My Own Ground by Hugh Nissenson
Farrar, 182 pp., $7.95 Did you know that parents in Czarist Odessa purged their children with a fabulous enema device, half goose quill and half calf’s bladder? I didn’t: but now I won’t have to frisk myself for small talk at our next church dance. (See. Russians never were regular folk, despite the loud assurance of Detente. Makes me wonder what Stalin’s Great Purge looked like.) Did you know that McKinley was featured on a 1912 $10 bill? Or that peasants in the Ust-Kut wore nets of tarry horsehair against the sanguinivorous black fly? Or that some pressers on the Lower East Side took home eight cents per tweed jacket (each hot iron weighed 14 pounds)? My Own Ground is a slender museum. Hugh Nissenson’s themes are elemental and abstract. I sense that he’s been laying off on his bets. Look, Nissenson implies, maybe you won’t agree with or understand the premise of my novel, but at least you’ll pick up some hard information. I intend no snide parallel-Hugh Nissenson and Arthur Hailey should never be joined by a conjunction-still, this is the same strategy that operates in Airport or Hotel. Objects, events, processes, their authenticity will stand guarantee for less researchable matters: passion and spirit and human worth.
Comments