Elsewhere and a Pair of Novels

by Weston Cutter

1) The buzz lately seemingly everywhere’s been about D’Agata and Fingal’s Lifespan of a Fact. The good thing is: it’s a book well deserving of lots of buzz. The bad thing is: every goddamn thing that’s written about this book seems wildly off the mark. Bullshittilly bad recent NYTimes stuff here and here, and my thoughts on the thing here at the Kenyon Review blog, plus, bonus, here’s an interview with Fingal and D’Agata about the book. If you give a shit about books, keep your fingers crossed that this one starts getting talked about in adult, interesting ways and unlike it’s being talked about presently (which, obviously, are infantile, dull ways).

2) Other recent Kenyon stuff here and here.

3) I’ve got a stack of books to review and the next two weeks will hopefully see them all covered, so let’s begin.

Spring  by David Szalay

I decided in December that this year, 2012, would be the year of the novel, and Spring was among the first two or three I read. Sadly, the book hasn’t seemed to get the attention it should have, which makes some measure of sense, given that the book’s among the absolute most quiet narratives I’ve read in I can’t think how long.

The novel’s fairly simple to paint in broad strokes: it’s a novel of a relationship between James and Katherine, and the year’s 2006 and the setting’s London and the only aspect of the previous that really ends up mattering at all while reading the book is that it’s a novel of a relationship. Incidentals, should you be interested: Katherine works at a hotel, James works not at all in the present tense of the novel (thought he was once worth more than a million, and was part of an internet start-up of promise, about which more in a second).

The deal with the relationship at this book’s heart is that it’s not a good relationship. Scratch that: it’s a terrible relationship—James doesn’t love Katherine, nor she James, but the sparks and energy created by the narrative is in how they miss, how they each attempt to, ultimately, use each other to fill these holes in their lives, and how they both fail—in filling the holes for themselves, and in being the person able to fill the holes for the other. If nothing else, Spring would be devastating for how surgically exacting it was in dissecting an imperfect relationship.

However: there’s this whole other level to Spring, which has to do with the aughts and the laziness the easy wealth of that time engendered. James is equal parts tempting and repulsive exactly because he was at one point so recently potentially worth so much—you’re embarrassed for wanting to be near someone who almost was worth millions, yet it’s hard to get fully away from it as well. Szalay maps that toxic area of repulsion and appeal—moral, I mean, not physical—better than anyone I’ve ever read.

Be appraised: this book is a quiet and slow burner. I can’t say I finished it breathless and enraptured, but I can say it’s been nearly two months and I haven’t really shaken its spell. Read up, pronto.

The Odds by Stewart O’Nan

Though I’m a huge O’Nan fan and have loved his last 5 or 6 absolutely without reservation, The Odds is, unfortunately, a huge miss. It’s not that it’s bad—O’Nan’s writing’s never bad—it’s just that it’s frustratingly blah, a novel so easy to check out of you find yourself, page 50, wondering why you’re still reading (which is doubly hard in this novel, given its brevity—you feel like if you get 50 pages in, you may as well finish it, given that’s nearly halfway through the thing).

Art and Marion are headed to Niagara Falls—the scene of their honeymoon—to celebrate the final days of their marriage. They’re about to, for financial reasons, divorce. They’re about to lose their house, and Art’s been fired, and the life they’ve known has, in all ways, broken down (there’s backstory, deeper aches: Art had an affair [heterosexual] that Marion found out about; Marion had [a lesbian] one that Art’s never found out about). They’re here to gamble it all: Art, mathematically inclined, has a system for playing European roulette, the odds of which are just remotely in their favor, and if they can bet big enough at the right time, they can win.

The Odds ends up being decent as character work for both Art and Marion, though best of luck finding a way to care about these two: Art’s nice but feckless, and Marion’s insufferably bitchy, a scene-ruiner every time she’s on the page, someone who in real life would be, if not friendless, just barely put up with by friends.

Ultimately, the book’s got a complicatedly earned ending, and it’s fine and decent enough, but the problem is that you don’t care about Art or Marion—they’re just not worth the amazing firepower of O’Nan’s prose and attention. You’re best off skipping this one and rereading Last Night at the Lobster.

To The Kitchen

by Weston Cutter

            Jason Sheehan’s Cooking Dirty is, in lots of ways, a book I’ve been waiting for for a long-ish time–a book I’d guess anyone who’s waitered in a restaurant’s waited for for a bit. It’s not that there haven’t been decent books about restaurants before; Debra Ginsberg’s Waiting is pretty decent, and Stewart O’Nan’s Last Night at the Lobster is one of the best accounts I’ve ever read (even if–maybe especially because–it’s fiction). But Sheehan’s book’s the first I’ve read about the actual coolest, most fun, weirdest, most interesting people working at a restaurant.

            Cooks, people. Cooks (emphatically not chefs). Go to your favorite sit-down restaurant and sneek a peak back into the kitchen—see those dudes (almost always dudes) with tattoos and long hair and piercings and visible scars (on the hands and forearms from work; elsewhere from other motives)? Those guys are the coolest people working in restaurants. Also: sometimes the scariest. Almost always: the most entertaining.

            And there’s nothing if not for endless kitchen-based entertainment in the majority of Cooking Dirty. Fist-fights, fires, deep-fried hands: check, check, and check. Almost-fights among kitchen workers and restaurant supply folks? Also check. Along with the fights: drugs, drinking, smoking. Again, note the nature of this ‘fun’–the scene is typically dudes in an incredibly hot area, surrounded by knives and dealing with wait-staff and front of house folk who can’t ever be relied on to be totally, um, understandable and/or dependable.

            “In the end, I always found my way back to the kitchens,” writes Sheehan about midway through the book, and this is where things get dicey—not midway through the book, but because of the fact that (and this shouldn’t even remotely surprise anyone) given the sort of personality drawn to knives and fire, drugs and disagreements, there’s lots of storming off in this book (as there’s lots of storming off among line cooks, too, to a degree). Sheehan on the type drawn to the job:

            “The problem with hiring mercenaries is this: As management, what you’re looking for are guys who can do a tough, ugly job under bad conditions and survive long enough to make a difference. You hope for things like personal leadership, capability under fire, independence, guts. But when you get right down to it, what you’re hiring are killers. People who like to kill other people. Staffing a kitchen is not a lot different. What you want are guys who can do the job. What you get are guys who like doing the job. And at the low end—in the quarter of the business where I was currently residing—what that’s going to guarantee you is a line full of fucking lunatics, right off the bat. Guys who never rose through the ranks or never wanted to. Guys who want the job precisely because it is so punishing, because so many others have failed at it and because they want to be king of the dregs. Guys who hear ‘suicide mission’ and say ‘Sign me up, boss.’”

            Sheehan backs his description of these guys up and then some. But—and here’s the diciness—the hot tempers (ha ha ha), the storming off, the antics, these things are entertaining according to an algebraic formula, something with a basically direct ratio that’d follow the line of decreasing marginal return. First time Sheehan reports on some absolute madman in the kitchen? Eye-opening and buzz-inducing. Third? Still there but less so. Sixth, seventh, tenth? The arc of excitement descends.

            Which is the only real downfall of this book, and (of course) it’s got something to do with elements of voice and etc. in nonfiction: it’s a somehow tiring read after awhile. You get to a point where you wish Sheehan would just fucking grow up (which he does, eventually—married, kid, James Beard award-winner) and quit the sucky unbalanced relationship with kitchens he after long enough develops. The more fair way to say it might be that Jason Sheehan, like anyone prone to addictions, got hooked on kitchens, and this is his account of the full-on love and eventual withdrawl and detox. The whole thing’s worth if for the thrill Sheehan clearly felt and still feels for kitchens but, like any addiction memoir, there’ll be times you’ll have to sit back and be sort of amazed by and just assume that it must’ve been better to’ve been there.

Can’t Stop/Won’t Stop

by Weston Cutter

            One of the things that was really fun about being alive last year in the month of December was reading Stewart O’Nan’s Last Night at the Lobster, a quick but meaty book about, yes, the last day/night at a suburban Red Lobster (the store’s losing money, and so will be closing). If you worked in the service industry, you sort of have to read it (and if you haven’t already, do it; it’s probably out in paperback now). If you didn’t work in the service industry, consider the thing like a crash-course.

            And so now, less than a year later, O’Nan’s back with another book, this time not a quick and meaty thing but a considerably longer and much meatier thing, Songs For the Missing. It is, in starkest terms, one of the most propulsive works of fiction I’ve read this fall (and I started reading Le Carre recently, so I’m sort of surrounded by propulsion lately)(plus there was a two week stretch where I thought it’d be fun to read T. Harris’ Lambs and Red Dragon, books whose pages basically turn themselves). No joke: as I read Songs I’d actually get frustrated, first with the book and then with myself, for not being able to move more quickly (I couldn’t explain why I’d first get frustrated with the book: It had something to do with the fact that I wanted it to let go its secrets faster than it was).

            The story’s engine’s guts are simple: there’s an 18 year old girl named Kim and she disappears one summer day less than a month than she’s about to leave home for college. The first chapter’s got to be given some award for being so ridiculously easy to read and fall into and for being such a cliff’s edge at the end (you absolutely do not see Kim’s disappearance coming, and if you’re like me you’ll literally turn the page back and forth, like some information has been misplaced and is somehow in between the pages. The book really, really works you, I’m not kidding).

            The story of a missing 18 year old is ‘engaging’ (it seems awful to say it that way) enough to keep anyone riveted, but of course O’Nan’s out for way more than engagement. With a cast of characters that at times feels too large (in no time flat you’re dealing with Kim’s mom (Fran), dad (Ed), sister (Lindsey), friend (Nina), ex-boyfriend (J.P.), friend’s boyfriend (Hinch), mom’s friend (Connie), sister’s friend (Dana), plus various detectives and helpers and etc.), O’Nan moves from each to each, giving the reader time in all the family members’ heads, plus some time in J.P. and Nina’s head as well. The massive cast, actually, is the only slippery bit, and I should be totally clear: O’Nan makes it work, but it’s…there’s a sort of effort to it, to keeping all these folks straight (if you’ve read Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, you know the feeling).

            The thing about getting into the characters’ heads, too: from the outset, there’s a story that’s not being made ‘official’ in the investigation into Kim’s disappearance, and some of the characters whose heads we make our way into know about this secret, and so the reader gets one of those rare and magic charges that’s only offered in the best fiction: we’re privvy to something we don’t even know for sure about. We are, somehow, both part of the in-the-know group (since the detectives in the story don’t even know about the secret, and the reader does) and simultaneously totally in the dark re: that secret. In terms of metaphysics or whatever, this aspect of the book was hardest for me (because, as a reader, I don’t like to be cast in that much gray: I wanted to either know or not know, but O’Nan makes it clear that the reader’ll sooner or later know (or better: be offered the chance to piece things together), and so the reader’s just got to sort of sit there and sweat it out), and for all sorts of reasons I’d warn the reader to double up on patience or something before s/he plops down with a coffee and snack to start the book, but it’s—the work of this weird schism—totally worth it. It’s really, really worth it, actually.

            O’Nan’s writing’s the sort that’s just good enough to disappear, leaving something like a taste of simple and direct accomplishment in the reader’s reading mouth. I’m trying to think of how to say this so it sound nothing like a dig: O’Nan’s not a stylist. He writes sentences that feel, every word, there to serve the story at hand (97% of the sentences anyway: there are some clunkers, of course, and in this book the clunker sentences seem stuff that’s focused on weird, late-stage character development (telling the reader what music (Holly Golightly!) a central character’s listening to on page 100 doesn’t really work, for me)), and the sentences get the hell out of the way having served their purpose. I have zero doubts that O’Nan could (and probably has: I’ve read two of the guy’s like dozen books) write sentences that shine and sing with the best of them, but those sentences aren’t in this book. I go back and forth: if there were shining/singing sentences like that here, the reader’d slow down even more, basking in some sort of glow, which’d piss the (at least this) reader off because he’d want to read slowly and gather all the fictional nutrients in the book, and’d at the same time want to go fast to get as much of the story as possible…the whole issue seems dicey. Anyway: the sentences are good (not great): they work, they do their job.

            Any big talk about plot in here’s gonna screw all sorts of pooch: the book’s engine hums it’s 3000rpm best because of discovery. I’ll say this: years pass in the story, and they pass seamlessly, and if you’ve got the patience and the readerly hunger to do it right, the insight or epiphanic ah-hah you’ll feel sure you’ll find toward the book’s end is not, in fact, what you’ll get: what you’ll get is something grander and bigger and more amazing, a moment of illumination that neither acquiesces to Hallmarky needs nor grinds surely in the minor key we all seem to believe is the ‘true’ or ‘wise’ tone of How The World Works. It’s a staggering, staggering thing, this book, and Mr. O’Nan needs to be more widely recognized as one of America’s treasures, but, sure as shit, he needs to be more widely read. Start: now.

Quick Take: new Stewart O’Nan

by Weston Cutter

The dangerous part of writing about Stewart O’Nan’s phenomenal new Last Night at the Lobster is that there’s the temptation to say—truthfully, too—that this is the best novel (novella? It’s 146 pages: you decide) ever written about a restaurant. Far as I know, it’s the best treatment of a restaurant yet committed to page (and yes, I’ve read D. Gibson’s Waiting: True Confessions of a Waitress, and it’s a decent book, but O’Nan creates the whole restaurant better than Gibson does (which, in fairness, wasn’t her goal, so it’s not really a criticism, but whatever)). What seems like the simplest trap to fall into in a book about a restaurant—especially a chain restaurant like Red Lobster, which is what O’Nan’s writing about—is to cut it too simply, leave it clichéd and obvious, and it’s my great, great pleasure to report that O’Nan’s written a book that happens to be set in a Red Lobster on December 20th, and that the background is that there’s a snowstorm and the Lobster’s going to be closing as of 12/21 and there’s some love triangle stuff, but this book is, magnificently, perfectly, all about heart.

And the reader’s entry into the great big beating heart inside this book? Manny, the manager, a lovable, flawed, deeply good (or deeply trying to be good) guy. Too much detail won’t serve this review all that well, but you should know, picking up and purchasing and making your way into this book, that, in the best possible way, this character is flesh and blood—is real enough to make you ache for him, and laugh with and at him.

The story all takes place on the last day of business at a Red Lobster in the northeast, a Red Lobster like any of the countless chain restaurants we’ve all seen at the edges of mall developments and studding highway exit ramps like bumps from some ancient, giant, invisible corporate mosquito. What O’Nan does so magically is make this Red Lobster—despite the thick shellac of exhaustion and cynicism and weariness any reader may have in approaching a novel about a fucking chain restaurant (I mean, come on, right?)—specific, he makes it real. The foibles and troubles and actual details of this one little place—which, in the book, may very well be nothing but a dot on some corporate ownership map, just as it may be a vague haziness in the mind of the consumers who patronize it (how much do you know about your local Red Lobster? Your local Wendy’s? Could you tell a difference between the one nearest you and another a state or two away? Does any of that even matter? If it doesn’t, why not?))—make it resoundingly real, make it that magic sort of book that’s way, way too rare: a book that, though story, feels emphatically true.

There are within this slim but large-hearted book no tirades against downsizing or corporate layoffs or global-political blah blah blah, but the fact of the book’s drive is, perfectly, the simplest and most final rebuke to any heavily-winded, rhetorically charged argument: we may not love the glowing golden arches stretched forever down the highways, the gas station that could be in any state’s Albany, the queasy equalizing effect globalization has on specificity, but in each of these nameless, identical places are real people, with actual stories, with the same sorts of hopes and frustrations as any of us. The magic of O’Nan’s book is that, thankfully, he tells the largest possible story—about corporate everything, about that faceless/placeless/nameless American fact of chain stores—by telling the small, wonderful, heartening story of the people who do, in fact, have names and faces.

Can you see him there, Manny, the manager of this Red Lobster? It’s the last day of business. He’s just about to open the store, one last time. You’re a fool not to enter.