Melanie is fifteen, innocent, and full of romantic dreams. She pretends to be a girl in a film, a magazine, a painting.

She was too thin for a Titian or a Renoir but she contrived a pale, smug, Cranach Venus with a bit of net curtain wound round her head (…) She stuck moon-daisies in her long hair and looked at herself in her mirror as if she were a photograph in her own grown-up photograph album. (…) She said to the daisy girl with her big, brown eyes: “I will not have it plain. No. Fancy. It must be fancy.” She meant her future. A moon-daisy dropped to the floor, down from her hair, like a faintly derisive sign from heaven.

No good can come of this, of course, particularly not in a novel by the great English writer Angela Carter, who never trusts a romantic dream. One night Melanie puts on her mother’s wedding dress and accidentally tears it. The next day, a telegram arrives. Her parents are dead, and she must go to live with relatives in London.

In the house of her uncle, a tyrannical toymaker, and his unwilling apprentice, the vulpine young orphan Finn, Melanie’s sexual awakening ceases to be a romance and becomes a dark and dangerous fairy tale. In this new house there are no mirrors but there are eyes, judging Melanie for good or ill. When her uncle assigns her the title role in his marionette performance of Leda and the Swan, she realizes that to survive she must refuse this latest female role: that of puppet on his patriarchal stage.

‘The Magic Toyshop’ (1967), the best of Carter’s early work, is being published in the Netherlands as a ‘forgotten classic’, in a fine translation by Marijke Versluys. The appellation doesn’t do justice to Carter’s stature: in Britain she’s thoroughly established in the literary canon, while elsewhere in the English-speaking world she falls somewhere between canon and cult. But it’s true that she’s little known in the Netherlands. Though she’s a sharp-eyed observer of the condition humaine, Dutch readers tend to like their social criticism straight, or with an ironic twist, rather than the sophisticated literary cocktail Carter serves of sly comedy, eroticism, and Gothic dread, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, and Poe.

As her literary influence grows, however (see below), it might be time for readers in the Netherlands to take notice. In ‘The Magic Toyshop’ she was already exploring the themes that inform her later work, including Britain’s class divide, the tyranny of fathers, the cruel and innocent fantasies of teenage girls, the charged connection between power and desire. Along with mirrors, the theater recurs as a metaphor in her work. Melanie is one of Carter’s many women who learn to be themselves by playing a part—only to discover that the performance is dangerously real.

Youthful energy and imagination paper over the cracks in this early work, especially a disconcerting contrast between a surrealistic plot and a realistic narrative style. In ‘The Magic Toyshop’ Carter mixes ordinary details—cups of tea, inadequate plumbing, worn toothbrushes—with implausible events, such as a severed hand that turns up in the kitchen drawer. Carter must have borrowed the trick, without quite knowing how to work it, from films by Fellini and Buñuel.

In many ways this is a book of the 1960s. Carter was speaking for a postwar generation of long-haired kids who had claimed England as their decaying pleasure garden, the sacred images of Empire as their box of toys. The scene in which Melanie and Finn kiss in a neglected park, beside a fallen and defaced statue of Queen Victoria to which Finn has just affixed his wad of gum, gives a hint of Carter’s anti-establishment attitude.

Yet even this early work of Carter’s is layered and tricky, sexy and cerebral. Rereading it, I mainly notice how timeless and innovative it still feels, and how great Carter’s power still is to delight and surprise.

Trouw, January 28, 2015. Angela Carter, The Magic Toyshop (1967), Het nichtje van de poppenspeler (Nieuw Amsterdam, 2016)

Imagination and influence

Angela Carter (1940-1992) is regarded as one of Britain’s most important and influential postwar writers. For much of her early career she worked on the margins of the literary establishment. Popular acclaim came late, not long enough before her death from lung cancer at 51. It was only afterward that her work was fully recognized for its fierce, unorthodox feminism, playful sensuality, intellect and imagination.

Carter grew up amid the “seedy respectability” of postwar South London, a place and time so unimaginative it left her with a lifelong craving for the exotic and the unexpected. At 18 she went to work for a local newspaper, following in the footsteps of her journalist father. She later studied at the University of Bristol and published her first novel at the age of 26.

Along with the intellectually brilliant feminist adventure yarn ‘Nights at the Circus’ (1984), her best-known book is ‘The Bloody Chamber’ (1979), a volume of sophisticated, erotic, feminist retellings of fairy tales. Folk tales, Carter argued, were full of sexual symbolism to begin with: think of Bluebeard with his murdered wives, or ‘Beauty and the Beast.’ In her story ‘The Company of Wolves’ (and in Neil Jordan’s 1984 film of the same name), human and animal merge and Red Riding Hood and the wolf go to bed together as equals. Carter was interested in sexual desire, how it can make women vulnerable or, if they choose to own it, become a source of their power.

In a 1985 interview with Marc Chavannes in NRC she admitted that some readers found her work “a bit much.”* But she never thought literature should be a difficult or depressing enterprise. “Pleasure has always had a bad press in Britain,” she once wrote. “I wish there was more of it around.”

Any number of contemporary writers acknowledge her influence. Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan were her protégés, Margaret Atwood and Fay Weldon her friends, Kazuo Ishiguro and Pat Barker her students. Above all, she opened a door for English-language writers to slip out of realism and explore beyond it. Sarah Waters, David Mitchell, Jeanette Winterson, Ali Smith, and many more have taken their inspiration from her baroque mix of intellect and fantasy, her fearless eye and her passionate heart.

*Sommige mensen vinden het een beetje veel wat er op ze afkomt als ze mij lezen. “Some people find it a bit much, what comes at them when they read me.”

Timmi Duchamp at Aqueduct Press asked to write about my ‘year’s best’ books, which always makes me feel anxious and guilty (of not reading enough, of not having interesting taste). So instead I wrote about being alone for a few days, reading for ‘The Baby on the Fire Escape’ and discovering the unexpected. You can read it on the Aqueduct Press blog.

To read her new memoir M Train you would hardly know that Patti Smith is a rock star. She doesn’t let on that at sixty-eight she’s a hard-working performer, touring, lecturing, doing benefit concerts, going to parties with fashion designers, making appearances with the Dalai Lama. In her sequel to Just Kids, her magical 2010 memoir of youth and art, Smith prefers to present herself as a sort of intercontinental, frequent-flying, literary flâneuse in search of the perfect writers’ café.

The title comes from her idea of the book as a mental train journey, with the writer as conductor: where Just Kids told a story, M Train is a loose collection of sketches and observations from a musician and poet between tours. We see Smith in bed with a cat in her West Village townhouse, watching The Killing and reading Murakami. We spot her in Japan at the grave of the filmmaker Akira Kurosawa; in Mexico taking pictures in Frida Kahlo’s house; in her neighborhood café eating breakfast (brown toast, black coffee) and writing poetry. She even gives us an international list of her favorite coffee houses, including Coffeeshop Bluebird in Amsterdam.

“It’s not so easy writing about nothing,” is her opening sentence; later she laments, “I’m sure I could write endlessly about nothing. If only I had nothing to say.” With this play on words she confesses the limits of the book: the something she has to tell, she’s not telling. In Just Kids she described her early romance with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, but in her new book she does not break her long-standing silence about the other great love of her life, the guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith. After her marriage to Smith in 1980 she lived in semi-retirement in a Detroit suburb with him and their two children. A glimpse or two is all she’ll give away of her thirties. “An era of small pleasures,” she calls it, when she had a crib and a clothesline, got her coffee from 7-Eleven, did her best thinking in the lot behind the bait store, and was in a marriage she describes as a “clock with no hands,” “the silent synchronization of the jewels and gears of a common mind.”

She does tell us she and Fred began their relationship with a journey, visiting Suriname and French Guiana in homage to one of Patti’s heroes, Jean Genet. They also travelled in fantasy. When they bought an elegant vintage motorboat whose axle cost too much to repair, they put it in their yard and sat in it on summer evenings, Fred with beer, Patti with a thermos of coffee, listening to baseball games on the radio. Their happiness didn’t last. During a thunderstorm, a tree crushes their beloved boat; during another on Halloween 1994, Fred is taken to the hospital. He dies a few days later of heart failure, leaving Patti a grieving widow of forty-eight.

Her tone in these sketches is often melancholy, her theme often loss. She writes about the Arctic researcher Alfred Wegener, who disappeared on Greenland in 1930, and about her membership in the Continental Drift Club, a scientific society named for the theory Wegener proposed. Even a beloved, misplaced coat becomes a symbol of mortality. “Do our lost possessions mourn us? (…) Will my coat, riddled with holes, remember the rich hours of our companionship?”

Just Kids was full of people, the artists, writers, and musicians who influenced the young Patti and became her friends. M Train is full of ghosts. Many of the moody black-and-white Polaroids reproduced in the book are of gravestones, and her thoughts are often with Fred and other lost family and friends. Alone, she communes with the writers who speak to her in books. Through them she also recalls her younger self, the ambitious, starry-eyed poet in love with Rimbaud and Sylvia Plath.

The reader longs for more; but it’s not to be. Just Kids was a rich, full book about how to begin. This is a book about endings, about how to mourn and how to survive.

Trouw, October 17, 2015. Patti Smith, M Train (New York: Knopf, 2015), M-train (Breda: De Geus, 2015). Photo from the book via the New York Times.

The most talked-about, most prize-winning book of poetry in the United States right now is “Citizen: An American Lyric,” by the Jamaican-American writer and performer Claudia Rankine. Published in the midst of the Ferguson protests, Rankine’s prose poems are an attempt to make the reader feel the workings of racism—not only the prejudice and aggression that lead to police killings, but the more insidious discrimination found in educated circles. Her painful examples are often given in the second person. “The wrong words enter your day like a bad egg in your mouth,” she writes, so that not “I” but “you” undergo the alienation of being misrepresented, insulted, or overlooked because of the color of your skin.

In novels, too, much of the acclaimed writing about race right now takes the form of finely observed descriptions of social interactions—novels of multicultural manners, as it were. Zadie Smith’s great subject in books like ‘NW’ is the codes and assumptions held at various rungs on the class ladder, and their effect on friendship and love. In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s perceptive and canny “Americanah” a Nigerian academic at Princeton writes a blog on the unwritten laws of race in the United States, while her friends in Lagos try to give shape to an African professional class. To these and other upwardly and internationally mobile writers, realism is an essential way to document experience and explore identities that can’t be taken for granted but must be traced, reiterated, claimed.

But because race is constructed in part at the level of the imaginary, it can also be confronted on its own imaginary terms. Two recent novels from the English-speaking world explore racism in the symbolic language of the fairy tale, a form in which hidden emotions come to light and, sometimes, find magical solutions. Fairy tales reveal the inner life of the family, including the psychic damage that is done to children by parents who suffer from injustice and secrets. Like Rankine’s poetry, fairy tales are good at putting the reader at the center of the disturbance. In a fairy tale it is always you who goes on the journey, who loses the shoe, who undergoes a change of skin.

The tale that’s retold in both books is “Snow White,” and in both a girl’s skin color plays an important role. One is by Helen Oyeyemi, the young, playful British writer who has made a career of finding new meanings in old tales. The other, more surprising version is by Toni Morrison, who has been one of America’s great magic realists but has never gone so deep into the rich world of dreams.

Oyeyemi’s fifth novel, “Boy, Snow, Bird,” is set in a small New England town in the 1950s and ’60s, a sort of fantasy village out of Grimm by way of Hollywood, all soft colors, no sharp edges. A young woman named Boy comes to town, having run away from her cruel father, and marries a widower, Arturo Whitman, who has a beautiful daughter named Snow. Together they have a daughter named Bird who is dark where Snow is fair, revealing that Whitman has been passing for white. It seems impossible for the two girls to be raised together, and one must be sent away. Deft play with magical elements—lost children, stepmothers, wise grandmothers, and, of course, mirrors—make this a book that handles problems of difference, growing up a girl, marriage, and secrets with both keen insight and irrepressible charm.

Mirrors and reflections play a role in Morrison’s new novel, too, but she wouldn’t be Morrison if her tale didn’t involve quite a bit more broken glass. In “God Help the Child,” Morrison takes up her familiar theme of broken parent-child bonds, and especially the “wicked stepmother”: the mother who, trapped in her own situation, has nothing to give her children. She has given us dramatic examples of this in the past, such as the mother in “Beloved” who kills her daughter, and the mother in “A Mercy” who gives her daughter away rather than raise her in slavery. “God Help the Child” begins in fact with the mother’s protest: “It’s not my fault. So you can’t blame me.”

What the mother, Sweetness, has done is given birth to a child as black as tar, “midnight black, Sudanese black.” A woman proud of her light complexion and “good hair,” Sweetness can’t love her dark-skinned, different-colored child, can barely bring herself to touch her. The daughter’s longing for her mother’s love later leads her to accuse an innocent woman of child abuse. Cruelty to children runs through Morrison’s tale, just as it does in real fairy stories: another character, the sensitive, studious Booker, experiences his brother’s death at the hands of a child molester and struggles to recover from his loss.

The dark-skinned child, born Lula Ann Bridewell, becomes a beautiful young woman who works in the fashion business and shortens her name to “Bride.” The inventor of a cosmetics line called “You, Girl,” she sets off her black skin with all-white clothes: we see her “driving a Jaguar in an oyster-white cashmere dress and boots of brushed rabbit fur the color of the moon.” Morrison has fun coming up with fashion-catalog names for white and black, comparing skin to licorice or a chocolate soufflé, while Bride’s clothes are “ivory, oyster, alabaster, paper white, snow, cream, ecru, Champagne, ghost, bone.” Her fashion consultant assures her, “Black sells. It’s the hottest commodity in the civilized world.” But when your skin color is a commodity, you remain confined in your image. This fairy tale character, a California princess the color of “sable and ice,” is just as trapped in the mirror as Snow White.

Bride is in love with Booker, and when he leaves her, strange things start to happen. She has a violent and unforgiving encounter with the woman she once put in jail. She loses her body hair, stops menstruating, and seems to be turning back into a child. She steps into her Jaguar, journeys into a dark forest, is cared for by a family of woodcutters, and puts herself in danger to save the life of a little girl called Rain. She meets a wise woman called Queen who is part spider, part witch in a gingerbread house. And at last she finds Booker, her prince—though in lieu of a kiss scene she brains him with a beer bottle for leaving her. It’s this moment of righteous anger that clears the way for an honest discussion and, for both Booker and Bride, an acceptance of adult responsibility.

Morrison has always been open to magic and the uncanny, but never has she been so willing to fantasize and play as in this parable about choosing not to be defined by past hurts. Perhaps because she’s experimenting, she doesn’t always get the tone right. The combination of detailed, often harsh realism and improbable events can wrong-foot the reader. It’s not always clear when to read “God Help the Child” as social criticism and when to see Bride and Booker, Queen and Rain as purely symbolic figures. What is clear is that Morrison is writing about the problem Claudia Rankine raises in “Citizen,” the problem she herself has been exploring since her first novel, “The Bluest Eye”: the way society holds up a mirror to people of color in which they don’t recognize themselves. Her outrage is as alive as ever, her openness to new genres a surprise and a delight.

Trouw, June 20, 2015. Toni Morrison, God sta het kind bij (De Bezige Bij). Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric. Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird.

Practically everyone I know loves Cloud Atlas except me. David Mitchell’s 2004 novel is ambitious and clever, I can see that, combining six storylines, each written in a very different style, all loosely connected by a shared vision of human weakness and impending (self-)destruction. (Actually, “novel” hardly seems an adequate term for this kind of 500-page stem-winder. If a small novel is a “novella,” what is an overlong one? Novelissimo? Novepedia?) Switching modes from epistolary novel to thriller to dystopian fiction, Cloud Atlas foregrounds the art of storytelling while doing what science fiction does, and what most of us too seldom do as we’re carried along in the river of the present: ask where we’re going and how we got to where we are. By borrowing elements from genre it achieves that grand sweep from history to future that’s always exciting when you encounter it for the first time.

When you look at the parts separately, though, what do you have? A couple of highly ironic historical fictions, a second-rate thriller, one extended satiric interlude, and two sci-fi tales, all too long, all drenched in a sticky sauce of pastiche and imitation. The parts set in the future feel especially hollow: Mitchell lacks the inventiveness, the originality of vision, the moral urgency or wild-eyed paranoia that might make him a great writer of speculative fiction. As big and memorable as it is essentially gimmicky, Cloud Atlas is the “Bohemian Rhapsody” of postmodern literature.

Instead I admire a different Mitchell, the one who is so good at evoking real places and moments of everyday intimacy. His terrific gifts as a realist can best be seen in Black Swan Green, his short, sweet novel of English childhood in the 1980s, full of living, breathing characters, funny, moving, and believable human interactions, and moody, beautifully realized settings. As the hero journeys through the small dystopia that is the age 13, Mitchell gives each event its own tinge of magic.

Mitchell’s sixth novel, The Bone Clocks, is more like Cloud Atlas, another genre-blending, career-advancing doorstop of a book. But here Mitchell’s realist gifts are all seductively, brilliantly on display. It begins in the summer of 1984 in Thatcher’s England, when Holly Sykes, a 15-year-old with spiky hair and a thorny attitude, has a fight with her mother and leaves her home in Gravesend, east of London. On foot she follows the Thames toward its mouth at Sheerness, over flat, empty, sun-filled land, stitched with power lines and motorways, scarred with bunkers and gravel pits. The Thames, that slow river of the present, is “biro-blue; the sky’s the blue of snooker-chalk.” In Mitchell’s hands, a calm summer day on the edge of London, in a landscape where the place names that sound magical but turn out to be on the map—Allhallows, Saint Mary Hoo, the Isle of Grain—becomes a ravishing setting for the beginning of an adventure.

As in Cloud Atlas, Mitchell breaks his narrative into six sections, switching sharply from one perspective to another. This time the stories are more closely connected, though, both to each other and to our own time and place. After Holly, we step into the mind of a fatally self-involved Cambridge student, then jump to 2004 as seen through the eyes of Holly’s husband, a war reporter and devoted father. Then we move into the future with the former “Wild Child of British Letters,” a misbehaving middle-aged writer à la Martin Amis. This satiric interlude is followed by a long fantasy action sequence, culminating in a supernatural battle; and when Holly returns to tell the ending, she’s a grandmother and the year is 2043.

Some of the narrative and thematic strands that connect these stories have to do with time, rebirth, what of us survives after death. As a child, Holly is “cured” of hearing voices by one Dr. Marinus, who is later revealed to be a Horologist, a member of a small group of souls that are reincarnated, life after life, with all their memories intact. (He is, of course, the same Dr. Marinus who appears in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet; several figures from Mitchell’s earlier novels are given new literary lives in The Bone Clocks.) Opposed to the Horologists are the Anchorites, who preserve eternal youth in their own bodies by drinking the souls of others. “Bone clock” is the Anchorites’ scornful word for a mortal body, doomed to tick away the hours from birth to death.

This reincarnation fantasy is also a commentary on one of Mitchell’s central themes, the art of fiction. It serves as a metaphor for what readers do as they move from story to story, in each one occupying another person’s body and mind. It’s also—especially since Mitchell has said his books should be read as a set of linked narratives—a way of continuing Mitchell’s ongoing interrogation of man’s fate. Within the narrow limits of human power, what’s worth doing? What gives weight to an individual soul? Writing, Mitchell suggests, is only one way to live beyond death; so are family bonds, caring for children, and other domestic acts of kindness. This is not a dramatic or unprecedented answer, and The Bone Clocks lacks one of the compelling qualities of Cloud Atlas, its atmosphere of lurking menace. But it’s a more adult conclusion, from a mature writer who is ready to stop storytelling and start writing.

At the same time Mitchell is still working on the problem of fusing realistic and imaginative fiction, high art and low. Halfway through The Bone Clocks, a character snarls that “a book can’t be a half fantasy”—a statement the author has staked his literary career on trying to disprove. Once again, he only half succeeds. While the fantasy plot gives The Bone Clocks its narrative energy, its thematic resonance, and a great page-turning middle section, it’s also the place where Mitchell’s maturity deserts him. All of a sudden there’s a war on between the good guys and the bad guys, the wise Horologists versus the vampiritic Anchorites, who speak in cartoonish lines, like “What’s it like, knowing you’ll be dead as a fucking stone in sixty seconds, Holly Sykes?” and “Crush them like ants!” The final battle seems lifted from Harry Potter, with the combatants shooting “psychobolts” at each other and Holly in the role of Molly Weasley, taking out an enemy while shouting “I told you, nobody threatens my family!” If this is literature, then I’m from the Lost Continent of Mu.

The problem is not that it’s fantasy but that it’s not very good. Truly great fantasy, from Shakespeare’s ‘Tempest’ to Le Guin’s ‘Earthsea’, speaks to our unconscious, not just our love of adventure, and Mitchell isn’t yet at that level. In fact, I sometimes wonder whether Mitchell’s lack of feeling for genre isn’t the reason for his popular success: his readers may prefer clichés to being taken too deep into the realms of the weird. But if The Bone Clocks is flawed, it’s also evocative, intimate, and powerful; it feels less safe and more challenging than Cloud Atlas. Mitchell may be a terrific realist, but I don’t want him to stop mixing realism and fantasy. I’m prepared to keep going there with him until he gets it right.

Trouw, January 10, 2015. David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks (London: Sceptre, 2014), Tijdmeters (Amsterdam: Nieuw Amsterdam, 2014). Originally published in slightly different form.

My review of Lisa See’s China Dolls is out now in the summer issue of Ms. Magazine. The novel draws on the unknown (to me) history of San Francisco’s Forbidden City nightclub and the Asian-American entertainers who worked there. While I was writing I kept looking up more images and footage, great stuff like the dance duo of Dorothy Toy and Paul Wing, not quite as acrobatic as the Nicholas Brothers but every bit as fun to watch.

My review of Chang-Rae Lee’s “On Such a Full Sea” is in the winter-spring 2014 issue of Ms. I’m still thinking about the book, and about why I so often end up with mixed feelings reading science fiction by “literary” writers.

On one hand, Lee makes skillful use of science fiction to explore Asian culture and the Asian-American experience. He delivers a brilliant critique of American class divisions, and of the way immigrants, in trying to get ahead, can be seduced into participating in an unjust system.

But the dystopian set pieces (especially the crossing of the lawless lands, here called “the counties”) were disappointingly unimaginative. The best science fiction has the power to show us ourselves in the mirror of the alien. Although “On Such a Full Sea” started out with images of haunting strangeness, by the end I felt it wasn’t nearly strange enough.

Women writers need to “raise the bar,” write more forcefully, set aside relationships and other supposedly female business and tackle “bigger” subjects. So says the young male novelist Jamal Ouariachi in last week’s Vrij Nederland, repeating a popular current assessment of women writers’ problem. Now, to my mind, the idea that novels by women are too domestic or too subtle is roughly 90 percent bullshit. But on the other hand, it’s exciting when you come across a book by a woman that’s obviously out to impress.

“The Flamethrowers” is just such a novel, self-confident, ambitious, burning with the thrill of its own achievement. From the opening scene, in which one man brains another with the headlight of a motorcycle, the American writer Rachel Kushner seems to have served up the book the critics ordered. She has been rewarded with high praise, a place on almost all the New York best books lists, and murmurs of “Great American Novel.”

All this enthusiasm creates enormous expectations, and for a while, it looks as if Kushner might fulfill them all. From its start in Italy during the First World War, cut to America in the 1970s and the main character, a young artist called Reno, riding a motorcycle through the Western desert. Her plan is to race across the salt flats, then photograph the tracks. “The two things I loved were drawing and speed,” Reno tells us. She thinks of her motorcycle run as “drawing in time (…) drawing in order to win.”

I tucked in and pegged the throttle. The salt stretched out in front of me. (…) I was going 145 miles an hour. Then 148. I was in an acute case of the present tense. Nothing mattered but the milliseconds of life at that speed. (…)

There’s a false idea that accidents happen in slow motion. (…) What happens slowly carries in each art the possibility of returning to what came before. In an accident everything is simultaneous, sudden, irreversible. It means this: no going back.

Kushner is showing off her exhilarating writing, but she’s also talking about artistic daring. An artist, she says, can’t be afraid to crash and burn.

“The Flamethrowers” never crashes, although it never again attains this level of speed and excitement. Like one of her models, Don DeLillo, Kushner loves to digress and to slip around in time and place, stringing her scenes together on the thinnest of threads. She takes us to early-twentieth-century Italy, when the Futurist artists were getting drunk on speed, youth, and violence, and to the Italy of the 1970s, the years of the Red Brigade. Mostly she hangs around in the New York art world circa 1977, where Reno returns, having crashed, survived the wipeout with nothing but a twisted ankle, and, shortly afterward, set a women’s land speed record.

In New York, Reno takes a job as a “China girl,” a young white woman whose skin tint is used by developers of film footage to calibrate the color of the actors’ skin. Her face is the reality by which other images are measured, but she herself is never seen. Searching for a role she can play in life, she often views her surroundings as a scene from an arty road movie, “Zabriskie Point” or ‘Five Easy Pieces’. Also caught in the ambiguous space between life and art is Reno’s friend Giddle, who treats her day job as theater: she “was a waitress but also playing the part of one: girl working in a diner, glancing out the windows as she cleaned the counter in small circles with a damp rag.”

Kushner (1968) was an editor at the New York art magazine BOMB before she published her first novel, ‘Telex from Cuba,’ in 2008. Not surprisingly, she writes with assurance not only about art but about artists, whose interactions Reno observes like a fly on the art-world wall. (These sections are admirable in their structural daring but, unless you love eavesdropping on the self-centered bla-bla of the New York art world, make dull reading.) The artists that Reno meets are all searching for the perfect gesture, the judicious pose, the fiction that represents reality better than reality itself. Later, in Rome, Reno finds herself caught up in a very real milieu of protest and terrorist violence. In a traditional novel, this would be the moment for Reno to stop chasing illusions and return to reality. In Kushner’s view, though, reality is never as interesting as artifice.

Kushner has a terrific talent for description. A singer’s voice “entered the room like a floating silk ribbon.” Driving to Rome, Reno watches “all the little snub-trunked Fiats on the autostrada, matchbox cars in white, beige or yellow, a few of them cherry-red and gleaming in the rain like children’s plastic slickers.” The descriptions help give the book its undeniable authority, but they also overload it and slow it down.

“The Flamethrowers” is far from lightweight, but it is one-sided: on an emotional level it has no ambition at all. Reno as a character is something of a blank—though she’s easy enough to fill in with the reader’s own dreams (if any) of moving to New York and having brushes with artistic fame. I admire Kushner’s audacity and the sureness of her prose. But I’m not sure I’m ready to trade away the traditional pleasures of the novel—like caring what happens to the characters—for any amount of writerly fireworks.

Trouw, March 15, 2014. Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers (New York: Scribner, 2013), De Vlammenwerpers (Amsterdam: Atlas Contact, 2014).

There are publishers who like to rummage in the jewel box of literature, looking for old books to try on. Some turn out to be diamonds, others semiprecious stones that happen to suit the mood of the times. “Stoner” (1965) by John Williams, last year’s successful revival, is an example of the second. Writing fifty years ago about patience, humility, thwarted fatherhood, and an apparently failed life redeemed by love of books, Williams seemed to foresee our own second thoughts about our urban, success-obsessed, dysliterate culture.

Now “Butcher’s Crossing” has been reissued in Dutch, Williams’s Western about buffalo hunters trapped by a bitter winter. But if you liked “Stoner” for its thoughtful evocation of a professor’s life, and aren’t in the mood for snow and testosterone, there are other rediscoveries available in translation.

To prolong the nostalgic mood of “Stoner,” you might turn to Jetta Carleton’s ’60s classic “The Moonflower Vine.” Or for a true literary gem, seek out the recent reissue of “A Lost Lady,” by Willa Cather, a truly great writer of the American West.

“The Moonflower Vine” shares a setting with “Stoner”: America’s rural Midwest in the 1920s and ’30s. Although it was a one-off—Carleton never published another book—it was a great success when it came out in 1962. It still has a loyal following of admirers and rereaders, drawn to the timeless, fully realized world of the Soames family of Renfro, Missouri.

The Soameses live on a farm in a pretty and provident country that “does not demand your admiration, as some regions do, but seems glad for it all the same.” The lushness of the land reflects the novel’s major theme, which is sex and the way it strengthens and disrupts family bonds. Father Matthew has raised himself out of poverty and ignorance to become principal of the local high school. He suffers from the conflict between his humble origins and his love of learning and beauty—a discrepancy that, for lack of other outlets, takes the form of barely repressed crushes on teenage girls. His practical, sensual wife Callie cares for their growing brood, while his daughters break his heart repeatedly as they set out to please themselves in life and love.

See here the great subject of the late-twentieth-century novel: how to be true to your sexuality without destroying the family and hurting those you love. What can’t be done in “Stoner,” reconciling bodily needs and family ties, is possible here, and is symbolized in the Soameses’ annual summer ritual: going out in the night together, as a family, to watch the brief, voluptuous blossoming of the moonflower vine.

Carleton is affecting, but she’s no intellectual. More sophisticated in its emotional reflections is Willa Cather’s 1923 novel “A Lost Lady,” reissued in 2011 by Cossee. Light and sophisticated (despite the melodramatic title), it is a ravishing paean to beauty, devotion, and failure, a love story that reflects on the settlement of the American West and the tragic disappointments of the pioneers.

Cather (1873-1947) is a novelist who’s always threatening to slip out of the literary canon. Even among the rediscovered women of the 1980s, in their green Virago covers, she was hard to place: a Modernist who hated the modern age, a lesbian who looked at passion with a cool and distant eye. Like Alice Munro, she likes to keep at a distance from her characters, using a calm surface to conceal the true intensity of her work. Her dispassionate narration creates tension but can also make her hard to fathom.

Cather was almost certainly an influence on John Williams, if only because “Stoner” bears such a powerful resemblance to Cather’s 1925 classic “The Professor’s House.” The two books have roughly the same plot: a Midwestern farmboy becomes a professor. He marries above himself, but becomes estranged from his wife and daughter(s). He completes his life’s work only to find that the modern age values money more than learning. Cather’s novel is more literary and complex, and even now more innovative. “Stoner” is more modest, more explicit in telling us how to live.

“A Lost Lady” deals with similar themes, but for once here Cather is accessible and openly, passionately sexy. The lady of the title is Marian, the young wife of Colonel Forrester, the most powerful, most cultivated man in the little prairie town of Sweet Water. (It’s based on Cather’s own home town of Red Cloud, Nebraska.) The Forresters came there when the town was new, when the railroads first spanned the continent and homesteaders tamed the land. They represent a beauty and heroism that are already vanishing: the crops have failed and the pioneers have moved on, replaced by a generation of greedy businessmen who value the land only for the meager profit they can wring from it.

We see the Forresters through the eyes of Niel, a young man of nineteen who loves Marian from afar. “Not even in Denver had he ever seen another woman so elegant (…) And never elsewhere had he heard anything like her inviting, musical laugh, that was like the distant measures of dance music, heard through opening and shutting doors.”

In a scene as comic as it is ravishing, Niel goes to the marsh at dawn to pick flowers for Marian. When he comes to this unspoiled, female place, the whole prairie seems to light up with his feelings:

Under the bluffs that overhung the marsh he came upon thickets of wild roses, with flaming buds (…) Where they had opened, their petals were stained with that burning rose-color which is always gone by noon,—a dye made of sunlight and morning and moisture, so intense that it cannot possibly last… must fade, like ecstasy.

Niel gathers a handful of “these roses, only half awake, in the defenselessness of utter beauty.” But when he goes to lay them at her open bedroom window, he hears a man’s deep voice and a woman’s laugh within: Marian is with a lover. Poor Niel, fleeing, drops his thorny bouquet into the mud.

Like “Stoner,” “A Lost Lady” has a cynical streak: the villains always win; the nice guy never gets the girl; ideals don’t pay the rent. And like “Stoner,” it has the stubborn optimism of the romantic. Williams, Carleton, and Cather all insist that the dream of beauty for which you drag yourself up from ignorance still has value, no matter how badly things work out in practice. John Stoner will always have literature, and Marian Forrester turns out not to be “lost” at all.

In fact, her fate could almost be paradigmatic for the obscure great book: an underground, determined survival. When last we see her she’s “all done up in furs,” stepping out of her new husband’s motor car in a foreign country. She’s older, of course, and dyes her hair. But she hasn’t changed as much as you’d think, and can still be recognized by the sound of her joyous laughter.

Trouw, January 4, 2014. John Williams, Stoner (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Lebowski, 2012); Jetta Carleton, Het bloeien van de avondwinde (Amsterdam: Van Gennep, 2013); Willa Cather, Een verloren vrouw (Amsterdam: Cossee, 2011).