Yesterday's Trees, Today's News, Tomorrow's Mulch

The Imperfectionists
by Tom Rachman
2010, Dial Press




I try as routinely as possible to read the Sunday New York Times Book Review to stay abreast of contemporary fiction. Usually this takes place at my friend's camp in Maine, where we spend most of our Sundays throughout the summer working collaboratively on the Sunday crossword. As we sit on the lake dock, we work through our nemesis Will Shortz's thicket of punnery and find our ourselves alternately screaming obscenities in frustration or shouting in joy: "Take that, you piece of ****!" "Mongolia! I ****ing knew it!", etc. In between short bursts of word puzzle concentration and bracing dips in the lake, I usually delve into the Book Review, which on such occasions I read cover-to-cover.


While I would say I only remember to make note of one or two books from any given Book Review, and eventually read only a smaller fraction of these, it is not uncommon to see me a few weekends later with a book in my lap I recently encountered in the pages of the Review. Such a book is usually one accumulating a great deal of buzz or from a particularly ecstatic review (especially if the reviewer is a novelist I admire who contributes to the book review: i.e. Dave Eggers, Michael Chabon, Jonathans Lethem & Franzen, etc.).


This was certainly the case with Tom Rachman's debut novel The Imperfectionists, which I read about in an absurdly glowing review in the pages of the Book Review (by author Christopher Buckley, whose Boomsday sits unread on my bookshelf). A few short weeks later, The Imperfectionists and I spent some time lakeside together.


While the usual pace of my reading is a rather strong clip, Rachman's novel took me three weeks to finish despite its short (under 300 pages) length; it actually stayed with me to separate trips to two different lakehouses (I lead a privileged life throughout summer thanks to my friends). The reason for this is not that the prose is terribly difficult or the plot too intricate to be able to digest easily, but rather that the emotional depth of the novel necessitated a certain languid pace.


The novel's structural conceit is that each of its approximately dozen chapters is a stand-alone short story about one of the employees of a Rome-based international daily newspaper which can be read and appreciated separately as a complete emotional arc or can be read as part of the narrative whole and grow in meaning and substance as Rachman creates opportunities for telling cameos and inter-textual self-reference. In other words, each story stands powerful and gripping on its own, but when combined, create an overwhelming strength greater than the sum of its parts: think Winesburg, Ohio, say, or the Megazord.


Each chapter begins with a headline, a character and his job for the paper and runs the gamut from foreign correspondents and obituary writers to copy editors and managing editors, e.g "'Global Warming Good for Ice Creams' Corrections Editor - Herman Cohen". The subsequent chapter is ostensibly about that staff member, though as the stories accumulate, they begin to appear in one another's stories.


The effect this has on the narrative is interesting in that it endears the novelist and not his characters to us. (In one sense, it is endearing because of its surface cleverness, but that's not worth discussing.) Take, for example, copy editor Ruby Zaga, whose story "Kooks with Nukes" is an affecting portrait of a woman lost in her somewhat solipsistic attitude towards her workplace. Zaga is a perpetual loner, coming to work early to ensure that no one has stolen the chair she placed a special work order to acquire. She perseveres through the workday by mumbling under her breath about her incompetent colleagues.


Zaga's self image is one riddled with superiority and disgust at her favored colleagues and this misplacement of ego is somehow endearing in the same way a slightly ugly dog is, or the Charlie Brown Christmas tree. In other chapters, Zaga is the object of derision fromher colleagues when referenced and is generally seen as a bumbling harpy.


Strangely, though, the affect for the reader here is not increased sympathy for Zaga herself, who comes off increasingly as self-deluded, but rather for the author, whose empathy for his characters becomes evident as though through sleight-of-hand. Rachman ultimately comes off as far more empathetic and caring than any of his characters, who cannot take the time to know one another, despite his cruelty towards them.


And cruel he is. Perhaps the most disturbing and upsetting of the chapters concerns the Chief Financial Officer of the paper, who is set up rather carefully to be a tragically misunderstood figure whose impatience with her colleagues is a defense mechanism in place to protect her from the sorts of emotional collateral that may ensue when she implements a cost-cutting tactic for the paper. Despite the large quantities of sympathy Rachman wrenches out of the reader, he ultimately debases and shames her in what is perhaps the most horrifyingly striking chapter.


While the aforementioned chapter is hardly the only to exhibit sadistic tendencies on the author's part, his proclivity to put on display the loneliness and desperation, there are also several stories of rather touching redemption, as opposed to prolonged suffering and neurotic disconnect. One such story is that of Ornella de Monterecchi, a subscriber to the paper who reads each issue cover to cover, which necessarily takes longer than an actual day, causing her to lag behind be twenty-five years. She stores each issue fastidiously in her library and reads a different issue every day. Ornella forbids from guests and family references to modern politics or history so as not to ruin the events that will transpire, as the plot of a never ending novel, in her daily reading.


This system of reading acts as a suppressor on Ornella until she gloriously frees herself from her inability to let go of the past, making her chapter the most moving in the collection by far.


Each of the stories that comprises this novel is different, leading to an array of perspectives on the success or failure or the human spirit a la Altman's Short Cuts or Forester's Howards End. The novel's scope is therefore terribly honest and realistic in its inability to commit to any given view of the human experience; Rachman is content to be neither bogged down by his characters' inability to better their lives (Irish Girl) nor to be buoyed up by the triumphant rise of the human spirit over adversity (The Blind Side). What's left is an appropriate mix of the two where some people botch their lives, some scrape by, some transcend their experiences - a delicate and finely-wrought mix of tone.


The prose itself is also given to shape-shifting in the same way the novel's tone is. Some chapters are given to long passages of description, some to lengthy bouts of internal monologue, some almost entirely to dialogue. These shifts seem to depend in large part on each character's level of interaction with the world around him. This variety in writing style is by no means schizophrenic in nature; all are united by a larger authorial style and jive with one another in the grand scheme, but do lend the novel a bit of variety in the actual reading.


Ultimately, the strongest impression The Imperfectionists makes on me, other than the virtuosic talent of its author, is its slightly hermetic tone. After nearly a dozen characters and short stories revolving around this newspaper, one is left with the impression that despite the incredibly close working quarters most share with one another, none of these characters truly know each other. Our only glimpses into their inner lives are through the forty pages we spend with each character and as we move on and these characters are again referenced in subsequent chapters or in the afterword at the end of the book, I feel only a lingering sadness that my experience with each character was so short and that I can never feel as close to them again - rather like the emotional experience of staying in touch with a formerly close friend.


Rachman's characters exist together in a maelstrom of activity but despite their mandatory collisions seem not to know or care much for each other, unable to see the trees for the forest even though they're planted right next to each other, lending the novel a decidedly somber tone throughout. It's as though each character is holed up in Ornella di Monterecchi's library, sealed off from the contemporary world and to be cherished one at a time, once and then discarded forever, leaving only the traces of a context that help to inform tomorrow's news.

If You Lived Here, You'd Be Glum by Now

Model Home
by Eric Puchner
2010, Scribner


I have a rather large literary soft spot for contemporary family dramas. The modern American middle-class family, which I am privileged to have taken part in, is a very confusing and tumultuous place to come-of-age. I suppose part of this compulsion of mine has to do with a need to see my own experience somehow captured in the pages of someone else's book (my own attempts to capture it in fiction have fallen sadly short).

Model Home is a novel I read about in the Sunday New York Times Book Review and immediately requested through the miracle of interlibrary loan. While my rather adolescent hope to find a character with whom I could closely identify was stymied, there was something of my own experience in Eric Puchner's depiction of the trappings of adolescence: lusting for a more hard-edged image, sexual misconduct, a desire to project a more human face on one's parents, and a subsequent disappointment when these projections become depressingly real.

Model Home takes place in the mid- to late-eighties and features a family of five living in coastal California. The book is split into three parts, the first taking place in summer of 1985, the second a year later and the third six months after that. The plot traces the lives of the members of this family: a father who is a real estate developer, a mother who makes educational films, a son who plays in a band and lusts after his girlfriend's younger sister, a daughter who loses her virginity to a Mexican security guard, and a much younger son who exhibits troubling attention-seeking behavior like dressing head-to-toe in orange.

Puchner portrays the family as being essentially strangers to one another and yet his authorial perspective is intimate with each; chapters are written in alternating voices of each of the main characters (albeit noticeably avoiding the perspective of the carrot-colored youngest child until very late in the novel) and occasionally some of the supporting characters. Puchner is largely faithful to the close third-person voice; there were very few moments when he (accidentally) provided the perspective of both characters in one scene. In two interesting chapters, he unites the close third-person perspectives of each of these characters who are sharing a common space, producing an effect much like the climax of an Altman film when all the seemingly unrelated characters collide and interact - a nicely ironic touch considering these are members of a nuclear family.

These disparate voices are successfully captured, bringing to mind the incredibly absorbing work Jonathan Franzen did with his cast of characters in another trials-and-tribulations-of-the-modern-American-family novel The Corrections. The most compelling thing about the novel is the outright suspicion with which it treats adults. Puchner's best writing is when embracing the two teenaged children's perspectives. Puchner manages to capture the sexual frustration as well as the confusion of identity of adolescence extremely well - and especially the mistrust of adults inherent in coming-of-age.

Dustin, the son, is an extraordinarily handsome guy - but in a blandly warm way. He is eager to shake off his image as all-American surfer boy through his exploration of gritty alternative bands like the Butthole Surfers and the Stooges, mistakenly thinking that one can cultivate a worldview as simply as building a music collection. This mistake reveals itself shockingly half-way through the book when the reasons behind worldview and attitude are harshly revealed to Dustin. He is subsequently forced to confront the idea that your life experience are not something that you can fashion yourself, a truth that is perhaps obvious, but only until after you've had the chance to discover it yourself.

Lyle, the daughter, is another character developed with a sharp sense for the disappointments that coincide with maturity. Lyle is eager to partake in the adult world - she is a precocious reader - and experiments with adulthood through alcohol and sex. While this scenario is certainly not unique to either literature or life, Puchner develops carefully Lyle's fragile sense of ego with deft hands. She is defensive of her image and, like her brother, works hard to cultivate an identity. Both Dustin and Lyle care greatly about undermining their physical appearance: Lyle is embarrassed by her seeming naivete and Dustin by his approachable good looks.

The siblings both use sex as means to accomplish their quests to confound others' expectations of them. Lyle experiments with a sensitive, although perhaps unhinged, Mexican poet and when the affair goes bad, she is newly embarrassed by her attraction to this strange, broken creature. Dustin's sexual experience goes along similar lines, abandoning his generically pretty girlfriend for her twisted, self-destructive younger sister whose deceptively fragile, outwardly misanthropic edginess Dustin tries to collect her as he does his vinyl.

Their parents are portrayed with none of the same sympathetic identification which Puchner demonstrates towards the children. He writes them as self-involved and unsympathetic, particularly their father whose desperation leads him to deceptive personal and business dealings.

Moreover, Puchner does not seem as gifted in imbuing them with the same level of psychological depth. Both parents are barely developed cliches: the mother a "perfect" liberal housewife who gradually picks up chain-smoking and flirtation with European mean (to rekindle her sense of nostalgia over her lone-gone youthful indiscretions). The father is a husk of a man whose pride is ruined by his inability to provide for his family and who engages in garden-variety infidelity towards his wife.

These are obviously sketches drawn from cliche and imagined (as opposed to lived) experience, at best. (The chain-smoking mother is a particularly weak caricature.) Puchner's perspective is too closely aligned with that of the children that his development of the adults betrays an adolescent's view of parenthood.

I am reminded, for example, of the film The Squid and the Whale, where Noah Baumbach was able to heartbreakingly render the awful pain of coming of age but was unable to portray the adults in question, lacking the same kind of complicated multifaceted depth. Or, for another example, the singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright who writes so well about the difficulty of navigating the youthful quest to develop image and self-worth but whose songs about his parents remain nothing better than underdeveloped sketches, impressions of adulthood marred by lingering adolescent emotions. The portrayal of the adults in all these works are satisfactory on a surface-level only; that is, we accept the kernel of truth in them insofar as they capture how an adolescent views or imagines the adult world while remaining permanently outside it.

Compare these pieces with Rufus's father's own songs about his children, which are heartbreaking in their truthfulness, their willingness not to erect veneers to be studied but rather textured surfaces to be felt. Or, for a literary example, Philip Roth's portrayal of parenthood in American Pastoral, where the main character's uncomprehending grief regarding his daughter's violent reactionary behavior felt confused and alive and not merely studied.

These perspectives on adulthood in Model Home do not mar our enjoyment of the novel, but rather enhance our understanding of the adolescent characters and their own misapprehensions of their parents. These poor characterizations of the parents make the book and its sensitivity towards youth (and youth's struggle for adulthood) more endearing, rather than less.

The plot, while initially quite intriguing, takes a turn for the ridiculous when the youngest child runs away and begins narrating his own section of the book, where he is picked up by a mute who brings him on a Grateful Dead tour of California. This second son narrates his chapters while second-hand stoned and the grace with which Puchner endows the teenaged children evaporates in a misguided attempt to introduce, well, I'm not sure exactly - satire? black comedy?

Thematically speaking, the book plays off the image of the American home successfully. The family lives in a luxurious home, the picture perfect Southern California residence, that it can scarcely afford and which proves to be as false an image of contentedness as does the nuclear family itself. They move instead to one of their father's misbegotten model homes in the desert which is shoddily constructed and which the father had tried to sell to numerous people despite a toxic dump in the area.

There are also mobile homes that stay put and mobile homes that move with a community. It seems almost a joke that this latter "home" is really the most welcoming and communal of all; the Grateful Dead-Heads who use it are more caring and far less concerned about maintaining an appropriate image than the cast of main characters are.

Yet the point seems to be that however false aspects of these homes are, however broken the lives of these people are, they still inevitably form a family. While this family aspires for picture-perfect appearance, its failure in that regard does not dissolve the actual connective tissue keeping them together.

The strength in this book is in the accuracy with which it portrays how very distant from one another the members of a nuclear family are ("distant as satellites," the mother laments) and in the tender development of coming-of-age.

These wonderful qualities are not at all diminished by the inability to conjure up psychologically satisfying adult characters or to sustain the plot's climax without some rather confusing left-field shenanigans. Puchner, quite young as far as I can tell, has certainly has had little enough life experience not to be (thankfully) too far removed from the urgent pathos of adolescence but (unfortunately) also little enough to conjure up the anxieties of parenthood without some fair amount of bathos.

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.