Not recognized good writer; great grandson of Herman Melville. ( )

Some remarks on "Genoa," which is one of the novels collected here. The book, "Genoa," is astonishing, among the most powerful modernist novels I've read. Ostensibly, it's a series of quotations from Melville's novels and letters, and from Chrstopher Columbus's writing and from accounts of his voyages. Ostensibly, those quotations are running through the mind of a man who lives in the Midwest, in an old house, pondering questions of writing, travel, gestation, and deformity. Ostensibly, again, all the man does is think, pace, and smoke a cigar: we don't watch him writing. The quotations simply occur to him. Coffee House Press has done a magnificent job designing the pages so that the quotations are distinguished by indentation, by italics and boldface, and by font size. The result is graphical pages that aren't obtrusive or precious, and that's crucial, because this is not a visual book in the sense of Anne Carson's "Nox."

But that is just the surface. Somewhere Metcalf says that he doesn't know how good a writer he is, but he knows he's a great reader. That shows on almost every page. The narrator's mind moves back and forth between Melville's texts and Columbus's texts, weaving them into stories of the narrator's own family. Normally, that would be a recipe for fragmentation and inertia, as it is in so many other books comprised largely, or partly, of quotations. (Most recently, David Shields's awful "Reality Hunger.") But Metcalf's sense of tone, metaphor, subject, allusion, parallelism, and allegory, are supple, subtle, and fluid. Each page presents new and unexpected kinds of connections. Often, reading a quotation from Melville or Columbus, I wondered what the connection was, and often, I was delighted to discover a new kind of link: not just a new connection, but a new species of connection. Metcalf must have been one of modernism's best close readers, and his continuously shifting sense of how passages can be chained together keeps "Genoa" going, and gives it a strong momentum and a "mysterious" coherence (as a reviewer said).

The links between passages puts Walter Benjamin to shame: Benjamin's choices, when they can be determined, are much more stolid and thematicaly motivated. Metcalf is closer to Wiliam Carlos Wlliams's "Paterson," but even that book has clearly motivated sorts of segues. "Genoa" is a master class in the weaving of texts.

All that is only one dimension of the book, because about halfway through we suddenly start hearing about the narrator's brother, who was in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in China. The brother witnessed the horrors that have been so thoroughly documented outside of Japan, and reading about them brings the book, which was already infused with powerful, masculine, mid-century, Melville-style metaphors, into the harsher lights of torture and pain. From that point to the end of the book, the narrator's pale life and his scattered imaginings (and his compulsive returns to Melville) are all made to work even harder, in order that they can make contact with the passages on torture and murder.

It is an amazing book, the best of its kind (the "kind" made of appropriated texts), and should be on the reading list of everyone interested in modernist collage, postmodern pastiche, the art of appropriation, found texts, and what Marjorie Perloff calls the unoriginal. ( )