Late Work: A Literary Autobiography of Love, Loss, and What I Was Reading
Joan Frank
University of New Mexico Press 2022
Reviewed by Bob Wake
Few writers are as honest and uncompromising about their art as Joan Frank. The essays collected in Late Work: A Literary Autobiography of Love, Loss, and What I Was Reading address “writers who’ve been at it awhile.” Readers and writers at any stage will find it both inspiring and sobering to learn that one of her novels, The Outlook for Earthlings, took fifteen persevering years to find a publisher.
Frank disputes the notion that writers and introverts in general are somehow better equipped to withstand the isolating effects of a global pandemic. In “Make It Go Away,” the COVID lockdowns are depicted in all their hallucinatory disorientation. “We’ve had terrible trouble sleeping,” she writes. “We’ve felt spaced out or angry or glum, tired or twitchy, scared or numb or listless…”
She admits to a post-pandemic loss of “clarity and conviction” (“It Seemed Important at the Time: The New Doubt”) and suggests the feeling may be more widespread than we realize. Her cultural analysis is persuasive. Frank’s New Doubt, like Hunter Thompson’s fear and loathing, portends bad vibes ahead:
Why lie about the sad drooly bony smelly Black Dog plopping down upon one’s chest at all hours, groaning and farting in its nightmare-riddled sleep?
Late Work is wide-ranging. Other highlights include an encomium to the practice of letter-writing (“Just anticipating letter-writing is erotic for me—the way approaching a bloc of private writing time and space is erotic”), and a bookstore reading gone horribly wrong (“Gird yourself, earnest artist. When attention comes it will contain naysayers”).
Two essays are devoted to the “now-classic-but-once-unknown” 1965 novel by John Williams, Stoner, about the struggles and muted transcendence of a Midwestern literature professor. “The novel’s arc feels—like all our very greatest art—inevitable,” Frank writes. “Its particulars shine with the relevance of the universal. It is timeless.”
The advice to writers in her essay “What Are We Afraid Of?” becomes advice to anyone feeling unmoored right now. “Despair can paralyze,” she warns. “If we’re paralyzed, nothing gets made.” We must teach ourselves to “shut out the roar.” Joan Frank offers strategies to help us find our way back to doing the work we care about.
At 720 pages, Antkind succeeds as a large-scale comic novel. This is an impressive feat for a first-time novelist (albeit a first-time novelist who happens to be an Oscar-winning screenwriter). Line for line, page for page, Antkind is frequently deliriously funny. Kaufman’s 1990s TV scripts for comics like Chris Elliot are a clear influence. Antkind’s narrator and protagonist, B. Rosenberger Rosenberg, a self-important film critic, has the snotty arrogance that Elliot mastered so perfectly. Chris Elliot’s willingness to risk unlikeability is both his genius as a comic performer and probably his undoing with audiences (e.g. Cabin Boy). Charlie Kaufman seems to intuitively understand that an insufferable character is only as bearable as the jokes exposing the character’s pretensions and selfishness. Antkind has the jokes like Arby’s has the meats. As Kaufman has shown in his wildly inventive film scripts (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), he’s never met a meta gag that he can’t spin into comedy gold. Not unlike Martin Amis’s insertion of “Martin Amis” as a character in his novel Money, Antkind’s film critic is deeply hostile to the very real films of Charlie Kaufman (while extolling the more comfortably mainstream films, both real and imaginary, of Judd Apatow). Although the novel’s sci-fi trappings—time-travel and multiverses—seem at times like a lesser work by Philip K. Dick (name-checked in Antkind as an “American primitivist”), Antkind’s slapstick exuberance is like a live-action Tex Avery cartoon.
An author’s note chillingly informs us that U.S. coastal regions “harbor millions of pounds of dumped munitions” from military training exercises. The family in the poem visits the local police station to dispose of the shell. The mother is left discomforted. A chain-reaction of metaphors follows. She is haunted by her son’s autism and wonders “what it would look like / the bin for safe disposal of genes / that can ruin children.” These lines pack the kind of gut-punch that Rebecca Foust’s work never shies away from. She has addressed her son’s autism in poems over the years, at times with grace and understanding, and at other times with cosmic fury.
Frank’s well-received 2017 novel, 
Impersonal travel essays are nowhere to be found in Frank’s deeply personal collection of travel essays, Try to Get Lost. She is blessedly blunt about this turbulent era “of perhaps the most frightening protofascist ever to assume office in American history.” Her essay “Red State, Blue State” is a Baedeker for bad times. Survival strategies include everything from exercise to charity work to “you drink.” Pulling up stakes is an option, not a panacea. “Travel beats us up,” she admits in “Shake Me Up, Judy.” “Sleep’s elusive. Stress is amped.” Her sketches of European cities benefit enormously from shoe leather reporting (and the accompanying shin splints). The verisimilitude is breathtaking. Shop windows in Italy (“In Case of Firenze”) inspire a cinematic cascade of history and culture:
Coffee Spew 