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.

Mega updates, over and over

by Weston Cutter

Alright, let’s be totally honest: I hate multi-book reviews as much as the next book dork. I hate them for not giving each book as much space as it deserves, and for not doing any justice at all to the actual experience of reading the damn things (because what the hell could one say about, say, Lorrie Moore’s astonishingly great new one, A Gate at the Stairs, in one paragraph?), and for etc. Basically, the only good part about multi-book reviews is that you may see books coupled together in ways that bring new ideas to mind re: those books.

You could see all this coming, right? That I’m being something of an apologist, and that I’m gonna have to do multi-book reviews for a little while here just to cut through some of the backlog? Well, it’s what it is. All of these books merit much more of your time and attention than they’re here receiving; spend yr book-reading time acccordingly.

The Essays of Leonard Michaels by Leonard Michaels

 

            I’ve already and elsewhere written about how great dear old gone LM is (at least his fiction), but the moment of LM’s re-emergence has drawn out long enough now to convince FSG to come out with a book of his essays, and so every reader’s now in the exceptionally lucky position of being able to just buy two handsome, black-and-white-photograph-covered hardbacks and have a pretty good percentage of Mr. Michaels’s total output.

            Which output is, I think, more staggering for the fiction involved (seriously, those first two collections: holy cow), but the Michaels’s nonfiction’s all sorts of interesting and lucid and fun to follow. An analogy, maybe: there are drivers who are competent map-readers and there are drivers who are competent at getting lost and finding their way out of getting lost. Michaels’s best stuff is a schizy little combo of the two: he almost seduces you into believing that he’s lost, that the essay’ll just wander and he’ll find his way through, muddling and curious and eyes wide…and then you realize he actually knew exactly what he was doing, down to each last turn of phrase.

 

Nog by Rudolph Wurlitzer

 

            Hold yr head hard on reading this book. In fact, that might double nicely as (the phenomenal) Two Dollar Radio‘s secret motto: hold yr head hard on reading these books (Current tagline: Books Too Loud to Ignore. Accuracy: 100%). I feel slightly late to the game with these guys–they’ve been publishing for a bit now–but they blew my mind with Mr. Mohr’s Some Things That Meant the World to Me, and now they’re publishing Wurlitzer—not just Nog, his debut (from 1968, and of course published–like all the classic cult-and-out-of-print books–by Random House), but Quake and Flats as a 69′ed edition. Someone should be keeping score; someone should be noting that Two Dollar Radio’s pushing hard + fast into rarified heights of awesomeness re: small presses (Graywolf- and McSweeney’s-level heights, honestly, and in no time).

            Back to Wurlitzer’s Nog though…honestly, it’s hard to talk about this book in the exact same way it’s hard to talk about, say, Blake Butler’s stupendous Ever or about Lutz’s Stories in the Worst Way or anything by Caren Beilin or Deb Olin Unferth. There’s a certain glow in the eye of people who’ve read those folks, and the spark’s untransferable. What must you know about Nog to actually just sit down with it? A dude with few memories. An octopus. The sort of breezy, scrubbed-clean takes on things (people, towns, views) one must work awfully hard to get. Here’s the nastier truth, though: none of what I can here say will come near what Wurlitzer does in the surprisingly few pages of Nog. Buy seven copies + give most of them away. Here’s a first for me: I’d urge you to go so far as to buy a Two Dollar Radio shirt. Seriously: support them any way yr able.

 

Stupid Hope by Jason Shinder

 

            Here’s sorrow: Shinder died in 2008; he was barely past 50. Here’s the hardest line to live by, but also maybe, in the end, one of the few which really mean anything or are in any way helpful: you desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering (Henri-Frédéric Amiel). Here’s something approaching courage: Stupid Hope, Jason Shinder’s third and final book of poetry, is a gutsy, gimlet-eyed, frustrating book of poetry, out now from Graywolf. Why frustrating? Because of the kind of moves he could make, the moves that are gone now. From “Killing Frost”:

 

In that private hospital room,

 

Which I paid for, I could not sleep,

because the bed was small

 

and its white sheets too thin.

 

            Dig that brutal, exhausted comedy, the double entendre of ‘paid for,’ the fact that the Frost of the title could be the poet or the wintery element. It’s all like that, page after page in this book. I’m sad as hell I didn’t know Shinder’s stuff before; I’m thrilled I do, now, at all. Life’s harder without poetry like this.

Roundup Roundup

by Weston Cutter

 

Castle and Pieces for the Left Hand, both by J. Robert Lennon

           Even though I was lucky enough to get to interview Mr. Lennon, I should’ve trumpeted these books more loudly two weeks back when they hit. Of course they’re being released by Graywolf, so I won’t even talk about that part, so let’s just brass-tacks it:

            Castle’s a first-person narrator who, through the narrative and plot, discovers/remembers parts of himself. Would I like to say more about that? Sure, of course, but when a book’s momentum and function is predicated on a certain level of mysteriousness (see: The Cradle), it’s best not to rob the book or reader. I will say this: functionally, leaving a first person narrator with gaps in his/her memory is hugely dangerous territory (unless it’s straight-up amnesiac stuff, like Krauss’s Man Walks Into a Room), and, by and large, Lennon pulls the trick off, which is a hell of a feat.

            Pieces for the Left Hand is the book you buy if you loved Dan Rhodes’ Anthropology and have been looking for that strange, magical click ever since. Pieces is 100 short stories, which stories are perambulatory in all ways, centered on a small town, feature a consistent narrator, and which book, as an object, contains a flip-book (bottom right of each page: you can check it out just at the book store).

            Take-away lesson: Read Lennon.

 

Ever by Blake Butler

             I’m maybe hopelessly disposed to enjoying this book, because I’ve read Blake Butler’s sentences before (and can still remember lines from the first story of his I ever read), and because Blake Butler’s one of maybe ten writers currently writing whose sentences are miracles. We can get fancy and technical, but, really: they’re miracles. They do things you can’t literally cannot believe (other up and comers doing miracles: Caren Beilin, Deb Olin Unferth; the known masters of this stuff: Lutz, Lish, D. Williams, Hempel, etc.).

            And so Ever? This novella of his from Calamari Press? Sentences are bracketed: the story’s from the inside of a house, the inside of a head, and describing the book like that actually makes me feel bad: it’s like describing Arvo Part‘s stuff as “instrumental music,” which is true and false both. I can’t imagine it’s what Butler was aiming for, but Ever feels weirdly, awesomely, like a dark other-side dream of Danielewski’s House of Leaves, minus some of the more look-at-me pomo pyrotechnics and multiple narration and etc. Ever also reads, for the record, like something fixated on exploring all the infinity in a confined space—the infinity not of all possible numbers, but the infinity that exists between zero and one on the number line. Even these sentences, these groping descriptions, are worthless: read the book. Remember how reading feels when it’s not just passive, when it’s not just one thing.

 

Bottomfeeder by Taras Grescoe

            What maybe sucks for Taras Grescoe’s Bottomfeeder is that there was Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation and Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dillema: readers have some way of being able to approach this sort of book (which, actually, may make it a good thing, those other books as trailblazers, who knows). But so the crappy part is that one could say “Bottomfeeder is like Fast Food Nation, but about seafood,” and it’d be sorta accurate (the comparison to Fast Food Nation is, in fact, right there on the cover, in a blurb). Still: any comparison doesn’t do Grescoe’s book justice.

            Bottomfeeder is an outstandingly good read that, in fact, calls to mind Stolzenburg’s recent (and great) Where the Wild Things Were as much as Fast Food Nation: the focus is not simply on farming and catching seafood, but on the overwhelmingly complex chain of life of which the fish we like to eat are part. Exhibit A: the oysters of Chesapeake Bay, and how the fact that they’ve been over harvested has led to the bay’s increase in pollution, which leads to new disease and lifeforms, etc. And so, in fact, what Bottomfeeder does so amazingly well and interestingly is to offer these incredibly wide-lens shots of water-based life, and how our insatiability threatens that life, and, of course, how threatening water-based will have to, sooner or later, threaten land-based life (think: mercury in tuna, shortages, etc).

            Read Bottomfeeder for those reasons—because it excellently traces interconnectivity, because it’s written so well you don’t even notice you’ve read 40 pages. And read it to find out a better way to eat seafood.

Root Words and End Results

by Weston Cutter

 

 

The word mesmerize is an eponym; the root of the word started simply as a guy’s last name. Franz Mesmer was a precursor to the art/skill/whatever that would later be called hypnotism, and his name eventually lent itself to the world of adjectives. It’s worth bearing in mind—both the story of the word’s root and the word itself—when considering the absolutely incredible debut novel by Deb Olin Unferth, Vacation, published by McSweeney’s. Certainly there are hundreds of books each year published that are labeled “mesmerizing” by someone or other; Deb Olin Unferth’s book not only is mesmerizing, but her writing, her witchily clear and strange and startling sentences, almost demand that her name be adjectivized as well. Reading Vacation, you will be Unferthed.

Vacation begins with a two and a half page account, by a woman named Claire, about her mother and father, but that thread’s quickly put aside as the novel’s driving plot unfolds. There’s a man named Myers, his head strangely shaped from a childhood injury, married to a woman whose name we never discover. Myers has been following his wife as of late, and has discovered, through following her, that she is following someone else, a man named Gray, an acquaintance of Myers’ from college. The story opens with Myers going to Syracuse to confront Gray, presuming that something must be going on with Gray and Myers’ wife if she’s following him around the city like he knows she is (a fact she won’t admit, and a fact he doesn’t, until halfway through the book, confront her about). If the plot sounds even remotely convoluted or awkward or anything, it’s not: it’s maybe simpler to say that Vacation is the story of one man moving, a woman following him, and a man following that woman. 

Yet through what sounds like a pretty simple plot, Unferth is able to create (she may even be said to weave, a word that usually makes me squirm when used for anything other than the verb for how to make a rug) a story of almost shocking resonance and depth. Simple questions that might occur to you to ask a friend if he came to you and said he was following his wife, who was following a recognizable acquaintance: why not ask your wife what she’s doing? What is it you wish to ‘discover’ instead of simply ‘know?’ Doesn’t simple curiosity become something larger, danger, more strange, when it becomes a search? And the real question: what is it you hope to find?

I have no friend who follow wives who are following acquaintances. I’d like to think if I did, I’d ask those questions above. However, Myers’ need to dis- and uncover the details of what he presumes to be some infidelity reveal the far scarier, much simpler, darker workings of most of our hearts: the need to make sense of what we don’t understand, the need to make meaning. Given details, we craft narrative—true or false, impossible or simple. Vacation is, in I think profound ways, the story of a narrative being first constructed and then dismantled.

Claire, for the record, returns to the novel and plays a sort of shadow role to Myers’ wife (or maybe not: maybe that’s me making a narrative out of detail). Myers, his wife, and Gray are not alone, either: from Syracuse to Nicaragua to Panama, the reader meets a handful of other, seemingly ancillary (but never insignificant) characters. Too, it’s worth noting that there’s an active narrator somewhere in this book, and if that sounds bizarre, I urge you to pick up a copy and notice the structure: most chunks of text come in (at most) a handful of paragraphs, and different voices and points of view jump in and out of the way, fluid as athletes. There’s some narrator; not only, in fact, is there some narrator, but a narrator who seems in dialogue with another narrator, or perhaps only in dialogue with itself. It looks silly and dumb written out like what: what it feels like when you come across it is like you’ve found a friend on the inside. It’s a startling, gutsy, great move on Deb Olin Unferth’s part.

Okay, so: despite all the various trickery and wild fun the plot and characters offer the reader, the reason Unferth deserves her own adjective is because of her sentences. I’m opening at random:

 

“Hello, elevate! Unless he wanted to lose the thing!

He propped his arm against the wall.” (p.140)

 

“In an earthquake, if trapped, the experts advise, do not light a match, do not move or kick, do not shout. Use a whistle or tap on a pipe.

Yes, one should always carry a whistle in earthquake country because you might be crushed under a building and not able to holler for help but only able to breathe lightly into your whistle. Or you might be buried alive under the bricks and have just enough air to toot, while your voice, should you have the strength to scream, is absorbed into the dust and paint. Or you might be flung far from civilization and have two broken feet so you can’t walk back and two broken arms so you can’t drag yourself over the dirt but you do have this handy whistle which, if you are too far to be heard or rescued, can be used as solo entertainment while you wait to slowly die.” (p.90)

 

“The next time, he was there and he followed. She went off. The background blurred in his eye. She stopped, sat on a bench on the loudest corner the earth had ever known. A catastrophe of buses and drillings, the dash of the taxi, the rush and half, the tamping down of the cement, the suck of air in, the press of it out, the slow sink of the city, the spread of tar, the lifting of it, the footsteps going through, the out and out of breaths. He watched. In front of him two children knocked around a construction cone.

Who the hell did she think she was, sitting there like that?” (p.36).

 

No joke, at random, those three passages; any page in this book has at least equal treasures awaiting. They conveniently, too, highlight some of the things Unferth does better than almost anybody I know of: she’s fucking hysterically funny (figure 1); her sentences seem to follow the contour of a mind in the process of thinking (figure 2); she can put together prettier phrases and sentences and jamb them into this jumbo sentence rich with muscle and gut and feeling and startling beauty (seriously: a catastrophe of buses and drillings? Fucking hell: it makes me want to give up writing).

 

This is Deb Olin Unferth’s second book (both, by the way, from McSweeney’s, and let’s just acknowledge that McSweeney’s is no longer something exclusively for hipsters, nor some stone on which bitter, angry critics can grind themselves for being insular or exclusive: these people have now published two of the most audaciously great books of fiction (Sal Plascencia’s People of Paper and Deb Olin Unferth’s Vacation)(to say absolutely nothing of the great stuff they’ve been publishing in the journal, the best most recently being, from issue 23, Clancy Martin and Caren Beilin, and if you don’t have 23, seriously, buy it)). Again: this is Deb Olin Unferth’s second book. It’s an astonishing book for any author, at any point in her/his career. Here’s a guess: Unferth will be one of a small group of authors who will likely dictate not the direction fiction may go in the coming decades, but the shape and scope fiction may take. Whatever pessimism you harbor, bring that fact to bear on it and I promise you’ll feel better. Write Deb Olin Unferth, write McSweeney’s, write everyone: tell everyone to read the book. And, of course, as soon as possible, read the book.

Sarah Manguso

by Weston Cutter

 

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.