Weird Sisters

America! ÜEVIEW BOOK REVIEWS Williams continuedfrom previous page identifying a "mind," he gravitates more toward Hegel than Barbara Ehrenreich on the professional, middle class: the problem of our time and place is its Geist, its metaphysics rather than the physics of things like the distribution of resources or the status oflabor. I don't think that metaphysics is what makes people do what they do; rather, their habits and conditions make them do what they do. To change how they live, you need to give them ways to do things, to meet their situations and change them. The strange thing about The Spirit ofDisobedience is that the closing chapter records interviews with three people who have done something to provide a way out of our predicament. It is as if the person ranting has finally wound down and stops to listen to the other people at the pub. The section seems tacked on to the rest of the book, but it is the book's one mitigating virtue, at least to my mind. It tells us about John de Graaf and his work on Take Back Your Time Day, to counter the overwork—and in turn overconsumption — that most Americans are locked into. And James Howard Kunstler, who researches and writes on the ways that the physical attributes of modem American culture—especially after the automobile, with its corollaries of suburban housing and the global energy industry—have depleted our lives. And Michael Ableman, director of the Center for Urban Agriculture, recounts his work on better, more sustainable, natural food. It's not clear why these three, and why not more, and the interviews would benefit from some focused editing, as those in Tamara Draut's Strapped: WhyAmerica 's 20- and 30-Somethings Can't Get Ahead (2005), which builds a far better diagnosis of our impoverished times, particularly those who would like even a middle-class toehold. But one could imagine a book reporting on a spectrum of those likewise engaged in social experiments. To White's list I would add White himself. He has countered the corporate tide best by working to get into print the books from Fiction Collective. In one ofthe interviews, White mentions that his goal is to make people want to live differently. Rather than correcting our Spirit, I think we need more examples of DIY, telling how people are opposing the ills of early-twenty-first-century life, and less punditry. Jeffrey J. Williams 's most recent book is Critics at Work: Interviews 1993-2003 (2004), and he has been the editor ofthe minnesota review since 1992. Weird Sisters Davis Schneiderman Half Life Shelley Jackson HarperCollins http://www.harpercollins.com 448 pages; cloth, $24.95 Set like a glowing island among the dizzying archipelago of puns, jocular wordplay, and volcanic ruminations into the nature of language that together populate Shelly Jackson's brilliantly sprawling first novel, Half Life, there lurks an important "Knock, Knock" joke. OK, so who's there? "'Interrupting cow.' / 'Interru-' / 'MOO!'" A figure subtly disturbing literally everything in this wondrous book—from the two-in-one-in-two agon of bisexual conjoined twins (one body, two heads) Nora and Blanche Olney, through narrator Nora's misadventures with The Unity Foundation (a cult-like medical operation promising to cleave the sleeping-for-fifteen-years Blanche: '"We call it the Divorce'")—this Interrupting Cow creeps, at novel's end, across the Nevada wasteland near the so-called National Penitence Ground of Nora and Blanche's youth, where America bombs stylized versions of its suburban post-war life as displaced guilt from the radioactive age. It is precisely the eerie radioactivity embodied by the Penitence Ground that gives rise to the twofer population, those "plurality-challenged persons" such as Nora and Blanche, who the reader will imagine to have grown up in often relative obscurity and confusion, marked as monsters, before finding their way to affinity communities in San Francisco or London , with groups such as the Togetherists (who see twofers resulting from a "metaphysical split that took place when the first nuclear bomb was exploded"), or followers of Venn (as in the interlocking "diagram" developed by, supposedly secret conjoined twins, Joseph and...