It was a source of some annoyance to Charles Portis that Shakespeare never wrote about Arkansas. As the novelist pointed out, it wasn’t, strictly speaking, impossible: Hernando de Soto had ventured to the area in 1541, members of his expedition wrote about their travels in journals that were translated into English, and at least one of those accounts was circulating in London when Shakespeare was working there in 1609. To Portis, it was also perfectly obvious that the exploration of his home state could have been fine fodder for the Bard: “It is just the kind of chronicle he quarried for his plots and characters, and DeSoto, a brutal, devout, heroic man brought low, is certainly of Shakespearean stature. But, bad luck, there is no play, with a scene at the Camden winter quarters, and, in another part of the forest, at Smackover Creek, where willows still grow aslant the brook.”
Apparently, even now, it’s rather nice to open a book and suddenly feel understood.
Within a long sentence—clause upon clause, the commas and semicolons, em-dashes and colons, parentheticals and appositions piling up—there can be a veritable maze of imagery, a labyrinth of connotation, a factory of concepts; the baroque and purple sentence is simultaneously an archive of consciousness at its most caffeinated and a dream of new worlds from words alone. No doubt my proffered example of a long sentence, with which I began this paragraph, will not appeal to every reader, which is fine, but to those who hold as inviolate that the only good sentence is a short one, I’m happy to offer an interjection that’s simply two words, the first a scatological curse and the second a pronoun.
For all the ominousness of the title, The Last Catastrophe, Allegra Hyde’s sophomore short story collection, is remarkably hopeful. Not hopeful as to the eventual collapse of ecosystems, or the extinction of species, or technology addiction, or pollution, or the state of American politics (though Hyde’s satire on this front is biting enough to be, if not hopeful, quite funny) but hopeful as to the human capacity to find joy in spite of it all. Sometimes, as a particle scientist explains in one of Hyde’s stories, pollution makes sunsets more intense, more beautiful. The paradox of finding something decent—or, at the very least, something essentially human—amidst all the terrors and general badness lying in wait for the inhabitants of our planet is at the heart of Hyde’s collection.
Rather than replicate Rankine’s move, de Lima’s collection creates an altar to the dead, with offerings of blood.
Birnam Wood, the third novel by the New Zealand writer Eleanor Catton, picks up on the instability of trying to be good, a pursuit the book views quite bleakly. Loosely about the idealistic antics of a guerrilla gardening group, it has no hero but rather an ensemble of antiheroes whose foibles Catton uses to poke, quite hard, at the dreams and pieties of people who believe they can change the world. Such an impulse is a major shift from Catton’s Man Booker Prize–winning second novel, The Luminaries, an intricate, glowing love story set during New Zealand’s gold rush. Birnam Wood, in contrast, is dark in both its outlook and its omnipresent humor.
I could swear there’s a ghost
in the cloudless night because