Weston Cutter's Blog, page 25

Flynn’s Gone Girl: Year’s Best Fiction

            If you haven’t already, you’re about to see a whole lot of press regarding Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl—there’s a full page ad in the latest NYorker for the thing, for instance, and it’s just received what’s sure to be the first of two glowing reviews at the Times, and right here to my left is the publicity info on the book and there were count’em four starred reviews of this book (Kirkus, Booklist, Library Journal, PW). All of which I even bother bringing up here because I can’t remember a book behind which there’s been such positive consensus. And I’m here not to trash the book at all, but to toss my hat into the ring with the rest of the cheersquad: Gone Girl is among the year’s very best, most satisfying fiction.

The set-up: Gone Girl is the story of Nick and Amy. The chapters alternate—Nick speaking in present tense, and Amy in past tense—in the first half of the book, her chapters are diary entries, though in the book’s second half, that changes. The story begins on the day of Nick and Amy’s fifth wedding anniversary, though clearly all’s not well, as Nick reports on bile rising in him at his wife’s kindness that morning. There’s this casual disgust on Nick’s part that makes little sense: Amy, for the book’s first half, is this strange character, a woman we can’t help but love or respect or like or whatever, yet a woman whose husband seems to just loathe her. Nick leaves for his bar and, that afternoon, at work, he gets a call that his house’s front door’s wide open, and he returns to find his wife gone and signs of struggle apparent. Nick, in real time, tracks the developments in the search for his wife—dealing with police officers, dealing with in-laws, dealing with local good ol boys, advocates of a do-it-yourself justice—and does it narratively to us, as readers. As a character, he’s fine enough, but the way thngs are written make things fascinating: he addresses the reader, and when he admits to having an affair (a development the reader can see coming for miles, given that he’s mentioned but not explained having a disposable cell phone maybe four times by the time the mistress part surfaces), he admits that this admission will make him look bad, and that the reader will lose trust in him. The reason this tick is so fascinating is because, when you first come across it, you may (as I did) believe it’s just clunky, glossy postmodernism—it seemed to me, on first reading it, as if Flynn was overreaching, or at best offering a gimicky hook. Without going too much into things: if you find yourself mildly frustrated with the first 100 or so pages, and if it feels weirdly toying and cloying and strange, and the characters a bit stilted, I’m telling you: keep reading. You likely will anyway, because the story’s propulsive as hell, but it bears mention that the first 100 pages may make you doubt. Of course as Nick’s tracking his wife’s disappearance, his chapters are (sometimes cliffhangingly maddeningly) interspersed with Amy’s diary entries, which paint her as a saint. Again, without getting too much into things (it’d be a sin to say much about this book; the glories of it are just too fantastic to experience in any hand other than first), the psychic dissonance of how Amy and Nick appear gathers and creates enough friction so that at the book’s halfway point, when the story basically explodes, the reader’s about as satisfied by narrative as could be imagined. Seriously. I read the book a week back, all in a day, getting progressively more into it and then it just exploded, and my wife from the next room heard me gasp and then just say no way, no way. It’s that good. We had dinner at a friend’s house that night and I was as tempted to cancel so that I could stay home and read as I’ve ever been.

            Gone Girl’s other details—that Amy’s parents are a pair of psychologists who’ve spilled Amy’s life onto the pages of a series of best-selling kids books featuring Amazing Amy (and can you guess whether Amy’s got some issues with that fact?); that Amy and Nick’ve moved to Missouri from New York City two years back so Nick could care for his declining mother (again, issues on Amy’s part); that Nick and his sister Margo (who, too cloyingly, is mostly by her brother called Go throughout the book) are the proprietors of a local bar, called The Bar, which bar they purchased with cash from Amy (she has, in the book’s present tense, no money left, but had had, before the financial crash, a nice trust fund); that Nick’s father is a smoldering mess of misogyny and dementia, a broken man sputtering fucking bitch; that Amy has, every year of her and Nick’s marraige, given him a scavenger hunt on their anniversary, and that Nick’s always botched them (because he doesn’t remember every single detail that she does), but that this year’s SH is much easier and Nick gets nearly everything—are honestly too great and vivid to do justice to here. The central narrative of Gone Girl—a husband and wife discovering, five years into their marraige, who each of them really are—is so great that Flynn really, truly did not need to so thoroughly ace the ancillary stuff, yet she has. Each little tiny thing in this book seethes real and appropriate; nothing feels done in a Rube Goldbergian way, though clearly, in a mystery/thriller, that’s exactly how plot stuff ultimately has to work, and so that’s the real glory of Flynn’s accomplishment here: the book feels totally natural, like a story, like a real, human story, not some made-up thing to keep you turning pages. She has successfully hidden all the strings. It’s incredible.

I can’t say enough about this book. You really will be seeing info about it everywhere, as you should. You’d be wise to heed what everyone’s gonna say: read this book immediately. Cancel dinner ahead of time.

An Interview With Grant Lee Phillips

[image error]If you were listening to rock music in the 90s, then you probably remember Grant Lee Phillips, frontman of the eponymous Grant Lee Buffalo. Since that time, has a released a number of stunning solo albums, has been featured on several television shows–Gilmore Girls being the most notable–and was even ranked in 1995 as Rolling Stone’s Best Male Vocalist. For those familiar with this site, I probably don’t have to tell you what a huge fan I am of both GLB and GLP; I even have a cat named after one of his songs (Josephine, from “Josephine of the Swamps”). Do whatever you want with that info: the dude is untouchable, is my point. Phillips was kind enough recently to take some time out of his schedule to discuss his craft:

CB: I was hoping you could tell us a little about your songwriting process, such as it is. And let me amend this question by acknowledging outright that most musicians we interview hate being asked this, and rightfully so; it does sort of impose unfair limitations on the answer. But I think the very fact that every songwriter seems to have such a different answer is what makes it interesting, at least in an artistic sense…or maybe I’m just really dense about the creative process?

GLP: It’s a hard thing to talk about. When your native tongue is metaphor it’s a bit of a challenge to pin down the process. The song itself is by my best stab at communicating. Beyond that, it gets pretty murky quick. There is a lot of craft to songwriting which gets honed in time but the best music seems to fly in the face of all of that. You have to feel your way through it.

CB: In almost every interview I’ve read with you, there have been parallels drawn between your current work and that of Grant Lee Buffalo (and I realize I’m kind of doing the same thing, but just go with me here, please). I’m wondering how you feel about this: do you feel that what you are doing now is an extension of that, or are they two distinct spheres of your life? Or something in between? Is it even fair to draw any comparison between the two?

GLP: When my new songs are compared to those I wrote in Grant Lee Buffalo it’s like they’re going for the wide angle lens. Trying to get a handle on things. It’s actually flattering. Of course, there are bound to be people who prefer one facet of my work over another. As a writer I’m always moving forward. The performer part of me keeps in contact with the old songs but the writer in me is fixed on what comes next.

CB: Lyrically, your work leans toward rich imagery and quite a few classical and literary allusions. One descriptor that I see quite often in regard to your lyrics is “literate.” What do you make of that? Do you have any particular literary influences?

GLP: I’ve always loved books but I really keyed in very early to song lyrics. Literary allusions are probably a little more common in the Grant Lee Buffalo songs than those that follow. Sometime it’s just me getting busted. Pure theft. “Allusion” sounds so much more respectable though. Let’s go with that.

CB: It’s always interesting to see how reviewers try to categorize your sound; Southern Gothic comes up quite a bit. It’s almost as if folks are determined to find some kind of label for it, even though your work spans a spectrum of styles. Is there a certain way that YOU like to describe your music? Have you come across any descriptors that you would say are spot-on?

GLP: I’m the worst at describing what I do. The last time someone asked me what I did, I lied and told him I played “Blue eyed soul” just to wiggle out of the question. Southern Gothic is interesting. I’ve seen a few Goths down South.

CB: You did a brief tour with GLB last year, and you’ve been booked for the Haldern Pop Festival in Germany later this year. How did this tour come about? What was it like? Any plans for anymore dates?

GLP: The Grant Lee Buffalo shows were incredible last year. The silence of twelve years, all that pent-up energy exploded right out of the box the first show in. We’re coming back for more this summer, including Haldem Pop Festival in Germany and the HMV Forum in London. In the old days our year was laid out fifteen months in advance, with no end in site. That was tough. We’ve always played every show like it was our last. It’s no different today.

CB: Are you currently reading anything? If so, what is it?

GLP: I recently went back and re-read Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee which is a riveting historical account. Being of Mvskoke Creek heritage, I have a long interest in Native American studies, our history, customs and so forth. In fact my new album is called Walking In The Green Corn. That title, the song is based on a Southeastern Native tradition known as the Green Corn Dance. I’m currently raising independent funding through PledgeMusic.com and looking to release the album later this year. Fans can get involved and pre-order Walking In The Green Corn online http://www.pledgemusic.com/artists?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=grant-lee+phillips. I’ve just started reading Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History by S.C. Gwynne.-Grant-Lee Phillips

Adam Levin’s Phenomenal Hot Pink

            My experience with Adam Levin has always been through his stories. I know he did The Instructions, and people I respect like that book a lot, and that’s fine and good, but he first knocked me on my ass with “Hot Pink,” the title story of his recent collection (the title story: published in McSweeney’s #18; both his collection of stories and novel: published by McSweeney’s). Here’s that story’s first paragraph: “My friend Joe Cojotejk and myself were on our way to Nancy and Tina Christamesta’s, to see if they could drive us to Sensei Mike’s housewarming barbecue in Glen Ellyn. Cojo’s cousin Niles was supposed to take us, but last minute he got in his head it was better to drink and use fireworks with his girlfriend. He called to back out while we were in the basement with the heavy bag. We’d just finished drawing targets on the canvas with marker. I wanted small red bull’s-eyes, but Joe thought it would be better to represent the targets like the things they stood for. He’d covered a shift for me at the lot that week, so I let him have his way—a triangle for a nose, a circle for an Adam’s apple, a space for the solar plexus, and for the sack a saggy-looking shape. The bag didn’t hang low enough to have realistic knees.”

Enumerating the badassery of that paragraph would take days, but the thing that’s most amazing here, and the talent Levin’s got so in spades throughout this collection, is his ability to create full, real characters. If that sounds like simplistic claptrappery review-speak that means nothing, look again at that paragraph: that narrator’s thick and real after one paragraph as most characters get by a book’s end. We know he’s maybe a touch juvenile (the sack bit), has a moral code (allowing Cojo to choose what got drawn), and we don’t know yet whether it’s some wry humor or what about Cojo’s cousin and his choosing beer and fireworks and a girl over driving to Sensei Mike’s, but it’s something. There is, of course, that masterful myself in the first line—a word that reads just off enough, just human and weird enough, to make a character come blazing into vividity at a hat’s drop. For what it’s worth: Jack, the narrator, is 17 and a high school dropout and is in other reviews called a thug (ehh…I’d argue that’s a stretch), and has the hots for Nancy, of whom he’s nervous he’s dumber than. The story’s got electrically strange elements—a garbage truck with balloons on the grill, an incorrect barbecue attended, stolen grapefruit—but the real point of the story, as it is in lots of the other stories in Hot Pink, is language.

For instance those stolen grapefruits. Jack and Cojo get nodded at by a man across the street, and the boys accost him (okay, so they’re maybe a touch thuggish) and demand his grapefruits. After being given the grapefruits, Jack and Cojo arrive at Nancy and Tina’s. Here’s part of the scene:

Nancy said, “What’s with the grapefruits?”

            I said, “We intimidated a man. It’s all words.”

It’s all words. This could be the collection’s guiding spirit or motto. Don’t believe me? Here’s a passage from “Finch,” another story about a pair of boys in Chicago:

On our way back to the alley in the back of his ma’s, Franco told me, ‘See? It’s all in the voice. That’s how you get stuff. Speaking with conviction. Makes you convincing.’ (In the same story, Franco III, Franco’s dog, will kill based on a specific command, and will cease trying to kill based on another specific command. Again: It’s all words.)

Maybe the best story in here might be the one that was, until appearing in the collection, unpublished: “RSVP,” a story that ran on McSweeney’s website the week of the book’s release. Again there are similar aspects—young male friendships, the power of words (in “RSVP”‘s case, both regarding starting a religion and the perfect love letter)—to some of the other great Levin stories already in “Hot Pink,” but also, again, there’s a careening joy to the thing. Basically, this: you cannot tell where a Levin story will go, though I don’t mean that the stories gather and provide power because of how they surprise, I mean they gather power by how they jitter and jump, how it’s all words ends up being, over and over, such a powerful fact in these stories. You’ll be undone at the end of half of them (and, in fairness: some of these stories are eh experiments ["Relating," and "How to Play The Guy"]), in something like shock at what Levin can, seemingly so casually, pull off. It’s a great collection.

Sarah Jaffe’s THE BODY WINS

            I was lucky enough to hear Sarah Jaffe early on—winter of ’10 or so—and was even luckier to be able to be among the maybe two dozen folks who got mesmerized by her in ’10 or ’11 in Omaha’s The Waiting Room Lounge—the woman was up there with an acoustic guitar, spare accompaniment, and her voice was so many forks of lightning through that night—I can still, if I work at, recall how “Vulnerable” (a song I wasn’t massively into or not into from her debut, Suburban Nature) sounded, made new with a thumpy percussive flourish. She ghosted with and spooked through her own songs that night, bringing bones to light I hadn’t necessarily heard before, and I remember feeling 100% thrilled with how she was doing things (which doesn’t have to be the case when an artist reworks his/her stuff, as anyone who has seen a weird Dylan show knows [yes, he's a genuis, and yes, I love him, but some of the workings of his songs at his shows are just odd]). What I’m trying to say is: the woman put on, when I saw her, not just a hell of a show, but a show which, had I been paying better attention, would’ve made clear what The Body Wins, her latest, has now made sharply, awesomely clear: Jaffe was pushing into and, I’d argue, through her own music, looking for new clues to chase.

For real: listen to the first track of Suburban Nature (the fantastic “Before You Go”) and the first of The Body Wins (“Paul”) back-to-back; we’re talking about a shift, a growth, that’s as significant as the leap Wilco made to YHF, or LCD Soundsystem from their first to second disc, or Radiohead. Sure, stuff stays the same: Jaffe’s voice is still among the most mighty and gorgeous sounds imaginable, simultaneously strong and almost wincingly tender, and yes, it’s still pop music—it’s not as if she’s suddenly channeling Bartok or something (I don’t know if pop music sounds derisive or anything; it’s certainly not intended—I don’t know what else to call good music anymore. What genre exists anymore?). But Jaffe’s made some phenomenal growth from her first to second LP (a growth all of us could behold as well when she dropped The Way Sound Leaves a Room, her EP from September of ’11). Here’s the video for “Glorified High”:

I want to make this clear, too: Jaffe’s musical growth is not, I don’t think, merely the result of finding new instruments, adding some synths—the equivalent of an instrument clothes-change or haircut. She seems to be trying to find a new way into her songs, with results that are electric (I can’t not think, always, of how Tweedy spoke in the movie I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, when he’s confronted post-solo-show at one point by record store dorks who ask about the rumors they’ve heard about the new Wilco disc, and Tweedy says they’re finding spaces in their music and letting it have more holes in it). Jaffe’s The Body Wins is ultimately a darker affair than SN, yet the album ultimately doesn’t feel darker so much as thicker, murkier (this may be because of songs like “Hooray For Love” and “Talk,” two songs which feature a ferocity entirely absent from SN (and songs which, it should be noted, are fundamentally unclear: in the case of the former, the minor-key dirge of the music clashes mightily against the statement of the lyrics; in the latter she sings “I’ve opened my mouth too many times / and now that I’m done talkin’ / here you come walking” [I'd like to note that it's real easy to mis-hear the first of those lines as I've broken my mouth too many times, and I'm actually sorry I cranked it + now have clarity]).

There’s plenty more, obviously, to say about this, but ultimately I’m only really capable of jumping up and down and huffing on and on about Jaffe. Here’s everything I could possibly say: I can think of maybe three or four bands or musicians whose work will automatically be stuff I check out, forever, no matter what. Radiohead’s in that camp, ditto Dylan, Westerberg, etc. There aren’t many, is the thing, and the musicians that are on that list, for me, are bands that’ve been around for a long time, have shown again and again an urge toward growth that basically assures me of something fresh, a new sonic view, even if I ultimately don’t like whatever direction they’re moving in. Sarah Jaffe’s now firmly on that list: I can think of no young musician this exciting, no one taking these sorts of interesting risks and trying so urgently to make her way as an artist. I’m almost embarrassed to use that word, artist—it’s fey and silly sounding, I suppose, or at least I fear it comes off that way. But for real: Jaffe’s an artist. She’s as mighty + rare as they come. Get on board.

That Guy With All the Sex Stories

God Bless America by Steve Almond

Okay, so in the interest of full disclosure, I have to say up front that I’m a bit biased here because Steve Almond blurbed my recent book (and if that seems like it was a cheap self-promotion plug, it totally was).  But that doesn’t change the fact that he’s one of my favorite short story authors of the past ten years and that his new collection God Bless America is not only fantastic but also his best story collection yet.

Let me also acknowledge that in the stuffy, self-aggrandizing, throat-clearing world of capital-L literary fiction, Almond is a polarizing figure. The most common charge against him seems to involve his fetishization of, well, anything (remember that this is the guy who wrote an entire story about Michael Jackson’s dick entitled, appropriately, “The Idea of Michael Jackson’s Dick”). Plus, it doesn’t help that his last book Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life got slammed in the NYT: “A wrought-up, jocular treatise on music as gut-level soulcraft, it’s long on sarcasm and exaggerated attitude — a first-person survey of 30-odd years in the life of a self-described ‘Drooling Fanatic.’” Fortunately, God Bless America appears to find Almond back in a more comfortable position, crafting stories that combine low-brow humor with eloquent prose, and which are as heart-wrenching and insightful as they are amusing.

What’s more, God Bless America finds Almond maturing, if you can believe it. Humor-wise, he’s still up to all his regular tricks, but he’s scaled back the attempts to shock, the cheaper gags that make critics roll their eyes. Many of the stories have a heft that we haven’t seen up until now, including “Donkey Greedy, Donkey Get Punched,” a surprisingly grim tale about a psychiatrist and his professional poker playing client; and “Hopewood,” in which a couple of hapless college grads take part-time jobs helping an elderly man collect old discarded furniture to paint and sell. Stories like these seem to speak of desire on Almond’s part to venture beyond his customary schtick which, while greatly enjoyable, does sometimes come off as a bit too light.

As do some of the less-than-stellar pieces in God Bless America, like “First Date Back,” in which an Iraq War vet, having just returned to the states, pursues a stewardess he meets on the plane; or “A Jew Berserk on Christmas Eve,” which is about, well, pretty much that. It’s not that these stories necessarily fail; it’s just that they lack the depth that make the previously mentioned stories such knockouts. (Ironically, “First Date Back” is one of the few stories in which Almond consciously strives against his usual brand of humor.)

Almond’s appeal has largely been based on his ability to use humor to address what usually amount to distressing truths about our selves and our culture. He spoke about this in an interview in the latest issue of Gulf Coast, the often misconstrued distinction between using humor to get at something real versus using it just for laughs: “The basic misunderstanding…begins ways back with Aristotle, the idea that comic and tragic modes are somehow separate and opposed. That’s complete nonsense. The comic impulse arises directly from feelings that inherently tragic: sorrow, shame, disappointment, moral outrage, and so on.” An oversimplification this may be, but it still aptly underscores Almond’s literary philosophy: humor, in whatever form, needs to be doing something, articulating some larger, difficult truth, and by this measure God Bless America is a phenomenal success.

Guest Post: Anna Roorda on Tuccelli’s GLOW

           (The following’s a guest review by the great Anna Roorda, a young writer living in Illinois.)

            The satisfying feeling that fills your belly when you get what you pay for, when you see what you expected to see (plus more!), when you are filled completely—these feelings are both rare and remarkable. It’s what we’d call “to deliver.” And Jessica Maria Tuccelli delivered with Glow, a book that claims, from its inside jacket, to be the product of weighty and lengthy amounts of real live research with people and stories and landscapes that seem foreign to my temperate-climate-Midwest mindset. Tuccelli spent three years in the South doing research for this culturally mammoth work of fiction. Excuse me, I apologize—it’s not called the South, as she claims that parts of Georgia are said to have more Appalacian and Native American roots than one word allows them. Mixing American folklore and African American history and Native American families and the prejudices surrounding every type of family, Tuccelli truly did her research. She doesn’t simply conceptualize the historical events and swirling family trees, but she completes these stories and caps them off in a way that humanizes their experiences. And, mind you, these experiences aren’t easy to bite through—they are often blood and tear-soaked; torn apart by sadness and uncontrollable events—like the Confederates’ role in the Civil War and the face of legislation upon helpless people, or the ways the sins of a generation can quiver and haunt for years into the future.

            Perhaps the only weak parts of the whole novel lay in the connecting family trees that easily also make the novel great. Maybe this is the one true example of when strength can just as quickly become weakness. Because, let’s face it, the connecting family trees and names and ethnicities are sometimes hard to recall as a reader—thank God for thinking the “Solomon B. Bounds, Pioneer, Family Tree” just before the book’s start to serve as a guide for all her readers out there. These pages acted as a clear and handy reference system when my brain failed to make the connections I wanted it to make throughout the book. In addition to the inconvenience that this reference offered, it was a bit bulky and reminded me vaguely of the need to keep a finger on the list of characters and descriptions whenever I read a written play. Perhaps I was handicapped, or held back, in a small way, from an ethereal page-turning experience by this hindrance.

            Further from a sense of well-deserved readerly enjoyment, this organizational ‘bump’ may have left me feeling a bit more disconnected to the character relationships Tuccelli sought to bring about. Some of the most important, unspoken messages present in this book came about to me by the image of the family tree. “You love those you are related to. You love those you are related to no matter the cost to your dignity or your livelihood or your popularity or your comfort. Family goes deep into the bones of the soul, and though you may want to live without them, they’re there in your life and they may haunt you if you want them to or if you can’t let them go, or even if you think you can.” These connections still came to me, but there were a little more hazy, laced in mist, and slower to come by than Tuccelli (likely) originally hoped or intended.

            In any case, there’s a whole lotta Glow to celebrate. The purity of story, the precision of the places that are so well-described by Tuccelli—these capture what it is to forge a life and an identity for the first time, especially in a place where a diverse identity isn’t always welcomed or respected. The female voice was one of the highest assets this book has to offer. By Tuccelli’s narrative lulling, we get to unravel the connections for ourselves. We aren’t always given the answers for what Lovelady, the girl-child ghost represents, or why certain characters possess a certain glow all their own. The episodic plot lines, the acuteness of the voice in the story—we read on, ever-obedient and ever-thirsty for more, please, more, Jessica Marie Tuccelli. I don’t think I’d be over-exaggerating to say that for a male to write this novel would be impossible and bulky. We need the wandering stories and the connections that don’t always (and don’t have to) match up perfectly at the end of it all. We, basically, need this story told by no other.

            I learned new things while reading this novel. I learned that we always know where home is and how to get there because our “rememories” are far more sure than the most detailed map. I learned that the harshness I imagined to accompany pre-Civil War Georgia wasn’t necessarily there—what may have been present was a strength of the people there that I can’t even fathom. I learned that the marshes and the tobacco fields hold stories of their own kinds of injustice, and that though we can’t possibly know them all, Tuccelli offers us a few that she’s heard herself.

            Best of all, Glow isn’t a story so imagined that we have to take a giant, ghastly jump on the ship and be hypnotized by the author into thinking, “Man, this is really good stuff here, I don’t ever want to get off this boat.” This story is laced with living history that breathes a sweet breath. It’s a story all it’s own and you get the sense that it existed before all on it’s own just fine without you until Tuccelli wandered upon it in a hickory tree cove sometime within the three years of her research and decided to cultivate it like you would till a field. I needed no convincing to believe it, or buy into it, or read further, or appreciate it in an honest way, and that’s the truth. In this way, Jessica Marie Tuccelli is the craftiest of them all, weaving like a weaver would places and peoples and blood and skin and land. And this story is something that maybe the hopeful, firefly part in each of us has perhaps been waiting to see for a very long time.

Existentialism and Zombies

Zone One by Colson Whitehead

I’m not exactly sure when it was that zombies became such a fashionable literary trope. One could argue as far back as Romero, though I suspect the legitimization of the undead as a subject of popular fiction has a lot to do with Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend and Max Brooks’ World War Z. Since then, hordes of writers have thrown in their two cents to the zombie literary genre, some with a great deal of success, some without.

Of course, to be fair, there’s only so much you can do with a zombie story; there’s a pretty strict formula to follow, and only the most skilled writers are ever able to pull off something new in terms of narrative while adhering to it. Coleson Whitehead seems to be one of these skilled few. In Zone One, the award-winning author of Sag Harbor makes a clumsy but ultimately enjoyable foray into the zombie genre.

The story, which takes place over the span of three days, concerns a man who goes by the name of Mark Spitz (the reasons for him having adopted this moniker are made clear in the book). Spitz is part of a three-man team of “sweepers” through a section of Manhattan following a zombie apocalypse; their mission is to seek out any stragglers, that is, men and women who’ve been infected with the zombie virus but for some reason never transformed into the gruesome flesh-hungry creatures; rather, their brains more or less shut down, locking their bodies into place indefinitely, a kind of exacerbated shock syndrome. Spitz’s team is one of many sent in to help renovate NYC for habitation once more, a massive task overseen by the mysterious head office in Buffalo which, with a comical degree of corporate sponsorship and naivete, is trying desperately to reclaim the U.S.

Of course, surprise surprise, things begin to go horribly wrong, and soon enough the team realizes that the zombie threat is far from gone.

But that’s actually sort of beside the point in Zone One. Whitehead seems  aware of the limitations of his subject matter; even with all the gore and violence, the focus in this book is character–not only that of Mark Spitz and his team members, but also of New York City itself, the memory of its grandeur and the promise of its rebirth. This is, in a lot of ways, Whitehead’s love song to the Big Apple, which wouldn’t be so bad were it not for the book’s overinflated prose style. Perhaps in an attempt to compensate for the hokiness of the genre, Whitehead writes with wordy passion, employing an annoying degree of poeticism that in certain places really just makes it hard to understand what the hell he’s trying to say. He’s also quite fond of the word “interregnum,” which I guess makes sense in the context of the story, but still: you can’t use that word even once without seeming the least bit showy.

Ironically, one word that never once appears is “zombie.” Again, this is Whitehead acknowledging the history and inherent drawbacks of the genre in crafting legit character-driven fiction, and then finding ways around them. He doesn’t want this to read as a Dawn of the Dead-type horror tale but rather a brutally plausible story about America’s obsession with calamity. The human drive to persevere is rendered frighteningly realistic here; this is the only piece of zombie fiction I’ve ever read that addresses the large-scale psychological impact of such an event: the Buffalo office distributes intricate leaflets on PASD, or Post Apocalyptic Stress Disorder. To be sure, the gore here is second to the deep philosophical panic of extinction; Whitehead is writing about our fixation with post-9/11 catastrophe, and while the journey through Zone One can be bumpy, the destination is very much worth it.

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

I turned 30 not too long ago, and since then I’ve become disturbingly obsessed with aging. Or so says my girlfriend. Call it a midlife crisis, but at certain milestones in our lives we can’t help but reflect, with a certain level of regret, on what we’ve accomplished so far, the people we’ve become. Not necessarily out of any overt sense of self-hatred or failure (although this is sometimes the case), but mostly because we’re in a position to do so, and because we want to believe that we’re learning from our mistakes, even though there is pretty solid evidence that this doesn’t happen. And nobody seems to understand this better than Julian Barnes.

Our narrator in The Sense of an Ending is Tony Webster, now a middle-aged divorced father. Webster begins by laying out for us the story of his friend Adrian, whom he met while in middle school. Adrian was everything that Tony and the rest of the group was not: sophisticated, intelligent, seemingly too advanced for the world. So it’s almost no surprise when Tony discovers decades later that Adrian has committed suicide. What does surprise him is the package he receives in the mail shortly thereafter and his subsequent discoveries about Adrian and their group of friends.

It’s hardly any wonder why The Sense of an Ending, which doesn’t even run 200 pages, won the Man Booker prize: the prose is immaculate, gorgeous, the story fleshed out with grace and the kind of understanding that can only come from a life lived. Plot aside, Barnes’ primary concern here is Tony’s aging, his clumsy attempts to reconcile elements in his past that even the reader knows cannot be reconciled. Tony is, for all intents and purposes, a prick, although he doesn’t know this, not in the way that the reader can see, no, he believes himself to be a swell guy, an honest fellow attempting to figure out what it was that happened between Adrian and a certain ex-girlfriend. His thoughtlessness is both hilarious and a little sad, the result of which is a fantastic story rendered in exquisite prose.

JD McPherson + Alabama Shakes + That Old Old Sound : Best New Music 2012

If you’re paying attention to music of late you’ve likely heard lots about the Alabama Shakes, whose debut album, Boys and Girls, dropped last week. If you’re really, really paying attention to music, you maybe caught a song called “You Ain’t Alone” which hit the net last year (maybe you, like me, got it from Aquarium Drunkard), and maybe you, like me, searched in vain for months to find more about this band called The Shakes (which is as shitty a name as possible far as Google goes, almost as bad as The Glands, maybe the greatest unknown band ever)—a band which seemingly had recorded just that one song, “You Ain’t Alone,” which song could well have been an outtake from some old Janis Joplin session you’d never heard of, or, at least, I never had.

The Shakes, of course, we now know, were hard to find because they’d changed to the Alabama Shakes, and if you decide not to pay attention to this band you’re missing maybe the year’s best album—certainly the year’s most exciting debut (or, at least, top 2). Boys and Girls, their 12-tracker, is lots of things: it’s certainly, first and foremost, a sort of old-school album, something that sounds timeless—or, maybe better, sounds ripped from an older time, something that could’ve been recorded reel-to-reel in 1971. I mean that both in terms of the sound of the recording and in terms of the songs themselves. By way of example, here’s a video of them performing their phenomenal “You Ain’t Alone”:

That’s Brittany Howard, the band’s frontwoman (and good god, what a frontwoman: is that not exactly what vulnerable ferocity looks like?). That patience in their playing and style—that ability to let a song bubble quietly along, the way they don’t rush to fill in and max out every sonic aspect of the song (you think it’s common to let just a bass line keep a song moving? Listen to old M Ward and listen to his latest: even folks who’ve been huge champions of understated musicality seem to’ve been lately lured into believing more is better, always and ever)—that’s among the glories manifestly availble on Boys and Girls, but there’s more to it. Here’s what’s been my listening life of late: I’ve had a playlist with the Alabama Shakes and JD McPherson’s debut albums on it, and both albums feature throw-back sounds, yes, but the thing that unites them far more crucially is how…innocent sounding the music is. This gets tricky.

Look, one of the things that music’s seemingly always been able to offer—and one of the things one can get almost nowhere other than music—is the way it’s overwhelming, both to listener and to performer. Find some transcendent video of a great band—Pearl Jam, whoever—and the thing that’s striking in ways that no other art can possibly strike is how much the musicians can get moved and undone by what they’re doing. Yes: writers and painters get moved by what they’re doing when they’re making their art, certainly, but we don’t perform: we create, in quiet and remove, then let the shit come to light later.

But so anyway: what I’m getting from the Alabama Shakes, and from JD McPherson (about whom more below), is that Boys and Girls is ultimately hugely innocent—and I don’t mean that as a criticism. They sound like four people who dig the shit out making music together, and the album sounds exactly like that, song after song: like celebrations, each track. I don’t want to dwell on what that says about the music business and scene that that’d be so rare as to be worth celebrating, but there it is: Boys and Girls by the Alabama Shakes sounds as pure and innocent and fun a record as any I can think of from the last decade. It’s put-it-on-and-do-yardwork music, and it’s have-three-beers-and-finish-the-night music, and it’s, for me, been every-minute music for the last good while. You’re missing more than you can imagine if you’re missing this.

And then there’s JD McPherson, whose Signs and Signifiers is now coming out in wide release though it has, apparently, been available for the last 1.5 years or more as a smaller release. You’re best off just digging what this album’s all about by way of the video for the single, “North Side Gal”:

RIGHT?

The bulk of what’s written above applies to McPherson and his trio as well as it does to AS: this is innocent music, pure music. Let’s neither get all Alan Lomaxy, nor let’s pretend that innocence or purity are aspects which automatically lend music power or punch (who hasn’t seen earnest-as-fuck crapshows?). But, again, as with AS, there’s a directness and joy in what McPherson’s doing, or at least that’s what it sounds like to this listener. Here’s what you should maybe know as well: everything used to record and make Signs and Signifiers was made before 1970 (often well before). A move like that could, depending on the seen-it-all world-weariness of the listener, strike as a gimick or schtick—I wonder how I’d feel it, say, The Strokes were to try a stunt like that. I don’t know. I’d claim, though, that McPherson and his bandmates did not endeavor to make an album like Signs and Signifiers out of any avaristic, let’s-look-like-this intent. Who knows, maybe they did, but I doubt it: what it sounds like is they’re into this old-time rock+roll music (which, let’s be real clear: McPherson’s songs could be fucking outtakes from Ray Charles’s magic 1950′s years; I’m not kidding) and they’re trying to make the best old-time rock+roll album they can. Meaning it doesn’t remotely sound like they’re trying to appear any certain way, meaning they are—like the Alabama Shakes—about as rare as it gets in terms of modern bands and music: folks who seemingly, truly, don’t give a shit about coming off any certain way other than trying as hard as they can to get to the sound and idea they’re most moved by. If you think I’m crazy and that this is more common than I’m believing it to be, I’d simply ask: when was the last time you were surprised by music? We talk about Adele with such reverence for a reason, and we did about Amy Winehouse the same way for similar reasons, and we talk about Radiohead for similar reasons. All of these folks? I’d argue that they share an uncompromising, un-self-conscious drive to get to the music they’re most moved by. Holy hell do you owe it to yourself to listen, as do we all.

Updates + Elsewhere + MADDOW’S DRIFT

Elsewhere: an interview with me at the Sycamore Review. I’m more and more enjoying talking about MN and writing.

Also elsewhere: recent KR blog posts, including an interview with Tupelo Hassman. Like an idiot, I a bit back posted here about an interview not panning out with Hassman. For those who don’t do interviews: maybe 15% of the time, interview questions get sent (over email) and one simply never hears from the artist again. Ever. This is especially bad with bands, I’ve found. Regardless: I’d just assumed the same’d happened with Ms Hassman, but I’m here glad to report it was easier, just a matter of things and cracks and fallings, and I’ll here reiterate, again, that girlchild is a 100% badass book, and among the spring’s best fictions, and you’re a fool for missing this. I’m still sort of amazed it hasn’t been made of a big deal of, but I imagine this one’ll find it audience, day after day (seriously, buy and read the thing).

Also in interview news: I emailed with Daniel Torday about his about-to-be-released The Sensualist, which is coming out from Nouvella. I can’t say enough good about this book, though it struck me as offering a different sort of satisfaction than I usually track toward fiction to receive. I don’t know how to speak real clearly about this trait, or even how to logically articulate what it is I’m talking about. Mostly this: the book simply goes along, on its own, in ways I found sort of startling—its got a generative movement, but I couldn’t, no matter how closely I looked, figure out the causality that made it move forward. Maybe the easiest way to articulate this is to say that some books are really obvious in terms of plot movement—the reader’s fairly dragged through the narrative, and the narrative ends up being hugely satisfying, of course, though the reader’s also able to maybe scan certain late-stage paragraphs, simply because the narrative, building-block aspects of the story have become so crucial it’s hard to focus on much else. I’ll say here that Torday’s book is not something you want to skip a paragraph of, both because a) the writing’s wonderfully confident and clean, and b) the plot’s motion is not something you can see overtly coming. It’s a hell of a thing. Read it.

And now, today:

Drift by Rachel Maddow

I neither love nor loathe Maddow. My politics align closely with hers, and I appreciate the hell out of what she does, and probably the only reason I’m not a feverish fan is exposure: I lived years without tv (not for some moral snooty reason, just that I was broke and drank what disposable income I had). I want to establish this stuff at the start simply to make clear that what follows is in no way some fanboy screed in which the book in question is judged according to the merits of its writer in another context, or in how much the reviewier likes the writer.

(An aside: my wife enjoys Maddow quite a bit, and one of the reasons my favorite person so enjoys Maddow is because Maddow doesn’t wear jewelry on air. Maddow [my wife would likely argue, I think, and I'd agree] is betting that smart folks don’t care about baubles stuck into pierced lobes or dangling across necklines, that smart folks are more interested in the content of the news and ideas being presented than the way the person presenting appears [and that there's some very small but significant and worthy battle being fought by Maddow, a battle about how women are expected to look while on camera]. There are other reasons to enjoy Maddow, but that seems a worthy and great first aspect.)

All that said: holy shit is this a good book. This may in fact be the best policy book I’ve read in I can’t think how long—certainly the last policy-ish book I read this good was Herding Donkeys, though that wasn’t policy in this way. Anyway: Drift‘s subtitle is The Unmooring of American Military Power and I felt a level of oh-my-gosh-yes-exactly while reading it that I haven’t felt from any recent nonfiction. The ultimate gist of Maddow’s argument is that the way the United States wages war has increasingly become a private, unilateral decision, an executive command adjudicated behind the doors of some secure room in the White House’s basement—a decision which, sure, is come to with the help of military and intelligence experts, but ultimately the decision’s in one man’s hands.

This, of course, is antithetical to not just the constitution, but very much to the spirit in which the founders wrote the constitution: the President, acting as commander in cheif, was structurally prevented from falling under the sway of any war’s rush—Congress was given the power to declare war because it was a messy institution with divergent voices, because war is too massive a decision to put it in one—any one—person’s hands. Post-Vietnam, Congress moved to present future presidents from being so able to pursure military actions (given how de-fanged Congress’d been made by that fiasco), yet as of Reagan, such Congressional strictures were getting mercilessly end-runned.

And Reagan, for what it’s worth, really really does not come across well in Drift. The reader’s made to understand that there are structural issues afoot between the President and Congress and who gets finally to decide to go to war, but the scope of Reagan’s lying and duplicity is just jaw-dropping (Grenada, Iran, Nicaragua…it’s just shocking).

Drift‘s a real easy book to love—smart, passionate, and, I’d argue, largely nonpartisan. Maddow may be among the firebreathing leftists the right wing likes to believe will lead to this country’s undoing, but she comes across in Drift as someone nerdy and insightful and deeply engaged, akin to Sarah Vowell, and she’s wonderfully not content to sit back and lazily just point out things’s badness: the last chapter’s a primer on how we’re not stuck, how we’re still capable of living up, as a country, to the highest ideas and ideals of who we are. Maybe that sounds sappy, but Maddow actually makes you believe. You’re a fool to miss this.

Updates + Elsewhere + MADDOW'S DRIFT

Elsewhere: an interview with me at the Sycamore Review. I'm more and more enjoying talking about MN and writing.

Also elsewhere: recent KR blog posts, including an interview with Tupelo Hassman. Like an idiot, I a bit back posted here about an interview not panning out with Hassman. For those who don't do interviews: maybe 15% of the time, interview questions get sent (over email) and one simply never hears from the artist again. Ever. This is especially bad with bands, I've found. Regardless: I'd just assumed the same'd happened with Ms Hassman, but I'm here glad to report it was easier, just a matter of things and cracks and fallings, and I'll here reiterate, again, that girlchild is a 100% badass book, and among the spring's best fictions, and you're a fool for missing this. I'm still sort of amazed it hasn't been made of a big deal of, but I imagine this one'll find it audience, day after day (seriously, buy and read the thing).

Also in interview news: I emailed with Daniel Torday about his about-to-be-released The Sensualist, which is coming out from Nouvella. I can't say enough good about this book, though it struck me as offering a different sort of satisfaction than I usually track toward fiction to receive. I don't know how to speak real clearly about this trait, or even how to logically articulate what it is I'm talking about. Mostly this: the book simply goes along, on its own, in ways I found sort of startling—its got a generative movement, but I couldn't, no matter how closely I looked, figure out the causality that made it move forward. Maybe the easiest way to articulate this is to say that some books are really obvious in terms of plot movement—the reader's fairly dragged through the narrative, and the narrative ends up being hugely satisfying, of course, though the reader's also able to maybe scan certain late-stage paragraphs, simply because the narrative, building-block aspects of the story have become so crucial it's hard to focus on much else. I'll say here that Torday's book is not something you want to skip a paragraph of, both because a) the writing's wonderfully confident and clean, and b) the plot's motion is not something you can see overtly coming. It's a hell of a thing. Read it.

And now, today:

Drift by Rachel Maddow

I neither love nor loathe Maddow. My politics align closely with hers, and I appreciate the hell out of what she does, and probably the only reason I'm not a feverish fan is exposure: I lived years without tv (not for some moral snooty reason, just that I was broke and drank what disposable income I had). I want to establish this stuff at the start simply to make clear that what follows is in no way some fanboy screed in which the book in question is judged according to the merits of its writer in another context, or in how much the reviewier likes the writer.

(An aside: my wife enjoys Maddow quite a bit, and one of the reasons my favorite person so enjoys Maddow is because Maddow doesn't wear jewelry on air. Maddow [my wife would likely argue, I think, and I'd agree] is betting that smart folks don't care about baubles stuck into pierced lobes or dangling across necklines, that smart folks are more interested in the content of the news and ideas being presented than the way the person presenting appears [and that there's some very small but significant and worthy battle being fought by Maddow, a battle about how women are expected to look while on camera]. There are other reasons to enjoy Maddow, but that seems a worthy and great first aspect.)

All that said: holy shit is this a good book. This may in fact be the best policy book I've read in I can't think how long—certainly the last policy-ish book I read this good was Herding Donkeys, though that wasn't policy in this way. Anyway: Drift's subtitle is The Unmooring of American Military Power and I felt a level of oh-my-gosh-yes-exactly while reading it that I haven't felt from any recent nonfiction. The ultimate gist of Maddow's argument is that the way the United States wages war has increasingly become a private, unilateral decision, an executive command adjudicated behind the doors of some secure room in the White House's basement—a decision which, sure, is come to with the help of military and intelligence experts, but ultimately the decision's in one man's hands.

This, of course, is antithetical to not just the constitution, but very much to the spirit in which the founders wrote the constitution: the President, acting as commander in cheif, was structurally prevented from falling under the sway of any war's rush—Congress was given the power to declare war because it was a messy institution with divergent voices, because war is too massive a decision to put it in one—any one—person's hands. Post-Vietnam, Congress moved to present future presidents from being so able to pursure military actions (given how de-fanged Congress'd been made by that fiasco), yet as of Reagan, such Congressional strictures were getting mercilessly end-runned.

And Reagan, for what it's worth, really really does not come across well in Drift. The reader's made to understand that there are structural issues afoot between the President and Congress and who gets finally to decide to go to war, but the scope of Reagan's lying and duplicity is just jaw-dropping (Grenada, Iran, Nicaragua…it's just shocking).

Drift's a real easy book to love—smart, passionate, and, I'd argue, largely nonpartisan. Maddow may be among the firebreathing leftists the right wing likes to believe will lead to this country's undoing, but she comes across in Drift as someone nerdy and insightful and deeply engaged, akin to Sarah Vowell, and she's wonderfully not content to sit back and lazily just point out things's badness: the last chapter's a primer on how we're not stuck, how we're still capable of living up, as a country, to the highest ideas and ideals of who we are. Maybe that sounds sappy, but I know it's