‘Hell’ a darkly comic riff on the real land down under
The temptation to construct a review of Robert Olen Butler’s novel Hell entirely from quotations and excerpts is almost more than I can resist. And really, why should I resist? In Butler’s propulsively clever yet unsettling vision of the afterlife, I would be unable to avoid eternal damnation no matter what I chose: virtue or vice, piety or sacrilege, ethical rectitude or professional whoredom.
Oh, where to begin? With our hero, Hatcher McCord, a TV anchorman in love with the sometimes headless Anne Boleyn? Satan’s minion J. Edgar Hoover in a powder-blue jumpsuit with Robin and Maurice Gibb as his singing, dancing henchmen? William Randolph Hearst as a blogger (“keeping up with advances in technology is one of the great tortures of Hell for the old-timers”)?
Herman Melville, trying to write a novel but unable to get past the first sentence (“Call me E-mail”)? An Automat frequented by Minor Prophets whose writings didn’t quite make it into the Bible? George W. Bush, so dumb and deluded he thinks he’s in Heaven? Or Satan himself, all smarmy cunning, smelling of Old Spice and complaining of father issues: “It’s all about family values,” he tells Hatcher.
Clearly, this is a Hell where people suffer for our amusement. And yet, Butler’s ability to maintain this juiced-up, darkly comic riffing throughout the entire novel is the least of his achievements. Becoming too dazzled by the manic satire risks missing the humanity beneath the surface. Not to mention the existential horror.
In life, McCord was no worse than the common run of humanity. A bit of talent and luck brought him wealth and fame as a newscaster of the Peter Jennings-Dan Rather ilk, which he used mostly to satisfying his own desires, leaving embittered wives and collateral-damage children in his wake. But did he really deserve to go to Hell?
The question plagues not only McCord, but everyone he meets in Hell, which includes not only great villains (Hitler, Stalin, Leni Riefenstahl, now Satan’s personal photographer), but also ordinary people, inoffensive celebrities (Humphrey Bogart, Sylvia Beach, Ray Kroc), and even men of God – Billy Graham exhorts Satan to stage an altar call.
Hell’s plot follows McCord as he seeks a rumored back door out. Dante may know the way, or perhaps Virgil. Judas is certain a second Harrowing is about a take place, with Jesus descending to pluck a few lucky and deserving souls to Paradise. McCord desires escape not only for his own sake but also for his beloved Anne.
Butler wisely makes his Hell more than a cardboard backdrop before which 
he can lark a succession of modernist parodies. Hell is a specific, thoroughly imagined place, a sort of Atlanta, if Atlanta were designed by Hieronymus Bosch, where all the streets are named “Peachtree.” Pleasure is impossible – Hatcher and Boleyn never succeed in consummating the act of love. Flaming sulfur rains from the sky every afternoon, melting thousands to goo. The damned are dismembered daily, only to have their fleshly bodies reconstituted so they may endure fresh agonies. This sense of endless, inescapable torture is never far from the reader’s mind, even at moments of antic hilarity.
McCord’s interview with Satan comes not at the climax of the story, where a less assured novelist might put it, pregnant with meaningful revelations, but in the middle. The one useful thing McCord learns is that contrary to common belief, Satan cannot read his thoughts. This allows Butler to regain free will, even if he cannot always act on it. He begins looking up former wives (all in Hell, too) in an attempt to make amends.
Does McCord redeem himself from past crimes, however piddling, and make it to Paradise? It would be a sin to tell – but if Sartre was right, and Hell is other people, then what is Heaven? Of course, trite though it may be to say, Butler’s subject here is not suffering among the dead in Hell, but among the living on earth. Seldom has literary fantasy turned the trick so well.
Really, it’s no more than Butler has led us to expect. Like few others, he is a gifted literary egghead who takes trash culture seriously.
After winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain, a collection of short stories about Vietnamese refugees in Louisiana, he produced fiction based on supermarket rags (Tabloid Dreams), alien abduction (Mr. Spaceman), vintage postcards (Wish You Were Here), beheading (Severance), and human copulation (Intercourse). In Butler’s later work, high culture and low marry happily, ennobling the one and re-energizing the other.
In Hell, though, Butler has cast aside the last crutch of self-conscious “fine” writing, which occasionally encumbered otherwise admirable books such as Mr. Spaceman. That’s a noteworthy breakthrough, and it gives Hell a feeling of culmination, as though Butler has reached the end of something. I look forward to what he might think of next — albeit with no little fear and trembling.
Chauncey Mabe, the former books editor of the Sun-Sentinel, can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . Visit him on Facebook.
HELL. By Robert Olen Butler; 240 pp.; Grove Press; $24.
ArtsPreview 2009-10: The season in books
Readers rejoice! The show will go on, sputtering economy notwithstanding. The book show, that is.
All five major South Florida literary festivals – Miami Book Fair International, the Key West Literary Seminar, the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, the Boca Festival of the Arts, and Broward’s Lit/Live! – are scheduled to take place over the next five months in more or less their customary glory.
That’s not to say they’ve gone entirely untouched by budget cuts or donor shortfalls. The oldest, biggest and first on the schedule, the Miami Book Fair (Nov. 8-15) finds itself obliged to raise some prices and reduce some programs. No inauguration ceremony, no International Pavilions Village, no Laugh Out Loud Cafe, no Street Fair Parade.
“It will be a more contained fair this year as we have put some favorite components on ‘pause’ until next year,” says Alina Interian, executive director of the Florida Center for the Literary Arts. “But we are confident fairgoers will enjoy this year’s program as much as ever.”
The number of writers on hand is being scaled back, too, from last year’s tally of more than 400 to slightly less than 300. Still, the list is an embarrassment of riches, led by the Turkish Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk, Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood, and former Vice President Al Gore.
Other luminaries include Sherman Alexie, Robert Olen Butler, A. Manette Ansay, Taylor Branch, Brad Gooch, Mary Gordon, Ralph Nader, Meg Cabot, Francine Prose, Iggy Pop, Barbara Kingsolver, Mary Karr, Wally Lamb, Roy Blount Jr. and Mario Van Peebles, to name but a few.
“The Fair this year is very strong in spite of the economic challenges,” says Mitchell Kaplan, owner of Books & Books bookstore in Coral Gables, co-founder of the fair. “Our lineup is as strong as ever and we're expecting a very vibrant literary week. We still believe it's still one of the best values around.”
Miami Book Fair International takes place at the Wolfson Campus of Miami-Dade College, 300 NE 2nd Ave., in downtown Miami. For directions and additional information, visit www.miamibookfair.com.
This season the Key West Literary Seminar (Jan. 7-10) celebrates Richard Wilbur, a major American poet and sometime Key West resident like such predecessors as Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop and James Merrill. A former U.S. poet laureate, Wilbur has won nearly every available literary prize.
In addition to Wilbur, the seminar features 21 top poets, among them Billy Collins, Maxine Kumin, Rita Dove, Robert Pinsky, Mary Jo Salter, Mark Stand and John Tate.
“It’s been a slow pull but we’re out of the woods,” says executive director Miles Frieden. “In a normal year a stellar roster like this would have sold out at least a year in advance. A literary excursion to Key West in January is a luxury, but our audience is passionate, and they’ve come through for us.”
The accompanying writing workshops are full, says Frieden, but a few of the 400 seats for the seminar itself are still open – a rarity for a cozy and intimate literary event that usually sells out by the preceding January.
Oddly enough, Frieden adds, the 2011 seminar, The Hungry Muse: An Exploration of Food in Literature, is already experiencing early demand. “I think we're feeling a very early literary recovery,” Friden adds. “Let's hope the general economy is not far behind.”
For more information, visit www.kwls.org, where you can also find the seminar’s excellent year-round online literary journal, Littoral.
At the Palm Beach Poetry Festival (Jan. 18-23), now in its sixth year, executive director Miles Coon met the economic challenge by taking political action. “The festival was very active in a recent letter-writing campaign that helped persuade the Board of County Commissioners to restore 80 percent of the funding for ‘small and emerging’ cultural organizations like ours,” Coon says.
This year’s slate features Carolyn Forché, Stephen Dobyns, Thomas Lux, Marie Howe, David Wojhan, Kevin Young, Mary Cornish, and Ilya Kaminsky. Workshop participants pay $725 for an advanced program and $525 for an intermediate one. A number of readings are open to the public at $12 general admission, $10 for seniors and $8 for students.
The Palm Beach Poetry Festival holds most of its events at Old School Square, 51 N. Swinton Ave., in downtown Delray Beach. For more information, visit www.palmbeachpoetryfestival.org.
The Festival of the Arts Boca (March 5-13) , an unusual pairing of music and literature, doesn’t have a name quite as gaudy as last year’s Salman Rushdie, but it’s an impressive lineup nonetheless. "Once again, the Festival of the Arts Boca will bring world-class writers to South Florida,” says Susan Resneck Pierce, literary chair.
Those writers are: presidential (and baseball) historian Doris Kearns Goodwin; writer and presidential adviser Richard Goodwin; New York Times pundit David Brooks; scholar and food writer Albert Sonnenfeld; biographer Noel Riley Fitch; and the bestselling literary novelist, Gail Godwin. Tickets go on sale in October. For more information, visit www.centre4artsboca.com.
Literary Feasts, which brings some 20 national and international writers to Fort Lauderdale each March, is still in the planning stages. Set for March 19-20, the program so far includes prize-winning literary novelist Russell Banks, acclaimed popular novelist Elizabeth Kostova, chef and food writer Poppy Tooker, historian R.B. Bernstein and the author and graphic designer Ellen Lupton.
Sponsored by the Broward County Library Foundation and Nova Southeastern University, the Night of Literary Feasts is a society fundraising event to benefit the library. There is also a day of free lectures by the attending writers, open to the public and held at the university’s main campus in Davie.
Many more names will be added to that list. For more information, check the library foundation’s Website, www.literaryfeastonline.org, over the coming months.
Chauncey Mabe, the former books editor of the Sun-Sentinel, can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . Visit him on Facebook.
Editor's note: This is one in a series of 10 stories previewing the Palm Beach County and regional arts season for 2009-10.
Bringing an ancient American city back to life
Throughout American history, Indians have been viewed as either bloodthirsty savages, to be exterminated in the name of Manifest Destiny, or, more recently, noble savages who lived in reverence of Mother Earth. Though one of these conceptions is more benign than the other, they are equally products of white condescension and bigotry. Neither leaves room for the possibility Native Americans may have been capable of developing a sophisticated urban civilization.
Timothy Pauketat’s Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi River, the latest entry in Penguin’s excellent Library of American Indian History, will come as a shock to most readers. In clear and jargon-free language, Pauketat provides what is known to date about Cahokia, an ancient city a few miles east of St. Louis that, at its height in the 13th century, had a population of 20,000 – more than contemporary London.
This thriving metropolis rivaled the more famous Mayan and Aztec cities in grandeur, scale and influence. Centered on a 100-foot high pyramid and a 50-acre plaza, Cahokia was the capital of a political-religious culture that dominated the middle portion of the North American continent.
An archaeologist and professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois, Pauketat tells three interlocking stories: how Cahokia could have been missed for 400 years; the struggles of archaeologists, often working just ahead of bulldozers, to excavate priceless sites; and the story of Cahokia itself.
One reason Cahokia went undiscovered until recent decades is that its builders used the materials at hand in the Mississippi Valley – timber, clay, sand. These structures left not the monumental ruins of, say, Mayan stone temples, but vast, eroding mounds. And these mounds were plowed by farmers, removed for housing developments, cut to make way for roads. The site is now protected as Illinois’ Cahokia State Park, but only 80 of its 120 mounds still exist.
One fascinating figure in Pauketat’s book is Henry Breckenridge, a frontier lawyer who visited Cahokia in 1811 on his way to St. Louis. With remarkable clarity, Breckenridge immediately recognized the site, with its hundreds of mounds and regular layout, as of Indian origin, “a stupendous monument of antiquity.”
His insights were ignored for more than a century, until Warren King Moorehead began digging into the mounds in 1921. Pauketat also gives credit to Preston Holder, Melvin Fowler and Warren Wittry, among other archaeologists.
Pauketat handles his historical, anthropological and archaeological material well. It’s not his fault that a hole exists in the center of the book, the hole of what is not known about the Cahokian people – who exactly they were, why they disappeared after only 150 years, who their descendants might be, or even what they called themselves. The word “Cahokia” is borrowed from a tribe that lived nearby in historic times.
But what is known thrills and disturbs. Cahokia emerged, seemingly all at once, in what Pauketat calls a “big bang," in the middle of the 11th century, possibly inspired by a supernova visible in 1054. A village, also known as Cahokia, was razed and the city built on the same site. The dynamic new culture, by means of religion, force and public ceremony, converted or subjugated populations for hundreds of miles in every direction.
As in most Native American societies, sport played a key role, although it certainly had religious meaning as well. Cahokians were mad for “chukney," a game in which spears or sticks are thrown at a disc-shaped stone rolled across the ground. Betting on the game was fierce, with some people, Paukatet says, losing all they possessed.
Human sacrifice played a “gruesome” role in Cahokian culture. Archaeologists digging into the mounds have made amazing finds, including piles of chukney stones, thousands of beads, and numerous ceremonial graves containing an astounding number of human remains. In one mound, two male bodies, buried with pomp and honor, are accompanied by 53 young women, chosen possibly for their beauty.
Cahokia was also a center of wealth, stratified between elites, who ate meat-rich diets, and everyone else, who ate mostly corn. One garbage pit contained the remains of 3,900 deer, thousands of pots, quantities of corn, pumpkin and berries, and more than a million charred tobacco seeds — evidence of gigantic festivals.
If Paukatet errs, it’s in a too-ready acceptance of the notion Cahokians were influenced by Mayan or other Central American civilizations. Human sacrifice, sophisticated astronomy, a bird-snake deity – all recall Meso-American culture. While it is possible trade existed between the Mississippi Valley and Mexico, it’s equally plausible Cahokia is an entirely North American development. After all, Indians had been building pyramids for centuries. One mound in Louisiana has been dated to 3400 B.C.
That’s a small objection in a book that does so much, so well. Although Paukatet resorts frequently to words like “possible,” or “perhaps,” as he speculates on potential connections between Cahokian culture and other known aspects of Native American belief and custom, it rarely strains credibility.
Pauketat seldom goes more than a few steps from what is actually known, to his credit as a scientist and a writer.
Chauncey Mabe, the former books editor of the Sun-Sentinel, can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . Visit him on Facebook.
CAHOKIA: Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi. By Timothy Pauketat; 194 pp.; Penguin; $22.95.
Ex-FDA chief lays out map of our flabby discontent
After remaining stable for generations, Americans’ body weight suddenly began to spiral upward in recent decades. The average weight for women in their 20s soared from 128 pounds in 1960 to 157 pounds in 2000. Those numbers are included in The End of Overeating, David A. Kessler’s fascinating new book exploring the causes of weight gain along with strategies to take off the pounds, which have led to an explosion of diabetes cases and other serious illnesses.
Kessler has excellent credentials. He led the U.S. Food and Drug Administration under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton; he is perhaps best remembered for his aggressive campaign against Big Tobacco.
The shift toward excess food consumption coincided with shrewd strategies by restaurant chains. Half of today’s food dollars are spent in restaurants. Marketers found they could make food more appealing by stuffing it with fat, sugar and salt in enticing combinations. In a little more than three decades, per-capita consumption of fat and oils jumped from 53 to 86 pounds.
“Fat helps flavors merge and meld, creating a smooth sensation as it brings disparate ingredients together in a symphonic whole,” Kessler writes.
Panera Bread offers fancy bagels larded with sugar, fat and salt. Burger King’s breakfast sandwich features four eggs, four strips of bacon and four slices of cheese. Hardee’s Monster Thickburger, with 1,420 calories, is stuffed with bacon, cheese, mayonnaise and butter. Starbucks’ Strawberries & Crème Frappuccino comes with whipped cream and 18 teaspoons of sugar.
Foods high in sugar, fat and salt rewire the brain, the author says, making it more likely that customers will return again and again.
Kessler compares the allure of restaurant food to addictions involving drugs, alcohol and gambling, and cites studies involving animals and humans to bolster his point.
Marketers test foods to create combinations that will turn eating into an irresistible experience. Advertising pushes the theme that hard-working, stressed people deserve the treats they crave. Restaurants offer all-you-can-eat specials, supersize portions and processed foods that go down quickly and easily.
“By eliminating the need to chew, modern food processing techniques allow us to eat faster,” Kessler says. “Refined food simply melts in the mouth.” Kessler rejects the common notion that eating in moderation is simply a matter of willpower.
Although he notes the correlation between overeating and various other addictions, he fails to make the obvious point that no one has to drink alcohol, use drugs, gamble or smoke to stay alive, which is not the case with food.
Changing any ingrained habit, including what we eat, is difficult. Kessler recommends that people adopt sensible meal plans and stick to them. Just as eating junk food is a habit, eating nutritious food can become a substitute habit. He advocates consuming high-fiber or complex carbohydrates, such as whole grains and vegetables, combined with protein and a small amount of fat.
Kessler also advocates listing calorie counts on restaurant menus, showing the percentage of added sugars, refined carbohydrates and fats on all food products, and conducting more public education.
These are useful points, yet everything must begin with an individual’s decision to change, just as with any addiction or habit.
The End of Overeating reflects considerable research. Kessler interviewed scores of scientists and physicians, and he lists every one of them (more than 160) in the back of the book. At times the book bogs down in jargon, such as “asymmetrical selection pressure,” and references that might interest scientists, but are likely to bore general readers.
Kessler acknowledges his personal interest in food addiction. “For much of my life,” he writes, “sugar, fat and salt held remarkable sway over my behavior. I have lost weight, gained it back, and lost it again – over and over and over.”
I wish that Kessler had gone into greater detail about his own struggle, but perhaps that is a subject for another book. Another sequel might be a book with more practical diet tips and less theory.
Bill Williams is a freelance writer in West Hartford, Conn., and a former editorial writer for The Hartford Courant. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.
THE END OF OVEREATING: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite, by David A. Kessler, M.D.; 320 pp., Rodale; $25.95.
Ali shows deft plotting hand in 'Kitchen,' but overwrites like the Dickens
One of the knocks on modern literary fiction is that it seldom shows people at work, where, after all, most of us spend the preponderance of our time. And yet, as Monica Ali inadvertently demonstrates with In the Kitchen, it is possible to go too far in the opposite direction. Showing the tedium of a working life is one thing. Making it tedious for the reader is quite another.
That’s not to say Ali (at right) lacks novelistic gifts. She’s best known for her first novel, Brick Lane (2003), which garnered rapturous reviews, sold like crazy in Britain and America, and became a finalist for the Man Booker Prize. The story of a Bangladeshi girl who immigrates to London for an arranged marriage to a much older man, it displayed a sure hand with a large cast of characters.
In the Kitchen presents a complicated storyline with a richly diverse cast of characters, too. To Ali’s credit there is scarcely a South Asian among them. Clearly, she is a writer unwilling to return to the scene of past triumphs. Her protagonist, in fact, is the thoroughly Anglo-Saxon Gabriel Lightfoot, a 42-year-old chef on the verge of opening his own restaurant. He has the backing of two rich and connected London businessmen, but for the moment he’s proving his mettle at the Imperial, a once-posh hotel. If he can turn this kitchen around, then he’s fit to run his own place.
Gabriel is hardworking and knowledgeable, and though he firmly manages his staff of Senegalese, Ukrainian, Jamaican and Scottish workers, he’s not the bully we might expect from those celebrity chef reality shows on TV. He seems to deserve the professional leap he’s about to make. He’s also close to asking his girlfriend, a beautiful and emotionally stable jazz singer named Charlie, to marry him.
So of course the pressures mount. At the start of the book a Ukrainian porter is found dead in the kitchen’s basement, drawing police and press attention to the hotel. Gabriel grows increasingly frustrated by the work ethic of his Jamaican sous-chef. The hotel manager is up to something shady, though Gabriel can’t quite figure out what. And his father, back home in Northern England, is dying.
Ali does so much so well with this elaborate scenario that it is hard to figure out why In the Kitchen is so unsatisfying. She fearlessly moves from character to character, sketching credible personalities of people from a multiplicity of cultures. She’s deft with dialect, whether Jamaican, Scottish, Russian, or working-class English. She maneuvers a complex array of storylines, all seen strictly from Gabriel’s point of view, in just the right way to maximize tension and suspense. Still, reading this book can be a slog. Brick Lane has been called “Dickensian,” and the same can be said of In the Kitchen – only now that’s not entirely a compliment. Ali seems to have come under the misapprehension that Dickensian means not only richly peopled and plotted, but also verbose. Accordingly, she burdens the narrative with sludgy descriptive passages:
The morning was brittle-bright, and Gabriel stood in the frost-starched loading bay watching the cheese van pull in through the gates. A single white cloud stood in the hard blue sky. Beyond the courtyard, London hummed its early morning song, endlessly reverberating, one crescendo piling into the next. A black bird flew down from the wall and pecked the moss between the cobblestones…
London hummed? The sky was blue? Please.
Ali also has an irritating habit of stating the obvious. Catering a corporate gala at the hotel, Gabriel is chatting with his secret backers when a woman comes up to one of them, a member of Parliament, and says, “Excuse me – hope you don’t mind me asking, but – are you somebody?” That’s clear and funny. Or at least it’s funny until Ali expends the entire next paragraph explaining the irony of it to us.
In fairness, the gears start to mesh about halfway through. Gabriel’s greatest pressures are the ones he manufactures for himself, sabotaging his chances at success and happiness. He takes a woeful Russian prostitute under his protection, hiding her in his apartment and putting his relationship with Charlie at risk. Impulsively, he travels to visit his father and sister, absentmindedly missing an important meeting with his backers.
During this trip to Northern England, though, In the Kitchen begins to find its legs. Talking with his father, and even more so his fat, superficial sister, Gabriel is shocked to discover that almost everything he remembers about his childhood, especially his beloved dead mother, is false. What’s more, Ali brings a sharp yet affectionate focus to bear on the lives and attitudes of “real” English people, working-class whites and their deep if passive resentment of the immigrants in their midst.
Ultimately, In the Kitchen is not merely the story of one man’s unwilling journey to self-knowledge. It’s also a keen portrait of a changing nation, a former imperial power losing its identity — it’s no accident the hotel where Gabriel oversees a mongrel staff is called the “Imperial.”
But all this texture and thematic depth is smothered beneath a blanket of unfortunate writing.
Chauncey Mabe, the former book editor for the Sun-Sentinel, can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . Visit him on Facebook.
IN THE KITCHEN, by Monica Ali, Scribner, 448 pp., $26.