The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Collected Works, Volume I: 1956-1976 by Paul Metcalf
Curtis White

Paul Metcalf. Collected Works, Volume One: 1956–1976. Coffee House Press, 1996. 591 pp. $35.00.

There is a type of American genius whose genius consists largely in its uncanny ability to express the American Genus. If this type were French, we’d call it a bricoleur: a person who, lacking the “right” tool, takes whatever is at hand and makes it work. In this sense William Carlos Williams didn’t write poems because there is no “poetry” in his poems. Charles Ives didn’t write symphonies because there is no “symphony” in his symphonies. As Hugh Kenner put it, poets like Williams are makers of a “homemade world.” The reader wants to ask of this “pure product,” “Where did you find this stuff, this bric-a-brac? How and why did you cobble it together? And why in the world do you think it’s a poem/symphony/novel?” The response of this Type is most appropriately, as Williams himself put it in Kora in Hell, “I’ll do what I want when I want and it will be good if the authentic spirit of change is upon it.”

Paul Metcalf, working within this very eccentric “American grain,” is one of these seekers of the “authentic spirit.”

This is the first of three volumes collecting Metcalf’s work to be published by Coffee House in the next two years. The jewel in this first volume is the short novel Genoa. It is the densely layered story of Mike Mills, an M.D. working on an assembly line at a GM plant, who is not so much obsessed by as possessed by reveries and meditations about Herman Melville, Christopher Columbus, and his brother, Carl Mills, an executed murderer.

Mills is a character who is only superficially a part of his present moment. He has a job. His home is in the middle of the suburbs (although it itself is a nineteenth-century farmhouse). His children are being raised by the television set. Dinner comes out of the Frigidaire. In other words, he lives in a world of asphalt over history. But Mills himself is rooted through the present into the monstrous reality of the past. The old stone hearth and chimney in his mislocated home seem to radiate this past up throughthe house into the attic study where Mills reads and writes while the rest of twentieth-century America negotiates its present with “talking cereal boxes.”

Genoa is, in 1996, certainly even less “what the age demands” than it was when first published in 1965. But for those who still can imagine that language hardwires us to our own dense past, Metcalf has much to offer.

It is a book like this that makes it clear why a press like Coffee House—and independent, nonprofit publishing in general—is so critical to our collective future. [Curtis White]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Collected Works, Volume I: 1956-1976 by Paul Metcalf Curtis White Paul Metcalf. Collected Works, Volume One: 1956–1976. Coffee House Press, 1996. 591 pp. $35.00. There is a type of American genius whose genius consists largely in its uncanny ability to express the American Genus. If this type were French, we’d call it a bricoleur: a person who, lacking the “right” tool, takes whatever is at hand and makes it work. In this sense William Carlos Williams didn’t write poems because there is no “poetry” in his poems. Charles Ives didn’t write symphonies because there is no “symphony” in his symphonies. As Hugh Kenner put it, poets like Williams are makers of a “homemade world.” The reader wants to ask of this “pure product,” “Where did you find this stuff, this bric-a-brac? How and why did you cobble it together? And why in the world do you think it’s a poem/symphony/novel?” The response of this Type is most appropriately, as Williams himself put it in Kora in Hell, “I’ll do what I want when I want and it will be good if the authentic spirit of change is upon it.” Paul Metcalf, working within this very eccentric “American grain,” is one of these seekers of the “authentic spirit.” This is the first of three volumes collecting Metcalf’s work to be published by Coffee House in the next two years. The jewel in this first volume is the short novel Genoa. It is the densely layered story of Mike Mills, an M.D. working on an assembly line at a GM plant, who is not so much obsessed by as possessed by reveries and meditations about Herman Melville, Christopher Columbus, and his brother, Carl Mills, an executed murderer. Mills is a character who is only superficially a part of his present moment. He has a job. His home is in the middle of the suburbs (although it itself is a nineteenth-century farmhouse). His children are being raised by the television set. Dinner comes out of the Frigidaire. In other words, he lives in a world of asphalt over history. But Mills himself is rooted through the present into the monstrous reality of the past. The old stone hearth and chimney in his mislocated home seem to radiate this past up throughthe house into the attic study where Mills reads and writes while the rest of twentieth-century America negotiates its present with “talking cereal boxes.” Genoa is, in 1996, certainly even less “what the age demands” than it was when first published in 1965. But for those who still can imagine that language hardwires us to our own dense past, Metcalf has much to offer. It is a book like this that makes it clear why a press like Coffee House—and independent, nonprofit publishing in general—is so critical to our collective future. [Curtis White]

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