March is National Story Month

by Weston Cutter

Because it’s a month in which a Jim Shepard collection’s to be released, it’s easy to assume that his You Think That’s Bad will be the best collection of short stories released this month. Actually, that might be foolish: I don’t want to posit any of this as something competitive. Here’s what I mean: Jim Shepard’s got a new book, and it’s being released near the end of March (two days after an incredible person’s birthday, one day before another incredible person’s birthday), and for those of us who’ve been reading contemporary American fiction for the last decade plus, we know that a book by Shepard is one of the best gatherings of fiction there will be this year. A book by Shepard has, at this point, become akin to a book by Munro—both authors are almost mind-bogglingly consistent and their stories are, at very best, trap doors through which the reader gladly falls and, through falling, understands or realizes or sees the world anew. That sounds lofty, but it’s true, as anyone who’s read Munro or Shepard can easily back up (for the record: I interviewed the man when his last book hit).

Here’s what else, though: if you enjoy short American fiction, you’re in for a hell of a month. Because not only do you get Shepard’s new one (which, yes, features his National Magazine Award winning “The Netherlands Lives with Water,” and also “Boys Town,” that recent devastator from the New Yorker), but you get Alan Heathcock’s Volt, which has to be one of the best debut collections in the last five years. I mean this 100%: any reader with an ounce of sense would have to include Volt when talking about recent biggies (I don’t want to be critical, but Wells Tower‘s Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned was, yes, a great book, but putting Volt next to it makes it seem thinner somehow, paler).

Here’s how a genius book begins: “Dusk burned the ridgeline and dust churned from the tiller discs set a fog over the field. He blinked, could not stop blinking.” Here’s what I’d like to make abundantly clear regarding “The Staying Freight,” Volt’s opening story and my vote for the year’s best (an excerpt of which is here): the story’s title is a trick, or at least is engaged in multiple entendres, because you, as well as the story’s characters, will be dealing with the freight of that single story for awhile. You will. On finishing it I tried to remember the last story that stuck—clung, really—so fast and hard inside my head. It’s hard to think of many this good.

What’s so great about Volt, anyway? Surely it’s not enough two just quote to sentences and shuffle off, meaning hopefully transmitted. Here’s what’s astonishing:

: The faux-McCarthy voice—flattened, relatively comma-free, thick with casual ferocity—is one of the easiest-going masks fiction writers can pull. Good, hard readers and writers can discover for themselves, quickly, the limits of taking that model of voice out without knowing exactly how to execute it perfectly. Heathcock’s voice certainly has elements of that bristling, sedimentary tenor (opening at random: “Tonight her hands shook as she laced her boots, lost in the throes of a more desperate ache, an unsettled yearning to be apart from all things human.” That’s from “The Daughter,” p. 125), but he lacks the studied bleakness of the imitators. If McCarthy’s voice is an attempt to find the tiny morsels of meat left on the bones of things, Heathcock’s works to find the meat of the bones themselves. I don’t know if that comes across right, but read the book and get back to me.

: There’s no “trick” story in Volt; there’s nothing meta or envelope-puncturing at work. This isn’t to say the book’s stuffily serious—it’s serious, but not stuffy. But it doesn’t…I don’t know. I’ve read lots lately, and there seems, in lots of books (I’ve done it, too), some moment in collections where silliness can be allowed. And silliness is fine, but Volt feels serious as a worn tire, as cast iron. There’s nothing silly about the book.

: And the book’s seriousness? It’s wrestling with actual morals, with how people do/can/should make their ways through the world. I won’t say much more than that, other than this: the reason Tobias Wolff stories hang so long for lots of us is because the stories are more than just interesting fictions about imaginary people: the end of, say, “The Night in Question” damn near demands the reader ask him/herself what s/he’d do in the book’s scenario. In other words, the best stories (I’ll claim) ask us not just to empathize and find interest in these fake people, but force us to ask real questions of our own systems. Seriously: every single one of Heathcock’s stories do this. I envy the fuck out of every writer that can do this.

There’s more, but if you’re not convinced by now to pick up Volt (it’s $15! That’s two movie tickets, jackass! What, you think a Beiber biopic’s more worth your time?), you’re a lost cause. Read Volt raptorously and, of course, hope desperately that Heathcock’s even now thick into his next batch of mind-blowers.

Three In Brief

by Weston Cutter

Mary Gaitskill, Don’t Cry 

 

            If you read the NYTimes or Slate or, really, if you pay attention to literary stuff, you already know that this book’s out. Maybe you’ve seen Secretary, the movie based on a Gaitskill story that came out several years back. Maybe you’ve read Gaitskill’s stuff in the glossies, or read her last novel Veronica, which seemingly everyone loved tons. I don’t know. What’s happened now is that Pantheon’s published her latest collection and the stories within are, as usual, disturbingly good—hard to read in the best ways, giving a feeling like you’re wrestling with something intractable. She writes better than most writers in any genre, and she’s got an unsettlingly sharp eye for weakness which’d be just gutpunchingly wrecking if she didn’t also have an enormous capacity for something like pity or empathy. I feel like every short story collection gets praised for showing the flawed but ultimately luminuous nature of life, and boilerplate like that’s probably the best anyone can do in the face of Gaitskill’s stories: she’s dazzling and tough and true and very very very good.

 

Wells Tower, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned 

 

            Along the same lines as the latest from Gaitskill, it seems like everyone and their uncle’s talking about Tower’s debut collection (ahem, NYTimes Sunday Book Review cover). And, again, along the same lines as  the latest from Gaitskill, I can’t see how I can add much to the already din-like hurrah about this book. I don’t, for the record, find it quite the dazzle everywhere else seems to claim it is—Tower’s fiction’s good, but I’d rather read his nonfiction any day of the week—but it’s a solid and engaging read, and, sentence-for-sentence, there are stories in here (“Down Through the Valley” and “Door in Your Eye” especially) that are knock-down good, as good as anything else you’d see in Tin House or The New Yorker or elsewhere. And the title story: yes, it’s really good; read it and enjoy yr vikings.

 

D. A. Powell, Chronic

 

            I’ll absolutely admit that I couldn’t get my head even a little around Cocktails, Powell’s last book (from 2004). I’ll also admit that Chronic took like a week and a half, two weeks, of sitting and reading and looking crossly at and wondering aloud just what the hell it was doing before, somehow, the thing just opened, early-spring-flower-like. I can’t find a soapbox big enough to stand on to shout about this, but, honest to God, Chronic might be the best hugely-complex book of poetry I’ve read since the last Jorie Graham or C. D. Wright—he’s that good, that complex and gnarly. Honestly? The best thing to do is buy the book but don’t read it right away. Treat the book like you’d treat some new strange animal: give it time and air and space for awhile. Dip into it for a week or so, two weeks (I realize I’m advising doing what I did, so, yes, I’ll admit to feeling like I got something significant from this book because of the approach). Keep yr distance. But then, after you’ve gotten used to the book in your life, sit with it for two hours, or three, and read it through and through, and just be flabbergastedly dazzled. It’s a magnificent book which contains, yes Whitman echoes, multitudes.

Soon soon soon

by Weston Cutter

Corduroy’ll be quiet until early next week—travel’s intruded on regular book updates. However, if you’d like a head start, books to read quickly include:

Perpetual Care by Katie Capello

Chronic by D. A. Powell

So Damn Much Money by Robert G. Kaiser

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower

All the Living by C. E. Morgan

 

Plus there’ll be bunches more beyond these, as usual. Anyway, more soon.

Fake Fake Fake Fake Fake

by Weston Cutter

I assume all us dorks who read lit. journals have writers they track and keep dear, writers whose books (especially their debuts) are great big Happenings and Events just because we’ve seen so much for so long in such small doses (most recent list of my writers like that: Blake Butler, Caren Beilin, Crystal Curry, Lauren Jensen). And so, toward the end of last year, it felt like this great and magical gift when I found out that two of my old, old favs—Paul Maliszewski and Wells Tower—would both have books coming out early in 2009: Paul Maliszewski’s Fakers, out 1/19 from The New Press, and Tower’s Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, from FSG in March.

            What’s funny (and maybe telling about the full extent of my dorkiness re: this stuff) is that Tower and Maliszewski both write fiction and nonfiction, and if I’m totally honest I have to just admit that I like Tower’s nonfiction more than his fiction, and Maliszewski’s fiction more than his nonfiction, and so it was an odd sort of…not disappointment, but letdown, when I got both books. Because, seriously, have you read Maliszewski’s fiction in old copies of Gettysburg Review? Or have you read those old nonfiction pieces Tower had in Harper’s (esp. this one, about working in Florida for Pres. GWBush leading up to the 2004 election)? All that writing’s freakishly good, yet it’s apparently gonna be longer till we get those pieces in hardcover. Which, really, is not some hugely hard-to-deal-with thing, but it’s worth at least noting.

            None of the above is to in any way say that Maliszewski’s Fakers (and Tower’s Everything Ravaged, but that’s a review for later) is not hugely entertaining and fun and funny and almost sneakily deep and thought-provoking: it’s all those things. The book starts with what’s got to be Maliszewski’s most famous (idle Q: how would one measure?) piece, the one from The Baffler called “I, Faker,” about Maliszewski’s time at an upstate NY business newspaper, a time during which he wrote and sent letters, signed by fake individuals, to his own newspaper, which newspaper, of course, ran the letters, and so the falseness had to enlarge, and eventually Maliszewski even had to make a real website for his fake business…all of which is worth just going ahead and reading about (I’m sure the essay’s in one of the two Baffler anthologies, too, which you should have, obv).

            But what’s most interesting, as Maliszewskis sort of digs into stories of overt fakery (see: JT Leroy, a writer let me here say I never even liked and whose graceless fall gave me a bigger surge of schadenfreude than I’m comfortable admitting) and more borderline stuff (Sandow Birk’s paintings of the Great Wars of the Californias, which war was fake, but which paintings mimic/mock/push-at ideas of ‘historical’ paintings, how the narrative of history is made, etc.), is how dicey the whole concept of fakery even is. Obviously, the bulk of getting duped is about having trust destroyed: a prank may piss someone off, but the angered person wouldn’t likely say s/he’d had her trust betrayed by the prank, meaning the victim can sort of get at the impulse or intent of the act. Yet, for instance, people got pissed, deep-down, I-want-my-money-back pissed, about J. Frey and M.L.Pieces. Could he have just gone on Oprah and said his book was a prank, was a thing designed just to reflect something satirical back onto the culture that’d spawned it? That his book was, in fact, a high-minded critique of exactly the sort of ravenous vampiricism that drives most contemporary non-fiction? Would that’ve pissed anyone off less? More?

            The thing is, fakery’s a subject that’s maybe more important now than it’s ever been, because now that the whole idea of ‘authenticity’ is so slippery, the notion of ‘fake’ will, likewise, get messed with (though, in fairness, Maliszewski doesn’t really go into that brave-new-digital-world aspect, though with long-ish pieces on Jayson Blair [NYTimes] and S. Glass [New Republic], he’s certainly working toward that terrain [since the web's officially passed printed newspapers are the place most folks get their news]). And, of course, Maliszewski can’t, any better than anyone, find the Magic Secret that’ll allow us to all see through deceptions with ease, that’ll stop even the most cold-eyed cynics among us from (stupidly) opening that junk e-mail message that looks suspiciously possible, the one about the money… (though Maliszewski does tell the story of the Drake fortune, and the schemers who worked the midwest, netting millions for duping people the same way e-mail scammers are now duping people).

            Which is maybe the craziest part of Maliszewski’s Fakers: how uncomfortably close it has to come to basically pointing a finger at us, at the gullible, the duped, the folks taken by these deceptions. We’re not to blame, and it’s not an issue of fault, but Maliszewski does a really cool and interesting job of showing how deceptions works and hurts in the ways it does because of how closely deceptions hew to what we deep down want—want to own, or believe, or hear, or see, or whatever. Some fundamental aspect of getting duped involves not just a participant, but a willing participant: we must be drawn in, somehow. And that juncture—the moment when a story hinges, where the about-to-be-duped is ready to consider the whole thing true—is one of the most interesting things I can think of, and Maliszewski’s just written the best book that’s been written about that small, loaded, strange place.

 

            (The last chapter’s about Chabon, and I wanted to write about it here, but the chapter really, really threw me for a loop. If you’re going to get this book just to be able to impress friends at the bar or whatever, read the last chapter first. I still haven’t made my mind up about the chapter, which means that, in just that chapter, Maliszewski’s done one of the greatest magic tricks there is: he’s made something that might appear simple infinitely, infinitely complex).