Weston Cutter's Blog, page 24

Karen Thompson Walker and the Limits of Speculative Fiction

The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker

Okay, so here’s the situation: for reasons that no one can understand, the earth’s rotation has begun to slow. Scientists intimate that there is no immediate danger, though they worry about what might happen should the slowing continue, which all data suggest it will. Meanwhile, human beings must adapt to the longer days and nights, which affect not only their physical health (severe sunburns, dehydration, etc.) but also their psychological health. Among the billions of people trying to find a way to go on with their lives is sixth-grader Julia, who lives in Southern California with her worrisome mother and father who, as one might expect, are at odds over how to react to such an unprecedented situation.

That’s the premise of the book, and it’s kind of cool really, a newish spin on the apocalyptic trend in literature: we don’t know if “the slowing,” as it is called, signals the end of the world or not, which in some ways is even creepier than all-out extinction. Amazing, then, that The Age of Miracles could turn out to be such a letdown.

Ostensibly, the slowing is a plot device meant to parallel the chaos of Julia’s adolescence: the skater boy after whom she pines; the girlfriends making dangerous forays into sexuality; the mean new kid at school who torments her at the bus stop; the subtle turmoil creeping into her parents’ marriage; and the eccentric grandfather who regales Julia with stories of his past. If any of these sound familiar, that’s probably because you’ve read them in at least a hundred other coming-of-age books. It’s unclear how the slowing scenario and the general turmoil of Julia’s maturation are supposed to play off each other, considering that the latter isn’t giving us anything we don’t already know on an intuitive level.

Nor are any of these minor conflicts ever even resolved. Throughout the story, Walker tosses in characters seemingly at random, offering up little hints of trouble down the line, but the trouble never comes. For instance, there’s the bully who, at the beginning of the book, humiliates Julia at the bus stop one morning…and then that’s it, he’s gone, from the story and seemingly from her life. Same with Julia’s mother and the slowing-induced sickness she struggles with, or the piano teacher who is more or less ostracized for her refusal to assimilate to “clock time”–these are stock characters, underwhelming. Like a busy party host, Walker introduces them to us and then immediately flits off to other things. Her interest in them is minimal, and so their development is, too. 

But then, maybe I’ve missed the point entirely. Maybe the fact that so much goes unresolved in The Age of Miracles is precisely the point. Maybe I’ve just got a lot to learn about speculative fiction. I mean, critics were crazy for this book. Rolling Stone, the New York Times, the New Yorker–they all raved about it. Which is great for Walker; this is, after all, her debut novel. But as a reader, I’m left wondering what I’m supposed to take from the book. I want to know what Julia wants, and I want to see her strive for it, but as it is I’m not even sure she knows, maybe because she’s too young or maybe because the character hasn’t been fleshed out enough. I’m inclined to think it’s a combination of both. Either way, The Age of Miracles still seems like a first draft, a somewhat unrealized story that needs to be unpacked. I like that Walker didn’t go for the oh-shit-the-world-is-ending-let’s-all-brace-for-impact route; perhaps the most compelling aspect of the book was seeing how people struggle to maintain a sense of normalcy in their lives. Unfortunately, this is also one of its biggest problems, because most of us don’t want to read to about people trying to be normal. The world didn’t end with a bang or a whimper. It didn’t end at all. It just keeps turning, only slower, and where’s the fun in that?

Father John Misty + Frank Ocean: Best New Music

I was turned onto Father John Misty (FJM) through both Aquarium Drunkard and John Gallaher’s blog, the former with a track from FJM and Phosphorescent, the second with an enthusiastic mention and a clip of FJM’s Letterman show, which I’ll just put here as well:

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Here’s the background, before getting into too much: Father John Misty is a debut record of sorts by Josh/J Tillman, the former drummer of Fleet Foxes. That stuff’s largely not much significant. What is is that Tillman apparently left Seattle, drove down the Pacific Coast, and ended up in Laurel Canyon, which, if you know your American musicology, is the site of sort of jangly early-70′s stuff. Tillman’s said that he also happened to have enough mushrooms to choke a horse, though I think the aura of some drug-addled dude making a record’s far off the mark (this interview, for instance, is a good template-clearer by FJM/Tillman re drug use and the record). There have been other solo albums by Tillman (whose younger brother, as an aside, is Zach Tillman, he of the phenomenal Pearly Gate Music), but nothing like this.

Because what this is—this being Fear Fun—is an album that’s its own weird sort of reality. Watch the video above from Letterman: there’s a narrative going on, this son-of-a-ladies-man thing that Tillman-through-FJMisty is channeling or articulating or whatever. This is music which is actively attempting to make clear or articulate its forebearers, often in the actual music (in “I’m Writing a Novel” there’s a character named Neal, and one’d be probably safe in guessing it’s a Cassady reference). What Fear Fun—with production that digsuises what would otherwise sound exactly like a 1974 album by someone in California—sounds like, fascinatingly, is someone creating something just new: the other music Tillman’s made may or may not have much to do with how this one came about—and, frustratingly, even the bullshit enough-shrooms-to-choke-a-horse bit is a headfake of sorts: who gives a fuck what he took to make this record? It’s not some spazzy Naked Lunch-ish thing, no Lynchian weirdfest. Fear Fun is basically a perfect timecapsule pop album. We can all call it otherwise, indie or folk or whatever, but the shimering Beach-Boys-ish harmonies and the dunka-dunka bass so reminiscent of late 60s/early 70s pop and rock, and the attempt to make some narrative other—featuring this Father John Misty, and Sally Hatchet (“This is Sally Hatchet”), and more—I’d argue make the album this almost perfect 1970s pop album that’s suddenly come out, out of nowhere. It’s a glorious thing. I don’t know if I’ll hear anything better than this in terms of guitar-based pop music this year.

 

 

Oh good fucking god. Good lord. I don’t even know how to—. I don’t. There’s this—. There’s SF-Jones@ the NYorker talking up how great this is, and the shadow Drake’s cast and allowed R+B to become what it’s become, and—. There’s nothing like this record. There’s nothing like listening to this record. There no record this year that’ll come close to this record—nothing, at all, will approach the reach and attempt of this album. I’m sorry and thrilled to say that, sorry because Father John Misty, because Sarah Jaffe, because JD McPherson, because lots of records that’ve hit in the past 8 months that I’ve loved but which, I’m sorry, just no. Just nothing. Just listen to this (and know it’s sped up—it’s slower on the album, which you should be purchasing absolutely right this second):

That’s “Bad Religion,” which every place’s mentioned as one of if not the album’s best tracks and the most heart-rending songs I can recall from the last ten years. Easy. What Ocean does so awesomely all through the album is let stakes be stakes: name the last pop musician who’s actually trying to wrestle with aspects and tenets of religion. FOcean’s asking about, demanding clarity regarding, wrestling hoestly with big, big stuff. A friend yesterday attempted to smack down my comment that “Pyramids,” the 9+ minute and maybe most important track on channel ORANGE, is the first thing I’ve heard that honestly seems like it’s trying to get to the epic scope of what MJ was doing on Thriller and “Thriller” (evidence on “Pyramids”: listen to that bass beat; is that not Thriller-like?). This is it then. This is what it comes back to I guess. Maybe I’m old. Maybe it’s not that big a deal. FOcean though is I’d argue trying to do BIGGER things with his music—which music is in the same R+B territory as Prince and Drake and some of Kanye’s stuff—than anyone else working. The last release working on this scale was Kanye’s MBDTF, which was fine, but it was and remains a massively egotistical album—that doesn’t invalidate it or make it bad, it’s just so. Ocean’s channel ORANGE is not at all the work of a massive ego—or maybe it is, but the fact of the ego in the songs is not principal (the fact of Ocean’s sexuality—his letter on Twitter on his first love having been a man—matters not in the least on cO either, unless you need your pronouns to take/adhere to certain flavors). This is just—. This is so much—. This is the best music of this year, over and over, impossibly untoppable. Be thrilled that Ocean makes records fast. Be thrilled that he’s this young and this on fire. There’s no better music being made. It’s just unreal.

Late, Very Late, Right on Time: Three Story Collections

I missed the boat on Daniel Orozco’s Orientation, a collection released in hardcover in 2011 and out this spring in paperback, and a collection which was urged on me by more writer friends than any book I can recall. That there’s a mildly compelling story behind the book—long gestation by an older writer who didn’t just MFA his way into accolades—is gravy, but the crucial thing is that this is a really, really good work. I don’t want to play too much of this game, but it’s hard not to at least acknowledge that a writer’s work’s goodness has lots to do with that writer’s…well, grace, I suppose. Grace or wisdom, empathy. Maybe this is something that’s just happening to me as I age and especially as I wait for my first child to be born. But here’s the thing: I very much love me some young hot-shot short stories—they’re just great. The fresh-out-the-gate folks, frustratingly young in author photos and writing stories that are usually torqued and strangely charged—these things are great, and they (in best case scenarios) offer the pleasure (at least to this reader) of seeing old things anew or askew, different and interesting enough to feel, again in the best cases, that amazement that fiction first offered. Then there are books like Orientation, or like Alan Heathcock’s masterful Volt, books which seem suffused with a generosity and heart that pulses slightly thicker, more deeply, than some of the whiz-bang younger writers’ books. Maybe this is just me. Certainly there are exceptions (but think, too, of a simple example: Lorrie Moore. Read Self Help and then Birds of America; it’s not just that she grew as a writer, but as a person). Anyway, I didn’t even mean to write all of this: all I intended to say was that there’s a real magic gift, sometimes, in debuts from folks who’ve got some miles, and that the magic gift, in the best scenarios, feels like what’s on offer in Orozco’s Orientation, a book which (loosely) takes as its common theme aspects of working life, stories in which the folks within are all learning stuff, being oriented by stuff (by earthquakes and death in “Shakers,” by witnessed tragedy in “The Bridge,” by the explosive shifting brought on by love in “Officers Weep.” Orientation‘s just fantastic. Please: if you’ve missed this, rectify your errors.

 

Dan Chaon is just fantastic—you maybe found him, as I did, through his story “Big Me,” which was collected in 2001′s Among the Missing, though if you know him solely as a story writer, dig into Await Your Reply, a book I foolishly slept on till this spring. His new collection, Stay Awake, was released earlier this year and before anything else let’s cite what Chaon’s (pronounced shawn, says Wikipedia) said in interviews, which is that his stories are ghost stories in which the ghost doesn’t appear (the line, actually, is from Peter Straub, and somewhere online there’s an interview with Chaon in which he actually says all this, but I’ve lost track of it). What exactly is a ghost story in which the ghost does not appear? It’s a story of hint: it’s a story in which the door is always ajar into a darkness, in which folks are listening or waiting for whatever’s gonna come through the dark—the stories aren’t scary, at least I didn’t think so, but creepily portentous, loaded like springs, plus this: the bad stuff that happens is almost always a compounding, an other: the husband getting in an accident that leaves him with a brain injury is not the Big Moment the fiction moves toward—that happens three pages in (this is “Long Delayed, Always Expected”). What’s scarier is what happens more than that. In other words: these are goose-bumpily real stories, the sort that evade the sometimes tidy metric of fiction in which drama is risen toward then resolved. It’s murky, unsettling reading by one of the country’s best writers, stories or novels or whatever.

 

Battleborn, Claire Vaye Watkins’ debut collection, was released just this week, and it’s one of the best debut collections I can think of. That hyperventilation above, re: Orozco’s work and the tendency among younger writers to write whiz-bangy stuff instead of thicker, realer, heavier stuff? Mostly neatly avoided by Watkins (who I intended to interview and dropped the ball on, apologies). For instance “Ghosts, Cowboys,” the collection’s badass opener which, though slightly messed-with, form-wise, feels as naturally made and fluid a story as anyone could hope to write (for what it’s worth, the messed-with form isn’t obstrusive, and it’s a perfect example of a story’s form tracking exactly along to function). Even Watkins’s less massively compelling stuff—”Wish You Were Here,” for instance, about two young couples vacationing—is still absolutely readable. You find yourself sucked massively in, or I did anyway (ugly admission: for those of us who read lots of fiction, and who track the ‘literary scene’ or whatever, it’s impossible not to, several times a year, sit down to some heralded debut by some great whoever feeling something like grumpiness or worse, this stand-off-ish okay, dazzle me attitude [maybe I'm alone in this, though I doubt it]. Of course the schadenfreudy satisfaction on the clunkers is its own caustic fun, but when the supposedly good stuff actually hits, actually is as good as folks claim, well, that’s just something. This is exactly one of those somethings).

Other Thing/Shameless Self Promotion

Shameless self-promotion stuff: my chapbook Plus or Minus just dropped from the great Greying Ghost Press, and is now available through paypal here. Here’s the cover:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Anyway, that’s the update. I’m excited. It’s the first of three chapbooks coming this year–updates as those both come as well. Thanks of course for reading.

Catch-Up

So, having been apparently even more lazy* than I’d realized, I’ve been missing mentioning some books, all of which are good, some of which are below now in shorter reviews (part of this I’ll totally blame on still blogging for the Kenyon Review, which blogging’s seen recent stuff considering: some of the DFWallace books that’ve come out this year, a pair of music biographies [Springsteen and Freddie Mercury, both great, both radically different], an interview with the fantastic Alix Ohlin [whose new collection Signs and Wonders is just great, great short fiction, just tremendously good], something on political books and changing one’s mind, in this case regarding Gail Collins’s not quite [to me] successful As Texas Goes…, an interview with Jess Walter [author of the dynamite Beautiful Ruins], and an interview with Jensen Beach, author of the recently released For Out of the Heart Proceed). Regardless: that’s all elsewhere. Here’s here. Here are some brief reviews of books you should’ve been hipped to, and hopefully already have.

No Animals We Could Name by Ted Sanders. This thing’s just a monster of a book—stories as varied and divergent and bristly as one could imagine—the first story, “Obit,” with its perfect function-following form typography is worth the price of admission on its own, plus there’s “Airbag” parts 1-3, each trying to wrestle with a single event, to say nothing of little (seemingly) tossed-off stuff like “Deer in the Road,” which creeps and induces shivers the likes of which you mayn’t've felt since Wallace’s “Good Old Neon.” This is a hard, striking, quicksilvery book, something richer than most of us (I’m guessing) will realize even after we’ve made our way through it—the thing’s gonna be sitting on your shelf seething for years. Or at least it will be mine.

 

Big Hair and Plastic Grass by Dan Epstein. The subtitle’s A Funky Ride Through Baseball and America in the Swinging 70′s, and I’ll admit that I was and am termpermentally into this book because my beloved Twins played in the Metrodome, one of the Plastic-grassed venues covered in Eptstein’s account. With each chapter covering a single year of that insane decade, the book’s exactly the tonic one needs when reading stuff like, say, any of the thick august tomes regarding 1968 in all its halcyon glory (or whatever): this is baseball writing with a healthy tilt toward the style of the day and game, not just the substance. It’s a hell of a read, and, on finishing it, one needs little imagination to consider why football and Nascar had such meteoric rises once ESPN went on the air—baseball was crazy for a long ass time.

The Bellwether Revivals by Benjamin Wood. This was a book that snuck up on me in ways I wasn’t expecting: the thing starts with well-written scenes of young people meeting, and the reader (this reader) immediately thinks: I’ve seen this. Wood even seems like he knows that, like he knows you’ve seen it. I should here mention that it’s set in Oxford, and there are questions of class, and the love story’s undone/impeded/influenced by a beloved’s aggresively egotistical sibling. It’s a very strong book in the sense that, once in, you want to go all the way through, though I will say it didn’t knock my socks off the way it has some other folks (though also worth noting: I’ve read neither Brideshead Revisited nor Secret History).

 

Dark Pools by Scott Patterson. Just read the f’ing thing, and read Patterson’s The Quants while you’re at it. Look, folks like Patterson are hard to come by, and necessary: he’s Michael Lewis with a page-turner’s blood and pacing. Imagine reading, say, Michael Connelly being 100% factual and writing about Wall Street and darker aspects of the financial system than you want to really know about. That’s Dark Pools. Again: just read the f’ing thing.

*=everyone caught that the announcement for the Car Talk guys’ retirement was titled Time to Get Even Lazier? Amazing.

Adam Prince’s Beautiful Wishes

A review of The Beautiful Wishes of Ugly Men by Adam Prince

Black Lawrence Press, 2012

I met Adam Prince once. I was visiting a friend in Knoxville who allowed me to tag along to the Prince house for dinner. Prince and his wife, poet Charlotte Pence, prepared a lovely ginger curry dish. After dinner we watched Mad Men. They were charming and polite, the picture of suburban contentment.

Strange to think that this is the same man who wrote The Beautiful Wishes of Ugly Men, which author Bret Anthony Johnston calls the work of “a writer who understands the intimacy of violence and the violence of intimacy.” Combining the thematic grittiness of Stewart O’Nan with the narrative passion of Raymond Carver, The Beautiful Wishes of Ugly Men signals the debut of a writer whose vision is at once both alarming and utterly  mesmerizing.

To a large degree, the stories in here are analyses of character motivation, or rather the often frightening circumstances from which those motivations are borne. Take, for instance, “The Island of Lost Boys,” which snagged the Sycamore Review’s Wabash Prize for Fiction in 2010: a junior high school teacher–who for reasons he can’t yet fathom has recently made a pass at a male student–finds himself at his wealthy mother’s house on Newport Island, where he is confronted with cruel truths about himself and his past. This story exemplifies Prince’s affinity for turning dispicable people into fantastic characters. Same with stories like “Action Figure,” a skillfully crafted portrait of meth-induced paranoia, and “Tranquility,” in which a recently married woman struggles to comprehend her husband’s creepy new habit of bringing young women home under the pretense of finding her a friend; it isn’t that these people are “bad,” per se, but rather that they seem to be grappling with a kind of self-destructive drive, one that they don’t entirely understand but that seems to have seized them like an illness. Prince is interested in what it takes for seemingly decent, ordinary people to make spectacularly bad decisions.

None of this is to say that Beautiful Wishes is flawless. There are a few speedbumps, like “No Women Tonight” and “Six Months In, Another Kind of Undressing,” short-shorts intended offer the reader a breather between some of the larger, heavier pieces but, in so doing, slow the book’s otherwise thrilling pace. But even these throw out a stumbling block in a way that  seems almost intentional; in a book rife with calamity, they are subtle reminders that the author is always, always in control. 

And to be sure, it is this sense of control that makes these stories so engaging; even instances of humor, like those in “Tranqulity,” are tinged with threat, a haunting reminder of the close relationship between laughter and fear. Prince’s characters are all trying to make sense of their flaws, they want to know what it means to survive as imperfect beings, which line of reasoning often leads them toward catastrophe. With prose that is both accessible and lovely in its complexity, Prince maneuvers these characters through failing relationships, family tragedy, and drug abuse, all with an unyielding authority that surprises the reader over and over again.

The Mere Weight of Words is Not Quite Enough

(Today’s review comes from Anna Roorda, a young writer living and working in Illinois, and who’s reviewed for Corduroy before)

            I can see that Carissa Halston, the author of The Mere Weight of Words, had good intentions with this novella. The story basis is there, though it’s not anything especially flashy or irregular. It’s essentially about a girl named Meredith who is often at odds with both of her parents but especially her father. She’s also struggling to maintain vulnerability and peace with her boyfriend. As a result of these, at times, sinking relationships, we see the ways that silences can lengthen and wedges can form between people, and how everything will be destroyed unless bridges can be built. These framed relationships give the illusion that we as readers will be kept close to the nature of the story and its words. The story is built on the remaining threads between people, and these very threads make up our existence as humans. We recognize failing and successful relationships because they are familiar to each of us—we work with people, live with them, sleep with them, fight with and/or love them, clean their diapers or clothes or make their lunches.

            However, optimism isn’t always enough, and it may be too optimistic and perhaps naïve to assume Halston’s good intentions with this novella and judge it solely upon those hopeful, fluttery feelings that I originally had in those first few pages. Because the feeling that came as I finished this book, if I get to the bottom of the matter, was irony. The irony lies in the fact that the title begged me into thinking that the novella would use language and characters to create a kind of meaning and intimacy with the reader. Halston splashes across the cover of the book that words mean a whole lot of something and they carry a weight that actions or thoughts cannot.

            My impressions of the book were very different from these early presumptions. Black and white. I was expecting to see language precise and exact and dangerous, like tongues of fire ripping along a floor beneath my feet, cutting where it may. The truth is, I felt the furthest from Halston and the story she sought to tell through these characters. And all because the language simply wasn’t precise and it, frankly, wasn’t enough. Words often seemed to drag or hang there on the page like damp bathrobes on hooks, empty but still asking me to consider them or to take them for whatever they were worth. I wasn’t always sure what that was, because the words were too weak, too far away, too much of something that I wasn’t a part of as a reader. That was equally troubling and annoying.

            Does Carissa Halston want my sympathy for Meredith and her inability to communicate openly with her lover?  Does she expect a kind of sadness to bounce from to the page to my heart when I read of Meredith’s accident that leaves her face in a state of paralysis? What about when I read the word regret in regards to her father and all that has passed, or not passed, between them—what should I have felt then?  The thing was, I wanted to shake my fist in rage, or shed soppy tears, or flip through the pages with a kind of urgency that would surprise every speed-reader I know, but this novella wouldn’t allow me those small joys. I wanted to believe in words again, I wanted to be coerced that their existence is crucial and central, but I really wasn’t unable to because of the sheer force of inadequate language hitting me in the face. Or, rather, nodding at me but not hitting me or touching me at all. I wanted it to flick my wrist, or graze my hair, so badly.

            I remain hopeful for Halston and whatever novel she’s working on, as the book jacket told me. I am not sure if it was optimism that brought me through this book, or if it was the thought that maybe the grand moment that I was waiting for–when language, emotion, and character collaborate together on the page–would at last arrive on page 21, 37, or 49. That moment never did come, and I was given instead a vagueness that warranted, demanded, explanation. That left me feeling both robbed and sad. Maybe with future endeavors, Halston will deliver to her readers the strength of the words that she promises them.

Jess Walter’s Fantastic Beautiful Ruins

            The first thing I’d ever read by Jess Walter was his story “Thief” in Harper’s from maybe four months back—I read the thing lying on the couch in my wife’s office before we went out somewhere that night, took the story down fast and remember just feeling spun for the rest of the night by the sneaky ease of the thing—it’s a story about someone in a guy’s family stealing from the huge jug he puts his change in as a way to save for vacations, and there’s a twist, and, sure, the story itself was great, and the twist was great, but there was this almost shocking ease to the story, how it just unspooled with no noticeable effort. The analog might be that, in bicycling, the best components move with the least friction—a set of real high end hubs, for instance, will allow a wheel to spin for a long time with almost no effort. I can attest to how good it feels to clean and regrease and repack a set of hubs, allowing them to rolls incredibly freely and smoothly, so I can only imagine how it feels to be Jess Walter, whose new novel Beautiful Ruins is a book of such shocking smoothness and ease I’m sort of dumbstruck by the thing.

You’ve heard of Walter before, in all likelihood: his best known novel (at least among the folks I know), The Financial Lives of Poets, was seemingly everywhere when it was released in ’09, and his The Zero was a finalist for the National Book Award. Maybe he’s better known than I know, but I’m sort of amazed that this book hasn’t been called, by everyone, one of summer’s big best books—it’s right up there, for me, with Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and Crumpton’s The Art of Intelligence (about which more soon). Maybe it’s gotten more attention than I know, and I simply haven’t been paying enough attention.

Regardless, among the following are compelling reasons you should read Beautiful Ruins promptly: 1) you want a book which toggles back and forth between the past and present, the past in this case going back as far as 1962 and the present set in California, or 2) you want a book which focuses, sort of, on movies—the 1962 Beautiful Ruins jumps back to is in Italy, during the filming of Cleopatra, the first Liz Taylor/Richard Burton film (and the one on the set of which they first fell in love), or 3) you want a book which features characters cast in such vividity one feels totally fine, for instance, loathing the dickhead stripper-patronizing, internet-porn-obsessive boyfriend of one of the main characters, because this is a book in which it’s safe to loathe characters because they feel hugely human and real, and so, as in life, you know you can loathe or hate the character on one page but will likely change your mind soon enough. Actually, forget the numbering: character in Beautiful Ruins is everything: there is Pasquale, a young Italian who runs an inn in Porto Vergogna, a town that could/should be the sixth of Cinque Terre (thus forcing a name change, but whatever), and there is Dee Myers who shows up at Pasquale’s family’s inn (which inn is named: The Adequate View) during the book’s first few pages, sick and in need of rest and rehab, and there is Michael Deane, a movie producer who was involved in getting Dee to Porto Vergogna but who we meet in the present as an aged but legendary producer with an assistant named Claire, she of the beefcakey stripper-loving boyfriend. There are plenty more—specifically Pat Bender, Alvis Bender, and Shane Wheeler—and I swear that the stories of each become so moving and compelling that the book, which features chapters which stagger through time, will incense you in good ways, just that it prevents you from simply tearing through, trying to track each character’s story instead of sitting back and tracing the larger tapestry of stories and story they together weave.

Here’s what Walter’s said the book’s at least somewhat about, according to the press packet: “…a story about fame and how we all endeavor now to live our lives like movie stars, like celebrities, each of us an eager inner publicist managing our careers and our romances and our fragile self-images (our Facebook pages and Linked-In profiles).” Maybe I’m dim or have missed something, but I don’t feel like I often read something by a book’s author directly addressing what the book’s agenda might be, or it’s message, or its intent. I say that full of praise for Walter for saying/writing what he did: I think we each like to graft what we believe might be something like meaning onto our favorite books, but those things don’t often hold or add up, at least not in any larger way than the oldest most cliched take-aways (for instance: power currupts, the lies we tell ourselves undo us, certain emotional experiences sear us permanently; try this on your own favorite novel). But what charges what Walter wrote in that press kit, what makes Beautiful Ruins more than just a meditative novel which considers the various shades and darknesses of how we manage our lives and selves, is the book’s just fucking exquisite final chapter, a chapter which just astonishes in its wide-lens tracking of all the stories tracked in the book, a chapter which, to at least this reader, feels more than a little like some parts of the best of GGMarquez (especially Love in the Time of Cholera, for reasons you’d be a fool to want more detail regarding) in its whirling omnipotence, its god-view of humans and their urges and needs. There was, in a recent New Yorker, a Louis Menand review of the latest James Joyce bio, and you should just go read the whole article, but what Menand establishes in ways I’ve never wtnessed before is that Joyce was hellbent on celebrating the day-to-day, the casual miracle of living and loving and dying and hurting (Menand takes 6 pages to establish this stuff–you really should go read it), and maybe it’s just that I read Beautiful Ruins less than a week after reading the Menand article, but the zinging magnificence of Jess Walter’s latest novel feels exactly of a piece with what Menand wrote of Joyce: Walter’s fantastic final chapter begins with a character saying This is a love story, a line which is questioned almost immediately in the text: But, really, what isn’t? If this book hits you as I imagine it’ll hit all of us, and as it certainly hit me, the only answer possible to that question is: nothing, nothing is not a love story, and every love story’s full of beauty and chaos and surprise. Seriously: you just have to read this book, as soon as possible.

The Future of Indie Rock is in Good Hands

A review of The American Tragedy’s The Flame.

I owe the fellas in the American Tragedy an apology: this review is way overdue. And I’ll spare you the reasons for my lateness; suffice it to say, I’m a tool. It wouldn’t be such a big deal, I guess, if it were some self-absorbed dickhead  capital M-usician we’re talking about here (see: Weston’s super-awkward interview with Mike Doughty), but that’s not the case. In fact, TAT comprises four of the friendliest, most down-to-earth musicians I’ve ever met, though this doesn’t seem to interfere with their ability to combine brutal, pounding guitar riffs with elegant melodies, the culmination of which is some of the most interesting rock music in the indie world today. And nowhere is this more apparent than their latest release The Flame.

At just four songs, The Flame is the first in a series of EPs that TAT has planned as a follow-up to 2005′s Welcome to the Show, which solidified their reputation not only in terms of their fantastic songwriting skills, but also for their energetic live shows. However, there is a rawness to The Flame that, while uncharacteristic of their work up until now, seems oddly fitting considering the band’s attitude toward the record industry, an attitude made very clear in their music. “We didn’t want to overproduce it,” says frontman Adam Dale, whose voice combines mainstream clarity with punk swagger and just a touch of Motown. “A lot of the mistakes we made, we just left in there. We wanted it to be real. We figured, if it was good enough for Zeppelin, then it was definitely good enough for us.”

This isn’t to say that TAT has gotten any less conscientious about their recording, but rather that they recognize that the spirit of their music–and perhaps all rock music–lies in its unrefinement, that a certain degree of roughness is not only preferable but necessary. This is especially clear on tracks like “Blood on the Stage,” a rowdy, vaguely 80s-style celebration of rock’n'roll: Forgive me Jesus, for I have sinner/ I’m listenin to rock’n'roll records again/I like my Sabbath Black and my Lizzy Thin.  “Everyone Will Finish” and “There Are Some Things We Weren’t Meant to See” are songs built around riffs that would be perfectly fitting on Sabbath’s self-titled debut. Then you’ve got the eponymous track “The Flame,” an outlier in terms of its relative gentility and an excellent example of the band’s ability to meld raucous and melodic textures. All this, combined with Dale’s distinctive voice and his penchant for thought-provoking lyrics, altogether adds up to a pretty damn great EP, no doubt the first of several.

Two Car Books

What follow is a pair of reviews I should’ve done long, long ago, but I’m a terrible person, so there’s that to daily contend with. Elsewhere: a poem of mine in the latest issue of Witness, and plenty of other stuff over at the Kenyon Review Blog (which is where lots of what’d otherwise be here at Corduroy are—for instance, reviews of the absolutely incredible HHhH by Laurent Binet, a review of the latest Jorie Graham [short version: it's very very good], and reviews of  Kevin Young’s incredible Gray Album, the recent/posthumous John Leonard, and the collected Gilbert [which I should've made a bigger deal about and mentioned here as well, because holy shit, right? Gilbert's collected? That's like magic; you should buy the thing automatically, even if you hate Gilbert (though if you do, wtf?), just because you can finally have your own copy of the first two books), and also a review over at Rain Taxi as well.

 

American Icon by Bruce G Hoffman

Until recently I'd owned only one car in my entire life, the vehicle I've been driving for the past 12 years now, which vehicle is a '91 Ford Ranger, and which vehicle will soon die and I'll be just bereft, inconsolable (215k miles, fyi). Growing up, my family seemed more GM people, or at least my mother was, and so getting the keys from my grandpa to the truck was strange—the keys were different than any I'd handled. This stuff isn't necessarily crucial, other than to say: I became, because of my grandpa, a very very big Ford supporter, and it was fucking heartbreaking to watch them suck so terribly for so long, and it's been pretty thrilling to watch them turn around (you may have read, for instance, that this past week they got the blue oval back; yes, they actually had to leverage their own icon to continue).

            American Icon is the story of Ford's turnaround, which means it's also the story of Alan Mulally, a former Boeing exec who stepped to Ford's helm after Ford'd spent years with shit leadership (and not just shit leadership, but actively bad leadership, leadership which seemed to guarantee the company's fracturing and dismality...but of course in the late 90's and early 2000's, when the American Dream had to arrive with an SUV for every family, Ford was the biggest benefactor of our automotive idiocy, though despite that, they made mostly terrible cars [if you're really interested in this stuff, check the phenomenal CNBC documentary on Ford as well]). It’s a brisk read, written incredibly well by Bryce Hoffman, a writer who’s been covering the Ford Motor Company since ’05 for the Detroit News, and you will, if you’re like me, find that your reasons for liking Ford are totally validated. Yes: it’s sucky that their best stuff still doesn’t quite match the best stuff from other companies (but then again, it’s batshit that Mazda’s a losing-money enterprise when they’ve got arguably the best cars on the road, so), but I’m at least excited to be able to think about buying a Ford again. The book’s a great, great read.

Hack by Dmitry Samarov

I found this book very strange. On the one hand, it was instantly, pleasantly readable, and quick—one finishes it in maybe two hours. On the other hand, the book was, is, little more than Samarov’s gathered thoughts on being a cabbie in Chicago. That’s not a bad thing, obviously, but Samarov is one bleak and dour man—no one in this book is purely good. The kind way to say what Samarov is doing is: he’s casting a wry eye on the human comedy and condition. The mean way: he’s a prick who so doubts humanity that he can’t believe anyone would every ask him about himself out of authentic regard; everyone who gets in his cab, everyone everywhere, has a 100% selfish agenda, and that’s that. Maybe not: maybe Samarov’s a nice enough guy and he’s chosen to slice off this caustic view of Chicago because it’s what people like seeing in the Chicago Reader, where some of this stuff appeared before (also at Hack, his website, at which you’re invited to go take a look and revel in the everything’s-shit tone), but regardless: this is a bleak little book. Along with the text, the book features art from Samarov as well (that’s his work on the cover, too).

Anyway: it’s a book, and I’m mentioning it here because it’s about Chicago, which is the city where love comes from, and it’s certainly interesting to know about what transpires in cab garages, but this book is, but the reader has to listen to a hell of a lot of acid to get any notes of grace. And as an ending and preempt: I’m not advocating some Pollyana-ish anything, and everyone’s welcome to be as shitty and bitter as they choose, but when Samarov speaks of a woman getting in his cab with excitement—she got a part as a supernumerary in the opera and is thrilled—he pathetically finishes the scene as follows: “The sun is setting and my goals are more modest than hers. The cabdriver’s role is to play a bit part in others’ lives and be compensated accordingly.” (p.43) Ignoring entirely the fact that such an abstract statement could fucking apply to anyone in any public service job [teacher, waiter, bartender, banker, etc.], one wants, on reading the line, to just smack Samarov: grow up. Is he pissed that she didn’t ask him about his life? If so, he’s lying to either himself or the reader: elsewhere in the book he’s frustrated with people asking him questions about his life, totally confident they’re not really interested in him. So what’s the dour little piss sentence for? Again: I’m not looking for endless sunshine, but all Samarov seems capable of seeing or reporting on is bleakness, the worst of everything. Knock yourself out if that’s your bag.