Rick Simonson

Marched Fourth
March 10, 2008

For all the book business musings on what this election year would mean to business (and attention/attendance for author readings), let alone the publication of books come this fall, who'd have thought there would be impact in February, in March?

Our bookstore had scheduled a poetry reading at a branch library back on Saturday afternoon, February 9 - which went off fine, with the audience about what might have been expected. But the reading was dwarfed by the nearby mass gathered (the library is combined with a community center) to attend the Democratic caucuses, which drew record participation that day.

Then this past Tuesday, March 4: who would have guessed that national attention would be so focused on the primary election results due for Texas, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Vermont? Indeed, it did feel attention was elsewhere, people at work checking websites for primary results, customers who overheard behind the counter chatter would ask what was up.

One thing this meant was that a smaller audience than should have been on hand was at Elliott Bay for Terese Svoboda's reading for her new memoir, Black Glasses Like Clark Kent: A GI's Secret from Postwar Japan (Graywof). The smaller audience did mean a higher proportion of Nebraska-born attendees than is usually the case here: Svoboda is one who, though she has lived in New York for going on forty years now, still very much has roots there. And family.

Most known as a fine poet and the author of edgy, sometimes wonderfully bent fiction (her most recent novel, Tin God, spans centuries and is narrated by God herself, from Midwestern prairire grasslands), Svoboda's memoir is a fairly straightforward story, though it comes at the reader from different angles.

Most centrally, it's the story of an uncle - her father's brother - his descent into depression late in life. It takes family members time - tragic time, it turns out - to understand why, try though they all do to help. Against the contemporary backdrop of the US's occupation Iraq - and the disclosures of horrendous prison abuses at Abu Ghraib - a link gets made to the part Svoboda's Superman-like uncle played as a young solider in the US military in post-World War II occupied Japan. He was an MP,  prison guard duty. The charge of his unit was imprisoned US soldiers.

As the book reveals - in part from tape transcriptions orally made by Svoboda's uncle, in part from her archival researches, and lastly, by travel to Japan - there were, and are, secrets yet kept about things that happened. Certainly abuses were there. Even more - a number of executions, proportionally inclined towards black soldiers - seem to have been carried out, with scant evidence of procedure or documentation. It's a secret her uncle carried nearly 60 years - in her words, it is about how post-traumatic stress disorder can strike, even after this much time.

The book is moving, funny, captures all manner of family insights - Svoboda the family writer with all this 'real work' to do is mildly indulgent about the urgings that she take on writing a story of her uncle, a familiar notion to many writers who are considered 'the writer' to family members and acquaintances. There are also flashes of telling insight - Svoboda laboring away at her computer, working on this material of real trauma, real casaulties, real war, while a keyboard and screen away, her son is blasting away the 'enemy' in simulated war games.

The book's biggest 'problem' may be its title - one has no idea at all the rich depth, seriousness and humor that lie within. The references to this seeming Superman - and Clark Kent - within the family context, are there and can be made. But this is a story for more than Terese Svoboda's family. On a night when it seemed - from post-primary parsing - the most important things in the air was which candidate had 'momentum' or whose tactics 'worked' (never mind how short-term or superficial), this book was an apt reminder of the larger forces really at work: the reach of war, no matter where or when, but especially a war being waged right now.

One other little note about Terese Svoboda: her work is worth seeking out, wherever one can find it. It is interesting to talk with her about writing and publishing. Decades of living, writing, and teaching in New York, and yet she's never been published by New York - unless Counterpoint, which published two of her fiction books, was in its brief Manhattan phase (from D.C. to New York to the Bay Area it's been ... though one could imagine Counterpoint's new Brooklyn base, Richard Nash and Soft Skull Press, taking a cotton to her work). There has also been NYU Press, but otherwise it's been Graywolf, Nebraska, Zoo, Georgia, Iowa, and Greenfield Review along the winding way. 

Posted by Rick Simonson on March 10, 2008 | Comments (0)