George Anderson: Notes for a Love Song in Imperial Time

This novel--a crucible of interloping texts, betrayals, desire, damnation--burns with a white-hot energy. If that kind of energy could transcend the printed page to encompass our present American culture it would start to purify us from the likes of Bush, Cheney, Yoo, Addington, Bybee. It would put complicit individuals (like most of us) back onto the path of full humanity and freedom. It would burn up our narcissistic fantasies about ourselves.But leave our culture aside--the book is an extraordinary accomplishment as a novel. Within the novel, spoken by a narrator who is only a step away from despair, that same white-hot energy is tempered, not quenched, at the end by a yellowed newspaper clipping. Containing the final and full story of an ex-slave, now long dead, the newspaper article is placed next to an official government document. I am so moved at that point in the book that I can't bring myself to try to put my feelings into words.Full disclosure: Peter Dimock has been a close friend of mine for many years. But while I have come to know some of his ideas, not least of all through his earlier novel A Short Rhetoric for Leaving the Family, our friendship in no way prepared me for the scope and importance of George Anderson. I urge anybody who is interested in the art of the American novel to take up this book.

This book had everything I look for in a symphony. I mean that in a good way. It can be slow going, and there's plenty of straight repetition (which I love), but it is a really beautiful thesis on what it means to love as a citizien, to be responsible as a citizen, or to be mad.

This little gem of a book elegantly articulates the difficulty of cohering American narratives of freedom and justice with the realities of her actions to buttress empire. An astounding, astonishing little book that I will be recommending to basically everyone I ever meet for the rest of my life.