Weston Cutter's Blog, page 14

A Gorgeous Prayer for the Stolen

 Jennifer Clement’s PRAYERS FOR THE STOLEN

This book was incredible. It was so scary and so powerful, I was hoping author Jennifer Clement was describing some fictionalized, apocalyptic version of Mexico set in 2075 or something like that. No dice. Although the girls in the story are fictional, the premise is real, set in the very true and very scary mountains of Guerrero. It’s shocking – like, we all know people are fleeing Mexico because life in America holds more promise and opportunities for many, and we know it’s dangerous and hard to get over here, but most of us probably don’t realize the extreme extent. Prayers for the Stolen is a good place to start.

13-year old Ladydi Garcia Martinez doesn’t know any different. She’s used to posing as a boy, getting her teeth blackened and yellowed with markers and dirt rubbed over her face by her mother before leaving for school each morning so roaming drug lords don’t notice a girl wandering through town. When danger is getting close, the girls burrow like animals into holes dug in the yard while their mothers lie to unknown men, swearing there are no girls living there. Being a girl in her town is a scary thing – even though in truth, there are so few men around, and sons that have not yet headed to America are rare and prized as well. There are no fathers to be heard of; just mothers and the daughters they raise on their own.

Just getting to school is a danger. Dressed as boys, children learn to listen for the sounds of planes about to spray chemical meant to kill the opium plants approaching and get inside before those chemicals burn their young skin. Students know their teachers are less permanent role models than brave individuals with misplaced high-ideals coming in from bigger cities for as long as the can stand the place before they move on.  Even at 13, these girls aren’t going unnoticed by the male teachers, either.

Thankfully, solace can be found in friendship. Ladydi feels a connection stronger than sistehood to the other girls in town. There’s Maria, the girl born with a harelip, making her the only one that doesn’t have to make herself into a boy because, as her mother says, she’s so ugly the druglords wouldn’t want her anyway. Estefani, a girl whose mother is slowing dying yet seems to be sucking the life out of her daughter at the same time. Then there’s Paula, the girl more beautiful than Jennifer Lopez herself. Her mother tries to keep men from noticing her, rubbing chili powder over her cheeks until they burn red, but it doesn’t stop Paula from getting stolen away and being sold as a slave mistress, a tragic fate, yet not an uncommon one.

Ladydi (yes, named after Princess Diana) is in this place while coming of age, imaging what a future could look like outside of Guerrero’s walls. She’s struggling with how far she can really go from her mother, a woman alone after her father left for America, started a new family, and forgot to send any money back for Ladydi. Although her mother’s a strong independent lady with a knack for revenge (Ladydi wasn’t named after the Princess for her elegance, but rather, for her role as the patron saint of scorned women), her alcoholism has already built a graveyard of beer cans in the backyard, one that Ladydi fears will eventually bury her mother.

It’s an awful, heart-breaking read, yet, its prose is so lyrical beautiful, the book’s impossible to put down because of the sheer gorgeousness on each page. I can’t tell you how much you’ll enjoy this book.

If You Have Kids You Need This Book

All Joy No Fun by Jennifer Senior

I need to preface this with a couple caveats:

1. I’ve read a total of zero parenting books in my life. I have had quite a few recommended to me but got around to none of them.

2. I have a sixteen month-old daughter.

The reason those caveats seem significant (to me anyway) is that I want to make clear that my massive enjoyment of Jennifer Senior’s glorious All Joy and No Fun has likely more than a little to do with context. I cannot in fairness address the paucity of my background in parenting books and how that lack affected by reading of this one—might I have liked Senior’s less were it number twenty? Possibly. I’d like to think not, but perhaps. The second point’s even more critical: this is absolutely a book for parents. You know how sometimes there are books you can read for fun about topics or folks you’re not involved with, like a dude reading a book written, say, by one of the writers from Sex and the City? That sort of read can absolutely be fun, but I’d argue that this is not one of those books: this is 100% a book for parents. 100%. I don’t know what a non-parent could get from this book. I want to be clear, though: if you’re not a parent and want to read the thing, read it. If you’re thinking of having kids, read it. If you’re a grandparent, read it. All I’m trying to say is the book’s so necessary and vital for parents that part of me almost wants to protect the book from non-parents because the book’s not for spectators. It’s for those of us still navigating the unfuckingbelievably tricky course marked Modern Parenting.

I’ll posit here that this book’s glorious for a couple really profound reasons, and the first reason is the simpest to address though the toughest to notice, sometimes: it is gloriously written. All Joy and No Fun is one of the best-written books I’ve read this year (or last) period, regardless of genre or style or whatever. It’s just astonishingly well-done—it’s the sort of book where there’s a casual gloriousness on damn near every page, such as p 41, which features this: The phrase “having it all” has little to do with what women want. If anything, it’s a reflection of a widespread and misplaced cultural belief, shared by men and women alike: that we, as middle-class Americans, have been given infinite promise, and it’s our obligation to exploit every ounce of it. “Having it all” is the phrase of a culture that, as Adam Phillips implies in Missing Out, is tyrannized by the idea of its own potential. Goddamn, the smarts of that—and be appraised that Senior deploys such insight and wisdom on the regular, and that, at all times, her prose is that rarest kind, the fantastically clear and compelling sort.

What you realize, too, on coming across such bits and pieces of electrification is that All Joy and No Fun is not exclusively a parenting book—i.e. addressing basic how-tos—but is instead attempting to address what it means to be a parent at present (again, to be clear: maybe every parenting book does this, and I’m just stupid, but I don’t think that’s the case). Junior’s actually asking: what does it mean to be a parent at present, but to get at that question, there are thornier things to address as well, such as the fact that kids are at present “economically worthless but emotionally priceless,” and that we are, all of us, in a weird moment of blindness regarding the purpose of kids (if you want to useful pull-quotes, head to the WaPo or NYT reviews—lots of reviews of this book go to the same quotes, sensically, of course, and it’d feel repetitive of me to do the same).

This, friends and faithless, is the Real Deal of Junior’s book: I know of almost no books that are willing to actually use, as their premise, the question what’s the point of children. It’s a stark question, and I don’t want to imply that there isn’t a point, but, certainly, the point of kids is different now than it was even 50 years ago. Because of that shifting (which of course is ongoing), we’re living this interstitial moment, and so, in some ways, we’re open to all sorts of ideas, tiger moms or whatever else. And, of course, as anyone who’s attempted to do anything ever, if you don’t know the ultimate point or goal of something, it’s infinitely tough to muster anything like a plan regarding something (if you don’t know what you’d like for dinner, how do you go about preparing it?). We know, of course, most of the softer abstractions regarding raising children: we want them smart and healthy and respectful and engaged and etc. But abstractions are nothing like maps or rules (imagine having a friend tell you directions to his place, but, instead of giving street names, he tells you to take a left when you feel like it or to keep going as long as it feels right).

I don’t want to make it sound like all Junior’s doing is merely diagnostic, either: in the book’s six chapters, she looks at families (in Minneapolis and Houston), using their stories as jumping off points for considerations about larger notions (ch. 1′s Autonomy and 2′s Marriage and those two alone are worth the price of admission). Junior pairs these actual flesh-and-blood stories/examples with ideas from various social scientists (the ones I most resonated with were the ideas of D. Kahneman and, more than anyone, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi), and this move is just huge. This part’s really important. By presenting actual stories, and then considering ideas or theories that offer some illumination on those stories, Junior actually (I’d argue) makes sensible, thoughtful parenting feel possible, and (again, at least for me) makes it easy to pause and reflect on what exactly it is we’re doing, as parents (that means nothing in general. Here’s a specific: why do I check my fucking email when I’m hanging out with my daughter? I know from experience that a year from now I’ll remember almost no emails but will remember and relish those fun moments with my daughter. So why interrupt it?). I don’t think I can quite clearly say what it is Junior’s done here, but it’s a shocking kindness, or at least that’s how I read it.

This review’s already half down a rabbit hole. Look: this is the parenting book folks are gonna be talking about for awhile for all the above reasons, plus because Junior’s had connective pieces of it in New York, where she’s an editor, and those pieces have generated their own wowser moments for readers. I don’t know what to tell you. My wife loves Curtis Sittenfeld’s work—I don’t know it—but the start of her blurb is perfect: If you’re a parent in 2013, you have to get your hands on this book. I’d update it for the next decade or so, at least. You’re an absolute fool to not have this book in your world if you have children at present.

Entering Olshan’s Marshlands

  Matthew Olshan’s THE MARSHLANDS

Written from end to beginning, The Marshlands reveals the story of a man who dedicates, loses and finds his role helping the people of the Iraqi marshes. Spanning three decades, Matthew Olshan’s story begins with a broken down, nameless old man being released from prison into a place and a time unfamiliar to him. Wandering the city, finding scraps to eat like granola bars given by the skinny new shop girls, the man is living in the streets until an elegant young woman takes him in, rescuing him from a street assault and bringing him into a warm, well-cared for home. After years in the harshest conditions, it’s all so unknown.

The Marshlands is the first full-length novel written for adults by Olshan. Although it’s much more mature in theme, including violence, crimes and issues of race, for a book dealing with a war-torn country, it offers a surprising amount of the same magic and the courage found in Olshan’s work for young readers (The Mighty Lalouche, Finn and The Flown Sky).

From the beginning of the story there’s the mysterious sense that the old man is the hero of the story, or at least he will become one, even though his behavior does nothing to suggest this. It’s not until a little while into the story, when the man begins avoiding eye contact with strangers for fear they may recognize his face that the curiosities really begin to arise. A little while later, a dentist fixing the man’s teeth, the trip provided by the lady who has taken him in, does indeed recognize his face, pulling out a magazine from years earlier with his face on the cover, the headline on the front stating “Betrayal.” Suddenly, we question what he must have done. From this first-person narrative, all we see is a hero – how could this be?

Although we’re shocked by this revelation, the women, a philanthropist and museum curator working on a new exhibit dedicated to the marshland the man has came from, seems to have already known. Suddenly, it’s clear she knows exactly who the man before her is, even though we have no name for him.

The first jump back in time, going back 21 years, brings us a new insight: this old man was once a doctor amongst the people of the marshes, treating their ailments, respecting their culture and caring for them as best he can. He’s treating the sick, helping burying the dead, even doing his best to comfort the grieving. It’s his way of caring for these people on the fringes of the Iraqi society that ultimately gets him trouble with the government.

We flash back in time again, 11 more years, and our hero now has a name: Gus. Gus is a visitor to the marshes, an officer just off the hospital ship, trying to absorb their culture and practices while still bringing their healing remedies into the current century. He’s no longer the poor man we meet in the beginning, or even the marsh dweller we saw in the previous section. Yet, the question remains: What happened to make him stay?

It’s a beautiful tale filled with grim moments. A tale of suspense, untold treasures and hope in the good of mankind, I’m hoping The Marshlands won’t be Olshan’s only foray into adult literature.

Alain De Botton’s THE NEWS: A User’s Manual

  THE NEWS by Alain de Botton

British author Alain De Botton has made a name for himself writing essays and non-fiction manuals on how to use, appreciate, and get the most out of everything. Past topics of study include travel (The Art of Travel), religion (Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion), Proust (How Proust Can Change Your Life), and even love (Kiss and Tell, How to Think More About Sex). Botton’s tradition of explaining to how-tos on topics you thought you already knew how to utilize continues with his latest release, The News: A User’s Manual.

For starters, yes, we all know how to read a newspaper or cnn.com, and even a 3-year-old can watch 60 minutes. What Botton proves is that simply scanning the pages does not mean we are using the news effectively. There’s no blame on either side – it’s not our fault we can’t quite appreciate the news of every quarrel in Israel, nor is it the fault of the news source that its viewers are missing the full impact of their stories. That’s where The News comes in. Throughout the pages, Botton provides a way to navigate through the different sections, from the meaty, world news and political pieces to the Sunday paper’s travel and entertainment pieces. There’s even advice for how to garner useful knowledge from a slushy celeb gossip rag – literally, anything that could be considered news, Botton will help you get the most out of.

Here’s a quick peek at some of the ways Botton will open your eyes and alert to what you’ve been missing while checking the daily news:

-       Political News: Journalists find it their responsibility to keep an eye on Congress, to make sure the people in charge aren’t abusing their powers, to keep the powerful in check. That said: they report much more on the faults they uncover, point out the sex scandals and hypocritical acts these people perform to remind the mighty that their deeds do not go unseen. This is a good thing, even if it does not make for the most enticing read (which is okay on the part of the reader).

-       World News: When we see news about foreign countries, it’s almost always bad. “200 Dead in Egypt,” “French Diplomat Caught in Sex Scandal,” “Congo Faces Humanitarian Crisis,” and so on. While it is important for us as citizens of the same planet to be aware of these happenings, we are almost never informed about the good things that are happening in these countries, or even the mundane. We aren’t getting their wedding announcements – just the news of their terrorist attacks, which is something to keep in mind.

-       Financial News: Don’t be intimidated if you flip to an article and see an un-understandable graph. Even the experts read the surrounding story to fully grasp the graph’s implications. You’re not alone.

-       Celebrity News: Human beings have it in their nature to look up to role models. Although we (or at least I) may never understand why the news reports on Kim Kardashian, it is important to remember that these people have done something that makes them a role model to someone, whether that thing may be submerging oneself in acting, balancing a family and a starring role in a sitcom, or simply wearing an amazing outfit while grocery shopping. Someone is finding advice and a role model from these pages.

There are plenty more ways in which Botton both justifies the news and confirms that we the reader are not crazy, ignorant or uncaring for skipping certain articles or sections as a whole.  What this all boils down to is simple, really: The News: A User’s Manual is a quick, fun and insightful read that will truly help you make the most of your newspaper subscription.

Leave the Romance to Patience

 ROMANCE IS MY DAY JOB: A MEMOIR OF FINDING LOVE AT LAST by Patience Bloom

First off, I don’t think there could be a more perfect title for this memoir all about author Patience (married name) Bloom’s long journey that ends in her fairytale romance with her own digital-age Prince Charming. During her decades of dating frog after frog, Patience – her REAL name, aptly enough, not just some metaphor psedo-name, which makes the book even more precious – works as an editor for none other than the publishing powerhouse that is Harlequin. So literally, Patience reads story after story about love, lust, well-endowed men and shy precocious women all day long at her job before going home alone to her cats and Julia Roberts films. Romance is SERIOUSLY a day job.  And, even if you pick up the book knowing nothing, there’s that mystery of “what is here day job? Is she the Millionaire Matchmaker? A wedding photographer? Is this a memoir Confessions of a Call Girl??” All enticing options, all options would make you want to pick up this book.

Do you like You’ve Got Mail? Of course you do, you’ve got a beating heart that’s still working, I assume. Reading this novel is the equivalent of watching that Meg Ryan classic. Well, maybe You’ve Got Mail plus When Harry Met Sally because it is 300 pages, so while perfectly consumable in one indulgent afternoon, it will take longer than 90 minutes. It’s as perfectly satisfying as a chick-flick you know will end well, yet with more heart and substance than the average quick-to-the-theaters film co-starring Judy Greer as the best friend. Like Mail, the Prince Charming is known and acquired online at first, although he is NOT a jerk in person at all, and the leading lady is a smart, sexy women who understands the importance of a good book. And while we’re at comparing Romance to Nora Ephron films, it’s also a bit like When Harry Met Sally in the way that the lovely couple meet, date/marry a bunch of people who are totally wrong before figuring it out.

Onto the plot: the story starts with a young Patience, in true 80s fashion with puffy hair and all, preparing for a dance at her boarding school. She’s been asked by a dream boy, even! His name is Kent! It sounds like it will be a perfect dreamy night, like the ones she’s already started to read about in paperbacks, yet within an hour, Kent is off dancing somewhere else. In swoops Sam, the loveable class goofball to save the day, dancing with the girl no one should ever go casting off.

Then it goes through the years, losing her virginity because it was time, through her year studying in Paris, through all the boring relationships with great guys that just didn’t want to settle down, through some less-than-great guys and mundane temp jobs. There’s lots of great bits in here, but Patience tells them better than I could ever summarize, so I’ll leave them to her. Years later, lo and behold, a man named Sam is using his web presence to get back in touch with the girl from his high school. In one of my favorite moments, and the most relatable sentence I’ve read in like, years, Patience explains how she knows she was in love by the way she’d rather spend time skyping this man than watching the Kardashians or the Real Housewives. That, my friends, is how you know it’s for real.

This book is adorable, heartfelt and more relatable than watching Girls while eating oreos and peanut butter. I loved it, and if you’ve got half a heart for romance, you will too.

Jesse Ball’s SILENCE ONCE BEGUN

 SILENCE ONCE BEGUN by Jesse Ball

The story starts with a quiet man, Oda Sotatsu, who has done nothing especially notable in his 29 years of life in a small Japanese town. Sotatsu is the type that shows up to work on time, performs his job as a thread salesman to an adequate degree, and goes home. That is, until one day when Sotatsu agrees to sign his name to a confession if he loses a simple wager. He does, indeed, lose, and so is arrested, tried and found guilty of all that confession entails.

It’s definitely gripping from the start; Kafkaesque in the way that a man is thrown in jail and proceeded through the justice system without us knowing what the hell is really going on. We do learn more than we ever did in The Trial, though it is piecemeal and remains not entirely clear until somewhere after the book’s final pages.

I should mention in one of these first few paragraphs, this is a work of fiction based only partially on some facts. We never get to know how much is real and how much imagined. The entire story is one so devotedly created that it feels like it could be unfortunately real in very detail. In the intro, author Jesse Ball  (which is the name of the narrator throughout the whole book) talks about the way in which he became obsessed with Sotatsu’s story, which itself unfurled in the 1970s a continent away from his home in Chicago, and how the resulting work is a series of interviews he conducted, research he has gathered and personal statements he’s included from the people involved in the story.

My guess is that the only “facts” in this story are that there was a Japanese man named Oda Sotatsu who was 29 when he was pinned with a crime he did confess to and that all of Ball’s interviews and collected materials are just his imagination, but, it’s hard to exactly tell. It doesn’t help that in interviews, Ball speaks as if he isn’t the narrator, but that character is a separate man named Jesse Ball, YET he talks as if the characters and their testimonies are entirely real, although he never saw them until reading this manuscript… It’s all entirely confusing.

Ball himself seems like a fascinating guy – he apparently works at the School of the Art Institute Chicago teaching courses for the MFA Writing Program about lying and lucid dreaming. The building I work at is literally 2 blocks from SAC’s main campus, so I’ve been starting to imagine that every normal-looking guy on the sidewalk doing something just inexplicably strange must be Ball…

Anyway, back to the actual plot of the novel. As I said, it starts with Oda Sotatsu agreeing to the terms of a simple wager, losing, and as an honorable man, signing a confession to a crime he did not commit. Unfortunately, the confession he’s signed isn’t just a simple robbery or other menial misdeed – it’s a confession admitting for being responsible for the disappearance of 11 citizens from the same town. Naturally, after being arrested, police, prosecutors and others are desperate for information on the missing. They’re willing to trade time in jail, offer him plea bargains, do anything he might want if Sotatsu would only give him some information on the locations or status of the missing people. But of course, since Sotatsu didn’t commit the crime, all he has to offer is silence.

Throughout the trial, Sotatsu remains nobly quiet about all evidence presented against him, holding only to the fact that it is indeed his name and handwriting on the confession. His own family, including his brother, the one who most frequently visits him in jail, knows some of the disappeared victims and begs Sotatsu to tell them anything, and do whatever he can to avoid the death sentence. Still, Sotatsu sits quietly, even as he is handed down the sentence that he will be hung. The only person he really opens up to during his time in jail is a mysterious woman visitor, Jito Joo, whom neither his family nor the guards know much about.

I think that’s all I want to say about the plot for now. The real fun of the read is finding out all the details and getting all your questions answered throughout the book. It’s a great, suspenseful thriller, a fantastic commentary with the flaws of justice and the human’s need for explanation and truth.

Jeremy Has a Huge Crush on Tom Perrotta

A review of Tom Perrotta’s Nine Inches

I was gonna go on this big gushy tirade about Tom Perrotta, the elegant subtlety of his writing, etc. But it occurred to me that a few months back I skewered Rebecca Lee’s Bobcat for some the same reasons I’m inclined to praise Perrotta’s new story collection Nine Inches. So I figured I owed it to our readers and to the authors to investigate what might be perceived as a double standard on my part.

Let me begin by stating that I’m extremely biased here. While Bobcat was the first thing I’d read by Lee, I’ve long been a fan of Perrotta’s work. The first book of his that I read was The Abstinence Teacher, which I tore through in a matter of days and then returned to months later for a second read. Same with the beautifully disturbing Little Children. I’ve since read everything he’s published, and each time I’m amazed by the simplicity of his prose, his ability to capture moments of extreme emotional complexity with such deftness and accessibility. Nine Inches is no exception; each of the ten stories is crafted with an eye toward linguistic simplicity, the result of which is remarkably stirring. In the first piece, “Backrub,” we witness an unusual instance of vulnerability between a recent high school grad trapped on the cusp of adulthood and a lonely traffic cop. From there we offered glimpses into the private lives of a Little League baseball umpire (“The Smile on Happy Chang’s Face”), a varsity football player recovering from a life-altering injury (“Senior Season”), an awkward teen involved in an illegal test-taking business (“The Test-Taker”), and plenty of other colorful characters searching for a human connection that, for whatever reason, their lives don’t seem to offer.

What makes Nine Inches similar to Bobcat is the recurrence of the same themes in almost every story. While Bobcat focused almost exclusively on academia, Nine Inches preoccupies itself with high school, or rather how that period of a person’s life affects her and the people around her, as in the title story “Nine Inches” and “The All-Night Party.” In this context, Perrotta’s interest is the way in which normalcy as we see it, the colorless calm of domesticity, often gives way to moments of absurdity and desperation and irrationality. We are interested in these characters’ lives insomuch as we can recognize something of ourselves in them, more than likely one or more of our own failures.

As such, each of these stories follows a firmly-established trajectory that mimics the lives of the characters. Fans of Perrotta’s work will know his knack for plot movement; his narratives are like machines, each part executing a specific function in unison with the others, which only makes the inevitable what-the-fuck moment in the story all the more potent: we know damn well that something is going to happen, something is going to go wrong, and yet we are still stunned when it does.

I think this is where Nine Inches differs from Bobcat. The latter does not exhibit the same sense of forethought and planning, the stories don’t necessarily move or perform any sort of function but rather announce themselves as artifacts from which we are to derive some sense of meaning. And for a lot of folks, this is perfectly reasonable. But it doesn’t imbue the characters with enough agency to make them relatable, and it doesn’t speak to the author’s investment in the characters.

Nine Inches, however, leaves no doubt as to the author’s concern for his characters–not necessarily for their well-being (where’s the fun in that?) but at least for ensuring that their struggles mean something, that it illustrates some abstract component of the human condition.

So maybe I am gushing a little, but whatever. I am aware that this all comes down to preference. Reviewing books is a pointedly subjective process (particularly when you’re doing it for free [*pats self on back*]). But I think the first thing that any reader asks him/herself is: what can I take from this? What’s in it for me? In the case of Nine Inches, the answer is a series of closely-related stories that demonstrate to us how illusory the American Dream is, how any attempt to perfect one’s life is balanced out by instability and unpredictability. There’s nothing ostentatious about this book, but that’s sort of the point.

Four New Ones

(for the record: I had three poems recently at Revolver, a great online mag out of the of everglorious Twin Cities)

 

The Time Regulation Institute by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar

 

Hopefully you saw the great MRiker’s take on this a couple weeks back now in the Times, and basically I’d like here to stand beside him and applaud and point and say exactly, that. The Time Regulation Institute is a fantastic book regardless of provenance or how it critiques history and memory and cultural confrontations—it’s a marvelous tale, funny and engaging and weird and compelling as a tractor pull (that may sound like faint praise, but I happen to find tractor pulls deeply compelling). At its heart, what you’re caring about when you read this is Jayri Irdal, the sort of first-person narratory that, somehow, evades being grating and coy and too-cute-by-half and instead, in his huffing insistence and overdone-ness, he’s a great guide through the novel’s realm (here’s a good example of his voice, from at random in the book: “Cemal Bey and I were the only ones who had never spoken to Murat on the telephone, and neither had we met him at the apartment in Sisli. But to tell you the truth, this didn’t put me out in the least. Had I never met Cemal Bey, my time at the Spiritualist Society would have been a pure delight; nothing in this world could have taken me away from it. Who doesn’t relish that sweet shiver running down the spine when communing with the world beyond? But, sadly, I did meet Cemal Bey, and, sadly, I was putty in his hands.” It’s that sort of voice). Anyway: read this thing. Don’t do the thing of just buying it because it’s a smart, culturally-other book: read the thing because it’s funny and entertaining as any book you’re likely to soon come across.

 

The Village Against the World by Dan Hancox

 

This book’s hard—hard not to love, hard to read straight, hard to find ways to talk about. Let’s get the objectives out first: there’s a village called Marialeda in Andalusia, Spain, which village is socialist. To some large degrees, it works: unemployment’s lower in Marinaleda than in the rest of Spain, and the world of the village that Hancox describes (really, really beautifully: the prose is insanely lush and vivid, which traits befit anywhere in Spain, certainly, but especially this region—it’s a strange, evocative, beautiful-if-difficult area, and Hancox does it great justice) seems just *better* than lots of other places, in or beyond Spain. This is, to me, the big place where the book gets hard, and the reason (I’ll posit) that the book is hard is that it demands a certain amount of belief on the part of the reader. Because, for instance, my kneejerk at socialist village is: come the fuck on. I simply don’t, or can’t, believe in the tenability of such a thing (and, in fairness, it’s not purely social: the village gets money from the government, for instance). I can’t imagine my scabby disbelief and dismissive grown-up-ness is rare: one reads The Village Against the World wanting to believe it’s possible (even if, say, it’d be impossible [or, to this limited mind, it feels impossible] to try such an endeavor in Fort Wayne, Indiana), this transformative way in which Marinaleda functions (well). And Hancox’s a hell of a great guide. What I’d say is this: it’s a book I kept coming back to, enjoying it very much, even if, on some level, I felt sort of consistently implicated for my own inability to let go of the sophisticated notion that such a thing’s too hard and therefore not worth it. It’s a gutsy story. I can’t imagine how one reads the thing without changing one’s mind, even just a little.

 

Starting Over by Elizabeth Spencer

What We’ve Lost is Nothing by Rachel Louise Snyder

 

Two fictions—the first a collection of stories, the second a debut novel—and both are the sort of enveloping, generous fictions one craves in winter (or, perhaps, this particular midwesterner craves in winter). Meaning: these are fictions which (in the best way) offer characters and an overwhelming sense of authenticity, of realness. I don’t know if I’ve even got a preference between these two (though I should note that I reviewed Snyder’s Fugitive Denim on its release at the end of ’07, and loved it, and the woman is overwhelmingly skilled at writing seductively readable sentences—I started What We’ve Lost is Nothing some night, post-dinner, thinking little of anything, and was 80 pages deep before really realizing I was)—they’re both compelling, direct, elegantly-written things. What We’ve Lost is set in Chicago; Starting Over‘s largely southern. I’d like to say this without sounding at all critical: these books are sort of classically approachable fiction: they’re not experimental or strange, and won’t suddenly make unreasonable demands or lead down dark, far-left paths. These books will give and give. I don’t know how much more to say about it. More than likely you need more fiction in your life; certainly no harm’s ever been done by reading deeply generous narrative. In other words: there’s a good chance you’re in short supply of the magic these books are both eminently full of.

Mary Miller’s THE LAST DAYS OF CALIFORNIA

   THE LAST DAYS OF CALIFORNIA by Mary Miller

While reading, I couldn’t help but think of the similarities between Mary Miller’s debut novel The Last Days of California and Cormac Mccarthy’s The Road. Both are apocalyptic tales of families holding onto each other in a wasted America, traveling with only each other towards California. Both families carry tense emotional baggage left unsaid out loud; both families are lead by a father-knows-best with his own rules of survival. Here’s the big difference: In Mccarhty’s novel, language is sparse and flat, and the apocalypse (or whatever huge earth-changing event that had happened) has already occurred. In Miller’s novel, the story’s told through the eyes of Jess, a budding 15-year-old girl, driving with her father, mother and pregnant older sister Elise to wait out the coming of Jesus Christ in California, at which point the righteous will ascend to heaven while the wicked perish.

The stakes are different, but it’s an apocalypse just the same. It’s a time we all know, I’m thinking spring or early summer of 2012, if not a year or two earlier (hints throughout the book: Katy Perry is a household name, Anderson Cooper has not yet come out as gay, even though the girls are suspicious), and this hyper-religious family is supposed to be on a journey to save as many lost souls as they can before the Rapture happens. They’ve gotten distracted, though, and hardly even remember to share the news with the cashiers at the Burger Kings and gas stations they stop at. Mostly, they’re trying to get to California on time – for whatever reason, Jess’s dad is set on the idea that they be among the last to be Raptured away.

In the quiet of their car, we get to know Jess, a self-conscious girl with her baby fat still intact who is trying desperately to believe that Jesus is really coming in a couple more days and the rest of her family. Elise, her beautiful older sister, who has already decided firmly against religion, or at least against the religion of her parents that has her and Jess wearing t-shirts that proudly proclaim “King Jesus Returns” and guessing when the world will end. Then there is their mother, a quiet, submissive woman who once had a life her girls would never recognize, and their father, the most devote of the group, clinging desperately to the coming events while still hesitating to put too much on his credit card.

We get to know the family little by little, through each town they drive through and every fast food order (oh man, do we get to know what Jess eats, what she orders and what she really wanted to order but thought maybe not). Sure, there are events, like a car accident the girls witness resulting in one man’s death, or pool parties in the hotel’s small space. Mostly though, the driving drama is purely progress towards getting to know the family and their motivations. Events take a back seat to perspectives in the novel.

Not surprisingly, this family road-trip/look into their lives as Jess is dealing with the pressures of young adult checklists. I mean, if you thought the world was ending, it would probably lower the standards on boys you’d like to give your first kiss to. Jess struggles between getting that “first time” in before the world ends without like, upsetting a soon-coming Jesus and getting rejected from his rapturing of the righteous, and oh, also not getting secretly pregnant like her older sister. Mostly though, she wants to know she could. Always shadowed by her sister’s looks, she wants to know that boys would have sex with her as well. Also, she’s struggling to decide whether or not this Rapture is actually happening, or if she should convert to her sister’s atheism, or fall somewhere in between. So, she’s dealing with a lot of teenage turmoil all while trapped in a car with her family, is what I’m basically trying to say.

Basically, this book is awesome. If I taught high-school English in some like progressive school, I’d totally force kids to read this (NOT because it’s high-school level – and remember back to what you read in high-school; for me, that included Grapes of Wrath, To Kill a Mockingbird, Catch-22, Lord of the Flies… all not YA books). And, if I had any authority over your reading list, I’d make you read this, too. It’s a wonderful, engaging read, full of care, doubt and love.

Kerry Hudson’s Debut Novel’s Name Is Too Long To Go Here

TONY HOGAN BOUGHT ME AN ICE-CREAM FLOAT BEFORE HE STOLE MY MA by Kerry Hudson

I don’t really know what makes me pick the books I read. With non-fiction, it’s pretty easy, but with fiction, especially with a debut novel, there’s not much context to work off of. Sometimes it’s just simple and straight: the cover was intriguing. It’s superficial, but you know what? Nine times out of ten, those books with the amazing covers are the ones magazines and critics and booksellers pay attention to most, so really, it’s not the worst way to go. Sometimes I like the title, which was the case when I first heard of Tony Hogan Bought Me an Ice-Cream Float Before He Stole My Ma.

Don’t know now why it stuck out to me. I guess it was just quirky enough to grab my attention. Anyway, it was months between I picked out the book and the time when I actually got to reading it, by which point, Honey Boo Boo had risen to such a high place of mediocrity in the public eye that the word ‘ma’ was really pushing it.

But, and this is important for all of you who are already thinking you’ll hate the prose based on the title, once you read a chapter, get into the head and begin to take in the dialogue of Janie Ryan, a girl growing up in 1980’s Scotland, you’ll realize that it is, in fact, the perfect title for the book and further, the story and the writing are so addicting, you’d keep reading even if the title was just a string of cuss words.

From the very first sentence (“’Get out, you c***ing, shitting, little fucking fucker!’ were the first words I ever heard”) you’ll get cued in that Janie’s voice is one all her own. It does take a few pages to get used to – for a little while, it can be difficult to figure out exactly what she’s saying. But get over it fast – the sentences are remarkable gross and gorgeous at once, like this treasure: “That first weekend we stayed indoors watching the telly, eating chips and biting the ends off each other’s sentences with narky little ones of our own.” Plus, get a piece of the story:

Just days after Janie is born (where she hears that string of cursing, telling her to get the cuss out of her mother), her ma, a poor Aberdeen woman knocked up and forgotten by a Yankee living in London, gets in a fight with Janie’s grandmother, sending the two packing off to a women’s shelter. From there, Janie and her ma go from house to house, finding a home wherever they can be together.

Often, the easiest way for her mother to get by with her young daughter and the mentioned-in-passing problem with drugs and alcohol is to rely on the help of a steady string of lovers, including the brash Tony Hogan. All though none of the guys really make the effort to interact with a little, 5 year-old Janie, at least Tony buys her ice cream before he tries to take her ma anyway, unlike some of the men.

The girls, later joined by little sister Tiny, real name Tiffany, are the base family unit here, no matter what guy may be hanging around. As Janie grows up, she’s proving to be far smarter than anyone would have guessed. She grows up too fast, really. It’s like one chapter, she’s trying to pick up her baby sister with weak little arms, the next she’s getting drunk on cheap 40s and lifting her skirt up in the clubs.

It’s a strange sort of beauty, one that’s so disgusting and heartbreaking yet wonderful all at once. The best comparison would probably be that this is like Angela’s Ashes set in the 1980s. Death is less of an imminent danger, but life is still quite bleak. Traditions break hard, and often, trying to get out is seen as turning your back.

It’s wonderful, though. Just go read it.