“American Rhapsody”

Carole Stone

CavanKerry Press, $16

    Carole Stone’s third full-length poetry collection, “American Rhapsody,” published this year by CavanKerry Press, eulogizes a bygone era in American history, Prohibition. More, however, than a re-creation of that time, “American Rhapsody” is also an attempt to recover and understand Ms. Stone’s personal history, the loss of her mother and father when a child and being subsequently raised by aunts and uncles. This collection, therefore, seems an attempt to expiate traumatic childhood memories — both societal and personal — and, paradoxically, keep those memories alive.

    Two poems illustrate this dichotomy well. In “The Past,” the poet hopes to strip history away “until nothing is left / but yourself.” We’re told that “the past swings / a noose from a tree,” a disturbing lynching image symbolizing our nation’s shameful exploits, but the poet will not “let its rope / tighten.” This revisionist wish is a rejection of our history, preparing Ms. Stone “for a new fiction / possible at a certain age.” History is not viewed here as a set of immutable facts but as a narrative for which the poet may reshape a more pleasant ending.

    With “Inky Heart,” however, we learn it’s never possible to live as stated in “The Past,” with nothing but yourself outside the context of one’s personal and cultural history. Rather, the poet in “Inky Heart” is haunted by her parents, “they who turn up / everywhere.” Long after the era of Prohibition, Ms. Stone’s parents remain real presences. Because Ms. Stone cannot expurgate the memory of her parents, inextricably entwined with the often brutal excesses of Prohibition, she conjures them up, “as an invocation.” I can imagine many readers finding themselves in identical emotional straits — at once both wanting to forget and wanting never to forget.

    Foremost among those alive in her “inky heart” is the poet’s father. He seems the impetus behind many poems in this book, including “Father’s Voice,” “Bundled Hundreds,” and “Homecoming.” Ms. Stone characterizes her father as not only glamorous but indifferent, as not only a financial provider but a philanderer, as both uncouth and suave. These poems reveal the ambivalent emotional connection — an ambivalence that permeates the entire collection — between poet and the memory of her father.

    A bootlegger during Prohibition, the poet’s father is compared to Odysseus, the classic absentee dad. At the end of “Homecoming,” Ms. Stone offers this bitingly cynical appraisal of her father: “Only his dog / knew who he was.” Yet, in the very next poem, “On This Date,” taking a cue from Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Art of Losing,” the poet confesses that in a newspaper photograph of men breaking up a Bund rally, “my father uses his fists against evil, / making this (Write it!) / racketeer’s daughter proud.”

    Some of the best poems here distill tension from the juxtaposition of the poet’s childhood idealism and the realities it confronts within the social milieu. Some of these poems are set in a time after Prohibition. In “FDR,” for example, the president’s death inaugurates a loss of innocence and childhood; in “History,” the poet watches contemporary business news, claiming, “My dream of America, / where no one would be poor, / slipping away into history,” and in “Newark” the poet balances a litany of gang activity and murdered innocents against her own discovery of lifesaving poetry in the library.

    In its entirety, “American Rhapsody” is neither bombastic nor ecstatic. But most of Ms. Stone’s lyrics are deftly controlled. She fixes readers in time, never allowing us to forget the history serving as setting for most of these poems. This ambiance is created through the use of literary allusions as epigraphs. These snippets of song lyrics or quotation tap the zeitgeist, grounding readers in the tumultuous days of Prohibition.

    And what a time: graft, booze, jazz, floozies, Jim Crow, murder, the Great Depression. Ms. Stone’s poems don’t stare these subjects in the eye; rather, they form the backdrop against which the poet carries out her search for “where the dead hide / in their secret clubhouse.”

    Carole Stone is professor emerita of English at Montclair State University in New Jersey. She has a house in Springs.

    Dan Giancola is a professor of English at Suffolk Community College. He lives in Mastic.

A Plimpton, Hurrying

    Sarah Plimpton is a poet and a painter, so it’s not surprising that her debut novel would be impressionistic. “Hurry Along,” from Pleasure Boat Studio, has been called “a luscious non-narrative map of shifting emotional and physical landscapes born out of the quotidian lives of people, trees, animals, beaches, and more.”

    “It tells the story of a family, in flashbacks and fragments,” the write-up in Publishers Weekly goes on, but here’s the kicker for those actually contemplating picking up the book: “What might become tedious in the hands of a less skilled writer is achieved by Plimpton with aplomb. . . .”

    Or you can take a listen for yourself when she reads from it on Saturday at 5 p.m. at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor. And yes, George, that late lamented man of letters and of Sagaponack, was her brother.

Behold, the “Plot” Luck

    Who says words and woks don’t mix? Heck, toss in “wellness” and you’ve got something embodied by one Debra Scott, writing coach and wellness chef, who has invited writers to a fiction workshop and dinner at a Water Mill home on Wednesday from 6 to 9 p.m.

    “Discussion will focus on premise, characterization, voice, plot, and more,” a release said. “Bring your novel, story, screenplay, or idea.” And don’t forget an appetite and $55. Registration and more information are with Ms. Scott, who lives in East Hampton and can be reached at [email protected] or 237-1040.

  “Kurt Vonnegut: Letters”

Edited by Dan Wakefield

Delacorte, $35

  Whackadoodle. That’s a word that was frequently muttered after meetings with Kurt Vonnegut. In this collection, “Kurt Vonnegut: Letters,” beautifully and lovingly edited by his friend Dan Wakefield, we see the whackadoodle guy plenty. And forgive me for what may sound trite, but underneath that crusty, self-described iguana exterior, he was a loving cynic. Who also proves himself to be a cynical lover, as well as a wise, irascible man who was struggling every moment to make sense of this nonsensical life. The writer of these hundreds of letters over a 60-year period displays his tormented soul, his voice by turns hilarious, angry, winsome, charming, cruel. And always thoughtful.

    But let’s start at the beginning. Vonnegut, born in 1922, was of perfect age for World War II. The volume starts with the horrific shock — the bombing of Dresden — that we will see in “Slaughterhouse-Five.” As a private just released as a prisoner of war, he wrote to his family on May 29, 1945:

Dear people:

    I’m told that you were probably never informed that I was anything other than “missing in action.” Chances are that you also failed to receive any of the letters I wrote from Germany. . . .

    I’ve been a prisoner of war since December 19th, 1944. . . . Well, the supermen marched us, without food, water or sleep to Limberg, a distance of about sixty miles, I think, where we were loaded and locked up, sixty men to each small, unventilated, unheated box car. There were no sanitary accommodations — the floors were covered with fresh cow dung. There wasn’t room for all of us to lie down. Half slept while the other half stood. . . . They killed about one-hundred-and-fifty of us. We got a little water Christmas Day. . . . We were released from the box cars on New Year’s Day. The Germans herded us through scalding delousing showers. Many men died from shock in the showers after ten days of starvation, thirst and exposure. But I didn’t.

    Vonnegut recounts beatings, fellow P.O.W.s shot dead for stealing food.

    “On about February 14th the Americans came over, followed by the R.A.F. Their combined labors killed 250,000 people in twenty-four hours and destroyed all of Dresden — possibly the world’s most beautiful city. But not me.”

    Vonnegut describes carrying corpses from shelters. “Civilians cursed us and threw rocks as we carried bodies to huge funeral pyres in the city.”

    At the end of the war Vonnegut and the other P.O.W.s walked to the Czech border, where the guards fled. “On that happy day the Russians were intent on mopping up isolated outlaw resistance in our sector. Their planes (P-39s) strafed and bombed us, killing fourteen, but not me.”

    As Mr. Wakefield points out in his insightful introduction, “but not me” is the precursor for “so it goes” from “Slaughterhouse-Five.”

    In these pages we clearly see the demons against which Vonnegut struggled: the true horrors of war, the punishing effect of his father’s mandates, the family’s diminishing fortunes, his mother’s suicide just as he was going off to war. Vonnegut has always written and spoken about the travails of the writer’s life in utterly original ways. He could also fight back against naysayers: “I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled ‘science fiction’ ever since, and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.”

    Yet when it came to questions regarding the arts, Vonnegut was always searching below the surface — and he was generous. His brother, Bernard, once raised the question about why paintings couldn’t be judged just by their quality without viewers having to know something about the artist. Vonnegut’s response is rather surprising, given his occasional curmudgeonly nature:

    “People capable of loving some paintings or etchings or whatever can rarely do this without knowing something about the artist. Again, the situation is social rather than scientific. Any work of art is one half of a conversation between two beings, and it helps a lot to know who is talking at you. Does he or she have a reputation for seriousness, for sincerity? There are virtually no beloved or respected paintings made by persons of whom we know nothing. We can even surmise a lot about the lives of whoever did the paintings in the caves underneath Lascaux, France.”

    Vonnegut frequently wrote just to needle — and perhaps he was needling himself at times. A master of the shock technique, he once told Legionnaires that he couldn’t come speak at the 77th convention in his hometown, Indianapolis, explaining: “If I could be there, my speech would be a short one. The older my father became, the dumber he became, and the same thing is happening to me. . . . I’m talking about plain old age.”

    Vonnegut’s agent provocateur personality is splayed across many pages. Take, for example, this 1993 letter written from Sagaponack to Knox Burger, who published Vonnegut’s first short story in Collier’s magazine. Burger, who nurtured Vonnegut his entire career, went on to found an extremely successful literary agency.

Dear Knox

    That’s something nice I’d given up hoping for, an easy and friendly letter from you. The brutality of the choice I was forced to make between you and Max is now as little remembered, thank goodness, as Shays’ Rebellion or whatever. . . .

    For the sake of our darling adopted daughter (half Jewish, half Ukrainian, kind of like you, now that I think about it), Lily, now ten, Jill and I are not divorced. I am too old, anyway, for all the paperwork. Divorce has become as obsolescent as marriage. My son Mark is in the process of getting divorced, and I’ve said to him, “Why bother?”

    And yet suddenly there are tender, passionate Vonnegutian outbursts. Here’s an unsolicited message to the poet Galway Kinnell.

    December 22, 1997

    New York City

Dear Galway Kinnell

    At the age of 75, I had come to doubt that any words written in the present could make me like being alive a lot. I was mistaken. Your great poem “Why Regret?” restored my soul. Jesus! What a language! What a poet! What a world!

    Cheers! —

    Kurt Vonnegut

    Underneath the bluster, there is a pervasive tenderness. Vonnegut once said, “I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’ ” Indeed, in “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,” one character says, “. . . babies — God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”

    One of the truly charming aspects of this collection is Vonnegut’s underlying devotion to offering advice. Despite his conflicts about being a teacher and his own lackluster traipse through academia, again and again his love of teaching comes through — in addition to his love of the epistolary form. In 1965 he became writer in residence at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. All of his course assignments were delivered in the form of a letter. Here’s a snippet from his “Form of Fiction Term Paper Assignment”:

Beloved:

    As for your term papers, I should like them to be both cynical and religious. I want you to adore the Universe, to be easily delighted, but to be prompt as well with impatience with those artists who offend your own deep notions of what the Universe is or should be.

    He “invites” his students to read 15 short stories, then grade them from A to F. Then he directs them to “Proceed next to the hallucination that you are a minor but useful editor on a good literary magazine. . . .”

    He asks students to write a report on three stories they like and three they don’t and to write a report for a “witty and world-weary superior.”

    Do not do so as an academic critic, nor as a person drunk on art, nor as a barbarian in the literary market place. Do so as a sensitive person who has a few practical hunches about how stories can succeed or fail. Praise or damn as you please, but do so rather flatly, pragmatically, with cunning attention to annoying or gratifying details. Be yourself. Be unique. Be a good editor. The Universe needs more good editors, God knows.

    Since there are eighty of you, and since I do not wish to go blind or kill somebody, about twenty pages from each of you should do neatly. Do not bubble. Do not spin your wheels. Use words I know.

    POLONIUS

    Skip 31 years. Vonnegut writes to a friend, “When I teach creative writing, I make Vincent Van Gogh the class hero, since he responded to life rather than to the marketplace, and the class motto is: ‘Whatever works works.’ ”

    In 2000, Vonnegut accepted a teaching gig at Smith: “I sure need something to do,” he wrote Norman Mailer. A world-famous writer who could have done whatever he wanted whenever he wanted, he nonetheless carefully timed his life around the school calendar. Yet he was also already admitting that his own fiction wasn’t going so well. “My writing grows clumsier with each passing day,” he admits to Mailer.

    The last letter collected in this volume was written in 2007, the year Vonnegut died, to Alice Fulton, a poet and Cornell faculty member who had requested Vonnegut come lecture. (Vonnegut had attended Cornell.) “Alas . . . at 84, I resemble nothing so much as an iguana, hate travel, and have nothing to say.” He muses over the fact that when he was at Cornell, he majored in chemistry “at the insistence of my father: ‘Learn a trade!’ ”

    And then the poignant end to this letter to Ms. Fulton: “But God bless you for being a teacher.”

    There is a fullness one feels upon finishing this important volume. An understanding of Vonnegut’s diffidence. A marveling at his brilliance and the generousness of his spirit despite, despite, despite . . .

    Laura Wells is a writer and editor who lives in Sag Harbor.

    Kurt Vonnegut lived in Sagaponack for many years.

“Steinbeck in Vietnam”

Edited by Thomas E. Barden

University of Virginia Press, $29.95

   When I lived in Hong Kong, in the 1960s, I’d met or heard about most of the war reporters who lived there or were passing through. How could I have missed John Steinbeck, one of my favorite writers of all time? As soon as I checked the dates of his dispatches, I realized why. A few months before Steinbeck’s arrival in December 1966, my first husband, Sam Castan, a correspondent for Look magazine, had been killed in Vietnam and I had returned to New York. It would take me far more than a few months to return to the life of the world, let alone the news of it.

   Recently, I’ve spoken to people, in less extreme circumstances back then, who were also surprised to learn that Steinbeck had reported from Vietnam. Two reasons may account for this. First, his columns were published in Newsday; even with its wide circulation and its syndications, Newsday was not a primary source of international news. Second, the Steinbeck family had turned down earlier attempts to collect his Vietnam columns in a book. Apparently, they were reluctant to rebroadcast, in a more permanent format, his ultimately unpopular, hawkish position on the war.

   Steinbeck a hawk! Impossible to imagine when you think of Steinbeck the novelist. I can still feel the cloth cover of “The Grapes of Wrath,” as if my palm were skimming across it, reverentially, right now, instead of half a century ago. How could this man, who chronicled the plight of Dust Bowl farmers and described the natural and human forces sustaining their misery, support a war that displaced, tormented, and maimed Vietnamese peasants? A war that would eventually kill at least two million Vietnamese men, women, and children and 58,000 Americans?

   Thomas E. Barden, editor of “Steinbeck in Vietnam” and professor of English at the University of Toledo, answers many questions in the scholarly background he provides. Why, for example, did Steinbeck, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1962, become a war correspondent in 1966? After all, he was 64 years old. In Vietnam, journalists in their 30s were called “old man” by younger colleagues. It turns out that Steinbeck had been a correspondent for The New York Herald Tribune during World War II, a job he sought because he was not allowed to serve in the U.S. Army.

    Now that’s a story in itself. In the 1940s, Steinbeck was regarded as an “extremist subversive” by U.S. conservatives. The F.B.I. kept a dossier on him, noting his association with “elements” of the Communist Party and the appearance of his writings in Communist publications.

    The U.S. Army intelligence service wrote, “In view of substantial doubt as to subject’s loyalty and discretion, it is recommended that subject not be considered favorably for a commission in the Army of the United States.”

    Here’s the amazing part. While the Army reached this conclusion, its commander in chief, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had a personal relationship with Steinbeck and sought his advice. Among the topics Roosevelt discussed with Steinbeck was the very war the writer was not considered trustworthy enough to engage in as a U.S. soldier. Meanwhile, the “subject,” wanting to see the action for himself, managed to get an overseas assignment from The Trib.

    In an odd parallel, more than 20 years later, President Lyndon B. Johnson wanted John Steinbeck’s opinion about the war in Vietnam. He asked his close friend — the Nobel laureate whom most Americans saw as morally trustworthy — to go to Vietnam as a correspondent. He thought Steinbeck’s words would promote his cause: to increase America’s involvement in a war he believed could be won.

    Journalists who dared to go into harm’s way had begun to provide images that ignited antiwar sentiment in the United States. Takeovers and teach-ins on college campuses, draft-card burnings, and protest marches were making news. These forms of political expression emerged quickly and organically from struggles that yielded the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

    War protesters made Steinbeck furious. He thought they should go to Vietnam and care for the wounded instead of burning their draft cards. This view may have been strengthened by the fact that his son John Steinbeck IV had just been sent to Vietnam as a soldier. His other son, Thom, also in the Army, was expected to be deployed to the war zone. Steinbeck wanted to go to Vietnam to see for himself what his boys would be facing and, most of all, he wanted to see them.

    For all his liberal leanings, we are told, Steinbeck was against any system that promoted the collective over the individual. He thought the individual was both source and guardian of freedom of thought. Like Johnson, Steinbeck saw the war as a necessary means to halt the spread of Communism, but he was not comfortable going to war as a government spokesman. So, he approached Newsday’s publisher, Harry F. Guggenheim, for whom he had written before. The author was given complete freedom to write whatever he chose.

    This reader instantly felt the sensation of being told the absolute truth, as Steinbeck saw it, or, perhaps, as he was assigned to tell it in what he perceived to be service to his country and to democracy. I confess it’s the first time in more than 45 years that I was able to experience pro-war words about Vietnam and not run screaming from the room — a testament to Steinbeck’s ability to convince by pure passion and by vivid description.

    He very quickly perceived and conveyed how the Mekong Delta was key to feeding the entire region beyond Vietnam. He grasped the local politics engendered by a culture of rice farmers. He met American soldiers along the way and portrayed them to be as vital and heroic as his humble fictional characters. Despite the inexcusable My Lai Massacre of 1968 and other heinous atrocities that became known after Steinbeck’s death, most U.S. soldiers certainly were valiant. Steinbeck’s appreciation, had it been available to them, might have offered comfort when they returned to a scornful nation.

    Praise of Steinbeck’s literary skills shouldn’t obscure the eerie confrontation with his naivete and/or his propaganda. He says that reporters had freedom to go anywhere they wished. Though there is some truth to this, most reporters partook of the military press briefings at the Rex Hotel in the city once called Saigon. Those notorious briefings came to be known as the Five o’clock Follies because of their increasingly unrecognizable relationship to what the more intrepid reporters learned in the field. And, of course, in Steinbeck’s “going anywhere he wanted to go,” he was escorted by military higher-ups. Did he really think the top brass who took him to see his son in combat, took him to what they didn’t want him to see as well as what they did?

    Steinbeck himself says it best: “. . . armies haven’t changed in one respect since Roman times. They have never liked or trusted news. Given their druthers, army commands would announce victories and deny defeats and nothing more.”

    Professor Barden writes that the dispatches are important and worth reading because they are the last work of a major writer. I would agree, even though they uphold fictions that did irreparable harm.

    Fran Castan, who lives in Springs, is writing a memoir. She is author of “The Widow’s Quilt,” a book of poems, and “Venice: City That Paints Itself,” a collection of her poems and paintings by Lewis Zacks, her husband.

    John Steinbeck lived in Sag Harbor for many years.

In the Shadow of a Hospital

    You don’t necessarily need a new medical center dropped on Stony Brook Southampton for there to be signs of life on campus. Consider Chancellors Hall, where upstairs every Wednesday at 7 p.m., writers, readers, master’s degree students, and the curious convene to listen — this week, to Stephen Dau, who will read from a debut novel, “The Book of Jonas,” that’s anything but superficial, concerning, as it topically does, a Muslim family in an unnamed country who are wiped off the face of the earth by a heedless American military operation. Except for a boy, that is, brought to America to try to make his way in a strange and hostile land.

    The series is Writers Speak, and its fall iteration will next offer up James Gleick, a New York Times reporter, interviewed by Daniel Menaker, formerly an editor at The New Yorker, on Oct. 17, Anna North, a novelist, on Oct. 24, Marilyn Nelson, a poet, on Nov. 7, Bret Anthony Johnston, a writer and director of creative writing at Harvard, on Nov. 14, and Susan Isaacs, the author of “As Husbands Go,” with her latest on Nov. 28. On Dec. 5, students in the college’s M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature will read from their work.

Poets and Pilsners

    Who says there’s no fun to be had here after the leaves start to turn? The Poets’ Prix Fixe series returns to Phao restaurant in Sag Harbor on Sunday, once again offering a free glass of wine or beer to those brave enough to rise up before a microphone to share their work.

    “Answer me I shout, lunging / to shove the blade / into his throat.” That’s the, er, arresting first line of a poem from “Omega’s Garden,” the new collection by one of the evening’s headliners, Rosalind Brenner. The other is Monica Enders, who has twice won the East Hampton Library’s poetry prize.

    The readings start at 5:30 p.m. To sign up, the organizer, Teri Kennedy of Springs, can be e-mailed at [email protected].

“Gil Hodges”

Tom Clavin and Danny Peary

New American Library, $26.95

    You know the joke. A Brooklynite has a gun with two bullets in it in a room with Hitler, Stalin, and Walter O’Malley, the man who moved the Dodgers west. So what happens? O’Malley gets plugged twice.

    But who knew Robert Moses deserved to be staring down the barrel? It’s one of a number of revelations the casual fan will find in a new biography, “Gil Hodges: The Brooklyn Bums, the Miracle Mets, and the Extraordinary Life of a Baseball Legend,” by Tom Clavin and Danny Peary. Moses, the colossus of urban planning, apparently stood in the way of O’Malley’s dream of a new Brooklyn stadium with a retractable roof and underground parking.

    Sports are all about debate and strong opinions, and this history is no exception. On the one hand you have Robert A. Caro, who grew up a city kid and baseball fan and went on to write the definitive biography of Moses, “The Power Broker,” convinced that he is to blame. On the other is the Pulitzer Prize-winning sportswriter Dave Anderson, who got his start at The Brooklyn Daily Eagle and who believed the two outsized personalities disliked each other intensely and were at cross purposes, but that O’Malley never intended to build the stadium on the site of the old Fort Greene Meat Market. The plan was a ruse, in essence. There was simply too much money to be made in Los Angeles.

    Even if it’s a familiar story, the account of the team’s departure is still gripping, and touches on more than a borough’s broken heart. The Dodgers arrived in L.A. and were immediately adrift. It’s as if the modern condition had descended. Clavin and Peary describe a soullessness, a depletion of team unity — the players didn’t even get together for cards because the driving distances were too great.

    Maybe it was time. Damningly, the Dodgers drew only 6,702 fans to their final game at Ebbets Field in 1957, before the move was officially announced. The Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers? It was a team of the golden era of the 1940s and ’50s, and better not to stick around for the shameful destruction of the trolley car system. Hell, you might as well throw in changing demographics and white flight. And when the heavy machinery came for Ebbets, the wrecking ball was painted to look like a baseball.

    Hodges, interestingly, kept his wife and kids in the family’s Brooklyn home and lived out of a hotel in L.A. during the playing months. Admirable. Loyal. Principled. Many other such adjectives, from the authors and from innumerable testimonials, adhere to the personally conservative son of an Indiana miner in this thoroughgoing, meticulously researched biography. Hodges was strait-laced, undemonstrative, a quiet authoritarian, a church-going Catholic. One sportswriter, Russ White, speaking of Hodges when he was the manager of the Washington Senators, called him “the worst interview . . . dull, reserved. . . .”

    All of which makes for a bit of a challenge for the biographers, and it’s met with the game of baseball — scores, standings, rivalries, blow-by-blow action from decades ago. That’s good for the diehard, hard on others, and ultimately laid out in service to a greater cause, the promotion of Hodges for inclusion in the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

    The case is more than solid. Hodges, a flat-out star of his day, won numerous Gold Glove awards at first base, set a National League record for home runs by a right-handed batter (370), led the Dodgers to the franchise’s first World Series championship in 1955, among other series appearances; managed the underdog ’69 Mets to a shocking title in one of the game’s best season-long demonstrations of decision-making, guidance, and intuition, and not only defended but befriended Jackie Robinson in 1947, the year he broke the color barrier, one of many displays of superior character. (In other ways he was a man of his time; he chain-smoked, for instance, which contributed to his death by heart attack or perhaps embolism before he turned 48.)

    And talk about opinion and debate, the induction process is completely arbitrary — votes are cast by baseball writers who at this point never saw Hodges play. Lesser players have gotten in. The biggest obstacle may be his Dodgers teammates from back in the heyday. From Duke Snider to Pee Wee Reese to Roy Campanella to Robinson, the team was loaded. All four of those players are in the Hall of Fame, and the writers may feel that that’s enough, the team’s done.

    If so, if it stays “a Brooklyn thing,” hey, what a heyday it was. Hodges was beloved in his adopted home borough. His weakness at the plate was the curveball, particularly on the outside of the plate, which could lead to horrendous slumps. But never boos. On the contrary, well-wishing cards and letters would fill his mailbox, and a respectful pulling for him would build in intensity to recited prayers across the pews of Brooklyn.

    Gil Hodges, too good to be true? No, just true.

    Tom Clavin lives in Sag Harbor, and Danny Peary lives in Manhattan and Sag Harbor. They are the authors of “Roger Maris: Baseball’s Reluctant Hero.”

 “Data Error”

Dan Giancola

Street Press, $15

In terms of literature, art, and society, we have left the postmodern building. What comes next is already well under construction, if not completely built. The new era has been called many things, post-humanism being one of the more provocative. Yet an even better term serves for context while reading Dan Giancola’s new collection of poetry, “Data Error,” and that is late elegiac.

    Mr. Giancola, whose biography on the back of the book states, “Blah, blah, blah about the author” under a boxy cartoon figure that looks suspiciously like an etching on a men’s room wall, is highly effective at delivering his elegies without letting too much seriousness get in the way. Yet “Data Error” is an unflinching record of a disturbance that gradually turns into a bacchanalia of gleeful language, but only after careful, measured deliberation.

    The collection opens with a tribute to the late Robert Long, a beloved local poet and longtime East Hampton Star writer and editor. The lines are crisp and clear:

    A steel wool sky scours

    the roof, rain on the skylight

    keys a familiar but forgotten tune.

    The poem’s sentiment is heartfelt, precise, and foreshadows much of what is to come in “Data Error.” Mr. Giancola is long on thought yet delightfully succinct in metrical performance. He knows and demonstrates well the economy of words, deftly accomplishing more with less. “For Robert Long” ends with a poignant distillation:

    Leaves drain into the street.

    Another friend is gone.

    I’ll have to live longer, & harder.

    Succeeding poems follow up on the initial tenor of loss, as if the poet wished to get suffering out of the way in order to proceed to lighter, yet equally weighed, subjects. The theme of separation, mostly bitter, rages in poems like “Good Luck,” “Lovely Failure,” “Marriage,” and “Someone.” They are some the most interesting poems in the collection, perhaps for their raw emotion and futile attempt to wrestle with the fallout of painful goodbyes. Those poems are also when “Data Error” strains to make sense of the world, and we acutely feel what it is like when love and happiness fail.

    I despised clutter, you hated dirt.

    Now when we kiss, we bleed.

    Those above lines from “Something Human” do not show how to span the divide between souls with disparate aims, but they do function as a definitive release from an untenable situation. The poet strikes out to find himself again. He no longer grasps at meaning that is not there. Instead, he seizes the will to go on, one day growing courageous enough to ask:

    Full moon in the creel

    of dogwood trees. Will

    anyone love me again?

    There are four poems in “Data Error” by the title “To Do List,” followed by a numeral. They become a rebellious refrain in which Mr. Giancola turns the tragic back on itself, into near banality. Rampant wordplay characterizes the “To Do List” poems, to the detriment of narrative continuity, yet they exhibit a sheer playfulness that quickly asserts a freedom from melodrama. This style of poetics, often referred to as language poetry, shows a lyrical virtuosity that tends toward the nonsensical:

    . . . Let’s this & that. Let’s pay cash. Let’s

    purge the puritanical, challenge evangelical

    piety. Let’s meander, sample local potables.

    It is an unavoidable feature in Mr. Giancola’s work that does come with a payoff. There is a refreshing sarcasm in such poems as “Slogos” (a portmanteau of slogan and logos), “Puppet Show,” and “Poem Found in Dylan Titles,” where familiar language comes alive like lyrics to a favorite song, savored in a new way. The vocabulary is fresh, energetic, and toys with a new idiom while acknowledging the timeless. From the poem “Riskier”:

    We eat paninis

    quaff acai juice, drive diesels

    but nothing, really, has changed.

    Acknowledge the end and move on.

    After struggling through emotional dissonance to re-establish his voice, then warming up to all the possibilities in words, the poet discovers a state of peace in a series of poems at home in America. And with the initial dissonance patched, and rupture healing, you can taste the ripe beauty of acceptance. Poems like “Tomatoes,” “Sandias Day Hike,” and the graceful “Trouble With Chopsticks” cohere in a solid lucidity. The poet senses a quiet, natural victory outside the incessant clashing of society. From “Swoon”:

When blue flames consume

your reference frame, swoon

into that wound. Slip that self

off like a shoe. Nothing new

without subtraction. Feel that?

Ethereal arms torque you into change.

What’s born anew is often borne in pain.

    The book acknowledges a central frustration in life: how to communicate with each other, and our selves, during unusual periods in time, when our identities as human beings must change. Mr. Giancola turns nonchalant phrases into formal revelations, letting his poetic mastery mask a darkness that is nearly impossible to face alone. “Data Error” will bring a smile to even the most cynical, wintry heart.

You’ll get blue when to the usual you hew.

Fashion a new fashion.

Don’t do what comes easily for you.

(From “Warm Bowl”)

    Lucas Hunt’s second collection of poems, “Light on the Concrete,” came out last year. He lives in Springs, where he works at a literary agency.

    Dan Giancola teaches English at Suffolk Community College in Riverhead. He lives in Mastic.

Caro’s a Finalist

    Robert A. Caro, whose house in East Hampton has an accompanying uninsulated writing shed that’s known herculean bouts of key-pounding, has been named one of five finalists for a National Book Award in nonfiction. The title, need it be said, is “The Passage of Power,” the latest installment in what might be the biography of the age, “The Years of Lyndon Johnson,” published by Alfred A. Knopf. The winners will be announced on Nov. 14 at Cipriani Wall Street in Manhattan.

Talkin’ “Cloud Atlas”

    Sci-fi fans, this one’s big. The Wachowskis of “The Matrix” fame will roll out their $100 million adaptation of David Mitchell’s “Cloud Atlas” on Friday, Oct. 26. In the meantime, why not start reading the genre-eclipsing book itself? Which could then be followed by a freewheeling discussion of same at the next meeting of the East Hampton Library’s science fiction book club on Oct. 31 at 6 p.m. The club’s nothing if not welcoming: Those who do nothing more than watch the movie have been invited. Heck, just stop in cold to see if you’d like to proceed with either, paper or screen, and help yourself to some refreshments.

    The book, it should be noted, was short-listed for the 2004 Booker Prize. It spans the South Pacific of the 19th century and a dystopian future.

Obser Motors On

    Eileen Obser, that friendly neighborhood writing coach, is back at it. To wit: a writing workshop focusing on personal essays and memoir. This one starts on Tuesday at 5 p.m. at the Hampton Library in Bridgehampton, lasts about two hours, and meets for four weekly sessions for a cost of $65. Ms. Obser will help participants bear down on what exactly about themselves they want to share with readers and why, as well as, in her words, “how the fine line between memory and invention is meshed.” Writers of all abilities can sign up.

One Eye on the Voting Booth

    Maryann Calendrille and Kathryn Szoka, the proprietors of that funkiest of South Fork institutions, Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor, have been tapped for a different kind of speaking engagement — bookish yet political, money-minded yet charitable. On Monday, as Election Day looms, they’ll give a talk titled “East End Writers: Past and Present” at a fund-raising lunch for the League of Women Voters of the Hamptons. It starts at 12:30 p.m. at Muse in the Harbor on Main Street in Sag Harbor.

    Of pertinence: The two came out with “Sag Harbor Is: A Literary Celebration” in 2006, and their talk will make particular note of writers who lived in the village. The book will be available for purchase.

    The cost at the door is $55. The league is a nonpartisan, nonprofit group that promotes participation in government by an informed citizenry. It operates from Westhampton to Montauk.

Mulvihill Novel Optioned

    Speaking of Sag Harbor, word has come that the rights to “Serengeti,” a novel by the late William Mulvihill of that village, have been acquired by two movie industry players in California, Alan Abrams of Santa Monica and Glenn Zoller of Los Angeles. The book, originally published by New American Library in 1960 with the title “The Mantrackers,” is set in East Africa before World War I and involves a native tracker and an elephant hunter out to stop a one-man slaughter of wildlife.

    A translation onto celluloid wouldn’t be a first for Mulvihill. His novel “The Sands of Kalahari” became a Paramount movie in 1965. He was a World War II veteran, early environmentalist, and student of African history. Locally, his book “South Fork Place Names,” from the 1990s, was revised and reissued a couple of years ago.

 “Back to Blood”

Tom Wolfe

Little, Brown, $30

   You know fiction is in trouble when the last novel that had any traction with the American public was a soft-porn novel for Mom written in young-adult-level prose. Stories just don’t seem to capture our attention anymore. The reasons have been rigorously speculated over: social media, video technology, rising illiteracy, increased work hours, sheer laziness, etc. Then there is the fascination of current events, which increasingly seem to outstrip even the best novelist’s imagination. When recently asked why he didn’t try his hand at a novel, Michael Lewis, author of “Moneyball,” basically said the same thing — that the fiction writers he knew lived in a state of permanent anxiety, always looking over their shoulders at the news in fear that “reality” will suddenly trump their current labors.

    Enter into this void Tom Wolfe. Back in the late 1980s, Mr. Wolfe wrote a famous manifesto that echoed Mr. Lewis’s sentiments and set out to correct the problem: Novelists, Mr. Wolfe asserted, had turned too much into the self, ignoring the great world around them. He urged them to get off their duffs and go back to the more reportage-style social novels of the 19th century. Mr. Wolfe had two smashing successes with this formula: “The Bonfire of the Vanities” and “A Man in Full”; then a more mixed result: “I Am Charlotte Simmons.”

    He returns now with “Back to Blood,” set in contemporary Miami.

    Readers will be happy to hear that at 81 Mr. Wolfe has lost none of his propulsive storytelling gifts. The pages fly by quite pleasantly; the novel seems much shorter than its 704 pages. The author also has two extremely likable characters at its center: Nestor Camacho, a Cuban-American police officer who stumbles into a series of racial conflicts, and his girlfriend, Magdalena, a nurse who leaves him to get a foothold in the social scene of South Beach. Unlike most characters in Mr. Wolfe’s novels, Nestor and Magdalena are treated with both sympathy and complexity (the scenes concerning their extended families, for example, are especially good), and their likability anchors a sometimes unwieldy book.

    The plot begins with Nestor bringing down a Cuban refugee from a schooner’s sail mast in Biscayne Bay, a great set piece that gives the author a chance to begin his novel with a wide-lens view of South Beach, literally surveying greater Miami from the top of a mast eight stories high. The other plot threads, however — which include police brutality and art forgery, among others — are less convincing, and the second half of “Back to Blood” can sometimes feel a little perfunctory, as if Mr. Wolfe was determined to write a Big Novel, no matter that a smaller one, say a measly 500-pager, might have been more effective.

    More troubling, though, is the increased presence of Mr. Wolfe’s writing tics, namely his insistence on ejaculatory bursts of dialogue and prose that repeat themselves over and over, to the point of irritation. Here, for example, is a description of techno music in a Miami strip club:

    “The moment the leader and his orangeade-faced follower entered, BEAT-unngh thung BEAT-unngh thung BEAT-unngh thung BEAT-unngh thung began BEATING and thunging into their central nervous systems. It wasn’t a fast beat BEAT-unngh thung and not terribly loud, but it was relentless. It never changed and never stopped going BEAT-unngh thung BEAT-unngh thung. . . .”

    Get it? Techno is crass and repetitive. If you missed it, Mr. Wolfe scatters his next 10 pages with countless more BEAT-unngh thungs, until you’re thoroughly BEAT-unngh thunged yourself and ready to cry dios mio. Another character’s exclamations of “AhhggggHAHAHHHock hock hock hock” also go on interminably, and are not nearly as funny as Mr. Wolfe intends. (Speaking of overkill, the sign outside the strip club is described by the author as “Huge huge huge brilliant brilliant brilliant lurid lurid lurid.”) In fact, there is barely a page in “Back to Blood” that doesn’t feature one sort of onomatopoeic riff or another, and though this may be a fossil from Mr. Wolfe’s gonzo journalism days, it doesn’t make them any less tiresome.

    In addition, Mr. Wolfe has not entirely solved his problem with creating inner lives for his characters. Although Nestor and Magdelena are well drawn, most of the other characters in “Back to Blood” are creatures of single motivation. There is the billionaire who is greedy. The police chief who is ambitious. The morally bankrupt artist, the politically expedient mayor, etc. This sort of stereotyping can make for some pretty tepid satire. Suffice it to say that while “Back to Blood” skewers dozens of characters, very little blood is actually drawn (though perhaps with one exception: the sex-addict psychiatrist Dr. Norman Lewis, who is genuinely repulsive). And as for revelations about the human condition, readers will have to settle for insights like this: “As has been true throughout recorded history, rare is the strong man strong enough to shrug off a woman’s tears.”

    But in the end, and oftentimes in spite of itself, “Back to Blood” succeeds, mostly because of Mr. Wolfe’s great use of set pieces. As I’ve said, the book’s overstuffed plot will have most readers not caring much about what happens after about page 500, but chances are they will keep reading, primarily because of Mr. Wolfe’s infectious sense of staging. Even a vignette as innocuous as a Miami street scene turns Cinemascope in Mr. Wolfe’s lens:

    “. . . every couple of blocks, if you squinted at a certain angle between the gleaming pinkish butter-colored condominium towers that wall off the shining sea from clueless gawkers who come to Miami Beach thinking they can just drive down to the shore and see the beaches and the indolent recliner & umbrella people and the lapping waves and the ocean sparkling and stretching to the horizon in a perfect 180-degree arc . . . if you squint just right, every couple of blocks you can get a skinny, thin-as-a-ballpoint-refill, vertical glimpse of the ocean — blip — and it’s gone . . . on every page . . . glimpse — blip — and it’s gone. . . .”

    It is both heartening and a little awe-inspiring to see how curious and intoxicated Tom Wolfe still is about the U.S.A., and “Back to Blood” is chock-full of wide-angled Americana. Be it a Miami art gala, a spring break-like bacchanal, a South Beach restaurant-of-the-moment, a Cuban block party, or even, yes, a strip club, Mr. Wolfe’s perspective is never less than 35-millimeter, and rare indeed is the scene that does not draw you in completely. You keep reading if only to see where the breadth of the author’s fascinations will take him next.

    I don’t think it is unfair to say that there are dozens of better fiction writers in the country than Tom Wolfe, perhaps hundreds. Writers with more craft, more insight, more heart, more depth, more poetry. But then no writer alive takes such big bites out of the American hurly-burly as Tom Wolfe, and that is why a hundred years from now, when 99 percent of the fiction of this era is forgotten, his novels will still be read. In fictional terms, he is the great contemporary American Chronicler.

    His manifesto has been made manifest; he got off his duff and into the world, and he told us who we are. Posterity will reward him for it.

    Kurt Wenzel is the author of the novels “Lit Life,” “Gotham Tragic,” and “Exposure.” He lives in Springs.

    Tom Wolfe has a house in South­ampton.