“It was Napoleon who had such a passion for chicken that he kept his chefs working around the clock.”
Another reread of The Passion for me, this time specifically because I had the audiobook for it, and that tends to go very quickly. One thing about the audiobook that works here especially is that they used a male reader for the Henri sections, and a woman for the Villanelle sections. What stands out most to me this time around is the way in which in the novel in being more or less about championing (if not quite celebrating) the differences of love and passion and gender and sex, struggles with what to do with poor Henri, whose passions lie in part with his patriotism, in part with Napoleon, in part with his church, and of course in large ways for Villanelle, until they don’t. He’s trapped within the confines of the assumptions of heteronormativity, and this novel flips those for the positions he finds himself in throughout the novel. With Villanelle offering him a way outside those confines, but with the understanding that he cannot put her back in them, having more or less escaped them, he wilts, and cannot.
She really does represent what is possible, even in small ways, if you are able to step outside, even a bit, and as much as he loves her, he does not love this for her. What’s great about this novel though is that he is the one who pays the price for these limits, and not her.
American Melancholy
I wasn’t really expecting much from this collection of poems by Joyce Carol Oates. I am already bearish on novelists and short story writers writing poetry, as it’s often a flight of vanity for them to have their poetry published. Like, I generally don’t believe that most of their work would get published if they weren’t the ones writing it, and this probably takes some opportunities from better, less well known poets. Anyway, that said, there’s a few very interesting to very good poems in this collection, and in general, some good writing. There’s also plenty of examples of poems that never quite come together, and prose poems that don’t stand out in any way different from very short Joyce Carol Oates fiction pieces, which has become less narrative driven in recent years and more associative — a little more free floating in some ways.
The two poems that stand out are “To Marlon Brando in Hell” and “Doctor Help Me”. The first of these is an excoriating poem written to Marlon Brando in death castigating him for his successes and failures, successes in becoming a the alluring sex symbol and actor that he was, and his failures for being the man he was. There’s a final moment of failure in the poem to step away from him one way or the other. The other is a long poem detailing not a conversation between a woman and her doctor, but the opening lines of dozens of conversations between women (often teen girls) and their doctors as thy broach the conversation of an abortion.