carolyn kellogg

My pint-sized review of Rebecca Curtis’ short story collection Twenty Grand is in the LA Times Book Review today. Other fiction covered: Steve Almond on Love Without, a new collection from Jerry Stahl; and Carol Muske-Dukes’ fourth novel Channeling Mark Twain is reviewed by Wendy Smith.

On the nonfiction front, editor David Ulin casts a crticial eye on The Culture of Calamity by Kevin Rozario.

In short, there is no blood here, no sense of disaster as anything more than an intellectual construct, no notion that for calamity to affect us, it must touch our emotions.

That’s unfortunate, because Rozario clearly knows the territory of disaster, especially its history in America, beginning with a 1638 New England earthquake and a fire that destroyed “about fifty homes, stores, and warehouses” in Boston’s North End on Nov. 27, 1676. This is the best stuff in the book, not just because it’s largely obscure (an earthquake in New England?) but also because it allows Rozario to get at the issue of national identity when it was still in nascent form.

Ulin’s book The Myth of Solid Ground also dealt with calamity — earthquakes in particular — but managed to combine the emotional with research. Which is why I’m a bit surprised that he didn’t know New England has earthquakes.

My first earthquake experience: I’m sitting in one of the big chunky chairs of the library’s 3rd floor lounge in 10th or 11th grade. Between lines of hideous French homework I’m gazing off at, well, not much, when I realize that the chairs are moving. Stuttering across the floor. My chair is moving. I sit up, but people are slow to react. Some students don’t even wake up as their chairs move sideways. Did I imagine it? No, a couple of other students do, and we find out soon that it was an earthquake. In New Hampshire, of all places.

It was just few minutes of sleepy surprise, a welcome distraction from French subjunctives — not calamitous at all.