Geary Hobson. Plain of Jars and

Other Stories. East Lansing. Michigan

State University Press. 2011. xiv + 245

pages. $29.95. isbn 978-0-87013-998-7

Geary Hobson’s thoughtful introduction

to Plain of Jars cites the influence

of Katherine Anne Porter, but

the collection seems more reminiscent

of Ernest Hemingway’s In Our

Time. Both collections portray “a

particular person . . . involved in

an episode of his or her life . . .

caught, for a moment in a manner

that signals a turning point.” A short

story, Hobson adds, “is a segment,

or chapter, of a person’s life that can

be rendered in one scene or several.”

Roughly two-thirds of the stories

in the collection conform to this

description, and almost all follow the

progress of a Marine from boot camp

until some forty years after the action

(in one case, the ex-Marine is a minor

figure in the background). Although

he has various names—Lawson,

Rollins, Darysaw, Wayne, Steve—

and the episodes are sometimes in

first person, sometimes in third, the

character is identified and identifies

himself as Indian, though as a

mixed-blood he doesn’t look it and

is questioned about why he doesn’t

act like everyone else. He feels the

call of home—usually Arkansas—

but knows, as at the end of “Shin

Splints,” that “it could never be the

same for him as it once was.”

Most of the time, the central

character reacts rather than acts: to

the thoughtless racism in an overheard

monologue that prompts his

decision to return home rather than

go to San Francisco and sample the

white world; to the insistent evangelist

in “The Odor of Dead Fish”

who leads him to abandon the last

vestiges of Christianity; to the martinet

lieutenant who orders the needless slaughter of

elephants, and, on a larger scale, to

the destruction of irreplaceable Laotian

artifacts by the U.S. military that

parallels the Corps of Engineers’

bulldozing of ceremonial mounds

in Arkansas. Both point to “typical

American wastefulness.”

Although the focal character

finds comfort in the rare presence

of other Natives, Hobson does not

further the myth of Indian nobility,

savage or not. In several stories, characters

destroy themselves and others.

One, “the Laguna prima donna,”

dogs the central character until his

new girlfriend backhands her,

“woman to woman.” Apparently this

gets her attention, for in a subsequent

story she is friendly and supportive.

Hobson is particularly critical of professional

Indians, like Wounded Knee

wannabes in “A Christmas Story”

and the drunken, wife-beating pseudopoet

in “Hollow Horn.”

But “Hollow Horn” and what

Hobson calls “fantasies”—all of them

satiric—seem less successful (some

based on premises whose conclusions

soon become apparent) than those

stories involving Marines. And they

lack the precision of language and

feeling of the great majority of the stories.

Those are distinguished at times

by close observation of the natural

world and most often by embodying

a psychological and social world that

exists, if not exactly in our time, in

a sharply rendered and deceptively

modest vision.

Robert Murray Davis

University of Oklahoma

Edward Hoagland. Sex and the River
Styx. Howard Frank Mosher, foreword.
White River Junction, Vermont.
Chelsea Green. 2011. xiv + 247 pages.
$17.95. isbn 978-1-60358-337-4
Those who agree with Edward Hoagland
that Emerson is the “cynosure
of American literature” and have a
taste for a writer who is “by temperament
a rhapsodist” will share
the general opinion that Hoagland
is a major essayist. An argument
can be made for such views. They
account for Hoagland’s undoubted
seriousness, his biophilic concern
for all of nature, including humans,
and the moral stance which mandates
that we “act purposefully but
minimally, and keep [our] reason
under wraps.”
But these premises also explain
the underlying current of self-satisfied
moral superiority exhibited
in batches of reader-nudging rhetorical
questions, often followed
by abstract assertions of principle
that allow no questioning, as in
“anybody winning more of life’s
rewards than we are is probably
selling out to some extent, don’t
you think?” He dislikes the spread
of technology but admits that some
of it has prolonged his life, and he
calls for seniors to make space for
new generations. (That’s rather like
the publisher’s note, which boasts
that 30 percent of the paper used is
postconsumer, saving all kinds of
resources and energy. The logical
conclusion is never reached.)
Hoagland’s Emersonian desire
to embrace “All”—he quotes “All
natural fact is an emanation”—may
account for his inability to end a
series in three elements or anything
near it. Some of his rhapsodies
about nature sound rather like William
Boot’s column “Lush Places” in
Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. The relative
absence of a sense of humor and
a marked irony deficiency may be
traced to Hoagland’s kinship with
what Philip Rahv called “Palefaces”
as opposed to “Redskins” like Mark
Twain. Twain and, later, Hemingway
were able to show us the wonder
of nature rather than (not quite
merely) insisting on it through generalizations
in a style that, in Cyril
Connolly’s terms, is mandarin rather
than plain.
Furthermore, the sense of the
interconnectedness of everything
may relieve Hoagland of the necessity
of imposing a structure on most
of the essays. For most of the book,
the prose is like water from an office
cooler—you can get more, but it
won’t ever have a different flavor,
and the only principle of organization
is provided by the cup.
The most coherent essays in
the book are the travel pieces about
India and China, since they deal
with movement from one place to
another. And to offset overwritten
passages like the one about “one’s
ability to marinate in the spices of
solitude,” there are quite sensible
observations like “Existentialism . . .
was kind of fun, when hedonism
and pessimism still boasted of their
novelty.” His views of his generation—
he was born in 1932—accord
with those of many of his contemporaries,
and his attempts to understand
what happens to us as we age
are often quite sensible, though he
may be wrong about older people’s
being kinder and more forgiving.
Robert Murray Davis
University of Oklahoma
world literature in review

Christopher Hitchens. Arguably:

Essays. New York. Twelve / Hachette.

2011. isbn 9781455502776

Ordinary book reviewers have three

tasks: to determine what the author

set out to do; how well that task was

accomplished; and whether it was

worth undertaking. Here the reviewer

is in a way subordinate to the book. Not

so reviewers given the space to show

their credentials as public intellectuals.

In their work, readers often find it

difficult to discover just what book is

being discussed because the reviewer

subsumes the discussion in a wider

consideration of the topic.

Christopher Hitchens is preeminently

in the second group. He seems

to be as widely read and traveled as he

is prolific—the publicity sheet for the

book notes that Arguably: Essays is his

first collection since 2004, not counting

the six other books he wrote or coedited

in the meantime. This output is

fueled (a word he detests) by consistent

and unvarying opinions. Though

he has a soft spot for the English Reformation

because it destroyed Catholic

power, he dislikes all religions in an

ascending intensity from Protestantism

to Catholicism to Islam.

He is particularly severe on religious

elements in the novels of Evelyn

Waugh and even more in those of

Graham Greene (he refers to the girl

in The Heart of the Matter as Scobie’s

“scrawny and tedious mistress”), giving

unqualified praise to the unreligious

vision of Anthony Powell, whose

clotted and stuffy prose he praises

for inexplicable and unexplained reasons.

But irreligion is not enough

to gain his approval: John Updike’s

“grueling homework” and Somerset

Maugham’s utter stylessness are

severely criticized, with some justice.

George Orwell sits understandably

high in his pantheon for his idiosyncratic

socialism and for the parallels

between Nineteen Eighty-Four and the

English Reformation, and he thinks

more highly of Upton Sinclair as a

social novelist than he does of Dickens

or Zola—a decision hardly based

on aesthetic grounds.

His political views are antiimperialist

and anti-totalitarian, and,

forced to choose, he would go with

the latter. He excoriates practitioners

of any form of jihad, and all regimes

or individuals from the wet Left who

support or excuse it, and almost gushes

about the Kurds.

In reviews and essays on political

subjects, he can be quite caustic,

but he also says that “the people

who must never have power are the

humorless. To impossible certainties

of rectitude they ally tedium and uniformity.”

To lack of humor one might

add the sin of sentimentality. Thus in

dealing with quite serious subjects,

like the near-collapse of the American

economy in 2008, Hitchens compares

Hank Paulson’s attitude of “prayer

and beseechment” to the end of Peter

Pan, “where the children are told that,

if they don’t shout out aloud that they

all believe in fairies, then Tinker Bell’s

gonna fucking die.” And the economy

76 | World Literature Today

Wltreviews

very nearly does. He also excoriates

“the moist, vapid effusion that greeted

the death of Diana Spencer” and

the unearned appropriation of grief at

the killings at Virginia Tech as “proof

of how utterly painless all this vicarious

‘pain’ really is.” And his view of the

British royal family can be summed

up in “This is what you get when you

found a political system on the family

values of Henry VIII.” But he is equally

sharp on the failings of JFK.

Although Hitchens can be snarky,

he makes interesting and often valid

points, mostly negative, about the

weakness of Ezra Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn

Mauberley,” and his analysis of

Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey

Falcon is both pointed and balanced.

Even when he condemns, as in his discussion

of Waugh, he can see virtues

to mitigate faults.

On the (very great) whole, the

chief impression one might take from

this massive collection is that, given

the willingness of outlets like Vanity

Fair, the Atlantic, and Slate to publish

extended and thoughtful material

like this, the condition of American

journalism and thought might not be

quite as bad as some have feared.

Robert Murray Davis

University of Oklahoma

Kerry Shawn Keys. Night Flight.
Rockford, Michigan. Presa. 2012.
isbn 9780983125136
A good many of Kerry Shawn Keys’s
poems can be characterized, if not
explained, by the lines “Everything’s
open to derangement” and “There
aren’t any rules for the subjects in
this medium.” One of the simplest
examples is “The dogwood at the
edge / of the park is barking out
flowers,” but other poems, like “The
Ache,” which opens Night Flight, have
more consistently startling imagery.
Many of the other poems celebrate,
sometimes with considerable
reservations, the power of the female
principle and, especially in the first
of the book’s two parts, the natural
world, rural but hardly pastoral and
sometimes sounding like that of Robert
Frost—the American woodlands,
in particular the birds who inhabit
it. In the second half, the world is
predominantly urban Vilnius, Lithuania,
where Keys has lived for some
years. These poems tend to have
less wrenched or striking imagery,
but they are at least as somber or
guarded in their celebration.
Readers who take comfort in
paraphrasable sense may prefer part
2, but those more drawn to experiment
will find the daring, imaginative
flights more appealing. Read
word by word, these can seem confusing,
but they create an emotional
undertone that uses a different kind
of syntax. Throughout the volume,
poems create a world both entrancing
and confusing and reject the lures
of pantheism or indeed any kind
of theism. Near the end of “The
Ache” Keys writes, “at last you understand
the majestic indifference of
the Promised Land,” though the last
line offers “the rising sun.” To put it
another way, throughout the collection,
biblical and other religious texts
offer frameworks for imagery but
no solutions, but the end is not illumination
but nothingness, for “this
dream / of life is a little whiff of the
opium / of death opening its womb.”
Yet the overall effect of the book
conveys the speaker’s joy in observing
and recording. The poem just
quoted ends with the central image
of the octopus, which cradles and
seems to sustain humanity, rocking
“in a swish and suspense / Of children
about to commence / a journey
together into another space, / a spinning,
a suction, a balance of grace.”
Robert Murray Davis
University of Oklahoma