The Theban Mysteries by Amanda Cross

Although Kate Fansler is on sabbatical in this book, she finds herself teaching at her old high school, one of New York's most exclusive schools for girls, when the leader of the senior seminar on Antigone finds herself on bedrest (unrelated to the mystery!). Kate is mystified by youth culture and finds a number of young people struggling with the Vietnam War and the draft. The mystery develops slowly (the body doesn't even appear till the second half of the book), and Fansler's much more adept at spotting the questions of group dynamics (and an elementary form of consciousness-raising) than I was.  Like the other books I've read in this series, the mystery has a certain old-fashioned feel to it, but I enjoyed it.

Moon Palace by Paul Auster

There is something both absurd and beautiful about this book, whose protagonist, Marco Stanley Fogg, after the death of his uncle (his only remaining family) drifts through college and life, eventually wasting away to almost nothing, until he is saved by a girl he's met once and his college roommate, and takes a job that leads him (temporarily) to the family he didn't know he was missing. There's a great deal of playful imagination in the book, and the West looms large--the same sort of West that fills the middle chunk of Willa Cather's The Professor's House. The image of the moon, too, fills the pages of the book. The tone of the book was very inviting; I could barely stand to put it down. I am looking forward to reading more of Auster.

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

While this book seems at first focused on the fate of a briefcase of money that Llewellyn Moss discovers at the scene of a massive heroin deal gone bad, by the end, I came to the consider the really moving story that of Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, who matches himself against Anton Chigurh, in an attempt to save Moss and to redeem himself from the errors he made as a young soldier. I found the book really moving and surprisingly (to me at least) exciting. It did a great job balancing action and moral consequence. McCarthy handles both his characters and the Southwest landscape really well.

Villa Incognito by Tom Robbins

This book is a strange pastiche. In part, it's the magically realist tale of a tanuki (a type of wild dog that looks like a badger) (or the Tanuki) who comes to earth and mates with human women. In part, it's the story of three Vietnam vets who've been MIA and would prefer to stay that way. It was an engaging story, but the parts only seemed to connect in a superficial way. Also, there was a reference to the terrorist attacks of September 11 thrown in at the end in a weird way, which I found rather unsettling. I would probably read other books by this author, but they won't be the next books I seek out.

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

In this book John Irving explores coincidence and events that can motivate religious faith. I found the story really beautiful and moving. I think the narrator's responses to Vietnam and especially to the Iran-Contra crisis fell a little bit flat. I really loved the character of Owen Meany, who kept surprising me, even at the very end.

A Web of Words: The Great Dialogue of Southern Literature by Richard Gray

In A Web of Words: The Great Dialogue of Southern Literature Richard Gray investigates the Bahktinian dialogue present within the tradition of Southern literature. His first chapter traces the voices of disaster through Southern literature, but instead of beginning and ending with the trauma of the Civil War, Gray includes many different types of voices rehearsing defeat including Native Americans and African Americans and ends his chapter with Southern writers dealing with the Vietnam War. Gray’s second chapter looks at the dialogue of agrarianism: the pastoral voices of Jefferson and the Agrarians, the anti-pastoral responses that query the agrarian dream, and finally “a contemporary and radical rewriting of agrarianism that offers one of the few plausible remaining alternatives to global capitalism” (x). Gray concludes his book by looking at the Southern tradition in its larger context: a transnational dialogue that occurs at the borders and that helps to move the south beyond the popularly conceived “bipolar biracial model of the region and so of the regional dialogue” (xi).

I found this book very helpful. Its methodological approach contests Harold Bloom’s theories presented in The Anxiety of Influence by using a Bahktinian model of dialogue in the strain of T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” rather than a Freudian model of influence. This model of dialogue, I think, is a particularly helpful way of dealing with Faulkner in concert with other Southern writers. It also allows critical discussion of the Southern experience to move beyond the trauma of the Civil War (although not beyond trauma entirely) to consider more recent events (like the Vietnam War) and to deconstruct the monolithic Southern past into something more fragmented and fluid.

Gray uses a wide range of examples in his text, never neglecting Faulkner and other famous writers, but including modern authors and concerns as well. He does a better job fitting new voices into the dialogue than he does finding older, ignored voices to include. For example, in the first chapter, Gray acknowledges the dispossession of Native Americans and their experience of defeat long before the Civil War, but the focus of his chapter is incorporating two Vietnam War narratives into the dialogue of loss.

Ultimately, this book does a good job of investigating borders and old formations in order to participate in the documentation of the global south. Gray starts by taking two Southern clichés, the experience of defeat and the agrarian dream, and showing in a detailed history how current authors join an old, tired dialogue and reinvigorate it with contributions valid beyond the borders of the South. These contributions become even more valuable in the third chapter, when Gray demonstrates that not only is the Southern dialogue an integral and organic part of a larger dialogue, but also that the incursion of the larger dialogue in the Southern context helps enable writers to talk back to their predecessors more meaningfully and hopefully than before.