The California Poem

By Eleni Sikelianos. Coffee House Press, 196 pages, $16 (paper).

Eleni Sikelianos's The California Poem turns natural history into an epic – one that includes humans, with all their industrial and technological baggage. Its intent and execution are admirable, so slapping it with the label "irritating" feels petty. But epics must be judged by high standards; besides, it is precisely because Sikelianos has basically realized her ambitious intentions that the minor flaws suggest sloppiness or, at times, flippancy.

According to the dedication, Sikelianos wrote the poem sequence "for all the echinoderms and dinoflagellates." After epigraphs by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Garcia Ordóñez de Mondalvo, she boldly addresses the reader: "Let me tell you of my cat-o-nines cosmovision." And that's exactly the sort of microscopic and telescopic dreamworld Sikelianos scrolls past readers; micro- and macrocosmic too. Even the hard facts seem filtered through her perception of them, cinematically collaged through rhyme-laden sentence wisps.

This is fragmented impressionism, with the metacognitive aids of endnotes that are often her own poem-commentaries on texts and a section that is a list of endangered species. She relies on the likes of John Adams (the composer), Fanny Howe, James Joyce, and Walt Whitman for further epigraphs, and the text also includes photographs and collages. The following lines more or less exemplify the general tone:

The dental imprint of California

is gravelly, epileptic, spasm

of sea-borne bungled broken Coastal Range of ridges & spurs

with localized names

parking lots littered of glittering dead dented cadillacs

...

unknown modes of road wind back the black hot gila monster

tarmac beading up into ripped hills

The abundance of rhyme, alliteration, and so on, facilitates the stream-of-consciousness flow, but it can also have the gratuitous, tacked-on quality of rap rhymes. And often the writing draws attention to itself, with no apparent purpose beyond cleverness. On the whole, however, The California Poem works through a skillful blend of intuition and organization, and it succeeds as purposely subjective music sharing a private but valuable experience of landscape. (Alexandra Yurkovsky)

The Inner Circle

By T.C. Boyle. Viking, 418 pages, $25.95.

Alfred Kinsey should have been red meat for T.C. Boyle, the wonderful, witty writer whose portrayal of 1920s-era crackpot health theories, The Road to Wellville, made him deservedly rich and famous and whose new novel, The Inner Circle, deals with Kinsey's personal peculiarities. The world-renowned sex researcher wasn't a scientific wacko by any means; in fact, his work was meticulous, scrupulous, and designed to be, if anything, dull. But Kinsey had a private side that was anything but boring: he believed human sexuality was horribly repressed by the mores of the 1940s, and behind closed doors, with his so-called inner circle, he practiced what he preached. Boyle doesn't have to fictionalize the fact, as pointed out by Kinsey biographers, that the good doctor had sex with men and women, with his students, with his coworkers, with his coworkers' wives, in groups, on camera, in every imaginable way and at every possible opportunity.

Of course, he kept this all very quiet, and on the surface the eminent zoologist at the University of Indiana was very much the professional scientist. The clash between the public and private lives – and the clash between his mild-mannered fictional associate, John Milk, and his wife, Iris – form the backbone for what could have been one of Boyle's best pieces of work. But sadly, the characters (always the heart of Boyle's writing) never really come to life. Iris – whose reluctance to participate in Kinsey's group-sex games and whose affair with another coworker should be the central foil in what favorable critics call a "love story" – is so superficial you barely remember her name. Milk comes across in a few good moments as the gee-whiz-golly kid turned inner circle sexual adventurer he's supposed to be, but he still falls flat. The scene in which Kinsey first seduces him – a turning point in the plot – is so anticlimactic that it hardly seems to matter. And there's none of Boyle's laugh-out-loud crazy sense of humor that made Wellville and his other best work so enjoyable. This isn't a bad book, and it's worth reading for the historical interest. But it could have been a contender – and for a die-hard fan like me, the outcome was seriously disappointing. (Tim Redmond)

Not So Prime Time: Chasing the Trivial on American Television

By Howard Rosenberg. Ivan R. Dee, 269 pages, $26.

During a 25-year run as TV critic for the Los Angeles Times, Howard Rosenberg has been described as the medium's antidote and its misplaced conscience. And although you often get the feeling from Not So Prime Time: Chasing the Trivial on American Television, a collection of his columns, that you might be better off tuning out, Rosenberg says the severity of his criticism comes out of respect for the medium's potential. His verdict is tough nevertheless: TV, the nation's primary means of discourse, runs the danger of "dumbing down America and making the third-rate the standard." Whether it is "news cross-dressing as theatre," making it harder and harder to distinguish the "significant from the silly," or (as Marshall McLuhan predicted) the medium's becoming the message and news anchors becoming celebrities, TV is morphing and molding American reality into a frenzy of sensational images.

Rosenberg's essays deal with many aspects of TV, and he succeeds in analyzing its meta-narrative, not just single shows in isolation. He notes the paradox that the tube manages to create the illusion of greater diversity while continuously narrowing choices, and the fact that even though TV news is often almost devoid of information, it makes people feel well-informed. He also addresses the cultural isolationism the medium fuels and perpetuates. Whether it's coverage of the Olympics ("not just America first but America only") or diminishing news reports from abroad, "you often get the impression from American television that the world is flat and limited to the United States, and that anyone leaving risks falling off the edge."

Eloquent and witty, Rosenberg provides refreshingly sensible commentary on an increasingly maddening media circus. At the core of his message is "critical awareness." While he does believe the medium can and must change, he also fears that the longer the mundane on TV endures, the greater the danger that America will get desensitized to it. (David Moisl)

Dick: The Man Who Is President

By John Nichols. New Press, 224 pages, $23.95.

Many great books exposing the treachery and mendacity of the Bush administration have come out over the past year – so many, in fact, that any literate U.S. citizen who would still consider giving these extremists four more years must love money and/or war to a degree I can't fathom. Yet John Nichols, a talented investigative reporter with the Nation magazine, has written a book, Dick: The Man Who Is President, that does more to lay bare the agenda, tactics, and worldview of the Bush administration than anything I've seen.

Nichols is a funny, insightful writer, but it's the premise of his book, as spelled out in the title, that cuts to the heart of what every American needs to know right now. To truly understand Dick Cheney is to understand how and why this president makes the decisions he does. Sure, many of us have long suspected George W. Bush is a lightweight who must be getting his strings pulled by people like Cheney, Karl Rove, his daddy, and power brokers on Wall Street and in the military-industrial complex. Yet Nichols makes a compelling case that there really is just one great and powerful Oz behind the curtains, someone who has spent a lifetime preparing for an opportunity like this to seize unprecedented power. Just reading the 10-page introduction will give even the seriously studied Bush basher an "ah-ha" moment. It connects the dots – from Cheney's early power grabs, to his self-selection as the veep nominee, to the role he played on the morning of 9/11, to his formation of the administration's Iraq policy – to form a picture of Cheney as someone more like an all-powerful prime minister than a president-in-waiting.

Yet as convinced as you become of the premise even before chapter 1, this book is a page-turner – not only because of the verve and wit of Nichols's style but also because even policy wonks and history buffs will learn all kinds of relevant new details about Cheney's time in Congress and in the Nixon, Ford, and first Bush administrations. Far from the agreeable centrist that many journalists have painted him to be, Cheney has forged a record that shows him to be a dangerous, power-hungry, right-wing ideologue who never lets the facts interfere with his fanatical worldview, nor principles slow his relentless drive for absolute power. (Steven T. Jones)

Mr. Benson

By John Preston. Cleis Press, 232 pages, $14.95 (paper).

The late John Preston was a most un-Jamesian master – a writer who claimed as his venue not well-appointed drawing rooms filled with witty conversation but dark city places smelling of piss-stained leather where men put dog leashes on other men – and while no one will ever mistake his masterpiece, Mr. Benson, for The Portrait of a Lady, the novel (first published in 1983, now handsomely reissued by Cleis Press) still commands residual interest, as a glimpse into rare lives not easily imaginable by those multitudes who live otherwise and as a peek at the lost demimonde of gay New York, circa 1980.

Mr. Benson is interesting rather than good, and it is interesting chiefly because of the unintended psychological disclosures it makes about the human worship of power and the lust to be enslaved. The narrator, Jamie, is a fetching 25-year-old clone who haunts the leather bars of the West Village but isn't yet quite in touch with his bottomness. When he connects with Mr. (Aristotle!) Benson, a rich top with a whip and a plan, the circle closes in a sequence of domination-submission scenes so vivid that the lack of literary art by which they are rendered does not matter. But Mr. Benson is really two novellas, and the second – an implausibly plotted and badly written melodrama of white sex slavers who speak in the heavy, sinister accents of movie villains – nearly undoes the dark power of the first. But not quite.

Preston seems quite unselfconscious about the steep, either-or power dynamic along which he arranges his characters, and his matter-of-factness – or obliviousness – on this large point gives the novel its brutal life. I am this, you are that, and this is the only way we can relate. It may be that one reason Mr. Benson has survived is because of the challenge it mounts to more egalitarian and fluid understandings of human relations. Mr. Benson's world is strangely bifurcated – a realm of black and white instead of countless shades of gray – and though it is not a particularly pleasant place to visit, one does finally depart not merely with a sense of relief but also of having witnessed a spectacle illuminatingly other. (Paul Reidinger)