Weston Cutter's Blog, page 21

Elsewhere Part Whatever

This came out this morning.

Also: this was really cool to see, and Joshua Ware’s was in my mind a badass before anyway, just for his writing, but to have him look hard/close at my stuff’s just awesome.

 

Jess Walter’s WE LIVE IN WATER

 

I’ve gone on and on about Jess Walter before, so I don’t want to belabor anything—his Beautiful Ruins was among 2012′s best books, and if you haven’t read it yet, boy, do I envy you. But I happened to get into Walter through his stories—specifically “Thief,” a story in Harper’s. I know he had pieces in older McSweeney’s that I’d skipped (because I’m human: let s/he who’s read every single word of every lit journal that’s come in cast the first stone), but once I finally read the man I hankered after his stuff, dove backward through what I could find (one of the glories of having old lit journals one hasn’t read around the house: discovering a writer and then finding out you’ve got other, older work by that same author, just around, just waiting—it’s the literary equivalent of finding a hundred dollar bill in a couch’s cushion). Fortunately, my hankering’s been slacked, even after I half-ransacked the upstairs bookcases: We Live in Water was published last month by Harper Perennial, and it is, of course, glorious.

What struck me about his work when I first experienced it still obtains: JW makes stuff that’s so crazily readable, that feels so easy, that it’s almost comic. What’s strange is there are, that I can off-top-headedly think of, few corollaries of stuff that is radically easy yet nutritionally good. I’ll here admit I’m a former angry-young-man, someone taken with notions of difficulty, enamored of that old line all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare. I like that thinking, of course: I’m Catholic, and goodness for my people depends on some serious work (not just that, but I’m midwest, meaning my notions of summer’s greatest glory has everything to do with my sense that we pay for those days with the shittiest freezing ones we shook through in winter). I can think of few things, aesthetically, that are both good and approachable. Maybe that’s a false dichotomy (though I don’t think so, honestly). My favorite writers—DFWallace, Jorie Graham, Richard Powers, DeLillo, Bob Hicok, Dean Young, Olena Kalytiak Davis, Jennifer Boyden, Terrance Hayes—are, I think, unbelievably rewarding to read, but I don’t think their work is ultimately real easy. It’s rare, to be accessible and great. Few things can pull it off. Of course it happens: there’s Christopher Nolan, who makes popcorn movies that actually make your brain light up, and there’s early Weezer, and I’d posit an argument that Patrick Somerville does work that’s fairly approachable and doubtlessly great…but there’s not much.

But Walter’s stuff: Walter’s work is, in the very best way, approachable and easy. Here’s the first paragraph of “Thief,” which still gets me going:

“It’s got to be the girl.

Wayne opens her door and hall light spills over the bedroom floor, across her sleeping face. She’s fourteen. Sits all day in headphones, glares out at the world. Wears her jeans too tight. Pretends to walk to the bus stop and gets in that knucklehead’s Nova. Tapes album covers all over walls—like this jackass guitar player with curly hair above her bed: frampton comes alive! On the pillow, her hair looks like Frampton’s—a ratty halo. She spends thirty minutes on it every morning, runs up half the power bull on the goddamn blow dryer. Wayne looks at the other albums on the wall. what the hell is a blue oyster cult? She’s probably smoking pot.

But a thief?”

Goddamn the guy’s covering ground. Look at that, look what he’s doing. You’re in, aren’t you? Of course you are. You want to read more. You must.

I honestly don’t know how many writers do this, or how many can. Saunders, I suppose. Shit, of course: Jim Shepard. I’m not knocking folks who can’t or don’t do this stuff: I’ll set down damn near everything else to read every new Munro story that comes out, but let’s not pretend that her stuff’s easy. It’s amazing, and it rewards the reader plenty, but the reader’s got to get there. You get the idea.

Look, you know Walter is fantastic. You have to know. He’s been ascendant for years now, and he gets reviewed everywhere, and his stuff incites the sort of fervency reserved for a reader’s most-clutched handful of favorite writers. He’s the Real Deal. His novels are fantastic, and his stories, this whole time, have been great too, and the book’s fifteen bucks (or like six from Amazon, of course). Get this. Get this book now.

What You’re Reading Next: Holly Goddard Jones

Holly Goddard Jones is a hell of a thing, the absolute real deal–her stories have been appearing for the last 6 or so years in the best journals (here’s an interview with her from the Kenyon Review), all of which are devastating—she’s just magic. She’s got a novel out now called Next Time You See Me which is even better than one could’ve fairly guessed or expected—the thing’s a riveting page-turner that should absolutely be what you’re reading if you liked Gone Girl (and if you didn’t like that, what the hell?). If you’re wondering whether or not fiction’s healthy in this country, Holly Goddard Jones is the resoundingly affirmative you’re looking for (she also writes phenomenal essays, like this one). Below is an interview we did over email. For real, though, get her stuff: Girl Trouble, her collection of stories, is worth whatever you pay for it.

 

You’ve talked about Bobbi Ann Mason’s influence, about which I can’t much ask because I know all of like two stories of hers. I’m curious if you’re…it’s weird: Next Time You See Me is still in Roma, but you mentioned that this feels like a closure of that phase of your writing life, of setting stuff in yr fictional hometown (or however you’d rather say that). Are you feeling or finding new influences, two books into your career and however many words in now? Or if not new influences than new tugs, new pullings in other directions?

I guess I am. I wrote Girl Trouble in draft as a grad student, and when I was a grad student that was my first time living outside of Kentucky. I was deeply self-conscious about where I was from, and defensive. I felt very passionate about representing my place and therefore myself in my fiction. Now that I’m older, I’ve lost a lot of that self-consciousness and defensiveness, and so it seems OK to me to stretch out into other directions. Mostly, I want to keep the writing fresh. I don’t want to keep telling the same stories. And I have new experiences to draw on. When I went to grad school, Columbus, Ohio, was the farthest from home I’d ever been. I’d never been in a plane, or seen the ocean. I was writing about the world I knew, and now my world is a little bigger.

Holy shit–you studied with Gurney Norman? I have no question other than: how awesome was that? Ignore this, actually. It’s not even a question, just sort of jealousy.

I didn’t ever have Gurney Norman as a professor, actually. He was never teaching the fiction workshops in the sequence that I was taking them, unfortunately. But Kinfolks was a book I read in freshman comp, and it made a significant impression.

I’m curious if you can address this—you mentioned in one of the other interviews that teaching makes you “more open and generous about fiction, more open to risk.” This is weird—I want to ask about what you’re writing now, but I don’t want to, obviously, for the prying aspect and everything. Maybe it’s better as a structural thing: do you buy this argument forwarded by David Shields (with which I feel compelled to note I 100% disagree) that linear narrative fiction is somehow no longer fit to tangle with the felt reality of lived experience? Are you feeling your way into new fictional structures or ideas? This might be a really dumb question.

No, it’s not dumb at all. And I don’t want to argue with anyone’s theories, but it doesn’t seem bold or radical to me to suggest that there’s a certain kind of writing structure or style that a person should or shouldn’t do. I’d say it depends on the writer and the story, and I’m Paul and that’s between y’all.

I suspect I think differently about risk and experimentation than some do. To me, taking a risk means doing something you’re not necessarily comfortable with. Experimentation doesn’t have to be some kind of crazy stream-of-consciousness thing, or a story told in the form of mattress tags. Some of the writers credited with being bold and experimental never take on a point-of-view character outside of their gender and race, or their class, for instance. I’d say that those are also experiments, and sometimes the riskiest kind.

How hard was getting the structure and movement of Next Time You See Me nailed down? It’s so satisfyingly plotted (the comparisons to Gone Girl feel real apt) and reads like something that’s been very cunningly designed to give maximal pleasure to the reader. As a corollary: why’d you pick, essentially, a literary thrilled as your first novel? You spoke in the book’s trailer (that’s the first time I’ve ever written that phrase) that the book sort of has its roots in an event that happened in your hometown, but it could easily have just been a sort of (not at all bad) noodly literary fiction about small towns/death/south/young experience, etc. Not this gangbusters page-turner that it ended up being. Any way you want to attack this’d be welcome.

Hands down, the biggest surprise and delight of encountering this book’s reception has been hearing from people that the book is a page-turner. I mean, I probably worked harder on pacing issues than anything as I was revising the draft—the manuscript shrank by over 40 pages, and I did a lot of rearranging. But one of the worries I had was that people would say it’s too literary to be a page-turner and too genre-informed to be literary. My fear was that I’d gone for both and succeeded at neither.

My fiction has always been pretty dark, and I’ve written before about murder, so the subject matter felt natural enough. In the earliest drafting stages, the book probably was a bit more noodly, to borrow your excellent term. And I just wasn’t happy with the lack of urgency. So I kept whittling and honing, and I forced myself to think consciously about causality. That was key. Instead of “this thing happened and then this other thing happened,” I wanted “this thing happened and therefore this other thing happened.” Then the book eventually became what it is. I was thinking more about the effect I wanted to achieve than the genre I was trying to write in.

You also mentioned that Emily was the hardest character to write, and Tony the easiest (or more fun). And that Emily was sort of the entry character for the novel, for you (or at least you sort of hint/nod in that direction). Yet, at least to me, the book ultimately sort of escapes Emily pretty thoroughly—not in a bad way, just that there are thicker tethers to other characters. How far along into the process were you before you realized that? (if that sounds forward or anything, I’m sorry–it’s certainly not intended; I just really like that this book ends up being not really *about* anyone, not tied hard to anyone, yet it doesn’t, ultimately, feel like Emily’s book to me. Who knows. Maybe I’m 100% off [I don't know who's book I'd say it feels like, though: maybe Ronnie and her sister, maybe it's theirs. I'm not sure]).

Well, to clarify, Tony wasn’t the easiest by any stretch. Tony was pretty hard and scary to write, because I wasn’t sure if I even had the right to try to represent his experiences as a black man in a small town.

I wouldn’t argue that the book is Emily’s story more than it is anyone else’s, but for me it was as much her story as Susanna’s or Wyatt’s. I’m not sure what realization you’re asking about…when I realized the book was tethered more to other characters? I’m not sure if that’s a realization I’d own, at least in those specific terms. I do agree that there’s a remove with Emily, but that’s in part because Emily herself is kind of a removed character—a character who engages in some pretty heady disassociation to function. And that’s partly what made her scary, because I felt with her that I might be verging into behaviors that weren’t merely strange put pathological, and how important is it for me to make her diagnosable? I ultimately decided it wasn’t important, at least to me.

This might be a stretch, but I don’t read your stuff as *southern* stuff—I guess mostly because it’s not *deep* south, and stuff in Kentucky sits in that middle area of the country—Virginia, Missouri, etc.—that to me is like this weird southern midwest place. I don’t know. What I end up feeling about those places is that they’re *between* places—neither one nor the other. I don’t know. I wonder how much regional distinction stuff even matters—the story’s glorious or it’s not. This isn’t even a question, I’m realizing. I was going to ask if you got sick of the BS notion of Southern Writers, and how you’d change the terms of that catchall, if you could.

I appreciate this question a lot, because I have some of the same thoughts. On the one hand, being branded “southern,” as a writer, is a good and helpful thing, because the region embraces its own. It gets you some notice that you might not get in wider circles. But it can also have kind of a flattening effect. If you’re a southern woman writer whose fiction has any grit, someone is going to compare you to Flannery O’Connor, whether or not your writing actually bears any resemblance to hers. That’s an example. (Not that a comparison to Flannery O’Connor ever hurt anyone.) I agree that parts of Kentucky feel as much like the Midwest as they do the deep South, and Kentucky itself is so different from one part of the state to another.

What’s the view out your window?

The window where I write? Well, my writing desk is upstairs, in a spare bedroom. It looks out on the neighbor’s house and an ugly gravel drive that the owner of that house put down about five minutes after my husband and I closed on our house and moved in. The drive leads to a big parcel of land in the middle of the block, where the guy now stores a half dozen junked cars, a couple of campers, chickens, a loud-ass rooster, and mounds of yard waste that he’s supposedly going to mulch and sell. If my desk faced the back of the house I’d probably just stare at that junkyard until a vessel burst in my eye.

I work all over the house, though. I like to be on the couch, down in the living room, with my laptop on my lap, my feet propped up on the coffee table, and a dog on either side of me.

Briefly

So, this happened, strange and funnily enough. Super cool.

 

Also, here’s a review I did for the Brooklyn Rail of the great Middle Men by Jim Gavin, which is a spectacular book and should be on everyone’s reading list pronto.

Between What Is and What If

Josh Ritter’s The Beast in its Tracks hits tomorrow, though it’s been streaming for the last week through NPR’s First Listen, and if you haven’t already, you need to put this work in your brain rapidly, either download it or stream it or steal it, whatever. Here’s the bold claim I’ll try to support with the rest of this: Ritter’s Beast 1) is redemption for the over-the-top excess of his book and his last album (So Runs the World Away) and 2) the most steeped-in-humility album ever made, and 3) we need, all of us, more steeped-in-humility art.

So: if you’ve been tracking Ritter (and you should be), you’ve been watching/listening as he has, for the last decade+, released album after album that’s showed him stretching his powers. I tuned in as of Golden Age of Radio, which has more confidence than just about any quiet lone-dude singer/songwriter folks affairs I can think of. What’s startling about Ritter, though, was how quickly he zipped into his next realm: he built and built on his sound and released The Animal Years, which was large but not bursting, and then, in ’07, he released The Historical Conquests, which was everything: large, bursting, overwhelming in the best way. Hearing that album for the first time will remain one of my all-time listener highlights—if you’ve yet to experience the thing, I’m infinitely jealous. Here’s what I mean by overwhelming and bursting and large—here’s the opening track, “To the Dogs or Whoever”:

I don’t want to geek too blissfully out on that one (for instance, noting the crazy lyric genius that rams Grateful Dead and Dylan lyrics together like siblings, or that just fucking sick chorus balancing longing with danger, someone calling in the dark), but let’s just acknowledge that that track has to be included in any discussion of top-10 tracks from the ’00s, and certainly among the very best track-one-side-one tracks ever. The album was fucking titanic and glorious—everything about it was big-shouldered + glad; it’s one of those very rare albums which requires no track skipping or cherry picking. It’s rambunctions, big-spirited, playful, aware of risks, etc. It’s one of those this-might-be-perfect listening experiences. The album felt, in that best way, almost like a debut novel from some crazed madcapper: there was elbow room to it, and there was jaunty joy, and there was infinite joy—just look at that dude in the video up there.

And then came So Runs the World Away. Released in ’09, it felt very much like JR’s grown up album: he got married, he was settling down, etc. Maybe that’s an overread, but go listen to the thing: it sure feels that way. It feels…stuffed. Turgid. Gone was the lithe agility that made him such fun: now there were big orchestral pieces—gorgeous, certainly, but almost moribound, funereal. Check it (and I believe this is the most gorgeous track on the album, “Change of Time”):

So there was that. I’ll admit to some trepidation. He also at this time wrote Bright’s Passage, his debut novel, which was (I think) pretty much perfectly reviewed by Stephen King here. I should also here cop to the fact that I was engaging in some similar lifechanges as Ritter right as he was (he’s a few years older than I, but we got married like months apart, and I published a book around when he did, and etc. etc. etc.). I bring this up just to say that I cared a whole shitload about Ritter’s personal artistic shit more than I have any right to, simply because I (like any young whatever) looked at his life/accomplishments and thought: okay man, trailblaze this next section for us. I don’t imagine I’m remotely alone.

But then what happened though is that Ritter and his wife divorced, and then I honestly sort of let go of him. I listened to his stuff endlessly, but I figured maybe he’d just missed an exit he shouldn’t have. I hoped I’d hear more, but didn’t think much, didn’t expect much. So then imagine the joy this fall when, months apart from my own daughter’s birth, there was this news that he had a kid, with this new love, and there’d be a new album in March—The Beast in its Tracks. I was hugely excited. And, thankfully, my enthusiasm was totally, 100% warranted.

Look, I’ve already taken way, way too much license with shaping Ritter’s bio and forcing a narrative onto it. Maybe I’m 100% wrong and he loves So Runs the World Away (one of the best things Westerberg always does is note that there are fans of the last two Replacement records, and that maybe they’ll end up being right), and it’ll in time be recognized as his greatest album. I don’t think so, though, and I think Beast is strong evidence that the best is yet to come with him.

Because Beast is an infinitely smaller—in scope and sound and imagination—record than So Runs, and I’ll here claim its better for its size. Look, Ritter could’ve gone two directions after Historical Conquest, right? Sure, there were infinite options, but he could’ve gone, basically, larger or smaller. He chose larger. Beast feels like the smaller album that, who knows, maybe he couldn’t have made then, given the size of his life (I know getting married and feeling like I’d arrived into adulthood made for some larger notions as well, made me think I needed to Get Larger about everything [I don't know if that makes any sense; if you make stuff, you probably already understand; in my own case, after marrying—after finally having instead of longing—I found myself wrestling with some large, large ideas—how to live a good life, the point of experience, religion, etc.—and I ended up sort of believing the more fun, loosey-goosey rock+roll playfullness of my unbound years was supposed to be laid to rest at the altar of this awesome togetherness I'd for so long wanted]).

I can’t support any of these claims, of course: this is just what Beast sounds like to a guy who’s heard most of what Ritter’s done, and a guy who for real was crying tears of joy on seeing him at the Metro in Chicago in ’09 (the infectious energy of his liveset is enough to stun you like a course of heavy pharmaceuticals). Ritter’s Beast (which is I think unwisely being compared to Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, simply for the fact that they’re both divorce albums) is small and is reflective in ways I don’t hear Ritter’s other stuff having been: Beast feels almost like an emotional economist running tabulations on the life that led to this moment. “I’m just happy for the first time in a long time” he sings at the close of “A Certain Light,” and it’s a starkly bland line, but (I think) riveting for it: just happy. Think of the difficulty of that, of just being happy, of just being—and remember that however Ritter lives, he’s been building crazed spectacles of narrative and songsmithery; none of that old stuff’s about anything as banal and mundane and just being happy.

Hence what I believe is the humility of this album, the being-humbled. What’s striking about the album has I think nothing to do with whether it looks bitterly or happily at the events that’ve led the songs’ narrator here: what’s striking is that he’s just looking at this shit. He’s just acknowledging, is just being there, being where he is. Interestingly (I think), that line—”Between what is and what if”—is a line Ritter sings regarding where ghosts really are instead of graveyards. I’ll here make my final, big, bullshitty claim: Ritter’s earlier albums are full of colossal what-if stuff, and Beast is his big What Is album, and it’s gorgeous for it.

Two last things: Ritter’s singing behind himself on the late choruses on “Hopeful,” and the phrase he’s singing is: “The World Is as the World Is.” Take that how you want, but it’s certainly not an accident that the driving, repeated thing is about the world as it is, not as it could be, not as it may yet be, but right now, here, presently. Also: there are, through several of these songs, whispery bits of conversation—what one’s got to assume are whispery bits of conversation between Ritter and his new lover (Hayley Tanner, whose story will fucking bring you to your knees). I don’t want to propose even more grand theoretical bullshit about what that might mean or anything, but you’ve got to love an album that’s built, literally, on whispers. The thing’s a stunner. Ritter’s back, thank god.

Very Briefly

 

1. This is a place I’m thrilled to have stuff in–they’ve been great forever and it’s huge joy. Read everyone else in the issue, it’s all phenomenal.

2. This is funny and a friend passed it along and why not? How could I not try?

 

More later.

Apparently, it’s 1996 Again.

King Animal by Soundgarden

“I’ve been away for too long!” brays Soundgarden vocalist Chris Cornell on the opening track of the quartet’s most recent album, King Animal. It’s a fitting proclamation for a band whose last studio album was released 17 years ago. And while King Animal doesn’t pack quite the same punch as Soundgarden’s seminal works like Badmotorfinger and Superunknown, it does demonstrate a very admirable devotion to the band’s original aesthetic while also representing a refreshing change from today’s hyper-polished rock landscape to a more raw, primal sound.

Having formed in the early 80s, the band split in 1997, only to reunite 13 years later, much to the delight of those of us who were teenagers during their heyday and have since longed for a return to the stripped-down growl of actual bands playing actual instruments (and yes, I am aware of how cliched and unfair and whiny it is to complain about how shitty rock music has become, that it’s more indicative of my own age than of the actual contemporary musicscape, blah blah, but–Jesus Christ– have you listened to the radio lately??). Thankfully, King Animal is as raucous and gritty as their previous work, full of the same kind of moody imagery–drying blood, animal bones, etc. There are instances in which some of these images don’t really come together as well as they should, like “Taree,” with its enigmatic references to bloody needles and tilted shadows, but then that’s sort of always been grunge’s hallmark: it gives the listener the tools to craft meaning from a tapestry of dismal, disparate images.

Compositionwise, the songs follow Soundgarden’s tradition of power chords, bluesy riffs, and peculiar time signatures; the band is especially fond of riffs that run a few beats too long “Outshined” from ’91′s Badmotorfinger. In this case, you’ve got “By Crooked Steps,” with its pummeling and intentionally uneven momentum, as well as “Eyelid’s Mouth,” a calm, mid-tempo number that calls to mind much of the band’s early music and makes for an excellent driving-to-work-in-the-morning song.

However, beyond these things there is little substance to be found in King Animal, mainly just a lot of the same stuff that made Down on the Upside, the band’s last studio release, so underwhelming; As Pitchfork’s Stuart Berman notes, King Animal starts off with a bang but then, just like Down, devolves into a kind of checklist to make sure that each tune corresponds stylistically to one of their previous hits. And while the results here aren’t terrible–if “Bones of Birds” is their attempt to recreate “Black Hole Sun,” then that’s fine with me; at the end of the day, they’re both good tunes–it is decidedly uninteresting.

Yet, I don’t think this is a fault of Soundgarden’s so much as a fault of the genre. After all, there’s a reason that grunge met the same fate as disco and nu-metal and that cringe-inducing swing band movement of the mid 90s (Squirrell Nut Zippers, Cherry Poppin Daddies, etc.): it ultimately collapses under the weight of its own formula. Of course, maybe this is just the 16-year-old in me talking, maybe I still want Soundgarden to be relevant and hip and artistically viable. Because hey–Nirvana? Pearl Jam? Helmet? Those guys were really good at what they did, and it made a lot of sense at the time. But that’s sort of the thing: this isn’t the 90s anymore, and as much as our hearts may leap at the notion of grunge’s return, our ears tell a different story.

Koi No Yokan by the Deftones

The Deftones finally discovered their wheelhouse with 2010′s Diamond Eyes: it’s in the cross-section between the heavy, brooding guitar riffs characteristic of their earlier work and large-scale elegaic ballads. It was a formula that worked well for the Sacremento-based quintent, both artistically and financially, and so I’m guessing this why they’ve essentially rehashed it on 2012′s Koi No Yokan, only this time the results are much more mixed.

Don’t get me wrong, Koi No Yokan (a Japanese term for a kind of love at first sight) is good, maybe even very good, but that’s pretty much it. Which, you could argue, is perfectly acceptable. I mean, you can’t expect every album to be a homerun. It’s just that, as in the case of Soundgarden, the things that make it very good don’t really have anything to do with the album itself but rather the way in which the band has rehashed their previous work.

The album begins promisingly with “Swerve City,” a fast-paced heavy-hitter whose power is in the juxtapostion of menacing riffs and elegant, ethereal vocals. A lot of this you can attribute to producer Nick Raskulinecz, who has worked with such bands as the Foo Fighters, Rush, and Alice in Chains. But there’s also the Deftones’ penchant for catchy hooks and melodies, as well as their ability to turn simple song structures into deceptively vibrant sound tapestries. All of these things are held together by vocalist Chino Moreno’s voice, a frenzied combination of angry shriek and sensual purr. There’s a vulnerability in it that gives resonance to the songs in its haunting intimation of sexual violence.

From here, though, the album seems to falter. Between the over-the-top grandstanding of songs like “Romantic Dreams” or the stuttering tempo of “Poltergeist,” Koi No Yokan lacks focus. Or rather, it has too many foci, too many things it’s trying to accomplish, which isn’t necessarily unforgivable, except that those things aren’t new for the band. In this way, Koi No Yokan becomes predictable and, near the middle, sluggish as the band struggles to make sense of its own sound. It’s a good listen, one that newer fans might enjoy but that doesn’t really showcase their true potential.

Catch Up

No real great excuse for this long radio silence here at Corduroy. Part of it — lots of it — has to do with reviews elsewhere (coming soon in the Star Tribune, coming soon elsewhere, this one recently for the Rumpus), but part of it’s just living. This little page is now more than 5 years old, and in that time I’ve reviewed well over 400 books here and elsewhere, meaning 80 books/year just for reviewing purposes…all of which is I guess a way of saying: I got tired recently, and have been trying to figure out how to get less tired. As you are likely aware, Corduroy’s just for fun, and the reviews for elsewhere are, with rare exception, done simply for free books and maybe karma or something (meaning: not $). Honestly, books have seemed a bit crappier of late. Maybe that’s just me. Maybe I’ve been picking bad books to read/review. I think lots of it’s that I picked bad books, but who knows. I’m not even sure why I’m writing this now. Basically I guess: thanks for reading. And: if you’re like me, and you’re aware of the younger crop of writers who also review and teach, please just be grateful—the work to do this stuff, at any level, is staggering—and send them thanks (I’m thinking of folks like Joe Salvatore, Roxane Gay, Ander Monson, Megan Mayhew Bergman). Enough bellyaching. The following are 2012 books I meant to get to and didn’t. Go figure.

The Southern Journey of Alan Lomax by Tom Piazza

If you’re at all like me, there are things you simply take too much for granted. Doritos, for instance, and Irma Thomas, and Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folks Music, and all sorts of other things. High on this list of taken-for-granted, for me, is Alan Lomax, a guy whose field recordings have, I’d imagine, done more to shape the work of folks I ultimately love than anyone other than Dylan (but then: could there be a Dylan without Alan Lomax? According to Wikipedia: Davis’s glorious Sketches of Spain had its seeds in the tree of Lomax’s earlier work in Spain). I don’t know what you know. There was Moby’s Play, which sampled old Lomax field recordings, but that’s pretty dated now. Here’s the basics: Lomax, born in 1915, collected field recordings of folks that’d never been put to acetate before. Ever. He’s one of those quietly heroic folks who pay almost saint-levels of devoted attention to things, and offer us plebes entry to things we might not otherwise ever get. This book seemed like a breeze to note and I find myself now fairly terrified of not honoring it the way it should be. Regardless: Lomax’s story’s fascinating, dude Established himself with Library of Congress work, left the US in 1950, returned in ’59 and departed on his Southern Journey, another set of field recordings (this time, unlike his work from the 30s+40s, a matter of recording a disappearing world)(of note: dude started in Salem, VA, which is a stone’s-throw from good old Blacksburg). Among the results: the included CD with this book. Among the results: this glorious book which has at its center Tom Piazza’s amazing consideration of Lomax and how crucial his Southern Journey was and is. The book may seem ho-hum, or stuffy, or a matter of should—respecting cultural elders—but this book and the CD will be among 2012′s most lasting additions. Have this in your life. I don’t know when you’ll need it, but I’m 100% sure you will.

The Hive by Charles Burns

Through nothing but kismet and timing, Burns’s The Hive, the second part of his X’ed Out trilogy, was released the same year as Chris Ware’s best-of-everything Building Stories, which is too bad simply due to the fact that in mainstream bookreviewing there’s little notice paid to graphic work anyway, and, during a year like 2012, in which everyone focused on One Big One, this got missed. So, The Hive: I actually don’t know X’ed Out, yet I hung with this fine. In fact, I think I liked it more for that aspect, the same as, say, someone might like Radio City by Big Star more for not having to appreciate it in the follow-up to #1 Record and the predecessor to Third/Sister Lover. I don’t know how you need your info about graphic novels: Ware’s was a big playpen of infinite depth; The Hive feels like a mash-up of creepy rock and roll (storywise) and glorious clarity (graphics). Here’s how I think of this stuff: I read books, and then they go somewhere else in the house immediately after, so I’m not surrounded by what I just took in, but then, often months later, I go find where I put a recent book and bring it back, needing it close for whatever reason. I did that maybe a month after finishing The Hive. I’m excited to see what the third book brings.

Our Andromeda by Brenda Shaughnessy

This has been loved and praised everywhere, which is great. I found the NYTimes review particularly useful, ditto this one at The Aviary, and this conversation about it very very good as well. I find this a very very hard book for the bio aspects, and the way those bio aspects are rendered (BShaughnessy and her husband had a baby, Cal, who was born with disabilities; my wife and I were waiting for our daughter’s birth as I read Our Andromeda, and I finally just had to set it aside for a bit, because I’m crazy and fearful and couldn’t stand that close to sort of pain as we were on the cusp of our own welcoming). Anyway, that’s one thing. There’s a strange glory in this book: if you know Shaughnessy’s stuff, you know she’s as linguistically glorious as they come (I dare anyone to find something better sounding than her “I’m Over the Moon” from Human Dark with Sugar). The linguistic propulsion’s still evident, but it’s now in service to domesticity—specifically, the domesticity of compromise. How do we do this is over and over the chorus. The book’s stuffed with riches, but they’re incredibly hard riches—hard to wade through and readerly earn, I think. That said: I imagine this is a book I’ll be coming back to soon.

SUSAN STEINBERG + Free Books

            I got Susan Steinberg’s Spectacle  (out from the of-course-they’re-still-killing-it Graywolf Press) I think in November and, sure: I’m just like everybody, and so I scanned names on the book’s back, seeing if the blurbs offered a hint of the DNA within and, therefore, if it’d be something I’d need, and for the record Spectacle has got blurbs from folks I very very much believe in, and also for the record (you know this already) blurbs mean very very little (though they can be sort of associatively helpful), and the work inside a book is always what’s important, and the blurbs on the back are very much the equivalent of a bib on some beauty, meaning at best a useful accessory.

Can you tell I don’t know how to talk about Spectacle? I don’t know how to talk about it. Spectacle is a dazzling jolt of a book, beautiful like few collections I’ve seen, ever. I don’t know if this is just a start-of-the-year temptation, the desire to freak out and proclaim that the literary world is doing well, hale and vital, etc., but it seems every year I’ get thrilled by something or a few things Jan-April, and this year’s first OH WOW is Spectacle. Here’s why:

1. Here’s how “Superstar,” the book’s first story, begin:

I once hung out with this shit group of kids and they were just such shit.

            This is to say I made some mistakes.

I don’t want to do much other than draw/force attention to such lines, as they’re representative of the glory available everywhere in this book. If I were to present this in some lit-analysis way, I’d be forced to admit that Steinberg’s stuff is crunchy as bad gravel, crunchy as bones with cartilage gone raw between them: her sentences are wonder/dangerfully sharp things, and you less apprehend the story as it’s being built but feel it, like it’s being injected or tattooed or tapped against you with moderate roughness.

2. There’s a better feel for order and structure in this book than any book of stories I’ve seen, ever. That’s bombastic and too-much, but fuck it: the thing is better tailored and organized than many novels. That feeling you get sometimes from very good books of poetry in which there’s a thread your hands can’t help but find and catch again and again on? This book feels like that. To do Steinberg’s ordering genius justice would take several thousand words, and I’ve got a sick wife and daughter upstairs and so will not here go into it, but maybe this: the ordering of a book is, seemingly, a sort of minor thing. It’s hard to think of when a book’s ordering really hurts it, but when the ordering’s done well, the help it offers is shocking, immense: it turns a good book great and unforgettable. Spectacle is that book. I tried/failed to get at this down below, in the interview with Steinberg, and she addressed it, but please just pick up the book and be dazzled by this.

There are more than two points to make, but I’m forcing you to tread water instead of offering you the good parts, which are as follows:

++ down below is a brief back-and-forth-over-email interview with Steinberg. She’s dynamite. She’s also got two other books, and you’re damn right you should be purchasing them (that’s as much to be as it’s to you).

++ I have TWO COPIES OF SPECTACLE TO GIVE AWAY. If you live in the US, please write to wlcutter(at)hotmail.com by 5pm this Friday, 1/25, and I’ll draw two names at that point and be in touch to get yr address.

 

Okay, now the good stuff:

 

In the loosest and/or most general way, how did you come to writing and/or what are some influences on your stuff? I know these questions can be toxic. I’m real interested, here, in the fact that you seem to be torquing the hell out of your stuff at a language level a la Lish + co, yet your work ultimately gives a lot in coherence, in narrative, in ways (I don’t think) the reader’s given such by Lish + co (+ co being, I guess, Lutz, Williams, Hempel, those sort of folks)(that’s not a dig on them: your work just reads like it’s giving more in terms of emotional/narrative stuff, though that could easily just be my reading). Is this remotely close to anything like what you’re aware of doing, or trying to do?

 

I came to writing short stories via the visual arts—I was a painting major in an art school.  After graduating, I shared a studio with some friends in Baltimore, and after that, I moved to Boston, because Baltimore had gotten too small and Boston was a place I’d completely idealized.  I found a studio there too, and I painted in the days and wrote late at night while my paintings were drying.  Writing was a way to keep going I guess, to keep working through the stories I was trying to tell through painting, and after a while, I only wanted to write.  All to say, my writing didn’t grow out of reading fiction so much, and I wasn’t even aware that my work was dealing with language in any different kind of way until my peers in grad school pointed it out.  As for Lish and Co., I became aware of this in my grad program as well, and I felt about it as I did other schools:  I liked some of the work that came out of it, but not all.  But I think what you’re asking has more to do with prioritizing emotional content over aesthetics?  Or balancing the two?  I’ll just say it’s important for me to try to achieve this constant balance between form and content, presence and absence, emotion and withholding of, among other things, even mechanical things, while I’m writing.  And this was how I painted, as well.  I think the tension in the work can grow out of this struggle in the process.

 

There’s this awesome symmetry to Spectacle, as if it’s almost palindromatic—Spectacle to Spectator, Signifier to Signified; a mimicry in structure or style in some stories (particularly those beginning with a semi-colon, which jump right out, obviously); the feeling (maybe just for me) that “Underthings” represents this a) other voice in the collection and b) a voice that’s equivicating more, or seems more about seeking than some of the other voices do. Anyway: does this notion of symmetry or palindrome ring remotely true for you? Was that an attempt? Or maybe just: that by the book’s conclusion there’s been a revision of things, these issues of exposure and sex/intimacy and family, these things are picked at again and again and set in different places/ways by the end than the start. I don’t know. This might be a lost question. If any of the bones of this make a bit of sense, I’d love to hear anything you’ve got.

 

I think a lot about how writers tell the same stories over and over, and how we’re not even always aware of these obsessions or recurrences.  And I also think a lot about how it hasn’t always felt right to repeat myself as a writer, whereas, as a painter, I painted different versions of the same thing for years.  The sort of “pairing” of stories in Spectacle started as a desire to retell the story “Cowboys.”  It didn’t seem like telling it once was enough—not because I thought it was a good story but, rather, because it was a painful one, and now that I had taken a risk in telling it, I wanted to go through the experience again from a different perspective.  I thought that retelling it would reveal something new or deepen the narrative.  And I wanted to give myself permission to repeat unapologetically, to redo, to be unoriginal.  This opened up other opportunities to push more connections throughout the book, connecting lines, images, forms, and titles to complicate the notion of narration and structure, to create echoes, and mostly to try to make sense of things.

 

Only because I’m inordinately fond of writing that’s specific in terms of place (I’m from the midwest, and doubtless you know enough midwesterners to know the sort that loves the place fervently and Believes in it, etc. [I'm that type, obv]): is there a place to these women and their stories? I know they mention specific locales (Warrensburg, Baltimore), but there’s little sense of being of any of those places, nothing rooted. Does this play at all? I guess the only real possible q would be how come, but I’m curious about intent and anything behind the how come as well.

 

No matter where these stories take place in the real-time of the narratives, I realize I’m mostly thinking about Baltimore, my hometown.  It’s a place I’m deeply connected to and the place I can’t seem to stop writing, no matter how far west I go.  I understand it more than I do any other place, and I suppose it’s the place in which I feel most understood.  And yet I also had to get away from it to write about it (see question 1).  So while my characters are in Boston or San Francisco, like me, their stories are often rooted elsewhere.  All to say, place plays a part in this collection, but in a quiet, internal, minimally described way.  It’s like it lives inside the characters, as opposed to being where the characters live.

 

This might be hilariously/awfully off, but there seems to be this almost morality to the book, at least if one reads start to finish and one gets to this woman whose voice is basically in the reader’s head by that point, and the final words have to do with (what I read anyway) just being present, with the voice/performance/story that’s ultimately (as I read it) connecting. Is that remotely fair? This doesn’t seem a dour book at all—it’s one of the strongest, most ultimately positive books I’ve read in a good bit. I don’t know. I’m curious. It’s just interesting: the women in this book are all sorts of steel and edge, but the drive to connect, the baseline significance of reaching out (and not in a life’s-fucked-let’s-connect way, but more life’s-fucked-we-can-be-in-some-small-thing-together-briefly way) seems to ring like a bell in this. Who knows.

 

“…life’s-fucked-we-can-be-in-some-small-thing-together-briefly…”  That sums it up.

Action! Adventure!

Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, by Robin Sloan

In his A.V. Club review of Robin Sloan’s Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, Kevin McFarland credits Dan Brown and Jerry Bruckheimer for the recent explosion of adult adventure-mystery books, to which Bookstore is indisputably belongs. I’m inclined to add the Harry Potter series (books & movies alike) to this list, at least in the case of Sloan, who has crafted a witty, if not somewhat digressive book that combines the keen humor of George Saunders with a rollicking mystery involving secret codes, clandestine societies, and the role of literature in the digital age.

Our narrator is Clay Jannon, an out-of-work programmer for a bagel company in San Francisco. In his search for a new job, Clay stumbles into Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, an easy-to-miss densely-packed store full of largely unrecognizable titles. After a few weeks on the job, which includes little more than operating a register and not asking questions about the inventory, Clay begins to notice certain peculiarities about the store’s merchandise and clientele. Most of the books themselves are unreadable, novel-length codes of some sort. Enlisting the help of a childhood friend-turned-software mogol named Neel and a beguiling Google programmer named Kat, Clay launches an investigation into the history of the store and its cryptographic library.

From here, though, well…

Sloan does an excellent job of introducing each unique character, but once this is accomplished the plot seems to spiral out of control: suddenly we’re lost in a world of robe-clad scholars puttering around lavish underground chambers, centuries-old conspiracies involving the history of the printed word, and legions of hyper-modern computer hackers wielding complex algorithms for data configuration. However, I get the feeling that, despite how well-crafted these elements may be, this really isn’t the direction that Sloan intended to go. It all seems tacked on, out of sync with with what we know about these characters. We are beaten over the heads with the juxtaposition between the two worlds–the musty, aged, academic world of the bookstore, and the psuedo-futuristic world of modernity that Clay and his cohort occupy–a conceit that gets old pretty quick, as does the treasure hunt-like format of the group’s quest.

Moreover, most of it isn’t really necessary, not for what Sloan is trying to accomplish here: he wants to question the power of the written word. Are books still relevant? Who determines this? How has the digitization of all available information changed the very nature of knowledge? These are worthwhile questions to ask, particularly for Clay and his friends who, in comparison to the bookstore itself, seem to exist in a sleek technological limbo. But the questions, or at least their implications, are shouted down by the over-the-top plot, leaving the reader feeling somewhat unmoored.

The Art Forger, by B.A. Shapiro

The Art Forger is a lot like Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore in its adventure/mystery formula: Here we have a guileless main character who, in trying to salvage her career, finds herself embroiled in a scandal whose roots extend back to the nineteenth century. However, in this case we’ve traded the cyber-lit world for the art world, and while the Shapiro’s prose isn’t nearly as vibrant as Sloan’s, her vision of the art world–in particular the realm of art forgery–is much better realized.

Our main character is Claire Roth, a Boston artist who has become a pariah after a scandal involving the authenticity of an ex-boyfriend’s work. Since then, Claire has supported herself by painting legal forgeries of well-known paintings for Reproductions.com (a decidely stupid choice for someone whose professional integrity has already sustained as much damage as hers has, but whatever). When she is approached by the proprietor of a high-end gallery to produce a copy of a Degas painting that purportedly vanished from the Isabelle Stewart Gardner Museum twenty-five years earlier, Claire reluctantly accepts, only to find herself, yes,  caught in another scandal, this one involving the origins of the painting and, to a degree, Degas’ relationship with the musuem’s namesake.

What’s interesting is that the book is premised on a real-life art heist: on March 18 1990, two thiefs dressed as policemen stole a number of paintings from the ISG Museum, including several sketches by Degas (though not the painting upon which The Art Forger is based). This, combined with Shapiro’s extensive knowledge of Impressionist art and the mechanics of art forgery (in the context of the plot, the process is explained step-by-step in such a manner as to sometimes make the book feel like a how-to guide), is the real crux of the book, it grounds the story in reality.

Beyond this, however, the book flounders. Like Bookstore, The Art Forger is crammed full of double-crosses, bait-and-switches, and oh-my-gosh moments, except that in this case we don’t learn anything about the characters from them; rather, these moments seem to serve as a distraction from the apparent fact that Shapiro herself has very little idea who these people are–particularly Claire, whose seeming inability to discern the ethical pitfalls of the forgery scheme make it difficult to sympathize with her. Are we supposed to feel bad for her when her tryst with the gallery owner in question doesn’t turn out as she’d hoped? Her character is too underdeveloped and one-dimensional for us to form any real attachment, an unfortunate result of Shapiro’s turgid, unremarkable prose; the book is full of people saying things like, “Please…just hear her out. Maybe, just maybe, she’s onto something you need to know.” I think the author made the mistake of assuming that the audience would be too rivited by all the technical info to notice how sparse and convoluted the rest of the story is. I wanted to like Claire. I did. And I wanted to care about her plight. But unfortunately, The Art Forger is just another stock mystery masquerading as sophisticated character-driven fiction.