Month: September 2009

When Ben Marcus reviewed UVA professor Deborah Eisenberg’s most recent collection of short fiction, 2006’s Twilight of the Superheroes, he characterized the 63-year-old Eisenberg as a sort of archaeologist of American domestic secrets. “Eisenberg has given us these remarkable stories,” wrote Marcus, “machines of perfect revelation deftly constructed by a contemporary master.”

Odd choice of language, considering the ranks that Eisenberg joined last week. On Tuesday, September 22, the MacArthur Foundation unveiled its annual list of fellows—24 total, each to receive “genius” grants of $500,000 spread over the next 5 years, each grant described by the foundation as “out of the blue” and “no strings attached.”

The vaguely scientific language of the review  makes Eisenberg seem like a precise fit among previous UVA winners—among them, an epidemiologist (Janine Jagger, 2002) and a professor of chemistry (Brooks Pate, 2001). The only previous book-centric faculty “genius” is Terry Belanger, the former director of the Rare Book School, which moved to UVA in 1992.

But Eisenberg’s recognition—add it to the five O. Henry awards, MacArthur!—is a great bit of attention to the strengths of the UVA creative writing program. As it happens, the number of literary MacArthur winners with ties to UVA grows when you look beyond faculty: Heather McHugh, also a 2009 winner, has published poems in the Virginia Quarterly Review. And Edward P. Jones, a UVA creative writing alumnus, nabbed a genius grant in 2004, the same year his novel The Known World won the National Book Critics’ Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

A self-described “slow writer,” Eisenberg told UVA Today that the award “represents time.” Roughly nine years passed between Twilight of the Superheroes and her previous collection; with Eisenberg’s new budget, the next work might, conceivably, arrive a bit sooner. But why rush a genius?

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It was as if the rainiest night of the summer didn’t come until the first week of autumn. Lucinda Williams, awaiting showtime, was sheltered in one of two identical tour buses behind the Charlottesville Pavilion. Across the Ninth Street Bridge a small group of folks, many of whom appeared to be friends, was assembled at The Bridge to hear Tim Davis read something that was dubbed PerfectlyNormalPoems—a selection of unpublished works that Davis said will likely never be published.

Inside, copies of his 2004 collection American Whatever lay on a small table, next to a handwritten note: “Free—seriously.” Greg Kelly, managing director of The Bridge, introduced the reading as “poetic sideshow to Tim’s big exposition.” Davis, who was in town for a residency at UVA, is known for his work as a photographer—his collection, “My Life in Politics,” is showing at Ruffin Gallery through October 23—much of which explores his fascination with the American ephemeral. “Seven Entertainers,” for example, is a canted view of cardboard cutouts of real-life powerbrokers (Bill and Hillary) next to not-so-real ones (Dr. Evil and Xena). A harsh light glares off the creases at each character’s waist, where the cardboard folds.

Davis shuffled through a Manila folder of loose pages, reacting to them with the audience as if he had just found the poems in some soggy alleyway. His poetry—referential, messy and often funny—hoisted onto language that same preoccupation with preserving the disposable. A brief poem entitled “Retail” winded through variations on the phrase, “For all intents and purposes,” and ultimately came to rest on “For no intents or purposes.” Another poem, “Bumper Sticker Humor,” explored what Davis called a “false sense of community” by re-imagining bumper sticker slogans; among them, “My other car is a terrorist,” and “End hunger: Eat a little snack.”

The surface-level silliness in these lines at times gave way to more serious considerations. Was it the same poet who asked how many orifices a human has (arguably, 11), who poignantly asked, “What is the difference between terror and horror,” and went on to answer, “The old French said it had something to do with trembling”? It was.

In his essay “On Photography,” Davis writes, “America is a symphony of One-Offs. We’re always Supersizing and Downsizing or something. That’s why photographing it matters.” As the group stood to leave, somewhere in America—what Davis calls the “theme park of Flux”—three George W. Bushes were simultaneously broadcast on three flatscreen TVs at a Circuit City. Davis’ image of that moment, when it happened once before, hung on the wall of the Ruffin Gallery. And just outside, as Lucinda Williams began to play songs in the style of a durable American tradition, no one braved the rain on the Ninth Street Bridge to catch a free glimpse.

“I don’t remember any of that,” writes Liz Welch in The Kids Are All Right, a heart-rending new memoir she co-authored with her brother and two sisters about their transition from members of an elite Connecticut family to orphans and outcasts. The book shifts in perspective between the four Welch siblings, whose ages span more than a decade.

The first of the book’s three parts sets family tragedy before a backdrop of opulence. Their father’s death in a suspicious car accident brings rumors of his involvement with the C.I.A. His unsavory business dealings in Central America leave the wealthy family saddled with debt. This forces his widow, a gorgeous soap opera star who is battling cancer, to sell the “house, pool, and poolhouse.” 

In the parts that follow, the Welch children run unsupervised through the emotional gauntlet of young adulthood while their mother ails in the next room. When she dies, parenthood duties are farmed out to a broad cast of characters, good and evil, leaving the orphans to search widely for themselves and each other. They ultimately stake a new claim on family life in Louisa, Virginia, where the oldest child, Amanda, buys a rickety country home and hosts for holidays.

The book’s multiple perspectives unearth meaningful discrepancies that inevitably arise when a family tries to render a collective past. Some of these are less meaningful than others; as Steiff teddy bears and pony rides give way to bong rips and benders, two sisters can’t agree who they paid to kick guests out of a keg party. But elsewhere, it shows the peculiar sensitivity one has to a sibling’s emotions in a time of need.

Amanda and Dan, both outwardly rebellious, serve as reminders that, Hamlet aside, eternal tragedies cast juvenile angst in an unflattering light. (“‘You cannot wear leather pants to your father’s funeral,’ Mom pleaded.”) But their evenhanded, often terse explorations show that the tragedy of losing one’s family begets that angst even as it belittles it. The youngest of the bunch, Diana, was too young to remember the earlier events. Her moody reconstructions—when her mother dies, she feels like “cotton floating apart from the stem”—feel more true to the processes of memory. Such ethereal musings go a long way to temper the authors’ natural tendency to narrativize things like death that operate on their own schedule.

As the title suggests, pop culture references do a lot of heavy lifting. The farthest we go into “an ’80s world of alternative music and drugs” is a Buster Poindexter concert. But aside from the occasional “ha” of recollection (much of this stuff happened in the ’80s, folks), The Kids Are All Right is not a funny book, but an affecting portrait of death in panorama. Just happens its authors watched their share of John Hughes films.