Andrew Altschul
>Be afraid. Better still: Be alert
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“In America, we tend to think belief trumps knowledge. To tease out the truth from the fabric of lies that surrounds us requires a certain degree of intelligence. Which is bad news for us, alas.”
If you’ve read Mark Slouka’s books of fiction—the story collection Lost Lake (1998) and the novels God’s Fool (2002) and (2007)—you know that, in his heart, he’s a cartographer. He maps the relationship between the present and the past, detailing the emotional topography, shading out those zones where the borders between memory and history, fact and fiction, have become porous. The Visible World, which Booklist called “almost unbearably poignant” addresses the almost unbearable need of the living to piece together the stories of our pasts, even as the truth of those stories remains, inevitably, inaccessible. The New York Times called it “a delicately imagined and beautifully rendered novel.”
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )But there’s another side to Mark Slouka, as any regular reader of Harper’s knows. Here Slouka plays the role of a canary in the coal mine, or a Jeremiah howling into the American bazaar: “Mend thy ways!” In frequent essays and meditations, he provides incisive, sometimes blistering analyses of American politics and culture. He was a blunt and passionate critic of the Bush administration and the war in Iraq, and has recently taken aim at the failure of American higher education to produce informed citizens, as opposed to “workers.” The concerns of his fiction—our need to connect past and present, and to distinguish truth from the lie—are just as central to his nonfiction.
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