her true feat lay in convincing the gullible that she harbored exceptional power. This teenage girl grabbed the Victorian man by his fear of the looming twentieth century and threw him to the ground. She was “the master of them all.” In one of the few remaining photos of her, Hurst smiles out like a possum in a dress. She’s every kid I simultaneously admired and feared: the girl who stuck her foot into the aisle when I was called to the blackboard, the girl who tossed cans of cheap beer onto the blacktop from the passenger window of her boyfriend’s speeding Camaro. The Magnetic Girl’s feats—and the profits they generated—saved her family from desolation. Lulu Hurst, would that I were you.

Lulu Hurst and the Magnetic Girl phenomenon were forgotten to all but aficionados of weird science until her 1897 book, Lulu Hurst (the Georgia Wonder) Writes Her Autobiography, and for the First Time Explains and Demonstrates the Great Secret of Her Marvelous Power, reappeared as a book-within-a-book in The Georgia Wonder: Lulu Hurst and the Secret That Shook America by Barry Wiley, published in 2004 by Hermetic Press. The delirious mayhem of Writes Her Autobiography’s cover, reproduced in Wiley’s book, portrays caricatures of nine men crawling away from, being tossed into the air by, or recoiling in fear from a woman in a bustled dress. Lightning bolts erupt from the woman’s fingertips. This cover differs slightly from the original, which promises A Death Blow to Spiritualism and Superstition of Every Kind.

But for me, a reproduction wouldn’t do. I wanted to get as close to Lulu (by now I was sure we could be on a first-name basis) as possible.

One copy of Writes Her Autobiography is in the archives at the library in Madison, Georgia, the town where Hurst and her husband raised their family. Madison is less than an hour from where I live, so I hit the freeway for my laying on of hands. In Madison, the librarian took Hurst’s book, which was in a folder, from a cabinet and gave me white gloves with which to turn the pages. Wearing white gloves while reading the secrets of a Southern lady who manipulated the world with her hands seemed innately perfect.

Hurst’s tenant-farmer father saw deliverance in his daughter. In an era when the average person didn’t differentiate between electricity and magnetic force, which many believed transited the human body as a fluid, William Hurst bet the farm on his daughter’s desire for attention. He put her on the national circuit for almost two years, predicting correctly that her pretense of weird science would attract the paying public in droves to witness the dangerous forces emanating from the hands of his Magnetic Girl.

Lulu in action

In her autobiography, Hurst claims that she “set aside the eternal laws of gravitation, reverse[d] the order of nature, and . . . impart[ed] life to dead matter.” Her onstage “tests”–a term suggesting more science than “act”–invited audience volunteers to hold a cane or billiard cue horizontally while she pressed on the tips. Locked in Hurst’s gaze, the mark pushed down while Hurst simply held the object in place and waited for Newton’s third law of motion (the “equal and opposite reaction” one) to kick in.

Her admirers believed that the inexplicable, treacherous power of electricity generated from her hands knocked the hapless volunteers to the ground. Men–almost always her audience–left the stage red-faced, flustered, and thrilled. Anecdotes suggest she stopped a runaway train with her hands, bested a sumo wrestler, and cured a woman of fainting spells. A brand of soap, a line of saddles, and a cow were named in her honor. When Hurst quit the spotlight in 1885, she had inspired at least two copycat acts and earned a reported $250,000, a relative fortune that redeemed her subsistence-farming parents from the dire economy of the Reconstruction South. She retired, attended college, and married Paul Atkinson, her onstage interlocutor.

Writes Her Autobiography begins as a cheerful deceit. Hurst writes that her stage persona was that of “a young girl . . . in a short silk frock,” but she’s stretching the truth; she was thirteen, but as curvy and tall as a young woman. For the first half of the book, she refrains from debunking the nature of her feats, relating instead the spectacle of her gift. Maybe it’s science, she implies. Or maybe it’s mystery. In the second part, Hurst uses photographs, diagrams, and helpful arrows to reveal how she lifted those men, flipped those fellows, and tossed actress Lily Langtry down a flight of stairs. Claiming a need to unburden herself, she confesses discomfort with undeserved fame. But science–this time of the mind–remains useful. Believing in her was the audience’s fault. Their credulity, she writes, was a “psychological problem of vast importance.”

Handling Hurst’s book without paying her a visit was ungrateful and un-Southern, so I left the library for the old Madison cemetery. I found no Hurst, and no Atkinson. As I wandered the grounds, a train whistle blew. Startled, remembering the train that teenaged Lulu Hurst was rumored to have stopped, I jumped back from the rails that bisected the cemetery. Out of habit, I waved at the conductor as the train passed. He waved back. I felt, for a moment, hypnotized, but perhaps it was the heat.

When the air was still again, I glanced in the direction from which the train had come. In my sight line was a stone engraved “Lulu Hurst Atkinson, 1869–1950.” A name and date on an unremarkable gravestone, a marker for a wife and mother, not a magnetic girl. But Lulu Hurst’s weird science had outlived her, proving to me that imagining one’s own power can be enough to make it real.

Jessica Handler is the author of the forthcoming Braving the Fire: A Guide to Writing Through Grief (St. Martins Press). Her first book, Invisible Sisters (Public Affairs, 2009) is one of the “Twenty Five Books All Georgians Should Read.” Her nonfiction has appeared on NPR, in Tin House, Drunken Boat, Brevity, Newsweek, The Washington Post, and More Magazine. Honors include residencies at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, a 2010 Emerging Writer Fellowship from The Writers Center, the 2009 Peter Taylor Nonfiction Fellowship, and special mention for a 2008 Pushcart Prize. 

All in all, I came away with the impression that the seventies were a hairier, more trusting time. The magic of this era returned to me as I read Burt Reynolds’s inexplicable 1972 tome, Hot Line: The Letters I Get…and Write!, a book that rekindled my dimmest childhood recollections of all the uncomfortable things adults seemed likely to do and say.

It’s fair to assume that Signet’s literary goals in publishing Hot Line were modest. The three-paragraph intro—in three different fonts—and the back cover copy (“The great new fun book by the guy all America’s talking about!”) suggest the efforts of a passing intern. For the body of the book, the publishers gathered up a few of Burt’s numerous fan letters (many received in the wake of the infamous 1972 Cosmopolitan centerfold for which he reclined nude on a bearskin rug) and a brief response by him to each. Then they added some photos and called it a day.

Hot Line Burt’s concerns include hot pants, ladies’ measurements, randy grannies, and his own luxurious pelt. His literary style is heavy on puns, brief suggestive messages that sound jaunty but upon closer inspection are mostly nonsensical, and many an unnecessary quotation mark.

The letters form an accidental social document that cuts across class, gender, sexual preference, and intention; there are letters from seventy-year-olds, children, men and women, single and married, urban and rural. Husbands, especially when they try to compete with Burt for their wives’ attention, seem a hapless, beer-swilling, yet accepting lot. Most of the writers are women, some dangling the promise of a swinging single girl (“I dig fast cars, motorcycles, groovy guys, groovy times and sex”), while others see no reason to prettify their particulars. “I can’t write too good,” explains Hot Mountain Gal, “as three years ago I cut the first joint of my index finger off grinding meat… I smoke a pipe when I’m hunting. Other times I smoke cigars.”

It soon becomes evident that even for the seventies, Burt’s hairiness was notable. Correspondents frequently discuss his body hair and mustache, speculating on the potential applications of both. “Say, Burt,” writes one Connie L. of Lincoln, Nebraska, “that mustache is a real womb broom.”

Sometimes I think these fans actually intended to leave a time capsule of the decade. They drop seductive promises for “a motel with water beds,” plenty of grass, no VD, and a good lay. The tone ranges from chummy (“Isn’t that a big howl?”) to brash (“Hi, Ballsy”) to outright desperation (“Honest to God, Burt, the thing in the world I’d most like to do is fuck your brains out”). But most striking is the cheekiness of the overall tone, indicating either pre-AIDS freedom or just the freedom of writing to someone you do not know. Sex as wished for, joked about, and offered in these pages seems human, forgivingly imperfect, even fun-loving. Compare it to chaste Twilight-style abstinence melodrama and tell me that “womb broom” doesn’t sound a little better.

Still, some letter writers were gravely offended by that Cosmo centerfold. One states primly, “I found you very repulsive with that hairy body.” And a few letters are simply transactional, whether tendering horses for sale or a role in a presumed-to-be-inevitable film adaptation of the letter writer’s book, titled The Cocksman and his Geronimo. One mother literally offers up her virgin daughter.

I should say, however, that it’s not all pleas for sex: there are missives from young boys in need of father figures and romantic guidance, semiliterate teenage babysitters, and several people who’ve flirted with suicide and seem mostly to need some contact or to prevent Burt from feeling the same despair. And so Burt becomes the furry, grinning screen on which to project a thousand needs and fantasies.

As enjoyable as it is to dig for subtext in the letters, the photos in Hot Line’s sixteen-page spread are truly riveting. Burt can often be found in wrestling singlet or head-to-toe denim, gazing skyward and guffawing at his dizzying good fortune. He has his soulful moments, too. He likes to peer out a window, bare-chested and holding a highball. I suspect he may have been mentally preparing himself for the final photos, which display him—nude but for a ranger’s hat and cigarillo clamped between his teeth—astride a hand-shaped chair. (I looked in vain for the suggestion of undies before accepting that this situation is probably just as unsanitary as it appears.) The spread concludes with Burt, exuberant before a white screen, pantsless and catching a football.

Hot Line’s photos depict a version of male beauty almost unrecognizable today, when a glance through People magazine’s sexiest men, undertaken for purely professional reasons, reveals a far more manicured vision of attractiveness. Modern teen idols are now depilated to an unthreatening smoothness that calls to mind laminated paper or a waxed apple. Men in their late twenties or above are occasionally permitted a light heart-shaped chest fuzz or two-day chin stubble, but even the modern sex symbol’s rumpled look is polite and controlled. Jon Hamm’s occasional dishevelment indicates he rented a cabin and stocked up on craft brews, whereas Burt’s fur suggests he unwound with a little light logging before consuming the uncooked head of a lynx.

The photos, staged and ridiculous as they are, have that same fleshy, silly enthusiasm that seems as much a relic as a gold medallion: buttocks are cupped; women hang on to Burt’s limbs like gibbons, gazing ferally up at him. Burt’s hand sometimes grips a woman’s flank firmly enough to indent the skin—nowadays, I bet that hand would hover, so as not to suggest any unsightly softness in an actual human body. Burt’s seamed and too-tan face, his many forms of tobacco, his sweaty glasses of booze… it’s all a bit much. Looking at these images, I feel I know exactly how everyone smells.

But it must be said that this overbearing, long-outdated version of manliness is also strangely enthralling simply because it may once have been sincere. While I was making the acquaintance of a plethora of mustachioed strangers, all of this was going on. There was a whole subtext I couldn’t have understood at the age of four: men like Burt were part of the reason all of these other men were cultivating sideburns and goatees. As ludicrous, baffling, and deeply embarrassing as Hot Line is, it also has a disconcerting ring of authenticity beneath all the staging, like discovering a dream that you felt silly about having was not a dream at all.

Michelle Wildgen is an executive editor at Tin House magazine. She is the author of the forthcoming novel Bread and Butter, the novels You’re Not You and But Not for Long, and editor of an anthology, Food & Booze: A Tin House Literary Feast. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in publications and anthologies including the New York Times, O, the Oprah Magazine, Best New American Voices 2004, Best Food Writing 2004 and 2009, and elsewhere.

Chesterton trained as a painter at the prestigious Slade School in London, yet he would make his name and his living not as an artist but as a man of letters. All the letters. During his lifetime, Chesterton produced volumes of light verse, essays, biographies, satires, an autobiography, theological tracts, his own magazine (G. K.’s Weekly), books of literary criticism, a half dozen novels (including The Man Who Was Thursday), and fifty-odd short mystery stories featuring a Catholic priest with a flair for what Edgar Allan Poe called “the art of ratiocination.”

Father Brown debuted in 1910, and for many years was the most famous fictional detective after Sherlock Holmes (who debuted in 1887, when Chesterton was thirteen years old). Brown was modeled on a really existing (though not actually mystery-solving) friend of Chesterton’s, Father Joseph O’Connor, but I prefer to think of Brown as a kind of funhouse-mirror image of his author. Chesterton stood six foot four and tipped the scales at just under three hundred pounds. He kept a bushy mustache and often strolled about in a cape, with a cigar in his mouth and a cane—if not a swordstick—in his hand. Few photographs of him contain all of him; he probably never slipped into (or out of) a room unnoticed in his life. This is all in starkest contrast to the diminutive Brown, “round and dull as a Norfolk dumpling” in his rumpled vestments, with “eyes as empty as the North Sea.” His manner is unassuming to the verge of blandness, and he often comes off like a miscast extra in his own stories—at least, that is, until he opens his mouth and solves the mystery of the hour. Most authors are mice who write in order to see themselves as elephants, but here we have something much more interesting and rare—an elephant who dreamed of being a mouse.

Father Brown is a keen observer and listener, but his real specialty is a kind of inductive moral logic informed by a deep understanding of evil gained during countless hours served in its close proximity—as a hearer of confessions, as a comforter to those who have been dealt life’s harshest blows. Brown is typically called in to work cases that seem to have a supernatural dimension, but he refuses categorically to entertain any explanation that involves the occult, black magic, superstitions, ancient curses, evil ghosts, or anything else to which a good Christian ought not give credence. As he explains to a bemused onlooker in “The Curse of the Golden Cross”: “It really is more natural to believe a preternatural story, that deals with things we don’t understand, than a natural story that contradicts things we do understand.” What he means is that reason and faith are not mutually exclusive categories, but reinforce and amplify each other. It also doesn’t hurt that, as one character remarks in “The Arrow of Heaven,” “Somehow you’re the sort of man to whom one wants to tell the truth.”

Because he’s a priest, all the other characters in a given story will tend to make two assumptions about him—first, that even if nobody called him, he has a basic right to hang around and do as he likes; second, that he is some kind of walking anachronism with no understanding of worldly things or the exigencies of modern life. Father Brown always takes full advantage of the first assumption, and he always upsets the second. This is necessarily to the chagrin of the assorted academics, Bolshevists, Darwinists, journalists, Nietzscheans, spiritualists, dandies, poets, policemen, cult leaders, anarchists, atheists, industrialists, swindlers, murderers, Americans, and crooks Brown encounters—all of whom Chesterton relished hoisting by the petards of their own presumptions, hypocrisies, predilections, and newfangled ideas.

The “original” Father Brown stories are collected twelve apiece in The Innocence of Father Brown (1911) and The Wisdom of Father Brown (1914). The next book, The Incredulity of Father Brown, did not appear until 1926, followed by The Secret of Father Brown in 1927 and The Scandal of Father Brown in 1935. Like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle before him, Chesterton had become the slave of his own success. Doyle threw Holmes over Reichenbach Falls in the hopes of being rid of him, but eventually—succumbing to popular pressure and the need for a sure cash fix—contrived to bring him back. Chesterton, who would have seen Holmes die and return before publishing his first Brown story, never made such a mistake. Several introductions to collected or selected Father Brown anthologies relate that whenever his wife told him money was running low Chesterton would reply, “That means Father Brown again.” David Stuart Davies, introducer of the Wordsworth Classics Complete Father Brown Stories—the best and the cheapest edition I have come across, if not the most handsome or durable—adds the colorful detail that this utterance was accompanied by a sigh.

A general consensus exists that the first twenty-four stories are superior to what came later. Most Selected Father Brown editions that I’ve seen draw sparingly from the latter three volumes. Some simply reproduce Innocence and Wisdom in their entireties, and leave it at that. The main critique of the later Brown tales is that they wax didactic and feature flimsier mysteries, because the author is palpably less interested in the stories than in their morals. (In the twelve years between Wisdom and Incredulity Chesterton officially converted from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism.) This is a fair complaint, to be sure, but as a full and final judgment it is insufficient. In an essay called “The Labyrinths of the Detective Story and Chesterton,” Jorge Luis Borges—who knew a thing or two about paradoxes, and who revered Chesterton’s work—gently chides The Scandal of Father Brown for its lack of “felicity” to the detective form, but he is quick to assert that two entries in Scandal—“The Blast of the Book” and “The Insoluble Problem”—are “stories I would not want excluded from a Brownian anthology or canon.” (Appallingly, neither story is contained in any Selected that I’ve seen.) But the biggest problem with the wholesale dismissal of the latter three books is the implicit suggestion that the first two are above critique.

Chesterton’s work is peppered with stunning moments of racism and anti-Semitism, only some of which can be excused (if still not forgiven) on account of the time and place in which he lived. For two of the most egregious examples, one need look no further than “The Wrong Shape” from the first book and “The God of the Gongs” from the second. But since that unfortunate aspect of the work is more or less evenly distributed throughout the Brown catalog, let me return to my original point, which is that the late work contains much to admire and enjoy. The stories are stellar pieces of literature, theology, and rhetoric, if not always precisely of detective fiction. Incredulity is an especially strong collection—“The Arrow of Heaven,” “The Miracle of Moon Crescent,” “The Ghost of Gideon Wise,” and “The Oracle of the Dog” are all first-rate mystery tales. The same cannot be said of “The Dagger with Wings” or “The Doom of the Darnaways,” two of my personal favorite examples of the kind of Brown story that so understandably irks the mystery purists. The premises are precarious, the only action takes place offstage, the real endings come in the middle, and no pretense whatsoever is made of pursuing—much less capturing—the killers. They’re unbalanced, to say the least, but all the more arresting and valuable for their peculiarities, which is not necessarily to say flaws.

In the Borges essay mentioned above, he suggests the six major rules for working in the mystery genre. The last one he gives is this: “A solution that is both necessary and marvelous.” In addition to being a supremely good rule for all fiction, not just detective stories, this is notable for being an uncannily Chestertonian description of Christianity. So if you go into a Brown story looking for a mystery and can’t seem to find one, it doesn’t mean that one isn’t there. All the small mysteries of this world are solved, sooner or later, or else cease to matter. It is only the large one that abides above our heads, emphatically pressing and perennially insoluble; an investigation that can—and should—never be closed.

Justin Taylor is the author of the novel The Gospel of Anarchy and the story collection Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever.

Not even David Carradine could karate chop his way out of death.

“When I was a little kid, I had a problem with God.” This, I suggest, is a rather surprising opener for a Hollywoodmovie star autobiography, although since the author is David Carradine, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised at all. The autobiography, Endless Highway, was published in 1995, at a time when he was in the middle of the comeback TV series Kung Fu: The Legend Continues. Commericially, this was no doubt a good time to release the book, though it’s a long way from being a quick TV tie-in. It runs to nearly 650 pages, and even if some parts of it feel a bit rushed, it’s clearly a work of great effort and genuine commitment.

When I first moved to Los Angeles in 2003, I went to a “Hollywood Collectors and Celebrities Show” in Burbank, an event at which movie and TV stars (some far more famous than you’d imagine) sat behind tables, peddling their wares: signed autographs, posters, DVDs, and, in some cases, autobiographies. And there was David Carradine.

His career was perhaps in the doldrums—Kill Bill would have been completed though not yet released—but even so I was amazed to see him there. Was he really so desperate for money or attention that he had to make nice with a bunch of rubbernecking plebs? Apparently not. He didn’t make nice at all. He sat there doing a crossword, head and eyes down, oozing hostility, daring anyone to approach. I certainly didn’t dare, though I wanted to. Consequently, it was a while later that I bought Endless Highway from a used bookstore.

The fact that it’s dedicated to a bunch of people including Plato, Shakespeare, and James Dean didn’t bode well. But it’s also dedicated to Dad—and that’s very significant. Dad was the legendary bad-boy actor John Carradine, the man who, according to his son, said to Katherine Hepburn, “Why don’t you take your Connecticut station-wagon accent and go home?” And she did.

The book tells us that the Carradine household was predictably troubled. Father was a jobbing actor who came and went, and even when he was there he was otherwise occupied. David writes, “When he was home, it was usually ‘don’t bother him…’ The only time I could really depend on having a real talk with him was when I needed discipline. It was almost worth a whipping just to get his attention.”

After his parents’ divorce, he was bounced around various dodgy educational establishments, including a trade school, Straubenmuller Textile High, inManhattan, where “between classes, I would be jumped in the halls and beaten. It had something to do with my dad being famous; specifically, with the fact that he had shot Jesse James.” Of course, he told them his dad was a hero.

The father remained elusive, and even after the son had grown up and become successful, their relationship was as difficult as ever. David came up with the idea for a theatrical season in which he’d direct Dad in King Lear, then Dad would direct him in Hamlet. It sounds like a crowd pleaser to me, but unfortunately it never came off. David writes, “He asked me, ‘How do I know you can play Hamlet?’ I asked him, ‘How do I know you can play Lear?’ Then we got in a big fight—family stuff.”

David organizes a party at Morton’s restaurant and Dad, aged seventy-six, arrives, picks up a twenty-two-year old German girl, and by the end of the evening is necking with her in the back of a Rolls Royce. I guess not every son would think this was endearing behavior, but when Dad comes up with the line “You’re only young once,” all is likely to be forgiven. And, of course, he had actually turned up at the party.

Inevitably an actor’s early struggles tend to be more interesting than his later successes, but Carradine remains consistently skeptical, and just this side of cynical, when it comes to his own career. In the army he enters a talent show, delivering the abdication speech from Richard II, but loses to a Hopi hoop dancer. Carradine can see why it happened: “Well, he jumped through fire, I just talked loud.”

Later, when he’s a success, he meets Marlon Brando and finds him utterly compelling. “He was looking right through my soul. His face was colored with a golden light. I was transfixed. Suddenly the golden light faded… I turned around and realized the sun had just set behind me. He hadn’t been looking at my soul, he had been watching the setting sun.”

He agrees to play a cop in the movie Q: The Winged Serpent. Then he reads the script. “I said to myself, ‘I can’t do this. It will destroy my career. But I have to, I said I would—I need the money, my house is in foreclosure, Linda will lose her Ferrari. We’ve got to keep one Ferrari in the family.”

Ah yes, the Ferraris. The Carradine lifestyle requires a lot of expensive props, a lot of expenditures. He spends several small fortunes on houses, fine wines, drugs, guitars, and cars; the rest he just wastes. Somehow it never sounds like boasting. The fact that he enjoys his toys so much, and that he’s only ever one step away from financial disaster, even collecting unemployment at one point, makes it all bearable.

And just once in a while he’s a pretty shrewd social observer. He was in San Franciso at the time of the Beat Generation, and he didn’t fall for that one. “The ‘generation’ consisted of, as far as I could tell, about fifty people, mostly male—the scene was a little rough for girls.” And then he finds himself in newly independentZimbabwe: “Everywhere were happy faces in fatigues carrying semiautomatic weapons.”

Look, I’m not trying to pretend that Endless Highway is somehigh point in Western art, but by the standards of mostHollywood autobiographies, it’s downright Proustian. There’s something about Carradine in print that’s very similar to Carradine on screen. He’s compelling; likeable without begging to be liked; he commands your attention.

After his sensationalized death in a hotel inBangkok[in 2009] I went back to the book. It had been a while and there were gaps in my memory, and yet how could I have forgotten, there on the first page, below the paragraph about having trouble with God: “When I was five, I tried to hang myself in the garage by jumping off the bumper of the Duesenberg.” He failed, obviously. His dad burned his comic book collection as punishment. Of course, as a five-year-old, he probably didn’t really intend to commit suicide. Equally, most of us don’t believe he actually committed suicide in that hotel room inBangkokeither.

Geoff Nicholson is the author of the novels Footsucker, Bleeding London, and The Hollywood Dodo (among others) and non-fiction such as Sex Collectors and The Lost Art of Walking.

Abandon all folksy Yiddish archetypes, ye who enter here. Sholem Asch gives a darker and richer portrait of Jewish life during the Russian Revolution in

I had to travel from schmaltzy New York to white-bread Gulf Coast Florida to discover the great Yiddish writer Sholem Asch.  I was visiting my parents and had run out of things to read when my father handed me Asch’s novel Three Cities.  “Try this,” he said.  “It’s a masterpiece.”

As I read over Asch’s bio page, I was surprised I’d never heard of the guy, given all the success and notoriety he achieved during his lifetime, from 1880 to 1957.  His first major work, a play called God of Vengeance (1907), about a lesbian affair between prostitutes, was considered so shocking, even for Broadway, that it was forced to close.  In 1933, his best-selling epic novel of the Russian Revolution, Three Cities, was featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review.  He was nominated for the Nobel Prize, and in 1936 he was named in the New York Times as one of the world’s ten greatest living Jews, the only writer on a list that included Einstein and Freud.

Today when we think of Yiddish writers, the first name that pops up is Isaac Bashevis Singer, who actually won the Nobel and whose short stories fit the general preconception on Yiddish literature: quaint magical realist fables set in backwater villages.

By contrast, Asch’s Three Cities is a grand historical epic in the vein of his heroes, Dickens and Tolstoy.  Most of the book’s characters are Jews, yet they think and behave in ways atypical of the usual folksy Yiddish archetypes.  They’re thoroughly modern, grappling with problems of psychology, philosophy and politics.  They wage war, indulge in kinky sex, and interact with the world of goyim as equals.

What struck me most about Three Cities was its core philosophy, that anti-Semitism is a non-Jewish problem.  “In every drop of the ocean all the attributes of the whole ocean are contained, for the ocean consists of drops,” says one of the novel’s characters, according to a Talmudic saying.  Similarly, for Asch, the fate of the lowest tier of Russian society, the Jews, becomes a barometer for the viability of an entire nation.  Time and time again, by screwing the Jews, Russia’s leaders end up screwing themselves.

Three Cities begins with a depiction of how the anti-Semitism of the Russian empire creates a cesspool of discontent that brings down Czar Nicholas II.  After centuries of despair, Russia’s Jews see an opportunity for change in the chaos of World War I.  Many of them join the fight for revolution, and in response the Czar, who’s losing both a world war and his grip on power at home, takes out his frustration on all his Jewish subjects.

Asch’s account of the resulting mayhem is an eerie foreshadowing of the Holocaust:

Sick people and women far gone in pregnancy who could not leave their beds were summarily shot by officers where they lay…[Jews] were packed indiscriminately like herrings into the railway wagons: grown-ups and children, sick and sound, without air to breathe, without food or drink, pressed limb to limb, a dense confusion of human members and variegated scraps of clothing.  Coupled to hastily-stoked locomotives, these wagons raced with their wretched cargo through fields and woods towards a destination which nobody knew.  It was not man that seemed mad, but the world itself.

The Czar’s cruelty backfires, driving the Jews squarely into his enemies’ camp.  After his downfall, a Jewish lawyer named Solomon Halperin convenes a meeting of Russia’s rich and powerful at the luxurious Hotel Metrople in Moscow to present a plan for the country’s transition to liberal democracy.  During the meeting, however, the Communists unleash an attack in the square outside.  Asch compares the frightened capitalists fleeing the meeting to a bank check written for a large sum that’s suddenly “been fully cashed in nothing but copper or nickel coins, which were so countless that they rolled away on all sides and could not be kept in hand…They left the complicated problem of Bolshevism, which had suddenly been presented to a great empire, to ‘Jewish brains,’ and the Jews could tear each other’s hair out over it if they liked!”  After the Communists come to power, Halperin is murdered by the anti-Communist forces, who are more eager to spill Jewish blood than to fight the Reds.

Many Jews hope the Communists’ egalitarian philosophy will mean a better future.  Instead, the new Communist government issues a decree closing the Jews’ small businesses.  The idea is that the Jews will become less greedy and moneygrubbing if they seek more “honest” means of labor.  But work is so scarce that there are no jobs for the Jews to turn to.  And worse, the closure of Jewish businesses produces a chain reaction that causes Russia’s entire economy to grind to a halt.  Crime spikes and the prisons become crowded with former socialist sympathizers who’ve been converted into counterrevolutionaries and petty thieves.

Today, Jewish American writers from Philip Roth to Nathan Englander write more like Singer than Asch.  The settings of their stories have changed from Eastern European ghettos to Brooklyn or Israel, but the themes are largely the same.  What does it mean to be a Jew?  How to we reconcile our faith with modernity?  Why do gentiles hate us so much?  Non-Jewish readers are free to draw parallels between the Jewish experience and their own, but as goyim, they can only be spectators.

Asch, however, shows us why the story of a small ethnic group matters to the culture at large.  Rather than focus on the unique aspects of the Jewish faith, he portrays a variety of belief systems – Judaism, Christianity, and even Communism – as interchangeable.  (In fact, his follow-up to Three Cities was a trilogy about the life of Christ, in Yiddish.)  “God does not care in what fashion you believe in Him,” says one of the characters of Three Cities, summing up the spirit of the novel, “so long as you believe there is a power for good directing the world, and resign yourself t it so as to serve its purpose.”

Aaron Hamburger is the author of a story collection titled The View from Stalin’s Head (Random House) which was awarded the Rome Prize by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and nominated for a Violet Quill Award.  His second book, a novel titled Faith for Beginners (Random House), was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. Currently he teaches creative writing at Columbia University, New York University, and the Stonecoast MFA Program

Lest you go into post-election political reading withdrawal, Tom Grimes talks dissent, Nixon, and literary heroes in this Lost & Found on Norman Mailer’s

During the 1968 Democratic and Republican conventions, I was thirteen and far from being a political junkie, yet it was impossible for me to incubate myself from the fever dream of that year.  On April 4^th, Martin Luther King was assassinated on the terrace of a Memphis motel; on June 5^th, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in the kitchen of a Los Angeles hotel.  And even though President Lyndon B. Johnson knew the war in Vietnam was lost, he ordered the U.S. army to send twenty-four thousand troops back for involuntary second duties.  Meanwhile, students burned draft cards, and, among other tragedies, Richard Nixon was elected President of the United States.  On a smaller, domestic scale, my father renounced his allegiance to the Democratic party and actually voted for Nixon, a man who, as Norman Mailer put it in Miami and the Siege of Chicago, “half the electorate had regarded for years as…a disease.”

The 1968 election was so close that the result wasn’t called until the following day at noon.  My friends and I were standing on line in our New York Catholic high school’s cafeteria when it was announced that Nixon had beaten Hubert Humphrey.  The boy next to me slapped one palm against his forehead in astonishment.  The cafeteria staff briefly stopped ladling out whatever gelatinous muck we were forced to eat that day.  Some of us cursed.  But soon our disbelief yielded to a sense of bereavement.  You see, for years, many of us, including myself, had lived on the fringe of the age’s radicalism.  Each Sunday I’d kneel at an altar rail and extend my tongue as a priest laid another papery white communion wafer on it, when in fact I wanted to be in Manhattan, hurling stones at Columbia University’s administration building.  But now that Richard Nixon had been elected, the death of that era of dissent had begun, and I felt cheated.  And yet, perhaps as a form of compensation for my disappointment, an inarticulate reverberation inside me suggested a new future for me.  I wanted to be a writer.

In 1974, I turned twenty and began searching for my voice as a novelist.  Living in New York, it was hard to escape Mailer’s presence.  He was everywhere – not simply on the page, but running for mayor, starting up the Village Voice, throwing martinis in Gore Vidal’s face, and, several years earlier, marching on the Pentagon with Noam Chomsky and Robert Lowell.  And since I naively believed that literature could shape political thought, Mailer became my existential hero.  Both are dated terms, I know.  Nonetheless, while working nights in a funeral parlor to put myself through college, I read his entire body of work in a month, staying up through the night, obsessed by the weight and density of his prose.  Coming half a decade late to the publication of Miami and the Siege of Chicago didn’t diminish the work’s power.  At least, not to me.  My literary imagination always seemed to be in pursuit of an apocalyptic vision.  Nothing less absolute or final would do.  I wanted to write lines like, “the Republic hovered on the edge of revolution, nihilism, and lines of police on the horizon, visions of future Vietnams in our own cities upon us.”  Mailer had created a form of literature that was part narrative and part prophecy.  Four decades before George W. Bush brought the ugliness of the Republican party’s spirit, tactics, and beliefs to full fruition, Mailer wrote that “only by wielding power could [Republicans] discover which concepts in conservative philosophy were viable, and what parts were mad.  One could predict: their budgeting would prove insane, their righteousness would prove insane…their livid passion for military superiority would smash its nose on the impossibility of having such superiority without mere government spending; their love of nature would have to take up arms against the despoiling foe, themselves, their own greed, their own big business.”

While many writers my age gravitated towards the newly ascendant and minimalist prose of Raymond Carver, I was drawn to Mailer’s ability to write riveting backyards and living rooms.  I didn’t want my novels set in backyards and living rooms.  Instead, I wanted to describe riots like the one at the Democratic National Convention, where “The police attacked [protestors] with tear gas, with Mace, and with clubs, they attacked like a chain saw cutting into wood…they attacked like a scythe through grass, lines of twenty and thirty policemen striking out in an arc, demonstrators feeling.  Seen from overhead, from the nineteenth floor, it was like a wind blowing dust, or the edge of waves riding foam on the shore.”

In time I would come to admire Raymond Carver, whose literary presence in the eighties was much like Mailer’s in the sixties – inescapable.  Yet I never tried to imitate Carver, whose unadorned prose was, according to literary critics, a reaction to our defeat in Vietnam.  As storytellers many of my contemporaries had moved from macro to micro, from prophecy to ambiguity, from revolution to revelation, from apocalypse to epiphany.  But I didn’t have a choice.  Mailer’s combination of concrete imagery and abstract speculation, his attempt to capture America on a grand scale – impossible and foolish, I know – and his sometimes overreaching and overwrought, yet occasionally disarmingly exquisite, insights and sincerity spoke to the writer I was trying to become.

Although I’m now far past twenty years old and have developed into the writer I imagine I was destined to be, my connection to Mailer deepened when I reread a particularly elegiac passage toward the end of the book.  Outside the convention hall, the riots had subsided.  Inside, Democrats would soon select their candidate for the presidency.  But first the party leaders “showed a movie…entitled ‘Robert Kennedy Remembered,’ and while it went on, through the hall, over the floor, and out across the country on television, a kind of unity came over everyone who was watching, at least for a little while.”  A few pages later Mailer concluded: Even dead, and on film, he was better and more moving than anything which had happened in their convention, and people were crying.  An ovation began.  Delegates came to their feet, and applauded an empty screen – it was as if the center of American life was now passing the age where it could still look forward: now people looked back into memory, into the past of the nation.

Tom Grimes is the author of five novels, a play, and a memoir. He edited Workshop: Seven Decades of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, the creative writing program from which he graduated. He now directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Texas State University.

Gilda and I had broken up, I don’t know, perhaps ten times. The back-and-forth was so notorious by then, had become so tiresome and ridiculous to our peers, that on the blackboard in the entranceway to our medical school there were two squares drawn in dedication to us, one labeled “on,” the other “off.” A check mark would toggle between the two, so you could keep track of our tumult and trauma like the daily weather report. It was always Gilda who cheated, Gilda who left, and always me who inexplicably begged her to come back.

But this time was for real. We’d been broken up for months and I’d been having a passionate summer romance with another woman, just before we fresh graduates would be scattered across the country, Gilda mercifully heading to the opposite coast.

Before our latest split, I had loaned Gilda a copy of Philip Roth’s oft-overlooked masterpiece of relationship malfunction, My Life as a Man, a copy I’d frankly forgotten that she had until the day I found it on my back porch, spine broken, whole pages torn out as if in a spasm of unbridled rage. It wasn’t until days later that I discovered she hadn’t dismantled My Life as a Man in a blind fury. The raised garden bed in my backyard was covered with tiny fragments of paper, meticulously ripped pieces of Roth’s prose mulching my vegetables. It must have taken her hours and come from a colder, slower burning emotion, one that prompted her not only to tear and tear and tear but also to slide these fragments delicately between individual leaves of various heads of lettuce. It was then that I realized that My Life as a Man meant as much to Gilda as it did to me.

Published in 1974, My Life as a Man is Roth’s second, lesser-known foray into confessional fiction, a subgenre that intentionally blurs the distinctions between literature and memoir and whose prime example at that time was Roth’s own Portnoy’s Complaint. But whereas Portnoy’s Complaint consists of Alexander Portnoy’s tragicomic monologue from a psychoanalyst’s couch, My Life as a Man portrays one man’s search for self-understanding through the act of writing.

The protagonist, Peter Tarnopol, a writer and English professor, finds himself in a relationship, and, ultimately, a marriage, with Maureen, whom he comes to see as a monster. Desperate, manipulative, aggressive, and unreasonable, Maureen is the epitome of the gentile barbarity his parents had warned him about. Yet Peter can’t walk away, and he’s tormented by his inability to understand why. Peter turns to writing to figure it out. In fact, the book in our hands is the result of Peter’s endeavor, My Life as a Man a record of his various attempts to make sense of things.

The book is split into two sections: the first, “Useful Fictions,” contains two short stories; the second, “My True Story,” is Peter’s attempt at memoir. It is in the latter section, which makes up the bulk of the book, that we learn that the two short stories at the beginning were Peter’s initial attempts at understanding himself through writing fiction. But Peter’s use of fiction as a means of uncovering the truth proves disastrous. By the end of the second story he has thrown up his hands in defeat, kicked down the fourth wall, broken the fictive spell, and succumbed to addressing the reader directly, telling us he can’t continue. Despite everything being true in these fictions, he’s sure the stories don’t work, he tells us. They’re not believable, the protagonist’s motivations for staying with Maureen are completely unconvincing, the essence of his torment uncaptured on the page.

Peter despairs that he’s failed to elevate his life to art, to find “Flaubertian transcendence,” to do for his neurosis what Thomas Mann did for tuberculosis. And so he resigns himself in the second part of the book to what he calls the “low road of candor,” telling it like it is, the way it really happened, abandoning all pretense of art and, in essence, confessing. At first glance, one might assume that Roth is asserting the power of memoir here, elevating nonfiction to the status of literature, arguing for it as the most effective way to bridge the existential gulf of loneliness between people, particularly since this section is Roth at his most visceral and powerful.

But remember this is the memoir of a fictional character, and thus ultimately not a memoir at all. Rather, Roth is cleverly reasserting the durability and protean flexibility of the novel as a form, even while undermining and fragmenting its most characteristic elements.

Of course, I wasn’t aware of the postmodern absurdity of my giving Gilda this book. Nor did I realize the subtext of what I was saying by gifting it to her—that I was the reasonable one, the innocent victim, and that she, like Maureen, knew no bounds, was out of control, and had me at her mercy, a force like a hurricane, tornado, the natural disaster of your choice. But while Peter’s perspective is all-encompassing for 99 percent of the book (and as a reader I was fully aligned with his plight), Roth pulls the rug out from under us in the final pages, giving us glimpses of Maureen’s journal entries (in which she appears surprisingly reasonable) and of the glowing impressions of her admiring friends. Everything we’ve read before is thrown into question, but not because Peter has lied to us.

Quite the contrary. Roth is arguing here that no narrative, even one with the best intentions, can achieve objectivity. Peter can only be Peter, can only put forth his subjective reality. His memoir is essentially a fiction, as all memoirs, with their arbitrary choices of what to include and what to omit, ultimately are. And while Peter’s narrative dominates the book, My Life as a Man is really a book of two colliding narratives, a book that grapples with the inherent subjectivity of consciousness. Through its two “useful” fictions and its one “true” story, it creates and tears down three personas; it asserts and then undermines the cohesion of the narrative voice and the form of the novel itself.

Maureen controlled Peter’s narrative—cutting short certain interactions, prolonging others, keeping him from writing or thinking about anything else but her—fragmenting Peter much as Gilda literally fragmented my paperback copy of My Life as a Man, breaking the book into fortune cookie–sized messages that I’d discover for months while gardening. Phrases like “you are a heartless selfish writing machine” and “ice in your heart instead of feelings” would reinsert Gilda into my life long after our relationship had ended.

But what details have I left out in the retelling? All summer long, the person I had been sleeping with was Gilda’s best friend, and I had done so without Gilda knowing. When she learned what I’d done, she could think of no better book to tear up than the terribly biased tale of one man’s failed attempt to understand and justify his weakness. Does this change your view of me, of this whole endeavor? Roth would expect so, each detail included or excluded, no matter how earnest the telling, changing the spell that’s woven. And like a snake eating its tail, upon finishing the book, you’ll want to revisit the short stories at the beginning of My Life as a Man in an endless and fruitless, yet surprisingly satisfying, search for the truth.

David Naimon is a writer, physician, and radio host of the literary program Between the Covers in Portland, Oregon. His work has appeared in The Missouri Review, StoryQuarterly, and ZYZZYVA, among others.

Samantha Dunn’s Failing Paris is the book I’ve been buying every deserving reader I know for the past year.  I’ve had to, because the only way you can buy it is online from its eccentric London publisher, The Toby Press.  How can such a brilliant book be lost virtually from the moment it is published?  Easy.  How can an author promote a book that is unavailable in any bookstore?  Do readings at Circuit City?

Yet despite the obstacles, this obscure first novel was nominated for the PEN/West Fiction Award in 2000.

The novel takes place during a week in the life of Sabine Wilcox, an American exchange student to Paris who has dropped out of her program – more exactly, the week before her interview for an abortion and the abortion itself.  (“L’avortement, which means the failure, the plans which have fallen through.”)  Sabine, the illegitimate daughter of a New Mexico saloon owner, has always dreamed of speaking French and coming to Paris as the means of becoming someone other than herself, someone better, a sophisticated woman safely ensconced in the bosom of a certifiably great civilization.

But what she learns in her stay in Paris is that one loses parts of oneself in the translation from one culture to another, as well as gaining a new persona.  The resulting alienation from self is underscored by Dunn’s risky but exquisitely apt use of the second person in Sabine’s narration as she describes herself and her life as a Parisian.

“That’s how it is,” the book begins, as the protagonist waits in the Hospital Saint-Louis for her psychological examination for the abortion.  “It’s as if I’m watching you stare at the lines nom, prenom, on which have been typed Wilcox, Sabine, fingering the edge of your student card…You are gripping that card because you might not recognize your own name when it’s called.”

Sabine does not know who the father of the child might be:

…the joke was on you, memorizing dead French poets, in your bedroom parroting cassettes of absurd conversations you would never have about the weather and the character of others…This in your house with aluminum siding that doesn’t even pretend to be wood grain, with its tears in the screened-in porch, red caliche earth, pecan trees rooted deeply in their rows, the interstate’s whining rubber never far off.  Why you rode your horse bareback across the pasture to the French teacher’s house during school breaks, the old maid with yellow barrettes in her black hair, an au pair thirty years ago but she gave you all she knew.

Yet despite your diligence, when you arrived you were so far out of your element you felt the way the drowning must feel, struggling and choking and the flood of what’s all around coming in too fast.  So to make your way, you used skin like currency across crisp cotton sheets, the attention of men so much easier, the only ones who have anything to gain by talking to foreign girls.  It was all in trade for the ease of saying exactly what you mean, to have language without seams.  At this moment you are doing the conversion, realizing the rate of exchange.

A book about failure, avortement, alienation in both the psychological and geographic senses, and the need to recapture the authentic self, Failing Paris is worth reading just for its miraculous prose.  Sentence by sentence, this is language as supple as a strap of kid leather, and as sharp as its lash.

Janet Fitch is the author of White Oleander, Paint It Black, and Kicks. Visit her on the web here.