Further Updates + Elsewheres

by Weston Cutter

Just for the record: CBooks has (geographically) moved this past year, in fact just this past month, hence the paucity and quiet. Things’ll be coming back sortly, be appraised. Of course, the speed with which this place gets back to more regular posting depends a bit on where else time’s being drawn with other work, of which there’s been a bit lately. Meaning:

Still going strong at the Kenyon Review, with posts here and here (both basically reviews, with digressions).

I reviewed Paul Maliszewski’s fantastic Prayer and Parable for the Mpls Star Trubine; I’ve been waiting for this book since 2003, and was thrilled to finally get the whole thing, and the review for the Strib’s short because they’ve got word-counts to consider and everything, but, really, you should be reading this book pronto.

(Maliszewski’s one of those ‘experimental’ writers whose work’s fundamentally driven by non-character engines—the scenario, the world of the story, dictates the eventual shape of the story as much as anything else. In this he’s lots like Helen DeWitt, whose Lightning Rods is coming this October and is fantastic. I’d be curious who else writes like this, this almost Borgesian way, in which schema/systems are as critical for book movement and heft as anything else [Barthelme, obviously, too][Danielewski's great in HoL, and, sure, his other stuff's systems-based, but don't pretend it's good writing—he's gone so far that the system/rules now dictate everything; reading him feels like listening to someone sing individual notes with perfect clarity for exactly 1 minute at a time and expecting thunderous applause for technical mastery].)

For what it’s worth: Blake Butler’s done some amazing stuff recently at HTMLGiant, not least putting up his submission list from 2006-2008. I’m personally interested in such a thing because 1) I like Blake and his work and 2) it was through a submission that I met the man. I have nothing exciting or sexy to say about what he posted, but when it went up I felt like it was just so fucking yes I didn’t know where to begin. Maybe this: Blake’s one of the younger writers it seems like lots of folks talk about, at least right at present this year, and I happen to mostly loathe some of the other younger writers getting press lately, and Blake’s response to people giving him attention seems one of the most generous and good things he could possibly do: he showed the work involved, what things too, the costs. Way too many younger writers are convinced that there’s some magic involved in securing an agent and a pub deal and etc., and I’m sure there are folks who’ve had different experiences, but shit is it a good public service of Blake to put up exactly how many submissions it took him—in just a two year period—to get to where he’s now got. If more writers owned up to this I think we could demystify the shit out of the whole snarky business (and I’ll note that this post is ironic in the extreme given Blake’s earlier piece: one’d think that writers should be those least inclined to flex any jealousy muscles, given that we all know the fucking insane amounts of work that go into getting things out and published. I’ll also submit that the line “Poets are the most jealous type of artist” might be the single fucking stupidest sentence I’ve read in a year, if not more).

Real Quick

by Weston Cutter

I’m blogging for the next while at the Kenyon Review Blog, and I’ve had a couple things over there recently, hence Corduroy being a bit quieter than it should otherwise be. Like everyone, as ever: I keep hoping more time just magically presents itself.

Here’s a review I’ve been waiting for for awhile–my book’s been reviewed in the Star Tribune. A note, too: authors actually don’t mind reviews that point out the bad crap in the book, especially when it’s bad copy editing. I’ve been waiting for a review to point out the mistakes for awhile–nice to just see it out there.

Also, just because it’s fascinating (I think): Blake Butler posted, on HTMLGiant, the list of everywhere he submitted to in 2006-08. For unclear reasons I’m hugely hit by seeing it.

Four Quicks

by Weston Cutter

So Much Pretty by Cara Hoffman

The Gospel of Anarchy by Justin Taylor

There Is No Year by Blake Butler

Three Stages of Amazement by Carold Edgarian

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

 

Edgarian:

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

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

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

 

Butler/Taylor:

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

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

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

 

Hoffman:

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

Patrick Somerville + HAPPY NEW YEAR

by Weston Cutter

I can, fortunately or un-, remember exactly when it was I last read a book of stories as compelling and gasp-inducingly fucking gorgeous as Patrick Somerville’s The Universe in Miniature in Miniature: it was four years ago, and it was Kelly Link’s Magic for Beginners. There’ve been great collections since then, of course—Blake Butler‘s Scortch Atlas comes instantly to mind, plus every collection ever by Jim Shepard—but it’s been a long, long time since I’ve been this knocked back and shocked by a book.

I started this book on a plane flying from Iowa to Atlanta, and Ellen was beside me, reading her own book, and I had to damn near put my hand over my mouth to keep from constantly, botheringly interrupting her, hitting her with these sentences which were, at 34,000 feet hitting me hard as hell. That, more than anything else, is the Somerville magic, or at least where it’s most clearly manifest: in sentences. Here’s a good sample, drawn entirely at random:

“Lucy says we aren’t watching to see if he will die. ‘That would miss the whole point,’ she says. ‘And besides,’ she says, ‘that would be, like, cruel.’” (“Universe/Miniature/Miniature”)

“I recognized it from the one time I had done it in Grayson, when I’d first come back to the midwest. I’d met an old friend and we’d gone to the playground at the same elementary school we’d attended twenty years before. He had gotten into ATV sales or something. I’d spent a lot of time having fourth-grade memories come into my head, not really knowing whether they were real or whether I was making them up—they’d been too pleasant, in a way, and didn’t fit into my haunted, dark-enchanted-forest sense of childhood. The kind where the trees eat little boys. He’d asked me why I came back, and I said “It was so lonely out there,” which had felt basically true, and then we’d smoked the meth.” (“No Sun”)

“Phil is not much of a researcher, or a reader, or someone who thinks anything through. For him to be preparing is a meaningful development. It’s like a horse reading The Celestine Prophecy.” (“Hair University”)

Look, I could keep going on and on like this—honestly, every page, or, at very least, every third page, featured lines like these—lines which featured a loose, chummy, playful confidence, lines which just fucking shone with good.

It’s worth me at least acknowledging all the ways I’m predisposed to liking this book. First, it’s Somerville, and his The Cradle knocked me sideways two years (or whenever) back. Second, it’s out from Featherproof, and if there’s a more interesting press publishing more gorgeous books—I’m talking all presses now, indie or big guys—I don’t know of it. Third, the book’s not only midwestern, but features one of my all-time favorite tricks of midwest fiction: it’s set in a fictitious town! I admit this may be a moderately silly adoration on my part, but seriously: fictitious midwest towns are where it’s at. Someday somebody smart’ll put together an amazing atlas of fictitious towns (for the record: one of this year’s upcoming devastators is Alan Heathcock’s Volt, which is a powerhorse of a collection as well, and that whole thing? It’s set in Krafton, another fake midwestern town). Anyway, those are three legitimate beefs you could cite regarding my overwhelming enthusiasm for Somerville and Universe/Miniature/Miniature.

But still…you should believe. You should believe how good this book is. Look again at that long passage from the story called “No Sun”—in which, by the way, the sun stops shining (not really: the world stops spinning, but the result’s the same). The genius of Universe is in the decisions at sentence level: that whole paragraph’s just about the moment a character spots some meth on a gas station’s counter, yet look at what you get, look at all you’re being given by this generous, incredible author—not just the ass-kicking fireworky stuff (“didn’t fit into my haunted, dark-enchanted-forest sense of childhood. The kind where the trees eat little boys.”), but the quieter, plainer stuff (“He’d asked me why I came back, and I said “It was so lonely out there,” which had felt basically true, and then we’d smoked the meth.”). Look, here’s a simple quiz: if you’re the sort of reader who just fell sideways over reading Cather/Rye and Holden’s description of his brother’s red hair (right at the start—Holden teeing up at the golf course—go to the shelf, pull it down and read, it’s before page 13), you need to read Universe/Miniature just for the sentences alone, for the associative glory of them. These are sentences propped one after another by someone with a phenomenal sense of how to make a reader comfortable, how to befriend a reader with nothing more than sentence order.

If that’s not your thing, though, you’re still not off the hook. Like gorgeous books? Pick this thing up–and, please, write a letter to Featherproof, let them know how spectacular the actual object is. Like pictures in your book? There’s pictures in here. Like fiction which is attempting to solve or address questions of empathy, aloneness, the boundaries of self, the difficulty of truly connecting and being with and loving another?

See how that snuck up?

It’s easy to flap arms and shout about Somerville’s sentences—they are really, really, really that good. What Somerville’s actually doing in these stories—the things he’s trying to make happen among and to his characters—is orders of magnitude more difficult and gorgeous. Here’s another quiz: in a non-Gardner way, are you interested in moral fiction? That is, fiction which, in some way, attempts to address how it feels to be alive and trying to connect to people and feel honest, decent love, to make do—and, actually, not just fiction which addresses it, but which honestly reckons with the difficulties, the threats, the risks, the attendant harm of all those enterprises?

This sounds lofty. It is. Not for nothing did Wallace couch such questions in futuristic tellings of tennis academies and halfway houses, and Somerville, in his collection, couches such questions in strange quasi-science-y ways. In these stories, the earth stops spinning, there’s a machine for understanding other people, an ox and man are burned on the same pyre. The word and idea of Pangea comes up more times than I kept track of. There are—maybe I’ve said this—some of the best sentences written in a long while.

Look, just read this book. It’s the new year. You’ve got resolutions. I guarantee that, if you’re generous with your definitions and yourself, reading Patrick Somerville’s The Universe in Miniature in Miniature will fulfill at least two of them, maybe more. Read and be amazed. Read and be grateful.

Three

by Weston Cutter

Kristina Born’s One Hour of Television is, above all else, a mastery of rhythm. Most times when we read books we’re not thinking of pages as being rhythmic, as carrying a time signature, yet there they are, sprawled out, numbered, and aside from Jenny Boully’s The Book of Beginnings and Endings and DFW’s Brief Interviews, I’ve never read a book which actually made use of the rhythm of pages (Boully’s because each odd-numbered-page [the ones on the right] were starts, and the even numbers [left] were the ends; Wallace’s Interviews is, as far as I know, the only book which has the evens and odds inverted, and I’m not sure what the intent was other than him starting the book with “A Radically Condensed History…” on page zero, but there [obviously] was method).

So what is this, One Hour of Television. It’s a waltz, essentially, though porous: there are three recognizable voices and, whiplashingly, they braid through the text. Are there three voices? There seem to be three voices, though I’d guess a good argument could be made for different ways to read these voices. For sure there’s a first-person narrator who, with his friend/enemy Jean-Phillipe, makes his way ultimately toward a gambling table, and whose relationship with Jean-Phillipe is the coaxing river of what-the-hell that keeps the boat up and drift. There are, along with this first-person’s voice (about whom the reader knows next to nothing—name, visage, tastes—other than he has a wife, though that relationship gets complicated because of/through Jean-Phillipe), two other voices, and though we know next to nothing about these two as well, what we do know is fascinating.

(This book, by the way, is maybe flash fiction, maybe poetry; I’m not sure. Each page features prose of varying lengths, the shortest entries featuring two words, the longest stretching somewhere not absurdly past 150 or so words. We’ll get to the writing and everything further down, but the magnificently fascinating and satisfying part of the book is, yes, certaintly, partly the writing involved, but the big oomph has to do with the ride of it, which has everything to do with narration, everything to do with the story’s rhythm. Know Brubeck’s “Take Five,” or, more recently, Radiohead’s “15 Step”? How both songs are almost mathematically addictive? How the songs beg enjoyment while also begging you to spend time/energy ‘solving’ for the rhythm, begging you to learn how to tap them out on your thighs sitting there on the couch or whatever? Kristina Born’s One Hour of Television asks a similar mathematical awareness.)

The other two voices are distinct, weirdly (weird because they’re both implacable, un-touchable). One voice is first person plural, and the ‘we’ involved seem fundamentally In Charge (of what? Of television? Of the election that’s ostensibly happening within this book [there are sections in this book: there's "The Campaign" for 40+ pages, then "One Hour of Tevision" for another 40+, then "Who Voted" for another 40+, and you see that? The triptych the text itself is structured according to? You think I'm kidding about this being a waltz [though when I say 'waltz' please in your own head hear 'fractured/scratched waltz, a waltz more scratched and darker than, say, even Tom Waits or any recognizable musician's idea: this is a waltz sung to tires from knives, hummed by every fingernail that doesn't but wishes to claw at something]). This ‘we’ says things like “On the one hand we can’t be attacked; on the other hand we try to order pizza and end up calling in a missle strike. We don’t even know where.” [p.61]. This ‘we’ seems fundamentally in-control and fundamentally unclear about what ‘control’ even means. Without sounding lame and airless, this ‘we’ has all sorts of power but is living someplace/some-moment in which ‘power’ as it’s understood doesn’t mean much, or at least not in any way to this ‘us’.

The third voice is harder to parse, and, honestly, I’m not sure about it (I’m sure about it as art, as it works in the book, but I’m not sure I’m ‘right’ in how I’ve understood it). It’s another ‘us’ but one more powerless, seemingly: this ‘we’ doesn’t call in accidental airstrikes; this one’s more put-upon, less acting-out. Does this make sense?

Here’s the thing: I’m not certain about One Hour of Television. He’s what I’m 100% sure about, though: It’s not necessary to be certain about One Hour of Television (to be certain about what it ‘means’ or, even, what it ‘means’; it’s a text which, in the best and most frustrating ways, does, and of course to handle a text that’s exclusively doing demands not reviews or anything else but reading the fucking thing). It’s a hard-edged book which asks sideways and gives oddly and I read it all in one sitting, flying from Omaha to Chicago, seat 20A, and I’m not a huge fan of flying and get occasionally white-knuckled at the turbulence and One Hour of Television both made the turbulence more and less. I can’t explain it, thank fuck, which, I suppose, is the whole point of reading to begin with. As in: go read.

(And it’d be dumb not to note: the book’s published by Year of the Liquidator, which is run by Shane Jones [Penguin version of Light Boxes hits in May, remember] and Blake Butler [Scortch Atlas is yours for the purchasing; two more coming from him in the upcoming-ish], and if for no other reason get excited that smart people still put their energy toward shit that blows up in non-destructive ways [I'm looking at you, bankers and warriors]).