Blood Oranges

Citrus County
John Brandon
2010, McSweeney's


Citrus County arrived in my mailbox several months ago from the McSweeney's book club and it wasn't until the New York Times featured it in the book review that I finally got around to picking it up. I'm not altogether certain what I was expecting but Brandon's work is at turns both vulnerable and chilling.

The novel takes place in a county in Florida that Brandon portrays as the sort of borderline white trash community that seems to consistently exist within a five year time lag. Initially I assumed the book's locale was fictionalized - a combination of the backwater setting of True Blood and the Wal-Mart strewn landscapes regularly featured on Cops. But after extensive internet sleuthing, I have determined that Citrus County is in fact an actual place.

Citrus County is something like 95% white and 12% below the poverty line. It is the sort of swampland riddled with dilapidated shacks unadorned with modern utilities. It is within one such shack that Citrus County's knotty, bitter heart beats.

The main character is an eighth grader named Toby, a boy who is struggling against inner demons to define himself. He is bright, but disinterested (as so many eighth graders are) in "working to his potential". In the early portions of the book, Toby makes snide comments to strangers and executes a deliciously apathetic prank phone call (he tells his victim exactly where he's calling from and then waits for him when he threatens to come and beat him). He has the sort of sardonic detachment from polite society that characterizes the "bad boy" archetype that so enthralls most adolescent girls.

This last is proven true by Toby's classmate Shelby, an honors student who is attracted to Toby's outer self-possession and disinclination towards impressing others, in stark contrast to her own need to advertise her abilities but shrug them off as incidental to her identity by lusting after said bad boy. Brandon spends a great many pages building up an achingly accurate portrait of the adolescent struggle to define oneself.

Discontent to let his novel stand at a superbly well-written examination of the adolescent mindset, Brandon complicates the experience with a dash of psycho with the psyche.

Within the first fifty pages, the reader is alarmingly introduced to a twisted side of Toby's character and from this point forward, Brandon constructs a rather tight tale of suspense that, rather than distracting from the quite engrossing character development, is augmented by the deep psychological realism present in his characterizations.

Almost as quickly as the reader realizes Shelby has a crush on Toby, Toby executes a precociously meticulous plan to kidnap Shelby's younger sister. He breaks into their house, stuffs her into a duffel bag and ties her up in an underground bunker. Federal and local law enforcement agents, as well as mass media outlets, swoop down upon Citrus County and turn it on its end.

The kidnapping has two primary effects, both on our two adolescent (anti-)heroes. Shelby, who has already survived her mother's death psychologically intact, grows utterly wearied by her sister's disappearance. In the later portions of the book, she does not suffer fools gladly; when, for instance, a schoolmate comes to provide her with solace in her religion, Shelby flings grits in her face.

She is dismissive of the students in her class and is unfazed by their attempts to comfort her. The more the adults and schoolmates in the outside world treat her with kindness and patience, the harder she tests this patience with outlandish behavior.

The only person who fails to treat her with respect is, naturally, her sister's kidnapper and so her relationship with Toby grows closer and closer the further Toby tries to distance himself from her.
After a fumbling, furtive attempt to pleasure him on a bus, Shelby reflects:

She was struck by a fresh and potent curiosity. She wanted to know, now, not only Toby's darkness but where he slept and what he ate and what his favorite type of weather was and what made him sneeze...She felt lush.

Meanwhile, Toby's sense of self-knowledge is changing (not necessarily for the better) throughout the kidnapping. He (thankfully) does not sexually abuse his victim. In fact, he does not harm her physically in any way and treats her rather well, bathing and feeding her. Toby alludes to an inner evil that possesses him and it becomes apparent that Toby's crime is a means of testing self will. He dreams of a normal life for himself.

Toby had glimpsed it. While walking alongside Shelby, he'd seen how things could be, how they would be, when Toby had nothing to hold him back, nothing squeezing his soul like a terrible vine...The sun kept going down and it kept coming up, and if Toby could keep clear of the bunker then one of these days when it came up it would find Toby unfettered.

His violence is a mean to test his ability for self-starvation, asceticism. Can Toby resist his urges despite providing himself with an environment within which he may indulge those desires at his discretion? Can he temper his evil nature with the kindness with which he treats his victim?

Brandon's novel is tightly constructed. It is populated by realistically bleak characterizations of the ways in which we fall short of our own aspirations to goodness. His subject, it would seem, is the root of self-loathing that lingers in many people's lives and is at its sharpest in junior high. We aspire to be good but are prevented often by our failure to show kindness when presented the opportunity, to deny ourselves our self-destructive tendencies, to refuse to let self-pity cloud our ability to empathize.

Yet, Citrus County despite the bleak twistedness at its antihero's core and its devastatingly stomach-churning plot is a surprisingly optimistic book in regards to our capacity for empathy. It does not offer pat resolutions to the thorny problem of its characters' inner lives and its resolution is all the more sincere and rewarding for that fact.

Stocks & Bongs

The Financial Lives of the Poets
by Jess Walter
2009, Harper Collins


After reading The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake I was in pretty desperate need of something to read that was far less emotionally taxing. I had recently been wandering around the Andover Public Library and recalled the title of a book that had been recommended to me by a childhood friend. With blurbs on the jacket from both Sam Lipsyte and Sarah Vowell, I correctly assumed this novel would not be particularly heavy lifting.

The Financial Lives of the Poets is as much about dashed hopes as it is about the insidious reach of the financial crisis. The premise of the book is that Matthew Prior, a former journalist, has discovered his quirky website offering financial advice in meter has gone under. His house is being foreclosed on and he cannot find another job.

Prior goes out for milk at a 7-Eleven (amusingly written as "7/11" throughout the book as reference to his mother's conflation of terrorist attacks and slurpees) and winds up getting stoned. From there, he cashes out his retirement account and intends to buy a large quantity of pot and sell it to make a livelihood (a la Weeds) but things go comically awry.

The book is quite funny. There are numerous half-formed sketches of poetry that supplement the narrative - villanelles, haiku, etc. - and enormous comedy provided by his senile father who pines for chipped beef and The Rockford Files and the lawyer-cum-drug dealer who makes Matthew sign amusingly vague contracts before purchasing marijuana.

Throughout the book, Prior smokes a lot of pot and reflects on his Job-like lot in life. These are characterized by the sort of abstract yet oddly discerning thought processes that accompany large quantities of marijuana. To wit:

So I make one phone call, and just like that, we're eating pizza at 6:30. What is this world? You tap seven abstract figures onto a piece of plastic thin as a billfold, hold that plastic device to your head, use your lungs and vocal cords to indicate more abstractions, and in thirty minutes, a guy pulls up in a 2,000-pound machine made on an island on the other side of the world, fueled by viscous liquid made from the rotting corpses of dead organisms pulled from the desert on yet another side of the world and you give this man a few sheets of green paper representing the abstract wealth of your home nation, and he gives you a perfectly reasonable facsimile of one of the staples of the diet of a people from yet another faraway nation.

And the mushrooms are fresh.

Despite the humor, The Financial Lives of the Poets has a fairly dark core. Prior's wife has been conducting an overture to an affair via facebook and the economic recession taints not only Prior's rather cynical outlook but nearly every page of the book, adorning the humor with a rather sharp edge.

As Prior's narrative spins out of control, the humor becomes more cutting and self-destructive. While the characters are a bit flat, reading the book was the perfect antidote to my rather upsetting reading of Lemon Cake.

The Financial Lives of the Poets is notable for its knowing, wearied tone towards the financial crisis. It is offbeat without being downright silly and Jess Walter does not sacrifice seriousness regarding is subject for humor; instead, they play rather perfectly off of one another, each deepening in turn the quality of depth in its counterpart.

The Unbearable Chairness of Being

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
by Aimee Bender
2010, Doubleday


I first encountered Aimee Bender years ago - during my junior or senior year of college, when I was still under the delusion that I was a writer and purchased a copy of the Short Story Writer's Market. Largely a compendium of contacts, agents and publishing houses, the Writer's Market also features interviews with notable writers both of literary and traditional genre persuasion. The interview with Bender described her work as a variety of magical realism, a genre that (thanks to One Hundred Years of Solitude) was at the forefront of my interest at the time.

I ferreted a copy of her collection of short stories (still my format of choice) Willful Creatures away from my library and devoured it rather quickly. I began teaching shortly thereafter and her story from that collection entitled "Dearth", about a woman who unwillingly becomes mother to several anthropomorphized potatoes, became a staple of my classroom resources.

In that story, the woman spends her life craving intimacy but willfully avoiding it, afraid of the emotional entanglements that follow. She is counterintuitively drawn to the very intimacy she shies from and in one rather heartbreaking scene she eats one her potato children whole, voraciously consuming and simultaneously destroying her need for love.

The same heartbreaking inability to justify the pangs of desire and loneliness pervade Bender's new novel The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. I won't waste much space summarizing plot here, in part because there is so very little of it to summarize.

Rose Edelstein is a nine-year-old girl who discovers she has a heightened sense of taste that enables her to identify farms and factories with surprising geographic accuracy and to vicariously sense the emotions of animals and people involved in the process of cultivation, processing and cooking the food she eats.

Her reaction to homemade baked goods is particularly acute, as she discovers when she eats the titular birthday cake and is overcome by emotion: a debilitating emptiness and overwhelming need for fulfillment inextricably imbued by her mother in each bite of the cake.

From this simple but indelible concept, Bender elaborates on the emotional lives of Rose's family using Rose's gift as a means of extracting complicated themes from her compact, lovely narrative in much the same way Rose draws the messy emotions of a baker out of his cupcake.

While reading I could swiftly touch upon some of the simple albeit appealing themes that settle on the novel's surface (for example the writer's desire to capture the inner lives of others, or the forced intimacy of the nuclear family). The longer I've spent in reflection, though, the more I've found some of the more darkly inexplicable themes of this book have been steeping away in the back of my mind - the inevitable chasms of separation that persist despite the intimacy of the nuclear family, how these chasms seem all the wider for the existence of that intimacy, the often crushing, seemingly inevitable loneliness that this intimacy begets.

Rose's family has the skeletal structure of the classic nuclear family: educated but unambitious parents and two children. Moreover, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake does not stoop to muck around in the more cliched American Beautiful representation of the insidious shockingly unexpected underbelly of the suburban dream. That is to say, none of Rose's family is a particularly bad person nor has anyone suffered a major tragedy to account for what is unmistakably brokenness.

The revelation of this brokenness occurs when Rose first discovers her ability and she senses her mother's struggle to find an outlet for her passion and the emptiness that has filled her sense of purpose. With this discovery comes the knowledge that the world of people around here almost unanimously are incapable of acknowledging or confronting their feelings. The layers of emotion Rose can sense in each bite of homemade food betrays its chef - often these emotions are not only go unexpressed but undetected by those with whom Rose interacts.

The worst offenders by far are her family. Each Edelstein is impossibly closed off from one another, incapable of communicating or truly connecting despite their otherwise close relationships. They all avoid the possibility of connection with one another despite the obvious toll this takes on their emotional well being. Even their long-distance grandmother refuses to meet her family, sending inscrutable boxes of possessions and instructing Rose firmly on the phone that she cannot love her grandmother, as they've never met. This woman eventually dies as much of a stranger as she was at the beginning of the narrative.

It is unsurprising, then, Bender renders as her main character a young girl afflicted with a surfeit of emotion; it is as though Rose is condemned to experience not only her pain but the cumulative pain of all of those around her, incapable of coming to terms with their own emotion.

Rose's brother, who seems almost autistic, is the worst offender when it comes to engaging in the world. He retreats to his room, where he spends hours on end alone. He does not converse at the dinner table, preferring instead to read science texts and the nutritional facts off of cereal boxes. He does not seem to be stricken with the generic distaste of immediate family so common amongst his age group; it appears that he simply would prefer not to interact with the world.

Rose's relationship with her father puzzles over the nature of the nuclear family. When watching television with her father, Rose reflects, "It was like we were exchanging codes, on how to be a father and a daughter, like we'd read about it in a manual, translated from another language, and were doing our best with what we could understand."

Bender is clearly not suggesting their relationship is empty or harmful, but seems instead to be touching on the idea of how the idea of familial roles - mother, father, black sheep, younger sister, middle child - interferes with the ability to truly share ourselves. The desire to make ourselves into something normal means adopting these convenient roles and playing our parts until we become surprised to find ourselves acting instead of interacting.

The nuclear family is an idea - an enduring, comforting one - and one can find solace in adopting a requisite role in that idea. Over time, the burden of carrying these roles chafe us and we realize how unfulfilling this role can be. Conveniently, society offers another solution: the deeper connection you have been desiring can be found in romantic and sexual love.

Indeed, this solution presents itself to Rose in the form of her brother's kind friend George, who understands her condition and takes her more seriously than anyone else. But Bender debunks this myth (gently, always gently) when George grows older and distant and finds his own conventional love. Rose is left to make sense of the world on her own; Bender deprives her of the social safety nets of family and marriage and, without them, Rose is left to seek complicated answers to her uneasy questions about why she is surrounded by so much unhappiness.

This unhappiness manifests itself as a singular fear of engaging fully in life. Rose's father, for example, avoids hospitals because he is feels drawn to them. Rose, understandably, tries to convince her father to enter one in the hopes he has a skill like hers that could save people. Still, he refuses. Rose's mother, she of the empty longing-filled baked goods, eventually decides not to confront her messy love for her husband and instead picks up a convenient affair that fulfills her in a simple, unmessy manner.

In one of the more curious turns in the book, Rose's brother begins disappearing for hours on end and eventually she discovers that he has been methodically turning himself into a chair. At first this plot point seems a bit too fantastical, even after the reader all too happily suspends disbelief for Bender's work.

Eventually, though, the chair business becomes the emotional linchpin of the novel. Rose's brother is so incapable of enduring the burden of life that he prefers to become insensate to extricate himself from the obligation of love. Rose speculates that her brother was similarly gifted but that his gift was not as finite as meals and required the transition to senselessness to find peace.

Clearly, the brother is a foil for Rose, who (unlike her whole family) is not afraid of engaging in life; she gives herself to emotion and, uncomfortable though it may be, is possessed by the emotions of others. Rose nobly accepts the burden of vicarious adopting the emotions her family proves incapable of addressing.

This is not an easy choice for Rose. Like the woman in "Dearth", madly consuming her potato baby in an effort to destroy it and to make it wholly a part of her, Rose's gift is (like empathy itself) a curse as well as a blessing.

Early in the book, Rose laments, "I wanted to erase them all. But I also wanted to be them all, and I could not erase them and want to be them at the same time." In this, Bender seems to encapsulate the perfect madness of living, as perfectly plausible an alternate title as the Kundera Bender seems to have lifted from.