Flynn’s Gone Girl: Year’s Best Fiction

by Weston Cutter

            If you haven’t already, you’re about to see a whole lot of press regarding Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl—there’s a full page ad in the latest NYorker for the thing, for instance, and it’s just received what’s sure to be the first of two glowing reviews at the Times, and right here to my left is the publicity info on the book and there were count’em four starred reviews of this book (Kirkus, Booklist, Library Journal, PW). All of which I even bother bringing up here because I can’t remember a book behind which there’s been such positive consensus. And I’m here not to trash the book at all, but to toss my hat into the ring with the rest of the cheersquad: Gone Girl is among the year’s very best, most satisfying fiction.

The set-up: Gone Girl is the story of Nick and Amy. The chapters alternate—Nick speaking in present tense, and Amy in past tense—in the first half of the book, her chapters are diary entries, though in the book’s second half, that changes. The story begins on the day of Nick and Amy’s fifth wedding anniversary, though clearly all’s not well, as Nick reports on bile rising in him at his wife’s kindness that morning. There’s this casual disgust on Nick’s part that makes little sense: Amy, for the book’s first half, is this strange character, a woman we can’t help but love or respect or like or whatever, yet a woman whose husband seems to just loathe her. Nick leaves for his bar and, that afternoon, at work, he gets a call that his house’s front door’s wide open, and he returns to find his wife gone and signs of struggle apparent. Nick, in real time, tracks the developments in the search for his wife—dealing with police officers, dealing with in-laws, dealing with local good ol boys, advocates of a do-it-yourself justice—and does it narratively to us, as readers. As a character, he’s fine enough, but the way thngs are written make things fascinating: he addresses the reader, and when he admits to having an affair (a development the reader can see coming for miles, given that he’s mentioned but not explained having a disposable cell phone maybe four times by the time the mistress part surfaces), he admits that this admission will make him look bad, and that the reader will lose trust in him. The reason this tick is so fascinating is because, when you first come across it, you may (as I did) believe it’s just clunky, glossy postmodernism—it seemed to me, on first reading it, as if Flynn was overreaching, or at best offering a gimicky hook. Without going too much into things: if you find yourself mildly frustrated with the first 100 or so pages, and if it feels weirdly toying and cloying and strange, and the characters a bit stilted, I’m telling you: keep reading. You likely will anyway, because the story’s propulsive as hell, but it bears mention that the first 100 pages may make you doubt. Of course as Nick’s tracking his wife’s disappearance, his chapters are (sometimes cliffhangingly maddeningly) interspersed with Amy’s diary entries, which paint her as a saint. Again, without getting too much into things (it’d be a sin to say much about this book; the glories of it are just too fantastic to experience in any hand other than first), the psychic dissonance of how Amy and Nick appear gathers and creates enough friction so that at the book’s halfway point, when the story basically explodes, the reader’s about as satisfied by narrative as could be imagined. Seriously. I read the book a week back, all in a day, getting progressively more into it and then it just exploded, and my wife from the next room heard me gasp and then just say no way, no way. It’s that good. We had dinner at a friend’s house that night and I was as tempted to cancel so that I could stay home and read as I’ve ever been.

            Gone Girl’s other details—that Amy’s parents are a pair of psychologists who’ve spilled Amy’s life onto the pages of a series of best-selling kids books featuring Amazing Amy (and can you guess whether Amy’s got some issues with that fact?); that Amy and Nick’ve moved to Missouri from New York City two years back so Nick could care for his declining mother (again, issues on Amy’s part); that Nick and his sister Margo (who, too cloyingly, is mostly by her brother called Go throughout the book) are the proprietors of a local bar, called The Bar, which bar they purchased with cash from Amy (she has, in the book’s present tense, no money left, but had had, before the financial crash, a nice trust fund); that Nick’s father is a smoldering mess of misogyny and dementia, a broken man sputtering fucking bitch; that Amy has, every year of her and Nick’s marraige, given him a scavenger hunt on their anniversary, and that Nick’s always botched them (because he doesn’t remember every single detail that she does), but that this year’s SH is much easier and Nick gets nearly everything—are honestly too great and vivid to do justice to here. The central narrative of Gone Girl—a husband and wife discovering, five years into their marraige, who each of them really are—is so great that Flynn really, truly did not need to so thoroughly ace the ancillary stuff, yet she has. Each little tiny thing in this book seethes real and appropriate; nothing feels done in a Rube Goldbergian way, though clearly, in a mystery/thriller, that’s exactly how plot stuff ultimately has to work, and so that’s the real glory of Flynn’s accomplishment here: the book feels totally natural, like a story, like a real, human story, not some made-up thing to keep you turning pages. She has successfully hidden all the strings. It’s incredible.

I can’t say enough about this book. You really will be seeing info about it everywhere, as you should. You’d be wise to heed what everyone’s gonna say: read this book immediately. Cancel dinner ahead of time.

An Interview With Grant Lee Phillips

by Jeremy Griffin

If you were listening to rock music in the 90s, then you probably remember Grant Lee Phillips, frontman of the eponymous Grant Lee Buffalo. Since that time, Phillips has a released a number of stunning solo albums, has been featured on several television shows–Gilmore Girls being the most notable–and was even ranked in 1995 as Rolling Stone’s Best Male Vocalist. For those familiar with this site, I probably don’t have to tell you what a huge fan I am of both GLB and GLP; I even have a cat named after one of his songs (Josephine, from “Josephine of the Swamps”). Do whatever you want with that info: the dude is untouchable, is my point. Phillips was kind enough recently to take some time out of his schedule to discuss his craft:

CB: I was hoping you could tell us a little about your songwriting process, such as it is. And let me amend this question by acknowledging outright that most musicians we interview hate being asked this, and rightfully so; it does sort of impose unfair limitations on the answer. But I think the very fact that every songwriter seems to have such a different answer is what makes it interesting, at least in an artistic sense…or maybe I’m just really dense about the creative process?

GLP: It’s a hard thing to talk about. When your native tongue is metaphor it’s a bit of a challenge to pin down the process. The song itself is by my best stab at communicating. Beyond that, it gets pretty murky quick. There is a lot of craft to songwriting which gets honed in time but the best music seems to fly in the face of all of that. You have to feel your way through it.

CB: In almost every interview I’ve read with you, there have been parallels drawn between your current work and that of Grant Lee Buffalo (and I realize I’m kind of doing the same thing, but just go with me here, please). I’m wondering how you feel about this: do you feel that what you are doing now is an extension of that, or are they two distinct spheres of your life? Or something in between? Is it even fair to draw any comparison between the two?

GLP: When my new songs are compared to those I wrote in Grant Lee Buffalo it’s like they’re going for the wide angle lens. Trying to get a handle on things. It’s actually flattering. Of course, there are bound to be people who prefer one facet of my work over another. As a writer I’m always moving forward. The performer part of me keeps in contact with the old songs but the writer in me is fixed on what comes next.

CB: Lyrically, your work leans toward rich imagery and quite a few classical and literary allusions. One descriptor that I see quite often in regard to your lyrics is “literate.” What do you make of that? Do you have any particular literary influences?

GLP: I’ve always loved books but I really keyed in very early to song lyrics. Literary allusions are probably a little more common in the Grant Lee Buffalo songs than those that follow. Sometime it’s just me getting busted. Pure theft. “Allusion” sounds so much more respectable though. Let’s go with that.

CB: It’s always interesting to see how reviewers try to categorize your sound; Southern Gothic comes up quite a bit. It’s almost as if folks are determined to find some kind of label for it, even though your work spans a spectrum of styles. Is there a certain way that YOU like to describe your music? Have you come across any descriptors that you would say are spot-on?

GLP: I’m the worst at describing what I do. The last time someone asked me what I did, I lied and told him I played “Blue eyed soul” just to wiggle out of the question. Southern Gothic is interesting. I’ve seen a few Goths down South.

CB: You did a brief tour with GLB last year, and you’ve been booked for the Haldern Pop Festival in Germany later this year. How did this tour come about? What was it like? Any plans for anymore dates?

GLP: The Grant Lee Buffalo shows were incredible last year. The silence of twelve years, all that pent-up energy exploded right out of the box the first show in. We’re coming back for more this summer, including Haldem Pop Festival in Germany and the HMV Forum in London. In the old days our year was laid out fifteen months in advance, with no end in site. That was tough. We’ve always played every show like it was our last. It’s no different today.

CB: Are you currently reading anything? If so, what is it?

GLP: I recently went back and re-read Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee which is a riveting historical account. Being of Mvskoke Creek heritage, I have a long interest in Native American studies, our history, customs and so forth. In fact my new album is called Walking In The Green Corn. That title, the song is based on a Southeastern Native tradition known as the Green Corn Dance. I’m currently raising independent funding through PledgeMusic.com and looking to release the album later this year. Fans can get involved and pre-order Walking In The Green Corn online http://www.pledgemusic.com/artists?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=grant-lee+phillips. I’ve just started reading Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History by S.C. Gwynne.-Grant-Lee Phillips

Adam Levin’s Phenomenal Hot Pink

by Weston Cutter

            My experience with Adam Levin has always been through his stories. I know he did The Instructions, and people I respect like that book a lot, and that’s fine and good, but he first knocked me on my ass with “Hot Pink,” the title story of his recent collection (the title story: published in McSweeney’s #18; both his collection of stories and novel: published by McSweeney’s). Here’s that story’s first paragraph: “My friend Joe Cojotejk and myself were on our way to Nancy and Tina Christamesta’s, to see if they could drive us to Sensei Mike’s housewarming barbecue in Glen Ellyn. Cojo’s cousin Niles was supposed to take us, but last minute he got in his head it was better to drink and use fireworks with his girlfriend. He called to back out while we were in the basement with the heavy bag. We’d just finished drawing targets on the canvas with marker. I wanted small red bull’s-eyes, but Joe thought it would be better to represent the targets like the things they stood for. He’d covered a shift for me at the lot that week, so I let him have his way—a triangle for a nose, a circle for an Adam’s apple, a space for the solar plexus, and for the sack a saggy-looking shape. The bag didn’t hang low enough to have realistic knees.”

Enumerating the badassery of that paragraph would take days, but the thing that’s most amazing here, and the talent Levin’s got so in spades throughout this collection, is his ability to create full, real characters. If that sounds like simplistic claptrappery review-speak that means nothing, look again at that paragraph: that narrator’s thick and real after one paragraph as most characters get by a book’s end. We know he’s maybe a touch juvenile (the sack bit), has a moral code (allowing Cojo to choose what got drawn), and we don’t know yet whether it’s some wry humor or what about Cojo’s cousin and his choosing beer and fireworks and a girl over driving to Sensei Mike’s, but it’s something. There is, of course, that masterful myself in the first line—a word that reads just off enough, just human and weird enough, to make a character come blazing into vividity at a hat’s drop. For what it’s worth: Jack, the narrator, is 17 and a high school dropout and is in other reviews called a thug (ehh…I’d argue that’s a stretch), and has the hots for Nancy, of whom he’s nervous he’s dumber than. The story’s got electrically strange elements—a garbage truck with balloons on the grill, an incorrect barbecue attended, stolen grapefruit—but the real point of the story, as it is in lots of the other stories in Hot Pink, is language.

For instance those stolen grapefruits. Jack and Cojo get nodded at by a man across the street, and the boys accost him (okay, so they’re maybe a touch thuggish) and demand his grapefruits. After being given the grapefruits, Jack and Cojo arrive at Nancy and Tina’s. Here’s part of the scene:

Nancy said, “What’s with the grapefruits?”

            I said, “We intimidated a man. It’s all words.”

It’s all words. This could be the collection’s guiding spirit or motto. Don’t believe me? Here’s a passage from “Finch,” another story about a pair of boys in Chicago:

On our way back to the alley in the back of his ma’s, Franco told me, ‘See? It’s all in the voice. That’s how you get stuff. Speaking with conviction. Makes you convincing.’ (In the same story, Franco III, Franco’s dog, will kill based on a specific command, and will cease trying to kill based on another specific command. Again: It’s all words.)

Maybe the best story in here might be the one that was, until appearing in the collection, unpublished: “RSVP,” a story that ran on McSweeney’s website the week of the book’s release. Again there are similar aspects—young male friendships, the power of words (in “RSVP”‘s case, both regarding starting a religion and the perfect love letter)—to some of the other great Levin stories already in “Hot Pink,” but also, again, there’s a careening joy to the thing. Basically, this: you cannot tell where a Levin story will go, though I don’t mean that the stories gather and provide power because of how they surprise, I mean they gather power by how they jitter and jump, how it’s all words ends up being, over and over, such a powerful fact in these stories. You’ll be undone at the end of half of them (and, in fairness: some of these stories are eh experiments ["Relating," and "How to Play The Guy"]), in something like shock at what Levin can, seemingly so casually, pull off. It’s a great collection.

Sarah Jaffe’s THE BODY WINS

by Weston Cutter

            I was lucky enough to hear Sarah Jaffe early on—winter of ’10 or so—and was even luckier to be able to be among the maybe two dozen folks who got mesmerized by her in ’10 or ’11 in Omaha’s The Waiting Room Lounge—the woman was up there with an acoustic guitar, spare accompaniment, and her voice was so many forks of lightning through that night—I can still, if I work at, recall how “Vulnerable” (a song I wasn’t massively into or not into from her debut, Suburban Nature) sounded, made new with a thumpy percussive flourish. She ghosted with and spooked through her own songs that night, bringing bones to light I hadn’t necessarily heard before, and I remember feeling 100% thrilled with how she was doing things (which doesn’t have to be the case when an artist reworks his/her stuff, as anyone who has seen a weird Dylan show knows [yes, he's a genuis, and yes, I love him, but some of the workings of his songs at his shows are just odd]). What I’m trying to say is: the woman put on, when I saw her, not just a hell of a show, but a show which, had I been paying better attention, would’ve made clear what The Body Wins, her latest, has now made sharply, awesomely clear: Jaffe was pushing into and, I’d argue, through her own music, looking for new clues to chase.

For real: listen to the first track of Suburban Nature (the fantastic “Before You Go”) and the first of The Body Wins (“Paul”) back-to-back; we’re talking about a shift, a growth, that’s as significant as the leap Wilco made to YHF, or LCD Soundsystem from their first to second disc, or Radiohead. Sure, stuff stays the same: Jaffe’s voice is still among the most mighty and gorgeous sounds imaginable, simultaneously strong and almost wincingly tender, and yes, it’s still pop music—it’s not as if she’s suddenly channeling Bartok or something (I don’t know if pop music sounds derisive or anything; it’s certainly not intended—I don’t know what else to call good music anymore. What genre exists anymore?). But Jaffe’s made some phenomenal growth from her first to second LP (a growth all of us could behold as well when she dropped The Way Sound Leaves a Room, her EP from September of ’11). Here’s the video for “Glorified High”:

I want to make this clear, too: Jaffe’s musical growth is not, I don’t think, merely the result of finding new instruments, adding some synths—the equivalent of an instrument clothes-change or haircut. She seems to be trying to find a new way into her songs, with results that are electric (I can’t not think, always, of how Tweedy spoke in the movie I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, when he’s confronted post-solo-show at one point by record store dorks who ask about the rumors they’ve heard about the new Wilco disc, and Tweedy says they’re finding spaces in their music and letting it have more holes in it). Jaffe’s The Body Wins is ultimately a darker affair than SN, yet the album ultimately doesn’t feel darker so much as thicker, murkier (this may be because of songs like “Hooray For Love” and “Talk,” two songs which feature a ferocity entirely absent from SN (and songs which, it should be noted, are fundamentally unclear: in the case of the former, the minor-key dirge of the music clashes mightily against the statement of the lyrics; in the latter she sings “I’ve opened my mouth too many times / and now that I’m done talkin’ / here you come walking” [I'd like to note that it's real easy to mis-hear the first of those lines as I've broken my mouth too many times, and I'm actually sorry I cranked it + now have clarity]).

There’s plenty more, obviously, to say about this, but ultimately I’m only really capable of jumping up and down and huffing on and on about Jaffe. Here’s everything I could possibly say: I can think of maybe three or four bands or musicians whose work will automatically be stuff I check out, forever, no matter what. Radiohead’s in that camp, ditto Dylan, Westerberg, etc. There aren’t many, is the thing, and the musicians that are on that list, for me, are bands that’ve been around for a long time, have shown again and again an urge toward growth that basically assures me of something fresh, a new sonic view, even if I ultimately don’t like whatever direction they’re moving in. Sarah Jaffe’s now firmly on that list: I can think of no young musician this exciting, no one taking these sorts of interesting risks and trying so urgently to make her way as an artist. I’m almost embarrassed to use that word, artist—it’s fey and silly sounding, I suppose, or at least I fear it comes off that way. But for real: Jaffe’s an artist. She’s as mighty + rare as they come. Get on board.

That Guy With All the Sex Stories

by Jeremy Griffin

God Bless America by Steve Almond

Okay, so in the interest of full disclosure, I have to say up front that I’m a bit biased here because Steve Almond blurbed my recent book (and if that seems like it was a cheap self-promotion plug, it totally was).  But that doesn’t change the fact that he’s one of my favorite short story authors of the past ten years and that his new collection God Bless America is not only fantastic but also his best story collection yet.

Let me also acknowledge that in the stuffy, self-aggrandizing, throat-clearing world of capital-L literary fiction, Almond is a polarizing figure. The most common charge against him seems to involve his fetishization of, well, anything (remember that this is the guy who wrote an entire story about Michael Jackson’s dick entitled, appropriately, “The Idea of Michael Jackson’s Dick”). Plus, it doesn’t help that his last book Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life got slammed in the NYT: “A wrought-up, jocular treatise on music as gut-level soulcraft, it’s long on sarcasm and exaggerated attitude — a first-person survey of 30-odd years in the life of a self-described ‘Drooling Fanatic.’” Fortunately, God Bless America appears to find Almond back in a more comfortable position, crafting stories that combine low-brow humor with eloquent prose, and which are as heart-wrenching and insightful as they are amusing.

What’s more, God Bless America finds Almond maturing, if you can believe it. Humor-wise, he’s still up to all his regular tricks, but he’s scaled back the attempts to shock, the cheaper gags that make critics roll their eyes. Many of the stories have a heft that we haven’t seen up until now, including “Donkey Greedy, Donkey Get Punched,” a surprisingly grim tale about a psychiatrist and his professional poker playing client; and “Hopewood,” in which a couple of hapless college grads take part-time jobs helping an elderly man collect old discarded furniture to paint and sell. Stories like these seem to speak of desire on Almond’s part to venture beyond his customary schtick which, while greatly enjoyable, does sometimes come off as a bit too light.

As do some of the less-than-stellar pieces in God Bless America, like “First Date Back,” in which an Iraq War vet, having just returned to the states, pursues a stewardess he meets on the plane; or “A Jew Berserk on Christmas Eve,” which is about, well, pretty much that. It’s not that these stories necessarily fail; it’s just that they lack the depth that make the previously mentioned stories such knockouts. (Ironically, “First Date Back” is one of the few stories in which Almond consciously strives against his usual brand of humor.)

Almond’s appeal has largely been based on his ability to use humor to address what usually amount to distressing truths about our selves and our culture. He spoke about this in an interview in the latest issue of Gulf Coast, the often misconstrued distinction between using humor to get at something real versus using it just for laughs: “The basic misunderstanding…begins ways back with Aristotle, the idea that comic and tragic modes are somehow separate and opposed. That’s complete nonsense. The comic impulse arises directly from feelings that inherently tragic: sorrow, shame, disappointment, moral outrage, and so on.” An oversimplification this may be, but it still aptly underscores Almond’s literary philosophy: humor, in whatever form, needs to be doing something, articulating some larger, difficult truth, and by this measure God Bless America is a phenomenal success.