End of Year Attempted Catch Up

by Weston Cutter

Now that it’s five seconds from the new year there are, as always, suddenly these books I meant to cover yet which went uncovered. It happens every year; my surprise is as constant as there being no need for it. Anyway, for the next couple weeks: catch-up on books that should’ve been covered here, books that were read and relished but for whatever reason got missed.

 

Waging Heavy Peace by Neil Young

Bruce by Peter Ames Carlin

Both Flesh and Not by Wallace

 

1. You should purchase and read these books. Maybe. I’m not sure.

2. I have a harder and harder time with music books, at least those trying to be fairly direct. The Wallace we’ll get to further below. Also a harder and harder time with books that are ultimately trying to cartograph a fairly known person.

3. Here’s the thing: what do you want to know about Neil Young or the Boss? Or equally: why do you want to know about Young/Boss? I’m not remotely the first person to ask these questions; maybe everyone asks, and I’m just getting to it. But for real: would reading anything make “Helpless” or “Rosalita” or whatever different?

4. I love Paul Westerberg and the Replacements, love Big Star, love the Roots, love Stan Getz. I’m trying to think who else. Love Wilco’s first four, hugely. Love Gillian Welch. I’m just trying to list stuff here. You’ve got your own list, certainly.

5. But here’s the thing: The more I’ve read about any of those bands and people, the less I end up feeling. I’d like to unread most of what I know about folks who make art I like. There are exceptions—Lyle Lovett getting his leg busted seems important to have known. If I didn’t know Westerberg was from Minnesota, I’d want to know that. But otherwise I’m more and more aware that the music either is or isn’t, and that’s it. Is this what happens when one enters his or her mid-30s? I mean that honestly: if you have an answer, please leave a comment.

6. (Wallace said something along these lines in his intro to Best American Essays, about how he wished he knew less about celebrities than he already does. Smart and astute, but I think he meant in an exhausted, I-can’t-escape-celebrity-culture way, which isn’t this).

7. Take your favorite song. Here’s mine: “I Am the Cosmos” by Chris Bell. Read more about it wherever (JJSullivan wrote a cool essay on Bell awhile back, which I regret not asking him about, but whatever). Here’s how much I like that song: I know he had it mixed be Geoff Emerick, the guy who engineered the Beatles’ stuff. I know it was released as a 45 on some vanishingly small run by Car Records, and I know that, rarely, copies of the 45 hit ebay, and some of us pay for them (I bought mine for 1/7 the cheapest price I’ve seen recently, which data I include here only to make myself feel better). I know lots about all of this—that Chris Bell’s brother put together what ended up being Bell’s lone full-length (titled I Am the Cosmos, released by Ryko in the 90′s), that Bell killed himself/died in a car crash in 78, that he found heroin and Jesus, that he’s in It Came from Memphis. I know that his keening, pleading voice at the song’s very end, when he sings “Really want to see you again” puts a fucking knife in my throat almost every time I hear it, and that the song was covered by the Posies/Big Star on the Live at Columbia disc from ’94, etc. etc. etc. This isn’t me proving bona-fides or something: I’m trying to say that I’ve dug into the song pretty thoroughly (I’m sparing all sorts of less important shit that can’t possibly be interesting to more than maybe four dozen folks).

8. Here’s the thing: all of that above about Bell doesn’t change a lick of “Cosmos,” and when you hear the song it will either melt you as it should or it won’t. No amount of data can change that, no matter the sort of data.

9. All of which is to say: Bruce and Waging Heavy Peace are fine for what they are, but if you, like me, find yourself in a place in which you’d rather just listen to the damn song, whatever the song is, than read about every last aspect of it, these books might drag. I love Neil Young, and I looooooooooooooove Springsteen, and I now know more about how Young bought his place in northern California, and the sort of vehicle he drives there, and I now know that Springsteen’s been on antidepressants for awhile, and that he was a sort of colossal jackass to an old girlfriend way back. I know these things. Okay.

10. It’s complicated. I don’t think there’s an answer. I’d buy these two books, honestly. I would. I’ve read so many fucking books on music it’s not even funny—that great thick Willie Nelson one from ’08, all G Marcus’s stuff, the bulk of the Dylan tomes (including the ones about specific albums, specific songs), all sorts. Just endless. I can’t help it. When someone writes the story of any band that’s helped build my insides, I can’t help it. I have, upstairs at present, a book which literally details what the Beatles did every day from their start to the day they broke up. No joke. I used to have certain dates memorized, for reasons eclipsing imagination or recollection. Music books are shocking draws. Fucking Our Band Could Be Your Life—need I say more?

11. But what’s weird, at least for me, is that, ultimately, all I want to do is just listen to the music. I’ve never read a word that’s made one note of “Born to Run” or “Here Comes a Regular” or anything better. Do I care that Springsteen worked on “Born to Run” as long and hard as he did? Sure. Does knowing his background—how he grew up in New Jersey, his relationship to his dad—do anything to the music? Not really. Good to know? Hard to say. What I’m trying to say is: sure, read the books, but nothing’s gonna make “Old Man” or “Tunnel of Love” suddenly sound even better.

 

Obvious q: what could possibly do that anyway?

 

A. Wallace’s Both Flesh and Not is, sure, of course, worth having. Some of us have this stuff already, downloaded it back when it was available on Howling Fantods, and some of us have been passing to friends, for years, old .doc files of “The Nature of the Fun” or “Fictional Futures” or whatever, but it’s nice to finally have these things in book form.

A. And of course it’s a sort of b-sides/outtakes LP, this book. None of these save the Federer piece seem like things Wallace would’ve used in a next collection of essays (aside from the Federer one, unless I’m mistaken, all these pieces are old enough that Wallace in fact chose against including them in either Lobster or Fun). The pieces here feel alternately like watching a slugger take BP, or like watching a VHS tape of some phenom’s junior-high years. If you’re like me, you’ll eat this shit up—again, I’ve had most of these (including, yes, the “Twenty-Four Word Notes”) for a good while.

A. But the impulse behind the book, akin to the impulse behind the Springsteen and Young books, has something to do with an imagined equation balancing Total Knowing or Exposure with Getting Genius. Or something like that. Look, we listen to every single last Beatles (or Radiohead, or Indigo Girls, or whoever: pick your music) outtake because we believe something’s there. Either 1) the outtakes by the best bands are better than the perfectly polished takes by everybody else (sometimes true), or 2) we want to more fully understand the steps that got the band/artist to the moments we fell for. If you believe the first statement, then stuff like this Wallace book are fine—and the writing is good, even the toss-off stuff (that piece that ran in Might about AIDS seems to hold up least well). If you believe the second thing, there’s trouble.

A. To whit: on the old VHS of the Beatles visiting Ed Sullivan, there’s a moment in which John, in their hotel room, plays a mouth piano thing, and he plays the intro to “Strawberry Fields Forever.” You see it and you just….get sort of undone in time. If you like cultural things, books/music/movies, your life’s parceled by them in ways, delineated: there’s life before you listened to Pet Sounds, and there’s life after. And there’s of course this fascination for those of us whose lives have been changed by experiencing these things, a fascination about where this thing came from. Almost like there’s a faith that if we could understand the ingredients that led to the thing that gave us this experience, we’d…I don’t know. Feel it more? Believe it more?

A. Here’s the thing: that’s sort of bullshit. Nothing will get us, those who experience the art, to the process by which the art was made—or, better, we can get there, but it’s fucking dull, and the art is what ultimately obtains and lasts. This Wallace is fine (this is being written by a guy who literally has every published thing, all the books of the last few years, the Considerations and Interviews and etc.). I don’t know. Maybe it’s just me. It sucks that Wallace is dead. It sucks that there’s not gonna be more writing from him. It’s fascinating that he’s now this thing folks can sit around and attempt to decode and decide about. I can say this: in all of what I’ve read since his death, not one thing’s changed how I felt originally reading “Good Old Neon,” the echoey blast that thing had on my a night in like October of ’02, ot how the thing still hits. Nothing’s gonna change how it felt to walk around, winter of 2000, reading my crappily printed-off (from the Dalkey site) copy of the big Larry McCaffery interview, saying to myself again and again, just to feel it on my tongue, “Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.” If you want to be a completist: get the book. If you believe there’s more of Wallace to ‘discover,’ or that knowing more about him’s gonna do anything for how his genius work actually hits you, find a different book.

Wallace Forever

by Weston Cutter

I was never as simultaneously excited and sad about a book as I was for Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, DTMax‘s bio of David Foster Wallace, and I’m not remotely alone or unique on this: I was thrilled because it was the first bio of one of my literary heroes, and sad because the bio existed because the man no longer did. I spend so much time here talking about Wallace that I sort of forget that perhaps folks don’t even know who he is, or perhaps folks’ve started to understand him historically—he was some legend. He has after all now been gone four years as of one week from now. But here’s the thing: Wallace was huge and real, and his suicide was the rawest rip. This sounds cheesy, but it gets at something accurately: as soon as the news of his death spread (the story broke on a Friday night), the McSweeney’s website went entirely white (am I remembering this wrong? You could actually scroll down, like the whiteness was of depth and length), and instead of some cute phrase at the top (today’s: Timothy McSweeney takes his cookies straight), I think it just said Timothy McSweeney is brokenhearted or something. Maybe very very sad. The thing that was crucial, though, was the blankness of the page—McSweeney’s, which may be the most obviously in-Wallace’s-debt literary organization in the universe (in good ways, I think), just blank, as if something’d exploded and cast everythign in this huge, awful can’t-look light. Or anyway that’s the way it read to me.

And now it’s been four years, and now there are no more holy-shit essays to amaze us and force us to look at some aspect of the world in a new way, and now there’s likely no more fiction ever and The Pale King will have to be enough, and now the books-about industry for the man cranks to life (this year there’ve been now three; there was another in ’11, I think), and now every last aspect of the life and literary magic of Wallace’s life gets fast-tracked for publication, and we all read it (I’m talking the tiniest, least-consequential things: his senior thesis from Amherst, say), and and and. There’s no end to this. I bring all this up simply because…because Christ, it’s been four years, and this guy who wrote the absolute best stuff of anyone for a decade, he’s gone, and it still fucking sucks.

Which is where Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, by D. T. Max (whom I interviewed for the Kenyon Review Blog) comes in. It’s a book which will do lots of things for or to your insides, good and bad, some of which might include: make you remember how thrilling it was to read Jest in the first place (if you love Wallace for Jest, this bio will be very helpful and good; if you got into Wallace through the essays or stories, you’ll have a harder time: Jest is the only book which, ultimately, stands full straight in this book—every other book, fiction or non, is somehow a compromise; Jest is an Achievement [or at least seems one through all the correspondence Wallace did at the time] the whole way through, even as it was edited for publication); make you suddenly, deeply aware of just how huge was the depression in Wallace’s life (this is especially true if you’re not intimately familiar with clinical depression), and how huge a role the depression and its corresponding anxieties and struggles played in Wallace’s life; and, maybe, make you understand why Wallace was and will likely remain such a singular talent, and why his work is unlikely to be eclipsed in terms of heart or morality by anyone (simply because, as one can discover here, dude just cared about this stuff more than anyone, thought about it all in terms of fiction much more than anyone else I know of).

(Before going further: a piece of correspondence between Wallace and I is in Every Love Story. I wrote to Wallace, like lots of other folks, when I was in my 20s and his work hit and spoke like nothing else (the letter used in the book was one I sent basically immediately after reading Conjunctions 37, in which his “Good Old Neon” debuted and which is, I think, still a piece of fiction unlikely to be eclipsed). I bring up my involvement/inclusion in the book here just to acknowledge it—lots of us exchanged letters with the guys, and as rad as the letters were to get, and as glad as I am to have them, I’d of course burn any of them to have the man back alive, in the flesh, writing and being present for his friends and family.)

So, how is Every Love Story as an actual, you know, book? This is weird. I read the thing in a total of I think 6 hours, and I loved it, and I’m trying really, really hard to be clear with myself about how the actual book was, versus just how I thought and felt about it because of how I feel about the subject. I think this, more than anything else: Wallace was a tricky figure, or at least trickier than any of my friends or I are—there was a multivalent way of stories about the guy, according to Max’s narrative, and he provides plenty of evidence: all those times in interviews Wallace’d talk shit about something like the public perception of him, he’d be hand-wringingly hysteric about the same fact in private letters, as just one example. He lied, or led, anyway, various existences depending on audience. Maybe that was necessary for him. Hard to say. One feels a pain for Big Craig, the guy who was clearly the basis of Gately in Jest. And then one feels a sort of weird pain for having been so certain that Wallace was just inventing all this stuff, and for feeling a bit let down to discover that he wasn’t. And then maybe one feels even weirder about, say, having made such a stink about how much of a prick Richard Yates was—that bio was just merciless about him, that Blake Bailey one—only to here discover that Wallace was a pretty sizeable prick as well, and used just as much bio info in his stuff, in his way, as did poor old Yates.

So I guess what I’d like to say more than anything about Every Love Story is that it complicates the hell out of Wallace. The correspondence between he and I that’s in the book is about how one keeps doing work and believing in shit when the overwhelming evidence is that such pursuits are silly, fruitless, etc., and his response was: “This is like listening to a transcript of my own mind.” In the interview with DT Max, there was a line I didn’t include, which was this: he asked, during our phone conversation, how I felt when I got that letter from Wallace, and I told Max that I felt weirdly sort of let down. Wallace was basically just assenting to and agreeing with what I’d written in my letter, and I was 24 then, and I wanted someone to say IT GETS TOTALLY DIFFERENT LATER DON’T WORRY. But the truth was that I didn’t feel let down by the letter, or maybe I felt a little of that, but, as much as anything, I was thrilled that he said my letter to him was like a transcript of his own head. I was thrilled! My head and his head were alike! It was perfect. And I guess ultimately what Every Love Story is a Ghost Story makes any of us think is this: if we’ve fallen for Wallace, it’s because of his perfect, wonderful voice that made you feel like he was right there, smart and beside you, making you smarter, making you feel intimate, unalone. And I remember thinking, almost a decade ago, that something like that’d be a good goal, and what fun that’d be to write like that. And I suppose there’s still that enticement, to a degree, but Every Love Story makes shatteringly clear not just the cost of such effort on the part of Wallace, but also the reasons for his reaching out like that—his desire to make life be something bigger than just little games of showing off, being smart, whatever. What Every Love Story makes terribly, excruciatingly clear is how hard Wallace had to work to make his spark-casting genius secondary to his heart. Such an effort is, when you think about it, fucking incredible, and if you’re like me you’ll finish Every Love Story sniffling because of how unlikely it seems that such a combo of strength and frailty and genius and fear will come around again any time soon, and how lonesome it is without Wallace’s voice.

Going All the Way with John Jeremiah Sullivan: An Interview

by Weston Cutter

John Jeremiah Sullivan’s got a modest, measured voice, a thing that I can’t help but thinking of as having sounded sturdy. His voice sort of reminds me of someone’s, though I can’t think of who that person is.

In my eight or so years of interviewing people I’ve yet to comment on anyone’s voice though Sullivan seems worthy to be the exception—his voice, on the page, has been among the most fantastic and gorgeous of the last decade or so. Tempted though I am, I will not here mention at length how Sullivan’s voice is among the very best going in contemporary nonfiction, and I will absolutely not go to lengths about how, for those of us who will never be able to get enough Wallace, Sullivan is who we should now be tracking (reasons for not going to lengths on that: seemingly everyone everywhere puts Sullivan and Wallace together).

What I will say is that Pulphead is among the year’s best books, and any time Sullivan’s got new work in any magazine anywhere is reason for celebration, and also this: there is a difference between Sullivan and Wallace, a significant and real difference. Though both writers will, if you’re reading them correctly, make you a better person, and will make you see the world bigger and with more color and strangeness and also more love, Sullivan’s work ultimately seems to be asking for or providing something different from Wallace’s, a less whiz-bangy burst of stuff and more a deep thrum—ultimately the feel is a matter of connection in Sullivan, whereas for Wallace it felt more about recognition. At the end of Sullivan’s best stuff (the piece about his brother’s near death is up there), the reader feels less like something’s been revealed but that something’s been awakened, some deep part of himself made aware.

Sullivan awesomely spent almost an hour on the phone answering these questions on a Wednesday and Friday morning. There were tributaries that’ve been compressed or cut for clarity, but this is fairly accurate.

How’s it going? (ed note: Sullivan had to call back like a quarter hour after the first call, saying there was a plumber situation going on). What’s this plumber thing?

There’s this candlelight tour through historic homes in our area, and we’ve used the opportunity to attend to some home maintenance we’d been meaning to get to. I’ve also been reading ships logs from 1722. I’ve been working on this book for many years set in the first half of the 18th century, and the plan was to have a chapter about that done and excerpted in the Paris Review by the end of the year, but the plan is shrinking.

Harbach’s Masterful Fielding

by Weston Cutter

            Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding has as of today been released for just shy of two weeks but this book’s been a large spot on the radar for awhile, as anyone who tried to finagle an ARC after the initial fifteen hundred ARCs were distributed. One’s got to assume few debuts get an initial ARC run in four digits. Plus of course there was the news of the book’s sale itself, the high six figures Little, Brown shelled out (all of this stuff is well covered in Keith Gessen’s article in the latest Vanity Fair, which to this reader seems like the absolute easiest article to ever have been written in the history of ever: I like Gessen quite a bit, and I’m as into VF as the next guy, but seriously? You write a huge article [which'll be turned into an e-book for $1.99] on your friend, the co-editor of the magazine you work? For what it’s worth: it’s moves like those that get folks up in arms about MFAs and networking vs. artistic merit—I’m glad Gessen wrote the article, and I’m happy Harbach’s getting the attention, but it’s just…the whole thing’s about as nepotistic as it comes). anyway: all the background info you need about Harbach’s book’s out there: The Art of Fielding has been the publishing of the story of the year so far.

Regardless of whether the story of the book’s birth and existence Matter or Last in any significant way is up to others to debate. What’s for sure is that The Art of Fielding is one of the most satisfying, fantastic long novels to have been released in a long, long while. Harbach’s clearly trying to take his place at the table alongside Franzen and the rest (worth asking: who exactly is the rest? I can’t think of any who are working that Dickensian seam quite like Franzen: Eugenides, maybe, and Powers to a degree, but Wallace isn’t quite part of that group, I’d argue, and ditto some of the other guys that used to be clumped in there [Moody, Antrim]). If you’re looking for a book that will suck a solid weekend of yr life and offer all the essential and mesmerizing joys of fiction, this is your book.

Yes, to get the obvious and perhaps necessary stuff out of the way: Harbach’s an n+1 guy, which, if you’re into inside baseball, puts him in the post-Eggers, more serious milleu (someone should make flow-charts of how Wallace led to Eggers/McSwys let to n+1). Harbach’s also the guy who wrote the awesome old article about how Franzen’s The Corrections was the follow-up to Infinite Jest, an article which is necessary reading according to this reviewier. Also, through homage or whatever, Harbach’s made a cast of characters which shares similarities with lots of Wallace—anyone who comes to Fielding with Jest in mind will notice all sorts of overlap (big and little things: chewing tobacco, surnames built around variations of the word light in various languages, a parallel between lead characters [Hal in Jest, Henry in Fielding]). Anyway, enough of the other shit: that’s what a keen, score-keeping reader may wish to have acknowledged before entering the book.

But oh lord, what a book. Seriously, just such a book. I unfortunately recently read the latest Eugenides (who has his own Wallace-based issues), which I was expecting to be a big, satisfying novel with an immersive narrative world and etc (how could I not expect that, given Eugenides’s past works?). I was massively let down by Eugenides, as I imagine most people will be, but I left the book just bereft, hurt that the book absolutely did not deliver on that rarest magic, the believable and sustained fictional world (there’s really just a ton wrong with the new Eugenides).

So it was with that hellhound of disappointment on my ass that I dug into Harbach’s door-stop last Friday, and I spent the day gladly on my back, getting up at 7pm feeling that wonderful, strange way one does on finishing a great book: thrilled that I’d been in the world, disappointed that I was now finished with the world. The story centers around Henry Skrimshander, a college short stop playing for Westish College, a fictional school on the coasts of Lake Michigan. Henry’s an almost magically gifted short stop, a mistake-less monster on defense, and, at the book’s start, we trace him moving quickly from high school through the first two years of college as he plays and works out, bulking up and becoming a hitter as well and, of course, playing the whole time without committing an error.

Henry’s Fielding‘s bright sun, and it’s strange: the characters which orbit him are, arguably, more fascinating and riveting than he is. There’s Guert Affenlight (see what I mean about surnames and light?), Westish’s president, a Melville scholar who gave up a faculty position at Harvard to return to Westish; there’s Pella, Guert’s drop-out, young-married daughter, who arrives at Westish and tries to start a new life (or pick up where her old one went off the rails); there’s Schwartzy—Mike Schwartz—who is absolutely the heart and soul of this book, a year Henry’s senior, the team catcher, habitual tobacco chewer…Schwartz is the reason, I’m guessing, most folks’ll love this book; there is, finally, Owen Dunne, Henry’s roommate, and Owen happens to be gay and who becomes involved in the relationship for which most readers’ll feel most powerfully. There are other love relationships, one of which is fantastic, one of which will give you a stomach ache. There is, of course, Henry’s fall from perfection: 164 pages into a 517 page book, Henry’s errorless streak ends.

Henry’s streak ending actually provides perfect insight into how badass Harbach is, for two reasons. First, Harbach lets the story just go: real early on in the book two full years of college pass in a matter of pages. This was, to this reader, jarring on coming upon them: it’s too early in the book to fully understand the author’s sense of pacing, sure, but two years in a matter of pages seems much. Turns out, however, that Harbach’s doing exactly the right thing. Here’s a sideways route to Harbach’s badassery: the latest Colson Whitehead and Jeffrey Eugenides both move like stuck muck, so slow you’ll find yrself flipping pages just because otherwise you’ll pass the F out, and both make for terrible reading because of such speed—whole pages devoted to microdetails one finishes reading about only to be pissed, borderline hurt that one’s been made to focus on something that feels trivial. Harbach’s speed through such moments builds massive trust rapidly: not once, after that first two-years-in-a-blink blip, did I question his moves.

The second big reason to love Harbach and Fielding: the plot’s just a fantastic zigging thing. You already know the big plot pivot point—that Henry eventually earns an error, and that that imperfection dogs him. But, again: that happens 164 pages in. You’ll spend the rest of the book—350+ massively satisfying pages—wondering how things’ll shake out, only very occasionally being able to see clearly the upcoming moves (and those moves you can see coming are fairly well telegraphed, meaning you’ll actually get satisfaction from being able to see it coming and then seeing it actually transpire as imagined).

There’s plenty else to love about this book—the writing’s clean and open, feels in the best ways like the midwestern school and people the book’s set in and with and around: the writing feels true, mostly without guile, mostly attempting to do both good and well. I can’t think of a book that’s gonna come close to this in terms of satisfaction, story, character, plot…it’s gonna be awhile. You’ll see.

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.