Chuck Resnik, brother of Space Shuttle Challenger astronaut Judith Resnik, left, and NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, right, visit the Space Shuttle Challenger Memorial during a wreath laying ceremony that was part of NASA's Day of Remembrance on the 30th anniversary of the Challenger accident, Thursday, January 28, 2016, at Arlington National Cemetery. Wreaths were laid in memory of those men and women who lost their lives in the quest for space exploration.


Photo Credit: NASA/Aubrey Gemignani

Last Updated: Jan. 29, 2016

Editor: Sarah Loff

...........................................................Novel : Valparaiso, Round the Horn by Madeline FFitch (2)

Strange owl, indeed. Not everyone loves this sort of dialogue, but ffitch’s imaginative scenarios (probably further muscled by her years as a performer with The Missoula Oblongata, the punk theater troupe she co-founded) almost demand it. It is the kind of thing that makes these stories a delight to read aloud.

ffitch’s characters may live on the fringes of contemporary or “plain” society, as Frank puts it in “Fort Clatsop,” but that society still leaves their stamp on them, and they wrestle with what they’ve inherited—especially in what you might call matters of the soul. The Granddad in “Storm Beach” raises Edmond to “make up his own religion, his own method, his own blueprint reason.” Still, he makes that journey down the cliffs to baptize the baby, though no one is there to witness it. The rite itself has meaning for him, even though the traditional theology may not.

In “The Private Fight,” a white man, Maxwell Conley, is on his deathbed and desperate to talk with a black man, Murray Rose, whom he hasn’t seen for years. These two men have an old, brief, intense connection: as teenagers, Murray saved Maxwell’s life—but a short while later, grieving and angry after the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Murray also said to Maxwell: “White boy ain’t got no soul.” Murray was a teenager in a moment of anguish when he spoke those words, but they have haunted the white man ever since. Maxwell was raised Catholic and though he’s mostly lived apart from that faith, the question still plagues him. Now Maxwell is desperate to talk to Murray, craving confirmation that he, Maxwell, does have a soul.

Through Murray’s response, a monologue to the dying man’s niece, ffitch deftly tackles some of the racial baggage inherent in all this—including Maxwell’s belief that somehow, as a black man, Murray should be expected to have more authority on souls: 

I don’t want to hurt your uncle’s feelings now, not when he’s sick and worried, but if he   wants to sit there turning us into symbols, it just won’t work, man, and it’ll only make things worse. You think I know more about souls than you people do? Do you think that’s because I’m black?... I’m no priest.

Even so, the weight of this question on Maxwell’s mind, and the story’s placement as the book’s penultimate one, lends it some import in the book as a whole. Souls are the territory of humans, all humans, ffitch seems to argue, and some ways of human living enlarge our souls, and some ways impoverish them. Finally, as Maxwell dies, “what he wants most is to be unmanaged. He wants to be twelve years old and alone with his dog, coming down Mount Rainier in the night, down past the timberline, where the Douglas firs begin.” There it is again: the draw to wild places. The desires of characters like Maxwell and others in this book may reveal a bit of the author’s belief that these wild places are the territory where the human soul most comes alive.

Or perhaps not. Maybe to live soulfully has less to do with whether we can burn our grandfathers’ bodies on beaches and more to do with a certain honest alertness and compassion-in-action, which is also in abundance in the book. It’s right there in Murray’s monologue—which is spoken in Seattle, in the “modern world”—in the fact that he speaks it to Maxwell’s niece and not the dying man himself, in his desire not to hurt Maxwell unnecessarily, though he cannot answer his question.

Whether your home base is rural, like ffitch’s, or you dwell in the city or in the suburbs, as I do, finding a potent book like this frees up the imagination—resets the moral compass—not through moralizing, but by jarring us. I read this book aloud, story by story, to my husband on our commute, and each time, it jolted me out of routine. It made me feel alive.


Jen Hinst-White recently completed her first novel, Inklings. It centers on a tattoo shop in the rural, working-class Long Island of the early 1980s.

I like stories that leave me feeling I’ve encountered a living creature, or eaten a spicy meal, or sat stunned in a light-drenched temple. When a book feels like that, I want to offer a chili-studded forkful, or make urgent gestures: Feral pigs that way!

In the case of Valparaiso, Round the Horn, the debut short story collection by Madeline ffitch—which does, in fact, include feral pigs, along with myriad other wild creatures—I would hand it to you green and dripping, like a poultice of macerated plants, as an antidote to ennui.

Start with a paragraph from “The Storm Beach”:

Granddad took me in his freckled arms when I was three days old, and he sat me in Grandmother’s largest wooden mixing bowl, and he balanced his way down the black rocks to the Storm Beach. Pissing on myself and howling, I didn’t look at all like the hero he hoped I would become one day, but he baptized me in salt water, and one thing about the modern world is, you’re not allowed to just do whatever you want to do with your dead anymore….

The speaker is Edmond, a young man living in Seattle, but raised on a wild island off the coast of Washington State. The Granddad is the dead man. Edmond has returned to the island upon Granddad’s death because he has promised to “heap up beech bark out on the Storm Beach, stick a sheaf of Winston Churchill’s best speeches in [his] breast pocket, and light the whole thing on fire.” In Seattle, you cannot burn your grandfather on the beach. On this wild and never-named island, you can—or could, if you knew how. First, though, you have to get the body out of the refrigerator where Grandmother has been keeping it and down the cliffs to the beach below.

An oath to complete an unusual task in an inaccessible place: what an auspicious start for a story. “Storm Beach” is bracing and funny and urgent, full of fisticuffs and redolent of the earth from which it springs. Just as the grandfather once carried Edmond down to the beach “pissing and howling” for his baptism, Edmond returns the favor. But after hours of arduous work—hefting the body into and out of a wheelbarrow, dragging it across rocks, fighting the tide, building a funeral pyre, beating the crabs off the dead man, and many more ordeals I will let you enjoy for yourself—Edmond cannot get the body to burn. This is a more interesting problem than any I’ve had all year.

Interesting problems in interesting places would, in fact, be a fitting subtitle of this collection. Many of the stories are set on the coastlines of the Pacific Northwest, and in the book’s most triumphant endings, characters escape to wild places. Sometimes it’s to sea, as in the title story, “Valparaiso, Round the Horn,” which is also the refrain of a sea chantey sung by a cartoonish captain who sweeps the characters off to sea at the end. Sometimes they escape to the woods, where they “sew together buckskin breeches” and “carve [their] dugout canoe for the unfathomable trip.” ffitch herself homesteads in Appalachian Ohio, where she “raises ducks, goats, and her small son, Nector,” and that life makes its way into her stories, which are full of plant names, animal trapping, and women of fairy-tale-giantess proportions who chop wood at age six or emerge from the woods with a “dead goat yoked around her shoulders.” Indeed, many of the stories feel as if the writer hunted them down and returned with them yoked around her shoulders.

Amidst all this vigor, however, we find lulls of quiet depth. In “Fort Clatsop,” the eccentric Frank, a school janitor, and his young daughter, Huck, are struggling “in a world of plain men and women.” Frank often recounts his imaginary travels with Johnny Appleseed, Woody Guthrie, Wyatt Earp, Elvis Presley, and other historic figures. When Frank and Huck’s house is condemned, they secretly move into the basement of the school where he works and she attends sixth grade, killing Huck’s hope she might one day fit in.

This unshakeable feeling of being different shapes the story. To the outside, their “differentness” looks like poverty and oddity. But Huck comes to understand that whatever their current circumstances, there is something desirable in their way of seeing the world, if only they could translate that vision into a sustainable way of life. She tries to explain this to a new friend, who has never heard of any of the famous iconoclasts her father claims as “his crowd,” “that these were our talismans, our measure of the brightness that had occurred, that could occur again.” Translation: Once upon a time, these singular people lived and became radiant in their time. We live in a world that values sameness, but it could happen again.  

ffitch, likewise, tells stories in her own idiosyncratic, resolutely ffitch-like way, and as I hand you this particular poultice against ennui, here are the fine-print warnings—possibly polarizing aspects, elements that readers may find distracting.

First: The endings often swerve suddenly. “Valparaiso, Round the Horn” seems to be a third-person tale—until the final paragraph, when a first-person narrator appears, and we realize the entire story has been a prelude to a proclamation of undying love. In one story, the world abruptly ends in cosmic fireworks; in another, the characters realize they are separated-at-birth twins. Are these off-kilter endings crafted to shift a story’s meaning, like the unexpected twist in a parable, or for the sheer pleasure of the strange? Up for discussion. You may say, as some of us do at the end of Haruki Murakami novels, “no fair”—or you may love the rebellious weirdness and re-read the story, as I did, to see if you can uncover the logic behind the end.

Second: The dialogue in these stories is often Wes-Anderson-weird—the way people might talk if they were simultaneously as honest as children, awkward as adolescents, and sharp as quick-witted adults. In the title and first story in the collection, a lovelorn character named Abie is receiving advice from his boss, Phil, on how to talk to women. Phil says that women might like Abie better

…if he said something like this to them: “There’s a tiny little owl, the strangest, cutest owl. Yes, it has been appointed the cutest owl, and the strangest owl.” If he spoke from the heart. If he asked her questions about herself, questions such as, “Is it cuter, do you think, than those two kittens there, fitted together sleeping like beans?”…

“What if she asks what the tiny owl is called?” Abie asked.

“Tell her it’s called the xenoglaux,” Phil said. “The Strange Owl.”.........................................

Next see Novel : Valparaiso, Round the Horn by Madeline FFitch (2)

"Was Katrina a Monster, Daddy?" A Review of Beyond Katrina by Natasha Tretheway (2)

They brought jobs to one of the most economically depressed areas of the country. Embraced because people “feared an erosion of the coast’s cultural heritage [and] the depletion of wetlands,” they turned quaint towns into neon-lit gambling resorts with their own brand of desperation, such as car-title loan businesses, places that give high-interest loans using car titles as collateral, with “the same cars parked [outside] month after month.” The story of the casino boats isn’t simple: neither is our Katrina story.

About half of Beyond Katrina explores life on the coast BK. Trethewey’s family history is entwined with the broader history of the Mississippi coast. Trethewey’s great uncle, “Son” Dixon, born at the turn of the 20th century when his former Delta sharecropper parents moved to the coast, slowly established himself as a businessman in Gulfport’s black community. Son owned several rental houses and was known as a good landlord among people for whom housing was sometimes a struggle. After World War II, shipbuilding became a major part of the coast’s economy, and Son, using veteran’s benefits, built nightclubs catering to shipbuilders. Parallel to Son’s story, Trethewey traces Gulfport’s rise as a shipbuilding center for the country and the transformation of the Mississippi coastline from marshy wetland to the nation’s longest manmade beach, 26 uninterrupted miles.

In these history lessons, Tretheway zooms in on her family, Son Dixon in particular, while simultaneously giving the larger, wide-angle view. The story-within-a-story frames how she talks about its present, too. The small stories of Katrina’s destruction and aftermath reveal that larger economic interests have used the disaster to push out small businesses. A friend of her late great-uncle, Cicero Tims, owns a snow cone stand in the north Gulfport neighborhood Trethewey’s family has called home for years. Permits to make renovations and repairs on existing structures were difficult enough to come by, but city officials outright refused to give permits for complete rebuilds—and often, rationale was never given. In Tims’s words:

I’ve had to start over several times in my life when everything I had was destroyed. This time, the city won’t let me rebuild my business the way I want to. This old shack that my snowball stand is in—I can’t even tear it down to build a new one. If I tear it down, the city takes the land. I’m only here now because of the grandfather clause. If your business was here before a certain date, you can keep your property. But if you tear it down to do something else, it’s gone.

This hardly sounds like the plucky, well-run, relatively egalitarian story that Mississippi rubs in the face of Louisiana. From Tims’s struggle, Trethewey pulls back the camera to expose disparities in how Federal-rebuilding money was distributed, how restrictions were enforced in some places but ignored in others. “Instead of replacing all of the low-income housing lost in the storm,” Trethewey says, “the state of Mississippi found ways to divert those funds for such things as the refurbishment and expansion of the Port of Gulfport [the Gulf’s major importing gateway]—a project that was in the planning stages long before Katrina hit.”
Trethewey’s brother, Joe, inherited most of the properties owned by Son Dixon. Before the storm, Joe was continuing in his great-uncle’s footsteps as a landlord, and using his skills as a builder to expand into his own small contracting business. Despite his skill and reputation, Joe was unable to find steady work to keep up the tax and mortgage payments on his uninsured properties. He made the “desperate decision” to transport and deliver several ounces of cocaine for an acquaintance. It yielded a quick $4,000, a few more deliveries, and tragically, a felony conviction. Joe’s heartbreaking story takes up a significant, essential amount of the book. Trethewey recounts her correspondence with Joe, giving us his own meditations on life, justice, and punishment. Joe attended their mother’s funeral in an orange jumpsuit and leg shackles, flanked by armed policemen, even while privately viewing his mother’s casket. Barred from any physical or verbal contact, the siblings share only a silent, sustained period of eye contact before Joe is ushered back into the armored van and taken back to prison.

Tretheway makes a convincing case that none of this would have transpired had Katrina not wiped out the coast, had rebuilding funds been fairly handled, had city governments not placed undue burdens on small, mostly minority-owned businesses.

Before Beyond Katrina, Trethewey made her mark on American letters as a poet.  Her debut collection, Domestic Work, was awarded the Cave Canem prize. Native Guard, her third collection, won the Pulitzer in 2007, and she was named U.S. Poet Laureate in 2012. Her quick, dense prose reflects her roots as a poet:  “the landscape is inscribed with the traces of things long gone… Names are talismans of memory too—Katrina, Camille. Perhaps this is why we name our storms… I know that [writing] is a form of rebuilding.” A lovely surprise for me was the inclusion of her own poetry. “Theories of Time and Space,” a poem from Domestic Work serves as an epigraph for the book:


You can get there from here, though there’s no going home.

Everywhere you go will be somewhere you’ve never been. Try this:

head south on Mississippi 49, one- by-one mile markers ticking off another minute of your life. Follow this to its natural conclusion—dead end at the coast, the pier at Gulfport where riggings of shrimp boats are loose stitches in a sky threatening rain. Cross over the man-made beach, 26 miles of sand dumped on the mangrove swamp—buried terrain of the past. Bring only what you must carry—tome of memory, its random blank pages. On the dock where you board the boat for Ship Island, someone will take your picture: the photograph—who you were— will be waiting when you return.

In the book’s midsection, a lovely sheaf of poems springs up, meditating on (and even borrowing language from) some of the people and stories in the book’s prose chapters. Trethewey’s voice as a prose writer is good, but her poetry truly shines, and having some tight stanzas in the midst of larger paragraphs is a welcome break.

Beyond Katrina was originally published in 2010—five years after landfall—and was reissued this year to commemorate the 10-year anniversary of the storm. This new edition contains an epilogue, rounding out Joe’s story—he’s been released, and is living in Atlanta with his wife and daughter. However, Trethewey doesn’t provide us will full closure, either. She mentions a politician’s billboard boasting the words: “Katrina isn’t over.” The coast’s future is “ever evolving,” she writes. The monster is dead, but not entirely gone.

James Dickson’s poetry appears in The Louisiana Review, Spillway, Glassworks, and other journals.

reviewed by James Dickson

whatthingnews : I was reading my five-year-old son a story about dragons, when he threw me an unexpected question: “Dad? Was Katrina some kind of monster? Robbie’s big brother was talking about her at school. He said Katrina smashed his grandparents’ house a long time ago.”

For most of us living close to the Gulf of Mexico, Hurricane Katrina, which struck on August 29, 2005, was a monster of nearly mythical proportions, and for my son who was born five years later, the carnage Katrina inflicted seems beyond reality, the work of cartoon meanies with raspy voices and serrated teeth. Yet she was entirely real, and the destruction she wrought created millions of individual stories that make up the larger story of our nation’s weird relationship with Katrina. In her reissued and updated memoir, Beyond Katrina, poet Natasha Trethewey, a native of Gulfport, Mississippi, tells lots of stories about the coast, beginning in 2007, two years after the hurricane. Unlike much of the Katrina literature, which centers around New Orleans, this book is set farther east, near the midpoint of the Mississippi coast, where things supposedly turned out better. As the title suggests, Tretheway uses Katrina as the jumping-off point for a broader essay on the way it has changed the region.

In the initial section, she shows us the psychic scars of the disaster. We learn that coastal residents refer to things as BK or AK: Before Katrina or After Katrina. The worst hurricane BK was 1969’s Camille, a storm that washed some boats ashore and destroyed buildings, but with far less rage than Katrina. We are told of Trethewey’s aging grandmother, struggling with dementia, whose memory has conflated the two storms. Always the poet, Trethewey uses this as metaphor:

She has layered on the old story of Camille the new story of Katrina. Between the two, there is the suggestion of both a narrative and a metanarrative—the way she both remembers and forgets, the erasures, and how intricately intertwined memory and forgetting always are.

When Mississippians talk about the storm, we invariably contrast our successful resurrection to Louisiana’s extended zombie state. The easy narrative is this: things (like levees and local government) worked here; in Louisiana, they failed miserably. Here, volunteer efforts led the way; there, a corrupt and ineffective set of decision-makers allowed poor people to die. But Trethewey refuses to let that oversimplification go unchallenged. She uses it as a template for the way that simple stories about Katrina are often untrue or only half true. She points out that the first businesses to re-open on the Mississippi coast were the “boats,” as they are known—floating casinos, created by the 1992 legislation legalizing gambling in Mississippi, which restricts casinos to navigable water. With their deep pockets, the casinos could fund their own rebuilding; and with their huge contributions to the state’s tax coffers, their ability to get rebuilding permits was unsurprisingly easy, according to Trethewey.
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reviewed by Rebecca Chace 

whatthingnews : Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet is complete with The Story of the Lost Child, making it possible to see the whole structure, which reveals itself in layers like Naples itself, where former cityscapes are buried by time, political violence, and natural disasters. Reading this final volume, it’s easy to forget that the first book, My Brilliant Friend, frames the entire work as a mystery—aside from the much-discussed secrecy of Ferrante, who uses a pen name, allows no photographs, and, with few exceptions, will only be interviewed via email or telephone. With this volume, Ferrante reminds us again that a question of authorship is embedded into the narrative—who is telling this story? Lila or Elena?

In My Brilliant Friend, Elena tells us her best friend Lila has erased all trace of herself at the age of 60. Elena then recounts their childhood together in the slums of Naples. Lila is brilliant, a precociously gifted writer with a captivating and erratic personality. Elena is also an excellent student, but she knows that Lila is the prodigy. Yet Lila’s parents don’t let her continue her education. Elena’s do—though with hardly more enthusiasm than Lila’s—and their paths diverge. Elena becomes a successful writer. Lila marries very young and stays in the violent neighborhood of their childhood. The first book drops us off after Lila’s shattering wedding, and by then, we’ve very likely forgotten the framing prologue about middle-aged Lila’s disappearance, so relentlessly compelling and immediate is the story of the girls’ deep and complicated friendship, which touches on issues of class, history, and the politics of feminism while holding fast to an intimate and brutal core.

Book 2, The Story of a New Name, takes us into young adulthood; Elena escapes Naples to the intellectual university life she craves and begins her career as a novelist, while Lila becomes a glamorous figure in the old neighborhood with new-found wealth and power. In the third book, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, Lila, having divorced her abusive husband, is struggling to bring up her young son while working in a factory. Elena marries a conventional professor from an intellectual family and has two daughters, but leaves them for a destructive relationship with Nino, Lila’s first love. The two women continue to be haunted by each other’s choices. Elena’s first novel was based upon Lila’s childhood notebook, which she destroyed after plundering it for material, but Lila remains the one person from whom Elena craves approval.

Elena reminds us at the beginning of the final volume that Lila’s abrupt disappearance motivated her to write their story. The Story of the Lost Child is told from Elena’s point of view, but in the opening pages, Elena writes with a hint of paranoia:

Only she can say if, in fact, she has managed to insert herself into this extremely long chain of words to modify my text, to purposely provide the missing links, to unhook others without letting it show, to say of me more than I want, more than I am able to say.


It’s possible. Over the years, Lila has become a self-taught computer genius. Ferrante ends this paragraph with an imagined dialogue with her friend, who says, “[F]orget it, Lenù, one doesn’t tell the story of an erasure.” But this is exactly what Ferrante is setting out to do. The book we are reading may in fact be told by both women, who are bound not only by lifelong friendship, but by rivalry. Is Lila taking back the narrative from her less-gifted, but published and successful friend, who has exploited their shared history for her greatest literary success? Is this true of Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet itself, as well the fictional world within it? The sheer daring of this premise, which loops back on itself like a mobius strip, is hard to imagine.

Ferrante couldn’t possibly have known at the novels’ conception that these books would, in fact, become her greatest literary success. Or that she would produce a literary sensation late in life, as the character who shares her pen name does in the novel. Is life following art? Is this a meta-experiment in which Lila and Elena are two aspects of Italian women of a certain generation, imagined by a writer who will only divulge her pen name? While this final volume is driven by the disappearance of Lila’s daughter, you can’t help but wonder whether it is the daughter, the mother, or herself whom Elena is really trying to find.

There is a scene which unfolds like a childhood nightmare in the first book. Lila throws Elena’s beloved doll “Tina” into the cellar of the most feared man in the neighborhood, Don Achille Carracci. Elena takes revenge by throwing Lila’s doll after her own, neither doll to be recovered. In this volume, Elena and Lila give birth to daughters within weeks of each other, and Lila names her child, “Tina.” Elena reminds her that this was name of the doll Lila threw so maliciously into the cellar:

[Lila] touched her forehead as if she had a headache and said:

‘It’s true, but I didn’t do it on purpose.’

‘She was a beautiful doll—I was attached to her.”

‘My daughter is more beautiful.’”

This seems to be Lila’s way. She avoids examining the subterranean forces at work in their relationship: ruthless competition and cruelty, as well as love and loyalty. Yet there is a central event in this book which briefly reveals Lila’s true nature, and turns her tough exterior inside out. This is the devastating earthquake which hit Naples on November 23, 1980. Lila and Elena are together, both very pregnant, when the earthquake hits, and they take shelter inside Lila’s car, parked on the street. Both are terrified, but Lila cracks in a way that Elena has never seen before. “She emitted a sort of death rattle, eyes wide, she trembled, she caressed her stomach, she no longer believed in solid connections… she cried out that the car’s boundaries were dissolving,” When Elena tries to calm her by pointing out one of their neighbors, Marcello, who is driving out of the neighborhood, Lila says that “the boundaries of Marcello too, too, at the wheel were dissolving, the thing and the person were gushing out of themselves, mixing liquid metal and flesh. She used that term: dissolving boundaries.” This is more than the terror brought on by a powerful earthquake.

Elena writes of Lila after the earthquake,

However much she had always dominated all of us and had imposed and was still imposing a way of being, on pain of her resentment and fury, she perceived herself as a liquid and all her efforts were, in the end, directed only at containing herself… Lila lost Lila, chaos seemed the only truth, and she—so active, so courageous, erased herself and, terrified, became nothing.

Lila, the working class woman, is in fact ruled by the unconscious forces which drive our perceptions, and Elena, the educated novelist, remains rooted in the material world. It is Lila who is using her rage as a weapon to control her own nature but is finally undone by her profound and intuitive understanding of the illusory nature of reality. As she tells Elena in this moment, “the fabric that I weave by day is unraveled by night, the head finds a way. But it’s not much use, the terror remains, it’s always in the crack between one normal thing and the other.” Lila is not mad or unhinged, but her perceptions are so heightened that it is impossible for her to live easily in the world. This heightened perception may also be the source of her brilliance, which Elena recognizes more than anyone.

Much has been written about the rage of the women in this quartet. (Can it still come as a surprise that women get angry too?) Lila and Elena share a tendancy to rage at the world, and more directly, at the men around them, using the Neapolitan dialect, which Elena returns to when she is angry. (Note: Ferrante does not actually write in dialect in these sections. In the Italian, as in the English translation by Ann Goldstein, we are instead told when characters are speaking in dialect.) But in this final volume, motherhood becomes as central to their relationship as rage—and both are angry mothers. It’s another arena in which they can both compete and care for one another.

The Story of the Lost Child opens with Elena resenting Lila’s judgment of her mothering. She writes, “Ah, I had my faults, but I was certainly more of a mother than she was.” In fact, Elena has left her husband and two young children to run off with Nino. She writes:

It was terrible to confess it, but I still wanted him. I loved him more than my own two daughters. At the idea of hurting him and of no longer seeing him, I withered painfully, the free and educated woman lost her petals, separated from the woman-mother, and the woman-mother was separated from the woman-lover, and the woman-lover from the furious whore, and we all seemed on the point of flying off in different directions.


Elena returns to the old neighborhood, and her attempted escape from her working class roots into the northern Italian intelligensia is both scorned and admired by Lila. Elena makes a new life in Naples with Nino while maintaining her career, but after her third child, she becomes frustrated and angry. “The girls and Naples have eaten me alive,” Elena writes (the italics are in the text). “I don’t study. I don’t write. I have lost all discipline.” Later, when Elena achieves wider recognition and the opportunities that come to a successful writer, she leaves her children with Lila:

A range of alluring possibilities opened up to me in the space of a few hours. The chains of motherhood weakened, sometimes I forgot to call Lila, to say goodnight to the girls. Only when I noticed that I would have been capable of living without them, did I return to myself, did I feel remorse.

We don’t like to think of mothers as choosing to live without their children because of their own ambition. It is still a dirty secret that mothers may be as capable of this as fathers. Yes, Elena feels remorse, she absolutely loves her three daughters, but she puts her career first. Lila takes the children and exacts an emotional price for it in her barely concealed resentment and dismissal of Elena’s literary success. No matter how much Elena may achieve, both women understand Lila has the finer mind and greater gift, no matter how much she may deny it. As Elena writes, “As usual, half a sentence of Lila’s was enough, and my brain recognized her aura, became active, liberated my intelligence.”

Friendship, hateship, loss, and finally erasure. By the end of this fourth book, Lila has suffered the worst loss that any parent can endure when Tina inexplicably vanishes in the time it takes to turn your head away. How the two women respond to this horrific event is the final crucible of their characters and sets in motion Lila’s own final disappearance.

In an interview in The Paris Review, Ferrante says, “Writing requires maximum ambition, maximum audacity, and programmatic disobedience.” Ferrante is a fearless writer, and in these books she is able to conjure the everyday world of demanding jobs, ex-husbands, diapers and shopping, simultaneously with that subterranean world where all of the boundaries dissolve. In this final volume, it becomes absolutely clear that this juxtaposition of realities which Ferrante portrays so well is the source of Lila’s brilliance and her limitations.

After the earthquake, Elena remains nervous of sleeping inside her building, but observes that Lila

immediately returned to work, to manipulate, motivate, deride, attack. I thought of that terror that in a few seconds had annihilated her, I saw the trace of that terror in her now habitual gesture of holding her hands around her stomach with the fingers spread. And I wondered apprehensively: who is she now, what can she become, how can she react? I said to her once, to underline that the bad moment had passed:

“The world has returned to its place.”

She replied teasingly:

“What place?”

It’s an insult to the work to call the Neapolitan Quartet a book about “women’s friendships.” Elena and Lila’s relationship has such power because they see each other with a fullness of perception that only they can share.


Rebecca Chace is the author of: Leaving Rock Harbor (novel), Capture the Flag (novel), and Chautauqua Summer (memoir).

Whatthingnews: (reviewed by Dara Mandle) : In his biting, insistent book of poems, Bastards of the Reagan Era, Reginald Dwayne Betts lets the reader know he will not depict the ghetto in the feel-good manner of the early ’90s films he references, Menace II Society and Boyz n the Hood. From the solid black cover to the desolate landscape contained therein, light rarely penetrates his bleak book, in which the “boyz” are “bastards” abandoned by Ronald Reagan’s misguided war on drugs. Just as Betts claims “there is more than a dead black / man in the center” of his book, there is more to the author than someone who grew up in a tough neighborhood, sold drugs, and went to jail.

Dwayne Betts was an honors student taking AP classes in Suitland, Maryland, just south of Washington, D.C., when, at 16, he started smoking pot and fell in with the wrong crowd. One day, he and a friend went to a mall looking for trouble. When they found a man asleep in his car in the parking lot, they carjacked him. Their joyride was short. Betts was soon arrested and sent to prison. Betts was a juvenile, but since he used a gun, he was sentenced as an adult and spent over eight years in prison, sometimes in maximum security facilities, where he did stints in solitary. At a time in life when a young person seeks his identity, Betts’s was stripped away in the dehumanized environment of prison, “the country / Where life is cheaper than anywhere else.”

In his second book of poems, Betts confesses his regrets: “I peddled crack to pregnant women / And this cell is my reminder of the wages.”

Betts fought to hold onto his humanity. He has said that, ironically, time in solitary proved productive, allowing him to read, which he did voraciously, devouring the African-American canon. As Betts recounted to The New Yorker in 2010, the judge who sentenced him said, “‘I don’t have any illusions that the penitentiary is going to help you, but you can get something out of it if you want to.’” Betts completed high school in prison. When he got out, he earned a BA from the University of Maryland, an MFA from Warren Wilson College, and a 2012 appointment by Barack Obama to the Coordinating Council of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. Betts wrote a memoir and his first book of poetry. He applied and got in to the country’s best law schools, including Harvard and Columbia, chose Yale, and now lives in New Haven with his wife and two children.

Prison did not rehabilitate Betts. Books did. In Bastards of the Reagan Era, Betts makes clear that prison was a “purgatory.” Still, the crushing repetition and despair he experienced there gave shape to his most recent verse, in terms of content and form. The first poem, “Elephants in the Fall,” invites us in with two luminous moments: the births of the author’s sons, Micah and Miles. Betts charms us with his capacity for lyricism. With the very next poem, he cools things down: it is an elegy that opens, “Many gone to grave.” While Betts calls the first poem a “Prologue,” it is really an epilogue, coming after the other events the book describes. You get the sense that the birth of his children engendered the birth of this devastating chronicle. Betts writes of the birth of his first son, Micah: “you were smiling then, / as if you knew you were the first song / that found me worthy.” That validation facilitated Betts’s poetic creation.

In “Elegy With a City in It,” one of many mournful songs in the book, Betts writes: “I sing this awful / tale,” which reminds us of the beginning of Greek and Latin epic poetry. At several points Betts refers to a blood-stained street as “the wine-dark asphalt,” using Homer’s epithet for the Aegean Sea. A mini-epic constitutes the book’s centerpiece and shares its title. “Bastards of the Reagan Era,” the best poem in the collection, spans 15 pages and nine parts. The poem details not only life in prison, but also the life Betts had before he was incarcerated, when

The hustle courted us. And we were down.
It’ll take you to ruin moms would say,
As if disaster wasn’t that damned place:
Those afternoons and all their sirens blare.

The book also contains another epic called “For the City That Nearly Broke Me.” Interestingly, instead of making this one long poem with sections, Betts breaks it into 11 different poems, all with the same title, and scatters them throughout the book. As a reader when you turn the page you’re denied the surprise of a new poem, echoing the oppressive monotony of prison.

Behind bars, there must have been moments here or there of reprieve. How else could Betts have gone on to accomplish so much? Betts chooses not to elucidate these. Rather, he wants the reader to feel trapped. There is something breathless, fast, and tight about Betts’s writing: “This guard, he yanks against the chain so hard / I buck, then buckle, a man against a leash.” The alliteration and internal rhyme help structure the free verse, as does the repetition of motifs, such as the “toothless crackhead.” This reliance on repetition, if not the image itself, resonates with epic poetry.

Betts blends ancient and modern in other ways. Take his use of the ampersand. Throughout the book Betts uses this symbol instead of writing the word “and.” The ampersand may have descended from a combination in Latin of “e” and “t,” since “et” means “and” in Latin, and apparently a secretary of Cicero’s invented the shorthand. 20th-century American and African-American poets such as Amiri Baraka used the symbol to indicate they were experimental and outside the academy. The symbol also offers a visual treat on the page.

But it is sound that triumphs in Betts’s book. In an interview produced by his publisher and put on YouTube, Betts says his book is about music and rhythm. Rap music as much as epic verse informs Betts’s writing. In one of the “For the City That Nearly Broke Me” poems, he implores the reader:

Stress this: the lit end
of anything will
burn you. & that is just
just a slick way of
saying: running will
never save you. This man’s first son caved, fell
to the pressure, to
the barrel’s indent
against his temple.

A percussive rhythm adds emphasis to Betts’s exhortation.

From rap, Betts borrows the technique of sampling, taking a part of one song and using it in another as a form of homage. His title poem features two lines quoted almost verbatim from the Russian emigré poet Joseph Brodsky, which Betts has noted elsewhere are extremely important to him: “I have / Braved, for want of wild beasts, steel cages. / Carved my name on bunks and rafters.” To name the nine sections of “Bastards of the Reagan Era,” Betts uses song titles from the second studio album of the rap group Public Enemy, who famously sampled everyone from James Brown singing to Malcolm X speaking. Betts doesn’t attribute these lines, but neither did artists of an earlier era, who did not worry as much about copyright infringement as they do today.


With It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, released in 1988, just the time period about which Betts writes, Public Enemy intended to make a socially engaged work of art. Betts’s book, too, is certainly political, invoking and excoriating the Republican president in its title and addressing profound issues such as racism, the war on drugs, and the mass incarceration of black men. You could say Betts’s book bears witness. Carolyn Forché, who coined the term “poetry of witness,” would call poems such as Betts’s “poems as evidence.” In fact, in prison, as a recent article in The Huffington Post notes, Betts “called himself Shahid. ‘I thought that was perfect. I was in a situation where I was seeing things that I never had any expectation of seeing. That’s what writers do. They pay witness to the world.’”

With his book, Betts gives us an inside view of the epidemic of incarceration and the tragedy of poor children who fall through the cracks. He asserts:

[...] there is a secret to why the small boy
can step into the street & no one notices
as it swallows him whole, a mathematics
for the hold that Newports have on men
struggling with child support & probation.


Not many other contemporary American poets know these men and boys as intimately or write as eloquently about them. Of a fight in a neighborhood school, Betts observes,

[...] & fuck it
all as the mob of students and teachers
watching wonder what we hunger for
in the center of this ghetto.

The tricky syntax and the density of a phrase like “watching wonder what we hunger for” make us read several times to understand the multiple meanings a situation might carry.

Betts keeps us on our toes and specifies his grievances. He indicts de facto segregation and “decades of racist housing / policies.” He connects the violence he’s experienced not only to hateful policies of the 20th Century, but also to slavery, using words to apply to his shackles such as “coffle,” meaning slaves fastened together. Elsewhere Betts puts prison vernacular in his verse, words such as “bid” (prison sentence), “twenty sac” (bag of weed), and “sally port” (controlled entrance). By situating this vernacular in a book that draws inspiration from epic poetry, Betts repositions the language of the streets.

Betts’s epic shares with such war stories as Beowulf grisly battles and copious bloodshed. Betts tells of gunshot wounds and the ravages of crack cocaine. After riding a “caravan to hell,” all he wanted was “his body whole.” At one point in his ancient tale, Beowulf contradicts Unferth, who doubts his strength. Speaking of his exhausting but successful attempts to vanquish sea monsters, Beowulf notes, “Often, for undaunted courage, / fate spares the man it has not already marked.” Fate seemed to have marked Dwayne Betts, but with courage he transformed those markings.


Dara Mandle’s poems have appeared in Brooklyn Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Harpur Palate, among other journals.
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