"When a bird breaks the line of the window it surprises me almost as much as a word."

In the acknowledgments for his latest novel, Zoli, Colum McCann suggests that it is "the novelist's privilege to play the fool, rushing in where others might not tread" (331). And so he does: the novel takes as its subject a Romani singer and poet, Zoli, who negotiates the tensions among tradition, self-expression, cultural heritage, and activism. Zoli breaks tradition by learning to read, by writing out her poems (a taboo in a culture that values transience and orality over fixedness and documentation) and this conflict is at the heart of McCann's project.



The book, in a similar fashion to McCann's earlier works, updates the genre of the historical novel. Romani culture during the mid- to late-twentieth century is a deftly selected topic for such an update. Allow me to explain. In his seminal definition of historical novels, the Marxist theorist György Lukács discusses the social and economic contexts that give rise to any given text. He insists that successful historical fiction exhibits an understanding of the "specifically historical," in other words, "the derivation of the individuality of the characters from the historical peculiarity of their age" (19). He points out that historical novels developed in part thanks to the paradigmatic shift that occurred during the revolutionary (and successive) wars of the Enlightenment: hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of soldiers from all backgrounds were exposed (suddenly and en masse) to vastly different cultures (think of those French peasants fighting in Egypt, in Russia). This exposure gave rise to a popular ability to comprehend ones own condition as specifically, culturally and economically situated (24). It makes obsolete the intellectual laziness of taking ones own condition for granted. Given his position, Lukács is a staunch supporter of realist historical novels insofar as they expose historical conditions as varied and particular. What I see in McCann is a shift in the notion of what a realist representation of an individual's historical condition might be.

Consider: Zoli is Romani. She is a marginalized member (since she breaks taboos) of a marginalized group, a group that (significantly) wanders. In the context of Lukács' observations, wandering can take on a political significance. In wandering, in maintaining a strictly marginal existence, Zoli achieves a broadened sense of her own historical positionality. The specificity and peculiarity of the spacio-temporal representations McCann makes, then, are never the product of an automatic assumption that his own historical position is the default.

McCann, himself, is a wanderer as well. Born and educated in Ireland, he now teaches and lives in New York. As a practicing (and prolific) writer, he travels to various countries on book tours, which is itself another form of wandering. I also think it's significant that McCann is something of an academic "wanderer." He teaches in the academic nether-world of creative writing. Situated not quite in the realm of the humanities, nor firmly in the world of the Fine Arts (a monicker usually reserved for Visual, Dramatic, and Musical Arts), creative writers are marginalized academics who, often, exist on the edges of fairly insular disciplines.

What I observe in Zoli (and in other novels by McCann, as well) is a kind of blending of genre: the historical novel meets memoir, prose meets the structural imperative of contemporary epic poetry. This blending, as I see it, demands a certain broadened perspective in the reader; one begins to understand that her expectations for what it is that a historical novel does are themselves historically situated (within academe, within a canon of endorsed literary endeavors).

• • •

I'm going to stop here, I think. This is, by far, the most scholarly thing I have written since I finished graduate school (in 2006) and, I must say, it took me by surprise as it was flowing from my fingertips. I did not sit down this morning—sun shining on the hardwood floors, Bon Iver on the record player, omelet ingredients just waiting for me to assemble them (goodness me, I'm hungry!)—intending to write what amounts to a kind of lazy and whimsical, yet academic, essay. And yet, here I am. Old habits die hard.