A Worldly Country

by John Ashbery

(Ecco) $23.95

My decision to read John Ashbery's A Wordly Country: New Poems was made from this reasoning: Like the subject of Thomas Mann's novella Death in Venice, Ashbery is an "eminent man of letters." He is part of the long and noble tradition of American poetry. His early poetry was recognized by W. H. Auden, and the American treasurer and defender of the Western literary canon, Harold Bloom, has called him "America's greatest living poet." He is connected with New York School, and like so many great American writers, he once lived in Paris. He has published more poetry than you can imagine and won all of the important awards that America can bestow on its literary giants. Knowing all of this—and knowing that Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror is a 20th-century masterpiece—what choice did I have?

I read A Wordly Country. I read it in bed and found it as dull as reading in bed. There was nothing in it but flat words and desiccated ideas. But what readers in bed want out of poetry are deliriums and the dangers of "dancing in the sheets." We want the urgency of a hard cock, the fruit and juice of a ripe nipple. We want life thrust into the words we are reading. That is what we really want. This is not what we want: "The hat hasn't worn too well" or "Do you still need a handkerchief" or "It all happened long ago/a murky, milky precipitate."

But let's be fair, you might argue. The man has lived since 1927—80 years of being alive!—how can you expect such an old poet to be great in bed? Fine. Your point is made. But if he is too old to draw from the forces of life, then why doesn't he draw from the destructive forces of death? Where is the fear and trembling in his work? From these polite poems you'd gather that the poet had many more years to live and to write about not much at all.

You must make a choice: pleasure your reader with life or scare him/her with death. If neither will do for you, then the reader will fall asleep. CHARLES MUDEDE

The Unbinding

by Walter Kirn

(Anchor) $13.95

Walter Kirn's latest novel is set in an alternate reality, where Tom Cruise may be a creation of the government, privacy has been cheerfully abandoned by our citizenry, and OnStar roadside assistance has been upgraded into an all-encompassing life-assistance program called AidSat. Whether it's directions, the answer to a nagging trivia question, or tak-ing notice of spiking vital signs, AidSat's operators are at their subscribers' beck and call—sometimes without being asked.

The Unbinding began as an experiment for the website Slate, published in weekly installments and, as Kirn writes in the introduction, "Powered by a surge of naive faith in the capacity of cyberspace to do for long-form fiction what it has done already for journalism, music, gaming, and graphic arts." The resulting novel, when bound between physical covers, loses much of its original interactivity, leaving the book's storyline to carry the burden. It's a task Kirn's characters, and the hoops he's crafted for them to continually jump through, are unable to fill. In weekly doses, The Unbinding worked well enough, offering a cheerfully twisted tale while allowing readers to fall down a number of rabbit holes through deftly provided links. On page, however, it has the feel of a perpetually restarted work, its characters—including an identity swapping AidSat operator, a virginal pedicurist, and a slimy government snoop—seemingly reinvented from section to section. This may dovetail nicely with the book's title, but for the reader it can be exhausting. BRADLEY STEINBACHER

Walter Kirn reads from The Unbinding at Elliott Bay Book Company, 101 S Main St, 624-6600, on Tues Feb 20 at 6 pm, and it's free.

A Royal Affair: George III and His Scandalous Siblings

by Stella Tillyard

(Random House) $26.95

It's a book I'm ashamed to be seen carrying, one I don't want to be spotted reading on airplanes or in bars. The title is just... so squalid, so trashy. It's a title that screams, "I'm an unserious book and only an unserious person would be caught dead reading me—well, in public at any rate."

The offending title? A Royal Affair. And it doesn't help that the subtitle—"SCANDALOUS SIBLINGS"—is rendered all in caps.

But Stella Tillyard's engaging new book, which examines the private lives of George III and his awful, terrible, no-good siblings, isn't trashy at all, and those of us who enjoy reading about royals—historical ones, not contemporary ones—shouldn't be put off by the title.

The bulk of Tillyard's book is dedicated to the story of Caroline Mathilde, George III's youngest sibling, who was married off at 15 to the batshitcrazy King of Denmark (his ministers spent most of their time trying to prevent him from hurling himself out of palace windows). After becoming Queen of Denmark, Caroline Mathilde assisted a commoner (a doctor) in usurping most of her husband's authority, smiled on the enacting of a slate of liberal social reforms (including complete freedom of the press), and had an illegitimate child with the doctor—all before she was 21.

Someone get a copy of this book to Sofia Coppola—here's the queen she needs to make a film about, what with Caroline Mathilde's intimate involvement in the enlightenment, her backing of radical social reforms, and her messy private life—to say nothing of her arrest, cruel separation from her children, and tragic death at age 23. DAN SAVAGE