Resistance
By Barry Lopez (Knopf, $18)
Barry Lopez, renowned for his nature writing, has never kept his feelings about the environment a secret. But he steps over into the broadly political with his latest, diamond-sharp book of short stories, Resistance. Set in the present day in countries from France to Argentina, the volume consists of nine fictional testimonials. In each one an artist or writer tells their story, revealing over and again how governments and civilizations threaten to crush artistic expression, how capitalism and globalization threaten to leach the meaning from our daily interactions. It's an age-old story—the individual vs. the state— but one not often carped about in this country's fiction. This whiff of the revolutionary so redolent in these pages is sometimes a tonic, sometimes a turnoff.
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"Apocalypse" begins with an American curator and his wife doing research in Paris, but culminates in a 12-page screed against artistic repression. In response to a harassing letter from the Office of Inland Security, the narrator admits to the cell-like nature of the artistic community. "We have unraveled ourselves from our residences, our situations. But like a bulb in a basement, suddenly somewhere we will turn on again in darkness." What's creepy about this story is that the ghoulishly dystopian France it portrays isn't that different from the U.S. of the present day.
Lopez is a sumptuous descriptive writer, especially when evoking nature, although his prose occasionally turns wooden in fiction. He's at his best when addressing otherness and how it can often inspire violence. In "Mortise and Tenon," for example, a man journeys to the Middle East for work, where he's assaulted by some street thugs who hurl anti-American epithets at him. Lopez beautifully captures the backwash of rage that bubbles up after such an event, and how easily it can turn into bigotry. "Traveling with Bo Ling" records the memories of a Vietnam veteran whose internal landscape—not to mention his flesh—is scorched by his tour in the jungle. By loving a Vietnamese woman, he begins to live again.
Alan Magee has contributed a series of monotypes to this collection, and the ghostlike figures in them help give each story an otherworldly, ominous tone. They also signal Lopez's intention to test the boundaries of what we expect in fiction. There are no brand names here, even fewer glimpses of pop culture. Instead, Lopez gives us a glimpse of how the sparks fly when individual will digs in against culture's monolith. The title is most appropriate. J.F.
Barry Lopez will appear at Third Place Books, 7 p.m. Tues., June 8.
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