New Year Review

What I Read in 2009

Last year I made a facebook note listing the books I read in 2008 so I figured with about twelve hours to the new year this was a good time for me to reflect on what I read in the last year. I did not read nearly as many books as I did last year or the year before, but it was still a rewarding year for literature.

What follows is a list, in chronological order, of books I finished reading during 2009. There are many titles that are left in progress or were abandoned or half-read. For the sake concision, I have only included McSweeney's (lengthy) quarterly concern and not other literary journals (such as Zoetrope) that I read during the year.

My six favorite books I read this past year are in bold and include a brief description of the book. Other notable titles have asterisks and there are some brief notes about genre for some of the entries.

01. It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken by Seth (a really beautiful graphic novel)*
02. Maps and Legends by Michael Chabon (non-fiction Christmas present)*
03. Shakespeare Wrote for Money by Nick Hornby (columns about what Hornby reads each month compiled from The Believer)*
04. The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God and Other Stories by Etgar Keret (trippy short stories)
05. The Best American Short Stories 2008 by Salman Rushdie
06. Skellig by David Almond (YA novel Hronby wrote about in his book [it's about an angel])*
07. Nothing Right by Antonya Nelson (short stories)
08. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon (great novel)*
09. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

NfU is a thrilling tale of anger with society. The narrator is a disturbed, but charming, man who despises the pretensions of the upper class around him and lashes out at the world in what is written as his ranting document.

10. McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Issue 30 (the only McSweeney's I finished cover to cover this year)
11. Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link

MfB is a collection of beautifully crafted stories pondering the funnier and eerier possibilities of the human experience through science fiction and horror genre-writing. Written in gentle, lovel prose about dark, twisted subjects, the collection is a compelling argument for the ability of genre writing to probe the mysteries of existence in the same way as...

12. City of Glass by Paul Auster

CoG is a haunting exploration of the inner mechanics of the human mind and also a eflection on the purpose of literature. It has been described as a "metaphysical detective novel" but this descriptor by no means adequately explains what a trenchant, harrowing experience it is to read, especially with the other two entries in this so-called "New York Trilogy"

13. Ghosts by Paul Auster (part two of a trilogy, weakest entry)
14. The Locked Room by Paul Auster (part three, brilliant)*
15. The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon (novel)*
16. Uglies by Scott Westerfeld (YA novel, taught in my reading class)*
17. Pretties by Scott Westerfeld (its first sequel)
18. Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (won the Pultizer, beautiful short stories)*
19. The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich (lovely novel)*
20. Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower (short stories)
21. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

Another example of strong genre-writing this year. HoHH is a disturbing story fraught with tension. The reader cannot help but become psychologically disturbed as the narrator does so. Jackson's real strength here is the emotional complexity of this character, which creates a stronger sense of empathy as the heroine goes slowly mad.

22. Specials by Scott Westerfeld (second sequel)
23. How It Ended by Jay McInerney (collected short stories)
24. Nobody Move by Denis Johnson (super cool McCarthyesque novel)*
25. Love and Obstacles: Stories by Aleksandar Hemon (short stories)
26. Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut (novel)
27. The Convalescent by Jessica Anthony (wonderfully weird novel)*
28. Read Hard: Five Years of Great Writing from The Believer (excellent essays)*
29. The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon (excellent detective novel)*
30. Caricature by Daniel Clowes (graphic novel)
31. The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet by Reif Larson (really cool YA novel)*
32. Run by Ann Patchett (novel)
33. True Grit by Charles Portis

TG is the story of a young woman in the American frontier hell-bent on avenging her father's wrongful murder. What follows is a hysterically funny and yet gripping story of a woman wise perhaps beyond her means who is underestimated by everyone she meets.

34. The Way through Doors by Jesse Ball (metaphysically twisted novel)
35. Oracle Night by Paul Auster (novel)*
36. Couch by Benjamin Parzybok (novel)
37. Castle by J. Robert Lennon (super creepy suspense)*
38. Men and Cartoons by Jonathan Lethem (stories)*
39. Wrong: Stories by Dennis Cooper (twisted gay stories)
40. Fever Chart by Bill Cotter (novel)
41. Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon

AYR is a chilling meditation of the significance of the creature comforts of identity we use to feel secure in our lives. It is also an incredibly compelling, well-plotted, seemingly conventional contemporary thriller in the best sense of all of those terms.

42. In the Valley of Kings by Terrence Holt (excellent stories)*
43. Animal Soul by Bob Hicok (poems)
44. Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon (pyschedelic detective novel)*
45. Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem (novel)*
46. Erased by Jim Krusoe (weird little novel)*
47. Altman: The Oral Biography by Mitchell Zuckoff (biography)*
48. Invisible by Paul Auster (novel)*
49. Heroes by Robert Cormier (YA novel)
50. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (novel)*
51. A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver (nonfiction)

Happy New Year, and Happy Reading!

Childhood Nemeses

A Christmas Carol
by Charles Dickens
1843, Chapman and Hall
Heroes
by Robert Cormier
1998, Puffin


I have to admit a strong aversion to Dickens. (Perhaps the snob within me is turned off by the lack of complexity in his plots or by his archetypal characters.) So it was with some small amount of dread that I agreed to teach in my reading class his classic A Christmas Carol. My students and I spent three short weeks reading this book (appropriately enough, just before the holiday season) and contrary to my expectations, I was very much enamored with Dickens and all of his trappings.

I also ought to admit a strong attraction to Cormier's work. Two of my all-time favorite children's novels are his brilliant I Am the Cheese and The Chocolate War. His prose is emotionally fraught and his characters brooding, a combination seemingly unlikely for young adult fiction - but this is the essence of why his books are so wonderful. Cormier refuses to talk down to his audience and in doing so, he reaches them far more directly than any number of pandering novelists might.

Dickens is by no means a young adult novelist. However, it is a testament to the appeal (and simplicity) of his novels that so many of them have become co-opted for children's enjoyment (think Disney's Oliver & Company). A Christmas Carol is the best example of this, with its plethora of cinematic and theatrical adaptations. Each adaptation seems to get increasingly saccharine and, foolishly, I assumed the novel would follow in tone.

It was with no small amount of surprise that I fell in love with the book. Dickens' eye for detail is incredibly astute and as such his prose is rife with lush passages evoking Scrooge's London. The descriptions grow increasingly bright as the book progresses along with Scrooge's emotional re-birth.

I am sometimes disdainful of books whose sole purpose is to create some sort of world to inhabit for the span of the audience's involvement with the book. (This goes doubly so for film, Cameron's Avatar a perfect example of a film I am reluctant to see.) This is a large part of Dickens' purpose in A Christmas Carol and is perhaps its greatest asset. Dickens creates a full physical environment within which the reader can dwell at length, but his ability to manipulate tone and to evoke mood are equal parts of what makes London seemingly come to life in the book.

A secondary purpose of Dickens' in writing the book, I discovered as I was teaching it, was to chastise England's rich and to motivate them to enact labor reform laws. This was certainly an interesting angle to teach to my students, particularly in connection with Dickens' "rediscovery" of Christmas and the extent to which the Christmas festival was a tool he used to that end.

What makes A Christmas Carol so surprising as a children's literary archetype is that the book is thematically very adult. The book's message of goodwill toward man and to repent for past sins are attitudes intrinsic to childhood. The deeper emotional tensions of regret for those sins and desire for self-improvement are completely lost on children.

This does not impoverish my experience of reading the book, but rather improve it. The expectation of the saccharine ghost story I knew of my childhood was a delightful thing to have dashed.

Cormier's story, on the other hand, was a surprise in its disappointment. Cormier's work has always dealt with serious adolescent themes and his work causes his readers to live up to the standard of emotional empathy that his narratives set. Heroes is no exception to this statement; it is concerned with the aftermath of war and the fleeting torment of love lost.

While portions of the book are quite beautifully narrated, it seems also to be a rather single-minded work. The main character is literally and emotionally scarred from his performance in World War II and returns, disguised, to his hometown to seek revenge on a community "hero".

This dichotomy between the concept of heroism and harsh reality is the central motivating factor in the novel and every chapter pursues to some small degree elaborating on the plot context that elicits this thematic construct.

The chapters eventually begin to lag with the weight of Cormier's snail pacing. The book alternates too regularly between flash back and the present and Cormier's revelatory plot points are meticulously planted despite being an incredibly short book (barely over a hundred pages) it felt as though it were a short story aspiring to greater heights than it warranted.

Obviously, these two works make unlikely bedside-table-mates. But considering my decades-long aversion to Dickens and my hero worship of Cormier, these were revealing books with which to spend some time.

Bildungsromance

Invisible
by Paul Auster
2009, Henry Holt


Several years ago, a great friend of mine who has great taste in books bought me a copy of Paul Auster's Book of Illusions as a Christmas present.

That particular book referenced film a great deal and one of the main characters was a silent film director. The book was concerned (as it seems many of Auster's novels are) with the blurring of the line between oneself and one's art and in what ways others' art blurs our own identities. The book addresses the empathetic tendencies lovers of art have to identify themselves with a work of fiction or art.

What does this identification say about the artist's own relationship with his work, which is to be understood as an inimitable expression of self? In Book of Illusions the main character (a writer, working on translations) becomes distracted with the films of a hermit living in self-imposed seclusion from the world.

That book was the first I had read of Auster, a man I nearly revere now for the metaphysical/metafictional brilliance of his work, and I have to admit that I didn't care for it at all.

Suffice to say, my friend was quite disappointed and it was without hesitation that a year or so later I picked up a used paperback of Auster's City of Glass from a library book sale for something like a quarter. As all the books I buy at such events do, it wound up on my shelf for quite some time until I felt inspired by its relative brevity to bring it for some car reading on a road trip to South Carolina last spring.

City of Glass struck me hard. Its central conceit is a mock-noir style detective plot but Auster's exercises in genre-aping lead only to breathtakingly brilliant existential examinations. It felt so obvious to utilize gritty noir thrillers to create a harrowing attack on identity through the degeneration of a detective case, but yet it was entirely an innovation.

So thus began my fascination with Auster and it was with great pleasure that I consumed in a matter of two days his new novel, which takes the guise of a romance-laden bildungsroman to investigate the nature of self-awareness and the blurry lines between fiction and reality.

Invisible takes place alternately in 2008 and in 1967, a formative year in the life of the story's oblique hero Adam Walker. Over the course of three seasons (spring through fall) twenty-year-old Walker trysts with three different-but-the-same women and moves from New York to Paris and back again. He witnesses a brutal attack on a young man where his life was in danger and is ultimately framed for a crime he did not commit.

The novel has considerably more plot than any other of Auster's novels that I have I read. Moreover, the characters in his other works seem to operate largely in a Brechtian mode (I hesitate to use a theatrical term because it demonstrates my utter unfamiliarity with literary theory) in which the characters are representations of ideas and are used by Auster as tools to forward (or subvert) his plot.

In this story the characters, specifically Adam and his several loves, appear as fully fleshed and emotional rounded as any from the pages of, say, an E.M. Forester novel. The central focus of the novel is Adam's intellectual and emotional development into adulthood and Auster has taken this theme seriously.

Adam is a man marked by emotional fragility and intellectual insecurity which he attempts to cover by bluffing an air of intellectual and social sophistication that he does not possess. He smokes cigarettes and writes poetry self-consciously. He meets a pair of European sophisticates with whom he tries to hold his own in cultural discussions.

The pair, a meekly beautiful Parisian woman and her boisterously condescending lover, cause Adam to confront his insecurity. Adam fakes his way through some conversations and confidently asserts his intelligence when given the opportunity; when it comes, however, to more bohemian sexual matters, Adam's confidence is shaken and he fears himself proven a prude.

Adam's relationship with this older man who fancies himself his intellectual patron emphasizes how crucial these events are in Adam's moral development. Adam wishes desperately to please this man but is simultaneously repulsed by his own neediness. He emulates the man but then congratulates himself for the few minute disparities in their beliefs. Adam is attracted to his power and his confidence but is unwilling to permit himself to fully realize this attraction, preferring to hold him at an intellectual arm's length.

These emotional complexities are rarely so apparent in Auster's work. His character typically do not operate in a richly psychological mode and so it was with great surprise that I found myself so thoroughly compelled by them. Adam's lovers are all brought stunningly to life with nuanced characterizations that are striking in their realism.

Auster's prose, too, has taken a turn for the (relatively) more rich. His writing has always been incredibly robust and in some senses, lean. I was particularly taken with a passage at the two-thirds mark of the book that perfectly demonstrates the agility and simplicity of Auster's prose and yet shows the more poetic trend in this work:

Dread has become fact. Innocence has turned into guilt, and hope is a word that rhymes with despair. In every part of Paris, people are jumping out of windows. The metro is flooded with human excrement. The dead are crawling from their graves.

What is so utterly beautiful about this passage is the convergence of Adam's emotional arc and Auster's wonderful choice of setting for this arc: the upheaval in late-60s Paris. This is Adam's memoir, so is he writing from a metaphorical point of view or is he describing the turmoil (otherwise not addresses in the narrative) about him? Are his emotions coloring his description of the events or are the events providing him a context or a catalyst for his self-loathing?

The fact that one is asking so many questions about a character's state of mind in an Auster work is in itself novel; however, this is not to say that Auster has abandoned entirely his bag of meta-fictional tricks.

The narrative is encased (of course) in a larger narrative, which we only discover half-way through the novel. It turns out that part one of the novel, written in first person, are Adam's memoirs written and mailed to a colleague forty years later. The colleague is digesting the work as the actual reader is and the contextual developments of the plot are learned, frustratingly, at a distance through this additional narrator. Part two of the novel, which now seems like a flashback, is written in second person and again punctuated by the colleague's interpretation of the work.

Part three is written in third person as Adam grows increasingly unable to own up to his emotional failures. and the last portion of the book is a diary from one of Adam's lovers written once again in first person.

This development from confessional first person to objective third person follows a trajectory where Adam's colleague is discovering some curious factual inaccuracies and artistic licenses Adam has employed. This seems suggestive of the range of fiction and implies a correlative relationship between age and one's sense of guilt over one's failures of character.

Ultimately it is revealed that the Adam's colleague is publishing Adam's memoirs post-mortem and has changed all the identities to protect reputations while preserving the document's basic veracity. This is a not-unexpected trick of Auster's to once again bring to our attention our complicity in reading novels as psychological artifacts. Auster is winking at us, daring us to ponder whether or not this work is, as is suggested, a thinly disguised experience of someone he knew.

I'm not particularly interested in such useless lines of inquiry but I am once again reminded of Auster's connection between a man's life and the documents he leaves behind. Again and again, his novels are focused on men who leave written records of their lives as their sense of identity slips away or men who are obsessed by documents authored by others.

Adam's colleague is obsessed by such a document and pursues it to its natural conclusion wherein his maddening quest to create a fuller psychological picture ultimately results in his own participation in the act of creation. Adam's colleague resumes Adam's memoir from where it left off and finally writes it himself.

Auster is writing about the beauty of the spell of fiction: the intoxicating combination of one's experiences (lived and imagined) and a readership's imaginary co-authorship - how without a reader's complicity, novels fall flat.

Adam fails in his quest for adulthood and eventually shrivels into a man haunted by his past and becomes, as the novel's title suggests, invisible. Adam becomes increasingly inaccessible as the novel progresses, first by changing the authorial perspective from first to second to third person but in proving unable for his colleague to communicate with outside of tantalizingly cryptic and brief letters. Auster repeatedly reinforces that the reader cannot be satisfied by hearing Adam's story from his mouth, that we must go back to the memoir itself, his work, to experience Adam, an effort which becomes increasingly, gorgeously diluted by authorial perspective: Adam's colleague's, Auster's, our own.

Adam, Auster's first psychologically realistic character, becomes cloudier and drifts away and seems to disappear the more fervently the reader wants to connect with him. In this way, Auster creates a truly lovely, mesmerizing novel.

My Sweet Irascible You

Robert Altman: The Oral Biography
by Mitchell Zuckoff
2009, Knopf


I have a long and storied history with film for my short quarter-century of life. One of the first and longest-lasting of these stories is my admiration for Robert Altman.

Film began to interest me as an artistic medium in sophomore year of high school. At the time, I was incredibly interested in theatre, but living in the suburbs of New England somewhat preempts access to legitimate theatre. Film, I discovered, was an acceptable substitute for my creative cravings. (I should mention that the mother of one of my friends was particularly inspiring and nurturing in my interest in both of these art forms.)

I was waxing nostalgic recently with a colleague about how different the world of the arts was during my adolescent years. The world was full of great possibilities of discovery. For every film I saw, there opened a connection to a vast history of cultural heroes I had not previously been privy to.

When Gosford Park came out in 2001, I had never heard of Robert Altman. I went to see the film with a friend of mine and we sat in the surprisingly crowded theatre in the third row, craning upwards at the period costumes and crying to ourselves over the repressed, yet somehow dignified, lives of the characters on screen.

Oh, how taken was I. The spinning cameras and interlacing dialogue were obviously old hat to the filmmaking world and I had seen their evidence in films and television during my earlier, more oblivious days. But these techniques were completely electrifying. There was nuance in the scraps of dialogue Altman threw his audience as he camera brushed past the characters.

Altman's camera hovered at a distance, providing a distance from the action that made it easy for the audience to make judgments on the characters, to know them as constructs; yet, paradoxically, the camera's distance made the characters more real as well. When the camera would grace a character with a tighter, more intimate framing it revealed their essential humanity and tantalized me with the icebergian hint of depth below those waters. Like the people I knew in my life, his characters were real but not fully revealed. Their inner lives were present, but obscured by the minutiae of life.

Mitchell Zuckoff's incredibly affecting, affectionate Robert Altman: An Oral Biography paints Altman himself in a similar way through the virtue of its "oral biography" conceit and creates a beautifully suggestive portrait of Altman as a man and as an artist while maintaining some element of distance.

The book began as a traditional biography and Zuckoff spent several months interviewing Altman for the project. After Altman's death, the book was refocused to incorporate anecdotes and commentary by the dozens (and dozens) of actors who appeared in his films as well as his family, war buddies, producers and others in a manner similar to Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr. or Live from New York (the SNL oral history).

What is interesting about reading an oral biography is justifying the lapses in memory that time necessitates. Several of the accounts here contradict each other. If there is any specific flaw in Zuckoff's book, it's that in the case of discrepancies that cast negatived light on someone (Warren Beatty, for example), the target is given the last word to essentially contradict those who spoke before him.

The conceit of asking dozens of artists to characterize a man based on their brief experiences with him brings us closer to Altman and yet, like the characters in his films, further away. The reminiscences are amalgamated together as one reads the book and Altman becomes a difficult figure to pin down.

Some of the anecdotes and tributes are incredibly intimate and these tend to take place in moments of privacy between Altman and a colleague. When it comes to perspectives on Altman working with a group, the interviewees paint the same portrait of his gruffness, his antiauthoritarianistic tendencies and his egoism. These memories are recalled alternately with like-minded admiration and condoning apologies.

The interviewees seem to be suggesting in their frank admissions of his irascibility and their fond recollections of intimate moments of affection that, essentially, Altman was a difficult, bullying figure who had hidden depths of sensitivity in his relations with loved ones and artists under his tutelage.

His relationship with his wife, in particular, demonstrates this dynamic. Altman womanized behind her back but was also her biggest champion and adored her. Kathryn Altman is portrayed as such a fiercely-independent woman that, given her awareness of the affairs, it would seem she did not leave Altman because of some private vulnerability he showed her.

Altman's films would seem to bear this perspective out and Altman himself repeatedly suggests in the book that he is, in fact, his films.

In films like Nashville and McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Altman's worldview is a caustic, cynical one. But what makes these (and, by and large, all his) films so quintessential to the American canon is that they are not so entirely one-minded in this perspective. His characters are flawed to mirror the flaws of society, but Altman largely forgives their flaws and chooses to populate these films with lovingly idiosyncratic characterizations.

A perfect example of this dichotomy between cynicism and tenderness is Altman's Short Cuts, based on the work of the brilliant brilliant brilliant Raymond Carver and also my favorite of his films.

Nashville presented a country at a moral crisis, tinted by Altman's cynical and satiric viewpoint, but Short Cuts questions that cynicism. The worldview contained in Short Cuts is not an overtly optimistic one, by far. There are deaths and betrayals and Carver's small tragedies of life, but this view of life is tempered by an optimism that suggests that not every tragic situations must end tragically and not every cruel actions must correspond to a cruel heart. In this way, the characters and the plots of Short Cuts come to represent a more multi-faceted view of life, one that considers its shortcomings alongside its pleasures. With this film, Altman does not suggest that his worldview in Nashville was incorrect; he acknowledges society's selfishness, ignorance and cruelty. But with Short Cuts, he points to the counter-examples, suggesting that these varying perspectives of optimism and cynicism all occupy, after all, the same world.

The above quote comes from a paper I wrote in 2006 in film school. The class was an examination of the work of Jon Jost, whose brilliant but difficult films represented independent filmmaking, and of Altman, whose brilliant but accessible films were erected as a straw man by my brilliant but close-minded professor to demonstrate the false paradigm of indie filmmaking in Hollywood.

Altman was a Hollywood filmmaker who worked if not with indie budgets then with indie spirit. Altman mortgaged his house by my count three times to finance his films and is routinely broke throughout the biography. Altman's greatest contributions to cinema are truly independent-minded innovations like his trademark over-lapping dialogue and the use of zoom lenses.

The greatest achievement of Zuckoff's book is not in its attempt to create a portrait of the elusive, irascible Mr. Altman but in reproducing Altman's zeal for filmmaking. The anecdotes throughout the book, particularly those related to Popeye and McCabe, have the effect of inspiring awe in the reader simply by sharing, through the interview subjects, the awe Altman inspired in his collaborators.

Altman's seat-of-your-pants organic stick-it-to-the-man brash filmmaking is, in every sense of the word, exhilarating to hear tell of.

In writing this entry, I truly had to restrain myself from writing all the things I wanted to discuss. If given the space, I could very easily have written an entry three times as long discussing further Altman's independent-leanings, the nature of his idiosyncratic camera, his supposed misogyny, his reluctant role as father, and his identification with his work as well as the numerous truly delightful anecdotes about his methods of filming.

Zuckoff's book has truly reinvigorated by admiration for Robert Altman, both his role as artist and his artistic output.

Hieronymus Posh

Erased
by Jim Krusoe
2009, Tin House Books


A good friend of mine doesn't really like to read. He has been known to, like myself, attempt a Thomas Pynchon book once every couple of years. (This is in contrast to my other friends who don't like to read who pick up The Kite Runner or The DaVinci Code as their once-yearly novel of choice.)

About two years ago, this friend of mine kept bringing up this book he read, something called Girl Factory. I wrongly assumed it was a nonfictional account of Warhol's Factory or the Chelsea Hotel. (I think I had it confused with the film about Edie Sedgwick starring Sienna Miller.)

When pressed about the book, my friend repeatedly said it was "weird" and not much more. There were no thumbs, down or up, or star. He wouldn't even say if he recommended it or warned against it. It was just "weird" and it kept coming up in conversation.

Recently, Tin House published the next novel by the author of Girl Factory. Remembering our conversations about it, I signed up to check it out from the library. The book was published over the summer but the condition of the book was horrifying. There was a different-colored substance smeared on nearly every page.

So with the book held a good foot from my body at all times, I flew through this 250-odd page novel in two days.

Erased begins mysteriously with a son describing his last phone conversation with his previously-estranged mother, who is accused by a passing man of being dead without knowing it.

As if taking the stranger's suggestion, the mother promptly disappears, packing up and moving back to Cleveland and shortly dying.

Her son eventually receives mysterious postcards from her beckoning him to Cleveland and he follows.

The narrative becomes increasingly weird as Cleveland is portrayed as a city of smiling, helpful, artistically gifted citizens who are content with their lives. Inspired, the narrator takes up sculpting as he begins his not-especially-thorough search for his mother.

Some truly weird episodes ensue. Two that stand out in particular would include: a string of murders throughout the country involving artistic gardening implements that the narrator sells through a mail-order catalogue, which begin as a boon to sales and conclude with congressional hearings on the culpability of mail-order catalogues in such events; and a city-wide rat hunt prompted by an infestation of infanticidal rats throughout the city. The latter is conducted by concerned citizens signing up and then executing the rodents and culminates in a delightfully funny rat-on-mob stalemate.

All at once, as if at an invisible signal, they began a high-pitched, almost musical squeal that I took as either a battle cry or a cry for mercy. All of the rats[...] making this as-musical-as-it-may-have-been-to-them, earsplitting-to-me sound, as if to say: "What now? What are you accusing us of that you would yourselves not have done?"

This imagined dialogue spools out into a diatribe indicting humanity's affection for squirrels (because of their tails) and carelessness with musical instruments. The narrator ultimately decides, by the way, not to participate in the massacre of the rats. It does, however, continue on without him.

His search for his mother proceeds in this dream-like fashion, punctuated, for example, by periodic visits to women's auxiliary clubs like the "Lion's Rotary" and the "Christmas Tree" clubs.

Much like in dream logic, characters and places have their doubles and reoccur in slightly-altered forms.

The narrative is interrupted by transcripts of people discussing (in very choppy, tin-eared dialogue like "A good question, Warren, and fortunately the answer is both.") near-death experiences that set the stage for the plot's conceit that the narrator's mother could somehow traverse the tunnel-like link between life and death to communicate with her son.

But while the dialogue was written with a tin ear, the prose was not. Krusoe's talent for fresh, funny turns of phrase are evident throughout the book. For example, in observing his kitchen, the narrator remarks, "On my kitchen counter the toaster still innocently gleamed next to a patch of crumbs like a chrome elephant amid a tribe of pygmies." Delightfully clean, mildly absurd descriptions like these remind me somewhat of Flannery O'Connor's quirkier moments (I'm thinking of the parrots on Bailey's shirt) and are peppered liberally throughout the book.

In the actual machinations of the plot, Krusoe's novel reminds me primarily of Paul Auster (I'm thinking in particular of Ghosts or Oracle Night where writers exchange identities with their characters or other writers). The psychologically complex narrator is prompted by a thoroughly contrived plot device to conduct an existential search in a mirror world populated, in some solipsistic twist, by cartoonishly flat (and occasionally sinister) supporting characters.

Where the beauty in Auster's books is the urgent thrill reached vicariously through the narrator and the increasingly implausible events, the pleasure in Krusoe's novel is mostly in the form of rat-pack-monologues and dissertation-level dissections of the Indians mascot's socio-morphological implications.

Krusoe's charmingly mad flights of fancy are what really make this novel worth reading. Yes, the themes of abandonment and of death are interesting, but it's better to think of this work as epic prose poetry.

Finally, the cover of this edition is truly perfect, a detail from "The Temptation of St. Anthony" by Hieronymus Bosch, featuring a couple riding a giant fish. This image seems to convey the same balance of humorous absurdity and poetic dream-like grace that the prose does.

Interleaving Lives

Chronic City
by Jonathan Lethem
2009, Doubleday


Two weeks ago, Mr. Lethem did a reading through the Brookline Booksmith at the Coolidge Corner Theatre. I am not especially familiar with Lethem's work (I've only read his collection of short stories Men and Cartoons and his collection of essays The Disappointment Artist.

I had already checked out Chronic City from the library and brought my library book for him to sign, after checking with the library director that this request was kosher. Mr. Lethem read the entire first chapter of Chronic City with incredibly charming enthusiasm.

After the reading, Mr. Lethem signed my library book, "To the Ispwich Library and everyone who will enjoy this without stealing it."

Chronic City is, like its writer, an incredibly charming book. It is, however, also an upsetting, ruminative, depressing book as well.

Early in the book the narrator, a washed-up child actor named Chase Insteadman, muses about how fondness for Manhattan as such:

To live in Manhattan is to be persistently amazed at the worlds squirreled inside one another, the chaotic intricacy with which realms interleave... We only pretend to live in something as orderly as a grid.

Insteadman stumbles accidentally into one of those stranger realms, occupied by an eccentric cultural cataloguer named Perkus Tooth who takes it upon himself to educate Insteadman in the cinematic and musical touchstones which give some sense of rhythm to his world. Tooth suffers from what he calls "cluster headaches," which paralyze his thoughts and cripple his flamboyant idiosyncrasies.

Insteadman falls under his unlikely tutelage and their friendship serves as the ostensible plot of the novel and Tooth's acolytes populate Insteadman's life.

Tooth wakes Insteadman from a life of residually-fed complacency and, with the help of some powerful marijuana, enlists him in his increasingly odder and more paranoid obsessions, which progress from unhealthy appetites for Brando and hamburgers to the enslavement of the public by the font of the New Yorker to mystifying vase-like "chaldrons".

Eventually Tooth and Insteadman become consumed by theories regarding the aforementioned "interleaved realms" in the form of a Second Life-like game called Yet Another World. Tooth believes that there is no way to tell whether they themselves are members of some simulated world based on the real world (bringing to mind issues of meta-textuality that I really don't have the energy to write about).

The book seems to support this theory by its increasingly odd subplots, two of which recall a certain amount of 9/11-like imagery. For example, throughout the book, Manhattan is troubled by a loose tiger who appears randomly and decimates Korean supermarkets and hamburger joints. A minor character in the book continues this theme of destruction by creating installation art in the form of public chasms located throughout the island into which lonely souls fling themselves with abandon.

This theme of "worlds within worlds" or the fiction of life is continued in through the career moves of the protagonist and his lover. Insteadman, being a washed-up actor, occupies a nether-realm of personality where he embodies different people and never quite fully himself. As he puts it, in my favorite pop-cultural reference (of many) in the novel, "I winced [at the thought of being] Ralph Bellamy in a movie belonging to Cary Grant."

Insteadman's lover plays a similar societal role. Like an actor who dons characters, Oona Laszlo is a ghost-writer who pens others' autobiographies, adopting their lives as her own.

Which brings me, circuitously, to the issue of surnames. Lethem names his characters improbably compound words and unlikely combinations of vowels and consonants. Perkus Tooth and Chase Insteadman (who one character calls fittingly "Chase Unperson") as well as Oona Laszlo ("Laszlo" being a popular cinematic pen name) have already been mentioned. Other characters in the book include Richard Abneg, Grace Hawkmanaji ("The Hawkman"), and Strabo Blandiana.

In adding these curious elements to his otherwise emotionally poignant (and occasionally trenchant) narrative, Lethem brings a bizarre kind of levity to the text. I'd like to theorize that Lethem had some larger symbolic reasoning for the tigers and surnames and the stranded astronauts and chaldrons but it seems that these elements bring to mind nothing other than the unlikely peculiarity of life itself, as well as the meta-fictional motif alluded to above.

At the very least, these eccentricities, like Tooth himself, make the text incredibly endearing and prevent the reader from wallowing along with the characters in their existential marijuana-induced crises. Lethem's Manhattan is a strange place where his characters grapple with the pulsating rhythms of interpersonal relationships and intrapersonal introspection no less strange, I guess, than the rhythms of our actual lives. The tigers and chaldrons seem to lend the book the otherworldly (if slightly alarming) sense of humor with which I, like Mr. Lethem, prefer to view the world.

Mr. Lethem's characters ultimately intersect in one anothers' lives in their multitude of assumed identities and brighten, however briefly, each other's lives. Each character wonderfully, maddeningly, haltingly receives some renewed sense of purpose in their odd lives in what one might wrongly assume to be a disconnected island.

Pineapple Expressionism

Inherent Vice

by Thomas Pynchon

2009, Penguin Press

For an author I have never heretofore successfully read, Thomas Pynchon and I have an incredibly long relationship. The first time Thomas Pynchon and I crossed paths was during college. I had been going through a phase where things like the Pulitzer Prize called me like a siren to certain ruin.

This impulse I have towards awards and lists and bests of is one I have never been able to successfully shake; every year, I still compulsively load and re-load the Pulitzer website waiting to see what book has won the award so I can be the first to request it from the library. Part of this fascination comes from, I think, an anthropological/cultural bent I have. That is, I find it interesting why books are successful when they are and what the laudatory results have to say about the culture from where they come. Awards are a historical record of not so much taste as an idea of taste. The books chosen for these awards seem to present as evidence of the zeitgeist, if nothing else.

A perfect example of this concept is Thomas Pynchon's breakthrough novel Gravity's Rainbow. When the book was published in 1974, the jury that recommends novels to the Pulitzer board unanimously recommended Pynchon's 800-some-odd-page postmodern opus as the winner of that year's award for fiction.

The jury, which is typically small, merely recommends titles for the award, it does not bestow the award itself; this is the board's job. The board, in this case, rejected the jury's recommendation, accusing Pynchon's writing of density and obscenity. That year, no award was given.

Naturally curious about this book, I took it out from the library and labored (and I mean labored) through about a hundred of its pages of the course of several weeks. The writing was not bad, just difficult to navigate. As I have a tendency to do with significantly long works of fiction (like David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest), I simply ran out of library renewals and returned it unfinished and unmotivated to check it out again.

A year or two later, Pynchon published the equally long Against the Day, which I took out from the library with the intent of doing penance for my aborted Gravity's Rainbow adventure. I took it with me to jury duty with no alternate reading material (I usually bring two books and a magazine to ensure a wealth of options) as though to force myself through its pages. After about two hundred of them, I was dismissed and long story short returned the book again unread (though my memory of those two hundred pages is not unpleasant).

Finally I discovered The Crying of Lot 49, which was significantly more manageable in size. Scared of by the alarmingly dense prose, I abandoned that too.

So it was with considerable determination to make up for past wrongs that I set down to begin and to actually finish Pynchon's new novel, which I had read in a review was "accessible".

Imagine my surprise that Pynchon, whose elliptically plotted novels I abandoned as one might a strangely antagonistic first course at a restaurant you had heard raves about, has written a funny, somewhat simple and, yes, accessible novel that is funnier, and loopier, than I thought it would (have any right to) be.

Inherent Vice is billed as a noir and it is, of sorts. The protagonist is a small-time private eye named Doc Sportello who lives a hippie's life in the fictional Gordita Beach, California in the 1970s.

The narrative revolves around, as most noirs do, a woman (in this case Doc's former flame, Shasta) who presents Doc with a case and then promptly disappears. What follows is a paranoid spiral of organized crime, crooked cops, mysterious disappearances and unlikely reappearances presented through the drug-addled filter of Doc's joint-per-page self medication.

Much of the book veers, as Doc does, off the task at hand and delves into the lives of various colorful characters (neo-Nazi Ethel Mermanites, promiscuous stewardii, various stoners) that have no real relevance to the narrative.

Pages are devoted to these characters and their charmingly inane ramblings but none of these digressions bear relevance on the plot and as such linger ambiguously in one's mind in a manner not unlike Doc's copious drug trips. One is left wondering Did that page-long summary of the Godzilla-meets-Gilligan's-Island television movie actually happen, or was that something I dreamed? for example.

I've heard the book referred to as a "psychedelic noir", which might seem to be an unfortunate pairing considering that noir plots are typically prone to digressions devoted to many topics - sex, red herrings, back story. Doc and his gang's stoner shenanigans (at one point they stare at a package of heroin because it came in a box labeled TV) distract the reader from the narrative, but fortunately provide it a great deal of its punny charm.

The action becomes cartoonishly convoluted to the point where suspension of disbelief (which was never really the point) becomes difficult, much like the similarly structured Pineapple Express or the conclusion of Spike Jonze's Adaptation. The characters grow more and more exaggerated and the action more incredible by the page until the narrative seemingly owes more to the countless noirs and cop dramas it borrows from - and their conventions - than it does any semblance of realism.

One of the more interesting passages in the book reflects on this disconnect between the simultaneously contrived and convoluted narrative and our expectations for narrative sensibility. One of Doc's friend is a regular viewer of a soap opera and summarizes the week's drama as such:

This week – as he updated Doc during lulls – Heather has just confided to Iris her suspicions about the meat loaf, including Julian’s role in switching the contents of the Tabasco bottle. Iris wasn't too surprised, of course, having for the duration of her own marriage to Julian taken turns in the kitchen, so that there remain between these bickering exes literally hundreds of culinary scores yet to be settled. Meanwhile, Vicki and Stephen are still discussing who still owes who five dollars from a pizza delivery weeks ago, in which the dog, Eugene, somehow figures as a key element.

Our expectations of the soap opera are inverted (through either the prism of Doc's stoner haze or the deus-ex-machinations of Pynchon) to present an overwrought portrait of mundane realism.

This passage is, of course, quite funny, but it gets at what I suspect one of Pynchon's motivations is. Inherent Vice seems to poke fun at narrativity and at our desire for fiction to be realistic. By playing with our structural expectations (of plotting, of coherence), Pynchon seems to be emphasizing their relative pointlessness.

Much later in the novel, there is another reference to soap operas as Doc's parents try marijuana for the first time and relate their experience back to their son:

“Well," [his mother says,] "there’s this soap we watch, Another World? but somehow we couldn’t recognize any of the characters, even though we’ve been following them every day, I mean it was still Alice and Rachel and that Ada whom I haven’t trusted since A Summer Place [1959] and everybody, their faces were the same, but the tings they were talking about all meant something different somehow, and meantime I was also having trouble with the colors on the set, and then Oriole brought in chocolate chip cookies and we started eating and couldn’t stop with those...”

It seems to me that Pynchon's fiction acts in much the same way that marijuana does for Doc's parents. That is, Pynchon twists traditional fictional conventions through the carnivalesque funhouse-mirror of his narrative so that characters and themes and setting mean something different, show something different, than they did when we began.

Pynchon's narrative serves, much like expressionistic painting, to distort forms, flatten realistic perspectives and paint the world in, figuratively speaking, broad strokes and bold colors. Expressionism celebrates the drunken, chaotic, ecstatic capabilities of art, as opposed to the fastidiously and fussily ordered, composed, and realistic modes of art.

In stripping his reader of his narrative crutches and thoroughly subverting expectations of character and plot, Pynchon leaves his reader with nothing but the purest enjoyment of a pulpy plot and his alternately zany and dry wit. A wit that casts its gleeful and caustic gaze on the things that drive our everyday activities, whether they be the vicarious dramas of daytime television or the pleasant lulls of afternoons spent on the beach.

Wordless World

In the Valley of Kings: Stories
by Terrence Holt
2009, W.W. Norton & Company



Terrence Holt is a doctor as well as a writer. Additionally, he has apparently taught literature (one of his students was last year's Pulitzer winner, Junot Diaz whose Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a really great book).

I'm not sure what it is that I find so appealing about the mixture of medicine and fiction, but after reading the above facts in the Sunday New York Times Book Review I was compelled to check this book out.

In the Valley of Kings is comprised of eight curiously powerful short stories, only one of which is concerned with the practice of medicine (unlike Chris Adrian, another writer/doctor whose work is stronger tied to the emergency rooms and pediatric wards that doubtlessly fill his day). The stories, instead focus in most cases on science fiction which was a surprising discovery as the book progressed.

Holt's stories are stripped down to the barest elements of fiction: there is a rudimentary plot, at least (and in some cases no more than) one character and a bewitchingly mysterious and often times transformative setting.

The one story that centers around medicine is the story of a plague that strikes the world in which to gaze upon or utter a particular word is doom oneself to die (bringing to mind The Ring with its killer videotape plotline). This story, which appears first in the collection, sets appropriately the primary theme that seems to course throughout the book: the conflict between existence and literature.

Or, to put it more accurately, the inability of language to truly capture the essential quandary of existence. To what extent does a word, such as the deadly word of the initial story, bear any relation to the object it represents? At one point does the signifier become the signified? Holt's inquiries into this matter do not take the form of dense semiotic exploration but rather delicately present men who are variously deprived of and dependent on language to make sense of their lives.


Each of these stories is written in 1st person perspective and, with perhaps only one exception, the narrators are specifically the scribes of their stories and make mention of the tools with and method by which they record their tales. "Eurydike", for example, is narrated on a spaceship computer by a crazed astronaut who updates his story as it progresses. Another, "In the Valley of Kings", is written on parchment in blood.

Most of the characters in these stories are men removed to some extent from society. One story features a couple in an apocalyptic landscape populated more by the bodies of suicides than living people. One features an archaeologist making his way alone through a tomb. Two stories take place on a spaceship where the narrator is the sole occupant.

This element of isolation is key in bringing the theme of language in contrast to existence to life. The characters must be alone so as to more fully ponder their existence. Language as a means to communicate (i.e. with other people) is not of concern here; Holt writes about language as a means to express (in this case, to express the fundamentals of consciousness and to justify ourselves with the natural world).

In the aforementioned story "Eurydike", a character is recovering throughout the narrative from some sort of accident which has deprived him of the ability to attach words to the objects around him. He flounders for the correct vocabulary and is amazed how each new word he recovers demystifies the object for which the word was sought.

The character struggles to make sense of his environment despite his inadequate vocabulary. And yet the world continues to exist around him. His failure to attach a verbalized sign for objects does not preclude their existence.

In "In the Valley of Kings" an academic struggles to make sense of hieroglyphics, attempting to intuit meaning from symbols fruitlessly. Holt's narrator describes his inability to read a scroll.

"There are many terms I don't recognize. This is not uncommon in hieroglyphics: many signs were invented as needed. But in this scroll the normal alphabet is gone - the abstract determinative is entirely absent, and I am not certain if what I read is code or gibberish."

Clearly, the glyphs do mean something, and the narrator is intrigued by their ambiguity. He wonders if it is possible that some mystical process is invoked by the words; the power of the words is unknown because their meaning is. He is obsessed by this possibility and he forges through the tomb waiting to discover the power of the glyphs and what otherworldly concepts they might give name to.

Later in the novella, it is suggested that our relationship with language is one defined by a similar madness to categorize and explain the world. The academic is told by an expert in hieroglyphics,

"They never stopped, you see. You must know something of that yourself. They never stopped adding in. Any time they thought of anything new, they simply reached into the air and added on another glyph. It's worse than chaos... It's infinity."

Holt's subject, then, is the relation between the world we live in and the fervor with which we create language we use to define the world, to make sense of it. The way we depend on language for that definition.

Ultimately, though, we are no better than his astronaut characters, left without the luxury of language or familiar, easy meanings, to contemplate the vastness of the universe outside our space shuttles (for which, appropriately, there are few adequate words) and within our souls (for which, like the Egyptians, there are perhaps too many).

It is fitting that the collection ends with a story called "Apocalypse" and a character whose living is made as an editor of a science magazine. The editor fails to establish a connection between the written word, in this case the journalism regarding climate change, with the physical world he inhabits, the climate itself. He tries to express this disjunction with, ironically, the written word. He writes:

"[P]art of me always believed that the world written up in journals was imaginary...This world - the one we live in - was real, and there could be no connection"

And later he remarks,

"[As I write] this paragraph[,] the words clatter emptily about the page."

The natural world exists despite the terms we call it by. We ourselves exist, as Dan Chaon wrote in Await Your Reply, despite the names we call ourselves by.

Humans struggle to amass the vocabulary required to capture the complexity of existence, to formulate the questions that nag our souls, to name the world around us and make it more finite. But the world perseveres despite our floundering attempts to do so, as do our souls.

Language, it would turn out, is a pale facsimile of existence. Or so it would seem, anyway, until Terrence Holt so eloquently, painstakingly explores that quandary through (what else?) the written word.

Are we not all of us spirits?

Await Your Reply
by Dan Chaon
2009, Ballantine Books


Last year I read a short story by Dan Chaon called "The Bees" in a collection published by McSweeney's called Thrilling Tales which was edited by Michael Chabon featuring genre exercises. Later I discovered "The Bees" in an edition of the Best American Short Story series (2003, maybe?) and was equally impressed by it.

A couple of weeks ago Chaon's new book was reviewed in the New York Times Sunday book review and I remembered liking "The Bees" enough that I requested it from the library.

Await Your Reply begins aptly enough with an excerpt from Anna Ahkmatova that reads, "I myself, from the very beginning,/Seemed to myself like someone's dream or delirium/Or a reflection in someone else's mirror." Appropriately enough, the novel's plot is concerned directly with the idea of identity theft.

The novel alternates chapters between three characters: a twin searching for his schizophrenic brother who has been involved in hacking and theft; an orphaned high school senior who leaves home with her high school history teacher; and a college boy who discovers his real biological dad is his stoner uncle.

The story opens with the college-age kid having his hand cut off at the wrist and then flashes back in time, slowly ratcheting up the suspense. The college kid, Jay, lives in a cabin in the woods with his uncle. The uncle involves his son in an identity theft scheme where Jay travels around moving money from one account to another in cities like Vegas. Jay's non-biological parents eventually give up searching for him and he is declared dead, leaving Jay with a stack of passports and credit cards that add up to a more substantial identity than the one he left behind.

This line between one's "actual" identity and the various assumed identities filched throughout the narrative is the main thematic concern of the book. Chaon's characters are ill-at-ease with their identities.



Both of the kids in the book, Jay and Lucy (who ran away with her teacher), face crises of identity revolving around parental abandonment issues. Lucy's parents died in an accident and she is left to come-of-age with no one to help her navigate the path of self-discovery. Jay, as mentioned previously, that his parents are not his parents.

Jay uses his new identities as an easy comfort in the face of his own ontological uncertainty, slipping into various disguises knowing that the pressures of being are lighter when he can focus on superficial (and unnecessary) details like mustaches and wardrobe. Lucy, on the other hand, chafes at the thought of abandoning her as yet unformed identity in favor of an assumed one. Lucy bucks at the seeming burial of her past and is alarmed to discover that without the birth certificate and social security card she left behind her, she too finds the assumed identities a greater proof of existence than her own.

Miles, the twin who is not schizophrenic, has his own issues of identity. His life is lived in a limbo that lends itself to being shaken off at a moment's notice to follow his brother's cryptic clues throughout the country. Miles's sense of self is defined by his connection to his brother and his brother's concerted attempts to elicit his brother's pursuit and then to cruelly evade him. Miles feels no sense of purpose in his life beyond what his brother's cat-and-mouse games which seem designed in their taunting superiority to emphasize the lack of definition in Miles's life.

It is obvious from fairly early on in the book that one of the middle-aged adult characters is Miles's brother under a stolen identity, and there are clues strewn about those two other narratives as Miles conducts his search. Whether Mr. Chaon intended this transparency or not, the narrative is no worse for this predictability. The book's engine is this terrifying sense of inevitability and ruin. As the plot untwists itself and reveals its secrets, the effect is more of a sickening realization ("Oh, yes, of course!") than it is self-satisfied superiority ("I saw that coming!").

The novel's plot is exceedingly clever in that its secrets are in plain sight, just carefully obscured by the presence of the three narratives. But moreover, the plot carefully and precisely elicits some of the modern terror we feel about our identity in a global society. We do not feel the papers that prove our existence to our governments necessarily define us. And yet we are terrified of the theft of these documents, which of course mean only what we agree upon as a society that they mean. To live without a birth certificate is deny yourself the ability to be freely mobile - to possess a driver's license for example, or to obtain a passport for international mobility. Yet it is foolish to think these pieces of paper are secure or to rely on them to provide a sense of self.

Mr. Chaon's novel is, in a sense, about characters who live on the outskirts of these agreed-upon standards of living. These characters essentially live without the foolishness of equating these societal conventions with self-knowledge. They do, however, utilize the system to their advantage, using these conventions to obtain wealth if never security.

Mr. Chaon's characters are self-inventors. They disavow (or are forced to disavow) a sense of allegiance to something so false as a birth certificate. Our parents give us our names and because of this fact we associate a great deal of our self-knowledge in these names, in tying these names to a sense of personal history that lends some rhyme or reason to our existence.

Why this name? What does that tell me about that events that lead to my birth? What might this name infer about the expectations of me in this life? We then define ourselves by the extent of our willingness to realize these expectations and hopes, our willingness to carry along the line of history that brought about our lives.

Mr. Chaon's characters are freed for various reasons from this line of history, connections to parents are severed and these identities are left undefined, floundering, until some the occasion of self-invention and the luxury (and danger) of reinvention, and of the ultimate futility of evading the larger questions of self-knowledge.

Crazy Love

Fever Chart
by Bill Cotter
2009, McSweeney's

One of my favorite Christmas gufts last year was a subscription to McSweeney's publishers. McSweeney's is best-known for their literary quarterly which was founded by Dave Eggers, author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, amongst other things.

For a hundred bucks (it was a present, I shouldn't know that!) I get shipped the next ten books that the publishing arm of McSweeney's releases.

Jerome Coe, the hero of Bill Cotter's novel (and my tenth and final McSweeney's book) Fever Chart, really loves romance novels. He hunts them down from spinning racks in convenience stores and reads and re-reads them compulsively. I, personally, am far less of a sucker for romantic novels than I am for films, but color me surprised when by the end of Fever Chart despite eits lurching, dizzy narrative proves to be just that.

Compulsively is an appropriate term for the novel because Jerome, one discovers, is a frequenter of mental institutions. As a ward of the state, Jerome is medicated and strapped and distrusted and neglected by the institutions who assume the responsibility of caring for such characters. When these institutions fail him, Jerome lets himself loose upon the world without pharmacological aid and seeks the opposite of the sterile, bright institutions of his youth: the hostels, waffle houses, bars and convenience stores of New Orleans.

New Orleans is an appropriate setting for such a narrative, as the bustling, hectic, lawless cityscape proves to be an ideal complement to Jerome's lawless and equally hectic emotional entropy.

The novel follows a similar pursue-stall-repeat pattern in Jerome's lovelife. He is prone to falling in love with ghosts, as those who befriend him characterize them, and ghosts cannot love you back. There are no less than six romantic interests, by my count, in the three hundred pages of the novel and with only two of these does he have regular social contact. (Both decidedly unavailable: one a lesbian, the other not single.)

Jerome continually falls for some distant idealized woman, stalks her, masturbates into socks and then loses interest when the woman becomes available.

This pattern of romance indicates a larger emotional paralysis. Jerome is passive (he lets one of his doctors molest him with no protest), he is unmotivated (he loses jobs with little remorse), he is fearful (he refers repeatedly to a fear of being "stompered" [your guess is as good as mine]), he is complacent (he elects to live as a hermit for a year in fear of meeting his friends but does not have the sense to leave New Orleans).

Jerome's delusions of romantic and sexual grandeur work ostensibly as both a manifestation of his emotional resistance to these habits and as evidence of his acquiescence to them. His romantic obsessions demonstrate a will to break from this entropic pattern of inertia but he is routinely enslaved by it.

Until...

Well, suffice to say the book is definitely a romance and that Mr. Coe (who, by the way, earns himself a Zagat-worthy reputation as a grilled cheese chef by the end of the book) finally meets his match in the guise of a character whose manic nature is a catalyst for his self-destructive nature. I'll avoid spoiling the charming progression to full fledged romantic hero, though.

Mr. Cotter's style is a bit cloying (remember "stomper"? It must be used about sixty times in the book) in that I Heart Huckabees kind of way.

A representative section of dialogue reads:

"Are you going to sell it?" I asked.

"I went down to Poski's. He offered me four-fifty in store credit."

"That doesn't seem fair."

"It isn't. I mussed up his hair and took his SORRY WE'RE CLOSED sign. Popski is one of those folks who looks especially funny with mussed hair....In the beginning, I'm going to market my coins here, in with the pies. Everybody contemplating pie can contemplate rare coins in the meantime."

"I bet you get rich."

"That Mr. Murdoch seems to think so. He's an expert in numismatics and marketing."

As you can see, it's a little twee.

But all the twee tendencies in the writing aside, the book caught me rather offguard by the end and I was pretty much sold on the whole romantic angle. It was, like Mr. Coe himself, a somewhat unnerving and deeply flawed but ultimately charming read.

Serial Promiscuity

Wrong: Stories
by Dennis Cooper
1992, Grove Press

Just as traditional art eschews the traditional notion of subject, relying instead on a display of purely aesthetic components, pornography's not about what it appear to observe - sex. Porn's simply intimate with human beings, its components... [Porn's true] subject is lust - theirs,
their director's, their viewers.

"Square One" by Dennis Cooper

I don't remember where I heard about Dennis Cooper's writing. I have a sneaking suspicion it involves Wikipedia in some way. In any event, wherever I read about his work, it did not prepare me in the least for the work itself.

I tend to avoid queer literature in much the same way I avoid queer cinema; that is, I hero-worship queer directors (Gus Van Sant, Todd Haynes) and writers (Bret Easton Ellis, D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster) but willfully avoid works that deal directly with queer themes (Tarnation would be an appropriate film to illustrate this point, Running with Scissors an apt book).

I can't really explain my disinterest but I suspect it has a lot to do with the issue of representation. I grow uncomfortable with being represented by a class of people. While not every portrayal of a class I belong to represents me (not all middle class white twenty-year-olds in literature represents me) the gay community dictates a sort of solidarity. Even the most marginalized within our margins I feel kinship for and thusly identify with to some extent.

With Wrong, this is problematic. Cooper writes about marginalized members of the queer community (rent boys, drug addicts) but also turns his focus on those so far in the margins that they are almost off the page.

Cooper advertises early in this collection that the material will not be easy to deal with. The first story "A Herd" chronicles the exploits of a John Wayne Gacy-like figure who kidnaps, sodomizes and mutilates teenage boys. Cooper does not hold his subject matter at an arm's length (like I literally did at one point with my copy of the book) by treating the rape and mutilation as a contextual plot device or as a signpost for "gritty" realism. Rather, he embraces the serial killer's perspective, and writes passionate, vibrant descriptions of really disgusting acts of sodomy and mutilation and combinations thereof. The killer is obsessed by the twilight stage between life and death of his victims. The killer consumes his victims with his lust and that desire is transferred to the reader in a dirty Trojan horse play on identifying with characters.

While "A Herd" is the longest story, it is easily not the most stomach-churning. In "A Herd" there is the small comfort of rationalizing that the main character is in fact a serial killer and that therefore some violence is only natural. In the titular story, a gay man named Mike kills at whim the guys he picks up for sex with none of a serial killer's compulsive orderliness or twisted reverence for his victims. Mike is callous in the disposal of the bodies, the randomness of his kills. In "Dinner" a boy is picked up at a club and in three short pages is fed copious drugs and sodomized in stomach-turning detail.

Cooper's writing is quite beautiful, for what it's worth. His gift for metaphor is quite impressive. Blue jeans gather "like accordions at his feet"; a self-involved writer's prose becomes so "chandelierlike it lights only its own mechanism, not the life happening under it"; an anus "handcuffs" a wrist. (Try not to vomit at that one.)

There are stories that do not feature murder. These feature instead nihilistic promiscuous young men contemplating their inability to love and their obsession with meaningless sex.

Cooper's world is, in a word, bleak.

Underneath the graphic descriptions of sadistic sex and acts of evil, however, I feel there is a definite moralistic undertow. Cooper seems to be commenting as much on our appetites (and aptitudes) for violence through these disgusting, tragic figures as anything else. The violence in this book is not meant to be discarded or ignored. It is at the forefront of his writing. He wants us to be forced to deal with the violence, to come to terms with our reaction to it.

Violence quite undeniably permeates our culture, from films and video games where the blood runs freely to nightly news reports on bloodthirsty, confused teenagers who commit unforgivable acts of violence (which are, of course, often blamed on those films and video games). We live in a world saturated with depictions of violence both sobering (nightly news, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit) and gleeful (Hostel, Tarantino's recent Inglourious Basterds) in tone.

Cooper does not use his violence as a plot device for some trashy thriller genre exercise though. His violence is intentionally difficult to make peace with. Is this not what real violence is? Not aestheticized (Tarantino), anaesthetized (SVU).

Last night I saw Rob Zombie's slasher epic Halloween 2 a few short hours after finishing Mr. Cooper's book. Zombie's sickeningly blood-splattered half naked girls have seemingly everything in common with Cooper's mutilated naked boys. Yet Zombie's penetrating knives and crushed heads are meant to quicken the pulse and, with its MTV-era editing, fire your neurons. Cooper's violence merely sickens. One could argue this is a discrepancy between media, but this is not a Stephen King genre exercise. This book is not meant to be horror, it is meant to be quote-unquote serious literature.

It seems Cooper is trying to shake his reader from a complacent cultural attitude towards violence. As awful to confront as it is, his violence is more real inasmuch as Cooper refuses to dress it down or up.

Post-script: While the novelist Bret Easton Ellis (who blurbs on the cover of the more contemporary edition than I had, featured above) comes to mind immediately in reading this book (specifically American Psycho), the work this book brings to my mind most immediately is Michael Haneke's film(s) Funny Games, where a well-to-do couple is tortured and terrorized extensively for no apparent reason. That film's depiction of violence, too, is methodical, its mise en scene clear of distraction. And the young men who terrorize the couple repeatedly address the camera asking the audience how they identify with them and why they care about the story.

Lost, But Gone Before

Castle

by J. Robert Lennon

2009, Graywolf Press

Men and Cartoons: Stories

by Jonathan Lethem

2004, Doubleday

Recently after a long camping trip (during which I devoured most of Reif Larson's Collected Works of T.S. Spivet, which was a cute little story about an adolescent genius cartographer that ultimately fell apart in Adaptation-like flights of narrative fancy at its climax) some friends and I were hanging around in Northampton, MA waiting for a Mexican restaurant to open its doors. While waiting, we passed by signs for at least four separate bookstores (!!) and I wound up frequenting two of them; the first was a used bookstore where I searched in vain for a copy of True Grit, the second a store called Broadside Bookshop where I found a discount copy of Jonathan Lethem's short story collection Men and Cartoons for $6.

I am well aware of Lethem's almost cult-like fanbase and have seen his reviews every so often in the Sunday Book Review in the NY Times, but I have very little personal experience with Lethem's fiction. Indeed, the only previous work of his I had read is a collection of essays called The Disappointment Artist, which I had taken out of the Lawrence Public Library on virtue of its cover alone.

In The Disappointment Artist, Lethem discussed at length and with enthusiasm topics both high brow and low (he writes on his infatuation with Star Wars as well as The Searchers). His interests and influences ranged from dear to my heart (the works of Philip K. Dick) to totally unfamiliar but nonetheless charming (Marvel Comics). What I found compelling about that work was the consistent thread of a tender, honest self-portrait underneath the pop-cultural flotsam.

Castle was a book I checked out from the library on the recommendation of the webpage staff of McSweeney's Internet Tendency, where it was described as a book that "creeps you out so badly you find it hard to sleep." I love those and hadn't read one probably since The Shining (in high school).

I might not have ultimately lost any sleep over Castle, but it certainly was one of the creepiest books I've read in a very long time. The action of the book (I used the word action very loosely) is based around a main character who purchases a large plot of land in his hometown consisting mostly of forest and one lonely cabin.

The main character begins to renovate the cabin as he lives alone in the woods, speaking rarely to the local townsfolk, some of whom remember a mysterious tragedy involving the main character's parents. His interactions with others are ungainly and uncomfortable to observe. For example, the following exchange occurs with a hardware store clerk regarding carrying bags to the main character's car:

"Oh, don't be stubborn, let me give you a hand. Pretty awkward, doing that all by yourself."

Finally I met his gaze with as much directness and authority as I could muster. "What is awkward," I told him, "is the need to deflect your attention away from my private business. I do not need help conveying these things to my car."

The character is self-conscious and slightly paranoid and begins to hear things in and around his property and so is compelled to begin investigating the land by hiking to a large, almost mountainous rock he can barely make out from the window of his cabin.

While the action is minimal, the repeated vague references to events in the main character's past both within his own narration and others' dialogue creates a slightly paranoid state in the reader's mind. Lennon pits the reader against his main character as he hints slowly at the character's instability and unreliability for information as a narrator while he simultaneously creates a dependence for the reader on the character for the information (motivation) that drives the action of the character (and in turn, the book). This complex relationship between reader and narrator becomes most forceful as the climax of the book occurs.

Towards the end of the book a series of events occur which shed direct and harrowing light upon the nature of the narrator's psyche. While the events that follow (which I would prefer not to spoil, naturally) have a ring of contrivance about them, they are upon closer inspection are exactly logical and inevitable. The events that seem convenient or too easy are in fact essential to the psychological complexity of the book.

Most of the psychological complexity stems from the notion of the lingering effects of the past, a concept that closely links it to Men and Cartoons despite their obvious tonal and structural differences.

Lennon's protagonist struggles to bear the weight of his past, struggles to form a coherent sense of self in the present in a way that would be utterly familiar to the characters in Lethem's short stories. The enduring influence of the past, both real and imagined (i.e. false nostalgia), is the uniting theme in Lethem's collection.

Lethem's plots are given to rather robust exercises testing how far the material of 'literary fiction' can stretch to encompass ghettoized genres. Many of his stories read like Philip K. Dick re-written by Barthelme (with his strange narrative aloofness and his somewhat disingenuous lack of self-seriousness). For example, one of the best pieces in the collection, "Access Fantasy" imagines a dystopian future so complete that it could have easily stretched to novel length. "Access Fantasy" involves a one-way permeable barrier and a satirical metaphor for class involving scores of invisible people who live in abandoned cars plugging up the streets of Manhattan who rent "apartment tapes," a kind of pornographic tour of the apartment dwellings they are not permitted to visit, never mind own.

Another story concerns a writer of dystopian stories in battle with a writer of utopian stories. The dystopian writer imagines a story in which there exists a species of sheep biologically predisposed to suicidal tendencies and spreading such tendencies among animalife through its pure despair.

The story provides an appropriate link to this theme of the past I mentioned above. "The Dystopianist", as he's called, was a grade school pal of his nemesis, the utopianist ("The Dire One"). Despite their childhood friendship, they enter into an unspoken rivalry together, revising each other's views of the world.

Rivalries with formative members of one's past recur throughout the collection: a super heroic goat man influences a young man from throughout his life (despite his gradual decline into a doddering fool through age); a gradeschool idol reappears next door to a character, allowing him the opportunity to test the extent of his former idol's cool, composed persona; and a former fellow prankster show up in "Planet Big Zero" only to move into his friend's garage consuming his beer supply.

There are endless other examples of the past loitering about in men's adult lives as the men attempt to shrug off old definitions of self and outgrown worldviews. But the past is also acknowledged, as in Castle, as something so intrinsically formative as to be immovable. The past in Lethem's work is given some amount of distant respect and his characters are repeatedly drawn to their pasts and as they are repulsed by them.

Both Men and Cartoons and Castle remind me of the works of filmmaker Ross McElwee, who explores the nature of his past through confessional documentaries. McElwee avoids use of archival footage (other than photographs) and even as time elapses over the course of his films, life is defined as what McElwee fails to capture on film instead of what he has. The film itself is an attempt to reconstruct some sense of how the past managed to construct what he films. The past then is a powerful, lingering force in men's lives but is difficult to capture; it is elusive but inevitable.

Despite Lennon's significantly more disturbing tone and Lethem's more postmodern hijinks (he writes one story as one paragraph, e.g.), I feel both books feature characters attempting to reconcile the past with the present. The authors, however, leave their characters, unable to sever ties to pasts that haunt them, languishing in an ever-more alienating present.