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Let’s begin at the end. The final piece in the latest Virginia Quarterly Review is John T. Casteen IV’s incisive look at Poetry magazine’s long, strange trip since Indianapolis heiress Ruth Lilly bestowed some $200 million to it in 2002 and the young Christian Wiman took over as editor. Casteen compares the general voice of Poetry’s current brand of criticism to the notoriously surly (add Casteen’s words, “arrogant, masturbatory, spiteful”) reviews of poet William Logan.
Vine, thanks, how are you: Al Schornberg drinks to the future of the Virginia wine industry at the opening of his new tasting room at Keswick Vineyards.
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As it turns out, flip back a few pages from Casteen’s piece and you’ll find one of those said reviews—Logan’s painstaking (read: painful) deconstruction (read: demolition) of Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, Against the Day. Logan immediately gets off on the wrong foot by calling the novel “untidy.” As anyone who’s read Pynchon’s spasmodically evolving mock-narratives knows, that’s like chiding Little Orphan Annie for having red hair. Logan then goes on to go after the book’s verisimilitude (his word), when Pynchon’s writing always deliberately exists on the fringes of reality. Logan is too smart to not be aware of this fact, but once he locks onto a line of attack there’s no stopping him. He can’t seem to find even a tiny, cobwebbed corner of his peevish mind for the book’s cunning humor. At least he eventually gets around to praising Pynchon’s style (“passages of consummate beauty”). But that’s before he supplies a dizzying array of near-dismissals of Pynchon’s talent and legacy.
Consummate beauty is in short supply in this issue’s four short stories. While their clear narratives work as a necessary counterbalance to the brazen inventiveness of artists like Pynchon, the writing itself is as stagnant and colorless as Pynchon’s is fertile and revelatory. Even the celebrated Mario Vargas Llosa’s luminous details aren’t sung to the tune of a style that flows and enchants.
The poetry in this issue steps in to fill that void. Edward Hirsch’s claims for the greatness of Jirí Orten in his introduction to the late Czech poet’s work don’t quite pan out, but there are plenty of other choices, such as two examples of Marianne Boruch’s supple approach to personal narrative and Robin Ekiss’ clear yet suggestive “Mozart’s Mother’s Bones.”
Several more treasures await the reader: Burke Butler’s terse, tense memoir of her father, Adam Kirsch’s finely tuned essay on Yeats, Pound, Auden and the Modernist ideal, Michael Collier’s fascinating overview of the journals of Louise Bogan, and—if you begin at the beginning—a series of unconventional photos and articles on Iraq.