Tarantulas

Virtue, Zarathustra suspects, expects wages: heaven, reputation, the warm feeling of a debt collected. On the Virtuous goes looking for a goodness that wants nothing back, and Clancy Martin tests it on his own biography: five years of failing at a novel, a mentor's post-it note, and the book that became possible only after the ambition broke. Then the tarantulas, Zarathustra's name for the preachers of equality, whose cry for justice, he says, has revenge folded inside it. Martin saw real tarantulas hunted once, in Honduras, with bubblegum on a string, and he follows the argument all the way to the American present, where you may recognize the bite.