Quantum of Solace

I'm not the biggest James Bond fan in the world, don't get me wrong, of late Daniel Craig has brought a much needed face life to the franchise, but sadly he'll be type cast like Henry Winkler. But if you get a chance rent Flashbacks of a Fool, which is a wonderful movie done by 007 when he's not 007.

Marc Forster has been making damn fine movies for a while now, Monsters Ball, Stranger Than Fiction, Stay (a personal favorite) and seems to be pushing the corners of the medium in an attempt to find something new.

I've got a tiny bone to pick, when all of the people who worked on this movie sat down for the test screening, or even when Forster watched this at home alone, did anyone catch the loose collar of the dress shirt that 007 has tucked in the collar of his sweater, it's out, then it's back in, then it's out on the other side? This all in one scene towards the start of the movie. Did anyone see this? Could you have re-shot this scene? The same thing happened to Brian De Palma in the Untouchables, with Sean Connery on the receiving end of a lazy wardrobe staffer.

Mathieu Amalric as Dominic Greene is wonderful as the "green" villain, he's wild and full of hatred, and basically ruthless. If you're not helping him, you die, even if you are helping him...it's not so good. 007 manages to weasel his way into a huge outdoor theater production, and even throws a beating in while he ease drops on Greene who spearheads a large nefarious group of double dealers who run the world. If 007 isn't driving on the edge of a cliff, he's flying off the roof of a moving bus onto another roof (sounds easy...this movie makes it look magical). He's trying to stay one step ahead of Greene who has it in his sights to do Bond in.

Greene plans on taking over a small country so he can create a dictatorship, in his path are not only her Majesty's Secret Service, but a horrendous actress that looks good in tight clothes, the truly awful, Olga Kurlenko as Camille. Bond helps her even a score, as he's got his own score to settle from Casino Royale. Forster shows his incredible visual story telling range with scenery and camera angles that defy logic, his color taste is wonderful, everyone fits into his world and even 007 manges to show a little artistry when he's not beating ass.

-JR

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Everything by Aleksander Hemon

The first two stories in Love and Obstacles, Aleksandar Hemon's new collection, are both about adolescence: that awkward period in human development that reveals its full freakishness best when you attempt to depart from it.

So let's have some laughs at the expense our fictional narrator, who is on a train bound for a town called Murska Sobota, entrusted with a family mission to buy a huge freezer chest. If our hero wasn't so young he'd remind me of Don Quixote. But our hero's quest is no less improbable. He is trying to grow up.

He's in a train compartment with a secret, he's holding a huge amount of cash to buy the freezer. Two thugs enter talking about rape and manslaughter and their colleague with the incredible moniker, "Fahro the Beast". Fahro had his nose bitten off. The guys don't say how this happened but I wouldn't be surprised if they did it. Our boy, who they refer to as "the child" pretends he is still asleep and I don't blame him. When he "wakes" the first thing the cons want to know is if he fucks. Answer: "a little." Let's move on.

At Zagreb, our narrator switches to a bus for the final leg to MS and meets some other offbeat characters. I noticed the elegant dodge that Tobias Wolff also used in Firelight...having his child narrator tell this story as a grown up so that you weren't shaken out of your fictional suspension of disbelief by having a kid appear to have the sophistication of a mature Aleksandar Hemon.

At the hotel, our truly hapless hero has more crazy experiences connected to his too direct means of trying to solve one of his problems. Too direct and misplaced...and too pharmaceutical...like she's married and happily sharing a room with her husband You can piss off hotel management to no end this way also but, hell, it's his first big trip.

But all that's just like playing dodge ball with your hormones. The comedy is a screen for something special. It turns out that growing up isn't such an insane project after all. It's involves being yourself and seeing the world as your parents don't see it....a quest for a stockpile of frozen food shouldn't be the primary goal in life. A stockpile of short stories, like Love and Obstacles, will last much longer.

-DH

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look...it's Saturday morning and this is what's on my mind right now...

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Ismail by Hasanthika Sirisena

It's about time for me to react to another Narrative Magazine Story of the Week. I can't praise this site enough...both for its high editorial standards and the literary crap shoot it offers the reader in which you nearly always win.

You can't help it...if you choose your own stories to read then you are going to run down a well-worn channel. JE has mentioned getting dangerous with his literature. Well, here is one suggestion...let Narrative Magazine showcase a story for you and then react to it...as I'm doing here. You will find that NM never volleys in the same direction twice.

I figure that the community where I live is the land without literature...like I'm the only one within ten blocks of my house who is going to be reading a serious poem or story except if its a school assignment. 

But then I pick up Ismail by Hasanthika Siresena and find that the action in this short story takes place within five miles of me. So I get a needed reminder that art is not something that has to take place somewhere else.

I love that Sirisena is such a tactile writer...and that her story is full sounds and smells. It's like you're in the dark, which every reader is, and you are trying to figure out what the complex piece of fabric is that you are holding in your hands.

But it's the logic of presentation in Ismail that interests me the most. It's a wild vine of a story. But it's in seven disciplined sections divided in the text by breaks of white space: Way to go, Hasanthika.

First: This story revolves around a prank. Ismail, the narrator, is with his younger brother Harry in the dark backyard of Ismail's best friend Abdul. It had better be dark because they are trespassing while Abdul's family is away. And they are afraid of the Ukrainian family who lives next door, have floodlights and are trigger happy.

They have five mason jars filled with milk and turkey parts. They are going to break into the cottage out back which Abdul has made into his private homestead and leave the jars lying around at critical points. It's the hot August season. The organic shit in the jars will spoil and burst the jars...ruining Abdul's place. They learned this trick from their teacher. Ismail is the leader with a grudge against Abdul...Harry is the follower with a crush on Abdul's sister. 

Second: Backstory of the family. We learn that Ismail's family is from Sri Lanka and they won "the visa lottery" and were able to escape civil war. But they had to leave their older sister behind. She was sacrificed for the boys who were felt to have more opportunity in the U.S. The older sister is going to work as a maid in the Middle East. They don't want to think about what might happen to her. So...this prank and it's true significance are the story. But this isn't a tale out of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn...except if the boys grew up in Jamaica, Queens in 1999.

Third: Backstory of the prank and life within Ismail's house. We also get a hint of the real juice here...why Ismail is so keen to pull off this sadistic prank. It turns out that Abdul's friendship is getting cold...while he is losing his docile brother Harry to Ameena. Harry and Ameena may get married. Ameena and Harry, you see, rule the Burger King on Jamaica Avenue. Well...blow me away, why don't you. Eros casts a dark shadow. Harry's love for Ameena combined with Abdul's boredom with Ismail means he may lose both of them. No wonder he wants turkey parts and spoiled milk to rot Abdul's bedroom.

Fourth: "Love doesn't just make you more beautiful. Love also makes you lose all sympathy for those who don't have your luck."

Fifth, Sixth and Seventh: The action speeds up...like an opera in its last act. I've hinted at all the detail here...there's ton's of it...including what it's like to have a turkey explode onto your best friend's bed. And don't forget those territorial Ukrainians. I mentioned them for a reason. 

So learn all about Queens. Read this story.

-DH

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Morocco, from My Father's Tears by John Updike

There isn't a good reason why I've been so quiet about John Updike. I've dabbled here and there over the years, usually under some peer pressure, trying to read him. I really like A&P, a story that everyone points

to as a classic.

In June of this year Knopf will be publishing a collection of his short stories, My Father's Tears. Discovering it laying on my desk reminded me that I did intend to read it.

There are moments in your life when you find yourself stuck in another part of the world, like the family Updike describes in 'Morocco'. He's stranded them with what seems like a bucket full of days rolling out forever before they can get back to civilization. Updike's narrator tells this story in flashback, a remembrance of sorts, about the horror that seemed commonplace in Morocco, realities that this civilized family didn't know were waiting for them in this off-season paradise.

Updike is cold with his delivery of a dead girl under a truck, or a man masturbating on the beach, I don't think the image can be described any other way, especially when Updike recounts the episodes that have resonated on his narrator at the end of this story. The family is stuck, the father gets money wired from London to pull his clan out of the fire, but gets long stares as the notes are counted out for him at a local bank. There is talk of Tangier, visiting there, it reminds me of the difference between the third world and the United States, what we take for granted here, hot water and paved roads for instance, in Morocco it's a given that neither one of them is a high priority, and natives could care less. Updike cares, because he makes you feel what it's like not to have these staples at the ready.

-JR

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Angel Bones by John Updike

Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Angel Bones from Endpoint and other poems

Next to the statue-laden cathedral of Reims,

the bishop's palace has become a museum

containing many stones cast down by wear,

bombardardment, renovation, and the rare

too-thunderous Te Deum.

Huge saints and angels, retired from the weather,

stand tall above us. Their visages were carved

to show a soul-a face of grace above the wars,

the plagues, the congregational stench of masses-

to worshippers they dwarfed.

Now chips and missing chunks give proof these hulks

on loan from Heaven fell prey to earthly harm,

for limestone, soft to sculpt, breaks easily.

Look here!-a sheared and fractured flank reveals

a tiny shell, distinct, intact,

from vanished, darkling, long pre-Christian seas,

The pious masses, milling underneath

and looking up to holy largeness, lacked

the science to deduce from this small clue

what mighty absence it might mean.

posted by DH

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Friends by Jason Rice

JR has had a new story published online at the demanding Failbetter.com.

It's as if you're driving through rocky terrain and come across a lot of turn-offs and signs pointing in different directions. Each turning will lead you into a new look at yourself...maybe even into a new life.

But you don't know where you'll end up. All you know is that somewhere up ahead there's a destination waiting for you. Friends is a complex, power drive through such a landscape.

-DH Read more!

Revisiting McTeague

Jonathan Evison: While my livelihood insists that I consume as much current fiction as possible -- and the same can be said of all four Three Guys -- I'd be lying if I said I didn't miss reading my dead guys. Last week, even as my galley pile grew four books higher, and my five-hundred-pound-gorilla of a novel required much editing, and my lovely pregnant wife was nagging me (I mean reminding me!) about something neglected (the unfinished floors? the nursery? the taxes?), I managed to carve out a little time between petting my bunnies and drinking my beers to revisit Frank Norris's 1889 classic McTeague, which was among my favorite books as a young alcoholic misfit. Some things don't age well. Foreigner, for instance. I swear they sounded cool in 1978. It didn't matter that all their songs were about physical ailments (hot-blooded, cold as ice, double vision). The point is, I heard them on KISW the other day and they sucked major ass. I'm pleased to announce that this was not the case upon dusting off McTeague, which was, in a word: McAwesome. JR, this strikes me as your kind of book. Norris and you share a lot in terms of outlook. I guess I think you have the makings of a naturalist. You should read it. Or re-read it. It'll make you want to pinch your wife. It'll also make you want to stick a cue ball in your mouth (I almost peed my pants at that part!). You'll wanna' drink some Steam Beer, too. And you'll be really grateful for the many wonderful advances in modern dentistry!

McTeague is the story of Mac, a slow-witted red-haired giant who is perfectly content pulling teeth and drinking beer in turn-of-the-century San Francisco, until the day Trina, his best friend's cousin, enters his life. Let the unraveling begin! McTeague falls for Trina while working on her teeth, which I find both perversely divine and totally disgusting. At any rate, it's a great place to begin this lurid and eccentric tale. Don't hate me, but that's the last detail I'm going to provide you plot-wise. If you've read it, you already know. If you haven't, I'm not going to rob you of the experience. And I'm not going to reduce Norris to the isms which inevitably seem to attach themselves to discussions of his work, and I'm not going to talk about the shadow of Zola. I just wanna' talk about Frank Norris the writer. 

There is a gorgeous brutality to Norris's prose which is perfectly harmonious with the brutality of his tale. Norris dresses down language like he dresses down humanity, unsentimentally. At his best, his sentences can pulverize language like bones into dust. Even when they're riddled with passive forms, his sentences are never static; they're alive, because Norris knows how to move them. Why? Because Norris is not a sentence writer. Norris is a natural story-teller. He's decisive. He knows exactly what he's trying to say. He knows when to linger and when to pass. He knows how tho make his exposition serve him. He knows how to choose his details, and makes his choices seem inevitable. And above all, he knows how to build and indestructible scene -- and lordy, some of the scenes in McTeague, from the aforementioned cue-ball scene to the epic finale in Death Valley, are seriously unforgettable. If I ever finish these floors, and these taxes, and this nursery, and these galleys, I might take a run at Vandover the Brute.

Well, that's all I've got for today. My nephew just asked me if I was done writing my Chuck Norris blog. God, that made me happy!

JE

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grand stand-in

Kevin Wilson is dynamite in a tube. I started reading the first short story, grand stand-in, in his debut collection, tunneling to the center of the earth, and I wanted to read standing up and shout "wow". But I was sitting in a Long Island Rail Road car at the time so I decided to cool it.

KW takes a silly "what-if" and treats it seriously until you are totally wrapped up in a nutty world that casts a dark shadow over this one: reality squared-you've been checkmated by literature, bub.

The conceit in grand stand-in is that successful, middle class families, know as fams, are hiring grannies (and grandpas) from an agency to emotionally enrich the lives of their small children. So grandparenting, no longer left to the vagaries of genetics, has become a profession.

It turns out that real grandparents just don't fill the bill anymore: too slow perhaps, not interesting or politically correct enough. Hire a professional granny who can scuba dive and teach your toddlers Japanese as well as performing the classic skills like sewing and baking cookies.

But one of the best parts of the professional grandparent experience is that your child gets to experience death in a controlled environment, carefully prepared for. When the grandparenting contract runs out, the child is told their grannie has died...maybe while skydiving. Mortality becomes another enriching experience for your offspring.

In grand stand-in we get a first-person take on what it's like to be a professional grannie. This is a lesson in what I'd call embedded fiction. We are drowning in media these days...film, TV, books, video games...blogging...but KW makes that all seem like old hat. Why not graft fiction right into your life by hiring pros to be bit players in the only story that really counts-your own?

But a critical pro grannie skill is also to disconnect. Professionals in this line may perform for six or more families at a time and all the family history details, whether fake or real, have to be kept straight. And you and the child must actually accept and love one another. But at your equivalent of 5PM, you have to turn the love off...like flipping a switch, and walk.

Can you do that? What I found intriguing is that I bet some people can. Experience the distorted mirror world of grand stand-in for yourself. I'm going to read the remaining stories in tunneling to the center of the earth. Maybe they will be as good.

I've calmed down now. I liked this story. Tunneling to the Center of the Earth will be published as a Harper Perennial original next month.

-DH

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Sunnyside & A Dog's Life

JC: Readers may recall that some time ago JR wrote about the first chapter of Glen David Gold's forthcoming novel Sunnyside, and had a short interview with Gold. I've been entranced by the book for the last couple of days and, as a result, have been thinking a lot about Chaplin. Did you know that the California blood test evidence rules were changed in part because of the injustice done when CC was railroaded in his ex-lover's paternity suit? And that the Mann Act, under which he was prosecuted, was later used against the man thought to be the inspiration for Humbert Humbert?

Of course all that comes much later than Gold's story. What he discovers is a younger Chaplin, and every scene with CC just crackles with life. In the early parts of the book, he works on his new film A Dog's Life, so, in anticipation of so many reading the book, I thought I would add the clip to the blog.

I'll do a proper review of Sunnyside later, but for now enjoy this, even those of you who prefer Buster Keaton to Charlie.

jc

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Christie The First Page

Here is the first page of Caitlin Macy's story 'Christie' from her short story collection, 'Spoiled'. It is reprinted by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved by Random House...who are very nice people. My discussion of 'Christie' can be found below this post.

-DH

Christie - Page One

When you met Christie for the first time, it took only minutes to learn that she was from Greenwich, Connecticut, but months could go by before you got another solid fact out of her. After a couple of years in New York, she realized that she had to give people a little more information to stop them from digging, so once she'd mentioned Greenwich she would quickly add that she'd gone to "the high school", meaning the public one. The first time she said this, you'd find her forthrightness refreshing-disarming, even, in the midst of so many pretenders. You'd be prompted, perhaps, to admit something about yourself-the fact that you were doing Jenny Craig, for instance, and had to sneak the packaged food into your office microwave when no one was paying attention. But then you'd overhear Christie making the same confession to someone else, and it would lose its charm. It was just Fact No. 2, which added to Fact No. 1-her childhood in Greenwich-represented the sum total of what could be stated about Christie Thorn's background, about her entire life before college and New York, where I met her.

       Plus, you couldn't help be suspicious of her motives in revealing Fact No. 2. If, at a party, a group of people were standing around, sharing a corner of the room, and someone made an opening bid-mentioning Hotchkiss or St. George's, say-Christie would...

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Christie

I took this picture at Columbus Circle last summer. My favorite figure is the guy in the upper right-hand corner, looking at his watch. But I also like that fourth guy, standing frontally, who is gesturing and dominating their conversation...the leader.

If you asked watch-guy, who looks so pissed-off, to tell you about his dominant friend, you'd have the basis for a good short story.

That's what happens in 'Christie', the overture in Caitlin Macy'srequired reading collection of short stories, Spoiled. Christie's girlfriend gives you the scoop and boy, is she ever a bitch. But maybe not...she is just speaking realistically for her status-obssessed group, wealthy young people from Greenwich or with summer homes in Edgartown that their families own, not rent, mind you...who are largely through with competitive dating and are down to playing the marriage game.

The friend's description of Christie's wedding reception is choice, with Christie described as looking like she's made up for an ice-skating competition and with her parents ordered not to talk, just make obscure guttural sounds in response to questions, so they won't embarrass the bride.

But Caitlin Macy hits the ball out of the park in her use of first person narrative which is, by nature, a limited POV. Caitlin subtly shifts the quality of information that you are getting about Christie. The friend grudgingly admits that the reception is at the Pierre, that the champagne is superior and that her groom, an East German immigrant, may have a title in the family...although she makes fun of that possibility by saving Christie's Christmas cards, which now are embossed with a family crest, so she can show them to friends and make fun of Christie's "ridiculous" pretensions.

Caitlin scores again by having the friend drop Christie...she never calls her back to arrange a lunch date...in order...this is great stuff..."to trim the fat from her life."

You will have to read 'Christie' to find out how this friendship between the friend and Christie finally turns out. If friendship tells us who we are then the four Three Guys are in fine shape. And J's, I promise, I will never say you looked like you were made up for an ice-skating competition at your weddings or that your families had to mortgage the trailer to pay for the reception. Mortgage the trailer...now that's what I'd call bitchy.

-DH

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Castaways, third story from Drift by Victoria Patterson

Check this out: http://www.hulu.com/watch/55345/movie-trailers-500-days-of-summer

It has nothing to do with this book.

There are great moments in a readers life, everyone has a story, for me; I was in the South of France, (living/teaching for a year, that's another story) and my father sent me a copy of Where I'm Calling From, by Raymond Carver. I hadn't done much reading up to that point, unless it was for school, but suddenly I'm flying through these stories one after the other, really getting my ass kicked. From then on I've always looked for a story that connects with me, really, right down to my toenails, and I think with 'Castaways', from Drift, by Victoria Patterson, I might have found it.

Of course I'm older now (France was a bad acid trip...it seems like donkey years since I was there), not much wiser, but still...older, than I was when I first read Carver, and now I'm really identifying with men in the stories I read, whether it be in the New Yorker, or what ever I can get my hands on when it comes to contemporary fiction. I had a really hard time holding my emotions in check when I read this story, 'Castaways'. Being a dad might have something do with it, having my dreams sometimes squashed by life, and when the main character Michael has a late night run in with his father in law/employer, I really connected with what the father in law says, "Disappointments...shape us." Michael, the just divorced father at the center of this story is battling with being a good dad, realizing that it's not his fault that his wife left him, and struggling with his drinking problem. When Michael takes his son to the park you won't be able to hold it together, worse yet, when Michael talks to his sister on the phone and they both talk about their own father, you will mostly likely set the book down and need to compose yourself. Michael is a good father trying to make the bitter pill of divorce go down a little smoother for his son. 'Castaways' is just too damn good to be described.

A lot of people from the book business read this blog, (I think they do) so you need to ask your HMH rep for a galley of this stunning collection.

-JR

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Many things to see, many places too.

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Holloway's: Part Two, second story from Drift, by Victoria Patterson

A funny thing happened while I was writing yesterdays post about Drift, by Victoria Patterson. I'd been thinking about Victoria Robinson, an old friend from my days of working in film production in New York City, she was really something special, a wonderfully smart, witty, good humored person that I lost touch with. When I saw Victoria Patterson's name, I immediately thought of Victoria Robinson, because up until yesterday I've only known one Victoria. So every time I mentioned the author of Drift, I used the wrong last name, and, well...shame on me, but it's been fixed for those of you watching at home.

There was a stunned silence that swirled around my car just now, as I read the second story in this marvelous collection. It was very cinematic. I'm sitting in the parking lot of Stop & Shop, rain falling down, reading this blistering story about a group of women who work as waitresses in a restaurant. This seems fairly banal, but right away you’re floored by one woman thinking about what a shitty person she believes she is. "You fucked so many men", "trying to get attention and love" "you're disgusting, filthy." Then she thinks of a friend of her fathers that she slept with, how screwed up it was, how young she was, "but then her hair was in his fist." At this point I'm completely riveted. I'm not telling you this because it's salacious, I'm telling you this because it is so good that it might just be true. Sometimes the best fiction feels like that.

Patterson writes about a dead end group of women who haven't got the self esteem to ask for a second helping from the plates of left overs they nibble on in the kitchen. July Anne, the manager who rules with a whip and finds ways to feel better when she threatens her staff with unemployment, "you're too old... to perform lap dances". Maybe you've reflected on the job of a waitress, how sometimes they seem sad, tired, worn out from waiting on YOU, but that's the job, Quentin Tarantino said so... There isn't an easy resolution to this story, and it just flies, like the difference between cotton and silk sheets. The build up involves the real owner of the restaurant that July Anne manages, and his arrival, which is just to good to be spoiled here.

-JR

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It Looks Great From Here.

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Remoras, from Drift by Victoria Patterson

It is amazing when a short story jumps out of a collection and completely turns your day on it's ass. Drift by Victoria Patterson won't be in stores until June, but you can toss this little gem into your shopping cart and when it arrives you'll be glad that you listened to me.

It can be so hard to write a short story, one that shines and holds your attention for thirty pages, especially when a writer writes in the opposite sex. Ms. Patterson delivers a narrator who for the time being is called 'Nice Boy'. We meet him as he starts his descent into a waiter job at a restaurant. Jim, his boss, a strange man who runs his life on cigarettes and red wine is full of attitude. Patterson treats us to the local color of Newport Beach, California, where the stories in this collection take place.

Remora is a kind of fish that attaches itself to a shark, (whales, turles, manta rays as well) and you can enjoy this little detail when you come to it. 'Nice Boy' feels like a character out of my own High School, wealthy kid from the right side of the tracks who hasn't known hunger. He's dodging his own gilded cage and finds comfort in an Armenian beauty that is hired by Jim the same day he is. It was hard not to sink my teeth into these pages and devour this story like a succulent piece of prime rib, especially when 'Nice Boy' ends up at a rich kids house after a night of waiting tables and we get to feel Patterson's take on enjoying a hot tub. I was so impressed by a little detail, 'Nice Boy' goes to the bathroom to get towels and his hand slaps the wall of the bathroom as he looks for the light switch. It's something simple like this that makes me want to stop people on the street and tell them about these stories.

Patterson writes 'Nice Boy' like a man would write about a woman he knew well. She gives him plenty of room to explain himself, his greed, and his keen ability to avoid being sexually categorized, "ambivalent" is how he likes to think of himself. As a writer you can spend your entire life hoping that someday you'll write a story as good as this one, maybe you will, but until then, seek this out.

-JR

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Wonderful World by Javier Calvo and another word on DFW.

JC: JR's reference to DFW the other day was timely in a lot of different ways. Of course, he's been in the news often the last couple of weeks, with the recent article and the discussion of his unpublished work. I was thinking of DFW the other day, as I was reading Wonderful World by Javier Calvo. Calvo, of course, was the Spanish translator for DFW among many other fine authors, and their prose has more than a little in common, at least in English translation. I swear that reading the first chapter of WW was like reading the opening pages of The Broom of the System. Dizzyingly referential, slightly exasperating, and very funny.

Lucas Giraut is an awkward, thoughtful man, an antiques dealer, and the head of a multinational company, the majority of which he inherited from a father he barely knew. Between commiserating with the troubled adolescent in the neighboring apartment and fending off attacks on his stock position by his mother and her lawyers, Lucas discovers that his father Lorenzo was betrayed by his associates in a 70's prog rock-influenced art theft and forgery ring called The Down With The Sun Society, and hatches a cunning plan for revenge.

Wonderful World is complex and amusing, with a host of memorable characters, including a mobster with a soft spot for The Thing, the self-proclaimed Top European Expert on the Work of Stephen King, a porn star working her way up to respectability, and a reclusive art collector-philosopher. This was great fun, and I'm looking forward to seeing the other three of his published works translated into English.

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The Art of Pushing Yourself to New Places: Hooray for Stewart O'Nan!

Jonathan Evison: Probably my favorite writers are the ones who continually push themselves to new places. Shape-shifters. Writers compelled by the reckless impulse to test their own boundaries with every book, to plumb their own depths, disrupt their own smooth surfaces, subvert their own devices, and above all, frustrate their own comfort levels. Risk takers.

I sometimes wish that some of the writers whom I greatly admire (Kurt Vonnegut Jr., say, or J.D. Salinger, or John Fante, or Charles Bukowski) would've pushed themselves a little further into new territory over the course of their careers. I'd love to read a Salinger western. A Vonnegut story that lingered. A Bukowski novel without drinking. A Fante novel without Italians. The conventional wisdom, of course, is write what you know. I submit that if you can empathize, you can write about anything.

Which brings me to the number one reason I admire Stewart O'Nan. In my inaugural post I stated (brazenly, perhaps) that: the closer you get to the sure-thing, the bigger turd you're bound to unleash on the world.

This idea of getting dangerous, however, is not always what it seems. It doesn't necessarily mean re-inventing the Aristotelian story arc, or re-writing the English language, and certainly it doesn't mean shocking the reader, or denying the reader access to some masturbatory super-conception of “the novel” as a form of experimentation. Sometimes being dangerous just means writing the furthest thing from a sure-thing.

Exhibit A: Last Night at the Lobster. Try pitching this one to an editorial committee: A middle-aged schlub who manages a Red Lobster in a dying suburban rust-belt mall scrupulously walks us step by step through the minutia of the restaurant's final day, from turning on the deep-fryer to de-icing the parking lot, to turning off the neon sign for the last time. And yet . . . and yet . . . it's fucking riveting. Why? Because O'Nan empathizes with Manny's misplaced loyalty, and his admirable conscience. Because O'Nan get inside the skin of his characters.

Which brings me to the next reason I love O'Nan: He does it again and again every eighteen months or so: writes a novel that has little in common with his last novel. Does he have tendencies? Sure, he likes writing about the working class, he likes writing about families being tested by calamity, but he always manages to do something new with these themes, always pushes himself into a new places, from the nineteenth century prairie town of Friendship, Wisconsin, to Oklahoma's death row, to the stock room of the Red Lobster.

And I say: Hooray for Stewart O'Nan!

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Firelight

Here's my review of a second Tobias Wolff story, also from Our Story Begins. The first was 'Awaiting Orders".

Firelight doesn't begin with a cozy fire. Quite the opposite...it begins with boarding houses and window shopping. A mother and her boy are wandering around Seattle. They are smartly dressed and make a good impression but they haven't got a dime...or hardly a dime anyway.

Window shopping is an art. The mother in this story excels at putting up a good front. That's why she gets attentive service from store clerks even though she doesn't buy anything. But Wolff raises the stakes and presents a more coherent vision since the character is window shopping not only for clothes and furniture but also for a place to live....window shopping for a whole life, really.

Mother and son visit an apartment, masquerading as usual, as prospective tenants for a place they can't possibly afford. The man of the house shows them a large, beautiful room which contains a crackling fireplace, and in a lovely stroke, a counterpart to the boy in a girl who is reading by the fire.

I was stunned by Wolff's next move, the window shoppers leave, never, of course, to return. They can't afford the place. But the boy imagines a life history for the father and daughter that he has left behind...and imagines very plausibly too. But what I find delicious is that he can't possibly guess right in this sense...that he can't ever know if he was right or not.

Mother and son imagine a secure home, a home that they don't have in their boarding house existence. They visit such a place and imagination leaps up another level as they imagine the lives of its real owners. It's tricky having a first person child narrator who might seem too knowing. But Wolff solves this problem with elegance, by having his boy narrator grow up. Firelight concludes with another fire but colored by the imagination of the grown-up narrator. See for yourself. The craftmanship, the detailed insights of character that make the quality of Wolff's stories comparable to Updike's and Cheever's are present in nearly every line.

-DH

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He was a good man, but a better friend.

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This Is Cool.

http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/jrice/2009/03/this-is-cool/ Read more!

The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart

JC: I don't know why the hell I knew nothing about this book before it started getting award nominations. Well, I do, actually. A distinctly southern tale about an outlaw and a hero rarely crosses the threshold of some of our finer New England establishments, and make it the product of a university press on top of that (other than the Ivys, that is) and this book is all but invisible to a wider audience. What a damn shame. Had I actually read it in 2008, it would have been among my favorites for the year. Still too early to tell about 2009, of course, but I think it will be mentally filed in Favorites - Any Year.

Early Taggart drifted downstream in an ice-filled stream when he was baptized by his clinically insane mother at only 2 months old. Adopted by a nails-tough moonshine-brewing widow, and cursed by a foul, diseased piehole, the aptly nicknamed Trenchmouth suffers through a childhood and adolescence of verbal abuse, all the while honing his very personal skills - architectural design, sharpshooting, and cunnilingus. Unsurprisingly, the latter two aforementioned skills create both friends and enemies - among the labor unions and local ladies on one hand, and strikebreakers and cuckolds on the other. Driven from society, pursued by the law, Trenchmouth disappears into the mountains, where ascetic and isolated, he escapes his past. Years later he emerges and embarks upon a new life, only to have his past encroach upon it in ways and at times he could never have imagined.

What a great novel! Glenn Taylor has the dark, backwoods humor of Tom Franklin, and a great dose of what a good friend once called "hillbilly sophistication." Taylor pounds the reader with hard prose, hyperbolic and funny, outrageous and ambitious. His first "religious experience" is jawdropping, his damning gunfight is the stuff of western legend, and his end is the stuff of literature. It's remarkable. Read it.

JC Read more!

The Diver and David Foster Wallace.

I didn't know how depressed David Foster Wallace was. The New Yorker article on him is good, but very sad. I liked the entire piece until it got to the point when you knew it was over, and so was DFW. The talk about his unfinished novel, The Pale King is wonderful, and the actual excerpt felt strange, out of place, and very hard to penetrate. It's interesting to see what he was doing to get ready for this novel, and how hard he worked on Infinite Jest, a whopper of a story, the origins of which are very interesting. I never knew he was friends with Jonathan Franzen, or went to Amherst with Mark Costello, both men have written incredible novels.

The Diver is a short story written by Lewis Robinson, it starts off the collection; Officer Friendly and Other Stories. Robinson lives in Maine where his fiction comes to life. His novel Water Dogs was just published by Random House, and is enjoying solid sales here in the Northeast. Years ago I picked up the collection, Officer Friendly and never read it, a mistake. In the story The Diver, Robinson leads with a solid combination of fast paced excitement and even toned peril, it's a story that could be heard at a dinner party, imagine couples listening intently to one person's retelling of a sailing adventure and the man who came to get the family out of a jam.

Peter seeks the help of a local Diver to get his sailboat's motor untangled. He arrives soaking wet to ask for help, he has just swam his way to the shore from his stranded boat. Right away the Diver gives Peter a hard time, it's funny and frustrating, because Peter wants help. Peter's wife and child are on the boat, alone in the water. When the Diver does help Peter, it's quick and to the point, but in return he wants what Peter has, a taste of the good life, and the subtle sense of entitlement that Peter unintentionally gives off like a bad scent. This Diver is a man defined by his actions, like a Mamet character, his speech patterns remind me of something that had been polished and worked on for a long time. Robinson likes his characters to keep talking, even as they think, which is like Carver, and this writing is very remote but emotionally ready. By the time the Diver has and accident, and Peter might have planned it, the story is rolling past you faster than imagined. I refused to read my first edition of this book (don't ask), and picked up a paperback copy, which had some notes written in the margins...clearly the last owner of this book was very interested in recording his reactions to Robinson's stories. This collection is a gem and shouldn't be missed.

-JR

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Denver, Boston, Washington, Whatever.

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Jason Rice's Notebook

Dennis Haritou: If you enjoy being a voyeur, like Jimmy Stewart does in Rear Window, or if you are curious about the writer's process, and I presume that you are if you are reading our blog, then by following the link below you can take a peek at a page from Jason Rice's notebook. It was posted on a hyper-cool site that shows the pages of writing-in-process.

JR is getting posted to so many websites these days that I am losing track of them all. He is on Nervous Breakdown, Rumpus and has had his short stories published on several lit websites whose names I can't remember.

But then something like this nice cultural perk happens...

I've watched, over the past year, as his prose style has continued to evolve. His sentences these days coil like iron snakes, not a word is wasted...the phrases lash out. He's like one of those iron man athletes only he does it with language.

Here's the page from Jason's notebook...just a bit into this site: Hit and Run Magazine Read more!

Welcoming Jonathan Evison Part Two

Dennis Haritou: Having JE on our blog has reminded me of how green our cities are. There's a great story about Thoreau burning down the Concord woods in this City Journal article: http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_1_green-cities.html I am presuming that Jonathan is more circumspect around the campfire. But JE and I have been talking about camping lately and I wonder if he could tell us at least one camping story. Jonathan, I'd love to hear one, I swear, so please. Read more!

Welcoming Jonathan Evison to the Three Guys Blog

It’s exceptional to encounter a personality so strong, so open to new ideas that you become friends, even though that friend lives 3,000 miles away and you have never met him. We have to admit that from our sealed-up world back East, we don’t always know what we're dealing with in the vast Western territory of Jonathan Evison’s mind. But that’s what we like most about him.

The Three Guys have reviewed books and interviewed authors now for about a year. But ever since we covered All About Lulu, Jonathan's debut novel, we have stayed in touch with him, sharing ideas and a growing friendship. His prose, through its agility and warm-humored intelligence, has inspired us and made us better writers. So we thought, why not? We will ask him to join us and add a West Coast POV to what we do.

The Three Guys welcome Jonathan Evison to our blog, which is now his blog also. Read more!

Jonathan Evison has something to say

All this recent bet-hedging in the publishing arena makes me want to get dangerous with my literature. It makes me want to read and write books that only the most fearless editor would ever dare to publish, and only the most uncompromising writer would ever endeavor--at the risk of starving their family-- to write. Whether you’re talking about narrative decisions or acquisitions, nothing is worse for literature than safe choices. The closer you get to the sure-thing, the bigger turd you're bound to unleash on the world. And I fully expect a steady diet of turds from the big houses in the coming years unless they decide to get dangerous (and I don't mean fiscally irresponsible). Thus, I begin my tenure as the fourth of 'three guys' with a challenge to corporate publishers: bring me something dangerous. Bring me something that demands to be read. Send me a galley that will insinuate itself to the top of my impossible pile not because of a marketing push, or a big print run, but because the writing is viral and the word-of-mouth cannot be stopped. Then I'll have my intern read it.

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Awaiting Orders by Tobias Wolff Review

Dennis Haritou: JR has recently reviewed two Cheever stories on Three Guys. I decided to take a turn and review two Tobias Wolff stories from Our Story Begins. Later on, JR and I had the notion that we would each review one Updike story. That's still sort of up in the air since I haven't settled the details with JR but I hope it happens.

Cheever, Updike, Wolff: a triad of American short story masters, have been haunting our dreams. Cheever is the subject of a massive new biography from Knopf. Tobias Wolff has won the Story Prize and Updike is now our history. A posthumous Updike collection will be coming later this year from Random House.

How to pick my two Wolff stories? JR suggested I do one old story and one new one. The new story, Awaiting Orders, comes first. But I didn't pick it. Your cat picks you.

Army sergeant Morse takes a night duty call from Julianne, the sister of Billy Hart, a specialist who has just shipped out. Only his sister didn't know Billy had shipped out. That kick-starts the story. But in the best literature, isn't it character that leads the story? 

So let's take a closer look at Morse. Julianne brings up Billy...puts him to mind in Morse's head. But Billy was already lingering in Morse's head. That's the way Morse feels about Billy. We are in the surreal land of "Don't ask, don't tell".

Julianne is pissed that Billy took a powder, leaving a son behind that a cash-strapped family has to support. Morse offers to help. He liked Billy, he tells Julianne. He sure did. I am being snide to help indicate that there's a false relation in Morse's personality: like/"like". Can you enter Morse's character and separate them? No.

At the heart of Awaiting Orders is a tryst in a pancake house. Sounds dreary, doesn't it? But the working class is dreary...believe me, I know. Wolff hits a home run in the second phone call between Julianne and Morse that sets up this pancake house meeting.

In that call, Julianne refers to her family members and their situation as if Morse should know who they all are. Morse, of course, doesn't know what or who Julianne is talking about. Her whole conception of the world extends no farther than about five miles around her house. She's a small-time, small town gal.

At the pancake house, Morse opens up a bit as a human being...something that's hard for a gay guy to do who has trained himself to live in a strict closet for his whole army career. He just says something like: "You must be tired." to Julianne. And because this harried woman of limited resources suddenly finds herself treated sympathetical...treated as a human being...she becomes a human being...and so does Morse...as if being human is a touching temporary condition that can't be maintained. Life's just too rough for permanent human status.

That covers the first two thirds of this story. I won't say anything about the last third. It's pretty hard for anyone to help anybody. We are so locked up in our own characters that, sometimes, that's all we can see. But I hope I've been able to indicate something of the fallible richness of Morse and Julianne in Awaiting Orders.

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the wonders of camping out, no. 23 in a series of 485...dh

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Cheever, The Swimmer - Goodbye, My Brother.

It's a very strange experience to be this excited by a writer who actually hasn't written anything new since I was in grade school. John Cheever and his legend seem to be taking up permanent residence in my mind. Today I watched Cheever and Updike talk for a half an hour about life, baseball, religion, even the difficulties of raising children while finding time to write. The NYT's has an old interview with the two of them partaking in a admiration society, run by Dick Cavett, and it's wonderful, funny, filled with kind words and feelings that pour out of Cheever when he knew he was probably dying. Updike is flattered by the entire event. There is much to be said about their similarities, but they are very different writers.

The same guy who told me to read the 'Housebreaker of Shady Hill', said the 'The Swimmer' might have been written right after it. Cheever describes who can only be Johnny Hake, swimming from one pool to the next in the neighborhood Hake tried to ransack in 'Housebreaker'. You feel the warmth of the water (and alcohol) as he swims quick laps in different pools, and then to watch Cheever pull his point of view off the ground and describe the town from above, how the land stretched out and bent oddly like a dogs back legs.

When he arrives at the Bunkers home and there is a party in progress around the pool he jumps in, and somehow the laughter is suspended in mid-air, and the voices seem to rise off the water. He hears a ball game, people talking in the Bunkers kitchen, all of this cuts a tapestry of humans passing through their houses and stomping in their own lives. All of this is perfect detail, right down the New York Times green plastic tube and the private property sign that mark the Levy's driveway. He stands on the road, people might mistake him for a victim, but this man has no goal, just the need to move on, through the lives that surround him. He's left his wife Lucinda alone at the start of this journey, and when he gets home the door is locked and the house dark. This is where the real trouble starts.

I thought 'Goodbye, My Brother' was over written, at first. It's not of course, I'm just getting used to Cheever's tongue, his way of describing in detail a game of backgammon, or a brother who arrives by ferry and after a long introduction turns out to be a sour apple. The Pommeroys are a family steeped in generational wealth, (at least it seemed like it) and have a brother Lawrence, who has been given the nickname of Tifty, which I'll let you discover. Tifty isn't having this family reunion, and does everything to turn it to shit. Their mother, a drunk who can't find the time to talk the nuts and bolts of life with anyone, and seems to be drunkenly living it up in some gilded past. Sadly she is denying that her home is coming loose all around her...so Cheever moves her into the shadows.

I suppose there is a moment in a short story where a reader's heart stops:

"When I woke the next morning, of half woke, I could hear the sound of someone rolling the tennis court. It is a fainter and a deeper sound than the iron buoy bells of the point-an unrhythmic iron chiming-that belongs in my mind to the beginnings of a summer day, a good portent."

A man laying in bed and listening to the day happen around him, before he's had a chance to join in the fun. From then on Cheever had my full attention. It's unfair to describe in detail how the brothers sort out their differences, but when John Updike quoted the last several lines of this story in his review of the Blake Bailey biography, 'Cheever', in this week's New Yorker, I was thrilled to know that I'd read this story, and also found those last moments to be brilliant, even stunning. In these few moments we see the wife and sister swimming, these things in life that you only half recognize when they are happening, but years later they might be the only thing that stick in your mind.
-JR

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It's a very strange experience to be this excited by a writer who actually hasn't written anything new since I was in grade school. John Cheever and his legend seem to be taking up permanent residence in my mind. Today I watched Cheever and Updike talk for a half an hour about life, baseball, religion, even the difficulties of raising children while finding time to write. The NYT's has an old interview with the two of them partaking in a mutal admiration society, sheriffed by Dick Cavett, and it's wonderful, funny, filled with kind words and feelings that pour out of Cheever when he knew he was probably dying, and from a obviously flattered Updike. There is much to be said about their similiarties, but they are very different writers, even if Cavett said otherwise.

The same guy who told me to read the 'Housebreaker of Shady Hill', said the 'The Swimmer' might have been written right after it. Cheever desribes who can only be Johnny Hake, swimming from one pool to the next in the neighborhood Hake tried to ransake in 'Housebreaker', and the ripple of emotion it set off in me was very exciting. I could feel the warmth of the water as he swam quick laps in different pools, and then to see Cheever pull his point of view off the ground and describe the town from above, how the land stretched out and bent oddly like a dogs back legs. When he arrives at the Bunkers home and there is a party in progress around the pool he jumps in, and how the laughter is suspended in mid-air, the voices seem to rise off the water. He hears a ball game, people talking in the Bunkers kitchen, all of this cuts a tapestry of human's passing through their houses and stomping in their own lives. All of this is perfect detail, right down the New York Times green plastic tube and the private property sign that marks the Levy's driveway. He stands on the road, people might mistake him for a victim, but this man has no goal, just the need to move on, through the lives that surround him. He's left his wife Lucinda alone at the start of this journey, and when he gets home the door is locked and the house dark. This is where the real trouble starts.


I thought 'Goodbye, My Brother' was over written, at first, it's not of course, I'm just getting used to Cheevers tongue, his way of describing in detail a game of backgammon, or a brother who arrives by ferry and after a long introduction and turns out to be a sour apple. The Pommeroy's are a family steeped in generational wealth, (at least it seemed like it) and have a brother Lawerence, who has been given the nick name of Tifty, which I'll let you discover. Tifty isn't having this family reunion, and does everything to turn it to shit. Their mother, a drunk who can't find the time to talk the nuts and bolts of life with anyone, and seems to be drunkenly living it up in some gilded past, and is denying that her home is coming loose all around her...so Cheever moves her into the shadows.

I suppose there is a moment in a short story where a reader's heart stops, and for me it was this:

"When I woke the next morning, of half woke, I could hear the sound of someone rolling the tennis court. It is a fainter and a deeper sound than the iron buoy bells of the point-an unrhythmic iron chiming-that belongs in my mind to the beginnings of a summer day, a good portent."

It's scary to say this out loud, but I was very moved by that section. A man laying in bed and listening to the day happen around him, before he's had a chance to join in the fun. From then on Cheever had my full attention. It's unfair to describe in detail how the brothers sort out their differences, but when John Updike quoted the last several lines of this story in his review of the Blake Bailey biography, Cheever, in this week's New Yorker, I was thrilled to know that I'd read this story, and also found those last moments to be brilliant, and incredidly stunning. In the story wew see the wife and sister swimming, and it's moments like this in life that you only half recognize when they are happening, but years later it can be the only thing that sticks in your mind.
-JR

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John Cheever's Swimmer and Goodbye, My Brother.

It's a very strange experience to be this excited by a writer who hasn't written anything new since I was in grade school. John Cheever and his legend seem to be taking up permanent residence in my mind. Today I watched John Cheever and John Updike talk for a half an hour about life, baseball, religion, even the difficulties of raising children while finding time to write. The NYT's has an old interview with the two of them partaking in a mutal admiration society, sheriffed by Dick Cavett, and it's wonderful, funny, filled with kind words and feelings that pour out of Cheever when he knew he was probably dying. And Updike who seems more flattered than anything else. There is much to be said about their similiarties, but they are very different writers.

The same guy who told me to read the 'Housebreaker of Shady Hill', said the 'The Swimmer' might have been written right after it. Cheever desribes who can only be Johnny Hake, swimming from one pool to the next in the neighborhood Hake tried to ransake in 'Housebreaker'. He swam quick laps in different pools, around his neighborhood, and then to see Cheever pull his point of view off the ground and describe the town from above, how the land stretched out and bent oddly like a dogs back legs. When he arrives at the Bunkers home and there is a party in progress around the pool he jumps in, and how the laughter is suspended in mid-air, the voices seem to rise off the water. He hears a ball game, people talking in the Bunkers kitchen, all of this cuts a tapestry of human's passing through their houses and stomping in their own lives. These detail are great, right down the New York Times green plastic tube and the private property sign that marks the Levy's driveway. He stands on the road, people might mistake him for a victim, but this man has no goal, just the need to move on, through the lives that surround him. He's left his wife Lucinda alone at the start of this journey, and when he gets home the door is locked and the house dark. This is where the real trouble starts.

I thought 'Goodbye, My Brother' was over written, at first, it's not, I'm just getting used to Cheevers tongue. The way of he describes a game of backgammon, or a brother who arrives by ferry and after a long introduction turns out to be a sour apple. The Pommeroy's are a family steeped in generational wealth, (at least it seemed like it) and have a brother Lawerence, who has been given the nick name of Tifty, which I'll let you discover. Tifty isn't having this family reunion, and does everything to turn it to shit. Their mother, a drunk who can't find the time to talk the nuts and bolts of life with anyone, and seems to be drunkenly living it up in some gilded past, who still occupies a home that is coming loose all around her...so Cheever moves her into the shadows.

-JR

I suppose there is a moment in a short story where a reader's heart stops:

"When I woke the next morning, of half woke, I could hear the sound of someone rolling the tennis court. It is a fainter and a deeper sound than the iron buoy bells of the point-an unrhythmic iron chiming-that belongs in my mind to the beginnings of a summer day, a good portent."

A man laying in bed and listening to the day happen around him, before he's had a chance to join in the fun. From then on Cheever had my full attention. It's unfair to describe in detail how the brothers sort out their differences, but when John Updike quoted the last several lines of this story in his review of the Blake Bailey biography, Cheever, in this week's New Yorker, I was thrilled to know that I'd read this story, and also found those last moments to be brilliant. In the story we see the wife and sister swimming, and it's moments like this in life that you only half recognize when they are happening, but years later it can be the only thing that sticks in your mind.

-JR

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The Housebreaker of Shady Hill.

I think John Cheever and his short stories, and even his novels have been waiting for me to discover them. A friend of mine suggested I read ‘The Housebreaker of Shady Hill’, and at the time I was resisting this writer’s work, for reasons that fail me. For years I avoided Cheever, I thought he was stuffy and old school, not prescient enough, the same goes with Updike, and even Yates. I read 'Revolutionary Road' a few years ago and was completely wiped out by its blistering power. There is a style among these writers that clearly defines modern man, educated and married, the company man, as a hollow shell of disappointment who has been successfully worn down by life, love and a overwhelming insecurity that wanders around even in my cold heart.

Cheever seems to be the buzz right now, the NYT Magazine story, the big bio coming from Blake Bailey, on sale right now, and the general feel in the wake of Updike’s passing that this kind writing is in vogue, so, here I am, discovering it for the first time. If you’re still reading in a minute, I’ll be impressed.

‘The Housebreaker of Shady Hill’, which moves like a story that might take place across the street from Don Draper’s home and has a unique feel to it that isn’t easy to put a finger on. The narrator, Johnny Hake describes himself like he would to a divorce lawyer. He would be shocked to find out that he’s been a callous asshole, and that his wife is taking the kids, because he ignores her and them. There is a blind-drunk, wealthy without showing it off vibe to this story, and Hake talks about his neighbors, his children who he loves, and his neighborhood like it weren’t quite what he had hoped it would be, but now that he’s here, it really does deserve his discerning eye. He talks about being alone in the night while his wife sleeps next to him. The empty pit in his stomach which is hard to figure out, he realizes his friends are rich, and he knows this because they seem to be in a state of constant leisure, traveling, enjoying life, where Hake is confused by his own place in the world, and his job seems like a cheap sports coat that could be the lining to a better coat. He’s woken up and discovered that somehow, and with great permanence, that he is living in a community of well-educated members of the upper middle class, and his dark soul knows he’s miscast.

Hake steals a neighbor’s wallet, hoping the money will get him out of a jam. This is all a symptom of a disease I like to call boredom of reality. Hake can’t shake the rough edges of life, the despair and loneliness no one ever told him this was waiting in suburbia, marriage and a nine to five job that defines him and leaves him very little room to live. He finally eviscerates his wife and children in Yates like fashion, which reminds us all just how out of touch and self centered he really is. The sections about his family, especially his wife, will shove you to the floor. There is something very powerful about this story, which isn’t always obvious. The strange thing (to me, the rest of the world knows this already) I discovered about this story, is how much it reminds me of Rick Moody's novel 'Ice Storm'.
-JR Read more!

deflationary expectations...dh

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Trouble by Kate Christensen Review

Dennis Haritou: Can you imagine that a look in a mirror could change your life? Kate Christensen's moderately-scaled, appropriately named new novel, Trouble, gets a terrific kick-start when middle-aged Manhattan shrink, Josephine, catches her own reflection in a mirror at a party at the home of one of her two best friends, Indrani. The recoil leads her to break with her family and join her second best friend, Raquel, a fading rock star who is hiding out in Mexico City from a disastrous liaison.

The complex resonances of friendship: I was curious, as one of the Three Guys, to see what I could learn about friendship by examining the plight of these women as they tried stand by each other. It's not the same style as guy friendship at all, that's for sure. For one thing, I doubt very much that any of my straight male friends are going to lie in bed with me and just hold hands to give me some peace of mind. That happens in this book with the two women and it's quite sexless...but it is very touching.

This novel is divided into three large sections. The first part takes place in Manhattan where it's fascinating to see Josephine deal with the problems of her patients, we get to meet three choice ones, and then see the contrast as she confronts her own demons. It's also delicious to have Indrani, as the friend with the maximum amount of rectitude, chide the good Josephine for violating the boundaries of marriage, when she has never been married herself.

But the main field of play is Mexico City and here is where I had my problem with this novel. Although the citation within the text was to Passage To India, which Josephine happens to be reading, my association, as a book buyer, was to Eat, Pray, Love. You know, upper-middle class matron travels to discover herself. Self-discovery consists of eating exotic foods, sampling relationships with the natives, and indulging in the occasional major religious faith but without being subject to the inconvenience of actually being committed to it. There was too much sightseeing in this book. If I wanted to read a Lonely Planet guide, which is cited in Trouble, then I would get one.

But I am being an impatient reader and that's not fair to Christensen who is a subtle writer. And maybe also I am missing some of the emotional heft in a story about two women, close friends who are both in trouble, trying to comfort each other as best they can when all they have to work with are the quotidian details of a Christmas break vacation in Mexico City. The story ends up packing quite a wallop, thanks to an author who has carefully laid the groundwork.

I have to say that I think it's unrealistic to expect that friendships as wonderful as the ones in Trouble really exist either between men or even between women. But I wish to God they did. Trouble will be published by Doubleday in June of 2009.

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kamikaze biker: the last moments of a lovely couple recorded by our camera...dh

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