Second Course

Page 22 American Book Review Second Course Alicia Ostriker Dinner with Osama Marilyn Krysl University of Notre Dame Press http://undpress.nd.edu 194 pages; paper, $20.00 Did you read that title right? Yes. Is it a cookbook ? No. Is it some kind of a joke? Well, yes and no. Was it really published by the profoundly earnest University of Notre Dame Press? Why, yes. But before I begin to carry on about this book, I’d like to back up and take a breath. A poet, fiction writer, and essayist, Marilyn Krysl is known both for her lively sestinas and for her accounts of volunteering with a human rights nongovernmental organization in war-torn Sri Lanka and at Mother Teresa’s home for the destitute and dying in Calcutta. She has written two books of poems commissioned by the National League on Nursing, though she is not herself a nurse. Dinner with Osama is a book of tragicomic stories, meditations, and a novella, written in a style that’s fast, snarky, parodic, anguished, passionately engaged politically, screamingly funny, seriously erotic, vastly maternal. Think Grace Paley, updated and without the Yiddish accent. An equal opportunity satirist happy to skewer the bleeding heart lefty she herself is, her finger is on the pulse of political correctness along with political infamy. Here’s the opening of the title story: I’m on the Boulder mall half an hour before my herbal wrap appointment, shopping for an eyeliner not tested on rabbits, when I get the idea: Why not ask Bin Laden over for a glass of Chardonnay and something light but upscale? Me, Sheila, your average liberal neocolonial with a whiff of Cherokee thrown in way back when. Krysl’s Boulder has been officially declared a compassionate city by its city council, which means it has “more meditation per square mile than in Lhasa and Varanasi combined,” a Negative Attitude Ordinance which will get you arrested if you oppose stem-cell research, and a Nonslaughter of Mosquitoes policy which requires all residents to use DEET pending the importation of an appropriate mosquito predator. Not that all is completely peaceful. Sheila’s neighbors hurl habitual insults on the stairwell: —Hey, you with the clitoridectomy ! Rachel shouts from the landing. —Where’s your jallabiya husband?At the mosque with his rear end in the air? Rehima hurls another rock up the stairs. —Have you crawled past sniper to get to water truck?! Have you given birth to sixth child while standing at army checkpoint? When Osama arrives with his dialysis machine, courtesy of the corner gyro seller, and Sheila feeds him the “Salmon à la Tetsuya topped with chives and kombu on a bed of rice paper noodles surrounded by parsley oil and ocean trout caviar, ” world peace seems almost at hand. But not quite; for the dark ending of the story, think Kurt Vonnegut. One of Krysl’s fantasies features Hathor, the Egyptian love-goddess, checking Boulder out for an appropriate annual male sacrifice. Two pieces explore the passion, pleasure, and greed of motherdaughter love. A story called “Belly” celebrates the way the female belly “ranks up there with the great universals: love, death, and the changing of the seasons .” It’s also a story about friendship, betrayal, and generosity. Krysl advocates love in all its forms, not least the forms of sex. She would be a supporter of the William Blake who claimed in “The Marriage of Heaven & Hell” that it is better to murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires, that Energy is Eternal Delight, and that everything that lives is holy. When a belly-praising female protagonist sees her lover caressing her best friend’s hitherto-rejected belly in the supermarket, she tackles jealousy nobly in an imaginary dialogue with Charlie Rose. “What’s important,” she asks herself, “Having a dog on a leash or putting more love into the world?” This kind of chipper tone is a constant in Krysl’s work. Krysl has a habit of addressing the reader when niceness threatens to overwhelm, teasing us for our addiction to fictional conflict. She addresses us as well, however, and with pointed detail, on topics such as...