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Leaving the Atocha Station

February 1, 2012 in fiction, online, poetry, reviews by Stephanie

Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner
(Coffee House Press, August 2011)
Adam Reger

Poetry in Prose

There’s no getting around the fact that Ben Lerner, author of the novel Leaving the Atocha Station, is primarily a poet, having published three collections before this foray into fiction. It’s not, in itself, a criticism. Beautifully written and keenly observed, the novel is more than passable as a sustained piece of fiction, coherent and effective at characterization, and with a number of compelling scenes. But in his narrator’s concern with issues of translation, his asides on the function of poetry and the aesthetics of verse quoted in prose, and his pointed choice of words and phrases like “insufflation,” “hemic,” “the law of excluded middle,” to carry his meaning, Lerner imports the economy of language and density of thought more commonly associated with poetry.

Leaving the Atocha Station documents the stay in Madrid of Adam Gordon, a young poet on a fellowship in early 2004, tracing his development as a poet over that period. Gordon’s project, as described to the fellowship committee, is to produce a long, research-driven poem on the lingering effects of the Spanish Civil War on present-day Spaniards. The actual project Gordon has undertaken is more nebulous—a mystery even to himself—and not explicitly concerned with poetry. He avoids the other fellows and foundation staff and spends most days alone, reading Tolstoy and visiting a local art museum. Eventually he makes friends with locals, and is drawn into Madrid’s arts culture.

The first phase of my research involved waking up weekday mornings in a barely furnished attic apartment . . . then putting on the rusty stovetop espresso machine and rolling a spliff while I waited for the coffee. When the coffee was ready I would open the skylight . . . and drink my espresso and smoke on the roof overlooking the plaza where tourists congregated with their guidebooks on the metal tables and the accordion player plied his trade. In the distance: the palace and long lines of cloud.

This early passage encapsulates Gordon’s approach to his time in Spain as well as Lerner’s direct, borderline laconic, prose style. Gordon is forever modulating his state via spliffs, tranquilizers, alcohol, and “white pills” (probably antidepressants) that he self-administers in varying doses according to whim. Lerner documents moments like these in a straightforward, clipped style, alternating them with the rambling yet incisive intellectual meditations of Gordon’s internal monologue.

Lerner’s evocation of place is one of the novel’s great strengths. His use of Madrid as a backdrop is nearly as inspired as his choice to place Gordon there in 2004. Asked by his girlfriend, Isabel, why he is studying Spain and Franco now, instead of America under George W. Bush, Gordon can only make pretentious replies even he finds unsatisfying: “‘The language of poetry is the exact opposite of the language of mass media,’ I said, meaninglessly.” When Isabel further challenges him, he greets her anger, “with silence, so as to allow her to imagine an array of responses I was in fact incapable of producing,” in his rudimentary Spanish. His clumsiness with the Spanish language parallels the inherent difficulty of his relations with other people—Isabel doesn’t remain his girlfriend for long—which in turn evokes the myriad difficulties Gordon has with poetry. Even when he stumbles into a historic moment for Spain, it serves to rouse him only briefly: as all of Madrid masses for street demonstrations, Gordon pursues Teresa, a translator whose polite disinterest in Gordon as anything more than a fellow poet and friend is maddeningly clear.

Gordon is daft, arrogant, and petulant, while also being thrillingly sharp in his internal monologue. Lerner integrates a number of engrossing mini-treatises into the text in the guise of Gordon’s stream of consciousness. Reading the work of John Ashbery on a long train ride, Gordon notes that although Ashbery’s poetry uses “language that implied narrative development—‘then,’ ‘next,’ ‘later’—such terms were merely propulsive.” It’s a credit to Lerner’s facility sustaining the world of Gordon’s heightened, drug-addled intellect that such an observation feels not only unforced but fresh and engaging.

That observation also suggests a way of reading Leaving the Atocha Station. Time passes, and occasionally one of Gordon’s actions leads to something, but mostly the framework suggesting narrative development is, indeed, “merely propulsive.” The novel is full of fascinating ideas, often displaying beautifully repeating patterns and surprising connections, but it falls short when it comes to plot. Lerner derives some narrative excitement from the historic moment mentioned above, and a bit more from Gordon’s pursuit of Teresa, and a tiny bit from his dilemma over whether to remain in Spain at the end of his fellowship. But by and large the novel’s events, such as they are, feel desultory, a string of occasions about which Gordon can pontificate. Combined with Lerner’s somewhat cool tone, the result is often a sluggish read.

But it seems fair to conclude that crafting a white-knuckle thrill ride was not Ben Lerner’s intent in taking on the novel. As much as the novel is about anything, it is about Gordon fighting his way to an uneasy peace with poetry. Where he begins the novel somewhat cynically, assembling meaningless poems by taking random phrases and then translating and mistranslating them, by novel’s end Gordon has reached a place of greater comfort in his relationship to poetry. He arrives there by way of an almost-mystical process of gaining experience and confidence. It’s the same slow artistic growth encountered by any artist, and here it is rendered carefully, in invisible increments, by Lerner. Poets, poetry readers, and especially fans of Lerner’s work will likely be excited, and rightfully so, to explore the author’s fascinating meditations in this new and fertile form.

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.

You Might Have Missed… Brick Lane

January 15, 2012 in fiction, reviews by Stephanie

Brick Lane by Monica Ali
(Scribner, 2003)
Eileen Y. Lee

“If God wanted us to ask questions, he would have made us men.”

Monica Ali’s most recently published novel, Untold Story, is the “what-if” tale of Princess Diana—what if the glamorous icon had not died in a Parisian car crash and instead had moved secretly to Midwest America with a new identity and taken up the simpler life? The book was released in the UK during the run-up to this past year’s royal wedding media extravaganza. Ali, however, started her writing career in different waters with the socially aware Brick Lane, the story of a married Bangladeshi woman living in London public housing. This first novel thrust the Dhaka-born, Oxford-educated author into the literary stratosphere, earning her a nod as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists, while Brick Lane was short-listed for the Man Booker prize.

The beating heart of Brick Lane is Nazneen, a village girl who is sent to London for an arranged marriage to a 40-year-old man. Part immigrant story and part meditation on the fate of women from a particular religious and cultural background, the novel is ultimately focused on Nazneen’s transformation from passive Muslim housewife into an individual possessed of free will who says, “I will decide what to do. I will say what happens to me. I will be the one.” This transformation happens—but not before one begins to wonder whether her richly-detailed life will simply collect dust as the narrative moves from 1985 to the months following September 11^th.

During its quiet unfolding, Brick Lane flits between Nazneen’s childhood memories of her sorrowful mother and letters from Hasina, the sister she had to leave behind in Bangladesh. The letters depict a life filled with hardship and small joys, all written in Hasina’s broken English and naïve voice. Even shocking details about her own rape and then a story about a friend burned with acid as punishment is told in several letters rather matter-of-factly.

As a chronicle of Nazneen’s marriage, Brick Lane is delightfully comical and at other times, sadly painful. Early on, Nazneen learns to put aside any “high notions” of herself when she overhears her husband, Chanu, on the telephone: “Perhaps when she gets older she’ll grow a beard on her chin, but now she is only eighteen. And a blind uncle is better than no uncle. I waited too long to get a wife.” Pretentious Chanu is continually the source of a good chuckle whenever he rails against the “ignorant types” of British society or forces his wife to listen to his pedantic speeches on philosophy or his “first love,” English literature. “Have you heard of Richard II?” he says, “It’s not easy to translate. Give me one minute. This is a wonderful passage.”

Chanu is as equally proud of his university degrees as he is of his numerous framed certificates from night classes and correspondence courses on such varied topics as cycling and IT communications. Driven to improve himself, yet ineffectual in his career, Chanu speaks constantly of a promotion that the reader—and Nazneen, as she grows more insightful—knows he will never get. While a gentle soul, he can sometimes be heartless towards Nazneen, such as when he condescendingly mocks her suggestion to go to Dhaka to locate Hasina, who leaves her love marriage and must fend for herself in Bangladesh’s capital city. He says:

“Shall I pack a suitcase? Perhaps you have prepared one. I shall go to Dhaka and pluck her instantly from the streets and bring her back to live with us. On the way, I could pick up the rest of your family and we could make a little Gouripur right here. Is that what you have in mind?”

It is only because of Ali’s sensitive regard for her characters that Chanu does not become a caricature of a husband. Chanu eventually garners his own sympathy as his full portrait is painted, showing that he is a decent husband, loving father to their two daughters, and a man of quashed ambitions in a society that lumps him together with every other dark-skinned immigrant.

At its most incisive, Brick Lane is a sustained study of both its major and minor characters. Even when the novel’s plot languishes midway through, the supporting cast in Nazneen’s life continues to shine. Her best friend, Razia, is feisty (“Do you know why I’m going to learn English? So that when my children start telling dirty jokes behind my back, I’ll be able to whip their backsides.”), but chooses to turn a blind eye to her son’s worsening drug addiction until nearly all the furniture in their home is sold. She lives a life that matches her independent spirit only after her controlling husband is killed in a factory accident by the crush of “seventeen frozen cows.” If there is a villain in Brick Lane it is Mrs. Islam, the elderly, sweet-tongued usurer lady, who will bring along her thug sons to enforce payments in the neighborhood. Her changing relationship with Nazneen is woven throughout the story.

The most pivotal character is the decisive community organizer, Karim, who also delivers clothes for Nazneen’s sewing jobs and is therefore able to cross the threshold into her domestic world. His appearance as her younger lover comes as a surprise, as is Nazneen’s decision to start attending radical Bengal Tigers meetings at his encouragement. This is the first time the outside world penetrates her narrow life—as talk of the World Trade Center attacks comes to dominate the local meetings and her family’s mailbox becomes the target of a “leaflet war” that seeks to draw or erase the battle lines between “native” and “Islamic” elements.

Nazneen finds herself in turmoil over her relationship with Karim. At these times, Ali’s graceful writing can unfortunately veer towards romance novel territory with such sentences as this: “Unbidden, a memory of Karim came, entering her as he entered her, tearing apart her passive soul.”

Karim sees Nazneen as a concept of maternity and security (“A Bengali wife. A Bengali mother. An idea of home”) and hopes they may marry, but time is running out as Chanu aspires to take his wife and daughters back to Bangladesh. In the end, Nazneen’s choice is not between her husband and Karim, or London and Bangladesh, instead she must decide to be the director of her own destiny. For those who have waited patiently for the dust on the pages to be swept away, the last chapters provide a frenetic energy and offer an ending filled with hope and new beginnings.

Eileen Y. Lee has a B.A. from Vassar College and a J.D. from Boston College Law School. She studied abroad in London for one year and counts it as one of her favorite cities in the world.

Sister

October 1, 2011 in books, fiction, online by Maria

Sister by Rosamund Lupton
(Crown Publishers, June 2011)
Beth Steidle

I’ll Take the Crazy Uncle Instead

Sometimes when I’m relating tediously essential information to a co-worker—inconsistencies within a fiscal report, for instance—I’ll notice a glaze of boredom slip over her eyes for a few seconds before she starts, then mutters apologetically: “Can you repeat that? I know your mouth was moving, but all I heard was blahBLAH blahBLAH blahBLAH.” This is how I often felt while reading Rosamund Lupton’s debut novel, Sister. What is on one level an eminently readable novel, with predictably-paced forward motion, is on another level a tepid rehashing of every Law and Order episode and blasé Hollywood cop-conspiracy movie you’ve ever seen. Ultimately, the blahBLAH diagnosis proves fatal for this modern crime thriller as it attempts a 285-page uphill tease before squashing not one, not two, but three twists into a tiresome 30-page finale.

To be fair, perhaps my expectations were set too highly. I was a victim of aggressive marketing. Already released in the UK and slated for US release in June 2011, the advanced reader’s plain blue cover demanded, in bold yellow letters, that I “READ THE UK PHENOMENON THAT EVERYONE IS TALKING ABOUT!” Beneath this was a smattering of succinct praise: “Exceptionally confident domestic gothic thriller,” says The Guardian; “Stunningly accomplished,” says Daily Mail; “Utterly compelling,” says Closer Magazine. I felt bullied and won over before I’d even opened the thing.

As one might expect, Sister revolves around the indissoluble link between two siblings: Beatrice, an uptight marketing executive transplanted in Manhattan, and Tess, her beautiful bohemian counterpart, recently found dead of an apparent suicide. Beatrice, distraught over her sister’s death, returns to London where she finds the situation immediately suspect. Her sister’s flat provides the stock setting for an unraveling crime, replete with stereotypically charged props: baby clothes for a stillborn child, creepy lullabies recorded on an antiquated answering machine, paintings of masked men, a broken window, an unplugged phone.

And voilá. You can already begin to see where this is going. Is the uptight exec going to come undone and discover what is truly important in life while solving the crime? Is the world going to attempt to sully the beautiful sister’s character only to have her returned to eternal grace? Yup and yup. The initial pairing of these female archetypes, with their ready-made impending reversals, is only the first of many stock characterizations. Coming up: a couple of incompetent detectives, one kooky psychiatrist, an overbearing mother, a posse of art students with facial piercings, some slimy men, and the pregnant woman who looks like a prostitute but has a heart of gold. If you feel like you’ve met them before, it’s because you have—they’re cliché characters given screenplay-sketched personas, with none of the fat an actor would bring to the role.

It’s not surprising that Lupton’s bio notes that she spent many years as a scriptwriter. Even the opening lines, rendered in a conversational tone, have the air of a voice-over. The story begins in letter format, with the words “Dearest Tess, I’d do anything to be with you, right now, right this moment…” One expects this direct dynamic to shift, as these things often do, into a more traditional first-person narrative. Let the cinematic action commence! But Lupton chooses to keep the entire novel in letter format, a technique which she manages, surprisingly, to pull off and which occasionally yields the one element I ultimately valued: a transformation of the reader.

In fiction workshops, we’re warned consistently against the use of the second-person point of view. A sprinkling, perhaps. We’re pointed towards Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big Cities, as an anomalous 80’s-fueled exception, with the caveat: You can’t replicate it, so don’t try. In Sister, Lupton uses the “you” address in a more poetic fashion, most often in an implied manner, married to the “I”, or in extremely personal moments. There were plenty of times when the “you” didn’t move me, but instead reinforced my intrusion in a narrative fixture. But when it worked, it worked well. It drew me so strongly into the text that for brief moments I felt a direct connection, a merging of my past with Tess’ past, which was, in and of itself, a weird contemplative flare on death and the impotent status of the reader. For instance, when Beatrice says, “he also reminded me of Mr. Normans (did you have him for math?)”, there is that brief moment where I found myself thinking, Wait…who did I have for math?

And yet, it was all too few and far between. Even such remarkable flares could not compensate for the thin characters, increasingly preposterous plot, and unintentionally hilarious moments. When Beatrice says “my ending was a strand of hair caught in a zipper,” I just don’t know what that means. And when the killer, in the middle of an attempted murder, says (this is not a spoiler), “Who has an answering machine nowadays with a tape? Everyone’s got voice mail through their telephone provider,” I laughed out loud. A couple pages later comes the line “[The killer's] hubris was huge and naked and shocking.”

SPOILER…or not: the killer is a man. In fact, this would never have been a spoiler because Lupton seems to have imbued her entire novel with a militantly feminist bent. Not many of the characters are particularly likeable, but the men tend towards the heinous: the abandoning father, abusive boyfriend, lukewarm fiancé, despicable adulterer, stalker, dismissive policemen and, well, the murderer. And while it did not seem surprising to me that Lupton’s brief bio mentioned her scriptwriting credentials, I did find it strange that the only other thing mentioned was that she lives with her husband and two sons.

While I clearly wasn’t wowed here, I do believe there are interesting elements at play with both the novel and the author. I don’t mean to insinuate an inherent failure. Lupton is clearly skilled. If she wasn’t, I wouldn’t be so riled up. She understands the quintessential elements of successful pop fiction: a clipped pace, an emphasis on plot, a particular economy of language. Perhaps she just needs a little bit more time to adjust to the lushness, nuances and complexity that the novel form offers. By her third or fourth book I expect to be won over.

Beth Steidle is a recent graduate of the MFA program at the University of Pittsburgh. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Drunken Boat, DIAGRAM, and several anthologies.

You Might Have Missed… The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight

September 15, 2011 in books, fiction, online, reviews by Maria

The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight by Gina Ochsner
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, February 2010)
Rosemary Callenberg

Gina Ochsner weaves together the perspectives of multiple characters living in a slum-like apartment building in Perm, a city in post-Soviet Siberia, in her introspective first novel, The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight. The characters the reader spends most time with are Olga, whose job at the newspaper The Red Star is to “translate” distressing news stories into more palatable terms; her son Yuri, a young vet damaged by the war who prefers to spend more time with fish than people; Azade, a lavatory attendant who longs for the home her Muslim parents were forced to leave; and Tanya, a museum coat-check girl who dreams of losing weight so she can work as an airline stewardess among the clouds.

When the novel opens, Tanya, Yuri, and the other workers at the “All-Russia All-Cosmopolitan Museum” are informed that they will be visited by a group of Americans who want to donate a substantial amount of money to the Russian museum they find most promising. Much of the novel is spent preparing to impress these American women when they visit. Their arrival sets off a comical series of misunderstandings as it becomes clear they are looking for a romanticized version of Russian culture, not the difficult and often dirty reality these characters live from day to day.

Ochsner (and her characters) deal with these realities with grim humor—for instance, one of the “perks” of working a museum job for months without a paycheck is free use of the toilets. These quirks of Ochsner’s humor are often emphasized by magical realism. In the first chapter, Azade’s husband Mircha, commits suicide by leaping from the roof of the apartment building. But he sticks around for the rest of the novel, his ghost running around voicing opinions while his body—unable to be buried in the still-frozen ground—lies on the trash heap.

But the gritty humor of these details is always held in balance with the genuine struggle the characters must face because of them, and their psychological consequences. Yuri hides from the world in a cosmonaut helmet left behind by his dead father. Olga despairs of the ability of language to convey truth. Tanya, an artist at heart, records her thoughts and observations of clouds in a notebook she carries with her, but cannot express herself to anyone. Working in a museum where all of the exhibits are cheap forgeries and imitations, Tanya tries to recreate icons of the Madonna and Child with chewing gum, popsicle sticks, and eye shadow, which promptly drip and turn into brightly colored smears.

Always this was what came of her attempts to think in hues and gradations of saturation; this was what happened when she tried to knuckle an understanding of her own life as it ticked from shade to hue. This was what came of her attempt to depict love in any form, even if it was from stuff as low and humble as wet coloured flour smeared on ice-cream sticks. (183)

Although Tanya feels that she has failed in her attempt to create something beautiful, to reach the transcendent through her humble materials, the reader cannot help but feel that she has achieved it simply through trying, through believing that it is possible.

The above passage is typical of Ochsner’s lyrical prose. Her pages are saturated with beautiful language, almost to the point of leveling out the perspectives of the different characters. As Yuri ice-fishes with his head encased in his helmet, the reader might have a hard time believing his thoughts could be as poetic and profound as those that Tanya records in her notebook. And perhaps her thoughts, along with the poetic longings of Azade for a home she doesn’t fully remember, would have even more weight had the language been moderated with other characters.

However, the characters themselves remain distinct. Each is occupied by different problems, has a different rhythm to their thought, and their own desires. These characters are all real people, complete with flaws and prejudices and insecurities that separate them from each other. Tanya says: “Suffering, if beautifully done, is an art form.” In the end, it is their suffering that brings these characters together, as well as their hopeful struggle to bring beauty and meaning to their lives.

Rosemary Callenberg lives in Western Pennsylvania, where she is working towards her MFA in fiction at the University of Pittsburgh. It is here that, among other things, she teaches, writes, and pursues her love of beauty and of words.

When Life Gets in the Way of Writing

August 8, 2011 in blog by Robyn | 1 comment

by Rachel Mangini

Without going into all the gory details, let me tell you, my life as of late has been a complete mess, a hot mess, to use the popular adjective. And while I’m sure in a few years I’ll look back on this and find some useful material, right now, while I’m living through it, it is sapping my time, energy, and brain power for writing anything other than melodramatic drivel masquerading as bad poetry.

Upon learning of the mess that is my life, my fiction co-editor, Jen, said she hoped I could at least take refuge in my writing. I didn’t respond to her email (sorry Jen), because I didn’t know what to say other than: Huh?

Writing as refuge. Hm. For me, it usually feels that I need to seek refuge in order to write. I need a quiet room, good music, and several uninterrupted hours. Perhaps that is an incredibly bourgeois way of looking at it. I mean, there have been many great writers who wrote in much more serious and life-threatening situations than my mini personal crisis. Take for example, Irene Nemirovsky, who apparently composed Suite Francaise during and very shortly after fleeing Paris as the Germans invaded.

If you clicked over to that link from the Times you’ll have already read this quote from cultural and literary historian Paul Fussell:

The significances belonging to fiction are attainable only as ‘diary’ or annals move toward the mode of memoir, for it is only the ex post facto view of an action that generates coherence or makes irony possible.

Right? Exactly. Ex post facto. I’ve got to memorize that, because that is my excuse for not having gotten any useful writing out of this period of hot mess.

Oh, who am I kidding? If Irene could write a masterpiece in teeny tiny script on her limited supply of paper in the midst of religious persecution, can’t I open up my MacBook and get busy? Is the difference here that I want to avoid writing anything resembling memoir? Maybe stress kills creativity for some but heightens it for others. Or maybe when your situation is as dire as hers was, it sort of forces you to need to create in order to leave something behind.

Have you all got any answers? Is writing your refuge? Does the writing you do during times of hot mess add up to anything? Or is it simply the exercise of writing that is the refuge? And, finally, got any tips on getting motivated? Because I can’t seem to take refuge in anything other than episode after episode of Kourtney and Khloe Take Miami.

Rachel Mangini is a Fiction Editor at Hot Metal Bridge. She lives in Pittsburgh with her dog. If she were a Kardashian, she would be Kourtney.

Episode #5: A Dialogue with Paris Review Editor Lorin Stein

October 25, 2010 in books, litmags, podcast by Steev

This month, we present “The Sordid Confessions of a Subversive Big Apple Editor,” a dialogue between Paris Review editor Lorin Stein and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Books editor Bob Hoover, hosted by Chuck Kinder.

Episode #5: A Dialogue With Paris Review Editor Lorin Stein [28:27m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Episode #4 Kim Revay Live at Fuel & Fuddle Pitt MFA Reading Series

November 9, 2009 in fiction, online, podcast by Adri

This week, we present Kim Revay, reading live at the Fuel & Fuddle Pitt MFA Reading Series, February 23, 2009, hosted by Billy Coakley.

Episode #2 Kim Revay Live at F&F [11:07m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Submissions for Hot Metal Bridge #5 (Spring 2009) Now Open

January 16, 2009 in HMB, criticism, fiction, litmags, nonfiction, online, poetry by Sal

It’s that time of year again writers, readers and friends. We here at Hot Metal Bridge are ready and willing to pore over your finest literary submissions in preparations for the fifth iteration of Hot Metal Bridge, due to be released later this spring. Below you’ll find the updated call for submissions from the various genres. So whether it be fiction or criticism, nonfiction or poetry, send us your work by Monday, February 23rd. We look forward to it.

Submissions Guidelines:

Fiction:
Hot Metal Bridge is interested in your well-crafted literary fiction, whether short story, flash fiction, or novel excerpt. What counts as literary? Just don’t send us a story about spaceship-flying dinosaurs. That said, we like aesthetic diversity, from realism to surrealism, maximalism to minimalism. And if you simply write stories and don’t care about literary classifications, send us your work too. We accept submissions as Word attachments sent to fiction@hotmetalbridge.org. Please keep submissions under 7,000 words and make sure to include your name and contact information.

Poetry:
We are many, and our tastes differ, but as this is an entirely online journal, there’s no reason not to read the past issue before submitting (it’s good, we promise). If you can smell what we’re stepping in, then send something our way. Down to business. We welcome poetry submissions of five (5) pages or five (5) poems, whichever comes first. Please attach your submission as one document (we prefer .doc, but .docx .rtf or .pdf will all work) with your name appearing at the top of the first page. E-mail subject heading should read “Spring Poetry Submission” and in the body, you may include a short bio or cover letter, if that strikes your fancy. Send your work our way:poetry@hotmetalbridge.org.

Nonfiction:
We’re looking for nonfiction writing in all its disguises: memoir, travel writing, literary journalism, satire, etc. We want to hear about dirty kitchens, ill-mannered exchange students, and hydrogen bonding. We will read about decaying vineyards, heroic mall guards, disenchanted cartographers, and sweet potatoes. Look, just don’t James Frey us and everything will be fine. If it’s new and it’s true, send 500 to 5,000 words as a Word or RTF attachment to nonfiction@hotmetalbridge.org.

Criticism:
Hot Metal Bridge criticism is looking for innovative academic or non-academic work from professional, student, and other sources. As a forum for a variety of approaches to cultural criticism, we want your seminar and conference papers, your unpublished chapters, your articles and miscellany. Our aim is to create a space for previously unpublished pieces which may not find an easy home elsewhere. Because critical work is inherently creative, we encourage interdisciplinarity and hybridity in both form and content. Send us your poor, your tired, your huddled pages yearning to breathe free. We want to give voice to ideas that might otherwise be confined to obscurity. Submissions should be about 1 to 30 pages in MLA style. Send Word documents as attachments to criticism@hotmetalbridge.org.

And finally, good luck to all of you and we hope you’ll stay turned for upcoming book reviews, podcasts and our glorious fifth issue.

-Sal Pane and Geoff Peck
Editors

Silber’s ‘World’ is big. Almost as big as the next edition of Hot Metal Bridge.

January 16, 2009 in Contributors, HMB, books, fiction, online, reviews by Emily

The Size of the World by Joan Silber

(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.

“American Light” Coming Soon!

March 31, 2008 in HMB, fiction, litmags, nonfiction, online, poetry by Kelly | 4 comments

Hot Metal Bridge’s third issue, “American Light,” is set to debut at any moment. Please expect it by/on April 1.

We apologize for the slight delay and promise to repay you in gold coin — or rather, in fiction, poetry, nonfiction, criticism, and art, all of which we’d take over gold any day.

Yours, with anticipation,
The Editors