Joyce was, as we know, writing at a time of enormous artistic and cultural upheaval. The seemingly stable conventions of classical music were being shattered by composers like Arnold Schönberg; the refined traditions of Western realist painting were revolutionized by the Cubism of Picasso and Braque. And writers like Marcel Proust were already beginning to destabilize the familiarities of the nineteenth-century novel form. It’s easy to understand in this context how a book as innovative and iconoclastic as Ulysses could be seen as striking the final blow against an already ailing literary tradition. In fact, it might be less easy to understand why, one hundred years later, the novel is still lumbering on, not yet superseded by any more popular or critically significant form of textual storytelling. Classical music, after all, effectively gave way to popular music in the twentieth century; figurative painting never again reasserted itself as a dominant cultural form. But novels as we know them are still being written and widely read. And as one of the people writing and reading them, I can’t help but be interested in the question. What exactly did Ulysses do to the novel? And if we can’t escape it, how can we go on?
“This here is a fir that would be classified as a Charlie Brown tree,” Greg Williams declared, of a spare little cutting of balsam fir. “But prune it severely the first year and you can make a good tree.” Williams was demonstrating some of the knowledge that goes into tending a Christmas-tree farm. He broke a few needles off the fir, releasing the cough-drop intensity of their scent. He showed me the latent buds on the branches; they looked like little thimbles. Those were the spots to trim back to, Williams explained, as he clipped the branch with shears. “But that pruning strategy doesn’t work for a pine,” he said. He picked up another plausible Christmas-tree candidate, a white pine. “With this, you shear the tree when the new needles are half the length of the old ones.” He had two different sets of shears, but told me that many people prefer to simply use a long knife. “That’s faster,” he said. “But you have accidents. You use that and you’re going to have a slit boot, or stitches, or a dog with an injury.”
A big and bold book, but essentially a quick read because of an excellent flow and pace. Fierce and shocking but also darkly comical. The Michael Keenaghan I have always known. There is a filmic quality at work here. Could easily be the next Gerard Johnson movie. London is Dead is the title, but this debut novel is alive and kicking.
So don’t be fooled by the cheeky peach emoji on Radke’s cover. Despite her sporadic and careful sense of humor on the subject, the author’s account of the female butt is in many cases a narrative of physical suffering: from the tightly cinched waists of the Victorian bustle to the later “confinement” of diets that “demanded masochistic self-control, or even self-harm,” the “Buns of Steel” fitness craze of the 1980s to the risk of fatal embolism during Brazilian butt lift surgery.
Christmas falls on a Friday — the long week
of labor and waiting is gray with dull light,