of looming ghosts. Perhaps you desired

only to know what it was to party,

to enjoy the power of your young body,

feel the light of worship on your face.

So at a house in the suburbs you faced

thirty men in button-up shirts, heart beating

as you threw off your dress for the first time, body

frail and wan in the harsh light. That night

ended in no disaster, and you left the party

with a need for a nom de guerre. You desired

something classy. You should call yourself Desire,

I said, which you rejected with a face.

You said you liked Lilith, though at the next party

we found men’s drunken tongues were beaten

by its lisping sounds. They were Teamsters that night,

great hulks, and in play they lifted up your body

as you protested unheard. But your body

was your tool and you learned to use it, the desires

of men slowly acceding to its will. Each night

you learned a little more, how to face

down a troublemaker with a joke, to playfully beat

an unruly father with a riding crop, keep the party

under control with a gesture. Even when the party

turned mean, and a frat boy pressed upon your body

with brute insistence, or a coke dealer beat

upon your fears with an unspoken threat, your desire

for mastery was pure as alabaster, your face

locked in a diamond smile framed by night-

black hair. Still there’s no expressing the nights

we spent that way, the endless parties,

the river of nameless men’s faces,

your bared flesh, the naked voluptuous bodies

swaying and shimmering in a heat wave of desire,

and through it all the city’s electric beat.

And yours was the ivory face of the goddess of night

glimpsed through a party of tortured supplicants beating

themselves from the desire to touch your shining body.

I’ve fallen far behind on these reviews, but here’s the beginning of my effort to catch up. This also mark the beginning of a blog, which probably I should have started when I started doing these reviews.

2010: Tinkers by Paul Harding. As an old man lies dying, he reflects on his childhood and his own father’s demise from epilepsy. If this reads on first glance like literary-fiction boilerplate – As I Lay Dying, anyone? – believe me, it’s even worse than it sounds. Among other conceits, the protagonist of this graduate-school-writing-program thesis repairs clocks, which allows the author to include periodic asides from a presumably fictional horological text. Well, Harding may congratulate himself on writing a book that reads like clockwork: meticulously crafted, precise in its inner workings, and utterly mechanical.

1951: The Town by Conrad Richter. Some genuinely witty anecdotes arise in this story of an early Ohio settlement in the midst of its growth into a proper town. I liked it, for the most part, although I found the actions of its characters unbelievable at several points.

1950: The Way West by A.B. Guthrie. Guthrie’s adventure story of settlers heading across the Great Plains reminded me a great deal of another, later winner, The Travels of Jamie McPheeters, albeit with fewer literary pretensions. While wholly readable, it also was rather forgettable, due, I think, to a plain prose style, simple characters, and a straightforward plot. If you’re curious to see how the Oregon Trail video game would read as a novel, here it is. Just try not to die of cholera.

1949: Guard of Honor by James Gould Cozzens makes for an interesting contrast with The Way West because Cozzens has precisely the eye for for verisimilitude that Guthrie lacks. It’s always apparent when you’re reading the work of a master writer, and Cozzens displays his skill from the first page as he describes the Florida landscape from a bird’s eye vantage. The novel also shows a nuanced understanding of the relationships between different troops and their commanders on an Air Force Base in wartime, and his expansive cast includes many remarkable portraits. I can’t say that it changed my life, but I’d be willing to give another of Cozzens’ books a try.

1948: Tales of the South Pacific by James A. Michener. It’s obvious Michener meant well by this book. He clearly loves the South Pacific, and is at his best when relating light anecdotes of his wartime experiences there, as with a particularly amusing story about a black-toothed Chinese matron nicknamed Bloody Mary, who sells souvenirs to soldiers and encourages one particular soldier in a liaison with her daughter. Bright spots notwithstanding, Michener’s book has aged poorly, and is marred throughout by blind nationalistic jingoism and by persistent racial stereotyping that periodically flares into flat-out racism.

1947: All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren tells the story of Willie Stark, who begins as an earnest young lawyer in the South and ends as the most cynical of governors. Along the way, he destroys any number of people’s lives, his own included. Warren fills his book with memorable characters and memorable scenes – one of Stark’s early speeches especially stands out – and America’s limitless capacity for corruption makes its message as timely as ever.