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.