A Best + Necessary Read: Revolution

by Weston Cutter

I can’t remember how or why I picked up Deb Olin Unferth’s Vacation—I’m sure I was excited that it was a McSweeney’s book, and that the blurbs were from Aimee Bender and Diane Williams. I don’t really know what else there was, though, why I thought to heft the thing, turn those pages. Of course, like every human who has hefted/turned Vacation, I feel desperately, little-kid in love with the thing: the confident ease or whatever it was that allowed Unferth to so blithely craft this narrative that simply did, simply went propelled and which trusted the reader to follow, to get it, to keep up, to trust.

Plus to the above, for reasons having to do with this particular reviewer and having nothing to do with me, know the following: 1) McSweeney’s also published Unferth’s Minor Robberies in part of that little stories-in-a-box thing (there were I think supposedly 145 stories in that box), the one that featured Eggers and Manguso as well; 2) Deb Olin Unferth sends great postcards; 3) Unferth’s presently in New York, teaching at Wesleyan; 4) I’m 100% biased, or compromised anyway, in that the woman blurbed my own book (though I’d like to think I’d be strong-minded/-willed enough to call out a book’s badness, regardless of my emotional or otherwise proximity to the author). Anyway, that’s just info to bear in mind.

I’m tempted to say that those who should snap quickest up and read Revolution are those who read Vacation, tempted to say that the books are a strange little mirrory combo of Unferth’s life, or aspects of it, despite the fact that Vacation is a novel and Revolution is a memoir (subtitled: the year I fell in love and went to join the war). For those who are still getting to Vacation, the story involves a man following his wife who is following another man; things move from Syracuse to Central America; the driving questions (why’s he following? why’s she?) end up being less interesting than the ancillary ones (what’s the nature of searching vs. finding? and the relationship between knowledge and fact? and is there something generative in not knowing certain things clearly?), and the whole book, despite its size, ends up really being a sledgehammer of awesomeness, one which’ll knock you as sideways as any book you’ve let into your life.

And yes, certainly, those of us who come grateful and thrilled to Revolution with Vacation in mind or memory (or spleen or wherever it is readers keep old books) will find much excitement. Those Central American scenes in Vacation? There was probably quite a bit of actual first-hand experience that led to them (I don’t know why stuff like this matters, the fiction/reality overlap, but I know it’s true: Wallace’s Jest felt/feels more because of his drug use and tennis playing as the quickest/easiest example). The compulsion/desire to stalk someone, and, through stalking, discover something one believes findable (that’s gnarly to write, I know, but we’ve all done this—it’s the hope we’ll discover why we want to hang out with someone by hanging out with that person)—that’s huge in Revolution, that’s everything.

Because here’s the story: young Unferth (like early college, 18 or something) decamped to Nicaragua with her Christian boyfriend, the sort of guy all of us know or have met or have maybe been, the one who believes Changing the World is somehow an activity one goes elsewhere for. He wants to go help the Sandanistas claim their country.

This may not sound riveting, but it is, emphatically and fully. Unferth’s writing’s some of the finest, most taut stuff being put on paper in English, and the chapters through Revolution are short, several pages at most, episodic in a snapshotty way. Here, for instance, is “Parade” from page 75:

 

There was the day in San Salvador that we went to the plaza. It was more or less deserted except for the police forces, the military, and the guardia nacional. We spotted a few citizens moving through. I hadn’t wanted to come and now that there was so little to see, I hoped that meant we could leave. “You see?” I said to George. “Nothing here.” Suddenly we heard drums, the regular beat of western drumming, and a parade came marching along. No one saw it, except us and the soldiers and a thin line of locals who obligatorily assembled. In my memory it seems as if the parade was going by a few inches from my nose, so large I could see only hands, faces, drums, the white and red uniforms, the sway of the legs of the stilt walkers and the purple material of their costumes, their eyes through the masks. They stopped in the middle of the plaza. The drummers played a marching tune. The clowns and stilt walkers waved and teetered around. Then they all went on.

Please know that this episode is not immediately preceeded by a scene in which George and Deb were headed to the plaza; the chapter immediate before, in fact, was about Deb admitting to her mom that she’d suddenly gotten engaged. This associative (some’d say random) narrative construction—linear but not causal—has been a cool tool among a certain sort of stylist for awhile now, but Unferth’s actually using it for larger, stranger ends, too. Of course, what the style does, first and foremost, is force/allow the reader to draw intellectual/emotional connections between disparate events which, because they crowd each other chapterly, end up feeling like they’re related: my understanding of Unferth’s engagement, and her telling her mom about the engagement, is colored by this weird hyperparade, this thing she didn’t necessarily even want to be there for, this thing which so few people saw.

But what the reader discovers as the book wraps quickly to its close is that Unferth’s been using this defamiliarizing narrative trick throughout to bring the reader in, to make the reader feel the sort of traceless confusion that Unferth seems to have felt then. Actually, not even (or not only) felt then, in her 18th year, in 1987 in Nicaragua, but in the passage of time since: Revolution is, in the end, an attempt to reckon with the past and with the younger Unferth the present Unferth is. I will submit that however that may sound, written down like that as a boring sentence, the way you’ll actually feel, reading it, is too big to name, too expansive and breath-takingly great to minimize. This is a book, fundamentally, about the self, particularly past selves, and if you’re reading anything other than this this month, February of 2011, you’re making a mistake to every self you’ve ever had, the one right now and all the ones you could later become.

And Now! The Overlooked, Part 1

by Weston Cutter

It’s November (as if you weren’t aware) and there’ve been way more books read than covered here by Corduroy Folk this year. Here’s the start of the final-scramble, an attempt at giving some blinking, glancing attention to all the great books that’ve hit this year to which we haven’t given enough time.

 

Bound by Antonya Nelson

 

Here’s what’s fun about aging: the increasing embarrassment of coming to things later and later. I was lucky to catch certain comets when I was still a kid—read Wallace young enough, ditto Powers, ditto Moore and DeLillo and etc.—but there’s all sorts of writers I’m only now getting to, here as I’m past 30. This isn’t a problem, not by any stretch, as much as its cause for slight discomfort, and that absent wonder one does—what was I reading before instead of reading this?

I’ve talked up Nelson’s short fiction before, and you for sure should be all over that work, but Bound, her latest, which came out this summer? Good lord these sentences are fantastic machines. This: “Her mother said nothing, but the silence was acquiring an interesting texture.” Or this: “While he talked and clicked and scrolled, he realized he was inviting, or perhaps merely allowing, his mother-in-law to pity him.” Or “And God was listening, it appeared; she rode bumping and pitching, sailing and banging, winding through the desert for many digressing miles.” It’s not just that the language is thickly gorgeous throughout: the depth of human understanding Nelson’s got on display page after page is just damn near shocking. Bound was one of those books which I’d pick up and put down but which I could never put down enough to get let go of by the characters witihin. Oh, and if plot’s significant: mother’s death, orphaned daughter, old friend and connections, mothers and daughters. Feel silly? Good: no encapsulation of Bound will do it decent justice.

 

Long Way Home by Bill Barich

 

Before anything else, let’s acknowledge that we all owe Barich our book dollars and reading energy simply because he wrote one of the best books ever: Laughing in the Hills (note: not one of the best sports books ever—there’s no qualifier: the thing’s one of the best, ever; it’s rubbing shoulders and elbows with tall and hard classics—it’s such a good read [if you don't have it, get it--it's really far better than you can even imagine]). As if that fact weren’t enough to guarantee a readership, let’s try this: Barich is a former NYorker writer, and now lives in Ireland and the states (he and Thomas Lynch, apparently, following the same track [Lynch's new book of poetry's great--don't know if we'll get into it deep here at Corduroy, but it's a fine book, a nice dose of formalism if that's the verse yr into]), and his latest book, Long Way Home, is subtitled On the Trail of Steinbeck’s America, meaning: you should see this book and think: I want my own Charlie to travel with.

Here’s what’s cool and interesting: Barich’s Long Way Home is the tale of him travelling just shy of 6000 miles across America in the autumn of 2008 (literally right up to the election), travelling as a native who now lives elsewhere, travelling as someone who has his serious doubts about the American experiment (like who doesn’t; especially in the autumn of 2008, who didn’t?). Here’s what’s awesome: by the book’s end, Barich has found ample evidence to keep believing in America despite the closed-minded-ness of small towns, the brutal ugliness of strip malls, the casual stupidity that seems to always be festering somewhere, everywhere. “All across America, I encountered people who weren’t threatened or cowed and still ardently believed in the bright promise of the future.” In all sorts of cool ways, the ideal companion book for Long Way Home is not, actually, Steinbeck’s Travel with Charlie, but Greil Marcus’s Shape of Things to Come. Barich’s book is a strong, frank reminder that America’s an invention, and that machinery depends on each of us investing what we can, annually, daily, to the invention. It’s a hopeful book, satisfying as hell, and as masterly written as anything you’re likely to find.

 

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender

 

Here’s why I’m dumb: because I assume that everyone knows certain things. I believe everyone knows that the best snack is chips and salsa, and that everyone knows that the Minnesota Twins are the reason to care about baseball, and that the best music in the last decade has, yes, sure, been made by Wilco and Dylan and the National and the rest, but that the real best indie stuff’s been made by un-/under-heralded bands like the Glands and Throw Me the Statue, and that the best way to watch the Wire is to just sit down and watch all the discs, back-to-back, until you’ve seen everything in one massive ingestion of brilliance.

And I assume people automatically purchase and consume art made by certain people. I assume everyone knows enough to go see whatever Christopher Nolan directs, for instance. I assume, equally dumbly, everyone knows enough to read anything by a handful of authors: Richard Powers, Lorrie Moore, Jorie Graham, Terrance Hayes, Lewis Hyde, Matthea Harvey…the list is actually pretty long on this one. Anyway, this is all sort of bullshitty preamble: I expect everyone already picked up The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake long ago, right when it came out. Why? Because nobody but Aimee Bender’s writing about a character who can sense the emotion of whoever made her meal. Because nobody but Aimee Bender can write such California-y books and make them palatable: weird, dreamy, just a touch impossibly awesome but also dark, touching without being maudlin or syrupy. This is not a review, by the way: it’s public service. You should be reading Bender. You’ve never read any Bender, you say? Good god, kid: get to work. Start wherever, go wherever. Like the best maps, you can go any direction you want through the land Bender’s made.

A Brief Public Service Announcement

by Weston Cutter

So, I’m all for (obviously) reading books, and of course there are plenty of amazing ones at the moment to keep you plenty busy. That said, it’s good to get around + see wider, and so here are a few places you should be sniffing toward:

 

 

Madras Press. Remember how excited you were when One Story hit (and then how excited you were when you got John Leary’s “Scenarios for Lee’s Forgiveness,” which is still one of the all-time great short stories ever [seriously, if you don't own that, buy it; if you know John Leary, tell him to write more and publish more and make all our lives better])? How cool it was, this one-at-a-time urge re: short stories? Or maybe you’re a McSweeney’s type, and so you remember with fondness issues 4 and 7, issues in which the stories were all individually printed/published? Well, now there’s another thing to fall for: now there’s Madras Press, and it’s a small house that’ll be publishing single novellas and short stories which, according to their site, “will cost about as much as a greeting card,” which is great, but maybe more great is the brass to, as everyone keep moaning about publishing, publish literary fiction on paper, in small batches, individually bound. For the record: the first group of stories will be available for sale tomorrow, October first, and you can go ahead and be sure to order the Aimee Bender (yes!) book that’ll be available. Seriously: check these guys out. It’s gonna be great to see what they do. And, as ever: don’t just get excited about the idea and pass it along—spend money. Buy this stuff.

 

Make Magazine. These guys are, in fact, not super new or anything–it’s been two years for them–but I haven’t seen another literary journal doing this much great stuff this quickly after their inception—I can think of few literary magazines which are this great period, regardless of lifespan and etc. (honestly: the last lit journal I thought was this good this quick out of the gate was Swink, which I adored, and which is now a husk of what it was and could’ve been, but which was, for a second there, devastatingly great). Full admission: I’ve got work in the latest Make (along with Blake Butler, who recently signed a two book deal with Harper Perennial, which is such great news it’s made my week), and I’ll be reviewing books for them regularly, and so of course I’m biased, but please believe this: I’m anxious to write for them because of how awesome the journal is; I’m not excited about how great the journal is because I’m writing. They’re a dynamite, dynamite publication (seriously, in this last issue, along with Blake Butler they’ve got Joyelle McSweeney, whose work is always worth the price of admission, plus this great interview with/among S. Elliott (Adderall Diaries) and Dave Daley (Five Chapters), plus they’re in Chicago, and they seem to throw good parties regularly, and the magazine itself is gorgeous and well put together, and just buy it and read it already, wouldjya?

 

The Outlet. Alright, have you seen what Electric Literature‘s doing? Maybe it’s more fair to say what E. Literature’s trying to do, since they’ve only just begun, but seriously: holy crap. Really. First issue? Jim Shepard. I know! (there’s 5 stories total in the first issue, and they’re all pretty good, but I’ll gladly, chin-forward, follow Shepard’s stuff anywhere). And next issue? I’m pretty sure I’ve seen something about Colson Whitehead. Again: I know! So let’s be totally honest, let’s get right down to brass tacks: publishing as we know it is, if not totally hosed and doomed, then it’s at least changing radically and wildly. While every prognosticator’s running around, talking about books on demand and e-books and readers and etc., I think what’s gonna happen, left of the dial/behind the scenes, is gonna be stuff like Make and Electric Literature and Madras (plus plenty of other great and fantastic and human-sized institutions—Pank Magazine, Two Dollar Radio, Dzanc Books [and The Collagist], Flatmancrooked) coming out and making waves and splashes. I think the reversion that the ‘death’ of ‘publishing”s gonna enforce/afford/cause is gonna be one toward community, one toward smaller, tighter-knit groups. If that’s the direction things go—and all signs point to yes (take one second to consider that McSweeney’s has, as of this week, begun offering exclusive content through an iPhone app, which app costs $5.99/6 months; McSweeney’s, whatever you think of it, is one of the best community-building publishing ventures out there)—Electric Literature should, with luck, play a significant role in that community, should continue to be another wild fun playground of idea and art. Oh! by the way: The Outlet’s Electric Literature’s blog, which is what this is ostensibly all about. It’s a stellar site. It’s far, far better than this site–you should be reading that one instead.

Interview with Aimee Bender

by Weston Cutter

            Maybe four years ago now, I got the lucky chance to interview Aimee Bender, and I’d been hoping to land the interview but ended up unable to find a home for it. Since I started this site, I’ve been meaning to put it up, and through some combo of laziness and insecurity (that the interview’s old, that I was young when I did it [and asked young questions, I think]) I’ve kept convincing myself not to put it up.

            All that’s over: here’s the interview. I’m pretty sure we did this interview in the summer of ’05, when Willful Creatures was coming and after Ms. Bender’d recently had something in the great Secret Society of Demolition Writers. Aimee Bender’s personal site is here, a great interview with her is up here at Powell’s, here are three maps she drew and which were published in Ecotone (and here’s the book about the place Aimee’s mapping), and here’s an incredible essay she had this summer about moths and flies and marriage.

            If you haven’t read Aimee Bender yet, there’s a good chance that your life is more frustrating and less joyful than it could be. Consider her writing to be an experience similar to what life was like before you discovered tea or coffee, whichever’s your non-alcoholic beverage of choice.

            Three books she’s written: two collections of stories (Girl in the Flammable Skirt and, the most recent one, Willful Creatures) and the novel An Invisible Sign of My Own. She teaches at USC. She’s got dark hair and, if you can download her podcast from Powells.com, a fun voice to listen to.

: Okay, so questions. All of the following are just loose guidelines and if there’s something that’s more interesting to say than the answer I’ve set you up for, by all means. I don’t really suppose, actually, that any of this pre-ambulatory stuff is important at all, but just in case. No matter what: thank you so much for your books. As a complete aside: a few  years ago, like a year and a half, you got a letter from a kid in Minneapolis and you couldn’t read his name but you responded, addressed him W. That was me.

            Ah yes! I remember that letter! I’m delighted it’s you.  Hello then, again, now that you have more letters with your name.

: Who are you reading now? Who did you read before, and before that? Is there some group or style or school or anything that you see as particularly substantive and true at the moment?

            True in what way?  I am reading, currently– some Sharon Olds‘s poems, and now even more happily so after she said she wouldn’t read at the White House.  I’m reading Observatory Mansions by Edward Carey.  I’m reading Ben Marcus’s essay on experimentation which I am liking a whole lot.  I am blurbing a couple of books– short stories and a novel.  I do think there’s a lot of very lively fiction out there right now– George Saunders has a new book I want to read, and Sal Plascencia’s The People of Paper is incredibly permission-giving and I hear Julia Slavin’s new novel is terrific. 

: How do you like teaching at USC? Did you teach before elsewhere? Is there (for example with People of Paper) some bright sense of pride when your students publish and are  well received?

            Before USC, I was teaching all over LA– UCLA, Caltech; before then, at UC Irvine.  Before that, elementary school.  I love it when students publish. It’s thrilling, and gives everyone hope, and it feels like winning a baseball game or something.  That said, someone like Sal knew from the get-go what his book needed to be, and it was just exciting to witness his process as it happened. 

: How did you get into writing, like as a way to live, as publishing and books and etc?

            It was slow.  I was in graduate school, and sending out stories, and then there were enough stories for a collection, and I went looking for agents and it started to happen from there.  I wanted to publish a book, but I was still amazed when it actually happened.  I still have moments where I am surprised, that I am a writer. 

: Do you have an equal affinity for both short stories and novels? Will the next one be a novel, or do you not think and work that far ahead?

            I work on lots at once, so I have a novel cooking along, and another novel that is either simmering or dead, and I work on short stories along the way.  I do like both forms so much– I write more stories more quickly, but I love that a novel is unknown for so long; it both pains me and thrills me.

: What do you listen to (Red House Painters, railroad cars late at night, coyotes)?

            I’ve been trying to listen more to real-world sounds.  I wish there were railroad cars nearby! What a great thought.  I just listened to Iron and Wine. They’re pretty great.  I listen to a lot of NPR.  I like listening to guitar without words, too.  John Fahey.  I like it when I can remember to take the time to listen to what’s happening out the window– be it birds or cars or people, talking.  Even on their cell phones.

: How did that profile thing in the NYTimes Magazine come about, where you talked about your house and etc? How, also, was the experience of doing the Secret Society of Demolition Writers?

            I knew the writer of that profile indirectly, and they were looking for a female writer, so from there it happened.  It was funny, and fun, and strange, talking about things like what kind of frozen pizza I liked.  The Secret Society was a treat, because Marc Parent, the editor, was such a pleasure to work with: supportive, thoughtful in his edits, enthused.  I have a terrible time guessing who’s who.

: One of the reasons your stories are so absolutely fucking breathtaking is how true they are of themselves: there’s a strength in them to just go wherever the story is bound to go, an integrity, I guess, that puts story above language, plot, anything. How do you…? I almost don’t know how to really ask the question. Here, perhaps: so one of the theories of evolution is that all the elements were right on earth and then, suddenly, wham: there was the presentation of some electrical field, some power applied, and cells joined other cells and suddenly things started moving in new ways. Your stories seem to be just the electrical/power current that comes along and zaps things to life. Are you aware of that while you’re writing? Do you revise endlessly? Did you go through some time where you just wrote the classic ‘straight’ story, terse and cutting sentences (I’m thinking of that just  because George Saunders, in an interview, said he did, for awhile, write the really terse Hemingway-ish stuff, but then realized it wasn’t where his power was)? This is probably just a really long, overtly unclear attempt at asking: how the hell do you do it?

            The thing is, your question is the same way.  You let the question associate to something within itself, and it’s a very compelling and great question!  I love the electrical field image. So, in that, you were following your thought and letting it ride.  Same thing with the stories.  I try to just go where-ever it’s going, and yes, I revise a ton. I reread a ton. I hack a lot out of the story and I add a lot, and I just try to sit with it and grope around in there.  When I’m stuck, I move onto something else.  I did go through a time, yes, where I was writing what I felt might be more acceptable stories, and they were dull as can be.  I read that Saunders interview as well, and strongly identified with that feeling, with the great relief of putting aside what felt like a writerly ‘should’ and moving onto what was actually working.

: Simply because you’re connected, a bit, with the only overt ‘movement’ in literature (that I know of) at the moment, McSweeneys, and because they clearly have a political bent, do you also have a political bent that you think your books can/should/may address? Not moral fiction, but fiction with multiple citizenships, maybe: to itself and story, to good and left and more empathizing culture, to the color green?

            I suppose some of the bent comes from a desire to think freely, to let the story move freely.  To have space for all sorts of ideas and styles.  And in a way, that is political.  I feel so strongly that writing needs to be whatever it has to be to get a feeling across, and the form it takes should serve that feeling.  It’s also my belief in feminism– at a reading once, a student asked: “why are your women characters so broken? Do you feel a need to have strong female characters?” And I thought, well, no. Because brokenness is as true as strength, and it feels like a gesture of strength and freedom and progress, for women to write as honestly as we can.  Honesty is tough– I think I really rely on the surrealism/whatever you want to call it as a way to contend with the difficulty of stating things truthfully. 

: And what do you think literature can do, overall? Totally seriously. Not like validate your existence and books, but what do you think literature can do, what do you hope yours might do?

            Awhile back I was reading after watching a lot of TV and film, and the characters in the book I was reading were so flawed, so deeply flawed and unresolved, and I thought: oh.   Right. This is why it’s so key.  There’s something about the internal access to characters, to seeing what they’re doing and also seeing that they may improve/they may not that feels so, so important.  Although I love fairy tales, and I write fairy tales, I do think the neat ending, the pat finale is a dangerous expectation, and I honestly look to literature for complexity. Not to say TV and film can’t have that– sometimes they do. But it is harder, to see that complexity without a narrator, or without access into the internal life of a character, and that is what writing can do, without even blinking an eye.  And all this is done with language!  Literature reminds us about words, puts us face to face with words.  And like it or not, we are all married to words.

: Have you always lived in LA? What do you like and not like about it (loaded question: I don’t like the place and I’m always curious what others do enjoy of it)?

            I’ve lived in California most of my life, not always LA.  I have mixed feelings about LA but it is a good city– it’s a major metropolis, with such a huge range of people and art and style. The first layer of LA, the botox driving boob job shallow LA– yuck. But, in fact, it’s really easy to peel that layer back and suddenly find a really diverse, lively city, where all art forms that aren’t film are happily plugging along, and where it can be exciting, too, to happen upon a film trailer on the street next door, and where all sorts of interesting outreach is happening too.  I like big cities, and even though LA is a sprawling one, I like that it is an invigorating one, too.  And the beach is good.

: What’s the view out your window?

            A big leafy tree, and a pink building that reminds me of Greece, though I’ve never been to Greece.