fiction

Voice of the Fire by Alan Moore
(Top Shelf, 2003)
Steve Gillies

If you’ve heard of Alan Moore, it’s probably for his groundbreaking work on comics like Watchmen, From Hell, V For Vendetta, and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, all of which contributed to the respect that has emerged for comics as an art form over the past 20 years. Possibly you only know of him through the terrible movies adapted from those books—but let’s hope not. Moore had the good sense to take his name off those projects and tends to be pretty grumpy about movies and superhero comics in general when asked about them in interviews. Instead, he prefers to talk about more arcane subjects like history, religion, and magic.

Moore’s become known as an authority on that last subject. On his fortieth birthday he declared himself a magician, devoted himself to occult studies and started worshipping an old Roman snake god. It sounds crazy until you hear him explain magic as the manipulation of symbols (like words) to alter people’s consciousness (like stories), and that there basically is no difference between the word “spell” (as in to spell a word) and the word spell (as in to cast a spell). Then it only sounds kind of crazy.

In the mid-90s, during one of Moore’s periodic withdrawals from the world of comics, he wrote a prose book that explores his ideas about magic and the tenuous relationship between big ideas like truth, fiction, and history. Originally printed in paperback in 1996, Voice of the Fire was largely ignored, but Moore’s American comic publisher later went ahead and produced a beautiful hardcover edition featuring book design by Chip Kidd, an introduction by Neil Gaiman (the most successful comic writer to cross over into novels), and illustrated plates by José Villarrubia. The book was once again largely ignored.

Within half a page, it’s easy to see why the book remains an afterthought in Moore’s body of work. The opening chapter, told from the viewpoint of a half-witted prehistoric youth who can’t tell the difference between waking and dreaming, is as hard to follow as any book in the English language. And it’s not exactly lyrically on par with Joyce. Take this passage for example:

There is not grass on high of hill. There is but dirt, all in a round, that hill is as like to a no-hair man, he’s head. Stands I, and turn I’s face to the wind for sniff, and yet is no sniff come for far ways off. I’s belly hurts, in middle of I.

There are 50 more pages where that came from!

Yet, over the course of those 50 pages, you can’t help but feel for this wandering pre-historic half-wit surrounded by powerful forces he can’t even put a name to, let alone understand. And the limited language begins to work its particular kind of magic, especially when the boy struggles to “glean that one may say of thing while thing is not,” an apt description of magic, fiction, history, or a lie.

From the tale of the man-child, Moore moves through time with a series of first-person narratives taking place in and around his hometown of Northampton. The reliability of these narratives vary, but themes of deception, betrayal, and disillusionment repeat themselves throughout, as do images of giant black dogs, one legged cripples and sacrificial fires. If you were interested in making distinctions, you’d be hard pressed to decide if Voice of the Fire is a novel, a set of interconnected stories, or something else altogether.

Some of the chapters could work alone as short stories, some more as character sketches. In every chapter, it’s impressive how expertly Moore inhabits each of these narrators, from a Bronze Age murderess to a hobbled and aging crusader to the disembodied head displayed on a pike outside the city gate, giving them a voice that’s uniquely theirs. This talent for first person narration carries over from Moore’s comic work, where he uses caption boxes (previously been reserved in comics for exposition or redundant descriptions of the action on the page) to render carefully crafted internal monologues.* In fact, he’s so convincing that many readers associate the views of Watchmen’s ultra-conservative, homicidal vigilante Rorschach with Moore himself.

Another of Moore’s formal concerns from comics that apply to his only novel so far is the depiction of time. Moore frequently uses the visual nature of comics to challenge standard perceptions of time. For Doctor Manhattan of Watchmen all of time happens at once, leading Moore (and artist Dave Gibbons) to juxtapose images from different periods in the character’s life in a narrative that’s just as associative as it is linear.

Many chapters in Voice of the Fire display a similar concern with time, crosscutting between flashbacks and present tense action, but what’s more interesting is how the novel as a whole deals with time. It spans centuries in what seems like a linear narrative, but images keep repeating, characters from the past appear before a more contemporary one in inexplicable visions, and key plot elements of disillusionment and treachery constantly recur. The book seems to ask, are we all as helpless as that half-witted manchild from chapter one, unable to tell the difference between waking and dream, “a thing that is become a thing that is not”? Yet as the book progresses and characters repeatedly march towards despair and doom, it becomes exhausting. Maybe we all have the same basic story, but do we have to read it over and over again?

Moore, however, rewards the intrepid reader with an absolutely stunning last chapter, which begins with the author typing the final words from the previous chapter. We arrive then, all the way from prehistory to present tense. We follow Alan Moore through the process of trying to find an ending to his novel in what is part first-person narrative (which never uses the words “I” or “me”), part metafiction, part essay, and part history lesson.

Despite a few rough spots, Voice of the Fire puts the reader right into the head of a unique and visionary artist, one who is prone to believing in a mad idea or two and is nearly convincing enough to make the reader believe, too. By that criteria, the book might quite possibly be an incantation in and of itself.

Steve Gillies is a 3rd year MFA student at the University of Pittsburgh and co-editor in chief of Hot Metal Bridge. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Artifice Magazine, The AV Club, and the American Journal of Orthopedics.

* Readers interested in Moore’s process for these first-person narrations should read his essay “Writing For Comics,” where he describes how he imagines every psychological and physiological detail of his characters, to the point where he stumbles around his room shouting and pretending to be Etrigan the Demon. That’s dedication to craft.

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The House At Pooh Corner by A.A. Milne
(Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1928)
Jacob Thomas Berns

In Which The Case for The House At Pooh Corner Is Made

It wasn’t until college that I read A.A. Milne’s The House At Pooh Corner, suggested by a friend equally enamored by the minimalism I was reading almost exclusively at the time. The recommendation may seem an odd one, especially for those whose familiarity with Hundred Acre Wood begins and ends with the Disney adaptations. While similarities between Milne’s books and the movies do exist—each finds Pooh and friends setting out to solve some problem they’ve discovered or invented, and adventure ensues—in the original stories, the “message” or “moral” is never explicitly stated. For Milne’s characters, the discovery process is as ongoing and uncertain as growing up; every moment, every interaction—each interruption, silence, and contradiction—is significant. In making the unexceptional—eating breakfast, climbing a tree, racing twigs down a river—extraordinary, Milne asks us to believe in the possibility of doing the same, makes the meaning compelling because we are a part of it.

Where their Disney counterparts are scrubbed clean of subtlety and complication (e.g., Eeyore’s resolute fatalism traded for his affable gloominess), Milne’s characters are developed and complicated, and one’s sense of self-worth is subject to change with experience (e.g., Piglet becomes convinced of his bravery, which gives him the mettle to sacrifice his house to Eeyore and move in with Pooh). Tensions in one story arise in others, allowing the characters’ opinions of one another to change as their strengths and flaws become apparent (Eeyore’s self-ostracization, for example, which the animals stop humoring by book’s end). No character is predictable, and their actions are as likely to surprise themselves as those around them. Milne’s characters, with their fears and affectations and failings (complimented perfectly by E. H. Shepard’s iconic line drawings), are less tidy than their animated selves—which is to say, they’re more like us.

The second and final collection in Milne’s series, The House At Pooh Corner grapples with loss, most notably Christopher Robin’s leaving home for boarding school. As he’s the center of the characters’ universe, Christopher Robin growing up and away poses a significant threat. Milne hints at this impending departure throughout, building to the characters’ realization of it: “Christopher Robin was going away,” Milne begins the final story. “Nobody knew why he was going; nobody knew where he was going; indeed, nobody even knew why he knew that Christopher Robin was going away. But somehow or other everybody in the Forest felt that it was happening at last.” It’s not the only time the characters are aware of their vulnerability, but it’s the first time they are explicitly so. Both inevitable and—while still safe from it—unknowable, disillusionment is the price of growing up.

Above all else, Milne exalts imagination, which he distinguishes from education (which, in turn, he separates from intelligence), suggesting that those most capable of it are perhaps those with Very Little Brain, those who aren’t hastening their way into the adult world. Danger is ever-present in these stories, and even imagined dangers such as the Heffalump present real risks. But nothing is more perilous than the absence of creative thought—and for these characters, whether or not they’re aware of it, Christopher Robin’s loss of imagination means they’ll cease to exist.

It’s this reminder of what we’ve lost since we were Christopher Robin’s age, and at what cost, that helps ensure Milne’s stories’ relevance. What was once unique and exciting, we’ve become accustomed to; “Nothing”—as discussed by Pooh and Christopher Robin in the last story—is no longer a proper noun meaning “just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.” This breakdown is natural, and it follows that fighting against it must be a conscious and constant choice. Milne reminds us of this, fittingly, in a description of nature:

“By the time it came to the edge of the Forest, the stream had grown up, so that it was almost a river, and, being grown-up, it did not run and jump and sparkle along as it used to do when it was younger, but moved more slowly. For it knew now where it was going, and it said to itself, ‘There is no hurry. We shall get there some day.’ But all the little streams higher up in the Forest went this way and that, quickly, eagerly, having so much to find out before it was too late.”

Milne’s characters are constantly trying, sometimes succeeding, but always discovering, because they’re looking and listening for what isn’t there but could be. Taking nothing for granted, they see the world clearly, with no confusion as to what’s really important—friendship, compassion, imagination. By the time we leave these characters, they acknowledge the disappointment of reality and grieve what will be lost to it. But they remain optimistic so long as they are able—the alternative being the truly unimaginable prospect. Milne has said he didn’t write the Pooh books for children, and indeed, what we learn from these stories, children don’t need to be taught. The House At Pooh Corner reminds us that while we may have forgotten how to see the world this way, we were able to once, and can again.

Jacob Thomas Berns is an MFA fiction candidate at the University of Oregon, where he teaches composition and creative writing. He is the founding editor of the online journal Miracle Monocle.

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Abbott Awaits by Chris Bachelder
(Louisiana State University Press, March 2011)
Adam Reger

Turning the Page

At a glance, Abbott Awaits seems like a departure from Chris Bachelder’s previous novels. Compare each book’s subject: America is gripped by the Super Bowl-sized spectacle of a bear fighting a shark in shallow water (Bear v. Shark); Upton Sinclair repeatedly rises from the dead and is assassinated by socialism-fearing Americans (U.S.!); a college professor spends a quiet summer with his daughter and wife, waiting for the latter to bear their second child (Abbott Awaits).

One of these books is not like the others. But as it turns out, Abbott Awaits differs from Bachelder’s idiosyncratic, formally-inventive first two novels in degree more than kind. The novel is divided into three months, each day with its own brief chapter. Compared with the zany grab bag that is U.S.!— which includes Amazon.com reviews of Sinclair’s post-reanimation novels, lyrics to blues songs, and a 911 call transcript reporting a Sinclair shooting—this conceit is minimal.

But Bachelder uses this elliptical structure shrewdly. On June 25, Abbott, his wife, and their two-year-old daughter set out to see an antique tractor in a field before becoming bogged down in logistics–Abbott has dressed his daughter in winter clothes, sunblock has not been applied–and then permanently distracted. “Neighborhood children ride by on their bicycles, captivating Abbott’s daughter,” Bachelder writes. “Her naptime is looming. The tractor is an impossible dream. Nobody in Abbott’s family will see an antique tractor today, if ever” (50). On June 26, Abbott reads about the families of trapped miners on the Internet.

That’s all we hear about on those two days. But around and between these events, we can infer that Abbott is having a lazy-but-busy summer, full of time spent playing with his daughter, trips to the supermarket, and hours spent online. Bachelder tells us enough to infer what’s not there. It’s a perfect evocation of the emptiness of a long break: there’s one noteworthy thing per day, seldom more.

While the novel is essentially plotless, Bachelder draws dramatic tension from the march of days. Abbott will return to the classroom at the end of the summer. His hugely pregnant wife will have a cesarean on August 31, and thus Abbott knows exactly when his life will change. Caught between looking forward to these changes and savoring the freedom of summer, the reader feels (with Abbott) pushed and pulled, pressured to enjoy each moment while it lasts. Abbott Awaits thus sinks or swims on the strength of its individual moments. In this department, the reader is in good hands. Throughout his career, Bachelder has shown himself to be not only smart and funny as a writer, but deathly afraid of being boring. (Refer to the descriptions of his first two books, above.) His writing here is crisp, clear, and surprising.

Bachelder is also more focused on his characters than in his previous works. Here he renders Abbott precisely and at length, taking the various types his protagonist might embody—professor, husband, father—and creating a distinct individual whose observations, habits, mistakes, and small triumphs are, from one page to the next, funny, cerebral, wise, and affecting.

Two examples:

“Abbott’s wife, inside the house, comes to the kitchen window below the section of the gutter that Abbott is cleaning. Her face in the window is level with his thighs, and so naturally he imagines her sucking his penis and swallowing his semen. ‘Are they bad?’ she asks. ‘The gutters?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘They’re not that bad,’ he says, lying for no reason at all. She says, ‘The baby is really kicking today.’” (66)

“Abbott, sitting by his wife’s head, can see, over the drape, the eyes of the doctors above their masks. The birth feels secretive, covert. He can feel the hot air pooling in his own mask. The thing he’d like to tell all of them is Please be careful with this woman and this baby.” (176)

Bachelder writes with the apparent understanding that each page has to convince the reader, with keen observations and winning lines, to turn the next page. The accumulation of such moments, the constantly repeated stimulation of vivid descriptions, sharp insights, and perfectly drawn scenes, is the source of Abbott Awaits’ real pleasure.

Another way to think of the shift from Bachelder’s previous books is to view the difference as a matter of maturity, given the novel’s more domestic subject matter. (A single glance at Bachelder’s author bio, identifying him as a college professor with two daughters, suggests that Abbott Awaits may be a product of Bachelder’s life experience.) In contrast to the heavy notes of idealism in the first two books, Abbott’s own convictions and passions are tempered heavily by pragmatism—by his daughter’s low blood sugar-induced crying jag, but also by the humility that comes with knowing he will never reach the bottom of his marriage or have full knowledge of his wife’s every waking moment.

It’s to Bachelder’s immense credit that he makes the daily concerns of Abbott, so often centering on marriage and fatherhood, accessible to readers outside of these circumstances. Presenting a summer-long pastiche of Abbott’s insights and experiences, the ups and downs of his moods, his screw-ups and shining moments, Abbott Awaits is a novel about an individual who happens to be married, happens to be a father with another on the way. Marriage and fatherhood, here, take center stage but are no more real than the rest of life. They’re not cults one is inducted into, changing the very nature of life, but relationships one navigates constantly: frequently on the verge of screwing up, often making it up as one goes along, constantly surprised, always alive and awake.

Adam Reger is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh’s MFA program in fiction. He is the author of U.S. Navy Pirate Combat Skills.

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Gryphon: New and Selected Stories by Charles Baxter
(Pantheon Books, January 2011)
Stephanie Wilson

The Familiar and The Strange

I first became acquainted with Charles Baxter’s work after reading The Feast of Love, a National Book Award nominee in 2000. The novel, a compelling interweaving of stories about (mostly failed) relationships, was later turned into a bland bit of rom-com sausage by Hollywood—the risk of having “love” in the title, I suppose. But Baxter, a professor at the University of Minnesota, had been publishing decades before The Feast of Love sparked national attention; to date, his impressive oeuvre includes five novels, a collection of poetry, two books of essays, and five short story collections, the most recent being Gryphon.

Baxter once said he was “a Midwestern writer in a postmodern age,” a description that’s been liberally attached to him since. A Midwesterner myself, I’m more than happy to claim him, yet I find such a description to be limited, especially when considering the twenty-three stories—seven of them new—which comprise Gryphon. There’s too much territory here to be circumscribed by a simple label, both in a literal sense—“Poor Devil” takes place in San Francisco, “Royal Blue” travels between New York and Alaska—and a figurative one.

The titular story, at least, is set in a familiar Baxter landscape: the fictional town of Five Oaks, Michigan. An isolated place plagued by harsh winters and high unemployment, its essence is embodied by the flat landscape. In “Gryphon,” an outsider dares to penetrate the sameness when she substitute teaches for the narrator’s fourth grade class. Miss Ferenczi immediately upsets the students’ sense of order—telling them that six times eleven could be sixty-eight, for instance, and that she’d once seen a gryphon while traveling in Egypt. While the majority of his classmates balk at Miss Ferenczi’s methods and eventually rail against her, the narrator fervently believes in—and eventually defends—her version of truth.

Baxter possesses a particular talent for crafting memorably complex characters like Miss Ferenczi. In “Mr. Scary,” Estelle struggles in her role as the primary caregiver for her surly, prepubescent grandson Freddie. At the outset, she seems like a typical clueless grandmother, buying a baseball bat for a grandson who’d much rather be killing video-game zombies. Yet we soon find out that this is in, in her words, “Part Two” of her life. “Part One” was spent crisscrossing the country with the volatile, philandering father of her children, a man named Squirrel. Though her current situation is far more comfortable (and her second husband infinitely kinder and more dependable) she still possesses a sense of longing for her reckless past.

And it’s not just the characters that are compelling, but their relationships as well—how they rub up against, connect, and collide with one another. Baxter has a knack for illustrating these interactions in evocative and unpredictable strokes. In “Fenstad’s Mother,” Fenstad tries to hide the scent of wine on his breath from his mother, a staunch liberal, because she’ll know he’s been to Communion. In “The Old Murderer,” a recovering alcoholic attempts to assuage his guilt and ease his loneliness by befriending his new neighbor: a recently released convict who claims to be building a spaceship in his basement.

At first glance it may appear that the stories in Gryphon are straightforward, character-driven fiction, but that’s owing to Baxter’s wonderful subtlety as a storyteller. In “Poor Devil,” the first-person narrative moves between dialogue and exposition in such a way that you can’t always be sure whether the narrator is sharing something with just you, the reader, or with his ex-wife as well:

We were like two becalmed sailing ships, with sailors from different countries shouting curses at each other, as we drifted farther and farther away.

“No, right, sure, of course,” she says, standing up and stretching. “Two ships.” She turns toward me and loosens her hair, so that it falls lightly over her shoulders and so I can see her do it.

The effect is jarring, and purposefully so, as it is unclear to the characters themselves how well they know one another—and the lengths each will go in order to prove the other’s ignorance.

As is to be expected in a collection of this size, some stories were less resonant than others. “The Winner,” in which the protagonist interviews an absurdly wealthy investor for a profile in Success magazine, reads like a Depression-era rant against the rich. The billionaire—more caricature than character—lives in a lavish, secluded compound (with both wife and mistress) and spends part of the visit with literal blood on his hands—from killing and field dressing a deer that wanders onto his property.

A few missteps aside, Gryphon stands as a substantial work from a master of fiction. Though Baxter may wear the mantle of the Midwest, a place often associated with the middle, the mundane—his writing is anything but ordinary.

Stephanie Wilson, a Michigan native, is pursuing her MFA in fiction at the University of Pittsburgh. She has been published by unFold, and is currently working on a novel.

Death Sentence by Maurice Blanchot
(Originally published in French in 1948; most recent English edition by Station Hill Press, June 1998)
Andrea Applebee

Christian Rohlfs’ Death as a Juggler (1918-1919).

A slender book of three sections. Two, and a very brief afterword omitted by the author in the second printing. The first section that has all the strength and force; the second emerges from it like a shadow, less-than-a-story, a series of echoic but brief resurrections. These are followed at last by a small, explanatory apology. The speaker has trouble getting started with each part: a theoretical sort of kicking about in the dirt before getting underway. Once speaking, he finds himself bound to the exposure of a thought, or it of him.

This ‘thought’ is also at times a woman, is also truth, darkness, a private space arbitrarily divided, is an existence below existence, behind itself and infinitely far back, and is also, somehow, the speaker. He finds himself mutually contingent on this thought, devoted to it, hardly even, since the one part cannot be separated enough from the other. A narrative rises out of this reciprocal bond, at once incidental and illustrative.

The mythical and biblical conceit that love and the art that records it is as strong as death (and just as terrible, so that it is unclear which is in the service of the other) has been of use to many readers of this enigma of a story. The motives and fates of Orpheus and Eurydice, Odysseus and the Sirens, as well as Lazarus, and Jairus’ daughter, bring a narratological depth and texture to Blanchot’s abstract tale.

J—, called ‘the kid’ by her sister, is the central character of the first part. She is dying of an illness that causes coughing fits, recurring pain and difficulty speaking and breathing. “She will not die,” the palm reader states after looking at a plaster cast of her hands. It is J— that makes statements and gives commands in the first part of the book. To her doctor, “If you don’t kill me, you’re a murderer;” to her nurse, “Have you ever seen death?”, “Take a good look at Death;” and to her lover, “Hang up,” “Don’t ever touch me again,” “No more shots,” “Quick, a perfect rose,” “Quick, a shot.”

J— even addresses those forces that for all purposes decide her fate: her illness, and the world beyond it. “She fought with all her strength . . . not with supplications, but inwardly. Children are that way: silently, with the fervor of hopeless desire, they give orders to the world, and sometimes the world obeys them.” Again and again one encounters her vigilance and resolve. The speaker (her lover) describes her as very brave, but afraid. She is the only character with real power; dying, she is the most alive person in the story. At no point does she resort to slyness, and in this sense and perhaps for that reason is on equal footing with her own death. “And when she was alone she faced it all alone, without recourse to tricks or charms.” She dies and comes back to life at her lover’s bidding, is even cheerful, then with his help and assent, dies again.

Nathalie emerges partway through the second section: but one begins to realize she was mentioned in the beginning. She translates at the Embassy for a living and is the second and parallel love (if love it could be called) after J— . The speaker describes her as having the peculiar quality of being less than a person. She has poor vision in the dark, and at some point a surgery to aid this is attempted. As with J—, Nathalie first encounters the speaker by entering his room at night before knowing him; except where J—— did this intentionally, she does it almost without knowing, as if lost or under a spell. It is he that speaks to her, gives her commands. “Come . . .”, “Do your eyes hurt?”, “If you don’t answer me, I’ll never speak to you again!” She steals the card for the artist out of his wallet and has a plaster cast of her hands and face made.

In conversing with and observing these characters a reader experiences not just the vagaries of a love triangle, but also the thought that dictates them. Words—and so too, in the world of Death Sentence, thoughts and actions—have the capacity to modify and qualify, but not to name, not to signify. They graze, but cannot grasp: suggest, but cannot describe. The speaker’s reliance on adverbs—nearly, hardly, soon, almost, sort of—evidences this condition. This constitutes a kind of illness of language beyond treatment, like J—, perhaps capable of being diagnosed, but not cured. A permanent fight ensues of the vocalist to breathe in the face of imminent death and speak in the aura of silence befitting an intimate knowledge of that death. Strung throughout the book commands, agreements to suicide, wills, names, diagnosis, reported speech, letters, phone conversations, empty proposals, explanations, confessions, threats, and riddles lead one back into this illness of language. In every conversation, these Hegelian dialectics (one starts to feel it in one’s own conversations, too) resurrect a meaning and then collapse again. And below them, something else: something past mentioning.

By cooperating with this illness of language, this temporary resurrection of experience into words, the speaker slips into a self-conscious furtiveness that at once binds him to it and obscures his relationships. “My deviousness put us face to face like two creatures who were lying in wait for each other but who could no longer see one another.” This notion of connivance invests itself in the speaker’s decision to have a cast made of J—’‘s hands to send to a fortune-reader, as well as in Nathalie’s sly stealing of the artist’s card to have her own casts made. At almost every point the speaker tries to denounce and evade this cooperation (describing the destruction of the previous manuscript, suggesting that all evidence of the story also should be destroyed), indicating again and again that he is setting out with the knowledge that what he will say will be inadequate. Yet he is complicit with this inadequacy.

Coagulation of speech. Delusions of alterity. Wandering into the dark rooms of strangers and near-strangers. Flimsily partitioned rooms and locked doors that open easily. Stairwells without lights. The sadness of the other side of the wall. A reader encounters this love, illness, morphine, death, a temporary miracle ending again in death, the speaker’s blood problems, his work, bombs on Paris, hotel rooms, the practical affairs of somebody else’s duel. Silence, speech. Collusion with death as a force. One is left, in the end, like the speaker, with the cast plaster hands of his lovers, and the edge of that splendid thought he is in vain trying to bring to its knees.

Andrea Applebee lives and teaches in Philadelphia. She graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 2009.

An Object of Beauty by Steve Martin
(Grand Central Publishing, November 2010)
Jonathan Gotsick

Art for Art’s Ache

Steve Martin’s versatility as an artist is a given. Showbiz titles have attached themselves to his name like barnacles, and at this point only the sequence of those titles is in question. Novelist and musician now come first, while comedian and actor have, amazingly, become veritable afterthoughts. It’s enough to make a guy feel old: the Jerk isn’t even a jerk anymore; the Wild and Crazy Guy has officially met the Muse.

In fact, Martin has been a writer of much more than jokes for over 30 years now, and in the last decade his fiction has garnered particular notice for its subtlety, playfulness, and panache. Following 1998’s Pure Drivel, a collection of comedic short stories (including some which had appeared in the pages of The New Yorker), Martin ventured into more emotionally-involved territory with his novella, Shopgirl, in 2000. Three years later the bittersweet, underrated The Pleasure of My Company arrived, and after a detour into nonfiction for his fascinating memoir Born Standing Up (2007), Martin returns with another assured and engaging novel, An Object of Beauty.

Set primarily in the art world of Manhattan, An Object of Beauty tracks the rise and not-quite-fall of an ambitious and enterprising heroine, Lacey Yeager, as she navigates the New York art scene in the topsy-turvy 1990s and 2000s. She starts out in the basement of Sotheby’s, and eventually—through instinct, savvy, and the exploitation of her own sexuality—comes to possess her own gallery. She grows up, but it’s not a loss-of-innocence story, because Lacey is never all that innocent to begin with. Like the objects of beauty she finds so fascinating, Lacey herself does not change. Instead, what changes is her value in the estimation of others.

We are told early on that Lacey “was headed somewhere—though she often left blood in the water.” Nothing about Martin’s rendering of the contemporary art world suggests sharks, however, or at least not particularly hungry ones. Dealers and collectors cruise about New York and LA, their eyes open for steals and deals and ego-boosts, but they never rise to the level of “menacing.” As enthralled or entrapped as they are by their own world, they don’t ache over it so much as wallow in it. Yet somehow they rarely get dirty. Nobody dies or goes to jail; rather than getting fired, they simply “move on.”

The novel is narrated by Daniel Franks, a friend of Lacey’s and a fellow traveler in the art world. Daniel’s journey as an apprentice critic parallels Lacey’s journey, yet he reveals snippets of his own tale only incidentally, and mostly as they intersect with Lacey’s. He is present to tell Lacey’s story, and in doing so he is like a gallery owner, positioning the light just so in order to illuminate Lacey, though not necessarily to flatter her. At one point he states that his “style is courtly, which fails to excite those who anticipate drama,” and in a way this is true of the book itself. A subplot involving an art theft falls well short of intrigue, as does Daniel’s sketched-out love story with Tanya Ross, a rival of Lacey’s.

But in An Object of Beauty, drama doesn’t seem to be the point. The appeal of the novel rests mainly in the milieu itself, and we are invited to consider it in great detail, with the sexy and irrepressible Lacey as our guide. Her education in contemporary art is our education, and it’s broad rather than deep. Toward that end, the book even features color reproductions of paintings by Picasso, Andy Warhol, Maxfield Parrish, and other great twentieth century artists. Martin, a noted collector himself, has obviously taken great pleasure in selecting them, and as they comment on the text and vice versa, one looks forward to them as if to a treat. Maybe we agree with Lacey’s appraisals, maybe we don’t. Beauty is, naturally, in the eye of the beholder.

Jonathan Gotsick is a first year student in Pitt’s MFA Fiction program.

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
(Originally published in 1969; review of Ace edition, July 2000)
Kate Sedon

Le Guin’s Imagined Community

For many freaks, geeks and others, science fiction has offered an imagined community divorced from the dominant groups of mainstream culture. In light of the increasing population of hipsters and leading movie roles based on nerds, one has to wonder: is geek the new chic?

When I went looking for some science fiction to read, my D&D and World of Warcraft friends unanimously recommended Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hugo-and-Nebula-Award-winning The Left Hand of Darkness, a seminal text according to recreational readers and literary critics alike.

Following the trials and travels of Genly Ai–a native of Earth and ambassador of the Ekumen tasked to entreat the nation-states of the planet Gethen to join an alliance of more than eighty worlds–Le Guin presents readers with an evocative tale that stirs the imagination and the senses. Also known as Winter for the obvious reasons, Gethen’s populations include androgynous peoples who consider Genly a pervert because he always appears to be male, positioning him as a freakish outsider and complicating his mission all the more.

In order to convince the nation of Karhide to join the alliance, Genly works with Estraven, the king of Karhide’s closest advisor. But when the king exiles Estraven as a traitor, Genly’s mission seems an impossible challenge and his inability to fully understand the politics of Gethen’s nations just makes things worse. From his terrible predicaments, an intimate friendship develops between Genly and Estraven which eventually aids Genly in accomplishing his charge.

The novel opens with Genly addressing his audience and fellow tale-tellers: “I’ll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust. Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are. But both are sensitive.”

Aside from introducing readers to the main protagonist, Le Guin’s opening paragraph reveals her work’s strengths: beautifully-crafted language and, more importantly, an ability to comment on itself, especially as the truth of this tale has less to do with speculations about the future of the universe and more to do with a devotion to human dignity. “It is a terrible thing, this kindness that humans beings do not lose. Terrible, because when we are finally naked in the dark and cold, it is all we have.”

A productive writer in many genres–from children’s literature and poetry to essays–Le Guin is one of the most recognizable names in science fiction, not only for her profuse body of work but also her attention to the structure and function of the genre. In her introduction, Le Guin clearly defines science fiction as a medium concerned with descriptions of the present, not predictions of the future.

While the plot might appear as an escape into a fantasy of the future, the novel actively resists such a classification, instead reading like an ethnography and history of the Gethenians–complete with a creation myth and an explanation of the Gethenian calendar and clock; Genly reports back to the Ekumen about Gethenian society, sexual reproduction, and culture.

Perhaps Le Guin’s readers enjoy her science fiction because it has something to say about humanity today. One can easily draw parallels between Gethenian androgyny and the social constructionist perspective of sexuality, as well as Karhide’s power-hungry-and-obtuse-yet-paranoid king and our very own George W. Bush. I solidly recommend that you read The Left Hand of Darkness, whether today or years from now.

Kate Sedon studies at the University of Pittsburgh.

Cut through the Bone by Ethel Rohan
(Dark Sky Books, December 2010)
Chris Lee

On the surface, the thirty brief stories in Ethel Rohan’s debut collection are about losing things—a leg, an ability to turn down a glass of wine, a mother’s ghost, and a father’s mind. Yet, it’s not the holes in the characters’ lives that break your heart, but the little gestures they make in an attempt to fill themselves up again.

When the book was given to me, I was warned not to read it entirely in one sitting. So, of course, I did. And if whoever is giving out this advice is saying it because they gave up halfway through, then it’s a shame, because this is the kind of collection that works best as a whole. Each story presses forward to the next, each arc driving the characters from a place of despair and desperate emptiness to an even stranger, often misguided, but ultimately hopeful attempt at reconciling themselves with what is left of their lives.

The strongest moments in the book come when Rohan pushes her characters into moments of what might look like, to a stranger on the street, subdued insanity. As readers, however, we are not strangers to their lives and our intimate relationship with their cracks and gaps force us to take solace in even their most absurd attempts at reconciling themselves with their worlds. Indeed, it seems that the sillier the action, the more it resonates.

In the opening story, “More than Gone,” a grandmother who has lost so much—her husband, her youth, her outlet for all conversations that don’t begin with the phrase ‘did you make it home all right?’—draws a face on a balloon and talks at it late into the night, trying to fight back the loneliness that fills her home. Later, in “At the Peephole,” a woman stunned by the end of a love affair fills a donkey piñata with stones—representing the weight she’s gained, the looks she’s lost—and tries to give it all back to the man who left her with it.

There are other successful motions and gestures throughout the book, some less absurd than others. They all play into each other as the stories go on, creating a kind of existential weight as they collect and push forward.  Perhaps it’s because the actions that make the least sense end up doing the most work in these stories that characters who react to situations in expected ways seem less engaging. For example, the woman in “Scraps” picking up the divorce papers and dashing out of a diner, gasping at the air, falls flat on the page. This is, though, only one small misstep in an otherwise strong collection.

Well, all right, so there are two small missteps in the collection. Even if there are the few moments that don’t quite fully capture the character’s despair, they’re forgivable. Unfortunately, many of the stories’ titles are not. The title story is enough to pique the interest of most people, but a casual reader browsing the table of contents might skip over stories with titles like “Lifelike,” “The Trip,” or “Fe Fi Fo Fum.” It would be their loss, since these are some of the best stories in the collection. Perhaps the best way to read the collection is like listening to an album without ever looking at the liner notes. I’ve been listening to Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska” for years, and the only song I can name off the top of my head is “Atlantic City.” And, like that record, it seems that other than one or two stories, the titles in Cut through the Bone are better if they’re altogether ignored. Then again, maybe that’s what Rohan was going for with story headers like “Make Over,” “Rattle,” and “Crazy.”

Titles aside, the collection is good. In the two or three pages that are given to each, Rohan manages to find her way into the deepest fractures of people’s lives. She fills them up again, not with love or compassion, but with what’s left over, and makes sure we know that people do carry on, too strong to die, but too weak not to limp.

Read Ethel Rohan’s “Fresh from God,” published in the Fall 2010 issue of Hot Metal Bridge. 

Christopher M. Lee grew up as a TV kid in West Virginia, and his favorite show has always been Seinfeld. He started out life as a Jerry and managed to joke his way through a BA at The College of Wooster. After that, he moved out to Cincinnati and became the Kramer of all his friends, working sporadically as a saxophone player and feeding himself regularly from the neighbor’s fridge. Now finishing his MFA at the University of Pittsburgh, he’s beginning to worry that he may be turning into a season eight George.

A Dream in Polar Fog by Yuri Rytkheu, trans. by Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse
(Originally published in Russian in 1968; released in English by Archipelago Books, April 2005)
Jennifer MacGregor

Lost in Siberia

Rythkheu’s A Dream in Polar Fog takes the genre of ethnographic adventure story and adds the perspectives most often missing: those of the indigenous community the work describes. Rytkheu is an advocate of the Chukchi , a community of native peoples who live in the northeastern-most corner of Siberia, and was born nearby. He offers insight into a community that has been diminished by the Russian Revolution and the collapse of the USSR. Now, a month before the English translation of another of his works will be published (Chukchi Bible) it seems appropriate to take this elegant edition off the shelf and consider what inspired a translation after nearly 40 years.

The novel is organized around the experiences of John MacLennan, who is introduced by his wanderlust: “books. . . called the junior MacLennan to faraway seas. The poems of Kipling, the vague insinuations of seasoned mariners, hinting of distant lands, of night squalls and morning shores, undiscovered by civilized man.” John seeks adventure aboard a ship sailing to the Arctic, but the overambitious captain finds his ship stuck in ice near a Chukchi settlement. John loses most of his fingers in an explosion while trying to free the ship, and his beloved captain barters with three Chukchi men in order to transport John to the nearest town for treatment. Shortly after John’s departure, the ice dissipates and the Captain sails for home, leaving John to survive until the next America-bound ship passes. Thus begins John’s internal struggle between a longing to return to his familiar home and a desire to stay and become an honorary Chukchi.

John’s Eurocentric viewpoint is challenged early and often in this novel. At first, he does not see that the Chukchi are “civilized,” but his time with them brings him an appreciation of the people who save and house him. Early 20^th century ethnographic literature often contains dehumanizing misconceptions of indigenous peoples. The difference between this novel and progenitors of the genre is apparent in the opening chapter. Before we even meet John, the Chukchi characters’ activities, thoughts, and dialogue are portrayed. By employing the third-person omniscient viewpoint, rather than first-person narrative used in earlier adventure ethnographies, Rytkheu shows Chukchi people to be capable of self-centeredness, complex thought, and persuasive speech. They are not a community solely focused on survival, as John initially believes to be true.

Just as John begins to feel comfortable as a contributing member of Chukchi society, he accidentally shoots Toko, the man who has taken him in and taught him to hunt and live honorably. After Toko’s death, John is designated to care for his family by marrying his widow Pyl’mau. She is the only female character depicted with any depth, but her character is limited to thoughts about her husbands.

Despite its shortcomings, Rytkheu offers stunning descriptions of Chukchi daily life and the novel is truly moving when the characters are allowed to demonstrate their complicated relationships through actions. The narrative loses steam, however, during long didactic conversations in which characters discuss societal relationships with declamatory statements. These conversations seem intended to influence the philosophy of the reader, not the characters involved.

Though the book’s cover suggests an enlightened and multicultural John as the novel comes to a close, “John comes to know his new companions as a real people who share the best and worst of human traits with his own kind,” his actions and language do not suggest enlightenment. When questioned, he tells a man to whom he’s been teaching English: “A Chukcha has no need to read and write, not in hunting, not in household work. It would only take up his time and stir up thoughts and desires that would distract him from real life.” John’s statement seems both incorrect and insulting. Due to John’s naivety, the novel struggles to convince the reader of the value of the Chukchi society’s isolation from the rest of the world. Rytkheu seeks to move beyond the binary of “white man’s society is exploitative and evil, and Chukchi society is good,” but the final scenes of the novel do little to advance this cause.  

Jennifer MacGregor is pursuing her M.A. in English literature at the University of Pittsburgh. She hails from Oregon and finds Pittsburgh to be as cold as Siberia is for John.

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.

Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem
(Doubleday, October 2009)
Steve Gillies

A quarter of the way into Jonathan Lethem’s novel, narrator Chase Insteadman takes a break from the action to spend a short chapter describing the view from his window of a flock of birds in a church spire.  He’s described it already, but he tells the reader he wants to take make sure to get it right.  Then he completely fails to do so.   His description of language as the very thing that makes accurate description impossible is emblematic of the book.  “I employ it the way a dog drives a car,” he says, “without grasping how the car came to exist or what makes a combustion engine possible.  That is, of course, if dogs drove cars.  They don’t.  Yet I go around forming sentences.”  Attempts to find or convey some kind of meaning about the world consistently run headlong into the futility of language or the very idea of meaning itself.

Except, to say Insteadman takes a break in the action might be putting it generously.  There isn’t actually too much action to speak of.  Surviving off residuals from a teenage TV career, Chase Insteadman drifts aimlessly through the novel, attending fancy dinner parties, eating cheeseburgers in greasy spoons, and getting high in the ratty apartment of oddball ex-rock critic Perkus Tooth.  Insteadman indulges Tooth’s obsessions, from paranoid delusions about Marlon Brando and something called the Gnuppets to a religious awe of a type of pottery that can only be seen by bidding on it on ebay.  Yet anytime they might be in danger of following one of these obsessions into something resembling a plot, Lethem quickly moves them along to some new and equally fruitless pursuit.

Meanwhile, Insteadman’s astronaut fiancé writes love letters to him via weekly tabloids while trapped aboard a space station.  A giant tiger that might not actually be a giant tiger patrols the city, wrecking buildings that are coincidentally inconvenient to urban development.  A very literal grey fog hangs over the financial district.  Blending science fiction with surrealism, Lethem artfully renders a Manhattan that’s both strange and familiar, not to mention almost entirely populated by people with silly names.  The aforementioned Insteadman and Tooth are joined by the likes of Oona Lazlo, Laird Noteless, Georgina Hawkmanaji and Strabo Blandiani.  It’s the type of book where someone named Bloody Chicklets or Kilgore Trout could come strolling by at any moment.

There are dangers in following in the footsteps of Pynchon and Vonnegut.  For one thing, it isn’t the 60s anymore.  What once seemed new and profound now can seem an awful lot like random stoner-talk in Perkus Tooth’s living room.  Yet Lethem takes care to place such concerns in contrast to the novel’s hyper-modern surroundings.

Sure, there’s a conspiracy in Lethem’s Manhattan.  There are hundreds of them.  The question Lethem’s characters ask, though, is not what is reality? but in a place like this, what isn’t reality? The world Lethem creates can be a cold and alienating place.  Still, it has room for friendship, genuine human moments, and the promise that something new and indescribable lurks in the writing around every corner.

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.

Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy
(Riverhead/Penguin, July 2009)
Loring Ann Pfeiffer

If I recounted a handful of the stories from Maile Meloy’s most recent collection, the book would quickly begin to seem sensational.  In “Red and Green,” a teenaged girl has a sexual encounter with a much older man (a client of her attorney father); in “Lovely Rita,” a widow raffles off her romantic services to her dead husband’s colleagues; in “The Girlfriend,” the father of a murder victim, desperate to understand the mind of the man who killed his daughter, interviews the murderer’s girlfriend.  But what is most remarkable about Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It is that the experience of reading it elicits much more complicated responses than a simple summary of its plotlines might suggest.

A skilled sustainer of tension, Meloy writes stories that don’t so much resolve as arrive at a lingering uncertainty.  Like most real-life conflicts, the tensions at the center of Both Ways break only because some force shunts them aside.  In the final paragraph of “Travis, B,” after Chet Moran has had his hopes for intimacy dashed by a young lawyer named Beth, he stands in the darkness trying to determine how to proceed.  Just before the cold weather forces him inside, he takes the only action he can at that moment—he removes from his pocket the piece of paper that contains her phone number, memorizes it, rolls it into a ball, and throws it into the wind.  Such an ending contains within it both a finality—the piece of paper is gone, after all—and an uncertainty—if Chet intends to call Beth, why has he felt it necessary to rid himself of all physical traces of her?

It is Meloy’s economical use of language that enables her to sketch these stories in as emotionally complex a way as she does.  The A. R. Ammons poem from which this book’s title comes conveys in just sixteen words—“One can’t/ have it/ both ways/ and both/ ways is/ the only/ way I want it.”—the at-times excruciating nature of the decision-making process.  Similarly, in Meloy’s collection, the complications that underlie characters’ actions are lain bare in short sentences and paragraphs that feature the simplest possible diction.  In my favorite story in the collection, “Two-Step,” a medical resident, Naomi, listens as her friend Alice relays her suspicions that her husband is having an affair.  Five pages into the story, Meloy takes us inside Naomi’s head: “Naomi hesitated.  She had told her husband that she was leaving him, with the understanding that Alice would simultaneously—or at least soon—be told the same thing.  It had been a difficult week” (94).  These three sentences entirely shift this story’s trajectory, but Meloy conveys this reversal in the simplest language possible—“It had been a difficult week” is one of the best examples of understatement I have recently come across.  Because she reveals Naomi’s adultery in such a matter-of-fact way, Meloy avoids the melodrama typically evoked by the other woman and, instead, extends the reader’s sympathies.

Both Ways is not perfect.  A Montana native, Meloy is at her best when writing about rural locales and the people who populate them; when the collection ventures elsewhere, Meloy’s characters lose some of their complexity.  In “Liliana,” the titular character reads like a caricature of a flamboyant European doyenne, and her miraculous return from the grave ends up indulging in the sensationalism that the rest of this collection so judiciously avoids.  Likewise, when the aging Argentinian hero of “Agustin” tries to help a former lover who has lost everything, he comes across as merely kind-hearted, not as a character with whom the reader feels aligned.

In the vast majority of Both Ways’ stories, though, Meloy’s unresolved tensions and her simple language help her to achieve near-mastery of the short story form.  These stories challenge the reader to do that most difficult of things—suspend judgment of characters and, instead, exist with them in the tensions they inhabit.

Loring Ann Pfeiffer is a doctoral candidate at the University of Pittsburgh, where she studies Restoration and early eighteenth-century drama.

The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood
(Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, September 2009)
Bradley J. Fest

Readers who remember the final scenes of Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood’s 2003 entry into speculative, post-apocalyptic fiction, may not be surprised to find that she has written a sequel. The Year of the Flood (whose narrative is staged simultaneously with Oryx and Crake’s) suggests an alternative to Crake’s diabolical destroy-the-world-to-make-it-new vision. Here, an anarchic cult called God’s Gardeners has reinterpreted the Bible to support a version of eco-Christianity, erected a hierarchic monastic order to ensure the success of its eschatological project, and reclaimed various ruined urban spaces so heavily under the heel of the all-powerful Corporation. The Year of the Flood, for the most part, attempts to offer a less problematic utopia than that imagined by Crake in the first novel, even if achieving it still requires the deaths of 99% of the world’s population in what God’s Gardeners call the “Waterless Flood.”

Though assuredly a worthwhile, thought-provoking, and interesting read, The Year of the Flood, like the soon-to-be overexposed film 2012, is yet another contribution to the glut of what I call “eco-jeremiads.” Atwood’s consideration of the apocalypse only exacerbates the manipulative and weighty rhetoric of the genre. While Oryx and Crake raised some serious metaphysical and ontological questions through its use of eschatological catastrophe, it is unclear what the new novel is attempting to accomplish beyond its gesture toward the generalized anxiety that “we should be more environmentally conscious.” In the same way that nuclear disaster narratives often merely point out the banally obvious—it would be really bad—The Year of the Flood relies upon the apocalyptic thrust of disaster primarily to highlight the author’s serious (if unambiguous) environmental engagement. It appears that Atwood truly intends much of this novel as a model for a lifestyle that moves past the “green” and “eco-friendly” into a wholly-revamped mode of operating in the world more naturally and responsibly. There are hymns interspersed throughout the book (and set to music on the website) that are explicitly intended for readers’ “amateur devotional or environmental purposes.” Major figures in history of ecological activism form a religious canon for the Gardeners: St. Rachel Carson, St. Dian Fossey, St. Al Gore, St. Julian of Norwich. But Atwood isn’t really exploring much territory beyond that of other eco-utopian or eco-apocalyptic novels (most notably the bundle of work from Kim Stanley Robinson).

Adam One, leader of God’s Gardeners, asks in his final speech, “Do we deserve this Love by which God maintains our Cosmos? Do we deserve it as a species?” If the major goal of this novel is to answer “No, we don’t, but we should all work individually toward a place where we would deserve that love,” then it is quite successful. But everything from Carson’s Silent Spring to Shyamalan’s The Happening has effectively already covered the same ground. For Atwood, the possibility of a collective, emergent movement capable of effecting change gets derailed in favor of a thrilling yet normative narrative with an emphasis on the individual’s relationship to the environment. Basically, The Year of the Flood comes off as being far more programmatic than aesthetic, and it is difficult to discern much in that program beyond the cliché: “think locally, act globally.”

(That said, if the endings of Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood are any indication, Atwood may be inclined to contribute one more post-apocalyptic novel to this universe. A third volume might provide an interesting and necessary engagement with our penal system and culture of ubiquitous surveillance. But we shall see.)

Bradley J. Fest, a PhD student studying 19th through 21st century American literature with an emphasis on literary representations of the apocalypse, recently reviewed Thomas Pynchon’s for Hot Metal Bridge.Inherent Vice

Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon

(Penguin, August 2009)

Bradley J. Fest

The publication of Inherent Vice makes even more apparent that one of Thomas Pynchon’s fundamental projects for the past fifty years has been to rewrite the history of the United States.  If the novel is not exactly an alternate history in the mode of something like Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004), it is surely a history that privileges the outsider, the deviant, the interstitial, occluded, and secret.  If the Tristero was the mark of global conspiracy in the 1960s, it is the “Golden Fang” which reinscribes that secret history of the world into the aughts.  In this way, Vice finds its closest companion in the Pynchon oeuvre in The Crying of Lot 49.  A psychedelic-noir set near the end of 60s in Los Angeles, Vice is relatively and surprisingly straightforward… for a Pynchon novel.  Romping into the seedy underbelly is as-always-wonderfully-named-Pynchon-character Doc Sportello, a private detective who quickly becomes embroiled in a tangled network of postmodern intrigue.  But instead of being named the executor of an estate, an old flame of Doc’s comes walking up to his office.  Cue Humphrey Bogart smoking a joint.

I do not think it a mistake to call Vice a sequel to Lot 49, but a sequel that only forty years of hindsight could provide.  Like if Lucas didn’t screw up and wait another ten years before telling Jar Jar Binks’ story.  And this is what makes it so weird.  First of all, though I won’t tell you how, the book ends on an explicit contemplation of our current moment in which distributed networks are becoming  the form all social interaction.  Unlike Gravity’s Rainbow, whose ending feels like a cheap,  untimely meditation on technology, Vice explicitly transposes the 20/20 significance of ARPAnet (in brief: the internet) onto the fabric of the tale.  In considering Vice as a sequel, however, I must acknowledge that its similarities to Lot 49 are not always its strongest suit.  The sixties were kinda-sorta promising in Lot 49, whereas that optimism, or spirit of the time (if you will), is surely on the wane in Vice.  The main weavings of narrative motion—sexual escapades, drug use, mysteries wrapping into mysteries, protagonists who never really “get it” even if they show pluck and aplomb throughout— are still on display, and haven’t necessarily aged well.  Pynchon is every bit as foot-loose and fancy-free as before, but after publishing two massive novels Mason Dixon (1997) and Against the Day (2006), he rides Inherent Vice like the last leg in the Tour de France when the winner is already more-or-less crowned and merely has to coast in.

Still, it is fascinating to juxtapose pretty much straight-up noir with the psychedelic culture of the late 60s.  And it’s a viciously fun tale.  Having also recently traversed the sky with the Chums of Chance, I cannot, as a late comer, feel more and more tickled by his work.  So, some bias, eh.  But that doesn’t change the fact that Vice is, like, fun to read.  The pages turn, and all that; and it’s kinda sexy.

And here Pynchon is always pretty successful.  Juxtaposing one popular generic construct with another, as in Gravity’s Rainbow’s convergence of WWII stories with the spy narrative (mostly a Cold War thing), Vice permits noir to go beyond its recent status as merely inspiration to La Nouvelle Vague and historically enter a world which, to vastly oversimplify it, is a cross between Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, and Law and Order: Charles Manson’s Internet Dating Show.  In other words, it combines popular culture, established genres, and detritus pretty well.

Vice is definitively adding to Pynchon’s fifty-year paranoia project, multiplying the global conspiratorial forces whose goals could be anything from world domination in the form of eugenics (Alex Jones) to merely a tax haven for dentists .  This is ultimately the success of Vice: its paranoia is relevant.  Against the Day’s anxiety over time and light, to boil it down, was perhaps too metaphysical.  GR’s permanent implied mark of importance upon Slothrop prevented the materialization of the conspiracy of Rocket 00000 (or whatever) to escape farce, even if an infinitely complex farce.  Vice, however, lets the apocalyptic Pynchon—the Pynchon who imagines a “more-perfect-world” through a Tesla who never existed, an ARPAnet which throws Humphrey Bogart into the ash-bin of history (as Tarantino just did to WWII)—breathe deeply in returning to the late 60s.  In this late, strange age, it feels like something of a call to “remember” the sense of the future contained in that moment when the past was slowly falling away (rather than forget, something which Doc is constantly doing), when the revolutionary nature of the “hippie” lifestyle was becoming aware of its own narcissistic naïveté, when the apocalypse had already happened and everyone was clear about what exactly that was or meant.  There is simply too much of the 21^st century here to see this as merely a critique of the LA (or the America) of the 60s and what it led to.  For there is a strange suggestion that “perhaps” it all went in the right direction: “Someday. . . there’d be phones as standard equipment in every car, maybe even dashboard computers.  People could exchange names and addresses and life stories and form alumni associations to gather once a year at some bar off a different freeway exit each time, to remember the night they set up a temporary commune to help each other home through the fog.”  In other words, Pynchon seems to be suggesting that if what we’ve gained from history is the ability to discern ourselves within a community of people, even if it be of the Facebook type, and if this is all we have of the past, of the perverted promise of it, then so be it.

Bradley J. Fest received his MFA in poetry from the University of Pittsburgh, where he is now a PhD student studying 19th through 21st century American literature, with an emphasis on literary representations of the apocalypse.

Things That Pass for Love by Allison Amend
(2008, OV Books)
Robert Yune

Alison Amend has a gift for inciting incident, that magical intersection of character and opportunity. Most stories in Things That Pass for Love begin with characters in bizarre situations: a fifth-grade teacher attempts to conduct class as bodies rain from the sky, a government agent tracks cult members at garage sales, and a disabled photographer finds himself lost in Miami.

Although these scenarios seem ripe for cheap thrills and easy humor, Amend uses them as opportunities for psychological exploration. Ms. Gold, the fifth-grade teacher in “Dominion Over Every Erring Thing” is rightly horrified at the splattering bodies in her schoolyard. The fact that no one else seems to mind—her students, the school’s guidance counselor, even Ms. Gold’s husband remain unaffected—proves to be the source of the story’s tension. What initially sounds like a headline from “News of the Weird” becomes, in Ms. Amend’s hands, an examination of control and the quiet freefall that occurs in its absence.

Some stories in this collection map new physical and cultural terrain, such as the numerous destinations the climber/photographer conquers in “What Was Over There is Over Here.” Another, “How Much Greater the Miracle”, juxtaposes the genteel rules on a golf course with the strain of a 25- year marriage. Amend’s views into these worlds is warm and thorough—in many stories, she carves out space for a redemptive moment, something positive to salvage the story from the wreckage that this kind of fiction seems to require. Despite this range of serious subject matter (incest, insanity, suicide golf), Amend’s humor and sympathy for her characters rescues her stories from their own depressing ends.

Half the blurbs on the outer jacket discuss the Amend’s skillful range—and Things That Pass for Love is impressive in its variety of characters, settings, and conflicts. Amend is equally adept at writing from the perspective of a male Vietnam veteran, detailing corporate guidelines, and testifying for an entire town in the flash fiction piece “Bluegrass Banjo.” Although her language is consistently clear and calmly objective, Amend deftly accommodates the voices of her characters, as evidenced by the stylized prose in “The Janus Gate,” which moves swiftly to mimic the frenzied pace of a professor’s relationship with a pupil:

He could throw back his head and cackle with the thought of what he could make her do with his glances and his fingers. He could touch her pinkie next to the computer and feel her stiffen. Repulsion, attraction, surprise, it was all the same to him, so long as he provoked in her a sharp, uncontrolled physical reaction. He could make her scream, he knew, during sex. He did. Not knowing or caring whether it was out of pain or ecstasy, whether she craved or hated him. Whether she did it out of duty or gratitude, desire or curiosity. She was unused to it, he could tell, and he liked to look at her, both of them with their eyes opened wide, hers sparkling with terror or suspense.

Like many stories in this collection, “The Janus Gate” is itself a study in several themes: a racy story about a professor having an affair with a student, a meditation on language and duality, and a wry observation on academic politics.

Here and elsewhere, Amend’s strongest stories provide a multifaceted glimpse of their characters: in “Dominion Over Every Erring Thing,” we see Ms. Gold as a fifth-grade teacher, but also as a novice Hebrew student. Marca, the main character in “The People You Know Best” can navigate the chatty politics of the book clubs she hosts, but she’s also a successful cyberotica writer. It’s fascinating to watch Amend converge her characters’ dual worlds in unexpected ways.

Amend’s collection is impressive for its range, but it’s also an entertaining take on finding the unexpected in the mundane. Though their subjects and situations might appear to test the limits of possibility, these stories take place in our real world. Here, the current pulsing through Amend’s collection—connecting cults, cyberotica, terrorism, and suicide golf—seems to whisper, There is a logical explanation for all of this. And isn’t there? Things That Pass for Love offers a thoughtful, sympathetic, and often surprising view into the world that belongs to its characters, and to us.

A Better Angel by Chris Adrian
(2008, Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Adam Reger

Chris Adrian has an interesting biography. He wrote his second novel, The Children’s Hospital (2006), while he completed his pediatric residency. Working as a pediatrician, Adrian enrolled in Harvard Divinity School, where he wrote many of the stories collected in A Better Angel. Adrian’s old teacher, Marilynne Robinson, blurbs for him this way: “Chris Adrian’s life is a dedicated exploration of the things that matter most, and his writing is his companion and interlocutor . . . as he travels a landscape not before seen by other eyes.”

Whether you consider this statement hyperbole will depend on your reading of Adrian’s stories, which share common threads of violence, grief, and the mystical. In “The Changeling,” a father exorcises a demon (actually, approximately three thousand tormented souls; more on that later) from his son by burning and cutting himself. The protagonist of “Stab” hopes to rejoin his dead brother by murdering ever-larger creatures. The title story dramatizes a drug-addicted doctor’s squandered potential by detailing his defiance of the angel who has followed him since childhood, prophesying his greatness.

The question with Adrian’s work is whether the darkness and grand scale of plots like these transcend the form and conventions of the short story. If you are inclined to believe that the father in “The Changeling” is sacrificing himself to appease the spirits that haunt his child—that this is not mere metaphor, or mental illness—you will find much of A Better Angel affecting, even revelatory. If that ending sounds like a standard-issue climax with the volume cranked up, you may find these stories a little arch, maybe even ridiculously so.

A number of the stories in A Better Angel deal explicitly with the September 11 terrorist attacks, casting the spectacular horror of that event in spiritual terms. In “The Changeling,” the narrator’s possessed son speaks with the voice of the 9/11 dead–yes, all of them. In “The Vision of Peter Damien,” images of falling people, immense silver “angels,” and burning towers afflict the children of a small Ohio town at least a century before the morning of the attacks. And in the collection’s strongest and most hair-raising story, “Why Antichrist?” a man who has died in the World Trade Center uses a Ouija board to tell the narrator that he is—you guessed it—the antichrist. Among Adrian’s great strengths is the ability to sell conceits like this one without winking at the audience or falling into self-indulgent darkness. “Why Antichrist?” is full of legitimately creepy Ouija messages like “What matters time when time is soon to end?” and “My suffering is great but yours will be greater.” But it’s also, often, disarmingly offhanded: hours after drinking holy water to show that he’s not the antichrist, the narrator reports that “the burning came again, and though I made it to the toilet this time, I had barely finished throwing up before I had to sit down and shoot black blood out of my ass.”

At times, the off-handedness of Adrian’s prose distracts. Seven of the nine stories in the collection are written in the first person, and Adrian occasionally suffers from the flabbiness and weird rhythms that can afflict first-person narratives. In the title story, the narrator says after taking a droplet of morphine that “[i]t was too good, and it made everything too beautiful, not just the angel, whose ugly skin flew off as if blown by a real hurricane wind, so her wings were clean again and her naked face and body were open and compassionate.”

Even so, the reader understands the occasional flat sentence as the price of writing (and reading) stories this ambitious in scope and theme. The stories in A Better Angel begin with images of everyday life, but use those ordinary moments as openings to something larger, something less familiar and less comforting. This is the joy of reading Chris Adrian: the sense that Marilynne Robinson is right, that the writer’s life is a grand and novel journey, and his fiction dispatches from that distant territory.

Ablutions: Notes for a Novel by Patrick deWitt
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, March 2009)
Emily Testa

This debut novel from ex-bartender and ex-Angeleno Patrick deWitt appears as a series of “notes for a novel”.  The observer and transcriber of these events is a bright, young, whiskey-guzzling bartender who catalogues (in the second person) the miseries and misdeeds of a ragtag bunch of regulars at a faded Hollywood lounge:

Discuss the regulars.  They sit in a line like ugly, huddled birds, eyes wet with alcohol.  They whisper into their cups and seem to be gloating about something—you will never know what.

Here are tattooed teachers, charming crack addicts, mute transvestites, psychotic surfers, and a bloated former child star.  He knows they lie to him and to each other.  He knows, too, that his own future sits just across the bar from where he stands.

Newcomer deWitt revives a tired theme—addiction begets despair—with razor-sharp prose and a startling twist: the never-named narrator (a version of the author, it would seem) is neither self-pitying nor self-loathing to the point of extinction.  He acknowledges his downward spiral with an uncommon clarity, and never reports his circumstance as though it just happened upon him.  Thus, even the most debauched behavior of the regulars is related coolly, dispassionately.  The narrator is reluctant to condemn them because he recognizes himself in their unconscionable actions.  For this reason among others, Ablutions is more than a book about a bar and its resident aliens.

Part travelogue (Grand Canyon, inner psyche), part documentary (destruction and despair in Hollywood), deWitt’s novel defies easy classification.  Undoubtedly, though, the formal elements of the author’s style are pitch-perfect.  Whether delivering news on the bar’s ghost-in-residence, a tragicomic gangbang, or the dissolution of his marriage, the narrator remains distant but deeply involved:

You stagger closer to the old horse, thinking of him standing in the alley by himself with nothing in his mind but gray sound and all of a sudden you are so sorry for hitting him like that, and you cannot understand why you would do such a thing and it seems to be the worst thing you have ever done in your life.

Though he is always attuned to the real pain of his regulars, he rarely steps this close to his own.  While basic sentiments—sadness, or anger—are revealed as a matter of course, the narrator’s (and the novel’s) emotional nucleus is avoided at all costs. This is deWitt’s greatest risk and a probable source of his readers’ frustrations.  The novel hints at—but does not affirm—its narrator’s more complicated feelings and eventual fate.  The narrator, replete with acute insights and a quick wit, certainly has a brain.  But where is his heart?

Emotional evasion aside, Ablutions resonates because it does not forgive the indiscretions and toxic opportunism of its characters.  The novel’s narrator offers, for all of them, the only apology he can muster: this will have to do for now.  deWitt emphasizes, at every pulsing turn, the thread of loss and regret that holds his ‘notes’ together.  Here, the hilarious and pathetic escapades of the narrator and his barflies are less evidence of moral turpitude than of searing loneliness.  They are greedy because they have nothing, selfish because they have no one.  Only the narrator is hopeful, remotely and occasionally so, and in a way that tugs at the edges of a reader’s restraint.  Even as the narrator destroys himself, we root for him to win.  In these, its best and most unsettling moments, Ablutions aches with honesty.