The Notebooks of Lana Skimnest - R book reviews

Literary Review, Fall, 1993 by Burton Raffel

Satire can be a forgiving genre., provided the author displays fundamental, convincing caritas. Pope's The Rape of the Lock is better satire, and better poetry, than his Dunciad, in good part because it is also more affectionate, more caring about what it belittles. In the Rape, too, Pope mocks himself as well as others, and the poem prospers; in The Dunciad he rails like a righteous storm from on high, and the poetry, alas, rather shrivels. Don Quijote is arguably the greatest novel ever written precisely because Cervantes is not in the least interested in a cut-and-slash, take-no-prisoners approach to his character's foolishness and follies. Like T.S. Eliot, in his famously satirical "The Hippotamus," Cervantes clearly shows himself able to condemn the sins without condemning the sinners. It definitely helps.

Anselm Atkins, in his frequently hilarious The Notebook of Lana Skimnest, mocks both broadly and plentifully, but always keeps himself in cheerful, even symbiotic relationship to the pedants and pedantry, the pseudo-science, and the artistic pomposities he satirizes: of the Thoreaus and Waldens of the world, for example, he notes that "it is all very well to be a pacifist in Hobbitland - as long as there are some pretty mean warriors of yours out there on borders fending off the heartless pillagers." Of ultra-scholarly prose, that "exhalation of pent-up scientizing," he remarks that "It reminds me of the way Germans hold back their verbs till the very end, toilet-trained, then let them loose all at once in a spattering of ugly's ge' and 'guh'." Of Melville's inclusion in Moby Dick of vast quantities of whale-lore, he wonders "why did he pour this perfectly irrelevant lake of god into an already thoroughly rain-soaked quagmire?" In the middle of a deliberately, elaborately ponderous laundry-list he turns to the reader and exclaims, "amazing, that you'd keep reading this without promise or hope of climax!" - carefully appending his initials to the comment. "All my assertions are true," he insists at an earlier point, but "who cares? The point is, they're plausible. Nothing else matters."

The experimental (Nabokovian, Beckettish) side of this generally jolly romp through birdwatcher's heaven and birdwatchers' hell is the blandly-uttered, often disregarded pretense that, whatever else it may be, the book is emphatically not a novel. Were he a novelist, that is, describing Lana's morning behavior, "I would have preferred to say, in stark contrast to the facts given in the first paragraph, that she was working on her art, or having sex with her goat. But no, she worked on her notebooks at night, at night crept out to taste sex with her goat. I'm sticking by the truth, going with the evidence, as best I can. Look, I'm not omniscient, the way novelists pretend to be." Later he exclaims, again directly to the reader: "You may possibly resent how I, the author, keep intruding into your reading experience this way. That's learned behavior on your part - time now to unlearn it. Books don't arrive out of nowhere, authors aren't passive robots."

But as I said at the start, what particularly drew me on, in this sometimes wonderfully eccentric little book, is the author's pervasive warmth and humanity. His cleverness does no harm; like his obvious good-heartedness, it too is on constant display. But still, it is the truly felt emotions rather than the equally truthful but - in fiction - necessarily much less meaningful criticisms that make this bok work:

At any rate, her Second English period, which started like pirates but ended in repossession, passed. She made her way back to America from Shropshire, in steerage with immigrants, suffering the spray of the deck, sharing shawls and lemons and bites of bread and onion, listening to yakky tales, her inner eye melding outscape with inscape, her outerorb ceaselessly tracking the black and white wings that raked the jagged clouds.

What separates the Literary men from the Schoolrom boys, the Remembered women from the Forgotten girls, is in the end just that basic. Some can write, and some simply can't. Anselm Atkins can, and more power to him.