Their escapades start off as relatively good clean fun: late nights, bars, bourbon, drugs, pickup trucks, guns, and lots of music. But things change once JAG is introduced to fallenangels—an online network for singles with extreme desires. What starts off as a tongue-in-cheek diversion quickly blossoms into full-blown obsession, and then a kind of spiritual mission. Operating under a series of screen names, JAG becomes convinced that he can offer some brand of sexual redemption to the women of fallenangels.

Soon, JAG has a hard time keeping track of all his online “friends.” The site crashes; he jeopardizes his church job in order to keep fallenangels alive. His overlapping online identities compete for control of his psyche. Cyrus and other flesh-and-blood friends disappear. The reverend turns attention toward political influence. JAG’s hopes for a life with his son look more and more unlikely. In the book’s final chapters, JAG crosses the line into violence and desperation.

This novel is exceedingly good at what it does. Few writers in García’s peerage could pull so many raunchy sex scenes so artfully. The narrator’s eclectic love of music is palpable and endearing. Much of the novel handles both sides of rural America’s cultural divide—reverend included—with balance and empathy. Cyrus—ostensibly a sidekick and minor character—is a beautifully rendered 21^st century Southerner. In fact, I’d argue that one of this novel’s greater triumphs is its refreshing vision of Dixie: finally, a piece of fiction that frees the South from those same tired, gothic tropes—what Barry Hannah called “the canned dream of the South…a lot of porches and banjos.” While it’s true that the Klan still marches through the streets in badbadbad, it must compete with a Gay Pride Parade across town.

badbadbad is not without its problems. The narrator’s brother and son are both characters whose promise doesn’t fully pay off. And though it’s well executed, there’s a lot of on-screen messaging—which, while it may be true to life, tends to grow tedious on the page. Most unfortunately, the exact nature of JAG’s mission on fallenangels is never fully fleshed out; it never seems to be about salvation so much as getting laid.

Still, this book is fast, fun, irreverent, and unlike anything else in the fiction aisle. García’s prose and imagery are well rendered and perfectly matched to his subject. Many of his scenes would turn zany and cartoonish in the hands of a lesser writer; his gift is the ability to describe excess with craft and heart. Totally fearless in its treatment of religion, race, sex, and rural America, badbadbad breathes fresh air into what sometimes feels like a stuffy literary landscape.

Extras

• Read the first three chapters of badbadbad.
• Here’s an interview with Jesús Ángel García at The Nervous Breakdown, where he was a Featured Author in July 2011.
• Below, watch FEAR, Part I of a five-part badbadbad documentary (also edited by García) featuring interviews with his readers from across the U.S. You can also listen to a six-song sampler from the badbadbad soundtrack, or check out the book’s chapter-by-chapter YouTube playlist.

It is a flawed argument. As the narrator makes clear for just under 200 pages, there are also people who talk about themselves in the second person. The character shares a number of qualities with his creator: a last name that rhymes with “jock itch”; a son named Owen; residence in New Orleans. One cannot help but wonder to what extent Yakich is using the second person to talk about himself as well.

That potential juxtaposition is wrenching, since the narrator of A Meaning for Wife is a recent widower, whose wife’s unexpected death hovers over nearly every page of this book, set during the weekend of the narrator’s twentieth high-school reunion (class of ’88). Bringing his toddler back to his parents’ home for the occasion, the narrator faces plenty of demons from his past, including his father’s schizophrenia. But somehow, Yakich infuses this story with humor.

Readers can have strong reactions—not always positive—to the second-person point of view. Most of us can think of a handful of highly successful short stories that rely on this narrative technique; successful novels with second-person narrators, however, seem fewer. Since I’m continuing to experiment with second-person storytelling in my own writing, I wanted to see how Yakich managed to sustain his narrator’s voice for the length of an entire book. I discovered that at least two writerly tools helped him: dialogue, and plenty of narration that comes from but is not necessarily about the narrator.

A brief, intriguing mention in the December 2011/January 2012 issue of Shelf Unbound magazine led me to this novel from Ig Publishing, which also brought us Jacob Paul’s excellent Sarah/Sara. That Yakich’s primary literary reputation is as a poet also drew me as I recently read another debut novel from a poet—Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station. It turned out to be one of the most impressive books I read last year. A Meaning for Wife sets a high bar for 2012, too.

Further Links and Resources

• Read an interview with Mark Yakich about A Meaning for Wife, second-person narration, and more.
• Learn more about Ig on the publisher’s website.
• Here are some samples of Yakich’s poetry. His collections include The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine, Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross, and The Making of Collateral Beauty.
• With Loyola University-New Orleans colleague Christopher Schaberg, Yakich has co-founded Airplane Reading, a site that was started “to treat ‘airplane reading’ seriously.” Yakich and Schaberg have also recently published Checking In/Checking Out, a nonfiction book that reflects their individual experiences with and attitudes toward air travel.

Perhaps the only category of reader not listed is you, the future FWR-referred reader, introduced to The Georgia Review through this write-up—or perhaps through the random drawing for a free subscription that will occur next week.

But don’t be intimidated—you’ll be amongst friends right from the Table of Contents. At the end of the Spring issue’s foreword, Corey announces the journal’s nominations for the National Magazine Awards competition. In fiction, Corey and his colleagues chose to sponsor the Pushcart Prize-winning “The Lobster Mafia Story” by Anna Solomon, whom Fiction Writers Review interviewed just a few weeks ago and whose debut novel, The Little Bride, was named our Book of the Week.

“The Lobster Mafia,” was, in fact, my introduction to Solomon’s work. The story explores the relationship of a wife and husband in the aftermath of a violent crime the latter commits with a gang of fellow lobster catchers. The men take the crime to their deathbeds, which is where we meet the narrator, Marcella, tolerating suspicious glances from the gang’s widows after her husband’s funeral. From the first page onward, we quickly learn she won’t grieve him so much as reflect on their marriage, rooted in Boston’s North End right beside the pride, resentment, and repression that kept them there:

They knew that I was not from here, either, that I’d grown up in Boston’s North End, praying to be delivered from the crowded, garlic-stinking streets, from family, from spinsterhood, from tackiness; that when Bobby finally found me, I was grateful to him the way you are grateful when the hairdresser makes your hair into something it isn’t, though you feel a little nervous, every time the wind lifts, that the style won’t last.

Emma, a curious young neighborhood girl, becomes the catalyst that helps Marcella understand how and when her marriage turned. Finding the freedom to tell Emma her story gives Marcella the freedom she never had when holding it inside.

In her interview with Sara Schaff here at FWR, Solomon states, “I actually feel like a really masterful short story is harder than a good novel because it’s such a demanding form. It feels much more particular, and if things are not perfect, it’s much more obvious.”

The Georgia Review has shared this commitment to storytelling since its founding in 1947. Heading toward its 258th issue, the journal has been recognized by the National Magazine Award in multiple categories: “Essays,” Single-Topic Issues,” “Fiction,” and—unsurprisingly, given this list’s breadth—“General Excellence.” But besides winning awards, the journal’s careful curating of stories, essays, poetry, reviews and art has helped it survive the test of time, which of course has included budget cuts and new production processes.

This curating has brought readers work from the likes of Joyce Carol Oates, George Singleton, Robert Olen Butler, William Faulkner, and Harry Crews. I discovered two pieces by the last in the most recent Winter 2011 issue: an essay in which Crews shares the real-life inspiration for the character Didymus in his novel The Gospel Singer, and an excerpt from the novel itself.

Though the first piece is nonfiction and second fiction, they read as a one-two punch of breathless narrative. In “We Are All of Us Passing Through,” Crews tells how he rode across the country fighting frostbite and a rational—yet hilarious—fear of rape at the YMCA, only to come face-to-face with something that represents the Devil and Jesus and what Crews is sure is his impending bloody murder.

Ten years after escaping the dreaded Y, this “wasted night” returned to the author when he set out to write The Gospel Singer, and the fourth chapter of the novel—excerpted later in the issue–shows how this real-life inspiration manifests itself through an imagination as vivid as Crews’. Having read Classic Crews: A Harry Crews Reader a few years ago, I relished the rare opportunity to cross-reference the moment of inspiration against the story it birthed. Not surprisingly, what emerged from that moment was wholly different, informed by the subconscious instead of the factual settings, characters, and descriptions that inspired it. Rather than simply narrate what had occurred in the YMCA, or create a character with a similar physical build or voice, Crews transferred the spirit of insidious evil from his night in the YMCA into Didymus. Crews’ nightmare gives form to Didymus’s motives and perspective, the justified heartlessness with which he operates.

Now’s as good a time as any to let editor Stephen Corey address you with our Journal of the Week question set:

What is the role of The Georgia Review in today’s literary community, be it for readers or writers?

Picky though this may seem, I find myself uncomfortable with the notion of a “role,” which to me implies, variously, something fixed, something “played,” and something about which one might allow oneself to feel self-important. I’d rather try to say a little about what I think The Georgia Review “does” that might be noteworthy within the broad literary community.

• We are among a relatively small number of magazines that regularly gives substantive space to four genres: essays, short stories, poems, and reviews.
• We have a special if understated commitment to publishing on a regular basis the most outstanding environmentally-conscious writing we can find, having featured such committed authors and thinkers as Barry Lopez, Pattiann Rogers, and Reg Saner. If we have no Earth we can live on tolerably and humanely, we will have no “literary community.”
• We have managed to institute and to maintain a payment scale for our contributors that may not be decent but is at least more than a token: fifty dollars per published page for prose and four dollars per line for poetry.
• We give a fair shake to every submitted manuscript because we recognize there is no predicting the source of the best pieces of writing—and this equal treatment of submissions is what leads to our publishing a significant number of previously unpublished and scarcely published writers. (I never use the term “slushpile” except when denouncing it, and I forbid my staff from using it or thinking in its shadow.)
• We are heavily and sympathetically hands-on editors, working closely with our contributors to make their manuscripts as strong as possible before they go to press. Our writers do the great bulk of the work, of course, but I believe that good editorial work can improve even the best writing by a few percentage points. A few writers are annoyed by our proactive approach, but the great majority of them are appreciative—and even come to enjoy the back-and-forth effort.
• We are committed to producing print issues whose design and production details we take just as seriously as we do the manuscript details. If the world reaches a point where it has no need for beautifully printed books and journals, that world will have no need for The Georgia Review.

How do you see The Georgia Review’s mission and tastes evolving in the next two years? Will the rise of digital publishing impact the composition of The Georgia Review?

The stated mission of The Georgia Review is to present the best thought, writing, and visual art to an audience of intellectually open and inquisitive readers, both nationally and internationally. The tastes of the journal are, like those of any similar publication, those of its editor(s). The only ways these may evolve in the short term will be as they are incrementally influenced by whatever submissions are brought to bear upon the editorial staff’s thinking and feeling. I am quite certain any such changes would of necessity be small, yet at the same time they will be vital because The Georgia Review can be nothing except the communal, somewhat serendipitous creature produced by writers and editors in concert.

Sometime in 2012 we intend to make available by paid subscription a digital version of The Georgia Review’s print edition. The latter will remain the heart and soul of our operation, but we believe we can now offer an onscreen edition that, for those readers who want it, can give a mirror experience of our printed pages. (We have been offering various behind-the-scenes extras on our website for some time, and we will continue to develop those in the coming years.)

If you could put three items in a time capsule (or USB drive) to be opened in 1,000 years that would provide a snapshot of The Georgia Review’s aesthetic today, what would they be?

Well, the capsule can’t be sealed just yet because one of the three items isn’t ready to go. I’d include a copy of our Winter 2001/Spring 2002 double issue, which gives a retrospective of some of our best essays from the first fifty years of the journal, and a copy of Spring 2011—a retrospective of stories from the past twenty-five years that picks up where our forty-year retrospective (Spring 1986) left off. The third item, nonexistent, is a follow-up to our forty-year poetry retrospective (Fall 1986)—an issue I hope to bring out in 2013.

What album is playing on the The Georgia Review stereo these days?

See What Tomorrow Brings by Peter, Paul and Mary. I could write an essay on why I’m giving this response to such an impossible question, but I won’t. I’ll leave it to readers to spend a couple of years with the journal to see whether they can figure out some reasons behind my choice.

Bower House Writers' Retreat

Beyond its core publishing missions, The Georgia Review serves the public with ongoing literary programs. You might recall the 1995 Cultural Olympiad, carried out in conjunction with the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. The Georgia Review produced two special issues for the signature event, as well as organized the largest-ever gathering of Nobel Laureates in Literature.

They’re also grooming future Laureates with a newly established writers’ retreat in Canon, Georgia. The hotel-turned-home will boast literary readings and events in addition to its Writers in Residence programs.

This March, you’ll be able to catch up on The Georgia Review in one fell swoop with their new book from the University of Georgia Press, Stories Wanting Only To Be Heard: Selected Fiction from Six Decades of The Georgia Review.

Until then, head to The Georgia Review’s official site for subscription and submission information, back issues, excerpts, and much more. Completing the southern (online) hospitality are the journal’s blog, Twitter feed, and Facebook page.

~

As a special bonus to readers of Fiction Writers Review, we’ll be giving away three free subscriptions to The Georgia Review! If you’d like to be eligible for this week’s drawing (and all future ones), please visit our Twitter Page and “follow” us.

For those of you already in the FWR Twitter family, you know our presence there exists in part to inform followers of what’s happening here on the site, as well as to update the community on literary trends, worthwhile links, etc. We couldn’t be happier to see this role expand in a way that allows us to put journals we love in the hands of readers who will love them too.

On the boat, we were mostly virgins.  We had long black hair and flat wide feet and we were not very tall. Some of us had eaten nothing but rice gruel as young girls and had slightly bowed legs, and some of us were only fourteen years old and were still young girls ourselves.  Some of us came from the city, and wore stylish city clothes, but many more of us came for the country and on the boat we wore the same old kimonos we’d been wearing for years – faded hand-me-downs form our sisters that had been patched and redyed many times.

As an introduction, this style of narration intrigues. As the mode for the entire book, will such artifice lose its charm?  I began to long for one character, one story, one plot I could hold onto.  Instead, I got a “list” novel.  Lists have long been employed, and with great effect, in poetry.  However, in a novel, merely listing what might happen to each ‘we’ in a narrative burdens the reader, and makes her complicit in the outcomes, no matter how beautifully the sentences string together.

Do we still need the Aristotelian notion of protagonist and antagonist?  Must one create rising tension?  Is a Greek chorus still drama?  How far can the bounds of narrative be stretched and still provide satisfaction?  Perhaps satisfaction is not Otsuka’s goal. The Buddha in the Attic puts forth a collective unconscious in which individuality, our particular stories, are rendered null and void.  These stories wind down many paths, as though Otsuka has thrown down the gauntlet: will the reader follow a story that explores each road, including those not taken?

Extra

Click the streaming audio below to hear Julie Otsuka interviewed on WNYC’s The Leonard Lopate Show:

Grossman proudly displays nerdy genre cred with allusions to prominent works from fantasy legends like C.S. Lewis, Ursula K. Le Guin, and J.K. Rowling. But he continues the work he started in Book One: upend the tropes! No derivative fantasy or a genre paint-by-numbers found here. Fillory is no Narnia, but a world being torn apart by its own gods. The latest installation continues to play with reader expectations. Grossman pushes further into the subversive territory of what real magic looks like and how far Quentin—and readers—will follow.

The Magician King picks up where The Magicians left off: Quentin and his friends—Eliot, Janet, and Julia—reign as the kings and queens of Fillory. Peace and idleness grow stale for Quentin, and jonesing for adventure he volunteers for a sea voyage to the outer islands with Julia to collect back taxes, aligning with the spirit of Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Once there, Quentin hears the fable of “The Seven Golden Keys,” a story about a man who loses his daughter and searches for her through of a network of gateways unlocked by magical golden keys. The tale holds the secret to preventing unfeeling gods from sundering magic from all worlds. The first golden key leads Quentin and Julia back to earth where they reunite with Quentin’s schoolmates and start their Sisyphean task of returning to Fillory.

While on earth, Julia introduces Quentin to the desperate, anarchical world of hedge witches and itinerant magicians. She is the only character to fail the Brakebills entrance exam, and Julia’s outsider status gives Quentin access to a network of mortals and immortals that the establishment rejects. This seedy underworld has its own cryptic structure and rules, and Julia’s scramble to learn magic through bouts of depression has a timely ring to it. Anyone tried looking for a job lately? Still, in this instance at least, hard work prevails. Julia is obsessive enough to memorize arcane languages, painful hand positions, and obscure cosmological theory, and thus reclaims magic from the privileged, the institution.

As a magician king, Quentin exchanges schoolboy melancholy for some confidence, though the traits that made his character lovable in the first novel—hopeless idealism and naive ambition—persist. Quentin still dreams about leading other lives in still other worlds (for some, one magical realm is not enough). Face to snout with a river dragon, Quentin fantasizes:

Somehow in the back of his mind he’d vaguely thought that the dragon might want to be his friend, and they would fly around the world solving mysteries together.

This moment is pure Quentin. Even in the face of marvels, he always wants more.

Grossman’s fictional landscapes are consistent and concrete. The rules and consequences for magic are still absolute, and his fantasy settings retain the patina of the quotidian. The underworld where the dead gather is an aging middle school gym with crappy board games with pieces missing. Grossman makes allowances for the passage of time between this and the first novel and embraces the possibility of magic as progressive. When Julia and Quentin sneak onto the Brakebills campus, the waiting dean explains that Brakebills upgraded their magical security system and can identify both intruder and intent within a certain radius.

These details plant the novel in the contemporary world, and Grossman considers how the convenience of modernity translates to his magical. Technology plays a greater role in this narrative. When Josh creates a portal from Italy to England, he uses satellite maps on the internet to pinpoint the portal’s stopping location. One character defends her use of a smart phone by saying, “But I used magic to hack it.” Technology enhances spellwork. Grossman builds a world where the real and the imagined intertwine in unexpected ways.

The Magician King tells of the hero’s journey, a lineage drawn from the great epic sagas, from the Nibelungenlied to Tolkien. However, Grossman refuses Quentin his overarching desire to return to and stay in Fillory. Being a hero is a risky business and heroes don’t always get what they want, even if they end up on the winning side. The parting image of Quentin roaming the Neitherlands, a series of portals to other worlds, acts as a foil to his longing to be exactly that: between worlds. The sly and roundabout ways that Quentin’s wishes are fulfilled remind one of another ancient form: the fairy tale. Grossman revives it with panache, and just the right amount of irony.

Further Links and Resources

• Follow Lev Grossman on Twitter: @leverus



• Get the inside scoop on the television pilot script of Grossman’s first book in the trilogy, The Magicians (via io9), including a pretty sweet artist’s rendition of Alice entering Brakebills.
• Interested in losing yourself in a fantasy world this winter? Read Leslie Clements’s review of The Magicians, and get started on the series itself. (Plus, you can read this dishy post on Grossman’s blog about the gratification of seeing a larger audience for the books, returning home from a book tour, and the tantalizing promise of a third—and probably final!—book in the series.)

Everett’s prose does not aim at flowery. In fact, the only elevated passages deal with Walker’s one passion outside his job—fly fishing the mountain streams of his jurisdiction. The straightforward, dialogue-heavy style of Assumption creates a cinematic feeling, allowing for a quick read. This refusal to editorialize allows the author to depict the West’s underclass without judgment or condescension. Prostitutes, meth addicts, hayseed bigots—the people Ogden must deal with—typically antagonize him for being black, yet the deadpan narration conveys their straitened lives with empathy.

To Everett’s credit, these novellas stretch the mystery genre’s formula. Some of the series’ strongest moments are Ogden’s many conversations with his mother, a woman constantly fretting over her son, always foisting food on him. These tender scenes take what could have been a familiar, hard-bitten protagonist and push him into surprising, real, and—at times—humorous territory. For example, in my favorite exchange, Ogden’s mother needles him for developing a crush on the daughter of one of the murder victims.

If the first two novellas take an expansive view of what a mystery can be, the final installment aims to subvert it outright. Specifically, a shift in point of view promptly throws everything that comes before into question. I won’t spoil the twist, but once you close the cover of Assumption you can’t help but feel that the book has flown in the face of convention. Rather than neatly solving its final puzzle, Assumption leaves us more mystified than ever, wondering if there can ever be such a thing as “case closed.”

Extra

• Listen to “The Appropriation of Cultures,” an Everett story that deals with race and class tensions in a bar full of drunk frat boys, and a nineteen-forty Martin guitar with a Barkus-Berry pickup. It’s read here for Selected Shorts by Ruben Santiago-Hudson.

The novel’s protagonist, Benjamín Chaparro, is essentially a bureaucrat in the Argentine judiciary: a deputy clerk and chief administrator of its investigative court in Buenos Aires. The novel opens sometime in the early nineties. Chaparro is about to retire and begin writing a manuscript of his own. Ostensibly it’s about a man named Ricardo Morales, whose young wife was the victim of a horrific rape and murder twenty-five years before.

Sacheri has said that “writing is a special way to read,” and here Chaparro’s writing constitutes a close reading of—even as it’s mixed with the feeling he’s tampering with—the experiences implicating a group of characters. Included in his account are his alcoholic but cunning assistant and best friend Pablo Sandoval; Irene Hornos, a court judge and the woman Chaparro has secretly loved for nearly thirty years; the crime victim, Liliana Colotto, and her widower, Ricardo Morales; and Isidoro Gómez, Liliana’s attacker turned henchman for the Argentine government. Chaparro’s tone is by turns ironic, self-deprecating, questioning, and sincere.

Through both chance and disposition, the crime makes Chaparro a sort of unwilling detective. The Secret’s plot employs the familiar patterns of a mystery or detective novel. Sacheri, who also teaches high school and university-level history and economics, is interested in literature that is preoccupied with ordinary lives but also grapples with socio-political, historical, and philosophical questions. In a recent interview, he articulated a belief that literature’s complexity should emanate from the multiplicity of contacts it allows the reader—with other reading, with his or her own interiority, with that of other people:

At times I’ve seemed to notice that for some, the most laudable form of complexity is opacity… An author who contemplates his navel and a reader condemned to the contemplation of some other person’s navel. I’ll sound unforgivably profane, but that concept doesn’t satisfy me. Not as an author and not as a reader.

The detective/mystery plot serves Sacheri’s position well. I think of Roberto Bolaño, Julio Cortázar (Sacheri cites his earlier work as a major influence), and even Alice Munro as other writers who have used the popular form masterfully as a way to engage with rigorous ideas and create rich, complex experiences in the mind of the reader. Sacheri’s novel experiments in this way with tone rather than form. Some scenes have a madcap, schmaltzy quality—as when Chaparro and Sandoval collaborate to trick an uppity judge into signing off on some court documents—reminiscent of the most satisfying TV comedy writing. These moments are entertaining to read, and they also serve to fully render character and illuminate the weaknesses of the court system through humor. In this way, the novel indeed plays with form differently than both traditional detective novels and its film adaptation.

The book’s complex structures are a strength, serving its particular themes. In an author’s note, the mention of “the bloody Argentina of the 1970s, which occasionally appears as the background of the story narrated here” strikes me as a sardonic understatement. Chaparro picks up on a photographic clue that helps identify Isidoro Gómez as a suspect, and his comment that “…I’ve always liked looking at things a little sidelong, focusing on the background instead of the foreground,” points us to a way of looking at the novel as a whole; its historical “background” is equally significant.

In the film adaptation, the period surrounding Argentina’s Cámpora government and its Dirty War indeed functions as a menacing, all-pervasive backdrop. In the novel, John Cullen’s translator’s note provides critical information for readers who come to the book without knowledge of this time period, providing explanations like the following:

[A] time of great turbulence in Argentina culminated in the so-called Guerra Sucia, the Dirty War, which lasted from 1976 to 1983. During these years, Argentina was the chief sponsor of massive and systematic political violence, whose victims included…students, activists, trade unionists, teachers, journalists, and leftists in general. In such an unstable and dangerous environment, even the basically apolitical Chaparro is at risk.

The "grandmothers" protesting the lost generation from the dirty war

This environment transcends setting to become both structural enclosure and subject matter. It has a direct impact on the court system where Chapparo works as well as the crime’s ultimate consequences for Morales, Gómez, and Chapparo himself.

The complex hierarchies of the court judicial system and the labyrinthine vault where cold case files are archived are Borgesian labyrinths where power, guilt, and accountability are distributed and refracted between people and the systems that bind them together. Indeed, Chaparro often struggles with the shady boundary between the implicit and the complicit. He frequently calls attention to the way personal attitudes and actions—often his own—can incriminate individuals. “We’re all cowards, it’s just a question of who frightens us enough,” he reflects after finding a colleague with military connections has secured an order to suspend Liliana Colotto’s murder investigation indefinitely. Chaparro wishes that the judge in charge of the case had held his corrupt colleague accountable: “My stomach turned at the thought of that son of a bitch getting away with such rank malfeasance,” he says, but then admits, “but after all, I was idle and pusillanimous too, in my way…The interview with Batista left a bitter taste in my mouth. I felt somehow implicated in this injustice done to some and the sinister impunity granted to others.” How are individuals implicated when systems are corrupt? What is the mechanism by which those implicated become complicit? Who is responsible for justice and punishment in the absence of a trustworthy state? How does violence at the state level breed violence between individuals?

Because Sacheri was integral to the writing of the film adapation, it’s interesting to consider the two works as companion texts with differing strengths. Sacheri says that his characters became more complex under the gaze of director Juan José Campanella. I agree. One example is the scene in which Chaparro interrogates murder suspect Isidoro Gómez, attempting to extract a confession. In the novel, Sandoval appears at work still drunk after a night of carousing. At first it seems that he threatens to derail Chaparro’s interrogation. He throws both characters off guard when he begins a line of half-joking questioning that ends with Gómez blurting out—in pride and self-defense—that he indeed was responsible for Colotto’s rape and murder. In the novel, this moment is both a repugnant and triumphant one, revealing Sandoval’s brilliance (and Chaparro’s doubt of him) at the same time as it reveals Gómez’s insecurity.

In the film, Irene is the pivotal character in this interrogation—gorgeous, self-possessed, and very pregnant. Until this point, we’re not entirely sure Isidoro Gómez is capable of the crime he’s suspected of committing. His claims of innocence seem convincing. He comes off scared and timid and somewhat bewildered. But Irene surmises correctly that if he’s the right one, hitting him where it hurts will cause a certain effect. She dismisses him as a viable suspect based on his lack of masculinity and strength, speculating aloud in blunt terms why surely he can’t be the one. And this is finally what makes him lose it: he punches her in the face and defiantly screams his confession in the most vile and violent detail.

This use of her character and the issue of her pregnancy resonates on several levels. It creates a parallel with Liliana Colotto, who was two months pregnant at the time of her rape and murder. We rarely ever see this variant on justice: a young pregnant woman ingeniously provoking a man into an indignant declaration of guilt for a violent crime against another young pregnant woman. It’s both Irene’s sexuality and vulnerability in this moment that allow her to wield power—she secures the confession they need to send Gómez to jail—and modulate the accumulation and release of tension in the scene. The film’s somewhat richer development of character (and by extension, plot and parallels between characters) ratchets up the emotional stakes and rings on a deeper psychological register than the novel.

But what’s less visible in the film is one of the book’s great strengths: the trope of the novel within the novel. Chaparro is uncertain about the whole enterprise—why he wants to tell this story, if he should be writing it, and what it’s really about: “…[I]t’s not my story I want to tell,” he writes by way of introduction, “it’s Morales’s story, or Isidoro Gomez’s, which is the same story but seen from the other side, or seen upside down, or something like that.” His uncertainty allows readers to witness his writing as a process, and, as a result, this foregrounds the construction of the story as a whole. The novel alternates between third-person chapters narrated through Chaparro’s consciousness, titled with words and phrases like “Retirement Party,” “Cinema,” and “Coffee;” and Chaparro’s numbered, first-person-narrated manuscript chapters. These chapters are even typeset in different fonts. In “Cinema,” we read that “[Chaparro]’s anxious about how to continue, how to recount what happened to those people. He wonders if that’s the feeling writers have when they tell a story, a certain sense of omnipotence as they play with their characters’ lives.” Later:

Chaparro rereads the opening sentences of his new chapter and hesitates. Is that a good way to start this part of the story? he wonders…Can a single human action—in this case, a monumental drinking binge—be the cause that changes another’s destiny, assuming that such a thing as destiny exists?

The crime that ties Chaparro to Liliana Cotorro, Ricardo Morales, and Isidro Gómez is a bloody and visceral metaphor for Sacheri’s exploration of the relationship between a single human action and its consequences. The Secret of Their Eyes (originally La pregunta de sus ojos, or The Question of Their Eyes) is a supremely accessible novel and a thrilling page-turner whose most nuanced tensions lie in the relationships between its structures and characters and the questions that these pose. Sacheri says that the book is “a reflection on punishment.” Readers are invited to ask, who is responsible? How are we all implicated? And how is the longing for love like the longing for justice?

Further Links and Resources

In The Art of Fielding, debut novelist and co-founder and editor of N+1 magazine Chad Harbach taps into this ephemeral baseball consciousness through four characters at Westish College, a fictional small liberal arts school on Lake Michigan. There’s the hot baseball prospect at shortstop, Henry Skrimshander; his catcher and mentor, Mike Schwartz; the school president, Guert Affenlight; and Affenlight’s once-estranged daughter Pella, returned to her father’s school after the dissolution of her marriage.

This four-person starting rotation, if you will, offers up infinite pleasures through alternating points of view, all in close third-person. The protagonists possess clear, distinct voices and lovable affects, rendered in prose as pristine as a freshly mowed outfield. Harbach is particularly effective at rendering the quirky particularities of a team’s collective personality, the nicknames (Buddha, Schwartzy, The Skrimmer, Suitcase) and superstitions (no haircuts before game day, the inspirational quote in the pre-game huddle, yoga on the field). The novel’s sense of humor is one of many reasons its appeal extends beyond baseball fans without disappointing die-hards.

On a micro level, the sense of place—a Midwestern college campus on Lake Michigan—feels rich and real. Harbach achieves this verisimilitude using clean, bright descriptions that are always clear and straightforward. The characters’ physicality highlights both setting and theme without weighing down the language, as in this locker room description: “As he twisted his combination lock in its casing, right left right, he could sense a gentle depression, like the hollow of a girl’s neck, each time he reached the right number.”

The same could also be said of the landscape:

Shreds of clouds blew past the setting sun, causing shadows to scurry rodentially over the grass. To his right rose the big stone bowl of the football stadium; to his left stretched Lake Michigan, which this afternoon was colored a deep slate blue that perfectly matched his bathroom floor.

And then, of course, there’s the narrative itself—that of a storied shortstop who comes upon hard times, and of those around him. The archetypes of College Novel and Baseball Novel are as well-worn as the path to first base, but the story isn’t solely restricted to the often clichéd worlds of sports or academia. Harbach introduces complex, intellectually engaged characters, well-versed in Melville and Emerson in particular, Eliot occasionally, Greek mythology often. Far from casual name-dropping, the characters’ ongoing dialogue with these canonical texts makes Moby-Dick et al. an integral part of the narrative itself. A college athletics setting allows for and appreciates the blending of sports and scholarship.

In a climactic example, the characters reenact a famous Emerson rite. At another moment, Affenlight broods on the post-modern “Prufrockian paralysis” of Bill Blass Disease, when a player’s mind keeps him from executing simple tasks on the field. In this way, baseball becomes like a literary trope, and the ghosts of literary greats like locker room legends. Dumb jocks these characters are not, nor geeky English nerds. And the story, as a result, is strengthened by the interplay of sports and words. By switching pitches in this way, between baseball-as-art and thought-as-play, The Art of Fielding elevates and transcends its classic subject matters:

For Schwartz this formed the paradox at the heart of baseball, or football, or any other sport. You loved it because you considered it an art: an apparently pointless affair, undertaken by people with a special aptitude, which sidestepped attempts to paraphrase its value yet somehow seemed to communicate something true or even crucial about The Human Condition. The Human Condition being, basically, that we’re alive and have access to beauty, can even erratically create it, but will someday be dead and will not.

Indeed, the title—which refers to a fictional retired-shortstop’s creed called The Art of Fielding—encapsulates this union of art and baseball. Schwartz, the team’s captain, is particularly aware of the parallels. At one moment, he muses on the idea of coaching as essentially story-telling:

All you had to do was look at each of your players and ask yourself: What story does this guy wish someone would tell about himself? And then you told the guy that story. You told it with a hint of doom. You included his flaws. You emphasized the obstacles that could prevent him from succeeding. That was what made the story epic: the player, the hero, had to suffer mightily en route to his final triumph. Schwartz knew that people loved to suffer, as long as the suffering made sense.

The Art of Fielding is a love-story many times over. We watch the President of the school fall for an undergrad he knows he shouldn’t. There’s affection between players, between unlikely lovers, for the game itself, and between father and daughter. But it is the universality of falling in love that deepens the narrative with urgent feeling:

Everything that floated through his life’s width—a sunny day or a sudden cloudburst, an e-mail from an old colleague, a conversation with Pella that didn’t turn into a fight—seemed loaded with such poignance that he found himself on the verge of country-music tears, and could cope with his own ridiculousness only by making fun of himself.

Baseball, like books, in the right hands, becomes an expression of love. But the cost of loving something too much is all too real here. When a routine throw to first seriously injures a beloved teammate, Henry’s faith in his art and in himself is irrevocably shaken. Over the course of the book, all of the characters risk serious consequences for that which they love most: loss of jobs, weight, friends, sanity.  The stakes are high.

Harbach has been compared to (and is blurbed by) Jonathan Franzen. In certain echoes, this makes sense, particularly when expounding on the dangers of freedom:

Henry knew better than to want freedom. The only life worth living was the unfree life, the life Schwartz had taught him, the life in which you were chained to your one true wish, the wish to be simple and perfect. Then the days were sky-blue spaces you moved through with ease. You made sacrifices and the sacrifices made sense.

But where Franzen can be cruel to his characters, and more than a touch melodramatic, Harbach’s is a more compassionate narrator; his characters never try your patience the same way or tire your nerves. The comparison between the two authors, outside of a couple coincidental parallels, doesn’t really hold up beyond that.

The fictional motivational volume The Art of Fielding (the book within a book) reads: “It always saddens me to leave the field. Even fielding the final out of the World Series, deep in the truest part of me, felt like death.” After spending five hundred pages with these memorable characters, it was bittersweet to let them go upon finishing the book. The Art of Fielding, like baseball or college, inspires wistful fondness after the action has ended. It’s the kind of book that insists on the local train instead of the express, even though there are six additional stops, because it’s just too good to put down.

As Schwartz observed about the Human Condition, we are all indeed alive with access to beauty. And in reading The Art of Fielding, this profound sentiment is brought home.

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It feels like the prerogative of an author with a career as long as Desai’s to take up the bureaucrat’s lament or the translator’s brief flowering. The novellas take place in the India of our time. The first story, “The Museum of Final Journeys,” has a whiff of Lovecraft; one keeps waiting for eerie tone to resolve into fleshly monster as a lonely bureaucrat wanders the rooms of an abandoned private museum, led by a caretaker as cryptic as any Poe imagined.

All three novellas contain these spidery characters, spinning webs from the slender stuff of lonely lives. The middle story features a translator plucked from obscurity, only to overstep her lucky break. Desai feels keenly aware of the Millennial generation’s yen for greatness, something to set the individual apart from the muddied masses. Of course, such longings are as common and ancient as the species.

In the title story, a hermit builds a secret bower, a beauty meant for himself alone. When strangers stumble upon it, he feels “Their gaze alone was a desecration.” Herein lies the tension of The Artist of Disappearance: does something only exist with an audience? Or does a witness spoil something noble? Desai plays coy; her most powerful moments are the hidden, unseen graces of her misfits, but here we are–reading a book that lays them bare.

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The most consistent plot-line in this complex, unconventional novel relates to an animal sanctuary, started by accident as an extravagance to please Kitty’s fetishes and insecurities, but which grows both in size and relevance as the novel progresses. It is where Rory’s artistic ideas first take seed and where Kitty finds her calling and heritage. More importantly, it provides sanctuary not just to abandoned circus animals but also to artists just as talented as Kitty and Rory, who have no hope for success beyond the role of “makers” without patronage or media attention. Those employed at the sanctuary are effectively human animals through whom the more privileged artists orchestrate their complex performances.

Rory’s evolution as an artist comes at some risk; he first courts, then shows disrespect to, a mentor whose rich acquaintances disgust Rory.  Yet, later in life, when Rory is a successful artist petitioning the government for a grant, he allows his assistant, Nora, to do most of the work. In Nora’s words:

“[O]n certain levels [Rory] tries to be the best he can… he’s aware of inequity in the art world, he tries to address it in the ways it has occurred to him, but he makes a common error in thinking that since as a gay man he can be considered a member of a group that has been oppressed, he has some sort of exemption from ever being considered oppressive himself.”

Nora’s story forms the crux of the symbiotic relationship between the makers of art and those who represent it.  Seamlessly woven in with her self-doubt is Rory’s almost didactic narrative of the grant application. He expresses his ambivalence about having benefited from as well as being held back by his mother’s fame, but also relies on Nora to complete the pesky grant narrative for him. Rory’s fame shields him from the injustices of art world, but it also keeps him from personally connecting with the people who might help develop his art.

Art patronage is represented in various forms, but the complexity of the artist/patron relationship is especially evident in the character of the misogynist film director, Albert Wickwood, whose resentment for his mother (and all mothers) is emphasized throughout the novel. He is behind Kitty’s rise to success, but, ironically, he is also the director who ends her career. Wickwood’s art is controversial in both method and form.  He wants to draw attention to animal cruelty, but he’s often insensitive to the conflicting messages he conveys.

For example, in a fragment about one of Wickwood’s documentaries, we see that he often fails to observe the realities of his subjects in blatant and disconcerting ways. In this particular narrative, “one of the dolphins breaks away from the group repeatedly in order to linger against the frothing jet of the water intake…” while an oblivious voice-over exclaims: “’They’re a mighty playful bunch, aren’t they?’” Meanwhile, in italics, the stunt-woman observes: “One of the dolphin attempts to insert his penis in the soft tissue at the rear of the turtle’s shell would be prominently visible from the first camera position.”  We then shift back to the official version: “From this new panel, the lone dolphin and the turtle pair is mostly eclipsed….” The dolphin’s playful nature is juxtaposed with a disturbing subtext and significant omissions.

Thus, relationships between artist and art object, mentor and mentee, patron and protégé, are explored in double-edged turns through these characters’ lives. Wickwood is near-sadistic in his direction, effectively treating his actors as animals (“Kitty Dawson responded best to some of the methods trainers used with dogs,” Wickwood confesses during an interview). Similarly, Rory’s indifference to Nora’s struggle suggests that patronage comes with some inevitable oppression.  In Animal Sanctuary, art demands blood sacrifice, and injustice comes dressed in the garb of good intentions. Success is relative, and art, like nature, is both a mother and a killer.  The titular animals in their sanctuary are also unemployed artists, refugees, victims of rape and violence; proud, even elegant, but nonetheless, displaced tigers and lions.

But to reduce the book to these dichotomies would be a disservice. Animal Sanctuary doesn’t raise a political platform. Rather, it resonates with moral questions about the role of art in social change through fragments in various narrative forms: film synopses, a textbook passage on film theory, an interview fawning over the director’s success juxtaposed with another focused on Wickwood’s best actress, Kitty, and whose tone leans toward sexist brow-beating.  Falkner braids her narrative with emails, journal entries, letters, magazine articles, blogs, and even voice recordings. These are interspersed with the most intimate thoughts of the characters, some of whom make dramatic entrances only to disappear, never mentioned again.

Trying to encapsulate the complex animal refugee metaphor brings to mind a quote from Wickwood:

“Now, I don’t really ever enjoy discussing beforehand with anybody else just how it is I intend to pull of one of my stories. It always seems to come down to trying to describe in words how I am going to show something visual by not-showing it: a perverse impossible task of the type gods or devils set before an unlucky soul.”

Wickwood holds that plot “is absurd on paper,” and a work of art ultimately “succeed[s] precisely because the plot eventually steps aside and lets other things be accomplished.” Thus, Falkner, by discarding plot and structure conventions, highlights the ambivalent systems which both nourish and threaten art. The book contains no climax, no resolution, no punchy dialogue, no riveting main scenes. Nor does it contain any real protagonists or antagonists. The characters, like their art forms, are submerged within murky, subconscious waters, and only the lights of the camera reveal their true natures.

Sarah Falkner

Even beyond the novel’s halfway point, the reader may still be uncertain of the story’s protagonists or the animal sanctuary’s role. But the pages keep turning because of Falkner’s incisive prose, her accurate and fluid discussion of the aesthetic values of film, and the moral complexity of her characters. The reader is left, at the end, with the singular effect of a well-executed work of art full of dark undercurrents, sometimes destructive, sometimes spiritually uplifting.  In Animal Sanctuary, Falkner breaks the modes of craft to show us that the idea of control over art is an illusion. The creation of art can be controlled no more than its interpretation, and no more than the change, violent or passive, it may excite among generations of its audience.

Further Links and Resources:

Read a Q&A with Sarah Falkner at the blog, We Who Are About To Die.

Browse through images from the innovative art book project, City of Salt, for which Falkner collaborated with visual artists Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick.