Reviews by Sarah Jensen
The Great Gatsby
By F. Scott Fitzgerald
Each year during my annual reading of The Great Gatsby, I vow to focus on one theme in order to understand the book more deeply. And there are plenty of themes to examine: true love, hope and the American Dream, money and the class system, the decline of moral responsibility coincident with the arrival of movies, bootleg hooch, and the Charleston. It may be read too as a defining portrait of the 1920s – an era Fitzgerald himself dubbed The Jazz Age – replete with beaded evening gowns, yellow roadsters, and free-flowing champagne. Gatsby is all these things and more, but before I reach even the end of Chapter I, I’ve forgotten my analytic plans and am lost in the pure poetry of its language. It may well be the “intricately patterned” book Fitzgerald intended to write, it may be rife with term paper topics, but in the end, it is, according to the late Fitzgerald scholar Matthew Bruccoli, “just a masterpiece.” Every sentence is a distillation, each deliberate word evoking whole worlds. Fitzgerald accomplishes in his short description of Gatsby gazing across an expanse of dark water what lesser writers would take pages to express, defining the essence of the character and the novel in a minimum of images: the silver pepper of stars overhead, Gatsby’s nearly imperceptible trembling, a single green light at the end of the pier. I careen through the book, eager to savor singular, rhythmic phrases describing Gatsby’s gorgeous pink rag of a suit, glasses of gin rickeys clicking with ice, Daisy blossoming like a flower beneath the autumn moon of Louisville. It’s that language that drives me to re-read sections, paragraphs, phrases for the sheer beauty of the words, astounded every time by Fitzgerald’s genius and control. Critics have argued since its publication in 1925 over whether or not Gatsby is the Great American Novel. In truth, perhaps it is not a novel at all but a poem – albeit a poem 47,000 words long, each perfect one charged to the utmost with beauty, emotion, and meaning. Sarah Jensen
The History of Love
By Nicole Krauss
Everything in The History of Love is true. It’s true that lonely octogenarian Leo Gursky feels connected with the world only because his upstairs neighbor, Bruno, delivers his mail sometimes and late at night knocks on the pipes to see if Leo’s still alive. (Two return knocks mean “yes”; one means “no.”) It’s true 15-year-old Alma is on a mission to find her mother a suitable new husband while simultaneously trying to convince her brother he’s not really the Messiah, even as he constructs an ark in the lot across from their Brooklyn apartment. And it’s true that somebody in Chile published a book a long time ago called The History of Love, whose main character Alma is named for, her mother is commissioned by a mysterious stranger to translate from Spanish, and through which Leo is surprisingly connected with them all. But the facts behind these truths lie just beyond reach, allowing the reader to savor the delicious shifting palimpsest of the real and the merely imagined, wished for, remembered. Born in 1974, Krauss is of a generation of postmodernists seemingly intent upon the extinction of narrative. But her deft layering of images, complex characters, and interwoven plot lines hark refreshingly back to a time when structure and craft were essential elements of literature, and renew my hope for the future of the form. Combination mystery, dysfunctional family case study, and lush poem sequence, The History of Love resolves itself in a heartbreakingly moving ending, revealing long-sought-for facts, yes, and driving us to amazon.com for more of Krauss’ books. More than anything, though, The History of Love is a paean to language and its alchemical ability to be made flesh. Leo’s and Alma’s and Charlotte’s stories symbolize our own – tales we translate and refine and tell out into the world until their truths elicit – maybe – two knocks in response. Sarah Jensen
broken symmetry
By Jack Ridl
Michigan poet Jack Ridl has created a wonder of a book. If, as they say, God
is in the details, the selections in broken symmetry glisten with the divine.
Every small item – and Jack chronicles lots of them in his poems: collections
of salt and pepper shakers, Vs of geese, broken windows, a spray of violets sent
from France during World War II – shines with significance. Jack’s
specificity forces us to pay attention to the complexity of overlooked things,
taken-for-granted things, as in his “The History of the Pencil,” reminding
us of the simple tool crucial to all this writing stuff in the first place. Jack
doesn’t just write about toast, but toast with jam – currant jam.
On a plate not just a plate, but a chipped plate. Painted with a half-moon. At
its center. In the hands of someone less masterful, less controlled, such incessant
accretion of detail would amount to annoying linguistic disposophobia. But Jack
guides us to look – at egg timers and piles of television sets, his gone
father’s old shirt, cheese curls, the honeysuckle in the back yard – the
way mathematicians view a shoreline. Measure the edge of each grain of sand along
the coastline, and seemingly fixed distances become as they are: infinite. (Indeed,
the poems are gently arranged around a trio of mathematic tropes: fractals, quantum
theory, and differential equations.) Jack writes in the opening poem: “Only
the broken reveals, gives / the universe its chance at being / interesting…” And
when I finished the book and looked up from its pages, my tchotchkes and stack
of newspapers and a subway token on the coffee table and the ailanthus umbrellas
outside my window seemed suddenly dear, fundamental to the galaxies’ continued
spinning, luminous as stars. Sarah Jensen
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