Arrested Development

Buffalo Lockjaw

by Greg Ames

2009, Hyperion

Recently, The Believer magazine named their fifth (or so) winner of the annual Believer Book Award. The award went to a book called I Am Not Sidney Poitier, which I have to admit interests me very little. But a few months earlier, the staff of the Believer had sent out a small postcard asking readers for their suggestions for the most moving and inventive works of fiction that they read in 2009.

I suggested on my card Auster's Invisible, Holt's In the Valley of Kings, and Chaon's Await Your Reply, all of which wound up the reader survey shortlist published recently. At the top of the reader list, in which I was far more interested than the staff award, was a novel called Buffalo Lockjaw by Greg Ames. After a short investigation, I discovered that my local library had a paperback copy and I went right over and picked up.

Buffalo Lockjaw, as its title might suggest, takes place in upstate New York. In reading it, I was reminded of a recent article that appeared in the New York Times regarding the maturation (or lack thereof) of Gen X. While Ames's age is not readily apparent (and I am also more than a bit confused about where generations begin and end), Buffalo Lockjaw would seemingly fit rather well into A.O. Scott's explanation of the inherent silliness of the irony-laden anxiety-riddled over-educated under-achievement that seem to typify that particular generation at first glance.

The main character of the book is one such underachiever, a young man named James who has moved to Manhattan to make something of himself and has fallen somewhat short. James, who is now a greeting card writer (much like Joseph Gordon Levitt in 500 Days of Summer, but less of a romantic), has returned for Thanksgiving weekend to his boyhood home in Buffalo, New York.

James's trip home is fraught with interpersonal peril; he attempts, with hesitation, to reintegrate himself temporarily into his home life, which seems to have more or less carried on without him.

His friends still hang out in the backyard drinking beer, getting stoned, grilling hotdogs. James finds it all too easy (and more than a bit eerie) to slip back into these behaviors; it is as though none of his friends have aged a day since his last winter break from college. For these ambition-less townies, James's move to Manhattan is not entirely dissimilar from his semesters at school. his stymied attempts at success in the world are, for all intents and purposes, the continued false starts of those early collegiate attempts at becoming an adult; while he has made nothing of himself yet, he still might.

It seems that James holds his re-admittance into this slacker circle at an arm's length. James is reluctant to socialize with them and caves from boredom, he doesn't flaunt his career in Manhattan in part from embarrassment at what it ultimately amounts to and in part from humility at what it implies about their own stalled lives. But moreover, James is disturbed by what this smooth transition to old social patterns implies about his life: is it possible he hasn't changed as much as he has thought?

To counterpoint this theme of paranoia about the true extent of one's adulthood, James attempts to ingratiate himself to his nuclear family. James's father is a garden variety local charmer who knows the waitresses at the restaurants and remembers the names of people's mothers. James's sister, a lesbian who brings her partner home to visit, is and always will be more successful than James in everything from earning their parents' adoration to social grace to striking out in the world. James's move to Manhattan pales in comparison to his sister's successful career which has taken her to the Pacific Northwest.

James is unable to make an impression on either his sister or his father as much of a success. James seems unable to shake his post-adolescent personality with either his family or friends; the impression he made as a young adult proves too deep to change, or perhaps the distance he has carved out for himself has effectively eliminated the ability for anyone to witness such a change.

Perhaps the person who might be able to afford James a sense of perspective on himself, his fears about not having matured enough or his inability to reconnect successfully, is his mother, who is in the last stages of Alzheimer's.

Part of James's desperation to be taken seriously as an adult is because he has decided to undertake the emotionally devastating project of euthanizing his mother.

Buffalo Lockjaw, then, seems to express rather perfectly the fear that as you grow older and mature, there will be no one to guide you or to recognize the changes you have been through. James is forever to his family and friends as he was at 19 and while James could easily look outward to serious relationships with women or building a family, Ames directs the reader's attention backward, to the past.

Ames seems to be giving voice to the childhood fear that there will be no one to see your success, to appreciate who you are, and that those we suspect might are forever disconnected from us. James has no one from which to obtain the approval he needs to successful strike out as an adult in the world. His return home, with its specifically adult quest to silence his mother's suffering, is disconcerting.

James does not feel confident in his adulthood when he can too easily mirror his adolescent life and where no one can tell him that it doesn't fit him anymore. In James's Buffalo, you can go home again, but you might find you don't like how easily you belong.

"Hardscrabble" Lives

Irish Girl

by Tim Johnston

2009, University of North Texas Press

Recently, I had an opportunity to see David Sedaris read for the second time in a year read at Boston Symphony Hall. Mr. Sedaris is one of my favorite writers and he is an absolute delight to hear read his sardonic, but incredibly vulnerable, prose.

Sedaris recommends a book written by another writer each time he goes on a new book tour. Last year, he was peddling The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders (for whom I did not particularly care until he published an adorable little story called "Fox 8" in a recent McSweeney's). Sedaris reads from these volumes as part of what I hesitate to call his set. When I saw him most recently, he had selected a book of short stories that recently won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for short fiction, called Irish Girl. He read a very short excerpt and prefaced his selection by insisting that the stories within the collection were very, very dark.

Irish Girl isn't really as dark as I was led to believe. It's stories are reminiscent of Carver in their focus on blue collar people fumbling their already broken (what a jacket writer would prefer to call hardscrabble) lives.

Tim Johnston's stories are full of empathy for his characters even as he tortures them with the full range of his deus ex machina abilities. Johnston's stories, while well-written, are essentially one of many collections in which uncommonly bad things happen to uncommonly normal people.

The title story of the collection was a notable exception. "Irish Girl" tells the story of a young boy who idolizes his older delinquent brother. He forms a special bond with this brother and watches as his brother smokes pot and cigarettes and generally carouses with other maladjusted teenagers.

The boy's father tries desperately to eliminate the possibly corrosive influence the older boy has on his younger brother, but in doing so alienates the older boy with his judgmental outbursts. The younger boy is swept away by his brother as a birthday present and spends the evening with his friends, including the incredibly beautiful titular Irish girl. At the end of the evening, the boy is dropped home by his brother who disdains to spend an evening with the harried father and is subsequently hit by a train in his car. The younger boy's relationship with his father is forever altered after the tragedy.

While I summarize at length (and also comprehensively), I cannot fully convey the beautiful, sad horror of this story, of what it means to be torn from a parent by allegiance to a spurious idol, of the father's sadness and frustration at his inability to preserve a child's innocence.

The entire collection is very readable and I wouldn't shoo anyone away from reading it in its entirety. However, it is the highly visceral title story with its elegiac tone and empathetic point of view that makes Johnston memorable.

Don't Feed the Bears

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Who needs Mars?

Tinkers
Paul Harding
2009, Bellevue Literary Press


Every year, I wait in anticipation for the announcement of the Pulitzer Prize and do my damnedest to request the fiction finalists before the library system gets bombarded with requests. This year, my class prevented me from having access to a computer until very late in the afternoon. I figured to myself, Who really is going to request these books before you? and was content to wait until several hours after the announcement.

In the past, I was happy to discover that the need to request was null, for I had already read the book awarded the fiction prize - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, for example, or Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

While the book was available for request, I was rather surprised to find that afternoon that the Pulitzer website had crashed from an excess of traffic. To further my surprise, I discovered after ten minutes of refreshing the page that this year's winning novel was a work I'd never heard of: Tinkers by an author I'd never heard of, Paul Harding.

Paul Harding, as it turns out, is one of the finest writers I've had the privilege to read in my life. His novel Tinkers takes place on the North Shore of Massachusetts, which coincidentally, is where I live.

Tinkers is about death. The main characters are George, a man reminiscing about his life from his deathbed, and Howard, George's father whose own mortal troubles are recounted not so much in flashback as simultaneously in a time-warping feat of narrative. One man's consciousness bleeds into the other. George's death illuminates his father's life, Howard's life lends gravity to his son's.

But while Tinkers is primarily about death, it is so much more about life - about what the experience of consciousness is, about how to (re-)discover the world around you, about ways of perceiving the physical world, about how to cope with the emotional world, about how the intertwining of our lives necessitates man's need for spirituality.

Most excitingly, though, it's about how good writing can reinvent the world, reinvigorate the soul. Rather than continue writing about the novel, I will instead include a lengthy excerpt from the book (which at a mere 191 pocket-sized pages leaves you no excuse not to read this book). I will warn in advance the the book does indeed contain a narrative (of sorts) and that the sample below is representative of the author's jaw-dropping wordsmithing and is not representative of the way the entire novel reads.

This is a book. It is a book I found in a box. I found the box in the attic. The box was in the attic, under the eaves. The attic was hot and still. The air was stale with dust. The dust was made up of the book I found. I breathed the book before I saw it; tasted the book before I read it. The book has a red marbled cover. It has large pages. The pages are made of heavy paper the color of blanched almonds. The book is filled with writing. The writing is in blue ink. The ink is heavy and built up in places the way paint builds up on canvas. The paper did not absorb the ink. The ink had to dry before the book was closed or a page turned. The blue of the ink is so dark that it looks black. It is only in flourishes tailing off of serifs or in lines where the hand lessened its pressure on the pen that you can see the blue. The handwriting looks like yours. It looks like you wrote the book. It is a dictionary or an encyclopedia of some sort. The book is full of reports from the backs of events, full of weak, cold light from the north, small constructions from short summers. Let me read you an example...

Cosmos Borealis:
Light skin of sky and cloud and mountain on the still pond. Water body beneath teeming with reeds and silt and trout (sealed in day skin and night skin and ice lids), which we draw out with silk threads, fitted with snags of fur or bright feathers. Skin like glass like liquid like skin; our words scrieved the slick surface (reflecting risen moon, spinning stars, flitting bats), so that we had only to whisper across the wide plate. Green drakes blossomed powder dry among the stars, glowing white, out of pods, which rose from the muck at the bottom of the pond and broken open on the skin of the water. We whispered across the galaxies, Who needs Mars?

Such prose moves me to tears. "Skin like glass like liquid like skin." I mean... shit.

Like his protagonists, Paul Harding is a tinker. He twists and pulls the mechanics of being, manipulating syntax and perception, and re-examines the world through his heart-stopping prose. Harding is nothing short of a visionary.

I hope that this excerpt, if not my somewhat dumbfounded recommendation, spurs you to read this book. You won't regret it.

Conventional Cortices

A Single Man

by Christopher Isherwood

1964, Simon & Schuster

A colleague at work who teaches drama suggested this book to me. I dislike very much reading books that are just about to or just have been adapted into films - it seems to cheapen the literary experience and invite inevitable unfavorable comparisons between the two media. (Worse yet is the embarrassment of reading a book with film stills on the cover accompanied by the phrase 'Now a Major Motion Picture!') I'm not sure at one point I will see the film adaptation of A Single Man (probably sooner rather than later, as it stars my former paramour Julianne Moore), but I am rather glad I read the book despite its coinciding with the film release.

A Single Man, by Christopher Isherwood, is an appropriately svelte novel. It details a day in the life of George, a middle aged professor of literature at a college in California. The novel is ascetic in scope; the action is confined to the professor's movements throughout the course of a single day (what will turn out to be his last). The prose is relatively spare and is quite intimate with its subject.

I say relatively spare because of a rather bombastic beginning in which Isherwood describes his subject's physicality in nearly cosmic turns. As though a camera beginning on a tight extreme close-up and gradually pulling back to reveal its contextualized subject and in doing so revealing also the inherent trickery in the distorting effect of such a close up, Isherwood introduces the novels' protagonist. "Waking up begins with saying am and now. That which has awoken then lies for a while staring up at the ceiling and down into itself until it has recognized I, and therefrom deduced I am," Isherwood begins.

This high abstraction of the process of regaining consciousness after sleep is just that - an abstraction. Putting into words such an inherently wordless process is difficult and while Isherwood would begin to look silly should he continue in such a manner, he eventually broadens his frame to establish character, and in some small way, theme:

It stares and stares. Its lips part. It starts to breathe through its mouth. Until the cortex orders it impatiently to shave, to brush its hair. Its nakedness has to be covered. It must be dressed up in clothes because it is going outside, into the world of other people; and these others must be able to identify it. Its behavior must be acceptable to them

...It knows its name. It is called George.

The emphasis here in the beginning of the novel is largely a fatalistic foreshadowing. George is established first as an almost mechanized entity, neurons and dendrites firing or what have you, emphasizing quite clearly the impermanent nature of such machines. Eventually, its gear wear down. Eventually, it will die.

And yet these mechanized neurological feats - brushing, dressing, shaving - are emphatically associated with social obligations and herein lies some of the essential thematic content of the book. George's physical death, the winding down of his gears, is symbolically synonymous with his spiritual death. George dresses because he must be made presentable to the world, and it is this need to be acceptable that has stifled his soul.

Isherwood's protagonist is a middle-aged gay man who is still in the process of grieving the untimely death of a long-term partner. George's relationship contributes largely to the fatalistic vibe of the novel; all things, especially good things, must end.

George's willingness to submit to society's demands (albeit rather sensible ones, like dressing) is a sign of his inner death, a death begun at the loss of his partner. George has become conventional, and is accepted by his neighbors and colleagues.

Initially, this acceptance was confusing - this novel was published after all in 1964, hardly a high-water mark in terms of gay rights (a half-decade before the Stonewall riots, for example). But thematically, George's neighbors are accepting because George has done nothing to challenge them. He has lead a tame, suburbanized lifestyle, attempted to "settle" into a house with a domestic partner and, having failed, has settled further into the complacency of middle age. He has given his neighbors nothing to be angered by except perhaps his own paltry imitation of their lives.

George is angered by his own inability for a less conventional life. He obsesses over books and academia, imagining his intellectual abilities a suitable substitute for the more "Howl"-like expressions of soul-searching for which he yearns and he flirts with sexually ambiguous students who exhilarate him with their freedom from societal constraint. But while George is invigorated by these dalliances with youthful abandon and is comforted by the sense of self-worth that his epistemological investigations through academia provide him, George's life is one ultimately filled with a quiet (read: restrained) anger towards himself for choosing to play by social rules.

In this regard, the book reads as a polemic towards complacent gays and is an interesting read in light of some of the more domestic ambitions of the contemporary gay rights movement: namely, marriage and children. The acceptance (I suppose a better word in this case would be tolerance) George is granted by his neighbors comes mainly from his desire to conform to their standards of expression (notably, of love). Isherwood seems to argue that surely an acceptance based on such a limp aspiration is not worthy of seeking.

George chafes at his own domesticity, snapping at close friends (a middle aged woman, for example, who asks George to move in as though his domesticity has negated his sexuality) and continually thinking a stream of occasionally vitriolic thoughts about colleagues and students. (Isherwood, too, chafes at the conventions and expectations of novel-writing with frequent scatological comments.)

George seizes an opportunity to loosen his shackles when he skinny dips with a significantly younger man (the aforementioned sexually ambiguous student) but this event thrills George for its novelty. He is not a truly adventurous man and is unable, after taking the youth home, to effectively seduce him.

This reprieve: the stripping in public, the bracing cold of the ocean, the drunken flirtations with a more liberated younger man - it all proves to come to naught. George's last grasp at authenticity is a desperate one and his body by the novel's end has caught up finally with his ruined soul.

...In the Friscalating Dusklight

Ghosts of Wyoming
by Alison Hagy
2010, Graywolf Press


During the ELA MCAS every year I stock up with several books. It's hard to get through several days of testing (several hours each) without some brain candy. A few weeks ago, I was forging through Alyson Hagy's Ghosts of Wyoming and had it out on my desk when a colleague stopped by to drop off extra #2's or something. Upon seeing the book, she exclaimed, "Ooh! Ghosts!" While my knee-jerk reaction was to explain that the "ghosts" in question were haunting figures of the past who have imbued Wyoming with a sense of hard-earned history, I just laughed a little and grabbed the pencils.

This turned out to be true. Hagy's stories were indeed populated by those "haunting figures of the past" etc. But imagine my surprise when I discovered my coworker wasn't so off the mark after all - in at least one story in this collection a bona fide ghost appears, an occurrence that in and of itself would not necessarily turn me off. (I do, after all have an enormous affection for magical realism and the likes of Garcia Marquez and Aimee Bender.)

Ghosts of Wyoming is somewhat disjointed in tone. The book opens with a tragic gem of a story called "Border" in which a teenage runaway steals a Collie puppy to be a travel companion during his journey to flee his past. It is a difficult story to read because its emotional impact is quite powerful. It is simultaneously a portrait of people at their best and at their worst, and is about the disappointments that ensue when we confuse the two.

The second story, "Brief Lives of Trainmen", functions as a series of sketches adopting similar voices of people working at a train yard. The story is interesting to read despite its lack of plot. It feels as though it would be better placed as a prologue of sorts to a longer novel. Hagy manages to persuasively capture the voices of these men but does not imbue them with any of the urgency that creates interesting fiction, or even the most basic semblance of conflict.

Up to this point, I was pretty satisfied with Hagy's collection. "Border" was a fine story, "Trainmen" an interesting exercise in voice. The third story in the collection, entitled "How Bitter the Weather", is where she began to lose me. The story concerns a narrator who is sleeping with a man named Armand who has disappeared. It took me about ten pages to figure out whether the narrator was a man or a woman, and by the time I did, it was too late to work up a sufficient emotional reaction to the narrator's plight. (In retrospect, the character is referred to by name in dialogue on the second page of the story, which I apparently missed.)

The ghost story, "Superstitions of the Indians", occurs about half-way through the book and where the stories that have come before it were rough, gritty little stories written in realistic mode, "Superstitions" is downright silly. A graduate student meets a ghost in the stacks at the research library who infects the student with tuberculosis or something and subsequently helps the grad student win the championship in Frisbee golf. It's a turn so befuddlingly off the Wyoming road map Hagy has been crafting that it created a stumbling block that I needed several days off before I could continue reading the collection.

When I finally picked the book back up, the damage had clearly been done. The next piece, "Oil & Gas" was structurally similar to the preceding "Trainmen" story in its alternating points of view and actually did seem to have a plot. But I was disappointed to find that this plot was buried in the story like anthropological artifacts under layers of sand and silt, waiting for an industrious fellow to excavate them carefully. After my encounter with the librarian Frisbee golf-enthusiast ghost, I was far too impatient for such an undertaking and was contented instead to glean snatches of plot when possible.

My experience with the book quickly went from bad to worse. The next story, "The Little Saint of Hoodoo Mountain", was so riddled with arch, self-serious prose that I was frequently laughing out loud, reminded as I was of Owen Wilson's Cormac McCarthyesque nonsense in The Royal Tenenbaums. One passage in particular truly tickled my fancy:

Her mother said dreams were to be saved, written down as soon as you could get from your pillow to a pencil. But Livia almost never remembered her sleep dreams. If she could have designed a dream like she sometimes designed beaded hatbands, the dream would be about flying - soaring over the Red Mask Ranch, gliding up the silver vein of the river into the black shadow heart of the Absaroka Mountains where nobody went except sheep hunters and loners who believed it was important to walk all the way into Yellowstone Park. If she could fly like hat, she'd know where the raspberries first came ripe in August. Where cow elk bedded down for the morning. Where the cutthroat trout were fat, unhidden, unhurried.

Beaded hatbands? This kind of completely bombastic, self-conscious folksiness pervades the rest of the book. It reads like an E. Annie Proulx undergraduate discard. It could also inspire a new parlor-game where at the end of each one of these sentences you could tack on the Eli Cash-ism "in the friscalating dusklight." "Where cow elk bedded down for the morning... in the friscalating dusklight." See? It works!

Once the prose took such a floral turn for the worse, Ghosts of Wyoming was a struggle. It took several days to read only sixty or so more pages.

I was truly surprised to discover that the last story in the collection, "The Sin Eaters", was as strong a story as the first in the book. "The Sin Eaters", based in part on true accounts, tells the tale of a missionary caught in a bloodbath between lawless frontiersmen. The story, whose prose was only marginally less ridiculous than that quoted above, managed to evoke a quietly amoral mood that was riveting. "Sin Eaters", while self-serious, was not self-conscious or forced. The story accumulates great dramatic momentum and I followed the story with a great sense of unease.

Hagy's prose in this final story successfully walks the line between the ridiculous and the gripping:

The gathering heat of the day began to take its toll. Porterfield wiped real and imagined perspiration from his brow. Twice he asked Drumlin to halt the freighter so he might relieve himself among the prairie grasses. Still, the pangs in his bowels rose like air bladders to press against his lungs. Drumlin talked of Lander, of the great mountains there, but Porterfield could not make sense of the driver's words - the phrases seemed strangely purloined from his own unfinished letter to Phyllis.

This reads to me eerie and haunting, unlike the dream ostentation of early passages in the book.

"The Sin Eaters" is long. Its plot gathers and disperses like sand in a windstorm and its characters are obscured from the reader, as though glimpsing figures in turmoil through such a storm, at a distance. The effect is distressing, and all the more magical for it.

While I was relieved to see Hagy redeem her book with the final story, the emotion that lingers for me after having read it is sharp disappointment. Such mastery as is evident in "Border" and "The Sin Eaters" is not maintained throughout the collection. The book is susceptible to sketchy writing exercises and downright silly writing and these missteps are more painful when compared with the highs of its bookend pieces. I'm not sure if the book would have benefited more from a less indulgent editor or a larger pool of writing from which to select the work. Either way, I don't doubt I will read Hagy again, even though it will be with a wary eye.

Stormy Weather

One D.O.A., One on the Way
by Mary Robison
2009, Counterpoint


In college, I read Mary Robison's Why Did I Ever. I can't recall who or what recommended this book to me (I suspect it may have involved by obsessive perusal of Amazon.com listmania! pages). Whatever the circumstances were, they were fortuitous.

Why Did I Ever is a brilliantly funny little book, collected in hundreds of scraps of ideas (the longest chapter was several paragraphs long) and scenes and anecdotes and sketches. Alone each of these was a marvelously cynical little gem and together comprised a very witty novel whose plot was abstract at best but that packed quite a punch.

(A sample chapter:

16.

Something else that makes me angry is that I got too old to prostitute myself. I wasn't going to anyway but it was there, it was my Z plan.)

Why Did I Ever was apparently published at the end of a decade of writer's block and it reads as such; Robison's frustration is evident in the sharp, jagged edges of her worldview.

One D.O.A., One on the Way, Robison's first novel in the eight years since Why Did I Ever was published, shares a lot in common with its chronological predecessor. The chapters are remarkably short (the longest this time a little over a page) and these chapters do not develop a plot so much as they immerse the reader in an experience, the experience of how frustratingly hard it is to know someone intimately despite being privy to their most emotionally revealing experiences.

The object for our consideration is Eve Broussard, a location scout for a movie studio (the main character of Why Did I Ever was a script doctor) who lives in post-Katrina New Orleans. Eve is prevented from fully exploring her work because of the ruins in which Louisiana has been left since the storm and also because her husband, Adam, is sick with a grave illness. (The awkwardness of the coupling's names is mined for all the humor it's worth throughout the book; the main character of Why Did I Ever was named, amusingly, Money.)

Robison's observations about daily life - both its mundane activities and its moments of incredible importance - preclude the need for a traditional plot. If there is one, it's that Eve, while in love with her husband, conducts an affair with his indistinguishable twin brother. This plot is interesting for thematic reasons but the plot is not traditionally structured and the novel is the better for it.

One of the novel's great pleasures is Eve's sarcastic nicknames for the twin brothers: "Smash & Grab are here to join us for lunch"; "I'm with Rhythm & Blues and their parents at an eatery called The Half Moon"; "Here are the twins, I've Seen Fire & I've Seen Rain, propped on their sides on the bed, a chessboard between them", etc.

The novel's subject is ostensibly the collision of the aforementioned facets of life: the trivial and the significant. Because the chapters are so short and alternate so rapidly the discordance between scenes of emotional turmoil and domestic routine are jarring and produce a sense that both of these things are farcical in their own way; the trivial is made more trivial by demonstrating the time we waste on it when there are more important things to consider, and the significant is muted by the distraction of the trivial.

Here, for example, is a scene of the mundane:

[65]

It's 6:30 in the A.M. Collie's opened my bedroom door a little. I see her eye.
"Where do you keep the paper cups for baking cupcakes?" she asks me.
I say, "This is Mars and we're on it."
"They're colored paper cups," she says.
I say, "Oh, those. They're in the drawer with my parakeets."
"Nevermind," she says, and steps in and leans against a wall.
Scooting along the wall now.
I say, "You could go out and rock the porch swing off its chains."
She heaps herself onto the end of my bed as if to climb it. "What's the difference between lying and when you're making things up?" she asks.
"I know of none," I say.
"What about stories in books?"
"They don't count," I say. "They're made of writing."

Now compare that observantly funny (but ultimately insignificant) scene with this shorter observation, which delivers a stronger emotional wallop:

[180]

I have memories of being in love with Adam, sure. Of the music we were listening to before its sound became a ting in a bucket.

To say that these are separate moods would be true; however, the narrator is one and the same. Eve's feelings of disenchantment with her husband are cutting and color all her observations about life. These two perspectives do not really need justifying because they present a beautifully rounded, realistic sense of character.

The book is punctuated further by listing statistics, mostly about public facilities, about a post-Katrina New Orleans. These facts are at the very least disturbing and contribute at length to the murky tone of cherished-things-lost that pervades the novel.

Framing the novel in terms of the wider perspective of exploring what it means to live in New Orleans years after the storm lends considerable gravitas to the book; it feels much less slight than Why Did I Ever but the trade-off is in creating a substantially more morose tone. What's humorous is made darkly so, and what is ruminative or nostalgic is made doubly so.

Eve seems to be a woman dissatisfied with a life that should be satisfying. Her observations are colored by her disenchantment with her husband; even her affair with his identical brother has none of the spice that hackneyed love affairs are usually flavored with; at some points in the novel Eve is unsure which brother she's bedding.

Eve's voice is freighted with reluctant urgency. She is attuned to the world around her and takes in its beauty ("Her champagne hair, immaculate skin, a gargantuan sweater," she observes of a friend), all the while attempting to extricate herself from it.

One D.O.A., One on the Way reads like Eve's journal, a melange of observations of the world and of half-revealed emotional truths. Reading it feels like the intrusion of reading someone's diary and is marked particularly by that sensation of the incredible distance that is maintained even when seemingly engaging in such an intimate act. What is strange, and sad, about reading a diary is in how much is left out - reading between the lines of someone's painfully real emotional experiences. Robison creates the sensation of feeling close to someone while remaining distant, of knowing someone but not wholly, of understanding the why's of someone's life, but not exactly the what's.

The experience of reading One D.O.A., One on the Way is steeped in melancholy, but it is the kind of melancholy I am most familiar with: nostalgic for what once was and can no longer be, acutely observant of the comedies of life, appreciative of the vast, heartbreaking beauty of what it means to live.