Dark Waves and Light Matter (review)

246Fourth Genre of the fictional Star Trek Captain James T Kirk ("Future Tense"), as when he's writing about mechanical milking systems ("The Proper Level of Vacuum"), or describing a visit to the house depicted in Grant Wood's famous painting ("The Other Houses in Eldon, Iowa"). Martone's coUection is a welcome addition to an important and growing body ofliterature defining the new reality ofthe Midwest. Martone's essays belong on a shelf with the fiction of Jane Smiley and the poetry of Ted Kooser. "To write about the Midwest is to cast a web in those spaces and then waiting patiently for things to begin to stick." The Flatness and Other Landscapes casts a wide net, and makes quite a haul. Reviewed by MarcJ. Sheehan Dark Waves and Light Matter by Albert Goldbarth The University of Georgia Press, 1999 177 pages, cloth, $21.95 "When we think about the present,"Albert Goldbarth writes in the middle of Dark Waves and Light Matter, "we need a pattern." Helpful acknowledgment from an essayist who assembles a wildly humane order from disparate parts. Goldbarth's overarching concern in this coUection of personal essays is how our history is remembered, how our future is created, and how our past's ever-evolving obsolescence saturates the present with longing. These essays assume their shape as the author's wide-ranging curiosity and democratic practice in cultural interpretation barrel through history—both the world's and his own—in an attempt to link flash points of the past, some epochal, many trivial, into a sense of order that reminds us that beneath the dusty categories of human history lies human desire. Dark Waves and Light Matter is a remarkable book. Goldbarth achieves a kind ofliterary omniscience that moves through time and space with a rambUng interest in humanity and the imagination. He presents an astonishing range of subjects, from ancient myth rituals, nineteenth-century science, and Frankenstein movies to transistor radios, sci-fi comic books, and Walt Whitman—with more in between. Goldbarth holds our incongruous documents of the past up to the Ught of his near-manic regard, and truth and relevance are revealed in invisible ink. A proUfic poet, Goldbarth is the author of two previous coUections of personal essays, A Sympathy of Souls (1990) and Great Topics of the World Book Reviews247 (1994). Characteristically, he assembles his essays in segments, accumulating through a fierce imagination a near-cinematic synthesis ofthe personal and the global, and, very often, the intersteUar. His essays locate themselves within the cinematic tradition of dynamic or rhythmic editing: his resdess eye jump-cuts from century to century, culture to culture, high art to low art, stranger to famüy member, in a seemingly random manner, achieving a montage narrative that is, at first blush, difficult for the reader to track. Goldbarth's modus operandi is to begin an essay by introducing a person, an anecdote, a concrete detail, and then to build narrative and meaning around it, later reveaUng the context and specifics (his aunt, an aUeged UFO abduction , Rembrandt's warehouse of coUected items, for example). In this way the reader is cut adrift in Goldbarth s imaginative piecing-together ofa universe , bouncing from significance to ephemera, epoch to epoch, Uke a radio wave. Like aU great segmented essays, the most successful pieces in Dark Waves and Light Matter accumulate significance through the proximity of separate-but-related truths, reveaUng a larger narrative. The strongest essays locate points of intersection between Goldbarth's own personal history (second-generation Jew, born and raised in Chicago, divorced and remarried, insatiably inquisitive) and culture and history at large. In "Keepers of the Flame" Goldbarth narrates a Utany of loss both famiUar and cultural, starting the essay in groundless fashion with a nameless pyromaniac ("he") in a psychiatric hospital who, many pages later, turns out to be Goldbarth's Uncle Lou's business partner Laszlo, who torched his and Lou's accordion-case factory for insurance money: this family fact centers the essay. But reducing a scholarship-laden Goldbarth essay to its "story" is an exercise in futiUty: there is no single narrative around which other narratives might coü in...