July 11th is for Awesome

 

I think I got into Jack Pendarvis sort of randomly—if I remember right,  I was in Housing Works, browsing the (illegal, but whatever) advance reading copy shelves, and found his first book and read the first story, “Sex Devil,” and I was as hooked on him as I’d been on anybody in awhile.

If you don’t know who Jack Pendarvis is it’s because you haven’t been reading the Oxford American or Paste or The Believer often enough, or it’s because you somehow missed his “Our Spring Catalog,” which was a story in his first book (The Mysterious Secret of the Valuable Treasure) that was also published in the 2006 Pushcart Anthology (and originally in Boulevard, I think)(Chelsea, actually), or it’s because you’re not monitoring the writer other writers write/talk/blurb about, (the back of the new book’s got blurbs from George Saunders and Barry Hannah). There’s a chance you’ve stumbled on Pendarvis’ “blog,” but I’ve got to imagine the readers who find their way to him through that medium still represent a small sum.

He’s got two books of short stories, both from MacAdam/Cage (which, let me just go ahead and admit a total bias here: if all small presses in the country took as inspiration MacAdam/Cage, Greywolf, and New Directions, life would be great and there’d be flowers and lollipops everywhere for everyone all the time), and his latest book is a novel called Awesome, also from MacAdam/Cage. It’s fair to wonder, if you’re a Pendarvis reader and fan (I have to think one sort of leads to the other, causally: if you read him and don’t like him, you’ve got issues), how he could pull off a long-form book after his short stories. His short stories are wild, crazed things, and so funny they can, after multiple readings, still draw, from me anyway, loud laughter. Here’s one of the sections of “Our Spring Catalog,” the Pushcart Prize winner:

 

I Couldn’t Eat Another Thing

Angela Bird

 

In this luminous collection of sparkling stories, former newspaper columnist Bird makes a stunning fictional debut with a wry look at the state of modern commitment. A lot of the time I’d get to the end of one of the stories and turn a page like, “Huh?” Like, “Where’s the end of it?” Like, “What happened next?” But nothing happened next. You know, those kinds of stories. Luminous.

 

The story is a collection of eight descriptions of books, all written with a similarly self-aware and -involved tone, and the story’s a scream not just because it takes great shots at the sort of publishing garbage that many of us find pretty repellant (novels and stories that Chabon described in the intro of McSweeney’s 11 as “glistening with epiphanic dew” instead of having stuff actually resolve), but because it takes those shots with a bracing honesty and directness. The overused, hyperbolic sentences fall apart as the story strips off its own skin to reveal the funnier, more true part underneath.

But so back to the idea of how Pendarvis might tackle a novel: how could he do it, right? He writes great short, hilarious stuff, but long stuff? More than a hundred pages? How does it happen?

 

How it happens in Awesome is that Pendarvis seems to have decided to completely ignore some basic tenets of reality and has made one of the weirdest, most wait, what?-inducing novels I’ve ever read. What you must dispose of, mentally, when getting into Awesome are beliefs like: a vehicle cannot be powered by a giant’s ejaculate; life ends at death; a giant may first fight and, later, carnally know another giant; that the world could come to an end because of a robot (built by a giant) inside of a giant, or that the world could be restored and repopulated by another giant.

Awesome is, top to bottom, an engaging book, sucking the reader in if for no other reason than to see what happens next, and what happens next is, literally, almost always unbelievable. The book’s whole arc centers around a giant named Awesome and his search for treasures, which treasures will, if he secures them all, win him the love of a miss Glorious Jones. Spelled out like that it is, yes, a quest story, and recognizably so. The whole of the book is a very straightforward narrative thing, with elements you’d recognize from any number of books, but it’s all the fantastical elements in the novel that make it so strange and different and, in lots of ways, compelling.

The novel’s a first-person account, from Awesome’s point of view, and here’s a good primer for what’s in store throughout:

 

Here is a normal day for me.

Wake up.

Look at my handsome nakedness in my big mirror.

My robot ward, Jimmy, is already up and making coffee. I could turn Jimmy into a wife robot if I wanted to. I could stretch him out to giant size and add some female-looking parts and a sluice of some kind where I could deposit my ejaculate. I could give him a different voice and name and put some eyelashes on him. But it wouldn’t seem right.

 

And with a voice like that, of course, the book gathers much of its comedic steam around Awesome’s hilarious, almost unbearably cocky tone and view (or maybe he’s not cocky, since Awesome is actually capable of everything he says he is). This is also, for me, the only part of the book that ends up lagging at points: Awesome’s voice and view is so dialed up at all times that there’s little time for the reflective, recharging-type moments that fiction routinely offers. Which, I suppose, is just stating the obvious: that Pendarvis is like absolutely no one else, and is brazen in his dismissal of some elements of what we recognize as a ‘novel.’ I go back and forth. (full admission: I’m sort of a too-serious dude, and so stuff that’s eternally jokey can sometimes just make me tired).

What is for sure is that Awesome is the first novel I’ve read in I can’t remember how long (ever?) in which I never once had any idea what would happen next. Authors are usually wonderful little Hansels and Gretels, leaving crumbs through the text to give the reader a sense of what might be coming, and Pendarvis does a little of that, but not much. By and large, for me anyway, each page brought a new event or twist that I couldn’t have seen coming, which, I think, is great praise. If we can acknowledge that books are the result of a certain person’s process of thought; Awesome stands as evidence that Jack Pendarvis has a way of thinking, a whole process of thinking, that’s totally original and his own and unique and startling, and worth paying plenty of attention to. Buy it, read it.

Mondays are for Music

Haley Bonar “Big Star”

I’ve got a terrible fondness for most Minnesota musicians anyway, and even though Haley Bonar’s from one of the Dakotas she’s known as a Minnesota musician (for her time in Duluth and, now, St. Paul), and so I’ve got a soft spot for her just as is. Still, geography’s not enough to make me love a song or an artist, and Bonar’s songs are freakishly pretty. I first heard her track “Am I Allowed,” off her first disc The Size of Planets, and that song might still be one of the prettiest, gutsiest, most honest songs of love and ache I’ve ever heard. The song’s action is of a lover returning to a lover she’s left, and though some of the phrases are sort of stock and simple, Bonar edges them into new territory with strange new additions to what the listener might be expecting: “Just let me see you, I sure miss your smile, we’ve both been lonely, we can kiss for awhile…” She sings that passage toward the start of the song and it’s unfair to even go too far into all this just because to understand the impact of Bonar’s singing you need to hear her soft, slightly sad voice—she sounds both exhausted and quietly determined, if that makes sense. Anyway: the song to get, if you’ve never heard her, is “Am I Allowed.”

Her new single is the title track from her latest CD. Another weakness I’ve got is for stuff titled Big Star—the band (obviously), the Jayhawks track (off Smile)—and so this track made me smile even before I heard it. The singer this time is not the one who has left, is not even the one who is leaving, but is a lover singing about her beloved’s desire to find “all the loving that you need.” In the chorus her voice takes off, assuring her beloved “You’re gonna be a big star,” and then later advising that “They’re gonna call you baby, treat you like a symbol, something that they’ll never understand…I’m gonna read your stories, spend springtime in the gardens…” There’s a weird lack of overt sentiment in the song—it’s not clear that Bonar’s happily wishing this lover well on his way to fame and glory or if she’s really really hurt by it. It seems to me to be both, simultaneously, which is all the more devastating. Anyway: download it, listen to it, buy her album, come to see her when she comes to your town.

 

The Rural Alberta Advantage “Don’t Haunt This Place”

I know next to nothing about this band: I know that they are a trio (2dudes/1girl) from Canada, and that this song is from their debut album Hometowns, which they self-released this past fall and which should have a much wider release than it presently does, and at the end what I know about the band is sort of unimportant: I got this song a week ago and I haven’t gone a day without listening to it four or five or nine times a day, no joke. I can’t believe how crisp and cool the drums sound, how basically this sounds like a song with a folk lyric and melody and a pop guitar/strings part with techno drumming and somehow those three things work perfectly despite the fact that it’s not (I’m guessing) anyone’s idea of the perfect Neapolitan ice cream of music. Still though: believe it, the song’s perfect, it’s a great early evening summer song, and everyone should download it and listen and listen and listen.

 

Langhorne Slim “Spinning Compass”

I can’t speak with anything like coherency about this guy, so I’ll try to make it quick. This is a track of his recent self-titled release, which was supposed to come out on V2 but, of course, didn’t because there’s no more V2. Langhorne Slim’s apparently been around for 2+ years and I’ve known of him for 1+ month which makes me feel just stupid and awful because I’m sure at some point in the last 2+ years I could’ve used some of the music he’s made, but I had to suffer through with whatever I had. The other side of that coin, though, is that now I do know his music, and my life’s all the better for it, and from what I’ve read and found about the musician he’s worth plenty of attention and enjoyment and etc. Exhibit A: he’s buddies with the Avett Bros, which might be the greatest band in America at the moment and who also seem to be some of the nicest guys in the world (and seriously, if you don’t have Emotionalism, you’re missing way, way out). Exhibit B: in an interview with Daytrotter, Langhorne had this to say: “I wanna make peoples’ heads explode with good feelings. I would like to move people and be moved.” Is it even reasonable to not give a guy with that sort of idealism and hope five of your minutes for one of his songs? And it’s not even five minutes: “Spinning Compass” is a wild one minute, fifty-four second blast that is the perfect pop song—it makes you want to sing along and shake, and then when it’s over you want to hear it again right away (the first time I heard it I played it four times in a row). I don’t know what else to say about Langhorne Slim. Buy his discs. See him play. Do whatever you can think of doing to make sure he has more time and energy to spend writing music.

 

Two New Ones

 

I know Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland came out like a month and a half back—and the review just a bit down, of the recent Willie Nelson bio, is at least a month late, too—but I just didn’t have time. I also, for selfish/stupid/misguided reasons, decided after reading Wood’s review in the New Yorker that I didn’t, in fact, want to read Netherland. (Idle Q: does anyone else have reviewers that they automatically disagree with, as a stupid, knee-jerk, idiotic reaction? If John Leonard or Louis Menand likes a book, I’ll do anything to make time for it; if Wood or Updike likes it, I get nervous or back off…all of which is stupid and something I need to get better about rapidly.) I came around at the urging of a reliable friend who said he was going to read it, and I figured I wanted to at least be able to talk with him about it, and so into Netherland I went.

In Wood’s New Yorker review, he writes at one point that O’Neill gets “extremely subtle,” and though Wood was using the phrase to describe only one fraction of the book, I couldn’t help but think, while reading it, that the whole book is, by and large, extremely subtle. The basics are pretty straightforward: Hans, a financial analyst (working, specifically, on oil futures and the like), and his wife Rachel, move to New York from London shortly before 9/11 and then, after the attacks, Rachel and their son move back to London, forcing Hans into a few-year stretch of living at the Chelsea Hotel, working steadily, and befriending an entrepreneur from Trinidad named Chuck Ramkissoon. From the outset of the novel the reader knows Chuck’s fate: he’ll be found dead, once Hans has left New York and reunited with his wife and child in London, in the Gowanus Canal with his hands bound. He’ll have died not too long after Hans left the states.

The central point of both Chuck’s and Hans’ friendship and the book itself is cricket, a game Hans played in his childhood and a game for which Chuck could very modestly be described as a huge booster. The sport functions thematically in the book as something like the classic pot in which Americans can melt together into a unified, colorful whole. Chuck, full of grand plans and lofty speeches and touched with more than a little deviousness (he does, after all, start the book dead, and though the reasons for his demise are never made overtly clear—no killer fingered and trial begun or anything—it’s pretty obvious that he was killed for below-the-table business transactions), spend the whole novel working to make cricket a transformational experience for America. It is, he declares, the first true American sport, noting that Ben Franklin was a cricket man.

The extreme subtlety of the book demands that the reader impose/bundle Chuck’s notions of cricket-as-transformational-experience and 9/11 and Hans’ necessary personal growth (he’s Dutch and casual and sort of cold and distant in ways that feel greatly real), and though I don’t think I really got everything of the book (there’s a great, great review by John Self at his blog Asylum which articulates many points more clearly than I could), the book’s so freakishly well written it’s hard for me to find much to argue with. It’s not simply that O’Neill writes beautiful sentences—he does, he does; it’s that the book’s structure is so incredibly soft, so intuitive, it’s almost hard to believe. Time is so fluid in this book that it might frustrate some readers who want a Monday-then-Tuesday-then-Wednesday-type narrative: no such dice in these pages. Instead, the book is a spookily seductive book in ways that are baffling and, to some degree, infuriating: I can’t really say exactly what all ‘happens’ through the book (aside from major points), or what it all ‘means’ or whatever. I will say, though, that the attention it’s getting seems pretty worth it, and that I’ll be glad to read it again in a few months, and that I can’t imagine how this isn’t a book that’ll keep well on any shelf and pay huge dividends to the close, careful reader.

 

Joe Patoski’s Willie Nelson is, for my money, one of those perfect biographies that enriches your understanding of a complex person while subtracting nothing from the subject. I am totally a sucker for happy endings and it makes me sad to read about artists I’ve adored and find that I’ve been adoring, well, a dick. Willie Nelson comes across in Patoski’s account as a deeply, wonderfully human character—someone who spent early years selling himself at radio stations and whooping it up with friends at bars and honky tonks; someone who has grown steadily, as an artist and as a person, throughout his years. I’m sure Willie Nelson’s got skeletons in his closet and that there are, of course, shadows over parts of his life. That said, he seems, to this reader and listener, an incredibly American icon—not simply an American Icon (meaning we can all recognize his red braids and big grin and we know about the tax evasion and pot smoking and etc), but that he’s a self-made man who was loyal to many and unfair to few and has charted an interesting and successful life by dint of hard work and imagination.

Patoski’s style, too, is about as pure as it gets: he neither tried to recreate situations with a pretension to get into the heads of the characters involved nor does he stuff each scene with long rambling recollections. The scenes move so quick and deft that I was on like page 150 before I even realized it. I don’t know how many huge, thick, heavy-duty biographies are coming out this year, but this has to be near the top of the list both in terms of interesting subject and great writing.

 

More Ambivalence (Plus Some Ranting)

 

 

Dana Jenning’s Sing Me Back Home is a hard book for a lot of reasons. This is, actually, the second or third book recently that I’ve been more than a little conflicted about (see Guterson, David as example number one, and later, in July, see Pendarvis, Jack for the next)(actually, there’s Jorie Graham’s Sea Change as well, which I swore to myself I’d review here eventually, and which I never got around to for any number of reasons, not least of which is that I was/am conflicted with how good I thought/think it was, but anyway…). As is likely obvious to anyone who’s been reading this site with any regularity, music’s as big a factor around here as are books. What may be less clear is that country music—Waylon, Willie, Patsy, etc.—is a huge deal, for me anyway. Now, very fairly: yes, at age 15, I swore to my father that I’d 1) never listen to country and 2) never grow sideburns, and I’m presently sitting in the southeastern United States listening to Red Headed Stranger with my sideburns down to the bottom of my ears, and so I don’t want to paint myself as a purist. Country’s something I came around to.

Which is real different from Dana Jennings, who was born into a small New Hampshire town bordering the Appalachian Mountains, was born into a holler in 1957 to a pair of 17 year olds who loved and listened to (and presumably loved to, as well) country. Jenning’s argument is that to hear the history of the white lower/working class one must listen to country music from the 50’s to the 70’s, one must listen to the stories of heartbreak and ache and job insecurity and feeling stuck and all the release that’d ever be available would come in the form of a six pack on the weekend and dancing with your girl. I don’t know anywhere near enough about the white lower/working class from the 1950s-1970s—I was born at the end of the 1970s, and my parents listened to the Beach Boys, not Johnny Cash—but Jennings’ argument seems sound. However: the argument also seems a little, um, obvious. Arguing that a certain type of music at a certain time reflected a certain demographic seems unbelievably simple to me: the Beatles meant what they did in the 60’s for social and political reasons, ditto the punk movement begun in ‘77, ditto the Pixies and the rise of alternative in the late 80s/early 90s…none of this stuff seems tough to parse, does it? Maybe I’m not being clear enough:

The sunny optimism that the Beach Boys represented at the beginning of the 1960’s seems pretty obviously based on socioeconomic influences, the booming postwar years, the election of JFK and etc. It’s not accidental that they started getting weird as hell in ‘66 with Pet Sounds, which was also (1966) when things started to get weirder politically in the United States, with the boomers all heading off to college with their shifting attitudes attendant; or that the next thing the Beach Boys did (Smile) was called by its author a teenage symphony to god, and that it was hugely drug-induced and crazed and left unfinished, and that it eventually was released like 35 years after its expected release, or that the Beach Boys’ cultural and musical influence largely diminished as the 60’s came to a close and political assassination and Vietnam became the flags around which the country circled (instead of the old flags of optimism and peace and the summer of love and etc). Music is always, always a reflection of a certain culture, is it not? You think it’s for nothing that Puffy has changed his name three times in the last 15 years? You think he doesn’t do it each time to carve himself just a bit anew for various demographic segments that comprise the year’s or moment’s audience for rap? You think Radiohead’s OK Computer was as big as it was just because all my friends and contemporaries and I were bored in 1996 and just wanted some paranoia-influenced stuff to listen to? You think it’s just coincidental that Radiohead was writing about the creeping oddness of a more computerized/monitored life at exactly the same time that the web was, well, webbing its way into and around and through contemporary life?

All of which is just to say: yes, I think Jennings’ argument is logical and sensical, and while I’m glad someone’s now written this account of things, I can’t for a second pretend that it’s fundamentally a shocking awareness-raiser. Perhaps it’s because all my friends and I, as monumental music nerds/snobs, look and listen for, in our music, cues and clues about social crossovers. I’m not talking about everything, of course: the Replacements, maybe my favorite band ever, have almost no songs that speak toward a specific generational, socioeconomic moment or anything (that I know of or can think of). But it’s like…well, here: Springsteen released Born to Run in ‘75, and you think for a second, after the tumult of Watergate and Vietnam, after the absolute vicegrips of stagflation and energy crises and shitty jobs and etc, that it’s coincidental that Springsteen’s album’s like half balanced between songs of wild escape and abandon and songs of mourning and loss and being stifled?

So that’s all part of it. The other big, big thing about this book (and J. Yardley at the WaPo hits this way, way better than I’m able to), is that the writing is…well, forced. As hell. (Seriously, read the Yardley piece) Jennings works at the NYTimes, and has written several books, and there are times/passages in this book in which he’s clearly aiming precisely for your knees, emotionally: he writes in a tinny and disingenuous voice, which (I think) dramatically subtracts from whatever you might be feeling about the actual subject matter. Maybe even worse than cloying writing is the admission, or at least the acquiescence, toward the notion that appearance must match actuality. Jennings’ writing is a striving toward authenticity, a bald and less than bold statement that to speak truly/realistically about the country that he enjoys and was raised on he must write sentences that are cockeyed and country and bumpkin-ish. An idle Q: am I not allowed to drive a dusty pickup truck and blast Willie Nelson because I’m a white graduate student from a solidly middle-class home in the midwest? Am I not allowed to blast Mos Def from the same truck because I’m a white guy who has not idea number one about the life that Mos Def commonly describes in his songs? It’s maybe a small point, but when you start to think about it, it can piss you off tremendously that Jennings would go to the trouble of establishing what he must think is an ‘authentic’ voice. Doesn’t he simply have faith in his ability to write the truth, and damn what charges may come? Are we incapable of accepting that someone can write movingly of a grammatically-incorrect background and life with perfect grammar? Must one match the other? Isn’t the sort of Kantian (means to an end) implication of all this pretty terrifying? Also, it’s hard not to read in his stilted prose a weird measure of guilt at the elitism he’s clearly worked his way toward (through good schooling and a job at the international paper of record). Most of us, if we admit it, want to get better at speaking, want to sound educated and cultured and aware. In ways that really make me sad, Jennings’ prose is, at times, a sort of George W. Bush move, the sham of folksy charm. This was a smaller point in my head, and now that I’m writing it I’m getting more pissed off, so I’ll let it go.

Now, the hardest and biggest point for me: Jennings claims that country music is now to him basically unrecognizable (except for that atrocity Iris DeMent, whose music Jennings adores and approves of)(I really do think she’s horrible, though that’s not what this part’s about), that it’s now full of patriotic car ads and about mostly bullshit and without much resonance to the hard scrabble country life he came from. To a degree, of course, he’s right: contemporary popular country music—Carrie Underwood, Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, Shania, Big and Rich—doesn’t much come close to the old stuff. That’s fine. However, to a larger degree, he’s turned into that fattest, easiest stereotype, the Old Man, the It Used To Be Way Better sort of guy. I’ve got a several-thousand-word rant about this whole subject and now’s neither the time nor place for it, but let me say this: anyone who wants to pretend that the style of music or book or movie that s/he once loved has now been irrevocably, horribly changed should just go fuck off and find something else to write about. Country music, like ‘alternative’/’indie’ music, like rap music, like classical music, like jazz music, like pop music, is a growing, vivid thing, and if Mr. Jennings has decided that his favorite old albums will never have a candle held to them by the newer stuff, that’s fine, that’s his choice, but he’s just pigheadedly wrong, and it’s unfortunate that anyone should be able to make that claim and doubly unfortunate that anyone would publish that claim. For anyone who thinks country music no longer has stuff worth listening to, I submit as exhibit A: Gillian Welch. Exhibit B: everything put out by the label Dust to Digital. Exhibit C: Richard Buckner (sometimes) and Kelly Willis (also sometimes). Exhibit D: Lucinda Fucking Williams. Exhibit E: Lyle Fucking Lovett.

And let’s just nip the pre-emptives here: No, Buckner and Welch and Williams and Lovett are not writing the exact same tough and tender stuff as Willie Nelson, not singing the same tough stuff that Patsy Cline sang. That said: music is not, cannot be, static, and so to mourn the fact that new music is on-the-surface different from older music is to be an idiot. We should celebrate the fact that music grows, and we should look for what the new music is trying to reflect to us. Jennings has written a book of great nostalgia, and that’s fine; everyone should be allowed her or his own nostalgia. However, as a man much younger than Jennings, and as someone pretty invested in the state of music in this country, I take great, great exception to Jennings’ idea that country music has now changed and, through that change, has lost something. Has it lost what he once recognized? Perhaps. Has he listened hard enough to newer, more interesting music? I don’t know. Is it always, always stupid to demean/damn a form of expression because it fails the listener/reader/watcher? Yes. Yes it is. If you think books are worse than they used to be, you’re not looking deep enough for good new books, and if you think music used to be better in the 80s or 60s or 40s, you’re not digging enough, and if you think modern cinema doesn’t have American masters like there were in the early 70s, or Italian masters like the 60s, you’re not doing enough work. Art is not passive, is not something we receive: we take part in it. Dana Jennings’ nostalgic Sing Me Back Home is a sometimes good trip into his own past, but for the sake of the child who, in thirty years, will write about how great country music was in the early years of the new millennium, let’s at least acknowledge that the present country of country music might be far larger, with wider boundaries, than Mr. Jennings had written of.

 

 

Ambivalence and David Guterson’s The Other

I hate to admit it, but I’ve been waiting to review David Guterson’s The Other because I wanted to see what others had to say about it first, and now that I’ve been able to read what Bruce Barcott had to say about the book, I’m a little more clear on what I’m willing to say.

The reason I’ve been waiting to review the book? Because I walked into this whole book disliking, pretty strongly, Guterson. I had to read Snow Falling on Cedars in high school and I loathed the book, though two things should be made clear: 1. I was 18 when I read it, and more interested in books that had nothing to do with World War II and missing limbs and etc., more interested in guitars and girls as well, but whatever, and 2. I’ve never read it again. It could’ve been great, and I just missed it at the time. What I was in high school, and what I still am to a degree that makes me cringe, was a snob, and it’s that part of me that Guterson really inflamed. I know, I know: it’s stupid, and being a snob’s to some degree moronic, and liking someone like DFWallace more than Guterson and then looking down my nose at those who like Guterson instead of Wallace is just about as dumb as it gets, and sure, Guterson won the PEN/Faulkner for Snow…but still. I’m admitting all this stuff, too, just to make it clear what my biases are: I’m not saying this is good, at all, I’m just saying it’s the stuff that’s in my head re: Guterson.

So: The Other, Guterson’s newest book, is a story of a man named Neil Countryman and a man named John William Barry. The two men met young, at a track meet, Countryman running for the public school, Barry running for the elite prep school. Countryman’s family is made of carpenters, Barry’s trust-funders (and a crazy mother)(really, really crazy) who never had to work because ancestors had invested and invented and led wisely. The two young men share an interest in literature, various drugs, going out into the wilderness together without a map or any real plan aside from walking for awhile (and getting stoned, and then getting lost, and then feeling euphoric when they made it out), and they share, as do most 17 year old white dudes I knew, a feeling of specialness, a sense that their view of the world—largely polarized along an axis of authenticity—is somehow more pure and correct than the view of those around them.

Countryman, as his name sort of comes out and gives you, is the good, even-keeled guy here: smart, earthy, hardworking, clear-headed. John William Barry is a touch nutty, taken by gnosticism and frustrated by fakery and unwilling to engage/participate in anything flawed (idle Q: what’s more terrifying than the person obsessed with purity?) and after a failed year at college moves off into the wilderness, first in a camper and then into a limestone cave that he builds himself. Countryman visits his friend regularly, bringing food and books and copies of Playboy, and as John William digs his cave better and deeper and learns to adapt more to/deal with his wilderness, Countryman gets married and finds his career as a teacher. It’s all very touching and very sweet.

That, really, is the story, to some degree. It’s the story of these two men, their backgrounds, their overlaps. It’s the story of one rich, lucky kid who refused to ‘compromise’ on his ‘principles,’ and the story of the rich kid’s friend who, without the lucky accident of birth into an eminent family, has nothing to divest himself of, no huge Thing to Prove (idle Q: how many poor or working-class people would, if they got rich, try to return to their poverty? How many generations removed would one have to go to find that?).

 

I read The Other in spite of myself: I’d received a copy, knew someone who liked Guterson more than I did, and so I read it quickly to pass it on quickly. What’s great about the book is how well and easily it moves: Guterson’s a master at the really elemental story/narrative-level stuff which might seem faint praise until you realize how few writers really write stories that well. The plot is balanced well against the inner workings of Neil Countryman, the first-person narrator of the book, and the story’s unfolding is pleasing in all sorts of ways even if you can, to some degree, see some of the seams, can more than once in awhile see what’s coming.

So it’s not, by any stretch, a bad book: it’s actually a really fine, decent book. Here’s maybe the part where I reveal another, more damning bias, but my question is: do we need fine, decent books? Why can’t we have beautiful, well-written books that reach toward something more than fineness and decency? This could absolutely be a thing of taste. The thematic arch of the book is Countryman’s narration about his own life and the life of John William Barry, how one of them chose to live and the other chose a form of wild martyrdom, and the sort of gradual pondering of the inherent value of those two pursuits. In other words: it’s not hard to imagine this being a book a middle-aged writer might write while looking back fondly at the more chaotic and emphatic younger version of him-/herself.

But which is also, to me, one of the book’s big problems: this is, for all intents and purposes, something like middle-aged porn. Countryman ends up very much benefitting from John William Barry’s financial background, and so the narrator gets it all, so to speak: he gets to live a compromised, good life with a wife and a son and a job and a house, and he is rewarded for it. Barry’s fanaticism undoes him; Countryman’s steadiness serves him well. It’s red-bloodedly, flag-pin-on-the-lapel Americanism.

It’s worth noting, too, that I get ancy when a narrator closely resembles an author’s bio. Countryman is a teacher in Seattle; Guterson himself was a teacher in Seattle before Snow was released (and yes, he quit teaching when the book allowed him the financial security to do so). It’s maybe a cynical read, but it’s not hard to see this book as Guterson writing a sort of what-if of a book, letting his doppleganger reap the moral benefits of choosing to live and succeeding at the austere, small-grind aspects of daily life while also reaping the financial benefits of choosing the right friend.

I don’t for a moment want to pretend this is a ‘fair’ reading. And I fully submit that part of this is about taste: when Wallace, for instance, published “Octet” in Brief Interviews, it was clearly about him to a large degree (at least in the last quiz), and when Powers wrote Gold Bug Variations he’d obviously put himself in there, to some degree or another, in the characters of both Jan and Franklin. What I’m trying to say is that I don’t have a problem when the narrator and the author overlap as long as I like the narrator/author, which is as unfair a rubric as I can imagine for judging a book. Though I hope that it’s not just about liking the author or narrator: it’s believing in the book’s pursuit, and that’s the hardest let-down of The Other: it reaches for almost nothing, is pursuing little (if you believe that a 300 page book must be written about the fact that being an adult in the late-20th/early-21st Century demands certain compromises, and that to live without compromise is as romantic as it is doomed, then you and I believe very different things).

The hardest thing is that I really don’t have anything bad to say about this book. I also have little good to say about it: it’s a book, it’s a decent story, people will buy and read it, and that’s got to be, in the long run, important enough: just reading books has to be enough. Is it unfair to judge Guterson according to my own admittedly silly/fickle tastes and demands? Sure. Is it unfair to judge him according to a set of standards he’s clearly not writing from within? Good lord yes. Still: this book will be trumpeted as literary fiction, and while it is certainly fiction, and is in some ways literary, it’s just not literary fiction. If you’re deciding between reading Guterson’s newest and, say, Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto—a great, spellbinding work of popular, accessible literary fiction—I’d push you toward the Patchett.