The Story is the Cure

Melinda Moustakis Interview

2012-02-21T08:21:00.002-06:00

In a first for The Story is the Cure, I partnered with my good friend Brian at WORD/SOUND to interview Melinda Moustakis, author of the 2011 Flannery O’Connor Award winning collection, Bear Down Bear North. (You can find my review, here.) She graciously agreed to answer a few of our questions. Part one of the interview is posted below. Go to WORD/SOUND or click the link to see Part two of the interview. Hope you enjoy and thanks for reading.

Casey and Brian: What was your process like for writing and putting Bear Down Bear North together? Did you set out to write a linked collection, or was it something that developed more organically?

Melinda Moustkis: I did not set out to write a linked collection. I was writing one story at a time and some of the characters just wouldn’t let go of me. So I would, after a few stories, come back to these characters at a later time in their lives and write that second story about them, then later the third. It was as if I could only see one fishing line and hook at a time, not realizing that all these lines were connected in one big messy knot out of my immediate field of vision and slowly, my the larger picture coalesced. Teachers and colleagues read a draft of the book and said, “You know, you only have a few stories that aren’t deliberately linking up to this one homesteading family in Alaska and it would be very simple to make them connect.”

C & B: Plenty of story collections attempt to reintroduce characters in multiple stories, and in this collection, you seem to have at least two groups of characters making multiple appearances. How do you go about structuring such a thing? After you realize that these people aren’t locked into just one story, was there a certain way you went about making sure you were developing them over the course of the entire book?

MM: I had a lot of help organizing these stories, especially from Nancy Zafris at UGA Press, editor of the Flannery O’Connor Award series. There were many decisions made on how this book should be organized. One was alternating stories by in terms of which characters were involved. Then I also had to think about spacing out the different points of view because the book includes first person, first person plural, second person, third limited, and omniscient. And I had to think about the structures of the stories. Some of the best I advice I received was that I needed to create a map for the reader, to create a guide on how to read the modular structures. So the story starts off with the short-short Trigger that not only introduces the Alaskan wilderness and the themes of family, violence, hunting, and inheritance but also introduces a compressed writing style. This one module sets up the stories written as modular series or cycle.

C & B: And to add on to the previous question, how do you manage the shift in time? A few stories jump several years, and in doing so, you’re in some ways dealing with different people even when you’re really just dealing with the same people who’ve grown and changed after many years.

MM: The shift in time comes from thinking about these characters for so long that their lives begin to take shape, how I had to return to them again with yet another lens. Time is part of a relationship and part of a family – the accumulation of regrets and triumphs and everything else. I wouldn’t say they are different people, but that certain traits come into sharper focus as time progresses.

C & B: Did you intend for Bear Down Bear North to have essentially two main story lines from the beginning? How do you see these two threads working together or perhaps against one another? Or do you see them working some other way? Also, both main story lines felt novelistic – it wasn’t difficult to picture the different sets of characters in a longer work. Did you ever consider writing a novel instead of a collection?

MM: My thinking process is very concentrated, one track, a thin beam of light in a tunnel. I have difficulty seeing chronology and the overall arc so I did not intend to have two main storylines. I see all the storylines working like knots, being pulled tighter and tighter—I can see time working the same way. I feel as if this book could have been called a novel in stories, even a novel if it was somewhat longer. I didn’t know what the book was going to be, if it would ever coalesce into something that felt complete, that I could call a book. I was aiming more for a sense that I had a book, rather than worrying about a novel versus a short story collection.

C & B: The collection opens with a beautiful flash fiction piece, "Trigger." The language is so concise; it works almost as a kind of prose poem. Thematically, though, this story works as a perfect opening story - did you write it knowing it would be the first story in the collection?

MM: I first put that piece in the middle of the book because I didn’t know what to do with it. Nancy Zafris at UGA Press was the one who told me it should be at the very beginning. And she was absolutely right. Sometimes you need another pair of eyes to see what you can’t see.

For Part two of our interview with Melinda Moustakis, check out WORD/SOUND.

Jerry Gabriel Interview

2011-10-30T09:12:00.000-05:00

Here is the long awaited interview with Jerry Gabriel, author of the Mary McCarthy Prize winning collection Drowned Boy. We conducted this interview through email over the course of several weeks. I'd like to say a quick thanks to Dan Hoyt for first suggesting I interview Jerry and then helping to get us in touch, and of course a big thanks to Jerry for not only agreeing to do the interview but for providing such thoughtful and engaging answers.

Casey Pycior: Can you talk a little bit about the genesis of Drowned Boy? In your interview with One Story, you talked about trying to give Drowned Boy a “cumulative effect” in the later stages of the draft. Can you say more specifically how you went about doing this? My impression is that you hadn’t exactly planned to write a linked-collection from the beginning, so were there certain stories you had to go back and write to fill in the blanks?

Jerry Gabriel: First, I would say not to trust anything I (or anyone other writer, for that matter) say about process. I have come to see how poorly I understand and remember it, which has been a bit of surprising realization. I don’t keep a journal, so I can’t go back and see that on some day in 2000, I said to myself, “I am now writing a book of linked stories.”

That said, I think I did have such a realization. I think to fully understand the genesis of the book—because it is my first book—is to look at the bigger picture of my “apprenticeship” with writing. I started writing in college. I was not particularly talented. But I had an ambition, you know. I cared about this and even though the majority of my classmates in my undergraduate workshops were “better” writers than I was, I could sense that it was thing that I wanted to do. But I needed a plan, a long-term plan. My plan, such as it was, was to write stories, one after another, until I learned how to do it. I did this from the time I was in college, through two masters programs. I never once, not even in conversation with agents in graduate school, conceived of myself as someone who was working on a book (which I’m sure the agents found confusing, if not appalling). I was still learning. It wasn’t until well after I graduated from the University of Iowa—after the anxiety one builds up in graduate school began to wear off—that I began to ask myself, Okay, what are you doing here? It so happened that I was also turning thirty around that time.

At that point, I had three or four stories that I thought were solid stories. I knew that the protagonists had a lot in common with one another. So I began to entertain the idea that it was just one guy, one kid. I thought a lot about what Stuart Dybek had said about the creation of The Coast of Chicago in a class I’d had with him, that it wasn’t disingenuous to go back and paint everything to make it seem like it had all been conceived together, in one flash. In fact this doesn't seem particularly different from novel writing.

I began to do that with those four stories. At the same time, I took drafts of a couple other stories that were in serious disrepair and began to think of them through the lens of Nate Holland, the main protagonist in the book. It helped a lot, it turned out, to have a plan. Soon, I had about eight stories, all about Nate and his family. I laid the stories out and asked, Is this a book of linked stories? The answer was, sort of. There were gaps—not so much in time, but in character formation. I think eventually I saw that I didn’t care about the time gaps. All stories—novels, short stories, whatever—leave out things that aren’t important. What I was interested in capturing was what happened with Nate and his brother that shaped them as they became adults. A piece that was missing at that stage was their father, whose eventual death drives the last few stories. But he was too mysterious, too inscrutable in those early stories. So I wrote the story “Atlas,” almost with the sole intention of helping the reader see the father. In truth—and this is why you can’t trust me—I stole this story from the novel I was working on. But, all the same, I did what I did because the book was missing something.

CP: There are rather long gaps of time between some of the stories in Drowned Boy, especially between “Drowned Boy” and the final two stories, “Weather” and “Reagan’s Army in Retreat.” I couldn’t help but wonder what happened to the Holland brothers during that time. Are there any stories that didn’t make the cut that take place during those years? What do you think the “gaps” in the collection do for the overall reading experience?

JG: Picking up where I left off in the first question: there were eventually twelve stories, I think. A few of them just weren't that good. A couple others didn't quite jibe with the tone of the book. But I wouldn't say that the purpose of any of them was to fill in time gaps exactly. I came to see these gaps as the essential mysteries of identity for these characters. I have a novel – so far unpublished – that tracks these characters 10 years later, and in it, there are more such mysteries, more such gaps. The writer Robert Boswell talks in his book The Half Known World about the need in fiction to preserve a sense of mystery, a sense that all is not known—nor could it ever be—about these characters; that, in effect, is what makes them real. He contrasts this idea with characters on sitcoms, who never change; their character is a static, almost measurable thing. It might be good for a couple laughs, but it probably doesn't have much to tell us about who we are. Not really.

CP: Two of the stories in the collection, “Marauders” and “Slump,” deal closely with sports: “Marauders” about a community’s allegiance to, and support of, their town’s junior high basketball team, and “Slump” about a talented high school shortstop’s inexplicable fielding slump. Can you say a little about what inspired these two stories, and how you see them working in the collection?

JG: The sports stories in the book are in their way my favorites. I grew up playing sports, was surrounded by sports culture. I still-- with some shame, especially in light of the recent and ongoing misbehavior of many top NCAA programs – watch a lot of college football and basketball. Suffice it to say, it's a medium that I get. "Slump" began as a story that I think I meant to be more absurd than it turned out to be. I had read a baseball story by Ron Carlson called "Zanduce at Second," and was, I think, trying to emulate it. In Carlson's story, Zanduce, a professional baseball player, is having a bit of a slump of his own. He keeps hitting foul balls that kill people. It's a great story; Carlson is such an imaginative storyteller.

So there was that. I think that may have been the germ of it. The other thing I was thinking about was Steve Sax, the second baseman for the Dodgers through much of the 1980s, who had a terrible fielding slump in 1983; the slump was so bad that the term Steve Sax Disease was coined. In my own baseball career, I'd had my own batting and fielding slumps. So it was terrain that I knew--the repetition of failure and the helplessness you feel in the face of it. And I explored what that might be like for a kid who was a star, who everyone was watching. Eventually the story moved from a third person narrator to first person: the umpire of the kid's Little League games the summer this all happened. And the story came to be not just about the failure, but about the expectation of those watching. Which dovetails neatly with the other sports story, "Marauders," which is also, at its root, about the fixation of fans on young athletes. I saw a lot of this growing up in southern Ohio, was even the object of some of it. The fact that the athletes are so young in the stories – I think they're both about fifth and sixth graders – is important. That's the absurd part, I guess. They can both be read as a sort of hyperbole. But I would argue that they're both closer to a stilted realism.

I think the stories fit into the collection because they do so much work in situating the reader in this town. Nate happens to be on both of these teams, but he is not an important character in either story. I'm pretty sure I was borrowing heavily from Winesburg Ohio here, in using these outlying stories as a means of triangulating Nate and Donnie Holland's location.

CP: I played baseball all the way through college, so I completely get the idea of failure. In fact, I think the failure rate of baseball players, especially hitters, is analogous to that of writers. I’m in a fiction workshop with Jonis Agee, and a couple weeks ago she passed out a chapter from David Huddle’s book, The Writing Habit called “Let’s Say You Wrote Badly This Morning” that speaks to this very same thing.

JG: David Huddle's essay gets at a couple messy truths about writing — one, the writing world is not a meritocracy and two, there can be no emotional symmetry between your response to rejections and acceptances. Of the second point, what I mean is: not every letter that comes through the door can get the same weight for you. The fact that Jonis Agee would pass this out to a graduate fiction class makes an awful lot of sense to me — more sense than passing it out to undergraduates, who, for the most part, have not come to see themselves as writers in quite the same way, haven't become aspirant toward those goals.

But once you call yourself a writer, you need a mechanism for dealing with rejection, because you’ve got so much riding on your success at this. To wit, your very identity. And if there is one thing you can be certain of (in the context of being a writer), it is that you will get rejected. Sometimes more than once a day. People will respond to your work negatively and they will dismiss it (and probably you). It is a writer's job — it is a particularly important one for a young writer — to sort the wheat from the chaff in all of this, and to have a way for dealing with (particularly negative) assessment.

For better or worse, my background in sports – a fanaticism at certain points, I can admit now — has helped me with this part of the job for sure. It's not that I don't feel demoralized sometimes; that wouldn’t be human. It's just that I have a way of moving forward from that moment, for taking, as Huddle says, whatever lessons there are in the “failure” and doing something with them. Besides, of course, accruing a massive list of grudges.

CP: In your mind, what can a linked collection do that a novel cannot?

JG: It's a good question — in other words: what is a linked collection good for? For one, I think a collection of linked stories can give a reader a more complete — or at least a richer, more particulate — picture of a longer period of time in a character’s life. This might seem counterintuitive when stacking collections and novels against one another, but I think it works this way: in a novel, you have one or maybe central stories that are pushing things forward. All expressions of time and all development of characters are in essence subservient to this central movement or momentum. To take a relatively recent example, look at Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land. In this book – the third part of the Frank Bascombe trilogy — we follow Frank through his dealings with the various people in his life – an ex-wife, business associates, old friends, his daughter, his daughter's partner. Like the other books in the trilogy, this one takes place over just a couple days. The main thrust of the action happens in that space of time. Of course, there are flashbacks — there are all manner of scenes that we get that do not happen in the confines of those several days. But those flashbacks are a function of the larger story, and so they do not take off in unexpected ways to explore things that are not some important way connected to the larger story. In a collection of linked stories, on the other hand, you can sort of choose particular situations and dilate them and you're not relegated to using those moments as building blocks — at least not in the same way. So in a short story that lives within a collection of linked stories (which of course has its own arc), you can give a moment the space to breathe without such a profound obligation to the larger story; you can explore a character or idea that is at some remove from the main thrust of the larger arc or from the concerns of the protagonist. And the reader’s experience of that particular situation can be much richer.

But of course it's apples and oranges. The novel obviously does things that a collection of linked stories can’t do as well.

CP: You’ve placed several stories in what I would consider major literary journals recently – Five Chapters (“Above the Factory” is great), The Missouri Review (forthcoming), Epoch - is a new story collection in the works? You mentioned earlier that you have a novel; can you say more about it? Can we expect to see it soon?

JG: I am in fact working on a new book of stories. They're all very long, on average probably in the 40 page range. The book, tentatively titled After This, I Will Leave Here, is basically ready to go, except that the last story – the title story — is presenting me with some serious problems. Basically I wrote a story that I thought was going to be about 15 pages. I realized when it was done that it needed another section, so it grew to nearly 40 pages. At that point I came to understand that the story, as I wanted to tell it, was going to require some other work, some other back story, some development of what I thought were peripheral characters. Right now, it's definitely threatening novella territory, and I'm really doing my best to keep it contained there, because I don't think it's a novel that I'm prepared to write. I've had a version of this problem with every one of the stories in this book. They all started out in my mind as 15 page stories. But I think because I had just finished a novel and had internalized the pacing of a novel, I wasn't able to conclude them in a way that felt satisfying to me. The other factor was that when I started the book, my daughter — now two — had just been born and I didn't have a lot of uninterrupted time to work on something big. Perhaps a justification, but that's how it felt to me. So instead, I thought, I'll just write this book of small stories. It may not be the best marketing move of my life, but it's what I can do right now.

And then they turned out to be these long stories — six of them. It's been a lot of fun writing them, I have to confess. In them, I finally in many respects escaped the southern Ohio milieu of Drowned Boy and my novel manuscript, Resurrecting the Single Wing, which is a sequel of sorts to Drowned Boy. The stories are much more internationally focused and self aware than those first two books. Many of the stories actually take place in and around Columbus Ohio – admittedly not so far away from southern Ohio – where I went to college, but I wouldn't say that it's a particularly place-based book in the way that Drowned Boy is.

Several of the stories deal with the window of late adolescence in which we are expected to find ourselves somehow, in spite of all that is stacked against us in this search. Many of the characters are from lower economic backgrounds and are fighting against that too. The title story is kind of an outlier in that it's about a girl whose father was a Quebecois terrorist in the 1960s. "Above the Factory," which came out of Five Chapters over the summer, is another odd story: A young couple moves into a farm house somewhere in central Ohio only to discover that there is a very small functioning factory in the basement. It teeters on the edge of the absurd, but I don't think it ever quite capitulates.

I guess we'll see what happen with all of this, but I've been having a lot of fun with this stuff. When/if I finish off the terrorist story, I'll hope to start a new novel. I've been taking notes for couple years. It's pretty inchoate right now, which is probably the way it should be.

CP: I’m always interested to hear which authors the writers I admire are reading, so who are you reading now? What contemporary writers do you follow? Are there any lesser known authors flying under the radar that readers should know about?

JG: Right now I am reading, on the fiction side, Dogfight: a Love Story by Matt Burgess, which is fantastic, and The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies, whose stories I have long admired. I'm also reading an amazing unpublished manuscript by a friend of mine named Jecca Hutcheson. It's called Trifecta and is about two Pakistani immigrants living outside of Boston. I just read Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris for an independent study. I didn't expect to like it because of the strange point of view, but did anyway. Ferris is a very gifted storyteller.

My system for reading is pretty slapdash a lot of the time. I've never been great about reading the New York Times or any other source for what is brand-new. I roam the library quite a bit. I troll on the Internet some. In terms of writers flying beneath the radar, I'm not sure. For a long time I would tell anyone who would listen about Charles Portis, but I think that Portis is back on the main stage, since the Coen Brothers remade True Grit last year. His best books, however, are The Dog of the South and Gringos. For my money.

CP: Thanks so much for your time, Jerry. It’s been great talking with you. I look forward to reading much more of your work.

Melinda Moustakis - Bear Down, Bear North: Alaska Stories

2011-10-25T14:50:00.001-05:00

Bear Down, Bear North, Melinda Moustakis's 2010 Flannery O'Connor Award winning debut is formally inventive, yet, as the subtitle "Alaska Stories" suggests, strongly rooted in place. I've read previous Flannery O'Connor Award winners, and I've yet to be disappointed, but I have to admit, it was Moustakis's focus on place that really drew me to the collection.

I've read quite a few place-based collections and novels recently, and the more I think about how writers develop a strong sense of place, or even what it means for a collection to be "place-based" or "regional," the more difficult it is to come up with a workable definition. However, I think what makes Moustakis's collection distinctly place-based, is not just that the stories take place in Alaska, a terrain not well covered by contemporary literature, but because the characters and situations she creates are unique to Alaska. What I mean is that her characters act and react the way the do because they are from a distinct place.  Had they come from somewhere else, they wouldn't be who they are.  The place, and their experiences in it, shapes who they are. Moustakis's characters could exist somewhere else, but something essential about them would have to change. It's hard to pinpoint this exactly, but I think after taking in the collection as a whole, one gets the sense that these characters are as unique as the Alaska they call home.

In Bear Down, Bear North, Moustakis plays with the form in many of her stories. When I saw that the collection opened with a flash piece, "Trigger," I wasn't all that excited. I wondered why a writer would begin her relationship with the reader with a piece of flash fiction. Then I read the story and realized exactly why Moustakis opened the collection with "Trigger" - it's a damn good story, and it provides a perfect opening, thematically and stylistically, for the collection. "The Mannequin in Soldotna," a story about how a doctor places fishhooks in a mannequin in the places where her patients have been hooked, is a fractured narrative that is sectioned off with different subheadings.  It takes some getting used to, but Moustakis uses a similar structure in "This One Isn't Going to be Afraid," "They Find the Drowned," and most effectively, I think, in "The Last Great Alaskan Lumberjack Show."

Even in Moustakis's more "traditionally" structured stories, she uses page breaks to signify jumps in time or to switch points of view. This certainly isn't anything new but Moustakis has a deft hand at this and pretty much everything she does in this collection.

The collection is linked by two story lines - the first begins with "The Weight of You," and through the course of "Miners and Trappers" and "The Last Great Alaskan Lumberjack Show," follows siblings Gracie and Jack and their respective families and how they've come to deal with Jack's drinking and erratic behavior.  Each of these stories is told in the second person from Gracie's point of view.  Sometimes the second person can feel gimmicky, but in this case I think it works wonderfully.

The second storyline, what could is arguably the "main" story line because of it contains more stories, deals with an extended family through two generations, and begins in "Us Kids," a story told from a first person plural narrator, and continues through "This One Isn't Going to be Afraid," "Point MacKenzie," a story told from multiple points of view, each child from "Us Kids" getting a chance to narrate, even Rais, who is deaf and mute, and Kitty, who is only a toddler, "Bite," "Some Other Animal," a story about Kitty's daughter dog sitting for a couple who owns a team of malamutes, and ends with "What You Can Endure," a story about the daughter of one of the children in "Us Kids" told in fragments that mirror the daughter's fragmented knowledge about her mother's childhood. It's an excellent story with an image at the end that truly resonates - I'm still thinking about it.

If I had to find something to critique about this collection it would be that Moustakis falls back on a similar fractured/sectioned structure in one too many stories. I think it works wonderfully in nearly every story but "They Find the Drowned." In this one, the structure didn't seem to be in service of the story.  This was the weakest story in the collection for me, and I think the structure didn't help.

Of course, I have no idea what other collections were up for the Flannery O'Connor Award last year, but after reading Bear Down, Bear North, it's no wonder it won. This is up there with the best collections I've read so far this year. Truly great short stories.

***Just a couple weeks ago, Moustakis was named one of the National Book Award Foundation's "5 Under 35." Go here to read the press release.

Extras:
Moustakis's Blog, a great review at WORD/SOUND., and you can find multiple reviews and interviews on Moustakis's author page under "Press & Reviews" and "Interviews."

Lynne Barrett Interview

2011-10-20T09:22:00.003-05:00

Lynne Barrett is the author of three story collections, the most recent of which, Magpies (Carnegie Mellon UP), I reviewed here in September. Lynne graciously, and very thoughtfully and thoroughly, answered the following questions through email over the past few weeks.

Casey Pycior: Magpies is your third short story collection - can you first talk about your process of putting a collection together in general and then this collection in particular? Is there something specific you're trying to achieve with the order of the stories, or is it a more organic process?

Lynne Barrett: When I felt I must have enough to think about a new collection, I read through my accumulated stories, trying to discover which seemed as if they could keep company with each other. I set aside some that were off in what seemed very different directions, before I began to work on the order and final choices. I was twice a reader for the Drue Heinz fiction prize, each time reading over 100 books of short stories in manuscript, and that helped me evolve some ways of thinking about collections as wholes. You obviously want a strong story at the start, and it is good if the last one has some resonance that will make the reader think about the book as a whole, but you also want to think about variety in narrative approach, and contrast in tone and outcome, if possible.

I certainly thought about all that for The Secret Names of Women, which could have been presented in many orders, but for Magpies, I saw that the stories I chose had their main action between 2000 and now. Since, for a number of reasons, I wanted to place first the one with the earliest and most specific time references, “Links,” which uses the dot com boom and bust, I began to think about placing them in an order that forms a kind of unstated chronology as background. This is not the order in which they were written, but I found it interesting to discover how much I had been using the ups and downs of the decade to put pressure on my characters. Stories like “Gossip & Toad” and “The Noir Boudoir” draw upon the opportunism and temptations of the housing boom even though they aren’t specifically “about” it. “When, He Wondered” had to come later because it very definitely is a story about the implosion of that boom. This organization allowed me to juxtapose different types of tales, so that a story that contains a crime could be next to one that centers more on family conflict. I did think a lot about tone, where the comedy was, for instance. Things get a bit darker in the late going, but the last story has a note of optimism.

However, there is nothing that compels anyone to read a book of short stories in order. It’s not one long argument, and it’s not a novel. One of the first readers I heard from read the last story first. And I’ve done that myself, or chosen by titles in the table of contents. So ultimately the important thing is that the stories included are ones that can stand on their own, in whatever order they are read.

CP: I always read short story collections in order (except for anthologies) for the very reason you mention; I want to read the collection in the order the writer (or writer and editor) intended me to. But, I suppose once the collection is out in the world, you don’t have any control over what order the stories are read. In a kind of related issue, in my review of Magpies, I note that the opening story, “Links,” was published by Painted Bride Quarterly and later archived on their website, and in the story the “links” are actually live links that the reader can click on to take him or her to the “linked” section. After reading my review, you let me know that that was not your intent. Can you explain how this came to pass?

LB: The story is meant to be a single reading of a website where the reader would imagine that there were other possible paths to take but be held to one order. This accords with tensions in the story between chronological narrative and the associative jumping of the web. Had I wanted to write it as a hypertext story, I would undoubtedly have done different things with it.

At the time of its first publication, in a print issue of Painted Bride Quarterly in 2004, there was some discussion of also putting the story online. Anticipating that there could be misunderstanding, I made sure to stipulate that the links should not be made to work. That’s how it was on their website, the last time I’d looked. I was surprised to learn, from what you wrote, that it had been turned into a hypertext story. To find out what happened, I immediately got in touch with the current editor of PBQ, Kathleen Volk Miller, who was wonderful. It turned out that, unknown to her, an assistant who was restoring their archives after a crash had just assumed the story was meant to be interlinked, and so had created the linking without asking. The journal has now removed the hot links, and added a head note from me to explain that the form is deliberate, in the hopes of preventing future well-meaning changes.

The archived version differs from the one in Magpies in a number of ways. I used some elements of what a website looked like at the time of the setting that, for ease of reading now, I simplified, and of course I revised other things in the story.

The irony of having written a story that was partly about the idea that the web has a will of its own and then winding up trying to contain that will is not lost on me.

CP: The short form seems to be your bread and butter; what is it about short stories that compel you to write them? What, in your mind, can stories do that novels or novellas cannot?

LB: I love short stories—reading them and writing them. I like their concentration, the way they can be packed so that they are intense and convey a reality beyond their margins. I hold to the Poe argument, in his review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales, that because a tale can be read in one sitting, it can have “a unity of impression” without which “the deepest effects cannot be brought about.” Poe sees the “prose tale,” the “short prose narrative” as gaining force no other form can have because of the reader’s concentration on it, without interruption, so that the story takes over and shuts out the world. “During the hour of perusal the soul of the reader is at the writer's control,” he says. My shelves are full of short story collections, by Poe, Hawthorne, Maupassant, Chekhov, Colette, Borges, Eudora Welty, John Cheever, Alice Munro, Ron Carlson, Toni Cade Bambara, Haruki Murakami, William Trevor, just at a glance. And above them are many collections of myths and tales. In fact, I feel most comfortable calling my stories tales: the tale is allowed to have a bit of magic or darkness, and it also promises completeness. I think a good story always has some kind of metamorphosis in it, even when set completely in the real world.

I have no desire to knock longer narratives. But it helps to think about what the short story is equivalent to: a painting, say, that is small enough to be taken in at once, yet that rewards more looking. Even the choice of where the edges are, the framing, has an effect. What can the painting do that the mural can’t?

CP: I like that metaphor – the painting doing things that a mural cannot. I think that's true. So is it safe to say you don’t have a novel in the works?

LB: No, that would not be safe to say. There may be a stretch of my imagination that could hold a mural. We’ll see.

CP: Jenny and Carlos appear in three stories in Magpies: “One Hippopotamus,” “Gift Wrap,” and “Cave of the Winds.” Did you set out to write about this couple, or did they just come to you over time? I’m wondering if you imagined their stories (or even the entire arch of their relationship) before hand, or if you had a situation or scenario and you used familiar characters – I’m thinking here of the last story in the sequence, “Cave of the Winds.”

LB: I wrote the middle story, “Gift Wrap,” first. It focuses on Jenny and her sister, after their mother’s death, and the re-centering of the family at Christmas when for the first time Jenny and Carlos’s home is the base. Carlos, like Jenny’s father, is a more minor character, part of the new family that’s being formed.

But after the story had been published, I found I was still thinking about this couple. Was their relationship as reasonable as it seemed? Carlos has a difficult background. And Jenny is doing a job that clearly isn’t what she intended. What did she originally want? What pressures were these things bringing to the relationship? How did they get together? How were they brave enough to think they could make it?

Eventually, I decided to go back and look at just one night when the relationship, then new, changed. I already had a glimpse of where they would be a few years later, but I reminded myself that they (and the reader, presumably) couldn’t know that, so I tried to write not thinking of where they would wind up and to make it clear that these two people are deciding their future without knowing all that they are getting into. I used Jenny’s point of view, in first person, but for much of “One Hippopotamus” Carlos is telling her a story about his past. I worked mainly in dialogue because I wanted the feeling that at any point something could be said that would shift the relationship permanently. And I had them naked in the night during a storm that knocks the power out. I liked that they couldn’t really see each other, that the act of storytelling, and the ways Jenny listens to and elicits parts of the story, was essential to their connection.

Then I set the characters aside again, but I had given Carlos a line of work, fixing up old Deco houses. Their home in “Gift Wrap” was somewhere near the water, and Florida’s weather frames “One Hippopotamus.” After going through a couple of very bad hurricane seasons, I felt all too aware of the conflict between wanting a house to be something that shelters you and learning that a house is something that is itself in danger and can endanger you. I began to write a story about what a group of men might do after going through the absurdities and discomforts of several hurricane evacuations. I remembered a story of Cheever’s that uses an atom bomb shelter. In a Paris Review interview, Cheever says his story “The Brigadier and the Golf Widow,” "is about a level of basic anxiety." As I thought about present anxieties, Carlos stepped up and told me that he'd be a good protagonist for this one, and I was able in it to explore new angles of his character and the relationship. But I still tried to make sure the that this story was readable on its own.

Spacing this trio of stories through Magpies where they’d occur chronologically, I found I could think of Jenny and Carlos as living in a world that could contain other stories in the book. For instance, Carlos with his knowledge of construction would be interested in the sinkholes in “When, He Wonders,” and Jenny’s loyalty, which one might perhaps think of as simple, may read differently when seen beside some less-than-loyal wives in other stories. There’s a scene in “The Noir Boudoir” where a couple, unnamed, buys a Deco dressing table (perhaps holding evidence of a murder) at the antiques and collectibles market on Lincoln Road, and they very well may be Jenny and Carlos.

I don’t have any specific further story in mind for them, but you never know. I like their tenacity.

CP: There seems to an ease with which you move between what might be considered more “literary” stories and “genre” stories. Do you see them as different kinds of stories (as if on a kind of continuum) or as one in the same? What draws you to the mystery genre? Are there things that the mystery genre (or any genre for that matter) can do that more literary fiction cannot? (I don’t mean to imply any sort of judgment in this question.)

LB: You bring up judgment, and I think the term “literary fiction” comes laden with a whole history of judgments, from the late 19^th century on, that can be hard to shed. In a long dialogue among writers, movements have always critiqued some predecessors and praised others. But the Realist argument against the fantastic (perhaps in reaction to the Gothic), and the Modernist argument for the primacy of character over plot (reacting in part to sensational excesses of plot in late Victorian melodrama) played into the hands of those (including English departments) who wanted to mark literature as high or low. As far as I can see, this didn’t deter serious writers from including crime. Perhaps genre judgments did partition off the fantastic, although the recent two-volume collection American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny shows how, nonetheless, that tradition continued in American literature, from Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville to Tennessee Williams, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and John Cheever. It’s invigorating to read the “genre” writers beside the “literary” ones and examine your standards. I was knocked out by Jane Rice, who published in the pulps, and whose stories were only collected late in her life.

It seems to me that for much of the 20^th century the genre fence worked more to keep the purely crime and fantasy and adventure and science fiction writers out of the literary running, but time and readers sift things out: Raymond Chandler and Patricia Highsmith and Philip K. Dick and Shirley Jackson are taught in literature classes (and so, for that matter, is the Victorian sensation novel). The standards of psychological truth, language, originality, and, yes, tension and drama should be applied to all fiction.

For me, as I said earlier, the short story goes back to the tale, and tales may be funny or cruel, magical or realist, delicate or robust. A working definition of story I have used for a while is simply that the characters must propel the action, and the action must change the characters. All stories involve characters crossing lines (criminal or not), but it’s important that the transgressions fit the characters. Moving around, I think I may have learned more about how to use character and voice to keep a story that is about crime from going over the top, and how to make the most of the elements of tension and suspense in a story about a relationship or a family.

CP: Your essay “What Editors Want,” that was reprinted in the most recent Glimmer Train Bulletin, is an extremely practical guide (I mean that as a compliment) to what editors of literary magazines are looking for. I don’t want to speak for everyone (though I suspect I’m not alone), but during my MFA the assumption/expectation was that students were sending their work out, but I never felt like there was much guidance in that respect. Since you teach in the MFA program at Florida International University do you see this as a part of your role as a teacher? Aside from this, what draws you to teach fiction writing?

LB: As a teacher I’ve always felt that even though some students’ work might not be ready to submit yet, it is worth offering some instruction so they’ll understand the process later, when they need it. The fact that you assure me that practicality is a compliment suggests that you have some sense that some will find consideration of things practical taboo, as if art must be ethereal and unworldly to be art. I know quite a few visual artists, and they are very pragmatic about business (a tradition from Leonardo da Vinci on, perhaps). I admire practicality as the means to free yourself to pursue your art. And I find that when I assign students to read magazines (literary and slick), they gain a much greater sense of what is possible, rather than feeling constrained by some formula—there is such diversity out there, far more than they see in textbooks.

“What Editors Want” prompted an overwhelming response when it first appeared in The Review Review. It was shared all over Facebook and Twitter, sent out by teachers to their students, and within two days it had made the L.A. Times book blog. Much of that may have been about the advice in it, but I heard from many editors at journals and presses who were grateful for its portrayal of who they are and what they do, and its evocation of how unappreciated and invisible their work is. In this sense, it’s also a piece about character.

As for why I teach fiction: it is a joy and endlessly fascinating.

**********

If you're interested, Tigertail, A South Florida Annual: Florida Flash, editied by Barrett, was just released October 17.

News

2011-10-15T17:28:00.001-05:00

Got a bit of good news yesterday, my short story "The Current" was accepted for publication in Big Muddy: A Journal of the Mississippi River Valley. They've published some really good writers and I'm honored to join their ranks.

Daniel Woodrell - The Outlaw Album

2011-10-13T15:41:00.001-05:00

The Outlaw Album is Daniel Woodrell's ninth book (tenth if you count the recently reissued The Bayou Trilogy) but his first collection of short fiction. I'm huge fan of Woodrell's work and I was excited when I found out this collection was coming out. Of the twelve stories in The Outlaw Album, eight were previously published (including the short story "Woe to Live On," part of which appeared in Woodrell's novel of the same name), and while I enjoyed the whole collection, the previously published stories, with the exception of "Returning the River," stood out against the ones making their first appearance in print.

The collection opens with the surprisingly funny, yet dark "The Echo of Neighborly Bones." In it, an Ozark man murders his new "northern" neighbor for killing his dog and buries him in the hills, and he subsequently returns to the makeshift gravesite to uncover the body and "kill" him over and over. In "Twin Forks" a man from Nebraska buys a campground on the Twin Forks River that he used to visit as a kid, and he has to deal with a group of violent local thugs trying to cause trouble. Both "Black Step" and "Night Stand" are excellent character studies on what war can do to a man, while "Two Things" is somewhat of a departure from the previous stories, but it's in no way inferior. In it, a man is visited by a woman who has been tutoring the man's son in prison. She's come to tell the man his son is a talented poet and to ask for him to agree to take his son in if he is released. The real stand-out in this story is the voice of the man, Mr. McCoy; presenting authentic "voices" is clearly one of Woodrell's many talents. "The Horse in Our History" is written as if it is an autobiographical, "true" story. Structurally, it's interesting in that the narrator is gathering a series of recollections from elderly family and friends, similar to a kind of oral history. It's a story that seems to be spinning off into nowhere, but Woodrell ties it all together at the very end. "Woe to Live On" is essentially an excerpt from the novel of the same name, but since the novel is nearly impossible to find in print, this section provides a good taste of it. The narrator, Jake Roedel, is recounting his time riding with Confederate Bushwacker, William C. Quantrill during his raid on Lawrence, KS in the early 1860s.

Of the "new" stories, "Returning the River," the final story in the collection, is the one that stands out. In it, as a gift to his dying father, a son burns down a neighbor's newly constructed home so that his father can once again see the river from his house.

As the title suggests, The Outlaw Album deals with the marginalized and misunderstood people in society - the outsiders and outlaws - but in Woodrell's hands, these people are portrayed with grace and honor, even if perhaps their actions don't seem to warrant it. But that's the real beauty of this collection and Woodrell's writing as a whole.

As a side note, I drove down to Kansas City last weekend and met up with my good friend Brian (WORD/SOUND) to hear him read. If anyone gets the chance to hear him, I highly recommend doing so. He reads in a way that, though completely natural, is a kind of performance, especially as it pertains to the voices of his narrators and characters. There are times when reading Woodrell's work that I find it difficult to get into the rhythm of the syntax and sentence structures, but after hearing him read, I feel like I can access his prose a little better.

If you like Woodrell's work, then there's no reason why you won't enjoy The Outlaw Album. If you haven't read Woodrell before, then I suggest you do. This collection or Winter's Bone, his most recent novel, would be a great place to start.

Extras: Review at The Millions, review at Literary Kicks, review from The Guardian, review at Chamber Four, review at Bookmunch, and an excellent interview with Woodrell at Oxford American.

Robert Vivian - The Mover of Bones

2011-10-11T11:02:00.002-05:00

The Mover of Bones (U of Nebraska Press Flyover Fiction Series, 2006) Robert Vivian's first novel of his "Tall Grass Trilogy" (followed by Lamb Bright Saviors (2010) and Another Kingdom Burning (2011) both from U of Nebraska Press), is an interesting book. I know that's not a particularly good descriptor, but Vivian's work is difficult to categorize--which isn't a bad thing.

To say what The Mover of Bones is about or to describe its plot isn't all that easy. On the surface the novel is about how Jesse Breedlove, a man we ultimately don't know a lot about except that he's a janitor, digs up the bones of a murdered young girl who was buried in the cellar of an old Catholic church in Omaha, Nebraska, and takes her on a road-trip of sorts across the United States. But the novel isn't told in a conventional way; it's made up of 18 first person monologues, each in distinctly different voices (Vivian has written and had produced many plays, so this isn't a stretch for him), by the people who encounter Breedlove and the bones of the young girl in their travels. The voices we encounter are from people on the fringes and margins of society, and often their encounters with Breedlove offer them a kind of momentary salvation from their lives.

The story is interesting in that there are far more questions than answers: who is Jesse Breedlove - some kind of Christ-like redeemer, or someone who is sick and twisted? Why was the girl murdered and buried in the church? Who killed her? What becomes of Breedlove and the girl's bones? Why does Breedlove decide to become "the mover of bones"?

Vivian doesn't succumb the pressure to answer these and other questions. He lets his characters speak to us in their own voices, and in that way he gives them life on the page.

Ultimately the novel is a collage of sorts, a collection of voices that each paint a picture of a life lived in this country. It's a study of how to use myriad voices to create a strangely unified whole. The writing is lyrical and poetic, and in many ways almost fantastical. There are moment in the novel that border on magical realism, but I don't think that describes what Vivian does properly. The "magical" moments are grounded in the spiritual - perhaps is should be called "spiritual realism" - but this isn't a "religious" novel; it doesn't proselytize or try to be polemical in any way. In a way, the novel is far bigger and grander than that, even in its scant 159 pages.

If you're looking for a more traditional narrative structure, then this novel probably isn't for you. However, if you're interested a novel that experiments with voice and structure, then I think you'll find The Mover of Bones very satisfying.

Extras:
Katrina Denza's review of The Mover of Bones, and a faculty profile of Vivian at Alma College.

Lynne Barrett - Magpies

2011-09-04T16:52:00.000-05:00

It wouldn’t surprise me if Magpies, Lynne Barrett’s third collection from Carnegie Mellon University Press, is called “uneven.” But let me be clear: I’m not saying this is a bad thing. I think what sometimes happens is that readers (and reviewers) have ideas or expectations about what a short story collection should be, and when those expectations aren’t met, the collection gets tagged as “uneven.” I think that in some cases the “uneven” label is fair, but often it is a kind of lazy way to avoid discussing the stories more deeply (I’m as guilty as anyone else – I’m positive I’ve called a collection “uneven” before). And besides, do all story collections have to be unified in some way, thematically or otherwise? In fact, I’ve read a few collections that I would criticize as being too even. So, what do we then make of story collections that are looser, that mix genres, that don’t have similarly structured stories, collections where the themes don’t easily unify? Certainly, there should be a place for those kinds of collections. Though there are moments of unity in Magpies, I would argue that overall the collection works in its unevenness.

The opening story, “Links,” takes place during the dot com boom and subsequent bust, and is full of words that are underline in blue font simulating a hyperlink. The story is structured with subheadings, or links, and those links turn up in other sections which mirrors the self-referential way hyperlinks are often used. “Links” was first published online at Painted Bride Quarterly, and in the digital format the links are live, so when you click the blue words you are taken to the section where that word or phrase is the subheading. It’s really a pretty interesting way to structure a story, and in the digital format it allows the reader to follow the links down the proverbial rabbit hole and read the story in whichever order the links lead them. This is something that is certainly lost in the print version.

Though the stories are spread through the collection, the same set of characters, mainly Jenny and Carlos, appear in “One Hippopotamus,” “Gift Wrap,” and “Cave of the Winds.” We encounter these two characters at different times in their relationship, and in each story we get to know them a little better. They felt to me like they could carry an entire set of stories, or, perhaps, even a novel. In “One Hippopotamus,” Jenny and Carlos are new lovers spending the night together during a storm. It’s an intimate look at how two people come together and share their pasts. In “Gift Wrap,” Jenny and Carlos are married, and Jenny is at her childhood home for her family’s first Christmas without their mother. And in “Cave of the Winds,” we get Jenny and Carlos weathering hurricane season in south Florida. While this story in no way is the end for the couple, it provides a nice ending for them in this collection. It will be interesting to see if Barrett revisits these characters in the future.

The remaining stories in the collection are an interesting mix of genres. “Gossip and Toad” is magical realism, and “The Noir Boudoir,” and “When, He Wondered,” are both mysteries. "The Noir Boudoir," is where the title Magpies comes from. The characters in this story are "magpies," or "small time antique dealers," and, like poachers, they go into the homes of recently deceased people and buy what they can before the estate sale. It's a clever story and one that rewards those who pay close attention to the details. "When, He Wondered," is a slightly darker story about a man who dies while trying to fake his own death. While these weren’t my favorite stories, I really admire the way Barrett seems to effortlessly move between the different genres. Given today’s difficult publishing climate, it’s probably a pretty gutsy move mixing genre work into a more “literary” collection, but by all accounts I’d say she pulls it off. In fact, given the title of the collection - Magpies - and how her character defines the term, one can see how these seemingly dissimilar, "uneven" stories are more related than they might appear on the surface.

All in all, Magpies is solid collection by a writer who clearly knows what she's doing, and, though it's hard to quantify, I think through her playful mixing of genres and structures, it's clear she has fun doing it.

Extras:

The Florida Book Review, edited by Barrett; an interview with Barrett at Delta Blues; and a micro-interview at Grub Street Daily.

Here's Barrett's insightful and interesting take on the title, Magpies, and how she went about putting the collection together.

Check back soon for an exclusive The Story is the Cure interview with Barrett!

Adam Ross - Mr. Peanut

2011-08-25T09:49:00.000-05:00

Okay, to begin with, I went back and forth about even posting a review for Adam Ross's debut novel, Mr. Peanut - not because it's not worthy of being reviewed, but because I'm not sure how to go about reviewing it.

Rather than try to give any kind of summary here, I'll just say that Mr. Peanut is a complicated, complex novel (perhaps overly so). Normally I'd want you to read my review first and then go elsewhere but not this time. Here are several links to reviews that do a far better job explaining the book (though I would say that even some of these don't quite capture the novel completely): NY Times review, WSJ review, and the Guardian's review. While these reviews are mostly positive, I find myself agreeing with their criticisms of the novel and many of the questions I had while reading are similar to those of the reviewers.

Ultimately, Mr. Peanut read like two separate novels that had been fused together. Now, the interweaving story and plot-lines are the very thing that makes the novel tick, so it is hard to criticize it in that way. The two "main" story lines (there are far more than just two) felt out of balance to me - at one point the novel shifts away from what I would consider to be the central story line, that of David Pepin and his wife, for close to 130 pages. (The 130 page section has to do with the Dr. Sam Sheppard murder case from the 1950s.) Because it took me several days to get through this section, when I rejoined the Pepin story line I had forgotten where I was in that story and what had happened. Of course, this could just be my reading of it, though I suspect other readers may have a similar experience with it.

I can't imagine the kind of nightmare it was for Ross while trying to structure this novel - the dual story lines, the shifting back and forth in time, the shifts in location, the mirroring and doubling, the numerous characters, all of it. I commend his effort because despite some of the problems with the novel (most outlined in the reviews above), all in all, he pulls it off.

For this novel, probably more so than others, I'm really interested in hearing what others have to say about it. I've read quite a few engaging, thoughtful reviews of Mr. Peanut on Goodreads, and I'd love to get a good dialog going here as well. So, please feel free to post your thoughts, comments, and criticisms.

Here are a few more links:
Adam Ross's website where you can find a Q&A about Mr. Peanut, an interview with Ross at Nashville Scene, a conversation with Ross at Amymillergross.com, and Part one of an interview with Ross at The Book Lady Blog followed by Part two at Books and Brews.

Michael Knight - The Typist

2011-08-23T10:43:00.001-05:00

Because it is so carefully and economically (and beautifully) written, Michael Knight's most recent novel, The Typist, is the kind of book you read and think that you yourself can write. In that way, reading The Typist is incredibly inspiring; yet, as many know, the books that appear simple are really the most difficult and complex. The Typist is a deceptively simple, short book - only a little over 200 pages, and my copy is shorter and more narrow than a standard paperback - but like other short novels in the recent past (I'm thinking here of Stewart O'Nan's Last Night at the Lobster and Richard Bausch's Peace) it packs as much story into its pages as a novel twice its length.

The plot of The Typist is fairly simple. Francis "Van" Vancleave joins the army in 1944 and, because he is an exceptional typist, he is stationed in Tokyo at General MacArthur's headquarters where he is employed transcribing mountains of paperwork. Through a series of events, he befriends MacArthur's eight-year-old son, Arthur, and is enlisted by MacArthur to "babysit" him. On top of the obvious complications that situation breeds, Van is also dealing with a shell shocked bunk-mate who may or may not be working with Communists on the black market. In addition, Van's wife (who he met and quickly married before he left basic training) writes him to tell him that she is pregnant, and that he is not the father. Each of these plot threads play themselves out over the course of the novel, which culminates in General MacArthur's (in)famous Atom Bowl, a football game between American soldiers at the site one of the nuclear bomb detonations. (Knight manipulates the details some, but the game really did occur).

I really can't say enough about this novel. It tackles an issue that has been written into the ground--war--but in a fresh, new way. Essentially, it is a war novel without the war, if that makes any sense. Van is so well written that even in the short space of the novel, he is fully realized and readers, I think, will respond accordingly.

This doesn't directly relate to the novel at hand, but I'd feel a little remiss if I didn't mention that I got the opportunity to spend a little time with Knight when I visited the University of Tennessee where he teaches (I was wait-listed to get into the PhD in Creative Writing program - I was eventually accepted, but it was after I'd committed to Nebraska). He was incredibly gracious and kind, and though I didn't end up accepting their offer, just getting to talk writing with him one-on-one was worth the trip to Knoxville.

Extras:
Profile of Knight at Knoxville's Metro Pulse, and Knight commenting on his own work, Knight's Grove/Atlantic author page, New York Times review of The Typist, The Book Lady's Blog-Just Read It! review and Knight's The Bare Necessities list, a review in the book-blog section of al.com, and a review at Alabama Public Radio.

Quick Reviews

2011-08-21T21:08:00.000-05:00

The length of the following reviews shouldn't be taken as a criticism of the books being reviewed. I've simply gotten behind and this is a relatively easy (if unfair) way to catch up. If you have any comments or questions regarding the books, as always, feel free to post a comment.

Daniel Woodrell - The Bayou Trilogy

An omnibus edition of three of Woodrell's gritty early novels (Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing, and The Ones You Do) featuring police detective Rene Shade, The Bayou Trilogy is an excellent introduction to the work of Woodrell. While I don't think these early novels stand up to Woodrell's later work, most notably Winter's Bone, it's interesting to look back at the early work of a writer you greatly admire. Ultimately, I wasn't disappointed and I don't think you will be either.

For a more thorough review (including plot and character summaries), check out John Hood's review at the Sunpost Weekly column, Bound. Here's another review, this one from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch online edition. Finally, according to the Boston Globe online, The Bayou Trilogy was one of the books President Obama purchased on his most recent vacation to Martha's Vineyard. Read the short article here.

Joe R. Lansdale - The Bottoms

This was my first encounter with Lansdale, and while I didn't love The Bottoms, there was enough there for me keep an eye out for more of Lansdale's work.

One of the blurbs on the novel references To Kill a Mockingbird, and thematically, the blurb couldn't be more accurate. It felt to me like a mildly grown-up version of To Kill a Mockingbird - it was darker and more violent, yet it still retained the coming-of-age innocence of Lee's work.

The problems I had with the novel stem from it's narration. It's narrated by an old man telling the story of how things were in his east Texas town in the 1930s when he was eleven years-old. There are several moments where the narrator, and by default, Lansdale, needs the reader to know something that the narrator can't know or isn't present for, so he devises interesting ways around this. For instance, he listens through the wall on numerous occasions and peeks into the hole in a roof to hear a conversation he's not meant to hear. Now, one or two of these instances is okay, but after the third or fourth time, it began to wear on me.

Craig Johnson - The Cold Dish, Death Without Company, Kindness Goes Unpunished

The first three novels in Craig Johnson's Walt Longmire mystery series (now into its seventh book), The Cold Dish, Death Without Company, and Kindness Goes Unpunished are well written literary mysteries based in rural Absaroka County, Wyoming. Walt Longmire, sheriff and narrator of each novel, is the kind of first person narrator that readers enjoy spending time with. He's witty, smart (but not overly so), and just self-depreciating enough to be entertaining. Johnson's mysteries aren't whodunits but character studies. He seems much more interested in why a character does something.

My only substantial criticism is that through the progression of the first three novels, the violence became more stylized in each successive book. In Kindness Goes Unpunished, the cast of characters are in Philadelphia and a character actually hangs from the back of a speeding SUV (among a few other Hollywood-ish action scenes). The first three novels taken together remind me of a movie franchise like Rambo or even Death Wish. The first of each franchise are good, solid movies, but each successive sequel gets more and more over-the-top and less and less believable. I suppose that's the risk an author runs when he or she commits to a series of books.

However, if you're looking for well-written, literary mysteries that are a little different, not to mention fun to read, then you could probably do much worse than Johnson's work.

Though I'm in no hurry to get back to the series, I expect that at some point down the road I'll want to rejoin Sheriff Walt Longmire to see what sorts of trouble he's found himself in out in Absaroka County, Wyoming.

News

2011-08-12T20:45:00.003-05:00

It's been a few weeks of silence here, and I apologize, but things have been pretty busy. On top of trying to figure out this whole parenting thing (I think my wife and I are getting the hang of it--as much as anyone really can), we've been in the process of moving to Lincoln, NE where I'll be starting in the PhD program in creative writing at the University of Nebraska this semester.

Though I haven't been posting, I have been reading: Daniel Woodrell's The Bayou Trilogy, Lynne Barrett's Magpies, three of Craig Johnson's Walt Longmire mysteries, The Cold Dish, Death Without Company, and Kindness Goes Unpunished, Joe R. Lansdale's The Bottoms, as well as Michael Knight's excellent short novel, The Typist. I'll probably write short reviews of Johnson's and Lansdale's books, but Knight's deserves a full review - it's really good. So, you can expect those reviews in the next couple days.

In addition to the Miroslav Penkov interview, I have a few more lined up in the coming months, so check back for those.

Also, some good news on the personal front - one of my stories has been accepted for publication in REAL: Regarding Arts and Letters; it's due out in September. I know several people whose work has appeared in REAL, and I'm proud to join their ranks.

Miroslav Penkov - East of the West: A Country in Stories

2011-07-12T17:02:00.010-05:00

The stories in Miroslav Penkov's debut collection, East of the West, are by turns dark, funny, full of both hope and despair, and a couple are even a little mythic, but the one thing they all share is their quality. Simply put - these stories are good.

The first three stories in this collection, "Makedonija," "East of the West," and "Buying Lenin," really floored me. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a better opening three stories in a debut collection, especially from such a young writer (Penkov is only 29 years old). In "Makedonija," an old man in a nursing home in Sofia, Bulgaria (where several of the stories take place) finds love letters to his wife from a man fighting for Macedonia's freedom in 1905. She has saved the letters for over sixty years, and now that she is partially paralyzed and mute from multiple strokes, her husband begins reading her the letters. It's a moving story with a strong voice, and the image at the end is truly great. In the title story, a town is divided by a river, and after one of the many Bulgarian wars, the town is divided along the river. On the East is Bulgaria and on the West is Serbia. Every five years officials allow the town to have a reunion, and during these reunions the narrator and his cousin, Vera, meet up and begin a kind of love affair or courtship. It takes the narrator thirty years to ask Vera to marry him, and though I don't want to give the ending away, things don't turn out they way the narrator has planned. In "Buying Lenin," winner of the 2007 Eudora Welty Prize and chosen by Salman Rushdie for inclusion in the 2008 Best American Short Stories, the narrator, who has come to America from Bulgaria to attend college, exchanges rather contentious phone calls with his grandfather (who still believes in the Communist party) about their differing ideals. The narrator, as a joke and a kind of apology, buys Lenin's corpse for his grandfather off eBay, and when the narrator next calls his grandfather to admit how unhappy he is in America, he is surprised when his grandfather tells him a large crate with Lenin's body showed up on his doorstep.

My summaries don't do these stories any justice; in fact, they resist summary like great stories often do. These, and the rest of the stories in the collection, are complex stories that effortlessly weave in Bulgarian history and culture. Perhaps I shouldn't admit this, but often when I read work by foreign writers I don't feel completely grounded in the story or connected to the events. Though much of what happens in Penkov's stories is completely foreign to me (and I would guess many American readers), I never felt lost or that I was missing some key element or cultural reference, but at the same time, I never felt like I was reading a history text, either. This is to say there is a great balance in these stories. Penkov seems to understand what his readers need, and he doesn't fail to give it to us.

I'd put East of the West up there with Alan Heathcock's Volt as the best debut collection I've read so far this year.

If you get a chance, check out Penkov's website and blog. He discusses some of the stories in East of the West, and gives a brief overview of Bulgarian history. It, like his collection, is worth a look.

*Check back soon for an interview with Penkov!

Extras:

A Review at The Outlet, Kyle Minor's review at HTMLGiant, an interview at One Story, a profile at Art & Seek, and a review at Contrary Blog.

Shann Ray - American Masculine

2011-07-11T15:21:00.002-05:00

In the note at the beginning of American Masculine, Robert Boswell, judge of the 2010 Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Bakeless Prize in fiction (which this collection won), writes that "one might call several of the stories in American Masculine experimental, much as one might accurately call the stories of Alice Munro experimental. It is part of the magic of Munro's stories that they never seem experimental no matter how inventively they are structured or how radically they are shaped. In like fashion, Shann Ray's stories do not feel experimental. In fact, they feel almost old-fashioned, written with unfashionable seriousness and the kind of multidimensional characters that become forcefully real to the reader precisely because they escape easy definition" (xi). While my enthusiasm for the collection doesn't quite reach the level of Boswell's, I think his description of the collection is apt.

The experimentation that Boswell is referring to takes the form--at least in the majority of the stories--of a manipulation of time. With the exception of "The Dark Between Them" where Ray's toying with the time in the story took me out of the narrative, he does an excellent job flashing back and forth and using the passage of time to his, and the story's, advantage.

If you are a fan of the sentence, then Ray's style should appeal to you. Stylistically, Ray's drawn comparisons to Cormac McCarthy, and I think it's pretty evident, especially with works like Blood Meridian or The Border Trilogy. However, like his experimentation with time, there are moments throughout the collection where the style gets in the way of the story--at least for my taste.

Ray's use of place--namely Montana--is brilliantly handled. He clearly knows his landscape and his people.

There is some repetition in the collection, both in the way some of the stories are structured (for example, more than one stories starts with "present" action then quickly flashes back) and in the characters. In two stories a character attended the University of Montana on a rodeo scholarship.

My only other criticism of the collection needs a short explanation. Several of Ray's stories end happily, which isn't a bad thing in itself, but when I came to the end of those stories I felt a little cheated. Of course, this says far more about my reading habits and expectations than anything, and it's probably not fair to criticize Ray for it. The best example comes in one of the better stories in the collection, "The Way Home." It's a short, simple story about a man struggling with alcoholism. He's on his way home from work, and he passes the bar where he usually hangs out. His coworkers have given him a hard time about not coming out with them, and he sees their cars parked out front. The man has a wife and newborn child at home, and the central conflict for him is whether not to stop. Everything about the story is strong, but the man passes the bar and goes home to his wife and child. Now, this is a perfectly plausible ending, and in Ray's hands it's well crafted. But for me, reading about characters who make the "right" decisions just isn't as interesting. Again, I'm completely aware that this isn't exactly a fair or objective criticism of Ray's work.

All in all, though, the collection is worth reading. In fact, based on the quality of one story alone, "When We Rise," you should check out the collection. In this story, Ray is firing on all cylinders. All the elements are at work and all work beautifully. Also of note, "The Way Home," "Mrs. Secrest," and "Rodin's The Hand of God."

Extras:
Shann Ray's website, reviews at The Quivering Pen, BookFox, Full-Stop, and Three Guys One Book. Also my friend has a brand new blog WORD/SOUND, and you can read his review of American Masculine here .

And the winner is. . .

2011-06-21T16:44:00.000-05:00

After much thought and because the responses were so good (seriously), I decided to put my favorite four responses into a hat and draw one, and Brian's name was the one I pulled out. I didn't want to have to choose this way, but I hadn't anticipated the responses being so insightful, and it seemed to be the only fair way for me to choose.

So, Brian, I'll need to you send me your current address, and I'll pass it along to the marketing director at Crown.

For those of you who didn't win, I'm sorry, but thank you for posting comments. I'm planning to respond to all of you, and I hope we can continue the great discussions you began.

Thanks again for reading,

Casey

Lee Martin Q&A

2011-06-20T10:57:00.007-05:00

As promised, here's the interview I conducted with Lee Martin through email on June 17th. For more information about Lee Martin, see the previous posts, or check out his website, Leemartinauthor.com.

In Break the Skin you are writing about characters that are lonely and longing for love and a sense of belonging, who, in short, want to live lives that matter. However, they are essentially “stuck,” either by their own doing or by their debilitating sense of fear of being alone. That’s a fine line to walk – writing about people who are “stuck” while at the same time keeping readers interested. Can you talk a little about that?

I’m not sure that the characters are stuck; I prefer to think of them as being separated from the lives that they want. They’re characters motivated by yearning—a longing for connection, a longing for love, a longing for importance. These are people who live on the margins—Laney and Delilah and Rose in Illinois; Miss Baby in Texas. They feel they’re entitled to better lives, and they are entitled—as entitled as anyone. The problem is they make bad choices, or they make no choices at all, and the resulting consequences are irrevocable and resonate with the glimpse of what might have been. Laney is a prime example. This nineteen-year-old girl who has a beautiful singing voice that could take her places if she’d only let it, but she’s too timid, too fearful, so she drops out of high school and ends up devoted to the older Delilah Dade. It’s Laney’s dependence on and dedication to Delilah that creates the trouble of the plot. When Laney has the chance, she allows Delilah to believe that Rose MacAdow, who has stolen Delilah’s boyfriend, Tweet, has placed a hex on them. Delilah decides that the only way to lift the hex is to kill Rose. Laney and Delilah quickly see that such a plan is foolish—they’d never get away with it—but the desire to gain a measure of revenge is born and it has to have its full dramatization during the course of the novel. I wanted to see what the evil intent, no matter how brief its existence, could create for Laney and Delilah. My characters may be stuck in the sense that they don’t have what they want, but they can create an interesting chain of events simply by acting, which Laney and Miss Baby certainly do. Laney makes possible the revenge plot against Rose; Miss Baby claims Laney’s boyfriend, Lester, when he shows up in Texas, in the midst of a dissociative fugue. He doesn’t know who he is or how he’s ended up in Texas. Miss Baby sees a chance. She’s never been lucky in love, but she has the nerve and the stoutness of heart to tell Lester that he’s her husband, Donnie. “It came to me,” she says, “this whole other life, as if a curtain parted—Lordy McGordy—and I could see through to the other side.” That’s what my characters to—they see through the lives they have to the ones they want, and when they have the chance, they try to reach out and grab those better lives. That’s what starts the trouble. It’s my job to see the layers of these characters that make them human—all that longing, all those missteps, all those consequences.

Along the same lines, these characters, perhaps in response to their fear, believe, or at least want to believe, in magic: Laney, Delilah, Lester, and Rose dabble with spells, and Miss Baby has her fairy figurines. There is a sense that if they believe strongly enough they can wish their way out of their respective situations. I imagine that might have been a bit tricky to pull off while writing this novel. Was the magic something you’d planned, or did it come out of the characters’ desperate need to believe they had some power over their lives?

I first began to think about Break the Skin because I came upon a news story about a woman in a small Illinois town who convinced some other people that a young girl had placed a hex on them and the only way to get rid of the hex was to kill her. I wondered how in the world a fairly unremarkable woman could hold so much sway over these people. How was she able to convince them that their lives were being controlled by this young girl? How was she able to lead them to violence? You’re absolutely right that this belief in magic and hexes and spells comes from a desire that my characters have to wish their way out of unfavorable situations. Why do people buy lottery tickets, go to casinos, cast prayers to the heavens? Because they want more than they have. Because they think a stroke of luck or providence can save them. So the practical magic was always a part of my conception of the novel. During the writing, I had to make it believable that these characters would have faith in that magic. I had to pay close attention the particulars of their lives, past and present, so I could invite readers to think about the need these characters have and the extremes to which they’ll go in an attempt to satisfy that need.

Laney, more so than any other character in the novel, actually has something—her singing voice—that could get her out of her station in life. I kept thinking, “Just go. Leave all these people behind.” In that way, Laney is a frustrating character to read, though completely believable. What was it like writing her?

Oh, I had those same frustrations with Laney. I wanted her to trust her talent. I wanted her to have the pretty life that was waiting for her, but I can’t make my characters do what they aren’t capable of doing. In Laney’s case, she’s too afraid of her talent, too afraid to leave what she’s always known best—her life in that small town. She’s frightened that if she leaves she’ll find out she’s what she thought she was all along. No one. So she stays and she tries to make a happy life with Lester. Unfortunately for her, she’s already set into motion a sequence of events that she won’t be able to change. As I was letting her tell her story, she touched my heart in all the right ways because she was a girl who felt deeply, who wanted to do the right thing, who tried to be a good person, and yet she made the mistake of caring too much about Delilah. I can understand that because, after all, isn’t it human to do things we might have never imagined all for the sake of love? Not having children of my own, I look at my characters and my students the way I would my sons and daughters. I don’t have to always agree with their choices, but in spite of whatever poor decisions they make I still love them. They’re part of me.

Since the novel deals so much with doubt and speculation among the characters—as readers we never know who is telling the truth, what version of the “truth” to believe—did you consider giving any other characters their own sections? I think that Lester, with his “dissociative fugues,” or Rose with her “poppet” dolls and hexes would be interesting.

I’d already used multiple narrators in my novel, The Bright Forever, so in this book I wanted the challenge of two first-person narrators in different parts of the country. I wanted to see whether I could get these two narratives, which at first seem so disparate, to be necessary to each other. I tried to let the inner lives of other characters like Lester and Rose come to the surface through their interaction with the two narrators.

Given that the novel is dedicated to Miss Baby, the characters’ “voices” were clearly important to you in writing this novel, so how did you go about differentiating the voices? Did you write each story line separately, or alternate as they appear in the book? How did Laney and Miss Baby’s voices help shape the novel?

Miss Baby was the character who spoke to me first, and in an early draft her section opened the novel. It was only in later versions that I understood that the central event of the book is what happens with Laney and Delilah and Rose in Illinois; therefore, the novel needed to open there with the police coming for Laney in the middle of the night. I wrote long sections from the point of view of both Laney and Miss Baby. Then in the editorial process, with the help of my agent, Phyllis Wender, and my editors, Sarah Knight and Shaye Areheart, I started thinking about where to break each narrative in order to achieve the most suspense. I kept in mind that Laney was a young girl moving from innocence to knowledge during the course of her story, and Miss Baby was older and more experienced when her story began. Just knowing what a character carries onto the page with her, given her past experiences and her present circumstances, allows me hear each narrator’s voice and to know how she would express her response to the things happening around her and the things that she makes happen.

Shifting gears a little bit, what does it mean to you to be a Midwestern writer? What makes Midwestern writing unique from other regions, i.e., what makes Midwestern writing “Midwestern”?

That’s a question I think about quite often, and I’m never sure that I arrive at a very good answer. In general, I think there’s a directness, a stark beauty, a dignity, a certain degree of restraint, an attention paid to geography and the way the people respond to the landscape, a respect for those people whose lives may seem small and insignificant but ultimately rich with the complexity of human hearts in conflict. There’s no pretension, very little fanfare. Just the facts of the human life presented in language as cleanly built as a straight row of soybeans or streets running at right angles on a grid.

In your introduction to New Stories from the Midwest you argue that “the Midwest has always produced its share of outstanding writers,” and that it’s time to “crank up the publicity machine.” As you note in the introduction, some of literature’s heaviest hitters are Midwesterners—from Twain, Cather, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Dreiser, to Louise Erdrich, Jonathan Franzen, Marilynne Robinson, and Toni Morrison—yet the Midwest/Midwestern writers still seem to be overlooked in major discussions of place and region. Why do you think that is?

Maybe we’re just too unassuming. Maybe we don’t promote ourselves and our region as much as we should. Maybe folks on both coasts have a tendency to overlook the Midwest, or as they sometimes call it, the flyover zone. Maybe we’re victims of a cultural hierarchy we can’t overturn. Maybe we’re too easy to dismiss because we’re too hard to define. Want to start a spirited discussion? Ask someone whether a certain state is in the Midwest. Nebraska? Michigan? Missouri? North Dakota? I’m just thinking out loud, so please don’t take any of what I’m saying here as gospel. I just know that the literature of the Midwest and its people often get overlooked, which then puts us in the awkward position of having to defend and self-promote. Then we run the risk of being seen as whiners. Great literature has come from the Midwest, and I’m so glad to see the work that Jason Brown is doing with the annual anthology that you mention. Work like that can go a long way to helping contemporary Midwestern literature establish an identity.

Finally, if you don’t mind my asking, what’s next for you? What are you working on?

I’m working on a new novel called Late One Night. It involves a suspicious house trailer fire in a farming community in southeastern Illinois and the rumor that the occupant’s estranged husband is responsible for it. On one level, it’s a mystery of who set the fire and why, but it’s also a story of community and family and how the smallest word or silence can make space for judgment that can change lives forever. It’s also a story of endurance and the faith that people in dire circumstances—the put-upon, I like to call them—must have in the healing power of love.

**********

I'd like to thank Kate Conneally at Crown Publishing for sending my the advanced copy of Lee's new novel, Break the Skin, and for helping to set the interview up. I'd also like to thank Lee for being so gracious with his time and so forthcoming with his answers.

Lee Martin - Break the Skin

2011-06-15T14:53:00.000-05:00

Like everything Lee Martin writes, his new novel, Break the Skin, has all the hallmarks of his style: smooth, clear prose, well-crafted and complex characters, and a kind of generosity of spirit that is hard to quantify. If you read enough of Martin's work (I've read his collection The Least You Need to Know, and two of his earlier novels, The Bright Forever and River of Heaven) you know what to expect from his work, though I don't mean to suggest that translates into predictability. Martin clearly cares for and respects his characters, even when they act in ways that may be harmful to themselves or others.

I don't want to give too much of the plot away (follow the link on the title above for the jacket synopsis), but Break the Skin is told from two alternating first-person narrators: Laney, a young Walmart employee from Mt. Gilead, Illinois, and Miss Baby, a tattoo artist in Denton, Texas. The two story lines at first seem disparate, but they soon start to come together in interesting, and rather unexpected, ways. The two narrators, while different in age, occupation, and race (Miss Baby is Mexican), are similar in that they want nothing more than to feel like they matter to someone. They want to be wanted, and they want to be loved. This want--need--in their lives creates a kind of debilitating fear, especially as pertains to Laney. Laney has the gift of a beautiful singing voice--something her mother thinks she could use to get out of Mt. Gilead--but she is too afraid to use it. Instead, she gets caught up with Delilah Dade and Rose MacAdow who feel equally "stuck" in life, and Laney's life with them begins to take increasingly dark and violent turns.

What I found most interesting about the novel is the way it examines, with dignity, a certain "class" of people. Martin writes thoughtfully and generously about characters lesser writers might simply use as a caricatures or "types" - they work at Walmart, live in trailers, etc. Life has beat these people down to such an extent that they no longer think they have any power over their lives. They want so much for their lives to matter, but their fear keeps them doing anything about it. In fact, they even resort to casting spells and putting hexes on people. I admit, I struggled some with this aspect of the novel, but it shows, perhaps better than anything else, how powerless these characters feel. Their desire for some control over their fate pushes them to believe (or at least want to believe) in magic.

At it's heart, I guess you could call Break the Skin a mystery, though that's certainly selling it short - don't expect any major genre elements. In a way it reminds me of Dan Chaon's Await Your Reply, in that in Break the Skin you don't know (until the end) who is telling the truth, or even if their "truth" is true, though Chaon's novel much more consciously employs and toys with genre elements. (Chaon, by the way, is another excellent writer and a Midwesterner to boot. Check him out if you haven't already - his collection Among the Missing is really great.)

All in all, I think you'll enjoy Break the Skin, but, then again, anything with Lee Martin's name on the spine is going to be worth checking out.

**********

*Don't forget, the giveaway for a brand new copy of Break the Skin ends Friday, June 17th at midnight. See the previous post and get your comments submitted.

Also, check back in a few days for a The Story is the Cure first - a Q&A with Lee Martin!

BOOK GIVEAWAY: Lee Martin's New Novel - Break the Skin

2011-06-08T11:11:00.000-05:00

Last week I was contacted by someone in the marketing department at Crown Publishing Group/Random House about reviewing Lee Martin's forthcoming novel, Break the Skin, for The Story is the Cure. She sent me a copy of the novel and I'm currently reading it. I plan to have the review posted on or before the scheduled release date, June 14th. On top of that, the good people at Crown Publishing Group are allowing me to run a giveaway for a copy of Break the Skin.

In order to be eligible for the free book, you need to respond to this post - but that's not all. Instead of just putting everyone's name in a hat and picking one at random, I'm going to make you work for it just a little - after all, it's a brand new hardcover book, $24.00 cover price. Since Lee Martin is a midwestern writer (he grew up in Illinois, got his PhD from Nebraska, and now teaches in the MFA program at Ohio State), and this blog is based in the Midwest, I'd like you to either describe for me what you think makes midwestern writing "midwestern", i.e. how it's different from other regions, and/or give me your favorite midwestern writer/book and describe for me what makes it uniquely midwestern. You have until June 17th at midnight to respond, and then I'll choose the best response and send your address to Crown and you'll be the proud new owner of a copy of Break the Skin.

I really hope this giveaway works well, so I'm asking everyone to post a response - it's a chance at a free book - why not give it a shot? Also, if you run a blog or website and feel so inclined, please post a link to this so that even more people can have a chance at it. If this all goes well, then there's a possibility there could be more giveaways in the future.

I'm looking forward to reading your responses.

Thanks,
Casey

Philip Stephens - Miss Me When I'm Gone

2011-05-24T14:39:00.001-05:00

"'Old times are past and gone," Darby said.

Cyrus thought otherwise--the past lay like land on the far side of a bridge you crossed over many times, until the bridge collapsed and you could not tell which side you were on" (93).

I was initially drawn to Philip Stephens's debut novel, Miss Me When I'm Gone, because of the setting--the Ozark region of southern Missouri--and my personal interest in that area. I read a review in the KC Star when I was home visiting my parents early this spring, and the book seemed worth checking out; plus, Stephens lives in KC, so I felt good supporting a "local" author. Miss Me When I'm Gone certainly delivers on the setting--a fictional town called Apogee in the lakes region of the Ozarks--but it does much more, and it does it well.

I read somewhere that Stephens spent ten years on Miss Me When I'm Gone, and the plot reflects this. It's complex, but in a good way, the way only time and multiple revisions can accomplish. At its most basic, the story follows folk singer Cyrus Harper as he comes home to Apogee, Missouri to see to his dying mother.  When he was a teenager, Cyrus's sister, and singing partner, Saro, disappeared and was never heard from again. Cyrus is haunted by her disappearance and sees her in the faces of women in the crowd at his shows. Cyrus's brother, Isaac, is a land developer and has plans for the Harper land after their mother dies. The secondary story line follows recently paroled Margaret Bowman who has made her way from California to Missouri to reconcile with her daughter. The dual story lines come together late in the book, but since there is a pretty strong mystery element to the novel, I don't want to give anything else away.

Of the two story lines, I found Margaret's to be a bit tedious at the beginning, but once I got into the book and found the rhythm of each alternating section, I enjoyed both equally. In addition to the Cyrus and Margaret sections, there are four or five short sections narrated by a different character, a mute boy who lives in the woods of Apogee. I know that sounds strange, and it is, but it really works.  At first, I didn't know what to make of it, but as the book moves along, his sections begin to make more sense. In a way, he reminds me of Benji in The Sound and the Fury. Actually, the entire novel is reminiscent of Faulkner (I'm positive I'm not the first to make that comparison): Gothic elements, rich, lyric language (Stephens is a published poet), lush setting, etc.; however, that comparison is probably a little too easy for me to fall back on.

A couple other thing worth noting: this novel is full of music - folk song and artist references and anecdotes and lyrics. Though I love music, I'm no musician, and I could see how someone might tire of all the musical stuff. I wasn't bothered by it at all, but I didn't take the time to look up any of the songs or references to see if they were real or if Stephens had made them up. Ultimately, it didn't bother me and I don't think it matters. (I'm pretty sure I read somewhere Stephens wrote a couple of the songs featured in the novel - he's also a musician.) Also, there are a few "supernatural" elements at play here. Normally I don't go for that kind of thing, but Stephens pulls it off in a way that satisfies someone like me - as readers we're never sure if what the character is seeing is real or a product of their booze and drug fueled imagination.

Miss Me When I'm Gone is in the realm of Daniel Woodrell (Winter's Bone), though it is less gritty and the language is more lush and lyrical. I'd say if you like the writing of someone like William Gay or Ron Rash, then you'll thoroughly enjoy this novel.

A New Addition

2011-05-24T11:46:00.001-05:00

I know things have been quiet around here this past week, but I have a good excuse:

Carver Quinn Pycior was born May 13th - yep, Friday the 13th. It's been a crazy, emotional week (I can't believe he's already over a week old!), but I wouldn't trade any of it for the world. Carver and his mom are both doing great - though his mom and I would be doing much, much better if he'd learn to sleep as much at night as he does during the day.

So, although my priorities have shifted drastically (I never realized how selfish I was until Carver was born) and my free time has dwindled down to a few hours here and there when Carver is sleeping, I'm planning to work really hard to keep up on the blog. I suspect my posts will be few and far between for the next few weeks, at least until Carver gets things figured out a little better and we can get on a kind of schedule.

Thanks for reading,
Casey

(A special thanks goes out to my cousin Monica for the awesome picture.)

Edward P. Jones Inteview at The Rumpus

2011-05-19T09:52:00.000-05:00

If you haven't already seen it, there's a great, candid interview with Edward P. Jones up at The Rumpus. I got a chance to hear Jones read in Kansas City back in 2008 when he was The Carolyn Benton Cockefair Chair Writer-In-Residence at UMKC. Jones was very blunt, though not necessarily unpleasant, which I think comes through in this interview. During the Q&A portion of his reading, when someone asked one of the typical questions that are asked at readings, he gave short, clipped answers. He didn't seem to feel the need to indulge the audience with "typical" writerly answers. It wouldn't surprise me if many people found him rude or off-putting, but I thought his answers and his overall demeanor were refreshing. When someone asked a more probing question, he engaged them and gave longer, more thorough answers.

If you haven't already seen this interview, check it out. I don't really subscribe to his personal writing process, but I like that he's honest. Clearly it has worked for him. Great interview - it's worth the look.

Richard Ford - The Ultimate Good Luck

2011-05-09T15:54:00.003-05:00

With finishing The Ultimate Good Luck, Richard Ford's second novel, I've read all of Ford's novels, and I can say with some certainty that he has gotten better with age. While in no way do I think The Ultimate Good Luck stands up to Ford's Bascombe novels (The Sportswriter, Independence Day, and The Lay of the Land), it is, in my opinion, better than his first novel, A Piece of My Heart.

The Ultimate Good Luck follows Harry Quinn, a Vietnam veteran, in Mexico as he works to get his wife's brother, Sonny, out of jail. The plot of the novel is strong; it walks the fine line between action/adventure and literary suspense. Quinn must navigate the streets of Oaxaca, Mexico and deal with all manner of shady people in his efforts to get Sonny released. Sonny, who had been caught running drugs, needs to get out of jail in order to escape the men who think he skimmed money from the drug deal gone bad. His time is limited, and this adds a certain suspense that carries the action of the novel.

It's Ford, so the writing is good; however, it is very reminiscent of Hemingway (I'm saying nothing new here - Ford/Hemingway comparisons abound) - at times almost annoyingly so. The Ultimate Good Luck is a very existential novel, and while that's not a bad thing, there are numerous vague passages. For example (picked at random): "He stopped and looked up and took his glasses off again in the shelter of the lower arcade. Quinn felt something changing imperceptibly, something that didn't make any difference. It was simply the less important thing you gave up, the slightest measure of control, he knew, that meant you wanted something very bad" (63); or "he thought he looked good enough and up to things, even though he felt just at that precise moment like a man falling, all out of attitude and disposition, from somewhere he didn't remember toward someplace he couldn't see" (81). The novel is full of this kind of writing. It demands to be read slowly and carefully, yet I'm still not sure what to make of much of it. The dialog between the characters carries with it the same vague, disconnected quality.

Finally, I was never quite sure what to make of the relationship between Quinn and his wife, Rae. It is obvious that Quinn is damaged from the war, and Rae's nearly constant drug use doesn't help, but I could never pin down why Quinn would go to the lengths he does to get Sonny out of jail, except that ultimately I suppose we are to gather that he needed the adventure and the risk to survive.

I'd be interested to hear what others have to say about this novel, particularly if you've read Ford's later work. If you haven't read Ford before, I wouldn't start here. I don't think it is representative of his work as a whole. Start with Rock Springs (his excellent first collection of short stories), Wildlife, or the Bascombe trilogy.

Here's a brand new interview with Ford at Fiction Writers Review, and a Paris Review interview from 1996 (Ford briefly discusses The Ultimate Good Luck) - good stuff indeed.

Lee Martin - The Least You Need to Know

2011-05-01T15:15:00.002-05:00

I've read two of Lee Martin's novels, The Bright Forever (finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize) and River of Heaven, and both were great in a quiet, generous, large-hearted way that is reminiscent of someone like William Maxwell. Martin's 1995 Mary McCarthy Prize winning debut collection (yep, another one), The Least You Need to Know, is just as good.

In the foreward to the collection, Amy Bloom, the judge for that year's McCarthy prize sums up Martin's work perfectly. She writes:
"Martin's work resists the pull of shiny look-at-me prose. . .the inevitable result of too many competent people being encouraged to show off their tricks and erudition as a competitive sport, the other dead-end mix of too much technique and too little heart. Martin wants to tell the story. He wants us to know everyone and give them a chance, to understand what is happening, even as we are shaking our heads at how appallingly, how lame, how stupid, how vulnerable we all are" (xii).

Martin's stories deal mostly with teenage sons and their fathers, and most of the stories hinge on a father's decision. As readers we see that the choices the fathers make are "bad," but Martin never puts us in a position where we judge the father for what he's done. In fact, many times the protagonist sons go along with their fathers' poor choices--sometimes knowingly, sometimes not--and we are then forced to go along with them. I suppose one could criticize the the stories in this collection for being too similar (and they probably wouldn't be entirely wrong); however, since there are only seven stories, I wasn't too bothered by their thematic similarities.

Ultimately, these stories are "moral" in the way that John Gardner, in On Moral Fiction, claimed all true Art is. Gardner writes: "True art is by its nature moral. We recognize true art by its careful, thoroughly honest search for and analysis of values. It is not didactic. . .it explores, open-mindedly, to learn what it should teach. . . .As a chemist's experiment tests the laws of nature and dramatically reveals the truth or falsity of scientific hypotheses, moral art tests values and rouses trustworthy feelings about the better and worse in human action" (19). In stories like "The Least You Need to Know," "Light Opera," "The End of Sorry," and "The Price is the Price," Martin has done just this, and he has done it well.

Check out Martin's website for links to his books, and his blog, The Least You Need to Know. There Martin discusses writing (he teaches in the MFA program at Ohio State) and other issues. Under News and Events you'll find links to interviews and reviews of Martin's work. Also, it looks like he has a new novel, Break the Skin, coming out in June. I look forward to its release.

Richard Ford on "Work"

2011-04-29T12:46:00.000-05:00

Last week, the Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy posted "Richard Ford on the Meaning of Work," a short piece, which, I'm sure, was to help promote Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar: Stories of Work, a Ford-edited collection that came out last week. I first read about Ford's essay while checking out a new blog, So, You Have an MFA. Jon Sealy of Jon Sealy 2.0 is a contributor, and he posted a short response to Ford's piece and asked readers/writers to respond by giving their most difficult job and their most "challenging" writing project. I plan to respond, but I wanted to get something out here first.

I'm intrigued by Ford's for several reasons, which I'll get to shortly, but it's the timing of it that is most interesting. Let me explain: last fall I read and reviewed James Dickey's Deliverance, and I was disappointed by the novel (you can read the review here). Last week someone commented on that review and referred to me as an "elitist." Now to be fair, the commenter and I have since had some friendly correspondence and his initial comment amounts to little more than a misunderstanding, and I'm certainly not trying to call him out or throw him under the bus; in fact, in a way I'm thanking him for forcing me to really consider how I see myself in relation to what I'm doing with my life. I'm the only person in my family to graduate from college, and while I'm positive my family is proud of me, I wonder sometimes if the fact that I have two master's degrees (or will have in a few weeks) and will be heading off to get a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska in the fall is puzzling to them. I certainly don't blame them--quite often I'm puzzled by it, too.

Ford's piece is interesting to me because I'm the only male in my family who doesn't (or at least for a large part of their working life, didn't) get dirty for a living. What they do is real work. My father, for example, was a rough-in carpenter for close to 20 years before switching gears and becoming a auto body repair man (something he'd dabbled in on the side for years). I know the kind of work he's done, what he's put his body through (what he's still putting his body through), and I know why he did it: for me to be able to go off and do what I'm doing now. Maybe it's because I'm getting older and about to become a father myself (any day now), but I'm even more aware of, and sensitive to, the issues of what it means to do real work and provide for a family. In all honesty, while I know better, I have a certain amount of guilt for not following in my father's footsteps (not literally, but by working some kind of blue-collar job). I know that he's worked like he has so I don't have to, but still, I've never been able to shake the feeling. It's something that I've tried to work through and into my writing, if, for no other reason than to honor my father and those who've worked they way they have to allow me to do what I'm doing.

Sorry for the overly-personal, somewhat-rambling post, but the issue of work is something I'm drawn to. I look forward to getting my hands on a copy of Ford's new anthology to see what it has to offer. I'm interested in what others think about this as well, especially if you come from a blue-collar background (of course, white-collar folks are welcome to chime in, too).

Thanks for reading,
Casey

Holly Goddard Jones - Girl Trouble

2011-04-29T11:22:00.000-05:00

Girl Trouble, Holly Goddard Jones's debut collection (2009), is the third or fourth debut collection that I've read in row, though it isn't by any design. I suppose part of it is intentional; I have made a conscious effort to read new-ish collections by new-ish writers, so it's not a complete accident that I've read so many debut collections recently. Perhaps it's not completely fair to the respective writers, though, because inevitably I hold each collection up against the others. I guess that's the whole point of reading and critiquing/reviewing literature; however, in some cases it doesn't seem completely fair. Girl Trouble is one of those cases. After reading a collection like Alan Heathcock's Volt, it'll be hard for other collections to match up.

To begin with, Jones's writing is really suburb. Six of the eight stories are in the third person, but Jones's style and voice, even in her third person narrators, is strong and singular. They have nearly as much character as what you usually expect from a first person voice. There are also some really great images spread throughout. One that sticks with me is in "An Upright Man." A teenage boy in the summer before heading off to college goes out with a "cute" "sweet" girl basically to pass the time, and after sleeping with her, he breaks up with her in a cowardly way. The girl, who has remained fairly composed, gets out of his car and goes up the sidewalk to her house, only she trips and falls up the front steps. The boy, who realizes what awful insensitive thing he's done, watches her fall but doesn't do anything to help. Instead, quickly back out of the driveway and speeds away. For whatever reason, this image stood out to me probably more so than any other (maybe someone could read into that, I don't know).

Jones's stories are long--the shortest is 26 pages. Also, the conflict in the majority of her stories is internal. In that way her stories remind me of those of Andre Dubus, another writer of long stories. Of course, this probably more a matter of personal taste and an indicator of what I want/expect from a short story--some external conflict/tension/drama to go along with the internal--than a major criticism of Jones.

Jones is a Kentucky writer, but her stories don't have the kind of regional feel of say, Chris Offutt, but Jones admits she not as interested in setting and place--at least not in that way (there's a good interview with Jones at the back of copy of Girl Trouble), so it's not really fair to criticize her on that account.

Next to the actual writing itself, Jones's strongest work is in her characters. She creates complete, real people on the page (with the exception of only a few characters, most notably Theo and Josie in "Life Expectancy"). We have complete access to their deepest thoughts and fears. This came through the most for me in "Parts." The first person narrator is the mother of a rape/murder victim, and in the course of the story her marriage breaks up, and we as readers are confronted with some of her most disturbing thoughts. This also comes through in "Proof of God," a companion piece of sorts to "Parts," only this story is from the perspective of one of the "accused" rapists (it's a complex situation, and I don't want to give anything away). Personally, I found this story to be the stronger of the two, if only because it was more challenging/difficult to empathize with the man than it was the mother.

Ultimately, I enjoyed Jones's characterizations, if at times, her plots were a little stale. Charles Baxter, channeling Flannery O'Connor, says that all stories should be "surprising yet inevitable." In Jones's collection, I found myself wanting more of the "surprising" part of the equation, particularly in "Life Expectancy" and "An Upright Man."

Despite some of the issues I had with Girl Trouble, it was a worth reading, and I look forward to what Jones does next.

Extras:
Long interview at Chapter16.org, an interview at BOMBLOG, a short interview at Andrew's Book Club, and the Kenyon Review interview that appears at the back of my copy of Girl Trouble.

Don Waters - Desert Gothic

2011-04-29T09:22:00.004-05:00

Desert Gothic, Don Waters's Iowa Short Fiction Award winning debut collection (2007), has been on my shelf for quite some time. Had I known I was going to enjoy so much, I would have read it much sooner.

The ten stories in Desert Gothic are set in the southwest, mostly in and around Nevada, and the sense of place in these stories is very strong. You get the sense that the characters would be different people if they lived in different place, and I think that's one of the marks of how well a writer uses a particular setting.

Waters's stories are also full of great characters in interesting situations - that's really the easiest way to describe the collection. For example, the excellent opening story, "What to Do with the Dead," is about an artist who works at a crematorium out in the desert and has to deliver ashes/remains to the deceased's next of kin; in "Mr. Epstein and the Dealer," a man, only known as "the dealer" travels to Mexico every month to buy large quantities of pharmaceuticals and smuggles them across the border to sell to elderly people at retirement homes; "The Bulls of San Luis," is about a dying man who works as a pick-up man in an illegal immigrant border-crossing operation; and in "Mormons in Heat," an irreverent, recently-divorced thirty year-old LDS convert is paired up with nineteen year-old for their respective missions, only Eli, the convert, is only interested in escaping his life for an "all-expenses-paid" two year vacation and sleeping with women on the road. I don't want my too-brief, over-simplified summaries of these stories to give you the wrong idea: Waters's stories are more than just clever scenarios. They're well crafted, and they expertly walk the very difficult line between funny and serious, particularly in a story like "Mormons in Heat."

There were a couple of stories I didn't care as much for, but all in all, this collection is good. If you are interested in the American southwest specifically, or regionalism more generally, then I'd check this collection out.

Here's an interview with Waters at The Rumpus.

Alan Heathcock - Volt

2011-04-25T20:48:00.013-05:00

This collection, Alan Heathcock's first, has gotten some good press and reviews, and deservedly so. The eight stories in Volt take place in and around Krafton, a kind of any-place, and many of the stories have recurring characters. This gives the collection a unified feel, though the stories are not really "linked" in the traditional sense.

I've seen this collection referred to as "dark" and "violent," and while there are certainly dark, violent elements (particularly in stories like "Furlough" and "The Daughter"), I was surprised at the threads of hope and even faith. In almost all--if not all--of the stories there is at least some reference to faith. I don't want to give you the wrong idea - these are not religious stories - but thematically faith plays a central role.

There is also a sense of timelessness in this collection. Like the setting--clearly drawn but not specific to a particular place--the way Heathcock handles time in the collection is interesting. Many of the stories feel old, but in the very best way. Several times I found myself thinking a story was set in the 40s or 50s only then there would be a reference to something modern, like a character using a cell phone. I don't mean for this to sound like a criticism of Heathcock--in fact, I mean it as a supreme compliment.

All of the stories in this collection are strong, and each story begs to be read slowly and then reread. I would call these stories complex, but that might be misleading; these stories are big, deep, and expansive. I hate to use this cheap description, but Heathcock's stories are like mini-novels, not so much in length (though a couple are very long) but in breadth; these stories are full--full of twists and turns and subplots and themes, and it is easy to miss something if you are not paying close attention. In that way, upon quickly reading one of Heathcock's stories you might be left a little disappointed or feel unfulfilled/unsatisfied, but after rereading the story and thinking more about it, you're likely to appreciate Heathcock's abilities even more.

Read this collection--easily the best debut collection of the year so far (that I've read)--and I'm confident you won't be disappointed.  The best of the bunch - "The Staying Freight," "Furlough," "The Daughter," and my favorite, "Volt."

Extras:
NY Times review, New West review, Huffington Post profile with video of Heathcock, an interview at The Short Review, review and links at Fiction Writers Review, a review at The Millions, a long interview at Bookslut, an interview at Psychology Today, a profile in Boise Weekly, and a cool self-interview at The Nervous Breakdown.

Jerry Gabriel - Drowned Boy

2011-03-26T21:41:00.113-05:00

Jerry Gabriel's debut collection, Drowned Boy, winner of the 2008 Mary McCarthy Prize, was recommended to me by Dan Hoyt about six months ago, and I finally just recently got to it.

I hesitate to call this collection linked, though the jacket copy on the back of the book does, because I think that sometimes readers (myself included) have certain expectations about what a linked collection should do or be. For example, do all the stories have to take place in and around the same setting? Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio is probably the most famous example, and a more recent one is Donald Ray Pollock's Knockemstiff (interestingly, both in Ohio. In fact, Gabriel's collection takes place mostly in Ohio, too. Hmm. . .I may be on to something here. Maybe that's the only criteria for a linked collection - it must take place in Ohio. . .). But if setting is the main criteria, then why, for example, aren't Stuart Dybek's The Coast of Chicago or James Joyce's Dubliners typically considered linked collections? Do they have to include the same character or characters? If so, does the same character have to narrate every story, or can they narrate one story and turn up as a secondary character in another? I'm thinking this time of Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge. I suppose the point of my digression is to say that I'm not comfortable labeling Drowned Boy a linked collection. It certainly does some of the things above, but there are other elements that aren't so easily identifiable - the shift in setting and the long gaps in time to name two.

The stories in this collection follow, with only a couple exceptions, the lives of Nate and Donnie Holland, brothers growing up in southern Ohio. In the first story, "Boys Industrial School," Nate is eight and Donnie twelve, and by the final story, "Reagan's Army in Retreat," sixteen years have passed. It's what happens, or doesn't, in the sixteen years that make up the bulk of the collection.

What the early part of this collection does really well, particularly in regard to Nate in "Boys Industrial School" and "Falling Water," is convey the feeling of being a child at the age when you begin to know just enough to know you don't know anything about the world of adults. It seems too often in stories with children narrators or children as pov characters, they think and act outside or above their age. This isn't the case here. Gabriel does a great job of presenting Nate as a real, eight-year-old kid.

In "Marauders" and "Slump," there are only passing references to Nate. These stories are thematically similar in that they're both sports related, but they also both convey the feelings of isolation, disappointment, and stagnation of the people in the town. In fact, "Marauders" is told in with a plural narrator.

"Atlas" is the only story that really takes place in the middle of the sixteen year span, but it focuses less on Nate and Donnie as it does on their Uncle Donald's relationship with his son, Phillip, and Donald's debilitating fear of the change.

The last three stories, "Drowned Boy" (a long story or novella, you choose), "Weather," and "Reagan's Army in Retreat," take place at or near the end of the sixteen year time frame of the collection.  "Drowned Boy" is notable for the way it's structured.  It's an alternating point of view story and the two story lines come together and separate in interesting ways. In this story we learn that Donnie has joined the army, and Nate and Donnie's father has died. It's the lack of connection within this story that makes it hard to reconcile with. In "Weather," Donnie gets his turn as narrator, and he's stationed in north central Kansas. And in "Reagan's Army in Retreat," Nate has gone to Kansas in search of his brother, but as readers we don't know why or what for.

There is a lot of mystery in this collection, and I'm not talking about the genre kind. There is so much we don't know about Nate, but especially about Donnie. He's an enigma, and we as readers can't know him out because Nate doesn't even really know his him. I guess what I want is more. I suppose that's a critique, but in a way it's a compliment to the writing. I want to spend more time with these characters. I want to know why Donnie can't seem to settle, and why Nate feels the need to chase him across the country. We don't get any of this. Near the end of the "Reagan's Army in Retreat," Nate, who's thinking back to when he and Donnie were kids, says, "I was happy to be back with him in that moment, before every inevitable thing that came to pass afterward" (154).  I want to know what "inevitable thing[s]" have come to pass. If a character is looking back at his life at 24 and can recognize that the things that have happened were inevitable, I want to know about those things and that life.  That's really something, but I felt it was missing.

All in all, I enjoyed the collection. The writing is very strong, but subtle, and the setting--something I didn't touch on above--is handled beautifully throughout. I look forward to whatever Gabriel does next.

Bonus material:

Review of Drowned Boy at ForeWord Reviews, review at Bookslut, review at The Longest Chapter, and Gabriel's author page at Sarabande Books.

Goodreads - Spring Short Story Panel

2011-03-26T20:49:00.000-05:00

If anyone is interested, Goodreads has a Spring Short Story Panel up this month (the link will take you to the panel home page). The Form and Process and Sticking the Landing discussions are both great. Be aware that any Goodreads member can join that group and post comments, so focus on what the panelists have to say and you'll be in good hands.

In both discussion, the panelists, Alan Heathcock, Danielle Evans, Valerie Laken, and Emma Straub, have excellent observations and insights into the craft of short story writing. Oh, and you don't have to be a Goodreads member to access the panel (though I can't imagine you're not already a member).

Enjoy.

Urban Waite - The Terror of Living

2011-03-20T19:46:00.001-05:00

Urban Waite's debut novel, The Terror of Living, is a frenetically paced literary crime thriller. Told in short sections, the longest no longer than eight or ten pages, and from the perspective of five characters (all in the third person), the structure and pace of the novel take some getting used to at first. It has the effect of jump cuts in a movie or TV show, but once the main characters are established forty or fifty pages in, the structure and style work really well for the story being told.

Speaking of the story, it follows Phil Hunt, a low-level drug runner in Washington State, who is happened upon in a desolate section of the forest north of Seattle by small-time deputy Bobby Drake. Hunt gets away, but loses the drugs, and in doing so brings the wrath of Grady Fisher, a vicious hit man hired to track down Hunt by the people smuggling the drugs. This brief synopsis probably makes the novel sound a little over-the-top, but Waite does a really nice job--with a couple of exceptions--of keeping the genre elements reigned in.

In the acknowledgements, Waite thanks, among many other people, several writers and their books, including Cormac McCarthy for No Country for Old Men. Herein lies my biggest, and really only major problem with the novel. Even if I hadn't read the acknowledgements, the similarities to No Country for Old Men are hard to ignore. It's understandable, and admirable, for a writer to express his or her indebtedness to another writer's work, but I think that it's possible to become too indebted to a particular writer. Given the power of McCarthy's novel it's probably easy for a writer to lean on it, whether consciously or not, especially when writing something similar in theme. I think this manifests itself most clearly in the structure and theme of the novel and in the character of Grady, the hit man. He is very reminiscent of Chigurh from No Country for Old Men. Like Chigurh, Grady is a sadistic psychopath, but all along he is completely aware of who and what he is, and unfortunately it doesn't come off, or at least it didn't for me. Also, his weapon of choice is his bag of knives, which just didn't quite play for me either. Where Chigurh is mysterious, Waite gives some background on Grady, developing him much more than McCarthy does Chigurh; however, in a strange way, McCarthy's Chigurh is a better character for all that is unknown about him than Waite's Grady, though he is more "rounded." It's almost as if in "rounding" him out, trying to in some way explain his behavior, the essence of his character gets lost. What remains is a character who's a bit too cartoonish, especially given that the rest of the novel works so well. Finally, there is a section where Grady and Hunt talk on the phone that is too long to quote or summarize here (pgs. 210-213), but if you've read No Country for Old Men (or seen the movie) then the scene will be very familiar. It's a great scene, don't get me wrong, but it didn't feel completely original.

Even with it's similarities to No Country, I enjoy The Terror of Living. After all, if you are going to use a writer's work as a model, then you could choose far worse than McCarthy. I read somewhere that Waite sold another novel along with this one, so we're likely to see his second novel in the not too distant future. Based on what he was able to do with The Terror of Living, I look forward to whatever Waite does next.

Extra stuff:
Interview and brief essay at Hayden's Ferry Review Blog, a short story by Waite at AGNI Online, an interview at Powell's, a profile in a Seattle newspaper, and a mixed review from the Guardian.

John McNally - The Creative Writer's Survival Guide

2011-03-19T23:51:00.001-05:00

Let me start by telling you what John McNally's The Creative Writer's Survival Guide is not. It is not a craft book. You won't find chapters on plot, characterization, conflict, dramatic tension, point of view, or any number of other elements of craft, and you won't find any writing exercises or short stories to analyze or mimic.

What you will find, however, is exactly what the title says: a survival guide for writers. In six sections, "The Decision to Become a Writer," "Education and the Writer," "Getting Published," "Publicity," "Employment for Writers," and "The Writer's Life," each broken up into short mini-chapters, McNally covers pretty much everything outside of craft. His assumption seems to be that if you've found your way to his book, then you at least have a working knowledge of the craft or are in the process of learning it.

The book is written in a very informal, nearly conversational tone, and McNally is incredibly forthcoming (not to mention, very, very funny) about his own experiences as a writer. He does this without a bit of arrogance or pretentiousness. In a way, this book is a memoir of sorts, and McNally's career provides an excellent example for many of the book's sections. Based on his career, McNally seems to be someone whose advice about the writing life you can trust - he's published three novels and two short story collections, with both big and small presses, and he's edited six anthologies.

The book opens with a "warning" as a way to explain how to "use" the book and to dispel any ideas about what the book will and will not do. Depending on where you are on your own writer's path, a few of the sections may not be of any use to you. For example, in "Education and the Writer," McNally discusses the various creative writing degrees, MFA programs and how to choose one, the application process, the workshop, and life in general as a graduate student. Of course, for many people, this information may be too little too late, but for an undergraduate or someone who has been out of school for a time, this section is invaluable.

The "Getting Published" and "Publicity" sections are ones that I will dog-ear and keep as a reference to use down the line. McNally's focus in these sections is on the process of publishing and then publicizing novels or collections. His focus here is on the very practical aspects - the query letter (of which he provides a sample), agents, rejection and failure, and everything else that goes into the process of publication, and all the various (and sometimes interesting) ways to publicize your book once it is published. These sections do an excellent job of bridging the gap between what you (hopefully) learn while getting an MFA to what (again, hopefully) happens in the years following.

The final two sections, "Employment for Writers" and "The Writer's Life," provide a nice way to end the book. He discusses the life of writer in the academy and everything that entails, and how to make writing a habit rather than a hobby.

Though McNally's focus is primarily on the life of a fiction writer, I think The Creative Writer's Survival Guide will prove to be an indispensable text for writers of all stripes. I highly recommend it.

Here's some extra stuff:

Interview with McNally in VQR from 2004, an interview and link to audio interview with McNally at Pen on Fire, a discussion of the short story at Emerging Writers Network, an anecdote about his time at Iowa with T.C. Boyle at The Southeast Review, and a brand new, long interview with Anis Shivani at The Huffington Post.

A Quick Note

2011-03-19T10:30:00.000-05:00

It may be a bit presumptuous to assume that people actually check this blog on a regular basis, but if you do, I want to apologize for the lack of new posts the past few weeks. I've been working to "finish" my thesis and prepare for my comprehensive exams. Oh, and my wife is almost 8 months pregnant, so things have been a little hectic.

I'm going to make a concerted effort to get back on track and try to post something new at least once a week, if not more frequently. I also need to get caught up on my New Yorker story reviews - I'm several issues behind.

Anyway, thanks for reading.

Casey

A Little Change of Pace

2011-02-24T10:54:00.000-06:00

As the title of this post suggests, for a change of pace I recently read Dennis Lehane's first novel, A Drink Before the War (the first in the Kenzie & Gennaro series - if you've seen the movie version of Gone, Baby, Gone, those are the same two detectives), and James Lee Burke's The Neon Rain (the first in his long-running Dave Robicheaux series).

I've wanted to read Lehane's Mystic River for quite awhile, and I've heard good things about it - how it transcends the genre, etc. - but I wanted to read something else by him first, so what better place to start than his first novel? As for Burke, I've read one of his story collections, Jesus Out to Sea, and though I don't remember many specifics, I do remember liking it. Also, for time in the 1980s, Burke taught at Wichita State, and I'm pretty sure he wrote The Neon Rain while teaching here (the fact that the female character in the novel comes from just north of Wichita is a pretty good indication), so for that reason alone I was interested.

Except for the fact that Burke and Lehane are heavyweights in the crime/mystery genre and that I read these novels back-to-back, there's no reason for me to compare or connect these novels in any way; it's entirely arbitrary on my part. Anyway, both novels are gritty and violent, as one should probably expect, and both are well written, though there are things about each that stood out. Lehane's is a "detective novel" in that the two main characters, Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro, are private detectives, rather than police, which I think affords Lehane some leeway when it comes to what the characters do. The dialog is punchy and snappy, sometimes a little too much so for my taste, but I think he is clearly working within the genre. The same goes for the action scenes. They are a bit over the top and action movie-ish at times, but again, I think that is probably to be expected. I'd be interested to see if Lehane has toned that down in his more recent novels. The writing is at its best when Lehane is dealing with issues of class and race in Boston, where the novel takes place. He clearly knows the area and its people, and it comes through in the novel.

Burke's takes place in and around New Orleans, and like Lehane, Burke clearly knows the place and the people who inhabit it. Burke's main character, Dave Robicheaux, is a recovering alcoholic, a Vietnam veteran, and a police detective, so the deck is stacked, so to speak. Burke's writing is more lyrical than Lehane's, but there are a few things that stood out. There are several times (at least three) where a character's eyes "smile." That's one of those minor, pet-peevish kind of things that stuck out to me. The violence in Burke's novel is, perhaps, less stylized, but man does he pile it on. If this were the only Robicheaux novel (and granted, Burke may not have planned to write a dozen more at the time), the amount of violence this one police detective encounters might have been slightly more plausible, but knowing that there is a whole shelf full of Robicheaux novels that come after this makes it harder to swallow.

All in all, entertaining reads both. Neither book turned me away from the respective writer's work, and I may from time to time go back to each.

Richard Spilman - The Estate Sale

2011-02-13T20:14:00.002-06:00

The Estate Sale, Richard Spilman's second collection of short fiction (his first collection, Hot Fudge, was a New York Times notable book), published by Texas Review Press, is an example of what short fiction is capable of in the right hands.

In the spirit of full disclosure, you should know that Richard Spilman is one of my former workshop professors; however, if I didn't think the collection was good, I wouldn't be reviewing it.

What strikes me most about the twelve stories in this collection - outside of the writing, which is really, really good - is the subtlety with which Spilman is able to convey the complexity of the characters he presents, especially in the shorter stories in the collection. Nearly all of the characters and scenes are pitch perfect, with the kinds of simple, but telling details that help to craft real, believable characters that could, and probably do, exist off the page.

Spilman also crafts his stories as such that only the bear minimum of backstory is necessary, sometimes only a line or two and we know everything we need to know about a character's past. That's not easy to do. The temptation is usually to overdo that kind of thing, but none of these stories suffer from that malady.

Thematically, a few of the stories are similar but none tread the same ground. Clearly in the stories "Rain Forest Crunch" and "Spice," young love is a theme; in "Unclean Spirits," "Speaking in Code," and "The Estate Sale," religion and faith is important. But issues of guilt, regret, aging, and death appear as well, and each is explored with a careful hand.

Though all the stories are good, I found "Where the Spiders Sleep," "Where He Went Under," "Rain Forest Crunch," and "Speaking in Code" to be exceptional. If for no other reason but the quality of the writing, the poetic language and beautiful metaphors Spilman uses (but never over-uses), The Estate Sale is worth reading. Support a small press and a great teacher and pick up a copy.

For another great review, check out Our Stories Literary Journal.

Jess Walter - The Financial Lives of the Poets

2011-02-13T15:04:00.003-06:00

Jess Walter's newest novel, The Financial Lives of the Poets, is a wild, fun, funny, yet timely and smart novel. Honestly, I had more fun reading this novel than any other novel in recent memory.

A quick synopsis:

Over the course of about a week, forty-four year-old Matt Prior's world crumbles. After having quit his job as a reporter to start up a financial poetry website - poetfolio.com - only to have the site fail and have to beg for his job at the newspaper back, Matt is laid off. He's also on the verge of losing his home to foreclosure (a balloon payment of over 30K is due by the end of the week that his wife doesn't know about), his stock portfolio has tanked (partly because of bad financial advice), he's caring for his father who has early onset dementia, and he believes his wife is about to have an affair with an old high school boyfriend she reconnected with on Facebook. The novel opens with Matt on a late night visit to 7-Eleven for milk for his sons' breakfast in the morning. Two pot smoking teenagers with the munchies convince Matt to drive them to a party, and Matt ends up going to the party and getting high for the first time since college. Over the course of the rest of the week (in which Matt doesn't sleep more than a couple hours), Matt finds that many of his white collar friends would be interested in buying pot, he decides to become a small time pot dealer in order to pay off his debts; all the while Matt fights through the phone system maze of different lenders and mortgage companies to find an actual human voice to talk to about his mortgage payment, and tries desperately to find out more about his wife's online flirtations. I don't want to give anything more away - you can only imagine what happens. . .

What's great about Walter's novel is that as funny as it is and as much as he piles it on Matt, I never once got the sense that Walter didn't care about his character. Matt is a classic everyman. The situation he finds himself in is not unlike one that the average American might in today's economic climate, despite how absurd some of it seems at first.

The writing is really, really good, too. Not only did I find myself laughing out-loud in several places, but the voice is strong and consistent. In spite of Matt's complete unreliability as a narrator, I believe him completely, and I think that's due to the voice Walter has created. Walter also isn't afraid to play around a little bit textually. There are lists throughout which mirror Matt's way of thinking, and nearly every chapter opens with one of Matt's poems. Most all of them funny, but there are a couple that take a serious turn. For example:

The Last Time I Remember Crying, Haiku #4

I was an adult

When my parents got divorced

Or so I was told

I guess that's the real beauty of this novel. While seriously funny, it's also deadly serious. In the interview at the back of my copy Walter says: "An I thought: what if instead of re-creating it later, I just stick my head out the window and describe what I see as we go barreling off the road? So I did."

All in all, an excellent read. I'm looking forward to getting to more of Walter's work in the future.

Here is some extra stuff: A good interview at The Nervous Breakdown, an interview/article at OregonLive.com, a review in the New York Times, an interview where Walter discusses his work as well as his thoughts on genre at Mullholand Books, an excellent (and long) interview (pdf) in Willow Spring were Walter discusses his career and the craft of writing, and finally a piece Walter wrote for The Huffington Post last fall that will give you good sense of the kind of tone and style he employs in the novel - Oh, and it's funny, too.

New Yorker Story, 2/7: Tessa Hadley - "Honor"

2011-02-11T09:07:00.000-06:00

Like Matar's "story" from two weeks ago, Tessa Hadley's "Honor" reads to me like an excerpt, and since she has a novel coming out in June (according to the New Yorker's contributor's page), I have to think that it is.

It is difficult to read and review these excerpts, especially when they are presented as short stories. There are certain expectations when reading a short story (traditionally, anyway) that don't exactly equate with novel excerpts. Unfortunately, this is the case for "Honor."

Hadley's writing is good (as it should be, it's in the New Yorker), but this piece did absolutely nothing for me. The narrator, Stella, is telling of the time when she was a girl that her Aunt Andrea (Andy), from her father's side, came to stay with them. This is special only because, Stella tells us, at the time her mother had told her that her father had died when in fact he'd left the two of them when Stella was a baby, and Andy is the only person from her father's side of the family that stays in contact. (It's the early 1960s - just for some context.) Through the descriptions we are to understand that Stella's mother and her Aunt Andy are different kinds of people. Her mother is "elegant" and "sexy," while her Aunt Andy is "shy" and plain. The crux of the story, and the reason that Aunt Andy has come, is that her husband Derek had killed their son, Charlie. Stella is given strict orders not to mention Charlie, and the rest of the story deals with the trial and Aunt Andy's ordeal. She eventually remarries and has several "phantom" pregnancies with her new husband, even well into her fifties.

Not to take anything away from the kind of trauma and tragedy of the situation presented in the story, but since it all happens off the page and it doesn't really impact Stella in any tangible way (at least as far as the excerpt goes), there's no real conflict or even tension in this piece. There is one profound moment about two-thirds of the way through the story where Stella seems to comes to terms with her cousin Charlie's death. She tells us earlier that she never liked Charlie and that he was essentially a brat. But, Stella tells us, "From time to time. . .I would suddenly become fully, chillingly conscious of the fact that Charlie had once been alive inside his own head, as I was at that moment inside mine. And also that the person that he really was had undergone those things I had heard about in a moment that was as real as this one, and continuous with mine. . ." But then, just like a child, Stella says, "Most of the time, naturally, when Auntie Andy wasn't around, I hardly thought about Charlie. I got on with my life" (71). Of the whole excerpt, this seems to be the only moment or theme that has enough weight to carry on throughout the novel.

Though the writing was good, the lack of tension and conflict kept me from enjoying this piece. There was nothing to keep me turning the pages, and I think that's the real challenge with publishing excerpts.

Michael Knight - Goodnight, Nobody

2011-02-07T16:31:00.002-06:00

Goodnight, Nobody, Michael Knight's second collection is clearly a departure from his brilliant first collection, Dogfight and Other Stories, but while different, it didn't disappoint in the end.

After just a couple stories, it was obvious that Knight was trying something different, pushing the boundaries of the form out and away from the more traditional story forms in Dogfight. Honestly, because I liked Dogfight so much, it took some time to get used to the stories in Goodnight, Nobody. It seems Knight was exploring the theme of storytelling in several stories in the collection. "The End of Everything," "Keeper of Secrets, Teller of Lies," and "Ellen's Book" (and perhaps even to a certain extent "Killing Stonewall Jackson," "Blackout," and "Birdland,") all employ, through various means, storytelling as a theme. In "The End of Everything" it's Knight's use of form; in "Keeper of Secrets, Teller of Lies" it's a character who lies; and in "Ellen's Book" the narrator revises his life in order to create scenes for book he's writing for his wife.

There are a couple of stories that didn't work for me, namely "The Mesmerist" and "Feeling Lucky," but on the whole the collection delivered, especially in "Keeper of Secrets, Teller of Lies" (my favorite story in the collection), and "Ellen's Book."

To say nothing else of Goodnight, Nobody, it was interesting and worth reading if only to study the way Knight crafted these stories.

Denis Johnson - Nobody Move

2011-02-06T23:29:00.001-06:00

With the crazy weather here (and everywhere else, it seems) last week, I got a couple snow days and I wanted to read something quick and fun, so I chose Denis Johnson's most recent novel, Nobody Move. The novel was originally serialized in Playboy in four 10,000 word sections (I suppose an argument could be made about this book being a novella instead of a novel, but for the the sake of this review, it's a novel).

Nobody Move opens with Jimmy Luntz leaving a barbershop chorus competition only to find Gambol, the muscle for a man Jimmy owes money, waiting in the parking lot. It doesn't take long for a gun to come out and for Gambol to get shot in the leg. The plot takes off from there, and there's no looking back. This is familiar crime/noir territory: thugs, guns, gambling debts (Jimmy's a gambler), sexy women, more guns, betrayal, etc.

It's a fast paced narrative that delivers what I think most crime/noir readers want and expect - fast talking thugs, sexy banter between men and women, action - but Johnson clearly puts his own mark on things. While most of the writing and dialog is short and punchy, there are moments of poetry in the descriptions that, to me, are reminiscent of Jesus' Son. For example: "After the film it was raining, a light, steady rain. Ruthless neon on the wet streets like busted candy" (31); or "The crecent moon lay directly overhead, and on such a night the river's swollen surface resembled the unquiet belly of a living thing you could step onto and walk across" (129). I don't want to give anything away, but there are other things Johnson does with some of the characters that I think is unique, or at the very least a play on the genre's conventions.

I'm not a big reader of noir fiction (nor have seen too many classic noir films), so my assessment of what the conventions are and how Johnson plays with them should be taken with a grain of salt. However, in a couple of the blurbs at the front of the book, Nobody Move is considered an "playful" and an "exercise" for Johnson. I don't know, but this doesn't seem fair to either Johnson or dedicated crime/noir novelists. There seems to be some question as to whether Johnson took this project seriously, or if it was just a simple "exercise" he tossed off afer National Book Award Winner, Tree of Smoke. Was he merely paying homage to the genre, or was he trying to bend the conventions and write something fresh? It is an interesting debate, one I'm not sure I'm qualified to enter into, so I'm linking to more reviews than usual; when it comes to something like this - genre conventions - I'll leave the serious reviewing for those smarter than me.

Good, thoughtful, reviews from David Means in the New York Times here, and Jess Walter in the Boston Globe here; a good discussion of the novel and its place in noir fiction at Biblioklept; a review at Open Letters Monthly; an article about a rare Denis Johnson reading in New York in 2008 where he refers to his then work in progress, Nobody Move, as "just cheap pulp fiction," jokingly, I hope; another thoughtful review at New Ledger; and finally, several articles at Jacket Copy discussing Nobody Move as it was released in monthly installments in Playboy (Note - the posts at Jacket Copy are in reverse order).

New Yorker Story, 1/31: Alice Munro - "Axis"

2011-02-03T09:03:00.000-06:00

**For yet another place to read and compare New Yorker reviews, check out The Mookse and the Gripes for their review of Munro's story.

I haven't read a lot of Alice Munro's work, but I am aware of her place at or near the top of contemporary short story writing. After two weeks of stories by writers I unfortunately hadn't read or heard much about, I was excited to get a story from Munro.

The story begins, quite literally, "Fifty years ago," and is about two college students, Grace and Avie. Of the two, Grace is virginal and chaste, while Avie convinces her boyfriend, Hugo, to sleep with her in the hopes that they will fall in love. Unlike Avie, Munro tells us, "Grace was in love" with her boyfriend, Royce, and she believed her virtue was what was keeping him interested. Avie, too, is attracted to Royce, and the implication is that he's a bit of bad boy. Unlike Hugo, Royce has recently served in WWII, and he is "not used" to dealing with virgins like Grace.

In the summer, Royce goes to visit Grace at her parent's farm. He is sarcastic and rude to her family, but when the rest of her family is gone for the day, she plans a tryst with him. There is quite a bit of build up, but as you might expect, the two lovers get caught in the act by Grace's distraught mother. Royce leaves, and when Grace asks Royce to take her with him she gets no answer.

Grace seemingly never recovers. She and Avie lose contact with each other, and the story proceeds with an overview of Avie and Hugo's life together. The story ends with a chance meeting between Royce and the recently widowed Avie (it's been a year and a half since Hugo died) on a train from Toronto to Montreal.  We get this section of the story from Avie's perspective, and there is sexual tension between the two of them, but nothing happens. They reminisce about their lives, a missed encounter, and finally Grace. Royce is dismissive of Grace, and Avie thinks it is because he regrets what happened.

This story is very subtle, and there are things going on that certainly carry more weight than I'm giving them. For instance, Royce was a philosophy major until, on his trip home from Grace's house after the failed tryst, he sees a rock formation - the Niagara Escarpment - and, we find out later, goes back to school to become a geologist.  Then later, on the train with Avie, he points out the Frontenac Axis, a different geological formation. Now, Munro wouldn't have included these things if they weren't integral to the story, but I'm not sure I can put my finger on exactly why. There is also Grace's colitis. She seems to have come down with it sometime shortly after her encounter with Royce, and from what little information we get about Grace's life after college, the colitis seems to play an important role. I'm not exactly sure what to make of this, though I suppose, like the geological stuff, I have some vague idea. A story like this would certainly be worth reading a few more times to try to get at a deeper understanding of it.

This story is well crafted, as all of Munro's stories seem to be. For instance, the simple opening: "Fifty years ago." It's such a simple, elegant solution to setting a story in the past. She comes out and tells us when this story is happening without bothering to try to give us hints and clues along the way. She also handles the shift in time effortlessly. This seems to be a kind of trademark of Munro's work. She's also able to pack character's entire lives into this sort piece, again, seemingly effortlessly.

All in all, an interesting story by one of the contemporary masters.

Matt Burgess - Dogfight, A Love Story

2011-02-01T18:18:00.002-06:00

Matt Burgess's debut novel, Dogfight, A Love Story (published last September), is a helluva first novel. It takes place over the course of a single weekend in Jackson Heights, Queens, in the summer of 2002. While the plot isn't overly complex or complicated, though it is well crafted, a lot happens in this novel. I'll leave off giving a complete plot summary (I probably couldn't do it justice) - you can read more about the book in the links below - but it involves nineteen year-old Alfredo Bautista, a small-time independent drug dealer. Alfredo is awaiting his brother Tariq's release from prison, and there are rumors that Alfredo had something to do with Tariq's getting caught in a botched robbery. But that's not all: Alfredo's seven-months-pregnant girlfriend, Isabel, was Tariq's girlfriend when he went into prison, and he's not sure how Tariq is going to handle the news. According to the rules of the street, Alfredo must also present Tariq with a "package" upon his release. It's in Alfredo's acquiring of the "package" - a hollowed out beeper full of Ecstasy - that the plot of the novel really begins to move. Alfredo, on suspect information from his friend, Winston, jacks the drugs from who he thinks is just a skinny Russian kid outside an all-boys Catholic school. Guess what?  The skinny Russian kid isn't just some kid: he's connected. Though this isn't the only plot line, the central thrust of the novel begins here.

A couple things about this novel: first, don't let the subtitle "A Love Story" turn you away from this novel. Really, it's as much a love story between two brothers as it is a love story between the characters and Jackson Heights, Queens. Second, this is clearly a New York novel, and I'm sure there are things I missed, but I never felt like I didn't belong, like the novel wasn't for people outside of New York. That said, it strikes me as the kind of book that people in Queens will read and say, "Hey, I know exactly where that street corner/bodega/building/etc. is." I'm always drawn to novels of place, even if it is a place I've never been or can't easily identify with.

The language in Dogfight is superb. The dialog, to my ear, is pitch perfect, and the descriptions are gritty and real. The novel is in the third person, but Burgess seemingly effortlessly moves between multiple characters and each has their own "voice."  That's hard to pull off.

Also, although the situations surrounding the characters are deadly serious, the novel is funny. Alfredo is having one terrible weekend and it's hard not laugh at some of the things that happen. This may not be the best example, but the mix of violence and humor are reminiscent of a movie like Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, or even to a certain extent Burn After Reading.

Speaking of the violence, it's handled as well as everything else in the novel. There is a particularly violent dogfight (given the title, there has to be, right?), but I didn't feel it was gratuitous in any way.

Any gripes I have about the novel are minor.  Tariq's actions building up to and including the climax of the novel are a bit hard to swallow.  What he does isn't implausible, but it felt too far out of character for him. The pacing of the novel is excellent, so anytime there is a scene that slows down, it's more noticeable. It's interesting to see how Burgess wraps everything up for the climax. I'm not saying I don't like it - I do - but I'd like to hear what others think.

All in all, this novel makes Matt Burgess a writer to watch. I'm looking forward to what he does next.

Some reviews, interviews, profiles, etc.:

A review from Three Guys One Book, NY Times review, Indibound profile, including an NPR interview, an interview with the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Minnesota, a long interview at Bookslut, and a video walking tour of Queens at The Wall Street Journal.

Enjoy.

New Yorker Story, 1/24: Hisham Matar - "Naima"

2011-01-26T17:12:00.002-06:00

**A quick note before I get to the review - if you are interested in reading someone else's take on New Yorker stories, and other reviews, check out A Just Recompense.

This week's "story" is from the author of the Booker Prize shortlisted, In the Country of Men, Hisham Matar. I'm calling it a "story" because it feels like a novel excerpt to me, though I have no solid information to go on except that Matar has a new novel coming out in August. Like last week, I've never read any of Matar's work, though from what I've read about his first novel, I think I would enjoy it.

The reason I think "Naima" is an excerpt is because a majority of what is presented is backstory. We learn about the narrator's childhood in Cairo (though we find out later that the reason they live there is because his father is a political refugee from another unnamed country), about when his mother dies, and about his relationship with the family's live in maid, Naima. It's never clear what the narrator's mother dies of, but there are references to her being sick for quite some time. I hesitate to give away the ending, though it's not much of a mystery, but there is a telling moment when the narrator recalls he and his father visiting Naima at her home once when she was sick. Naima's father says that Naima "loves him[the narrator] like son." Later, one of the narrator's father's old friends, Taleb, who has come to visit, tells the narrator that his mother "Never ceased to be tender with Naima, who was innocent of course. Ultimately, everyone is innocent, including your father." I know we're dealing again with a Middle Eastern culture (of which I know little about--I think we established that last week), but I have to think that this story line--the maid/slave/servant giving birth to the boss's/master's child is as well worn as it is here in our culture. The writing is good, and though the it bounces around some, I never got lost in the narrative, but even these strong points can't save this story for me.

If this is an excerpt, then it ends with us knowing just enough about what has happened to get us interested, but not enough so that we have to keep reading. I can easily see it as an early part of Matar's forthcoming novel. But if it is a story, it doesn't really work--the narrator, though he is a boy, is inactive, and all of the action/tension/conflict happens outside of his realm. All he does is observe what is going on around him, and while it is interesting and fairly compelling, for a short story I think he needs to do more.

Cool Link from The Staff Recommends

2011-01-26T16:26:00.000-06:00

The current selection at The Staff Recommends (a parter site with The Millions) is "Readings from Flyover Country," a list of ten "books and writers who would be better known if we Midwesterners believed in horn tooting. . ."

Good stuff, and Warner gives a pretty good definition of Midwestern writing in the opening.

Charles Dodd White - Lambs of Men

2011-01-26T16:08:00.001-06:00

I just recently read a review of Lambs of Men over at on Jon Sealy 2.0, and based on his review and what I could find out about Charles Dodd White (you can find his blog here), I decided to check it out. Also, it's a small press novel, and you've got to support those, right?

Lambs of Men is short, a mere 158 pgs, but White packs in enough for a much longer novel. I read this pretty quickly, over the course of only a couple days, and while the story moves, it's not necessarily a quick read. In that way it reminded me of another short novel I read a few months ago, Scott Blackwood's We Agreed to Meet Just Here.

Really, I have nothing but good things to say about this novel. I don't want to give away too many plot details, but the novel deals with tried and true themes--sins of the father, redemption, war and what it does to men--but I never felt I'd read it before. From the blurb on the back cover:

Returning from the horrors of the First World War to recruit volunteers in his remote Appalachian home, Marine Sergeant Hiram Tobit finds the country changed. His mother has committed suicide, dredging up old resentments between Hiram and his father, Sloane. When a gruesome act of violence stuns the insular mountain community, father and son must journey together to see justice carried out while coming to terms with a deeply troubled family history.

White's choice to set the novel just after WWI works wonderfully and it provided the perfect time frame for this kind of story. I don't see it working as well if he'd set it much later. The setting, the mountains of North Carolina, and the characters are well wrought.

White does a couple things, that, while I don't think hurt the novel in any way, were interesting choices. The first half of the novel is told predominately through a close third person, with Hiram as the point of view character, with only a few slips into omniscience here and there. But at the beginning of Chapter 8, the point of view switches to Hiram's father, Sloane, though there is no indication that the switch is coming. It works just fine, though it was a bit jarring at first. It interests me because I'm curious, first, why White decided to switch to Sloane, and second, why he switched when he did. From the craft perspective, there are many ways White could have told this story, and I'm interested in what made him choose to tell it the way he did. Along those same lines, the final chapter of the novel actually flashes back two years and Hiram's mother, Nara, becomes the point of view character. In a way, she finally gets to tell her side of the story, and along the way she fills in the gaps of what the reader doesn't know, or at least doesn't completely know. Again, this is an interesting choice. In fact, I may be more interested in how this chapter, and it's placement, came about. While the information Nara provides and the way her section of the story is told are valuable and interesting in and of themselves, I'm not sure it was necessary to the novel as a whole. This kind of thing interests me because while working on draft of a novel it seems all you're doing is making once decision after another, choosing to craft something one way versus another, and each choice or decision has comes with its own set of consequences. Ultimately, it appears to me, the choices you do and don't make make a novel what it is, or isn't.

Lambs of Men is a great debut novel, and I look forward to reading whatever Charles Dodd White writes next.

Brady Udall - Letting Loose the Hounds

2011-01-23T14:02:00.003-06:00

Letting Loose the Hounds is my first encounter with Brady Udall's work. His name kept popping up here and there, and I read somewhere that Benjamin Percy really liked his work, this collection in particular, so I decided to check him out.

This collection came out in 1997, and it reads to me like a young man's collection, and I mean that as a compliment. There's a certain energy to these stories that comes through not only in the prose but in the stories themselves.

Of the 11 stories in the collection, 10 of them are written in the first person, and only one of the 10 is from a female perspective. Of course, I point this out not as a judgement, but merely to help give you the feel of the collection. These stories, generally, deal with young men trying to find their place in the world. Most have encountered hard times, but a sense of hope permeates virtually the entire collection, and it never feels cheese or forced. Another thing I admire is the way Udall isn't afraid to take the reader on a ride. Some strange--nearly implausible--things happen in these stories, but I was never taken out of the story because of it. For example, in "Midnight Raid," a six-foot-three Apache Indian carries a goat into his ex-wife's back yard in the middle of the night; in "Ballad of the Ball and Chain," a man leaving his bachelor party with a Civil War-era cannon ball chained to his ankle drives his convertible into a reservoir and drowns because the ball and chain make him sink; and in "Letting Loose the Hounds," Goody Yates has just gotten shoddy dental work done and is wandering along the side of the road, bleeding, out of his mind on laughing gas.

I don't think there is a single story I didn't enjoy, but among the best were "Letting Loose the Hounds," "Vernon," "Beautiful Places," "He Becomes Deeply and Famously Drunk," and an excellent, touching flash fiction piece, "The Wig," about a young boy who gets a wig out of the garbage and wears it to the breakfast table.

In all, I really enjoyed the collection. Though I probably won't get to it anytime soon, I look forward to reading Udall's newest novel, The Lonely Polygamist.

Here's a few interviews, reviews worth taking a look at:
Interview from 2002 at Indentitytheory.com, Interview from last at Bookslut, and a long profile in Boise Weekly from 2009.

Interesting Links

2011-01-21T16:15:00.000-06:00

Cathy Day has in interesting (and funny) essay at The Millions about teaching creative writing and the struggles it entails.

An essay by Sonya Chung about linked short story collections bridging the gap between short stories and novels, also at The Millions.

At The Missouri Review Blog, an essay by Michael Nye: "Can MFA Programs Teach Novel Writing." It appears that this post was in response to something Kyle Minor posted on Facebook. This essay, unlike many that are floating around, does its best not to bash MFA programs or the writers in them. Most of the comments are worth reading as well, but Kyle Minor has the first, and probably best, response.

A similar article by Anelise Chen on The Rumpus: "On Blowing My Load: Thoughts From Inside the MFA Ponzi Scheme." I almost didn't read this one because of the title - it seemed like it was going to be another MFA basher - but it's not. It's a thoughtful and humorous examination of what it's like to be in the final year of an MFA program. From the conclusion:

"As for me and a lot of the classmates and writers I queried, we find this debate about whether to MFA extremely dull. 'How can free time and community support be a bad thing?' 'If anything, I feel more free to experiment because I’m exposed to writing I wouldn’t otherwise have read.'"

I couldn't agree more.

New Yorker Story, 1/17: Amos Oz - "The King of Norway"

2011-01-20T22:42:00.000-06:00

This week's story, "The King of Norway," by Amos Oz, is a perfect example of why I decided to undertake this weekly project. Oz is a writer I've never heard of (though he is a famous and highly regarded Israeli writer), and he's someone I probably never would have read otherwise.

I must admit, stories like this make me uncomfortable. Since this story is dealing with a culture very foreign to my own, one steeped in history and struggle and turmoil, I can't help but wonder if I am missing some key reference or allusion that would unlock the story for me. Like, for example, if one of the characters stands for something, or if there are some allegorical elements I am missing. Perhaps this points more to my cultural ignorance than anything else.

"The King of Norway," translated from the Hebrew by Sondra Silverston, takes place on a kibbutz, which is a kind of communal neighborhood with socialist ideals (I looked it up, but someone can correct me if I'm wrong), and it is narrated collectively by the people of the kibbutz, though the style is unobtrusive. The story is essentially a kind of strange love story between Zvi Provizor and Luna Blank. Zvi is a fifty-five-year-old bachelor and the gardener of the kibbutz, and he "loved to convey bad news," such as trapped coal miners, earthquakes, volcanoes, storms, and the King of Norway's cancer. He comes to be known as the "Angel of Death" around the kibbutz due to his fascination with death and disaster. Luna is a forty-five-year-old widowed teacher, and she and Zvi develop a odd relationship where every evening Zvi tells her of the most recent world disaster. Zvi "had never had an interest in women," and once when Luna takes his hand in hers, he pulls it back "almost violently." Zvi "had never in his adult life intentionally touched another person and he stiffened whenever he was touched." Zvi stops meeting Luna in the evenings and explains to her that their relationship will only end badly and that it is "pointless" to try to make her understand. The story ends with Zvi telling someone on the street that the King of Norway has died of cancer.

About midway through the story Luna asks Zvi why he "take[s] all the sorrow of the world on [his] shoulders," to which Zvi replies: "Closing your eyes to the cruelty of life is, in my opinion, both stupid and sinful. There's very little we can do about it. So we have to at least acknowledge it." I think this sums up the "meaning" of the story, and it seems to me this is why Zvi doesn't want to get close to anyone, but I can't make much sense of his strange behavior.

I can't say that I loved this story, but I'm hesitant to levy much criticism for fear that I'm misunderstanding it. I'd be interested in hearing what others think, not only about the story, but about reading foreign stories, particularly those from vastly different cultures.

Philipp Meyer - American Rust

2011-01-16T12:04:00.000-06:00

Much has been written and debated about the New Yorker's 20 Under 40 list, and though I've read the work of only one of the other 20 writers (Wells Tower, if you're counting), I think it is probably safe to say that because of American Rust, Philipp Meyer belongs solidly on that list.

American Rust, told through the perspective of six characters, Isaac, Poe, Grace, Lee, Harris, and Henry (though really only five, since Henry doesn't get a say until late in the novel, and he only gets two short chapters), starts off strong, and the conflict/incident of the first chapter carries throughout the entire novel. I don't want to spoil it, but Isaac and Poe find themselves in a bad situation and an act of violence occurs. Structurally, I think this works, but the middle section of the novel slows quite a bit, before picking up at the end. Part of the slowness of the middle section of the novel comes from the way the story is told. Arguably, Isaac and Poe are the two main characters since they are the two whose actions set the story in motion, and Meyer uses a kind of modified stream-of-consciousness style for each of their chapters. Don't get me wrong, I think it works well, but I found myself getting a little bit bogged down because for much of the novel (after the opening action) the conflict is mostly internal for all of the characters. Again, I'm not saying this is bad, but the internal conflict paired with the stream-of-consciousness style makes for a somewhat slow, dense reading experience. I suppose that's less a criticism than an observation. However, the style does allow for Meyer to delve very deeply into each character, and his work there is superb. None of the characters are "types" and all their actions stay true to their character.

The novel is well plotted and Meyer is able to bring all five characters' storylines together by the end of the novel. I had a slight problem with the way Poe's story comes to an end, and I'd be interested in hearing what others think. For whatever reason, I found the character of Harris to be my favorite. I wonder how Meyer intended readers to respond to him. Of all the characters, Harris is the one who takes serious action in the end, and the consequences of his action effects the outcome of the novel. Honestly, his conflict is the most interesting of all the characters, and I would've liked to seen more chapters with him.

All in all, American Rust is a damn good first novel. Meyer has big shoes to fill with the 20 Under 40 honor, but based on the success of this novel, I'm sure he'll live up to the expectations.

Here are a few links to other reviews and interviews:
New York Times, LA Times Book Blog, The Telegraph, The Washington Post, The Rumpus.

Scott Wolven - Controlled Burn: Stories of Prison, Crime, and Men

2011-01-16T10:37:00.002-06:00

I don't remember how, probably a "you might also like" Amazon recommendation, but I came across Scott Wolven's debut collection, Controlled Burn. The reviews were good, I liked the subtitle: Stories of Prison, Crime, and Men, and Richard Ford had blurbed it. I've had it for quite awhile, and having just finished a long-ish novel, I finally decided to read it.

The collection is divided into two sections: The Northeast Kingdom, with the stories all set in the northeast, and The Fugitive West, of which most of the stories take place in Northern Idaho. On the surface, this collection delivers on the promise of the title and subtitle. However, as good as the writing is (the plotting, the snappy dialog, the strong sense of place), outside of a couple stories, the collection didn't really affect me in any way.

I've thought about this quite a bit, because when I'm overly critical I want to make sure I have a leg to stand on, and I think the problems I have with the collection stem mostly from the characters.  Several of the stories in this collection feature the same characters, but even the ones that don't feel very similar to me. Of course a collection like this is peopled with similar "types" of characters--and I'm okay with that--but I have problem with the characters not being individuals. I suppose what I'm getting at is that at the end of each story, I didn't care enough about the characters. It wasn't because they were meth dealers, bounty hunters, liars, or alcoholics, but because I didn't know enough about them to care. Most of the stories start off in motion, which is good, but through the course of each story I never felt like I got to know the characters past their "type." Most of the characters are on the run living under assumed names and there are allusions to their shady pasts, but outside of a few exceptions, that's all we get about them. In stories like the ones Wolven writes, I want to know these men, know what makes them tick, what decisions they made that drove them to do the thing that sent them on the run.  That's real conflict, and to me, it's even more compelling than a drug deal gone bad, or a couple of guys hunting someone who has skipped bail.

Though I've been critical of the collection, Wolven can obviously write. "Outside Work Detail," "Tigers," and "The Copper Kings" are three really strong stories, stories that provide not only action but pack an emotional wallop that the weaker stories of the bunch are missing. I believe he has a novel forthcoming, and based on the stories above, I'd be interested in reading it when it comes out.

New Yorker Stories

2011-01-11T13:24:00.000-06:00

As a New Year's resolution of sorts (I know, a couple weeks late), I'm going to make an effort to read and comment on the stories that appear weekly in the New Yorker. I figure it'll force me not only to keep the blog current, but to get me out of my reading comfort zone. In addition, by year's end (if I can keep it up) I'll have read and reviewed close to 50 new stories (there are five "combined" issues during the year) from arguably one of the top short fiction markets.

So, in order to catch up, here are reviews of the first two New Yorker stories of 2011: Steven Millhauser's "Getting Closer" from the Jan. 3rd issue, and Louise Erdrich's "The Years of My Birth" from Jan. 10th.

Steven Millhauser - "Getting Closer"
I've only read one other Millhauser story, and I can't say that I liked it. It was an idea story really--no plot, no characters, no action--and since that kind of story doesn't interest me, I haven't sought out anything else by him. "Getting Closer," however, is an interesting story. It's about a nearly 10 year old boy named Jim who has gone to a park by a river with his older sister, mother, and grandmother. As the title suggests, the story builds with Jim progressively "getting closer" to the river's edge, where, after much contemplation (perhaps too much for a 10 year old), he believe his day will finally begin. But as he gets to the water's edge, he can't just jump in like his sister, because he knows he'll lose the excitement and anticipation that has been building all morning long. "When you have that feeling," he thinks, "everything's full of life, every leaf, every pebble. But when you begin, you're using things up. The day starts slipping away behind you." Jim doesn't want to get in the water, because when he does, "the day will begin to end," and "things will rush away behind him." Jim then begins to understand that everything, even life itself, is ending with every passing moment. The story ends with a long passage: "Everything is nothing," he thinks. "If he stands still, if he doesn't move a muscle, maybe he can keep it from happening. Things will stop and no one will ever die. . . .He can't go back because he's already used it up, he can't go forward because then it all begins to end, he's stuck in this place where nothing means anything, it's streaming in on him like a darkness, like a sickness, he's seen something he isn't supposed to see, only grownups are allowed to see it, it's making him old, it's ruining everything. . .he feels a scream rising in his chest. . .and with a wild cry that tears through his throat he steps over the line and begins his day." The almost stream of consciousness effect speeds up the reading and forces you to feel this overwhelming pressure, much like Jim feels it. The story, and the way Millhauser has chosen to tell it, is very effective. Sort of sad way to begin the year, but it is a truth we all have to face.

Louise Erdrich - "The Years of My Birth"
Perhaps I shouldn't admit this, but "The Years of My Birth" is my first encounter with Erdrich. If the rest of her work is like this story, then I'll be reading more of her work in the future. This first person story open with Linda, the narrator, describing her birth as if she could remember it. She was an unexpected twin, thought to be too sick and deformed to survive. The mother gives the baby up and a Native American night janitor adopts her. As a child she is taken by social services (it's not clear why) and placed in a plain white room. She feels a presence that holds her hand and comforts her, and this presence visits her throughout her life. Much later, as a middle-aged adult, Linda's birth mother contacts her. They meet for dinner and we find out that Linda's mother has only gotten in touch with Linda because her twin brother needs a kidney and there are not other matches. I don't want to give away the ending, but there is a very terrible, powerful scene when Linda confronts her brother in the hospital. The story is well balanced, and the image of the white room from early in the story comes back at the end. All in all, a good story.

Maile Meloy - Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It

2011-01-07T18:41:00.002-06:00

There could be no better title than the one that adorns Maile Meloy's recent short story collection, Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It. The men and women who populate this collection find themselves in situations where they get what they want only to find it doesn't fulfill them, or are stuck wanting things "both ways," such as the spouse and the lover or freedom and security.

All of Meloy's characters are well written, but it is her men that really strike a chord. To say she writes men well would be an understatement. It's as if she's been given some secret key that allows her to access men's most inner thoughts and desires, values and judgements. It's remarkable, really, but also a bit unsettling, which I think is what makes most of her stories as strong as they are.

Though her style is much plainer and more unadorned (that's not meant to be a judgement), I couldn't help but think of many of Updike's characters and his portrayals of marriages and relationships, particularly in the Maples stories, while reading this collection. The thing that differs, I think, is that I like Meloy's characters better, even when they are being "bad." I guess that means that her characters, even when acting selfishly, are still sympathetic and real to me. One other note about her style--it is very plain, so it's easy to read her sentences too quickly and miss the sublty of what she's doing. Her writing is the kind that I think would deliver even more the more time somone spent with it

I enjoyed the entire collection, but "Travis, B.", "Red from Green", "Two Step", and the final two stories in the collection, "The Children" and "O Tannenbaum" stand out as the best. These last two most embody the theme which the title most eloquently refers.

Daniel Woodrell - Give us a Kiss: A Country Noir

2011-01-04T12:10:00.001-06:00

Published in 1996, Give us a Kiss was Daniel Woodrell's fifth novel, and his first (I believe) to take place in and around the Missouri Ozarks. Like Tomato Red, the first person voice really drives this loosely semi-autobiographical novel. The narrator, Doyle, is a writer (whose life and past resembles that of Woodrell) who has written a few crime novels and has come back from living in California. His parents, who live in Kansas City but are from the fictional town of West Plain, Missouri (a stand in for Woodrell's hometown of West Table, deep in the Ozarks), send him to the Ozarks to track down his brother, Smoke, who is on the lam and hiding out from the law in KC. Doyle not only willingly gets caught up with Smoke in a big drug deal--a large money crop of marijuana, the proceeds of which Doyle plans to use to finance his next novel--but a longstanding feud with another family, the Dolly's (who turn up in Woodrell's excellent novel, Winter's Bone). As the subtitle suggests, this is very much a "country noir," so you can probably guess what sorts of things happen as the plot unfolds.

If I had to rank this alongside the other Woodrell novel's I've read, it falls slightly below Tomato Red, which is below Winter's Bone. With that said, it was an entertaining, quick read, full of the great language and characters I've come to expect from Woodrell. While Give us a Kiss doesn't stand up to the brilliance of Winter's Bone, it was interesting to see where Woodrell has come from as a writer and how his style has developed, particularly as it pertains to writing about the Ozarks.

I know Woodrell's got another novel in the works because recently there have been two excerpts in Narrative Magazine, so be on the lookout for that one.

Michael Knight - Dogfight and Other Stories

2011-01-04T11:08:00.000-06:00

I read the bulk of Michael Knight's debut collection, Dogfight and Other Stories (1998) over a month ago, and I finished it over the holiday. I'd previously read his first novel, Divining Rod, and liked it, but his stories are on a completely different level. I think a reader would be hard pressed to find a single misstep in any of the ten outstanding stories in this collection. "Now You See Her," about a man and his teenage son peeping on and lusting after a new neighbor, "Dogfight," about neighbors and their dogs (trust me, there's more to it than just that), "Sleeping With My Dog," about a man who suspects his girlfriend is cheating on him with a colleague, "Sundays," about a single man living on street with nothing but single mothers--the ending of this story is haunting, and "The Man Who Went Out for Cigarettes," about a man and his recently paralyzed wife, are the real gems of the collection.

In my mind, this collection alone vaults Knight into the realm of truly great contemporary short story writers like Charles Baxter and Tobias Wolff. Knight's second collection, Goodnight Nobody, is pretty near the top of my to-read pile.

Here's a profile of Knight and a discussion of his newest novel, The Typist. Here's Knight briefly commenting on his own work.

Tom Franklin - Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

2011-01-04T10:11:00.000-06:00

I'm a big fan of Tom Franklin - I've read all his work. (I met him, sort of, at a Sherman Alexie reading last year at AWP in Denver at some weird coffee place off-site. We sat behind him and his wife, and at some point I told him I enjoyed his presentation on a panel about the novella.) I loved Poachers and Hell at the Breech, and Smonk was, well, Smonk (you'll have to read that one for yourself), so obviously I was looking forward to his newest novel, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter.

On the surface, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter doesn't disappoint. If you've read any Franklin, you know about his rich, lush descriptions and expert use of the language. That's here in full force. The characters are well written, and the story is compelling. The structure of the novel is interesting. It begins with a bang - almost literally - but the bulk of the novel takes place in the past, though it is what it happening in the present that is driving the novel. I didn't mind it because the writing was so good and Franklin pretty effortlessly moves from present to past and back (with maybe only a misstep or two), but it was an interesting choice. Clearly, readers are supposed to understand that in order to really know the characters we need to know their pasts. Again, I get this, but I think some readers may find that the backstory dominates the frontstory and that the novel is out of balance, or that because of the this the novel doesn't move forward.

Essentially, CL, CL is a literary mystery/crime novel, and though I don't have an issue with this in essence, I think this is where the some of my problems with the novel begin. In no way do I want this to sound snobbish, but I think the average reader of crime/mystery novels will find Franklin's novel to be superb. By this I mean that not only is it extremely well written, but it delivers in every way that a crime/mystery novel should. That's great, but it delivers in every way that a crime/mystery novel should. Of course it is easy for me to sit here and say this about CL, CL, but trust me, I'd certainly be happy to have written it. With that said, though, I suppose I was looking for a little something more from Franklin. The characters, while well written, turn out to be pretty much what we expect them to be; and the plot, once it starts to unfold, does so without too many surprises. Obviously, I'm not calling for weird, unexplained plot twists, but I think there are ways Franklin could have satisfied the expectations of the genre while still striving to great literary art.

Franklin would probably argue that it's not about figuring out "whodunit" or solving the mystery, but about the characters and their pasts, and how those pasts influence their presents. In that, I think Franklin has succeeded.

For a good plot summary and review of CL, CL, check out the link on Jon Sealy's blog from early December.

On Reading

2010-12-19T11:51:00.000-06:00

I've never read any Gary Shteyngart, and based on what I've read about the kind of books he writes I probably won't, but a friend of mine told me about this quote posted on Mark Athitakis' American Fiction Notes. Athitakis reposted it from an interview with Shteyngart posted at CBC Books, and I think it's so good I'm going to repost it yet again.

"Nobody wants to read a book but everybody wants to write one. Reading requires an act of empathy, really. What you're doing when you're reading a book is saying, I'm going to turn off who I am for a little bit, and I'm going to enter the personality of another human being. Reading is a very generous act, but it's a very helpful act if you really want to understand what another person is like."

I couldn't agree more.

On a related note, at HTMLGIANT Kyle Minor posted a very extensive "suggested reading list" for his spring workshop. Of course he doesn't expect his students to read the entire list or anything close to it; he's presenting this list to prove that to be a writer, he says, "you must read your brains out." See his list here. This really is how it should be. It seems many of my colleagues don't aren't reading outside of what is assigned, or if they are reading, no one is discussing it. I think we need more of what Minor is "suggesting" in his post.

Charles Portis - True Grit

2010-12-18T10:03:00.002-06:00

Because I'd heard the new Coen Brother's remake of True Grit was more faithful to Charles Portis's novel than the John Wayne version, I decided to read Portis's novel before seeing the movie. I haven't seen the John Wayne version, so I don't know how unfaithful it was to the novel, and since the Coens' version isn't out yet, I'll have to wait and see.

To be completely honest, I haven't read too many "westerns" outside of McCarthy, but I have read quite a lot of southern writers, and one could argue that True Grit is a kind of hybrid. Also, I haven't read many "adventure" novels to speak of (perhaps Deliverance would fall into this category, but I didn't like it either), so my assessment of this book is certainly shaded by my reading habits.

Based on the the fact that the Coen Brother's have remade the movie and the blurbs on the front and back covers:

"Skillfully constructed, a comic tour de force,"

"Portis could be Cormac McCarthy if he wanted to, but he'd rather be funny,"

"Like Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. . .Charles Portis's True Grit captures the naive elegance of the American voice,"

"It is, quite simply, an American masterpiece,"

I expected a different kind of novel than what I got.

As to the humor - I totally and completely missed it. Outside of a few quips from Rooster Cogburn, I didn't find anything even mildly funny. The narrator, Mattie Ross, is so straight-laced and proper that I suppose some readers may find some comedy in her actions, but to call this novel a "comic tour de force" is a too much for me.

The "voice" is probably the second most lauded thing about this novel, and I didn't get that either. The novel is about Mattie Ross's quest to revenge the murder of her father. In the action of the novel it is the 1870s and Mattie is fourteen; however, she is telling the story as an adult in 1903. This is tricky for Portis because he is telling the story through a female character that is recounting something that happened to her 30 years before. There's a fine line between teenage naivete and adult knowing, and Portis does a nice job with it for the most part. I didn't find Mattie's voice to be particularly compelling in any way, as opposed to Huck Finn, but I didn't have any serious problems with it, either.

I wasn't crazy about the dialog, the plot seemed a bit contrived at spots, and the characters felt a little flat. I was expecting a complex, literary western, but I didn't get that. Ultimately, this novel just didn't do it for me.

Speed Reviews

2010-12-11T09:43:00.001-06:00

In order to catch up, I'm posting short reviews of the books I've read since I last posted. Obviously, each book deserves a full length review, but if I didn't do it this way I'd never get caught up. So, here goes (in no particular order):

The Wilding - Benjamin Percy

I've been looking forward to this novel ever since I heard Percy was writing one a couple of years ago, and it didn't disappoint, though I didn't love it quite as much as I hoped I would. Perhaps my expectations got in the way. The main story line - three generations of men out in the wild - is right in Percy's wheelhouse. The second story line - a returning Iraq war veteran - is so beautifully written that the extremes the character goes to are entirely believable. I didn't love the ending, either, but all in all, Percy delivered.

Caution: Men in Trees - Darrell Spencer

This superb collection won the Flannery O'Connor Award in 2000. Though I haven't read much Barry Hannah, Spencer's style reminds me of him. Reading this collection was a bit of a challenge until I got used to the rhythm of the syntax and the voice, but once I did, I was rewarded. My favorite story: "Pronto Bucks." It's about a boxer whose former manager is trying to get to take one more fight. What makes the story really interesting is the way Spencer has the narrator, the boxer, directly address the reader in an almost combative way. At the end of the story he asks the reader a question and provides multiple choice answers. Really interesting technique.

Behold Faith - Tom Noyes

This is former WSU MFA grad Tom Noyes's first collection, published in 2003. As the title suggests, many of the stories in this collection deal with faith, but never in an uncomfortably overt way. Really, I can't say enough about how much I liked this collection. Some of the stories are funny and reminiscent of Ron Carlson, while others are deadly serious. I wish this collection were published by a larger press; Noyes deserves the attention of a wider audience. I'm looking forward to reading his second collection, Spooky Action at a Distance.

White Tiger - Aravind Adiga

This Booker Prize winning novel is not the kind of book I usually read on my own, but it was for a class so I had to read it. That said, I did like it, but not as much as the (very few) other Indian novels I've read. I think my biggest problem was the prose style. Although the writer is Indian, the novel was clearly written for a western audience, and one could probably even argue a western book club audience. However, this aspect of the novel made it enjoyable to read, though ultimately not satisfying in any kind of substantial way. The novel is engaging, easy to read, has a strong first person voice, and it's set in an foreign location, all elements that seem to beg for a book club. Of course there is more going on in the novel than what is on the surface, I'm just not sure many readers ever got that far.

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa

This autobiographical novel, published in 1977, is an interesting and complex read. There are two story lines that Llosa alternates between. One follows the character Mario as he struggles as an aspiring writer working for a radio station in Peru while at the same time courting his his newly divorced aunt (by marriage) Julia who has come to visit. The second story line involves a famous Bolivian scriptwriter, Pedro Camacho, who the radio station has hired to write serials and his descent into madness. Structurally, the novel alternates between the first person Mario chapters and the radio serials as written by Camacho. This makes for a very complex but extremely entertaining reading experience. This is the second Llosa book I've read (The Feast of the Goat was the first), and look forward to reading more.

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned - Wells Tower

This is Tower's (one of the New Yorker's 20 Under 40) first collection. It got a lot of big press when it came out, probably due in part to Tower's growing popularity - the stories in this collection originally appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, McSweeney's, The Paris Review, and the title story "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned" was reprinted in The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories. Quite a debut, to say the least. I enjoyed the collection, particularly "Retreat," "Down Through the Valley," "On the Show," and the title story, about a gang of Viking marauders told in a modern, almost business-like slang. My only criticism of the collection is that many of the stories seemed to end too soon. This could certainly be the effect Tower was going for, and perhaps if I read it again I might feel different. It'll be interesting to see what his next project will be.

Quick Note

2010-11-09T08:27:00.000-06:00

Obviously the posting frequency has slowed in the last couple of weeks, but I've been incredibly busy lately. I'm applying to PhD programs this fall, so my free time has been occupied by polishing writing samples, crafting a personal statement, getting transcripts ready, taking the GRE (both General and Subject), asking for recommendation letters, etc. Once all this shakes out, I'll have more time to devote here. I have several books to comment on - Benjamin Percy's The Wilding, Darrell Spencer's Caution: Men in Trees, and a couple others, so check back in the next couple of weeks for those.

Thanks,
Casey