Castle and Pieces for the Left Hand, both by J. Robert Lennon
Even though I was lucky enough to get to interview Mr. Lennon, I should’ve trumpeted these books more loudly two weeks back when they hit. Of course they’re being released by Graywolf, so I won’t even talk about that part, so let’s just brass-tacks it:
Castle’s a first-person narrator who, through the narrative and plot, discovers/remembers parts of himself. Would I like to say more about that? Sure, of course, but when a book’s momentum and function is predicated on a certain level of mysteriousness (see: The Cradle), it’s best not to rob the book or reader. I will say this: functionally, leaving a first person narrator with gaps in his/her memory is hugely dangerous territory (unless it’s straight-up amnesiac stuff, like Krauss’s Man Walks Into a Room), and, by and large, Lennon pulls the trick off, which is a hell of a feat.
Pieces for the Left Hand is the book you buy if you loved Dan Rhodes’ Anthropology and have been looking for that strange, magical click ever since. Pieces is 100 short stories, which stories are perambulatory in all ways, centered on a small town, feature a consistent narrator, and which book, as an object, contains a flip-book (bottom right of each page: you can check it out just at the book store).
Take-away lesson: Read Lennon.
Ever by Blake Butler
I’m maybe hopelessly disposed to enjoying this book, because I’ve read Blake Butler’s sentences before (and can still remember lines from the first story of his I ever read), and because Blake Butler’s one of maybe ten writers currently writing whose sentences are miracles. We can get fancy and technical, but, really: they’re miracles. They do things you can’t literally cannot believe (other up and comers doing miracles: Caren Beilin, Deb Olin Unferth; the known masters of this stuff: Lutz, Lish, D. Williams, Hempel, etc.).
And so Ever? This novella of his from Calamari Press? Sentences are bracketed: the story’s from the inside of a house, the inside of a head, and describing the book like that actually makes me feel bad: it’s like describing Arvo Part’s stuff as “instrumental music,” which is true and false both. I can’t imagine it’s what Butler was aiming for, but Ever feels weirdly, awesomely, like a dark other-side dream of Danielewski’s House of Leaves, minus some of the more look-at-me pomo pyrotechnics and multiple narration and etc. Ever also reads, for the record, like something fixated on exploring all the infinity in a confined space—the infinity not of all possible numbers, but the infinity that exists between zero and one on the number line. Even these sentences, these groping descriptions, are worthless: read the book. Remember how reading feels when it’s not just passive, when it’s not just one thing.
Bottomfeeder by Taras Grescoe
What maybe sucks for Taras Grescoe’s Bottomfeeder is that there was Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation and Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dillema: readers have some way of being able to approach this sort of book (which, actually, may make it a good thing, those other books as trailblazers, who knows). But so the crappy part is that one could say “Bottomfeeder is like Fast Food Nation, but about seafood,” and it’d be sorta accurate (the comparison to Fast Food Nation is, in fact, right there on the cover, in a blurb). Still: any comparison doesn’t do Grescoe’s book justice.
Bottomfeeder is an outstandingly good read that, in fact, calls to mind Stolzenburg’s recent (and great) Where the Wild Things Were as much as Fast Food Nation: the focus is not simply on farming and catching seafood, but on the overwhelmingly complex chain of life of which the fish we like to eat are part. Exhibit A: the oysters of Chesapeake Bay, and how the fact that they’ve been over harvested has led to the bay’s increase in pollution, which leads to new disease and lifeforms, etc. And so, in fact, what Bottomfeeder does so amazingly well and interestingly is to offer these incredibly wide-lens shots of water-based life, and how our insatiability threatens that life, and, of course, how threatening water-based will have to, sooner or later, threaten land-based life (think: mercury in tuna, shortages, etc).
Read Bottomfeeder for those reasons—because it excellently traces interconnectivity, because it’s written so well you don’t even notice you’ve read 40 pages. And read it to find out a better way to eat seafood.
