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An
Ingenious Book with a Luminous Soul
My other publisher, who will be bringing out
my next three nonfiction books over the next three years, will be mildly
annoyed at me for saying this, but if you only choose one book of nonfiction
for your bookshelf this year, choose this one. Boss Broad is pure
adrenaline magic. It is in one sense a cultural critique of the past four
decades, organized in 13 chapters, each titled after a Bruce Springsteen album.
In another sense, it’s a journey across America with a plot as complicated and
as thrilling as Homer’s Odyssey. In another sense, it’s a brilliant
piece of LBGTQ advocacy reaching out to the semi-numbed mainstream of the
nation. And in another sense, it’s a devotional to spiritual doubt, and to
Love. It can do all this with a kind of pop-culture sleight-of-the-hand that
has you at one point mourning Kurt Cobain’s suicide as the defining moment in
your generation; at another point in the audience for Stephen Colbert; at
another point in a workshop for Atlanta inner-city high school teachers; and at
another point at one of Patti Smith’s weirder gigs. The fact that this book
feels so effortless in its complexity and moves with such alacrity is all the
more testament to its brilliance. Megan Volpert
didn’t wind up as a Lambda Literary Award finalist—twice—by accident.
Organizing the book around 13 of The Boss’
albums—from the first, Greetings from Asbury Park, N. J. (1973) to Wrecking
Ball (2012) may sound both clever and worshipful, but in the hands of Volpert it inevitably becomes more complex. It’s 2019 now.
Trump is president. White supremacy is on the rise, the worst parts of the
American past are returning with a vengeance, and here and there in this book
you can tell how sad Volpert is. But she refuses to
give in. The keys to not giving in? One is rock ’n’ roll. The other is the
experience of profound, soul-filled love, and solidarity with other women who
also refuse to give in. About Springsteen and rock ’n’ roll, Volpert writes (quoting Springsteen):
“[Springsteen] believes this is the purpose
of rock music at large, this communion. ‘Rock ’n’ roll music, in the end, is a
source of religious and mystical power.’
The power of rock shows is not hat they inform
or educate, but that they are evocative of something beyond our individual
selves. ‘One plus one equals two. It keeps the world spinning. But artists,
musicians, con men, poets, mystics and such are paid to turn that math on its
head, to rub two sticks together and bring forth fire. . .People don’t come to
rock shows to learn something. They come to be reminded of something they
already know and feel deep down in their gut.’”
Volpert is greatly
interested in Springsteen’s Catholicism, but in that way that interrogates it
as a flawed and inescapable foundation. Her interest particularly interests me.
If you look at Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, for example, the
final point is that if you’re born Catholic, you are Catholic, and
nothing you do will ever change that. I myself was born a Christian Scientist,
and after about eighteen years of non-stop suffering from what is surely one of
the most foul and duplicitous religions ever founded, I began to ponder the
curious reality in the Manual of the Mother Church that basically said
if you were no longer in accord with the religion you could quit. Just like
that. A letter to the Clerk of the Mother Church would do it. And when I was
24, after watching my mother die an agonizing death from melanoma in a
Christian Science “care home,” that’s exactly what I did. Catholics don’t get
to do that. But what does it mean, really, to “be” a Catholic? Does it have to
do with the Nicene Creed? The catechism? The liturgy? The centuries of papal
encyclicals? The writings of Karl Rahner? Thomas
Merton? Thomas Keating? The massive contradictions among all of these
inheritances? Or does it have to do with what most moves Volpert—the
love that we feel “deep down in [our] gut” but for which we need others to
remind us? If love is in place, Volpert argues
(generally implicitly; in some places explicitly), the theology will take care
of itself. Meanwhile we have the music that blasts us across the years toward
home, just as Odysseus needed a decade of travail to find home again, just as Volpert herself follows a meandering yet intensely coherent
course toward a home she has not yet reached. For those of us who find
ourselves late in life, unexpectedly, to be loveless, this book is at the very
least a reminder of what used to be, and for others, still is.
Springsteen lovers will perhaps be most
taken by the table of contents—which Volpert refers
to as her “Hymnal”—and the fascinating fact that, while Volpert
chooses the best of the the best of Springsteen, she
doesn’t subtitle each chapter with the best song from each album. She often
chooses more obscure songs, and they are all in one way or another about the
women Springsteen loves—sometimes three unnamed girls, as in The River from
1980, sometimes “Mary” in “Thunder Road” and “Wendy” in “Born to Run” from the
1975 Born to Run. You get the impression that Volpert
isn’t hugely persuaded by Springsteen’s obsessions with different women over
the decades, though she’s not judgmental. If you’re not paying close attention,
when you get to the moments in each chapter when Volpert
appears to quote the very lyrics from those songs, your idling mind thinks,
“How the hell did she come up with the money for reprint rights? Each one of
those Springsteen lyrics would cost fortune to reprint, and there are 40--40!--reprints!”
But they’re not. No—these are actually 40
moments when Volpert writes back to
Springsteen, and to us, in her own poetic voice, pairing her voice in a sense
with the Boss’s. I have to say, on the one hand, that these poems aren’t very
good. On their own they’re the weakest part of this remarkable book. (To be
fair: reading these lyrics as “poems” is possibly entirely wrong-headed: you as
reader know, from various places in this book, that Volpert
has a Strat and a Fender amp and a foot-peddle console not far from her writing
desk, and depending on the music that goes with these lyrics, these could be
really good songs.) But—taken with the book as a whole—these poems work
brilliantly.
A long time ago, my most reliable poetry
workshop professor at Stanford observed that, once you had 20 or 30 or 40
poems, each of those poems became a line in what was the 21st or 31st or 41st
poem, which was the book itself. Every poem became a line in the ultimate
book-as-poem. It thus mattered hugely how you ordered your poems. A seemingly
weak poem in the right position would perfectly set up the next poem, and
strength became relative—shared across the entire structure of the collection,
even if a few poems obviously stood out. This seems to be right way to look at
how Volpert’s book in one sense comes down primarily
to its table of contents and its poems. The poems, like the author, share
strengths across the book with its luminous prose. This is very much a book
about communion, as Volpert notes of Springsteen. .
.Communion, in the end, is what defines us.
Communion is the magic that we already know,
no matter how deeply the twilight seems to darken, no matter how long
“democracy dies in darkness,” no matter how shocking the present seems to be.
As Volpert notes at one point, America has a long
history of appalling behavior. For all of her narrative pyrotechnics, Volpert can be in places shockingly simple and direct.
About Hillary Clinton, Volpert sums things up this
way 61 pages in: “We lost one very significant battle and I am hurting for
Hillary as a person—but as she herself well knows, feminism is a war of
attrition and none of us can ever give up.” The fact that roughly 48,000 people
in America give up each year through suicide is sad, but here that is not the
point. Here the point comes down to Julia Kristeva’s shortest, least known, and
most poignant book: In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith. “En arkhêi
ên ho eros [or “caritas” or
“agape”].” The rest, as Annie Dillard once observed, is gravy.
Thomas Simmons
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