Weston Cutter's Blog, page 8

Guns, Outlaws, Daughters

 BULLETPROOF VEST by Maria Venegas

Maria Venegas’ Bulletproof Vest: The Ballad of an Outlaw and His Daughter is at once a memoir and a biography of probably one of the most fascinating gangster you’ve never heard of. Throughout the pages, Venegas charts the story of her father, an outlaw well known and oft wanted by the authorities of Mexico and Chicago, a man who was said to cheat death time and time again, and how this legend’s life intersects with her own.

Of course, the violent stories of blood and revenge, love and limelight don’t come to Venegas right away. The girl grows up in the same hacienda her father was born in with a vague sense of the danger and the reputation surrounding her father. Even after they move to the United States, to Chicago, it’s normal for Maria and her sisters to hear a row of gunshots go off, whether in celebration or as a threat. The girl’s only a child when she sees the violence firsthand – her father stumbling into the house with a hand trying to hold in the blood, his friend dead in the yard due to, what the newspapers would later report as “an argument over the last beer” (if only it was so simple).

Like so many outlaws, he disappears, leaving behind Maria, her mother and siblings for years. Men might be following him, and the thought that these men might harm his family does nothing to stall his flight.

Understandably, his children grow up hating him, fearing for him, waiting for a call one day saying he was shot in a bar, killed by the roadside, something, so the man that has been as good as dead to them for years can finally be buried.

To be fair, the man tries, sort of. He calls. Even though his children rarely talk to him. Maria herself really has nothing to say. It’s too hard to explain her own life – how hard she fights to get into college, her move to New York, the sacrifices she has too make too young – to someone so distant.

Fourteen years go by with this estrangement and then, Maria decides to visit him.

It’s so strange to watch the tenderness between the two – in the missing years, has her father gone soft? Of course not, the man has still killed again and again. Sometimes, simply because he’s already pointed the gun at another man’s face and after he’s pointed it, there’s no stepping down. Yet with Maria, there’s a newfound role of father in this man. He weakens, shows how much he wants her to stay, lets her into his life, divulges his secrets and the tales of his past. What didn’t work as a little girl-father relationship succeeds as a father-friend.

Of course, the story of her father is still difficult. He’s a man who kills, threatens, hurts and walks away with little to show for it. He’s a man that did abandon her family in times of need. Yet, he’s always her dad, her flesh and blood, and even further, the hero of epic tales and legends throughout the land. Bulletproof Vest never forgets the struggle and the tension between these two versions of her father, the hero and the villain.

Does Not Look Like Catey Shaw

 MARINE PARK by Mark Chiusano

The term “Brooklynites” has changed. You probably used to know what that meant, but I have no idea what you are picturing. Now, at least for my generation, Brooklynite probably refers to some 20-something that got bored in Michigan and moved to the borough to pursue acting or like, vintage watch repair or some shit. Brooklynite probably refers to someone who lives in Bushwick. Yeah, they definitely live in Bushwick. Wait, what’s the difference between Brooklyn and Bushwick? Aren’t they like, the same?

Let’s face it: there is more to Brooklyn than what we see in Lena Dunham’s Girls, or that now infamous cliché music video “Brooklyn Girls” (or “Brooklyn Boys”) Not to say there isn’t truth to Girls – really, many 20-somethings experiences probably looks just like that. They probably do only run into racial minorities on the bus on the way to another shift at Café Grumpy. They probably never leave Bushwick.

So it’s new, at this point in the cultural flood of violet-haired femmes flooding into the neighborhood, to find a book that focuses on the other Brooklyn. On the babies who grew up there, thought they might leave, then had some kids with a south-side Brooklyn girl and ending up staying. It’s new to read about the lives and times of Marine Park rather than straight-up Bushwick.

And so Mark Chiusano frames his 17 stories about the people of Marine Park. People you know have Brooklyn rolling through their blood by the way they talk about “going into the city” as if the other boroughs are another world. Little kids who go from shoveling your walkway to holding down the jobs your uncle used to have.

Many of the stories revolve around a pair of these boys, Lorris and Jamison, the first-person seer of a good portion of the book. Their experience looks nothing like what I’d expect from binge watching too much Girls – it seems so much more community, so much more neighbor-helping/knowing-neighbor, almost more small town. The boys age throughout these stories, find love, find their niche. While Lorris goes off elsewhere to college, only coming home for emergencies and major holidays, Jamison stays. Something about Marine Park keeping his inside its boundaries.

There’s other characters as well. One a sleaze who sells goods like cigarettes and pills to grade school kids before going home and jerking off with one hand holding a firearm (I KNOW this guy! I know him!) Another a couple who’ve raised their kids in the area, been there seemingly forever and look like they’re going to stay seemingly forever. Another a group of friends that pass herpes around, one to the other to a boy to a girl. All people you probably remember from your own neighborhood, really. While little seems to tie these characters to Lorris and Jamison besides their neighborhood, reading the new characters serves at least to show the other experiences of residents besides that of the young male protagonists.

While I had fun reading through the stories, discovering this new neighborhood, there’s little in terms of heart or juicy sentences that’s really making it stick for me. I had hopes this would like, catch and capture a significant time/area/culture much like Let the Great World Spin, but there’s no comparing. Maybe more than anything, Marine Park can be culturally significant right now to make us remember that, yes, there are real people in Brooklyn that live here and grew up here and don’t look like Catey Shaw.

Bad Feminists are the Best Feminists and Writers Apparently

Roxane Gay’s BAD FEMINIST

I said it a couple months ago when I reviewed Roxane Gay’s novel An Untamed State and I’ll say it again: Woman’s got a voice to be reckoned with.

As with most young female writers who recognize themselves as a feminist to whatever degree, I can’t help but feel like Gay is better at writing out in intelligible ways the same exact thoughts that are going on in my own head. I mean, I could have written this paragraph (by that, I mean it’s like she’s describing my life. I probably couldn’t have written it as *well* as Gay):

“Pink is my favorite color. I used to say my favorite color was black to be cool, but it is pink- all shades of pink. If I have an accessory, it is probably pink. I read Vogue, and I’m not doing it ironically, though it might seem that way. I once live-tweeted the September issue…. I have opinions on maxi dresses! I shave my legs!… If I take issue with the unrealistic beauty standards of beauty women are held to, I shouldn’t have a secret fondness for fashion and smooth claves, right?”

So when I heard she was releasing a book called “Bad Feminist,” and it was basically about how she willingly acknowledges some of the ways she sucks and will probably continue to suck at feminism, I don’t even remember what I did. I probably put a towel down or something like that as I read further.

Because really, I love the terminology of “Bad Feminist.” Again, it’s like Gay is better at articulating my own thoughts. I mean, I hate being mansplained, but I would be open for Gay to follow me around and Gaysplain things I say at any time.

I’ve always thought of feminism as an ideology the same way any religion or political party is an ideology. Like, I’m a Christian and a democrat, but when I walk past a homeless man on the street, I don’t give him my coat. I don’t even give him cash. I’ll smile if he looks at me, and if I have extra food, maybe I’ll share, but I don’t practice what my bleeding-heart ideologies teach. If I were a good Christian, I’d probably do a lot more volunteering. If I were a good Democrat, I’d probably learn more about my candidates instead of voting for people because they have a little (D) by their name, and when it’s so local they don’t have that (D), just guessing based on how progressive their last name sounds (THIS IS TERRIBLE, DO NOT FOLLOW ME).

It’s the same way with feminism. I call myself a feminist, but a real feminist, or a “good” feminist would probably think I’m a poser; just some wannabe now that feminism is entering it’s third (or fourth… I forget where we landed on that debate) wave. I mean, I LOVE Vogue! And Bitch, but if I could only read one magazine for the rest of my life…. I have hardly gone three days without shaving my legs since the age of 12. I bleach my hair blonde just because I like it. I read The Second Sex for the very first time in June. I read The Feminine Mystique for the first time just a few months before that. That’s about it for the historical feminist texts I’ve read. If feminism were a church, I’d be the one the congregation prayed for a little more than the others. I am the Bad Feminist Gay is talking about.

So, it’s entirely freeing that after reading Gay, feminist icon on a pedestal I myself have created for her, calling herself a Bad Feminist, she allows room for this kind of sucking at the ideology.

What I’ve discussed so far is like, 3 out of 30 or so chapters of the book, though. The vast majority of the pages are collected essays Gay has previously written for Salon and other culture sites about anything from Scrabble tournaments to why The Help is actually a really shitty movie.

I’m actually kind of upset by how much I agreed with like every single essay. She talks about why she wasn’t as pumped about 12 Years a Slave as everyone else seemed to be – I totally understood what it’s like to be given the side eye for saying maybe that film could have not focused so much on the white savior / blood and guts aspects of the man’s story. She talks about the annoyance that Girls has to have EVERYTHING and include EVERYONE and not be offensive anytime, but still be funny – I can’t help but nod along as she questions why other shows aren’t held to this standard.

Of course, many many of these stories are incredibly difficult to read. It sucks to hear any more about Trayvon Martin since we know how shitty that story ends and how we haven’t even learned anything since her original essay. It pains me to read another woman’s account of her own rape, especially at such a young, tender age. It fucking sucks when Gay points out all the misogyny in today’s world you didn’t even realize before, but now can’t stop thinking about.

So maybe I’m a Bad Feminist. I hear Gay is hawking buttons spouting that logo, which I would like to get my hands on and wear loud and proud.

Don’t Stand So Close to Me

 Excavation: A Memoir by Wendy C. Ortiz

In middle school, one of my friends had a crush on her teacher. We used to giggle with her, laughing at how passionately she’d spout out lines about how cute he was, how good he looked in his khakis that day, how much smarter he was than all the boys our own age that the rest of us had crushes on. We had crushes for a hobby. School was boring; it helped to project love onto someone no matter how clueless they were. I only got through 6th grade history because I had such huge crush on this boy I sat by, measuring my time in glances he made in my directions, the number of times I’d make him laugh throughout the hour. So I get it, why my friend had a crush on the teacher. Here was a crush you were supposed to stare at all day. Here was a crush miles more mature, more sophisticated, more intelligent than the milk-chugging ilk of our own. Here was a crush that actively tried to connect with you, complement you, even though it wasn’t in the way my friend would have liked. I get why a little girl could have a crush on her teacher.

Do I get why a grown man would have a crush on a student, some 14-year-old girl in the third row?

Abso-fucking-lutely not.

Yet, it happens all the time. Male teachers are let go for fooling around with 5th graders. Female teachers get fired for having sex with 15-year-old boys. Investigations are started. Piles and piles of abuse are unearthed. Girls come forward.

Maybe though, Wendy C. Ortiz is among the first to detail it in a memoir, the stunning and haunting Excavation.

At just 14, Wendy is wise beyond her years, bookish, well-read and yes, a shy quiet girl in the class. A new teacher doesn’t mean much – just another adult giving her homework – until Mr. Ivers, or as he asks her to call him, Jeff, assigns the class to keep a notebook as a journal.

I’ve kept journals for class before, in 7th grade. I know we’ve all seen Freedom Writers or whatever that Hilary Swank movie was, where the at-risk youth keep journals and discover their voices and it’s all wonderful and they become stronger people. This is literally, the 1% of what can go right. When I kept a journal in 7th grade, I just used it as a diary in an effort to get to the proper page count. I’d draw pictures. I’d lie about kissing boys. And when I got it back from my teacher, there were notes on every page in conversation with what I’d written. When I lied about getting flowers from a boy, he’d written “he’s a lucky guy!’ When I talked about how ugly and calf-like I was, he’d write something reaffirming I was beautiful. Like, I’m convinced it was innocent – nothing ever happened ever – but looking back, thinking about it, it still sort of creeps me out. Is there really, ever, an appropriate way for an older male with authority to comment on a girl’s personal diary?

Ortiz was a writer as well, from early on, and her teacher noticed it. He called her on the phone after reading her journal, talked to her for hours, and after a little while, began to graphically explain the things he wanted to do to her, the places he wanted to touch. A 14-year-old sitting on the phone, she listened blank face, answering yes when asked if she had a crush on him, too.

I get why a 14-year-old would go along with an adult’s crush. 14-year-olds are stupid. They don’t know shit about relationships or love or sex. Which is why they’re easy easy meat.

Weston and I have talked just a little bit about why guys would prey on someone half their age. What do they think they have in common with little girls? Why would they believe the girl’s in LOVE love and not just in confusion of love since this is probably one of, if not the first relationship she’s ever been in? Ultimately, it seems to come down to power and ego. The girl’s a helpless figure. Even the attention from the guy makes her feel something like power. The guy knows this relationship is all in his hands. It’s nice to have a little control, to tell the girl not to talk to other boys even as you sleep with other women. Remember – young girls are dumb, and not in the sense that we’re not intelligent, we just haven’t heard men lie and lie and lie to us yet. Our bullshit detectors are at zero. You could tell us anything, if you’re tricky, and we’d believe it.

Throughout the rest of Excavation, Wendy relives her time throughout high school, relying heavily on the personal diaries she kept which detailed every conversation and kiss she shared with her teacher. It’s horrifying, really, and even she sense something is wrong with this relationship, especially after hearing a song from The Police on the radio talking about some Nabokov guy and a situation that sounds a lot like her own. Here’s the scariest part – at 14, she reads Lolita (even though Jeff tells her not to) and thinks that’s not her. While Lolita was prepubescent, only hints of breasts and hips, Wendy bloomed early, already looking like a grown woman. So, in her mind, it was different. Her man was attracted to women, not the body of little girls.

AHH I could go on and on about how horrifying this memoir is and how creepy and WRONG WRONG WRONG and messed-up this Jeff guy is, as well as the way our culture makes space for this creepy wrong wrong wrong people to dwell in, but instead, just go get Excavation, read it and weep.

Blue Crow Blue

 Adriana Lisboa’s CROW BLUE

Vanja’s mother isn’t the type of woman who stays in one place. Once she decides to leave, she goes and goes and doesn’t look back. It’s not that she’s a gypsy, she’s no senseless wanderer traveling without direction; it’s just that when she gets tired of something, it’s over.

She’s always been this way. She’ll move between Brazil, America, settling in a place for as long as she can. It’s the same with men. She loves them until she has to leave them, a switch that happens instantaneously. Fernando, for instance. They were married six years until it just…ended. She flew off so quickly, moving to America, meeting a man named Daniel and falling for him.

It’s Daniel that gets her pregnant, fathering Vanja. But she never sees him again. It’s Fernando’s name written as the father on Vanja’s birth certificate.

Which isn’t a big deal. At least until Vanja’s mother dies, leaving the 13-year-old girl alone, with a dad somewhere in America.

Staying with Fernando, her father in name even though she had never met the man, Vanja plans to track down her biological dad from a new base in the United States. At least, that’s the reason she gives to us as the reader. In truth, Vanja carries on the life of her mother, leaving her home in Rio de Janeiro at the drop of a hat, easily casting aside her possessions and material weights.

Fernando’s a mystery to her, but also, maybe the only man who truly knew her mother. A former guerilla fighter, the man is now living quietly in Colorado, working as a security guard and cleaner, keeping his profile low. Vanja doesn’t know much about his past – her mother told her so little about her husband – but over the course of the novel, his story (as well as much of her mother’s story) is revealed.

Of course, it’s scary at first, showing up at the doorstep of a man to whom Vanja has no real claim. And it’s weird living in America, a country where you have to ask people if you may pet their dog before rubbing its tummy, where you have to be careful not to brush shoulders on the sidewalk. Vanja adopts quickly, though, thanks in no small part to the English her mother taught her as a child.

Also brightening her time in the U.S. – the 9-year-old neighbor boy Carlos, a precocious little kid that is happy to carry on conversations with Vanja in Spanish, and eventually, step in as a sort of surrogate brother.

The story starts off with a pseudo-orphan leaving home, coming to America just to track down the rest of her family. Quickly though, it’s evident she’s had a family all along, just waiting for her to discover them, and willing to help her discover her the truth about herself along the way.

See America! with John Waters!

 CARSICK by John Waters

I have a love/hate relationship with John Waters. Mostly love, though. I look forward to watching the next movie (I’ve only seen about five of his) with utter fascination, googling all the trivia online, getting so excited about what sick things may happen. Then I watch it and am like “why the fuck did I think I would be able to eat chips during this?” as images of assholes (not mean people, literal buttholes) implant themselves forever on my impressionable mind. I’m pretty sure my boyfriend hates whenever I try to rent a film – I don’t think I let him touch me for a week after watching Pink Flamingoes, I just kept screaming “PERVERT!!” whenever he got close to me. Yet, I keep watching. I memorize those lines like I’m about to audition. I watch the behind-the-scenes features, during which, most surprisingly of all, John Waters seems like a nice old uncle.

This is the first Waters book I’ve read (he’s got a bunch more of various themes and popularity), so really, I had no idea what to expect. Could words ever get as visceral as watching people throw up on film? Would this book just be a bunch of metaphors about throwing up? Would John Waters come off worse than some gay Woody-Allen pervert?

Surprisingly, while narrating Carsick, Waters comes off as a sensible, normal guy. His plan, the premise of the book may be crazy enough – Waters plans to hitchhike from his home in Baltimore all the way to his apartment in San Francisco, alone. John Waters is also probably the only person who COULD do this – I know if I tried, you’d probably read a report of my rape/murder somewhere in Pennsylvania. But a 66-year-old gay cult film director? He’d be fine, right?

So Waters tells himself in his head, just before the first of the book’s three parts, a novella about the best hitchhiking experience he could possibly have. It’s funny – the voice narrating this is so calm and collected, so ordinary and relatable, but then, he presents these scenarios of an “ideal” trip that nobody would ever think ideal, ever. My ideal hitchhiking experience? I get picked up by a cool late twenties chick shuttling some vintage records all the way to San Fran; we stay together the entire time; I never get murdered. Waters’ idea of an ideal trip? Riding in a car with an Army of God driving instructor locked in the trunk, screaming at the man, “I wish I was a girl so I could get an abortion!” Getting picked up by a dishonorably discharged librarian with a mission to collect novels based on the porn based on major motion pictures (for instance, Homo Alone). Spending his night at the home of a man who gets off watching cars demolish each other. Best road trip ever, right??

And then, to play Devil’s Advocate, he imagines the very worst that could happen on his trip. Which really, in some cases, didn’t sound all that different from some of the best things that could happen. Like, he could get stuck in a car with a fan who just constantly wanted to quote lines from his films back and forth. People could forcibly tattoo him. He could have to ride on a MOTORCYCLE. He could develop a goiter and run out of supplies to shade in his mustache!!

Finally, Waters does the real thing and records for us. The results are somewhere in between the best that could happen and the worst (he meets nice people; he spends a lot of time getting passed by, standing alone in the rain). There are parts that seem too story-lined to be true, like his getting picked up by an indie band out on tour, and parts that are so hilariously close to home, you know that’s how it would be for real, like this kid being texted minute after minute by his mother, she being worried to death about what her son is doing with some weird hitchhiker.

Maybe the best part about all these real rides is simply watching Waters open up the views on certain types of people he thought he knew to a T. For instance, his first ride comes from a middle-aged woman, his second from a minister’s wife, even though he was sure women would never pick him up (and he understood why). Waters meets lots of happily married hetero men, a genre he didn’t even believe existed before.

And even better, we get to watch what this road trip does to the young and impressionable driver Waters refers to simply as ‘The Corvette Kid.” A 20-year-old Republican small town city-councilor, the Corvette Kid picks Waters up at the beginning of his trip, takes him beyond the borders of his own destination before saying goodbye. Later, the kid wants to help again and ends up taking Waters through much of the West, experiencing much of America for the first time, despite getting texts from his friends that say shit like “Way to go, you’re with a gay man in a hotel room in Reno?” Hey, if you don’t get Waters, you don’t get him.

Fiction and a real-life hitch-hiking story all in one book, written by the master of trash – really, do you need a better tagline for me to sell this? Oh, and in case you’re wondering, this book didn’t leave me pushing my boyfriend away or grimacing at complete strangers. It just left me with the hope that there’s still some pretty neat people out there.

Fucking Coolidge Effect

 LOVE ALL by Callie Wright

There was this distinct classroom session I had in a class I can’t even remember now where we discussed the theory that men are biologically programmed to cheat. They may love their wives to death, the affair could mean nothing but still, it’s the male nature to have as many sexual partners as possible, not matter his marital status.

There was more, like all these scientific reasons about the evolution of mankind, how back in cave people times, the man was programmed to plant his seed in as many wombs as possible to ensure his lineage continued; the woman, on the other hand, to cling loyally, no matter what, to one man in hopes that he would take care of her and their offspring. Okay, I understand in cave man times, maybe this made psychological sense, but in our times, this is bullshit. Sex for men is no longer about reproduction (in our cases, really, a cheating man would pray NOT to produce a child), and are you kidding me? Married women get the itch to have affairs as well.

In Callie Wright’s Love All, Bob Cole is the type of man that buys into this myth. Men have affairs. Wives understand not to take it personally; this is just men being men. Years later, Bob’s daughter Anne is married to a man having an affair of his own, despite the years spent faithful and the two high-school children they have together. Is cheating really just a programmed male thing?

Bob’s affairs are numerous, unremarkable even to him. One girl is like another, until a “fictional” novel set in his hometown of Copperstown, New York, reveals the entire neighborhood’s dirty laundry. Bob’s secrets threaten to escape, especially if this wise-ass girl’s book catches on nationwide.

As far as Anne’s marriage, her husband Hugh has picked possibly the worst woman to sleep with. Hugh’s a principal at a preschool he’s mostly brought up himself, and it’s going well, enrollment is booming, even though a little boy’s been hurt on the playground which may or may not have been sort of caused by supervisor’s lack of care. Hugh goes to visit the boy in the hospital and ends up have sex with the child’s divorced mother not even yards away from where her son is sleeping. Stupid. They hook up again. So stupid. They kiss in public. Stupid stupid stupid.

What the hell is wrong with these men? Can affairs really be kept secret? Does the wife ALWAYS know? Can love actually last more than like, 4 years?

Really though, this old guys suck. The only hope, the only promise of love, real real intimacy and care is found in Anne and Hugh’s children, the saving grace of this whole unhappy family.

There’s Teddy, the oldest son, a senior in high school. He’s a jock, not much of a thinker, and by no means a “sensitive jock” type on the outside. Teddy’s the one who discovers his father’s affair, and his reaction at cheating is the only one I could relate to: rage, anger, disappointment, disbelief, vomit. Even Anne’s trying to calm the kid down, even though it’s not like his father had the affair on him. But still – it’s this attitude that presents the biggest source of hope, evidence that history doesn’t have to repeat itself, that cheating isn’t programmed into all XY brains.

And then there’s their daughter, Julia, a bright young women with friends thick as thieves and a language all her own. She’s got the wisdom, the intuition, all the brains we could ask of the next generation. She’s still cool about love. In my favorite part of the book, we hear one of Teddy’s best friends talking about how he’s totally falling for Julia, wanting to take her out, but when he calls, Julia so simply thinks about it, doesn’t see it, and essentially tells him nah. And that’s the end. Why did I love this part so much?? I don’t know, in most cases, a girl has to have a REASON not to like a guy. There was nothing seemingly wrong with this boy; Julia just didn’t feel it. It’s empowering in the stupidest simplest way.

Really though, the essence of this book: Everyobody’s lonely in some sense, teens aren’t as fucked as the news says; Grown-ups suck. And knock it off with the affairs, okay?

Paper! Snow! A Ghost!!

 Rebecca Makkai’s THE HUNDRED-YEAR HOUSE

I don’t know if anyone has died in my apartment. I really don’t want to. I know the guy who rented the place right before me was an old man that lived in it for years and years. I just pray he moved out, went to the hospital or home to family, or you know, just died at peace, because seriously, I cannot deal with the idea of ghosts.

It’s as dividing as politics – are ghosts real or just a myth? Personally, there’s shit I can’t explain. I can’t rule anything out.

Neither can artists, intellectuals and the highbrow residents of a hundred-year old house-turned-artist’s-colony in Rebecca Makkai’s latest, “The Hundred-Year House.”

An old home just outside Chicago, artists, especially writers, have been flocking to the Devohr’s (oft referred to as the Divorced hahaha) estate from 1900 to the present majority of most of the book, the eve of 2000. There’s a strange dichotomy between the home’s residents. While some have creative bursts of energy, pumping out art better and faster than before, others go adrift, losing concentration, becoming paranoid and useless inside the walls.

The difference seems to stem from how each person deals with the ghost of the house, Violet Devohr, an unhappily married woman who lived there for only a brief period, killing herself someone on the grounds. Some think she threw herself from a high window, another imagines her hanging herself. Of course, the rationalist blame the eeriness, the strange happenings on superstition, the fear of Violet stemming only from an oddly uncomfortable oil painting of the matron hanging in the dining room. The rest, though, know there must be more to the sounds, more to the mysterious sights and woozy feelings that abound.

Outsiders don’t understand. A little boy from the neighborhood may best summarize the impression onlookers have – “It’s an asylum for people who think they’re artists.”

Makkai’s story unfolds in pieces, throughout the decades separating the century of the home’s existence. First comes last, meaning the story opens on Y2K, on Zee, the beautiful great-granddaughter of Violet, a Marxist scholar who keeps herself tethered to reality mainly through her husband Doug, an academic currently working (slowly) on a biography. The two surround themselves with more deep thinkers, including Zee’s mother, Grace, a woman who has lived at the house for many many years, through an unhappy marriage and other secrets.

Where it gets thick: Doug gets bored sitting around the old house, can’t concentrate on his writing and starts exploring around the attic. Grace doesn’t approve. Doug is curious why, until he begins to find things that don’t add up.

The art of this story comes softly with Makkai revealing just the right amount of history and mystery with each page. As we move back, secrets come to light, characters come into focus, their stories and motivations suddenly making sense.

Take this, if you will: I never read mysteries, and ghost stories don’t grab me. Complex family dramas I’ll devour, and expert prose, always.

Scaredy Cats & Surface Cracks

 

DEATH IS NOT AN OPTION by Suzanne Rivecca  

On the train the other day, a perfectly polished girl set down next to me. You know the type – perfect black day cut at the appropriate lengths, string of pearls around her neck, ponytail so cleanly composed it looks unreal. The girl bosses want you to look like. A few stops later, a sweaty looking guy, spiked hair, basketball shorts and a black hoodie even though it’s July gets on. The girl sitting next to me sees him and they begin talking, innocently at first, about her new job, where he’s living, and then, about the fact he’s four days sober. They start getting in detail about the causes of his relapse, how she’s successfully been two years sober, how she would recommend her sponsor, Mrs. ACTUAL NAME, if only she sponsored boys, who his sponsor is (again, saying the actual name), and how he was resistant to the group (Alcoholics or other addiction, I didn’t catch) the first time around. Okay, so this isn’t the sort of shit you should be talking about loudly on public transit, and also, I should keep my eavesdropping ass out of other people’s business, but still.

What does any of this have to do with anything is a far question for you to be asking at this point. So, really, I couldn’t help but wonder what some cosmic God, or maybe just the Catholic God was trying to tell me as I was hearing this conversation, which was happening simultaneously as I was reading “It Sounds Like You’re Feeling,” one of the incredibly honest and hilarious stories in Suzanne Rivecca’s 2011 collection of stories, Death Is Not an Option.

Basically, what happens in “It Sounds Like You’re Feeling” is this: a girl is working at a psychosis-crisis hotline and she sucks at it. Actually, it seems like the hotline itself sucks in general. Per the title, basically the only thing these people can say to those in crisis is “It sounds like you’re feeling [insert adjective].” As in, a guy says he can’t stop biting his fingers until they bleed, the operator might say, “It sounds like you’re feeling anxious,” which, every half-sane and many crazy people understand is a bullshit response. Oh, also, the operators are constantly encouraging the callers to take a warm, soothing bath. The girl protagonist sucks at her job simply because she can’t think of the right adjective to regurgitate to the callers quickly enough, and also, she herself may not be psychotically sound.

Damaged, maybe not psychotically sound, individuals are a cornerstone of this short story collection. From a teen-aged girl fighting her Catholic-school teachings by handing in papers arguing for women’s right to abort, to a teacher obsessing over the scratches on one of her students arms, Rivecca presents a collection of women who may not be perfect themselves, but at least they can see the fucked-up little cracks in the surface, a collection of women that may look all perfect and wear pearls on the outside, but really, that could have just gotten out of rehab or still have bleeding wounds still hiding under the surface.

There’s the story of a woman who was touched by her uncle as a child, who now can keep a healthy relationship with a man – as long as she doesn’t tell him about the abuse. Even though, the men also will say it’s not something she can keep to herself, whenever her story does get told, it ends up hurting her again. Doesn’t she deserve the right to keep some of the things that have hurt her a secret, especially if it will prevent her getting hurt again?

In another tale, a young author deals with an erratic landlord, a man who shows her a place, then gives it to someone else, then offers it again, then eventually, condemns the woman for playing the whore over real estate. When she files for a restraining order many don’t see the point of, questions of whether her past, her desire to play the martyr come into question.

Through these stories (which, YES, I’m getting to far too late, but still talking about now, so get over it), Rivecca explores just how terrifying it can be to be a woman. It’s something I’ve been struggling with lately – too many times recently, I’ve had to heartily explain to boys why I don’t want to do something because I am scared, often having to do with, simply, I’m tiny, I can’t defend myself, I don’t want to feel self-conscious. Is fear a predominate emotion for men? Do men feel degrees more on edge as soon as they leave their apartment complex? Is it even a woman thing? Is it just me? At least with Rivecca, I feel some comfort in that, yeah, other women are terrified, too.

This Is What Mastery Reads Like

            What’s weird is that Dybek’s analogue seems likelier to be found in poetry than prose. Sure: John Irving writes with lots of similar things cropping up (wrestling, New England, mother/son relationships in his, to Dybek’s Chicago, sensual/sexual encounters, weather like a character and the past like a horse you can’t stop riding or being thrown from), but there’s a way in which Paper Lanterns feels overwhelmingly like a Jack Gilbert book of poetry: it feels and reads like a near-magic, transfixingly beautiful work that circles some central idea/notion/’project’ [let's not fight about this term: I understand that Poetry Is Not a Project, says Lasky et al, and that's fine, but most poets (even--maybe especially--Lasky) have issues or concerns or obsessions that arise again and again in their poems, and to pretend otherwise is dumb and to claim some beef in calling it a project seems silly].

Gilbert’s who strikes me as the apt comparison maybe just because he’s who I’ve been reading lots of lately, but there’s also this thing that Gilbert does a lot which I’d argue Dybek’s doing a lot, too. If you know Gilbert’s stuff, you know that lots of it’s about domestic love (massive/wild understement): he’s a guy who fled to Greece for years so he could ravenously feast on his own life, lived his own way, and then his poems are these unfurled, peeled-back things, all exposure and intimacy. This especially happens more and more as of The Great Fires, his third book, a book as haunted as any—and haunted by the ghost of Michiko, his dead wife (there’s a poem in there which ends with him finding one of her hairs wrapped around the roots of a plant, the thing just about upends the reader, I can’t remember the title though it hardly matters: own the book). Here’s “Michiko Dead”:

 

He manages like somebody carrying a box

that is too heavy, first with his arms

underneath. When their strength gives out,

he moves the hands forward, hooking them

on the corners, pulling the weight against

his chest. He moves his thumbs slightly

when the fingers begin to tire, and it makes

different muscles take over. Afterward,

he carries it on his shoulder, until the blood

drains out of the arm that is stretched up

to steady the box and the arm goes numb. But now

the man can hold underneath again, so that

he can go on without ever putting the box down.

 

The whole book’s like this: a continual examination and consideration of how we do it, in this case: how does Jack Gilbert keep living, keep day-to-daying, despite the absence of Michiko?

 

We’ve certainly now reached the point of the program where it’s fair to ask Okay, but what the hell’s Gilbert got to do with Dybek? Dybek’s two new books, Ecstatic Cahoots and Paper Lantern, were released recently from the evergreat FSG (seriously: if you’re looking to buy books blind, with no knowledge of authors or whatever, you’d be wise to just purchase FSG and Graywolf books and you will, overall, be batting as close to 1.000 as you’re likely to get), and on the books’ release there was attention paid, certainly, but I was struck by the lack of rapturousness that greeted them. Maybe everyone’s still on Saunders and Munro and will get to Dybek shortly. I hope so. I’m nervous that Dybek’s reached that such-a-known-and-established-classic status that folks actually don’t *read* the shit, same as how (I anyway) have a tendency to sometimes skip poems by the Established Greats (Levine, say, or Goldbarth), which skipping’s always fucking idiotic: these guys are the Greats and Masters for reasons.

The books under consideration here are strange, strange books, maybe the weirdest books of fiction that’ll be published this year (I’m including the weird, bracing books dropped with Pacific Northwest-rain-like regularity by Calamari Press, which is another press you’re wise to just regularly purchase from). Here’s how weird these books are: the first story in Ecstatic Cahoots is called “Misterioso” and the entirety of it is as follows:

 

“You’re going to leave your watch on?”

“You’re leaving on your cross?”

 

What’s weird about that story is actually not just the story; it’s that, 136 pages later, there’s a story called “Naked,” which begins as follows:

 

“You’re going to leave your watch on?” she asks him, as if he’s guilty of an indignity on the order of disrobing down to all but his socks.

“You’re leaving on your cross?”

It’s not a question he’d have otherwise asked, especially given the way the cross—gold, delicate, and too tiny to crucify a God larger than an ant—brushes the pale slope of her left breast.

 

“Naked” goes on for another maybe 500 or so words—it’s over in two pages—but it’s impossible (for this reader anyway) not to feel like this little do-si-do is a perfect capture of one of the best and most beautiful and beguilingly strange things Dybek’s doing: there is identical text in these two stories, but, given the size of “Misterioso,” it’d be easy to, half a book later, come up on “Naked” without quite remembering it. What it reads like more is an echo, an attempt to dig back into whatever impulse led to the first stab at it, anyway (that’s admittedly a reach, but it’s hard not to read “Naked” as something of a revision or deepening of “Misterioso”). I didn’t even intend to get this caught up in this stuff, fascinating though it is: Ecstatic Cahoots is a fine and good book of short fiction, but, at times, the fictions are—due less to brevity than their focus on capturing the arrival and departure of sensations, feelings, sensual conjunctions—ethereal. Which is fine: they’re clearly not made to stick in one’s ribs like the stories in Paper Lantern are (please note I’m not judging, or claiming that rib-stickiness should be some Ultimate Metric in short fiction).

And Oh, dear reader: this is among the year’s glorious collections. Be advised it’s a slow book, Paper Lanterns (which for the record is subtitled Love Stories, which I’d argue could be singularized just fine: love story), but it’s slow in the way a Spanish city is slow during siesta (for some reason I picture Cordoba), slow meaning pausing and—to me anyway—meaning deepening. Here’s sort of what I mean: the second story in the collection is titled “Seiche,” which means this in terms of lakes, which is where the story begins: at Lake Michigan, in Chicago. The first-person narrator’s a case-worker and is relating details from his life: a priest he used to watch swim in the lake on his morning trecks to class when he was a track scholarship student at Loyola; an old love, a study-abroad student named Nisa, from Beirut; and a woman on his current case-worker list. And he’s out there swimming in the Lake now, during a Seiche warning, thinking about this stuff.

Sure, I’ll easily admit it: it’s dumb to list the details of the story. Here’s the qualifier, though: there’s no way I know of to summarize a Dybek story, and—like the built-up power of the best literature, the sort that, when quoted, feels like a shitty joke (we’ve all got our lists of artists who are like this: what good is my quoting a line from Jorie Graham, or Stevens, or Wallace, Kalytiak Davis, whoever, what’s the good of a single line when the ramp that led to the startling precipice of beauty the line earns and exhibits is missing?)—there’s not much to say or do about a Dybek story, criticism-wise, other than gesture excitedly at the work and shout “READ IT!!!” I could do the little above here’s-the-ingredients bit to any of the stories in here (favorite story, hands down: “If I Vanished,” the book’s penultimate and a story thick with a past that the character can’t quite get clear, can’t quite wrestle down and pin into a clear, readable position), but I can’t see what that’d do. What you need to know is that each of the stories in Paper Lantern are remarkable, strange movements in which you’re presented with a situation or scene at the beginning, which scene/situation very quickly shifts, often to the past, often to an amorousness whose photo still hangs importantly in the narrator’s mind’s hallway. Quite a few of the past loves share similarities—the woman the caseworker thinks and talks about in “Seiche” reappears later in another story. Even the title story—which ostensibly is built around a science lab going up in flames, a science lab in which a functioning time machine’s being built—is actually about old love. In this way the book feels remarkably akin to a machine I don’t know the name of. Maybe it’s just called a tumbler. What it is (there’s one in a basement I’m familiar with) is a thing one puts stones into and, by rotating the stones against each other, smooths them. A giant polisher? Something like that (some horologist: pipe up if you’d like). This is what Dybek’s doing in Paper Lanterns: the deepest stones of experience and living are being turned, again and again, flinting against each other, edges cracking off as what’s superfluous is sheared away and what’s most elemental and essential remains. It sounds too huffy and overwrought here, by my writing. It sounds like I’ve swallowed too much Kool-Aid. Here’s what I’d close with: for some of us, a book’s location in one’s domicile says lots, and, for me, it takes a fuck of a lot for me to put a book on one of the two main shelves in the main room of the home (instead of downstairs, or upstairs, or in the office at work). That, of course, is where Dybek’s latest books now are, waiting for me to pull them again, which wait I can all but guarantee will be no longer than a few months. They’re like spells, these stories. Enchantments. I cannot shake them and don’t remotely want to.