Articles by Robyn

You are currently browsing Robyn’s articles.

Scott Pilgrim vs. Reader Confusion – Does Good Fiction Really Need To Explain Itself?

September 1, 2010 in books, graphic novels, online, reviews by Robyn

Scott Pilgrim by Bryan Lee O’Malley
(Oni Press, various dates)
Steve Gillies

It’s difficult to know exactly how to categorize Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim series from Oni Press. It’s often described as a series of “graphic novels.” As problematic and unsatisfying a term as that usually is for people who like comic books or cartoons, it’s even more troubling here because the books are small and shaped exactly like manga. Yet while Scott Pilgrim uses plenty of stylistic and storytelling tricks seen in manga, it’s difficult to call it manga since the characters, themes and content are so American. Except, well, they’re Canadian.

So, what’s the deal with Scott Pilgrim? O’Malley doesn’t provide many clues in the opening pages. We get introduced to Scott Pilgrim, an unemployed 20-something who divides his time between playing in an indie rock band called Sex Bob-omb and looking sweet and clueless. He gets involved with two women, a young and naïve high school girl named Knives Chau who he starts dating in a moment of weakness and an aloof, mysterious woman from New York named Ramona Flowers who he thinks is the girl of his dreams.

Then, about halfway through the first volume, just when we think we’re being set up for some kind of updated, hipster version of an Archie comic, weird things start happening. Scott and Ramona travel through a magic portal. Peoples’ heads start glowing at random times. Cute, clueless, unassuming Scott Pilgrim is really good at fighting, and his fights look a lot like video game fights, complete with people turning into prizes once they’re defeated. Yet none of the characters react to any of this as if it’s weird. This is the world they live in, and O’Malley is confident enough that he never needs to explain or justify any of it. Scott Pilgrim takes place in a world full of ninjas, super powered vegans, video game logic, drummers with bionic arms and anything a 20-something would find cool [1].

It’s a testament to O’Malley’s talent that a series so chock-full of random stuff is not a complete mess. In fact, in O’Malley’s hands, these things all make a lot of sense. Sometimes spectacular first dates do seem like falling through a portal and into some alternate dimension. Why would anyone give up meat and dairy unless it led to having unbeatable superpowers?

And then there’s the series’ unifying conceit, which works on several levels. Scott must defeat Ramona’s seven evil ex-boyfriends in order to date Ramona. It resembles the form of the classical quest narrative as well as the structure of a video game. It also functions as a metaphor for dealing with a partner’s romantic history. Through the course of the series Ramona also encounters a vengeful Knives Chau and several other exes of Scott’s. Along the way Scott and Ramona also have to face up to their own shortcomings as partners and O’Malley deals with that with a maturity and humor that’s lacking in much popular fiction.

Fresh and original, with each new release Scott Pilgrim steadily grew a base of fans until it held down the top six places in the New York Times “graphic books” best sellers list. With a movie released this summer, some were hopeful of a publishing to movie phenomenon akin to Twilight, except you know, for hipsters.

The movie, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, directed by Edgar Wright, tightens up plotting that at times seemed loose and drifting over the course of six volumes, though it sacrifices some great moments with ancillary character to get there. Still, it translates the style and tone of the books remarkably well, and serves as a breath of fresh air in a historically lackluster summer movie season. Unfortunately, it bombed [2].

Like the book, the movie also stubbornly refuses to explain the world in which it inhabits. This, combined possibly with an overexposed star in Michael Cera, led moviegoers to opt for safer bets like Vampires Suck and The Expendables. Its box office failure has led to a lot of hand wringing from fans of the book and the usual questioning of the taste and mental faculties of the general American public. Yet the movie has gotten the kind of critical reaction that could lead to a cult following. The books will be lying in wait for discovery by generation upon generation of video game addicted teens. At the age of thirty-one, there is the promise of years of exciting work from Bryan Lee O’Malley to come. And besides, do hipsters really need their own Twilight anyway?

Steve Gillies is a current MFA candidate in fiction writing at the University of Pittsburgh. He was born in Brazil, raised in Alabama, and spent a considerable amount of his adult life in Chicago. One time he made a comic book that was called “the stupidest I have ever seen” by a noted environmental chemist.

[1] Except vampires. There isn’t a single vampire in this series.

[2] Note the resistance of the temptation to type “bob-ombed.” Many have shown less strength in the face of such low hanging fruit.

You Might Have Missed…Everything and More

August 15, 2010 in books, online, reviews by Robyn

Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity by David Foster Wallace
(W. W. Norton & Co., 2003)
Robyn Jodlowski

There are certain expectations one has before beginning a text by David Foster Wallace. One: the reading will be pleasurable but by no means leisurely. Two: you will learn about subjects both tangential and unrelated to the supposed topic at hand. And three: there will be lots of footnotes, abbreviations and surprisingly hip professor slang. All these hold true and then some in Everything and More.

This particular text was written for the “Great Discoveries Series” which, according to their website, “pairs today’s top writers with crucial scientific breakthroughs in ways that are both surprising and illuminating.” As Wallace explains (indeed, almost apologizes for) in his “Small But Necessary Foreword”:

“[The book’s] subject is a set of mathematical achievements that are extremely abstract and technical, but also extremely profound and interesting, and beautiful. The aim is to discuss these achievements in such a way that they’re vivid and comprehensible to readers who do not have pro-grade technical backgrounds and expertise. To make math beautiful—or at least to get the reader to see how someone might find it so.”

You know you’re getting into some heavy stuff if DFW not only gives a disclaimer, but begins his book with a dedication to his parents in Greek.

The foreword, complete with abbreviation glossary (one of several), then moves into the problem of infinity and the history of mathematics on both the meta and micro levels. Georg F. L. P. Cantor, we learn, is the cat behind the book, the guy who “solved” infinity in a sense. Infinity, seemingly either straightforward or baffling, is both and neither.

In the next section (divisions are marked with the mathematically-appropriate § symbol throughout the text), he backs up to think about just how abstract math and numbers truly are. Somehow Wallace uses quotes from math historians, O.E.D definitions of “abstract,” and common stumbling blocks for grade schoolers learning numbers to illuminate the distinction between saying there are five oranges on the table versus the concept of the number five: math suddenly seems much harder, but in a whole new way. Even the innocent number line gets a good philosophizing while symbols and representation reemerge throughout as important concepts of infinity, the term being represented by Wallace with the lemniscate symbol rather than linguistically to remind us of the utter abstraction with which we’re dealing.

The tale really begins with logical traps like Galileo’s and Zeno’s paradoxes, the latter of which goes something like this: in order to cross the street, you must cross every single point between one side (A) and the other (B). Because there are an infinite amount of points between A and B, it should be impossible to traverse that distance of infinity, therefore we shouldn’t be able to cross the street.

Obviously we’ve all crossed the road before, so something is instantly fishy. Stuck on this and similar mind traps, early mathematicians ignored or brushed aside infinity and greats like Plato and Aristotle developed incorrect theories that misled the math world for centuries. It wasn’t until the 1600s that mathematicians, by divorcing themselves from geometrical referents like the number line, were finally able to begin developing a rigorous definition for what had become the “problem” of infinity.

The book proceeds in much the same way as it begins: history of math, trimmed and in context; tight, clear reminders of common mathematical concepts and rules; no-nonsense explanations to bring you to his next arithmetical point.

What Wallace ends up achieving is a beautiful book, but not one that’s available to just any audience as the series wants him to do. By no means a technocrat or math genius (I took AP Calculus in high school and even retained a bit of that derivative and integral business), there were still parts of the text, full of symbols and variables, that I couldn’t quite wrap my head around, even with rereads of Wallace’s patient prose. At the very least, readers would benefit from a calculus class, a philosophy course, and probably another book or two of Wallace’s under their belt before they attempt Everything and More.

There are also sections with an overload of abbreviations and incomplete sentences that give it a not-quite-finished draft feel, though given the glut of research and rewriting the work must have taken, I can’t fault Wallace and the editors for not smoothing those out.

That being said, math types have found calculable problems with the text—problems I am too dense to understand but did the equivalent of a vacant head nod as I read about them online. Wallace seemed to anticipate this, as his acknowledgment ends with, “It goes without saying that the author is solely responsible for any errors or imprecisions in this booklet.”

I won’t give away the ending, mostly because I can’t, but let’s just say that the levels of abstraction increase quite a ways above the problem of five oranges and reach a universe of symbols I’ve never seen before, in arithmetic or otherwise. Rules are broken, infinities are found, and I’m back to feeling like a grade schooler.

All abstraction and mind-boggling philosophy-math aside, I’d say the book is worth a try—at least the first hundred pages if you’re weak at math but strong at patience. It’s interesting to see DFW in a realm he was interested in (his senior thesis was on modal logic), but not well-known for, and after reading, I felt like I had sat in on one of his lectures. The voice here is teacherly, kind, and witty. More than ever, I saw his dexterity, his mastery of language and thought, as he twisted around purely conceptual subjects and bowed under the weight of his characteristic sensitivity to ensure understanding, or at least interest. It’s wild to see spots where even a master like him couldn’t quite bend the language his way.

Like most of his work, and infinity itself, Everything and More is about one thing and everything, base and beautiful, floating somewhere in the realm of ideas.

Robyn Jodlowski is a nonfiction MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh and the book review editor at Hot Metal Bridge. To read more of her work visit http://www.politicsunlocked.com/

Ha Jin Strikes a Balance in A Good Fall

August 2, 2010 in books, online, reviews by Robyn

A Good Fall by Ha Jin
(Hardcover: Pantheon Books, November 2009; Paperback: Vintage, October 2010)
Jessica Wang

If people recognize the name of my hometown, Flushing, Queens, they usually recall that Fran Drescher, aka “The Nanny,” is also from there. A couple of people have even expressed relief that I don’t share her accent. As you could imagine, I’d love to have another cultural reference to use when speaking of my hometown, and I wouldn’t mind it being Ha Jin’s short story collection A Good Fall. The individual stories are subtle yet captivating, and are all the more powerful when considered up against the other stories in the collection.

A Good Fall focuses on the Chinese immigrant experience in Flushing, which is New York City’s second-largest Chinatown. The characters of the twelve stories are young, middle-aged and old, male and female, and vary in how much they’ve become acclimated with their new home. The first story, “The Bane of the Internet,” establishes that the collection is very much about the modern day immigrant experience. The protagonist, a woman who left her sister behind in China, initially rejoices when she and her sister begin to correspond via e-mail. She soon discovers, however, the downside to the more frequent exchanges. The narrator’s bluntness is amusing, and makes it clear that A Good Fall isn’t going to romanticize anything: “Certainly I wouldn’t lend her the money, because that might amount to hitting a dog with a meatball—nothing would come back.”

Maybe it’s because it follows the bluntness of “The Bane of the Internet,” but it’s hard not to be charmed by the second story in the collection, “A Composer and His Parakeets.” The title character of the story becomes attached to his actress girlfriend’s pet parakeet when she leaves to film a movie. Out of all the stories in the collection, “A Composer and His Parakeets” is the quietest and the least dramatic, but its tenderness holds the reader’s attention.

Just as “A Composer and His Parakeets” balances the blunt narrative voice of “The Bane of the Internet,” other stories balance each other. The narrator of “Children as Enemies,” an elderly man who has immigrated to live with his son’s family, bemoans his grandchildren’s decision to change their names so that they sound more “American.” On its own, the story seems too familiar: ungrateful youngsters, long-suffering elders. But the next story in the collection, “In the Crossfire,” flips the situation. The protagonist of this story, with whom the readers sympathize, struggles to keep peace between his mother, recently arrived from China, and his wife, who is of Chinese heritage but is Americanized. The antagonistic character in the story is the more traditional mother, a reversal from the previous story. Likewise, the consecutive stories “Shame” and “An English Professor” both deal with Chinese professors of English literature (who may be stand-ins for Jin, currently a Boston University professor), though the point-of-view employed in “Shame” is of a former student, while the narrator-protagonist of “An English Professor” is the professor himself.

There’s one notable imbalance in A Good Fall, however. Jin’s male characters tend to be wonderfully complex, such as the composer in “A Composer and His Parakeets,” the monk in the title story who attempts suicide when threatened with deportation, and the protagonist in “The House Behind a Weeping Cherry” who befriends his three prostitute housemates. Even a secondary male character in “Temporary Love” surprises readers when he does not fly into a jealous rage over his wife’s infidelity, but manipulates her guilt to his advantage. But other than the female home health aide who is the protagonist of “A Pension Plan,” Jin’s female characters seem closer to stock characters. This is most apparent in “In the Crossfire,” with the overbearing mother and the none-too-supportive wife, but the issue also exists in other stories.

Still, Jin is mostly successful at showing that the immigrant experience, with fellow immigrants and Asian Americans and with Flushing itself, is a varied and complicated one. Flushing’s place in our cultural imagination isn’t going to rival Manhattan—which is what many people think of when they think of New York City—anytime soon. But with its multidimensional representation of Flushing and understated but good stories, A Good Fall can hold its head up high.

Jessica Wang is currently a MFA candidate in nonfiction at the University of Pittsburgh, working on a family memoir. She received her BFA in Writing from Emerson College.

You Might Have Missed…This Noisy Egg

July 15, 2010 in online by Robyn

This Noisy Egg by Nicole Walker
(Barrow Street Press, March 2010)
Amy Whipple

No matter how many classes I take, no matter how many literary journals I read, poetry still makes me nervous. The distinction between brilliant and appalling sometimes seems to be made based on how much sleep you got the night before, and it’s just so scary to look at that line and realize that everyone else around you picked the opposite side.

It needn’t be that difficult, right?

All I ask of poetry is that it sends me off with strings of words that run themselves through my thoughts with the tenacity of a Top 40 hit.  I want to hear and see with the weird intensity that comes after leaving a movie theater.  I want to snuggle into images as I do my favorite memories.  This might be a childish way to read poetry, but so be it.  Because under those guidelines, Nicole Walker’s debut collection, This Noisy Egg, does all the right things.

Walker’s thirty-nine poems (nineteen of which have been previously published) meditate on conception of all kinds – birth, rebirth, beliefs. So much in these poems feels lost or unfulfilled for the many speakers though there are lighter moments as well.  “A Number of Things Are Scarily Lacking” – a list not unlike a Whitman poem or a Cole Porter song – counts on both the humorous (“9. A hotdog. No condiments.” “18. Telling your boyfriend that he looks like Alan Alda.”) as well as the crushing (“6. Your loud voice, no whispers, only walls acoustic.” “30. Turning. 30. No able-bodied Superman to spin the world backward—make up for lost time.”).

The physicality of being often emerges through the emotionality. “She doubled in size & split into you, your mother’s personal geometry. / One noisy seed caused a sea of regret & repainted walls,” says the narrator of “Bivalves.” And in “The Coroner Senses a Blackbird” – “My body told a story my mouth could / not hide.”

As might be expected, the collection wavers a bit in the middle. “What Is Wanted from the Suicides” is probably the weakest piece, not really adding anything to the thick stack of suicide poetry already in existence. I wouldn’t not recommend the book as a result of it, though. Especially by the time we get to my favorite lines in the collection, which are in the middle of “Where P is P & not P”: “You will / find the compass / which will / tell you what lines you must read.”  (Note: sometimes you stumble across exactly what you need to hear.)

While most of the poems fall into a standard page-or-so length, the penultimate poem, “The Unlikely Origin of the Species,” stretches for almost twelve full pages.  It is here where the changing rules of childhood parallel the just as random rules for which animals become pets while others are left to the wild.  It’s actually the narrator of “Canister and Turkey Vulture” that explains the themes most aptly: “everything that stands between the oh so obvious / and the almost can’t imagine.” (Almost can’t imagine – Darwin and St. Francis of Assisi in a tryst.)

The broken sections of the poem are marked with Greek symbols and headline-esque words. To that end, Walker’s note to the poem adds much to “Unlikely” as well as the collection as a whole: “But doesn’t it nearly make you cry when you realize the alphabet doesn’t have to begin with the letter A?”

Amy Whipple is an MFA candidate in nonfiction at the University of Pittsburgh. Readers can also find her at <http://www.amywhipple.com/>.

Rusty Sabich’s Second Act

July 1, 2010 in books, reviews by Robyn

Innocent, by Scott Turow
(Grand Central Publishing, Hachette Book Group, May 2010)
Erin Lewenauer

It is likely that questions concerning Rusty Sabich’s fate have been knocking around in the minds of Presumed Innocent fans for the past 22 years…questions which can now be answered with Turow’s definitive sequel, Innocent.

Turow is the king of the Legal Thriller Genre, which is to say, he defined it, and set the bar high. His near-abnormal ability to focus is apparent, especially in Innocent, in the seamless reintroducing of his realistic characters and a refreshingly complex plot, which switches between perspectives and points in time.

In 1987, with the release of Presumed Innocent, readers met a slew of absorbing characters and identified with their individual struggles. In 2010, returning to Turow’s beloved Kindle County, Illinois, readers find former lawyer, Sabich, a Chief Appellate Judge, turning 60. His sensitive and brilliant son Nat, has recently graduated from law school, following in his father’s footsteps, and Sabich has managed to somehow maintain his marriage of 36 years to bipolar Barbara.

“Barbara and I have resumed our normal mode,” Sabich says. “There is no sound, no TV, no dishwasher rumbling. The silence is the absence of any connection. She’s in her world, I’m in mine. Not even the radio waves that come out of deep space could be detected. Yet this is what I chose and more often still believe I want.”

Then one morning, Sabich wakes up next to a dead wife and chaos ensues. He waits 24 hours before reporting her death, casting a shadow of a doubt on his character. Was this murder? Suicide? An accident? The public demands an answer. The cards are not stacked in Sabich’s favor when it is revealed that a 24 hour window would have allowed incriminating chemicals and evidence to disappear from Barbara’s bloodstream.

Tommy Molto, a former acting prosecuting attorney and Sabich’s nemesis, who unsuccessfully prosecuted him for killing his mistress decades ago, resurfaces alongside cocky and shifty, Chief Deputy Jim Brand; both are determined to go after Sabich once again. His candidacy for a higher court in an imminent election and his most recent affair with his magnetic law clerk, Anna Vostic, 26 years his junior, combine to shift his life once again toward downfall. On top of this, his former attorney Sandy Stern, who saved his life the first time around, is now in poor health and the question remains, whether he, or anyone, can save Sabich from himself a second time.

Turow will always stand out because of the seriousness with which he approaches his work and the weight he gives his characters. It is comforting and discomforting to revisit Sabich, his family, and his cohorts. Readers see evidence of their maturity, yet a new sadness blooms, revealing sharp insights about relationships.

“It’s prosaic most often, but so is much of life at its best—with the family around the table, with buddies at a bar,” Sabich says.

Most of Turow’s old characters long for the unattainable and mourn their past choices. New characters, dynamic Anna and hilarious Judge Yee among others, provide some relief from the dark turmoil that accompanies scrambling with unchangeable mistakes and flaws. Sabich concludes, “The Declaration of Independence said we have a right to pursue happiness—but not to find it.” Innocent’s airtight plot will have readers racing toward the end, while battling an impulse to slow down and appreciate Turow’s craft at its best.

Erin Lewenauer is an MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh. She has also reviewed Manhood for Amateurs and Elephants in Our Bedroom for Hot Metal Bridge.

You Might Have Missed…The Writer on Her Work

June 15, 2010 in online by Robyn

The Writer on Her Work: Seventeen Essays by Twentieth-Century American Writers
Edited and Updated Introduction by Janet Sternburg, Preface by Julia Alvarez.
(W.W. Norton & Co.: 1980; reissued in 2000)
Jody Lucas Kulakowski

“Inherited Fears and Real Dangers: Being Visible as a Woman Writer”

All I needed was a decent copy of Joan Didion’s “Why I Write.” I found several online, all excerpts, and when I combed the digital archives made available to me through the university where I teach, I found The New York Times Magazine backlog stopped just short of the issue in which it first appeared (December 5, 1976).

I wanted to use “Why I Write” as a companion piece to “On Keeping a Notebook.” My summer composition course began in less than two weeks, and I wanted to teach these two pieces. I wanted to start a conversation about freedom, about writing as a means to express perspective, memory, and, in the case of “Why I Write,” as a vehicle for uncovering thoughts and ideas.

I finally stumbled across the essay in an anthology called The Writer and Her Work: Seventeen Essays by Twentieth-century American Writers. I ordered it, and it arrived several days later. I didn’t think about it again for a couple of weeks until I was tired: of reading student papers; of staring at blank screens, waiting for my own words to appear; of trying to be wife and mother a hundred miles from my home, my heart; of questioning myself, wondering what the hell it was that made me think that, at middle age, I should be, in my mother’s terms, gallivanting, shrugging my responsibilities in favor of pursuing what I want, what I’m driven to do, not what’s good for everyone else. Woman, take up thy cross.

I picked up Writer and Her Work and began reading. Janet Sternburg collected these seventeen essays (nineteen, actually, as the second issue includes an essay-length preface by Julia Alvarez and a second introduction-in-miniature by Sternburg) because, she says, “we have very little by women that intentionally and directly addresses the subject of their own art.” I don’t know if, in the intervening thirty years since its initial publication, ten years since its reissue, that statement still holds true—we women writers today seem much less reluctant to commit our process to the page—but the value of these women writing of their craft and their writing lives in the decades that feminists’ heralded the cracking and crashing of glass ceilings everywhere, it’s comforting for this woman writer to know my own insecurities, my fears, my occasional sense of isolation is not a regression or a betrayal of my sisters who’ve come before me.

Sternburg set criteria for this essay collection: First, they must be written by American writers (her rationale: “to ‘go abroad’ would scatter the impact of our own experience.”). Second, they must represent “many different kinds of writers, especially those who have worked in more than one literary form.” Third, the backgrounds of these women must be diverse, while at the same time “suggest what women writers have in common.”

Sternburg solicited and received material from Mary Gordon, Nancy Milford, Margaret Walker, Susan Griffin, Ingrid Bengis, Toni Dade Bambara, Erica Jong, Maxine Hong Kingston, Janet Burroway, Muriel Rukeyser, and Gail Godwin. Among them are novelists, screenwriters, playwrights, essayists, literary critics, memoirists, feminist and Womanist critics, documentarians, and authors of children’s books.

They are recipients of many awards, including the Pulitzer, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Emmy and many others.

Julia Alvarez, in her preface to the updated edition, calls the book, “a liberating text for so many women writers who, like me, felt isolated and afraid.” Isolated and afraid? Check. I had to keep reading.

Anne Tyler addresses the Woman-Having-It-All Syndrome in her essay, a condition that began developing among independent-minded women sometime in the mid-sixties, morphed several times over the intervening decades, has been disputed, disproved, redefined, and, lately, appropriated in the most twisted sort of way by certain far-right conservatives [halting now my derisive tangent]. Tyler’s recounts the many intrusions into the writing life and brings a reader like me, one who “always did count on having a husband and children” back down to earth. She offers hope, says, “I’m surprised to find myself a writer but have fitted it in fairly well, I think.”

Not what you’re looking for? Then turn to Alice Walker, who begins her essay by answering the question about women artists and motherhood—you know, that one that implies we can be only one or the other, so what’s it going to be? She says: “Yes….[women artists] should have children—assuming this is of interest to them—but only one….Because with one you can move….With more than one you’re a sitting duck.” (Is that what I am, as a mother of four? A sitting duck? Hmm.) This is not to say that Walker maintains for nearly twenty pages a discussion limited to this one narrow (narrow?) consideration. No, she expands, blossoms, even, from womanhood to black womanhood, to criticism and representation (nonrepresentation?) of black women artists in feminist thought. She covers a lot of ground, ending, just prior to her closing poem, with the words: “We are together, my child and I. Mother and child, yes, but sisters really, against whatever denies us all that we are.” It’s worth the read to discover on one’s own what comes between.

Michele Murray’s[1] essay, entitled “Creating Oneself from Scratch,” resonated most strongly with me. It is a posthumous creation, comprised of selections from her diaries and covers a twenty-year period where she contemplates writing, motherhood, the agonies of motherhood in relation to her writing, and, the motivating force—cancer—that drove her on, in spite of the challenges of raising four children, to produce four books, two children’s books, an anthology of women’s literature (her bio mentions it being one of the first of its kind), and a book of poetry prior to her death. She yearned to live long enough to see the publication of the last, The Great Mother, her poetry collection. She died seven months too soon. It makes me wonder at we women artists, especially those of us for whom prominent identifying labels often shift, one day more mother than writer, another more writer than any incidental markers of DNA. What would we do, what would we produce, knowing our time is limited? How would we shift our time, how would we choose our priorities, what would we leave for our daughters, our sisters, what words of wisdom or folly would we commit to the page, not leave to chance and stardust?

My recommendation? If you’re a writer, pick up this book. If you’re a woman writer, pick it up and don’t put it down. Hold it close to you. Create.

Jody Lucas Kulakowski is current MFA candidate in Creative Nonfiction at the University of Pittsburgh. She writes about pain and spirituality, motherhood and rural womanhood, growing and dying. She lives between Pittsburgh and her home in Punxsutawney, where she much prefers peacocks to groundhogs.

[1] As a matter of trivia (though these days, perhaps no trivial matter), Michele Murray is one of only two of these women who does not have her own Wikipedia entry. Janet Sternburg, ironically, is the other.

Disorder in the House: Sarah Waters’ Marxist Gothic

May 15, 2010 in books, reviews by Robyn

The Little Stranger, by Sarah Waters
(Hardcover: Riverhead, April 2009; Paperback: Riverhead Trade, May 2010)
Kathleen Davies

It is 1947, and the English countryside is still reeling from WWII. Doctor Faraday has been summoned to Hundreds Hall, the home of the Ayres family, to look in on a servant girl who claims that she is too ill to work. Faraday determines that the girl is merely homesick but, before he leaves, she confides that she keeps hearing strange noises. She believes that the house is haunted.

We are in familiar territory from the moment we enter Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger: there is a rational man of science,  a repressed and restless heroine, her scarred and reclusive brother, her alluring mother, even a long-dead child who may be the “little stranger” of the title. There are also mysterious fires, madness, and things that go bump in the night. And of course, there is a house. Still grand despite patches of dry rot and peeling wallpaper, still impressive despite the encroachments of Council estates and nouveau riche neighbors, Hundreds Hall may be the central character in Waters’ novel (as in any good haunted house story). However, it is the unfamiliar spin that Waters puts on these familiar material that elevates her tale above a good rainy day read.

Best-known for bringing queer sensibility to Victorian generic conventions, Waters here turns a critical eye on the type of sedate country-house ghost story embraced by Henry James and Edith Wharton. But in this case, Waters doesn’t focus on sexuality (perhaps because sexuality is so often the subtext of gothic horror; the house becomes a symbol of buried impulses). Instead, she takes a good look at the house itself as an object of desire, locating the discontents of gothic horror in socioeconomic resentment rather than psychosexual neuroses.

Waters’ (very unreliable) narrator, Doctor Faraday, is keenly aware of himself as an expression of class aspiration. The son of working-class parents, he frets that his position as the village doctor’s partner doesn’t warrant the sacrifices his parents made for him. Faraday also worries about the effect that the introduction of the National Health Service will have on his income and ambitions. He is thus both flattered and relieved when the Ayres family begins to depend on him – first for medical advice, later to provide a rational explanation for a spate of bizarre sights and sounds. The characters’ relationship to the house and its haunting are informed by class. Both Caroline Ayres and her brother Roderick fear that they have given up productive lives in the larger world in exchange for preserving the family estate. Unsurprisingly, they are readier than Faraday to accept the possibility that the house has taken on a malevolent life of its own. (In one memorable scene, household objects seems to attack the family in a ghoulish parody of commodity fetishism.) But Faraday also may be haunted by the house. As a child, he was so taken with the place on his sole visit that he chipped off a piece of ornamental border as a souvenir. And, in that single neat image, Waters blurs the line between acquisition and destruction, forcing us to wonder if Faraday’s concern with the Ayres family is entirely benevolent.

Waters’ adherence to gothic narrative conventions and style has its drawbacks. Her style here is leisurely and circumspect (which may come as a surprise to readers who know her playful and robust prose from her debut novel, Tipping the Velvet) and a good hundred pages pass before the muted shocks of footsteps in empty corridors give way to something more visceral. Further, Faraday can be a frustrating presence – at one crucial moment, he literally can’t see what’s right in front of him, and the disconnect between his actions and his intentions becomes increasingly painful. Still, if you’re interested in seeing how old houses can be inhabited by new spirits, The Little Stranger offers a lingering chill sharpened by social critique.

Kathleen Davies is a PhD candidate at the University of Pittsburgh.

You Might Have Missed…Monkeys

March 15, 2010 in books, reviews by Robyn

[Editor's Note: Watch for regular reviews of older titles with the heading "You Might Have Missed..." coming each month.]

Monkeys by Susan Minot
(Dutton, 1986)
Rosemary McMillen

I hadn’t heard of Susan Minot’s book Monkeys until recently, when it was recommended to me by one of my professors. Originally published in 1986, the book was reprinted in August 2000 by Vintage Contemporaries, a division of Random House. It ended up being one of those books I spent all day reading from cover to cover, and I’ve been passing on the recommendation since.

Although the nine short stories that make up Monkeys follow the same characters over the course of thirteen years, the book cannot be called a novel. Many pivotal events happen off-stage, and it is left to the reader to infer what has happened between stories: break-ups, a death, a marriage. What binds the stories together are the Vincent family—Mum, Dad, and their seven children—and their relationships to each other. Minot’s prose is sparse and economic, but she portrays these characters with a warmth that allows you access to their lives.

The reader is introduced to the Vincents through the eyes of nine-year-old Sophie, who narrates the  first story, “Hiding.” Because of her youth, Sophie notices many things innocently, without understanding their significance. Thus unknowingly, she introduces the reader to the problems that will haunt the Vincent family throughout course of the book: Dad’s alcoholism, his distance from the family, Mum’s hunger for his affection. Sophie describes Dad’s withdrawal while Mum dances for her children:

She bangs the floor with her sneakers, pumping and kicking, thudding her heels in smacks, not like clicking at all, swinging her arms out in front of her like she’s wading through the jungle. She speeds up, staring straight at Dad who’s reading his book, making us laugh even harder. He’s always like that.

Because she doesn’t understand the implications of what she sees, and so does not dwell on them, Sophie’s observations become an example of what the jacket blurb calls Minot’s “sparely eloquent” writing.

While it is impossible to develop the personalities of all seven children in the space of 150 pages, as a whole the Vincent family is believable and knowable from story to story. Mum especially comes alive with her zest for life. On the way home from fancy parties, she goes swimming in the ocean in her cocktail dress; she holds protests against the Vietnam War. Her joy in life is passed on to her children, expressed in their enthusiastic welcome of new births in the family. She surrounds her children with affection to make up for their aloof father; but her own unsatisfied need for love cripples her. The reader is never given direct access to her thoughts, but sees her through the eyes of her children, who perceive more of her pain as they grow older.

Although most of the stories were published individually before the release of Monkeys in 1986, the book does come together into something more than a collection of  individual works. Each story draws subtle details from others that would otherwise lay dormant—a box of postcards in one story from a lover in another; a seemingly irrelevant ghost story that becomes foreshadowing.

And despite the gaps between them, the stories trace an arc that would be incomplete were any of them missing. By the final story, “Thorofare,” the emotional journey is brought not so much to a resolution as to a revelation of the tragic effects that Dad’s distance and alcoholism have on each member of the family. The pain here, as in all the stories, is tempered with graceful understatement, a fitting conclusion to this soft-spoken, heart-rending book.

Rosemary McMillen is an MFA student in fiction at the University of Pittsburgh.