Hello subscribers! Welcome to your February digest of Melendy Avenue Review! I picked out two reviews for this month, and wrote a fresh one. Want to see all the reviews? Upgrade to Citizen! Just go on your Substack profile, select the “Citizen” subscription level, and you’ll get it all- all the reviews, all the podcasts, all the Mithra pics! I was sick for a while so didn’t do my second podcast this month yet, but I will shortly. Anyway… enjoy the digest!
CONTENTS
Reviews
Walschots, Hench
Farrell, Studs Lonigans trilogy
Trilling, The Liberal Imagination
Lagniappe
Mithra Pic: Nurse Mithra
REVIEWS
Natalie Zina Walschots, “Hench” (2020) (read aloud by Alex McKenna) - This was a fun concept, not altogether poorly-executed but lacking oomph down the line. It follows the story of one Anna, a young woman whose main line of work is in “henching” - being a henchman for supervillains, in a world where both supervillains and the superheroes who oppose them are both part of life. She gets this work through a villainous temp agency, which sends out henches of all kinds- muscle, getaway drivers, and as in Anna’s case, standard-issue office workers. Supervillains need someone to do IT work and spreadsheets, too.
Anna gets hired by a sort of Silicon Valley guru-style supervillain who puts her in an awkward spot, as an extra of sorts in a televised kidnapping of some innocents. When superheroes crash the party, the sort of Superman-equivalent of this world, Supercollider, casually smacks her aside and seriously breaks several of her bones, leaving her laid up for months and with permanent injuries. She does what any self-respecting millennial would do with funemployment, a serious injury, and a working internet connection, and gets blogging.
It turns out superheroes cause a lot of collateral damage! Anna teaches herself actuarial math and finds out how many life-years superheroes cost, and it’s a lot. Eventually, a more competent supervillain notices her way with numbers, and recruits her to lead a team to inconvenience and harass superheroes, with an end goal of exposing them for the jerks that they are. The superheroes retaliate, and it gets fairly ugly.
Walschots’ storytelling fundamentals are decent, especially early on. Among other things, she does not frontload worldbuilding, which is a good call. She lingers on damage, both physical and emotional trauma, in a way that brings home the stakes involved. That being said, there is a world here… and I’m not sure it needed more building, as such, or just better building… but when you set up a situation where there are markedly different facts about the world, and those facts shape your story, it would be useful to have a more in-depth understanding of what those differences mean.
Superheroes and supervillains, it seems, just sort of do their thing in this world without much in the way of motivation beyond personal grandiosity, and the rivalries said grandiosity entails. Anna’s opposition to superheroes appears equally apolitical, and as she gets into the numbers, almost gruesomely actuarial. For instance, when she got busted (and some of her coworkers, muscle goons, killed), her employer was using a mind control ray to make a child cut his own finger off. “How many lives is a kid’s finger worth?” Anna muses. How can she calculate the kid’s finger in life-years, the unit of her math? Certainly less than her shattered leg, or the lives of assorted goons.
I understand Anna is meant to be an anti-hero, someone who finds empowerment through villainy, and that Walschots may or may not accept this logic… but it does take me out of the story, that no one else thinks the logic is strange. The superheroes don’t so much articulate any of the obvious objections – that it’s traumatizing and fucked up, beyond the loss of functionality one finger entails, and if you agree to hurt people on behalf of a criminal then maybe you’re not in that much position to complain when someone hurts you in turn – as act shocked, hurt, and enraged that anyone objects to what they do, at all. This actually sounds about right – superheroes are basically a combination of movie stars and cops, and neither are known for accepting accountability – but it makes the world feel both physically dangerous and morally/politically weightless. It’s an odd combo.
This dovetails into the ending, which basically entirely revolves around personal relations between Anna, her genius supervillain boss, Supercollider, and assorted other parts of the super-universe who have some kind of connection. People can pooh-pooh worldbuilding, but that’s also generally where some kind of conflict other than “these made up characters had beef a while ago that we need to find a good way to expose to you, the reader” comes in with these secondary world stories (technically, this story takes place on Earth, and there are references to parts of it, and it seems to be more or less the early twenty-first century, but I don’t think it’s clear, say, where this story takes place, other than a North American city). The big superhero is sort of a sociopath, others enabled him, the villain dislikes him for it, Anna goes with the villain (and convinces some heroes to help). The supervillain basically takes the role of the superhero in most of these stories. While being weird and vaguely sinister, he is always supportive of Anna, encouraging her autonomy and growth, and there’s a will they/won’t they aspect to the story complicated by us not knowing whether the dude is really human or not.
Comparison is unavoidable here to “The Boys,” the comic and tv series which is also about a small group of people reigning in superheroes for the damage they do to the world. This is interesting territory for me, due to a weird psychodrama involving a former friend and his feelings about my (real or perceived) ideas around said series and superhero media in general. Walschots avoids many of the pitfalls Garth Ennis, author of “The Boys” and assorted other comics, has become notorious for: tryhard edginess, insensitive portrayals of people from marginalized groups, a sort of barstool philosophizing about how “real life” is work, very vanilla heterosexual sex (despite a clear fascination with less-vanilla sexuality), and beers, and the rest of it is pretentious nonsense. You don’t get that in “Hench.”
What you also don’t get is a story with much in the way of visceral impact, and at the end of the day, much of a rationale as to why anyone does anything, and you can’t fault “The Boys” or Ennis’ work more generally for that. This extends to storytelling: Ennis loves the dirty details, whether it be of a character’s background or of how to go about blackmailing superheroes (for their actually somewhat less objectionable behavior- see Ennis’s attitudes towards any non-vanilla hetero sex). Walschots wants to get into the muck, blood, pain, and need of the world, but doesn’t really want to get her character’s hands – or her authorial voice – dirty, and so we miss out on a lot. We don’t even know why Anna got into henching in the first place. Was it really the only option? She couldn’t temp for a normal company? People do- the normal economy works as it does, hence why superheroes can be measured by how much they disrupt it by throwing cars through shopping malls. All told, this was an interesting but frustrating novel, and one that seems to be a product of a literary culture in contemporary scifi/fantasy storytelling that wants to tell dark, villainous stories, but is scared to death less of being accused of not being “woke,” but more of being “edgy” - not being woke is at least a character arc, being edgy, like a nineties person, is an embarrassment. Surely, there’s another way. ***
James Farrell, Studs Lonigan novels (1932-1935) - I had a look at this trilogy of novels about a Chicago Irish-American of the early twentieth century for a few reasons. It did wind up on that big “top 100 novels of the twentieth century” list that used to go around. More to the point, Studs Lonigan came up at an odd time in an Ishmael Reed novel. Reed was one of the founders of ethnic studies as a field- but, from the distaff side (ironically, as a proudly masculine figure). He didn’t play nice, and he made moves that would later be ruled out of bounds, or anyway suspect. In one of his novels, the son of a racist Irish-American cop liberates himself by embracing ethnic studies, Ishmael Reed style: by reading neglected works by people from his ethnic background. In the case of this young Irish-American, that meant Farrell and Studs Lonigan (I can’t remember if he also read Irish-Irish writers too- it was a minor plot point). Free your reading, and the rest will follow! And your mean Irish cop dad will get Big Mad, but ineffectually so. Whatever Reed’s “bad takes,” I’ll always admire him for his belief in the power of literature.
So, I found this compilation on a free pile and gave it a read. Farrell was a Trotskyist for a long time, and the Studs novels are definitely in the “realist” school, but not quite “socialist realist” – they don’t idealize the working class. Besides, the literary gatekeepers who really clamped down on American literature during the Cold War wouldn’t let any socialist realist writers get posthumous praise, for better and for worse, and some of them liked Farrell. Studs does not get shirtless and bring the wheat in, heroically. One way in which these books might follow a socialist realist line, in fact, is in showing the degeneration of the petty bourgeoisie. Emphasis on the petty! Studs is the son of a small businessman and his wife, with one foot on the ladder of “lace curtain” respectability in Chicago. Dad Lonigan wants Studs to follow in the family housepainting biz, Mom Lonigan wishes her darling boy heard the call and would become a priest.
Studs is having none of it. He wants to be one of the neighborhood tough guys. Despite the presence of middle class strivers like the Lonigans, this takes place between 1916 and the then-present (Depression years), so there are youth gangs running around. They’re not very serious – some fights, minor pilferage, then they grow up and get jobs – but Studs and some of his peers do not get that last part. He never focuses. His only thought in any given situation is to get the esteem of whoever seems the coolest and toughest to his juvenile brain. He gets that through various social maneuvers, street fights, and acts of daring that are generally pretty stupid, and cutting off anyone who values anything other than this version of “street cred.”
Critics call these novels of squandered potential, but to be honest with you Studs always seemed like a loser… though it probably doesn’t help that we first meet him as an adolescent boy, literally mean mugging into the mirror. Booze enters the picture and makes things worse. There’s just enough reality to many of his resentments – of bosses, of the Church, of the generally phony and unfair society around him – to let him justify his rejection of their values, which also entails rejecting any responsibility to be honest or treat people decently. As he gets older and everyone else moves on, he becomes a pathetic figure.
The Studs books are “realist” in the old-fashioned sense of not pretending to have an edifying moral and of showing things – particularly coarse language, drinking, and some sexuality – that Victorian novels, which still cast a long shadow over literature even that far along the twentieth century, did not show. The sex stuff is interesting- Farrell won’t describe anyone’s figure in detail, let alone their nude figure, but several of the scenes where Studs or other drunken louts basically begin raping their women companions have an immediacy that has some power to shock even today.
Another way in which these books can be called realist- they are repetitive. Studs thinks the same dumb thoughts, does the same dumb things, the consequences of which get worse and worse, but beyond that, there’s not much variety in the action here. This is reasonably realistic- this is the way a lot of people’s lives go, and you have to figure in a walled-in environment like an ethnic neighborhood during the Depression… so, while these books are in some sense admirable, they’re not especially interesting to read. You more or less “get the picture” a few chapters into the first one. I guess there’s some element of “will Studs make good?” in the latter books, if that kind of suspense moves you. Sorry if I spoiled it for you! But I did not find that suspense very compelling. All told, more of an interesting artifact then anything I’d recommend… but then, given the rather thin bench of Irish-American literary talent (in marked contradistinction to the prominence Irish literature has globally), you can see why Reed would pick this one for his funny little tableau. ***’
Lionel Trilling, “The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society” (1950) - When you read a lot, and make some effort to read old stuff, and commentary and criticism about old stuff, you get these funny layers of reception history over your own takes. Anyway, I do. Lionel Trilling was one of the dons of midcentury American literary criticism. As such, he’s been interpreted and re-interpreted almost as much as he, himself, interpreted literature. And then add the filter onto that that, other than weirdos like me, nobody knows his name now!
That’s too bad, because some of the discussions around Trilling are interesting, his own work was often top notch, and the whole scene indicates how much less seriously the educated public takes literature. Yes yes, a broader swath of the populace goes through college, and yes, many books are sold, and sure, there’s whole online subcultures, even on platforms dedicated to the ephemeral like TikTok, dedicated to talking about books. But most of it is so many Yelp reviews, advice for what entertainment products you might or might not enjoy. On the higher end, your N+1 type journals, they essentially LARP the life of the “little magazines” Trilling writes about in this collection (and wrote for), back when magazines like Partisan Review and Commentary really felt relevant… and there’s more than a little consumer advice there, too, but more about what books to posture next to to convey that you’re smart to other bougie youths looking to breed.
Say what you want about Trilling, or the other midcentury New Criticism or American Studies types (he was neither, exactly, but was close with both), but they really did believe literature meant something, independent of – which isn’t to say unrelated to – its social value. Ironically, given that Trilling has been made to stand in for the depoliticized literary sphere of post-WWII, pre-1968 America, most of the essays here have something to do with literature’s relationship to politics. It isn’t Trilling’s smallest accomplishment that he could both pick off very specific partisan targets and keep the larger goal of what he thought literature was supposed to be in his sights throughout.
You can tell a lot about a critic by tracking where they are specific and where they are vague. Trilling reacts to the general atmosphere of conformity, sentimentality, lack of interest in the arts (with undercurrents of terror) as the Cold War sets in around him- he’s no booster of the coming Eisenhower America. But he’s much more specific when he wants to “punch left,” as they say. He has corruscating essays directed at the likes of Vernon Parrington and Sherwood Anderson, idols of the progressive, romantic, “soft” literary left of his time. Vagueness creeps back in when he attacks the general tendency towards ideological conformity that characterized left-leaning intellectual circles in the thirties, the “Popular Front” era. He names fewer names, here. It could be that there just weren’t many names to name, that socialist realist literature in America just didn’t produce much, and even less of merit- I think that’s how Trilling might have defended himself. Everyone just came out of college in the Depression, assumed the Communists had some answers, sat around mouthing slogans and expecting someone to come up with something… they didn’t, and then everyone slunk home embarrassed. That seems to be the implicit story here.
I don’t remember if Lionel Trilling was enlisted into old Tony Judt’s canon of good, liberal/social democratic saint figures, the “tough-minded,” often ex-communist, “travelers in the century” he thought we were at risk of forgetting (ironically, I, someone who no longer agrees with Judt’s ideological project, am probably one of the better rememberers, going along with the meta-project) at our grave cost. But he’s for sure “the type,” smart, skeptical, nice prose style. That said… you look at his target list, where he’s vague and where he names names, and it really does seem less like a principled defense of literature and philosophy against Stalinist ideological canting, and more hedging against the classical bourgeois fate worse than death- embarrassment. American Communists weren’t responsible for the gulag, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, or the Katyn massacre, even if they either signed off on or denied all those things, to their discredit. But they got stuff wrong, and it was embarrassing. They especially got stuff wrong culturally, if socialist realist literature is as bad as everyone says (I haven’t read much, does Mikhail Solokov count? How about Dashiell Hammett?), or if you cringe at the corniness of stuff like “Ballad of an American” or Washington Square folk revival material. The core of Trilling’s attack on Sherwood Anderson is, basically, that he wrote like a big, earnest kid, that it played a bit when it was restricted to Winesburg but got real old, real fast. Parrington, dean of the old Progressive School historians (that the Consensus School, at that time, was in the midst of rendering verboten in the American academy), got got more or less the same way- sentimental, sloppy.
Well, they were, both of them, Anderson and Parrington, sloppy, sentimental, risibly so. It’s worth noting that the sloppiness of Parrington and other old school Progressive historians – at least one major figure on the scene, Harry Elmer Barnes, let his hate for the American government and all it promoted lead him to support for the Nazis and Holocaust denial – in his prose and categorization schemes also let Trilling, and the Consensus School guys, duck their larger points about the material interests that drove much of American history… but that doesn’t make Trilling’s critiques wrong.
I don’t want to call it a shell game, exactly. But it has some of the same dynamics. Pay attention to the cringeworthy, ignore the rest of it- especially given how small, how internally-divided and messed up the American left, from the softest of soft progressives to the hardest-edged commies, were (and are), it’s easy enough. Ironically, it was their very strength in the thirties, as Trilling and his generation were coming up, that allowed the likes of Trilling to define a literary attitude against their thing at all.
Further irony- communists, especially American communists playing to liberals in the Popular Front era, made the right, the other enemy, out to be anti-intellectual, no fit background for the likes of Trilling to posture against. What literary stance did Joe McCarthy have other than “I don’t like it”? New Criticism largely came from conservative-leaning critics — Eliot, Leavis, the Fugitive school — but all that did was make their epigones like Trilling feel a little frisson. They were a —safe— right. For those keeping score, in Trilling’s world, you could blame Katyn on American reds, in large part because their values (and sometimes orders from the party, ultimately from Moscow) insisted that they show solidarity with the USSR, but one didn’t feel the need to blame Auschwitz (or Selma) on fascist sympathizers or segregationists, as long as said sympathizers were sneaks with a facade of class. It was, in some ways, a better era in terms of seriousness of engagement- but it’s not like everyone was noble, that they didn’t play with a lot of the same incentives.
Anyway! With all this in mind, Trilling doesn’t so much lay out an Anglo-American canon for the Cold War era — he lets others play that much more vulnerable role — but patrols its edges, keeping some out, bringing others in, and instructing the reader as to the logic of it all. Arguably the crown piece here is Trilling’s essay on Henry James. I never got into Henry James — I might give him another try, not entirely on the strength of Trilling’s recommendation but partially — but still found this essay a fascinating piece of criticism and of rhetoric. Henry James was one of the more purely “literary” writers of his or any time, and it’s that quality that Trilling praises- but he spends thousands of words and achingly close readings of both James’s written work and his letters to prove that James’s aloofness from any questions that didn’t come down to sentence structure and comparative upper class manners was, actually, the bravest, and politically soundest, stance anyone could have taken… especially next to that battle ax of a feminist sister (Trilling, like most of his cohort, built a very male literary world) and goofball do-gooder of a brother of his! To do this, Trilling raises from the dead one of James’s less well known books, makes some very dicey generalizations about anarchists, “whirls like a dervish and bawls fluent Babylonian” as Vonnegut once put it, to prove that what literature is for is mature, somber reflection on the basic contradictions of the world and the inevitability of failure of all great dreams, whether of youth, love, or ideology. And, well- it is for that. It’s for other stuff, too, but it’s definitely for that. But for whatever reason, this is hard for people to take on board sensibly, without falling into snobbish complacency, or a rebellion against the tragic sensibility that, wouldn’t you know it, also leads to complacency, just the complacency of formalism, sentimentality, whatever else you’ve got.
So, I don’t agree with Trilling’s arguments all around. But his work is impressive, and it shows that to make a world where we could be blasé, complacent half-readers of stories of upper middle class divorce (and, after that, enthusiastic, complacent consumers of YA), the critical enforcers of consensus in midcentury could not afford to be blasé and complacent themselves. Trilling was clearly a masterful reader, a great prose-lawyer sometimes making cases out of little, and this shit had stakes for him, and one has to assume for at least some of his readers. It’s this, that the content and the form of literature means something in and of itself, not purely art for art’s sake but because art ties into everything else and vice-versa… well. We’re missing that, today, we try, some of us, like so many cargo cultists to wave the cargo plane of meaning back on to our island with our feeble imitations of earlier eras, or cackhanded inventions, and get nowhere. How much responsibility does Trilling and his cohort have for this state of affairs? To what extent did their definition of the zone of literature in the postwar period lay the groundwork for both a useless literature of navel-gazing and various poorly-considered rebellions against it? The cohort, a fair amount, Trilling himself… well, he taught Ginsberg at Columbia, tried to nurture the Beats. I’m not a big Beat fan but this implies Trilling saw something outside of his canon and its contemporary imitators. And he left us this, to think over and with and against, which is something, too, for what it’s worth. ****’
LAGNIAPPE
Mithra Pic: Nurse Mithra I was really sick last week! I’m fine now but it sucked for a few days. Mithra came to cuddle on the couch with me and aid in my recovery.