Everything’s Always Too Fast: Rescue Press, Dean Young, Charles Wright

by Weston Cutter

There have been way too many great books out recently, and I’ve been way too busy for complete coverage, so I’m apologizing at the start for under-covering the following, all of which are really, really great and worth way more of your time than these short reviews.

In Canaan by Shane McCrae and There Is Something Inside, It Wants to Get Out by Madeline McDonnell

A good friend told me I was an idiot for missing McCrae, and of course he was right, but even knowing McCrae’ll knock you sideways isn’t enough: In Canaan will ring the same bell in you that Morrison’s Beloved did, or, at least, the overlap’ll make you wake and take notice—both feature runaway slaves weighing values none of us would ever want to be pressed to measure (life, freedom, slavery)—but the thing’s just seething alive, the language is..how to say this. You know those poems which feature wonderfully precise language? Those are good. And the ones that feature language which feels more chaotic, more wild? Those are also fun. And then those rare ones which somehow feature chaotic and precide language? That’s McCrae. His book’s to eat and carry for long stretches.

            And McDonnell’s Something Inside is a trio of stories which, unless you’re missing something, will remind you why you like stories at all, or why you ever did—or, I suppose, it could be a collection which’ll finally make you like stories, after all this time of not having liked any. Here, for instance, is a bit from “Trouble,” the third story: “On second thought, the trouble started years ago. It started in December.” That may seem like an insignificant pair of sentences, but they immediately follow a woman running a red light. There’s more goodness in this book than is totally fair.

Both books, by the by, are from Rescue Press, which is absolutely the best press I’ve seen in a long, long time. Honestly, I can’t think of the last small-ish press that’s made books this gorgeous. I like Five Chapters, and their books are great (review coming soon of Jess Row’s Nobody Ever Gets Lost—it’s really, really good, read it now, buy it now), and certainly Ugly Duckling Presse does amazing things, but hot damn, these Rescue Press books, as objects, are as sexy as they come, and with only a few releases they’re blazing a hot-shit trail to keep an eye on. For real people. Get in on the game early.

Bye-and-Bye by Charles Wright

I don’t want to go too much into the fact that I literally had never read Wright until this book, and how stupid I feel for that fact, but please know this: this book’s achingly, insanely gorgeous. I’m now fairly tempted to go buy every bit of Wright’s stuff I can find, all the way back to his earliest stuff. It’s unbelievable what he does—the touch is so incredibly light, the eye so mesmerizingly exact. I started this book as I was about to go to bed one night and then didn’t sleep for hours, read instead. I’m serious, too: read Wright. Everything he’s got. His old interview from Paris Review is pretty phenomenal, too, maybe obviously.

Fall Higher by Dean Young

This is the first Dean Young book I’ve had an advance of, and so I’ve of course spent the last, what, month, feeling cool, and if you don’t know enough about Dean Young yet, google him and dive deeper, but at least know the following: 1) he needs a new heart, literally (holy shit update! He’s got a new heart! This is fantastic, fantastic news—whoever you are, be happy), 1a) he used to be (or at least trained to be) a nurse, so his own awareness of the trick and slipperiness of life’s probably a bit more thorough and grounded and attuned than, say, mine, which is dominated by fear and my lack of knowledge, 2) he came out with The Art of Recklessness last year which I’ll put money on being, eventually, one of the single most important pamphlets released in the last thirty plus years—there’ll be whole handfulls of us who’ll track back to that book over and over, digging into it for its hidden, strange instructions (the book’s a huge joy and necessary reading if you’re at all interested in creative writing—hell, creative thinking), 3) he is, far as I can tell, one of about 5 writers who almost everybody now reaches toward in some way or another, or at least a good swath of the writers you either already do or should care about—he’s surrealism and the New York School but with a realer, bigger heart (his large heart [not ironic] is, in fact, what’s always been most mind-blowing about him—he’s hilarious, yes, and jittery smart, but it’s real shit going on in his great, great books [for my money, the best entrance is stillFirst Course in Turbulence]). Anyway, there’s more about Young—not least that he’s apparently recently found new love—and Fall Higher‘s his hands-down most interesting book yet. Sure, okay: I fell away from DYoung for a bit recently, got Elegy on Toy Piano and couldn’t really feel what I thought I should’ve been feeling, didn’t get Embryoyo and only cared real recently about Primitive Mentor, and who knows if it was my fault as a reader or what, but whatever blip in Young’s ouvre may or may not even exist doesn’t matter: Fall Higher is fucking insane. There’s…I don’t know how to describe it. It feels riskier, somehow—there’s never been much bullshit to wade through in Young’s stuff, but this latest book’s been almost comically bull-shit-scrubbed. Plus this: there’s rhyming poetry. If you know Young’s stuff, you know that’s not what to expect, usually. I’ll say this: I don’t know what the man intended in using rhyme, but somehow the framework and singsong of rhyming stuff and the fact that Young’s poetry is almost entirely about stuff not lasting, about the beauty and brevity and comedy of everything, makes the rhyming poetry—the poetry which makes obvious the work necessary in design while somehow simultaneously commenting on the everything-slips-away nature of all life, designs included—weirdly large emotional items to come up against. There’s more (“If only my body wasn’t borrowed from dust!”), and it’s almost all gorgeous, and if, by the end of Fall Higher, you don’t feel your heart trembling in your throat, you need massive anatomical help, pronto.

Quick Elsewheres

by Weston Cutter

For those of you remotely interested in reviews of the work done by one of the writers here, check out reviews of my (WCutter’s) first book, You’d Be a Stranger, Too, at the following places:

@ the Collagist

@ the Rumpus

Book Notes @ Large Hearted Boy

An Excerpt @ the super cool Shelf Unbound

Reagan Duck Moonshining

by Weston Cutter

Rawhide Down by Del Quentin Wilber

Mody-Duck by Donovan Hohn

Chasing the White Dog by Max Watman

I was raised in a house in which my mom threatened my dad with divorce if he didn’t vote for Mondale in ’84 (we’re Minnesotan–mom’s reasoning was the guy had to win his own state). I also came of age during the governorship of Jesse Ventura, and I was, like lots of us, devastated by Wellstone’s death in 2002. All of this is simply to say that, though I’m political, I’m from Minnesota, and I’m as liberal as they come, and I’m as frustrated as anybody by the almost comic adoration for Reagan that’s become the norm in the last 10 or so years from both sides of the aisle.

However, my take on Reagan has been shifted by Del Quentin Wilber’s fantastic Rawhide Down, the sort of historical book which a) all but demands to be read in one afternoon (both for how engaging it is and how compellingly Wilber writes) and b) will absolutely shock readers—the world 30 years ago is entirely different from the world we presently occupy, not least because of security measures taken for the sake of our presidents.

Like most folks, I read the first bits of Rawhide Down in Vanity Fair, and let me just say this: the book’s a thousand times more interesting and engaging than the excerpt was, and the excerpt was phenomenal. I can’t sing high enough praises for this book, honestly: regardless of where your politics lie, this is a book that’ll knock you glad on your ass and leave you gasping—at how narrowly disaster was averted, at the to-the-bones decency of people you may’ve until now suspected to not have much decency, at what happened how 30 years ago in front of a hotel. You’ll likely see this book everywhere: I’d encourage you to believe there’s a good reason for that—you should read it and find out and agree.

Remember that Harper’s article from like three years ago? About the big plastic deadzone in the Pacific, north of Hawaii, that Texas-size mass of debris? It wasn’t just a regular article but one of those Harper’s folio pieces? (coincidentally, that article was just referenced like today by n+1) This is the book that came from it.

Honestly: if you’re not reading Hohn, you’re an idiot. Hohn’s who to read if you like Bryson, Wallace, McPhee, any of the great nonfiction folks. There’s facts galore in this, and the facts themselves are great and fascinating, but far more compelling is how many of them Hohn gathers and stuffs into one place, and the effect such an infoload causes on the reader. Here’s what I mean: the book’s essentially about a shipping container of rubber ducks which went overboard in the Pacific—that’s its starting point. Yet through that single object and event, Hohn travels the world, examines environmental effects, considers the facts of consumption and disposability, the lastingness of things, etc. It’s a whallop of a book, over and over—best not to miss it.

 

Max Watman’s Chasing the White Dog seemed, to me, inauspicious for a bit: I was worried, after having read a few books recently which essentially tease the reader about focusing on a single object or pursuit when, in fact, the books are simply considerations-of-self on the part of the authors, that this’d be another book like those.

Oh my lord was I wrong. I mean it: I picked this book up with suspicion and caution, but I was so deep in so fast I didn’t notice the pages going by. Is part of my enjoyment of the book a matter of me caring more about moonshine than about, say, a baseball team, or a store in NYC? Sure. But also, Watman emphatically cares, page after page, about his subject: moonshine, the culture (both real and created) which surroundings home distillery (the first 30 pages are fantastic just for the deflation they provide of the creaky old back-porch old-boy clubbiness one might [rightly] imagine is a central component of ‘shining), what it means to try to make one’s own liquor. It’s just rivetingly great: please don’t be the idiot I was. Please don’t approach this book with anything but the most fervent excitement and gratitude.

Four Quicks

by Weston Cutter

So Much Pretty by Cara Hoffman

The Gospel of Anarchy by Justin Taylor

There Is No Year by Blake Butler

Three Stages of Amazement by Carold Edgarian

(Note: You should really purchase and rapidly read all four books under consideration.)

 

Edgarian:

Holy shit is this a beautiful book: this is what to read next if you finished the ravising Visit From the Goon Squad and felt that sick internal fall, the one you taste when you get through a work of glory and beauty and then go wait, what can I read next that’ll come close? The one to read next: Egdarian’s gorgeous, gorgeous book.

It is, very simply, the story of a marraige: Charlie Pepper and Lena Rusch are a San Francisco couple negotiation present life—and very present, I mean: real people are in here, real issues (Obama’s election’s mentioned, and, at a ritzy party, Al Gore’s in attendance). Charlie’s a doctor (ha ha ha, Dr. Pepper—it’s the only cheap joke Edgarian tries in the book, and it’s not even cheap, just cutesy; it works) who’s trying to get funding for a robotic surgery process he’s helmed with a colleague. Lena works part-time as a writer (I may not be 100% on that fact—she works for someone else, punching up scripts, maybe, or in some way connected to advertising—the fact that I can’t remember shouldn’t be a sign of my lack of concern but at the insignificance of Lena’s work as a plot device). They’ve got a son, and they’ve got a daughter who was one of a pair of twins; the other twin died. I want to make it that stark and black + white because it’s one of the things Edgarian does best in this book: the fact of Charlie and Lena’s life together, as a family, are presented just as that. In a lesser writers’ hands, the fact of a dead child would be the engine for the whole novel.

Not so here: the book is fundamentally about the process people go through to become themselves, even at middle age. The challenges and trials of youth—defining oneself through pursuits, allegiances to idealogies, etc.—continue, Edgarian shows, throughout: Lena’s uncle, from whom she’s estranged (rightfully), shows up to complicate things, as does an old beau of Lena’s. These are, however, silly to write about like this: the book’s glorious and moving and jaw-droppingly pretty: there are sentences in this book which should be taught to anyone trying to write. It’s a shockingly good book. If you want a novel which’ll have you caring and believing and breathing deep and hard because of what happens to the folks therein, you’ve now found what you’ve been looking for.

 

Butler/Taylor:

I don’t want to say too much about Blake’s There Is No Year—it’s fantastic, better than any of us could’ve expected or hoped even having read Ever and Scorch Atlas. The book’s a madhouse depthcharge, and Blake’s got language in rivers in him that nobody, nobody, has got. If you claim to care about contemporary fiction and you’re not reading Blake Butler, you’re lying to yourself or dumb (see my interview with the guy here)

And, because of the HTMLGiant connection, there’s Justin Taylor’s debut novel The Gospel of Anarchy. What could’ve been an easy, brief, disposable read—post-college or college-age kids hanging out, trying to find meaning, something to give a shit about and/or believe in—is, in Taylor’s hands, a really, really good first novel. I don’t mean to downplay that: the book’s very good. Is it great? I’m not sure. It’s a hell of a good read. It captures the desperate energy of a certain age better than many books. There’s an oh-I-get-it aspect to the book, in a way: it’s about young people who live in the same house and want some hook on which to hang their wanting beliefs. There’s a trickster, there-and-gone figure, who blasts mightily in these young peoples’ sky. I’m not saying this stuff’s been written of well before, necessarily: I’m saying that if you’ve gone through yr late teens/early 20′s with a certain aspect of desire and hope and searching, you’ve felt what Taylor’s written.

Is it a great book? It’s a very, very good book. The praise is earned. Taylor’s absolutely a writer to watch: dollars to donuts his next one, whatever it is, is a mind-blower of magnificent proportions.

 

Hoffman:

The book’s an attempt to make a high school shooting make ideological sense, and, to do so, Hoffman puts her cards hard down. I can’t give too much away—the book is, fantastically, written with the plot unclear throughout—chapters swap voices, and the principle characters all get their chances, hinting about something that’s happened on April 14th (two days away from what all VT students remember as being The Day). It’s weird: the book’s tremendous and great and a phenomenal read. It’s also, I’ve got to point out, an attempt sensically sort out violence, which is fine, to a degree, but there’s an aspect of So Much Pretty which feels contrived, which feels as if it takes too easy a view of causality. That’s a bigger discussion than needs to be gotten into here: you should for sure buy/read So Much Pretty, but you should also let your own questions bubble to the surface as you read it. You should for sure wonder if the answers or assumptions provided mirror the world you know and live within. That said: Hoffman joins a stupidly small group—Bolano’s in there—of folks who are boldly wrestling with real questions regarding violence and gender, and, for that alone, she deserves massive applause and support.

Michael Ventura, Same Genius as Ever

by Weston Cutter

Let me be 100% clear from the start: Michael Ventura is one of my all-time favorite authors, and he is, for my money, one of maybe ten truly indispensible American authors working at present. If you live in a good city, you may’ve been lucky enough at some point in the last two decades to, in your local arts weekly, find a column titled Letters at 3AM. I grew up in the twin cities, and the City Pages, when it was still magic and fantastic, ran Ventura’s Letters columns at, for me, a real critical time—like ’95-2002, I think, or roughly thereabouts (the column still runs, every two weeks, in the Austin Chronicle). What happens when you’re 16 and you read a guy talking about love being the magic it is because it breaks us out of pattern and offers glimpses of potential and promise we hope to still possess, or a guy writing a list of what he believes are the Solutions to Everything (and, better, when the Solutions are bullshit free in ways most info doesn’t for 16 year olds)—what happens when you’re 16 and you see writing like this is you feel almost comically grateful, like you’ve found some unspoiled river that runs right through everything, even if it’s not what everyone’s paying attention to.

But let’s say you haven’t spent time in a good city. Let’s say you’ve just had access to books and bookstores. Fine: Ventura’s the author of three novels, some poetry, and, with James Hillman, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy – and the World’s Getting Worse. He’s written screenplays for movies. From the evidence gathered in his latest book, If I Was a Highway, you may’ve seen the man at some point, driving cross-country—he drives a ’69 green Chevy Malibu, he wears glasses, he’s often got a fedora on (the one time I’ve seen the man, I saw him decked in exactly these specifications). Regardless of whether you know Ventura or not, though, I’m here to tell you now, for real, you need to know him. For real. You need to have this voice among yr books. You need to have this traveled voice in your head, if only as counterpoint, the half-trickster-ish voice that marks the best in American wisdom.

And what a voice: If I Was a Highway is a gathering of Ventura’s Letters at 3AM columns (if you’re the collecting sort, purchase this book and find old copies of Shadow Dancing in the USA and Letters at 3AM: Reports on Endarkenment and you’ve got, poof, instantly, a good chunk of columns by one of the best American columnists going). The Letters columns are wild, wise, dusty columns about self and identity, about travel and searching (for The Moviegoer fans, consider Ventura a Texas-style cousin of Binx’s [though Ventura's from Brooklyn and spent years in LA, he lives now in Lubbock, and whatever else Texas is, it seems to be his voice's best home]). These are columns about America, in all the big and small ways—the fattening of the place, the wild careeners who follow their own call and are redeemed by the search, the moneyed farce that is politics, all of it. They’re about cars and rebels, about home and friends.

Of course, none of that abstract nonsense comes close to capturing what Ventura captures in his columns—and, unfortunately, snipping sentences to give a taste of the man’s style doesn’t remotely do him justice: “And let’s remember that when the McDonald’s opened, nobody put a gun to anybody’s head to go there instead of to So-and-So’s cafe. Choices were made, a way of life was betrayed, and nothing was ever the same.” So much of the glory of Ventura’s writing comes through in that passage—the bullshit-free glance that cuts through the day’s stuffing to find the meat, the shameless honesty. But these words, when they all get gathered together, produce a whallop greater than you can imagine: reading Ventura’s unvarnished honesty hits as it does because, after all, he’s not hopeless, all’s not lost. These are, yes, bleak times, and that bleakness is adequately reflected here. But there are other facets in the mirror, other things you probably haven’t noticed which should give you pause, which should make you glad to be alive and aware. Ventura notices these things, writes them all down, says see, says there’s more here than you’ve seen, than you think you know.

You’d best heed the man. Tune in to his radio. You’ll be a better and changed person for it. And, for the record: this is the first book I’ve ever read from Texas Tech University Press, and it might be the best looking object I’ve seen in awhile, book or otherwise. I haven’t even mentioned that, aside from the Ventura words, there are, throughout, photos from Butch Hancock, whose music is as worth your time as is this book featuring his photos. You’re a fool to miss this.