Shameless self-promotion stuff: my chapbook Plus or Minus just dropped from the great Greying Ghost Press, and is now available through paypal here. Here’s the cover:
Anyway, that’s the update. I’m excited. It’s the first of three chapbooks coming this year–updates as those both come as well. Thanks of course for reading.
So, having been apparently even more lazy* than I’d realized, I’ve been missing mentioning some books, all of which are good, some of which are below now in shorter reviews (part of this I’ll totally blame on still blogging for the Kenyon Review, which blogging’s seen recent stuff considering: some of the DFWallace books that’ve come out this year, a pair of music biographies [Springsteen and Freddie Mercury, both great, both radically different], an interview with the fantastic Alix Ohlin [whose new collection Signs and Wonders is just great, great short fiction, just tremendously good], something on political books and changing one’s mind, in this case regarding Gail Collins’s not quite [to me] successful As Texas Goes…, an interview with Jess Walter [author of the dynamite Beautiful Ruins], and an interview with Jensen Beach, author of the recently released For Out of the Heart Proceed). Regardless: that’s all elsewhere. Here’s here. Here are some brief reviews of books you should’ve been hipped to, and hopefully already have.
No Animals We Could Name by Ted Sanders. This thing’s just a monster of a book—stories as varied and divergent and bristly as one could imagine—the first story, “Obit,” with its perfect function-following form typography is worth the price of admission on its own, plus there’s “Airbag” parts 1-3, each trying to wrestle with a single event, to say nothing of little (seemingly) tossed-off stuff like “Deer in the Road,” which creeps and induces shivers the likes of which you mayn’t've felt since Wallace’s “Good Old Neon.” This is a hard, striking, quicksilvery book, something richer than most of us (I’m guessing) will realize even after we’ve made our way through it—the thing’s gonna be sitting on your shelf seething for years. Or at least it will be mine.
Big Hair and Plastic Grass by Dan Epstein. The subtitle’s A Funky Ride Through Baseball and America in the Swinging 70′s, and I’ll admit that I was and am termpermentally into this book because my beloved Twins played in the Metrodome, one of the Plastic-grassed venues covered in Eptstein’s account. With each chapter covering a single year of that insane decade, the book’s exactly the tonic one needs when reading stuff like, say, any of the thick august tomes regarding 1968 in all its halcyon glory (or whatever): this is baseball writing with a healthy tilt toward the style of the day and game, not just the substance. It’s a hell of a read, and, on finishing it, one needs little imagination to consider why football and Nascar had such meteoric rises once ESPN went on the air—baseball was crazy for a long ass time.
The Bellwether Revivals by Benjamin Wood. This was a book that snuck up on me in ways I wasn’t expecting: the thing starts with well-written scenes of young people meeting, and the reader (this reader) immediately thinks: I’ve seen this. Wood even seems like he knows that, like he knows you’ve seen it. I should here mention that it’s set in Oxford, and there are questions of class, and the love story’s undone/impeded/influenced by a beloved’s aggresively egotistical sibling. It’s a very strong book in the sense that, once in, you want to go all the way through, though I will say it didn’t knock my socks off the way it has some other folks (though also worth noting: I’ve read neither Brideshead Revisited nor Secret History).
Dark Pools by Scott Patterson. Just read the f’ing thing, and read Patterson’s The Quants while you’re at it. Look, folks like Patterson are hard to come by, and necessary: he’s Michael Lewis with a page-turner’s blood and pacing. Imagine reading, say, Michael Connelly being 100% factual and writing about Wall Street and darker aspects of the financial system than you want to really know about. That’s Dark Pools. Again: just read the f’ing thing.
*=everyone caught that the announcement for the Car Talk guys’ retirement was titled Time to Get Even Lazier? Amazing.
A review of The Beautiful Wishes of Ugly Men by Adam Prince
Black Lawrence Press, 2012
I met Adam Prince once. I was visiting a friend in Knoxville who allowed me to tag along to the Prince house for dinner. Prince and his wife, poet Charlotte Pence, prepared a lovely ginger curry dish. After dinner we watched Mad Men. They were charming and polite, the picture of suburban contentment.
Strange to think that this is the same man who wrote The Beautiful Wishes of Ugly Men, which author Bret Anthony Johnston calls the work of “a writer who understands the intimacy of violence and the violence of intimacy.” Combining the thematic grittiness of Stewart O’Nan with the narrative passion of Raymond Carver, The Beautiful Wishes of Ugly Men signals the debut of a writer whose vision is at once both alarming and utterly mesmerizing.
To a large degree, the stories in here are analyses of character motivation, or rather the often frightening circumstances from which those motivations are borne. Take, for instance, “The Island of Lost Boys,” which snagged the Sycamore Review’s Wabash Prize for Fiction in 2010: a junior high school teacher–who for reasons he can’t yet fathom has recently made a pass at a male student–finds himself at his wealthy mother’s house on Newport Island, where he is confronted with cruel truths about himself and his past. This story exemplifies Prince’s affinity for turning dispicable people into fantastic characters. Same with stories like “Action Figure,” a skillfully crafted portrait of meth-induced paranoia, and “Tranquility,” in which a recently married woman struggles to comprehend her husband’s creepy new habit of bringing young women home under the pretense of finding her a friend; it isn’t that these people are “bad,” per se, but rather that they seem to be grappling with a kind of self-destructive drive, one that they don’t entirely understand but that seems to have seized them like an illness. Prince is interested in what it takes for seemingly decent, ordinary people to make spectacularly bad decisions.
None of this is to say that Beautiful Wishes is flawless. There are a few speedbumps, like “No Women Tonight” and “Six Months In, Another Kind of Undressing,” short-shorts intended offer the reader a breather between some of the larger, heavier pieces but, in so doing, slow the book’s otherwise thrilling pace. But even these throw out a stumbling block in a way that seems almost intentional; in a book rife with calamity, they are subtle reminders that the author is always, always in control.
And to be sure, it is this sense of control that makes these stories so engaging; even instances of humor, like those in “Tranqulity,” are tinged with threat, a haunting reminder of the close relationship between laughter and fear. Prince’s characters are all trying to make sense of their flaws, they want to know what it means to survive as imperfect beings, which line of reasoning often leads them toward catastrophe. With prose that is both accessible and lovely in its complexity, Prince maneuvers these characters through failing relationships, family tragedy, and drug abuse, all with an unyielding authority that surprises the reader over and over again.
(Today’s review comes from Anna Roorda, a young writer living and working in Illinois, and who’s reviewed for Corduroy before)
I can see that Carissa Halston, the author of The Mere Weight of Words, had good intentions with this novella. The story basis is there, though it’s not anything especially flashy or irregular. It’s essentially about a girl named Meredith who is often at odds with both of her parents but especially her father. She’s also struggling to maintain vulnerability and peace with her boyfriend. As a result of these, at times, sinking relationships, we see the ways that silences can lengthen and wedges can form between people, and how everything will be destroyed unless bridges can be built. These framed relationships give the illusion that we as readers will be kept close to the nature of the story and its words. The story is built on the remaining threads between people, and these very threads make up our existence as humans. We recognize failing and successful relationships because they are familiar to each of us—we work with people, live with them, sleep with them, fight with and/or love them, clean their diapers or clothes or make their lunches.
However, optimism isn’t always enough, and it may be too optimistic and perhaps naïve to assume Halston’s good intentions with this novella and judge it solely upon those hopeful, fluttery feelings that I originally had in those first few pages. Because the feeling that came as I finished this book, if I get to the bottom of the matter, was irony. The irony lies in the fact that the title begged me into thinking that the novella would use language and characters to create a kind of meaning and intimacy with the reader. Halston splashes across the cover of the book that words mean a whole lot of something and they carry a weight that actions or thoughts cannot.
My impressions of the book were very different from these early presumptions. Black and white. I was expecting to see language precise and exact and dangerous, like tongues of fire ripping along a floor beneath my feet, cutting where it may. The truth is, I felt the furthest from Halston and the story she sought to tell through these characters. And all because the language simply wasn’t precise and it, frankly, wasn’t enough. Words often seemed to drag or hang there on the page like damp bathrobes on hooks, empty but still asking me to consider them or to take them for whatever they were worth. I wasn’t always sure what that was, because the words were too weak, too far away, too much of something that I wasn’t a part of as a reader. That was equally troubling and annoying.
Does Carissa Halston want my sympathy for Meredith and her inability to communicate openly with her lover? Does she expect a kind of sadness to bounce from to the page to my heart when I read of Meredith’s accident that leaves her face in a state of paralysis? What about when I read the word regret in regards to her father and all that has passed, or not passed, between them—what should I have felt then? The thing was, I wanted to shake my fist in rage, or shed soppy tears, or flip through the pages with a kind of urgency that would surprise every speed-reader I know, but this novella wouldn’t allow me those small joys. I wanted to believe in words again, I wanted to be coerced that their existence is crucial and central, but I really wasn’t unable to because of the sheer force of inadequate language hitting me in the face. Or, rather, nodding at me but not hitting me or touching me at all. I wanted it to flick my wrist, or graze my hair, so badly.
I remain hopeful for Halston and whatever novel she’s working on, as the book jacket told me. I am not sure if it was optimism that brought me through this book, or if it was the thought that maybe the grand moment that I was waiting for–when language, emotion, and character collaborate together on the page–would at last arrive on page 21, 37, or 49. That moment never did come, and I was given instead a vagueness that warranted, demanded, explanation. That left me feeling both robbed and sad. Maybe with future endeavors, Halston will deliver to her readers the strength of the words that she promises them.
The first thing I’d ever read by Jess Walter was his story “Thief” in Harper’s from maybe four months back—I read the thing lying on the couch in my wife’s office before we went out somewhere that night, took the story down fast and remember just feeling spun for the rest of the night by the sneaky ease of the thing—it’s a story about someone in a guy’s family stealing from the huge jug he puts his change in as a way to save for vacations, and there’s a twist, and, sure, the story itself was great, and the twist was great, but there was this almost shocking ease to the story, how it just unspooled with no noticeable effort. The analog might be that, in bicycling, the best components move with the least friction—a set of real high end hubs, for instance, will allow a wheel to spin for a long time with almost no effort. I can attest to how good it feels to clean and regrease and repack a set of hubs, allowing them to rolls incredibly freely and smoothly, so I can only imagine how it feels to be Jess Walter, whose new novel Beautiful Ruins is a book of such shocking smoothness and ease I’m sort of dumbstruck by the thing.
You’ve heard of Walter before, in all likelihood: his best known novel (at least among the folks I know), The Financial Lives of Poets, was seemingly everywhere when it was released in ’09, and his The Zero was a finalist for the National Book Award. Maybe he’s better known than I know, but I’m sort of amazed that this book hasn’t been called, by everyone, one of summer’s big best books—it’s right up there, for me, with Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and Crumpton’s The Art of Intelligence (about which more soon). Maybe it’s gotten more attention than I know, and I simply haven’t been paying enough attention.
Regardless, among the following are compelling reasons you should read Beautiful Ruins promptly: 1) you want a book which toggles back and forth between the past and present, the past in this case going back as far as 1962 and the present set in California, or 2) you want a book which focuses, sort of, on movies—the 1962 Beautiful Ruins jumps back to is in Italy, during the filming of Cleopatra, the first Liz Taylor/Richard Burton film (and the one on the set of which they first fell in love), or 3) you want a book which features characters cast in such vividity one feels totally fine, for instance, loathing the dickhead stripper-patronizing, internet-porn-obsessive boyfriend of one of the main characters, because this is a book in which it’s safe to loathe characters because they feel hugely human and real, and so, as in life, you know you can loathe or hate the character on one page but will likely change your mind soon enough. Actually, forget the numbering: character in Beautiful Ruins is everything: there is Pasquale, a young Italian who runs an inn in Porto Vergogna, a town that could/should be the sixth of Cinque Terre (thus forcing a name change, but whatever), and there is Dee Myers who shows up at Pasquale’s family’s inn (which inn is named: The Adequate View) during the book’s first few pages, sick and in need of rest and rehab, and there is Michael Deane, a movie producer who was involved in getting Dee to Porto Vergogna but who we meet in the present as an aged but legendary producer with an assistant named Claire, she of the beefcakey stripper-loving boyfriend. There are plenty more—specifically Pat Bender, Alvis Bender, and Shane Wheeler—and I swear that the stories of each become so moving and compelling that the book, which features chapters which stagger through time, will incense you in good ways, just that it prevents you from simply tearing through, trying to track each character’s story instead of sitting back and tracing the larger tapestry of stories and story they together weave.
Here’s what Walter’s said the book’s at least somewhat about, according to the press packet: “…a story about fame and how we all endeavor now to live our lives like movie stars, like celebrities, each of us an eager inner publicist managing our careers and our romances and our fragile self-images (our Facebook pages and Linked-In profiles).” Maybe I’m dim or have missed something, but I don’t feel like I often read something by a book’s author directly addressing what the book’s agenda might be, or it’s message, or its intent. I say that full of praise for Walter for saying/writing what he did: I think we each like to graft what we believe might be something like meaning onto our favorite books, but those things don’t often hold or add up, at least not in any larger way than the oldest most cliched take-aways (for instance: power currupts, the lies we tell ourselves undo us, certain emotional experiences sear us permanently; try this on your own favorite novel). But what charges what Walter wrote in that press kit, what makes Beautiful Ruins more than just a meditative novel which considers the various shades and darknesses of how we manage our lives and selves, is the book’s just fucking exquisite final chapter, a chapter which just astonishes in its wide-lens tracking of all the stories tracked in the book, a chapter which, to at least this reader, feels more than a little like some parts of the best of GGMarquez (especially Love in the Time of Cholera, for reasons you’d be a fool to want more detail regarding) in its whirling omnipotence, its god-view of humans and their urges and needs. There was, in a recent New Yorker, a Louis Menand review of the latest James Joyce bio, and you should just go read the whole article, but what Menand establishes in ways I’ve never wtnessed before is that Joyce was hellbent on celebrating the day-to-day, the casual miracle of living and loving and dying and hurting (Menand takes 6 pages to establish this stuff–you really should go read it), and maybe it’s just that I read Beautiful Ruins less than a week after reading the Menand article, but the zinging magnificence of Jess Walter’s latest novel feels exactly of a piece with what Menand wrote of Joyce: Walter’s fantastic final chapter begins with a character saying This is a love story, a line which is questioned almost immediately in the text: But, really, what isn’t? If this book hits you as I imagine it’ll hit all of us, and as it certainly hit me, the only answer possible to that question is: nothing, nothing is not a love story, and every love story’s full of beauty and chaos and surprise. Seriously: you just have to read this book, as soon as possible.
