WORD/SOUND.

Stewart O'Nan/ The Odds

2012-02-25T16:50:00.000-06:00

Stewart O’Nan, for all his accomplishments as a novelist over the past decades, most likely received some of his greatest acclaim upon the release of 2007’s Last Night at the Lobster, a novel that beautifully captured the desolate and hopeless world of an owner of a Red Lobster set to close its doors for good. In less than 200 pages, O’Nan set about recreating the world of those who spend hour upon hour working, living their lives shift by shift, and his attention to detail and his compassion for his characters were what stood out and made the novel deserving of so much praise. With The Odds, O’Nan has returned to similar territory; rather than a closing restaurant, however, O’Nan focuses on a suffering marriage that has exhausted its financial stability. At the onset of the novel, Art and Marion Fowler are set to declare bankruptcy, and they’ve decided that before they do, they’ll risk their remaining savings at the roulette tables. They take a second honeymoon to Niagara Falls, spend Valentine's weekend at a glamorous hotel and casino, and try one last time to see if their marriage is worth saving. The results mirror those of Last Night at the Lobster; O’Nan often dips into the mundane interactions of Art and Marion's lives, but he does so only to show the truly humane moments of his characters, and by the novel's end, The Odds concludes as another of O’Nan’s great triumphs.

O’Nan doesn’t appear to set out to do much more than follow Art and Marion over the course of one weekend, but his execution is quite admirable. Weaving each of his character’s backstories into the thread of the main narrative and seamlessly moving between each of their points of view, O’Nan allows his readers to get dangerously close to Art and Marion’s perspectives about the weekend. Many occasions arise that could possibly give readers an idea as to how The Odds will conclude, but to his credit, O’Nan—despite the close distances he achieves through point of view—never shows his hand, and readers will most likely be held at bay until the final pages. On other occasions, O’Nan flourishes at getting to the core of Art and Marion’s marital problems. In these spots, tension spikes considerably, and Art and Marion act as though they are walking on eggshells. The conflict is great during these scenes and almost uncomfortable to read. Marion doesn’t pass up many opportunities to remind Art of his past infidelity, and although she, too, is guilty of infidelity—of which Art is unaware of—she often maintains a more pessimistic view of things than Art, who remains decidedly, and perhaps somewhat naively, optimistic through the entire weekend. The contrast of character throughout the novel is portrayed wonderfully, and even if O’Nan spends a majority of the novel illustrating the everyday activities of a vacationing couple, he manages to spike many scenes with a bitter taste, a simple reminder that beyond a lovely Valentine’s weekend is the story of two people figuring out if they still wish to be with one another.

All of this is to say that O’Nan fills The Odds with a great deal of tension, and such a thing propels the novel and creates a compelling story, but in the end, The Odds is a very humane book, and there are moments of small joy and humor within. As easily as Art and Marion show their differences, they also show what drew them to one another in the first place. Their inside jokes to one another, which O’Nan captures throughout, point to a part of their past that seems to wash right over them. Too often focused on what they’ve lost, Art and Marion sometimes neglect to see what they still have, and careful readers will surely see these things emerge as the novel moves forward. When Art and Marion attend a Heart concert on their second evening at the casino, readers can see a bit of what their past lives might have been like, and through the highs and lows of the evening, O’Nan shows that there can be satisfaction amidst otherwise stressful times (anyone who doubts this simply must see O’Nan read—and sing—this section of the novel in person; it’s an absolute delight). By the end of The Odds, the stress has not completely worn away, and while readers leave Art and Marion before their fates have been set, O’Nan provides a fitting conclusion for them; there’s nothing overly sentimental given what’s already occurred between them. It’s a matter of fact ending that offers a final statement that readers should’ve realized long before, one Art and Marion will hopefully discover themselves before any more time passes between them.

Further Reading

Interview at The Book Bench.

Interview at Savannah Book Fest.

Review at The Boston Globe.

Review at The Los Angeles Times.

Review at NPR.

Review at Time Out Chicago.

Melinda Moustakis/ Interview

2012-02-21T12:32:00.001-06:00

Melinda Moustakis published her debut collection of stories, Bear Down, Bear North, last fall. It won the Flannery O'Connor Award for short fiction, and Moustakis has since been named one of the National Book Foundation's 5 under 35 Fiction Writers for 2011. My review sheds some light on why I found Bear Down, Bear North to be an outstanding collection, and through email, Moustakis was kind enough to answer some questions regarding the process of writing and the manner in which she assembled the stories into her first book. The first half of this interview can be found at The Story Is The Cure.

C & B: How allegorical is a story like “Us Kids”? Out of all the stories in the collection, this one spoke most specifically to the idea of place as it pertains to economic and social status. With the children sleeping in a car, for example, the general feel of impoverishment, and the eagle possibly a symbol for the country as a whole, are you trying to make a larger statement in the story, and if so, was this a conscious move?

MM: I am never trying to make a statement when I write—I just want to tell a good story. When I try to make a statement the writing is a disaster and I throw it away. A character has to take over, an image, a voice and then I can move forward with a piece. The particular and concrete will lead to those lofty ideas, the allegory, the philosophical overcast. I wanted to write a story about an eagle in an outhouse, one my uncle told me. The story changed, it morphed and shimmered, and became something else. The story is however allegorical the reader wants it to be. What is fascinating is that you’re not the first person to ask me about the possible larger statements about the symbol of the eagle. To me, that means the story is working in both the concrete and the abstract—that’s what I hope happens. It also means the reader becomes invested in the story and brings in other elements—all these things work together to make the story three dimensional.

C & B: A few of the stories in the collection take on a more traditional story structure, and they stand out due to their more conventional style. As readers, we were initially pleased to be in familiar territory, but the further along we got, the modular style you use became just as familiar and, perhaps, more enjoyable. How do you envision a story when you begin to write it? Assuming you don’t always envision the same thing again and again, what prompts you to go with one style over another?

MM: I envision lines or images I have to write toward. Or a voice or point of view takes over. For some reason, I think my strengths and shortcomings as a writer make the modular style more comfortable. Which is very frustrating at times and I often wish my writing wasn’t so condensed. Usually, I can’t write beyond two pages on a story unless the voice and point of view is right. I’ll keep writing the beginning until I feel a click, as if suddenly I find the rhythm, and then I can move on. I don’t sit there in my chair and think oh, the modular format is so much fun, let’s try that. I have a realization, and it is paired with utter dread, that the story has to be in the modular structure, has to be a certain way, but everyone will think it ridiculous, it can’t be, but it has to, and how in the world am I going to make this work?

C & B: We are both interested in place, and to us, Bear Down, Bear North is clearly a successful place-based collection. In discussing the book, though, we had some difficulty articulating why we thought it worked so well. In your mind, what makes a good place-based story or collection? How does Bear Down, Bear North embody those qualities? Alaska is relatively uncharted literary territory, as compared to the American south – do you think its uniqueness or unfamiliarity plays into it at all?

MM: I think a good place-based collection has to make the reader feel as if these characters and stories could not take place anywhere else. That the reader can’t separate the setting from the characters or the plot. This is such a difficult question—one I’ve recently discussed with friends and colleagues. My friend Kate Asche pointed me towards Dorothy Allison’s essay called “Place” which says “place is people with desire.” I read the preface to The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories which was written by Ben Marcus, who edited the anthology, and he breaks down the definition of plot and one definition is the literal: a “small piece of ground,” and the setting or “the space in which a story occurs,” a plot of land where characters live and events happen. Plot is a piece of land, a place. Plot is place. With any good place-based collection, I think there is an overwhelming sense of a whole community just from the pieces you’ve read, the small details you’re given.

There’s definitely interest in Alaska as a fascinating, far-off place. Deep south, far north. Places on the metaphorical margins, so to speak. I’ve even described my work as Northern Gothic because of shared sensibilities with Southern Gothic writing. But there is also a sense of responsibility to write beyond the mythology and find the paradoxes and the complexities of these characters, this setting.

C & B: What contemporary writers do you follow? Who are you reading now? How do these writers influence or inspire your work? Are there any writers you believe should be more widely read?

MM: Right now I am looking at how writers I admire are beginning their novels—Once Upon A River by Bonnie Jo Campbell, The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollack. I am always shocked when students say they haven’t read Louise Erdrich, and then I remember I started reading her work a couple of years ago. I think she’s marvelous. Also, Jaimy Gordon’s brilliant novel Lord of Misrule.

C & B: Can you talk a little about whatever it is you're working on now – what can readers expect to see from you next?

MM: I hope this next project will be a novel. Maybe not in the strictest definition of a novel, but surely novelistic in scope and length. All I can promise is that it will be set in Alaska. And, as I’ve been telling people, there will be moose.

Katherine Karlin/ Send Me Work

2012-01-24T10:05:00.000-06:00

Katherine Karlin’s debut collection of stories bares the title Send Me Work, and among the eleven stories within, the function of work and its role in people’s lives plays a crucial role in not only the development of story but in the development of character. In a time when employment is often treasured, Karlin captures characters in search of work and stability as well as characters already employed and in the midst of their job. For characters without employment, Karlin reveals their struggles as well as their hopes, as even in their lower moments, they still wish to maintain a sense of pride in who they are, and the story always aims to lift, rather than denigrate, their accomplishments. More often, Karlin focuses on characters who are currently employed, and although they appear more stable, their lives aren’t always as such. For some, work is meant as an outlet, a retreat from conflict; others find that work is the conflict itself. Karlin’s stories follow a realistic perspective that yields tremendous results, and Send Me Work is the kind of collection readers should be in search of not only for its literary value but for its attention to contemporary issues.

Send Me Work begins with the appropriate “Bye-Bye, Larry,” which focuses on the aftermath of a death in a refinery. Most of the employees are men, but the narrator is female and a lesbian. The way Karlin constructs the story, readers first get a glimpse of the world these refinery workers live. Sitting in a bar, waiting to the go to the deceased’s wake, they’re in mourning but also bitter. Their jobs are threatened by their female supervisor, and the story flourishes in these opening scenes. There’s a recognizable conflict, but more so, there’s the issue of the narrator, Gina, who knows more of their supervisor and her life than anyone else. Later, the supervisor makes an appearance at the wake—an unlikely move—and while the men are angered by this, Gina is greatly conflicted not just by the future of her employment but by her knowledge of her supervisor. The story deals not only with issues of class but with gender as well, and the questions of equality and status weigh heavily throughout. The story is a perfect opener and one of the best in the entire collection. Similar questions of equality and status come elsewhere, particularly in “The Severac Sound,” “Muscle Memory,” and “Into the Blue Again.” All are fantastic stories.

Elsewhere, a story like “Underwater” functions to show the imbalance between those happily employed and those who aren’t. Nan takes a job caring for fish tanks at local businesses. At times, it seems a stressful occupation, but it’s nothing compared to the previous job she held at a bank. There, she was forced to enter homes of people who could no longer afford them, and in one moving flashback, readers see Nan breaking the unfortunate news to a homeowner who not only could not pay for his house, but he couldn’t sell it either. Nan also recalls a video bank employees would watch, a video of a woman in the process of being removed from her house. These scenes, coupled with those of Nan struggling to succeed in her fish business, emphasize the theme of the story’s title, not to mention reinforce the general feel of the collection. Karlin’s stories don’t always offer easy solutions, but in a story like “Underwater,” readers see that with struggle comes possibility. For those who are willing, there are paths to success, and more often than not, Karlin’s characters are able to locate those paths and head in the right direction.

Further Reading:

Interview at One Story.

Overview at The Story Prize blog.

Review at Belletrista.

Review at BookForm.

Review at ZYZZYVA.

James Warner/ All Her Father's Guns

2012-01-10T09:55:00.001-06:00

All Her Father’s Guns, the debut novel from James Warner, is a funny, tightly-plotted story that aims to poke fun at just about everything sacred in American culture. Warner’s main targets, however, trend between those ingrained in the world of business and those in the field of academia. Through his two first-person narrators, the conservative businessman Cal Lyte and Reid Seyton, a British PhD candidate studying in the Department of Theory, Warner marvelously captures the divide in American politics and culture, and despite the satirical nature All Her Father’s Guns carries, the novel never strays from presenting a humane side. The results are surely humorous but also rooted in strong emotional drama.

Warner’s novel is a rollercoaster of action. His characters are constantly in movement, and for this, the story is a joy to read. Coming in at just under two-hundred pages, All Her Father’s Guns pinches away any fat; the journey Cal takes is especially entertaining. Readers see a gun-obsessed right-winger go from wishing to sabotage his ex-wife’s Congressional run to succeeding and ultimately winning the very election he tried to keep his ex-wife from winning. Along the way, he questions his feelings on gun rights and abortion, and for such a stuck-in-his-ways kind of guy, his inquisitive nature is a welcomed rush of character transformation. While he may ultimately not arrive at full conversion, readers still see the conflict within, as they do with Reid, who struggles with his on again, off again relationship with Cal’s daughter, Lyllyan. Being the liberal academic that he is, Reid finds it difficult to succeed in a world that seems more befitting of the Cal’s of the world. While his section of the story isn’t as adventurous, it’s perhaps because Reid has a particular connection to Cal’s story, which readers discover at the conclusion of the novel. Also of particular interest is Reid’s acceptance of some of Cal’s customs, which suggest Reid has changed since the onset of All Her Father’s Guns.

The humor within will appeal to anyone familiar with the last ten years of American history, and Warner, a Brit himself, certainly has a viewpoint into the subject that is fresh and amusing. Very few novels offer such a host of one-liners that not only serve to define characters but to bring laughter to the reading process. But beyond comedy, readers will most likely be impressed with the taut storytelling. Warner keeps readers reading, and outside of a conclusion that might seem over the top to some, All Her Father’s Guns is a satisfying novel that will appeal to many.

Further Reading:

Review at City Book Review.

Review at Critical Flame.

Review at HTMLGiant.

Review at Small Press Reviews.

2011 Review

2011-12-31T18:07:00.001-06:00

There's absolutely no way one person can digest all the meaningful books, music, and films released in a given year let alone spend enough time with any of them to allow full absorption. Regardless, I still try to find some way to highlight the items that I favored most over the past year. Lists are arbitrary and perhaps lazy criticism, but I'll proceed nonetheless. Seeing as how I was able to get to more music than film, the length of these lists will vary. Here's to a more balanced new year...

Books

1. Alan Heathcock/ Volt

2. Peter Orner/ Love and Shame and Love

3. Bruce Machart/ Men in the Making

4. Ryan Call/ The Weather Stations

5. Dana Spiotta/ Stone Arabia

6. Patrick deWitt/ The Sisters Brothers

7. Charles Dodd White/ Sinners of Sanction County

8. Caitlin Horrocks/ This Is Not Your City

9. Jason Skipper/ Hustle

10. Lee Martin/ Break the Skin

Music
1. Kurt Vile/ Smoke Ring for My Halo

2. War on Drugs/ Slave Ambient

3. Boston Spaceships/ Let It Beard

4. Mogwai/ Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will

5. Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks/ Mirror Traffic

6. Wild Flag/ Wild Flag

7. Bon Iver/ Bon Iver

8. Okkervil River/ I Am Very Far

9. Bill Callahan/ Apocalypse

10. Yuck/ Yuck

11. Mountain Goats/ All Eternals Deck

12. TV on the Radio/ Nine Types of Light
13. Lifeguards/ Waving at the Astronauts

14. Black Keys/ El Camino

15. R.E.M./ Collapse Into Now

16. M83/ Hurry Up, We're Dreaming

17. Tom Waits/ Bad As Me

18. Mars Classroom/ New Theory of Everything

19. Wilco/ The Whole Love

20. J Mascis/ Several Shades of Why

Film

1. Tree of Life

2. Drive

3. Martha Marcy May Marlene

4. Take Shelter

5. Moneyball

Hannah Pittard/ The Fates Will Find Their Way

2011-12-21T09:35:00.000-06:00

In her Year in Reading write-up found at The Millions, Hannah Pittard writes glowingly of Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods, and having recently read it, I found that it made a great deal of sense for Pittard to write about O’Brien’s novel as her debut novel, The Fates Will Find Their Way, has much in common with one of O’Brien’s strongest works. Like O’Brien, Pittard seems most interested in the strength of storytelling and the issues surrounding truth in storytelling. Where In the Lake of the Woods speculates on the events of a politician and his wife after a failed election campaign, The Fates Will Find Their Way is about the disappearance of a sixteen-year-old girl. Pittard never succumbs to easy answers, and Nora Lindell’s whereabouts are never truly given, yet the boys who make up Pittard’s first-person plural narrator are haunted by Nora and her family. The resulting novel follows the boys as they age and question their own stories; it’s absorbing stuff, and The Fates Will Find Their Way is a tremendous first novel.

Pittard’s use of the first-person plural (which recalls another novel, Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides) is particularly effective. She captures a set of young men who are enthralled by the disappearance of a classmate, and as they age, Pittard develops their sense of character. Their lives become complicated and intertwined, and the drama that comes forth clearly has its roots in the disappearance of Nora Lindell when they were all teenagers. These sections of the novel are the most fascinating, and Pittard excels with the development of these young men. While there surely will always be some readers who question one gender’s ability to capture another, Pittard shouldn’t give readers any doubts. She illustrates the mysteriousness and confusion of adolescent boyhood quite well, and like Eugenides did years before, Pittard also shows how these boys are riveted by the girls their own age, particularly Nora Lindell and her younger sister, Sissy.

If Pittard stumbles anywhere, it might be when she chooses to dip into the hypothetical life of Nora Lindell after she disappears. She certainly walks a fine line concerning how much to reveal, and while the sections involving Nora are well written and insightful into why a sixteen-year-old might choose to run away (which is only one of the options Pittard allows), these sections just don’t show the same level of intrigue and captivation as the sections focusing on her young male narrators. To her credit, Pittard does structure The Fates Will Find Their Way to reveal more from the boys’ side of the story, and much of the sections concerning Nora are brought up because of the boys’ interest. Ultimately, Pittard has created a novel that aims to question the idea of how stories are told and how we as readers and listeners ought to accept those stories. The idea is certainly an interesting one, but the story is absolute quality stuff and a must read.

Further Reading:

Interview at The Chicago Sun Times.

Interview at Three Guys One Book.

Interview at Words With Writers.

Review at The A.V. Club.

Review at The New York Times.

Take Shelter

2011-12-19T17:21:00.001-06:00

The climactic scene in Take Shelter is a dazzling moment on par with the sort of mesmerizing scenes seen in great short stories. Writer/director Jeff Nichols has prepared viewers for such a moment, building up the tension between Curtis LaForche (Michael Shannon) and his wife, Samantha (Jessica Chastain). Curtis, who through the course of the film has believed himself to be schizophrenic, has envisioned awful moments where his life and his family’s lives have been threatened, and each of these instances is signaled by a change in the weather. So when an actual storm approaches, Curtis and his family must flee to the storm shelter he’s taken out loans to build, and there they wait, hopeful that the storm passes and that Curtis can emerge stable and committed to his family. The decision Curtis faces makes for a satisfying conclusion, one that in turn makes Take Shelter a remarkable film.

Nichols does a fine job of setting up the final moments of the film. Through the early sections of Take Shelter, Curtis’ fragile psyche is on display in a subtle yet convincing manner. While his visions might be the stuff of basic horror movies, the emotions are real, and Shannon never overdoes any scene in which he’s been asked to play off of Curtis’ fears. To Nichols' credit, as the film approaches its conclusion, viewers see less and less of Curtis’ visions, and thus, his visions become all the more terrifying and traumatic. Just the image of Curtis walking into the kitchen to find his wife, drenched from a rainstorm, her fingers lingering close to a butcher knife, suggests the kind of internal horror that drives at Curtis throughout Take Shelter. Nichols would seem to be subscribing to the notion that the less graphic a scene is, the more distressing it ultimately will be viewed; such a decision is key to the success of the film. Viewers come away getting a feel for what Curtis is suffering with, but very little of his condition is exaggerated. In lesser hands, such issues might have been horribly overacted and turned into a weaker movie.

Although it speaks little to the actual story of the film, the cinematography should be credited for creating scenery that perfectly complements the story Take Shelter aims to tell. The images of looming storm clouds and migrating bird patterns do a great deal of setting the mood, and the shots of rural Ohio seem to suggest something of the economic lives of the LaForche family, which is shaken by some of the financial choices Curtis makes. In the end, however, the story itself is what makes Take Shelter memorable, and the parting scenes are some of the best a viewer will see all year.

Further Reading:

Interview with Nichols at IFC.

Review at The A.V. Club.

Review at The Chicago Sun Times.

Review at The New York Times.

Bruce Machart/ Men In The Making

2011-12-15T19:56:00.000-06:00

The title of Bruce Machart's first collection of stories suggests a common theme seen in American fiction, that of becoming a man. The subject is one that can be covered quite artfully and even spiritually as evident in Shann Ray's American Masculine, but unlike Ray, Machart writes more practically, his language less dense, perhaps even less poetic. The results aren't any less powerful, however; in fact, Machart's collection seems more heartfelt, poignant, and ultimately more enriching. The men in Machart's collection suffer great losses in family, and their attempts at recovery and salvation are captured in moving and matter-of-fact prose that resonates long after the story is over. Machart's stories are to be admired because of the seemingly easy way they've been put together and executed; any reader will understand that such work doesn't come easy, but Machart presents stories that are absolute marvels, and Men in the Making is a stunning collection deserving of much acclaim.

Machart's stories take place primarily in Houston and the southwest portion of Texas, and while there's a strong sense of the area in these stories, the greatest triumph of the collection takes place in Machart's characters and their response to tragedy. Conflict and drama are identified quickly in every story, and Machart illustrates time and again his skill at setting a story. It's rare to find a writer who routinely proves to be a classic storyteller, yet Machart does so often in Men in the Making. The second story of the collection, "The Last One Left in Arkansas," is a strong contender for the best story in the collection; it identifies conflict early in the most subtle of ways. Its narrator begins with, "I'm no Arkansas native. Still, I've seen my share of strange skies." What follows is a story of family tragedy, local travesty, and the downfall of a marriage that begins with a decision that must be made between dirt bikes and dogs. Those strange skies loom over the narrator and his family, and the results are stunning. Happy endings are seldom in Men in the Making, but the drama within is always convincing.

Elsewhere, "Because He Can't Not Remember" and "The Only Good Thing I've Heard" both deal with sudden deaths in families, and Machart handles these situations in a way that avoids any trace of sentimentality. Both stories end not with resolution but rather with a sense that the men at the center of the conflict have come to some understanding of the monumental weight upon their shoulders. They aren't just men in search of a stronger notion of masculinity; these are men who work to fortify their emotions. They aren't cured, nor are they entirely free of their condition; they still have to deal with pain and suffering, and that helps to define them as men. Perhaps the greatest strength of the entire collection is Machart's ability to focus on how men face these internal struggles. The concluding story, "What You're Walking Around Without," cements this notion, focusing on a man who spends his days driving excised body parts from area hospitals. The story deals heavily with faith and the power one man tries to exhibit in recovering from physical and emotional trauma. As the story reaches its finale, Machart moves away from his protagonist and allows the reader to view him from a distance, and what we're to realize is "that to be a man, a whole man, is to remain forever in need." It's an absolute fitting end to the collection, a realization that despite the tragedies that befall men, there's also the feeling of need that compels them to move forward.

Further Reading:

Interview at Bookslut concerning Machart's novel, The Wake of Forgiveness.

Interview at Fiction Writers Review.

Overview at Fiction Writers Review.

Review at The Rumpus.

Stuart Nadler/ The Book Of Life

2011-12-02T15:54:00.000-06:00

The seven stories found in The Book of Life, the debut collection by Stuart Nadler, all center on the idea of faith and the trouble in maintaining a sense of faith. Infidelity looms heavily in many of the stories, and when characters aren't cheating on one another, they're often cheating on their own sense of belief. They question their actions, their relationships, their religion (they're almost always Jewish, often lapsed), and their sense of being, and thematically, over the course of the entire book, The Book of Life becomes a very even collection of stories. Too often a collection of stories can lack a unifying element, but in his first set of stories, Nadler's stories always seem to strike a similar note. This isn't a flaw of the collection, however, as despite the familiarity some of the stories share, Nadler has created a collection of stories rooted to one another yet at the same time highly distinct and worth reading.

Nadler writes long short stories, and the length of these pieces allows him the space to develop scenes and parallel them with moments from the past. In fact, his best work comes in this back and forth structure that can be seen in "Catherine and Henry" and "Beyond any Blessing." In each of these, Nadler either alternates between the present and the past or jumps ahead in time to continue the story two years after the beginning section. The additional length provides a fuller, developed story, and Nadler continually impresses with the measured amounts of detail. While he may not always provide the stunning one-liner or dazzling turn of phrase, Nadler always proves to be a master of plot. These stories move well, and again, much of that has to do with the attention to scene as one can see in the second half of "Catherine and Henry". If there's anything to quibble with, it's Nadler's choice of conclusion. In longer pieces, finding a place to end can perhaps be somewhat arbitrary, and in some of Nadler's stories, while the choice of when to conclude isn't exactly off, the feeling of resolution seems slightly off. As strong as "Catherine and Henry" is, its finale doesn't seem to offer the full resolution some readers might be in search of while in "Winter on the Sawtooth," the finale provides a moment worth continuing, not concluding. Ultimately, such criticism comes from personal taste more than anything, and while some might find Nadler's choice of conclusions off-putting, others will relish in the journey the story provides and find the conclusions much more satisfying.

Nadler's work resembles that of Cheever, Updike, and Baxter in certain spots of The Book of Life. The stories are carefully crafted with the sense of a strong storyteller at the helm. It should go without saying that, given his propensity for longer works, Nadler's upcoming novel (he discusses it briefly in the Reader's Guide at the end of the book) should be quite expansive and masterfully put together. If it's anything like the work seen in The Book of Life--comical, moving, heartbreaking, and enlightening--then it'll be a novel worth the time of readers.

Further Reading:

Interview at The Rumpus.

Interview at The Story Prize blog.

Review at The Rumpus.

Peter Orner/ Love And Shame And Love

2011-11-30T17:45:00.002-06:00

Peter Orner’s Love and Shame and Love is a sprawling novel spanning three generations of the Popper family. Based in and around Chicago and shaped by many of the significant political moments locally and nationally of the last half century, Love and Shame and Love succeeds at being very much a novel of place and time, yet Orner is just as much a documenter of family drama as he is a writer of place. The novel centers on Alexander Popper (referred to throughout as Popper), the youngest boy of Phillip and Miriam and grandson to Seymour and Bernice. Readers early on see Popper as a young, idealistic writer in college, in the midst of a burgeoning relationship, but as Love and Shame and Love progresses, Popper’s background and family history become the primary subjects of the novel. The troubles Phillip and Miriam encounter managing two children and a marriage in suburban Chicago during the 1960s and '70s dominates much of the middle section of the novel, but paralleling these issues are those of Seymour and Bernice, who have been split apart due to World War II and Seymour’s service overseas. Orner works through these generations quite effectively, and the story that emerges is often rather riveting. Ultimately though, Orner’s greatest triumph is in structuring Love and Shame and Love, offering a somewhat fragmented viewpoint of the Popper’s history that while seemingly disjointed at first eventually materializes as rather expressive and poignant.

Love, without question, plays a significant role in the novel, yet just as apparent are the negatives of love: disappointment, divorce, regret, and frustration. All are hallmarks of the great family drama, and in recent years, plenty of novels have covered these themes repetitively, and Orner certainly isn’t rewriting the book on any of this, but he does manage to differentiate Love and Shame and Love from other likeminded novels. Orner formats the novel in brief sections, almost none of them lasting more than a few pages. Beyond that, he shuffles these sections so that the story is told nonlinearly. Pieces of the novel that focus on Phillip and Miriam are followed by impressionistic sections about Chicago and the political landscape. Intertwined into these moments are shorter sections consisting of only letters written by Seymour to Bernice. These segments are usually the briefest, but these single-paged pieces are some of Orner’s most heartbreaking moments. Almost always from Seymour as he writes from overseas, the letters reveal one man’s love and frustration for his wife, who almost never chooses to respond. Her lack of response and Seymour’s recognition of this is a growing rift, and by the end of the novel, after readers have heard Bernice’s side of the story and seen her own letter to Seymour, their marriage seems to be as disappointing and regretful as readers might suspect.

That sense of disappointment, coupled by the failures of Phillip and Miriam and then later by Popper and his college sweetheart Kat, would seem to suggest that Love and Shame and Love never captures the essence of love, but Orner does illustrate the growth of relationships. Early on, the sections centering on Popper and Kat as college students are quite effective at portraying young love and the manner in which two people can grow together. And elsewhere, there are moments of adoration between the Popper family, but Love and Shame and Love truly seems to be about the difficulties in keeping and strengthening these relationships. The politicians who are mentioned throughout the novel are always flawed, always trying to find ways to hide their problems in favor of appearing faultless, loving, and above all us, the right man or woman for the job. But in some ways, this is how all people wish to be seen, and Orner never shies away from the struggles his characters encounter in trying, in their own ways, to be faultless and loving. In the end, while the Poppers never fully thrive as they might’ve wished to, Orner has; Love and Shame and Love is a fantastic family drama, one whose structure and scope pushes it above the many others.

Further Reading:

Orner's blog, The Lonely Voice, at The Rumpus.

Review at The New York Times.

Review at The Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Justin Torres/ We The Animals

2011-11-21T14:16:00.000-06:00

Justin Torres’ We the Animals displays the label of a novel on its cover, but the scope and structure of the book would seemingly argue against such a categorization. While there are indeed several hallmarks readers are likely to associate as novelistic, We the Animals is more a book consisting of vignettes that work together to narrate the lives of three boys in Brooklyn. Only 125 pages in length, We the Animals excels at capturing the minuscule moments of one family, and despite the use of some shopworn images and scenes, Torres has succeeded at the difficult task of creating a powerful and moving story in such few pages.

The most effective scenes come early in We the Animals, and perhaps this is so because early on Torres provides only glimpses of the family and the three boys. The mother works nights at the brewery and the father, at best, comes and goes unexpectedly, thus leaving the boys to manage on their own. “Seven” is one of Torres’ better moments, and the scenes reveals the strained relationship of the parents as well as the boys’ response to it. The boys enter their mother’s room and watch as she lies silently in bed, her face swollen and bruised from what their father claims was a trip to the dentist. Taking a cue from what they saw in church one Sunday, the boys cover their heads with curtains and blankets to resemble Monks before surrounding their mother and waiting until she wakes. She eventually does, and the boys tell her that today is the youngest boy’s seventh birthday. The mother, still woozy, says that once a boy turns seven, he forgets his mother. The youngest boy, the narrator of the We the Animals, admits that this isn’t what he wants. “Then you’ll stay six forever,” the mother says, and the young boy seems willing to accept such a decision. Moments like these are the particularly earnest ones in We the Animals and demonstrate Torres’ talents for creating dynamic moments within a family.

There are many such moments in We the Animals, and when Torres is at his best, readers get a sense of the isolation and stillness prevalent in many tense and struggling households. Of course, the motif of animals is used to show the rambunctiousness of the boys, and despite being somewhat of an overused symbol, animal is an apt term for these boys. “We Wanted More,” the first scene of the book, exemplifies this quite well. Another somewhat familiar moment comes toward the very end of We the Animals, and without giving much away, it’s fair to say that while the direction Torres takes is a fascinating one, the actual scenes being told are perhaps a bit too commonplace. Even a small acknowledgement of this can’t completely save the moment, but despite the obviousness of it, Torres rebounds to have a gripping moment at the family dinner table. The scene is well portrayed and carries with it a sense of drama that’s fitting as a conclusion for the book.

Further Reading:

Interview at The Rumpus.

Overview at The Wall Street Journal.

Review at The New York Times.

Martha Marcy May Marlene

2011-11-20T15:34:00.004-06:00

The rising sense of unease that settles into viewers of Martha Marcy May Marlene is a testament to writer/director Sean Durkin, who has managed to create a film that succeeds at crafting three-dimensional characters among the many tense scenes of psychological drama. The film, which centers on a runaway member (Elizabeth Olsen) of a cult based on a farm in the Catskill Mountains, offers the sort of story that in other hands might rush through the more action-based sequences, favoring the effects of quick violence over the measured sense of discomfort that Martha Marcy May Marlene ultimately uses to its advantage. There is violence, however, and when it occurs, always under the command of cult leader, Patrick (the Charles Manson-like John Hawkes), the film is probably at its most common, yet even in these scenes, Martha Marcy May Marlene still proves to be a dynamic story to watch because Durkin seems to realize that his characters and their insights are what carry the film more than anything.

The film’s title illustrates the fractured sense of self Olsen must portray. Her original name is Martha, her cult name Marcy May, and the name used by all woman in the cult to answer the phone Marlene. At certain times throughout the film, she is all of these women, and her performance in each is outstanding. In particular, the scenes that involve Martha post-escape are some of the film’s best. Martha is psychologically damaged from her time with her cult family, and her interactions with Lucy, her newly married sister—who hasn’t seen Martha in over two years—and Ted, her brother-in-law, are shaped by that experience. A guest in her sister and brother-in-law’s lake house vacation cottage in Connecticut, Martha can’t fathom the materialistic lives of her new family, and the assimilation is difficult. She swims in the nude, she interrupts Lucy and Ted’s lovemaking, and worst of all, she can’t shake the feeling that her cult family is going to find her. This fear drives the film and continually heightens the feeling of unease. Durkin chooses to split the film between past and present, moving between Martha’s past with the cult and her present life with her Lucy and Ted. Oftentimes, scenes blur into one another, leaving viewers to guess what it is they’re seeing. The effect works because it demonstrates how closely related the two worlds truly are, and despite the possible misgiving of a few viewers, the back and forth direction ultimately creates a kind of scattered point of view, which greatly enhances the feel of the film.

Beyond Olsen’s great performance, one can’t help but be entranced by Hawkes’ performance. His thin and sinewy figure and his cold and distant speech are mesmerizing; Hawkes plays a character that differs greatly from his role in last year’s Winter’s Bone, but his performance in each is marked by an eerie quietness and intimidation, and his influence on many of the scenes in Martha Marcy May Marlene is immense (the scene where he sings "Marcy's Song" is all one needs to see to believe this). Outside of the performances, however, what will surely stick with viewers is the ending. Faced with the inability to care for Martha, not to mention that they’re still unaware of her recent past, Lucy and Ted decide to take her to a facility that can better treat her. As the film winds down, however, Martha’s sense of her old cult family coming to take her away is heightened, and the final moments of the film play on this. The final scenes might seem ambiguous or even a cop-out to some, but the sense of impending doom is a strength for the film, not a flaw. Easy resolution doesn’t always work, and Martha Marcy May Marlene is a film that makes the decision to avoid anything resembling simple results. The outcome is one of intrigue and imagination, and it’s a fitting end for a film that continually pushes the sensation of apprehension onto its viewers.

Further Reading:

Interview with Durkin at Reverse Shot.

Overview at HitFix.

Review at The A.V. Club.

Review at The Chicago Sun Times.

Review The New York Times.

Review at Rolling Stone.

Alexander Maksik/ You Deserve Nothing

2011-11-16T12:47:00.000-06:00

You Deserve Nothing, the debut novel by Alexander Maksik, is a story that’s been told many times before. A beloved young high school teacher who’s able to relate to his students regrettably begins a relationship with a high school student, and the fallout affects all involved. The premise has been covered any number of times, yet somehow, Maksik manages to avoid a completely conventional story. The teacher, Will Silver, challenges the students at Paris’ ISF School with readings from literature and philosophy, and Sartre and Camus factor heavily in the discussions during class. They influence much of Silver’s decisions—inside and outside of class—as well as provide Maksik with a kind of philosophical core that turns You Deserve Nothing into more than just a clichéd novel about a student/teacher relationship.

The novel shifts between three points of view and is told five years after actual events have taken place, and while the voices of Silver and his high school companion Marie are effectively captured, Maksik’s most distinct and enthralling voice comes in Gilad, one of Silver’s students and a young man who becomes caught up with Silver and the lessons he teaches. The early sections in You Deserve Nothing that center on Gilad are perhaps the novel’s finest as in those sections, readers see a boy new to Paris and new to the experiences that such a large and cosmopolitan city offers. Gilad is awestruck by Silver’s teaching and reading assignments, and he becomes inundated with a certain kind of lifestyle he believes Silver to live. At one point, Gilad even considers just what sort of attraction he has for his teacher, and during such moments, the novel seems to bend in an unfamiliar direction, and Maksik is perhaps at his best. Later, when Gilad sees Silver at a public rally, and Silver fails to act in a way Gilad believes he should, the adulation Gilad has for this teacher dissipates, and Maksik excels at depicting the disappointment and regret a young man feels when an idol proves to be human. Only towards the end of You Deserve Nothing does Maksik begin to falter with Gilad’s character. Faced with an abusive home life, Gilad eventually stands up to his father in an act that Silver could never undertake, and while the action is the culmination of all that Gilad has learned, the moment itself is a bit too hackneyed to register as truly moving.

Elsewhere, Silver’s point of view and story are most fascinating when he mirrors Camus’ The Stranger. As Silver’s relationship with Marie begins, readers can see the back and forth pull of Silver’s hesitation and conviction. There’s a sense of true conflict in the story, but oftentimes Silver is less than moved to handle that conflict, and the results are often worth watching unfold. Marie, on the other hand, is less engrossing, and while the path of her story carries with it some worthy moments, she doesn’t seem to have the same effect on the novel as Gilad. If anything, Marie is partially responsible (along with Silver) for the more formulaic scenes in the novel, and when Maksik steers away from her point of view later in the novel, the story seems to pick up steam. Ultimately, however, it’s what happens to Marie that propels You Deserve Nothing, and despite the spots centering around Gilad where Maksik could’ve gone in a completely unfamiliar direction, the novel takes the path most readers will expect. If readers can look past this though, the novel contains enough rewards to prove satisfying.

Further Reading:

Interview at World Literature Today.

Review at Bookslut.

Review at The New York Times.

Review at The Rumpus.

Larry Watson/ American Boy

2011-11-09T09:12:00.000-06:00

The danger of a coming of age novel is that everything often seems telegraphed. Before a reader arrives at a pivotal moment in the story, he/she has already anticipated it pages ago, and if the novel doesn’t bother throwing in a curveball or two, the reading can become dull and predictable. There’s a bit of predictability in American Boy, the new novel by Larry Watson, but it’s inescapable, and the novel is never affected by it. Following young narrator Matt Garth over the course of a few months in the early 1960s, American Boy centers on a small Minnesota town and how one working class boy’s relationship with an affluent family changes due to the appearance of a young woman. While it might follow some well-worn plot threads, the novel ultimately manages to extend beyond mere predictability and offer something more substantial.

Watson doesn’t take long introducing the novel’s main source of conflict. In the first chapter, as the Dunbar family and Matt sit for Thanksgiving dinner, a call comes that says Rex Dunbar, the only doctor in town, will be needed. A young woman has been shot by her boyfriend and is still missing. Matt and Dunbar’s son, Johnny, take the opportunity and head out into the snow to join the search party. The girl is eventually found and brought to Dr. Dunbar, who nurses her back to recovery. The girl, Louisa Lindahl, then settles into the Dunbar’s lives, serving as Dunbar’s live-in assistant and providing Matt and Johnny with a fair amount of temptation. A few years older and carrying with her a questionable past, Louisa is the sort of girl who can entice two young men, and the novel’s middle section relies heavily on the budding relationships between Matt, Johnny, and Louisa. Matt and Johnny, whose friendship was so great that some saw them as twin brothers, seem to suffer the most from Louisa’s appearance as they noticeably become less friendly towards one another as their relationships with Louisa grows. Matt develops a deep sexual attraction for Louisa. Johnny, on the other hand, remains somewhat subdued and distant from the girl he now shares a house with. By the end of the novel, such issues will have been worked out, yet not as some readers might expect.

As American Boy pushes towards its conclusion, these tensions between characters finally explode, and the relationships Matt has had with Johnny and the Dunbar family undergo significant change. What stands out most about the finale of the novel is that it definitely attempts to break from any notion of the predictability seen in earlier parts of the novel. Yes, readers will see Matt metaphorically break away from his adopted family in an action that seems to forecast his ascent into adulthood, but the twists and turns Watson packs into the final third of American Boy should have some astute readers thinking beyond the conventions of a coming of age novel. At some point, Watson, perhaps through his excellent rendering of Matt’s first person narration, starts to dip into the psychological motives of his protagonist, and it’s fascinating to watch a young man confront the issues of love, friendship, and the division of class. Ultimately, American Boy will most likely be read as a coming of age novel, but it far exceeds such simple classification and should be recognized as simply a great piece of fiction.

Further Reading:

Overview at The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Overview at Three Guys One Book.

Review at The Denver Post.

Rusty Barnes/ Mostly Redneck

2011-11-03T16:38:00.000-05:00

Founder and proprietor of Redneck Press and the blogazine Fried Chicken and Coffee, not to mention the editor of the online journal Night Train, Rusty Barnes is an incredibly active proponent of rural, Appalachian literature, and his most recent collection of short stories, Mostly Redneck, is a fine addition to the already long list of great material concerning the region. Broken into three sections and comprising of eighteen stories, Mostly Redneck doesn't merely play up to the expectations one might have from the title alone; in fact, Barnes repeatedly creates meaningful and gripping moments from mostly mundane situations, and the resulting stories are often fascinating, always impressive, and never cliched.

From a memorable standpoint, the first story in the collection, "If the Tree Falls", is an absolute fantastic piece that might be the best of the collection. Concerning a father who must come to the aid of his pregnant daughter after she's committed a terrible crime, the story follows the two of them after the daughter escapes her father's truck and flees into a nearby wooded area. Barnes keeps the tension high throughout while also capturing the increasing dilemma the father faces. The tragic conclusion finds the father somewhat a victim of his surroundings, a man trapped: "he felt the woods closing in around him." The moment holds significance for the story, yet it also holds greater influence for the collection as a whole as several of the stories in Mostly Redneck utilize setting as a way of creating a certain tone. "The Howling" and "Where Water Fails" are both excellent examples of this and some of Barnes' best work in the collection.

Mostly Redneck features many characters of a similar background and future, a particularly rural sort that Barnes portrays with honesty and respect. He also, on occasion, allows in outsiders, and the two stories that predominately feature outsiders--"Rick's Song" and "Song and Jimmy: Four Scenes"--are notable not just for the different ethnicity of certain characters but also for a style of ending that is reminiscent of the early work of one of the great contemporary short story writers, Charles Baxter. Both stories concern Jimmy, who is attempting to overcome the mistakes of his life, mainly a drunk driving accident that took the life of a child. Physically, he's damaged as the scars on his head will attest. Emotionally, he's damaged. People in town have shunned him, and he's become somewhat a loner. The only place he finds work is a Chinese restaurant run by a Vietnamese man, Rick. Jimmy has it bad, but what Barnes reveals in these stories is a path for Jimmy to find some kind of solace, some sort of reprieve. He finds it in Song, a young woman whose own terrible past is told in "Song and Jimmy: Four Scenes". Song and Jimmy's paths cross, and their own tragic pasts are what unites them, and what Barnes excels at is seizing the emotions of both characters. It's never sentimental; instead, the endings of each story illustrate a sense of unknowningness. Characters are left to consider the unpredictably of life, and in doing so, the stories seems to resemble some of Baxter's early stories, where characters do not undergo significant change as much as they come to an understanding of their own place in the world. At the end of "Rick's Song," Jimmy undergoes a kind of epiphanous moment following so many moments of disappointment: "in his bones he could feel something beginning, again." It's a quiet finale, one of subtly rather than outright obvious change, and while it may spark reminders of Baxter, or perhaps even Carver in some of his few hopeful conclusions, it's brought forth by the kind of developments through character and place that only Barnes is capable of, and he shows time and time again that he's quite a master at creating them.

Further Reading:

Publisher of Mostly Redneck, Sunnyoutside.

Interview at Fictionaut Blog.

Interview at The Short Review.

Review at Prick of the Spindle.

Jeffrey Eugenides/ The Marriage Plot

2011-10-25T21:04:00.001-05:00

Nine years after his Pulitzer Prize-winning Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides returns with The Marriage Plot, his third and, to date, least satisfying novel. The story of Madeleine Hanna and her struggles to navigate college and the year after graduation, The Marriage Plot is a rather apt title for the novel, for it focuses on the love triangle Madeleine finds herself in along with Leonard Bankhead (the unpredictable one) and Martin Grammaticus (the spiritual one). All three are students at Brown, all three love to read, and Eugenides seems rather delighted to be inserting title after title of books for his characters to read. It allows him the opportunity to characterize the people who inhabit his book, and if there's one thing Eugenides should be applauded for, it should be his careful attention to creating these people. It shouldn't be surprising that he's more than capable in doing this, given what he's done before in not only Middlesex but The Virgin Suicides. Unlike those novels, however, The Marriage Plot leans too heavily upon those characterizations, and it lacks the sort of compelling narrative that made Middlesex such an engrossing and expansive novel.

To get an idea of the sort of format The Marriage Plot takes, readers need only read the first section of the novel. Spanning close to 120 pages, the section's present day storyline covers less than one day. Of course, Eugenides generously dips into flashback, and he does so to the point where many readers, including this one, might wonder just why the story needs to begin where it has. As the novel jumps between different moments in the past, readers surely get a better sense of the novel's key players, but at what cost does it effect the novel's forward momentum? Perhaps for some, very little, yet the more Eugenides looks back rather than moves forward, the weight of the present day story seems to dissipate and feel less significant. While Eugenides recovers somewhat by the end of the first section, giving readers a mostly meaningful scene between Madeleine and Leonard, there have been many story threads seemingly left to be forgotten. One can't help but be reminded of Franzen's Freedom, which follows a similar pattern of dipping further and further into the past to find the most engrossing storyline. While there are certainly benefits to such a style, after a while one has to wonder that if the past is so fascinating, why we're even focused at all on the present.

To find a counter format, one needs only to go back to Eugenides' last novel. Middlesex is the sort of novel that spans generations and continents, and it seems to be constantly moving forward. It suffers and at the same time conquers all the pitfalls of the standard big book. The plot is expansive and propelling. The characters are well captured and complex. But while Middlesex accomplished so much, The Marriage Plot remains lacking, particularly in story. Elsewhere though, characterization remains a strong suit. Perhaps the biggest accomplishment in The Marriage Plot is not just Eugenides' ability to develop his characters but his ability to weave these traits into different areas of the novel. Since he jumps between the exploits and point of view of Madeleine, Leonard, and Martin, Eugenides has to be mindful that when these characters interact, readers are only privy to the emotions of the point of view character. He manages this well. But where he truly succeeds is when returning to some of these same moments, now in the point of view of another character, and readers again are witness to these events, yet this time from another perspective. There's a sense of complexity in the storytelling taking place during these moments, and it's one of the joys of reading The Marriage Plot. Eugenides isn't the first to work in this particular style, but that he's able to pull it off--given the amount of times each character's story seems to weave into another's--is something to applaud, a lacking story or not.

Ultimately, The Marriage Plot suffers from being the child born after the genius. No doubt, Middlesex is a tough act to follow, and while Eugenides aims in another direction with The Marriage Plot, he does misfire a bit, offering a novel that carries its own merits. One can't help but recognize the meta-qualities the novel plays with, yet that alone can't save the novel. The Marriage Plot will certainly appeal to those who seek a particular kind of story, yet for many readers, the hope is that there isn't another nine years before Eugenides returns with another novel.

Further Reading:

Interview at NPR.

Interview at Powell's Books.

Overview at The New York Times.

Overview by Eugenides at The Millions.

Review at The Millions.

Review at The New York Times.

Melinda Moustakis/ Bear Down, Bear North

2011-10-20T21:40:00.001-05:00

Melinda Moustakis, recipient of the 2010 Flannery O'Connor Award in Short Fiction, has managed to compile a set of interconnected stories that captures a distinct feel for Alaska in her debut collection, Bear Down, Bear North. Moustakis' work offers traces of other great writers of place, particularly Faulkner and Proulx, and while place is certainly a key component of the collection, style and form are also integral parts of what makes the collection so successful. Employing a modular style of fiction that favors the poetical and collage-like, Moustakis excels at creating moods through sectioned pieces that succeed at propelling the narrative. Not always are characters the central focus of a piece, which is not to say they are ever marginalized; instead, they play a particular role in establishing a sort of atmosphere that runs throughout the book. At times, it's a challenging style, but almost always, it's a rewarding experience, making Bear Down, Bear North well worth the time.

From the onset of the collection, Moustakis' style is on display. "Trigger" spans all of half a page, yet in the brief space the story occupies, one can see the precision in language and the effects of place. The first line--"You were conceived on a hunting stand, they say"--serves as a jolt to the reader, and from there, the story beautifully describes a moment of hunting moose, complete with exact and chilling images. The concluding lines--"They say, you came into the world with a bang./Which means: Do something to deserve us"--resonate just as much as the opening lines, providing not only a gripping finale to the story but a thematic cue for the remainder of the book. Characters attempt to prove their worth, whether it be to their siblings, their parents, or, perhaps most importantly, themselves. No story illustrates such a point than "Some Other Animal," where a young woman asked to dog sit faces a crisis of self-value. The story offers several possible outcomes, but Moustakis ends on a note that suggests that sometimes self-worth has varying degrees of actual worth.

Readers of Bear Down, Bear North will find several reoccurring characters, and almost all of them appear at different moments in time. The five children introduced in "Us Kids" appear sometimes as children, sometimes as adults with their own children. The siblings in "The Weight of You" also return in latter stories, and in both narrative timelines, it's interesting to see how Moustakis manages each storyline and the growth of character. Often, the siblings Gracie and Jack (seen in "The Weight of You") are featured in a much more straightforward narrative style while the young children of "Us Kids" are seen in a sectioned story structure. Moustakis uses the modular fiction style frequently in the collection, yet the most effective uses of the style are found in "This One Isn't Going to Be Afraid" and especially in "Point MacKenize"; here, Moustakis shifts point of view to all five children and flourishes at creating five unique voices, including one by a deaf boy. It's a style that some might find challenging, but Moustakis shows again and again that she's a master of such form, and readers who grow accustomed will certainly find the great value of such a story collection.

Further Reading:

Interview at 49 Writers.

Interview at Tusculum Review.

Moustakis' blog.

Drive

2011-10-12T14:51:00.003-05:00

In a post of mine from earlier this year, I said I didn't think I'd see a better film this year than Tree of Life. Now that some time has passed, I think I'm still prepared to stand by that statement even if there's some strong competition from Drive, the most recent film from Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn. The film is stunning in both its use of light and shadows and its portrayal of violence. Its actors turn in performances that on the surface seem ordinary but in fact are highly nuanced, but perhaps the most impressive element of Drive is the way viewers are tricked into watching a film that strives to be seen as an art film rather than an action film.

The opening scenes of Drive perfectly set up the film, offering very little in the way of exposition, instead dropping the viewer into the thick of what Ryan Gosling's character does for a living. As he says a handful of times throughout the movie, "I drive." And in the tense beginning scene, viewers see Gosling's unnamed character manage the streets of Los Angeles, acting as the getaway driver to two thieves. The angles that viewers watch him--from behind, from below--always show the same thing, a very relaxed, cool, almost emotionless driver. As the film plays out, however, Gosling's character reveals himself to be anything but lacking in emotion. The infatuation he holds for Irene (Carey Mulligan) soon propels the story, which blossoms to include impressive performances from not only Mulligan but Bryan Cranston and Albert Brooks

Brooks certainly commands the screen while on camera, but Refn is deserving of much of the praise. He's managed to light the film in a way that complements the story and its actors. Seeing Gosling navigate the downtown streets of Los Angeles or put to bed Irene's child is all the more compelling by way of the shadows that are thrown across the screen. And when a character meets his/her demise (and plenty do), the violence is captured rather gratuitously, but there's something Lynchian about how it's filmed (think Wild at Heart, for instance) that almost delights rather than horrifies. Refn also should be credited with deciding to go with the decidedly unexpected choice of music. The retro, 80s synth/dance sounds compliment the film, particularly during the scene where Gosling drives Irene and her son home. There's a haziness in the atmosphere of that scene, and it acts to be a rather soothing moment early on before the tension of the film heightens later on.

Further Reading:

Review at The New York Times.

Review at The Los Angeles Times.

Review from Robert Ebert/The Chicago Sun Times.

Charles Dodd White/ Sinners Of Sanction County

2011-10-03T21:43:00.001-05:00

The stories in Sinners of Sanction County, the first story collection and second book from Charles Dodd White, center around a certain type of people; some of them seek violence against others, some seek violence to themselves. They're forgiving at times, yet others never seem to forget the pain others have caused. The Appalachian setting informs much of these characteristics, yet White never falls into archetypes. In fact, despite the regional uniformity of these stories, there's a sense of timelessness that strengthens these stories. Volt, Alan Heathcock's debut story collection released earlier this year, would seem to be a complementary piece to Sinners of Sanction County in that both collections exist in precise places and times (Heathcock's place is the fictional Krafton), yet the feel of the work--mostly brought out by exact and wonderful language--transcends any certain place or era. Perhaps this is just a rather dense way of saying that White's collection is magnificent stuff and well worth reading.

Like any strong collection of stories, Sinners of Sanction County begins with an absolute stunner. "Hawkin's Boy" may be one of the best stories of the bunch, and it showcases much of the themes that play out over the course of the book. Hawkins suffers the loss of his son and is kept awake at night by the sounds of dogs upsetting the makeshift grave he's dug. By his side, his wife hears none of it, her deafness a constant barrier between the two of them. Without language, there's little to keep the two together. Even his hands, which he once used to try and communicate with his wife, have failed Hawkins. In such a quiet world, one where even the downtown clock has day confused with night, Hawkins can only seek out his own silence, one where he will no longer have to hear the sounds his wife has been free from for years. The conclusion is devastating, but it scores a knockout punch to the gut. Likewise, the conclusion to "Winter by Heart" is equally moving, and again, there's a sense of relief by way of violence. It's simply extraordinary storytelling being shown here.

White's use of violence in these stories is particularly well done. It's never used sensationally, and, in fact, the best uses of violence often come when no violence is even seen. The mere threat of violence in "A World of Daylight" propels the story to its gripping finale while the violence that takes place in the past in "Jack's Gun" enlightens the present day story. Elsewhere, the results of a violent skirmish haunt McCallister, the protagonist in "Age of Stone":

"The dead would not enter McCallister's tent, but would congregate by the patches of moonlight in the clearings, drawn to that silvering in death as living men might seek the comfort of a mended fire. Whenever he tried to sleep he could hear the quieted grinding of their bones" (69).

Yet again, another man who simply yearns for a quiet night, one away from the sounds that haunt him. Sinners of Sanction County is haunting stuff, indeed, and it's some of the best fiction from Appalachia or anywhere for that matter.

Further Reading:

Bottom Dog Press, publisher of Sinners of Sanction County.

Interview at HTMLGiant.

Review at New York Journal of Books.

Review of White's first novel, Lambs of Men, at The Story Is The Cure.

Kevin Wilson/ The Family Fang

2011-10-01T08:11:00.000-05:00

It seems the best was of describing The Family Fang, the debut novel by Kevin Wilson, is to call it quirky. The story of a family whose two parents participate in outrageous performance art and who force their two children to be a part of the experience, The Family Fang has drawn plenty of comparisons to the films of Wes Anderson, and I suspect many readers have The Royal Tenenbaums in mind when they envision such a comparison. Without question, Anderson's films do have a quirky feel to them, yet they're infused with a great deal of heart as well--something that some viewers tend to overlook. But to make such a comparison seems too easy to me; Wilson's written a novel that certainly might seem to be informed by a certain visual film style, but ultimately, that sense of style seems to wear away, leaving Wilson, for better of for worse, with his own story of an eccentric family.

The Family Fang is set up to reveal the present day family as well as to offer moments from their past. Each chapter includes the current storyline and ends with a separate section that acts as a kind of report of one of the Fang's performances. The format works; readers get the opportunity to witness some of the Fang's more bizarre stunts, and such events seem to influence the current state of the two Fang children, Annie and Buster. Their parents, Caleb and Camille, appear far more interested in their art than their family, and by a certain age, the children have left home and abandoned their performance art backgrounds in favor of other artistic lives, which their parents find inferior. The main story of The Family Fang centers on Annie and Buster returning home after a series of personal and professional defeats, and upon their return, they must deal with the disappearance of Caleb and Camille, whom authorities presume dead. The bulk of the novel focuses on Annie and Buster's search for their parents, and while fascinating early on, the search angle wears thin as the novel progresses.

One reason is that readers might have a difficult time understanding just what drives Annie and Buster to look for their parents. After all, Annie and Buster mention several times their dissatisfaction with their parents and the performance art pieces their parents forced them to do as children. Motivation would seem to be an issue here. If readers believe that Annie and Buster truly need their parents, a need they are unwilling to admit, then readers are to suggest that Annie and Buster are in a state of flux--without their parents, Annie and Buster don't seem to know how to proceed in their own lives. This very well might be the case; however, for much of the novel, Annie and Buster seem to be stuck in such a state of need. And while they're stuck, the novel, too, seems to be stuck. Not until the novel's third act, when Annie and Buster discover where their parents might be, does the novel really seem to move. The problem, though, is the element that propels the Fang children to seek their parents. Without giving anything away, Annie and Buster--who appear stumped as to the whereabouts of their parents--receive a lucky clue, which is introduced almost arbitrarily, that leads them to their parent's possible location. Once they finally arrive at their destination, the payoff is not what they would seem to wish for, and for readers, the resolution is perhaps surprising if not a bit rushed and disappointing.

In the end, Annie and Buster achieve the separation from their parents and appear to be on the rise, forging their own lives that are informed by their own art forms, film for Annie and novels for Buster. For this reader, however, the concluding sections of The Family Fang come much too quickly after a long period of inactivity. One wish would've been to have seen more of Annie and Buster after the separation from their parents, not to mention more of the moments causing that separation. Wilson seems to move through these sections a bit quickly; thus, the novel's greatest instances of true action and mystery are rushed. It's a shame since Wilson has drawn quite the interesting set of characters. The Fang family is the sort of family an author most likely falls in love with while writing, and if Wilson ever feels the urge to return to the well and offer another adventure with these characters, it would certainly be welcomed. And if they never return, I'll still be interested to see what path Wilson follows, quirky or not.

Further Reading:

Interview at Bookslut.

Review at Full Stop.

Review at The New York Times.

Review at The Rumpus.

Matt Bondurant/ The Wettest County In The World

2011-09-21T20:29:00.000-05:00

Matt Bondurant's second novel, The Wettest County in the World--first published in 2008--is an absolutely fantastic read, the sort of book that commands a slow, deliberate reading. And for those who take their time, they'll be rewarded with an absorbing story of violence and bootlegging. Based off Bondurant's own family history, The Wettest County in the World takes place during the last years of Prohibition in the mountains of Virginia, and not only does Bondurant capture the era and the environment with a great eye, he creates quite the riveting story. Critics have cited Cormac McCarthy and William Faulkner as influences, but Bondurant certainly works to establish his own voice throughout and emerges successfully.

One of the things that Bondurant does so well is characterization. The three brothers who comprise much of the story in The Wettest County in the World--Howard, the eldest, Forrest, and Jack, the youngest--are all so distinct in their actions and habits. Howard has the most violent streak of any of them and has a penchant for tossing the lids of the liquor jars before he begins drinking. Forrest, the most mysterious of the three and also the one in charge, carries around a wooden figure in his pocket, a reminder of his grandfather. Jack, the protagonist, relishes in the money that bootlegging provides, and perhaps a little naive, he can't work up the same streak of violence either of his brothers possess. Now these identifiers aren't unique; plenty of worthy fiction writers provide these kinds of minute details to allow the reader to understand their characters to the fullest extent possible. In this case, Bondurant is just proving himself an outstanding and talented writer, but it's still nice to see a novel that goes to such lengths to stimulate the reader.

Just as impressive is Bondurant's use of language. This, more than anything, ties him to McCarthy. Yes, both handle the use of violence in very meaningful and compelling ways, but their ability with language is impeccable. Take the following description of Forrest after he's been attacked and left for dead at the beginning of the novel:

"A part of me is missing, he thought. There was only one whole being in the universe and it was the one who rose in the morning, who stepped over the mountains and reaching down with massive, blunt fingers plucked men's souls like weeds in the furrow. When Forrest looked up the roof of the sky was gone, just a ragged hole, the stars gone out and light coming down in slow glistening streams. The hole in the sky rotated and he felt his weight shift and it seemed like the earth and all the people in it were in a box that was being tipped over, to be dumped out into the black. Not yet, he thought" (39-40).

Perhaps not as complex as some of McCarthy's prose, but it's every bit as human and powerful.

The Wettest County in the World has been adapted into a film, directed by John Hillcoat and written by Nick Cave, who've worked together on The Road and The Proposition. The adaption should be arriving this fall, and if the film is anything like the novel, expect it to garner heavy praise. Bondurant also has a new novel forthcoming. The Night Swimmer is due early next year. Expect a review here soon after its release.

Further Reading:

Interview at Goodreads.

Overview at The Roanoke Times.

Bondurant reads an excerpt from The Wettest County in the World at The Southeast Review.

Richard Spilman/ Interview

2011-09-08T18:11:00.000-05:00

At Our Stories Literary Journal, good friend Justin Nicholes, author of Ash Dogs, interviews Richard Spilman, who directed both Justin's and my MFA thesis. Much of their talk concerns The Estate Sale, one of my favorite books to be released this year.

Chad Harbach/ The Art Of Fielding

2011-09-02T16:49:00.000-05:00

Coming in at over 500 pages and aiming to encompass the pulse of a small Midwestern college and five of its inhabitants, Chad Harbach's debut novel, The Art of Fielding, comes with plenty of expectations. Long before arriving in most reader's hands, the novel has gained the kind of attention reserved for only a few select pieces of fiction. Given its size, its attention to a Midwestern setting, and its popularity among a certain part of the population, it's tough not to see a comparison between the release of The Art of Fielding and, say, last year's release of Jonathan Frazen's Freedom. Harbach, however, treads his own path for the most part, but the results only on occasion rise above middling, leaving The Art of Fielding as an extremely readable novel but nothing close to the grandeur it might strive for.

The opening chapter of the novel offers one of the more compelling moments in The Art of Fielding. Two of the novel's main protagonists--Mike Schwartz and Henry Skrimshander--are introduced, Henry--at the time--a weak-hitting, smooth fielding shortstop, Mike already a confident, strong catcher; he's the kind of young man who already commands more attention and respect than any other player and even most coaches. Mike admires Henry's work ethic, which consists of fielding grounders after the game's over and everyone's left the stands. This moment at the onset of the novel reveals the kind of commitment Henry has to the game of baseball, and shows Mike taking an initial interest in Henry and his potential. These strands play out over the remainder of the novel and form some of the more intriguing aspects of the narrative. Soon after, the novel takes its time introducing the other three main characters--Owen Dunne, Henry's gay college roommate, Guert Affenlight, Westish College president, and Pella Affenlight, Guert's 23-year-old daughter and newcomer to Westish College. Harbach diverts the plot in several of these introductions, devoting multiple chapters to back story in an attempt to elucidate just who these people are. It's common to see such diversions in longer works of fiction, yet these introductions seem to hinder the novel more than enhance it.

The main culprit early on would seem to be in the pacing. While Harbach chooses to focus the novel on one season of the Westish College baseball season, he begins The Art of Fielding well before that integral season. While the time spent giving exposition seems adequate, ultimately, it would seem Harbach might have benefited from trimming the early sections so as to dive immediately into the main section of the novel. A good representation of this comes about 40 pages into the novel. Up to that point, Harbach has spent several pages detailing the first games of Henry's college career. In a tournament held in Florida, the team underperforms, and Henry's finally given a chance to start a game. Harbach describes the games in detail, filling the pages with the kind of baseball talk he's sure to be applauded for. The next paragraph, however, begins with, "After his freshperson year ended..." and like that, Harabch has cut to the end of the baseball season. It's an awkward shift and one that would seem to point to his wish to move ahead with the story. Such jumps have been done before, but coming in the midst of a chapter and after several pages of in-depth baseball description, Harbach just seems to jumping ahead arbitrarily. It's a moment that most likely will get passed over by many readers, but it was one instant that left me considering just how necessary some of the early sections were, not to mention just how long the novel needed to be.

Given such length, Harbach seems intent on creating a novel full of scope, but while he succeeds at providing a story that indeed contains a good amount of material spread out among five main characters, the depth is what is lacking. Outside of a few passages hinting at the internal turmoil at the heart of each character, too often The Art of Fielding glosses over such moments in favor of plot. The plot is well constructed, no doubt, but Harbach seems to have a penchant for short chapters and quick bits of story that while--on the surface--seem great, they neglect the depth of character that a novel of this size should be concerned with. Readers will carry different opinions on certain characters, but, for me, Mike Schwartz probably provided the novel with the most fascinating arc. After him, Pella and Henry would probably have to be recognized for their advancements, but even some of their actions along the way--Henry especially--seem a little underwhelming and--I'm hesitant to say this--implausible. Again, for a book of its size, The Art of Fielding doesn't always provide a great deal of depth, and outside of Henry's baseball career, we see little of what he does or what makes him tick. By the time Henry undergoes his fall from grace and begins his eventual upswing, I'm not quite sure if Harbach has painted him broadly enough.

Ultimately, The Art of Fielding is a flawed, but somewhat enjoyable and certainly readable, novel. There are a few moments of questionable plausibility towards the end of the novel that would seem to bungle the conclusion, but Harbach rebounds to close on a note that recalls the beginning in an appropriate and meaningful way. The Art of Fielding will certainly garner enough accolades over the course of the next few months, and while some of them will probably be deserved, Harbach seems to have a brighter future ahead of him. Just like his lead character Henry, the potential should translate to a very long and healthy career.

Further Reading:

Review at Entertainment Weekly.

Overview at NPR.

Stephen Malkmus And The Jicks/ Mirror Traffic

2011-09-01T10:04:00.002-05:00

With the release of his fifth album, the fifteen-song Mirror Traffic, Stephen Malkmus has now released as many full length albums as his former group, the seminal 90s band Pavement. While he spent last year celebrating the twentieth anniversary of Pavement's formation with a year-long reunion tour, Malkmus certainly isn't stuck reliving the past. Mirror Traffic is a continuation of a solo career that's getting more and more secured and less and less connected to Malkmus' previous band. It will always be somewhat difficult to judge his work as completely divorced from Pavement, but Mirror Traffic makes a case to be seen as wholly Malkmus and nothing else.

Malkmus' solo career began somewhat erratically. His self-titled debut held promise, but it wasn't until his second and third albums, Pig Lib and Face the Truth, that he began to carve out a clear niche as a solo artist. Real Emotional Trash, his fourth album, was, at the time, his most fully realized piece. While it didn't contain as much of the shambolic, spastic material found on Face the Truth, it did contain his most guitar-driven work. Songs were spread out and never before were his guitar skills so admirably and impressively put on display.

On Mirror Traffic, Malkmus continues to shine musically, and his lyrics are just as clever and funny as ever. There are the pop songs that only Malkmus could write--"Tigers", "Senator", "Stick Figures In Love"--complete with the requisite amounts of sneer and sweetness. "Brain Gallop" and "Share The Red" are stretched out, not to the same lengths or levels as material from Real Emotional Trash, but they do reveal the guitar theatrics Malkmus is known for, and they don't fail to impress. Overall, Mirror Traffic might be the strongest album Malkmus has released as a solo artist, and coupled with Real Emotional Trash, it appears Stephen Malkmus is forging an impressive career that one hopes will span beyond a mere five albums.

Further Reading:

Overview at The New York Times.

Overview at Aquarium Drunkard.

Interview at Salon.

Jason Skipper/ Interview

2011-08-31T07:48:00.004-05:00

Jason Skipper released his debut novel, Hustle, this past spring on Press 53. My review offers enough reasons as to why I think it’s an absolutely wonderful book, but Stuart Dybek sums things up quite perfectly, stating that “If works of fiction could be harnessed as alternative sources of clean energy, then Hustle would be lighting up a town.” Jason was kind enough to answer a few questions through email about the writing of Hustle and the significance of music in the process. His answers are insightful and, like his novel, well worth the read. If you haven’t already, pick up Hustle and enjoy the story.

BS: Talk about the process of going from an idea of a novel to the completion of Hustle. What worked for you in the process of writing the novel?

JS: The novel began with a short story based on an event from my life. I grew up selling shrimp from a van on the side of the road in Texas for my father, and the health department shut us down for good around the time he was diagnosed with cancer. It was an experience I had always questioned – whether I could have stopped them, and if I had chosen not to – so I wrote that initial story about that day. But by the time I was done writing it, the characters had taken on their own voices and the experience was different from mine. I continued to write more stories about these characters, and eventually a professor suggested I write a book. At that time, I had become familiar with short story cycles – interconnected story collections – like Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson and Monkeys by Susan Minot. I liked the form because it seemed to most clearly represent how lives are lived, in stories. People continually have new experiences and are made anew, while at the same time they come back to persistent questions and particular needs. All of these lead to patterns that give us particular identities. So I wrote the initial manuscript along the lines of that structure of the interconnected collection. In earlier drafts, Hustle centered round Chris but contained stories from the points-of-view of different family members. Eventually people read the book and suggested I focus on Chris. I was hesitant to cut the other pieces, but finally I tried it, and that felt more natural. As I went through these revisions it increasingly felt more like a novel, and it was becoming a battle to keep the stories self-contained. I fought with this, mainly on principle of staying true to my original intent, but this became a ridiculous fight and only stalled the process. So I took everything apart and wove the chapters together, centering it around Chris’s struggles with these people coming in and out of his life and his own struggles to escape the sort of life his father and grandfather lived. In terms of what worked for me, something I learned during the process was to not fight with the characters or the book when they want to move in a new direction – eventually they will win or the project will fail. I never really had to nudge these people into trouble; they were aching to get at it.

BS: The way the novel is set up, the chapters advance the story rather quickly. In just over 200 pages, Chris ages nine years, and we see a lot of his development. There’s obviously a connection between each chapter, but each section works just as well independently as they work together. Can you talk about the process of doing this?

JS: Most contemporary novels focus on a portion of a person’s life, but I wanted Hustle to cover several years. This meant dividing the chapters by years and having each chapter represent a point in Chris’s life that would speak to the arc of his overall development, as it pertained to ideas within the book. To do this, I had to make sure each chapter was self-contained, which required each chapter to have its own beginning, middle, and end. For this to work as a novel, the beginning of each chapter needed to speak to the previous chapter, the end of each chapter had to leave questions open, and the chapter itself needed to connect to the underlying ideas maintained throughout the book. Each one also needed to present some sort of change in Chris, building incrementally toward the climax of the novel. This weaving was the most surgical part of the process, because I had to work in tendons and ventricles between the original stories.

BS: You grew up in Texas and set Hustle in Texas. Can you talk about the importance of setting the story in Texas?

JS: Setting is vital to me as a writer. I always begin with setting and character, seeing the two as inherently entwined. When I write, I try to locate the character in the geography, asking: if this place were a person, what human characteristics would it have? As a writer, I am most drawn to Texas’s contradictory nature. In terms of its physicality, there is the enormity of its size that at times feels inescapable, yet at the same time there is this sky that seems boundless in the best way. You have relentless heat in the summer and biting cold in the winter. I believe that people often carry the nature of where they’re from within them. In Texas – at least the Texas I know- there is a similar contradictory temperament as one would find in the setting, with people struggling to find a balance: wildness mixed with loyalty, roughness mixed with love. As a young kid, I spent a lot of time in the honky-tonks my father frequented, around men in jeans and cowboy hats who sat day and night at the bar, telling stories and making jokes, rough but typically good-natured. Set-jawed women who maintained a quiet ferocity beneath their smiles. These qualities would later exist in kids that I grew up around. With Hustle and Chris’s development, I became interested in the idea of how identity is formed within contradictions, the struggle to find oneself when raised around disparate natures. For instance, the father is deceitful and unable to sit still, while the mother is more honest and desperately tries to hold things together. Chris struggles with these qualities, seeing the strengths and the destructiveness in both, as he struggles to establish his own identity.

BS: Larry McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy might be considered the preeminent Texas writers, even though their styles might not overlap all that much. Given their status as elder statesmen of Texas literature, do you sense that there’s a more contemporary style to Texas fiction? And to broaden the question a bit, what makes up Texas literature? Is it possible to define it, or is the state too big to tackle?

JS: That is a very big question. Personally, I try not think of it in terms of lineage but, as E.M. Forster writes in Aspects of the Novel, instead imagine all novelists seated together in a large circular room, all writing their novels simultaneously with different aims and temperaments, all with pen in hand. Of course, Texas writers are closely bound in that room, but rather than seeing it as influence moving down a line, I try see it where the past and present continuously inform one another. Texas literature is difficult to define, I think, because the state is so large. You have the bigger cities, the Gulf, the border, the smaller towns, and the west – regions that are all quite different and have their own identities. Certainly distinct images come to mind when we think of Texas, and with each of them comes a certain mythos: the outlaw, the cowboy, the lawmakers, the oil baron, the farmer, the frontiersman. I think we still carry these identities over into current literature, only they have stepped out of the plains and into cities, small towns, and the burbs. Some people speak of Texas writing containing a pervasive nostalgia for “simpler days,” and I can see this in the literature. A common narrative is one where characters find themselves in moments where sets of moral principles - either individual or cultural - are called into question, and what was once seen as hard-truth is realized as fragile. But Texas literature is definitely difficult to nail down.

BS: Music is an important part of Chris’ life throughout Hustle. It’s the art form that gets him through the rest of his life. What music got your through the process of writing Hustle? I know some writers have a hard time writing and listening to music at the same time, but were there particular artists you found inspiring?

JS: Knowing Chris would grow up in the same Dallas music scene that gave birth to bands like Reverend Horton Heat, Polyphonic Spree, and the Old 97s, I wanted the book to have the framework of a debut album by a local band, so I used an album by a Denton band named Centro-matic called Redo the Stacks, which blends shorter lo-fi songs with longer more heavily produced songs. Eventually, as should happen with all creative endeavors that begin with a model, I needed to let go of that structure for the book to become itself; but it was important early on. In terms of my process, I think music is a good way to get to know people, and I often use music to get to know a character, asking them what kinds of music they would like. Doing this, I learned that the grandfather Buddy is a big fan of Dwight Yoakam and Willie Nelson. Theresa, the babysitter who teaches Chris about sex, loves Janis Joplin, which is why she steers him toward her records at the thrift store. Josie, Chris’s girlfriend who appears later in the book, is drawn to all kinds of music, but she loves Built to Spill. I do this often. Once I know what music the characters like, I feel a better connection to them. Sometimes I actually don’t like the bands they like, but they teach me what they most appreciate about the music, and it’s a good conversation to have. They will point things out to me, saying: See? And I say Sure…quietly jotting down that a certain character likes a song because of a certain line or because it’s got big drums. And this reveals their inner character. For me personally, I need silence to write – which is why I tend to write at night.

BS: I tend to ask this of all writers I have an opportunity to speak with, and this seems particularly of interest given the subject of Hustle. What are your top five albums, all time? And why?

JS: Sure. I love a lot of music. But these are the albums going with me to the deserted island.

Centro-matic – Redo the Stacks. I love everything about this album. The rawness of the music, the honesty of the lyrics. The album feels like walking through a sweaty and paint-peeled house, where every song is a different room embodied by the ghost of the same person, full of anger, love, and sadness, as well as humor and joy. I love everything Centro-matic has done, but this record for me was seminal.

The Old 97’s - Hit by a Train. Okay, so I cheated! I can’t select one album, so I’m throwing in a compilation. I love the narratives in Rhett Miller’s lyrics and the tenor of his voice. I remember the first time I saw them live. I expected to see a bar-type band, but Rhett came out in Chuck Taylors with a beat up acoustic, and he played like they were a punk band. Years later, on my last night living in Texas, I went to a show in Denton in August, and I think the a/c at the club was out. We’re talking 100+ degrees, and sweat-soaked crowd, drinking just to stay up. And at one point, in mid-song, the bass player Murray collapsed on stage. Almost immediately Rhett broke into an acoustic cover of “Wave of Mutilation,” just to keep everything focused and moving. I have always thought that moment was amazing.

Pavement – Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. I can’t imagine the pressure of writing a follow-up to Slanted and Enchanted, but I think this album resulted from: “Fuck it, we’re going to do exactly what we want to do,” an approach that many bands employ just before they call it quits, and it brings them out of the ashes. Pavement followed up a great debut album with one that didn’t sound much like it. They got more melodic, which may have pissed off the fans that liked S&E for its lo-fi’edness, and they poked fun at popular bands, which may have cut some possibilities at getting mainstream attention (that they knew they’d never get into anyway). Really though, it’s just a fun and smart record that demonstrates the joys of joining playful, thoughtful lyrics with dynamic music.

Wilco – Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Imaginative, sincere, and soulful. I love how Wilco’s music has at its center a few chords and some lyrics, but then they play with timing and various sounds, building layers until it’s expansive. In my creative writing classes, I like to use the words to the album’s opening song “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” to discuss with students the benefits of using concrete and particular imagery to contextualize abstract ideas and what the chorus means in relation to this idea.

Fugazi – Repeater +3 Songs. I appreciate the energy and intensity of this album. I love that Ian MacKaye uses no effects on his guitar, that he’s still trying to figure out what all an SG paired with a Marshall can do. Also, he says that music is the only place he feels free, and as a writer, I can relate to that.

Rebecca Makkai/The Borrower

2011-08-23T13:06:00.000-05:00

Rebecca Makkai's debut novel, The Borrowers, is a charming, fun ride that follows the exploits of a rogue librarian and a precocious ten-year-old who travel across the upper part of the United States. While Lucy Hull isn't exactly kidnapping young Ian Drake, she's compelled to lead him away from home and his Evangelical parents. Throw in the Russian mob, a strange man in sunglasses, a group of fellow librarians, and a theater troupe and Makkai has the makings of a fantastic and witty novel. More than a few literary allusions grace the pages of The Borrower, not to mention a few prominent tips of the hat to Huckleberry Finn and Lolita; however, Makkai's novel is uniquely her own and a pleasure to read.

Of the many things that stick out while reading The Borrower, Makkai's attention to characterization is to be applauded. She gives Lucy and Ian--Lucy in particular--extensive backgrounds and is able to forge that information into a compelling narrative. Everything from Lucy's experience with a gay friend in high school to her father's stories she heard as a child are introduced to guide readers through various moments in the novel. They lend insight and poignancy to a story that is often comical, but throughout, everything from Lucy's background seems to emerge as a telling reminder of the person narrating the adventure. Her voice is absorbing even if there are more than a few times where readers suspect Lucy is dipping into stories herself, claiming falsities as facts. Unreliable or not, Lucy is one of the more fascinating first-person narrators I've read this year alongside Patrick deWitt's Eli Sisters.

Ian's background may not be as extensive, but Makkai appears to have had quite a bit of fun creating him because of the large amount of spirit in Ian. I imagine it might've been a bit of a challenge for Makkai to write a young character who is so clearly gay to every adult who meets him. There's a risk of falling back on stereotypes and gender expectations, but Makkai never does any of these. In fact, she succeeds extraordinarily, and in the process, creates a very believable portrait. Read any sequence where Ian expresses his glee and you'll be able to discern the lengths Makkai went to in creating such an enjoyable and unique character. Of the many highlights in The Borrower, reading Ian's conversations and insights might be at the top of the list.

All said, The Borrower is an entertaining read. I must admit that I was curious how Makkai would wrap up such a whirlwind adventure, and outside of a few moments, I think she handled the final pages quite well. The ending delights as well as supposes, giving readers a chance to both cheer and imagine. It's an appropriate feeling for a book comprised of characters who, themselves, have big hearts and imaginations.

Further Reading:

Interview at The Millions.

Another interview at Bookslut.

A lengthy and comprehensive interview at Shenandoah.

The War On Drugs/ Slave Ambient

2011-08-21T17:40:00.000-05:00

The War On Drugs debuted in 2008 with Wagonwheel Blues, an album exhibiting a strong mix of driving Americana and swirling atmospherics. Comparisons to Dylan and Springsteen, Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine were made, yet the contrasting styles didn't always mesh within the same song. Half of the album demonstrated a knack for the kind of rock and roll perfect for a long road trip. The other half seemed destined for late nights and lava lamps. The band's most recent album, Slave Ambient, perfects the balance of these styles, and the results are one of the finest albums to emerge in the second half of 2011.

Beginning with the one-two punch of "Best Night" and "Brothers" (one of two songs also found on last year's fantastic Future Weather EP), Slave Ambient relishes in the ambient, mid-tempo songwriting of lead singer Adam Granduciel. It's a welcoming introduction for the album, and it leads directly into the first driving rocker on the album, "Your Love Is Calling My Name," the kind of song Granduciel excels at. Clocking in at just over six minutes, the song never comes close to feeling like the longest song on the album. Instead, it feels like one of the album's strongest statements. The music continuously builds to its euphoric conclusion, providing the best illustration of the fusion of sounds Wagonwheel Blues first hinted at.

The album doesn't reach its standout track until near its end, however. "Baby Missiles" is perhaps the finest moment in Granduciel's career up to this point, the three and a half minute burst of energy filled with droning keyboards and sparked by a rambling harmonica. It recalls the hallmarks of heartland rock and shoegaze while forging something entirely new. On an album filled with carefully arranged and performed songs, "Baby Missiles" manages to stand out due to its frantic pace but also for its tunefulness. It begs to be repeated. Perhaps in another universe it would be a more immediately recognizable song, but instead, it's simply an outstanding track on a rather impressive album.

Further Reading:

Interview at The Phawker.

Overview at The Aquarium Drunkard.

A great review at The Decibel Tolls.

Lee Martin/ Break The Skin

2011-08-19T16:35:00.000-05:00

To appropriate the words of Laney, the hard-luck high school dropout who just wants to find a place to fit in and one of the two first-person narrators in Lee Martin's latest novel, Break the Skin is "a story of want. A story of greed, but under it all a story of fear." The novel centers around a crime in the small town of Mt. Gilead, Illinois and includes a corresponding storyline that takes place in Denton, Texas, narrated by a tattoo artist who prefers to be known as Miss Baby. The resulting story centers around just what Laney suggests, and it offers strong evidence that Martin is an assured storyteller capable of crafting a strong, literary crime novel.

Perhaps the greatest strength of Break the Skin is Martin capturing the voice of his two female protagonists. One can quibble with this point, but throughout the novel, Martin routinely seems to understand the longing in both Laney and Miss Baby. Their wish for love and connection drives them to do things most readers might not see themselves capable of doing, but as the novel progresses, and as Laney's and Miss Baby's stories begin to overlap, readers are surely able to understand these women and, perhaps, sympathize somewhat with their thoughts and actions. Martin would appear to verify such a statement by dedicating the novel to his own character, Miss Baby, and while I found Laney to be a far more interesting character, I can see why Martin would feel such a connection. Miss Baby's profession allows Martin to play with the idea of marking people. Tattoos are permanent, and the want, greed, and fear that Martin's characters feel are by no means temporary. They're lasting, and that's what makes Break the Skin such a strong novel. The characters have conviction, and readers can feel that.

Another strong suit of the novel is the shift in time Martin uses to continually play up the tension of the novel. While readers are made aware of the finale early in the novel, Martin is able to keep the story moving forward by playing with time and never allowing the reader to get too comfortable in any location or with any character. If there's anything to find issue with, it would be the ratio of time Martin chooses to spend with Laney and Miss Baby. Laney gets the lion's share of page time in Break the Skin, and while her story certainly is the foundation of the novel, there were more than a few times that I found myself wishing that Martin spent more time from Miss Baby's perspective, particularly as the novel worked through its second half. Nonetheless, Martin does place himself and his novel firmly in the upper echelon of recent literary crime novels. While not as inventive or surprising as Dan Chaon's Await Your Reply, Break the Skin shows a willingness to break away from convention, something that was mostly lacking in Tom Franklin's last novel, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter.

Further Reading:

Review at The New York Times.

Good friend Casey Pycior has a review and interview with Martin on his blog, The Story Is The Cure.

Jason Skipper/ Hustle

2011-08-14T23:43:00.000-05:00

Near the end of Jason Skipper's wonderful debut novel, Hustle, there's a moment where the narrator, Chris Saxton, reads a note from his father that says, "Have a good time." At that point in the novel, a reader will have understood the magnitude of such a statement. The relationship between Chris and his father has been a complicated one. Chris' father hasn't always been there for Chris, and as Chris has gotten older, he finds himself with less and less time for his father. And yet the note is an indication that the bond between them hasn't been completely broken. It's also a reminder that time is always of the essence, and of the many things one can glean from Skipper's novel, it's the influence of time. There's never enough of it, and it passes much more quickly than anyone can image.

Hustle manages to do something rather spectacularly over the course of its 200+ pages, which is span nearly nine years and cover much of Chris' formative years. At the onset of the novel, we see Chris as a nine-year-old, manning the counter of his father's seafood store. A man walks in carrying a guitar case, and within minutes, Chris' father is able to talk the man into giving him the guitar for only $15, $10 off the original asking price. Thus, the title of the novel is made clear, but just as important is the acquisition of the guitar, as music will be one of the few constants throughout the next nine years of Chris' life. It's there the following year, when as a ten-year-old, Chris accompanies his father on a road trip to Florida to bring back to Texas his alcoholic grandfather. In the truck, a Dwight Yoakam song plays over and over. And it's a Dwight Yoakam song that Chris, as an eighteen-year-old, plays at the conclusion of the novel in front of two thousand people, his music career blossoming just as his relationship with his father reaches its most tranquil moments.

But to speak again of time. Skipper jumps ahead in Chris' life, focusing on moments involving parents, bandmates, and girlfriends, and in doing so, readers get a very detailed look at a fascinating protagonist. The movement in time and through Chris' development is seamless, and with Skipper's ability, the story never feels weighted by unnecessary moments. What readers see is consistently enthralling; of particular interest, the scenes of Chris and his father and grandfather selling shrimp on the side of the road show a familial bond and a lifestyle (the hustle) taking shape. Also, the section detailing Chris' first real romantic relationship is particularly strong. The interactions between him and Josie come off as very real and filled with the sort of aching and turmoil Dwight Yoakam has surely sung of thousands of times. And it's the stuff that make great stories, and Hustle is without question a great story.

Further Reading:

Overview at The News Tribune.

A short story at River And Sound Review.

Another short story at Freight Stories.

Richard Buckner/ Our Blood

2011-08-11T11:56:00.002-05:00

I first saw Richard Buckner in 1999 or 2000 at South By Southwest in Austin. He played in what seemed to be an abandoned church with only a guitar and a drummer beside him (can anyone confirm what year this was?), and the setting was perfect for the kind of weary rock and roll Buckner has mastered over the years. As I recall, the songs were the chugging, driving sort, and the drumming kept pace throughout. It was a great show, yet for reasons I cannot explain, I didn't keep up with Buckner's music afterwards. I picked up Devotion + Doubt (1997) on a whim a few years later, but that was it for quite some time.

It wasn't until 2006's Meadow that I paid attention to Buckner again. Admittedly, I was most intrigued by the news of ex-Guided By Voices guitarist Doug Gillard's involvement, but upon hearing the album, I was quickly back in Buckner's camp. Sure, Gillard's guitar really propelled the songs, but Buckner was certainly the star. The vocal delivery and lyrical content was strong, and they complimented the music quite well. Meadow turned out to be one of my favorite albums that year, and returning to it now brings the same sort of excitement that came the first time it played through the stereo.

It took him a while, but Buckner's released the follow-up to Meadow, and Our Blood is a worthy successor. Its nine songs continue along the same vibe as Meadow, many of them accented by what sounds like vintage keyboards and harmonium such as the opening track, "Traitor". Elsewhere, Buckner's guitar work is impressive, particularly on the album's two standout tracks, "Escape" and "Collusion". The pluck of the guitar strings recall some of Buckner's earlier work (I'm thinking mostly of the material on Devotion + Doubt), but Our Blood never sounds anything but fresh. The second half of the album devotes itself to more mood pieces, and overall Our Blood is very much a singular piece as opposed to the more band-oriented Meadow, which should come as no surprise as Buckner recorded his latest album almost entirely by himself.

I won't dip into an analysis of Buckner's lyrics but instead encourage anyone who hasn't already to pick up a copy of Our Blood and read along. It'll be 37 minutes of literate, smart rock and roll, and it'll be worth every second.

Further Reading:

The Richard Buckner Preservation Society keeps track of all Buckner related news and tour dates.

Recent interview at IFC.

Another interview at Aquarium Drunkard.

Caitlin Horrocks/ This Is Not Your City

2011-08-02T09:21:00.001-05:00

Earlier this year, I read Miranda July's first collection of stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You, and found the book to be a bit of a disappointment, mainly because the stories blended into one another. The main issue at fault seemed to be the voice of the mostly first-person, female narrators. Every narrator seemed to sound like the last, and if not for the white spaces and the titles, the stories might've started to run into one another. In short, the stories were too homogeneous, the collection a little one-dimensional.

Caitlin Horrocks' debut collection, This is Not Your City, doesn't suffer the same fate. In fact, Horrocks' stories boldly seek out individualized female voices, and the results are often very rewarding, particularly in the stories featuring narrators who aren't afraid to make decisions most readers might classify as being the wrong decision. Among stories that feature characters who seek some aspect of unity, Horrocks delivers several stories that involve characters who go out of their way to create divisions, and, as a reader, seeing these moments of disruption is a bit of a welcome change. To see a character act in ways that are so clearly wrong is a foundation of absorbing narrative after all, and the pay off is seeing what awaits these characters once the decision has been made. Almost always, Horrocks doesn't disappoint.

The opening story, "Zolaria," and the collection's centerpieces, "Steal Small" and "Embodied," all reveal characters who make questionable decisions, and the stories are perhaps the finest of the bunch. "Embodied," despite its tragic conclusion, ultimately became a favorite because of Horrocks' ability to stay in the narrator's voice and mindset throughout the story. In lesser hands, the story might've slipped away from narrative and into judgments, but readers never get any. Instead, the story of a pregnant woman who believes herself to be living in her 127th life comes across as honest. Horrocks presents her narrator as someone who dearly believes in the life she lives, and as an added bonus, it's nice to see Horrocks build a relationship where the woman's husband appears to accept his wife's belief of reincarnation one-hundred percent. The ending is shocking, but like many of Horrocks' stories, the reader is not only surprised but changed, and the stories continue to reward over and over again.

Further Reading:

Review at the The New York Times.

Andrew's Book Club has an overview and interview with Horrocks.

Interview at The Story Prize blog. Of particular interest, Horrocks briefly discusses aspects of form and the story "Zolaria".

Friday Night Lights

2011-07-26T09:46:00.002-05:00

Having recently gone off the air, Friday Night Lights has garnered a significant amount of coverage, much of it celebrating the show as one of the era's most preeminent televised dramas. To critics, the show centering around a small Texas town and its love of high school football was "the quintessential show about American spirit." FNL was the sort of show that "illuminate[d] the great tragedy of American life: we will never live up to the myths we have created for ourselves."

Weighty stuff, but for most, such praise was on the mark. More recently, The Millions offers another overview of the show (their celebratory remarks were featured earlier this year), yet this time Alexander Nazaryan seems content on finding fault with the show, claiming "Friday Night Lights is bad television. And if it is art, then it is art that is purposefully misleading, which is art of the worst kind."

Nazaryan's argument concerning the show seems to be rooted in some issue of verisimilitude. Pointing out the sometimes quick turn around FNL's storylines sometimes took (look no further than the last minute comeback victories), he states, "all that overcoming is superficial and rushed." Nazaryan offers further proof by pointing out a host of characters whose actions seem to be more tied to a storyline than to actual character development. In such a compromise, the sense of a true character can be lost, and I certainly see what Nazaryan is out to suggest. As strong of a show as Friday Night Lights was (and I would count myself as a fan more than a detractor), there were without a doubt several times where the show seemed to be lacking a true direction for its characters and its story.

Yet while I see some strength in Nazaryan's piece, I take some issue with later claims he makes, particularly the one suggesting that "there is nothing true about [FNL]. It ignores hard battles in favor of superficial ones." Without going through each episode, I can recall several moments in the five seasons where the writers of the show do focus on moments that are without question true and difficult. The arc that backup quarterback Matt Saracen undergoes is filled with very real and dramatic moments. Same for Buddy Garrity. Sure there are some missteps, but outside of The Wire, which might be the closet thing to perfection in televised drama, Friday Night Lights hit its mark a lot more often than many other programs in its time.

I'm glad Nazaryan's article is out there. It takes the show to task and introduces some questions worth asking. Its no surprise that the comments on The Millions have so far have been less than enthusiastic. It'll be interesting to watch where this conversation goes.

Kyle Minor/ In The Devil's Territory

2011-07-25T17:07:00.003-05:00

Kyle Minor, from his web presence alone (HTMLGiant and the all night reading of Barry Hannah's New and Selected Stories among many others), appears to be an astute and enthusiastic writer that any young writer ought to look to for inspiration. He's dedicated to the craft and apparently reads his brains out.

His first collection of stories, In the Devil's Territory, is the sort of book people should be reading. The stories within vary in length and style, but each of them consistently showcases a careful eye for detail, particularly that of character. The actions Minor's characters undertake and the insight they carry are the things of wonderment on the page. Early in the long story "A Love Story," a young man in college, after an enjoyable evening out on a date, leans in to kiss the girl he'll one day marry and spend his life with. His reaction to the moment is one of surprise and foreshadowing, and among many amazing moments in the entire collection, it may be my favorite. I found myself rereading the paragraph a couple of times, marveling at the physicality of the moment and the way Minor is capable of injecting a devastating amount of emotional resonance at the same time. From there, the story expands significantly, but that particular interaction is worth the price of the book alone.

"A Love Story", in its 40-plus pages, is the third longest story in the six-story collection, but the long story seems to be where Minor excels. "A Day Meant to Do Less" offers multiple point of views of the same event as bookends of the story, and the effect serves to reveal the pains of family history. Once again, the actions and insights seen throughout the story are consuming enough that the length of the story doesn't matter. In fact, the story, along with the even longer title novella, doesn't feel long at all. Minor crafts stories that take their time in developing, and each page reveals something more captivating than the previous page.

Minor lists Andre Dubus as one of his influences, and there are several places within In The Devil's Territory where such an influence is recognizable. There's a subtle, reflective, almost philosophical approach to these stories, and the attention to the spiritual is certainly considered. Overall, an excellent debut.

Further Reading:

Charles Dodd White has an insightful and recent interview with Minor, covering among many things the long short story.

Guernica has an excerpt from Minor's forthcoming novel, The Sexual Lives of Missionaries. If you've read it, post your thoughts. I'm not one for novel excerpts because I tend to want to read on, and I end up a little frustrated that I cannot. Rest assured, I look forward to the entire novel. (There's a good chance my curiosity will force me to succumb to the excerpt eventually).

Donald Ray Pollock/ The Devil All The Time

2011-07-20T17:56:00.003-05:00

Donald Ray Pollock's first book, the short story collection Knockemstiff, was the sort of thing a reader was either going to put down after a few pages for being too grotesque and violent or rabidly read through for being entirely engrossing and ... well, grotesque and violent. Knockemstiff was a thrilling ride, and Pollock's first novel, The Devil All the Time, continues in the same vein. The grotesque and the violence are ever present, but adding weight to the novel, Pollock injects a good dose of religion, and readers see the good and the bad of such a calling.

There are characters who seek immediate help from religion, going so far as to sacrifice dozens of animals and offer them to the Lord for the chance to save another person's life. Others continually seek to find answers through prayer and the guidance of Godly men, preachers, and the results are usually nothing of what they sought. Death comes too quickly to those who seek the guidance of religion, yet for those who find themselves in what many would consider an un-Godly situation, there is also a sense of religion, one surely to fascinate and/or perhaps horrify some readers.

Carl and Sandy Henderson are a married team of serial killers, and their story seems to be the centerpiece of the novel. Pollock jumps into the point of view of several characters throughout The Devil All the Time, but Carl and Sandy are by far the most interesting two as readers witness their travels throughout the Midwest and Southeast, searching for hitchhikers they can lure into posing for a few pictures before becoming the next victim. Carl and Sandy refer to these men as "models," and as their story progresses, readers start to see the strain between the pair and how they both seek something different from these "models" they search for. To Carl, the killing has purpose, one that again connects to the theme of religion: “To his way of thinking, it was the one true religion, the thing he’d been searching for his whole life. Only in the presence of death could he feel the presence of something like God.”

Like Knockemstiff, The Devil All the Time often centers around a world of depravity, but it's a world that Pollock captures in an absolutely absorbing way. Beyond the violence and the grotesque, there's a story here, and it's one sure to have many readers marveling.

Further Reading:

The New York Times has an excellent overview of Pollock.

Review at Three Guys One Book, including some discussion of what the reviewer perceives as the weaker elements of the novel. I tend to agree with the reviewer on just about every point.

Patrick deWitt/ The Sisters Brothers

2011-07-15T18:44:00.001-05:00

Imagine No Country For Old Men-era Cormac McCarthy composing Blood Meridian and the result would be something like Patrick deWitt's latest novel, The Sisters Brothers. The language is clipped, immediate, and movie script-like, all characteristics of McCarthy's 2005 novel; however, the western setting and occasional spurts of violence offer a passing resemblance to McCarthy's unquestionable masterpiece. But unlike just about anything McCarthy's offered, deWitt offers a novel that's also filled with a slew of humor and black comedy, the kind that seems almost Coen Brothers-esque. It's an enjoyable novel that moves quickly and never takes a dull turn.

deWitt's finest achievement with The Sisters Brothers is probably the narrative voice. Told by the younger Sisters brother, Eli, the story carries with it a contemplative voice. Eli, half of the murderous pair of brothers, questions his commitment to the job he and his older brother, Charlie, have undertaken. Throughout the novel, he envisions a life with a caring, beautiful woman by his side, and he longs to one day open a trading post--something that will allow him to get away from the killings he's built his life around. Throughout the novel, this sense of the future seems to weigh on Eli and provides a kind of melancholy tone.

Despite the pensive tone, the novel still comes across as rather funny. There are the sort of scenes that one could easily see played out on the big screen, but there is also the quick back-and-forth sort of dialog that, for some, might play better on screen than on the page. For me, however, those moments of dialog were often the funniest parts of the novel. deWitt couldn't have created two better characters in Eli and Charlie. As close as they are, they certainly have their own styles and beliefs, and reading the moments where they play off one another is one of the joys of reading this novel. This attention to humor and the setting have prompted a few reviewers to invoke the name Charles Portis, and while I have yet to get around to reading any Portis, if the reviewers are on the mark, I'll soon seek out some of Portis' work.

Further Reading:

Review at The Washington Post.

Review at Three Guys One Book.

Interview at The Rumpus. Of particular interest, deWitt talks about deciding to make Eli and Charlie brothers and having to revise the early parts of the novel to reflect that decision.

Tree Of Life

2011-07-15T11:23:00.001-05:00

After a few less than rewarding trips to the theater this year (Everything Must Go should've stuck more closely to the Raymond Carver short story or abandoned the idea altogether; Super 8 proved to be far too predictable and, alas, quite a disappointment), I finally found a winner in Terrence Malik's Tree of Life. I won't bother to lay out a plot summary or even attempt the kind of deep philosophical exploration I've seen from a few others; rather, I'm more interested in pointing out some aspects of the film that lead me to believe there won't be a better film to come out in 2011.

It was refreshing to watch a film that didn't rely on the typical linear plot structure that much of storytelling adopts. Tree of Life certainly isn't the first film to play around with the idea of how to tell a story, but the lengths to which Malick went to obscure any recognizable format of linear storytelling was certainly a risk worth taking. While it does take a minute or two for viewers to accept the journey Malick has put them on, the visuals are rather stunning. The origins of the universe, chaotic and wondrous as they are, eventually gives way to our characters, whose make-up seems to emerge from the visuals we've just witnessed.

Early in the movie, there's a reference made to nature and grace and how these elements play a part in the world. We get these characteristics played out by the parents, portrayed by Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain. They play their parts exceptionally, Pitt the rough and somewhat abusive father and Chastain the more sensitive and outwardly loving parent. The dichotomy grows through the movie and ultimately serves as the foundation of the drama, but to see it emerge from the very beginning of the movie in the images of the developing universe is to see how such different characteristics are born.

But to focus on the visuals again. The movie is built upon them. To see a dinosaur place its foot upon the dying head of another, the killing imminent, only to run away is a fascinating image that's recalled later in the film in the roughness Pitt shows his children. Elsewhere, the development of the children is captured perfectly, seeing the jealousy form in a toddler's face and later, seeing the faces of adolescents discover they can hurt one another. These, and many other images, tell the story of Tree of Life, and it's a movie worth seeing many times over.

Further Reading:

Biblioklept has the aforementioned deep philosophical exploration, and it's a rather fascinating one.

The Millions offers a nice overview.

Bon Iver/ "Beth/Rest"

2011-07-12T10:23:00.003-05:00

Bon Iver’s recently released second album has been met, perhaps unsurprisingly, with a sizeable amount of attention and nearly unanimous positive review. Coming after the success of For Emma, Forever Ago, the self-titled release finds Justin Vernon expanding his range with a much fuller, lusher sound. Like any well-received sophomore album, it doesn’t simply offer a rehash of what made the debut great, yet it doesn’t entirely neglect the elements that made the debut such a success. However, by itself and without the influence of the debut, Bon Iver is a strong album, an album made even stronger by its polarizing finale, “Beth/Rest,” perhaps the most atypical, yet ultimately the most rewarding, song in Vernon’s young catalog.

Of the many commentators, Pitchfork claims, "["Beth/Rest"] stands as one the record's bravest and most deftly executed moments." Later, Pitchfork sinks back into its customary role of placing the value of coolness into music by noting, "The song draws a line in the sand for anyone with a deep investment in cool, and Vernon stands behind it with confidence," but I sense Pitchfork--for once--might have its heart in the right place.

Elsewhere, PopMatters states: "From the cheesy synth chords to the flat percussion to the ascending guitar solos and sexy sax lines, it’s an absolute wonder to behold" while Slant suggests that "Beth/Rest" is "a full-on ballad of the Top 40 variety circa 1988, complete with hilariously outdated elements like delicate percussion reverb and bell-like keyboard surges."

Most surprisingly, Allmusic, usually a standard of above average music journalism, comes off sounding a bit juvenile (and like the customary writing from Pitchfork): "Sounding like it was recorded using a five-dollar Casio and featuring some of the worst dueling sax/guitar solos you’d ever imagine, it shoots for a majestic, album-ending feel but instead sounds like the theme song to a horrible '80s movie about unicorns."

I'm not sure about the unicorn movie, but I'd agree that the song does aim for some kind of majestic concluding feel. But it succeeds rather than fails. And part of that success probably comes from the combination of familiar musical elements (see 80s nostalgia) with the totally unexpected use of them. Ultimately, "Beth/Rest" takes its most significant cues from Bruce Hornsby, and if it sounds like it's from twenty-five years ago, so be it. The shelf life of popular culture items is as long as we wish for them to be, and a song like "Beth/Rest" will either sound timeless or outdated for any number of listeners, but for this listener, it's one of the better songs to be released in 2011.

Andrew Scott/ Naked Summer

2011-07-05T08:21:00.007-05:00

For a while now, I've been a fan of Andrew's Book Club, a great website devoted to introducing new collections of short fiction each month. The site's driving force, Andrew Scott, recently published his first collection of stories, Naked Summer, and just like the many collections featured on his site, Scott's collection is one worth picking up.

The stories are all based in Indiana, many centered in and around Lafayette, and have a particular Midwestern feel to them. This is of interest to me because just recently, I participated in a dialogue of sorts about what Midwestern writing is. It's a tough category to pin exactly, but Scott's collection, for any number of reasons, is distinctively Midwestern. There are characters within who, try as they might, hang on to some form of dignity and pride all while the world around them remains chaotic and a bit mysterious.

No story better exemplifies this than "The Hypnotist," one of the gems of Naked Summer. The story hinges on a moment that the protagonist, Missy, can't bear to watch, yet she can't force herself to turn away. The moment itself is too miraculous yet, at the same time, too distressing, and at the end of the story, when Missy and her brother--most likely confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life--are alone, she cannot reveal what her brother has gone through, even if it might provide him with a moment of hope. For that moment of hope would only be fleeting, and despite her wish for her brother to be happy, Missy remains quiet, attempting to hold on to something akin to pride, for she's just witnessed "an event she doesn't know how to explain."

The stories in Naked Summer, outside of a few, almost always focus on young men and women in the midst of that complicated shift between adolescence and adulthood, and Scott has an outstanding handle on the feeling. The title novella, which ends the collection, contains a wonderful moment that makes reference to the title, and it captures the mood of the entire book. A young girl, playing outside without a shirt on, prompts one of Scott's characters to say: "How cute....It's probably her last naked summer. Next year she'll have to wear clothes." It's a touching and momentous line in a collection full of them.

Further Reading:

Interview at Lafayette Journal and Courier. Of particular interest, a question on how Scott approaches place, particularly Lafayette, Indiana, in the collection.

Interview at Bark.

Review at Book Punch.

David McGlynn/ The End Of The Straight And Narrow

2011-07-04T11:44:00.022-05:00

I first came across David McGlynn at the AWP Conference in Denver, 2010. He was chairing a panel on Texas Fiction and doing his best to navigate a discussion with some zealous members of the audience. I found the entire panel fascinating, and between the comments from McGlynn and Scott Blackwood, I came away with quite a bit. It turned out to be--for me--the best panel of the conference.

So for some unknown reason, it took me a long while to get to McGlynn's first collection of stories, The End of The Straight And Narrow. My mistake. Despite being split into two sections, the collection carries a strong thematic unity in its nine stories--faith and forgiveness, or at least the chance for forgiveness. The final story in the first section, "Seventeenth One-Hundredths of a Second" exemplifies these thematic cues quickly and often. The protagonist, Jonah, is troubled by the death of his best friend, Charlie, while forging a relationship with Charlie's pregnant widow, Abby. Complicating matters is Jonah's struggle between following his beliefs and fighting his temptations. A long, but rewarding, read.

In the second section of the collection, McGlynn turns his focus to a family in Houston. The narrator of four of the five stories, fifteen-year-old Rowdy, feels responsible for his mother's blindness, a result of her pregnancy with Rowdy. Throughout the stories, Rowdy faces complications between him and his father, Lee, between him and his sister, Jill, and witnesses the disintegration of his parents' marriage as his father begins an affair with the in-house nurse.

As strong as the stories in the first half are, the most impressive work in The End of The Straight And Narrow comes in the second section. McGlynn comes off sounding like an experience novelist, weaving the family's background into the present all while complementing a developing storyline with well-placed character details. Each of the five stories can stand alone, but together, they reveal uplifting and devastating results.

Further Reading:

The Texas Observer offers an outstanding review of The End of The Straight And Narrow and gives further insight into McGlynn's connections with the state of Texas.

Shann Ray/ American Masculine

2011-07-03T04:41:00.003-05:00

“Lord, to be thirty-three forever.”
- Craig Finn of The Hold Steady, “Stevie Nix”

While only some of the characters in Shann Ray’s first short story collection, American Masculine, are thirty-three in age, almost all of them are, in some way, figuring out how to become unstuck from their own personal forever. Men are afraid of giving up and giving in. They hold on to their past, their sense of love, their dependence of substance, and their perception of what’s right.

“Men, dumb as animals, but like angels, majestic. Born into foolishness. Into love awkward. Unknowingly they willed themselves to succeed or die.”

- Shann Ray, “The Miracles of Vincent van Gogh”

Ray does what any good writer does, giving his characters the opportunity to succeed or die, and although he allows some to linger upon that tightrope, he brings back nearly every single one of them. And for the characters’ sake, they appear better for the experience. As do we, the readers.

The stories that work best in American Masculine are those that seem to contain a trace of what might be best called magic. The two men in “When We Rise” spend a whole night scouring a small town for basketball hoops still covered in the fresh snowfall. Their goal is to sink the perfect jumper, to experience the thrill of seeing the snow explode from the net and hearing the accompanying pop. It’s no surprise that on their final attempts, on two baskets outside of town in the early morning, they both succeed.

“They are standing in the snow like brothers, the big lights of the Jeep making everything immortal.”

But of course, nothing is ever truly immortal, but for Shale, a character we see in multiple stories in American Masculine, there’s something about seeing that snow fly. It’s a chance to remember a brother who has died, to solidify a moment in his past as the rest of his life continues on and changes. It’s a “chance,” Ray writes, “to be face-to-face not with the mundane but with the holy.”

Salvation is sought after throughout American Masculine, and when characters do come face-to-face with it, Ray achieves his most powerful moments. Lives are restored, born, and saved, and in every instance, Ray captures the moment with quiet dignity. His language, perhaps wrongly read as digressive by some, circles from all directions and hones in on true emotion.

Ray's characters won't be thirty-three forever, but throughout American Masculine, he shows us why that's not something one ought to worry about.

Dan Hoyt/ Interview

2011-06-30T19:31:00.004-05:00

Dan Hoyt, good friend and outstanding writer, is interviewed at Iambik Audiobooks, offering up quite a bit of insight on writing his debut collection, Then We Saw The Flames. Dan's book can be purchased as an audiobook through the site, and it's a worthy collection to check out.