Lehman Weichselbaum / Review: PAST DIFFERENCES
ABRAHAM: A Novel by Sparrow: Autonomedia: 181 pps.
TRUMP VERSE by Sparrow: Alte Books 29 pps. $10.
AMONG THE BOAT PEOPLE: A Memoir of Vietnam by Nhi Manh Chung: Autonomedia 127 pps.
As Tolstoy knew well, when history gets personal, it becomes literature.
The narrator in Sparrow's novel "Abraham" is Robert Klassen, a Hudson Valley chiropractor (who we never see at work), whose altogether satisfying life is upholstered in wisdom common and uncommon. The spine of the brief tale is a series of countryside walks taken by the doctor with Grange, his four-year-old biracial son. They play daffy impromptu games and observe the quirks of the local flora and fauna ("A brisk wind rushes through the valley casting leaves off trees, like a madman gleefully pulling out the hair of passing children."). Dad is frequently struck by the lad's precocious insights. He also recollects his wife Winnie's sage commentary on salient everyday matters and ruminates on the life, works and eloquence of the Great Emancipator.
Since Basho and Henny Youngman, no one has done more comically with one or three lines than Sparrow, in his customary poet's robes. Here, the gift is an easy enough transfer from poetry to prose. Inside the novel's short sections strung together with the more than the bare requisite cohesion, the author delivers his characteristic minimalist's smart-cloaked-in-funny.
At the same time, in the narrator's "year of living Abrahamically," Lincoln has become the dead-serious lodestar of the teller's mental universe, as we know he has for numerous real-life Americans over the many decades. Behind the author's prize, unceasing flashes of oddball humor is the furrowed brow whose passion for principled rightness shows on every page. "I can find no other political figure in history with his deep, motherly lovingkindness," attests the narrator about his hero. There's no Gore Vidal-ish imaginative riffing on any covert histories behind the "outsider" president's eternally looming mystique. Instead, our storyteller simply harks back to books he has read across the actual Lincoln canon and freely muses on their content. He shares thoughts on Mary Todd Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth. It may feel like a boxed-in premise, but the author makes it work. He creates a generous capsule of one contemporary man's world as he lives it and aspires to live it. If, say, Edmund Wilson can make writing about literature its own kind of literature, why not this mighty Sparrow? "Lincoln was a cautious, moderate politician who was cast by Fate in the role of a revolutionary," sighs Robert Klasson. "I wish Fate would use me for a high purpose, but so far, She is unwilling."
Sparrow's muse glides nimbly from prose back to her charge's trademark brand of single-breath poetry, from the rosy distance of two centuries to the hot and desperate lived history of today. "Trump Verse," a glossy chapbook published as a chronological companion to "Abraham," presents a skein of fleet, silent screams that cloak their fear and loathing in a rolling, steely-eyed mirth, as in "Political Analysis":
One-third of the USA is ready for Hitler.
One-third of the USA hates Hitler.
One-third is undecided.
Sparrow carries words as close to sticks and stones as physical laws allow ("'They go/low, we/go high'/didn't/work so/great./Now I/go low," from "New Strategy."). He calls Trump's tweets "outrageous cruel, sullen, nocturnal poems." He invents fake panegyrics to the not-quite-gone Dearest One ("Stormy Daniels should have paid You!"). Sometimes he's simply too funny to make you feel the pain. Tariff Anxiety
I hope Trump
doesn't impose
a tariff on poems;
I can barely afford
Chinese poetry now!
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