Roy Miller's Blog, page 248
March 12, 2017
A Japanese Woman’s Life in Art, Made in the Village
Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
Credit
Eric Tortora Pato
HARMLESS LIKE YOU
By Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
308 pp. W.W. Norton & Company. $24.95.
It’s a crisp fall day in 1968. A man in a beige fedora and grease-stained trench coat sits on a New York City stoop, eating a hot dog and singing the first lines of a Beatles song. As a female office worker walks by, he whips open his coat to reveal “the shriveled purple stump of his penis.” Down the street, Yuki, a sensitive and lonely Japanese teenager living with her parents on the edge of Greenwich Village, watches in fascination, so hungry for experience of any kind that she envies even a mildly repellent one.
This early scene sets the tone of Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s debut novel, “Harmless Like You.” Though it alights briefly on a variety of themes, the book is chiefly preoccupied with the romance of New York City in the 1960s and ’70s, a place and time imagined as a bohemian paradise full of both danger and opportunity. Within 50 pages, Yuki has been befriended by a glamorous, feral blonde named Odile, who teaches her how to skip meals and glue Twiggy-style nylon eyelashes onto her bottom lids; has received her first kiss in a bar near Washington Square Park; and has persuaded her parents to let her remain in New York to pursue a career as an artist when they return to Japan.
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In the first of the novel’s two alternating strands, Yuki’s artistic and sentimental education is traced over the period from 1968 to 1983. In the second, set in the present day, the narration is taken over by her adult son, Jay, who was 2 years old when Yuki left him and his father in Connecticut and moved to Berlin to devote herself to her work. Now a new father himself, Jay has decided to meet his mother for the first time since she abandoned him.
Buchanan’s prose is lyrical and evocative, if occasionally overdone. Reflecting Yuki’s artistic sensibility, each chapter narrated from her perspective begins with a description of an exotic shade of pigment — carmine, raw umber, quinacridone gold — selected to correspond to its mood. The language in these sections is insistently color-saturated: Odile is “spearmint-eyed,” a pair of tinted sunglasses are “Tropicana orange” and “citrine-glazed,” Yuki’s bare knees in the cold are as “vermilion as the Red Delicious apples that sat in the kitchen uneaten.” The effect is like looking at the past through a series of Instagram filters, with even mundane scenes bathed in a romantic glow.
Yuki remains indistinct through this nostalgic haze, overwhelmed by the meticulously styled tableaux constructed around her. Somewhat surprisingly, it’s Jay, at first seemingly a secondary character, who emerges as the book’s strongest presence. A dealer in Asian and Asian-American art, a business “blossoming in the wary, post-recession years” as his rich clients seek safe investments, he’s a cheerfully opportunistic denizen of Manhattan’s mercenary art world, networking furiously and bragging about his ability to “evaluate the wealth of a woman from the health of her nail beds and the state of her split ends.”
But Buchanan also lends Jay an endearingly off-kilter charm (he fusses over Celeste, his hairless cat, rubbing moisturizer into her skin and dressing her in black, blue and “festive” turtleneck sweaters), and makes it clear that he has a sharp eye for the self-deceptions of the artists he manages. His voice is sour, unsentimental and often extremely funny, and the contrast between his cynical milieu, in which individual identity and artistic creation are marketable commodities, and Yuki’s ecstatic search for self-actualization gives the novel an edge it might otherwise lack. After all, Buchanan reminds us, the ethereal dreams of the 1960s shaped the all-too-solid contours of the world we inhabit today.
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March 11, 2017
Fiction Is the Most Popular Category at Audiobooks.com
In data drawn from its database of customer downloads, Audiobooks.com found that general fiction was its most popular subject area in 2016, accounting for 23% of all audiobook downloads. The only other category to capture a double-digit share of downloads was mystery/thriller, which had a 12% slice. The most popular nonfiction subject area was biography, which had an 8% share. Overall, fiction accounted for 64% of downloads and nonfiction 36%.
The busiest month for downloads was June, which Ian Small, CEO of Audiobooks.com., attributed in part to promotions tied to June’s being Audiobook Month. In general, the spring and summer, when people are travelling the most, were the most popular times for downloads; fall and early winter were the slowest periods.
The company also found that its top users each listened to about 75 books—more than 1,000 hours of audio—in 2016.
A version of this article appeared in the 03/13/2017 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Fiction Most Popular Category on Audiobooks.com
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Intertwined Lives Cast Light on Korean Society
Yoojin Grace Wuertz
Credit
Lisk Feng
EVERYTHING BELONGS TO US
By Yoojin Grace Wuertz
356 pp. Random House. $27.
The title of Yoojin Grace Wuertz’s debut novel, “Everything Belongs to Us,” is a statement of defiant optimism. It echoes a line from early in the novel, when an officer admonishes a rebellious protester he has jailed. “Not everything is your plaything,” the officer says. “Not everything belongs to you.”
The year is 1978, and that protester is named Jisun, who, along with Namin and Sunam, is Wuertz’s literary conduit for 1970s Korean history — a time when President Park Chung-hee’s fixation on economic recovery after the Korean War entailed suppressing all forms of political dissent and allowing inhumane working conditions to flourish. The title of Wuertz’s novel is therefore steeped in irony too: Under a program of authoritarian industrialization, everything belongs to something else — to country, to patriarchy, to capitalism. Wuertz has written a rich and descriptive case study — or a “Gatsby”-esque takedown, if you will — of 1970s South Korea. Reading “Everything Belongs to Us” is as much an education in sociology and history as it is a story about people, and the characters are so memorable they lend an intimacy to that history.
Namin wants to save herself from abject poverty by becoming a doctor, and she plans to provide for a younger brother with cerebral palsy, even if it comes at great personal cost. “It was an exhilarating idea,” she tells herself, thinking about how she would find her brother again after he had been left to the care of her grandparents. “Like being allowed to breathe cold fresh air after being trapped all her life in an underground cave.”
By contrast, her best friend, Jisun, is from one of the wealthiest families in the country and views her own privilege with disdain: “By the time Jisun arrived at the lauded gates of Seoul National University, she wanted to burn the whole place down. Not just for democracy or the repeal of the repressive constitution or anything else that the student activists shouted about every day. . . . She was fueled by personal vengeance.” Her sense of independence is intertwined with tearing down the establishment — a goal that Namin cannot understand.
Namin and Jisun befriend a young man named Sunam, a striver. He wants to be invited into the Circle, an elite secret society — “To survive, there was just one rule: obedience” — and when we first meet him, he has been tasked by the Circle to watch one of the protesters, who turns out to be Jisun.
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The three main characters are all students at Seoul National University, and therefore enjoy a certain amount of privilege; even Namin, who grew up poor, is holding a golden ticket as a student. But Wuertz still gives us glimpses of how the other half lives. Namin’s sister, for instance, is a factory worker, whose choices lead to tragedy. She represents the stratum of society that makes sacrifices for the lucky few. By the end of the novel she has vanished, one of those “girls who had once been predictable and good, girls who disappeared into the night.”
Happiness is secondary to this generation; it is a luxury, as is love. Wuertz tries to contain a sociological history of Korea by structuring it around the romantic entanglements of her characters. These love stories are the most conventional parts of this book — familiar terrain that helps to situate the reader. Nevertheless, I’d argue that the novel could have stood on its own without all the romance — Wuertz has some stunning chapters that focus on the various ways different women navigate the patriarchal strictures of Korean society.
This is the story about Korea I’ve been waiting to read — a story not about the Korean War, but about its aftermath and emerging democracy, and it is a fine telling.
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A Science Journalist Foresees One Grand Explanation for the Universe
The main reason Watson has been able to compile so much varied material is that he has perfected the journalist’s art of epitome. Whether accurately or not, he can boil a book down to a striking sentence or two and an article to a sound bite. When he has read the primary material himself, he can make a very good job of it. But in areas where he lacks time or competence, he relies on secondary literature, and that not always of the best. One of these secondary authors is Watson himself, whom he copies substantially, as in his accounts of the discoveries of X-rays and Planck’s quantum, which come from his book “The German Genius.” The high marks Watson deserves for epitomizing, however, scarcely compensate for his errors or for his abandonment of good journalistic practice by being a cheerleader for the story he is reporting.
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Does it matter that some, perhaps much, of Watson’s material is unreliable? If you believe with him that the sciences are converging, by which he usually means reduction to physics and sometimes unification under unstated principles, you might not care. He can be read for introductions to wide swaths of subjects most people know nothing about, and for such jaw-dropping generalizations as “Humans are an amalgamation of biology and mathematics.” Perhaps his quasi endorsement of the propositions that the Fall in Genesis records the birth of agriculture (“by the sweat of thy brow . . .”), and that the knowledge conveyed by eating the forbidden fruit was that coitus would be required to sire the human race, may give even his best-disposed readers pause. To be sure, he does not insist: “These are tentative arguments, but their main strength lies in the consistent picture they paint.”
To historians and other skeptics, Watson’s errors matter very much indeed. They know that science, like all human activities, has been formed by a great many contingencies. No doubt it has developed so as to give us extraordinary control over our environment, in many cases to our advantage and improvement. This control is a product not of convergence, however, but of specialization, of individuals coming to know more and more about less and less. It does not follow that the stories we tell to tie this knowledge together guarantee convergence to a unique Science, or that we would be able to discover such a Science if it exists. To return to our opening metaphor, the primary reason for what appears to Watson as a convergence of the sciences is that they have been cooked in the same kitchen, or, to speak plainly, in their contemporary forms they all try to progress by the application of increasingly precise instruments and strong mathematics to artificially constructed experiments.
The physicist Steven Weinberg, who believes, or has believed, in the imminence of the creation of a Theory of Everything, but more recently has expressed doubts about fundamental aspects of quantum mechanics, devised a metaphor to answer historians who argue from the contingencies of scientific discoveries that theories are to some extent social constructions. Mountain climbers may try many paths, the metaphor goes, run to and fro (the classical method of acquiring knowledge), scramble and slip on their ascent; but if they reach the top, no one doubts they have gotten there. The metaphor can be developed further: A successful ascent does not remove the contingencies in the choice of the mountain. There may be something in Ernst Mach’s remark that the only reason physicists based their science on mechanics and not thermodynamics or acoustics is that human beings have hunted and made war by throwing things.
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At the moment the summit we are climbing is obscured by dark matter, which physicists have postulated to save established theory. Although it must have eight or nine times the mass of all the matter in the universe from which mountains can be made, physicists do not seem to know much more about it than what they have had to assume. Perhaps we are barking up the wrong mountain. Perhaps Watson’s story, even if told with all the competence possible, cannot converge. And yet, perhaps, it may. Scientists and taxpayers have invested so much thought, emotion and money in following up the generalizations that Watson thinks put the sciences on the course of convergence that even if our mountain of Science should be no more than a hillock, we might not be able to turn back. In this Pickwickian sense the natural and human sciences might be limping toward convergence. And that would not be a welcome thing.
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Bookstores Get Political
The election of President Donald J. Trump has galvanized many in the book industry to a level of political activism not seen in generations. This week, we begin a series that shines a spotlight on some of the actions taken by those in publishing, bookselling, libraries, the nonprofit world, book-related media, and more.
Deandra Beard, the owner of Beyond Barcodes in Kokomo, Ind., recalls her shock the morning after the presidential election when she learned that more than 57% of voters in Indiana had cast their ballots for Donald Trump—including more than 50% of the voters in her county. She committed to using her multicultural bookstore as a safe space for aisle-crossing political conversations.
Since the election, Beard has organized two in-store community dialogues: the first was intended to let attendees blow off steam about the election, and the second was in a larger town hall format as part of the year-old store’s ongoing “We the People” series of discussions about intersectional social issues in the U.S. During the town hall, people of “various political persuasions” discussed the election, why they voted the way they did, and how to “work across the aisle” to build relationships in the future, she explained.
“Through that [town hall],” Beard noted, “I know that people for sure voted for Trump and are already regretting it.” More town halls on current events will be held as necessary, she said.
On April 22, Beyond Barcodes will hold a day of education about immigration. The event will include a concert by a Chicago-based band, Bassel & the Supernaturals, whose lead vocalist, a Syrian immigrant to the U.S., will also facilitate a discussion about the issue from the perspective of an Arab-American.
Chicago’s Women & Children First, one of the oldest women’s bookstores in the country, has taken a strong and vocal stand against the Trump presidency and its ramifications. In early January the store owners, Lynn Mooney and Sarah Hollenbeck, announced that they were launching a feminist craft circle with the goal of “using traditionally ‘feminine’ crafts for political statements, art, and more.” The Feminist Craft Circle members knitted 100 pink “pussy hats” for the Women’s March in January, which were distributed before and during the marches in Chicago and Washington, D.C. The crafting group has decided to continue to meet as a regular crafting circle; most recently, they knitted hats and scarves to provide to a local nonprofit, Care for Real, that helps people in need with food and clothing.
Women and Children First has also launched two monthly events in response to the current political climate. The first, called Activism, showcases local activist organizations. Each month, representatives from a different Chicagoland social justice organization make a presentation about its mission, followed by a q&a and information session on how people can become involved with it.
The second monthly series is called the Conversation. In it, authors discuss issues of political, social, and cultural relevance. The inaugural panel was subtitled “Art + Resistance” and featured Aleksandar Hemon, Eula Biss, and Roger Reeves, among others.
In Houston last month, Tony Diaz, the proprietor of Nuestra Palabra Arts & Books, took to the streets to voice his opposition to some of the new policies of the Trump administration that have filtered down to the state level. Under protest was SB4: a law making its way through the Texas legislature that would empower police on university campuses to act as de facto immigration officers. “We have to work together to make this stop,” he said to the nearly 50 people who’d gathered in the 80-degree heat outside the administrative building of the University of Houston Downtown to hold placards with slogans such as “Immigrants Welcome Here” and “Stop Racism” for the television cameras. “This city behind us hums with industry, with trains and construction,” he announced, “and we know who built this city, this country—immigrants.”
Diaz opened Nuestra Palabra late last year. By his own account, it is just the fifth Latino-focused bookstore in the nation. It is housed inside Talento Bilingüe de Houston, a cultural center that also includes a 270-seat theater, which the store will use for special events. Currently, the shop has 500 titles on offer, with plans to expand to some 2,000.
A vocal advocate for Latino literary life, Diaz is also the founder of Nuestra Palabra: Latino Writers Having Our Say—an organization that was responsible for the Latino Book and Family Show, which ran from 2002 to 2007—and a self-described librotraficante (“book smuggler”). In 2012, he organized a caravan to smuggle “wet books” into Arizona after the state outlawed Latino and ethnic studies at universities. In keeping with the spirit of that project, one of the first events at the store was a seminar for high school teachers on how to use Latino literature, which was free to attend with the purchase of Hecho in Tejasi, the anthology of Mexican-American literature edited by Dagoberto Gilb.
Asked why he started a bookstore, Diaz explained that downtown Houston is a book desert and, save for the headquarters of the Houston public library, there is nowhere to get a book in the district. (A Books-A-Million closed several years ago.) His mission is to give the Latino community a literary place to “chill” and to help the curious discover books that can help share the Latino experience.
At KitaabWorld, an online children’s bookstore focused on offering hard-to-find books from South Asian countries—including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Burma, Afghanistan, and Nepal—the focus has also been on educating readers, parents, and teachers. An ongoing campaign dubbed “45+ Books to Counter Islamophobia,” which has promoted books on topics from Muhammad Ali to the Grand Mosque in Paris, has garnered international attention.
“Our roles are not purely as booksellers,” said site cofounder Sadaf Saddique, a Silicon Valley consultant. “We see ourselves as taking bookselling to the next step by trying to facilitate representation for South Asian culture and children’s books. In this regard we are activists and advocates in addition to being booksellers.”
The site, which operates out of the San Francisco Bay area and has an office in Menlo Park, Calif., was born last year when Saddique and cofounder Gauri Manglik, an attorney, recognized a gap in the market for books that featured South Asian children in various cultures and countries, not only in the context of an immigrant or assimilation experience in America. “We wanted books that authentically depicted life back in India, for example, and for that reason we had to import the books ourselves.”
KitaabWorld currently offers approximately 1,000 titles, and it is working with a dozen publishers in India. The site also handles its own warehousing and distribution.
“The biggest challenge is discovery, educating people to let them know that these books do exist—there are books that depict little girls in hijabs doing everyday things,” Saddique said.
Educators are as much a target audience of KitaabWorld as are general readers. Sometimes, Saddique said, “teachers can sometimes be reticent to order books about, say, Islam, because they fear that they don’t know enough about the topic to make a good decision as to what to buy.” He added, “That is why we put out our list to counter Islamophobia—it was more to make people comfortable with the topic.” However, he continued, “we want to emphasize that we are not just a site for Islamic books. We have done campaigns to educate people about Diwali, for example.”
Among the site’s bestselling titles are Big Red Lollipop by Rukhsana Khan and illustrated by Sophie Blackall (Viking) and Four Feet, Two Sandals by Karen Lynn Williams (Eerdmans). But perhaps dearest to the cofounder’s heart is Dear Mrs. Naidu by Mathangi Subramanian (Young Zuuban), a story about an Indian girl living in a slum who battles the government to get education and becomes pen pals with Mrs. Naidu, a long-dead freedom fighter. “The book won the 2016 South Asian Book Award,” Saddique said, “and we were so eager to sell it here. Part of our mission is to help expand the audience for these books in the United States, but also to simply prove that the audience exists here so more of these types of books get published.”
A version of this article appeared in the 03/13/2017 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Bookstores Engage in Diverse Forms of Protest
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“Saturday is a dismayingly bad book”: John Banville on Ian McEwan
“The novel is set on a specific and momentous day, February 15, 2003, the day when hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of London to protest the imminent war on Iraq. Perowne wakes early, some hours before dawn. Standing at the window in his bedroom, he sees an airliner with an engine on fire streaking through the night sky in the direction of Heathrow. Although his mood is euphoric—he is at the top of his career, he loves his wife and still finds her desirable, his house is handsome and secure, and that night there is to be a loving family reunion—Perowne’s thoughts, like the thoughts of all of us in these days and nights, have been straying over the millenarian threats that have arisen against the soft target which is the developed West.
…
“It happens occasionally that a novelist will lose his sense of artistic proportion, especially when he has done a great deal of research and preparation. I have read all those books, he thinks, I have made all these notes, so how can I possibly go wrong? Or he devises a program, a manifesto, which he believes will carry him free above the demands of mere art—no deskbound scribbler he, no dabbler in dreams, but a man of action, a match for any scientist or soldier. He sets to work, and immediately matters start to go wrong—the thing will not flow, the characters are mulishly stubborn, even the names are not right—but yet he persists, mistaking the frustrations of an unworkable endeavor for the agonies attendant upon the fashioning of a masterpiece. But no immensity of labor will bring to successful birth a novel that was misconceived in the first place.
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“Something of the kind seems to have happened here. Saturday is a dismayingly bad book. The numerous set pieces—brain operations, squash game, the encounters with Baxter, etc.—are hinged together with the subtlety of a child’s Erector Set. The characters too, for all the nuzzling and cuddling and punching and manhandling in which they are made to indulge, drift in their separate spheres, together but never touching, like the dim stars of a lost galaxy. The politics of the book is banal, of the sort that is to be heard at any middle-class Saturday-night dinner party, before the talk moves on to property prices and recipes for fish stew. There are good things here, for instance the scene when Perowne visits his senile mother in an old-folks’ home, in which the writing is genuinely affecting in its simplicity and empathetic force. Overall, however, Saturday has the feel of a neoliberal polemic gone badly wrong; if Tony Blair—who makes a fleeting personal appearance in the book, oozing insincerity—were to appoint a committee to produce a ‘novel for our time,’ the result would surely be something like this.
It affords no pleasure to say these things. Ian McEwan is a very good writer; the first half of Atonement alone would ensure him a lasting place in English letters. In this new book, however, he has stumbled badly. This would be of little consequence outside the book-chat columns were it not for the arrogance which Saturday displays.
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“Another source of dismay, one for which, admittedly, Ian McEwan cannot be held wholly accountable, is the ecstatic reception which Saturday has received from reviewers and book buyers alike. Are we in the West so shaken in our sense of ourselves and our culture, are we so disablingly terrified in the face of the various fanaticisms which threaten us, that we can allow ourselves to be persuaded and comforted by such a self-satisfied and, in many ways, ridiculous novel as this?”
–John Banville, The New York Review of Books, May 26, 2005
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John Parsley Named EIC At Dutton, Among Other Changes
John Parsley, formerly v-p and executive editor at Little Brown, has been named v-p and editor-in-chief of Dutton. Parsley will oversee the imprint's editorial department and work with Putnam/Dutton/Berkley president Ivan Held and senior v-p Christine Ball on acquisitions.
“I am beyond excited to join such an established and successful team," Parsley said in a statement. I’m a fan of so many Dutton authors, and I look forward to working with Dutton’s excellent editors to continue seeking out and publishing wildly discussable, must-read books.”
Additionally, Berkley's Caliber line, which focuses on military history, and its executive editor, Brent Howard, will move to Dutton. Howard will keep his title and report to Parsley, along with fellow Dutton executive editors Jill Schwartzman, Stephen Morrow, and Maya Ziv.
The moves come as .
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I’m Not O.K. Neither Are You. Who Cares?
Some of Mr. Brinkmann’s prompts, such as contemplating your own mortality daily, are comically doomy. In “Sack Your Coach,” a chapter about severing the ties with your therapist, he writes: “Consider sacking your coach and making friends with him instead. Perhaps buy the coach a ticket to a museum, and ask what lessons life has to offer if you direct your gaze outward instead of inward.”
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In the chapter “Dwell on the Past,” he writes: “When someone presents plans for innovation and ‘visions’ for the future, tell them that everything was better in the old days. Explain to them that the idea of ‘progress’ is only a few hundred years old — and is, in fact, destructive.”
O, to have a camera to capture earnest Brinkmann adherents as they respond to their office manager’s explanation of new petty-cash accounting procedures with, “You know, the idea of progress is only a few hundred years old.” This reality-based Bravo series practically writes itself. Or what about a coffee-table book comprising photos of the moment when therapists are terminated by their patients and handed tickets to a Seurat show? It could be a glorious new direction for the “Humans of New York” author, Brandon Stanton.
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That said, Mr. Brinkmann distinguishes himself in the anti-improvement genre by taking an essayistic approach rather than a how-to one and by seamlessly weaving into his arguments the philosophies and writings of thinkers like the Stoics, the psychologist Barbara S. Held and the novelist Haruki Murakami. But more important, Mr. Brinkmann brings to the genre a refreshing dose of classical restraint, particularly as it relates to tone. To wit, his book, unlike Mr. Manson’s, does not refer to its reader as “dumbass.”
Which brings us to the question: What’s with all the F-bombs, guys? Ms. Knight’s book, patterned after “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” by Marie Kondo, is essentially a decluttering guide, but for a life, not a residence. Ms. Knight told The Toronto Star that she’d counted how many times she had used the obscenity in her slim book “and it’s something like 732.” She continued: “Somebody asked me if I had beat ‘The Wolf of Wall Street,’ so I Googled and found that ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ used the [expletive] like, 500-and-something times. So I have well exceeded.” We all have our goals.
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The year 2014 saw the publication of “Good Manners for Nice People” who sometimes utter this particular expletive; 2015 brought “One Shrink’s Practical Advice for Managing All Life’s Impossible Situations” (again, a subtitle) and 2016 brought “Get Out of Your Head and Into Your Life” with even more creative obscenity affixed beforehand. Why can’t these writers use their indoor voice? It would be easy to blame network television’s efforts to keep up with the hipness of premium cable, or to the success of Adam Mansbach’s one-joke bedtime manual for children, or to the reduced presence of gatekeepers in a world in which the president posts policy on Twitter that he has not run by his advisers.
But I prefer to look at the writing style of the self-help genre itself. Take a sample from the Manson book. He’ll make an interesting point, such as: “The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience,” but he indents it on the page as a pull-quote, and runs it in bold type. Then he adds, “I’ll give you a minute to unpretzel your brain and maybe read that again” — and then he restates the premise, only this time in italics. In such an ecology, the only possible intensifier is a curse word. Or maybe 732 of them.
I love well-deployed profanity. But while a dose of gritty humanity is a welcome contrast to the earnestness of Ms. Kondo or the mindfulness of the stress expert Jon Kabat-Zinn, a 732-unit-tall mountain of it suggests a lack of imagination. Or a cumulative juggernaut that is operating outside the purlieus of human agency.
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Come September, when Houghton Mifflin Harcourt publishes Robert I. Sutton’s “The [Expletive] Survival Guide,” whose title uses coarse English to refer to “a jerk,” and which is a follow-up to his book “The No [Expletive] Rule,” l expect further escalation in this particular arms race. I’m imagining that the book will reach out and punch its reader in the kisser. Or maybe it will cut off its nose to spite its own face.
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Joshua Mohr: The Time I Robbed a Liquor Store
Our alibi was a sandy blanket in the back of my truck, an acoustic guitar, a knockout brunette in the passenger seat. Our alibi was a night picnic at the beach. When we got pulled over—if we got pulled over—the cop would peer in the cab and he’d think, now there’s no way this pretty young couple just knocked over that liquor store.
It was an alibi that seemed rock solid right up until the cops pulled in behind us, putting an end to our adrenaline-fueled euphoria.
I couldn’t out gas them, not in my old truck. Pulled to the shoulder and two police officers walked up, one on either side of the vehicle, their cruiser lights still flashing and a spotlight right on me in the driver’s seat.
My girl squirmed and asked, “Are we going to jail, Josh?”
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“We’ll be fine, [May],” I said, young and cocky and dumb, “I’m too pretty for prison.”
One cop nearing my window.
The other behind the truck, hand on holster.
“I’m scared,” said May.
All of this was so fragile, so stupid. A sandy blanket? A guitar? A night picnic? The worst alibi ever.
Especially considering what was stuffed under my seat: baggy black clothes from the robbery, a broken gun. We’d kept it all like hoarders and they’d search the truck and find everything and send us to the penitentiary.
Me rolling the window down.
The cop was right there.
“This truck matches the description of one used in an armed robbery,” he said.
*
I’ve devised a simple story, dividing my life between the bad and the good, the past and the present. I used to be a drug addict, used to freebase bad ideas, but now I’m rehabilitated, a family man, a boring dad, a model citizen.
That narrative is easy and comforting. That narrative seeks to pardon mistakes. But do our mistakes really deserve mercy? Can something as simple as time erode the severity of our indiscretions?
When I was nineteen-years old, I tried to rob a liquor store. And I was completely sober, hadn’t had a drop to drink that night, hadn’t popped a pill or snorted courage.
I was clear headed when I charged into the store with a busted gun.
It’s the worst thing I’ve ever done, and I can’t blame booze or drugs.
And this simple story won’t clear my name.
*
The cops were at the window, talking, saying things. Their mouths moved. Mine didn’t. Mine couldn’t. This was the end.
Thing was, we didn’t need the money. I’m not sure if that makes it better or worse (my gut says worse), but we weren’t operating under any imperative. We were just stupid. We were just mean, thoughtless, disgusting.
So we didn’t need the money and we were sober, and the baggy black clothes and the broken gun were stuffed under my seat.
“Did you hear me?” the cop said.
“I’m sorry?” I said.
“Where are you coming from?”
“The beach,” I said. “We had a night picnic.”
The cop took his flashlight and aimed it at May. I had her dress nice and sexy underneath her baggy black clothes from the robbery, unrecognizable from the description called out over the police radio.
The cop took the flashlight and inspected the back of the truck, the blanket, the guitar.
“Hold on,” he said, and walked back to the cruiser.
*
When I was still drinking, I’d tell this story to barflies in sad saloons and see awe on their faces like suds on draft beer. They’d lean in for all the gross details.
“So they arrested you?” they’d ask. “Then what happened, then what, then what, then what?”
I’m wondering about you.
Are you leaning in to hear more?
Why am I telling you this story? Why can’t I stop telling this story? Why won’t this story stay in the past?
*
We were walking out of a late screening of Pulp Fiction, which had just come out—so this happened in ’94, I guess—we left the theatre, arm in arm, nursing the last of a pint of tequila, and I said, “We could rob something, too, just like the movie,” and she said, “We could rob something, too, just like the movie!” and I said, “Why not a liquor store?” and she said, “Why not a liquor store!”
It was that simple, that clean—a lark, a line pulled tight around our consciences, severing the air flow, two stupid humans making a huge decision—the sort of moment that could change a life—leaving us in county jail to stew on who we’d become, a future with a noose around its neck… But why should we care? Who was worth anything? What in our world had trained us to be anything except disaster parasites? Where were our families to feed these malnourished hearts? This world, this species bent on violence. Deaths Molestation. Fists. The ache of remembering it all. The army of tomorrows that made us so fucking mad and careless and cruel.
So what if we were sober? So what if we’d put the guitar, the blanket, even some sand from the beach in the back of the truck? So what if we went to a thrift store and bought our baggy black clothes? So what if we found the broken gun in the basement of the punk house we lived in? So what if we screwed talking about getting away with it? So what if we never talked about getting caught? So what if nothing could slide inside our ire? So what if we planned and thought things out and didn’t reconsider for even a second?
I park my truck in front of the liquor store and we pull stockings over our heads and I run into the store. May waits by the front door. I have a broken gun but never even raise it. The woman behind the counter sees me and takes off running toward the store’s back and the door closes between us and I’m standing there with the broken gun. There’s a gurgle from a suffocating conscience, its gruff voice saying, “What are you doing, Josh, Jesus, stop ruining your life?!” I take off to the front door, slide in the driver’s seat and May’s next to me and we peel off our stockings and black clothes, jam them under the seat and I drive and try not to speed and try not to cry and feel a macerated hate collecting inside of me.
*
When the cop came back to my window, he was in a hurry. “Okay,” he said.
“Can we go?” I asked.
But he was already walking away.
The cop car sped off, lights on, maybe hunting down another rusty late 80s pickup.
May and I smiled at each other and went back to my place, some disgusting punk house out in the avenues. I remember there was a party roaring when we got there, the rooms filled with smoke and trampling music and people I barely knew. I hugged everyone. I loved them all. I can’t possibly make you understand how lucky and free I felt that night, and so I celebrated by bear-hugging every stinky punk I could get my arms around.
*
I once told the liquor store robbery story to my friend Jim, who looked at me and scoffed when I told him the cops let us go.
“Must be nice to be white,” he said.
*
This essay is my confession, and here’s what I’m hoping for: I want you to judge me, yell at me, never talk to me. I want you to take your pound of flesh.
The great tragedy in all this is that these are only words—you’ll forget them—or you won’t care—maybe you will for an hour or so but your curiosity—and then your contempt—will crest, recede.
You’re busy with your own past, preoccupied with what you’ve screwed up, squandered, with what weighs on your conscience. And that’s not to mention your present, the job and the boss and the family and the friends and the letdowns and the malaise and the unfairnesses and the unrequited passions and the regret.
You don’t have time to track me down. We barely have time to track ourselves down. And if you’re not going to hold me accountable, what I’m supposed to do it?
How?
Time is the only statute of limitations that matters.
*
When I was in rehab, a man changed my life in one swift moment. It was a pretty fancy rehab shop, and every morning we got acupuncture to help with withdrawal. He put pins in all our ears and we sat in the dark, in a huge circle, and he’d do a sort of guided meditation for us, one flush with the real drug we needed: tough love.
One morning, he told us, point blank, that nobody cared about sob stories. He told us we were the only people who cared about our histories, the abuses. And if you’re the only one who cares, he challenged us, why are you letting the past control you?
Maybe this sounds obvious to you, but I had a tarnished catharsis in that dark room. There I was in the throes of withdrawal, pins sticking out of my ears, and I could finally stop the past from crawling all over me like lice, laying eggs, colonizing.
And it worked for almost every one of my harrowing and selfish and dangerous antics. It worked for everything except this memory. The robbery.
I pointed a gun at another human being. Sure, it was broken, but that doesn’t matter. I made her fear for her life.
And maybe that’s how it works. The strongest parasite survives, feeds on you so long that you become one. I’ll never strip off those baggy black clothes. I’ll never put down the broken gun.
And good.
Let it be like an extra limb I lug forever.
*
So what if I’m sorry, so what if I’m a good parent, so what if I’m a good husband, so what if I pay my taxes, so what if I drive a Subaru Outback, so what if I volunteer my time, so what if I take the neighborhood kids for ice cream, so what if I listen to NPR, so what if I try to help people, so what if I give and give, so what if I write this, so what if I try to find a rhythm in the beat of a busted heart, that mad stupid kid doing something so reprehensible and getting away with it, and getting away with it, and getting away with it?
To win a copy of Joshua Mohr’s memoir, Sirens, courtesy Two Dollar Radio, email giveaway@lithub.com.
The post Joshua Mohr: The Time I Robbed a Liquor Store appeared first on Art of Conversation.
Week of March 13, 2017
Margolin Moves to Minotaur
In a three-book North American rights deal, Phillip Margolin is moving houses, having signed with Minotaur Books for a new thriller series. Keith Kahla bought the books from Jennifer Weltz at Jean V. Naggar Literary. The first book, The Third Victim, follows an attorney who finds himself on trial for murder. Weltz said the novel features “surprising twists until the shocking end.” Margolin, who has more than 11 million copies of his work in print, was previously published by HarperCollins.
Berkley Picks Up Higgins for Seven Figures
In a seven-figure deal, women’s fiction author Kristan Higgins agreed to write four books for Berkley. The North American rights agreement was negotiated by Berkley’s Claire Zion and agent Maria Carvainis, who has an eponymous shingle. Higgins is a bestselling author of 16 novels, and her most recent, On Second Thought (HQN), was published in January. Her first book under this deal, Good Luck with That, is tentatively scheduled for 2019.
Malerman Takes ‘Carol’ to Del Rey
Del Rey Books’ Mike Braff bought North American rights, at auction, to two novels by Josh Malerman—the first is called Unbury Carol and the second is currently untitled—in a six-figure deal. Braff penned the agreement with agent Kristin Nelson at Nelson Literary. Unbury Carol, which follows an outlaw racing against the clock to save his love from being buried alive, is, according to Del Rey, “a dark, lyrical adventure novel in the vein of Stephen King and Louis L’Amour.” Unbury Carol is slated for April 2018.
Millennial Activist Signs with Atria
After just two days on submission, Jhanteigh Kupihea preempted world rights, for six figures, to Amanda Litman’s Run for Something. Litman, who is 27 and worked for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, cofounded the organization Run for Something, which encourages millennials to run for office, shortly after her candidate lost the election. Sanford J. Greenburger agent Stephanie Delman, who represented Litman, said the book, which is slated for fall 2017, will serve as a “call to action” for young people to engage in politics, and will feature “testimonials from politicians and political operatives.”
Anderson’s ‘Witches’ Casts Spell on Simon Pulse
Simon Pulse’s Liesa Abrams nabbed North American rights, in a three-book deal, to a new middle grade trilogy by Jodi Lynn Anderson (Tiger Lily) called the Thirteen Witches. According to agent Rosemary Stimola at Stimola Literary Studio, who brokered the sale, the books follow an 11-year-old girl who is “trying to solve the mystery of her mother’s lost memory.” While investigating, the young heroine “discovers a layer underneath reality in which good and evil struggle in an eternal battle between thirteen witches and a benevolent goddess who lives on the moon.” The first book in the series is set for spring 2019.
S&S Kids Buys Ashley’s ‘Kosmo’
David Gale at Simon & Schuster Children’s Books bought North American rights to Jonathan Ashley’s Lily & Kosmo. Mark Gottlieb at Trident Media Group, who represented Ashley, said the book is “styled in the tradition” of such titles as A Tale Dark & Grimm and Flora & Ulysses. It follows a girl from Brooklyn (the Lily of the title) who longs to join an all-boy group of space cadets known as the Spacetronauts. To prove her worth and land a place in the club, Gottlieb said, she must show that she can “hold her own among the galaxy’s unruliest rascals.”
Greenwillow Grabs Middle Grade Debut
In a preempt for two books, Martha Mihalick at Greenwillow Books took North American rights to Jennifer Blecher’s middle grade debut, The Math of Me. Blecher, a freelance writer and former assistant DA in Boston, was represented by Alexander Slater at Trident Media Group. Slater said the first book, which is slated for 2019, is about a 12-year-old girl named Cove Bernstein who, having never left her small town on Martha’s Vineyard, “devises a way to get back to her best friend whose sudden move to New York City turns her world upside-down.”
Marvel Press Revives Black Panther for Kids
Award-winning children’s author Ronald L. Smith (Hoodoo) signed a world rights deal with Marvel Press to write a middle grade novel featuring the Marvel superhero Black Panther. (The character made his debut in the Fantastic Four and is considered the first black superhero.) This book, which is set in the mythical African country of Wakanda and present-day Chicago, will depict Black Panther in his youth. Adrian Ranta Zurhellen at Foundry Literary + Media represented the author, striking the agreement with Emily Meehan at Disney-Hyperion (where Marvel Press is an imprint). The book, which Hannah Allaman and Tomas Palacios will be editing, is set for January 2018, timed to hit shelves just before the release of the Marvel film featuring Black Panther.
A version of this article appeared in the 03/13/2017 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Deals
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