I just can't believe it. That all you have to do is sleep with somebody and get caught and you never have to see your in-laws again. Ever. Pfffft!
I just can't believe it. That all you have to do is sleep with somebody and get caught and you never have to see your in-laws again. Ever. Pfffft! Gone. It's the nearest thing to magic I have yet found.
Don't be fooled by the sentimental title, or the romantic songs that lead off each chapter—these are sly and brittle ironies that ping emotional soft spots like a volley from a peashooter to the back of your neck. The Forgotten Waltz is pitch-perfect social satire that mirrors adultery with the reckless love affair of the Irish economy in the mid-late 2000s. Illicit sex, easy money—two sides of the same tarnished coin of lust. Sean and Gina pursue the former in a series of hotels around Dublin, while the Irish middle class strives for the latter in their gated communities and German sedans.
This is not the cozy Ireland of peat fires and Catholic guilt and rain on rose petals. This is boom-time Ireland, with all its flash and well-cut suits and Chardonnay and vacation homes and holidays in Spain. This is Ireland built by IT and pharmaceuticals and foreign investment. This is Ireland rising. This is Ireland falling. In The Forgotten Waltz lives are destroyed as fortunes and marriages are lost, as you would expect, but everyone survives and carries on, without really having learned a thing. As you would expect.
Narrating with pithy self-awareness, Gina embarks upon an affair with Sean, a married man with a little girl who is just slightly off-kilter, a bit fuzzy around the edges. Gina herself is married, to Conor, who is also fuzzy around the edges—solidly built, hairy, good-natured, a bit like a big hedgehog—not at all her type, yet somehow they marry and buy a condo. Her caustically funny voice is so natural. She is genuinely making an effort to get herself sorted, to atone, to be a person of compassion. At least she thinks she is. Gina is a woman in love, catastrophically; but she is not a bad person. She is outrageously, maddeningly human.
Years later, in the middle of a snowstorm that shuts down Dublin, Gina recounts how and where and when things went awry. But not why. You may find yourself scrabbling around the plot, looking for the reasons Gina and Sean risk their settled lives for the starched anonymity of hotel rooms and the pretense of nodding acquaintances when their social circles cross, which they frequently do (it is a small island, after all). Love doesn't seem to be the point. And of course it isn't. The point is the selfishness of the new Ireland and the new Irish within it. By the end, it's all turned to custard.
We listen to it . . . the rumour of money withering out of the walls and floors and out of the granite kitchen countertops, turning them back to bricks and rubbles and stone.
Anne Enright is one of the bravest writers I've read. Readers and publishers alike will take an author to task for characters whose behavior leaves our wells of empathy dry. And yet Enright writes without apology, pretense or false redemption. She isn't afraid to depart from cause and effect to acknowledge the universal truth that shit just happens. You fall for the right person at the wrong time. You take out a bank loan to support a lifestyle beyond your means because they are just throwing money at you, anyway.
The Forgotten Waltz is not without its moments of beauty and grace. Enright is so skilled, she knows how and when to thread in humanity, sometimes with self-deprecating humor, sometimes with visceral emotion. I love what she does and how she does it. I love that it drives readers crazy and occasionally, drives them away. With fierce and candid and gorgeous prose, Enright writes life's madness and makes us feel all the saner for it....more
I read each of these poems aloud. There was no other way to do it. The rhythm of Rankine's lines, the urgency of her stanzas, demand to be listened toI read each of these poems aloud. There was no other way to do it. The rhythm of Rankine's lines, the urgency of her stanzas, demand to be listened to as much as read. My throat, tongue, mouth, lips felt the meaning at least as much as my brain.
In the half-light, I am most at home, my shadow as company.
When I feel hot, I push a button to make it stop.I mean this stain on my mind I can't get out. How human
I seem. Like modern man, I traffic in extinction. I have a gift. Like an animal, I sustain.
From The Current Isolationism
There is very little of the literal in Rankine's debut collection; instead, quiet, keening allegory and dreamlike-imagery push politics and love and body and broken soul through thin ice into the air to be snatched like smoke. She writes often of loneliness and of love, which are inseparable conditions, aren't they?
I am dirt and all the nights that keep ending like this: I return from the party, my life is smoke, I fall asleep trying to seduce you.
From Wilt
Rankine presents a range of poetic structures, from numbered lists to tercets to free verse that ranges over the page, sometimes like the unchecked rush of a waterfall, sometimes like the painted stripes on a highway that keep you in your lane. But always, ever-present, is the lucid and luminous prose that rings like a clarion.
Dear night: It was so warm under you that I offered but you refused
to endure
From Vespertine
Here is what a broken heart feels like:
I turn to you to find there is no you, which means it's morning
and I will fail at everything today.
From Wake
Incorrect Merciful Impulses was a chance find at a Copper Canyon Press poetry reading of Pablo Neruda's forthcoming Lost Poems. An impulse purchase. A correct and merciful one. ...more
The power of desire. The first flush of lust that takes us to trembling bodies we hope will shelter us, bodies that might become home. Megan Kruse, in her debut, Call Me Home writes of desire and of home, and the vast space that separates them. In her world, that space is filled with violence, betrayal, and smoldering, heart-twisting longing.
Amy, barely out of high school and adrift in a tiny central Texas town, marries Gary a few months after they meet on a blind date. Gary is sure of himself, a man with a plan. He takes her immediately to Washington state, where he attempts to farm five acres of forest in the moss and mud of rural Skagit county.
Although there are early, frightening signs of instability, Gary isn’t immediately abusive. The first blows come several years into the marriage, when the couple has become a young family, with a five-year-old and another child on the way. In retrospect, we see what a skilled manipulator Gary has become, a sociopath who holds the puppet strings of his family in a tight grip. In one wrenching scene, many years into the marriage, we also see how skilled Amy has become in responding to the abuse. The week her children are at a school camp, she forces Gary into a blowout, knowing that there is a period of peace—weeks, months even—that follow a bad beating. If she can bring down violence upon herself now she will spare her children, at least for a little while.
With non-linear flashbacks that drift in and out of the main story, Call Me Home focuses on the year that Amy leaves Gary and this time, the leaving seems to stick. With her in flight is her thirteen-year-old daughter Lydia. Left behind is her eighteen-year-old son, Jackson. Amy and Jackson cover most of the narrative ground in anxious, searing chapters and Lydia, whose clear and plaintive voice is the book’s only first-person point-of-view, provides a counterpoint of hope.
Jackson, left behind after a heart-rending betrayal of his mother and sister, doesn’t remain long in the depressing double-wide, where his father Gary is a bomb that explodes again and again, without warning. Jackson lights out for Portland, where he hustles for a few dollars, a warm bed, drink or drugs. Offered a way out by a social worker, he takes a job cleaning up debris at a construction site in the Idaho panhandle. He lives alone, deep in the dry Alpine forest, shacking up in the sleeper cab of a long-haul sem. Jackson, reserved, lonely, nearly invisible, falls in love with his crew boss, Don, a beautiful man in his mid-thirties. Don is married, but during their trysts in half-built A-frames, his promises to leave his wife tumble out of his mouth like starlings from a barn.
While Jackson kicks his way into adulthood with steel-toed boots in a tiny, depressed mining town, Amy and Lydia find shelter in New Mexico. They change their names and prepare to rejoin the world, on guard but looking forward with hope and relief. Inexplicably, Amy returns them to her hometown, where fear that Gary will seek them out is overcome by Amy’s desire to be within the shelter of the family she left nearly twenty years earlier.
Megan Kruse writes with piercing clarity and a profound understanding of poverty, abuse, maternal love and the physical intoxication of lust. Her prose is spellbinding, unflinching, and vital. Call Me Home is one of the year’s most important debuts, for it signals the arrival of a singular, forceful narrative voice. ...more
I purchased this both as a resource for my own writing and to use in my writing workshops.
When I'm not fully engaged in writing a novel or writing frI purchased this both as a resource for my own writing and to use in my writing workshops.
When I'm not fully engaged in writing a novel or writing fresh material, a part of my soul starts to wither. I've learned I need to write fresh, new, even if it's just short pieces, while in the midst of revisions and edits, to keep my sense of intellectual and emotional equilibrium. I appreciate the specificity of these writing prompts, the unique themes and unusual scenarios and will use them as a way to enter into a story, a poem, an essay. For my works-in-progress workshops, I can mine some of these ideas to help students see their work in a new light, to explore their characters and themes in new or deeper ways. ...more
In Sweden, a 'wolf winter' is a particularly long and brutal season, “the kind of winter that will remind us we are mortal … mortal and alone...” CeceIn Sweden, a 'wolf winter' is a particularly long and brutal season, “the kind of winter that will remind us we are mortal … mortal and alone...” Cecelia Ekbäck's atmospheric, tense and brooding debut, Wolf Winter, opens in high summer, but the discovery of a mutilated body augurs the dark season to come.
Multiple characters share point-of-view time, but it is Maija and her elder daughter Frederika whose grip on the story's reins steers the narrative. Maija and her family have only just arrived from Finland to take over a dead relative's homestead when Frederika comes across the body of local man. It's presumed he was slain by a pack of wolves, but the nature of wounds would suggest otherwise.
Ekbäck pairs a murder mystery with finely-crafted historical fiction. Set in Swedish Lapland in 1717, Wolf Winter immerses the reader in an isolated collection of homesteads clinging to Blackäsen Mountain, as well as the politics of a monarchy on the edge of collapse. She shows us the power granted to clergy in holding together communities strung out over vast terrain and the power of legend in feeding suspicion and fear.
Wolf Winter joins other northern latitude noir literary fiction, such as Stef Penny's The Tenderness of Wolves (more wolves!), Eowyn Ivey's The Snow Child, David Vann's Caribou Island and Hannah Kent's Burial Rites, where frozen landscapes exact a dark tone, a ponderous pace, an otherworldly struggle for survival against elements both natural and abnormal.
The author set herself an enormous challenge for her debut: a blend of genres that relies on tight control of pacing, yet demands a rich tapestry of detail and exposition. There is a certain superfluity to some village scenes, a need to make certain the reader understands the distant political wranglings, but these are mild complaints set against a deliciously shivery tale rendered in gorgeous, pitch-perfect prose. After this impressive debut, I can't wait to see what she does next.
The Doctor who fixed Maria's madness was nearly impossible to look at. Not because she was ugly, but because she was so severely handsome. Her face an
The Doctor who fixed Maria's madness was nearly impossible to look at. Not because she was ugly, but because she was so severely handsome. Her face and body were arranged in sharp angles that sliced the air as she moved through space. When the Doctor sat in her armchair, Maria wondered if the cushions cried out when the daggers of her elbows sunk into them. "Graduation"
Story after story crafted in this exquisite, piercing prose. Kristy Webster invites us into a world that shifts in the shadows just beyond our own. This collection of short stories and flashing moments reveals an inner life that in our rush to achieve, earn, interject, assert, we pass by. Stop and listen to the scariest things, the most painful things, the most beautiful and haunting. Kristy has. She stopped and listened to hear the stories behind the noise and then gave us the gift of her own particular magic.
At age fifty, after three decades of rejection, Eldon marries an onion. "The Harvest"
Allegory is a delicate thing and in Kristy's hands it becomes a web made of shimmering strands, woven with an imagination fixed on the terrible beauty of the world.
These are stories of the lost and forgotten, the vulnerable and compromised. Stories of falling for the wrong person or perhaps the right one at the wrong time, of mothers who love like lionesses, of lovers who love until the sky cracks open, of the wounded who keep secrets and learn to survive.
A woman was in the habit of taking on lovers and not repeating herself. At night, upon their arrival she would open the door to her home without a word, turn and walk away, letting her silky cape fall to the floor, leaving a trail for the man in the doorway. In the dark, her body was collection of moons. In the morning she would offer coffee, and leave all conversation to her paramour, while keeping herself in little books, secretly stacked inside her ribs. "Birth"
In "Coco", the novella which closes the book, a little girl with a third arm leads us into an embrace of compassion. It is a story full of love and joy, that speaks of all the ways celebrating our weirdness liberates us from the burden of self-doubt. It shows the high cost of envy and the rewards of community, the perfection of children, the grace of hope.
Magical realism is storytelling's gift, for it takes us out of our present world and shows us the possibilities alive in our imaginations. It touches the most vulnerable parts, brings them to life, and allows them to dance. Kristy's gift is giving voice to the inexplicable, putting words to the things we feel but cannot account for.
My first BAE! A trusted reader recommended the anthology and upon finishing I thought, "What took me so long to read one of these?" It's like having aMy first BAE! A trusted reader recommended the anthology and upon finishing I thought, "What took me so long to read one of these?" It's like having access to all those wonderful literary journals and magazines I can't afford, just there, on my nightstand, for my usual 3 a.m. open eyes.
So many of the names in this collection are familiar: Justin Cronin, Anthony Doerr, Malcolm Gladwell, Margo Jefferson, Kate Lebo, David Sedaris, Zadie Smith, Rebecca Solnit, Cheryl Strayed that I wondered, "Did these marquee names really write the best American essays of 2015?, or do they remain marquee names because their writing is just that good?" In a couple instances, I felt the writer's inclusion had more to do with attracting a certain demographic into reaching for an anthology of essays than it did with the actual quality of the work.
But let's not worry about the few pieces I found forgettable. Because I've forgotten them already. Let's talk about the ones that made me tremble, laugh, cry, shake in outrage or wonder.
Aging seemed to be the only theme uniting some of these essays, and editor Ariel Levy cites the prevalence of essays on growing old published in the American essay canon this past year. Roger Angell wrote This Old Man at the remarkable milestone of ninety-three (I say "milestone" because I reckon each year over ninety deserves to be lauded). Sven Birkerts convalesces in Strange Days. Mark Jacobson looks at 65 and realizes he's reached a true milestone when the world deems him "old".
But the one that got to me, the one I could read over and over, the one I'd read at a slumber party, if I wasn't too old for slumber parties, is John Reed's ohmygodohmygodohmygod My Grandma the Poisoner/ Yeah, it's about an old woman, but she wasn't always old. Question is, why didn't anyone notice she was always evil? Brrr... chilling. Unputdownable.
Despite the emphasis on aging and bodies broken down by time, it is the work of two younger writers that stopped me in my tracks. Kendra Atleework's Charade cries out to be a full-length work. Her writing is stunning. Raw. This is a true story, but I ache to read the rest, either as a novel, or in memoir form. Watch this writer. You will see her again. Kelly Sundberg's essay about her perfect marriage-turned-horror-show of abuse, It Will Look Like a Sunset is a perfect example of how the most intelligent, perceptive, strong people can lose their way, can be detoured by fear, manipulation, shame, and guilt. It is an exceptional piece of writing from yet another rising voice in creative non-fiction.
Anthony Doerr's meditation on one of the founding families of Boise, Idaho, Thing with Feathers That Perches in the Soul, is poignant and beautiful, as is most everything he writes. And then there is David Sedaris being utterly true to character, his usual unusual laugh-out-loud self, in Stepping Out.
Scenes for a Life in Negroland is one of my favorite pieces of this collection. Jefferson opens a window into her childhood, growing up in a upper-class Chicago neighborhood, the child of highly-educated, well-off parents.
We thought of ourselves as the Third Race, poised between the masses of Negroes and all class of Caucasians. Like the Third Eye, the Third Race possessed a wisdom, intuition, and enlightened knowledge the other two races lacked.
It's at first a fascinating, then a shattering, look at racial culture and racism in years leading up the Civil Rights movement of the early 60s.
Philip Kennicott and Kate Lebo explore a different type of identity, in Smuggler and The Loudproof Room, respectively. Kennicott recalls encountering same-sex desire in literature and finding at last a common narrative to help shape and define his own feelings; Lebo's compromised hearing allows her to experience the world in ways she's not certain she's ready to give up to corrective surgery.
I end with the two pieces that took my breath away: Ashraf H. A. Rushdy's Reflections on Indexing My Lynching Book and Rebecca Solnit's Arrival Gates. Rushdy's piece speaks of past anguish that has caught up to our present, except that today we do not speak of lynchings, we hear instead the oft-repeated phrase, "police shooting of an unarmed black man", we see the statistics behind mass incarceration, we have to point out that Black Lives Matter, because Jim Crow still walks amongst us. Rushdy writes of his index, a listing of names—the names of the murdered, the murderers, those who fought to change the system and the culture; place names, dates—an alphabetical history of lynching in the United States.
... the index, the part with the least imaginative input ... contain a great deal of emotional energy that is probably no readily apparent to the reader.
It is a profound piece of writing.
I saved Solnit's essay for last, even though it is not the last in the BAE 2015, because: Rebecca Solnit. She does not disappoint. Solnit writes of traveling to Japan to see first-hand how the 2011 disaster trifecta has affected the country one year later and, in Solnit-style, this objective leads her into a journey of a different sort. She wanders through a park outside Kyoto and contemplates the representation of time, what we mean when we say "arrival" and how to be present with our own past and future. It's an essay I will return to, one that make this particular volume a keeper in my personal library. ...more
Stories I admired, but with which I felt very little emotional connection. Exceptional technique, but curiously absent of heart. The characters were dStories I admired, but with which I felt very little emotional connection. Exceptional technique, but curiously absent of heart. The characters were distant, disheartened, sad creatures, dried up, like hollows in the desert where water once stood.
Highlights included Ghosts, Cowboys, a channeling of Watkins' family history, when her father sat at the right hand of Charles Manson; Rondine Al Nido, the collection's most true and fragile, about two young girls gambling their innocence in Las Vegas, although the use of "our girl" to refer to the story's central character felt like a writing workshop affectation; Man-O-War, exquisite in its pain and loveliness.
It is impossible to remain unaffected by Watkins's astonishing skill. She coaxes and teases the short story into doing her will. But the hard iron that becomes pliable under her pen too often remains cold to the touch. ...more
Although this novel was published only ten years ago, it feels like something from much earlier decade. And it's not that it's set in 1979-1980, openiAlthough this novel was published only ten years ago, it feels like something from much earlier decade. And it's not that it's set in 1979-1980, opening the day fifty-two Americans were taken hostage at the American Embassy in Teheran, Iran. I can't quite put my finger on it, but I don't read many stories like this, written quite this way, anymore. Perhaps Robin Black's 2014 Life Drawing or Ian McEwan's most recent The Children Act—are similar. Each a deep but brief character study, an exposition of marriage, an examination of how that which doesn't kill us wounds and weakens us as we age. What The English Teacher reminded me of was Judith Guest's Ordinary People. A tragedy creating distance between a mother—who copes with bourbon—and a son—who retreats from the world; a kind and bewildered father trying to be the bridge between the two. The same golden New England setting. A somber tone to the narrative; everyone living internal, remote lives. It reminded me a bit, too, of J.D. Salinger, with precocious teenagers and a stream of tragedy trickling underneath.
Although there is considerable tension as we anticipate the unraveling of Vida Avery, single mother to Peter and a highly respected English teacher at an insular New England prep school, there is little mystery to the storm brewing inside her. Vida is teaching Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Ubervilles and how she responds to Tess's encounter in the forest with Alec D'Uberville is enough to warn us of the rattling skeletons pressing against her closet door.
Why Vida, after remaining single her entire adult life, chooses to marry a widower she hardly knows and join her family of two with his three children is the true mystery and one that is never entirely resolved. But the sense of doom darkens the marriage as early as the wedding reception and we witness Vida's quiet horror with claustrophobic frustration. Perhaps this is the author's point--we don't always know why we do the things we do, but we are left with the consequences.
This is a story that moves quietly through the minds of Vida and her son Peter as they circle around each other, growing apart, building a wall of resentment and misunderstanding. Perhaps that's why this novel moves with the rhythm of a classic. It is quiet and reflective, free from clever meta-devices. I struggled to connect with the soft, tweedy patience of her new husband, Tom, and with Vida's curdled rage that makes her insufferable for most of the book, but Lily King's beautifully structured story and fine, fine writing made this impossible to set aside.
Three and a half stars edging toward four. ...more
Fresh off reading Anthony Marra's brilliant The Tsar of Love and Techno, I jumped into another collection of interrelated short stories, connected by Fresh off reading Anthony Marra's brilliant The Tsar of Love and Techno, I jumped into another collection of interrelated short stories, connected by place and characters. Coincidence? Or is this a thing now? Reckon it doesn't much matter if the thing is done well.
The Wonder Garden invites inevitable comparisons to Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge because of the New England setting, and of course the interwoven short stories, but the similarities end there. Strout's connective tissue was Olive, and an irrepressible humanity. Acampora does not tie us to any one character, unless it's David, the advertising exec-turned-mystical healer, and her community of Old Cranberry, CT is far more sinister than Strout's hard-scrabble Maine fishing village. It's not tragic, like Marra's Siberia and Chechnya, trapped in an endless cycle of war and surreal political machinations. No, Acampora writes of a place of enormous privilege and opportunity, the 1%, as it were. Hard to muster much empathy for these folks, in their colonial mansions, set back on wide green lawns, with their "help" and country club memberships and Ebel wristwatches.
But I don't think Acampora is really after our empathy. She writes, like Margaret Atwood, with delicious, irresistible irony, flirting with the surreal just enough to make us wonder, yet rooting us in a garden we recognize. We nod and snort and generally feel superior to those whose wealth and privilege have always made us slightly ashamed.
What strikes me is how little resolution and redemption is found in each story. The endings come abruptly, the characters caught in a moment, and we must leave them there, suspended in time. We are left to wonder, Did they learn anything? Have they changed? And then, suddenly, many pages later, that character reappears in someone else's story, as a minor figure, and we catch a glimpse of what their life is like now, or at least how they are viewed from the outside. It's brilliant really, for the author does not interfere. She doesn't explain or editorialize, she just offers moments of lives and lets us sort it on our own.
I thought to highlight individual stories, but that's not why anyone should read this book--it's not that kind of story collection. The Wonder Garden is very nearly a novel, at least this reader read it as such, with the ending of each story feeling more like the ending of a chapter. I couldn't wait to unwrap the next, looking for clues, like a scavenger hunt, wondering how the story would circle back, who I would encounter again.
I think it's trite to say that The Wonder Garden shows those whose lives look perfect from the outside face the same quiet desperation the rest of humanity. What I think it shows, in a darkly funny, bitter, and tragic way is how they simply do not. If there is any desperation, it's how to hang on to facade of perfection, while keeping the real world at bay. In a culture where the gap between the have and the have-nots has become a deep canyon, America's Old Cranberry neighborhoods seem more like colonies designed to keep the lepers out and the flawless safe. Lauren Acampora shows us how it's done from the inside out....more
An elegant and finely-wrought portrait of a marriage in the Atomic Age. Andria Williams' impressive debut begins with an accident at a nuclear reactorAn elegant and finely-wrought portrait of a marriage in the Atomic Age. Andria Williams' impressive debut begins with an accident at a nuclear reactor outside Idaho Falls in January 1961, then circles back eighteen months to bring us the gradual meltdown of a young couple reacting to the stresses of military life.
Army specialist Paul Collier is sent from reactor school in Ft. Belvoir, VA to Idaho, his pretty wife and two little girls in tow. Paul, bearing the scars of a difficult childhood, finds shelter in the vivacity and adoration of his wife and daughters, but remains a man apart—reserved with his coworkers, distant with his wife. Nat Collier, alone in a new town with only her girls for company, must learn to adapt to the constant upheaval of military life, the fast but shallow friendships that form between military wives, and the gossip-laden dramas that unfold in their tight, smothering community. Nat's free spirit tendencies clash with the unwritten protocols of the domestic military culture and her loneliness and naïveté are refracted in the tight circles that bind her to her home, family, and army life.
Williams presents concurrent streams of tension—the potential failure of a nuclear facility and of a marriage—with a deft and confident hand. She goes deep into her characters, allowing multiple perspectives to shape a singular era with an astonishing command of detail. The reader is immersed in the early 1960s: the vivid descriptions of clothing, furniture, cars, hairstyles, food, language are perfectly integrated, becoming a part of the emotional landscape.
The Longest Night is a quietly powerful novel, its tremors rising from deep under the surface, yet it moves forward with urgency. With intelligence, originality, empathy and beautiful language, Andria Williams has crafted what will surely be one of 2016 most highly-regarded debuts.
My thanks to the publisher, Random House, for providing an Advance Reader Copy for review. ...more
In Claire Vaye Watkins's searing debut novel, Gold Fame Citrus, fear is vast. It
I fear the vast dimensions of eternity.
Ciaran Carson, "Fear" 1948
In Claire Vaye Watkins's searing debut novel, Gold Fame Citrus, fear is vast. It is blistering hot, white, shifting, a thing massive and predatory, greedy and indiscriminate. It is the desert, one we have created by draining the West of its water, by changing the climate, forcing Nature to turn her back, jealously guarding her Rain. Fear has a name. It is the Amargosa Dune Sea.
Set in a future close enough to see if we shade our eyes and squint, Gold Fame Citrus presents a California annihilated by drought. A massive, moving sand dune is eating up mountain ranges, obliterating cities, and creating refugees known as Mojavs, a dystopian society that recalls the Okies of the Depression-era Dust Bowl. Watkins lists Tim Egan's phenomenal The Worst Hard Time in her acknowledgments and parallels the desperation and isolation of that time with one of her own keen and savage imagination.
Luz Dunn was a child star, born into drought just as science began to give up on cure or prevention and a desiccated society turned toward the mystic and the weird. Luz was to be the hope disaster couldn't defeat. The government made her a poster child for the new future, until the posters faded and shriveled in the relentless sun. Now Luz squats in the abandoned home of a movie star in a "laurelless" canyon, drinking ration cola while her boyfriend Ray writes lists in his diary that read like poetry and tries to keep them alive. They can't seem to muster the energy to flee to the cool, green, moist Pacific Northwest, or join the multitudes heading over the Dune, toward cities in the East. It's not that easy: even if you survive the desert crossing, Mojavs aren't welcome anywhere, states are building barriers to wall themselves in. And then there is Ray's past—a barbed-wire fence too tall and entangled to surmount.
They aren't alone in the desert: there are others, outcasts who've come together in survivalist colonies, living blackmarket lives. Luz and Ray rescue a little girl, a “strange, coin-eyed, translucent-skinned child”, from one such group, in a scene of an overnight rave party that is grotesque and haunting, like a Cormac McCarthy nightmare of the Old West.
The theft of this child, Ig, and fear that they will be pursued, propels Luz and Ray out of their sun-scorched inertia and sets them on the road, seeking a way out of the desert. But of course, the Desert will not let them go that easily. Luz and Ig end up alone, dying of thirst and heatstroke. Watkins's vision of mercy is also a prison, with convicted survivors sharpening blades of power on a whetstones of control.
This is a novel of passion and fierce love; it is cruel and brilliant, shocking and tender, created with an imagination as boundless as the desert. In contrast to the parched environment, Watkins's prose is lush and vivid, leading you, bewitched, through a shimmering mirage of hope.
I recall standing in Seattle's Queen Anne Bookstore on a rainy late autumn afternoon in 2009, reading the jacket of this book and ultimately, passing.I recall standing in Seattle's Queen Anne Bookstore on a rainy late autumn afternoon in 2009, reading the jacket of this book and ultimately, passing. I wasn't familiar with Jess Walter, although this book seemed to be making quite the splash. I was, however, all too familiar with the effects of the global recession and I just wasn't ready to find it funny. Nope. Not yet. In fact, that very bookstore became one of its casualties a few years later.
Fast-forward into a new decade. Jess Walter has become one of my favorite contemporary American writers. And although the effects of the recession are no less unfunny, time and perspective have only strengthened the relevancy of this book, if for the sheer amazement that America seems to have learned few lessons from its time teetering on the precipice of collapse. The cost of housing in Seattle is once again approaching the stratosphere; more than ever, it has become a City of Have More Than Anyone Else.
But The Financial Lives of the Poets isn't set in that shining city on the Sound. It's set in perennially grim Spokane, Walter's home, the conservative capital of the Northwest's Inland Empire. Spokane's a bit stalwart, a bit stale, but solid, uncompromising, built on farming fortunes. A good place to raise a family. As long as you don't hang out at the 7/11.
As long as you don't bet your family's financial security on a website that offers financial advice in poetic form. I mean really, what could go wrong?
Matt Prior has been out of work for a while. When things were flush—only a few days ago, it seems—he and his wife Lisa bought their dream house (more than they could afford of course, but remember when home loan companies were just THROWING money at us?) and Matt poured money into the stock market, congratulating himself for investments that seemed sure bets. She had a good job, he bid a snarky adieu to the crumbling newspaper biz to launch poetfolio.com, and for a heartbeat, the future was theirs. Then the economy collapsed. You can guess what happens next. Personal Finance Shitstorm.
As the story opens, forty-six-year-old Matt has less than a week to make a $31,000 balloon payment on his mortgage. He and his wife, Lisa, have no health insurance. Their savings, including once-flush 401(k)s, are tapped out, Lisa's working a crap job in an optometrist's office, Matt's dementia-inflicted dad has moved in, Catholic school tuition for their two elementary-aged sons is killing them (the Priors aren't even Catholic, but their neighborhood has stopped gentrifying and the local school is like Rikers Island for the Wii set), and Matt is fairly certain Lisa is having an affair with her high school sweetheart, Chuck.
Could you blame him, then, for hanging out at the 7/11 with a bunch of satin tracksuit-clad white gangbangers, smoking weed and eating pork rinds? Could you blame him for seeing the financial opportunity in selling pot to his middle-aged friends, just until he can get his family out of their financial hole? Tapping the keg of American zeitgeist, Walter—à la Weeds and Breaking Bad—sends us down the rabbit hole of Very Bad Decisions made with Generally Good Intentions.
Matt's insomnia imbues the narrative with a slightly surreal, hallucinatory glow, heightened by his pot-laced paranoia and Grandpa's dementia. There is tender relief offered by his two sons, reminding us that this is a book about the aspirations and failings of fathers, the vulnerability of sons, and how boys become men, or at least try to.
The brilliance of Jess Walter is the LAUGH OUT LOUD caper crazies of his characters, who kill you with their cluelessness yet manage to retain such believable humanity, such depth of sincerity, that you cheer them on from one fuck-up to the next. Because there is always a sense of "There but for the grace of God, go I". We know and love and are embarrassed and infuriated by these people because they are us.
The Financial Lives of the Poets is social satire with a warm, beating heart and fleshed-out, wounded characters who earn our compassion even as we are choking on our laughter.
Oh, and that bookstore on Queen Anne that bit the recession dust? Some local residents and former employees banded together and resurrected it in 2013 as Queen Anne Book Company. It's going strong.
You know, it really was a coincidence that I picked this up at the library the day after the HBO miniseries won something at the Emmy awards. I'm lateYou know, it really was a coincidence that I picked this up at the library the day after the HBO miniseries won something at the Emmy awards. I'm late to the Olive Kitteridge party because I never intended to go in the first place. But there I was, in-between reads, waiting for all the books I'd requested to arrive at the library (which they nearly all did in a single day, three days later) and here was Olive Kitteridge, sitting on a rotating rack of paperbacks that you can borrow on the honor system. It was slim, it had the gold Pulitzer Prize seal, the library was moments from closing, and who can leave the library empty-handed? So, Olive Kitteridge came home with me for a couple of days.
Hey Mikey! I liked it!!
Earlier generations had Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio to illustrate slices of Americana pie; we have Elizabeth Strout's Crosby, Maine. Her technique—the weaving together of individual stories with repeating characters and a common setting—is not unique, of course, but her empathy, poignancy, and clear-eyed storytelling are as fresh and bracing as a salty spring wind blowing off the Atlantic.
"Soul custody" is one character's heartbreaking malaprop, but it so perfectly captures what happens here, in the hours we give ourselves over to this town and its residents, particularly its eponymous protagonist. Soul custody, indeed. Olive Kitteridge is the collection's axis. The book is comprised of thirteen vignettes that are like tilts of a kaleidoscope: each offering a different way of looking at life in a place that seems to change very little from a distance, but when you look more closely, emotional fortunes are made and lost with the changing tides.
Olive herself is maddening and endearing. How to understand the tenderness you can feel for a woman who would beat and belittle her only child, then wonder in mealy-mouthed resentment why he would chose not to stay near her as he matures and creates his own life? That is the magic of Strout's character development, the way she is able to inhabit Olive's heart and head: you see a complete woman, with all her flaws and her ungracious attempts at humanity. And this deep character empathy is true for everyone we meet in Crosby, ME (and in a foray to New York City): in these brief moments, so much is shown and learned about an aging lounge singer/piano player whose hair is dyed shade too crimson; a young girl whose flesh and muscle wither away because she simply will not, cannot eat; a young man on the verge of emotional collapse as he trains a gun on four hostages locked in a hospital bathroom; an older married man on the troubling border of fatherly concern and a lover's yearning for a young woman in crisis.
This book, despite its emphasis on life's unkindnesses, is so empathetic and humane that it is impossible to remain in despair. It is an acknowledgment that to feel life, to feel it deeply, is terrifying. It is also irresistible.
And it's impossible to read Olive Kitteridge and not crave doughnuts. ...more
When I was seventeen, I had a mad crush on a musician who lived in my town. He was in his twenties and on the cusp of fame in the about-to-explode PacWhen I was seventeen, I had a mad crush on a musician who lived in my town. He was in his twenties and on the cusp of fame in the about-to-explode Pacific Northwest grunge scene of the late 1980s. Years later, I would flip through a scrapbook and find a poster from a concert held at a community center in town during the autumn I crushed on that man/boy. Well, would you just look at that: Fall 1986, Nirvana headlining the Hal Holmes Community Center. I'd forgotten about the concert, held in the same auditorium where the library offered its semi-annual book sale and the community choir practiced, until a scrap of a flyer brought it back. My Proustian moment. A poster for your madeleine. No, the musician of my senior year crush was not a member of Nirvana. He's still out there, recording, touring, clean after years of addiction.
But in those brief weeks we hung out, I read what he read, which was a lot of Richard Brautigan. My Richard Brautigan phase. I think I probably should have read Chelsea Girls then, too. I might have found a closer connection to the young Eileen, drunk and drugged and drifting between Boston and New York in the 1960s and 70s. An era that has always captivated me with its rawness, its coolness, its profound awakening. Mostly, I found Chelsea Girls to be profoundly sad.
I'm not entirely certain what to make of something called an "autobiographical novel", which appears to be publisher-speak for "memoir", except to take these stories at face value and assume they are true. These are the events which shaped Myles the poet, a creative life she terms as a "cultural accident." They are raw wild strange aching innocent confusing brutal funny. What else could they be, for an accidental, incidental, monumental poet.
I fell into Chelsea Girls after reading an outstanding interview with Eileen Myles in The Paris Review 214 (Fall 2014), loving what bits of her poetry I've encountered, and realizing Myles was yet another large hole in the Literary Education of Julie. I'm glad to have read Chelsea Girls but there was something about the diffident style of it that left me on the outside, a bit cold, holding onto the thin bars of the playground looking in, not sure if I really wanted to be invited to play....more
Not a book to read cover-to-cover and set aside, but one to reference, ear-mark, jot down notes, ideas. I bought this just a year ago, after a workshoNot a book to read cover-to-cover and set aside, but one to reference, ear-mark, jot down notes, ideas. I bought this just a year ago, after a workshop with the author, wondering if/when I'd ever have cause to use it. Now that I'm five months out from the launch of my first novel, I find inspiration, comfort and wisdom within.
The guide's first half is a practical laundry list of ideas and recommendations for the time and budget-strapped author. Regardless of our publishing method or size of publisher, we're all expected to devote significant time and cash to building our author platforms and promoting our books. Daunting. Terrifying. Stressful. Bewildering. Exciting! Particularly for those of us out there for the first time, flailing, wondering where best to spend our time and energy. But Everyday Book Marketing breaks it down into manageable chunks.
The second half is devoted to Q&A with authors and book/author promotion experts. I loved this. Midge Raymond is from the Pacific Northwest and many of the writers she interviewed are those I know or with whom I'm familiar; it's wonderfully encouraging to see some of the same faces I've met at conferences or workshops and encounter on Facebook detailing what has and hasn't worked for them. And to read how many of them are surprised by how much they enjoy promoting their work. Cannot wait until I can say the same!...more
Meticulous and ponderous, Matthew Thomas's debut novel, We Are Not Ourselves spans several decades, from a classic New York Irish immigrant story to tMeticulous and ponderous, Matthew Thomas's debut novel, We Are Not Ourselves spans several decades, from a classic New York Irish immigrant story to the grinding tragedy of dementia and health care in the 21st century United States (at least prior to the Affordable Care Act).
I've just lost a loved one to Alzheimer's and there is tremendous mercy to be realized in the relatively short span of time between diagnosis and death—only a few years and only in the final months was the decline as devastating as what is portrayed in We Are Not Ourselves. Still, the descriptions of what patient and caregivers endure as the brain slips into the shadow of dementia are chilling, heartbreaking, and painfully familiar.
Despite the connection to the themes, and many beautifully written passages, I struggled to connect with much of the narrative. It often read like a laundry list of events, rather than a story of flesh and heart. The relevance of Eileen Tumulty's childhood, her Irish immigrant parents, her mother's alcoholism, her father's conflicting public and private personas is lost as the decades roll on and Eileen becomes someone else entirely. That she is largely insufferable is not a detriment to the story-I have little patience for readers who have little patience for "unlikeable" characters-but the immigrant story seems to belong to a different book.
What we can and must endure for those we love is deeply private and personal; Matthew Thomas shows us the terrible costs exacted by dementia: the tragic loss of money, time, memory, patience, energy, vitality, and hope.
Back in the day, I was a huge fan of the TV show thirtysomething. Back when I was still in my teens and thirty-something seemed impossibly distant andBack in the day, I was a huge fan of the TV show thirtysomething. Back when I was still in my teens and thirty-something seemed impossibly distant and terribly romantic. Babies and briefcases. I loved all the navel-gazing angst, the soap-operatic lives, Hope Steadman's hair. I wanted to be Hope: a writer, a mother, wife to a hunky, kind of dorky husband. Amazingly, now that I'm fortysomething, I got most of what I wished for, except the babies. And I definitely don't have that hair.
I derived the same sink-into-a-comfy-chair-and-be-entertained pleasure from Nickolas Butler's Shotgun Lovesongs as I did from that iconic, pre-grunge television series. Lots of hunky guys, gorgeous women, everyone leading terribly romantic lives with heavy doses of angst and melodrama, all to a great soundtrack (the character Lee is based on Justin Vernon, the singer/songwriter behind Bon Iver, a favorite band of mine; Butler knows Vernon from their Eau Claire schooldays).
I have to chuckle when I read the professional reviews of Shotgun Lovesongs; it's as if—at least in the critics' eyes—Butler has broken new literary ground by telling a straight-forward story about the emotional journeys of everyday characters, set against the backdrop of domestic life, weaving in the antics of BFFs, and entanglements of the heart. Women authors have been doing this for years, in case they hadn't noticed. There's even a whole category devoted to these stories: Women's Fiction. Although Women's Fiction is largely ignored by professional reviewers and award-givers, readers have known for years that a sentimental story, with empathetic characters and relatable themes, can be deeply satisfying.
Nickolas Butler has a terrific sense of place and his affection for his homeland of Wisconsin is so evident, it had this devoted Pacific Northwesterner recall her years in the Midwest with homesick longing. The characters are warm and cuddly, all wrapped in flannel and Carhartts. This is meat-and-potatoes comfort food reading. The plot's a bit of Lycra stretched too tightly and occasionally Butler falls in love with his own voice, veering to purple, poetic phrasing, but it has the same small-town America charm as a Bob Seger song. You'll be singing "Mainstreet" (if only because you can't actually discern the words to any Bon Iver song). ...more
So recently set adrift by two novels with multiple points-of-view, each chapter taking me through my paces with a new voice, each novel leaving me parSo recently set adrift by two novels with multiple points-of-view, each chapter taking me through my paces with a new voice, each novel leaving me parched for emotional resonance as though I were desperate sailor drinking sea water, I thought, 'No, not again," when I embarked upon this voyage with Naomi J. Williams and her debut Landfalls.
Okay, I'll stop with the silly seafaring metaphors.
But I won't stop raving about this unputdownable tour de force, crashingly good, tsunami of a novel.
Williams offers a kaleidoscopic view of the ill-fated Lapérouse expedition of 1785-89, which saw two frigates filled with over two hundred men attempt a circumnavigation of the globe for the glory of science, human endurance, and the maritime prowess of France. With each chapter the kaleidoscope shifts, offering a different perspective—from seaman to scientist, Tlingit child to French castaway. Several of the chapters were published as short stories and in many ways this novel is a collection of individual works, as Williams leaps nimbly from voice, perspective, and style. Yet with each landfall, the threads of characters' lives are woven through the narrative, connecting each part to all those which precede it and the underlying tension of a well-paced thriller holds you fast. The author frames a daring, complicated structure and shores it up, page after page, with a gripping, marvelously inventive, and historically solid story.
The scope of Williams's research is breathtaking yet, like modern masters of the form Mary Doria Russell, Hilary Mantel, David Mitchell, you are drawn naturally, unresistingly into a distant era by flesh-and-blood characters. Heartstrings are pulled in the opening pages and are never released, until the gasping end. There is humor and irony, violence and tragedy, longing and despair. I greedily devoured the pages of a dreamlike obsession with a child bride at a Chilean outpost, gasped at the crystalline and savage beauty of Alaska, burned with anger over sadistic priests on the California coast, mourned love found and lost during the heartbreaking Siberian journey of a translator and his devoted bodyguard. The scope of history and setting, of character and voice and emotion, is nothing short of astonishing.
This is simply the best of what historical fiction can be: a voyage of discovery that speaks to the imagination and the heart, swallowing the reader whole like a literary whale.
"One thing I think proved, I shall never write to "please," to convert; now am entirely and for ever my own mistress." Virginia Woolf, 'A Writer's Dia"One thing I think proved, I shall never write to "please," to convert; now am entirely and for ever my own mistress." Virginia Woolf, 'A Writer's Diary'.
Above the Waterfall is Ron Rash's thirteenth work of prose and fifth work of poetry. Hmm, yes, you read that correctly. It is a novel written in part as a prose-poem, alternating between the straightforward storytelling voice of Les, a small-town sheriff three weeks out from retirement, and the slipstream soliloquies of Becky, a park ranger traumatized by a childhood tragedy and a disastrous love affair with an eco-terrorist.
We are in familiar Rash territory: the kudzu- and hemlock-choked borderlands of North Carolina and Tennessee, where the Appalachian struggle between poverty and progress plays out like a Shakespeare tragedy. The terrible beauty of the natural world is present in every scene, haunting and seductive.
Gerald Blackwelder (oh, that name!), an embittered old-timer, is accused of poisoning the habitat of speckled trout on land that belongs to a wealthy resort tycoon. His most vocal champion is Becky Shytle, the park ranger with a poetic, wounded heart. She is also the sheriff's sometime girlfriend. The ambiguity of their relationship is due not only to Becky's emotional fragility, but to Les' fear of ruining another relationship. His marriage ended after his wife attempted suicide; Les's neglect and indifference was nearly her death knell.
The grimy, rotten-mouthed world of meth addiction and production is woven into the plot—it adds a shiver of doom to Les' final days as sheriff—but it is not the main thread. This is a story of characters who struggle to maintain their footing in a place that holds them so close, it nearly crushes the air from their lungs. It is a profoundly-felt work, rich with imagery as all Rash's work, but somehow more personal. Becky's poetry-speak is a window into the author's own fervent, compassionate, lyrical humanism. With Above the Waterfall Rash is now entirely and forever his own master. ...more
Julie Christine
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