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.

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

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/

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ariana Reines notes in her brief preface that Charles Baudelaire began producing text for My Heart Laid Bare sometime around 1859 and composed notes for this work perhaps until his death in 1867. The intended result—an autobiographical work in which to “cram all [his] rage” —was never realized. In its place we encounter a collection of fragments, notes toward prospective essays, and personal musings. Baudelaire never intended to publish these fragments, and the sections progress rapidly through moments of unmitigated candor, oblique shorthand for future investigations, and autobiographical concerns over his debts, his health, his method, and his “greatness.”

My understanding of Reines’s translation is couched in a fair degree of ignorance; I do not speak or read French, and I have never seen the André Guyaux edition from which she draws. One scarcely needs to be a Francophile, however, to appreciate the vivid brevity that Reines brings to her endeavor. Norman Cameron’s previous translation (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1950), for example, presents the opening passage of the fifth section:

Woman is the opposite of the Dandy. That is why she should be regarded with disgust.
Woman is hungry, and she wants to eat; thirsty, and she wants to drink.
She feels randy, and she wants to be ——— .
Fine characteristics!
Woman is “natural” — that is to say, abominable.
Moreover, she is always vulgar—that is to say, the opposite of the Dandy.

Reines’s interpretation reads:

Woman is the opposite of the Dandy.
Therefore she is horrifying.
Woman is hungry and wants to eat. Thirsty, she wants to drink.
She is in heat and wants to be fucked.
Deserves it!
Woman is natural, which is to say abominable.
Also she is always vulgar, which is to say the opposite of the Dandy.

The success of Reines’s translation relies partly upon her willingness to displace a certain “etiquette”—which substitutes a long dash for “fucked” yet finds little fault in a description of women as “always vulgar”—in an act of fidelity to Baudelaire’s title. Reines’s rendering allows us to witness the corporeal fixation that suffuses Baudelaire’s text without the protective qualifications that attend a high register. I have no idea whose translation is more “accurate,” but Reines’s translation of “Deserves it!” where Cameron arrived at “Fine characteristics!” perhaps foregrounds the sensibility that each translator brings to the source text.

As an object (much like the press’s simultaneously released GLORY HOLE/THE HOT TUB by Dan Hoy and Jon Leon), this edition exemplifies Mal-O-Mar’s intelligent regard for formal novelty. (If there is a spoiler alert to be made, this is it.) Reines’s My Heart Laid Bare is printed on nine pages of full-sized newsprint, and the title is printed in a font size large enough to be read easily from the other side of the street. The decision to deliver the poem in this medium is endlessly intriguing: Baudelaire characterizes newspapers as “a tissue of horrors” in section 80, yet we encounter that opinion as readers in the present age, immersed in digitization and anxiety over the possibly imminent demise of proper newspapers. Of course, we must make the necessary distinction between newsprint and newspapers, and it may be that Baudelaire is granted a small victory here: the occupation of a form he vehemently despised. Edgar Allen Poe, cited in Reines’s translator’s note, elucidates both the text and its formal delivery:

If any ambitious man have a fancy to revolutionize, at one effort, the universal world of human thought, human opinion, and human sentiment, the opportunity is his own—the road to immortal renown lies straight, open, and unencumbered before him. All that he has to do is to write and publish a very little book. Its title should be simple—a few plain words—”My Heart Laid Bare.” But—this little book must be true to its title.

Mal-O-Mar’s edition resides at the perimeter of the definition of a “book,” but it does manage to depart from previous English translations that bury My Heart Laid Bare within collections of Baudelaire’s works. As a discrete, self-contained object, however, we might still argue whether it manages to be “very little.” We can easily describe it as slim. Yet its physical presence is imposing enough to resist becoming the “disgusting aperitif” with which “the civilized man accompanies his morning meal.” Readers need no prerequisite reverence for literary objects to understand that Baudelaire’s text must be laid flat and opened wide.

Chad Vogler received his B.A. in English from UC Berkeley and currently attends the MFA program at the University of Pittsburgh, where he is the assistant poetry editor for Hot Metal Bridge. He lives in a house without a furnace in Point Breeze.

(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.

]]> http://hotmetalbridge.org/2009/09/keep-on-keepin%e2%80%99-on-pynchon-rewriting-american-history/feed/ 0 http://hotmetalbridge.org/2009/01/unflinching-uncomfortable-and-unsettling-the-easter-parade/ http://hotmetalbridge.org/2009/01/unflinching-uncomfortable-and-unsettling-the-easter-parade/#comments Sun, 25 Jan 2009 16:00:00 +0000 Sal http://hotmetalbridge.org/?p=418 The Easter Parade by Richard Yates
(Delacorte Press, August 1976)
Sal Pane

When a novel begins with the opening line of “Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life,” you know you’re in store for a bleak take on the world. But that’s to be expected from Richard Yates, the voice of the postwar age of anxiety made fashionable again thanks to the film adaptation of his first book, the heartbreaking Revolutionary Road. The Easter Parade is his fourth novel and the book that rescued his career for very good reason. Here, Yates shows a good deal of growth as he chronicles the lives of the Grimes sisters for forty desperate years in the intellectual wastelands of New York City.

Yates’ vision is unflinching, uncomfortable and unsettling. Emily, the younger sister, is the protagonist of the book who we follow through her humble beginnings and her quest to become a bohemian. Along the way she indulges in meaningless relationship after meaningless relationship, all the way while comprehending nothing about life. “She often said ‘I see’ about things she didn’t wholly understand,” Yates writes of her, and it’s a phrase Emily uses constantly throughout the entire novel. Emily ends up alone and miserable, and her sister doesn’t fare much better. Yates wisely juxtaposes “the original liberated woman” with her sister Sarah who marries a “limited man, and in many ways an ignorant man.” Her domesticated life falls apart in a crumbling countryside manor while her husband beats her and discourages her from partaking in any form of outside life, even one of the mind.

Although The Easter Parade is a breathtaking portrait of two women’s lives following World War II, it does feel dated in places thanks to Yates’ occasional cheap shots at feminism. When Emily is completely alone and at her wit’s end, she meets a woman who runs a “female masturbation clinic” and a scene ensues in which Yates brutally mocks the early stages of women’s lib. But despite the fact that a few scenes and themes have aged badly in the thirty years since The Easter Parade’s publication, what’s truly startling is how contemporary the majority of the book still feels. At its heart, Yates’ fourth novel deals with human beings searching for happiness when there are only limited options available to them. In this sleek volume he examines the pros and cons of not only married life but that of the intellectual as well, and what he discovers is alarming not only because of the pointlessness of it all, but also because of Yates’ deeply nihilist bent. The Yates mantra, as spoken through Emily Grimes, is as simple as it is chilling: “Yes, I’m tried. And do you know a funny thing? I’m almost fifty years old and I’ve never understood anything in my whole life.”

(Norton, June 2008)

Emily Stone

Catapulted between New York State and Thailand, Florida and Chiapas, and even New Jersey and Bloomington, Indiana, the six interlinked monologues in Joan Silber’s The Size of the World explore the “elusive connection between place and happiness.” Silber, whose Ideas of Heaven was a finalist for the 2004 National Book Award, is a master of crafting overlaps in plot that imply larger meanings without compromising unity. Here, honest first-person accounts, equal parts confession and meditation, reveal a shared sense of freedom and displacement that marks American expatriates and, in one case, immigrants living as Americans. Recounting his life in Thailand, Toby describes himself as “a foreigner washed up here once by war.” Kit, a hippie single mother in Mexico, explains, “I was a traveler: I liked my comfort, I was not always brave, and I was only just starting to be curious.” In some cases, the relationship between parallel narrators is apparent within a speaker’s first paragraphs: Toby and Kit, for instance, were high school lovers. In others, the connections are more aloof, less linear–siblings’ stories are separated by decades, and a husband and mother-in-law paint a Rashomon-style portrait of the woman between them.

Of course, tales of international exploration are also tales of international conflict. Silber’s stories in The Size of the World are war stories, but, like the people who tell them, they are inherently off-kilter and framed by peculiar circumstances. Toby begins his story in Vietnam but as a civilian engineer rather than a draftee. Annunziata’s World War II story is of a contented life in rural Sicily under the Fascists until economics prompted her husband to emigrate. Owen alludes to the trenches in the First World War, yet his life in the book only begins (in a chapter spoken by his sister) during the following years when he is a soldier of fortune in Southeast Asia. Mike, a politics professor who raises a liberal voice against the American “War on Terror,” acts as much out of anxiety over losing a wife’s affection as he does out of conviction. In the final chapter, Owen returns as a pensioner and anti-war protester in California in the 1970s, a man whose small actions unintentionally attach him to the fates of the book’s other characters.

On occasion, Silber belabors the connections between her protagonists, assigning them awkward statements about a high-school science teacher or a first husband’s grandfather only in the service of connecting disparate narrative lines. Her writerly voice, too, can break through the scrim of the monologues, though her intellectual omniscience is less jarring than it is utterly captivating. She prompts Mike, the most contemporary and also the most sedentary of the narrators, to say that “if you longed for another place, you longed for another time,” signaling that the “elusive connection” between travel and emotion is the product of contradiction layered over romance.