All Hail Graywolf, etc.

The third Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize book is Terese Svoboda’s Black Glasses Like Clark Kent and, like Kate Braverman’s Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles and Ander Monson’s Neck Deep, the book’s a formal phenomenon, structurally interesting and likely to get pegged, somewhat incorrectly, as “experimental.” What the book for sure is is: great and interesting and a good read and, in the best possible way, containing that vital element of some of the best nonfiction books, Black Glasses Like Clark Kent has a conscience.

 

The structure’s basic enough: Svoboda’s uncle was an MP in occupied Japan, after the end of World War II. After a lifetime spent stolid and hardworking—well, it’s there in the title, Clark Kent, right?—he falls into a depression, unable to break out of it. He tells his niece that he has a story to tell her, one worth retelling, about his experiences after the war. He sends her tapes of his story, and she transcribes them. He hints at a clincher moment, something astounding enough to make the story more worthwhile and pressing than any of the author’s other obligations (and she’s a fiction and poetry writer, and a mom, and you’ve got to sort of figure the list of things she’s got to keep her busy is likely long as a train). Then he kills himself.

 

The secret Terese Svoboda’s uncle may or may not have carried for nearly 60 years is that the United States killed some of its own men after the war, in a dingy prison in Japan, on a gallows draped in black. No joke. It’s weird and awful enough to consider the Army killing its own lawbreaking members (no matter how sensical it is that, as a corporation, the Army’s got “kill people” listed in its job description), but as Svoboda’s uncle begins his hinting game with his niece, the story of Abu Ghraib breaks. Suddenly an old Svoboda family story—true or false or mythic or whatever—about strange treatment at prisons half a world away takes on, shall we say, a deeper resonance.

 

There’s no way to argue that a storyteller (musician, author, painter, someone who kisses you) doesn’t know what’s coming next, which is why this seems to be such a hard point to make (or it’s proving difficult for me to write, anyway): lots of why Black Glasses Like Clark Kent works so well is because there feels to be an element of surprise on the part of the author. The best stories, of course, carry a surprise for the witness/listener/reader—and the very best contain surprises that somehow feel inevitable as well. What Svoboda’s done in weirdly deceptive ways (coming all the way clean: I didn’t like this book right when I finished it, but over the next few days, like to a painting I couldn’t quite tease apart, I kept returning to the book, surprised and still curious) is woven her own surprise into the narrative, her own reticence and confusion and wonder and hope and hopelessness so that it’s not simply a book about what may or may not have happened to and/or because of her uncle sixty years ago in Japan, but also about how that information is shaped and shaping, how it morphs and shifts and takes on or sloughs off weight depending on circumstance, history, etc.

 

She cops to all this, too, Svoboda does: “Who tells any war story is what is important, that is, who has the authority to tell it, and then when and why.” Questions of authority are, of course, the heart of war stories: it’s infinitely more urgent to hear a soldier’s firsthand account of something experienced than to read some DoD memo of it. Which is, curiously, the buzzing call at the heart of Svoboda’s thin and beautiful book: that we’re no longer in the presence of a generation anyone would mistake for the “Greatest”; that the “official” story, cluttered and sutured with words thick enough to dam rivers of outrage, may not be the story we need most to hear; and that, despite the inherent confusion of any story, especially any war story (would you be surprised to know that Svoboda, in her research, finds conflicting accounts of the hangings—at the hands of MPs—that her uncle hinted at but never spoke of?), the stories must be told. And maybe most important (since it’ll depend on the reader whether or not one feels this book “concludes” satisfactorily): the telling of a story, sometimes, must be enough. The luxury of a true and complete account of anything is almost laughable, and history seems to have a good grip on that fine, final thread. What we have to do, living within history, is tell whatever we can, whatever we know, and Svoboda’s written a great book both about an actual incident and the telling.

 

(Just for the record, too: can we all just nominate Graywolf as the best small press in the world? And can all of us who are both from and forever devoted to Minnesota just kiss the damned ground every time we’re in the state for being the magic sort of place that lets things like Graywolf not only happen but flourish? Also: T. Svoboda’s Tin God is miraculous: buy that one too).