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Jacob Eigen's The Twenty-First Century

Dear Friends,

I’m starting a new section. These are write-ups of books by people I know. They’re a bit different from the ‘New(ish) Books’ since, here, I’m basically cheering on friends as opposed to trying to speak sense to a wayward publishing industry. I’m looking forward to reading more books by people on this platform. If you have a manuscript, please let me know!

Best,

Sam

JACOB EIGEN’s The Twenty-First Century (2024)

In retrospect, my college cohort were, as our professor Bill Deresiewicz cruelly but accurately put it, ‘excellent sheep’ — taking the path of least possible resistance to whatever notch in the establishment would have us — but at the time, within the depths of the student body, there was a very different energy that seemed to be prevalent. The people who seemed really admirable, who attracted the most attention — at least in my circles — had an almost overpowering gentleness. I remember being actually intimidated by this gentleness and atmosphere of otherworldliness —I felt really grotty by comparison. These were the people, good without trying to be good, lyrical without being precious about it, from whom a lot was really expected. In a different era and country, the Cambridge term for people like this was that they were ‘apostolic.’

G.E. Moore. Apostolic.

I haven’t heard all that much from people who fit this description — communications since we’ve graduated have mostly been dominated by things like social media — but it’s a real treat for me to see a volume by Jacob Eigen, who was among the gentlest and most unworldly of anybody on campus, and to have the taste of that era come flooding back.

Some of the aesthetic struggle that we were all having at the time was trying to figure out how modern to be — how much we wanted to be aligned with pop culture, how much we wanted to move into a register that was deliberately anachronistic — and part of what everybody liked about Jacob was that he seemed to have less trouble with that than others did: if he was obviously a poetic sort of person (that was kind of his identity like somebody else might have been ‘a football player’) he was also surprisingly earthy, watched reality TV, took the Knicks’ misfortunes very personally, had developed a chewing tobacco habit under the equivocal influence of Deep Springs. There is some of that aesthetic struggle still discernible in The Twenty First Century — there’s a gothic streak, a prose poem/flash fiction streak, a few poems that dissolve into exotic fantasy or preciousness, some that feel like they’re kind of searching for a genre — but, when the sweet spot is hit, somewhere between a casually contemporary and timeless sensibility, the poems are as good as anything I’ve ever read.

‘Soul,’ the strongest poem in the collection, kind of covers everything you might need to know about life. “Crushed by its parents’ union / it foams up and spills over / into the realm of substances,” it opens. If it’s mystical at times, the heart-stopping lines mostly have to do with the placid, soothing America of the ’90s and ’00s — a sort of suspended paradise of easy-to-use, affordable consumer goods. Here is how the infancy of the soul is rendered:

Only the sensation of motion

reminds it that wherever

it had existed, it had existed

swaying, which is why

its parents put it to sleep

in the Saab, driving in circles

And here is the soul attempting to come to terms with the fact of death:

The warm things are living,

the cold things are dead.

…

But what about the Xeroxes

its father sometimes gives it,

still warm from the green light?

What we notice about the craft is, first of all, the life of objects — which has something in common, distantly, with Bruno Schulz and, closer to home, with Joshua Ferris’ ability to find wonder in office life. In The Twenty-First Century, the crunching sound of a miniature golf ball disappearing at the end of the last hole produces a disquisition on physics and the mysteries of non-existence; and the scent of seaweed in a rental car generates a strikingly aphrodisiac effect. But what really gives the poems their power is a very warm, very boyish sense of humor. The climax of the ‘Soul’ poem, which is meant to be also the kind of climatic moment, the purest distillation, of the protagonist’s life, is a very tender joke:

Like the argument about what to send

into space. Its friend said Shakespeare,

but it wanted to send slips of paper

from Chinese fortune cookies,

so that many years from now

the aliens might find something

that said GOOD LUCK

IS COMING YOUR WAY  —

By the way, as befits a Jewish poet from Brooklyn, Chinese food looms very large in this collection. Life, as the old saying sort of has it, mostly happens while you’re waiting for your food in a Chinese restaurant. Several poems notice the fish in the fish tanks of restaurants; or the characters meditate on the cosmos over “many bowls of clouded broth.” This is related to the real crux of the collection, which is of trying to wrest meaning from the difficult, depressive period after college, when life has no obvious trajectory, when daily life sinks more and more into grotty routine, and gentleness seems like more a liability than any kind of positive trait. In the midst of a conversation with a fly in his Queens apartment, the fly asks the narrator (speaking of Thai food, this time):

I too lived in Queens, but I never left

my apartment. Balancing

The takeout on your handlebars,

weaving your way through the slush —

what did you think you would find

out there?

That’s the critical question that I wish the volume as a whole had circled around a little more consistently. There are hints in it of darker, more difficult emotions. The soul, at one stage of its journey, thinks: This is not its life / Then it lies in bed and hangs its head / over the edge of the mattress / like a bat.

There are promising relationships that summarily vanish — women remembered by some observation that they made once. That emotional nexus is, I expect, where future volumes would tend to gravitate — towards the absence of meaning, towards the struggle of being a basically-good person in a not-very-good world.

The more playful, far-fetched poems — with viziers and Russian ingénues and Boethius’ corpse — are harder to know what to do with. Sometimes they seem a bit childish — and Eigen goes after himself for this at one point, with an interlocutor asking him, “Are you still writing poems about your childhood?”

But I get the power of what Eigen is doing, letting himself drift into the very whimsical. Observing a roach on the street — insects play almost as significant a role in this volume as Chinese and Thai food does — the narrator thinks:

[a roach] rubs his mandibles with one of his six hands —

the sign (as always) that he has started composing a poem.

This is a beautiful way of seeing the world — observant and gentle, grounded but with an eternal innocence.