BookFox

Thomas Pynchon Inherent Vice Reviews

Here's a roundup of some of the reviews of Thomas Pynchon's latest novel, "Inherent Vice," which starts selling on August 4th. Of course, if you're truly a devoted fan, you can find the midnight parties on the 3rd (hello, Skylight! I'd be there if I wasn't flying out of state the night before!)

Salon Review: "Hard-boiled detective fiction" that you "don't need a decoder ring to read."

LA Times Review: Carolyn Kellogg says it's "Thomas Pynchon doing Raymond Chandler through a Jim Rockford looking glass, starring Cheech Marin (or maybe Tommy Chong)"

The Independent Review: "Inherent Vice is Pynchon's hymn to the Sixties, both homage and lament."

The New Yorker Review: Starts with a discussion of Raymond Chandler and moves to say that "Inherent Vice does not appear to be a Pynchonian palimpsest of semi-obscure allusions." Is that a compliment?

Of course, if you want to explore more Pynchon mania, go to the (unauthorized) site for all-things-Pynchon, www.thomaspynchon.com (what a URL steal!), which offers a Wiki to be rolled out on the 4th.

Review of "The Late Age of Print" by Ted Striphas

Ted Striphas will challenge every entrenched notion you have about the publishing industry.

You think Big-box retailers like Borders and B&N have put independents out of business?

Striphas argues that other factors often contributed to the indie's close, that the big-box retailers rectify the social/financial inequalities present around indie's, and that big-boxers have a history and a sense of place, too.

Think the problem of books is on the consumer side, that people aren't reading?

Nope. Striphas argues it's on the supply side, with how books are printed and distributed, the inequality of supply/demand (books are "ubiquitous and mundane"), and how books have been commodified since the 1930's "bookshelf in every house" campaign.

You think the emergence of e-readers creates a new problem for the book industry?

Well, back in the 1930s, publishers fought tooth-and-nail against consumers exchanging books with each other, even holding a contest to create a derogatory name for book-sharers (the winner? Book Sneak).

You think e-piracy will be a problem for booksellers like it is for the movie industry?

If you do, it's rather ironic, given that in the late 1800s, America didn't respect international copyright, and thus pirated European books and sold them at a heavily discounted price here in the States.

I could go on, because there's a wealth of data, narrative, and ideas here, vaulting this slim volume into the heavyweight class of tome. Striphas discards canards about the publishing industry and creates his own narrative, which makes "Late Age" fascinating to read, even if I remain skeptical at some points. I remain skeptical that big-box retailers ever capture a place or maintain a history in the same way an indie bookstore does, simply on the basis of my many interactions with indie's and big-boxers.

And I'm not sure that big-boxers challenge social inequalities. If you want to talk about access to books, there's always the (free!) library, which levels the playing field.

Some of the material here is just helpful information, and doesn't steer the industry toward its next step. For instance, the third chapter exposing the King-Kong-like ascendancy of Amazon.com using draconian efficiency protocols on their employees is interesting from an employee-abuse perspective, but leaves you wringing your hands asking what's next.

Also, the fourth and fifth chapters detailing the aesthetics of Oprah's Book Club and Harry Potter's copyright-protection wranglings around the globe both are intriguing narratives about our current cultural moment, but are more observational than argumentative.

I should warn you that the book's a bit academic. Striphas teaches American Studies and Cultural Studies at Indiana University and he quotes Heidegger and Marx within the first few pages. He also has an annoying habit of telling you what he's going to write about rather than just writing it (as well as summarizing everything at the end). These are academic protocols, I realize, but you have to expect your readers to be smart enough to get it the first round.

There are also some patchy spots with language that's been infected by theory: "In 1891, the accession of the United States to international copyright didn't represent a Copernican revolution in its stance toward protecting foreign works inasmuch as it expressed the declining marginal utility of the discourse of civic republicanism relative to the development and consolidation of industrial capitalism."

But if you can overlook the occasional academicism, I highly recommend this book. It'll have you chewing over the book industry for a good spell.

Cao Naiqian: There's Nothing I Can Do When I Think Of You Late At Night

Before I get to a micro review of the collection itself, I have to admit that I'm impressed by Naiqian's bio. Growing up in a rural section of China, he didn't start writing until 37, as a result of a bet with a friend. He still has his day job as a detective (!) for the government. He actually lived before starting to write, by working in a mine and in a factory and with music and as a farmer.

With a bio like that, you can't help but be interested in the fiction.

"There's Nothing I Can Do When I Think Of You Late At Night" describes the hardscrabble life of peasants in a rural cave-dwelling town in China. Each of these thirty stories is short -- think flash fiction, or short shorts -- but accomplishes much with a Carveresque-style minimalism. Desperate lives generate stories about simple elements like food and sex, which reoccur frequently: growing food, cooking food, destroying food, and adultery, bestiality, incest. The reappearing characters, with names like Dog, Grunt, Zits We and Widow San, don't want modernization or political progress or the afterlife, they want little more than pride and honor; full bellies and sated sexualities.

Stylistically, Naiqian has this habit of repeating an exact phrase twice: "It grew darker and darker. It grew darker and darker." Also, in dialogue, he gives attribution for every single line, so sometimes you read "Heinu said" four times in a row without any other characters speaking. By piling on the words the particular information grows in significance. It's reminiscent of the way Hebrew poetry in the Psalms moves elliptically around a subject by describing it in at least two and sometimes four different ways. But since Naiqian doesn't vary the expression at all, it lacks the kind of aesthetic variation of Hebrew poetry. Instead, it captures the bare-bones existence of his characters -- even the words to describe them, and their words themselves, are limited, spare, and can only repeat identical lines for emphasis, rather than by any kind of linguistic flourishes.

The details of this collection, especially about animals, come straight from the source. There's true-experience tidbits about flies, such as the fact that fly droppings on food can't immediately be seen, but turn black after a period of time, and also that a fly can still buzz around even after it's been decapitated.

There's also a spot-on description of a lesbian hen, and the way Naiqian describes her mating ritual in this excerpt is precise, especially the last line (I raised chickens, so yes, I know):

"Whenever the village hens saw Fluff Ball coming, they would stop what they were doing and hunker down, lift their tails exposing their red rumps, and allow Fluff Ball to mount them. Fluff Ball would strut, its chest thrust forward, over to the most attractive hen. It would spread its right wing like a fan and circle the hen. Round and round it would go before leaping on the hen's back to do it. To maintain its balance, it would grasp the feathers on the hen's neck in its beak."

The translator, John Balcom, who also wrote an introduction, mentioned that the dialogue is particularly difficult to translate, since Naiqian uses heavy dialect. How it comes out in English is full of curses. There's plenty of "fuck your mother to death" and "fuck your ancestors." For example, this exchange in the first story, "The In-Law":

Blackie said, "That fucking In-law is here for you."
The woman said, "Don't let him in. Wait till I put on my pants."
Blackie said, "Shit, what difference does it make?"
Blushing, the woman said, "Why don't you just tell him I'm sick? It is that time of the month, anyway."
"How can I do that?" asked Blackie. "We Chinese always keep our word."
Blackie went out to meet the In-Law.

A lot of cultural nuances are probably lost in translation, but the issue of class comes across loud and clear. The stronger pieces in this collection are the ones that don't rely excessively upon dialogue, like "Widow San" and "Heinu and Her Andi." Coincidentally, they're also the slightly longer ones.

If you'd like to explore rural Chinese culture, this book will give you a look that is almost too close for comfort.

Requiem for a Book Review

The title of this post might be overstated. The Los Angeles Times book review isn't deep sixed, it's just shrinking by a huge margin. But in three days, on July 27, the LA Times will issue its final standalone book review section. The loss of a standalone section is a huge blow to Los Angeles' rising literary cachet, and, as Steve Wasserman and other former book editors point in their letter of protest, a grave blow to the prestige of the Times.

Mark Sarvas makes an impassioned plea to pump up the online coverage. No, more than that. He suggests: "Rather than calving the book pages yet again, and grafting the limp remains onto Calendar's derriere, let's fold the print Book Review entirely. Stop it cold. Spare it further indignities. And take the budget of that hard copy review - including all physical costs (printing, a share of distribution) - and use those funds (with perhaps a bump if you're really committed) to create a web-only Book Review." I completely agree with him that the future of book reviewing is online, and that book reviewing sections should devote more funds to online activities (video, podcasts, more reviews -- with hyperlinks).

But unfortunately, in the current model of newspaper governance, it seems that authority comes from print and online receives a trickle down. In other words, the print/online relationship is not even symbiotic, but parasitic -- print as host and online as parasite. The amount of funds devoted to online coverage of a topic is almost always inferior to the print funds. This is changing, of course, but in the way that newspapers currently organize their funds, they are still primarily a print medium, most likely because the financial conduits still run with the physical page. So I wish the powers that be at the Times would be as visionary as Mark, dreaming up new modes of book coverage, but as it stands, I think if someone axed all book reviewing, some other part of the paper (celebrity coverage?) would snatch up the funds and we'd be left with a huge vacuum of coverage. Of course, we're getting a vacuum anyway.

Also, by axing a print section and going all online, we're losing a demographic, an older demographic that still reads in print. All my book reviewing sources come from online -- if anything, to the younger set, book reviews on the printed page feel a bit antiquated, a throwback like black and white television and Cold War bomb drills. But a significant proportion of readers -- as attested to by any independent bookstore worker who hears where people read about books -- still stick with tradition and read print. I don't want any readers disenfranchised, whatever medium they prefer. So given the loss of cultural prestige that comes from cutting the print review, as well as the demographic loss, and the necessity of a print section becomes all too clear.

Scott Esposito brings up the effect of this collapse on other literary outlets, specifically his own publication, The Quarterly Conversation. It's natural that the rapid demise of book coverage in newspapers will force readers to shift elsewhere for news (of course, some readers won't make that shift, and just pay less attention to books, continuing the downward cultural spiral of literature, but that's neither here nor there). Scott ends up mentioning that he's recently started paying contributors of TQC, which is wonderful, because this all ends up at money. Of course, I remember talking to Judith Freeman when she was writing a book review for the Los Angeles Times, and she said the money in book reviewing is so poor (even for a major outlet) in comparison to the time spent (reading all the author's previous works) that it never makes financial sense to review books. It's more about prestige and intelligent interaction with the literary world. Well, that's what we're left with. And may other literary institutions pick up the slack where the LA Times has left a gaping hole.

Nam Le: "The Boat"

So Nam Le's short story collection "The Boat" comes out today, and after reading it over the past month, it seems he's going to give Chris Adrian competition for best debut of 2008 (yes, I know Adrian's published before, but "A Better Angel" is his first collection). Le's got geographical range, that's for sure, both personally -- born in Vietnam, grew up in Australia, studied in the U.S. -- and in his fiction, which takes place in Iowa, Japan, Iran, Columbia, Vietnam. Aside from geography, there's also a wide range of genre. The first story, "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice," is a self-referential story with a character named Nam Le trying to write a story at Iowa, and deals with the nature and responsibilities of storytelling, while "Cartagena," involving child-assassins and grenades, takes on the mantle of an action tale, and the third story, "Meeting Elise," transitions into more of a domestic tale of an estranged father's relationship with his musical prodigy daughter.

The only place where the collection falters a bit is in the center, in the near-novella "Halflead Bay." The pace slows down in this story as Le addresses the domestic realm, of small-time exchanges against bullies and a teenage love interest, and this pales against the more ambitious stories surrounding it. But the collection as a whole has this big-hearted, adventurous spirit that isn't afraid to foray into territory with geopolitical repercussions.

There's a New York Times dinner-interview with him, and Luna Park also has a interview, more Q & A style.

Roddy Doyle Review

Sorry for the slow posting here this week -- I've been swamped with other writing projects. Hope at least that the links from Monday kept everyone busy. As for today, go over to The Short Review, which is, as its name suggests, concerned only with short story collections, and also the host of my review of Roddy Doyle's The Deportees and other Stories.

Review of the Short Story Reviews

It's lovely that the NYTBR reviewed Max Apple's collection of stories, A Jew in Home Depot, the first collection he's published in twenty years, but just strange that the review is coming out now, nearly four months after the book was released (The LA Times review, written by Tod Goldberg, came out in late November). Perhaps something to do with the collection being published by a university press? (John Hopkins University Press)

LA Times offered a single-paragraph review of Naomi Benaron's Love Letters From a Fat Man.

The nervous, tender-hearted stories in "Love Letters From a Fat Man" are often set in that netherworld humans inhabit after loss -- that strange, weightless, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other place that is a buffer between the painful present and the next chapter.

The Guardian has a paragraph review of Sunstroke by Tessa Hadley, which I reviewed in my last post.

Lastly, The Globe (via Kate) has two reviews of short story collections: A Grave in the Air by Stephen Henighan and Incidental Music by Carol Matthews. Here's part of the review of the former:

A Grave in the Air is a collection of eight stories set amid political events in Eastern and Central Europe, spanning the half-century between Nazi Germany and the Bosnian conflict of the 1990s. The narrative voices are wide-ranging, from a Polish chambermaid's ruminations about the cultural cost of exile, to a Hungarian immigrant's alienation from the anglo elite of Montreal.

Tessa Hadley - Sunstroke

I decided to read Tessa Hadley's collection Sunstroke and other Stories mainly because it had been nominated for the Short Story Prize. Hadley’s a Welsh writer that writes short stories of manners, usually with female protagonists, and always concerned about interpersonal interactions in domestic environments. Most of the stories in this collection share a theme of sexual misconduct, often of adultery, but also of sexual activity between people of vastly different ages. For instance, in the title story adultery is threatened with a stolen kiss; in the following story, "Mother's Son," a son confesses to his mother that he's slept with someone other than his wife; in "Phosphorescence" an older married woman flirts with a thirteen-year-old boy. These activities are very deftly commented on by the other events in the story -- a minor case of sunstroke seems to offer a metaphorical explanation of the momentary lack of judgment when kissing a friend's husband, or the stench of a rotten egg symbolizes a man's inability to stay faithful to his wife.

It's appropriate, given this focus on the overstepping of sexual boundaries, that Hadley has many wise things to say on gender. She devotes a line, or a paragraph, to limning out the differences in how men and women think about work, or how a woman might imagine a man feeling about sex in comparison to her own feelings. This excerpt is from the end of "The Enemy," which tries to set up the value of the protagonists quiet actions of cleaning as equal, worthwhile, and necessary in contrast to her male friend's activities that fomented revolution (literally).

In her thirties she had resented furiously this disproportion between the time spent cooking and eating; it had seemed to her characteristic of women's work, exploitative and invisible and without lasting results. She had even given up cooking for a while. These days she felt about it differently. The disproportion seemed part of the right rhythm of all pleasure: a long, difficult and testing preparation for the few moments' consummation . . . In her tasks around the flat -- polishing furniture, bleaching dishclothes, vacuuming, taking cutting from her geraniums, ironing towels and putting them away in the airing cupboard -- she was aware that her mother and grandmother had done these same things before her, working alone in quiet rooms, or with the radio for company. In truth she had had a stormy relationship with her parents, and used to think of her mother's domesticated life as thwarted and wasted. But she had learned to love the invisible work, the life that fell away and left no traces.

All in all, Sunstroke is an excellent read, although I would have suspected, if someone had described the book to me, that it wasn't quite right for me -- issues of domesticity in upper-class Britain just doesn't set off the alarm bells of a "must read" in my head. Nonetheless, she manages to keep me reading through the quiet stories by offering acute psychological perceptions, and entertain me with ones like "Buckets of Blood," which details the aftermath of a botched abortion. If you'd like to read it before the contest results are announced, you have until Feb. 27th.

I'm working on getting my hands on copies of Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures by Vincent Lam and Like You'd Understand, Anyway by Jim Shepard, the other two collections nominated. When I do, I'll let you know.

Update: Here's an essay by Hadley on reading short stories.

Beowulf

So earlier tonight I found myself reading poetry to Mrs. BookFox, only it wasn't exactly love poetry:

Unhallowed wight,
grim and greedy, he grasped betimes,
wrathful, reckless, from resting-places,
thirty of the thanes, and thence he rushed
fain of his fell spoil, faring homeward,
laden with slaughter, his lair to seek.
Then at the dawning, as day was breaking,
the might of Grendel to men was known;
then after wassail was wail uplifted.

We had gone to see Beowulf - and in 3-D, no less, with those fancy glasses, which I wore on top of my regular glasses - and I just had to separate the fanciful Hollywood tale from the original. So that was how I found myself reading forty-three chapters of Beowulf until after midnight (only excerpts of which I read out loud to Mrs. BookFox).

The movie holds rather true to the original - at least through the first half. Then it devolves into a soap opera connection between the Kings, Grendel/mother and the dragon. It does keep in some of the religious references that the Christian poet overlaid on the pagan tale (albeit heavyhandedly and somewhat anachronistically). And it creates ex nihilo a part for Beowulf's wife, who isn't even mentioned in the poem (obviously in order to hook the female demographic). But completely gone is the complex inter-relationship between the two clans, the Geats and the Thanes.

I'm not complaining, mind you. Because I know that staying true to the original would not make it a decent movie - I had no expectation that it should or would follow the original, I just enjoy knowing the difference and analyzing the difference. After all, the copy we have now was viewed through the lens of a Christian writing to Christian contemporaries, which obviously affected how the pagan tale was told, so I find it completely appropriate that this third degree away from the "original" (which was what? oral or written?) is changed once again to conform to the time and audience.

All that said, while I enjoyed the 3-D effects, that was probably the best part of the film. The use of live-action actors transformed into animation is a poor technique if actors don't want to look like they're acting through a bad plastic mask. Grendel looked like a pumpkin head at Halloween put on a child's body and Angelina Jolie looked too much like Angelina Jolie. It took a lot more brain power to read the poem, but I derived pleasures from it that I certainly couldn't get through a theater experience with the smell of fake butter in my nostrils and the grandfather behind me gasping every time a sword or severed limb protruded from the screen. One of those pleasures is feeling smarter, I admit. Another is discussing the poem with my brother, a Beowulf purist who harbors a penchant for ridiculously masculine tales that involve strong men defeating giants (he treats stories like Beowulf as instruction manuals for life).

I admit: in writing for this site and completing an MFA program, I'm often focused on the books coming out this year, a focus eliding even 20th century classics, much less the geriatric members of the canon (sorry King of the Geats - you're a geriatric now). So I suppose it's nice to have an excuse to go back and read Beowulf, which I haven't read since high school or college, I forget which. I'm reminded of an interview with a professor who argued we're almost doing a disservice to youths to make them read classics at such an early age, because there is so much that they can't connect to yet. Give them a decade, have them come back and read it on their own, and it will resonate with the force of an earthquake. I think I agree with that. I have no memory of reading Beowulf the first time, but this time around I love it, hyphenated metonyms and all. It's just so nice to hear the language as I read it, to hear the alliterative translation and the rhythm. No word yet on how Mrs. BookFox took it, but I enjoyed myself quite a bit.   

New Essay Collection by Umberto Eco

I've always been a fan of Umberto Eco, and not only of his fiction (of which my favorite is The Name of the Rose). Eco's essays, thoughts on popular culture as filtered through his semiotic lens, are always good for re-conceptualizing the way we view everyday items. For instance, I've used his essay "Lumbar Thought," in which Eco examines how the clothing we wear impacts the way that we think, in several of my English composition classes, in order to force my students to think about the possible repercussions of how they dress. Eco's semiotic analysis is similar to what Roland Barthes does in collections like Mythologies, but I think Eco does it with more panache.

All of that to say that good old Umberto is coming out with a new collection of essays entitled On Ugliness (isn't that a much better title than On Beauty, which he also wrote?). There's an excerpt in the L.A. Times.

There's also a review in The Village Voice.

The Bookaholics' Guide to Book Blogs

So I just received my copy of the Bookaholics' Guide to Book Blogs, and naturally looked for myself. There I was - BookFox, in the index - except with the wrong http address. It's www.thejohnfox.com, not www.bookfox.com. Thanks for fact checking that one. But I shouldn't worry about it, I told myself, I mean people will just Google me after www.bookfox.com leads to a labyrinthine page of Chinese symbols.

Right. Then I looked up the BookFox section in the body of the book, pages 36 and 37. Okay, good, I'm described as sassy sounding and cunning and deftly deploying light hearted sarcasm, great, great - and then they say young woman. ?!?!? Young woman?! I'm a man, baby! (think Austin Powers). And who says I'm young? (Okay, relatively speaking, but how would they know?) You would have thought the picture (I do look masculine, last I checked) or the posts about getting married to a woman (although I suppose in some states there could be ambiguity) or the web address (JOHNfox.com, not JUANITAfox.com, or some other feminine derivative) would have tipped them off.

Okay, so then they quote from me. Good quote - I'm funny, I'm insightful, blah, blah, that is, at least on the first block quote. The second block quote - no idea who wrote that. But it certainly wasn't me. I check - oh, the first half is a quote from Gwyn Topham, writing for the Guardian, and then the last paragraph belongs to Condalmo. Wow - they not only misattributed one quote to me, but two! How impressive!

What's the upshot? Someone has to take another crack at this and do it right. For one, it has to be electronic, because this book can only be written with hyperlinks. For two, the authors have to actually know something about the blogosphere. When I first read Ed Champion's evaluation of the book, I actually thought: maybe he's being too harsh, maybe I should take a look myself. Well, I've taken a look. And Ed's absolutely right. The book's an ugly attempt to survey an emerging medium. If I weren’t such a sassy, cunning, light-hearted sarcastic woman, I'd have even harsher words.

Steve Erickson: Review of Zeroville

Steve Erickson's books are not, usually, an easy read. Or the reading itself isn't difficult, it's just the understanding part. He'll employ unorthodox typography with the frequency of Mark Danielewski and use a Haruki Murakami-esque technique of channeling the narrative into the hyper-personal psychic journey of the hero. The result is always intellectually delightful to read, if not the type of novel you'd want to have to dissect, part-by-part, explaining the pieces and their contribution to the whole.

In Zeroville, an ex-seminarian student named Vikar, identified as a cineautistic, has a shaved head with a tattoo of Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor (and assaults anyone who misidentifies them). He is anti-drug, doesn't understand comedies, has a penchant for violence, and falls in love with a woman named Soledad Paladin. Above all, he's a genius at editing and understanding film sequence - or rather, that film has no sequence, no proper time - and that genius leads him to start tracking down the single frames from a reoccurring dream he's had since childhood.

The book's structure consists of a series of numbered sections - a reference to movie frames, or scenes - which climb to 227 before falling down the back side of the book down to zero. It's not unusual for Erickson to play with structure in his books - in Our Ecstatic Days he had a separate narrative running through a single line two-thirds of the way down the page, and in Tours of the Black Clock he has 164 short chapters. Contrary to expectation, the brief sections (some even don't reach sentence length) don't create discontinuity in the narrative, rather, they offer a steadily escalating structure to the book that makes the story feel more unified.

Zeroville is more accessible than his last book, Our Ecstatic Days, but shares the same emotional heart, as both are about the death of a child. Except in Zeroville, it's a variation on a theme, with the narrator waxing Kierkegaardian about the necessity of fathers (Abraham, God the father, Vikar's father) to kill their children. Along other religious lines, Vikar has replaced the authority of religion with the authority of cinema. In a model of a church he created, Vikar has replaced the altar with a cinema screen. Even to pay his respects to the dead, he goes not to the graveyard but to the movie theater. All these replacements of religion with cinema serve as a rather damning portrait of the deification of film, certainly an apt representation of contemporary culture.

Appropriately enough, the rifts on cinematic knowledge are Midrash-like in their detail and complexity of interpretation - and there are quite a few. Long-winded diatribes debating over the finer meanings of the song about the dog in Now, Voyager, homage to Mogambo, The Long Goodbye, and Heiress; summaries of half a dozen films from around the world - The Lady Eve, a few unnamed Japanese films. Zeroville is, on a fundamental level, a love song to film, to the history of film in all its artful incarnations. The reader who catches the many allusions and references will be reading a much richer, funnier novel, but it doesn't take an encyclopedic knowledge of film to enjoy the story.

As is common for Erickson, the novel traffics across the geography of Los Angeles - PCH to Zuma, Sunset, Laurel Canyon - and even imagines disasters such as an earthquake triggering a tidal wave down a Santa Clarita valley. The geography is recognizable and yet not - all the places are seen through a nightmarish, dreamy filter. In addition, there are interludes in Spain and France - other command centers for cinema - which contain stories that are no less entertaining for being narrative sidebars.

Zeroville is one of Erickson's most accomplished works to date, a dangerous, sexy romp through the history of film and one man's savant-like obsession with the meaning of film. There's not any novel like it, because no one writes like he does. In fact, the highest praise I can offer to Erickson is that in every book it seems like he's broken the emergency-stop of his imagination and let a meltdown occur, and we all get to the watch the highly dangerous but highly fascinating fallout.

Benjamin Percy: Refreshing

I once heard a senior editor at a publishing house say that book reviews, even in major newspapers and magazines, have a negligible impact on a book's sales (and went on to cite figures that showed hardly a hump in sales numbers, much less a spike, in the week after the review). That's myopic and ill-calculated. It ignores how people gain knowledge about an author and their long-term buying habits. For instance, virtually no single review will make me buy a book - but if I read a review and then read two blogs and read an interview, all within a certain time frame, then I'm propelled to buy the book. And if I don't buy it at that point - for any number of reasons - then three or six or nine months down the road, or maybe even a year or three later, when browsing online or in a store, I might pick it up. It's all about the confluence of multiple sources that mentally lock in an author's name for future reference. Reviews happen to be one of those sources.

That said, I've recently experienced a kind of confluence with the short story writer Benjamin Percy. Poets and Writers has an article (not available online) that profiles him in quite a favorable light, and the LA Times just reviewed his new collection "Refresh, Refresh." On that wave I read Bookslut's very recent interview with him (he has a blue-collar ruggedness which is quite endearing).

Apparently, his stories involve hyper-masculinity and (the latest one, at least) the fall-out on families from the Iraq War. Also, throw in some weird caves and meteor holes. Here's an excerpt, just so I can hook you like I've been hooked:

Many years ago a meteor came screeching down from space and left behind a crater five thousand feet wide and three hundred feet deep. Hole in the Ground is frequented during the winter by the daredevil sledders among us, and during the summer by bearded geologists from OSU interested in the metal fragments strewn across its bottom. I dangled my feet over the edge of the crater and leaned back on my elbows and took in the sky—no moon, only stars—just a little lighter black than a crow. Every few minutes a star seemed to come unstuck, streaking through the night in a bright flash that burned into nothingness. In the near distance the grayish green glow of Tumalo dampened the sky—a reminder of how close we came, fifty years ago, to oblivion. A chunk of space ice or a solar wind at just the right moment could have jogged the meteor sideways, and rather than landing here, it could have landed there, at the intersection of Main and Farwell. No Dairy Queen, no Tumalo High, no 2nd Battalion. It didn’t take much imagination to realize how something can drop out the sky and change everything.

Read the rest of the excerpt at the publisher's site, Graywolf Press.

Gina Nahai - Caspain Rain

V.S. Naipaul, in Among the Believers, takes a whistlestop tour through the Middle East, writing about the tension between the dynamic societies of the West, embracing new and revolutionary technology, and the static Islamic societies, holding onto tradition. That basic tension is present in Gina Nahai's new novel, Caspain Rain, only in sociological form. The novel, although it tells an intergenerational story, focuses on a progressive young woman trapped in an Islamic marriage to a man who is in love with another woman. The woman is infected with Western sensibilities - she wants to work outside the home, not to be a housewife, she wants to ignore the class gap between herself and her husband's relatives and friends - but social mores restrict her.

It is, through and through, a sad novel, though not a hopeless one. There are upswells of progress, but these are mostly transient gains. Nahai unswervingly depicts Iranian society in all of its bickering, class-snobby, ugliness - the prohibitions against dance, the refuge-taking Nazi's, the Jews trying to gain traction in an Arab society - but also shows a protagonist gamely fighting against these things. It is the size of the fight which redeems the depressing conditions of the novel.

Caspain Rain felt like part The Awakening, with a deeply unhappy woman trapped inside a marriage, and part The Unbearable Lightness of Being, with a woman refusing to leave her husband or be cowed by his unfaithfulness. Add in a heavy dose of Iranian society - even a Muslim/Zoroastrian feud (where else would you find that, eh?) - and the reader gets an excellence portrait of the condition of an oppressed woman in an Islamic state.

For an excerpt, head over to Nahai's website.

New Quarterly Conversation

I'll make this brief and direct: Go visit the Fall issue of The Quarterly Conversation - I believe that it's issue number nine - where you can find wonderful essays on things ranging from James Wood to prisons to a whole slate of book reviews.

Diary of a Bad Year

So J.M. Coetzee's new novel is out - but only in Holland. They've had it for the last few weeks while we poor slobs here in the U.S. have to sit on our hands for another few months, until October 23rd. The Literary Saloon alerted me to the first English language review of Diary of a Bad Year. The reviewer praises it, but be prepared for a thorough discussion of the metafictional elements in Coetzee's oeuvre. Check out the triptych structure described in this excerpt from the review:

Indeed, in the course of Diary of a Bad Year, JC becomes exquisitely alert to what he calls “the impostures of authorship”. Having been asked by a German publisher to contribute a run of essays to a book on “what is wrong with today’s world”, he sets about recording his opinions on a dictaphone tape – JC, whose handwriting is deteriorating due to a loss of fine muscular control, is suffering from Parkinson’s disease. His assumptions about the world, and his magisterial writerly stance, are, however, undermined by his encounters with Anya, the exotic young Filipino-Australian woman he meets in the laundry room of their apartment building, lusts after, and swiftly enlists as his typist. Anya not only types up the great man’s thoughts, but takes it on herself to “fix them up too here and there where I can”, generating a subtle, ongoing comedy of conflicting perspectives, as well as some cruder malapropisms thanks to her undiscriminating use of her computer’s spellcheck function (in her typescript Brezhnev’s generals sit “somewhere in the urinals”). The three layers of the text – JC’s philosophical essays, his heightened reflections on his meetings with Anya, and Anya’s own more sceptical version of their unfolding relationship – are presented in exactly the same order each time on successive pages, so that the novel resembles one of those segmented children’s books in which you end up with the head of a gorilla, the torso of a policeman and the legs of a ballerina (it is possible to read the different narratives discretely from start to finish, but not advisable, as each ligament of this hybrid is held in a weirdly elegant tension with the rest).

No one belongs here more than you. Stories by Miranda July

No one belongs here more than me. That’s what I kept telling myself while staring at the bright and shiny cover. Really, it was shiny. I could just about see my nose in the binding. An appeal to the reader—look I want you to read this book so much that I will show you how much you belong with this book. Except that the one I found was yellow. Actually, this was lucky for Miranda July, because if they only had the pink ones, I probably wouldn’t have picked it up.

You see, when I was about five or six my aunt gave me my first bike, and because it wasn’t new, she wanted to paint it for me—and asked what color I liked. I don’t remember my reasons at the time, but pink was my favorite color. Maybe it was because of the Pink Panther cartoons. Maybe it was because He-Man, when he was Prince Adam, wore a pinkish doublet. Maybe I am just trying to come up with a rationalization now. Whatever it was, I wanted a pink bike. In fact, I would have been even happier with a pink room. My aunt told me “boys don’t like pink,” which I didn’t understand, but took as some innate inferiority within myself. Eventually, we settled on a red and white bike and a green room. Ever since, I have been avoiding the color pink as recompense for my deep social faults. You won’t trick me again, pink!

But I am getting ahead of myself—I am the sneaky very last guest blogger that waited until everyone else posted to take over. And now I have. My name is Brent, and I went to school with the BookFox, before graduating in May. Mostly, I write short stories. My blog can be found here. I will also be launching a very cool literary podcast in August, which I will formally announce later, as BookFox permits.

Before I left you for my two tangents, I was auditioning Miranda July in the bookstore. I was auditioning her in Border’s for 20% off. The 20% off was key, because I am on a strict, post-graduate studies budget. I had heard July’s name mentioned several times before—once, here on BookFox, and once in the New Yorker. In fact, July had two pieces in the summer fiction issue, getting more play than the other they’re-so-hot-right-now writers in the issue, like Dave Eggers, Edwidge Danticat, Gary Shteyngart, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Charles D’Ambrosio. Also, the month was July, which had to help.

Her success is quite remarkable, given that she is essentially a beginning writer. However, this is a little misleading, since she previously made a name for herself as a filmmaker and performance artist. July’s directorial debut, Me and You and Everyone We Know, made an indie splash at Sundance in 2005, winning the jury prize. So this collection is, in some ways, building from that success. The first story that I read, “The Swim Team,” won me over, and I bought the book at Borders. The piece was only six pages, a length that July handles extremely well. It characterizes the best of the collection: intimate, sharing a secret withheld from everyone but the reader, and immediate, written in simple language that somehow emphasizes every moment. Raymond Carver is the absolute standard of everyday diction that feels fresh and significant (e.g. “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”). July is good at this too, and her imagery is often striking, as in “The Shared Patio,” where the narrator falls asleep while leaning on her neighbor, who has just had an epileptic seizure, or in “The Birthmark,” where a woman has a birthmark from her face removed, but begins to question her new identity. Her metaphors are well-crafted and beautiful and she writes amazing short shorts.

Sometimes, however, when she removes herself from the brilliant discoveries in everyday life and becomes more abstract, her language feels forced, (“This Person," “Making Love in 2003”), as if she is trying too hard to make sacred mounds out of what are, in fact, molehills. In reading this collection, I had a similar reaction as when I watched her film—that her characters, rendered beautifully through striking images, fall too easily, and perhaps without just cause, into the role of passive victim. In “The Boy from Lam Kien,” the narrator observes, “I was getting depressed and this was my own fault.” This phrase describes the vast majority of July’s characters—unable to enjoy life, because they are “rushing” through it and “are never satisfied” with what they have (“The Man on the Stairs”). I almost wished that her characters, even for a moment, could slow down enough to enjoy something, to be genuinely happy. At the end I wanted to shout, “it doesn’t have to be this way.” But I didn’t. I just closed the book.

The website for the book is also interactive and pretty cool, you should check it out. I also think you should know that July is not her given name, but since everyone loves the summer, perhaps people are more likely to love her. I am now considering changing my name to Brent Saturday.

Reading Roberto Bolano in Chile

Mucho gracias to my witty and wonderful guest posters. I will just briefly interrupt their reign of wisdom to weigh in with another Dispatch From Abroad, this time with my promised post about Roberto Bolano.

I have been reading Bolano in Chile, simply because he´s Chilean and I wanted my reading to match my travels. Everyone has been raving about his latest novel to be translated, The Savage Detectives, which I have yet to read, but I´ve been reading Last Evenings on Earth, his collection of short stories that came out in English in 2006. What´s nice about reading an author in their country of origin is that certain Chilean details leap out at me that wouldn´t be as resonant while reading in California. For instance, in the very first story in the collection, Sensini, which is about a young writer developing a relationship with an older writer as they both try to win literary contests, Bolano writes: ¨When the winners were announced I was working as a vendor in a handcrafts market where absolutely no one was selling anything handcrafted.¨ Ever since I arrived in Chile I´ve been wandering through these markets that target tourists with fat wallets and poor sense of taste, and I immediately understand the cynical, wry tone of the narrator. Also, Bolano drops a number of cities into his stories, like Conception and Los Angeles (the Chilean Los Angeles), and since I just stopped at one and drove through the other, I have a much better sense of the distances characters are traveling and the type of cities they are passing through. There´s something else about reading a book in place where it´s set that´s more intangible: the collective psychology of the natives. There´s still a shadow from Pinochet that hangs over the older residents, a kind of suspicion toward the government and a knee-jerk conformism that hangs around like a habit. It reminds me of when I spent a few months in Spain, because the older residents had lived under the reign of Franco while the younger ones had only known the new government. (Caveat - of course a good portion of the stories are set in Spain and Mexico, not only Chile, but I just imagine those settings.)

As far as the stories themselves, Bolano usually has writers as protagonists: journalists, writing teachers, poets (lots of poets), critics, short story writers. This prevalent use of writers might be considered precious or autobiographical, but by dealing with their doubts and fears and by connecting the lot of writers to a particularly oppressive moment in Chilean history, Bolano manages to sidestep the bromide of a writer writing about writers. And in all of these stories, the political environment is looming in the foreground, sometimes subtly, in the case of Chilean expats in Spain (their mere presence in Spain grounds the story in the historical fact that they had to run for their lives), and sometimes more explicitly, as a character in Sensini searches for his son who has ¨disappeared¨.

The most striking feature of all of the stories is Bolano´s ability to shoehorn a novel into short story length. The novelistic length of some of these stories - which can span five years or twenty - means that the narrative flies by, sometimes dwelling only briefly on a scene, just enough of a description to orient the reader before plunging onward to a summarization of the next few months. Whole lifetime shifts are covered. The use of time is encouraging, if only to prove that the one of the cornerstone pieces of advice frequently given to novice writers - to write in scenes - could really restrict some storytellers. Of course, Bolano often uses scenes. But the ratio of his scenes to the rapid sweep of time is much higher  than many writers. Ultimately, the effect of these grand narratives in tiny spaces is to make the story bloom even larger in the reader´s mind.

To those of you who have already read The Savage Detectives, I´d be interested to know how Bolano treats time in his novels. If he continued at the same pace, he´d be writing a novel with the scope of A Hundred Years of Solitude.

The Collected Stories: Leonard Michaels

Hello. This is Greg Rock. Third and last to arrive in the string of guest bloggers for the John Fox. I am a fiction writer and screenwriter based in Los Angeles.

The last book I bought was The Collected Stories: by Leonard Michaels.

Discovering Leonard Michaels, after he was first recommended by a writing professor, was sort of a revelation. To generalize or compare the man to other post-war Jewish authors is wrong but inevitable. Unfortunately, compared to contemporaries like Philip Roth, most people don’t know him or his work. I will say that like Bernard Malamud, an obvious influence, Michaels wrote mainly short stories and became an acknowledged master of the form. Born in 1933, he was a first-generation Americans born to Immigrant parents, grew up on the Lower East Side, and spoke Yiddish until he entered elementary school.

Fortunately this recently released collection is the first to gather Leonard Michael’s two major short story collections “Going Places” (1969) and “I Would Have Saved Them If I Could” (1975) in one place. Both of these collection earned Michaels high praise from fellow writers (Susan Sontag, Charles Baxter, Larry McMurty) who considered him one of the best prose stylists of his generation. And in my opinion they aren’t wrong. Michaels writes great sentences that function, as great literary art should, like a pistol whip to the face.

A young man, kicked out of his girlfriend’s parents house, wandering naked through New York City street
(City Boy.)

“I flicked the cigarette into the gutter and suddenly I knew why. I didn’t love her. Slender legs. I didn’t.”

Or a middle-aged man getting anonymously jerked off on the subway (Getting Lucky.)

“Fingers squeezed goodbye, replaced him, zipped up, slipped away.”

Or contemplating escape from one’s conservative and fearful family (Murderers.)

"I wanted proximity to darkness, strangeness. Who doesn’t?”

Hard to think of anyone else constructing such incredible prose from such strange moments.

Divisadero: Michael Ondaatje

Michael Ondaatje's latest book Divisadero, as the name implies, is a divided book. In the first half, three character's stories are told: two sisters and the hired hand Coop at the ranch. The first chapter, set in rural California, involves these characters in a tragedy, and each of the character's stories is spun out separately in subsequent chapters. But halfway through the book, just at the point when I was deeply invested in the characters' lives, the narrative swivels onto another set of people. These characters are connected thematically to the first crowd, and there are gossamer threads of storyline links, but emotionally, I had to start over, and read the second half as if another novella. It's a testament to Ondaatje's swift ability to suck the reader into rapprochement with his characters that I become quickly involved in the second half, set in France.

I can't help but love Ondaatje's meditations throughout the book on the significance and possibility of biography - or, more simply, the character's past. For all of these characters, their past haunts them, and in some ways determines their choices in the present. With most characters, Ondaatje's shifts time to relate seminal moments in their past, and everyone seems to harbor some hard kernel of pain, lodged inside them since their childhood, that irritates them in the present. This preoccupation with the stages of biography is exemplified by a character we first know as Liebard, who changes his name to Astolphe, and who had changed his name with frequency throughout his life to reflect different periods, as in this excerpt: "He spent the first day imagining moments from his past when he could have been Astolphe, when he might have behaved and participated with more ease and subtlety just for having the epaulette of such a name. It led to the kind of biographical reconsideration a man might make when looking at photographs of a wife or lover in an earlier time, in her teens or twenties, which always brought the wish to have known her then."

I was put off by only one section - the second section, where Coop learns how to cheat at Texas Hold 'Em. The rage of Texas Hold 'Em has worn a bit thin, from too much television time and the bandwagon hop from the film industry, and the topic felt out of place in such a novel where improbable and seductive affairs flowered without even a hint of relationship cliché. Thankfully, the poker playing wasn't a major facet of the novel, only a brief spell in a fragmented work where the characters lives shone with a brief, yet unresolved, luminosity.

Those are some of my initial thoughts - truncated from what I wanted to write, but at least true in their brevity. No matter what my opinion of the book, all you English Patient fans will ratchet up the sales, but I say go ahead. Also, sorry for the slow posting this week - I've been busy with fiction writing and syllabus creation for composition classes. Will try to be more engaging the next two weeks, before my summer jaunt to South America.

Another Atheist Diatribe

Even though The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins was generally panned by critics (not just by Marilynne Robinson, although her dismantling in the pages of Harper's was certainly one of the most thorough), his book sold quite well. Perhaps riding on the swell of attention Dawkin's book received, now we have a book of the same stripe by Christopher Hitchens, with the hard-to-ignore title of God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. If you got the stab at Muslim creed in the first part, the subtitle is there to make sure you know that all religions will be taken to task, and yes, "everything" does include a historical run-down of religion's faults and mistakes.

In The Washington Post, Stephen Prothero reviews God is Not Great, and his complaints seem to echo some of the problems critics like Terry Eagleton and Marilynne Robinson had with Richard Dawkins' book: shoddy logic attempting to explain away secular misdeeds, a vast ignorance of religious belief systems, an arrogant rhetorical stance that demeans rather than reasons, and the inability to separate inauthentic and authentic religious belief systems.

Here's an excerpt from Prothero's review:

As should be obvious to any reasonable person -- unlike Hitchens I do not exclude believers from this category -- horrors and good deeds are performed by believers and non-believers alike. But in Hitchens's Manichaean world, religion does little good and secularism hardly any evil. Indeed, Hitchens arrives at the conclusion that the secular murderousness of Stalin's purges wasn't really secular at all, since, as he quotes George Orwell, "a totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy." And in North Korea today, what has gone awry is not communism but Confucianism.

Just from the excerpts that I've read from Hitchen's book, it seems that the reason I avoid books of this type is the same reason I avoid fundamentalist tracts, talk radio and FOX news. It is the style of arguing that offends me, not the content. The style is one of arguing vehemently, but without balance - unmitigated dogma spilling to the page. If I were to categorize it as a speech act, it would fall somewhere between a rant and a diatribe. I find far too much of that type of discourse to want to subject myself to more of it.

Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead

Over at the Litblog Co-op, they're discussing Alan DeNiro's collection of short stories Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead. Later on in the week they'll interview Alan, but for now there is some discussion about the wide range of literary journals where his work has appeared (from One Story to Electric Velocipede), as well as a strange selection from his poetry chapbook The Black Hare. When I talked to Carolyn at Pinky's Paperhaus (who nominated the book) about this collection, she said that her professor and fellow students hated the book. Which is terrible, because the stories are so brave and adventurous. The stories are so risk-taking that you would never want to workshop them. A workshop would probably harvest hundreds of well-meaning bits of advice that dull the edges and sand off the idiosyncrasies. Personally, I like the stories just as weird as they are. Just to put the stories in the context of a genre, they would fit with the short stories of Aimee Bender or Kelly Link, but that's only a ballpark analogy - Alan's actual voice and subject matter are completely different.

The Children of Hurin: J.R.R. Tolkien

So yes, I admit, I'm a sucker for Tolkien (maybe it's the triple initials). I read the trilogy plus the prequel The Hobbit back in fourth grade, though I haven't read all of them every year since then, like my brother has. And Tolkien's most recent posthumous offering, The Children of Hurin, which was compiled and edited by his son, Christopher Tolkien, doesn't offer a story on the level of the Lord of the Rings - it reads much more like The Silmarillion. Vast sweeps of historical time are covered in a paragraph, a style that evokes both Norse mythological story telling and the Old Testament Hebrew narratives. And the book borrows from an amalgam of Greek mythology: Zeus and Hera, as well as Oedipus. The story is compelling, once you get past stilted diction like "worsted" and "fey" and begin to fall under the familiar spell of lembas and Balrogs. And it has such lovely topics like suicide, incest, torture, curses, spells, swords with histories, bravery, and lots of dying - you know, the type of topics you'd expect from mythology.

One notable difference between this story and, say, the Hobbit, is that while writing this tale, Tolkien's conception of dragons was more Eastern - more like a snake with a soft belly - as well as the dragon in this book is able to talk and has considerable psychological power, wielded through his eyes (very Medusa-like). If that doesn't win you over, then surely the illustrations will (which in the book are a mix of black & white and color, with the color ones the only worthy ones).

My Diverse Week in Books

Last week I wasn't very busy posting, but I was busy reading. I read three books - the first a collection of short stories by Alice Munro called Runaway. It's easy to see why she receives such acclaim as a writer - it's because she pens such classic stories, ones that transcend her Canadian place and that seem rather timeless. One theme that drew these short stories together was old culture values clashing with new cultural values. Younger characters spar with older characters over moral conundrums, and, in many stories, thirty pages will contain a vast sweep of time - from the protagonist as an adolescent to a geriatric - and their own values will have aged. I could feel, as I read, that this was from an older writer, one looking back on her life, and telling stories of her friends and contemporaries. Since I spend so much of my time reading younger authors - short stories of my colleagues, up-and-coming hotshots - I recognize that what they often lack is the ability to portray older people convincingly. And yes, I tire of reading too many stories about teenagers and twenty-somethings. So, in a way, it was refreshing to read a work like this, yet at the same time (and paradoxically, I know), I relate more to the sex-suffused stories of Mary Gaitskill or to the sophisticated urban tales of Deborah Eisenberg.

The second book I read was by an up-and-comer: Alex Mindt. Male of the Species is his first collection of short stories, and a good balance after Munro: she primarily dealt with women, he with men, specifically fathers. The fiction that leads off this collection, "Sabor a Mi", won a 2006 Pushcart Prize, and several others were published in Missouri Review. Mindt's best talent is in channeling the voice of the immigrant - whether they be Mexican or Chinese. In narration as well as dialogue, he manages to capture the rhythms of speech, the broken phrases, the difficult of speaking in a language not your own. The concepts of many of the stories were intriguing as well - the young black performance artist who burns a cross on his front lawn, and the high school teacher who continues to fail the star running back despite death threats on his family. What I found frustrating was that his portrayal of female voices was not as spot-on - I couldn't tell they were female, and they didn't seem to be distinguishable from his male voices. But all in all, a good debut.

The last book I read this week I never would have read if one of my book club members hadn't chosen it. Arthur Koestler wrote Darkness at Noon in 1940, and it's the story of a Russian man who has been imprisoned by the new-guard communists. I read it in one sitting, late at night, even though I should have gone to bed about halfway through, but I couldn't stop because I love stories inside closed parameters, whether it be a floating hospital or a sanatorium or a prison (don't psychoanalyze me on this one). It's painful to read of the mechanized, emotionless obedience of the new-guard communists as they interrogate the old-guard protagonist, but all the psychological stratagems and subterfuge during the series of interrogations reveals much about Stalin-era Russia.   

Tooth and Claw

T.C. Boyle is a remarkably entertaining writer, and I don't mean that pjoratively at all - no nasty connotations like only entertaining, or entertaining to the detriment of style or plot. No, he just writes stories that are word/plot candy, and I stay up late gorging myself on them. Last night I was reading Tooth and Claw, his latest collection of short fiction (although the man is so prolific, he probably has two more books coming out of the chute - I don't know how he puts out a book every single year, and teaches, and spends time with his family). Once I list a couple of the short stories summaries, you'll realize two things: that Boyle writes about everywhere, everyone, and everything - he is, in essence, unlimited in his short story scope - and that the premises are very high concept - you could nearly sell a screenplay off one of them.

-An ardent sunscreen proponent who also wants to put dark glasses on all humans and animals
-A woman who "becomes" a dog in order to study them - Interspersed with the story of two wolf children
-A man wins an African lynx in a Bar game, tries to keep it in his apartment
-Radio announcer breaks the world record for the most days without sleep

Boyle's often praised for his short story abilities, and sometimes this praise includes the caveat that he's more of a short story writer than a novelist, which is misleading. He's quite a good novelist - look at Drop City or the Tortilla Curtain - but sometimes a novel misfires - I found the pacing far too slow in The Inner Circle. That said, he rarely writes a short story that is unlikeable. Or rather, at least with a short story, you don't have to stay with it very long, so if it's not your favorite topic things won't drag. His talent with short stories is to take a interesting premise and write a tight, fast-moving narrative to propel it along. That's what makes his stories entertaining (if you want a heavy dose of them, buy his 704 page collected work: T.C. Boyle Stories).

To end this post, I'd like to weigh in on the MFA discussions that crop up perenially by mentioning that I studied under Boyle. He teaches ungraduate and graduate writing workshops at USC, and the way that he conducts the class helps avoid some of the pitfalls of workshops. Often in posts I find people complaining about fellow workshoppers - how a workshop takes all the energy out of a story - and they're right (Here's my rule - never listen to 80% of the people reading your story. Determining who comprises the 20% is the hard part). But writers don't complain often about professors, who set the tone for the critique. A misleading professor gives you advice on their version of the story, or how to change the story to reflect their narrative sensibilities, while a good one works with the premise you've created. Good ole Coraghessan (the C. in T.C.) isn't invasive, and he doesn't try to shape your story into the one he would like to tell. He's remarkable hands-off, often deferring judgment to the class, but when he does offer advice, at least in my experience, he's trying to smooth out the arc of the piece presented, not trying to radically alter it.

So, if you find a professor who works with your stories and practice the 80% rule, your work shouldn't take on "workshopped" characteristics.

The Dead Fish Museum

In an era marked by the short story's loss of cultural heft, Charles D'Abrosio's collection of stories makes that loss seem tragic.

The name of this short story collection by Charles D'Abrosio is taken from the title story, in which an immigrant wife can't pronounce the word refrigerator, so she calls it the dead fish museum. Clever and a good hook (pun intended), but more than that, the theme of fish extends over the whole book. Characters often fish, usually for salmon, and the catch or non-catch determines the course of the story. Not only are fish a theme, but on the cover, each word is set on a typewriter key (referencing a story starring a typewriter mechanic) and the word "Dead" in the title is italicized, which serves as a second theme: the lifeless psychology of the protagonists.

D'Abrosio writes of orphans and Catholics, and sometimes orphaned Catholics. He covers the down-and-out painter who's moonlighting on set design for a porn shoot, an insurance seller at a family reunion whose wife is cheating on him, the couple doing a charity scam in corn country. Although there's occasionally a snapshot of a hopeful moment, the narrative is shorn of all sentimentality. D'Abrosio keeps it raw, rarely letting his characters glimpse any form of redemption, and many of the characters seem so empty they probably wouldn't accept change even in light of their grim circumstances.

These short stories slant toward the long side - not Deborah Eisenberg long, but lengthy - and six of the eight originally appeared in The New Yorker. Each one ends at an unexpected spot. Not that the endings don't make sense in hindsight and resonate emotionally, just that before the last page is turned it's impossible to predict the end of the text. They don't climax and slide into the dénouement as much as seize a previous element in the story and twist it to provide closure. For instance, and while giving away as little as possible, a gun mentioned in the opening of one story disappears at the end. A family torn by arguments and betrayals is captured in a single moment of unification. And deep in the wilderness on a camping trip, a trio of characters shouts across the lake, the reoccurring echo representing the millions of others in existential crises much like their own.

Seeing is Blindness: Jose Saramago

The longtime readers of this blog know that I like the Portuguese writer Jose Saramago, and I especially like his novel Blindness. In the book, an epidemic of blindness sweeps the nation, and a band of travelers have to survive under quarantine. However, the sequel, Seeing, published in English in 2006, garnered rather unfavorable reviews, so I didn't buy it until recently. I bought it and read it because I had recently visited several countries with oppressive governments and listened to the type of grumbling that leads to uprisings. I thought that since Seeing dealt explicitly with governmental oppression, perhaps it would resonate more with me after my travels. It didn't.

The premise of Seeing is that all the people in an unnamed country go to the polls and leave the ballots blank. This is, in essence, a rejection of government itself, and the POV hovers on all the flummoxed ministers of the state. At least, the POV stays there for the first few chapters until it shifts to the leader of the town council, and then shifts to a police superintendent. Occasionally the POV flits off to anther character momentarily, and while this POV shifting is not an activity that I would universally condemn, it's one that certainly (in this case) lessens the emotional punch because I can't track with a single character and identify with them.

What makes this sequel crumple under scrutiny is the afflictions that plague most sequels. It depends too much on characters created in the original. And not only depends on them, but uses them without further character development, uses them as props to aid the story. The second half of the novel brings back the whole cast of Blindness, but only as the objects of an investigation - they don't really get to do anything.

Also, the themes smoothly developed in Blindness (oppression by the government, inhumanity of human nature, the restructuring of society) are hammered in Seeing. Saramago tries too hard to make you get his point, pounding away with dialogue and sharp observations by the collective narrator. The history of blindness, mentioned as happening four years ago in Seeing, was left for the reader to extrapolate meaning from in the original, but here in the sequel, there are multiple passages that explicitly link the plague of blindness with the plague of blank ballots. As if that wasn't enough, he also introduces the meta-fictional tool of talking directly to the reader, to show that telling the story alone isn't good enough to communicate his ideas (not that I have anything against metafiction, but I am disconcerted by essays inside stories).

There's a fine line between telling a moving fable that communicates an idea (a "novel of ideas") and offering a political tract (a "thesis novel"). With this sequel, Saramago's gone from the former to the latter. Another European writer has stepped on both sides of this divide: Italo Calvino. I love the mysterious, haunting qualities of If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, which resists the impulse to lecture or admonish, but find that his political short stories, such as the Numbers in the Dark collection, might as well be written in the form of a manifesto. It's as though both of these writers occasionally forget their professions as writers and step into an alternative career path as indoctrinators. They're much more entertaining when they simply remember to tell their stories.

As far as new stories, Saramago published the novel As Intermitencias da Morte in 2005. The first line: “The next day no one died.” No word yet on the English title or publication date, but judging from the rate of Blindness and Seeing, it should come out late 2007 or early 2008. This blurb from adnkronos tells a bit more:

Portuguese writer Jose' Saramago, Nobel prize winner for literature in 1998, will contemporarily launch his new novel in six European and South American nations in the next month of October. The first edition of the book, entitled in Portuguese ''As intermitencias da morte'' [The Intermittence of Death], will be published in Argentina, Brazil, Spain, Mexico, Portugal and Italy (in this case translated by Einaudi). This is the first time that a work by Saramago appears simultaneously: previous works have appeared in Portuguese with translations starting months later.

William T. Vollmann and the Principles of Review

I did not appreciate William T. Vollmann’s review of Anthony Swofford's Exit A in the New York Times Book Review yesterday. It's not that I believe he was wrong about the strengths of Swofford's first book, Jarhead, or even that he was wrong about the weaknesses of Swofford's first novel Exit A. It's because I found the tone of the review to be excessively harsh for a first novel. In my Manual of Book Reviewing Principles (yes, I just made that up), I think it's necessary to reserve different level of harshness for authors in various stages of their careers. For a literary great, if a no-holds-barred takedown is necessary, then so be it. The same goes for a mid-career author, perhaps with employing a pinch more carefulness. But a first time novelist (Jarhead was nonfiction) should be handled with kid gloves. Of course there are flaws in the novel, and Vollmann does the reader a service by pointing out how serious they are, but few first novelists come out of the gate at a sprint (If they do, they are often feted for it). More often, it does take a few novels, as Vollmann points out at the end of the article, to achieve a measure of literary competence, much less greatness.

Now I don't mean that a review of Swofford should be saccharine or cloyingly nice or even avoid saying harsh things. I appreciate a bad review because it tells me not to buy the book (as well as performing the pedagogical task of judging and analyzing types of literary flaws). And since Vollmann obviously didn't like Exit A, I don't mean that he should write empty praises. But his review, through and through, is ruthlessly demeaning (other than the compliments he pays to Jarhead). It's a scarring, eviscerating, decapitation. I think there is some way to express a strong dislike for a novel without a employing such a harsh tone. Ultimately, it's not the content of his complaints that bothers me as much as the dismissive tone in which it is conveyed.

I do appreciate the match-up: Well-established author reviewing beginning author. What I appreciate less is the obverse: beginning author reviewing established author. But both of these unequal match-ups can have their flaws. For the beginning author who is reviewing an established author, the danger is that the beginner critiques the wrong things, misses the point. For the well-established author reviewing the beginning author, the danger is that the review comes from such a high place (with a retrousse nose) that the review feels dismissive.

Vollmann says he "hate[s] to write reviews like this." I believe him. I believe that he was compelled by the poor execution of the prose and the flat characters to deliver a verdict that characterizes the novel as poor quality. But the way and extent to which he did it made first time novelists everywhere cringe over their computers.

Wendell Berry's New Book

The irony of writing about Wendell Berry on a computer, especially for a blog, doesn't escape me. Since Berry refuses to own a computer, and has widely (and trenchantly) written about the negative repercussions of technology, there is almost a note of friction simply by covering him in such a technological medium. Nonetheless, it's time to talk about him because he just released a new title, Andy Catlett: Early Travels, his sixth novel set in Port Williams.

I've read little of Berry's fiction, but a lot of his essays, and I have to say I enjoyed his essays more. Since I was introduced to him by way of his essays, it was interesting to read his fiction later and see his ideas of the world embodied in concrete stories. As far as his essays, I've spent a few years teaching various essays of his, especially Feminism, the Body, and the Machine, and students either see him as visionary or moronic, both reactions that mean he's imprinted himself on them.

Berry has been claimed, to some degree, by the Christian community as a writer of their own, because of his familiarity with Christian culture and knowledge of the Bible, but I think he stands a bit outside the Christian camp. What I mean is that he utters a rather prophetic message, or at least the best we can get in these days. As a prophet, he doesn't fit into neat societal grooves. A prophet is always a loner. Despite his religious convictions, or rather because of them, he's had no problem vilifying the Christian community for their complacence in permitting and even condoning environmental degradation. On that note, the richness and complexity of his view of the world is refreshing, albeit uncomfortably challenging. We all need to be challenged though, as iron sharpens iron. Berry's done that for me.

If you're new to Wendell Berry, I would suggest starting with this collection of his essays: The Art of the Commonplace

There aren't many reviews online that I've found of Andy Catlett (readers - any suggestions?) but here's a link to a brief synopsis.

Haruki Murakami: Hear the Wind Sing

One of my Loyal Readers, knowing of my penchant for all things Murakami, was able to procure an English copy of Hear the Wind Sing from a drugstore in Tokyo. The novella is perfectly pocket-sized, at four by six inches, and extremely slim, with 127 pages - a format I would like to see more in the States as a way to encourage portable reading. Hear the Wind Sing, along with Pinball 1973, are two early Murakami novels that aren't available in English, so I consider myself lucky to have a copy of one of them (and if anyone wants to send me Pinball 1973, I will reciprocate with all the publicity love I can muster).

When given the novella, I was looking forward to seeing what Murakami themes were present at a nascent stage of his writing career. Since so many of his other novels have shared themes (classical music, cats, coincidence that is actually fate), I wondered if many of these were already formed when he was just beginning to publish, or whether he had progressively developed them as he'd grown as a writer.

One aspect of Murakami that has certainly not changed over the years - although he certainly has refined it - is his tendency to use animals in his stories. The animal that appears most frequently is a cat - in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, a search for a missing cat launches the protagonist on a neighborhood odyssey, while in Kafka on the Shore, a character is cat-telepathic. That's not to say that other animals don't drop into the story, just that a single animal often plays a pivotal role in the narrative and it's often a cat. Even his book titles reflect the preoccupation with animals, with mentions of birds, sheep, and elephants.

When Murakami wrote Hear the Wind Sing, it seemed he had latched onto the notion that animals were key for his fiction, because he gave us a virtual menagerie, but hadn't quite decided that for narrative reasons it might be better to give a single animal a key and recurrent role. So this story moves through someone writing about elephants, a car crashing near a monkey cage, lyrics about giraffes, a story of a man-eating leopard, a psychologist's parable about a rabbit and a billy goat, a cow painted on a car hood, a character named The Rat, and the biologist protagonist who dissects cats. Those are just the main references, and all in 127 very small pages.

There are also a number of similarities with Murakami's later work that don't need excessive explanation: The protagonist is identical to most of Murakami's later protagonists - male, rather isolated, laconic, operating on cruise control, and jobless. The girl that becomes the protagonist's girlfriend has a twin - a familiar motif to the doppelganger-happy Murakami. There is even a couple-page bit on Martian wells on that transport you through time, which will be familiar to readers of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles.

One of the things absent from Hear the Wind Sing, though not the most remarkable thing, is plot. If you're wondering why I didn't give the plot up far sooner - such as in the third paragraph - it was because there wasn't much of a summary to give. The book is about eighteen days in a boy's life before he returns to college, and although events occur, they don't seem very significant (although they are interesting). Each passage in the book is broken by trios of asterisks or a numbered heading, and each passage seems like an anecdote that follows the last chronologically but not in terms of escalating conflict. There are mysteries that are never solved, such as a high school girlfriend that he borrowed an Elvis record from and never returned, and relationships that don't do anything. His relationships with The Rat, his friend, and the love affair with the nine-fingered girl, are not so much resolved as they are abruptly broken off as he resumes his schooling.

The lack of plot felt odd because Murakami novels and short stories usually have a fairly strong plot, even if in some of his longer books like The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle he will venture off to a side-story for a while. Kafka on the Shore is plotted precisely and tightly. Even Dance, Dance, Dance and Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World give the protagonist a single problem, a quest to solve that problem, and a solution at the end. Which tells me that at an early stage of his career Murakami had an excellent grasp on characterization, prose, and relationships, but his talents for structuring a storyline came later.

The most striking absence in the story is the magical realism for which Murakami is so well known. He remains, without much genre-blurring, in the concrete real of bars and bedrooms, cars and restaurants, and doesn't step outside to mess with character's shadow selves or discover parallel universes. In fact, the only hint of something outside "realism" is when the protagonist feels his "body overflowing with some strange energy" after sleeping on the beach with the Rat. Yet this energy is never brought up again. The lack of magical realism, interlaced with a number of familiar themes, makes the novella seem simultaneously Murakami-esque and Un-Murakami.

It is worth a read, especially you're a die-hard Murakami fan, but your only chance to land it might be inter-library loans in the US (and that's a long shot). As far as details to help you on your quest, it was translated by Alfred Birnbaum and published by the Kodansha English Library (originally designed to teach the Japanese how to read in English - which is why the last forty pages have an English/Japanese translation key). It was originally published 1979, but translated in 1987. Good Luck finding it, although Murakami doesn't believe in luck, only fate - so here's hoping you're destined.

Richard Ford's enduring voice

Richard Ford has been well covered in the blogosphere recently, with the third installment of Frank Bascombe in The Lay of the Land, and that's not territory I can one-up, so I'll cover slightly different ground.

Reading Ford alongside Raymond Carver, as I've been doing the last few months, has been a lesson in the power of minimalism. How the sparse word is potent. But what has stuck in my head from Ford (among many things of course, but some things really stick, you know what I mean), has been the pronouncement he made when announcing the winner of the Story Quarterly contest (I know, rather odd). This was back in 2003, issue 39, and the contest was the Robie Macauley award for fiction. Sylvia Sellers-Garcia won for A Correspondence. This was what he wrote:

A Correspondence' is excellent and is my selection. This story is sustained and serious, and the complex fictive world it reveals is entirely persuasive and pleasingly under the writer's authority. Importantly too, it is a very interesting story to read.

I must have read it twice, perhaps by accident, and it kept with me through the next few days. Those passive verbs! Five in three sentences. By using so many he inverted their usual weakness into a strength. And the trio of adverbs - what a mistake . . . that works.

It has to be a testament to the power of his voice that even a paragraph announcing a contest winner remained with me, haunted me, and echoed about in my head until I gave in to its cadences.

Labels: Richard Ford

Salman Rushdie's Defense of Fiction in Haroun

When you become doubtful of the impact of stories upon culture, Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories will cheer you up. Not because it is so clearly a book that has had an impact on the world (no, The Satanic Verses will fill that role), but because it's a book that discusses, through the vehicle of a magical, childlike story, the power of stories and how easily they can be corrupted. I suppose the corrupted part shouldn't cheer you up - but every book needs to have a villain, and the villain happens to occupy the role of story-corrupter, which cheers me because those who corrupt stories aren't often portrayed as villains, they are feted by marketing agencies and earn millions. Plus, a book for children that also entertains adults is a cheery prospect, not often enough enjoyed.

What makes this book even more entertaining is reading it parallel to Rushdie's life. Haroun's father - the Shah of Blah - is a master storyteller who is co-opted by the politicians to support their political campaigns (Compare to the enormous pressure put on Rushdie after the fatwa to say the Muslim profession of faith - there is no God but God - pressure exerted by the British government) The attacking army in the Sea of Stories wins by promoting freedom of speech between the ranks, for they all argue and their arguments make them stronger (The fatwa was placed on Rushdie's head in the first place because dialogue about the validity of Islam wasn't permitted - instead, an Imam threw down a death sentence for blasphemous speech) The anti-stories that are poisoning the sea of stories are there to control (the law invoked to condemn Rushdie was, ultimately, about controlling his freedom of speech)

The underlying question of the value of fiction - What's the use of stories that aren't true? - is repeated throughout the narrative and finally answered: stories bring his mother back, stories sustain the world (especially the older stories), and this very story is the one that Haroun's father the Shah of Blah wins back the people with.

It's a quick read, and ultimately, one that not only entertains but reminds us how much is at stake for writers and readers.

Labels: Salman Rushdie

Will Self: The Book of Dave

So the latest hyper-idiosyncratic vision of Will Self is out in the form of The Book of Dave. Summary: Deranged cabbie pens manuscript, buries the metal tablets in the backyard, and five hundred years later, after the apocalyptic flood, the tablets are unearthed and become the template for a new religion (sounds Mormonistic, but in the interview in the Telegraph he cites Christianity as his target). Self has always been excellent at creating worlds, whether in the short stories of Grey Area, where in Chest a man slowly dies from a poisonous atmosphere, or in Great Apes, where all of humanity is replaced by apes, and Book of Dave is no exception as he creates an entire world, language included. The language, however, sometimes goes over the top: consider this sentence excerpted by the NYTRB: “Mì awdas R onlë 2 tayk U sarf 2 Wyc, ware U R 2 B landid. Eye no nuffing uv oo U R aw wot U av dun, mayt, so folla ve rools uv mì ferrë an Eyel giv U no aggro.”

Right. Let me run out and buy more of that.

Although I usually like Will Self, I’m warded off by some of the early feedback about Book of Dave – a common complaint seems to be that certain sections are unreadable and that the rants against organized religion are hardly new critiques. But since Self has steadily produced work that I like over the years, I will probably end up reading it at some point.

Extra tidbit: Quote on writing from Self in a Telegraph interview:
“I think that what blocks so many writers is a platonic view of the text - the need to write an ideal. I've always subscribed to the other view that everything is a version. The best I could do at the time.”

On the whole, what he's produced so far has been good enough.

Labels: Will Self

Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners

I'm very taken by Kelly Link's new collection of short stories, Magic (for beginners), not the least because the title implies the genre: she writes otherworldly, magical stories, lying somewhere between Amiee Bender and Haruki Murakami. To read a story from the collection, check out The Faery Handbag (which won the 2005 Hugo and Locus Award). It has whimsical humor and keeps the magical realism grounded in the concrete details of a tangible world - absolutely bewitching.

Her website (well done - especially like the moving dinosaur!) has info on her touring schedule as well as a thorough bibliography.

Lastly, (seriously, the last link) is a piece of advice Link wrote for the newsletter of the Online Writing Workshop, telling students to write eccentrically and bravely.

Labels: Kelly Link

Richard Dawkins The God Delusion

So Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion is #4 on Amazon.com right now and #8 on the New York Times Bestseller list. His shill is simple: Belief in God is irrational and religion has caused irreparable damage to society. Unfortunately, his ideas are a bit too simple. Marilynne Robinson, in an essay in the November issue of Harper's, thoroughly dismantles the idea that Dawkins possesses even an undergraduate-level grasp of logic. Her review can be found here, and please, please, do your critical reasoning skills a favor and read her critique before you make the mistake of purchasing his book. Or, here for a similarly scathing review by Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books.

Labels: Marilynne Robinson, Richard Dawkins

The Road of Cormac McCarthy

So I just finished McCarthy's The Road last night. I didn't mean to finish it last night, I meant to start it, but by midnight I was convinced that it was good enough to lose sleep over. And the rest of the book certainly didn't disappoint. Here's a few bullet-pointed thoughts:

• The most common dialogue between the son and father is "okay." Rather ironic for such a hauntingly dark postapocalyptic tale.
• The book's obsession with food - missing it, finding it, describing it, eating it - turns every meal into a sacramental act, laden with the symbolism of memory and love.
• What is most intriguing about this novel is not what is included, but what is excluded - McCarthy writes with enviable restraint. In a lesser novelist's hands, it would have doubled in size to include much more backstory, internals, and explanation of the plague.
• The religious element is pronounced - both anger towards God and the child associating his father with God - but mainly at the beginning and end of the novel. God is slipped in subtly in the middle - as curses referencing Christ or as references to Job: "Curse God and die."

The story is told in fragments, and here's an excerpt:

There was a skylight about a third of the way down the roof and he made his way to it in a walking crouch. The cover was gone and the inside of the trailer smelled of wet plywood and that sour smell he'd come to know. He had a magazine in his hip pocket and he took it out and tore some pages from it and wadded them and got out his lighter and lit the papers and dropped them into the darkness. A faint whooshing. He wafted away the smoke and looked down into the trailer. The small fire burning in the floor seemed a long way down. He shielded the glare of it with his hand and when he did he could see almost to the rear of the box. Human bodies. Sprawled in every attitude. Dried and shrunken in their rotten clothes. The small wad of burning paper drew down to a wisp of flame and then died out leaving a faint pattern for just a moment in the incandescence like the shape of a flower, a molten rose. Then all was dark again.

Labels: Cormac McCarthy

Twilight of the Superheroes: Deborah Eisenberg

In Deborah Eisenberg’s latest collection of short stories, Twilight of the Superheroes, the reader is always catching up. In more than half of the stories she starts by throwing you in the middle of a scene, sometimes by way of a line of dialogue, and introducing three or more characters in the first sentence or two. For instance, she starts Revenge of the Dinosaurs with five characters:

Hi, Barbara, I said. You’re Barbara? Eileen, said the nurse who answered the door. Nights. I’m the granddaughter,” I said. I figured, Eileen said. Barbara told me you’d be showing up. So where’s that handsome brother of yours? Bill? I said, I beat Bill? That’s a first.

Or this opening for Like it or Not:

Kate would have a little tour of the coast, Giovanna would have the satisfaction of having provided an excursion for her American houseguest without having to interrupt her own work, and the man whom everyone called Harry would have the pleasure, as Giovanna put it, of Kate’s company: demonstrably a good thing for all concerned.

By the time you’ve unraveled the relational matrix of the original characters, Eisenberg has sped off to fill in back story, to add two or three more names to the many-spoked wheel of relatives and friends, and to ruminate on generational responsibilities (Flaw in the Design) or political repercussions (Twilight of the Superheroes). If you believe, somewhere in the middle, you have finally caught up, there will be a POV shift or flashback to stagger and surprise. If this disorientation of the reader were all she offered, Eisenberg would merely be a difficult writer, not necessarily a talented one. But she ensures that by the end of her stories, you have caught up, which makes the endings resonate.

Although her endings certainly aren’t a neat bowtie. In Window, a woman moves in with a man who has a small child. When the man becomes abusive, she runs away, kidnapping his child, yet the ending forecasts nothing – whether she gets away with it, where she’s going. In Like it or Not, Kate is taken (not entirely willingly) on a sight seeing tour with Harry, but the climax doesn’t even involve her. And it ends on a soft note, which does not wrap up the story as much as it simply portrays the end of an emotionally heightened span of time in her life. With stories this long, you would expect endings to make it towards the pot-of-gold side of the narrative rainbow, to reveal a twist or character turn. But they don’t. These endings don’t cater to plot, they cater to the emotional states of the characters, nipping at a sensitive region of a character’s motivations or state of mind, commenting in an elliptical way on the essence of their internal struggles.

For example, look at the end of The Flaw in the Design, a story about a disgruntled son who blames his father for the corporate greed ruining the earth, told from the perspective of the wife who has an affair. This last paragraph shows the scene just before the first paragraph, on how they came to be having an affair:

We had taken the taxi, had stood at the desk; we had done it – the thought kept tumbling over me like pealing bells as we rose up in the elevator, our hands lightly clasped. And we were solemn, and so happy, or at least I was, as we entered our room, the beautiful room that we might as well have been the first people ever to see – elated as if by some solution, when just minutes before we’d been on the metro platform, clinging fiercely, as if before a decisive separation, the way lovers do in wartime.

Between the beginnings and endings, these six stories are extremely long, although that isn’t a criticism. It’s just that they are longer than what is conventionally expected for short stories, which means they are in the no-mans-land between short stories and novellas. In this space Eisenberg still fleshes out remarkably complete human beings, welts, warts and all. Her characters often belong to the jet-set demographic, trafficking in the exclusive regions of the country, like plush lofts in Manhattan or sight-seeing along unnamed coasts. They often are disenfranchised – from their families, from knowledge of themselves, from hope. Bearing names like Giovanna, Matsumoto, Lucien and Alma, they seem to have their complete histories and futures implied inside a few scenes, a few bits of dialogue. In Some Other, Better Otto, the protagonist Otto is a gay musician and grammar nazi who cares for a sister so brilliant she had an episode and was institutionalized, and interacts with a little girl, Portia, who refuses to talk except to the microphone of her fist. Add in six or seven additional personas with character tags of their own, as well as a thanksgiving dinner, and you have an inter-relational maelstrom of delightful proportions.

It was challenging to wrap my head around these stories. They are difficult, but that is their virtue. These are the type of stories you must read at least twice: once just to get abreast of their accomplishment, the second time to try to unravel. To truly give them justice, they deserve many more readings than that.

Labels: Deborah Eisenberg

(Not) The Best Christian Short Stories: Bret Lott, Editor

I kind of liked some aspects of Bret Lott's Jewel (the lyrical voice, the emotional connection to the characters), so when I saw he had edited a collection, I decided to give it a try. The title made me wonder if anyone was creating good literary works that dealt with transcendent themes, but Lott terrible selections responded with a resounding no. What he promises, in the introduction, is literary fiction. What we get is half-craft moralistic fluff. Why is it that so many religious authors resort to the moralistic fable? Why is it that they refuse to make characters actually do something evil? (unless they are roundly punished in the end) What can't they curse like real human beings? (saying that a character said a word beginning with "D" and ending with "it", is not, as one of these authors assumes, transgressive) Where are the Flannery O'Connors of today?

In fact, Lott picked such horrible selections (on some of these, the prose sounds like something straight from a young adult series) that it made me wonder whether the publisher wanted only to capture the evangelical market, rather than anyone who is near literate. The answer did lie in the publisher: WestBow is a publisher for "Christian" novels, which means they did want him to select goodie-goodie stories free of any nasty elements that might ruffle conservative feathers. Westbow even sponsored the contest that one of the included stories won, for which they promised a book contract. The question then is why Lott would agree to put his name on a collection like this - perhaps his taste is not quite as good as it seems. In the end, I guess to get a real anthology of Christian stories, you need a secular publisher to publish it.

Labels: Bret Lott

Allen Ginsberg's Martifice

On November 1st, the 50th anniversary of Howl, De Capo Press is releasing poems and journals from Allen Ginsberg. If nothing else, they've chosen a provocative title: The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice. The title came from a notation on one of Ginsberg's notebooks that combined the words Martyrdom and Artifice into Martifice. The book is rich with comments and analysis of Ginsberg's friends, literary and otherwise, including this bit about Jack Kerouac that's intriguing because of his estimation of Kerouac and himself:

"I think Jack is the greatest writer alive in America of our own age - yet Harcourt rejected his first version [of On the Road] as being too personal and subjective - not worked out in objective story - which feeling I went along with. Now this second version seems to them a garble of unrelated free associations. I think I will stick by Jack, though I haven't seen the pages yet, only snatches in his letters. He understands me - so he must be great."

Poetry buffs and dilettantes, check it out - there's 65 poems that haven't been published elsewhere and the book clocks in at a hefty 515 pages.

Labels: Allen Ginsberg

Janet Fitch's Sophomore Effort

Janet Fitch is a very nice woman, although she's a bit too particular about her tastes in literature (It's one thing to dislike E.L. Doctorow, it's another to insist he can't write a sentence). On the sentence level, however, we find a key distinction between her bestselling White Oleander and her newest book Paint it Black. White Oleander had luxurious prose, sentences to cuddle up with at night. But Paint it Black sports much starker writing, words stripped raw by grief. Although the new voice fits the topic (a suicide and the aftermath), it's simply not the voice she excels at. The content of PIB doesn't feel as strong as WO either. In the first few chapters of PIB, the protagonist vacillates between sorrow and fury so often that the intended effect finally wore off. This vacillation might have been pitch-perfect for what happens in real life, but it just didn't work on the page. Oprah probably won't pick this one up, but that's okay. Fitch has gotten past the sophomore hump and can start on her next offering. And besides, PIB hit 19 on the New York Times hardcover bestseller list. She could be doing worse.

Update: Fitch just rose to #1 on the L.A. Times bestseller list on 10/8 (from five last week).

Labels: Janet Fitch

The Rein of Michel Houellebecq

It's been four months since the French writer Michel Houellebecq's latest novel, The Possibility of an Island, was released in English, and eight years since his first novel Whatever appeared on the scene. In that time he's managed to make quite a bad boy image for himself, primarily by the excoriating insults in his novels (in Platform a character asserts that Islam "could only have been born in a stupid desert, among filthy Bedouins who had nothing better to do — pardon me — than bugger their camels.") In addition, he's managed to act like an ass in person, even in his own documentary (in one interview he got smashingly drunk and demanded sex from the female interviewer, and in his documentary he's always alone, swigging off a bottle.) But not since Camus has a French novelist received such widespread popularity, and the sales come partially because of his willingness to sacrifice every sacred cow. He debases women (only slightly more often than men), critiques religions (especially Islam), and offers a selfish, despairing view of the world, but that's precisely what people find attractive about him. His ideas are attractive because he tries so hard to be unattractive. His ideas are also attractive because no one else is saying them. He's been characterized wrongly as a nihilist. It's simply not true, and what disproves it are two books that form the pillars of his work. The Elementary Particles, which was his first big hit, and his last book, The Possibility of an Island. These two books are hitting on the same theme: that technology cannot save us, and we should return to a primal state. This repeated theme (among many other reasons) is why he's called a novelist of ideas. Platform and Whatever are minor books, deserving a reading only if you're a die-hard fan, but if you want the heart of this misanthropist, read the two pillars. He's acerbic, difficult to swallow, and often offensive, but his original training in poetry comes through in well crafted prose and his ideas, told entertainingly, should be dealt with.

Labels: Michel Houellebecq

Gilead

I found Marilynne Robinson through an essay she wrote in Harper's critiquing evangelical religion. It was so dead-on I just had to read her second novel, Gilead. She pulled off a lovely voice, from a man at death's door writing letters to his son, and also managing to have quite a few theological rumorings and speculations. It's written in snatches, like Veronica by Mary Gaitskill, and somehow a large percentage of sections left me teary eyed. Other than Bret Lott (I've read Jewel) and perhaps Anne Lamott, I don't know of many other Christians who are writing literary fiction - there are slates of them churning out "religious" thrillers and romances, but those disgust me.

Labels: Marilynne Robinson