192 Poetry for Students
time, she was teaching creative writing at USC, in
the same department as T. C. Boyle. The novel is
about a scientist, Esme Charbonneau, who makes
a brilliant but highly technical discovery in physics.
“That novel came out of reading a very beau-
tiful novel by Charles Baxter, First Light.I fell in
love with that book, which is about a woman who
is an astrophysicist, who has a deaf child. Baxter
is great at showing how the child enters the world
in a different way that really captured my imagi-
nation. I knew I couldn’t just cop his idea, but I de-
cided I’d write about a chemist who wants to be a
cosmologist.” That she would have to use a whole
different vocabulary did not seem daunting. “I like
the vocabularies of other disciplines. I had an in-
teresting experience when I was researching this
book, because I went to a scientist at USC with var-
ious questions, and before he explained things to
me, he asked me, what level of calculus do you
have? Or trigonometry? Or algebra? And I kept
shaking my head. So he said, I’m going to have to
use lay language? And it turned out that when he
used ‘Jay’ language, he started giving me
metaphors and analogies—as you would get, noto-
riously, in poetry.” In the book, Esme’s life comes
apart as she tries to develop a purely theoretical in-
sight into the origin of the universe. “I got some
odd reactions to that book. A scientist from San
Diego told me that I was doing a disservice to
women in science by showing this woman as un-
stable. I tried to explain that it was fiction.” Sav-
ing St. Germwas also published by Viking.
Her current novel was inspired by Evelyn
Waugh’s The Loved One.“I thought I might do
something in a comic vein like that. So in St. Paul,
I talked to funeral home directors. But the satiric
impulse in the novel petered out as I got more in-
terested in Boyd. Now that David has died, I have
more perspective on her. I think maybe I didn’t al-
low Boyd to be as shocked—as traumatized—as
she would have been. This novel had nothing to do
with David. He was pyrotechnically active, and you
simply wouldn’t have suspected that he had ad-
vanced coronary artery disease.”
She has nothing but praise for her new publisher,
Random House, who will also be publishing her book
of essays, Married to the Icepick Killer: A Poet in
Hollywood,next year. She likes it that her editor
there, Daniel Menaker, is an author himself. When
Random House took her novel, she was between
agents. On the recommendation of Menaker, she
went to Molly Friedrich, who has “been more than
good, she’s been a source of strength, a real friend.”
Muske-Dukes is also pleased with the look of the
novel, which features, on its cover, a reproduction of
a painting by the Flemish master Joachim Patinir,
Charon Crossing the Styx, showing a gigantic ferry-
man of death steering a pale, dwindled, suppliant fig-
ure across a glassy sheet of water to a shore upon
which a signal fire, or funeral pyre, has been lit. The
painting complements not only this novel, with its
subtly woven tension between the transitions of
everyday life and the aura of myth, but also the striv-
ing in her work to understand the emotional tug pro-
duced by the stubborn particularity, the finitude, of
objects and persons. As she put it in a poem in Red
Trousseau:“The rest of it, you see, / is my work:
slowing the mind’s quick progress / from the hyp-
notic of that startled world / to the empty solicitation
of metaphor / the loathsome poetic moment.”
Source:Roger Gathman, “Carol Muske-Dukes: The Cruel
Poetries of Life,” in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 248, No. 25,
June 18, 2001, p. 52.
Sources
Craft, Kevin, “The Sparrow, the Fall; Carol Muske-Dukes
and the Awful Tangle of Language and Fate,” in The
Stranger, Vol. 13, No. 31, April 15–21, 2004, p. 49.
Dings, Fred L., Review of Sparrow, in World Literature To-
day, Vol. 78, No. 3–4, September–December 2004, pp.
101–102.
Hoffert, Barbara, “Best Poetry of 2003: Ten Titles, Four
Collections from Major Poets, and Four Anthologies,” in Li-
brary Journal, Vol. 129, No., 7, April 15, 2004, pp. 88–89.
Lorde, Audre, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” in By Herself:
Women Reclaim Poetry, edited by Molly McQuade, Gray-
wolf Press, 2000, pp. 365–66.
Muske-Dukes, Carol, “Our Side,” in Sparrow: Poems, Ran-
dom House, 2004, pp. 60–61.
Scharf, Michael, Review of Sparrow, in Publishers Weekly,
Vol. 250, No. 25, June 23, 2003, p. 61.
Tucker, Ken, Review of Sparrow, in the New York Times
Book Review, July 6, 2003, p. 20.
Further Reading
Ikeda, Daisaku, Unlocking the Mysteries of Birth and Death:
And Everything in Between, a Buddhist View of Life, 2nd
ed., Middleway Press, 2004.
Daisaku Ikeda, a winner of the United Nations
Peace Award, presents an easy-to-read and easy-to-
understand introduction to Buddhism, which explores
people’s interconnectedness to one another and all
things of the world.
Our Side
