THOMAS LARSON

(Brick 38 1989)

Into the Oak Brush

What is certain for Ursula K. Le Guin is that non-fictional writing presents her with a too terrible certainty. How can anything be understood fully, she argues, through the father’s voice (nonfiction—the critical, authoritarian tongue); only the mother’s voice (fiction—the relational, engaged tongue) can speak truly of experience. A writer like Le Guin—most of whose thirty books are fiction—expresses ideas and experiences with her natural voice, with the yielding uncertainty of fiction or poetry, the language she calls “a carrier bag . . . for people who don’t understand.” Cut off and adrift from fiction in these essays, she aches for the creative and despairs over the analytic. A recurring theme is her reluctance to write them at all.

(San Diego Tribune November 4, 1988)

A Soviet Poet's Prison Memoir

When we speak of human rights records, we talk of one country's violations and another's gross violations.

Remembering recent atrocities, we know too well that the denial of rights in Cambodia and the denial of rights in the Philippines are not the same; we distinguish wisely between murder and torture on one hand and economic neglect on the other. But how are we to judge the grossly hypocritical violators, those who insure the right of food, job, housing and medicine to all, but disallow rights to political dissenters? A clue emerges in "Grey Is the Color of Hope," a prison memoir written by a young Soviet poet, Irina Ratushinskaya, that exposes the gross hypocrisy of her country's human rights policies.

(San Diego Tribune September 9, 1988)

Tolstoy: The Man and the Legend

Martine de Courcel, a French psychologist and biographer known previously for writing a life of Andre Malraux, has produced an epic study of the Russian writer and religious thinker Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy. Her production is masterly in its explication and fascinating in its revelations.

Published in France in 1980, the work appears now in a flawless translation by Peter Levi. This book is a journey through Tolstoy's intellectual and spiritual development.

It is also an exhaustive trip through 19th century Czarist Russia, Tolstoy's marriage of 48 years to the indomitable Sofia (whom he called Sonya), the history of his family estate and the writing of the novels "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina," not to mention the revolt of the peasants, the rise of Lenin and the impact of Tolstoyism. De Courcel's biography, however, is not an attempt to write history via one exemplary life.

(San Diego Tribune August 26, 1988)

Pounding Away at Racism

White writers write. Black writers write. But black writers fight. The difference?

The opponent: racism.

Or, to put it his way: "Ethnic life in the United States has become a sort of contest like baseball in which the blacks are always the Chicago Cubs." Watch out—here comes Ishmael Reed, boxing his way through the color consciousness of white America with Writin' Is Fightin'.

(Richard Wright: Myths & Realities edited by C. James Trotman. Garland Publishing, 1988)

"The Political Vision of Afro-American Culture: Richard Wright's 'Bright and Morning Star'"

Richard Wright wrote Uncle Tom's Children, a collection of essays, stories, and novellas, in the late 1930s when he was an active member of the Communist Party of the United States.

The rest of this essay can be read as a PDF here.

(Written January 1988)

Prejudice--ethnic, racial, cultural--exists in each of us; we parrot prejudices early on from parents' and neighbors' examples. Later in life, some of us cultivate it, and a few try to disregard or even unlearn it. For some adolescents, though, learning about and mimicking prejudice is most painful: Inculcated by the family they love, the young begin to sense their elders are unacceptably flawed by bigotry.

Carol Ascher's novel The Flood explores a child's initiation into the world of prejudice. Set in Topeka, Kansas during the flood-scarred summer of 1953, 9-year-old Eva Hoffman, daughter of a first-generation family of Jewish immigrants, learns about intolerance and fear, not only from the havoc caused by the rising waters but also from the political malaise of the times: Fears of communism and racial integration have covered the town's white power structure with dread.

The rest of the review is available here (opens a PDF).

(Written January 1988)

An Etherized Fiction for the 1980s

I will hazard a guess outright: Sue Miller’s Inventing the Abbotts should receive oodles of good press. Critics will be enthralled by these stories, recalling the praise they ladled on Miller’s novel, The Good Mother, a few years back, and here again they will be taken by the skillful weave of psychoanalysis, sex, and middle-class angst, not to mention the pithy dialogue and narrative clarity of the pieces.

Reviewers, I imagine, will applaud how authentic Miller portrays the world of relationships between men and women in the 1980s. Many will re-live turbulent scenes from our lives with divorced parents, the children we over-protected during our own break-ups, or the nights wasted, prowling bars blindly for love. Men will wince, women will nod, young readers (if any) may flip to the “good parts.” (There are few of those.)