Short Takes
Dreaming Up America
By Russell Banks
Seven Stories, 127 pp., $21.95
Asked by a documentary filmmaker to do nothing less than explain American history and its impact on our national character to the French, who know us largely from the movies and newspaper headlines, novelist Russell Banks extemporized at length and with such lucidity that the transcript has been published as "Dreaming Up America," his first work of nonfiction.
Being a novelist, Banks is particularly insightful about the epic of self-invention that is the American Dream - or rather the American Dreams, for, as he notes, those who came to America over the centuries in the hope of remaking themselves arrived for different reasons guided by different ideals, and accordingly gravitated to different sections of the country. Banks describes the powerful role of religious fundamentalism in our national makeup (as he puts it, "The notion that God is an American") and in the principle of Manifest Destiny, which lives on in the missionary imagery our leaders summon to justify our foreign adventures.
Banks's historical observations are more striking than his critiques of contemporary US policy, perhaps because our circuits are already overloaded with punditry, though his eloquence never fails him.
Remember Love
By Jody Lisberger
Fleur-de-Lis, 208 pp., paperback, $13
This first-rate collection of short fiction by Jody Lisberger starts out strong and keeps on accelerating through tales of relationships shattered on the rocks of unmet expectations, a metaphor fully realized in the coastal setting of the final piece, "Point of Distraction."
Tinged with irony from the double meanings of the stories' titles to their open-ended conclusions, the collection begins with "Crucible," in which a couple who have just decided to separate squirm uncomfortably through their daughter's high school production of the Arthur Miller chestnut, whose adultery plot, in the wife's eyes at least, casts a sudden blinding spotlight on her failed marriage. In the sharply observed "In the Mercy of Water," a standout in that it is about the confusions of youth rather than the defeats of middle age, a teenage girl's ambivalent fascination with a daredevil new girl in town provides us a window onto, and her an escape route from, adolescent sexual anxiety.
In the title story a woman senses disaster when she enters a relationship with an aging mama's boy. Why take the plunge, despite their misgivings? As the heroine of another story ruefully reflects, speaking for many of Lisberger's veterans of curdled marriages and missed connections, "It isn't each other they want, but want itself."
The Girl I Left Behind: A Narrative History of the Sixties
By Judith Nies
Harper, 354 pp., illustrated, $24.95
Civil rights marchers, antiwar protesters, bra-burning women's libbers: This acid flashback of discontent is one face of the 1960s. The cover of Judith Nies's memoir presents another: a 1965 photo of the author on the deck of an ocean liner, smiling pertly in pageboy hairdo, pearls, and a cashmere twinset, home from studies and adventures abroad, the picture of self-confidence, eager to discover what life had waiting for her.
Not enough, as it turned out. Nies was shocked at first, then angry, to find that her master's degree earned her nothing but the usual offers of secretarial jobs and, before long, the social duties considered appropriate for the young wife of a Washington bureaucrat. Refusing to be banished literally or figuratively to the "Ladies Gallery," she landed a previously men-only job as a Capitol Hill staffer and became an early activist in the women's movement just then beginning to shake up American society.
A dense and energetic if sometimes ungainly conglomeration of public and private history, "The Girl I Left Behind" is addressed not to Nies's contemporaries, who recall all too clearly the days of dismissive inequality, but to their ambitious daughters, who have no idea how recent ancient history can be.
Amanda Heller is a critic and editor who lives in Newton.
