Book Reviews

Books by Rebecca Solnit, Geoff Dyer, and Ben Lerner

Short reviews of some recent reads:

• Orwell's Roses by Rebecca Solnit (2021)

• The Last Days of Roger Federer and Other Endings by Geoff Dyer (2022)

• The Topeka School by Ben Lerner (2019)

I read Orwell's Roses as a book, and I read the Dyer and Lerner books in audio form. I still want to use the verb "listened," though. I don't mind saying I read them as audio books, but what did I do? I listened to them. I know I listened to them, because as I contemplate how to review them, they are not here to flip through, to search out quotations, to re-read scattershot — jump back-and-forth. Ask yourself, would Orwell say he read an audio book? That master of precision language? Surely, not.

But here we are in 2023. Carry on. I enjoyed the Dyer and Lerner books as audio books. Neither is read (performed?) by its author, yet I felt absorbed — or to use another word popularized by the internet age, immersed — in the narrative experience.

I first encountered Dyer through his selected essays and reviews, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (2011). Born in 1958, he is 10 years older than me. All of his cultural references are familiar to me, yet they are also at the outer edge of "cool older brother/cousin" status. When he writes about England in the 1970s, I can go, "Oh, I remember that," but I don't really. I was in England in the 1970s, but I was 10, and he was 20. What I remember about what he remembers is, I saw it on TV, or I read about it elsewhere. We share some cultural filters, but in truth — he's in a different universe and always has been.

That said, when he ruminates on Bob Dylan in The Last Days of Roger Federer and Other Endings (2022), I'm right there with him. I enjoy what he has to say. I understand "it's not dark yet/ but it's getting there" (Dylan). I'd like to pull a representative quotation from the book here, but I'm not going to search through the audio file for that. What I'll say instead it, if you haven't read Dyer, don't start here. Also, if you don't share the cultural references and influences of 1970s England, this is probably not for you either. It's not about tennis or Roger Federer, by the way. It's about endings. There should have been more Leonard Cohen. Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye and all of that.

What Dyer gives us, is more Dyer. More obsessions and reflections on D.H. Lawrence, Burning Man, drugs (especially psychedelics), Bob Dylan, jazz, travel, philosophy (notably Friedrich Nietzsche), and okay, some tennis. Why did Bjorn Borg, for example, quit at the top of his game, while Federer (and Andy Murray, etc.) tested the limits of late style? Is this book Dyer in "late style"? It would be easy to say yes. There is so much here that is return to earlier Dyer topics, so much irrigation of what we already know him for, but there is innovation, too. A jazz-like spontaneity? Okay. A Dylanesque poke at what has a-changed and what has not? Yep. The Last Days of Geoff Dyer? Let's hope not.

Ben Lerner's The Topeka School (2019) is his third novel. The earlier ones were Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) and 10:04 (2014). They function as a trilolgy, but I started at the end. I read something that said the novels are connected but not linear. You don't need to have read the earlier ones to make sense of the latter one. I confirm this final point. The Topeka School made sense to me as a stand alone novel. It is, itself, not linear. In any case, I won't (can't) comment on the earlier books, but SPOILER ALERT I will talk about plot points in this one. Before I do, though, I'll say I've poked around on the internet enough to know that Lerner's work has generated a lot of commentary. I read a bit of it, but I'm agnostic on all of that. I'm just going to comment on this book as a book. Does it work? It does.

Interesting (maybe) that Dyer is 10 years older than me and Lerner is 10 years younger than me. Something could be made of this, I'm sure, because what makes Lerner's book explosive, is the specifics of being a Kansas high school senior in 1997 — and then a final chapter that leaps ahead 20 years and brings the protagonist, Adam, a Lerner doppelganger, into the Trump-infused manic 21st century USA. Lerner's mother is Harriet Lerner, author of The Dance of Intimacy: A Woman's Guide to Courageous Acts of Change in Key Relationships (1989), and other feminist self-help books. The mother of the protagonist in The Topeka School has a similar-type mother, author and psychotherapist. Is this link to life necessary? Let's not go down that road.

Sticking with the novel, therefore, let's complete the family. Adam's father is also a psychoanalyst, and the novel is infused with "self-awareness," particularly the knowing that not all is known and the anxiety about the unknown and the "processing" of conflict and motivations at cross-purposes. Adam, meanwhile, is a championship-level student debater, dub poet, and language master. He's also, apparently, good at going down on his girlfriend — and the novel includes instructions (or perhaps "self-talk" is a better description). Remember to flatten the tongue. Don't over-do the point-and-flick. (Not a direct quotation.)

The narrative is broken into sections representing father-mother-son. Overall, it presents a family portrait. These are exceptional people, accomplished people, deep and intelligent people. Deeply familiar and dull people, caught in a culture that is perpetually on the edge of violence. Violence breaks through. Male violence. All the deep thinking, feeling, and processing can't prevent it. Twenty-years later: the pussy grabber is President. The self-help culture has not produced much help.

End of plot spoilers. There's still plenty to encounter, but it's not the plot that's the novel's strength. Lerner’s relentless litigation of the everyday is remarkable. Compare Lerner's Adam to Updike's Rabbit Angstrom, for example. Both are young men, lost and searching, but Rabbit is fleetfooted and still has a romantic heart. With Adam, Lerner has shown a young man, in here and now (1997), the veneer of any American late-Capitalist optimism stripped away. It's a hard vision to stare at.

And the novel? Stunning.

(I leave as further reference for readers, Lerner's essay on W.G. Sebald, a review of Carole Angier's Speak, Silence (2021) in the New York Review of Books. Textbook close reading, tone, judicious.)

Rebecca Solnit brings such a tone and dazzling close reading skill to a topic, a personality, an author we all thought we knew, had reduced to an adjective: Orwellian. Orwell's Roses (2021) looks at Eric Blair, pen name George Orwell, through the filter of his garden, specifically the roses he planted at his rented country hovel in 1936. Solnit visits the Hertfordshire cottage and finds roses. The same ones Orwell planted? Quite possibly. I referenced Solnit's extended essay in a recent post here, noting her essayistic voice ranges widely. Among other things, she notes:

In 1936 [atmospheric carbon] was at only 310 parts per million, well within the limits to maintain the climate of this Holocene interglacial. Even in 1984, those levels were just below the 350 ppm settled upon by climate scientist James Hansen as the upper limit for a stable Earth. Orwell's final novel looked forward to 1984 as a year deep into political horror. We can look back across the huge divide that is our terrible knowledge and our worse actions to 1984 as the last good year, in terms of climate.

Solnit also writes about art as escape, art as beauty, beauty contrasted with politics/activism. Most readers of Orwell would prioritize his politics, which Solnit also keenly analyzes, but she prioritizes the roses, symbols of beauty, sure, but also actual roses, a true and real perpetual engagement with the earth and its cycles of life. She notes Orwell's commitment to both politics and what even he struggles to call aesthetics. Orwell is deeply committed to life's simple pleasures, often highlighted in his essays and a key theme in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), one often overlooked by anti-authoritarian readings.

Solnit has an uncanny ability to take the familiar and show it to you refreshed. I wrote an essay about Nineteen Eighty-Four in 2003 (first appeared in The Danforth Review) where I noted how the natural world symbolizes freedom in the novel. But Solnit does so much more. She makes an incredible network of associations, linking the small rose plants Orwell purchased at Woolworths — "All that for sixpence!" — to Mexican revolutionaries in the 1920s, the labour conditions of today’s international flower industry, and ultimately the climate crisis. She notes how Orwell went into the coal mines and remarked how alienated the British people were from the means of production. He said he found it hard himself to connect the blocks of coal he fed into his fire to the smudgy, toxic labour conditions he had experienced and written about. The international flower industry isn't smudgy, but it is toxic, and 747s packed with millions of roses shipped from Columbia to the USA contribute heavily to greenhouse gas emissions. How much more you get for sixpence than expected, right?

Solnit gives us a complicated Orwell, one as interested in tending his garden as he is in upending authoritarianism. More so, actually. Solnit tracks how frequently Orwell focuses in his essays on the simple pleasures of the day-to-day. In many ways, this is Orwell's foundation. It remains consistent through his life — and, yes, it has an element of nostalgia, as Solnit notes. It could be said to be grounded in Orwell's conservative side. Grounded, pun intended. The earth is the source of all life, as Solnit shows over and over, as she shows that Orwell was grappling towards an awareness of ecology that's mainstream now. The earth is mother. Human systems of power and control and degraded it. Orwell could not have articulated that the weather is broken. The climate patterns that sustain life aren't what they used to be. But Solnit shows that Orwell was connecting many of those dots even if by the time of his death in 1950 he hadn't completed a full sketch.

Solnit provides a welcome opportunity to re-visit, re-vision Orwell within a wide appreciation of his life, work, and times — and ours. She follows his awakening to the perils of imperialism during his tenure as a police officer in Burma, his commitment to his calling as a writer, his early financial dependence on his aunt (a suffragette) to make ends meet, his analysis of the communist-socialist-fascist triangle following his harrowing volunteering stint during Spanish Civil War — analysis that fed the fable, Animal Farm (1945), which of course we must note is an ecology-based story, too. Solnit’s approach is not hagiographic, it should be said. Orwell was no saint. As he distrusted ideologues, so we must not encase him as an angel in amber.

To this day, Orwell is claimed by both the left and the right. He was of the left more frequently, but mostly he was awkwardly, stellarly himself. Deeply English, rooted in that stereotype of British empirical common sense. Solnit demonstrates — through applied implementation — glitteringly — how not all of that valuable commodity has since left the planet.