Exhibit 1.6.5

The Actual Book I'm Reading Next

So I read around in this when I got it, but I had to put it away until after my exams. Now I'm reading it for real, and I'm excited. You should read it too because you like excitement and good things and good people.

Pick it up.

Exhibit 1.6.1

John Barth

Stepping from the treacherous passage at last into the mirror-maze, he saw once again, more clearly than ever, how readily he deceived himself into supposing he was a person. He even foresaw, wincing at his dreadful self-knowledge, that he would repeat the deception, at ever-rarer intervals, all his wretched life, so fearful were the alternatives. Fame, madness, suicide; perhaps all three.

From "Lost in the Funhouse"

Exhibit 1.5.27

Italo Calvino

Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears. We can rediscover the continuity of time only in the novels of that period when time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem to have exploded, a period that lasted no more than a hundred years.

from If on a winter's night a traveler

Exhibit. 1.5.26

On Bad Guys

So for a lot of reasons--reading dozens of books for comps, teaching a literature class, re-watching Fringe, Rex Ryan, everything else--I've been thinking a lot about "bad guys." Previously, it had been an easy category to ignore in fiction or leave to movies and TV shows, forms of art where the old good vs. bad, white hat vs. black hat narrative structures exist a bit more clearly and persistently.

(Perhaps they weren't quite as ravaged by modernity/post-modernity? Perhaps what we now call literary fiction, by definition, has always left these categories to whatever era's popular forms? Or it's both, that writers and readers don't need or want a Dickens?)

In literary fiction, however, there's rarely a clear antagonist, at least in the sense of being totally, irredeemably bad. It's maybe a stupid distinction. Of course fiction still deals with these plots, just that those books tend to be bought at airports or marketed to children. There's still the same impulse in genre work there's always been--to entertain, thrill, titillate--and we still crave the escape of this even if now we prefer to take it over a screen with pretty actors. And, of course, a good deal of literary work does use and play with this same dichotomy, this same old plot, especially as every hot young (male) writer since Chabon seems to want to make a case for comic books and pulp novels as art.

Even then, however, things are rarely allowed to devolve into that clear relationship between good and bad. It's simply not literary. Whatever qualities we want that word to carry--complex, layered, stylized--they're the opposite of such a defined way of looking at the world and of plot. Anything else is genre stuff. And, as I said, it's a binary that's mostly breaking down--maybe one of the last after decades of trying to stomp these things out--but even as genre work creeps into the literary, it's not able to bring the full starkness of contrast between its characters with it.

Far more often, the bad guy is anything but a person. The bad guy is government or a corporation or a religion or any other institution we're comfortable calling into question when we know that to call a person such a word is silly and shallow and, with a few terribly notable exceptions, typically fails to grasp anywhere near the whole truth of a human being. And it's not that there aren't bad characters--there are--it's that they're caught up in the same problematic system as the protagonist and so their agency isn't their own, they're acting out learned behaviors, their sin is, unlike the protagonist, in being unable to see or separate themselves from what is corrupting them.

And this is interesting to me not because I care about having bad guys in literary fiction--and I know, I know they are out there--or even making a case for literary fiction as a category (which I certainly don't care to do) but because the first thing most students seem to do is shift characters into these roles no matter how earned or unearned. It's fascinating, both as a teacher and as a person who realizes how often this gets done in life as well.

For students, they typically don't say "bad guy" but they often will come into class having read a complicated story without clear roles and say, "I was rooting for her." or "He's a jerk. I wanted bad things to happen to him." And they say these things not because they're misreading the story, but because most are coming from those genre narratives where these roles still exist and identifying them is the first step in understanding a plot.

(Teaching a class of high school aged students this summer who were obsessed with The Avengers, they would often assign characters--and themselves--the roles. So a particular strain of good guy would be "a Thor" and a bad guy "a total Loki". For a few texts and films, it actually sort of worked).

So I was thinking about this when my class read A.M. Homes's story "Do Not Disturb", a perfect example of a story with a bad guy and of how literary fiction these days chooses to complicate that idea. It's a story about how we lean on that narrative in real life, and it offers it to us itself in such a way that it's almost impossible not to take the bait.

(Ha, I googled to see if the story was online--it's not, I don't think--and saw that Dave wrote about it here. I'm not going to read that yet, but I'm sure his thoughts are better)

In sum: wife is a mean person, gets cancer, gets meaner, husband tries to run away, can't, the end. It is, frankly, a remarkably depressing story for anyone to read, especially for anyone who was in, is in, or plans to be in a relationship. And there's this whole reversal of gender roles dynamic, too. The wife takes on all the traditionally masculine qualities while the husband the traditionally feminine. My students were so good at pointing out examples of this that I actually started to think a little less of the story. There are also times--the husband does not know how many ovaries a woman has; the version of femininity who finally comforts the husband is literally (though subtly) a French maid--where it's more than a little ridiculous and on-the-nose.

It's a very heavily constructed story in this sense, for good and bad. It begins and ends with a character writhing in pain and stuck on the floor, there's the body of a husband who has jumped from a building our husband is compared to then later he gets the chance to jump from a great height himself, there's a Ferris Wheel on which they are (again with this word) literally going around in circles, etc.

But to say these are fatal flaws or even flaws would be to miss the humor of the story. It's very funny. And it's meant to be over-the-top given that an essential element in understanding the story is putting weight on the husband's narration. In his telling, the wife is certainly the bad guy. She's uncommunicative, withholding, demeaning, sarcastic, cold, etc. All the words you might throw at a bad partner or hear from a friend post-breakup.

(I initially said post-divorce there until I realized none of my friends are divorced. Yet. See you back at the bar someday, guys!--is that a terrible joke? Feels like a terrible joke. Fine, fine, I'm the bad guy of my own blog post).

And god is she really those things. The students, rightly, hated her in the same way they hated a lot of characters who did far less to deserve it. She was the bad guy. The end. So I asked, does that make the husband the good guy? This they didn't seem to want to grant--he's whiny and ineffectual--but ultimately they decided yes, he has to be. She's that bad and this is how these things work.

But it's impossible that this is truly the case because if we accept, at the end of the story, that the wife is bad then we have to accept that the French maid is good. Call it a hunch, but I simply refuse to believe this is what A.M. Homes intends to say about what it means to be a woman. That the wife can really be summed up, as the husband seems to think and as she herself says, as simply "a bitch." That what our highly sensitive, feminized male narrator really needs is for a sexualized woman to rub his feet and feed him chocolates so he can be a man again. I know in summary it seems ridiculous to think one could ever believe these things--that even by virtue of it being a "literary" story we know it can't possibly be arguing for such politically incorrect reductions--but what allows that reading, what allows students (and I'm sure many others) to take the bait of hating her, is how completely that narrative pushes her into that bad guy role. And it needs her there because it's only by coming to the brink of accepting that hate that the careful reader is able to see Homes's far more complicated narrative.

And this, I suppose, is where we come back around to how bad guys are getting used most often in literary fiction these days. As a sort of a red herring, as one who throws those old narratives back into question. As critiques of institutions not people. Because the wife is unquestionably a selfish, awful person, but to fall into the trap of labeling her the bad guy is to miss the moments where is not those things. Her concern for having children. Her trauma of having that, and the very organs that make her a woman, stolen from her by her own body and a male-dominated medical establishment she's a part of. Her own peevish, needy husband who wants something from her she cannot give, at least not now, maybe not ever. To miss these things is to deny her the full access to her own humanity. It's to fail to understand that this is a story not solely about a sick wife or a put-upon husband but about a marriage.

And it's not that to know this makes her anything but the bad guy or excuses her actions or her words. This is not some kind of "rewrite the fairy tale so the wolf is the victim" reading. It's simply one that finds the subtle points among all the hyperbole because having even a modicum of sympathy for her throws the husband's entire narrative into question. It's to understand that structurally the story wants us to feel that closed loop suffocating both of these people. It's to bemoan this marriage specifically, perhaps the whole institution generally, and certainly the ways gender roles, even if reversed, lead to trauma, miscommunication, and division. Her femininity is in crisis--likely always has been given her ambition and demeanor, her being "a bitch"--as is his masculinity (he's not literally impotent--though god knows it wouldn't surprise anyone--but he's both denied sex and denies himself sex). Their marriage--all marriages?--is dependent on finding a balance in this dynamic and is, therefore, in crisis itself. The sickness only brings it to a head, cements their roles (her "bitch"; him "unappreciated caregiver").

That his story has a bad guy, that it's her, is not surprising. It's still how we want to shape our narratives. We have to. We need to. I see it in both students in the classroom and in grad students understanding of a particular administrator. It's simply easier than looking for the truth of the situation. More than that, it feels more natural when we're all the heroes of our own stories. There's nothing revelatory about that, I suppose--really, that Didion quote I gave the other day says more or less the same thing about shaping narratives only without the good/bad/selfish dynamic--but it's an important thing for writers and readers of literary fiction to look for and be suspicious of.

And, of course, it's an even more important thing for us as people to be suspicious of.

But for "Do Not Disturb", understanding that impulse is essential to understanding the story and, if not accept or even forgive the wife, to see her (and not just her sickness) with sympathy she's done nothing to earn and definitely wouldn't want. We need to not take the bait of hating her because to do so is to accept the fantasy of definitions, the world as knowable, women as "Bitch" vs. French Maid, our struggles, our relationships with each other, as good vs. evil. We need to acknowledge that, once again, there are no bad guys though there are certainly bad things made worse, unthinkably worse, by being more complicated than that label. By being unfixable in all senses of the word.

Exhibit 1.5.21

Two Links

* I have a short piece giving some flash fiction bylaws over at Nano Fiction for their State of Flash series. I really do mean all of them. Especially the ones about poor, poor Doug.

* My short short "Biologists Study Grace" is over at Paper Darts and the entire page will soon be tattooed onto my back. Not really. probably. Maybe. Sort of. We'll see. But it is quite pretty.

Exhibit 1.4.4

Answers


I answered some questions for Midwestern Gothic here. Of course, that link includes a link right back here, so some of you are stuck in an endless Adam Peterson-loop while my cold, dead eyes look on disapprovingly. Or maybe it's not at all like that. I really don't know how you're spending your day.

In any case, it's a great journal and you should pick up a copy here.

Exhibit 1.4.3

Archival

One of the first stories I ever published is now online as part of the new Madison Review website. And from the same Spring 2008 issue you can also read a poem by Adam Day. Apparently we were journal buddies before we shared an office.

Adam is also an editor at Catch Up, a new journal of literature and comics. Check it out here.

Exhibit 1.3.18

Camera Obscura



I knew since their first issue that Camera Obscura would be one of my favorite literary journals. It's stylish without neurosis, smart without smugness, relevant without pandering. It's weird how easy a journal like this can make the format and how, well, obsolete it can make other journals.

It's not the photography that makes CO seem bigger--though it certainly doesn't hurt--but the boldness of the fiction which, much like the design, always seems to be doing several things at once without falling into any of the usual traps. Like the photographs, it's always worldly and adroit and, damnit, just hard to look away from. Take the opening to Vincent Czyz's "The Nameless Saint":

It was the hour when the lamplighter, toting a ladder over his shoulder, made his tedious rounds; when workers slogged through the streets as though souls on their way to purgatory; when bones turning to dust in graveyards unexpectedly shifted like a heap of logs burning on the grate. This was not the quarter of Samirska lit by theaters and cafes, cabarets and fine restaurants--a quarter smiling like a crescent moon in the dusk--here the restaurants had bare wooden floors and for a drima offered a bowl of cabbage soup or, for a few more, greasy stew and a slice of black village bread. here, mounted gendarmes patrolled the streets in pairs or not at all.

You want to read the rest of that story and the rest of that issue.

Of course, I have a story here which you probably don't want to read and is mostly notable for having taken its title from the repeated line in an Arthur & Yu song ("1000 Words") that Dave turned me onto a long time back. It seems appropriate to me that the story ended up in a journal with a photography emphasis, and I'm thrilled it's there.

Please help them out by subscribing here or by checking your local Barnes & Noble. Unless you're in Topeka in which case I think my parents already bought them all. See, that's how much I care. I told my parents, and they don't even know where I live.*

*That's probably not true.

Exhibit 1.3.6

Foul Weather

The Weather Stations by Ryan Call from Caketrain

Despite all the tornadoes and hurricanes and tsunamis of the last few years, Call's book is a shocking reminder that even more terrible things might be coming. Wind that kills, lightning that maims, sky that crumbles--the stories here aren't post-apocalyptic, they're simply apocalyptic. Worse, they're powerfully personal. So often in lesser work a story's heart shrinks as the disaster increases, but here the tragedies are always human ones. The weather here produces not destruction but terror, and it's not on insubstantial difference. You don't feel like the author is a child kicking over an anthill--he's the ant.

I was able to read this entire book on the plane yesterday which I both recommend and warn you against. Recommend because it's a great read that keeps the clouds moving quickly. Warn because this book tells you those clouds are trying to kill you and it's impossible not to believe it. Those. Clouds. Are. Trying. To. Kill. You. I honestly didn't think we were ever going to land and when we did, just a minute after I finished the last story, I was shocked when we all didn't burst into applause out of wonder for our pilot. You know it's a great book when it can re-mystify the commonplace.

And that's what impressed me most as I turned the pages and the plane rocked slightly in the air. I didn't want to land because I didn't want to leave the book's world. At that moment, we could have just floated away.

Exhibit 1.2.17

Things




* So I've got a Sire Line up at Everyday Genius right here. You should do what I do and have EG in your Google Reader. You will not be disappointed.

* That Sire Line is mostly notable for being the first one in the series. There are now 50. I have no idea how that project went from something inspired by a picture in Dave's bathroom to that .jpg I created at work (sorry, Mark!) to this terrible, long ridiculous thing.

* I'll write more about both of these bookish soonish, I'm sure, but last week I read Mat Johnson's Pym and received Ryan Call's The Weather Stations which I'm going to start today-ish. You're going to want them both. Trust me.

* The Cupboard is still having a contest. Tell your friends, submit, etc. The deadline is March 31st.

Exhibit 1.2.12

Thing

* I have a short(er) story in the new issue of StoryQuarterly. It comes from a time when I thought 1,000 word stories were the future. Now I know that the real future is 500 word stories. It was a simpler time, 2009.

* Anyway, my thing is mostly notable for being a one-note joke about having to harvest a cowboy if you want a pair of cowboy boots. Sort of like how I had to kill that elephant to get these stylish tusks you've noticed me wearing. I did not, however, have to kill it with my bare hands. That I did for me. Also, to best Orwell. The pussy.

* Now I've made myself sad thinking about animal violence. I'm against it.

* I'm still reading through the issue--it's fairly massive--but so far my favorite story actually has considerable animal violence (or at least animal death). Bethany Reece's "The Dog Dies" won me over anyway. A collection of different dog deaths, it's terribly sad but funny and touching in all the right ways. I didn't want to like it, but I couldn't help it, not when it includes lines about trying to slap a dog soul. It's hard to explain why that works, but it does. I'm a fan.

* After, in penance, I stared at a picture of Brett's dog soul for an hour:

Exhibit 1.2.10

Wieland




(Yep, another post on books. If you don't care, you'll probably enjoy this hyper-literal video of Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson's "Luckenbach, Texas." I know I did.

)


Charles Brockden Brown's novel makes two things clear: 1) the gothic is integral to American literature and 2) we should have seen M. Night Shyamalan coming. O, fine, a third thing: voice throwing is the world's deadliest talent.

Why America couldn't have produced compelling social novels is unclear to me, but her earliest books all seem to be obsessed with darkness and horror and the unsettling nature of life on the new continent. Without definitive social classes, nobody seems to know who to trust and so everyone is a rake or a murderer or some deviant ventriloquist. Wieland came out less than 15 years before Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, but they don't feel like they exist in the same world. And, I suppose, they don't.

Austen has her balls and parlors while Brockden Brown's America feels like a free for all. There is still a moral order, just not one that anybody feels comfortable asserting except when it's too late. At first the book even seems progressive. The titular Wieland is obsessed with reason and rationality rather than his father's odd, Puritanical religion. His sister lives alone without comment and serves as the book's narrator. Everyone, basically, feels like a free citizen in a land ruled by liberty rather than class or superstition.

O, then weird things start happening and then it all goes to hell. The brother no longer trusts his wife. The sister, too, is spurned by her suitor for being a hussy. One character believes God is telling him to kill everyone. It's only after these things start happening does the claustrophobia of the early pages seem suffocating. America, in a word, was a little boring.

The Shyamalan twist is that some and possibly all of this turmoil was caused by a passing "biloquist" who helpfully explains how through a series of very reasonable coincidences, he was forced to throw his voice, a power he laments and had sworn not to use (it being too powerful. Something _________ must have realized a long time ago [___________ being where I would put the name of a famous ventriloquist if there were any {O,shit, Jeff Dunham. Well, I'm still not giving him the satisfaction}]). In any case, this wizard stops short of confessing to causing Wieland to murder his family, but it doesn't really matter. The sister flees back to Europe where there's still evil but it's easier to recognize.

So what was wrong with America that this is where our imaginations immediately went? It's tough to say, though there seems to be some reaction not only to the wilderness surrounding the colonies but to the breakdown of social order caused by democracy. This breakdown, which was hardly as severe as it must have seemed, is a little ridiculous to a modern reader--as is the one moment of spontaneous combustion--but the young country seems to have experienced a lot of terror in the space between reason and freewill. O, we might be able to reason our way into explanation (it's usually ventriloquism) but that doesn't mean some of us won't fall back on superstition and violence and how will we know who those people are until they're approaching us with axes?

Exhibit 1.2.6

I Read This



I Should Get This



Well, okay, probably not a gold medal from the 2006 Winter Olympics, but I feel like I deserve something. I know reading the book is its own reward, but mostly I'm talking about having hauled it to and around Washington D.C. It's heavy, in other words. And I don't mean emotionally, I mean it weighs almost as much as my laptop. No, that's not exactly as memorable as winning the luge, but it's not so far off either. I'd settle for a bronze from Lillehammer.

As for the book, what can I say that hasn't been said. It's great. I prefer the small perfection of Jane Austen--whose work the book greatly resembles through the first two sections--but if you have ever wished she occasionally left the sitting room and wrote epic novels about a bunch of Russians, here's your book. After those early sections, it's as much social commentary as it a social novel but only occasionally does it feel didactic (sadly, one of those places is the ending but if you've made it that far, I imagine you've already given yourself over to it). Tolstoy obviously believes something about peasants and Christianity and hypocrisy and honor, but it's shocking how beside the point all of that is to understanding the novel. Mostly, it's hard not to read these portions of the novel without being all too aware of the wave that's coming through history to take all of these people out. Every time Levin started going on about not educating workers, I screamed, "Look out, they're coming to kill your children!" at the book.

(By the way, this completely ruined how smart and sensitive I was supposed to look while performatively reading it at coffee shops).

Around all that philosophy though is a really remarkable portrayal of humanity. There's no overstating it: I can't think of another book that has so accurately portrayed the human soul. All the contradictions and self-betrayals and doubt and relief--it's what allows a book like this to transcend its philosophy and its timeliness and give reason to the epic social novel. Yeah, it's never going to be my favorite kind of novel, but I can certainly understand the appeal of trying to signpost a moment with a monument big enough to be seen through history.

Exhibit 1.2.1

Best Movie Quotes to Pretend Are in The Great Gatsby

* "Here's looking at you, kid." -- Tom Buchanan to Myrtle

* "Forget it, James, it's North Dakota." -- Dad Gatsby

* "Love means never having to say you're sorry." -- Daisy

* "It was beauty killed the beast." -- Owl Eyes

* "We're going to need a bigger boat." -- Dan Cody

* "I'm walking here! I'm walking here!" -- Myrtle

* "You had me at hello." -- Nick

* "Nobody puts Baby in a corner." -- Jordan

* "I'll have what she's having." -- Wolfsheim

Exhibit 1.1.26

House (Boat) Party



I'm a bit in trouble on this book because I read it a couple of weeks back, couldn't think of a take on it at the time, and now feel like I should say something. Um, it won the Booker? That's worth something isn't it?

[Goes and checks to see if David Mitchell has won one, sees that he hasn't, decides it's worth nothing]

So, yep, people living in boats along the Thames, somewhat focused around a young Canadian mother and her two daughters, one a moody pre-teen, one adopted from St. Julian's School for Precocious Tots. In fact, I'm not entirely sure this entire book wasn't written in anticipation of movie version to launch the career of a not-yet-conceived Dakota Fanning. She's smart like an adult but whimsical like a child! Her idiosyncrasies are adorable! Just imagine a six-year old jumping rope in a dress and rain boots making intelligent observations about humanity and you've got a pretty good idea.

Anyway, there's something great about the carefree wandering of the omniscient narration and the characters aren't completely without interest. And I suppose living on a boat in the 60s must have been more scandalous than I'm giving it credit for, but I can't help but compare this book to Drabble's which had a lot more to say about the age, class, and country.

Maybe this is the way to put it: a lot of the novels I've read recently have been short but this is the only one that felt slight.

Exhibit 1.1.25

The Western


A fun book that didn't take me much longer to read than the new movie took to watch, and it's easy to see why so many people love it. I certainly did.

(Quick movie comparison: almost identical with a great deal of the dialogue coming directly from the book, one short and unimportant addition, and, oddly, a few minor plot points changed, which both solves some tiny oddities and creates a few new ones).

Like a lot of the books I've read recently, it's heavily voice driven. That's probably not an accident given that they're all for classes taught by the same person, but True Grit stands out for the oddity of its retrospective narration through the eyes of a 14-year-old girl on a manhunt for her father's killer. That conceit alone could and does take this book a long way, but its the absolute appropriateness of her position that makes it compelling. Mattie is by far the smartest and most honorable character and in the running for the toughest. Her competition is all larger-than-life western characters, and so she is both straightman to the genre conventions around her and the wide-eyed gaze that creates them.

It seems a shame to even talk about the book this way. It's just good. Exciting and funny and unsentimental right up until the stoicism of the genre breaks to show the character Mattie has never learned to hide.

Exhibit 1.1.24

A Perfectly Lovely Book


I don't have much more to say about it though I guess some comment should be made about just how odd Margaret Drabble's book's plotting is. There's a lot here that could be conflict but isn't, just as the primary conceit of the book (a not particularly young but pretty and highly educated woman gets pregnant her first time having sex) could be treated as some kind of "ironical" misfortune but isn't. In fact, early on two characters discuss their pregnancies in terms of Thomas Hardy's Life's Little Ironies and their differing conclusions inform the book only slightly less than the fact that, in both cases, everything worked out perfectly. ...and everything worked out perfectly is a strange concept to build a plot around, but there it is.

Well, okay, "perfectly," is maybe overstating it, but as well as could be expected if not slightly better. In some ways the book reminded me of a sitcom. Joey is not going to unexpectedly die in a mugging on the way home from Central Perk. We know things will work out fine and we watch to see our reassurances played out.

Who knows if Ms. Drabble had the will to do something awful to her characters, but she certainly didn't have the desire. Yet somehow the book works on the strength of its sensitive, smart, and funny narrator. There's real charm in how everything that should be a negative she somehow twists into a positive. Having an illegitimate child in the 1960s? No problem, because now the narrator can love. Being a single mother? She can enter into a mutually beneficial arrangement with a friend. Telling the parents? Someone else can do it.

The book is quite aware of its positivity and a great percentage of the words are spent inside the narrator's mind pondering her situation and how, though it might clash with both the staid conventions of an older generation and the freer beliefs of her own, it is nevertheless a good one. The point seems to be that she can have a child on her own terms and still be happy and successful and free. As a political point, it's now an old one (if not a little silly given we're talking about a profoundly privileged character), but a great deal of the book seems intended to present a different side of the more familiar depictions of Swinging London. The narrator is clearly of an age and social standing where she should, like her friends, use the era's hedonism to liberate herself yet instead chooses to do it by redefining domesticity and motherhood and love. I feel, I think, reassured.

Exhibit 1.1.22

Dude's Lyrical like Bernie Taupin



I think we're all sick of language-driven novels published by obscure presses winning Pulitzers. Okay, so that never happens. Bully for the Pulitzer people and for Mr. Harding whose book is as remarkable as Marilynne Robinson says on the cover which is both a good thing and a bad thing.

And what's remarkable about it is the writing. You really can't talk about the book without talking about its lyricism which is, on some level, a detriment. I mean, I love lyrical, and there's certainly something wondrous--though always in a strictly realistic way--to justify it here. Of course, there's also just a lot of characters sitting and thinking and talking which all gets the same sparkly brush. Here, I'll flip to a random page and grab the first sentence:

My goodness, I am made from planets and wood, diamonds and orange peels, now and then, here and there; the iron in my blood was once the blade of a Roman plow; peel back my scalp and you will see my cranium covered in the scrimshaw carved by an ancient sailor who never suspected that he was whittling at my skull--no my blood is a Roman plow, my bones are being etched by men with names that mean sea and wrestler and ocean rider and the pictures they are making are pictures of northern stars at different seasons, and the man keeping my blood straight as it splits the soil is named Lucian and he will plant wheat, and I cannot concentrate on this apple, this apple, and the only thing common to all of this is that I feel sorrow so deep, it must be love, and they are upset because while they are carving and plowing they are troubled by visions of trying to pick apples from barrels.

Ha! I swear that was random. Honestly, I was delighted when I saw the page. Anyway, I couldn't have picked a better example of what makes this book awesome and, I hate to say it, admirably overwrought. It's pretty much that all the way through and at times it's beautiful and awesome--describing the electricity of a seizure, the imagination of a child--and at others it's forced with the unworthy task of the book's plot.

This maybe is part of my problem: the past is not, in itself, magical. I'm going to stop before I go off on some rant about nostalgia except to say that no one would write about their office job the way Harding writes about being a traveling salesman. It's maddening to see such language applied not to the truly magical but to simply the past, as if beautiful things only existed between 1840 and 1962. And during those years, everything was equally beautiful--a sugar-glazed ham is identically as sublime as pulling a tooth with a pair of pliers.

It's a minor complaint that one that kept me from really loving the book. I'm not even sure I'd say I liked it though I admired it a great deal (I'm obviously hedging. Am I the only one comfortable for having a category for art that I can like without, you know, liking?). So, in the end, an absolutely beautiful, marvelously written book and certainly one deserving of its accolades. But, at least to me, the book reaches for something more than just beauty and falls short. There's a story about fathers and sons here, one about running away from a legacy, one about the painful gains and losses over a lifetime, but it's all too slippery with rosewater.

Exhibit 1.1.21

Huh


When McEwan's book reaches its sudden conclusion--as spoiler-free as possible: a creepy family achieves maximum creepiness, somewhere V.C. Andrews blushes--it's difficult to see past the shock of it all to any greater point. And that, I suppose, is the point, even if it's not a very good one. Don't get me wrong, it's a plenty interesting and insightful book--language, imagery, etc. all top-notch--but the final act it builds toward is achingly inevitable from the first pages and so it's a matter of simply waiting it out. Of course, there's a shocking act at the beginning too and even the first sentence--something from the narrator about not having killed his own father--seems needlessly incendiary as when that moment comes, there's nothing to suggest the character did kill his father nor that anyone thought he did. It's the literary equivalent of yelling fire in a crowded theater then, after everyone's maimed on the floor, putting on a pornographic movie just to be a dick.

(Or is it like that? Is anything like that?)

So much shock, so little of interest behind it all. Maybe this book once said something about the depravity of British society (or at least the children) or maybe--likely--I'm missing something, but I set this book down feeling sad that someone so talented had wasted so much time aiming so low. Shock ages poorly, is the problem, and so absolutely it's ghastly that this book involves incest but, you know what, so do about half the episodes of Law and Order: SVU. And yep, the events proceeding it are wonderfully described by a sensitive and complex character in the 1st person, but that blackhole of a moment is so strong that nobody else gets to be anything other than a scandalization-bot. Seemingly no other character has a choice, and those who have very good reasons to be disinterested or disturbed by it find themselves involved because this book is about a creepy family and if they're ever going to be the creepiest family then everyone's got to be on-board. Why they'd want to be isn't important. What is important is that every reader closes the book feeling ashamed because we're all implicated in it by how lovely the writing is. Well, I don't care. This isn't Lolita and dirty is not an emotion.

McEwan is better than this book, thank god. Apparently someone reminded him that--despite what a lot of immature writers seem to think--being shocking doesn't mean being more honest and usually it means the opposite.

Exhibit 1.1.19

Why Not


So, yes, more book posts. I'm sorry. I'm reading a lot, what can I say. It's either that or contemplate why the tornado siren is going off. My theories: either it's a test or God intends to finish what he started in Arkansas.

If it helps, I thought this book was fantastic. It's smart and original and funny and, basically, everything the last book wasn't (well, fine, the last book was smart. Maybe I should have gone with clever). This is the first Mary Robison I've read which I find slightly strange as it's a name that feels really familiar to me, just one of those names you hear a lot if you deal in literary fiction. I might have read a story or two some where but none are coming to mind and so I suppose she's nothing but a name and the vague impression that she's Amy Hempel-y which is a good thing to be.

Why Did I Ever is told in 536 chapters (Well, "sections" anyway. If I have a gripe with the book it's that these mostly numbered but occasionally titled sections are further broken up into chapters, as if without this the reader might be fooled into thinking these were short stories, as if any book needs two levels of numbering). Anyway, some representative ones:

141

That fat man driving around with his little pooch? Now why don't I know him or someone like him? That man, I bet, could make me very happy.

365

Hollis is perched on one of the seats in the breakfast nook as we come in. He's eating a pecan roll and reading the Book of Revelation. "Whoomp!" he says. "Did you ever know about this? 'There will be no more night.'"

There are longer chapters though none more than a page or so and some as short as a single word. Despite the fragmentation, the book does work around a cohesive plot and an established set of characters. The narrator is a middle-aged woman working as a screenwriter for a film studio with two children only slightly more troubled than she is herself. It's never sentimental and, despite the darkness, shockingly funny in little, real ways that always seem impossible to me. These kind of life-on-the-brink stories are done to death but rarely do they feel this fraught which is a credit to the form. These short chapters aren't a gimmick, they're a telling representation of the scattered thoughts of a woman in just enough control to get them in the right order but to see her own narrative.

As a teacher--not a reader--it's strange to read a book like this that seems so clearly suited to imparting one lesson. I mean, there's great dialogue and description and characterization and whatever else we're all supposed to be doing. And it's formally interesting and well-written in its own stark way. Plenty to say about that. Really though, it's a book about voice and though the narrator reaches no great conclusion, it's terribly sad to leave her.