literary

Salvage the Bones

Salvage the Bones is the second mythology-soaked literary account of Hurricane Katrina I’ve read in the last few months, which is odd, and completely unintentional, as I picked this book up only because of good things I’d heard about its author, Jesmyn Ward. The narrative presence of the storm doesn’t even present itself until nearly a quarter of the way through, but the intertextual dependence the narrative has on the many different incarnations that the story of Jason and Medea has taken is quickly realized. The lack of any single authoritative plot with regard to that epic makes it an incredibly nimble framing device, as the reader not only can call on many shapes of the same story, but has no idea just exactly where the novel’s narrative might be compelled to go. Nifty.

 

Ward has studied with some literary heavy hitters, including my guy Tobias Wolff, and it shows in her prose. The novel is told from the perspective of a young black teen, and while there is nothing so flashy or ostentatious that it rings false, the voice is beautiful, observant and descriptive in metaphor and allusion. It’s quiet and well-paced, building up a narrative and a  linguistic weight as the novel draws closer to its conclusion. There is no flab, no unnecessary sections or lines of thought or plot.

 

Continuing the theme of coincidence, I came across an essay on the debate about cultural ephemera in fiction, an essay that referenced both David Foster Wallace’s essay “e unibus pluram” -an essay that I had read perhaps a week prior- and this book, a novel that is directly time-stamped as it literally counts the days to Katrina, yet lacks virtually all reference to any work outside of the classics (a mention of Outkast playing on a car radio is the only thing I noticed). While there is plenty of opportunity to isolate the work in time and place, Ward chooses not to, chooses instead to tie it intractability to an ancient epic of no canonically defined narrative. While I must confess to be a bit standoffish with regard to an over-generous seasoning of pop culture references and the like, I think even a more objective reader would agree with me that these choices make Salvage the Bones an even stronger piece.

Blood Meridian

I read Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian about a month ago, and then went back and listened to the audiobook -the Richard Poe/Recorded Books 2007 version. This was definitely a very good idea, and something I intend to repeat in the future. Blood Meridian is easily the best novel I’ve read this year, and it’s the sort of book that is going to require you to give it a slow and studious read. There’s lots of archaic vocabulary that will need looking up, and a fair bit of untranslated and colloquial Spanish that will need translating (my very limited Spanish got me through about 40% of the non-English dialog in this book, so if you’re a casual speaker or have a bit of a background in the language you’ll probably be fine). This is all on top of McCarthy’s typical absence of conventional punctuation and the distinctive voice that some people have a hard time with. On that subject, Blood Meridian is very violent and very gruesome, so if you are inclined to having a hard time with that kind of thing this is really not a book you’ll want to read.

Blood Meridian is sometimes classified as historical fiction, and while there’s certainly a fair bit of real history going on, that history is more a means to an end than anything in and of itself -this period of violent history is just a very bloody sandbox for McCarthy to play in. It’s far bigger than the historical context in which it is set, and deals with some very fundamental questions in a much more intricate and profound scope than I can communicate well in one of these three-paragraph reading logs. Suffice it to say, the violence and the monologues that define this book are interdependent and intractable, and most important, gorgeously depicted. McCarthy’s prose is always the main selling point, but here it isn’t just the whole show, but defining and working in service of the central ideology of the thing. Blood Meridian isn’t a Novel of Ideas, but its powerful immorality falls neatly in line with Garner’s oft-misunderstood ideas on moral fiction. An aside -this book has been criticized for its depiction of Native Americans and, yeah, certain passages read out of context do look pretty bad, but when read within their context and against the same sorts of passages describing the alleged protagonists, a careful reader will find that McCarthy is very much not taking sides with those advocates of Anglo-Saxon/Western European cultural superiority.

Following my close reading of the novel with an extended listening-to of the excellently produced audiobook was a great way to experience this thing. The feeling of listening and knowing when a spectacular piece of prose is coming your way is great, and having already done my research allowed me to easily follow and immerse myself in both the narrative and the sentence-by-sentence writing, a luxury that also offered me a greater sense of the ideological complexity the book offers its more attentive and obsessive readers. I plan to come back to this book. I’ve found its mythological essence sneaking into some of my own work of late, and that’s a good feeling.

Emma Straub’s Other People We Married

Emma Straub is best known for her novels, but I came to her by way of this short story collection, as is my preference with new-to-me authors that I’ve discovered by chance as much as anything. She seems to have received the most attention for her novels -in interviews, this collection is treated more like a footnote than a full-fleshed part of her body of work. Regardless, I enjoyed it. I had some concerns, do to the way some of her books seem to be marketed, that the book would be a bit fluffy. Fortunately, this is not the case.

The “literary” label is a frustrating one. How does one define literary fiction? Is it “moral” in the John Gardner sense, or an existential striving? Is it defined by its removal from sparkling vampires, mommy-porn BDSM Lite, swords and sorcery, or spaceships? I’d like to think it’s a qualitative determination based on the prose itself, but there’s some bad writing that is proclaimed “literary”. I think, unfortunately, it has more to do with the kinds of publishing imprints that take on a piece and the way it’s marketed than anything else. Thus, the definition becomes rather literally useless.

Bringing things back to Straub, her stories are defined by very good sentence-level writing, compelling characters with interesting thoughts expressed well. The stories are ordinary and focus on human interaction, on documenting it and making sense of it. It’s a good read -nothing that’s a revelation, just good writing. But I feel like I don’t have much to say about it beyond “it’s good, I guess”. There’s nothing that transcends. Straub is a very good writer, but I’m not finding myself especially engaged with this particular work.

Recommendation: Give it a shot, or at least pick one or two stories and see what you think.

A Book of Uncommon Prayer

Reading Log favorite Matthew Vollmer edited this particular anthology, an artifact that began as a personal writing project and expanded to include the work of many writers. Everything in here is a variant of a prayer, specifically, an uncommon one, a prayer for people watching airline safety demonstrations, for people seeing their new home in the harsh light of objectivity, for people who bought Brazilian waxes on Groupon. Some of these prayers are very funny, some of them reveal an upsetting reality, some of them are simply thoughtful or meditative.

As will be the case with any anthology, some of these pieces didn’t do much for me, but the vast majority ranged between decent and excellent. Verbalizations are often an indicator of how deeply I am engaging with a book, and there were both audible laughings and muttered “fucks”. There were at least a dozen or so prayers in here that really stuck -not a bad ratio at all.

The rather novel conceit of this collection seems to have forced writers to either adapt existing work or to stretch themselves into a slightly different form, and with generally excellent results. I would recommend reading this collection over a week or two at minimum, rather than blasting through. The format holds up best when you aren’t subjecting it to a binge.
Recommendation: Buy it, read it. Very solid and diverse collection that does something different without trying too desperately to be different.

http://www.outpost19.com/UncommonPrayer/

Next Door Lived a Girl

First off, this is an extremely graphic book. There is sexual abuse and violence directed at children, and it is dark and extremely graphic. If you are sensitive to that kind of thing, you should probably take a pass on this book. Even if you are not, you will probably need to sit with your thoughts for a minute, or spend some time watching kitten videos on the internet, or whatever your personal response to distressing literary stimulus is.

Next Door Lived a Girl follows a few months in the life of Moritz, a pre-adolescent boy in a rural German town. The narrative is dominated by the intersection of sex and violence. Moritz is the target of sometimes humiliating sexual advances by older women, including his sister and his mother. His play with his fellow 6th-grade friends is often sexual, as is their rivalry with another gang of slightly older boys. And when the violence kicks up, it too is highly sexualized, either inherently or as an expression of sexual domination. The fact that these are all children at the center of the action, and the discovery of a feral and mentally disabled girl the boy’s age, make all this far more disturbing.

Stefan Kiesbye’s prose is recognizably German -terse and bleak descriptions that remind me of the sentences of Herta Muller, albeit far less figurative. The writing is brutally direct, brutally literal, giving the reader no comfort in the ambiguity of poetic expression. When something horrible is happening, there is no doubt as to the specificity of it. The sentences are short and expository, almost a linguistic revolt against the expansive compounding of the German language, and the close third-person narration provides free indirect characterization of Moritz that reminds you, again and again, that these are children doing these things, having these things done to them.

Recommendation: Read it, but, you, know. Trigger warning. This is very good, but this is some pretty dark shit.

NonBinary Review 8: Sun Tzu’s The Art of War

All of the stories, poems and other literary works in Issue 8 of NonBinary Review are connected in some way to Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. The first section correspond directly with specific chapters, while the work in Part Two connects with the book as a whole. There are excellent stories in both sections: “The Pig”, “The State of the Art of War Against Entropy”, “Burning Pages in Gaza”, “The Cubism of War”, “Interview with Juan Weider”, and (full disclosure) my own story, “AlterMist”.

By using an existing work of literature as a touchstone, NBR curates a unified body of work, and the limitations of the form seem to bring divergent writing styles and expressions together without and kind of homogenization. Like I’ve found with most anthologies, journals, and lit mags, there were a few peices that weren’t for me, but I thoroughly enjoyed most of these pieces.

NonBinary Review is doing some great work. Support indie lit mags! Especially the good ones, and especially the good ones that are good to their contributors.

Recommendation: Buy it! read it! Tell me my words are pretty!

On the Edge (Edward St. Aubyn)

Edward St. Aubyn’s 1998 novel rather recently got its U.S. release. I bought this book in Powell’s last year and just now got around to it. I have not read his much more well-known Patrick Melrose novels, but after reading On the Edge, I intend to.

This book is a very British lampooning of the excesses of the American New Age, the ruthlessly capitalistic California world of gurus, the fetishization of Native American spirituality, and so forth. Not to say that St. Aubyn is picking on the rich-idiot hippies exclusively -everyone and everything that shows up in this book will have some kind of clever cutting pointed at it if it sticks around long enough. And there are so, so many characters -it takes most of the first half of the book just to introduce everyone… second generation seekers, erotically obsessed beta-male investment bankers, French linguistic philosophers having bad peyote trips, the idle rich and their attendant gurus.

While I would have been more than satisfied with the book without this particular virtue, I was seriously impressed by the way it walked the line of savage mockery and genuine compassion. These new-age seekers aren’t all bad, and the things they have been hurt by are real, and their pain is real. Even challenging characters are often presented to the reader in painfully objective truth, but in such a way as to explain their actions as a coming from their own unique damages. Their dysfunction isn’t excused, but it’s contextualized in such a way as to present them as more than a two dimensional cut-out asshole. This is the first book I’ve ever read that reconciles such hilariously dark and sardonic observations of it’s characters with such a degree of compassion and legitimate happiness. Had you described the workings of this novel to me, I would have been incredibly dubious, but St. Aubyn manages to avoid the saccharine and the banal while still conveying a sense of peace and happiness among broken people working within a bullshit ideology. Damn.

Recommendation: Read it! This is a fantastic book and I can recommend it unreservedly.

“Time and Distance Overcome” by Eula Biss

This is easily the best essay collection I’ve read this year. I had previously encountered Biss reading Volume 1 of Best Creative Nonfiction, as well as on the wonderful podcast Book Fight, which I have recommended before and plan to again. Her work always stood out to me, but there’s a lot of good writing out there, and it took me a while to get to her. The project of reading fifty female authors this year probably expiated that, and I’m glad.

These essays deal with identity, specifically the search for identity in race and nationality. Biss, who is white, has grown up with black family members, and has developed a nuanced and piercing sense of racial examination. Whether she is pondering her time as a teacher in Harlem, examining her own role in the gentrification of a mixed Chicago neighborhood, or feeling shame at her American identity in a Mexican border town, she cuts through the obfuscatious bullshit and forces both herself and her readers to face some profoundly unpleasant truths.

While this description may sound like some unpleasantly sanctimonious lefty academic hand-wringing, the only thing it has in common with that unfortunate genre of academic writing is its subject. In the title essay, Biss talks about the history of lynching in America within the context of the invention of the telephone and the implementation of the ubiquitous poles that made phone lines possible, and their inevitable incorporation into the systemic terrorizing and murder of black men. It’s a masterful piece of writing that is simultaneously approachable enough for me to teach it to my 8th grade class (most of who read at least a few grades levels below 8th grade) and dense enough to not only stand up to a half-dozen readings, but to thrive under that degree of scrutiny, offering greater nuance and detail.

Recommendation: Buy this book. If you are undecided, read the essay mentioned above (link below).

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102235226#102237046

Matthew Vollmer’s “Future Missionaries of America”

Future Missionaries of America
Matthew Vollmer

This was my favorite short story collection of 2016 (of meaning “read during”). Vollmer’s book “Inscriptions for Headstones” was high on my list in 2014, and I seem to really enjoy everything he writes and edits. I’m looking forward to reading his two other short stories as well.

The stories in here often relate to the religious -some, like the titular short that closes the book, and a handful of others, revolve completely around that theme. Others interact with the idea more subtly, portraits of men and women wandering around those struggles and questions that lead others, not them, to faith. Vollmer’s illustrations of religion pass no judgment either way -happy families come together in their faith and a schizophrenic interprets her hallucinations as divine instruction, and both of these are written with an authentic sense of remove that belies the author’s deliberate relationship with organized religion.

Vollmer writes very good contemporary literary fiction. He plays with form, (a story written as a will) his structure, mechanics, and narrative change to fit the piece, and everything is meticulously edited and clearly worked out. It’s tempting to call people like Vollmer “writer’s writers,” but that seems to sell them short. This is very good fiction that deserves -and ought to appeal to- a wider audience than currently read it.

Recommendation: Read it. Long live the short story!