Promised Land: Thirteen Books that Changed America

by Jay Parini

Doubleday, 385 pp.

Reviewed by Edward Pettit

Jay Parini’s latest book, Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America, plots the course of America’s Manifest Literary Destiny. As the title suggests, Parini has chosen a baker’s dozen of seminal American works “that helped to create the intellectual and emotional contours of this country,” from The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn toJ ack Kerouac’s On the Road. Each left an indelible imprint on the American character.

In his introduction, Parini argues that this is not a greatest-hits of American literature. There is no Scarlet Letter or Great Gatsby. He also excludes poetry, because, he writes, verse only really affects the “tiny group who actually read poetry.” An exception might be made for Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, but I think Parini is probably correct: Poetry has yet to change the course of American culture.

Parini, a professor at Middlebury College, is the author of books of criticism (on Theodore Roethke) and biographies (on Robert Frost, John Steinbeck and William Faulkner), as well as several novels and collections of poetry. He’s an academic who consistently writes for a wide readership, a professor for the common reader. His novel about Leo Tolstoy’s final years, The Last Station, is currently being made into a movie.

Each chapter in Promised Land focuses on one book, with each divided into four parts: a thumbnail sketch of the book’s importance; a historical context for the writer and the work; a description of the main body; and a case for the work’s legacy. The books’ cultural and political climates are often as important as their content. In his chapter on William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation, Parini describes 1856 America, with its states heading toward disunion and its westward expansion coming to define the country’s “Manifest Destiny” credo. “Bradford’s account of the early Pilgrim adventures offered an alternative reality,” a society of “fiercely united and determined men and women” who would create America’s mythic first Thanksgiving. In 1856, the country needed a unifying myth, and Bradford’s fit the bill.

Parini has written a kind of guide to reading these works. Each chapter could serve as an excellent introduction to the books, and indeed, reading Promised Land made me want to read, or re-read, most of these seminal American books. I write “most” because I’m not sure what literary pleasure would be gained by reading Dr. Benjamin Spock’s The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care.

A few other odd choices help Parini’s work stand out. There are chapters on Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People and the little-known immigrant narrative The Promised Land, by Mary Antin. Parini makes strong cases for Antin and Spock, but his allegiance to Carnegie seems more about that work’s influence on Parini’s own life.

Several themes run through Promised Land, and as it progresses, one can see the connections among the books. America’s “outward expansion” is reflected in Plymouth Plantation and The Journals of Lewis and Clark. The “inward exploration” of the American mind is developed in Franklin’s autobiography and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. Later books, such as On the Road, encapsulate both inward and outward journeys.

Of course, many of the books deal with democracy, independence and race. These books speak to each other, some making promises and others reminding us to keep them. Parini consistently reminds us that all 13 are nodal books of the American character.

Sometimes these broad, sweeping statements seem too trite for a serious critic of American literature, but Parini backs up his rhetoric with detailed analysis. And, for the scholar itching to point out books that were omitted, the author has included an appendix of 100 more great American works, and a short paragraph about the importance of each.

Still, Promised Land left me a little cold, providing one serious discussion after another, each like a dose of American medicine. Most of these books are works to be studied more than enjoyed, so Parini’s book falls into a pattern, like 13 lectures in a row. Taken individually, each is fascinating and deep. But after the first half-dozen, one needs a little pulp fiction to enliven the palate.

Las Vegas Weekly

The King James of Noir

Cops takes Bruen’s no-nonsense approach to the extreme

Once Were Cops

by Ken Bruen

St Martin's Minotaur. 294 pp.

Reviewed by Edward Pettit

Ken Bruen has been perfecting his hard-boiled prose for a little over 10 years now. His finely crafted noir novels seem to get sparser, tougher and grimmer with each new one published. And there have been two dozen of these gems in that prolific decade. His latest, Once Were Cops, takes another step along his unique path to tell a crime story in the fewest words possible.

Michael O’Shea is an Irish cop, one of the Gardaí, on loan to the New York City Police Department. However, this is no Irish-bumpkin-let-loose-in-the-Big-City kind of story. Shea, as he styles himself, is a psychopathic killer who leaves a string of bodies in his wake. A few have suspected the killer that lurks inside him, but Shea’s own cleverness, coupled with his fearsome demeanor, has always kept him one step ahead of the authorities.

Noir master Jim Thompson worked this scenario in a couple of his greatest novels, The Killer Inside Me and Pop. 1280, in which small-town sheriffs use their guile to mask dark, murderous hearts. Bruen plows the same terrain, but Thompson’s sherriffs are mere farm boys compared to Shea. His killing fury is buried so deep inside him that, when unleashed, it erupts like a cold storm and he loses consciousness of his actions:

Then there’s the zoning, from the time I was a child, I’d go someplace in my mind, a cold place and it’s like seeing the world through fog or very heavy glass and what I most want is to do damage, biblical damage, it’s beyond rage, more like a controlled fury that oh so carefully watches, then strikes ...

My Mother used to say,

“Shea lives in another room.”

A room covered in ice and fierceness.

There are two overlapping narratives in Once Were Cops: Shea’s first-person voice alternating with a third-person point of view of his NYC Police partner, Kurt Browski. Later in the novel, the POV shifts to a former cop-turned-investigative reporter, Joe Mulloy, on the trail of a brutal serial killer who is preying upon young women in New York. Browski is nicknamed Kebar because of his weapon of choice, the short, lethal K-bar pipe he uses to tame his suspects. In any other book, Kebar would be the bad cop.

Bruen, in all his novels, likes to take the conventions of noir and crime one step further. The reader expects the punch. But Bruen whacks the reader senseless with a pipe, or more usually an Irish hurley stick, to the temple. Blood flows. What just hit me? Did he really just do that to a character?

More than once, while reading a Bruen novel, I’ve wondered what dark dreams must haunt him, his characters wracked with a Dantean pain. Then I realize it’s his masterful prose, the lyrical Celtic expression wrapped around the iron bar of hardboiled American idiom. Beating a guy with a hurley stick, Shea thinks that, “to hear that whoosh of the bat, it was like the darkest music.” Or when he runs into Jack Taylor, the Irish PI from another of Bruen’s series, drinking in a bar, Shea comments:

I saw a photo of Beckett in a mag once and fuck, more lines on his face than the ordnance map of the country.

Taylor’s face would have given him a close run.

The lines were imbedded, like with a very sharp knife.

And the ones around his eyes, you just knew laughter certainly hadn’t been responsible.

Bruen’s no-nonsense prose style is a good fit for Shea. Once Were Cops seems to operate on a whole new stylistic level for contemporary crime thrillers. Looking at the pages of the novel, I almost felt it was a novel in verse, with only 20-25 lines per page, spaced out so that there’s more white space than text. This isn’t prose. The novel is an exercise in the poetics of noir, each line aphoristically phrased to pack the sharpest, most damaging, biblically damaging, punch. Bruen is like the King James of noir, and an Irish one at that, weaving his spell of dark music, his pale rider coming out of the whirlwind to bring down the hammer of kingdom come.

Notes on Democracy: a New Edition

by H.L. Mencken

Afterword by Anthony Lewis

Introduction and annotations by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers

Dissident Books, 206 pp

Reviewed by Edward Pettit

Swimming Against the Sea of Morons

Over the last couple years, I’ve become so dissatisfied with the American political system that I’ve almost stopped participating. Politicians who speak in nothing but a coded language, pundits who do nothing but speak in a code of their own and journalists who feed the obfuscating fire. Is it any wonder that so many people have turned to comedy programs, like the Daily Show, SNL and late-night talk shows, for their political news? Comedy has a way of cutting through the bullshit. 

So how refreshing it was to read Dissident Books’ reissue of H.L. Mencken’s Notes on Democracy, first published in 1926. Mencken was a world famous journalist and iconoclast of the highest order, so politically incorrect that it is highly unlikely he would survive in what passes for news-reportage today. 

Marion Elizabeth Rodgers provides some biographical and critical background for Mencken in an introduction that borders on hagiography. But I forgave the saint-like treatment when Rodgers provided this Mencken quotation: 

If I have accomplished anything in this world it is this: that I have made life measurably more bearable for the civilized minority in America. The individuals of this minority are often surrounded by dark, dense seas of morons and so they tend to become hopeless. I have reason to believe that my books and other writings have given a little comfort to many such persons and even inspired some of them to revolt. I am glad of the comfort but the revolt doesn’t interest me. 

The elitist in me feels a pang of Menckenian kinship, as I daily swim against that tide of morons. 

Mob rule was feared by many of the politicians who founded America and the role of the common man was heatedly debated for the first few decades of the Early American Empire. This is not surprising when you consider they watched the French Revolution, modeled after and inspired by the American one, succumb to riot and rampant bloodshed. America never went down this path. Our politicians, at least, have been relatively safe from violent overthrow. 

However, Mencken saw American Democracy in the same stark turns, as a conflict between the elite, educated citizens and the shrill, blunt mob. Watching the political parties ratchet up the class war terminology for the last few months has done nothing to dispel this view. Mencken watched successive administrations play the fear card to pursue their agenda, especially with The Great War. Make the people afraid and they’ll follow you anywhere. 

Mencken’s fear of demagoguery has become an even greater problem today because of the power of mass media. Political operatives have learned how to manipulate a system, to control certain small pockets of voters, just enough of them to supply victories at the polls. Mob rule is now so deftly manipulated that the mob doesn’t know they’re being led and the watchdogs, the journalists, don’t know they are playing a role in manipulating them.

You might wonder why I’m pontificating about politics in what is supposed to be a book review. Mencken made me do it. Every page of his Notes was a refreshing shot to my political brain. I felt as if I had finally found someone willing to lay bare the bones of our democratic system. I can’t help but read his book and think about our own time. Comfort indeed in a world of morons. 

Philadelphia Inquirer

Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself
By Robert Montgomery Bird

Introduction by Christopher Looby

NYRB Classics. 425 pp.

Reviewed by Edward Pettit

So, you've been looking for an early 19th-century novel about metempsychosis? Look no further. Robert Montgomery Bird's Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself is back in print. What? You are not an ardent follower of tales of the metempsychotic? Let me explain. Metempsychosis is the transference of the soul or spirit from one body to another after death. Sounds like the kind of story Edgar Allan Poe might write. In fact, Poe himself reviewed Bird's novel when it was first published in 1836:

"We must regard 'Sheppard Lee,' upon the whole, as a very clever, and not altogether unoriginal, jeu d'esprit. Its incidents are well conceived, and related with force, brevity, and a species of directness which is invaluable in certain cases of narration."

There is even a blurb from Poe on the back cover of the newly printed edition, and Poe also mined Bird's plot for one of his greatest stories, "The Gold Bug."

Sheppard Lee is an indolent gentleman farmer in New Jersey who bemoans his dwindling finances, but can't muster enough energy to change his fortunes. When he dies in a foolhardy attempt to locate buried pirate treasure, his ghost discovers another deceased man, a rich Philadelphia brewer who has broken his neck jumping a fence while hunting. Sheppard wishes he could have led this rich man's life, and immediately his ghostly spirit enters the dead man's body.

Sheppard retains the memories of his own existence, but he also fully becomes the other man, gradually recovering that man's identity and memories as he walks in his shoes and interacts with his family and friends. However, Sheppard soon learns that all-important lesson about the color of grass on the other side of the socioeconomic fence. What follows are several picaresque adventures among the social strata of antebellum America, as Sheppard Lee hops from one dead body to the next.

The lives of others beckon to Sheppard like the desiderata of his own unfulfilled dreams. After the brewer, he metamorphoses into a spendthrift dandy on the hunt for a wealthy girl to marry. Then he enters the body of Philadelphia's most notorious moneylender. Next he is a wealthy Quaker philanthropist who can't give away his money quickly enough. Sheppard learns too late that each new existence has its own unique set of miseries. His metempsychotic gift becomes a curse. Sheppard is like a comic version of the Wandering Jew, roaming the streets and country lanes of a corrupt nation, solace never at hand. He is beaten, robbed and swindled.

After his Quaker self is kidnapped by Southern slavery sympathizers who mistake him for an abolitionist, Sheppard's only recourse is to jump into the body of a dead slave named Tom. Bird's satiric romp now takes a grim turn as Tom becomes involved in planning a slave insurrection on his plantation. The political and social humor is easy to swallow when the wealthy and corrupt receive their comeuppance, but slavery is a bitter pill.

Bird distrusts everyone who would attempt to alleviate the suffering of the downtrodden. His Quaker philanthropist is a fool who ruins himself trying to help those who scorn his charity. His abolitionists are scaremongers, sowing discord that will erupt in violence. Whereas early in the novel it's often hard to interpret Bird's political stances - some of his lines are pitch-perfect irony - when it comes to the effects of an abolitionist pamphlet in the hands of slaves, Bird pulls no punches. Humor leaves his pen and bloody carnage follows. It seems clear that Bird had no love for abolitionists or their cause.

It's not that Bird is pro-slavery. As a dramatist he wrote a heroic account of the Roman slave revolt led by Spartacus and declared that the play could never be performed in the South without its author being lynched. What scares Bird is the very real threat of violence over the slave question. He already sees enough misery and injustice in his society. The threat of a slave insurrection is too horrific for him to accept as a valid solution.

Poe wrote that the novel is "a farce of very pretty finesse." True, but Bird's humor is also sharp, even cynically driven. He leaves no social group (not even slaves) unscathed. Although I am suspicious of his characterization of the issues of slavery, it fits the broader purpose of his novel, which is to dissipate the delusions of a corrupt society. Sheppard Lee's imposture of his fellow citizens mirrors the false pretenses of a nation. Bird's richly nuanced novel wears the dramatic mask of comedy, but underneath lies the mask of tragedy.

More Doyle, yet still Unsated

Books on Holmes' creator leave mysteries unsolved.

A Phila. gentleman warms to Lincoln

A Philadelphia Perspective: the Civil War Diary of Sidney George Fisher

Edited by Jonathan White
Fordham. 282 pp.

by Edward Pettit

"Met Mr. Ryan on the road. He told me news had just come to town that the Republican Party had nominated a Mr. Lincoln for President. I never heard of him before," writes Sidney George Fisher in his diary on May 18, 1860. "It will calm many fears, allay much animosity and inspire hope of better times throughout the country, whoever Mr. Lincoln may be."

Sidney George Fisher was a member of Philadelphia's high society in the mid-19th century. He came from a wealthy family, hobnobbed with the merchant and banking aristocracy and, though not rich himself, spent his days as a gentleman farmer.

Fisher gave speeches to historical and agricultural organizations. He wrote books and pamphlets on the major political questions of his day, such as slavery and constitutional authority. Fisher was, as Samuel Johnson once said of Boswell (according to Boswell), "a very clubable man." Respectable, sociable and determined to make his mark (as long as he didn't have to break a sweat doing it).

Fisher, also like Boswell, kept a diary for most of his adult life. From 1834 until 1871 Fisher commented on the daily minutiae of his own life and of the society in which he lived. Only death halted his voluminous output: He died a mere three days after his last entry.

Unlike Boswell's, Fisher's diary is not filled with details of sexual encounters. While Boswell's journals would not seem out of place as a contemporary blog, with its author's private life splayed for all to see, Fisher writes with a precision and formality that suggest he hoped for readers in years to come. He was not merely taking notes for future writing projects. He was crafting an autobiography, in daily detail.

Fisher's diary has been a boon to historians of 19th-century America for some time. Nicholas B. Wainwright first edited and published a single-volume edition in 1967. This new one, edited by Jonathan White, is a reprinting of only the Civil War years from Wainwright's edition. White has not added any previously unpublished material, even though, as he notes in a preface, Wainwright only published "5 to 10 percent of the original diary." White adds that the Civil War years, in Fisher's own original format, "span some twenty-two volumes." Considering that White was only republishing a few years from the diary, couldn't he have added some extra material? Are there perhaps some salacious Boswellian moments that we don't know about?

From the first entry in this edition, on Jan. 1, 1860, Fisher crafts himself as a man apart. On not attending church service, he writes, "It is very well for the multitude to have a day consecrated to religious observances. . . . But for the thinking man, every day is Sunday, he sees the moral, the divine in truth, and truth governs every day and all things, the most common and familiar." He's not one of the rabble. This passage also suggests an iconoclastic distrust of organized religion.

The personal nature of a diary almost forces a reader to make emotional judgments about the subject, and I found myself disliking Fisher for much of the first year's entries. Longing for the aristocratic ways of yesteryear, lamenting the growing numbers of the uneducated, Fisher often comes off as a prig. But, in documenting the swirling events of the Civil War, Fisher evolves before your eyes. His views on slavery shift. He waxes philosophical. One day (March 13, 1861) he is viewing Barnum's exhibit of African and Central American natives, but can only see (like most of his time) "man in an arrested state of development." The very next day Fisher turns to metaphysical rumination: "We thus die daily and yesterday is as much lost to me as the hour of my birth."

Most interesting is the development of Abraham Lincoln's reputation in Fisher's eyes. From the first mention, quoted above, Fisher is longing for a statesman to save his society from its secessionist mess. And although, as a result of Lincoln's nomination, no fears were becalmed and those "better times" would come only after four years of bloody civil war, Fisher sees the light at the end of the dark tunnel, choosing to quote "the mystic chords of memory / better angels of our nature" part of Lincoln's first inaugural address. Lincoln's speeches gradually win him over and galvanize his commitment to the Union.

A melancholic tone, as Fisher nurses various ailments and mourns Lincoln's assassination, concludes these diary entries as if recording the final days of some lost America. The diary is, at times, an aristocratic idyll in which the classes are forever separate (and not at all equal), and at other times a place where Fisher can explore the ideas of his day and provide the reader with honest opinions. All in all, well worth reading.