HENBANE GRAVITY (Pt. 2)

Ieajaita caught the number 18 bus two blocks from the house. She may as well have hitched a ride with a funeral procession. She refused to look at any of the riders, would not even acknowledge their shade of a presence. She produced from her pocket a tiny volume of Neruda, opened to “If I Forget You,” and read it over and over, until the bus reached the corner of Umber and Thirteenth.

Ieajaita stepped off the bus, and the squalor of spiritual bankruptcy hit Her nostrils like sour milk. She was at the gateway to the Cascades, Madsen’s most prestigious neighborhood. The rat’s nest of affluential squalor was home to salons and athletic clubs and restaurants that catered only to the alleged quality. Each establishment reeked of expenditure, the sole justification for its prices. Every retail outlet was designed and cultivated to provide the most finely wrought, fatuous embellishments for any setting their blinkered, vacant clientele desired. Squire’s specialized in upscale furniture, the kind that was meant to evoke the individual vibrancy of an antique, even boasting of its practice of hand-crafting. But the dishonesty filled Ieajaita’s ears with a toxic white noise. Each block of wood, strip of metal, and globule of blown glass, every piece that came together to make a Squire’s, was crafted by a different automaton. They plucked pieces from different jigsaw puzzles and shaved them to fit a pre-determined mold. Old-world charm via flesh-and-blood assembly line. No Artists necessary, no Truth required.

Ieajaita crossed the street in front of the number 18, her boots striking the grime-slicked asphalt. As the bus squealed away, She took comfort in the ignorance of the Cascades’ clientele. They wouldn’t appreciate The Art if they saw it protesting their heedless vapidity. They had long ago sacrificed what was most beautiful in them on an altar of distraction. Ieajaita chose not to fight the urge to glance at “that wretched gallery” and indulge Her loathing. It was one of many that had sprouted like toadstools around the United States, each owned by the same travesty who dared to call himself an Artist. As She passed it, She remembered when She had sought out the man, compelled by some ineluctable force that eluded Her comprehension to stare into the man’s eyes. Now as the memory bubbled up, She felt foolish for having entertained the possibility that there might have been anything behind those empty divots. All he saw was a funhouse reflection of what he would never be. Self-portraiture as euphemism. Anything to keep from baring his soul.

She passed Le Millésime, a trough of poisons passing for perfumes. She held a handkerchief to Her nose and found herself several millennia away, when fragrances were crafted by miracle workers, not manufactured by chemists. When there was no chemistry, just a collection of half-grasped observations. And before She could stop herself, She remembered Ruut.

There had been no love to lose between Herself and Her Husband, the marriage having been arranged by Uros to tickle His resentment. Ruut’s disrespectful peccadilloes had never bothered Her. They were part and parcel of The Vanfiri, and She had long ago forgiven Ruut for disrespecting Her duty, for the lengths He had traveled to degrade Her acolytes, and the delight He had found by wallowing in Her pain. After all, the virtues of reason and logic were as fundamental to Ruut as sensitivity and empathy were to Her. To exorcise them would be to Unmake The God. But His supercilious dismissal of “entertainments:” that still roused Her ire with apocalyptic intensity.

Ieajaita brushed aside the pointless memory, focused on the task at hand. Her gloved hands in the pockets of Her jacket, she turned left and headed east on Thirteenth. She reached the corner of Vermillion just as the memory threatened a migraine. She looked across the street, to the opposite corner, and breathed easy at the sight of the Fabled Eaves. The greenery rose and curved into a proscenium arch. Beneath it a man and a woman embraced one another. They spoke in turn briefly, their faces close together, peppering their confectionary exchanges with stolen kisses. She could feel the humid residue of Art wafting off them as She passed, entering Truburgh Park.

Elihu Truburgh had for once in his life seen beyond the placebo of legal tender. Despite the blueprints and budget meetings, the scheduling and contracting, despite all the material rigmarole, Truburgh had Created. As She walked the pathway that coursed through the park like a macadam artery, Ieajaita remembered the moment of its conception, the quaking embrace that had ripped through the aether. It had been so long since She’d felt the like of it, those first stimulations from the pangs of birth, so many decisions to still be made, so many possibilities to squander. Terror and ecstasy in simultaneous climax, its echoes still radiating over a century later. From the Madsen Public Library, the heart of the park, to the valleys and glades of children’s games, to Zugzwang Corner and its 1600-square yards of marmoreal checkerboard, the entirety of the public space was infused with Magic.

But the scowl so often present on Her returned. She passed benches filled with people reading books or listening to music on electronic doodads. Playing games with phantoms and against them, necks bowed beneath a digital yoke. Romantic entanglements unknotted by the mutual exclusivity of foreign banalities. Entire conversations conducted in a non-language, committed to immortality in sand, and deposited in vaults guarded by invisible whores. She passed people who surrounded themselves with Magic, then blinded themselves on alien light.

The walk took Ieajaita up a hill, down the other side, and past a wall of green and masonry, before She veered to Her right and entered Busker’s Round. The amphitheater, a famished yawn, appearing as suddenly as the sun can burn away the rain clouds, was a special Creation. The terraces and arcades were verbatim those of the Roman amphitheater in Arles, and the tiered seats and faces of the round were embellished with recreations of the hoodoos of Bryce Canyon. An irrefutable cocktail of imperial majesty and indigenous myth, designed to ensnare and propel the Artist. It was where the Magic gathered, and Ieajaita smiled as the warm rush of manna swept over Her.

Musicians speckled the amphitheater. A clarinetist improvised in one seat. A violinist covered Albeniz’s “Mallorca” in another. A fourteen-year old boy practiced his saxophone in a row to himself, while four classical guitarists huddled together, re-arranging “She’s Leaving Home.” On the stage were two men in their twenties, one standing at a vibraphone, the other seated behind a contraption of PVC pipes of varying length. Everyone played their own tune, with no inclination to share the air. By all logic the breath of Busker’s Round should have been an ear-rending slog. But logic had no place here, and Ieajaita breathed deeply with each step further into and around the amphitheater, her nose filling with the scent of henbane. This was True: musicians, trained or otherwise, playing with full vigor and no regard for audience. This was communion with what can never be known, only felt. A sacrament by way of sonic divination. And the Artists felt it as strongly as Ieajaita, basking in the alchemy of anatomical manipulation and the atavistic here-and-now.

A stalk of wheat with peach fuzz on his lip sat halfway up the western risers, a dulcimer in his lap. As Ieajaita approached, the hammers kissed the strings, unsure of how to proceed. The peach-fuzzed man looked up at Ieajaita, and their loaded glances introduced themselves.

Ieajaita opened Her heart, let the music run its fingers through Her blood, along Her vessels, and feel the Inspiration.

It started as thoughtless tinkling. Not one easy, pre-conceived note. Then the tinkling happened across a rhythm, Common Time in repose. But underneath flowed a gentle air, the unprepossessing current of The Endless River. A phrase formed, a simple figure of a baby’s breath chant. The stalk of wheat played on, sprinkling shorter notes into the ostinato. And the ceaseless reprise poked through The Fabric of the universe, growing into an ongoing ritual.

An oboist drifted into the music’s orbit. She came to rest beside the dulcimer player and was Moved to join in. Her long first notes came moaning from the reed, oblivious to their incorrectness, the untarnished bliss of the undiluted moment. Both Ieajaita and the dulcimer player knew they were perfect. The rhythm was now threatening to break into a gallop. A percussionist materialized and brought the music to a full stride. Others appeared: a flautist, another percussionist sporting a shaku and sasara, a didgeridoo, a Tibetan throat singer from San Juan Capistrano. There were soon over a dozen musicians cloistered within Ieajaita’s Divine penumbra. The music swelled and collapsed into itself, everything drawn to and emanating from The Goddess at its nexus. And the fully-grown ritual blossomed into Magic.

Through Her they felt, lived within, and understood the heart of A God. They were in a vaulted world fever-dreamt by Hieronymus Bosch, surrounded by a churning sea of men in the billowing fashions of some future-bred Frazetta. There were pipers and harpists and cornum players, drummers, poets and playwrights, and dancers, painters, sculptors, illustrators, and actors and musicians, and metalworkers, woodcarvers, and cave painters, and they all filled the air with liquid Imagination. The Fabric rippled away, spiking crests unfolding into barely warbling lines that disappeared through the shimmering veil beyond the mortal spectrum.

Then, from the unseen absence, came monsters, two of them, grotesque rejections of virtue and beauty. They were violations of sanity, a profane dare for mercy. And to their own surprise, the celebrants found themselves inclined to show them mercy. No fear accompanied the beasts’ arrival, even as they appeared alien and undesirable. The celebrants found themselves welcoming them, loving them. And pitying them. The celebrants thought, They shouldn’t be here, / They shouldn’t want to be here, / They know I can grant them Death. / Why won’t they ask me? They wanted to take the monsters’ heads in their laps, pet them and hold them, and whisper kind final words as the monsters fell beyond The End. But pride hoisted the creatures’ heads high as they loosed a diluvian wail. And in the throes of unendurable sorrow the Artists found hope, for the demoniac obscenities still possessed Life, and they refused to surrender it. The sheer will of the abominations spread like an empowering contagion, and in their reflections the celebrants struck newfound strength, surging out of Despair’s lowest depths.

As if notated on staves etched in stone tablets, the musicians arrived in unison at the improvisation’s natural end. The music faded into the feeling of a beloved memory. The musicians turned to each other, marveling at the spontaneous greatness they’d all had a hand in making. Ieajaita smiled as the air over Busker’s Round started to thicken with ego, and she started away.

The wheat stalk with the dulcimer stopped Her. “Hey, hey,” he said, his pleading hand on Her shoulder. “Hey, you were fantastic.”

Ieajaita held up Her gloved hands. “I did nothing.” She turned away.

“Hey, listen,” said the poor, bemused mortal. “You know, I can, uh, I compose too. You know, I have, uh, like, whole symphonies for the dulcimer. Or, I guess, sonatas at any rate. Whatever you want to call them. Doesn’t matter. And it’s not just the dulcimer I play.”

Ieajaita faced him square, pity turning Her mouth up at the corners.

“Piano, harp, handpan. And I’m teaching myself the koto right now. So, you know, if you ever wanted to hear any of it, we could meet back here? Maybe grab a drink after?”

Ieajaita clasped the silly bottom-feeder’s hands. “My dear boy, / Were I so inclined to take you to bed, / we’d already be in transit. / Yet here we stand. / Let’s not pollute our moment with the sully of ambition.” She turned and left the amphitheater.

HENBANE GRAVITY (Pt. 1)

Never has nothing existed, for there has always been The Promise, and from The Promise issued The Vanfiri and The Tolteain. For incalculable ages the twin races of Deities worked in concert with one another, but had intelligent beings witnessed Their intimacies, they would have trembled before the mutual animosity. It was only a matter of time before the crucible that was The High War erupted, and when it did, The Vanfiri and The Tolteain made manifest every shred of destructive force at Their disposal, Each determined to destroy the Other. In time mankind chose its side, and the fortunes of war began to turn from The Tolteain. In a bout of desperation Elltennix, Tolteain Keeper of Secrets, opened the gates of His sepulcher and released to the world all knowledge hidden from mortal man. All the crimes he hid from his neighbor, every sin he had committed away from judging eyes, the unseen latticework of the natural world, the origins of this universe and all those that preceded it. Elltennix unleashed all His secrets, and a flood of madness subsumed mankind. Amidst the anarchy a crime was committed, a crime so unspeakable Uros-on-High has decreed it never be recounted. Its monstrous byproduct, an abhorrent violation of the laws of God and man, was the Charchilla. Of undefined and constantly changing shape, the Charchilla was a pulsating mass of interconnected tumors. One after another they would burst, producing a fountain of blood and pus, only to be replaced by a new tumor that would ripen in turn. Tufts of barbed cilia sprouted from its body, emitting a stench of sulfur and methane. It seeped across the ground on the muscular contractions of its undercarriage, secreting and sliding along a layer of feces. Upon the triumph of The Vanfiri over The Tolteain, Olemphia, Goddess of Cruelty, captured the Charchilla and consigned it to the island of Ioru, where it would trap and devour shipwrecked sailors and traders. An utterly loathsome creature, the Charchilla inspired hate and fear in all who encountered it.

Aberras was the first son and heir to Phyton, king of the mighty city-state of Dthalymci. Born and raised as scion to the greatest king of the True Golden Age, Aberras, heeding his father’s admonition that “a sharp mind will cut through steel,” developed his mind into the most powerful weapon in Dthalymci. Studying under both Bolbol and Sarmiche, he quickly surpassed his teachers in both wisdom and knowledge. Aberras grew proud. While in Morxos with his father, he engaged Lultaeil the Pedagogue in a public debate and won. Aberras’ pride grew. Upon asking for the hand of Euklepthea in marriage, her father, High Priest of the Cult of Uengru, challenged Aberras to pit his intellect against the Librarians of Kaalenmiir. If Aberras could confound just one of them, the High Priest would accede to the marriage. Aberras confounded them all. His pride grew further, as did his boredom. Aberras had come to believe there was no man alive who could teach him anything, but still he thirsted for all he did not know. So Aberras set out from his home, crossed The Skyward Bridge over The Endless River, and entered Nargory, home of The Vanfiri. There he implored Ruut, God of Knowledge, to teach him. Ruut told the man to return home, that Ultimate Knowledge was beyond the ken of mortal minds. But Aberras was prideful. In his anger he doubted the limitlessness of Ruut’s Knowledge, he challenged Him, and finally he cursed Him. Enraged, Ruut turned Aberras’ body backwards. His legs were now at his shoulders and his arms at his hips. His eyes now book-ended the small of his back, his nose had grown from his coccyx, and his lips ringed his anus. Ruut then turned Aberras inside-out, exposing his organs to the elements and condemning him to an eternity deprived of the blessed relief of his own mortality. Aberras was forced to roam the world, forever the embodiment of all that is wrong and should not be. Hence, it is from his name that we have derived the words “aberrant” and “aberration.” Recently it was also thought that the story of Aberras served as the inspiration for the expression “talking out of your ass,” but this has been proven erroneous.

Uros-on-High had grown concerned, for mankind, still a newborn in the cradle of The Gods, had developed the ability to Create. Man’s effrontery had begun in innocence, in fact purely by accident. Those few in command of The Art did not at first know what they were doing or how they were doing it. But through trial and error strong minds soon unearthed the fundamentals of Creation, and The Age of Sorcery began. This age was a brief one, for man had quickly learned much more than petty spells. Man had learned how to alter Existence to suit his desires—not only to Create but to Re-create. Creation was the province of only The Gods and The Promise, and mankind had grown from emulating Them to openly undoing Their Divine Work. Uros-on-High deemed it a blasphemy, judged that the world must be cleansed, that humanity must be destroyed. He opened His mouth and inhaled deeply, creating a great wind that swept across the whole earth. Humanity in its entirety was uprooted and sailed between the jaws of Uros-on-High, spending its last moments of Existence in the digestive tract of The Divine. But then Uros, King of All Gods, grew ill. A pain in His belly persisted and worsened until He was crippled in pain. He called for His Wife and Queen, Lyuemper, Goddess of Life, to give him succor. Lyuemper took up Her scythe, Paumnanox, swung, and sliced open Uros’ belly. Two soft, gleaming hands rose from the wound, parted Uros’ flesh, and Ieajaita emerged. A beautiful female of dove-white skin, with long flowing hair and eyes that could cast away Darkness, all of sorcery, all of mankind’s potential, had concentrated and assumed Divine Form. At first Uros-on-High wanted to kill Ieajaita, but Lyuemper warned Him off His murderous course. She reasoned that if mortals could develop the ability to Create as only The Gods and The Promise could, and the Gods had not taught them to do so, then only The Promise could have inculcated the ability in man. Therefore Ieajaita also was by The Will of The Promise. Lyuemper argued that The Promise clearly wanted man to command The Art. Who was He, Uros-on-High, to defy The Promise? The King of All Gods heeded His Wife’s wise words. He created a new humanity, and He named Ieajaita Goddess of The Art. It would be Her Divine Duty to guide, protect, and when necessary punish those mortals who practiced The Art.

The Charchilla limped across the basement floor, every inch an ooze of wet, impatient castigation. Aberras scuttered on all fours into the corner by the rust-choked water heater and shivered. Both beasts loosed a hungry, beset-upon moan.

The house sat on a shadow-draped street in of one of Madsen, New Jersey’s least auspicious boroughs. Long abandoned by even the most discerning of reprobates, Blue Orchard was an open scab making witness to its own decay, and 433 Mellon Street was ground zero for the desiccation.

Ieajaita slipped Her glowing hands into a pair of long, black gloves as the ululations of the two beasts reached Her ears. She let out a small, impatient breath. Every night the same thing, / They know I’m going out,/ They know they’ll eat,/ be it beef or fowl / or salmon, cod, or trout.

She crossed Her makeshift bedroom. She had done Her best to make the dilapidated living room habitable, at least enough for Her. Ieajaita had never gone in for the grandiloquent trappings favored by Her fellow Gods, columns and colonnades and the like. Prints of some of Her favorite paintings hung on the walls. A full bookshelf ran the lower perimeter of the room like a readable baseboard. Her feloniously powered computer was filled with Her favorite pieces of music. She had never warmed to cinema—too technological a medium for Her—but She would sometimes search the internet for videos of Her favorite bits of theater.

But none of it was the same. Artistic prints couldn’t compete with the originals. The few pieces She had ever bought from the Artist had invariable been stolen, and She held no sway with collectors and dealers. Recordings were pale echoes of a live performance. She couldn’t feed off them, commune with the musicians through the airy vibrations. And so much had been lost over time. Same with the plays, and as with poetry and prose, translation always left so much to be desired.

Ieajaita stooped to inspect Her hair in the mirror. She still liked it. Not yet time for a change. She slung Her purse over Her shoulder and started down the basement.

The Charchilla and Aberras perked up at the sight of Her and b-lined for the foot of the stairs, whimpering ravenous lamentations the whole way.

She bellowed as the monsters neared, ““Know you not the hour I make My egress? / Intellect nor memory is no stranger to you two / that lurch and prattle tears at Me, largesse / the only virtue that endears My hand to you.”

The Charchilla slunk back a step and trembled, its cilia waving with a stutter. Aberras bowed his head and looked up at Her from under a guilty brow.

“Look at My face,” She said, smoothing Her voice as She would’ve the comforter on Her bed. “Look in My eyes, / Do you not know Me by now? / Do you think I would really let you starve? / Is that something I would allow?”

The two walking nightmares perked up and shuffled closer to their Benefactor, the memory of Her anger already lost amid the scent of an impending meal wafting under their noses.

Ieajaita kneeled before them and smiled. “You fear too deeply / an impossible winter. / Sustenance will come.”

She remembered when She would reserve Haiku for the world outside Her refuge, when it was one of the few forms She could safely employ should She need to speak to a mortal. Thank Uros for free verse, She thought.

“Don’t think I’m oblivious / to what you two must endure, /” she said. “Cages are insidious, / I feel it too, I assure. / Were there to grow a forest / so dark no man would venture / into, there I’d let you rest / and end would your indenture. / Man, however, must own all, / Even that which he must hate / and cast upon it a thrawl. / Never would it, friends, abate. / No place is safe for you two / where Magic is for purchase, / for the world is but a zoo / all across its vile surface. /”

The two oddities shuddered at the mention of a zoo.

Ieajaita resumed Her chanso. “There are times I envy you. / While I pass, free of danger, / through the mortals’ cockeyed view, / Feel I more the stranger. / Please do not impede Me, friends. / Need you for My own defense.”

Aberras and the Charchilla looked at Her, an almost doe-eyed confusion turning their heads to one side like a dog’s. Ieajaita smiled at them, stood, and started up the steps to the first floor. Before She’d gotten to the front door, the duo’s tremulous wail filled the house. She slammed the door behind her.

IN MEMORIAM: PHILIP ROTH

I wrote this two days ago with the intention of keeping it in a drawer until the event of Philip Roth’s death. I wish I could’ve sat on it longer.

   It is May 21, 2018, and Philip Roth is still alive. I’ve just a watched a two-hour documentary on him. Produced by the BBC in 2014, it is to date Roth’s last interview. Four years hence that status is unlikely to change. He is now 85 years old. Having watched the man’s final public reconciliation with his work, I find myself, like many of the protagonists of his later novels, contemplating the impending mortality of a man who once engaged all facets of life, its most self-destructive zealotry, the revelries of the id, and the moribund wallows in between, through the caustic, insightful, crushing, and jubilant forge that was his typewriter. I’m unable to ignore the rapidly approaching inevitable, and I find myself inexplicably moved to commit to words my feelings about America’s bravest writer. 

   Maybe it’s not so inexplicable. I’m probably moved to write about my appreciation for Philip Roth for the same reason I was compelled to write about a Roman emperor with self-esteem issues. The thoughts and feelings that plague are incidental. The force that galvanizes me, that keeps my fingers repeatedly punching the keys in front of me, is as irresistibly elemental as gravity. It’s an incomprehensible drive as intoxicating, liberating, and empowering as it is frustrating, confounding, and mercurial. A good day’s writing will take you higher than the Amazon’s most potent psychotropic fungus with Sly Stone grooving through your head. A bad day will send you into an apoplexy of self-excoriation that would make a Catholic flagellant wince. You sit alone in a room, creating human beings and the worlds they inhabit, indulging the most deeply shrouded recesses of your imagination. It’s a task you can only accomplish through agonizing introspection, facing the fibers of your being that terrify and disgust you and refusing to shrink or flee. You are god staring into the abyss, and when the abyss stares into you, you record what it sees. Philip Roth has known this irresistible force with an intimacy to which I can only aspire.

   The name Philip Roth first crossed my path when I was in my late twenties. At the time I worked for a production company in Bala Cynwyd, in a small office building on City Avenue. Creativity was paramount to the owner, and he’d taken pains that the office space reflect that, so much so that in the lounge area he had erected two bookcases, each blanketing an entire wall, and filled it with a large portion from his own collection. He encouraged me to avail myself of the office library, and I did not hesitate. It was from that collection that I first read Kurt Vonnegut and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The owner even gave me to keep his copy of Flannery O’Connor’s complete stories.

    There, on the shelves, I found Portnoy’s Complaint. Beyond the summary on the jacket I knew nothing about it. I will never forget sitting on the steps outside that office building, with my cigarettes and iced tea, and ploughing through this ribald mating call to the self, this uproarious sucker-punch of a tug of war between guilt and pleasure. I loved that I had found a writer who was as creative and florid a wordsmith as he was genuinely funny. Portnoy’s Complaint is the funniest book I have ever read. “Funnier than Catch-22, Tony?” Much funnier. Even the one-liners rank with any comedian’s best: “I put the id in Yid, she put the oy in goy.” I wonder what Roth would think of the image of me, sitting outside this office building, laughing out loud while mere feet away three aspiring masters of the universe clad in expensive suits and no senses of humor stared at me past upturned noses, the notion of literature being funny as alien to them as selflessness and empathy.

   There was no turning back for me. I was going to read every word Philip Roth had ever published and do my damnedest to get my hands on the ones he hadn’t, and the more I read, the thicker the spell he had cast around me grew. His prose was a once-in-a-lifetime excavation. It was intelligent but never jumped about and waved its arms, drawing attention to itself. It was calculated and carefully realized but supple and inviting. This was literature that had been raised from the cold, unfeeling mausoleum where serious writers write oh-so seriously and elicit no human emotion so much as boredom. This literature was alive, Frankenstein’s monster post-lightning, Miles Davis plugging in and turning up the volume:

   The Devil of the Little Place—the gossip, the jealousy, the acrimony, the boredom, the lies. No, the provincial poisons do not help. People are bored here, they are envious, their life is as it is and as it will be, and so, without seriously questioning the story, they repeat it—on the phone, in the street, in the cafeteria, in the classroom. They repeat it at home to their husbands and wives. It isn’t just that because of the accident there isn’t time to prove it’s a ridiculous lie—if it weren’t for the accident she wouldn’t have been able to tell the lie in the first place. But his death is her good fortune. His death is her salvation. Death intervenes to simplify everything. Every doubt, every misgiving, every uncertainty is swept aside by the greatest belittler of the them all, which is death.

--The Human Stain, 1998

    And the more I read of Philip Roth, the more I came to recognize him to be America’s bravest writer. Yes, he was politically brave. He pilloried Nixon at the height of his untouchability with Our Gang. With The Human Stain he savaged America’s judgmental hypocrisy over Bill Clinton (and maybe took a swipe at all the self-serving, finger-wagging charges of misogyny directed at him over the years). And Roth received the best reviews of his life for his politically charged novels of the Nineties and early Aughts. But it’s easy to congratulate someone for taking a stand against outside aggression and obvious injustice, and if that was all Roth had done, he would be as shallow as the writers and critics who sang he praises for being as shallow and cowardly as they. But Roth did, and has always done more, been braver, than that. After holding up a mirror to the world at large, he turns the mirror on himself, walking Henrik Ibsen’s poetical talk: “To live is to battle with trolls / in the vaults of heart and mind. / To write: that is to sit / in judgment over one’s self.”

    Nathan Zuckerman is the most obvious mirror Roth holds before himself. In The Counterlife Zuckerman does what we have all done: imagines what might have been. He imagines a reality in which his brother, the Zuckerman who did not reject the life of the good Jewish son, tried to do so in a fit of middle-aged pique? Where does that lead him? Where does that leave Nathan? What are his options, which choices does he make, and how does the alternate history, the counterlife, compare to the reality? He does not like what he sees. Nathan Zuckerman (or is it Philip Roth?) has failed to understand and empathize, to accept and condone, to not pressgang those he loves into the roles he needs them to play in his story. He only manages to put himself into their shoes by fictionally killing himself. Only then is he able to feel their hurt and anger at him. The novel is as much a Molotov cocktail of self-examination as it is pelvic thrust of narrative whimsy.

   Then there’s Mickey Sabbath, the gloriously, obscenely lecherous anti-hero of Sabbath’s Theater, a man religiously committed to antagonizing the world via hedonism and intransigent in his refusal to examine his urges. Picture the following scene: you, with no money, no income, and a reputation you have willfully flushed down the toilet, have just been kicked out of your house by your wife, who has finally had enough of your bullshit. You bump into a dear, old friend, and though you have failed to reach out to him for decades, he nevertheless invites you into his home. Within forty-eight hours you masturbating into his college-aged daughter’s underwear and trying to talk his wife into sleeping with you:

   Of the second night that Sabbath spent in Debby’s room, suffice it to say—before moving on to the crisis of the morning—that his thoughts were of both mother and daughter, singly and together. He was under the spell of the tempter who task it is to pump the hormone preposterone into the male bloodstream.

   In the morning, after a leisurely bath in Debby’s tub, he took a wonderful crap in her toilet… He bequeathed unto the bathroom a big, trenchant barnyard bouquet that filled him with enthusiasm. The robust road again! I have a mistress! He felt as overcome and nonsensical as Emma Bovary out riding with Rodolphe. In the masterpieces they’re always killing themselves when they commit an adultery. He wanted to kill himself when he couldn’t.

--Sabbath’s Theater, 1995

   I would be surprised if Philip Roth actually leads, or even at one time led, a life comparably libertine to Mickey Sabbath’s. But what a fitting allegory for the writer’s life, that most selfish of vocations, a calling that demands the ceaseless dramatization of your hopes and desires and doubts and neuroses coupled with the expectation that total strangers not only enjoy being made privy to them but pay you for the privilege. I have no doubt that Philip Roth harbors enough guilt to fuel the fear that, like Mickey Sabbath, he will die alone, unloved, and in constant pain.

   It’s dangerous for the audience to conflate the art with the artist. One is immortal and perfect, filling some ethereal void too deep within us to identify. The other is mortal, all too human, and just as profoundly fallible as the rest of us. Remember: Chinatown was directed by Roman Polanski. Loving the art will never disappoint you, but artists are people, and people always disappoint. But over a career that has spanned six decades Philip Roth has disappointed less than one would expect to hold up under scrutiny. And yet he does, because of his unwavering commitment to the perpetuation of frighteningly honest literature that speaks from one to all. We will always have Philip Roth’s work, but we will not have the man for much longer. Let’s try and appreciate this extremely valuable and brave man while we still have him. 

“The thought of the novelist that matters most is the thought that makes him a novelist.”

--Philip Roth

THE PARASITE (Pt. 2)

I used to look forward to weddings. I grew up with the false idol of the lonesome bridesmaid at her friend’s big day, wondering where she had gone wrong, where her big day was, emptying one libation after another. What better way to enjoy a wedding, I thought, than with someone just as crestfallen as you. Worst-case scenario: we drown our sorrows in a pool of intermingled sweat. Best-case: we grow old regaling our children with Mom & Dad’s meet-cute.

But as the nuptials came and went—my sister’s, my cousins’, my friends’—I found that I was the only one propping using the open bar to prop up a smile. After entering the reception on the arm of a groomsman, each bridesmaid broke rank and made straight for her boyfriend. And the few who were single chose to remain single. Even a night of respite from the tatters of her ambitions couldn’t prod a single woman at a wedding onto the dance floor with me. As the matrimonial parade progressed, weddings became less an opportunity and more an agony of attrition. But the Parasite always came with me.

I was dreading my younger cousin’s wedding in Baltimore. I would have gladly forgone the comely cavalcade of alumni from the Marquis of Queensbury School of Rejection. Unfortunately I’ve been cursed not only with the Parasite, but also an unshakable sense of familial obligation and a healthy dose of Catholic guilt.

The day before the wedding was the rehearsal and obligatory dinner. I greeted my cousin and the bride-to-be before the altar, and the bride introduced me to her bridal party right next to the tabernacle. The majority of the distaff reliquary was already taken, but sure enough the maid of honor was single and singularly talented to wake the Parasite. She was tall and lithe and, somehow, miraculously curvaceous. Her face was bright and bubbly with large, dark eyes that seemed fluent in the private language of your soul. The girl’s smile was a nourishing spring rain, free of patronizing falsehood. Her voice was lyrical and opened like a budding rose. I was ensorcelled, and the slow reedy crunch of vampirism filled my ears.

We chatted more at dinner. She worked in child services, a big-hearted giver who felt every blow from an abusive parent, who bruised and swelled from a harsh word. I plied her with questions, peppering her with interest, nudging her to talk ever more intimately about herself. Anything to prevent her from—

“So, what do you do?”

—from that. I’d arrived at this crossroads many times. It was where the water of opportunity fled into the serrated cracks of a dry barren waste, where the Parasite couldn’t survive. 

“Well,” I hemmed, “I’m in sales, but I’m really a musician.” I tried to reset the trajectory of conversation, redirect her to my actual interests rather than responsibilities. But passion is secondary to income, or whatever it’s supposed to emblematize, and the maid of honor would not be deterred. I had no choice but to elaborate, to spell out what was at the time my unprepossessing and uninspiring employment.

I could see the strain she was exerting in keeping the smile on her face. I could hear the tinkle of enthusiasm she belched from her well of civility. I could feel her exertion to maintain the social contract even as she began to fidget, as her feet started to lead her away from me. I made it easy for both of us, and excused myself. She could barely meet my eyes the following day through the entire wedding.

The one advantage a depressive has at a wedding is that everyone else is too busy enjoying themselves to notice your torpor. While they danced and drank, posed for pictures, testified into the video camera, laughed and celebrated, I kept company with a bottomless glass of whiskey. Not that it did much good—I was too downtrodden to drink for fun, and the few whiskeys I imbibed had little effect on me. The reception wound down, and once the house lights were up, the younger celebrants repaired to the fourteenth floor for the after party.

I went to my room on the thirteenth, the lurch of revelry thundering through the ceiling, and changed into jeans and a t-shirt. I left my phone, my wallet, even the room’s key card on the little desk in the corner. At two in the morning I walked through the hotel lobby, out the front door, and headed northwest.

As the Inner Harbor receded behind me, I made for Grove Park. I watched the city decay around me. Tenements wept from neglect and abuse. The streets bled garbage and cast-off vials. A stray dog, shrunken and near-feral, crossed me with a growl. I was strutting through a thunderdome of betrayed dreams and tactile nightmares. Good, I thought. I turned a corner and saw a group of younger black men walking on the sidewalk, heading my way. They were talking amongst themselves and likely hadn’t even seen me yet. I kept walking toward them, my chin up, my eyes glinting with defiant privilege. My every step dared them to remember five hundred years of injustice. I wanted those black men to see me as I approached and see the face of every white man who’d called them, “nigger.” I wanted them to see an arrogant pale incongruity invading their sanctuary. I wanted them to teach me a lesson. I wanted to provoke them into attacking me.

I didn’t have a death wish. I wanted an excuse to kill someone.

As we passed one another, one of them nodded my way. “How you doing?”

I nodded back, walked on, and returned to the hotel.

THE PARASITE (Pt. 1)

You won’t find the Parasite’s mark anywhere on me. It’s been holed up deep beneath my skin for as long as I can remember. It’s nothing anyone can cure. There’s no purgative I can ingest, no treatment I can undergo that will kill it. It’s as much a part of me as any other organ. It’s my capillaries, the cartilage between my vertebrae. It’s every neuron in my brain translating stimuli into one serrated thought after another. I can only stave off its effect through constant intellectual activity. I have to keep my mind racing on its wheel.

My alarm wakes me in the morning, and I only allow myself the time it takes to wipe the sleep from my eyes to indulge in kneejerk self-pity. Once I slap the alarm silent, I only leave room in my head for the task at hand. I focus on the minutiae of routine like it’s a mantra. I dress myself to a strict cadence, never wavering in rhythm, never donning an article out of turn. As the coffee brews, I use a spoon to fold my granola into my yogurt. The coffee is ready by the time I’ve finished eating. I fix a quick travel-mug and head out the door.

I used to have my morning coffee at home. I woke up early enough to sit for fifteen minutes in a comfortable chair and enjoy the roast. But the Parasite always turned my head to the kitchen table. Just large enough for two, it was nestled in the breakfast nook where the morning sun streamed through the window, carrying into my apartment visions of two lovers and the thousands of words left unspoken by shared looks that said them all. The sunlight would catch the steam from two companion cups. A duet of bathrobes and slippers would echo over the sun reflected off the tabletop. The woman’s fingertips would massage the coffee cup in her hand. She would lean across the table to kiss me, and I would lean forward and meet her halfway. It gave me headaches.

My eyes are flitting in and around the car as I drive to work. Hands at ten and two. Blinker on. Ease off the gas. Keep the distance from the car in front of you. That jogger doesn’t see me. That asshole on the tandem bike thinks he owns the road. If I turn down Church, I’ll hit that construction gridlock. I’ll take Old Cuthbert; I’ll have to contend with school buses, but I’ll keep moving. Keep the Parasite quiet.

I used to save a thousand dollars a year taking the train into work, avoiding the expense of gas, tolls, and the parking garage. I would wait at my station and not speak to my fellow commuters. I would board the train, take a seat alone, and use a book or device to help me ignore the ranks of chattering banality. I was always the first one out of my seat, lined up at the door, as the train pulled into my stop, except one morning, for no discernible reason and unbidden by any logic, I stayed seated until the train stopped.

I had never seen her before, didn’t know whether she’d boarded before or after I had. She stood right next to me on legs that could never have been forged by miles run or hours logged in the gym, but only by the elitist grace of a jackbooted deity. Her hair, long and smoothed free of renegade strands, cascaded past her shoulders. A luminous auburn, it shimmered with the threat of scorching anyone who tried to approach. She stood with arms crossed and shoulders hunched against an impending assault. Her clothes fit her like molded bronze armor, impenetrable, proud, patronized by divine favor. Her patrician nose stood at the center of a face of thorned impatience and imperturbable confidence. The next day I drove to work.

Once I’m in the office, I’m safe.  I take my time, exacting and thorough, with every duty, regardless of its importance. I script out every phone call in my head before I’ve touched the receiver. I stack my paperwork and cut my way through it with Asbergian exactitude. I take my seat at the conference table and fill the pages of my notepad with runic scribbles that only I can understand. But they contain every speck of information uttered in that meeting. Not just what the contract will entail for each department and its head, as well as me, but what each team member is thinking. The twitch at the vice-president’s mouth when he informs us of our timetable conveys his lack of confidence, and I write it down. I note our director of operations’ expected impatience by her clipped, brusque tone.

I work through my lunch break and finish my day. Back at my apartment I make my dinner. Always from scratch. The culinary arts require time, patience, and full attention. The serenity of activity continues for an hour or more. As I eat I scour the internet for more recipes, new and different challenging distractions. Inspired or not, I plan what my dinner will be the following night. I finish eating and wash the dishes by hand. I can’t remember the last time I used the dishwasher. I go to the supermarket. Large brick-and-mortar stores with heavy traffic are good for me. As I wind my way up and down the aisles, I navigate the choppy sea of thoughtless shoppers. I use their ignorance to my advantage and gauge each one as an obstacle to be methodically overcome. Once I’m back home and have put away the groceries, I take out Rickenbacker and my amp. Playing is my favorite part of the day. I’m completely absorbed. Nothing exists but the instrument and my hands. I start off with my simple warm-ups: running scales, fingering exercises, striking the current note with my right index finger as I conjure an image of my left middle finger coming down on the next note’s string just above the fret. I run through some songs: “Kulu/Speak Like a Child” by Jaco, “Sound Chaser” by Yes, whatever I’m in the mood to play provided it’s long and complex. Then I continue teaching myself whatever outsized ambition I’m chipping away at. The current compulsion is Bach’s “Air on G String.” But the day always comes to an end.

I’ve tried everything: sleeping pills—over-the-counter and prescription—booze, weed, Benadryl. I’ve tried going to sleep with music playing, with the TV on, with looped white noise and the harmonies of ecosystems. But I’ve yet to find anything that will just knock me out. I always have to contend with the chasm that spans the dousing of the lights and the arrival of slumber. I have to lie there with nothing but my mind and the Parasite.

It’s the Parasite that drives my idle thoughts like undead dogs in a zombie Iditarod. I know it’s coming before I hear it, and I have to lie there like a scared child hiding in vain from a monster that he knows will find him. First, there’s only the vague ambience amidst the dark. Then I hear it. The bright chitter of steel pincers tearing into flesh. Saliva roiling like a witch’s cauldron. A rapacious tongue sliming over mandibles. As the sound draws near, the Parasite gives flute to apocalyptic promises, not of fire and destruction and blood and ash, but of a soft, feminine hand pressed against mine. Of laughter tickled free by mutual attraction. Of eyes with a gravity that pulls me in and carries me beyond the boundaries of reason. The Parasite’s voice, so familiar and comforting, fills my surrounding darkness with impossible visions. Of a city without squalor, umbrellaed by night’s sky throbbing with stars, a full moon its beating heart, a cobblestone street hosting a man and woman, their fingers intertwined without a care save one another. Of endless fields drunk on the thick green of their tall, silken grasses, man and woman embracing each other in a perfumed rainbow of surrounding hyacinth. Of a home ensconced in an untouchable pocket universe, insulated in mahogany and teak, warmed by a fire. A home for two people as they become one. As my eyes start to fill, the Parasite invokes a name, one of many I’ve known. I shut my eyes. Cold fluid streams down my face, onto the pillow. Beneath my eyelids the name assumes the form. It straddles me, runs its hands through the hair on my chest. I feel its lips, soft and moist, brush my cheek as they approach my ear. The form whispers to me, tells me everything I need to hear, everything the Parasite knows I want. The form ululates to its phantom sentiments. The Parasite tells me to move my hand. I do, and my focus is fully on the most welcome of lies. It clings to me, loves me, and I allow myself to indulge the lie. I indulge through the grief, through the pain beneath the linen. The Parasite finishes feeding and leaves. And I lay in the darkness and cry until sleep takes me.

MY 10 FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2016

     Before we get started, just so you know... there is more fiction coming. Yes, I know it's been a while, but THE TRIAL OF MARCUS AURELIUS is coming out in a few months--follow me on Twitter for that announcement--so I'm back into fiction-writing mode. 

     Now, here's the ten best books I read in 2016.

10) DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? (Philip K. Dick, 1968)

It bears very little resemblance to Blade Runner, and that’s a good thing, because—blasphemy alert—I’ve always found the movie to be beautiful but boring. Philip K. Dick’s novel, however, is grimy and wondrous. The book is not just a rumination on what constitutes life, but on the intrinsic value of one life over another. It’s not enough that we think and feel, but what we think about and who we feel for. In a dystopia where people drug themselves into emotion, any emotion, and where androids are identified via a test for empathy they should not have, the simulacra of life have developed not just consciousness but a fraternity of otherness. Each android cares as much about the others as it/he/she does about it/him/herself. Roy Batty is not a snarling Rutger Hauer. He is a charismatic and committed leader exhausted by a series of difficult choices. After a book populated by humans less alive than their machines, the happy ending is a hard-learned but well-earned lesson that teaches Deckard to recognize and value life in its strangest form and most unorthodox splendor.

9) THE SPORTSWRITER (Richard Ford, 1986)

“An eloquent and stately character study, brimming with the tensions of everyday drama,” is an example of the kind of blurb that could grace the cover of the novel, but it probably wouldn’t galvanize you to take the book home. But Richard Ford’s story of a man slowly pulling himself out of a grave of despair following the death of his child and the dissolution of his marriage is why literary fiction remains the most lauded of genres. Ford’s prose, lacking showmanship and disinterested in impression, is the eye of the emotional hurricane that is wreaking havoc on his protagonist, Frank Bascombe. In the shadows of his craftsmanship, the trenches between lines, and the nooks and crannies between words, is a cosmos of subtext, the primordial soup that gives richness and immediacy to a simple, human story. Richard Ford’s characters are indelibly real, and his story is foundationally profound. This book is marvelous.

8) THE STORY OF THE JEWS (Simon Schama, 2013)

The title is a little misleading and slightly dishonest (most dogmatically absolutist titles are—don’t trust a book named “How So-and-So Saved Civilization” or “Such-and-Such Made the Modern World”). But Schama does chronicle an aspect of Jewish history that is often neglected by Jews and gentiles alike. Beginning with an exhaustive and mesmerizing examination of the oldest extant ruins of identifiably Jewish origin, Schama presents a compelling and comprehensive case that the central conflict of Judaism and Jewishness has always been the internal struggle between a belief that says, “We are Chosen, and to remain Chosen we must remain separate from the non-Jewish world,” and the contrary belief of, “We can engage with society-at-large, allow a cross-pollination of cultures, and still be Jewish.” From the fog of near-lost Antiquity to the waning days of the Middle Ages, Schama tells the story in a passionate voice filled with ebullient wisdom that will leave history buffs ensorcelled and smitten.

7) THE PARABLE OF THE SOWER (Octavia Butler, 1993)

I’ve finally acquainted myself with the work of Octavia Butler, and she has proven her bonafides as a singular artist of uncommon power. As a creator of science fiction, she has crafted a believable apocalypse-in-progress that, two decades later, appears chillingly prophetic in its accuracy and all-encompassing probity. As an African-American woman, she has plumbed the vicissitudes she’s endured to conjure a reality that is tragically too familiar. As a writer her ability to turn a phrase, erect a narrative arc, and bring to life characters we come to know as well as we would anyone beyond the pages is a feat to behold. THE PARABLE OF THE SOWER is a novel unlike any other I’ve read, but I’m hoping to find its equal in the rest of Octavia Butler’s bibliography.

6) RED SORGHUM (Mo Yan, 1986)

Thank god I discovered Mo Yan this past year. Read my original Not-a-Review here.

5) BLOOD ON THE FORGE (William Attaway, 1941)

A child of the Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance, William Attaway’s titanic BLOOD ON THE FORGE is an intellectual primal scream. The Moss brothers escape the Jim Crow South for the more lucrative and tolerant future promised by the North, only to find the unfamiliarity of the steel mills, the depersonalized mechanization, is more dehumanizing than the familiar marginalization of the southern farms. Attaway contrasts the blistering red and orange heat of the cauldrons with the warm, wet, fertile earth the brothers are accustomed to and take pleasure in. The fires burn down the brothers—angry, god-fearing Big Mat; sensible, responsible Chinatown; and foolish, fun-loving Melody—in a tragic conflagration that leaves each of them in the last place he wanted to be. Like NATIVE SON, GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN, and INVISIBLE MAN, William Attaway’s novel is about much more than the black experience, and BLOOD ON THE FORGE stands shoulder to shoulder with those other giants.

4) CALL IT SLEEP (Henry Roth, 1934)

It’s the only proper novel Henry Roth ever published, and upon reading the book it’s easy to see why it took him over forty years to write another word. Like Ralph Ellison, Roth has presented a single life with multi-faceted verisimilitude and bullseye specificity that captures an entire universe of human experience. The poor, the immigrant, the young, the neurotic, the Jewish, the abused all have their story brought to life in CALL IT SLEEP. What else can Roth say? I’m hesitant to recommend the novel to anyone but the heartiest of literary adventurers. Consider yourself warned: CALL IT SLEEP is relentlessly bleak. The prose is a fugue of tears, and the plot is a totem pole of compounded miseries, so much so that the experience of reading is largely an endurance trial. But if you’re willing to endure for the sake of majestic writing, or if you’re just a masochist of letters, this novel will leave a scar on your heart you will cherish forever.

3) THE TENANTS (Bernard Malamud, 1971)

There’s something different about Bernard Malamud. His stories are always in one way or another about Jewish identity and its concomitant pains. As a Jewish friend of mine once observed, “That’s the culture,” but unlike Henry Roth’s writing, Malamud’s does not drown me in dourness and crushing loss. There is always an ember roasting in the dark center of his work. THE TENANTS is a story about two writers; one Jewish, one black; squatting in a condemned apartment, desperate for the isolation they need to finish their purgative books. But in each other they see a world they wish included them. They feel the sting of their respective hypocrisies, and the resentment stoked between the two desperate, broken men leaves the apartment building beyond dilapidated. As bleak as the plot may be, there is still that ember burning in the black ink of every letter, and while the characters may not feel its heat, we the readers do.

2) THE POWER BROKER (Robert A. Caro, 1974)

America’s scholarly community has really dropped the ball. Every child in this country should grow up learning about Robert Moses. He was a real-life Charles Foster Kane, a man of unshakable self-confidence and unparalleled intellect who sacrificed his own soul to propitiate the god of power. Robert Caro, now the go-to authority on Lyndon Johnson, tells the epic story of how Robert Moses transformed himself from an idealistic youth dedicated to solving New York’s many social ills into the state’s unelected dictator whose aims began with getting his way and ended with crushing anyone who opposed him. Caro’s doorstop of a biography is electrifying from the first page to the last because Caro never takes the stance of either apologist or persecutor. He details how Moses’ tireless energy and blade-sharp mind built the infrastructure of modern New York as they corrupted the mechanisms of government to make Moses’ dreams a reality. Robert Moses was a character with a capital-C.

1) AUGUSTUS (John Williams, 1973)

John Williams is simply one the greatest American novelists of the twentieth century. Read my original Not-a-Review here.

Not a Review of AUGUSTUS by John Williams

John Williams—no, the other one—was a little-known instructor of creative writing at the University of Denver who published only a pawful of books in his life. When he died in 1994 he was barely a footnote in the annals of American letters, but thanks to New York Review Books, the publishing industry’s Criterion Collection, Williams’ stature has grown by leaps and bounds over the last decade. His three major novels, all reissued by NYRB, have garnered him a posthumous reputation as a storyteller of uncanny insight, a writer of stoical craftsmanship, underneath which simmers a rare literary potency. Butcher’s Crossing is a Western that draws a knife across Ralph Waldo Emerson’s throat and leaves the American frontier and the national psyche doused by a pitch-black arterial spray. Stoner is a campus novel that by some mysterious alchemical sleight-of-hand manages to be both transcendentally idealistic and heartbreakingly realistic. Then there’s Williams’ final novel, Augustus, an historical fiction that is more believable than most histories, a tale of absolute power and its ultimate impotency. And it’s in Augustus that John Williams evinces the full power of fiction.

If you know me at all, you know how nerdily I obsess over Roman history, so you may suspect that my opinion of this book will be biased in its favor. But actually my standards for historical fiction are probably too high because I’m a history buff. I despise it when fiction ignores or rewrites history to accommodate a plot that could be just as easily applied to a contemporary or imaginary setting. As many people wiser than I have said, fiction is a lie told to reveal a greater truth. Why not take the historical truth and meld it to lies of characterization, to supposed motivations that the historical record never touches upon? Why write historical fiction if not to cast a little light onto history’s shadows? If not to outline those slender threads that will always tether the way-back-when to the here-and-now? That’s exactly what Williams does in Augustus, putting the distant and elusive under a lens that makes it immediate and knowable.

Given his subject, it’s only fitting that Augustus is John Williams’ most ambitious work. Augustus is a remote and larger-than-life figure, and the motivations of Rome’s first emperor have long puzzled historians. It’s hard to fathom how the definitive enlightened despot could so completely embody those words that to a contemporary mind reside squarely in mutual exclusivity. He’s a lot like Charles Foster Kane, an inscrutable character of intimidating stature and authority, simultaneously driven by an unquenchable thirst for power and a high-minded opposition to injustice, and as Orson Welles revealed his mercurial protagonist through the perspectives of others, so does Williams reveal his. The multiple points of view, with their unique personalities and prejudices, underline the oft-contradictory facets of a great and terrible man whose gravity holds those voices in his orbit.

Williams employs an epistolary framework to erect his panoramic and microcosmic view of Rome’s first emperor, and it enriches the reading experience in multiple ways. Firstly, it enhances the verisimilitude of the entire work. Some of our best primary sources on Roman history are the extant letters of those who lived it: Cicero, Pliny the Younger, and such. The epistolary structure creates the illusion that we’re reading a genuine first-hand account of Augustus’ life. The approach also enables a breezy economy of storytelling. Strabo of Amasia’s letter fears how Brutus will react to Augustus’ proscriptions, then Brutus’ letter to Augustus is the reaction, then Agrippa’s account of Philippi closes the matter and sets up the inevitable breakdown between Augustus and Antony. But each letter is flavored with a unique energy. Each individual is animated with the pure music of the written word. Agrippa’s starched military man, Maecenus’ cynical dandy, Salvidienus’ betrayed idealist, Piso’s sinister toady, Flaccus’ pretentious gossip. The entire novel is a sumptuous potpourri of character study.

Unlike Charles Foster Kane, Augustus is granted his own voice. After 260 pages of impressions from others who, no matter how close they are to him, can never truly know the most powerful man in the world, the Revered One speaks to us directly. Through a letter to his old friend, the only friend still alive, Nicolaus of Damascus, we meet a man who has only days left to live. He is dying of a life of regret. What begins as a simple thank-you note for some dates quickly becomes an epigraph in Augustus’ own hand. He confides the story of an idealistic youth who was handed the keys to the kingdom, who recognized the weight of the burden, and committed himself to the inexorable sacrifices he would have to make.

“When I was young, I would have said that loneliness and secrecy were forced upon me. I would have been in error… I chose to enclose myself in the half-formed dream of a destiny no one could share, and thus abandoned the possibility of that kind of human friendship which is so ordinary that it is never spoken of, and thus is seldom cherished.”

Now, in his twilight, with the wisdom that comes too late to us, he could not have foreseen the emotional toll taken by his loneliness and secrecy. With no companionship but from the ghosts of loved ones he had carved into pawns, he knows that the order he imposed upon a chaotic world has become his Frankenstein’s monster, and the monster has enslaved its creator. The most powerful man in the world is powerless against his responsibility.

Williams gives believable and fully fleshed voice to unknowable authority, but even more memorably he gives voice to the ultimate victim of that authority. Augustus imposed an involuntary responsibility on his daughter, Julia. She was married off repeatedly to the men who would succeed Augustus and ensure the survival of his orderly vision for Rome. When she rebelled against the princeps’ strict morality laws by cuckolding Tiberius and bedding half the men in Rome, he banished her and never set eyes on her again. Like her father, the historical Julia has become trapped in a popular image, one of wanton harlotry and irresponsibility. 

But through a novelist’s prose Julia becomes a full human being and the book’s most vivid and sympathetic character. Her story is entirely about her quest for agency, for the desire to lead her own life, to find value in herself, for herself, beyond her father’s political machinations.

“It was after the death of that good man, Marcus Agrippa, that Julia, daughter of Octavius Caesar, the August, discovered the power that had been hidden within her, and discovered the pleasure that she could take. And the pleasure she could take became her power, and it seemed to her that it was a power beyond that of her name and of her father. She became herself.”

The relationship between father and daughter is not the calculated arrangement undone by rebellion as history has cast it. It is a tragic love story between two people who want to make each other happy but can only sacrifice so much for one another.

In John Williams’ novel, Julia, alone among Roman women, gets to speak for and define herself. Augustus, a man who literally changed the course of human history, is free of his responsibility and can speak his mind. Augustus is not only a powerful story about power. It is a testament to the power of fiction. Fiction can correct the corrupted perspective of history, giving voice to the previously voiceless, revealing the humanity that impels history’s monsters, the heart and soul that is the foundation of the ignominy. And we are all stronger for it.