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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

As is (probably) the case for a few other people, classical music and chess are two things I respect and admire and largely suck at. I can’t play any classical instrument, I’d lose just about any game of chess I’d sit down to play, but some part of me wants to be better and know more about both. I check Shostakovitch CDs out from the library, I’ve heard of a few dozen chess openings (remembering the name of none of them, knowing nothing of the details of how they’re actually played), but I’m woefully stupid about each (and we can just skip over whatever commentary all this bears on whatever need I have to feel part of or conversant in matters that are pretty recognizably culturally snobbish, elite, etc). And so, of course, I read about them.

I’ve probably read a dozen books on chess and classical music, but I’ve seen nothing before like Katie Hafner’s A Romance on Three Legs, the story of Glenn Gould, Verne Edquist, and a Steinway concert grand given the designation CD 318. These three characters—piano, pianist, and piano tuner—are not the three legs of the title, but they work well as stand-ins for the actual, wooden piano legs Gould was talking about when he said the line (the book’s title is his line).

Gould the pianist and person probably need very little here, from me, in terms of background: he was a genius, obsessive/crazy about his health, Canadian, etc. What a reader could presumably guess from the available evidence re: Gould is that, yes, he was as nuts about his instrument as he was about his body, and by nuts I mean here, well, demanding. So just for a second, now, guess the number of moving pieces in a piano. Guess the number of ways a piano can be in one way or another manipulated for various accents and changes. True or false: each key on a piano, when depressed, causes three strings to be struck simultaneously, producing one note (true). Not even getting into whether his neuroses were piqued and fed by the dizzying array of things to get fussy about re: a piano, it’s hard to imagine an instrument more delicate and fickle. (I don’t know the number of moving parts of a piano—it’s in the high hundreds, maybe more—and the number of ways a piano can be manipulated for different tones is probably only expressible exponentially, something to the power of something else).

So, then, Gould+piano is a perfect storm as is, right? Enter Edquist, a nearly-blind piano tuner. Cool but sort of unsurprising fact: piano tuners with poor eyesight is not just a schlocky Hallmark-esque theme/idea of redemption through various senses, but is (was, anyway) common. Edquist was not alone in being shitty of eye and great of ear. If you play an instrument, especially one with strings, you know maybe a little of the difficulty in keeping the thing tuned. Edquist was some sort of piano whisperer, could get into a piano’s guts and therein tweak things until, according to Hafner, an absurd level of tonal purity was reached. It sounds dry and dull to say it like that, but it’s actually pretty riveting in the book.

So: pianist, piano tuner. Not even worth guessing about: Glenn Gould’s fickleness about the details of his instrument, of course, started with his choice of the instrument itself. Through tons of trial and error, Gould ended up falling for the CD 318, a Steinway grand that’d been made slowly during World War Two (slowly because the factory’d been turned over to making war supplies). The big thing that made the CD 318 Gould’s piano was its incredibly responsive action, which terms describes how easily the keys must be pressed to produce tone. Gould wanted the lightest possible action, and with the CD 318, and Edquist’s help, he got it.

There’s more to the book than just that, but that’s the guts of the story: Gould’s fussiness, Edquist’s incredible patience with the pianist and concern for the instrument, and the instrument itself. The book is filled out with details of the work involved in making a Steinway grand (which process has recently been made into a movie called Note by Note), the relationship between the Steinway company and the artists who played its pianos, both Edquist’s and Gould’s backgrounds, and the really, really sad story of CD 318’s life (I’m not joking: you get involved, and when bad shit happens to the piano (which it does, bad shit does happen), you feel almost sick, like to-your-stomach sick). Hafner’s writing throughout is lively and quick, and if there’s a lack of overt voice in her writing, you can tell that it’s because she’s (wisely, I think) holding back for the sake of the story itself to take center stage.

Field Folly Snow is not perfect. In fact, the late poems of this book hang like streamers from a solid center. The center is essentially Cecily Parks’ 2005 chapbook Cold Work, a work which won the Poetry Society of America New York Chapbook Fellowship, and these poems are the most carefully crafted, the most controlled and the most compelling in Field Folly Snow. Still, the book is my favorite in a stack of recent debut collections, and its success comes not in spite of the looser, hanging parts, but because of them.

The book begins with poems whose speakers are deeply connected to nature—the speaker of “I Lost My Horse” who “looked for the horse because she looked/ safe enough to love”; the speaker of “Self-Portrait as a Rain Gauge” who considers that her “lot is split precipitate/ around a measuring stick and swallowing”; the speaker in “The Minister’s Bad Wayward Girl” and her desire to “be gardened….tamped down” like soil. The poems are individually compelling but their real contribution to the collection is in the way they depict a world of man and nature intertwined, creating a foundation for the poems that follow them.

By the book’s second section, each page seems to speak to the next in a richly rewarding way. “Dear William, the Cottonwoods are Letting Go” combines Parks’ interest in language and sound with honest, human emotion. I feel this poem much more than any that proceeds it, and I am simultaneously captivated by its vocabularly, a union of scientific and the sensory language from the very start:

                        As they ought to.

Catkin, bit

of cotton. Each

rib spindly,

astral, petal,

auroral, arboreal.

Aural, oral

fluff. Falling

While the poem does not clarify the nature of the relationship between the speaker and William, the final line, the likening of the cottonwood’s strewn seeds to “A warm snow” poignantly depicts the conflicted feelings of a speaker (perhaps a lover, a parent, a sibling, a friend) who both longs for William and accepts his absence.

Other poems in this second section feel similarly personal, each speaker desperate to say something and to say it honestly. Some are narrative, some epistolary or in direct address to a subject, and they are the richest of the collection for many reasons, one of which is the ways the poems function as a group to describe a particular kind of life, a life lived with keen awareness of and reliance on the natural world, as described in the opening lines of “Trapline”: “The landscape holds you in no clouded thrall/ but holds you nonetheless.”

While this sense of the landscape holding the characters of Parks’ poems persists throughout the book, I am most impressed by this debut poet’s willingness to leave loose ends. Toward the end of the collection the poems become more frantic, more scattered, and brackets are used to section off blank space, shrugging off the kind of precision of language, the absolutes of image that come before. By the final piece, “Tecumseh and Ulysses and How Were Those for Names,” definitive characters and their emotions seem less important than the words and their sounds. It is a sort of linguistic puzzle that seems vastly different from “Dear William, the Cottonwoods are Letting Go,” though both poems show a keen interest in language. And yet, there’s an undertone of urgency here, an imprecise but compelling desire on the part of the speaker. It’s the ebb and flow of meaning in this collection, the specific set against the less defined, that makes this collection feel teased out emotionally and, in a word, whole. Field Folly Snow feels complete in a way that so many of the more cautious, more chiseled debut collections do not.

(This post was written by guest reviewer Carrie Meadows, whose writing we will all, if there’s justice in the publishing world, be reading much more of very soon)

Of the half-dozen or so real singular things that seem, to me, classically Minnesotan—state fair, birthplace of the DFL, almost hilariously great publishing and bookstores, scrappy/underdog baseball—the thing I’m most drawn to, of course, is music. It’s easy to make lists that make the cold, weird 32nd state seem like some freakish something’s-in-the-water type place: Dylan, Prince, the Replacements, Husker Du, Soul Asylum (they were good early), the Jayhawks, Mason Jennings, Atmosphere (and the rest of the Rhymesayer collective)(that new Atmosphere is insanely good, just in case you haven’t gotten it), Haley Bonar (who might be the prettiest woman I’ve ever seen a picture of, and whose “Big Star” makes me just fucking sizzle). Etc.

The line I’ve heard that I think makes the most sense is that it’s so damned cold in MN in the winter that there’s nothing else to do but practice and play music, and then, when it finally gets warm, all the bands come out and play. What’s funny about that line is that I heard it so long ago it doesn’t even matter whether it’s true or not: I believe it’s true, and (I think) I hear MN music differently because of it (not, like, I listen to music differently from how others listen to music, but I listen to stuff expecting to hear the we’re-stuck-inside-ness of it. If you think that’s nuts I defy you to listen to Jack Johnson and the Replacements back to back and then tell me which sounds like Hawaii and which sounds like MN).

Because it’s recently gotten warm enough to really believe in summer as something other than sham, I’m finding myself pulling out old summer CDs—discs that’ve, forever, meant the start of summer (I know I’m not alone in having something like seasonal music taste). There are a few great ones, all Minnesotan, that do it for me—the Jayhawks Tomorrow the Green Grass and Sound of Lies, Mason Jenning’s self-titled debut—but the one that always, always hits me hardest and marks the start of the season is Paul Westerberg’s 14 Songs.

Sarah Manguso’s now released a book of fiction, two of poetry, and, on May 27th from FSG, her memoir The Two Kinds of Decay. You are (for now) forgiven if you don’t know who she is: two books of poetry do not, from what I can tell, offer many writers something as tough to come by as name recognition. Her book of fiction, Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape is one of the three books that came included in 145 Stories in a Small Box, published by (who else) McSweeney’s (there are more than 145 stories in the box, for the record)(the other two books are by Eggers and Deb Olin Unferth (whose next book is coming from McSweeney’s this fall) and yes, all three books are fantastic, and yes, the set’s worth your money). All of which is just to say: Manguso’s arriving, meaning now, meaning perk up, buy her books, read her and pay attention.

The Two Kinds of Decay is a memoir of what seems to me one of the most fucking brutally nasty diseases ever, a rare, chronic form of Guillain-Barre syndrome called chronic idiopathic demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy. I am, for good or bad, squeamish: I get icked out quickly, and I squirm at even physical description of body/health related stuff, and so I cannot say for sure what Guillain-Barre or the CIDP form does to the body, not in any detail. Manguso went from feeling a little bad to not being able to breathe (well or deeply) to not being able to move (much at all), and to discover the malady doctors prodded the shit out of her took tests and ran blood from her body through a machine which removed her platelets and eventually stuck a main line directly into one of her arteries so they (doctors) could take blood whenever they wanted and even writing that now, weeks after reading it, makes me get goosebumpy.

But the just knock-you-on-your-ass part about Manguso’s writing is how unbelievably scrubbed and tough the words are. It’s weird, but the sentence I want to write is that there’s no self-pity in the whole book, and while that’s certainly true, it’s hard to even comprehend the feat of mental strength that’d require. It’s not even worth speculating on whether or not Manguso had why me moments throughout her entire time with this disease (which, by the way, destroyed much of her twenties, and which is incurable, meaning she’s in remission), what’s devastating is her ability to look so coolly at her own life and body and report not even from the frontline, but from within the frontline.

Though there’s a Didion-esque sort of objectivity to Manguso’s writing, there are moments of gut-wrenching, real basic human stuff that just floors you and jolts you to the realization that, yes, you’re reading about a body that went through an atrocious, hideous thing, but you’re also very much reading about a human being, a life. It sounds stupid to write it like that, or it feels stupid anyway: we sort of know this stuff, intellectually, but when you get to, for instance, the moment in the book in which Manguso describes one of her nurses marking on a form that Manguso’s color is naturally pale (the details of the scene are not easily compressible, plus just read the book—it’s page 78-79), a moment of real basic person-to-person generosity and connection, it’s enough to make you weep. No joke at all.

Manguso’s sentences are compact and scarily shining, and the structure of the book fits her writing perfectly. Chapters are short—a few paragraphs to a handful of pages—and the chapters are blocks of text, independent, disconnected. What’s most incredible, I think, about the structure is how Manguso basically allows/forces the reader to connect the text her- or himself, and how that feeling of agency brings (I think) the reader in incredibly closely to a story she/he/(very much I) might otherwise try to keep some distance from.

This book’s gonna/should get rapturous praise, and, yes, it’ll deserve every word. It’s a demanding book, and it’ll (likely) make you physically uncomfortable. Much more important is that the book’s astoundingly beautifully written and is almost freakishly wise and has more guts and heart than any other two dozen books I can think of off the top of my head. Read it and, if you’re the sort of person who does this stuff, pray for Manguso and for readers: that she stays well and that she keeps writing and that we get to keep reading.

The Box by Marc Levinson

I’ve got two different nonfiction reading friends (more, I’m sure, but two with whom I compare notes). One of them always wants books that brings him into the world of something—like Fatsis’ tremendous Word Freak or Blythe’s dynamite To Hate Like This is to Be Happy Forever. The other reader loves books about odd, Henry Petroski-style subjects. Books about rulers, pencils, toothpicks—The Billionaire’s Vinegar is right up his alley.

I haven’t told him yet, but I’ve got the best possible book for him: Levinson’s The Box. Here’s what you need to imagine: that reading about the history of the shipping container is one of the more riveting reading experiences you’re likely to read in awhile. Here’s why it’s so riveting: the history and development of the shipping container offers maybe one of the clearest possible lenses into the process that’s come to be called globalization.

I was born in 1978, so I have a pretty romanticized idea of the past. The idea of being in a place like New York City when it was one of the biggest port cities in the world seems fascinating and cool and interesting. Of course, the internet and globalization’s made New York sort of redundant: the same tea that a friend and I five years ago could only buy there is now available at the Whole Foods in Louisville, KY (I checked). Which is great, really, for all us tea drinkers.

But the reason I can get that tea, and the reason the shorts I just bought from Target were only $12 despite being made in Malaysia, have everything to do with the shipping container. We know this stuff, all of is, at an intellectual level,  but Levinson does an admirable, thorough job of leading the reader carefully through all the changes that’ve led to where we currently are. Also, maybe most critically: Levinson’s writing’s free of all cant and ideology. It’s a presentation of a (literally) world-changing thing, and thankfully nothing of a tract about that thing and the debate surrounding its use.

The Unfortunates by B. S. Johnson

Originally published in 1969, Johnson’s book-in-a-box was rereleased in 1999 in the UK and when I was there in 2005 I must’ve picked the thing up a dozen times in Waterstone or whatever the name of the big bookstore chain there is, wanting really badly to buy it but sure I should spend the money on, you know, food or something. Thankfully, New Directions has now given the US our own edition of the book—this version’s identical to the one put out in 1999 by Picador.

If you recognize Johnson’s name, it’s likely because of either reading or reading about Jonathan Coe’s bio on him Like a Fiery Elephant (another great book that was out in the UK first and here only later), which came out a few years back. And if you recognize this book, it’s likely because the book is, in fact, 27 discrete pamphlets held together in a box (sort of like McSweeney’s #4, but the box is better on this one).

Yes: a writer in England in 1969 pushed for just the sort of experimental postmodernism that would render a text nearly orderless (there’s a First and Last section in The Unfortunates, but past that the reader’s hand makes the moves). Yes: Johnson’s a sort of weird writer whose stuff is still largely unknown (and I don’t even know if it should or shouldn’t be: I’ve read nothing but this book, plus bits of Like a Fiery Elephant, and Coe sure likes the guy, and Coe’s pretty great, so maybe?) and this book seems unlikely to change that fact.

The book itself? The book itself is a sad story: Johnson, traveling to a cover a soccer game, arrives in a city and remembers that it’s where a friend of his, Tony, had lived—and Tony died some years ago, and the day’s soccer match and Johnson’s reminisces of his friend blend together in this weird, evocative thing that’s compelling as hell because, no joke, while reading you feel in the head of Johnson. And make no mistake: It’s Johnson, the “I” in the novel (Coe goes into some length about this whole thing in the introductory pamphlet).

The writing’s monumental as trains: the sentences move and move and then there are sudden pauses and then sentences that just bomb on the reader with the feel of a snatched, passing thought. There aren’t hugely radical shifts in text presentation—not, like, House of Leaves weird—though most blocks of text contain (or seem to contain) more than single paragraphs), meaning that a sentence ends and then the next sentence starts with some space between it and the last sentences, like the tabbed indentation of a paragraph…

All of which is frustrating to try to write clearly about, which was why this was just going to be a quick note. It’s an interesting, strange book—all the stranger for the fact that it’s nearly 40 years old and feels fresh as last Tuesday. If nothing else, buy the book just so you’ve given some money to New Directions: for all the moral and intellectual poverty currently at work in some rarified places in this country, we’re pretty fucking rich in brilliant, risk-taking publishers.

(for the record, too: New Directions is coming out with new editions of Kenneth Patchen’s old books as well. Patchen’s the guy, as far as I know, who first joined poetry with jazz (in his case, he stepped in with Mingus, which would’ve been just fucking great, but I digress). If you don’t know Patchen, you probably should.)

Man Killed by Pheasant by John T. Price

This book’s subtitle is and Other Kinships, and the book itself is a memoir of a midwesterner and so, of course, I have nothing to say about it other than: it’s great, and everyone should read it. There will never ever be a single great all-encapsulating book about the feeling of the midwest—not Gatsby, not listening to every recording of Prairie Home Companion, not playing every Replacements or Dylan or Prince or Husker Du or Mason Jennings or Haley Bonar album back to back: no one thing can add up to the midwest feeling, I don’t think. That said: John T. Price’s incredibly well-written and fluid and interesting and funny book is certainly a valuable link in the chain.