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[Poetry for Prosers] Like A Good Story? You’ll Love These Four Collections.

Katie Umans — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 13:00:18 +0000

Poetry for Prosers is an occasional column by Katie Umans.

These four recent books of poems should appeal to anyone who loves a good story. Warning: the plots may be absurd or cryptic or surreal—or may slip out the back door when you go looking for them.

Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions Ltd, 2011)
by Aracelis Girmay

Aracelis Girmay’s Kingdom Animalia, borrowing animals for metaphor and mirror, asks how a person can live as the one “pushed or fallen/out of the grave, to live.” The living in her books is big and ecstatic, the contemplations of death also somehow so. Her poems tumble into pleas, odes, and elegies, sometimes seeming to land with the imprint not of the brain but of the heart, at least as it can be summoned through poetry’s music. They are never restrained, jaded, or flattened. The speaker watches “the sea & beach move into each other’s mouths” and cries out “O, god, let us love / like they love.” Because of this largeness, this declarative ripeness in the poems, it’s sometimes easy to overlook the precision and intelligence of smaller images, as in the beginning of “Portrait of the Woman as a Skein,” which asks, startlingly, earnestly: “Tell me what, on earth, / would make you leave your hands / or want to, at the wash-sink? / in the lemon grove? / on the way home from standing, baffled, / in the grocery?” and opens from there.

“& isn’t the heart / an ampersand?” Girmay asks in “&.” Yes. In this book, the heart joins the self to everything it can. The heart exists perhaps only what it can join. The speaker’s loved ones are stretched across countries and continents and generations, so the ampersand is necessary, a symbol both rapturous and rending. At times family includes even people not related to one another, as when the speaker watches an intimate scene between a young man and a distraught woman who is not actually related to him, but who somehow is by the end of the poem.

Girmay’s poems are all about such connections, about the pull of family, the pull of earth, the pull of places one has been, the pull of the body’s own impulses, all the “touches of the disappearing.” Where they pause on politics, as in “Praise Song for the Donkey,” which recalls a moment of destruction in Palestine, it is in the context of how impermanent we already are and just how pointless the acceleration of violence is.

One day, not today, not now, we will be gone
from this earth where we know the gladiolas.
My brother, this noise,
some love [you] I loved
with all my brain, & breath,
will be gone; I’ve been told, today, to consider this
as I ride the long tracks out & dream so good

I see a plant in the window of the house
my brother shares with his love, their shoes. & there
he is, asleep in bed
with this same woman whose long skin
covers all of her bones, in a city called Oakland
& their dreams hang above them
a little like a chandelier
& their teeth flash in the night, oh, body.

—from “Kingdom Animalia”

Something in the Potato Room (Kore Press, 2009)
by Heather Cousins

Though this book is a few years old now, it is well worth bringing to the attention of fiction readers (and all readers) who might have missed it. In Something in the Potato Room, Heather Cousins draws us into a world that is bizarre and full of underside-of-the-rock images: a little bit Edward Gorey, a little bit office satire, and a little bit Heart of Darkness. The poems are bodily—full of saliva and crotches, houses “the color of lips and toenails,” then later mandibles, pearly bones, tendons, headaches.

The lines are like some dark glue that might seep out from the edges of a proper Victorian photograph. In fact, Victorian-style drawings dot the book and occasionally hold the frame of an image a touch longer than the poem.

Written more like a novel than a set of disparate poems, the untitled columns of text follow a protagonist who works at an unnamed museum, the stress of which seems to throw her into a state of hypochondria. She is tended by a cryptic, vaguely sinister doctor who sends her on vacation to clear her head. She buys a house and encounters more menacing mysteries there, but these become, at least, her own. The potato room of the title is a “dark, crumbling walk-in” found downstairs in her new home, one perhaps once used for cold storage. It is in this room that a central gruesome re-birth takes place, propelling the remainder of the book and ferrying the narrator into a kind of purpose with a story that’s all images and yet somehow utterly legible.

I held him. Like sailors
hold oars. Like the starv-
ing hold bread. Like boy
scouts hold knots. He was
pointy and full of scuttles.
He smelled of mushrooms
and placenta. It filled the
small room. Coated us.
An oily dust. My hair and
eyelashes were full of it.

Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie (The University of Akron Press, 2010)
by Joshua Harmon

Here is another slightly older book well worth resurrecting. “Can we just get rid of / Poughkeepsie little by little?” Harmon asks in a rare lighter moment (or maybe it’s the most deadly serious), but before he can get rid of it, he must build it exhaustively, and that he does in eight sections of truly remarkable poetry all devoted to that one city. This is possible and not gimmicky only because Harmon is so talented and does not go simply for a surface catalog of landmarks, nor fall into a detached disdain.

Borrowing openly from literary inspirations as diverse as Baudelaire, The Spoon River Anthology, Homer, and Robert Lowell’s “For the Union Dead,” at times Harmon’s vignettes make me think most of the work of a poet he doesn’t allude to—the T.S. Eliot of “Preludes,” with his “conscience of a blackened street / Impatient to assume the world.” Other times they are more like a Bruce Springsteen song pushed up into slightly more rarefied and intellectual language. Reading them you are word-ported to a stagnant and litter-strewn street, perpetually twilight, often cold, where the sealed-in domestic and commercial rituals lend not a sense of community but a sense of something encrypted, of many people working toward many survivals in some fiercely private way. Poughkeepsie and its people make up a kind of tragedy of self-containment (“We’re cutting down our half of the tree, you can do what you like with yours”).

The no-break look and rhythm of the early long poem “The Poughkeepsiad” may be off-putting to some readers at first. “The Poughkeepsiead” is not only one sentence that spans six pages; it is one sentence that barrels along like an avalanche gathering nouns, never culminating in a verb. Sure there are verbs, small actions, embedded in the lines, but the poem seems trapped (productively, in a literary sense) in “a terrain of nearly unbearable enjambment,” to use Ann Lauterbach’s astute assessment on the back cover. It can certainly seem intimidating, as if one would need a flash of instant large-scale understanding to match its ambition, but if you can shake that feeling and submit to the poem’s moments, you will find each astounding in its own right, from the “wire cart/loaded with the music of aluminum / cans” to the “traffic-struck doe kicking limply / beside the road” or someone sleeping “through gruesome / histories of endurance like an eyelash stuck to a cheek.”

For capturing a sense of place, far more often fiction’s work, it is hard to think of a book of poems that is more successful. As animated by Harmon, Poughkeepsie is a realm where knowledge of a place and the visceral feel of it are never far apart, where “it’s going / to get colder: and it gets colder.” At 90+ pages, the book is probably not one to read in a sitting, but open to any page and you’ll find a stunning portrait that speaks volumes about how poems, which so often boast of being timeless and placeless, can also land somewhere and lose nothing.

The automatic garage-door opener 
lifts on a prospect of Poughkeepsie:  
row of parked cars along curb, man 
leaf-blowing each falling leaf,  
sumac growing beneath the overpass:  
if you’re not part of the problem,  
you’re part of the lengthening  
tragedy: we see all the others  
slipped into the bright shapes of endeavor,  
imprints snow slowly fills, but the stray  
detours and workarounds of the secret 
city inside the more obvious one  
elude our plundered adornments  
and church-bell quarter hours

—from “Two Pastorals”

Lucky Fish
by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
(Tupelo Press, 2011)

With Lucky Fish, Aimee Nezhukumatathil makes her second appearance in this column. Considering the critical acclaim she is enjoying, this is probably the least of her recent accomplishments, but I think it says something about the reliable accessibility and charm of her voice, coupled with a joyous curiosity that can be appreciated by poets and prosers alike.

The bright and sun-struck poems of Lucky Fish seem at first to be pure Neruda-like odes to fruits and critters and to all that can be projected upon them, so pomegranates scattered from a stolen tree are the “stormy and still-beating hearts” of the original owners and stars in the sky are “cola-colored.” So the speaker says to a lover “I point my pistil / & blade of leaves to you.” But what’s most satisfying in these poems, and where Nezhukumatathil parts ways from the lusty and satisfied Neruda, is that they are not always pleasure-seeking. Sometimes they are inquisitive, often compassionate, sometimes even gently accusatory. These worlds don’t belong to us. They have their own meaning first, before we read our own onto them. The poems are inhabited, too, by a melancholy note, represented by disconsolate petting zoo animals and caged great apes and a fortune telling parrot who guesses that those to whom it tells less welcome fortunes might “tear [its] red beak / in two angry pieces / like a pistachio.”

The poems lean, too, into the magical, as when a flower eats a farmer in “Corpse Flower” or a boy transforms into a bird in “The Feathered Cape of Kechi.” They are fables and fairy tales, yes, but so, the poet suggests, is a honeymoon or motherhood or being a poet, all such delicate and unlikely states, all reliant on the larger narrative we bring to them, what we tell ourselves we are doing—and why.

The poems are not all nature-driven and fable-like. One of the most enjoyable sequences in the book is about Nezhukumatathil’s own identity. In “Dear Amy Nehzooukammyatootill” and “Are All the Break-Ups in Your Poems Real?” she betrays her affection for students trying to figure out her poems and poetry in general. In “Dear Betty Brown,” she strips the affection away to chastise the Texas Representative who suggested that citizens with un-American sounding names should change them to make pronunciation easier for others. The book’s third section is a sustained look at pregnancy, birth, and early motherhood, from a husband who stays “strong as a pepper plant” during his wife’s labor to the early weeks with a baby whose “ears / glow from behind like a church window.” In the haunting poem “The Toy Universe,” Nezhukumatathil zooms out from her son’s toy universe, where “there are smiley faces on trains, / race cars, buses” to the universe of the children “piecing together toy trains / and race cars and buses” in China, living out very different childhoods. In this poem, Nezhukumatathil breaks open the insularity of attentive motherhood. Her poems always seem to be about how much more can be let in, how much farther empathy can extend into world both human and animal, without breaking down our own carefully tended bonds.

She’s been warned not to sleep with moonlight
on her face or she will be taken from her house.

She wears eel-skin to protect herself. She tilts
her face to the night sky when no one is looking.
During the eclipse, eels bubble in their dark

and secret caves. Toads frenzy in pastures
just outside of town, surrounding the dumb cows

in a wet mess of croak and sizzle.

—from “Eclipse”

Katie Umans is one poet of Two Poet Truffles, a chocolate and poetry enterprise that publishes The Concher. Her first book of poetry, Flock Book, is forthcoming this summer from Dzanc/Black Lawrence Press.

Contents May Have Shifted, by Pam Houston

Michael Byers — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 13:00:29 +0000

Pam Houston’s new novel, Contents May Have Shifted (W.W. Norton, 2012), appears to be closely autobiographical, in parts. Its 320 pages consist of 144 journal entries written by someone named Pam. The book’s Pam appears to be a writer, or a teacher of writing, or both. Pam namedrops some fancy writer friends, mostly poets. Pam travels, opines about her love life and the love lives of others, laments her crappy childhood, considers the injustices of the non-white and non-rich world, and writes about animals. While in the company of her female friends, Pam is liable to say or think things like “on the subject of men she is totally fucked.” She tends to describe people of color as “gentle” or “pleasant” or “dancing—joyful—to the beat” or “singing a little song” or as having “kind eyes.” Sometimes someone nearby says a bad word like “faggot” or “niggerhead,” but the person who says this word can be counted on to have a secret heart of gold beneath his gruff horse-breaking exterior.

The 144 journal entries aren’t in any discernible chronological order, meaning there’s not much narrative to be found. In Pam’s world, bears, small planes, fishing, hunting, and Alaska are prominently featured, although not in such a way as to add up to a sustained story involving any of these things. Likewise, people appear without introduction and disappear without warning, and not in a good way. A fair number of entries are also devoted to Pam’s dreams, or to Pam’s experiences in therapy, acupuncture, Bhutan, etc. There are wise things said by wise people. There are beauties in nature. There are the horrors of history, sanitized as though for the Book Club Audience (in a former Turkish brothel, Pam experiences “rooms so thick with ghosts of women in captivity you can feel their hair on your arm, their jasmine-scented breath on your face”). The reader is peppered with such pronouncements as “I know faith springs out of doubt like topsoil, and one thing I am is here right now.”

I admit I have very little patience with this kind of thing. And I’m not the ideal reader for this book. Pam and her pals, all proponents of “spirituality,” or whatever, aren’t living the same life I am, which is the life involving facts and science, and the worst of spirituality’s practitioners—which seems to me to be most of them—are only interesting in the degree to which they are unable to recognize how tedious their chakra-talk is.

But even beyond my impatience with the subject matter and the characters’ careless habits of mind, this book is uncourageous and predictable. The problems of the characters are uninspired—Why doesn’t Rick love me more than he loves Sofree? Why were my parents such monsters? —and similarly little surprises the reader in the course of the narrative development.

As might be said of any failed book, this one had the chance to be interesting, frightening, challenging, beautiful. For instance, what if Pam suggested, somewhere, once, that she’s got a lousy love life because she’s mostly not very lovable? What if the book had taken on, treated, considered, addressed, the sad, evident mediocrity of her privileged personhood—a mediocrity all of us similarly privileged people might reasonably claim? What if she considered the notion that her parents were crappy to her because they didn’t like her much, and for some interestingly convincing reasons? That Rick, when leaving her, had his reasons too? Such a book, written by someone who dared to assess the sluggish economy of herself with some objectivity, would be scary as hell, because that would be a clear-eyed, forthright book written by someone who knew her way around the imperfect world of herself—someone who had taken a good look at what it means to be a fucked-up, unexcellent person and come back with a real report on behalf of the rest of us fucked-up, unexcellent people.

It is fair, in the face of this kind of thing, to consider what we ask of a literary novel. It depends who’s doing the asking, of course. Contents May Have Shifted is barely fiction at all, barely pretends to be, as far as I can see, and often seems to be a first-person account whose audience is meant to be the author and the author alone. Or, maybe fans of Pam Houston’s other books. But every successful novel is in its way an experimental one, in that it must derive its unique form from its unique content. This is why they take so long to write, even the short ones. And the long list of similarly hermetic autobiographical fictions—ranging the gamut from J.M. Coetzee’s Youth trilogy to Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home—suggests Houston’s tactic can work, in the right hands.

The only thing I ask, really, is that a literary novel take its own existence seriously—its own people, events, and concerns. Things must not only be told with a clear eye, but those things must also be important for the author to tell—because we, the reader, could not in a thousand years imagine them ourselves if the author were not around to do it for us. This test of elementary unimaginability is a handy way to distinguish genre, or non-literary, novels from literary ones. Lord Peter Wimsey, for example, is always perfectly imaginable. Indeed, we know he will remain the same man no matter how many people are poisoned around him. Mysterious death shapes the plot, but we will not be surprised except in unsurprising and smallishly clever and pleasing ways, as Lord Peter’s character, and indeed his whole world, continue ticking over like a well-kept Rolls, unaffected. This is why we love mysteries, as P.D. James has noted, and plainly it’s the case that if I insist on asking a genre novel to deliver the complex and unique pleasures of literature, I’m just a boneheaded killjoy.

So maybe it’s better to consider Contents May Have Shifted as a genre piece. Not sure what the genre might be called—it’s the one featuring a late-middle aged spiritually-minded unmarried childless woman who safely but with wise and fond sorrow considers her life’s path with the aid of acupuncturists, psychic masseurs, hot tubs, Buddhists, etc. It’s not a terrible book, I guess: it’s just thuddingly dull. Everything’s familiar, and safe, and predictable. Pam’s scary flights always land just fine. There’s always a nice dog around. The spirit world beckons.

There are a handful of highlights. There is a good mudslide in journal entry #30. There is a pet psychic who reads the mind of a pet fish, and who is good for a laugh. ”Your fish really likes being pretty,” the psychic reports. There’s some good writing about sled dogs. Most of the time, though, we’re just given the chance to read Pam’s journal while she thinks about her travels and her troubles, with the idea being that we are being given a portrait of a grief-stricken woman coming to terms with the betrayals she has experienced at the hands of the men in her life. But the lack of narrative drive and absence of complexity in these characters combine to deliver the impression that this narrator has not so much been felled by grief as she has bumped into it inadvertently while boarding a plane.

Further Links and Resources

In the Iowa Review, read an excerpt from Contents May Have Shifted.
On Flickr, check out the images that helped inspire the novel.
Listen to an interview with Houston on KPOV radio. In another recent interview at Fictionaut, the author offers writing advice, including tips for getting unstuck.
- The author’s website offers a section from Houston’s novel Sight Hound and the story “The Best Girlfriend You Never Had,” from her collection Waltzing the Cat.
- Preview Houston’s bestselling collection, Cowboys Are My Weakness, and her book on real-life adventures, A Little More about Me, at the publisher’s site.
- For a very different take on writing and spirituality here on Fiction Writers Review, read Aaron Cance’s interview with Melanie Rae Thon.

The Forbidden Thought: A review of Zone One, by Colson Whitehead

Michael Rudin — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 13:00:01 +0000

“If you weren’t concentrating on how to survive the next five minutes, you wouldn’t survive them.”

Welcome to the world of Colson Whitehead’s Zone One (Doubleday, 2011), where a concrete barrier at Broadway and Canal separates Mark Spitz and his fellow men from monsters. In case they get past the guns and bullets, the perched snipers and patrols, there is also armor, a woven-plastic miracle fabric that is the final separation between undead teeth and fresh flesh. That, and consciousness.

Yep, there be zombies out there, creatures infected by a mutating plague that’s only become more potent in the years since “Last Night,” the quiet Sunday evening when society came to its abrupt, bloody end. In the plague’s aftermath, what’s left of the world’s brightest minds have come to reside in Buffalo (Oakland was firebombed, St Augustine nuked, and, well, don’t ask about Birmingham), where they coordinate Manhattan’s resettlement with survivors who have bought into its “American Phoenix” campaign, complete with slogan, anthem, and administrative assistants who give out buttons and hats from the movement’s merchandising arm.

The schwag does little to help the survivors deal with their “vast galaxy of survivor dysfunction,” such as Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder (PASD). Nor does company wine or a black-market of painkillers and anti-depressants. Nothing can erase the final memories of friends and loved ones, the moments they went feral and tore into one another. Ditto for the moment the equally gruesome government did, tearing into innocents in early-stage quarantine panics.

No, in the end, Spitz, the Omega Unit he belongs to, and his family of “Pheenie” comrades must concentrate on surviving five-minutes-at-a-time if they are to reclaim the southern tip of the island. It is this real-time, reactionary mindset that provides the perfect narrative module by which to tell Zone One’s story: a Friday, a Saturday, and then a Sunday.

Over one hell of a long weekend, Colson Whitehead unfurls Mark Spitz’s story, squeezing flashbacks between gunfights and requiring that we hang on for the ride if we want to know what came before. Which is exactly right. How else would our narrator share his perceptions on the transformation of his world if not between artillery strikes? Spitz comes to the reader in bite sizes, a direct result of what he’s facing: “… a legion of teeth and fingers.”

This zombie legion falls into two groups. You already know the “skel,” recognizable from any zombie movie of your youth, or from AMC’s “The Walking Dead.” These are the bloodthirsty ones best to avoid. But leave it to Whitehead—shortlisted for both a Pulitzer and a National Book Award and the recipient of a MacArthur grant—to not only craft an apocalypse where survivors must file Incident Reports, but one where some zombies go for flesh and others freeze in time.

It is this second type of zombie, the “straggler,” that provides Zone One with depth and moral conflict. Whereas skels are walking hunger—muscle memory but no cognition—stragglers don’t walk at all, frozen in some place of their subconscious’ choosing, be it flying a kite, photocopying their buttocks, or reading a palm. They will theoretically do this one act for eternity, allowing Spitz and Omega Unit to muse over what event brought them there in a game called “Solve The Straggler.” When that gets old, they play games with them, be it administering wedgies or drawing on Hitler mustaches. But it’s Whitehead who plays the best game with these “stragglers,” allowing what might be a first in the zombie genre: genuine characterization of that drooling, half-decomposed shell of a monster.

Ironically, the straggler zombie—he who occupies—makes up the one-percent. Given the remaining ninety-nine are after blood and these stragglers aren’t running—on the attack, or, like survivors, from it—an odd affection builds between the unit’s Lieutenant and the undead who have stopped to smell the ash-covered roses. “Personally, I like them,” the Lieutenant remarks. “Not supposed to say it out loud, but I think they’ve got it right and we’re the ninety-nine percent that have it all wrong.”

Nevertheless, the Lieutenant orders Spitz and the other soldiers into a regimented block-by-block “sweep” of Manhattan’s sub-20-story buildings. They must off any remaining stragglers now that the Marines have plugged Manhattan’s subways and bridges from future invasion.

Most zombie stories focus on the survivalist narrative: the running, hiding, screaming defense of oneself or one’s family. And while Zone One certainly flashes back to those moments, be it Spitz’s return from Atlantic City on Last Night, or the years he spent on the run since, the bulk of Whitehead’s novel takes place in a time when it is the survivors who mindlessly patrol for meat, who mindlessly kill anything not like them.

The magic in Whitehead’s horror story is that the survivors may horrify the reader more so than the zombies. Hypnotized and bothering nobody, the stragglers gain your pity, then your sympathy. Along with Spitz, you envision who they were before, what love or memory has them hovering in a state between man and monster.

But “Pop ‘em and drop ‘em” are the orders, and when Spitz understands his work he sees it as “…an act of mercy,” necessary busy-work for the society to come, one in which bleach will be a booming industry and window makers will reap fortunes. In the absence of the typical running and hiding, he and the others have time to consider all the different monstrosities at work: the skel monsters, the possibly-monstrous act of killing harmless stragglers, and then the monster who permitted all of this to happen.

What kind of cruel deity granted a glimpse of the angelic sphere, only to yank it away and condemn you to a monster’s vantage? Sentenced you to observe the world through the sad aperture of the dead, suffer the gross parody of your existence. Outside Zone One, the souls sat trapped in the bleachers, spectators to the travesties committed by their alienated hands.

Through Spitz, Whitehead masterfully develops zombies and survivors equally, personalizing the conflict even as both sides can be at times bereft of personality, surviving on barbaric drive, be it for flesh or future.

And yet, even then, Zone One isn’t about the mission or even the zombie plague. It’s not about the delineation between frozen and feral zombies. It’s not even about the soldiers and how they cope, or don’t, or can’t. It’s about Zone One, New York City, and Spitz’s love of her; how if there’s one place in the world that needed to be reclaimed, it was Manhattan, and how the beginning of the world must start here or at least die trying.

“New York City in death was very much like New York City in life. It was still hard to get a cab, for example. The main difference was that there were fewer people.”

At the beginning of Zone One, readers learn that Mark Spitz held skyscraper aspirations as a boy, hoping to one day live in the Big Apple. Did he know it would be with an assault rifle? Probably not. But even as a post-apocalyptic New Yorker Pheenie, he honors the same mission as those of the pre-undead era:

Millions of people tended to this magnificent contraption, they lived and sweated and toiled in it, serving the mechanism of metropolis and making it bigger, better, story by glorious story and idea by unlikely idea.

The braniacs in Buffalo numbered Zone One this way for a reason. If they can fix New York, they can fix the world. And in their doggedness for the old domestic life, the soldiers of Zone One actually do something miraculous: though a plague rages out beyond their barrier, old life returns. Poker. Movie nights. Birthday parties. Paperwork. They begin killing time in addition to killing zombies.

In this New New York, rather than get promoted or own a home in the Hamptons, the end-goal is to survive, a calling Spitz believes he was born and bred for. In his own words, Spitz was a “survivalist” from a young age who “…had led a mediocre life exceptional only in the magnitude of its unexceptionality. Now the world was mediocre, rendering him perfect.”

Trained to evade zombies by evading girlfriends, a man whose yearbook designation would have been “Most Likely Not to be Named the Most Likely Anything,” we are given the gift of the perfect post-apocalyptic New Yorker, settling in if only it will allow him. It is through Spitz that we come to realize that modern life may have already been mediocre, zombie-like long before the plague accelerated things. Throughout Omega Unit’s sweeps of Manhattan, Spitz reflects back on the former city’s consumerism and entertainment addiction, those less-homicidal hungers that drove New Yorkers pre-PASD.

As for Spitz’s own drive, it seems the only thing that can slow him down is ash. Mobile Disposal units burn dead stragglers with “uncanny efficiency,” and though some surmise the steady fall of ash has more to do with faraway nuclear fallout than individual cremations, Spitz despises all of it equally. He feels the white flakes “in his lungs, becoming assimilated into his body,” and one can’t help but feel that he is, in ways, channeling another time in New York and Zone One’s history, another apocalyptic moment in which New Yorkers despised ash, “…sullying every edifice and muting the blue sky: the dust of the dead.”

But even then, Spitz is a New Yorker. He doesn’t quit. He pushes away “The Forbidden Thought,” an allusion to the suicides that others turned to when five-more-minutes became one-too-many. The only other Forbidden Thought? That would be to call Zone One a book about zombies.

Alive, dead, and undead, Whitehead’s novel is as much about people in their many forms as the city they are trying to re-inhabit. As Mark Spitz so clearly puts it: “The addresses remained the same and so did the flawed philosophies. It wasn’t anyplace else. It was New York City.”

Further Links and Resources:

Mark Spitz’s “Last Night” was spent playing poker in Atlantic City and that’s a subject author Colson Whitehead knows well, having covered the World Series of Poker for Grantland this year.

“In the cinema of end-times, the roads feeding the evacuated city are often clear, and the routes out of town clotted with paralyzed vehicles…It makes for a stark visual image, the crazy hero returning to the doomed metropolis to save his kid or gal…” If this excerpt from Zone One sounds like good popcorn-viewing to you, you might want to check out AMC’s “The Walking Dead,” premiering Sunday, February 12^th.

[Reviewlet] badbadbad, by Jesús Ángel García

Tyler McMahon — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 13:00:18 +0000

Jesús Ángel García (JAG) is both author and narrator of the debut novel badbadbad (New Pulp Press). Telling his story to a younger brother facing combat overseas, JAG complains of a heartless ex-wife who prevents him from visiting his young son. By day, JAG works as Webmaster for a charismatic Reverend and his conservative Southern church. By night, he raises hell with the Reverend’s wayward son Cyrus. While JAG excels at both tasks, Cyrus ultimately proves more persuasive.

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

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

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

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

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

Extras

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

The Magician King, by Lev Grossman

Leslie Clements — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 13:00:30 +0000

There are practicalities to consider when traveling in an enchanted realm, things like learning the proper way to unsheathe a sword or remembering to carry a passport after crossing into the underworld. The Magician King, the second novel in Lev Grossman’s fantasy trilogy, balances epic scope and the ironies of everyday life that always seem to get in the way. This book showcases his growth as a writer and a storyteller, providing a grittier and more sophisticated story than its predecessor, The Magicians.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Links and Resources

Follow Lev Grossman on Twitter: @leverus

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

[Reviewlet] Assumption, by Percival Everett

Cam Terwilliger — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 13:00:13 +0000

Percival Everett’s Assumption (Graywolf, 2011) is a collection of three mystery novellas centering on Deputy Ogden Walker, an ex-military police officer of mixed race, who now works as a deputy in the “hick-full, redneck county” of Plata, New Mexico. Due to its episodic structure, reading Assumption feels a bit like reading an entire mystery series in one sitting. Each novella poses a new murder (or series of murders) for Ogden to unravel with the help (or antagonism) of the rest of the provincial officers at the sheriff’s department. In the first section, Ogden searches for the killer of an old woman he’s known for years, one who always disliked him for being black. In the second, Ogden must save a prostitute who has run afoul of her dealer. The last depicts Ogden clearing his name after a New Mexico game warden accuses him of murder.

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

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

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

Extra

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

[Reviewlet] The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt, by Caroline Preston

Gwen Glazer — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 13:00:23 +0000

We’ve all felt that little rush of connection or electricity or mystery—let’s call it a frisson—from standing in a dusty corner of a used bookstore, flipping through a shoebox of old photos or postcards, and finding something that seems to tell a secret story.

Caroline Preston’s fourth novel, The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt, seeks to recreate that feeling. Preston put together hundreds of pages of hand-cut photos and captions to create the story of her 18-year-old heroine, who receives her father’s Corona typewriter and a blank scrapbook from her mother as a high-school graduation present.

To assemble the materials that would make up Frankie’s life, Preston trolled antique stores and eBay for Bakelite bracelets and ticket stubs, a war medal and a flapper purse, a cigarette holder and a pair of driving glasses, bobby pins and fortune-telling cards. She put these items into a scrapbook: “over 600 pieces of 1920s vintage ephemera, and that’s a lot of stuff,” she says in an interview on her website—and then pasted typewritten text around them to create Frankie’s narrative.

The thrill of that chase is evident in her voice during the interview; it’s the voice of an excited collector, someone who figured out how to translate her passion for ephemera in general and the 1920s in particular into a work of fiction that’s part literary fiction and part graphic novel. The book jacket deems it “a novel in pictures,” but it’s really the typewritten text that forms the story of an 18-year-old girl in 1920, leaving her hometown to see the world.

Through the pages of her scrapbook, readers learn that Frankie Pratt is the smartest girl in her small New Hampshire high school. She initially passes up a scholarship to Vassar because her family can’t afford it, but a failed romance provides an unexpected avenue out of her town and off to college, Greenwich Village, and Paris, not to mention brushes with Charles Lindbergh and Ernest Hemingway.

Frankie is believable and interesting, and it’s fun to spend a few hours in her world, but the unusual format of the book becomes its most interesting character. Imagining the joy it must have brought Preston to assemble this book—the countless hours of searching, the endless eBay surprise packages, the clack of the vintage typewriter, careful cutting and pasting, rubber cement on her hands—might even be a touch more enjoyable than reading the book itself. But for those of us who want to believe that agents and publishers truly are open to novel formats and creative risk-taking, and may be willing to venture into uncharted waters (even with a tried-and-true author), The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt offers a glimmer—a frisson, maybe—of hope.

Extras

Take a look inside the full-color book and flip a few sample pages on Preston’s website. Shop for a copy at your local indie bookstore.

Listen to a 2006 NPR interview of Preston discussing her book Gatsby’s Girl.

The Beginners, by Rebecca Wolff

Tyler McMahon — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 13:00:26 +0000

In poet Rebecca Wolff’s first novel, The Beginners (Riverhead, 2011), Ginger Pritt is a bookish fifteen-year-old stuck in the small New England town of Wick. Not yet over the death of older brother Jack, her parents have become withdrawn and disinterested in their daughter’s life. At two years her senior, Ginger’s best friend Cherry increasingly prefers the company of boys.

Enter the Motherwells. Theo and Raquel are a smart and worldly young couple, the newest and most stimulating presence in this sleepy town. In their home, Ginger is treated like an adult, allowed to partake of their wine and their grown-up conversations on sex and mortality. To the chagrin of their parents and the puzzlement of everyone else, Ginger and Cherry spend all their spare time with the couple. But there’s more to the Motherwells than meets the eye. Ginger uncovers some cryptic details of their background—how they met and why they neither work nor want for money. It seems their reasons for settling in Wick are wrapped up in the town’s own secrets, and lead all the way back to the Salem witch trials.

As the story proceeds, a series of lines are crossed. Theo’s interest in Ginger turns from friendship to something more dubious. Cherry has a change of heart and severs ties with the Motherwells. The unlikely threesome of Ginger, Raquel, and Theo breach the town’s taboo spaces: the locked-up old mill, the male-only Social Club, and the reservoir—where the ruins of another town lurk somewhere below the surface. At the novel’s apex, Wick’s norms prevail violently upon the Motherwells, and Ginger is reduced to the innocent and impressionable young girl the town still wants her to be—a victim rather than an accomplice.

The plot of this book plays second fiddle only to its atmosphere. A master of mood and tone, Wolff is able to conjure up a wicked cross of fear and intrigue upon every page. The term ‘gothic’ is thrown around with abandon when it comes to contemporary fiction, but this novel adheres to some of the key elements of that genre, as practiced by the likes of Horace Walpole or Ann Radcliffe: a blending of horror with romance, a fascination with cryptic architecture, and the pervasive charm of magnetic outcasts.

Wolff manages to get her hands around some of the slipperiest aspects of the adolescent experience. She makes real Ginger’s dreamy escapes into books, her burgeoning sexuality, her infatuation for the Motherwells, and her subtle superiority towards other adults in her life. Ginger’s intelligent first-person narration splices the limbo between childhood and maturity. It is a rare and refreshing thing: a novel that takes teenagers seriously, that reminds us of how surreal our world appears to fifteen-year-old eyes.

Her prose style is also rare: a formidable lyricism that understands restraint. The music of Wolff’s sentences does not recall jazz so much as an old-time Appalachian folk ballad—full of sex and ghosts, mixing caution and temptation, obsessed with origins but somehow timeless, with the haunting images and lonesome sounds that hint at something sinister lurking beneath America’s bucolic surfaces.

Further Links and Resources

Rebecca Wolff’s other books include the poetry collections The King, Figment, and Manderley. She is also the founder of Fence magazine and its publishing arm, Fence Books.

Watch the book trailer for The Beginners, and consider shopping for your copy at an indie bookstore.

[Reviewlet] In Zanesville, by Jo Ann Beard

Jackie Reitzes — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 13:00:22 +0000

At one 2006’s AWP panels, Margaret Lazarus Dean said something particularly provocative on the topic of writing adolescent girls in fiction. What she said, among other brilliant remarks, was that male-protagonist coming-of-age novels (The Catcher in the Rye, et al.) are often received as classics while female-protagonist coming-of-age books are collectively pushed to the sidelines and called chick lit or YA by publishers and critics. Why are young womens’ stories treated as inherently less relevant? Would Harry Potter, for example, be as successful if J.K. Rowling had used her whole name and the protagonist were female?

How refreshing, then, to read a novel like Jo Ann Beard’s In Zanesville, which she describes in interviews as written for a younger audience, but whose broad appeal transcends both gender and age. Indeed, short of Beard’s interviews, nothing about this book suggests it isn’t marketed for adults. Like the rare kid in school who is popular with all the cliques, In Zanesville can hang comfortably with anybody: the story perfectly captures the tenor of early high school without ever condescending to its characters or isolating its readers.

For one thing, the unnamed narrator is hilarious. Never cutesy or precocious, her dry wit and off-hand observations compliment a lyrical and authentic vulnerability. Her best friend Felicia (Flea) is – to borrow a term from Charles Baxter – an ideal counterpoint character. Their friendship is a reminder why everyone needs a war buddy in the trenches of high school. Whether negotiating the politics of a cheerleader sleepover, deserting marching band mid-parade, or cutting deals with God in order to effectively sneak out of her house, the plucky protagonist’s voice is sharp as a tack. And though the material is beautifully age-specific (the bananas-and-mayo diner orders, the atrocity of Mom bras), the implications of time and place are significant and far-reaching.

Set in a small Illinois factory town—perched between the rural obscurity of corn fields and the glittering architecture of Chicago, the landscape mirrors that in-between feeling the narrator experiences so acutely.

In addition, the tightness of Beard’s prose undercuts any potential sentimentality of her subject matter. The opening and closing sentences of this novel struck me as the best opening and closing lines I’ve read in recent memory (the first and last scenes both take place around fire, a lovely symmetry). Each chapter starts and ends with killer one-liners. The same is true before and after the white space within chapters. This book, on top of everything else, is a craft lesson in precise, elegant compactness.

Beard, whose gorgeous and heartbreaking The Boys of My Youth also bridged a literary canyon—that between short stories and memoir—clearly understands that good writing tells the truth through whatever medium the narrative demands. And like a good friend, her work stays with you as you age, taking on new meaning and reminding you of earlier selves with each new stage of life.

Further Links and Resources

Read Jo Ann Beard’s exquisite and tragic personal essay “The Fourth State of Matter” in the New Yorker archives.

Hear Beard read from In Zanesville in this NPR excerpt and interview.

Here’s a lovely conversation between Jo Ann Beard and a former Sarah Lawrence student in The Fiddleback.

Pick up your own copy of In Zanesville.

Tastes Like Poetry: a guest post by Kevin Haworth

Celeste Ng — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 13:00:41 +0000

Editor’s note: As part of our focus on teaching this month, we’re delighted to present this guest post by Kevin Haworth.

People tell me that I am a poetic writer.

My response to this characterization varies from Thanks! to What does that mean? to Yes, my novel did sell like poetry to I want people to love my work in the way that poetry lovers love poetry, desperately and a bit dangerously, gripping the pistol under the pillow with one hand and the childhood stuffed rabbit with the other.

But what, really, does this cross-genre accusation imply? It’s meant as praise (I’m fairly certain), but wary praise, as if I’ve stumbled into a neighbor’s backyard party, where I’m welcome as long as I limit myself to the potato salad. It also suggests that there is an unspoken set of rules that govern each type of writing—a set of values rooted in aesthetics but also race, class, even gender. If you doubt this, consider how often you’ve heard the phrase “muscular prose,” and how many times—if ever—you’ve heard the term “muscular poetry.”

As writers and as readers, we sometimes have a reluctance to drift too far from shore without reliable references to help us navigate our new surroundings. Categories are the high, clear points on the map, the ones that we can find quickly when we are nervous or lost. But what comforts us in these moments can also limit us—or worse, cause us to place limitations on others. Those of us who teach writing need to be especially attentive to the way we critique our students, to the language that we use to describe their work. How often are we encouraging them to take risks and create their own language for their work, one that is not poetic or prosaic, but something truly distinctive to their own sensibility? And how often are we telling them—even inadvertently—to return to safer shores?

The academic world of creative writing continues to grow, but at the same time, in many ways, it is becoming more compartmentalized. People apply to MFA programs as a poet, as a fiction writer, etc., pledging allegiance to one strand of DNA over another. Some of this is function necessary to run institutions—we need to be able to predict how many students will be studying with the poetry teachers, how many with the nonfiction teachers, and so on, to spread the work equitably and to give each student relatively equal access to their professors. But that same bureaucracy can create its own set of meanings, and not necessarily for the better, if students define themselves primarily in opposition to the other genres, rather than as a community of writers.

It was this belief in the benefits of multi-genre conversation that led to the anthology Lit From Within. Our goal for this collection of essays about writing was—and is—to break down these divisions and remind each other of the ways that writing, of any genre, speaks to all of us. In soliciting essays from writers such as Ron Carlson, Tony Hoagland, Rick Bass and others, Dinty W. Moore and I set out to recreate the kind of exchange that occurs when great writers are put together in the same room, regardless of aesthetic preference or school of thought; to find the connections that emerge when say, a Francine Prose essay on creating fully-realized characters (in fiction) is followed by a Billy Collins essay on creating fully-realized personas (in poetry). As Robin Hemley writes in one of the book’s first essays: “The altar at which I worship is unabashedly dedicated to the ambiguities of artistic expression, regardless of genre.” We write to find ourselves in these ambiguities, embrace them, make them our own.

One final story. When I was a boy, my parents took me to a party where various kinds of exotic game were on the menu: bear, goose, snake—each one shot or trapped or killed by some other method by one of the flannel shirted men around the table. There were heaps of potatoes, broccoli boiled to a light green. Someone forked a piece of alligator onto my plate. I had just begun to eat it when the host asked me, “So? Does it taste like chicken?”

Even as a boy, I knew that my experience had been circumscribed, narrowed: my vocabulary for eating alligator was now limited to Chicken or Not Chicken. Check the box and move on. If I had known then what I know now—as a writer, teacher, as a person—I would have held up my hand and said to the other guests: Wait. I don’t know what this is. I may never know, but I’ll give it a try. Give me a minute, and I’ll try to find the words.

Kevin Haworth’s novel The Discontinuity of Small Things won the Samuel Goldberg Foundation Prize and was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. His stories and essays have been published in Michigan Quarterly Review, Columbia, Witness, Harpur Palate, Sou’wester, Cold Mountain Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and many other journals, and he has held fellowships to the Vermont Studio Center, Ledig International Writers House, and Headlands Center for the Arts. He is the co-editor, with Dinty W. Moore, of Lit From Within: Contemporary Masters on the Art and Craft of Writing, published by Ohio University Press this spring.

Further Reading:

Read a conversation between FWR Contributing Editor Erika Dreifus and Kevin Haworth on Erika’s website.
Kevin Haworth’s essay “Reading Beyond Genre” appeared in Glimmer Train Bulletin 54.
Take a closer look at Lit From Within—including reviews, excerpts, and resources—at the Ohio University Press website.