Tag: The Outlook for Earthlings

• Late Work

  

  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.

  October 11, 2022

  Joan Frank, Late Work, The Outlook for Earthlings, University of New Mexico Press

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• The Outlook for Earthlings

  

  The Outlook for Earthlings
  Joan Frank
  Regal House Publishing 2020

  Reviewed by Bob Wake

  Melanie Taper and Scarlet Rand are Northern California-raised, self-searching, not always in sync, but supportive of one another since they were teenagers talking about boys and books at the school bus stop. Joan Frank’s ambitious new novel, The Outlook for Earthlings, is a puzzle-perfect narrative of interlocking flashbacks and flash-forwards, chapters qualifying and revising one another, circling elusive truths, charting the vicissitudes of Melanie and Scarlet’s decades-long friendship. Our perceptions and sympathies are jerked and jolted. Perspectives multiply. Consider a character’s anxiety when she ends a college affair with a married professor: “She felt like a cubist painting, pieces of her broken off and floating about the room. Mouth here, hand there, eyeball there.” The cubist dysmorphia foreshadows a medical illness.

  Friendship cannot function without a measure of confoundedness. Melanie might privately think of Scarlet, “Heavens, the woman wore her emotions like a sandwich board.” Scarlet, in an unkind moment, casts Melanie as a “docile homemaker” to Scarlet’s “globetrotting roustabout.” (Just as quickly, Scarlet retracts the labels as “vain, reductive.”) As a columnist for the Chicago Tribune, Scarlet lives her dream. Both women will eventually hold down unfulfilling jobs to make ends meet. Melanie Taper, one of the most enigmatic characters in recent fiction, becomes a prodigious autodidact:

  Mel knew all of Shakespeare, much of it by heart. She was reading Walter Benjamin, Nietzsche, Musil, Unamuno. She listened to postgraduate lectures on cassette while she drove to work: Philosophy of Religion, Foundations of Western Civ. She had lately told Scarlet, in perfect seriousness, she thought she should learn Italian so that she could read Montale and Morante in the original. 

  Melanie writes stories and novels and never seeks their publication. She’s preternaturally selfless in marriage and love. (“Subjugating oneself like some wretched servant” is Scarlet’s interpretation.) Melanie’s endlessly expanding and long-delayed graduate school thesis on Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot is conceived as a kind of emotional rescue of the epileptic Prince Myshkin. (“She felt this way about others, literary or real: poor Raskolnikov; poor Van Gogh. Somebody needed to make them some soup.”)

  Joan Frank has a painter’s eye for the natural world. (“The early sun struggled through the fog, a light of dirty wet coins.”) And a keen appreciation for the way our senses are assaulted by institutional spaces, such as academic administration offices. (“Smells of cleaning fluid, aging paper, bookbinding, overcooked coffee.”) The Outlook for Earthlings doesn’t discount the possibility of spectral visitations within the naturalistic confines of our world, but neither does it comfortably decipher them for us when they perhaps appear. The author’s tough-minded body of work, which includes numerous award-winning novels, short story and essay collections, has long refused to do the reader’s necessary work. Our task is clear. Each of us must answer for ourselves when this forceful and singular novel, arguably Joan Frank’s finest work to date, asks of us, “Did any ending ever befit the life it capped?”

  September 7, 2020

  California, Chicago Tribune, Elsa Morante, Eugenio Montale, Friedrich Nietzsche, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Joan Frank, Miguel de Unamuno, Prince Myshkin, Raskolnikov, Regal House Publishing, Robert Musil, Sacramento, The Idiot, The Outlook for Earthlings, Vincent Van Gogh, Walter Benjamin

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