After patriarch Mort Foxman passes away, the Foxman clan is forced to sit through what might be the craziest shiva of all time. Narrating this mess of mourning is Judd Foxman, a sad sack with a great comic voice. Just before his father’s death, Judd came home with a birthday cake for his wife, only to find her “lying spread-eagle on the bed, with some guy’s wide, doughy ass hovering above her.” The fact that “some guy” is Judd’s radio-shock-jock boss doesn’t stop Judd from attacking with “a chocolate-strawberry cheesecake with thirty-three burning candles.”

This forces his marriage to end “the way things do: with paramedics and cheesecake.”

Alone and resentful, newly single Judd returns to his childhood home in Knob’s End, New York. Even though his father was not religious, Mort’s dying wish was that his family would reunite to sit shiva for a full week. This family includes: Inappropriate Mom, a bestselling author on child rearing, who favors too-revealing blouses; Phillip, the baby of the family, who dates a cougar therapist; Wendy, the oldest sister, who’s raising three kids in a sexless marriage; and Paul, the oldest brother, who lost his college baseball scholarship after a Rottweiler incident. Presiding over the shiva is family friend Boner, a young rabbi trying to make Judaism cool by wearing Armani suits and diamond studs.

Over the course of the shiva, the brothers give each other black eyes, Judd realizes his adulterous wife is pregnant, and his mother begins an affair with the woman who lives across the street. Some twists and gags are a bit far-fetched—smoking a joint in temple, the brothers cause the sprinklers to turn on—and the author’s need for each character to reach a meaningful epiphany feels forced. But overall, this novel and its narrator’s voice are so smart and funny, they make its flaws seem negligible.

Jonathan Tropper

In one of Tropper’s finest (and most brutal) passages, Judd slams the parade of shiva callers coming through the doors:

“These middle-aged women in the early stages of disrepair…genetics help some more than others, but they are all like melting ice cream bars, slowly sliding down the stick as they come apart.”

Judd’s observations might seem cruel, but they are also startlingly specific, keenly true.

The novel’s real triumph is in transcending mere laugh-out-loud moments with the poignancy of Judd’s descriptions. Seeing (and mocking) others, he can’t help but examine himself. He grapples with questions of his own mortality and options: what should he do next? He loved his wife and was good to her, but still their marriage disintegrated. Like the rest of the Foxman clan, he’s not where he thought or hoped he would be as middle age approaches. But by the book’s end, Judd realizes that “anything can happen,” that the future isn’t mapped out. That it wouldn’t be interesting if it were. And if there’s an epiphany worth believing in, it’s Judd’s: Even (and especially) after a swinging bout of dysfunction, even if you can’t stand the sight of your family, deep down you know, you can always go home.

Further Resources

- Via the New York Times, read an excerpt from This is Where I Leave You.

- Listen to today’s interview (8-25-2010) with Jonathan Tropper on WAMC.

- In this Penguin video, Tropper introduces his latest novel and discusses the challenge of “setting an entire novel in the framework of seven days”:

- Watch and read an interview and Q&A with Tropper at Bookbrowse. And here’s a feature/interview with Tropper in TimeOut New York.

- Over drinks at Brooklyn Public House, Asylum editor Anthony Layser talks with Tropper about This Is Where I Leave You. Does Tropper have a Matthew McConaughey clause protecting his book from sappy romantic comedy adaptations? Is his description of getting kicked in the balls the best of its literary kind? Watch and learn…

- Find out more about Tropper’s other books on his website: How to Talk to a Widower, Everything Changes, The Book of Joe, and Plan B.

- Browse excerpts from The Book of Joe on Random House’s website.

Marisa Silver began her career in Hollywood as a writer and film director. During the past decade, she has impressed readers and critics with her stories and novels, including No Direction Home and The God of War, the latter a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Babe in Paradise, her first collection of stories, received a Notable Book nod from the New York Times and won Best Book of the Year from her home city paper, the Los Angeles Times. In this latest book, Silver navigates the inner turmoil of men and women who are often adrift in their own psyches, but does so with a sure, precise hand. One nearly forgets how difficult it is to make a piece of writing appear effortless, just right.

Marisa Silver, by Bader Howar

In the story “Pond,” Julia and Burton, parents of a mentally disabled young woman named Martha, grapple with their daughter’s pregnancy. Martha can barely comprehend the physical changes her body undergoes, let alone the attendant responsibilities of parenthood. Burton, absent from much of Martha’s daily care, carries around “every key he had ever owned on his chain.” His wife finds this habit “needlessly space- and time-consuming.” But Silver pushes it further by adding that Julia’s “frustration was underscored by the knowledge that Burton had secrets he did not want to let go of.” Julia understands that her husband will always maintain a cache of privacy to which she does not hold the key. It’s a realization that colors Julia’s later conclusion that, “whatever love was, it was also the opposite.” Many of Silver’s characters possess this acceptance of (though not quite resignation to) the hand they’ve been dealt, as though they stand holding up circumstance to a hard, clear light, examining every facet to fully appreciate the implications, the small victories and quiet horror of their lives.

In “Three Girls,” the sisters of the title return home from school early because of a snowstorm. The story unfolds through the eyes of Connie, the middle daughter. When a family shows up at their door later that evening, needing to call a tow truck for their snow-bound car, the strangers’ growing unease around the girls’ parents casts into relief an undercurrent of alcoholism and ruin. Silver plants misgiving in the very first scene, as the three girls prepare for school, devoid of any parental involvement. By the time Connie’s mother insists on the stranded family waiting in the living room while help arrives, these wisps of foreboding have gathered into full-blown alarm. Somewhere in the back of the reader’s mind hovers the image of Connie sprinkling sugar over her younger sister Paula’s Cheerios “so that she wouldn’t whine, her complaints threading themselves dangerously up the stairs.” That innocuous line sounds a warning note for the full scope of parental childishness that Silver explores through the daughters.

The absence of certain facts – a family’s last name, or where a roommate’s money comes from – highlights the gaps of knowledge that characterize even the most intimate relationships. What Silver does superbly well is draw forth the perfect detail. A tiny observation cuts to the surface like an iceberg’s tip, intimating a world

Love Worn by Timothy K. Hamilton

Silver can evoke an entire childhood in a single brief sentence, “Tomasz’s father was a square, unsmiling man who saw the world as a giant drill might see it: something hard to bore through.” She trusts her reader to feel the full weight of what this means to Tomasz. Even though each story is grounded in discrete incidents, she gives characters both past and future, an open-endedness that allows them to exist after the story leaves off. In the way that an old girlfriend or elementary school teacher might enter one’s thoughts after years of not thinking of them, so too Silver’s characters come to mind at unexpected moments – seeing a woman walk her dog, or a gardener resting for a moment on the handle of his rake. Silver’s characters aren’t chatty, and when they do speak, the dialogue has a fraught and layered quality, especially between husbands and wives, where statement and intent weave and feint like prizefighters. Take this conversation from “Leap” in which Colin and Sheila’s marriage is mirrored in their dog, Patsy, who has barely survived a jump into the river,

“We give Patsy her food,” [Sheila] said. “She doesn’t have to think about hunting and gathering. Her survival is assured.”
“So?”
“She’s got time on her hands. She thinks about what her purpose is in life. She comes up empty.”

It’s unclear whether Sheila is speaking about herself or the dog, or perhaps what is clear is that she’s concerned for Patsy and herself, that Colin might leave both of them. Silver’s precision about the vagaries of human interaction lets the reader hold them up to the light in the same way the characters in Alone With You keep coming back to doubt, abandonment, uncertainty, and that persistent, haunting question, What then?

Further Links and Reading:

• Read Marisa Silver’s story “Temporary,” included in the collection Alone With You, from its debut in The New Yorker on September 28, 2009.

• Check out Old Enough, a coming-of-age movie, written and directed by Silver. Old Enough also happens to be Alyssa Milano’s feature film debut.

• Listen to conversation in which Marisa Silver tells a joke and describes her attendance at an exorcism on “The Dinner Party Download” from American Public Media.

• Read an Ecotone interview with Marisa Silver, in which she discusses exactly how she knows when she’s arrived at the end of a story, and describes (at least part of) what drives her to write in this way. Here’s an excerpt from her conversation with Joanna Mulder: “I’m interested in all the mistakes we make on our way to trying to get what it is we think we want. I’m interested in the ways we deceive ourselves and in the mythologies we create about ourselves and our lives that help us to explain our actions to ourselves. I am sympathetic to humans in general. It’s hard to live.”

In a letter to Georges Izambard (May 1871), Arthur Rimbaud writes:

I want to be a poet, and I’m working to turn myself into a seer: you won’t understand at all, and it’s unlikely that I’ll be able to explain it to you. It has to do with making your way toward the unknown by a derangement of all the senses. The suffering is tremendous, but one must bear up against it, to be born a poet, and I know that’s what I am. It’s not at all my fault. It’s wrong to say I think: one should say I am thought. Forgive the pun.
I is someone else. Tough luck to the wood that becomes a violin, and to hell with the unaware who quibble over what they’re completely missing anyway!

Whether “I is someone else,” or perhaps the more recognizable “J’est un autre” in the original French, the statement disorients with its dissonant, playful play on the subject-verb agreement. Damon Galgut, in his superb novel In a Strange Room––better perhaps described as a collection of three linked novellas­­––similarly distorts the I as both first person and third. The storytelling alternates between these two perspectives, often in the same paragraph and sometimes in the same sentence. Soon, in the same way we become accustomed to a new locale when traveling, this point of view choice asserts itself not simply as artistic quirk but as part of the story itself. The protagonist, a young South African man also named Damon, reflects upon his younger self: “Looking back at him through time, I remember him remembering, and I am more present in the scene that he was. But memory has its own distances, in part he is me entirely, in part he is a stranger I am watching.”

In a Strange Room ­­chronicles Damon’s travels as he journeys from Greece, to various countries in Africa, to India. Traveling, in general, disorients. We are displaced from our normal locations, we are observing places that are not our own, and our minds constantly compare the new, foreign place with the familiar one. Like Rimbaud’s process of becoming a seer, the state of traveling might be a process by which we project toward the unknown by a derangement of the senses. To travel is to step into a sort of duality.

Duality is a major theme of the novel. When the Gulf War begins, Damon watches it on television in a public square in a Greek town: “Everybody has been waiting and waiting for it, now it’s happening, it’s happening in two places, at another point on the planet and at the same time on the television set.”

Damon Galgut / Photo via Telegraph.co.uk

Yet this produces a feeling of remove, of being almost invisible as a traveler. Damon says of his traveling companion: “it feels at times that for Reiner this country is only a concept, some abstract idea that can be subjugated to the will…. nothing matters except himself and the empty place he’s projecting himself into.” As if the empty place fills with the traveler and empties upon the traveler’s departure. Damon later muses of other travelers: “…it never seems to occur to them that the conditions they found horrible and disgusting  are not part of a set that will be struck when they have gone offstage.” Here, the traveler is simultaneously self-important and insignificant.

And this allows for a certain lightness. The idea of travel implies a certain freedom: “[B]y shedding all the ballast of familiar life they are each trying to recapture a sensation of weightlessness they remember but perhaps never lived, in memory more than anywhere else traveling is like free fall, or flight.”

However, as the book progresses, this sense of freedom becomes, ironically, an agonizing weight. When Reiner and Damon met traveling in Greece (“on that lonely road they looked like mirror images of each other”), there was a sense of parity in their relationship. Two years later, when they decide, rather randomly, to travel through the African country of Lesotho, a country completely contained within the borders of South Africa, the power dynamic shifts. The relationship starts to strain when they must deal with an oncoming storm: “Rolling in from separate points on the horizon are two massive storms, their paths set to collide roughly where they are standing.” Though they manage to survive the storm from inside their tent, here in this country buried within a country is where their relationship begins to sour. The power discrepancy is huge, and Reiner holds the reins. Reiner’s weight seems to constantly bear down upon Damon:

An image in a mirror is a reversal, the reflection and the original are joined but one might cancel each other out. So underneath the journey is a conflict, almost another journey in itself, a struggle for ascendancy, which as the days go by begins to push through to the surface.

Later, after the pair has split for good and the two are both back in South Africa, though not together, Damon hears of Reiner’s doings, and Reiner of his. “The two stories push against each other, they will never be reconciled, he wants to argue and explain until the other story disappears.”

Lesotho / Image by Mandavi

Duality is not only manifest here in the idea of our former selves as strangers and in the sense of one reality obscuring another, but also in the sense of multilayered selves and multilayered worlds. Even the structure of the book suggests this. Each section recounts separate trips and people, yet the events of the previous section are not referred to again as they might be in a traditional novel. But that doesn’t mean that no action–reaction is at play. The causality is not dramatic but emblematic: the more Damon travels, the more like “real life” it begins to feel and the more bleak it becomes. And with each novella the overarching mood of the previous seems to hang over the subsequent.

For instance, the sadness and confusion of his relationship with Reiner, though not directly mentioned, seems to be a part of the grief that Damon speaks of as following him on his travels in Zimbabwe. It’s as if Reiner has stayed with him, like the layer of sadness from a dream whose content you don’t remember but whose overarching mood you do: “Something in him has changed, he can’t seem to connect properly with the world.”

Galgut's novella "The Lover" received a 2010 PEN/O. Henry Prize.

Furthermore, this divide of the self becomes more intriguing, more endearing, and even more heartbreaking in the second novella. If early in the book travel was seen as a positive lightness, a shedding of ballast, as the book progresses this lightness becomes oppressive. “His life is unweighted and centerless, so that he feels he could blow away at any time.” Damon is grief stricken: “In this state travel isn’t celebration but a kind of mourning, a way of dissipating yourself.” When he visits Victoria Falls, he notes: “It is incredible to see the volume and power of so much water endlessly dropping into the abyss, but part of him is elsewhere, somewhere higher up and to the right, looking down at an angle not only on the falls but on himself there, among the crowds.”

Damon doesn’t tell this story just from memory but from a specific type of memory rooted in such self-awareness. Hence, again, the use of both first and third person. “What is he looking for,” Damon muses, “he himself doesn’t know. At this remove, his thoughts are lost to me now, and yet I can explain him better than my present self, he is buried under my skin.”

It is on this journey that Damon falls for Jerome, a Swiss man whose beauty is described as “almost shocking.” Their connection and attraction is immediate, and though they remain in contact after their travels, they never move their relationship to the next level. Damon continues to travel, and once, in what is only described as a “strange country, at the edge of strange town,” he sees the lights of a ferris wheel. Galgut writes:

He doesn’t know why, but this scene is like a mirror in which he sees himself. Not his face, or his past, but who he is. He feels a melancholy as soft and colorless as wind, and for the first time since he started traveling he thinks that he would like to stop. Stay in one place, never move again.

Damon does eventually settles in a place three hours from Cape Town, the empty house of friends. Here he takes a temporary respite from the traveling life, and he rather enjoys it. Now the ballast of the familiar that he sheds is not the predictable but the peripatetic; the journey has taken on weight and to stop roaming is freeing. The house becomes familiar to him, and he notes: “a sort of intimacy develops between him and the place, they put out tendrils and grow into each other. . . . and when old dead branches begin to sprout buds and leaves, and then bright bursts of color, he feels as if it’s happening inside himself.” The external world merges with the internal, creating more complicated layers. Damon not only doesn’t feel like a traveler but also finds it difficult “to imagine that he ever thought of himself that way.” He decides to write to Jerome, to tell him about it, but the news he receives back is not good. And with this news everything changes: “everything he knows looks strange and unfamiliar, as if he’s lost in a country he’s never visited before.”

From early on in the book, I was reminded of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, particularly of Kundera’s line: “what happens but once, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.” And here Damon echoes yet expands upon this idea:

A journey is a gesture inscribed in space, it vanishes even as it’s made. You go from one place to another place, and on to somewhere else again, and already behind you there is no trace that you were ever there…. Things happen only once and are never repeated, never return. Except in memory.

Except in memory! What this unbearable lightness does not quite consider perhaps is the palpable resonance of memory. And memory takes on quite a weight in In a Strange Room: “What you don’t remember never happened,” Damon thinks. To echo Rimbaud once more, perhaps not only to become a seer does one need a derangement of the senses, but to become a traveler, as aforementioned, and also, to remember. Memory is a derangement of the senses. It is about desire, it is about subjectivity. It is to allow oneself to exist simultaneously in two spaces—past and present—and to allow those spaces to act on each other.

In the third novella Damon travels to India with his good friend Anna, who is “in a bad way,” having arrived with “a small pharmacy in her bag, tranquilizers and mood-stabilizers and anti-depressants.” Damon begins to think of her illness “as a persona separate to Anna,” and he realizes that what is the most dangerous to his friend is inside her, “driving along with so much fury and power.”

In a novel where traveling is seen as existentially bleak, it’s no wonder Anna travels with “the dark other stranger inside her, the one who wants her dead.” We also continue to notice the division of his own self: “Now I’m watching myself move, like somebody who isn’t me.” When Damon realizes that Anna has done something drastic, it’s no surprise that here we see both the third person and first in the same thought, once again: “His body is working by itself, trying to undo what it already accomplished, while his mind and spirit are elsewhere, having a high, disconnected dialogue. What will happen if, if what, if she, no, I don’t want to think about that” [emphasis mine].

Travel, for Anna, is an active state of dying, made all the more resonant in the context of the book’s title. In a Strange Room comes from Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. It appears, disguised, in the first novella; after wandering around his campsite, Damon sits in the sun to read, and though neither Faulkner nor the title are mentioned herein (though Galgut does attribute the quote to Faulkner in his Acknowledgments),  this is what follows: “In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were.” These are the musings of Faulkner’s Darl, within whom is also a powerful duality that lies in the tension between what is said and what is felt; to the external world he appears slow and senseless but his interior landscape is lyrical and articulate.

In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. Perhaps in a strange land you must empty yourself for travel. Whereas earlier in the book, Damon speaks of travel as projecting oneself into an empty place, later it seems it’s the place that requires the traveler’s emptiness. Anna etches herself into her journal. She shits her pants and gets her stomach pumped and sleeps with inappropriate men (despite not really liking men, and despite her female lover back home). She is discarding herself, becoming a shell of the person that she was. After a dramatic episode and its attendant complications, Damon says of Anna: “The high tide of madness has receded, leaving behind this translucent husk of a woman who nearly resembles his old friend. But not quite.” Her identity has shifted.

The first novella begins with Damon feeling “intensely happy” and the last ends with him feeling “awful, but also relieved somehow, emptied out. … The day is wearing on and he has a bus to catch, a journey to complete. It’s time to go.” And then the journey becomes not one of searching, or idling, or waiting, but of escape: “His onward journey is like an endless running away.”

"Nadine Gordimer - Nobel Diploma" © The Nobel Foundation Artist: Bo Larsson / Calligrapher: Annika Rücker

In her Nobel Lecture (December 7, 1991), Nadine Gordimer says: “For myself, I have said that nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction. The life, the opinions, are not the work, for it is in the tension between standing apart and being involved that the imagination transforms both.” And here is the tension of the three novellas; here is the tension in the choice of point of view. Damon’s identity as a writer is acknowledged near the end, further blurring the author–narrator–character divide, when he receives an email from one of the taxi drivers he met during the ordeal with Anna: “I always remember your good words, your words are a great knowledge to me. In future if you publish a book you should write about that girl, who wished to die.” And the alternating point of view is no longer mere artistic choice or a function of the story itself; suddenly, with this delving into yet another layer of Damon the character as Damon the writer, the alternating point of view becomes philosophically brilliant.

Duality mirrors itself. The temporary life begins to feel permanent, the other life becomes more real than the real, and traveling is no longer a state of projection or suspension or derangement but the actual, concrete state of being. By the end of the novel, Damon can no longer be an observer: “In all of this he tries to behave like an ordinary traveler, marveling at what’s around him. But he hardly manages to lose himself, mostly he is stuck in one place in the past.”

The imagination transforms both. As in the heartbreaking reflection at the end of the novel:  “Lives leak into each other, the past lays claim to the present. And he feels it now, maybe for the first time, everything that went wrong, all the mess and anguish and disaster. Forgive me, my friend, I tried to hold on, but you fell, you fell.” And there Damon is, both in the first person and the third, both in the past and in the present, his selves real and observed melding into one in a strange yet familiar room.

Further Links and Readings:

• Although In a Strange Room has not yet been published in the US, you can get a copy of the British edition from Powells.com or order the Emblem Editions version (image right) from Canadian publisher McClelland & Stewart. It’s also available for the Kindle.
• Here is a 2003 interview with Galgut conducted by Stephanie Merritt for The Guardian.
• You can also read Nadime Gordimer’s 1991 Nobel Lecture, “Writing and Being.”
• Visit Galgut’s author page on the Booker Prize website. In a Strange Room was longlisted for the prize this year, and an earlier novel, The Good Doctor, was shortlisted in 2003.
• Damon Galgut is the author of six other books: A Sinless Season, Small Circle of Beings, The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs, The Quarry, The Good Doctor, and The Impostor. These last three, his most recent, are published in the US by Grove/Atlantic.

When I read Peter Neofotis’s Concord, Virginia: A Southern Town in Eleven Stories, I was back in my grandfather’s kitchen. The yarn-like stories that make up this debut collection recount the life of an imagined town in northern Virginia. Unlike a traditional collection, Neofotis chooses an oral storytelling method to structure these stories, utilizing the conceit that the narrator is not just the vehicle through which we are relayed the narrative but an actual character himself, one who sits down beside us to spool out poignant stories, juicy pieces of gossip, and far-fetched legends from his small town.

Neofotis during a performance / photo from the author's website

The process of the book’s creation also sets it apart from traditional collections. One night in March 2006, Peter Neofotis recited one of his short stories from memory at Greenwich Village’s Cornelia Street Café. Afterward, café management asked him to create a one-man show. The stories he developed for that production are the very ones that have been gathered here in Concord, Virginia. And they live on not only in this collection, but also in the fact that he performs this show at various venues around the country, most recently at the Theater of the American South in Wilson, North Carolina. It also continues to be regularly featured at New York City’s Dixon Place Theater, where he still performs from memory.

Performed is an important verb here. On his website, Neofotis is pictured on stage with an old fashioned typewriter in his lap, wearing a beige suit that brings to mind costumes from The Great Gatsby. And when one reads the stories in Concord, Virginia, one cannot help imagining how the stories must sound out loud, told in character, the narrator made tangible. The tone and voice behind many of the stories is one of a storyteller rather than a writer.

For example, in “The Heiress,” the story of the town’s favored daughter, Betty Joe, who is the unfortunate progeny of a cruel and unfeeling tyrant of a father, the narrator describes her first time competing at a horse show as follows:  “Well, you wouldn’t have thought that girl was an underdog when she showed up for the first event. Betty Joe had her long dirty-blond hair pulled back in a tight French braid and had polished every buckle and stirrup so well, light two-stepped off them.” Perhaps it is the use of colloquial language, or the closeness generated by the way the narrator refers to Betty Joe as “that girl,” but it is clear we are not receiving the story from a distant writer at a computer. Rather, it comes from a friend, someone who has watched Betty Joe grow up, a citizen of the town who has taken us in to tell us a story.

Enhancing that storyteller’s style is the content of the stories. They have much in common with traditional rural, Southern fiction, calling to mind classics from Faulkner or Flannery O’Connor, but because of the storyteller mode, there is a tendency towards hyperbole. What makes a yarn a yarn rather than just a good story? A smile playing at the lips of the teller? Exaggeration? Perhaps a don’t-blame-me-I’m-just-telling-you-what-I-heard attitude? Yes. These are all present in Neofotis’s style. Yet despite containing outrageous content, many of these tales take a realist approach: the opening story, “The Vultures,” tells the story of a hunter who accidentally kills his wife on a hunting trip, swears off guns, and then comes home one day to find his yard inexplicably full of vultures; in “The Heiress,” Betty Joe’s no-good father attempts to cheat her out of her inheritance, so she decides to kill him, and with the help of some of the townspeople, gets the case closed as accidental death. None of these tales exceed the bounds of reality; they are firmly set in the real world, one confined by space and time, however exaggerated they seem.

Other stories, however, dwell in memory and mystery. “The Stone Carver,” for instance, is a haunting story of the town artist, Jethro O’Pitcans, who fell down a mine shaft as a child and hit his head, rendering him unconscious and lost for two days. After, he swears he saw the Virgin Mary. In the present narrative of this story, black snakes have infested the town, and deep in the mineshaft where he works, Jethro uncovers a fossilized pterosaur, wings spread so as to look like a crucified figure. Neofotis balances the fantastical elements of this story with running commentary from Rachel, the town journalist, who attempts to set the whole affair down as fact. When Jethro asks her to come into the mineshaft with him, the narration stays close, explaining in beautiful imagistic prose the things Jethro knows and sees. Neofotis writes:

The Virgin Mary appeared, with serpents in her hair. She embraced him. He felt her mane slithering against his lips, earlobes, and jaw. And he knew that at the Place of the Skull, she had wanted to answer her son’s question. She also wished that she could have jumped, flown up to the cross, and ripped out the nails in his arms and feet. Then, with her son on her back, she could have soared away from Jerusalem, God, time, and written culture—to where no salmon-pink stone building society existed. Jesus did not have to be a revolutionary, just as Jethro did not have to be considered a fool. He could just have been her son, she his ma, and they could have lived by the sea in the giant fern, cycad, or coniferous trees. A landscape without grass, seeds, or fruits—just green.

While Jethro is in the throes of his vision, Rachel snaps pictures of him and the statue. Rachel is the one who drags him out of the shaft after he gives up, after he gives himself over to the place where he almost died once before, and where he seems bound to die again.

Jethro’s visions and religious babbling, his prayers, his surrender—“Without a psalm, I no longer live,” he says—make the character seem insane, or, at least for that moment, insensible. When read with a storyteller’s style, however, Jethro holds rhetorical power. He has the attention of the audience, and he’s not merely a madman but one of the townspeople. He has narrative authority. The oral storytelling style utilizes that authority, that rhetorical power, to play out what might otherwise be a crazy man’s magical story of religious visions. Though we get this story not from a live performance but from the page, we understand that the theatrical element is firmly in place. The rise and fall of his voice, the panic, the despair, the surrender, all play out in real time. Jethro is fantastical, Rachel is objective. Magic and realism are merely a matter of perspective.

Neofotis Performing / photos from The Cornelia Street Cafe

As with most things, in this book’s strength also lies its weakness. The very tone and voice that create the storyteller effect in the book can also, at times, be problematic. Specifically, the lack of continuity that is created by the stylistic decision to opt for a disembodied, “true” narrator for some stories, while choosing an anonymous-yet-present narrator who belongs to and speaks for the town in others. For instance, until I reached the fourth story in the collection, I was under the impression that the narrator was a separate omniscient presence, uncharacterized and uninvolved with the story—merely the vessel. However, when I reached “The Heiress,” the narrator became characterized, and considerably more intimate with the characters and the story at hand. Several others in this collection operate in the same vein of narration, most notably “The Flag Bearer” and “The Abandoned Church.” Most of the rest of the stories, meanwhile, maintain that separate narrative presence that the book began with, leaving the reader to decipher when they are in the hands of a town citizen or an uncharacterized, true narrator.

When we imagine the stories as being performed, the narration can be easily adapted to the performer, much like roles being bestowed upon actors in a play. Even when the narrator is a citizen of the town, we can see the person right in front of us, in costume, and we know they belong, they have authority, and we forgive any inconsistencies that take place. For instance, at the end of “The Heiress,” when Betty Joe shoots her father, the narrator (who we have heretofore taken as a citizen of the town—“our town,” as he/she puts it—but someone who is not present at the scene of the crime, and thereby has a limited perspective) describes the moment with omniscience:

[Betty Joe] took careful aim and fired—hitting her father in the top part of his backbone, right below the neck. The minié ball crashed through the upper regions of his heart, causing him to stumble into the bramble of a wineberry bush. The bullet burst out of his sternum just at the place where the rusty juniper trees begin, and at just that moment, Mrs. MacJenkins and the rest of the Concord Bridge Club sat smiling over their fresh iced tea.

When read with a performance in mind, the irregularity of a shifting point of view can be forgiven. The folksy tone of the story and the sympathy the reader has for Betty Joe may make a reader shrug and let the error go. After all, we know by virtue of the book’s creation process that the story was originally performed by the author in costume. The delight of the performance and the singular nature of the book’s creation trumps these minor contradictions. However, in the face of more uncomfortable material, such as the use of racist language, these errors in point of view affect more than just the suspension of disbelief.

Because these stories are set before and during the Civil Rights Movement, it would be dishonest as an author and naïve as a reader to pretend that characters in a rural northern Virginia town would completely abstain from racial slurs. Characters in the stories are bound to, and do, exhibit racist and homophobic sentiments. When these sentiments occur in dialogue, that is one thing—we can attribute them to that character and put it down to his/her particular characterization. But when they are channeled through the retrospective narrator, who is our present-day guide through these tales, the storyteller’s style complicates our ability to distinguish between the author and the narrator. Or, more specifically, the point of view issues created by this technique make it unclear at certain moments how the author wants us to see and judge the narrator.

“The Flag Bearer,” for instance, is the story of the town’s loyalty to a woman, Violet Graves, whose son died of brain tumors that he acquired after his tour in Vietnam. The present action of the story is an annual barbecue on July 4th at Violet’s house, and leads up to the traditional moment when she burns an American flag while the whole town salutes her.

The story opens with an explanation of the setting—where and when, what people are eating, etc. The narrator uses the second person plural pronoun “we”: “And out in that yard, we eat kale, black-eyed peas, and whatever else old Violet Graves has cooked up. In jovial fashion, we ask each other how the summer is going.” The narrator, then, is part of this scene, a visitor at Violet’s house, familiar enough with Violet to call her “old Violet Graves.”

When the narrator switches gears into backstory, he/she continues with the collective pronoun usage: “Since the only savings of many folks in Concord were chests full of Confederate currency (which we are still hoping will be recognized someday!) Eli and Mildred were able to buy up most everything around here.” In the next paragraph, the narrator explains the story of how Eli and Mildred raised a black servant’s baby, Violet, who would grow up to be the same Violet Graves of the present action, educating her and training her to help with Eli’s business. The town’s reaction is explained thusly: “Despite our initial apprehension about a learned charcoal, Violet proved not only to be sharp mentally but also smooth socially” [emphasis mine].

Now, my guess is that Neofotis has no intention of asking us to laugh along with this sort of racist remark. Nor does he probably want us to merely ‘tut-tut’ at the narrow-mindedness of a previous generation, only to let them off the hook because of age. The appropriate response here is shame and outrage—both that this type of thinking ever occurred, and that it still persists in parts of the country. Yet without the clear-cut boundaries established by point of view, it’s difficult to understand how the author has positioned the narrator. And, in turn, how we should trust him.

Frederick Reiken / Photo from Emerson College faculty page

In his article “The Author-Narrator-Character Merge: Why Many First-time Novelists Wind up with Flat, Uninteresting Protagonists,” Reiken points to several reasons why this merge can occur. But the one that seems most apt with regards to this situation he calls the “so-called ‘fallacy of imitative form’ or imitative fallacy,” which happens because of “an unintentional, unconscious merging of narrator and character.” He continues, saying:

Because there is never any distance between narrator and character, there is no apparatus for translating and contextualizing the character’s thoughts, visions, and actions (if there are any). As a result of this lack of separation, a boring character begets a boring narrative, and hence a boring story. Likewise, a disoriented character begets a disoriented story…One very common and often uncomfortable workshop situation pertaining to the imitative fallacy is that in which a sexist character begets a sexist story, and in which the author is held, and rightly so, accountable for the sexism. In contrast, a successful ANC separation would make possible the objective presentation of a sexist character, with no sense that the author is complicit, or is asking us for our complicity in, the sexism. This is true, for instance, of the book Lolita, in which the soundness of ANC separation becomes particularly apparent when unreliable narrator Humbert Humbert reaches the point at which he fails to understand that he has lost the sympathy of his reader. Like Holden [Caufield], Humbert is quite clear on the logic of his own story, but we as readers—as a result of author Vladimir Nabokov’s objectivity—come to understand Humbert as the well-mannered pedophile and monster that he is. The book itself, as structured in author Nabokov’s mind as well as on the page, never asks us for our approval or empathic participation in the pedophilia, which is why the novel never once devolves into pornography.

Neofotis’s stories are voice-based. The storytelling style depends on colloquialism, accent, affectations of rural Southern dialect and lifestyle—describing a building’s location as “yonder,” making sure to mention foods and flowers. It would be understandable, then, that Neofotis sought authenticity in the voice of his narrators, even to the point of extremes such as allowing the narrators to use racist language—not just in dialogue, but in the “telling” Itself. In “The Flag Bearer,” the narrator has no name, no face, and does not directly effect the present action of the story. This narrator is a vessel for information, exhibiting both omniscience and distance, and does a good job of establishing setting, voice, and characterization. The racist rhetoric of the narrator, then, is problematic rather than constructive because an author-narrator-character merge has occurred, leaving the reader feeling unsettled by the language, effectively kicking us out of the fictional dream.

It has been a long-standing debate—especially among Southern writers—about how to handle racist characters. Should the author omit racist moments from a story, even though a racist character is present, out of consideration for readers? What about in stories that take place prior to the Civil Rights Movement? Don’t we risk perpetuating these stereotypes if we continue to dwell on and record them? I think the answer to these questions is no. Each new generation encounters racism in a unique way, and those stories should be set down, illuminating the human condition at any given time. An author needn’t shy away from the difficult theme of racism, but he/she should proceed with caution, as well as an understanding of his or her responsibility as an artist.

But setting aside the argument about what “duty” we have as writers, perhaps consider the issue simply in terms of expending a reader’s intellectual energy. No matter if an author is tackling racism, sexism, homophobia, or any number of topics, there is always the need to create a consistent narrative structure. Without it, the reader spends all her time negotiating the boundaries between author and narrator and characters, expending an unnecessary amount of energy trying to sort out who is who, rather than losing herself to the dream of fiction.

As a way of thinking more clearly about this dilemma, Reiken offers the following model as a way to effectively visualize the separation and interplay of this complex relationship:

In this model, the author-narrator-character relationship may be envisioned as a wave-state simultaneity or superposition—to borrow the language of quantum theory—in which author, narrator, and character are at once both separate and simultaneous, since, literally speaking, they all derive from a single human mind. In this model the ANC separation still occurs, however, because the author constantly modulates between the three domains—alternately immersing himself in the consciousness of the character, then pulling back to the expository commentary of the narrator, while all the while shaping the narrative from the objective perspective of the author. In this sense, the ANC might be thought of metaphorically as a spectrum, at once both wave and particle, and an effective manipulation means having the ability to envision the separation between these domains while at the same time understanding that they are always consubstantial. As author you must understand that, on one hand, you are your narrator(s) and character(s), while on the other that crafting effective narratives requires structuring these domains hierarchically within your imagination, so that at any moment you are able to collapse the wave-state simultaneity and crash down momentarily into one of the discrete domains. The diagram might look something like this:

That is to say, the separation between author, character, and narrator must be distinct and consistent. We must always know where we stand in relation to the narrator, especially if that narrator is an unreliable one. Our position as reader or audience member must be outside the story, where the author resides, able to assess the narrator and the story’s character(s) from a distance. Because when that boundary blurs, we risk losing the objectivity necessary to gauge what’s humorous from what’s in poor taste, and to judge what’s harmful from what’s benign.

On stage most of this wouldn’t be an issue. An actor is, by definition, not the author—even when he is, as in this case. He is playing a role, as his costume makes clear, and that role is a fiction. But translated from the stage to the page, we lose those markers. We lose those temporal boundaries. We lose that structural artifice. The stories are being related to us in the present, via a storyteller, and so we must assume that the narrative voice is retrospective, with the full benefit of historical hindsight in place. Each form has its costs and benefits, and I believe that in an attempt to fully “inhabit” the voices of his characters in the medium of fiction in the same way that he does so on stage, the psychic distance between author, narrator, and character occasionally becomes so thin that it detracts from the true art of these tales rather than adds to them. From a craft perspective, those stories that let in a bit more light between those categories were the most successful ones for me.

In a final note on the structure and approach of this book, I want to line up Concord, Virginia with its canonical neighbors, particularly highlighting the storyteller’s style, the oral quality of the narration, and how that helps or hinders the stories. This book could be aligned with other collections of connected stories—Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, perhaps, or Clifford Garstang’s In an Uncharted Country. However, the work I think it is truly in conversation with is not a novel or collection of stories, but rather Thornton Wilder’s Our Town.

Thornton Wilder, 1948. From the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Carl Van Vechten Collection, via Wikimedia Commons

Thornton Wilder said, “The theatre is supremely fitted to say:  ‘Behold! These things are.’ Yet most dramatists employ it to say:  ‘This moral truth can be learned from beholding this action.’” Similarly, listening to my grandfather spin yarns was never intended to teach me a lesson. There was no moral, and the things I took away—a healthy appetite for gossip and storytelling, as well as a whole catalog of swear words—were left up to me. Likewise, Peter Neofotis’s stories align with Our Town in that they are the stories of people, but even more so of a town that is changing. Neofotis is not using his book as a pulpit from which to say that the Vietnam War was senseless, or homophobic intolerance is despicable, or religion practiced without love is hardly religion at all. As a reader, I might glean these things on my own. But at the base level of the stories, I am shown how things are, not what I should learn from them. This is to his credit. So despite the occasional misstep, Neofotis has done a wonderful thing with this collection: he has captured what it is to be human in a particular place at a particular time.

Still, the greatest strength of Concord, Virginia might be the way in which these stories function collectively to tell us something about ourselves, in the here and now, despite how focused they seem on the past. The final story, “The Ancients,” recounts a government plan to build a dam in the river valley, kicking the town’s oldest citizens out of their homes. Neofotis poetically draws the line between these people and the river that binds them:  “For a human, time means a progression from conception to birth to maturity to cricketness to dust. A waterway, on the other hand, may meander as it grows older, but it does not weaken if the climate stays.” Indeed, “The Ancients” ends with the town’s elderly giving “that wild river one last dive,” jumping in as the water rises. It is this sense of the temporary, fleeting nature of life in Concord—the way times change, and people grow, and perish, living large to the last—that provides a contemporary reader with both a feeling of recognition and solidarity. For we understand through the collection as a whole that each individual, in however limited or short-lived a fashion, plays an integral part in the broader fabric of the community, and that every place—even these communities that seem to exist out of time—will continue to shift and evolve like a river between its banks.

So I finish the book with the sense of a fulfilled promise, happy to have accepted the invitation delivered like an appeal to the muses in the prologue:  “Be it God or Gossip—the chorus sings of a particular community, in a certain valley. It is we, the voices of Concord, Virginia—replenished by a mountain river—inviting you, friend, to swim in our abiding story.”

East Concord, Virginia / Image from Peter Neofotis's website

Further Links and Resources:

• For more information about Peter Neofotis, including the origins of Concord, Virginia, reviews of his work, and tour information for his one-man show, please see the author’s website.
• To hear some of Neofotis’s own thoughts on his process and the experience of performing his work, here is a Q&A with the author that Kevin Kittredge conducted for the Roanoke Times in 2009.
• Neofotis also discusses how his writing and his performances have been shaped by James Hurst’s “The Scarlet Ibis” in this brief piece for Beatrice.
• You can also read a 2004 interview with Frederick Reiken that Eric Wasserman conducted for Poets & Writers magazine. In it, Reiken discusses his father’s opposition to his decision to pursue a life as a writer.
• Finally, here is a clip of Neofotis performing his story “The Heiress” at Theater at Lime Kiln in Lexington, Virginia:

Loosely based on this document and family oral histories, The Quickening follows the journeys of two Iowa families trying to build their lives amid the hardships of the Great Depression. Like Hoover, I’m a descendent of Iowa farmers, so I was interested in this story, curious to learn what my ancestors might have encountered as they built their farms in early 1900s, when so much was at stake and so little could be counted on. While there are subtle references to what is happening in the time period, Hoover’s focus is on the insular, everyday life of the American farmer—raising animals, rearing children, making sure the ground is plowed and the mouths are fed. These details are delivered through the unflinching and candid points of view of two very different women: Enidina—Eddie for short—and Mary. As each other’s only neighbors for miles, Eddie and Mary build a tenuous friendship: “I thought then that Mary and I might become more than neighbors,” Eddie says, years after they first meet. “That we might be friendly for once.”

A stalwart woman who could “heft the grain and birth a calf, lead a plow with the best of them,” Eddie’s voice is steady and haunting. Penning her story on her deathbed, Eddie writes: “And I have little left to me but the thought of you my grandchild who I’ve known only in the warmth of your mother’s belly under my hand. Even if you never come home, you should understand the way our life once was, your grandfather, your mother, and I, and all the little things that make its loss so very terrible in my mind.” Eddie and her husband, Frank, suffer through droughts, storms, fires, and several miscarriages, and though she reports these incidents with resignation, her pain is strikingly clear: “After I lost the second one, I was bedridden for a time. It wasn’t that I was too tired to work or too pained to lift my legs. Something in me wasn’t right. Some sadness I couldn’t undo. The women in town did their best to show me how wrong I was to pay so much attention to what I’d lost. I guess in a way I knew I should listen.”

Mary’s purpose for narration is less explicit, but no less poignant. Grappling with the secrets she keeps from her abusive husband, Jack, her life is rife with contradictions: taught to play the piano and walk in heels, she must also learn to dirty her hands in the fields. Taught to fear her husband, she also desires him. “After all these years,” she says of Jack, “after three sons and my fingers wearied from the work—I choose him, and I would, again and again.”

photo credit - Minnesota Historical Society

After the slaughter, the novel builds toward its central tragedy, an “accident” involving both Mary’s and Eddie’s children. This devastating incident, as well as its horrifying aftermath, propels us through the novel’s final, gripping pages, in which the harsh Iowa land finally takes its toll on the two neighboring families. Here, we learn why Eddie has never met the grandson to whom she writes. “That quickening under [your mother’s] skin,” she says, “it’s the closest to you I’ve ever come.”

Michelle Hoover / photo credit: Sanjay Subbanna

Further Reading:

• Visit Michelle Hoover’s website to learn more about the book, including an excerpt and the real life story behind the novel.
• In the following video, Hoover discusses the genesis of The Quickening:

• At the audio literary magazine The Drum, Hoover reads her essay “Our Little Bertha,” recounting her discovery of her great-grandmother’s journal, the document that inspired The Quickening.
• Follow Michelle Hoover on Twitter or subscribe to her blog.
• Buy The Quickening at an indie bookstore near you.

But they’d be missing out on something very special.

Sarah/Sara unfolds as the journal of Sarah Frankel, an American-born Jew who, shortly after finishing her undergraduate studies at Columbia, moved to Israel (in proper parlance, this is called “making aliyah”). There, where she took the Hebrew version of her name (”Sara,” pronounced Sah-rah), she continued to become far more ritually observant and schooled in Jewish texts than she was raised to be.

Cafe Hillel in Jerusalem after suicide bombing (9/9/2003)

When her visiting parents were killed in a suicide bombing in the café below her Jerusalem apartment, she became a twenty-three-year-old, sibling-less orphan. The explosion also left Sarah disfigured, although it’s not until more than halfway through the book that we learn some details: “Scars cover most of my face. I don’t have eyebrows. I’m missing half of an ear.” This tragedy was far from the first Frankel family trauma: Sarah’s father, an investment banker who was on the twenty-ninth floor of Tower One on September 11, 2001, survived that day physically, but remained haunted by his experience. The suicide bombing in Israel and the 9/11 attacks are relentless touchstones in this book. The reader can escape their impact no more easily than the characters can. (Oh, and did I mention that Sarah’s mother was the daughter of a Holocaust survivor/orphan?)

As if all of that background weren’t bleak enough, Sarah writes her journal entries throughout what some might consider at best a desolate journey: a six-week, solo kayaking trip through the Arctic. This was the retirement trip her father was planning before he was killed. There’s no denying the scenic beauty (”The tundra amazes me,” Sarah writes in one early entry. “It’s a forest, willow and pine.”).

photo credit: Free Wine

But there’s also no question that this is a dangerous adventure, with everything from polar bears to freezing temperatures threatening Sarah’s survival. These perils are no mere theoretical dangers; they are very real hazards. Further, the trip is shadowed by Sarah’s post-traumatic stress, grief, and guilt. Near the book’s end, when Sarah seems close to succumbing to almost certain death, she is prone to streams of thoughts like this set of “if only”s:

If I’d never become orthodox and moved to Jerusalem, if terrorists had never flown planes into my father’s office building, if my parents had never come to visit me, if that young woman hadn’t decided to kill herself by exploding in the middle of a crowded café, if I hadn’t survived the attack, if I hadn’t decided to finish my father’s boat and complete his retirement dream, if I’d found a more knowledgeable outfitter, if I’d started two weeks earlier or packed an emergency transponder, if I stopped whining so much and instead began searching for that stream. If I didn’t keep worrying that like Job, I was being punished rather than tested.

Jacob Paul

Throughout the trek, Sarah’s thoughts turn not only to her past—memories—but also to an imagined future. Grimness appears even in these fantasies of her post-kayak trip life back in Jerusalem. For instance, she imagines that she will meet a man, Udi, himself grieving a terrible loss (the death of his son), and that the couple will frequent a particular café:

They won’t discuss it, but part of Yechil’s Café’s appeal is the outdoor seating. In a large open area, they will have a much better chance of seeing a bomber before he detonates. Walls amplify blasts, echoing shockwaves with devastating effect. Yechil’s will be a kind of transitory therapy for Sara, a halfway house on the road to full café-recovery. Even the closest bus stop is on the other side of Rechov Ben Gurion and a full half block away. And their meetings will give Udi some structure, a sense of routine, a mandatory, daily perch which will be so important while he wanders Jerusalem’s streets, waiting for the expiration of his mourner’s leave from the army.

As a fiction writer—and as one who has spent considerable time and ink on Jewish characters and families—I was particularly drawn to multiple aspects of this novel. First, there’s the issue of language. The author does a good job explaining most of the less-familiar phrases (one example: “And I’m shomrei n’giah, which means I have no physical contact with men I’m not immediately related to if I can at all help it….”), and I suspect that words such as “Hashem” would be easy enough to comprehend from the context even if one didn’t already know that it serves as a referent for “God.” But at times, I struggled to make sense of sentences such as “Hashem made the yetzer harah to inflict us with taivah.” A prayer called Shemonah Esrai similarly sent me directly to that glossary we know as Google.

Incorporating what an MFA instructor once memorably derided in workshop as “foreign words” in one’s fiction is, I’ve realized, something that some of us simply can’t avoid. It’s something that makes perfect sense in this novel, where the very title suggests the inherent tensions between the protagonist’s secular Jewish-American and orthodox Jewish-Israeli selves. It indicates on small but identifiable levels—such as the Frankels’ expressed discomfort with being called “Eema” and “Abba” instead of “Mom” and “Dad”—a much greater conflict between Sarah and her parents, what Sarah calls “our ideological split.”

at the Western Wall / photo credit: Ram Viswanathan

Here, I move into delicate territory. For the divisions that can arise within what might be called “the Jewish community” or even within individual Jewish families over religious observances and Israel are not easy to talk about. But talk about them (in her journal, at least) Sarah does. She describes herself as having been born into a comfortable Diaspora Jewish identity. Her parents—her mother, especially—do not approve of her embrace of Orthodox Judaism and her move to Israel. It’s not just rituals and language they have difficulty accepting. In one post-9/11 telephone conversation, Sarah listens as her mother rails:

‘That’s why your Sharon’s policies in the occupied territories will never stop terrorism. The more fear he creates; the more fear will seek outlet. People who do not fear, who are not oppressed, hunted, haunted by occupiers, they strive to avoid a situation of fear, strive to preserve a status-quo; those kind of people would never blow up buses or fly planes into buildings.’ I asked her if she wanted me to start with her insistence on calling the land Hashem promised us in the Torah occupied, or would she rather I addressed the massive success of Jewish passivity during the Shoah, or would she simply rather I dropped the subject?

Sarah’s father’s feelings in this respect are somewhat milder. As Sarah recalls, “his primary complaints were that I lived too far away and that I fought with my mother, not that I’d adopted the faith of my forefathers.” Still, even within this small family of three, one manages to obtain a glimpse into some of the varieties of Jewish experience and attitudes. This alone is a significant accomplishment.

Then, since we often find much made of women authors who attempt to write in the first-person point-of-view of male characters, it seems appropriate to address Paul’s work as a male author writing in the voice of a female protagonist. Two observations seem worth making here. First, Paul consistently takes into account the prescribed gender roles of traditional Orthodox Judaism. (He also takes on some of the stereotypes, as when Sarah recalls that her longtime—and non-Jewish—best friend, Marie, had tried to dissuade her “‘from having a shitty life living with some stuck-up pretentious Jew who kept you cloaked like a sheik’s wife.’”) And then, Sarah’s awareness of her body while she is on the kayaking trip is not limited to muscle strength or soreness. Her menstrual cycle receives attention, too. I’m not sure I’ve seen many male authors tackle lines like this:

photo credit: Nick Russill

My trainer suggested going on the pill to suppress everything altogether. She said it would be more convenient…I wish I had gone on the pill; I don’t want this here, now. Even if I wasn’t susceptible to the fearful suggestion that my body has secretly sought to contact predatory bears, I would not want to deal with double-bagged used pads, cleanup, hygiene.

Finally, I return to the book’s darker qualities. It’s not altogether inconceivable that after reading Sarah/Sara, someone might be inspired to follow the example of Aryn Kyle’s readers and claim that “this book made me want to die.” But for the more discerning reader, one who identifies with and marvels over what Laura van den Berg has lauded as “stories that make my heart hurt,” Sarah/Sara will be an important—and impressive—read.

Further Resources

– Excerpts from Sarah/Sara are available on Numéro Cinq, author and professor Douglas Glover’s site for his students in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in writing program (of which Jacob Paul is a graduate; he also holds a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Utah), and on Paul’s own website.

– While touring for Sarah/Sara (on bicycle), Jacob Paul wrote a series of blog posts for Mountain Gazette. You’ll find them, in chronological order, here, here, here, here, and here.

– Although not available online, the July/August 2010 “First Fiction” feature in Poets & Writers spotlights Jacob Paul and Sarah/Sara.

– KRCL (Salt Lake City) conducted this interview with Jacob Paul in May 2010 (complete with complementary playlist).

- At Write the Book, listen to a podcast interview with the author (July 2010) and find a writing prompt inspired by Paul’s work.

– Laura Ellen Scott has reviewed Sarah/Sara for Prick of the Spindle.

– Watch and listen to Jacob Paul introduce the novel in this video:

Adolescent men appeared from nowhere. They drove expensive cars and kept company with expensive, long-legged women, women who were useless in all capacities save sex, who lacked any apparatus that might make them useful to society’s betterment. They certainly were not revolutionaries, these women.

Chimney Sweep 3 by janGlas

While Valeria’s character clearly represents the established proletariat vision of the hard-working, self-denying peasant, she is not above watching Brazilian soap operas, and splurging on the occasional imported banana. She otherwise spends her time criticizing her neighbors for their whistling, their brown-spotted cucumbers, and the celery they sell that smells like cat-piss. She rails against the flashy outrage of the mayor’s wife for having small breasts and hips and for buying a whole bag of oranges, when, as Valeria wistfully recollects, one would have sufficed to serve as treat to an entire family in the socialist days. It is inevitable, therefore, that the reader looks to Valeria for conflict, as her contempt for the world around her is an iron curtain in and of itself. It’s a wall that must come down in order for Valeria to progress into some kind of future, a future that Fitten casts as uncertain, and not necessarily all that promising. Just how Valeria lowers her barriers and combats her self-admitted pugnacity to become vulnerable to the possibility of change lies at the story’s heart.

Potter by Bogdan Ioan Stanciu

Goat Farmer (detail) by Mesq

Spy (detail) by daliborlev

The hyperbole Fitten uses to describe the town feels too much at times. Female voluptuousness is underscored so often and so much that one has to wonder if we’re talking about women or cows. So sex-starved are Zivatar’s villagers that when Iliaboya makes a pass at her lover in the bathroom, every man in the bar gathers round the door to listen and peek through the keyhole. Valeria is not protected from her porn-starved neighbors either, even behind gates and locks intended to ward against their voyeurism. Her exploits are always accompanied by a riot gathering outside, with the underlying purpose not an objection to Valeria’s pleasure, so much as the opportunity to catch old people in the act. Indeed there seems very little on the minds of all the characters in the novel beyond sex. Aside from the Communist-history lesson and the heavy-handed outlining of the socialist mentality that populates the first few pages, the rest of the tale abandons the semblance to real-life social dynamics, and surrenders very quickly to a surrealist cuteness similar to Joanne Harris’s Chocolat, without the mystic element and the commentary on repressive dogma.

In this respect, Fitten’s attempt to emulate all the gimmicks and devices of the fable with simplistic language, short sentences, and sketchy characterizations, ends up stumbling into the challenges that narrative style presents. For example, only one of the many male characters is given a name. Even Valeria’s lover, one of the pivotal characters in the tale, is referred to throughout as the potter. But by the time we get to Mr. Plum and Mr. Pear this device comes across as a clumsy attempt to explain two brand new characters serving important roles late in the story, rather than a style or method to shape an allegory. With the notable exception of Valeria, the characters are at best archetypes, at worst, clichés. The potter discovers that he loves making art, and waxes on in philosophical banalities about the role of artist as a god. The chimney sweeper is soot incarnate: lascivious, mean, and conniving. He seldom does more than paw at women and kick an endless supply of stray dogs. Ferenc, the one male character given the distinction of a name, has nothing else to recommend him to dimensionality: he is madly love with Iliaboya and acts throughout as the dumb, besotted beast. The two main women are simplistically characterized as being a volcano and an ocean, respectively. As if that distinction were not general enough, Fitten blurs the line even farther, amending the metaphor by adding “an ocean or a river.”

There are other setbacks to Fitten’s attempts to abide by the language of fables. A reader looking for an elegant, voluptuous sentence in the style of Angela Carter or Kelly Link won’t find one here. The author opts for a faux-Zen approach a la Coelho, perhaps in the hope to make a simple sentence resonate with wisdom; but unlike Coelho, or Hesse, in most instances his short syntactical stubs fail to delivery anything beyond a flat read. Characters are seldom seen doing much more than shaking their heads, repeating the same clichés (“We aren’t getting any younger”), pointing at things and each other, and even batting their eyelashes. These stage directions abound so much in the book that in one chapter Iliaboya seems unable to demonstrate any emotion other then the shaking of her head, which she does so often one imagines her nursing a headache by the end of the chapter. Women bake cookies and paw strangers, and men wave, drink, and slam fists into tables like caricatures of small-town peasants. Fitten’s hold over his characters’ personalities is especially damaging in one central episode of the story, where the charm and novelty of Valeria and Iliaboya’s rivalry deflates in a disappointing Hollywood-style scene, in which the least interesting character is revealed to possess unexpected talents.

Still, these awkward moments, not uncommon in a debut novel, should not prevent the reader from appreciating the loveliness of this imaginative tale, with its philosophy of rebirth in old age, and hopeful view of the role that maturity and courage play in a person’s happiness. Valeria alone is worth the read, carrying the heft of the charm with her irascible temper and her militaristic treatment of her peasant neighbors, as well as the men she loves. It is a pleasure to be taken through the story with her. Humor, too, has its peaks, as when the mayor, reflecting on the circumstances that tempted him into infidelity, explains,

“She had hazel eyes with green specks and a bum that extended out into the world the way the continental shelf extended out into the abyss. The mayor remembered slipping into that abyss. It was an incomparable pleasure, but that’s all it was: an affliction of the senses. A slippery, woozy, euphoric narcosis of the ass.”

It would be difficult to accept this kind of apologia with a straight face.

In spite of its imperfections, Valeria’s Last Stand delivers what it aspires to: a sense of good will towards its characters, interest in the imagined world of Zavitar, and plenty to consider after the last momentous chapters of this gentle tale. This young author’s work engaged me far deeper and with more satisfaction that those of some of his more seasoned contemporaries in this genre. I look forward to reading whatever tale he weaves next.

Further Links and Reading:

Marc Fitten

• You can find a reader’s guide as well as read the first chapter of Valeria’s Last Stand on Marc Fitten’s website.

• Take a look at Fitten’s very cool “Indie 100” – a blog dedicated to 100 great independent bookstores across America. He’s up to #65 – Kramerbooks & Afterwards Cafe in Washington, D.C.

• Fitten is currently editor of the literary magazine The Chattahoochee Review, based out of Georgia Perimeter College in Atlanta. The review blends fiction, poetry, nonfiction, reviews and essays tied together with some stunning visual art.

It’s a lesson this young writer’s lavish prose could benefit from, resonating as deeply with me as it does the novel’s protagonist when Kestin, a war-zone wordsmith, channels his unique perspective on “economy” through Shushan “Shoeshine” Cats, the Jewish gangster who takes Iron Will’s hero, Russell Newhouse, under his wing in 1963-era Brooklyn. Shushan sums up much more than Kestin’s past when he tells Russ,

“A general and a poet are exactly the same in one thing. What they do they have to do with critical efficiency. Not a word or an action wasted. And the action has to be more important than the man who creates it.”

This is as much a mission statement for how Iron Will is composed as to how Russ goes about solving the novel’s many crises. Kestin’s journalistic imprint paces the plot into a fluid regiment of short chapters jam-packed with reveals and introductions, all of which—and I mean this, because I actually charted out the turns, ten pages of hand-written notes because the story’s connectedness surprised the hell out of me—come full circle to impact not just Russ or Shushan’s fate, but every character’s and the city that contains them. It’s a no-nonsense approach to storytelling and the joy lies in discovering just how every word and action goes un-wasted. And in the end, Shushan is spot-on: the action that unfolds is indeed more important than the men who create it.

Or, as Kestin might say, the man who wrote it. In a 2009 reading with Dick Heffner, host of public television’s “Open Mind,”Kestin admitted this to his New York City audience: “I’m very often asked, what’s the book about? And I never know what to say because if I could say it in twelve words, I would not have spent 120,000 and a year and a half of my life trying to tell the story.”

Like Shushan, Kestin grew up in the Brooklyn of the 1950s and ‘60s. He knows the time period, and as a Jew, understands how it affected his people. More importantly, he knows how crime—organized, and, as Shushan puts it, “disorganized”—shaped the borough and its residents. The impregnation of Kestin’s past into Iron Will illuminates the author’s comments in a column for The Millions in which the author decried the state of new fiction, saying the following:

“Most new writing suffers from what can only be called peanuts envy, a wish to emulate the classic New Yorker story about uninteresting people with irritating little problems doing little or nothing about them but bumping into similarly boring people doing, if possible, less – and all of it slowly.”

Kestin’s Iron Will is a response to the shortcomings he describes above, stories he has punished physically, admitting, “For years I’ve had the extreme displeasure of throwing new fiction across the room. Launched just right, the spine splits and…pages shake out like, well, bad fiction: unconnected, insubstantial, rank.” Kestin attacks the shortcomings of boring, uninteresting characters by creating the opposite: connected in surprising ways and engaged in action constantly, Iron Will’s cast becomes more than simply colorful, it develops depth. By populating his story with gangsters and bookies from seemingly every New York City neighborhood, with strong-men, crooked cops and even JFK, some detractors of new fiction might think Kestin exchanges one problem for another—by attempting to write work that moves beyond character, he loses character. But that is not the case here. Beyond their looks or lines of work or historical significance, these characters are interesting because of their motivations, as devoted to one another as to a set of ideals or simply the ideal of survival. None of these characters has what can be called a little problem, and, as such, they go about solving them with incredible gusto, all of it developing fast and furious. Kestin has, in ways, written his first novel the only way he could: he has written something he would want to read.

Map of Brooklyn's Neighborhoods / image by Peter Fitzgerald from Wikimedia Commons

Perhaps this is because the story in Iron Will is one Kestin himself wishes he could have experienced. For me, a new writer torn between industry expectations of success—to say nothing of family, friends and self—and my own unique need to simply express, this realization was liberating. The setting, characters, and plot—bricks that instead of forming foundation so often weigh upon a young writer’s sense of story, the result of which is a deflating heaviness that I sometimes call duty but you might know better as a reader’s expectation—are developed in Iron Will with “critical efficiency,” an exacting journalistic authenticity. But Kestin’s reliance on the tools of his trade does not make his work laborious. While we cannot know for sure if the writing was fun, if it was a joy to immerse himself in this world, we can say with some certainty that Kestin wrote the only way he could: by being himself. And it is this authenticity in the work that makes it a joy for readers to immerse themselves.

Likewise, the intersection of the “real” and the “imagined”—what Kestin has lived versus what could have been lived—shines on every page of the novel, including its cover; Kestin is, after all, the face readers see on its front. This overlap of reality and fiction gives the novel the multi-layered feeling of a palimpsest. When asked to reflect on his creation at the aforementioned reading, Kestin said:

“All I know is that when I finished writing the book, I realized that the child, twenty years old, in question, was me. But the story, of course, had never happened. And I finished half a bottle of whiskey after that. Because I realized that although I had gotten into trouble at twenty, and eighteen, and sixteen, and twenty-one, and twenty-two, I had never gotten into this kind of trouble. And I wondered if I had been man enough to handle it the way this young man did. To this day I’m not sure.”

The “trouble” Kestin alludes to is in continuous evolution during the course of Iron Will’s forty-seven chapters—every new character introduction and subsequent re-entrance brings with it some fresh factoid of Shushan and Russ’s past, a hint at their future, how these things connect. In fact, “trouble” becomes Iron Will’s spine. The turns and twists that occur throughout the book fuse its narrative with milestones built on revelations, every one of them fundamentally shifting the direction and scope of Kestin’s story, a sinfully fun read not just because Kestin is a master storyteller from his journalistic days, or because he knows Brooklyn from his childhood, but because his characters are fun and flawed, and allowed to show us why.

Take, for example, the novel’s namesake, Shushan “Shoeshine” Cats. A fearsome gangster despite his diminutive 5’7” stature, a man who might “…gain weight on a diet of grubs and water,” Shushan is more than just a thug, he is a thinker. Routinely quoting La Rochefoucauld to cops and musing on the seventeen accents and dialects in Huckleberry Finn reveals him as a man as self-educated in literature and art as trained with a rifle and fists.

The Soldiers' and Sailors' Memorial Arch at Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn / photo credit Jeffrey O. Gustafson from Wikimedia Commons

Now, in a world post Tony Soprano, the gangster in touch with his feelings might not appear particularly original. Yet Kestin ensures Shushan isn’t too good to be true—a rabbi with a rap sheet—by making him painfully dogmatic on nearly every stance and subject. For a shortish man of Jewish heritage like myself, this ensures Shushan remains memorable without becoming a role-model. You come to respect the man for his black-and-white thinking, but fear him for the blood red that might come for foraying into the wrong. Shushan’s traits may be best encapsulated by his mother, a character we never meet but whose impact is clear when Shushan explains that it is she who taught him that if he is punched, he must punch back ten times. And in a perfect example of the duality of this character, he crafts a beautiful eulogy after her death, but insists that Russ read the speech because he can’t let people see him cry. After all, that would be bad for business.

Literature, poetry and music compete with gangster business-theory as constant forces in Iron Will, explored as often through Russ and his English professor as Shushan himself. These discourses on art and law and racism aren’t written to portray Shushan to the reader as some new evolution of gangster; rather, they illustrate how Shoeshine’s intelligence is as important to why he is revered and respected as to why he is feared. We end up believing in Shushan because he tells us what he believes in; because those beliefs, built as solidly as his physique, are allowed to be wrong, contradictory, flawed. Russ’s intimacy with the gangster gives us a unique vantage point. We come to understand how a man can become as committed to charity as crime, and how this makes that man human.

Language itself is a central seductive force in Iron Will. While on the surface drawing lines in the Brooklyn Babel-like war for turf—American streets fought over by decedents of China, Puerto Rico, Africa, and, of course, it being a book about crime, Italy—it is also one of the main reasons Shushan is able to seduce Russ, a devotee to reading and literature, into apprenticeship. The two bond over words and from there on, even when Shushan is absent, literature factors in how Russ solves problems and perceives the events around him in spite of the fact that he believes those old written worlds are no longer part of him:

…books, which had been all, were now merely a pleasant memory, a backdrop, a frame of reference. My adventures in literature could not hold a candle to my adventures in Little Italy, in Chinatown, at the Westbury. Whether purposely or not, I had to read to experience the world through the eyes of others. I was now experiencing it through my own, to say nothing of the other parts of my anatomy.

In the end, Iron Will isn’t about denial, it’s about confrontation. The confrontation of a Jewish people against the hardships they faced in World War II—“In melting-pot America [Jews] were heat-resistant, tempered by several thousand years of being close to, if not in, history’s fires”—just as it is about the confrontation and hardships that Black communities were enduring in Alabama—”‘I’m calling on you to do something about what’s happening to your people…Let me put it to you straight, Mr. Royce. Either you march for your people or you march against them.’” It’s about the confrontation of Russ against his sexaholic past, his orphan present, his open-book future. It’s about the confrontation of law men and criminals, gangster and gangsters, the right way of doing business and the wrong way of doing business. In the end, Iron Will becomes not simply a confrontation of a boy against his past and future, but a borough and country’s:

The ethos of the time was this: our failure—a nation’s, a group’s, an individual’s—was rooted in our own weakness or greed or lust or love or even in our genes. We could not blame someone else: we were our own enemy.

And yet, for such a perfectly tailored story, Iron Will sometimes veers toward too perfect. After all, there is something beautiful about a loose knot, and Kestin, who does such a fine job tying together his characters and twists, may leave some readers almost melancholy that their futures end so buttoned up. Still, if this book’s single flaw is that it it’s almost flawless structurally…well, let’s just say that’s a problem I’d happily embrace in my own work. Consider the multitudes of stories written about gangsters and it’s fair to say the world of new fiction is lucky to count Kestin in its ranks. Here is a writer who knows how to follow his own advice, to write work that matters, and to craft it not in floral prose but literary iron—forty-seven jabs, not a word or action wasted.

Further Links and Reading:

• If you’d like to purchase a copy of The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats, now is the perfect time to do it because Dzanc Books is having a huge summer book sale. From now until July 9th you’ll get half-off their titles plus free shipping. Help support this great non-profit by taking advantage of this equally great deal.

• To read a selection from Kestin’s novel, here is an excerpt from The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats, published in The Collagist.
• You can also read about how Kestin came to writing in a brief piece he wrote for the Three Guys, One Book blog in their “When We Fell in Love” section, entitled “Books–and Walks–that Made me a Writer.”
• Other authors who’ve recently written on this topic for the “When We Fell in Love” series on Three Guys, One Book include Eric Puchner (Music Through the Floor) , Elwood Reid (DB), Tom Rachman (The Imperfectionists), and Leslie Jamison (The Gin Closet).
• Kestin is also the author of Based on a True Story, a collection of novellas. Here is a description of the book from the publisher: “Set on the eve of WWII in an erotically charged Africa, an intensely un-Gauguinesque Polynesia, and a Hollywood of explosive racial and gender identities, the three novella that make up Based on a True Story reveal the roots of contemporary life in a world at war with itself.” This book was published by Dzanc in 2008.

Prague / photo credit: Pablo Sanchez

What is it about the European cultures, tucked like bats into their tiny cubbies, that seems so much more specific than our own? How do Belgium or Luxembourg achieve “culture” in little more space we might use to construct a Wal-Mart megastore? What is it about confinement that breeds a more tribal than national, identity? What are we doing when we sit down to read a collection of fiction culled from a continent? What to make of the contiguities of the stories, that seem at times to overlap the national boundaries so as to “say something about that place”? The very assemblage of stories is frustrating, and self-confounding. What you could comfortably say about “Europe” after a summer abroad and a few hostels in Prague sounds positively Mrs. Mortimer-ian after the reflexivity (On se voit) and pure strangeness of these narratives (?): even naming them calls for fresh punctuation and some superior method of notation, a more fertile subjunctive.

Olympic Rings in Berlin / photo credit: Will Palmer

How to avoid taking roll? Three collections of unrelated vignettes, present. Three stories tangent upon a famous person and his or her actions as reflected upon the world stage, present.

Zinedine Zidane, in a Camus-worthy cameo penned by Bruxellois Jean-Philippe Toussaint, is gripped by nausea as he feels his presence–in the existential sense–at Berlin’s Olympic Stadium on July 9, 2006. Toussaint, a cinematographer as well as an author, cites Freud among his influences, but it is a stunt double of Camus’s “dark wind” that seems to draw Zidane from the future that has become the present, and to the absurd act that will become immortal: the headbutt to Marco Materazzi’s chest. Like Meursault, ennui and pure fatigue lead him to the “unscripted action,” the endpoint that his entire career has determined for him. Everyone and no one has seen the action: there is only the “Italian player” on the ground, and Zidane’s own head, forever covering half the distance to his opponent’s chest, without ever arriving. What better characterization of the action shots, the contortions of perpetrator and victim immortalized on Google? How much of what we claim to know is based on circumstantial evidence about what we’ve missed?

Suspended almost dead center of the volume, Giedra Radvilavičiūtė lays out a handful of answers in her five criteria for evaluating texts. In a collection like this, the gesture is reminiscent of a primary-school exercise book: tear out this ruler, and use it to solve the problems on the other pages. The tenets–in short, memorability, connection to lived experience, immersibility for the reader, revelation of the banal, and the impossibility of formulating any assertion without doubt–hover over the rest of the stories, inducing the reader to flip back, like a dutiful student to the endnotes, even after moving on to a new region. Connection to lived experience? Check. Revelation of the banal? Half a check. Immersibility? Perhaps not; here we are, flipping around, taking measure.

Back to the roll call for a moment. (What is about this collection that calls forth the spirit of the schoolroom? Do we, with an anthology, become students again? Do we read it because we assume it’s good for us, because there is some moral good in having read it, in the plus-que-parfait, like “the classics” our Brit-Lit teachers upheld?) A pair of stories about futuristic death-obsessed bureaucracies, present. Now this is the sort of gritty, dubbed stuff we expect to tune into when we delve into the European humanities scene. Flamand Peter Terrin tracks pro-/ant-agonist Ferdinand, noir-style, through his unauthorized murder of a loud and boorish neighbor. Haunted by some indistinct memories that he may have already drilled through more than his allotted share of murders (two per citizen, thanks), Ferdinand has some “Tell-Tale Heart”-ish moments as he attempts to sneak out of his victim’s house. His reasoning, though, about his neighbors, about others in general, is purely modern: “They’d rather see me dead than alive.” We all sort of feel this way about each other, in a way, which makes the two-murder ration seem at once gratuitous and not quite enough. If “L’enfer, c’est les autres,” then “le ciel, c’est la solitude.” It is in this solitary utopia that Ferdinand lurks farther and farther afield, into les quartiers difficiles, waiting for the sound of the punitive shot, knowing that the actual bullet to the brain will have preceded it. It’s a dim and sardonic story, one where you wonder more about what it’s like to off someone than get off with them, and where the two-murder-per-person method of population control is considered kinder than asking people to cut back on their childbearing.

Over in futuristic Bulgaria, Georgi Gospodinov reports on the anesthetic–literally, flowers no longer have scents and the sky gapes at the seams like an old baseball–conditions that follow our depredations upon genetics and the ozone layer. Castor P., an elderly astronomer who still remembers real bees and who, way back in 2011, discovered the universe’s smallest black hole, is about to sign over the last several decades of his allotted twelve and a half. He’s only waiting for the arrival of his son, on some other star; the silent recipient of his brief telegrams. As he waits, Castor arrives at the conclusion that loneliness has become the only organic substance, having escaped from its container like a gas and filling the vacuum where air used to be. His son never does arrive, and Castor is extinguished, mortal as his namesake. We’re left to wonder: who is his twin? Is the reader meant to be his double? There’s an Oedipal universality to this narrative: we can picture our old fathers, in their felt shirts, sending us voice mails and shakily lettered cards from our old ZIP codes. We only respond ceremonially, when we have to go back because they are sick, or dying or, finally, when we have to sort through their crumbled old papers and photographs of a world where they were at ease. He’s touching, this untwinned Geminorum, because he doesn’t want to make a fuss; he doesn’t tear up in front of the young woman clerking at the death office, still hoping his son will take a shining to her when he gets there.

Not everyone is so moving: in the other corners of Europe, a john runs off from a bust in a public pay toilet, leaving his homeless young servicer unpaid and beaten by cops; children kill a dolphin in a salt-water novelty tank during a dinner party, and the adults laugh it off; a girl rejects a boy during a secluded picnic and makes him drive her back to town; and a couple, lost on an idyllic bike ride, tie their dog to a tree and abandon it just before the husband proclaims his affair with his wife’s half-sister. But what’s the difference, anyway? In the first collection of vignettes, Austrian Antonio Fian’s narrator confesses to an eerily similar act with a friend of his wife’s sister who, surreally, turns out to be his wife–and every other woman in the world–after all. “So, all the women in the world know about us?” asks the adulterer, unsettled. They might as well–as in Gregory Corso’s poem, “Marriage,” we’re all alike–”All streaming into the same cozy hotels/All going to do the same thing tonight.” The only rebellion we might possibly enjoy is to remove ourselves from the honeymoon suite altogether: “Stay up all night! Stare that hotel clerk in the eye!” Sexuality, so fascinating and individual to the self is, in reality, one of our most banal habits.

Another of humanity’s more banal projects, pop culture, finds an apt definition in Victor Pelevin’s description of “the merely comfortable selling the poor fantasies about the lives of the rich, the very rich, and the fabulously rich.” One immediately visualizes the same photos duplicated and recaptioned in the high-budget celebrity mags down to the press-release reprints in the low: if magazine layout was still analog, these images would be peeled bare by masking tape. From Professor Potashinsky, pioneering theorist of “Friedmann Space,” we learn that there is a whole field of quantum mechanics specific to wealth; apparently, the wealth-traveler, or “lucrenaut” (take that, Laika) ceases to perceive time and cannot recall any lucreventures if he or she is once again separated from the critical mass of wealth. Not for lack of trying, though–lucrenauts live it up, eating and drinking and–here is Pelevin’s most brilliant line, at least in translation–”transferring their genetic material to gentle creatures who sold themselves so expensively that the transactions already resembled love.” At the end of the experiment, the brain images of the lucrenauts’ perceptions during these brave ventures are uniform: a green corridor. The proletariat struggle, the rise and fall of communism, the corruption and trafficking, and drug-cartel stabbings for wealth, and what does it feel like? A waiting room in a third-rate clinic.

It would be a Short-Story-210, too-clever-by-half reader who would state that the motifs of overmanaged, generic nation-states and transactional, interchangeable relationships–and the substitution of celebrity gossip for village tongue-wagging–directly correspond to anxieties about the European Union and any amalgamating tendencies it might have on the cultures within its borders. Without putting words in anyone’s mouth, it’s fair to assume that no one wants the mother country to turn into the Epcot version of itself: a souvenir stand with a few snack specialties–extra points for chocolate, fried stuff in cones, and sausage. It’s limiting, though, not to mention a little boring, to read literature symptomatically, and we’re often so immersed in our era that we tend to overdesignate themes as specific to our own time. Reading with an inflection is one thing; “getting the news through poems,” or short stories, for that matter, is another.

Europe isn’t the only continent where people are overwhelmed by market psychology and looking around at each other to define themselves. The laments that nothing is genuine anymore, that style is winning over substance, that there’s nothing original left to do or say, are almost as old as recorded history–or, cynics might say, as old people themselves. Somehow, there have been new utterances and new pastimes and, much as the new is always indebted to its antecedents, the breath hasn’t been entirely snatched from us yet. In fact, if anything, there’s a little too much breath–together with text and bandwith and airtime and any of the other major transmitters. Of course, surplus doesn’t equal substance, and language doesn’t equal an utterance. We’re watching the same shows, in different languages: celebrities are whittling their faces and bodies down to the same androgyn; music is so produced it’s hard to name the instrument; and food–at least the affordable, available stuff–is so processed you can’t name the food animal or the preservative. The vacuum-inflating loneliness and ersatz bees may not be far behind.

Further Reading and Links

Aleksandar Hemon

- In this interview, World Books talks to series editor Aleksandar Hemon about the challenges of promoting first-rate European fiction to American readers.

- Here on Fiction Writers Review, read a review of Hemon’s most recent story collection, Love and Obstacles.

- Read interviews with some of the anthology’s contributors: The Quarterly Conversation talks to Jean-Philippe Toussaint; Dalkey Archive Press talks to Georgi Gospodinov (Bulgaria), to Antonio Fian (Austria), to Peter Stamm (Switzerland), to Naja Marie Aidt (Denmark), and to many others.

- Via BookBrowse, read an excerpt from Best European Fiction’s preface (by Zadie Smith).

- If you’re shopping for a copy of this book, support indie bookstores by ordering it from Powell’s.