Knock Magazine Preview - Jonathan Evison Guest Editor

If you want a look at the new issue of Knock Magazine, edited by the great JE, go here:

http://knockmagazine.com/issues/11/index.html

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Vast Hell

Guillermo Martinez short story, Vast Hell, appears in the current (April 27th) issue of the New Yorker. It takes place in a small town by the name of Puente Viejo; which means "small bridge' in Spanish.

The first person narrator, clerking in a grocery store, is having a day so slow that he can hear the "buzzing of the flies". I think the whole town can hear those flies. He is thinking about a scruffy young man, a stranger, who had pitched a tent at the edge of town. He hit town in the spring...as if unkempt young men were seasonal.

The grocer refers the kid to the newer of two barbers in town, Cervino's rather than the more remotely located Old Melchor's. We hear a lot about the rivalry between these two hair-shredders. It's sort of like a clash of the titans only they're barbers. Cervino has a hairdressing diploma and uses vegetable extracts. Melchor counters with porno magazines and a T.V. tuned to soccer matches.

But Cervino, shy to the point of virtual non-existence, has his secret weapon wife, "The French Woman". I guess that just means she's exotic...we don't know if she's actually French...doesn't matter. She has the habit of appearing in her husband's shop with limits on the clothing she's wearing. She checks herself out in the mirror. She looks in your eyes. Do you want to look back?

Here's where you decide if this story's for you or not. Have you ever had the experience of looking at someone who was so beautiful...or better...so hypnotic in their effect...that at first you wanted to be around them and then you just wanted to run away because you couldn't take it any more?

Wow...the male ego...what a piece of work. At first the French Woman makes Cervino's popular. You never know when she might turn up and put on a show. But she ends up driving customers away. It's those eyes...like she's looking down on you...making you feel you'd never be up to the job.

Our now better groomed young man and the French Woman both disappear at the same time. Crevino says his wife's gone to the city to look after her sick father. The young man's tent lies abandoned at the edge of town.

Readers think what they like. But what makes a story is what the characters think. And there's a nut job of an old harridan, Espinosa's widow, who's busying herself digging up the dunes near her house, looking for the bodies.

GM asks a lot of our imagination. He asks you to feel your way into this town's psychology: feel their boredom, their confusion, their oblivion...and their resulting illusions. Are they your illusions also? Ask yourself that question.

Vast Hell is translated from the Spanish by Alberto Manquel.
-DH Read more!

Brooklyn by Colm Toibin

Brooklyn is a myth. This may come as a surprise to the several million people who live there. In these parts, it is second only to Manhattan in glamor. But in coolness, it has the edge. You can no more take down a myth than you can pin an angel. Just as you think you may have a lock on it, it changes into something else and eludes your grasp. Like clouds, fairy tales, the reflection of the sky in a lake...or like beauty in your friends or strangers on the street...never the same from moment to moment...always metamorphosis is in the cards for the things that we love.

It is in that spririt that I am reacting to Brooklyn by Colm Toibin which is pubbing in early May from Scribner. Brooklyn is just one view of the angel. But it's a beautiful angel.

As is appropriate for the location of any myth, Brooklyn starts somewhere else. You have to travel to get to the myth...like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or Parsifal. But we start with the first words of the story: "Eilis Lacey". She is our voyager.

Even the name sounds exotic to me. But it may be a common enough name in the town in Ireland where Eilis lives with her older, leadership-driven sister Rose and her widowed mother.

I admire the way Toibin immerses us in this Irish world immediately. We get the name of her street, that her sister is returning from a shopping trip to Dublin. We get the name of the store Rose shops in and we conclude that Rose can't buy such fashionable stuff in her own neighborhood and that the family doesn't have a lot money. Rose went especially for the sale. We also find out that Rose's golf clubs are lying in the front hall, ready for use. This is all in the first paragraph of eight lines and there is more...but I can't fit it all in my paragraph of eight lines the way Toibin can fit it in his.

Life in Ireland in the 50's tends to curl back into itself...like a vine that gets tangled in knots because it has no where else to grow. Eilis is a whiz with numbers but it doesn't look like she is going to get the chance to study for a business degree. She lands a clerk's position in a bakery at a pittance of a wage dispensed by some old dragon lady who gives Eilis leftover stale bread to take home. But if you need the money to help out the family, it's not such a bad deal.

There is a dense social circuit, neighbors and friends walking everywhere...that must seem exotic to most Americans. You can sense that Eilis is going to have as good a provincial life as anyone but you already know what it would consist of...no surprises...in that first paragraph you have already been told all about it.

But then Eilis finds herself grafted into 1950's Brooklyn instead. You'll have to read about that transition for yourself. But it reminded me of Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. Like Dorothy, Eilis encounters a lot of strangers along the way, most of whom turn out to be friendly. And if you want to attend a Dodgers game in Ebbets Field with baseball fans that you can really care about then you'll love this novel.

There's a wonderful cast of minor players with most of them having their hearts in the right place despite their flaws. There is the supervisior in the big Italian department store where Eilis works, Miss Fortini..., the landlady of the boarding house where she stays, Mrs. Kehoe, (we hardly, if ever, hear their first names), the lovely Italian family of the new man in her life, Tony....many more. I wanted to make a point of mentioning their names because they seem like real people. Mr. Toibin believes in the dignity of his characters. My favorite bit player is the biblically-named Father Flood, a priest of many resources, who keeps a watchful eye on his Brooklyn parish.

One interesting feature of this 50's Brooklyn nostaglia is that it stops at the bedroom. A lot of this novel may read like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and it's just as good, but the treatment of sexuality is 2009. This created an odd optical effect for me. You may think you're within the atmosphere of Singing in the Rain or Belle of New York, two contemporary movies that are mentioned in Brooklyn, then you are brought up short by an erotic awareness that couldn't have been discussed in a 50's novel and that would have made Bennett Cerf pass out. This is a contemporary novel...don't make the mistake of thinking it's a quaint period piece. That goes for the story's take on Brooklyn's ethnic diversity as well.

Getting back to that Brooklyn angel...where is Eilis's myth truly located? The choices that we make create the shadows that we don't want to see, the streets that we never turned down, that would have created the lives that we never had, would haunt us if we paid any attention to them which we don't. If Brooklyn is not a myth, then is Ireland the myth? Is the myth always on the other side of the ocean?

-DH

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A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick

JC: I'm a bit late to the party on this review. Robert Goolrick is already getting some very good press on his new novel A Reliable Wife, and deservedly so. He performs a couple of pretty fantastic tricks in it. The first is in the very impressive opening chapter. He creates such a vivid picture in his first paragraphs that it's like he has frozen a moment in time, snowflakes in midair, gawking onlookers, and all of Ralph Truitt's tragic past is obvious. I thought it was quite a stunning scene.

Of course his past is not so transparant, and neither is that of his spouse-to-be, selected in a pre-WWI Wisconsin version of the mail-order bride. The two become acquainted in the close quarters of the north country winter. She is slowly killing him, but he doesn't mind, as long as she accomplishes one final task for him.
Pretty gripping stuff.

That other trick? Well, it's hard to explain. How many times have you been reading a very good book, and the author reveals a shocking turn in the plot that you know, you just know(!) has blown the rest of the novel, because he showed his hand too early? And you say Crap! because there is no way the author can undo it, and there is way too much book left. The whole thing's going to unravel.

I swear that's what I thought about halfway through A Reliable Wife -- damn, he's ruined it. But I was wrong. Goolrick takes the point of no return and makes a nice little Sophoclean shift, ratchets up the tension, and makes a hell of a novel out of it. It reminded me of Flannery O'Connor in some ways, dark and surprising. Worth your time.

jc Read more!

Western Swing

JE: With so much discussion around here recently about Cheever and Updike and Yates, I thought I'd venture past the suburbs today for a quick post about a writer out west whom I greatly admire for his warmth and humor, and his distinctly western brand of eccentricity: Mr. Tim Sandlin of Wyoming. This morning, attempting to govern the chaos of books ever threatening to overwhelm my fortress of solitude, I ran across Sandlin's Western Swing among the stacks. Though it has been at least four years since I read Western Swing, I remember the novel in vivid detail. This is rare for me, a reader who almost invariably must revisit a work in order to wax with any detail on its charms.

As its title suggests, Western Swing is a bit like a country song in the form of a novel. Tenacious characters losing wives and kids, haunting cowboy bars looking for love, fucking and fighting their way toward catharsis. Everything about the novel, from its unhurried tempo to its twangy cadence to its thematic concerns of broken love, domestic unrest, and dogged perseverance, embodies the spirit of classic country music. Even the humor is wounded and unsentimental. You can hear the pedal steels and smell the leather, feel the reckless possibilities of canned beer pumping through your veins as the band strikes up New San Antonio Rose, and the girl at the end of the bar sneaks a sidelong glance at you through a curl of blue smoke.

It is no small wonder that Sandlin's hard-knock characters feel so lived in. On his fortieth birthday, Sandlin himself was washing dishes at a Chinese restaurant and living in a tent in the Wyoming backwoods. At least that's how the legend goes. For my money, this is the sort rugged balls-to-the-wall individualism and privation that teaches pathos where an MFA program could never hope to.

Sandlin is deceptively fun reading in the manner of, say, Charles Portis--offbeat and charming and infused with great quantities of voice. But unlike Portis, Sandlin habitually dares to get dangerous. He plumbs the emotional depths where Portis glides across the surface. Sandlin has pathos. Western Swing ooozes it, right down to the last wavering steel guitar note. And pathos, more than anything else, is what makes writing resonate in JE's world.

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Hint Fiction Contest

Cool contest, go here: http://robertswartwood.wordpress.com/2009/04/19/hint-fiction-contest/


-JR Read more!

Where do you think you are? Who do you think you are with?

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Matrimony by Joshua Henkin

I am taking liberties by thinking of Joshua Henkin as a friend. The good JH sent me a copy of his novel, Matrimony, after reading a couple of my Tobias Wolff reviews. He figured from reading my reviews that I would like his book. He was so genial about it that I just had to like him. Thanks, JH.

I have a friend who once told me that friendship was like a marriage. Well...I don't think that's true...only a marriage is like a marriage. But matrimony is the paradigm for being involved surely, and in that sense writing, and marriage and friendship, all pull together in Matrimony.

Julian, from a wealthy family in NYC, meets his best friend, Carter, who is from the wrong side of the tracks on the wrong coast, at their ivy-infested college in New England. Carter has gotten in on a scholarship. 

Carter can't get over what life has not given him, no matter how much success he has. Julian is driven by the idea of doing it his way since his parents gave him everything. He breaks out of his cage with his marriage to Mia and his commitment to a writing career. His marriage and a novel is the territory that Julian is determined to own.

JH's is an art of getting all the details right and his voice is amazing while he does it: wistful at times, flippant or matter-of-fact at others...a third person authorial voice, detached but compassionate. Henkin can describe two friends playing basketball...or a couple having some other couples over for dinner...and make these quotidian events seem like the most important occurrences in the world...and they are. What you are doing...right now...is all you have. 

Marriage shelters Julian and Mia. It seems like their personal limitations are annulled when they are together in a union and that they both falter when they are separated. As for that weaker relationship, friendship, in this case Julian's for his best friend Carter, you can hear it crack apart under the strain of egos that just can't stop trying to beat down the past.

You end up rooting for Julian, Mia and Carter. You want this marriage and this friendship not to fail. These are characters....people...that you can care about. Joshua Henkin is a modest writer but a large talent. In Matrimony, he has written a novel that puts his characters, and not himself, first. It's quite a pleasure.

-DH

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Three Randomly Selected Books from JE's Shelf (all by dead guys)

I SERVED THE KING OF ENGLAND – BOHUMIL HRABAL Though widely considered a masterpiece throughout Europe, Hrabal's hilarious, sensual, and unforgettable portrait of Nazi-occupied Prague through the eyes of a Quixotic young waiter is--in my humble estimation--vastly underexposed stateside. Anyone who has ever worked in the food service or hospitality industry, must read this book, which was released in 1971 by Petlice, an underground anti-communist press in Prague, and not published in America until 1990. Hrabal was a bigger-than-life (though highly accessible) figure in Czechoslovakia, where he died at the age of 83, falling from a fifth-story hospital window while trying to feed pigeons. I rate Hrabal very high on my list of people I wish I could've had a few beers with before they fell out of windows--right before Chet Baker.

OUR MUTUAL FRIEND – CHARLES DICKENS Dickens under-read? Sounds like an oxymoron, I know. But how many people do you know who have actually read Dickens' final completed novel? In spite of what stodgy old Henry James had to say in his scathing review upon the release of OMF, it just may be my favorite Dickens novel. OMF finds Dickens at the top of his game, both as a storyteller and a wordsmith. While darker than any of his other works (with the exception of Bleak House), it may also be his funniest. For my money, Silas Wegg is one of the greatest comic inventions in all of literature. I'm guessing OMF was also among Evelyn Waugh's favorite Dickens novels, as he pays it a roundabout homage in A Handful of Dust.

SEVENTEEN – BOOTH TARKINGTON Okay, this is certainly the most ephemeral and least ambitious of today's three randomly selected books, which probably explains in large part why it has fallen out of fashion-- that, and a slight tendency toward the anachronistic where certain racial perceptions are concerned. But holy cow is it funny! Sure, it's a little Norman Rockwelly, but I'm not kidding, I busted a serious gut when I read this book. At the going rate of cultural acceleration “Seventeen” might be aptly be re-titled “Twelve” in this day and age, still Tarkington captures all the awkwardness and discomfort of adolescence brilliantly, with a comic verve arguably unmatched in America in 1916. Of note: I believe Tarkington is the only novelist to win the Pulitzer Prize twice. Weird, huh? Read more!

Just One More Time - John Cheever

I beg you to stop what you're doing and read 'Just One More Time', I'll wait. (At this point I'll assume you have Cheever's collected stories handy, if not, buy it here.)

Okay. You've read it...right? Did you ever wonder what people were like before Netflix and the Internet...even cell phones. When you knew everyone in your apartment building, and it seemed that most people were good mannered, dressed well, and invested in the stock market. You know...when men wore hats everyday. Cheever offers a peak into the mind of a man who is watching his own neighbors go from skid row to the front row.

The doorman smirks at the Beers, they've lost all their money on the stock market, including the millions (Cheever must have really been seeing stars if he thought people could only loose millions on the stock market) that they've inherited. The Beers are a funny bunch, they are several months past due on the rent and it never really matters since they seem to be eternally optimistic. I've known people like this in my life, and it's not easy to enjoy their company, because things always go right for them in the end. Cheever talks about the Beers when they "kited checks" and borrowed someones car, crashing it and walking away without a scratch or a care in the world. But in the social structure of Cheever's New York City, the Beers are constantly on the move, looking for the next free meal, or a stiff drink.

This story is gloriously quick, sly and extremely cutting; as it speaks to a class of people that no longer exist. The cocktail crowd, the social structure of a neighborhood, and the countless families with fathers who work day jobs and wives who tend to the homestead. In the end the Beers and their wealth return, and they sweep down to save the day. But you knew that already...right?

-JR

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God get's a little on the side.

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The Worm In The Apple - John Cheever

Take a moment in time; when you're standing alone behind that person who can't seem to get their groceries out of their cart fast enough, and you start to concentrate on their bald spot, or how this person's wallet has made a permanent impression in their jeans, you start to imagine all kinds of things about people if you stare long enough.

John Cheever seemed to focus his finer talents on the people of Shady Hill, this story, 'The Worm In The Apple' is the third story from this little suburb that I've read, and it's about seventy-five percent shorter than 'The Swimmer' or 'The Housebreaker of Shady Hill', but no less potent.

Trouble finds all families, some are self imposed injuries and in the case of the Crutchmans it's Cheever who holds a blow torch to their lives, and they stand up well to the test, even though they live a life of happiness. We know this; they are wealthy and most days Larry doesn't need to catch the 8:03, but he does, and somehow makes it look like work is the best place to be, which for married men with a houseful of kids, sometimes is. We learn about their children, who they were, and who they will become, Rachel is a fatty in short pants who grows up to perform wonders on her backside. Tom, like his sister neither recognizes or cares that their lives are financially secure, Tom falls in an out of love, and finally marries, but it takes much practice.

Cheever mentions Rachel when she gets old enough, "Rachel's way was not so easy. When she lost her fat she became very pretty and quite fast." She's not running the hundred yard dash that's for sure.

This is a story of a family told in less than four pages, and there is something so powerful like that first hit of alcohol after the initial gulp runs into your stomach. Cheever is deliriously talented when he turns his eye on the people of Shady Hill, and has created a place that is filled with great opportunity, grief, loneliness and savage realities.

-JR Read more!

Peter's Offender

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The Enormous Radio - John Cheever

I've seen this idea bobbing it's head in Hollywood, Cheever planted this seed a long time ago, and to read it now after seeing it mentioned the New York Times daily review of Cheever; A Life, I feel ashamed that I've never read The Enormous Radio.

Jim and Irene Wescott are Cheever citizens, keepers of the faith, holding down jobs, and keeping their apartment clean. They have children, (Cheever likes to have a few crumb snatchers around just to humble his main characters) and the strains of life aren't apparent right away. But when they buy a new radio and try to enjoy music, something that doesn't happen in the modern home anymore, they realize that the radio station's on the dial are broadcasting conversations from other apartments in their building.

We hear the squabbles, and mild accusations, threats, the beatings, and the radio gives voice to the common man as he grinds the day to day living which is taken for granted. In the suburbs you can get a taste of this kind of passive aggressive violent frequency by listening to people talk on their cell phones. People think that the entire world needs to hear what they're saying on the phone. Ninety-nine percent of the time I'm angered by this useless static, but sometimes you get a gem. Cheever of course never heard of a cell phone, but his radio that can catch the wantings and whispers of your neighbors is wonderful to experience. By the end of the story, Jim and Irene have turned on each other, and we hear what we always knew was the truth. That life is plain, dirty, one part ugly and one part beauty, and it stinks, but at the end of the day it is yours to live.
-JR Read more!

It's a big deal, and it means nothing.

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The Walk with Elizanne - John Updike, from My Father's Tears

I've often thought of attending my High School reunion, and after a few seconds thought again. I didn't like anyone I went to High School with and twenty years isn't going to change that. John Updike, was a brilliant stylist, subtle and unique in his ability to change tones from a marriage gone sour or a cheating husband during a freak storm to a High School reunion that is both sweet and tender.

Elizanne is a weird name, and it speaks to a time long before Jason and Jennifer became the names of the day. Updike does something very simple with this story, he follows Elizanne and David, old classmates, as they move through the town they grew up in and relive their first kiss. They've come home for their High School reunion which is the only real structure to this story. It reminds me of It's A Wonderful Life, the innocence of Bedford Falls, how everything was simple and high school dances became the most important thing on a Friday night. George Bailey could have been a character in an Updike novel, in fact, I think they may have crossed paths somewhere in time, if not, they will soon.

Like Bedford Falls the little town of Olinger is lined with quirky stores and fine landscaping, it's not busy, or filled with SUV's, like most modern suburban towns. David and Elizanne are remembering what it was like to fall in love for the first time, those moments when nothing seemed particularly important but everything had possibility. They both are older and there isn't much time left for either of them but this walk they take together seems vital and necessary. They are discovering the people that they've become, and realizing that their first kiss together is just as important as the last. Updike reminds us all that the passage of time is a hard truth. And in some ways this story shows the reader just how short a distance it is between the beginning and the end.

-JR

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If I had any more fun, I'd be dying.

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The Sorrows of Gin - John Cheever

It's hard not to read this story and think of Rick Moody...and his novel The Ice Storm. Imitation if the purest form of flattery, I suppose. I've always liked Moody, he's a polar ice cap, and sometimes it takes a while for the sun to reach him. Cheever gives us a first class ticket to suburban terror with The Sorrows of Gin, a top notch trip to a place that is so vivid and full of life that you'll be sorry when it's over.

The Lawtons and their daughter Amy are your run of the mill Cheever characters, Dad takes the train to work, Mom is a card player and a professional lay about, they've had a bad run of luck with their cook, and other people who work for them. Everyone seems to be drinking their gin...even the whiskey! Daddy is a brutal asshole, he runs his daughter like he himself is a drill Sargent, do your homework, don't eat the nuts they're for company (this last part in the presence of company) and generally makes life at home like walking a tight rope, which in her own way Amy points out. There is a velvet like aristocratic feel to these people, they are upper middle class, and a family unit in a Norman Rockwell way. When Dad blames the babysitter of stealing his gin this woman goes off the deep end, it's funny, and it's sad, but it's Cheever.
-JR Read more!

Distant Happiness

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The Karnak Cafe by Naguib Mahfouz

The hot Three Guys discussion of Revolutionary Road has me feeling that I'm encircled by two daemons. That's not demons in the Christian sense but the daemons of my Greek ancestors.

The first daemon wears the mask of necessity: "What people do and what they say is all that we can have...all that we can know. But if we really pay attention, it's more than enough." It's the voice of realism.

The second daemon wears a smile. "I am optimistic and have reason to be."..I feel like rereading Candide...it's the best of all possible worlds. I can prove that's not a rational statement...but it's a live voice calling on us to participate.

I thought I'd try to get loose from these daemons by reviewing the Anchor Books paperback re-issue of Karnak Cafe by Naguib Mahfouz. It's about a bunch of friends who hang out in Cairo in the late 60's after the Six Day War.

The novella is divided into four chapters. Each chapter is named after a different friend in the cafe that the first person narrator comes to know. It's a little like Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. The meaning alters as you see one friend's view and then another's.

I can relate to the citified opening: The narrator goes to al-Mahdi Street to get his watch repaired and wanders into a clean, efficient little cafe down a side street. He recognizes the still attractive, middle-aged manager, Qurunfula, as a once-famous belly dancer that he admired in his salad days.

She comes over to him..saying she can tell he has recognized her. Friendship and love get all twisted up in these stories. In one incident, Qurunfula discloses to the narrator that one of the old-timers, Zayn al-'Abidin, is in love with her:

"But he's preserved in oil!" And she replies that such are life's illusions. But Mahouz will turn this around brilliantly. Qurunfula becomes obsessed with a young student, hanging out at the Karnak with his clique.

When he and his brat pack disappear for weeks on end Qurunfula goes through agonies. When the stud returns, it's like the second coming. She knows better but she doesn't care. It's like the innocence of love is trying to persevere despite the long odds.

The students are being harassed by the state, their loves and friendships for each other despoiled by the secret police as you have to wonder who might be spying on who. Karnak Cafe is a net that widens and folds in on itself. It's amazing how dense this 101 page book becomes as characters that you think you know are turned into negatives of themselves...as if you first see the color photograph and then can't recognize the bleak monochrome as being a representation of the same thing.

"I found the entire social arena abuzz with phantoms, tales, stories, rumors, and jokes. The general consensus was that we had been living through the biggest lie in our entire lives."

-DH Read more!

There is time enough for all of you.

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Personal Archaeology - from My Father's Tears by John Updike

I've tried to read Updike's novels, Couples and Villages, both wore me out. So far it's been a positive experience reading My Father's Tears, and I'm finding the vernacular very easy to step into, where as the two novels I just mentioned were hard cases to say the least.

Craig Martin finds himself looking around at his own piece of land, his home and how it got to be the way it is. Looking back on what has happened in the history of his property seems like a dull way to approach telling a story, Updike pulls me in, and you might find this story to be very interesting. The narrator imagines the wagons that pulled the trees which were cut down by a previous owner to create enough space to build the home he now lives in. It's a slow sizzle, looking around at the things which surround you, and Updike does it with a caretakers ease, all things will come to pass, and Craig knows this.

Eventually he thinks about his own marriage, his friends, and how he likes to hit golf balls into the woods. His mind wanders, and then he ends up in the woods looking at the discarded items that over the years have arrived to rest forever on his property, tires, cars, bikes, and eventually he discovers the golf balls that he hit years earlier, half buried in the mud, yellowed by time. This is the start of an era for the narrator, and a way for Updike to explain time. All of this wrapped up, makes for a very effective story.

-JR Read more!

Apples, the tree, you get the idea.

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Outage - John Updike from My Father's Tears

How do you get a man to cheat on his wife?

You turn the power off.

'Outage' from John Updike is another softly piercing story about husbands trapped in the suburbs. The journey a man takes through his day can often lead to many opportunities, some good, others not so good. Evan Morris is safely tucked away at home when a violent storm hits the small New England town he lives in. Without warning he gets up from his desk to see what there is to see. At times of great calamity people often walk out into the street just to see what's going on. Evan gets in his car to examine a mid-afternoon downtown that is thrown into high drama by the lack of electricity.

Along his way, (after wonderful examinations of his town, local stores, and the fact that he's wearing a Red Sox cap) Evan runs into a neighbor that he innocently invites into his car for lift home, he warns her that rain is on the way. I knew what he was doing...why? Because I'm a man. That's what men do, they plot, scheme, imagine a situation, examine it from all sides, and then act accordingly. At least that's what this man does. Earlier in the story Evan has figured out a way to turn of the alarm in his house, when he hears that Lynne who is safely riding in his passenger seat is also having the same problem with her house alarm, things move to the end game Evan had planned all along.

If I could tell you how many times I've had this same thought while looking at a situation; "what would it take to get over there...to be in that spot...what chain of events needs to happen before I can be there...doing that?" It's amazing how quickly Updike gets his hands around the male mind.

-JR Read more!

If You Knew What Was Waiting For You...

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Rev Road - JE's take

Jonathan Evison: Recently, DH commented on my inclination to read books which, whether due to their style, approach, subject matter, or otherwise, dwell outside of my comfort zone as a writer and a human being. Revolutionary Road is such a book. Being doggedly optimistic (as I have every reason to be), I'm not a big fan of realism, which I find in many cases to be little more than plain old pessimism dressed up fashionably in black or gray flannel. That said, Revolutionary Road is one of the finest books I've ever read.

Yates writes with a precision that inspires and humbles. Rarely, in my thirty-odd years of voracious book consumption have I tasted such incisive, artfully wrought prose. While Yates writes with little of Faulkner's bombast, none of Joyce's playfulness, or Nabokov's smugness, and only a hint of Fitzgerald's silkiness, I consider the writing in Revolutionary Road to be of the order and magnitude of the aforementioned wordsmiths. The effect can be downright suffocating, like reading underwater—and indeed, Yates' language reads like water. This, more than anything else, is the reason why the recent Mendes adaptation fell flat for me. In spite of spot-on performances and scrupulous adherence to the text, cinematography simply cannot achieve the effect of language. Books can do things films cannot (yeah, yeah, I know, vice versa). Lovely cinematography (too lovely, in fact), cannot match the aching precision of Yates' prose for the sheer suffocating effect of the Wheeler's despair, as it fails by virtue of its very approach, to capture the interior lives of Frank and April. Yes, Leo does a mean chin-quiver, and Kate is masterful in the art of looking emotionally bereft, but neither can match the nuance, depth, and overall virtuosity of Yates' prose.

I've got the Easter Parade sitting around here in one of my stacks, and I'm excited to dig in!

JE Read more!

Revolutionary Road, Directed by Sam Mendes

I nearly broke a leg getting to the computer to sit down and write this post. Having just seen Revolutionary Road, it's very hard not to trip the light hysterical.

There is acting, and then there are performances that make careers, and sometimes you see people you've known your entire life. and they make something as simple as pretending to be someone else look like they actually are someone else. DiCaprio and Winslet perform like there is no tomorrow, they've embodied Frank and April Wheeler from the Yates novel to complete perfection, beyond perfection if that's possible. I think Sam Mendes threatened them with their lives if they didn't go all out in these roles. But Winslet and DiCaprio take it much further.

I don't know if it was the music, or stunning cinematography, or how DiCaprio clenched his jaw at certain moments, either way it was a stunning silent fury that lurked in plain sight. I've watched Leo grow up, and he's always been the kid from What's Eating Gilbert Grape, that's okay, but when you have to be a man, really step up, he put his hands around the asshole that is Frank Wheeler. There are fights in movies, but never has there been a fight like what goes on for nearly two hours between Frank and April. Perhaps it's the silence that comes between a man and woman after a few years of marriage. The truth is killing them, but would do more damage if it is let out of it's cage. Winslet buried herself in this role, and the fact that Mendes took on this movie and then actively cast his wife in the lead, says volumes about these people as creative forces. There were moments when I knew exactly what Frank was feeling, and have seen that look April gave him when she is pushed up against the wall, I'm married, and I've seen it before. Yes the Paris idea is silly (all married couples have their own Paris idea), but to stay living on Revolutionary Road was an even worse idea, like April says, she can't go, and she can't stay...

Of course Michael Shannon as John Givings would have an Oscar if he didn't have the terrible bad luck of giving this performance the same year that Heath Ledger saved the best for last. In the book his character is pure truth, in the movie he's the only performance that is more insane and accurately poisonous than anyone else around him.

It's hard to describe the feeling you get when you see a movie that truly rattles you. I felt this way when I saw Goodfellas for the first time, and now, I know that this movie is something real and truthful, people die, men cheat on their wives, parents are sometimes bad, and the neighbor's can make it hard to have them over. This movie is a powerful experience, but then again, I'm a day late and a dollar short, but that's life.

The line of the movie; "Hopeless emptiness. Now you've said it. Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness".

There is another line, given by Frank's boss about a man having only a handful of chances in his life...but it's not as good as the one John Givings lays on us.

-JR Read more!

Maureen Freely and Orhan Pamuk

JC: I know that DH is a big fan of the work of Orhan Pamuk, having pimped him for years for a well-earned Nobel Prize for Literature. On Monday, the Washington Post had a great article by Pamuk's translator Maureen Freely, a novelist in her own right, about her translation methods and her friendship with Pamuk. Included is this observation:

A novel can be a thing of such power that even judges will read it. But once that novel has been embraced in translation, judges lack the power to stamp it out.

There's a lot more, so click the link above and check it out. Here also is a nice podcast of an interview with Freely. Audio only.
jc

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There is always an excuse...

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The Trouble Of Marcie Flint- John Cheever

As I slowly move my way around Shady Hill, I'm finding that the people in these stories seem to be very lonely. They've gotten what they think they wanted, and suddenly it's all a "careful what you wish for" reality. 'The Trouble Of Marcie Flint' is a story about Marcie Flint and how she drives her husband out of the house they live in. In his absence, Marcie creates a lie for her neighbors benefit (strange to have to do that, I don't even know my neighbors' first names, one neighbor who sleeps seventy-five feet from where I do, didn't speak to me for five years, not even a wave hello), and she thinks that what they think is important. But they have problems of their own. It's something literate: the town of Shady Hill doesn't have a library. Excuses are made and when Marcie decides to take up with another neighbor to fight this injustice, she ends up taking it too far. She's alone, and looking for something to do. Which is where her trouble grows like a weed.

Meanwhile her husband is aboard a steamer ship, having left Shady Hill (with the idea of staying away for six weeks), and is recounting the problems at home. He recognizes the beauty of his home, and his friends and remembers swimming in the Townsends' pool where he saw a brassiere that had been tossed into a tree above the pool, he imagines the screams, long since past, the thought of the person the bra belonged to being carried away on the wind. Cheever develops with this narrative track as a kind of undercurrent of suburbia, the other end of the telescope, like it's all some kind of flashback with a strange soundtrack. Memories are what get us through our days, but Cheever uses these memories to create a kind of false present, where the past is cherished.

By the time Charlie and Marcie pass like ships in the night, we learn that their children have been poisoned and Charlie is desperate to find a cure. Marcie and Charlie are absent-minded towards their children, a Cheever trick, borrowed by Rick Moody in Ice Storm (kids having sex in the basement after school, Mom upstairs with the neighbor...screwing him, basically once they are old enough to eat and go potty on their own they are no longer looked after). By the time Marcie is confronted with her original sin - the seemingly banal library scandal - she is at her wit's end. Finally, a neighbor lectures her on the finer points of a meatball, and it's not exactly what you think.

-JR Read more!

All the Living by C.E. Morgan

Jason Chambers: Last year at the NEIBA trade show, JR pointed me toward this book at the FSG booth, saying that it was getting some advanced buzz, and that it was something in which I would probably be interested. He did not mislead me. This is a great first novel. It's emotionally complex and beautifully written.

Set in rural Kentucky in the 1980's, All The Living tells the story of two lovers: Aloma, orphaned as a young child, and Orren, whose entire family has recently died in an accident. As he takes over his family farm, Orren asks Aloma to come live with him and, guided more by passion than by knowledge, the two come together, begin to feel each other out, and carve out a life on the farm. They are ill-suited for each other. Orren is a man of the earth, simple, silent, rough-hewn. Aloma, a talented pianist in her former life, quickly becomes unhappy on the farm, a combination of boredom, frustration, and loneliness which leads her to the local church, and its young preacher.

Damn, C. E. Morgan can write! It's rare that I am so drawn into a book by the pure lyrical gorgeousness of the language. Only a few authors do it regularly- Faulkner, McCarthy, Jeffrey Lent. I don't even like to refer to WF or CM when talking about an author, because every third southern or western novel has a quote on them claiming similarity. I'm on the verge of making an exception. Just about every page of All The Living brims with fantastic lyrical description. Morgan's landscape drips with atmosphere. Her scenes alternate effortlessly from languorous and lonesome to violent and passionate. I can't wait to see more of her writing.

All The Living is slim and simply plotted, but the thoughtful spirituality and depth of characters, along with her narrative power, deliver a strong. strange novel. I'm impressed. Send me the next one.

jc Read more!

Vin Diesel Is "A List" Again...just like that.

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The Caitlin Macy Interview

Dennis Haritou: Thanks very much Caitlin, for taking my questions about Spoiled. I noticed from the first short story, 'Christie' onward, that you can employ a very flexible first-person narrative style. All the how-to-write stylists seem to say the same thing about first person...that it's limiting, that the reader will only hear about the story from one point of view: the character who is talking.

But you seem to solve that problem effortlessly. In Christie, for example, the central character is deeply flawed but she doesn't seem to notice any shortcomings or contradictions in her behavior...or maybe just barely notices and is mildly uncomfortable about it.

This creates a kind of disconnect in the reader's mind that allows the third person authorial voice to be sensed...even if the reader, I imagine, is mostly unaware of this. They are too wrapped up in the story. It makes your narrator multi-dimensional despite themselves. I wonder if, as a writer, you think much at all about this or it just comes to you naturally as a way to write. I know writers who think that this is a tough thing technically to pull off.

Caitlin Macy: I love the first person and I think the range can be marvelous as long as one is willing to “go unreliable.” I have a vivid memory of a high school English class, for which we’d read My Last Duchess. I hadn’t gotten it all and I remember the epiphany I had when our teacher read it aloud to us in this arrogant voice—the realization that there could be a distance between the author and the narrator, it was so wildly unexpected and I loved the idea of it. I had the same experience in grad school when we read the Aspern Papers. It’s such a chilling jolt somehow, because there’s a way in which as readers we start out assuming the first person is telling the truth and nothing but the truth. (Back to high school again: just before the poetry we’d read Gatsby; one wants to believe that all narrators are like Nick Carraway – morally unassailable.) When I wrote Christie I started out using a straightforward first-person…I had recently finished Ravelstein and I liked the idea of a first person story that was actually about another person and I thought I wouldn’t put the narrator into the story very much at all. But then of course she turned out to have a death-grip on it, and it was all about her. I wrote Annabel’s Mother later on and I knew from the beginning that I wanted to drop some hints that she wasn’t being honest with herself.

DH: Still on the subject of 'Christie', another way that a fuller contour is provided to your narrator is that she assumes the mantle, at times, of speaking for her whole social set.

There's is what I'd call the "litany" of nice things that you are supposed to have in the this story...you are great at using lists. The catalog starts with a grey, slate roof and proceeds through to the interior of the house systematically to retro kitchen appliances. I counted at least seven items, some with compound sentences supporting their descriptions. But....I can also sum it up in another phrase you use about a troubled youth's appeal...even though the edges were burned it was a cake that we all wanted to taste.

It seems stale to me, a failure of a whole class's imagination, that everyone would want the same things. How much of a send-up do you mean this to be? Or is it: "Yes, Dennis, they really all do want the same things."

CM: The narrator of course, feels threatened by the Christies of the world. The items on the list she makes up are all touchstones of old money; that makes her a little dated and a little grasping in a way, as if all she has is her taste. That’s why it’s so important for her to define and list and categorize—and to assume the “we” mantel (versus, of course, “her”—the arriviste). The litany (good word) of good taste is her attempt to stave off the storm of Christies. It’s no more than a quaint effort, however: since the Internet and the hedge-fund bubbles, that modest cottage on the Vineyard she describes has probably had a wine cellar and home theater put in by the likes of, well, Christie. Christie is more contemporary; she doesn’t have the class baggage; she’s freer, and the narrator knows it, and she envies, scorns and admires her for it.

DH: There are a couple of great OMG moments in your stories. Here's one: In 'The Red Coat', Trish goes out of her way to cross the street so she can "accost", her cleaning lady, Evgenia. This was so surprising...Trish has nothing of import to say to her. She is drawn to the more confident, at ease in her own skin, Evgenia, like iron filings are drawn to a magnet. Trish's whole character is encapsulated in this minor incident. If you know how to look, a tiny event like this can tell you a lot. In NY, that's all you get sometimes. Isn't that right?

CM: I see a hell of a lot of examples of this kind of encounter in New York. I was once at a party and a woman came up to me and said, “So, what are you doing here?” There are a lot of egos that need stroking, a lot of immaturity and insecurity. Oftentimes you’ll just see someone taking advantage of a less powerful person by simply holding her captive conversationally. The interesting thing to me is that it’s often couched in very friendly, non-aggressive terms. Europeans are more direct.

DH: Again, in 'The Red Coat' Trish adopts a favorite restaurant as her sort-of pampering yourself hangout...it's her own private retreat. But one day she goes there for a drink and is frustrated because the bartender seems to be ignoring her. Then she's appalled really, when she notices that her cleaning lady, who is also an aspiring fashion designer, is at the bar with her friends and is receiving plenty of service. Trish feels violated. But how can she feel that she, like, "owns" the restaurant? This seems amazing to me.

CM: Trish suffers from an acute case of class anxiety; that her cleaning woman would be patronizing the same restaurant as she—and with more success – completely unhinges her because takes it as a direct insult to herself. (How dare she…?) It’s a tough world out there. It’s so completely different than it was 100 or even 50 years ago in terms of the seeming fluidity of class; there are many more superficial markers that one can attain with a few hundred bucks. At a book group I was invited to the other night, a woman told me about recognizing her best friend’s nanny in the adjacent chair at Frederic Fekkai. In the old days, presumably, nannies patronized their own hairdressers, or cut their hair themselves. These would have been Irish women, perhaps, living lives in service, and their employers would have been Rich People, not the more class-queasy meritocracy.

DH: In "Eden's Gate', a woman totals her prospects for happiness, or perhaps demonstrates that she has no capacity for happiness, in the course of what I'd have to call the nightmare dinner-date of all time. I'd love to talk about the details but I won't. I'll leave that to the reader to discover. But there's a key to human character in your insight in these stories that the good life lies in letting personal baggage go. This comes up in 'Eden's Gate' doesn't it...that you are examining personalities that find it hard just to have fun?

CM: Yes! Jessica is supposed to be on the brink of getting everything she’s always wanted (hence the title of course) but instead allows herself to be derailed by a sense of historic deprivation. She suffers from the contemporary American curse: her whole life has been geared toward attaining a wild level of success. Now, although she’s pretty much achieved it, she doesn’t know how to have fun, is incapable of enjoying herself, even in basic ways (ordering a good bottle of wine). Her boyfriend wants to show her the way but his warmth unsettles her and she picks a fight with him rather than let her guard down.

DH: In 'Annabel's Mother' I felt that I was getting a lesson, along with Mrs. Kimball, in real class distinctions that were not going to bridged. The good Mrs. Kimball finally secures the services of Marva, an exemplary nanny who she has befriended in a children's playground. But it turns out that this relationship is opaque in ways that make a real connection with Marva seem like an illusion.

When she tries to provide material help to Marva which is simple for her to do, she becomes estranged from her peers in the playground who think that is inappropriate. Also, there are those little telling incidents...Mrs. Kimball finds wrappers at her apartment that indicate that Marva has taken her child for fast food which she abhors. This reminds me of that impromptu meal in the short story "Spoiled" where the pampered Leigh eats a sandwich with high-fiber bread while her horse trainer, Mrs. Murray and her daughter eat Wonder Bread sandwiches.

But anyone can think that they are relating to someone, that they are closer to the people they know, than the really are. And that they know more about them than they really do. It's just another way of being self-centered. Isn't that true? Or should I pull back from this generality and say instead: "Don't dilute the message of the story. This is all about class."

CM: No, that’s a good point and I thank you for making it. I don’t think of class as some kind of Marxist endpoint; I like to use class dynamics to examine what are actually psychological and emotional issues in my characters. When someone has a relationship with a person from a different class, the interactions can bring out some of the less flattering elements of the person’s character (narcissism, as you say; obsequiousness) – weaknesses that she might keep hidden around her peers.

DH: Caitlin, thanks for your wonderful stories. I not only thoroughly enjoyed them but I feel that I profited from them as well. Last question: What does it mean to be spoiled?

CM: Spoiled children – and more interestingly perhaps – spoiled adults have an outsize sense of their own importance and an anger at the world for not behaving as it ought to, and they suffer from a profound insecurity that nothing they have has been earned.

Thank you, Dennis; it’s been a pleasure.

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The Ocean - John Cheever

Cheever isn't selling as well as I thought it would, but neither is Hiding Man or other high priced hardcovers. I guess people would rather fill their gas tanks than buy a good literary biography.

To really know a man you should probably look into his diary, the one in his head, but in this case, you can read the short story The Ocean and find a million reasons why a man shouldn't write his thoughts down. Eventually you'll be called on the carpet for what you've written. It's not important who the narrator is, it's Cheever, you know that already. The wife Cora is trying to poison our narrator, and we discover it at the very moment he does, she's gotten hold of lighter fluid and has sprinkled it on his salad. There is an immediate fear that runs through the reader's larynx when we find out a page or so later that our hero will be home for a long time to come, he's just been downsized. Cora will have all day long to hammer home those final coffin nails. Cheever mixes a fear of losing your nine-to-five spot, which always makes a man feel like shit, but when he realizes his wife also finds him redundant...well...the game is on.

There is a white-knuckle intensity to this man's actions, his voice is nervous, and he is especially out of his mind when he tries to bribe his way back into the work force. Once at home, he dodges his wife's tenacious efforts send him off to a dirt nap, and sees that she may not be trying to poison him after all, sadly, she is losing her mind. She has been living in a world that is disconnected from reality, a different reality from the narrator, who was in the work force for so long that he doesn't know his housekeeper takes a nap at the same time Cora does each day.

Cheever knows this house is a sinkhole for the story, so he glides seamlessly to the narrator's daughter, who is living in the city - a foreign place for this man to visit. She wants nothing to do with him, even when he threatens to take her allowance away. Her significant other is just as lazy as she is, Cheever blames the generation, which I can assume is the 60's. There is a clash between the stiff upper lip that comes from doing your job, and providing for a family and the freedom of youth. It's amazing that I've only now discovered this great writer.

-JR Read more!

The Signal by Ron Carlson

The Signal by Ron Carlson will be published by Viking in June. It's not the sort of book that you'd expect an eastern "city slicker" (JE's apt description) like me to read. Why not? It's a mystery and adventure novel set in the wild country of Wyoming. Mack is an inarticulate, ex-rancher who is having problems fitting in. Growing up, he helped his father run a guest ranch. But after his father dies, Mack finds he is too anti-social to be in the hospitality business...too much meet and greet required in that line of work. 

I know how he feels. I'm not much of a people person myself. But if I want to be alone, there is no better place to be than Fifth Avenue. Mack has a different approach...he may not be much of a talker but he is a superior outdoorsman: we find him in the mountains at the opening of The Signal.

He is waiting at a trailhead as the dusk settles for his ex-wife, Vonnie. Every year for the past ten, they have taken this wilderness trek. Now the marriage has collapsed like a rock slide. But they are still friends of a kind and Vonnie has agreed to this one last trip.

You can get a grip on the rocks, the lakes, the fish, the elk, in every chapter of The Signal. Also, a fine sense of why people would want to camp. There are a couple of great scenes where Vonnie and Mack just react to the weather, to cooking simple meals and discovering the world as if it was the first time planet earth was there and they were among the only dozen people who had ever seen it. The wonder that the earth is there and that it's so beautiful, so wild, as if the words "beautiful" and "wild" were synonyms. Are you reading this JE?

But that's not the best part of this western story...that's the backdrop...a complex natural syntax, for the dialogue between Mack and Vonnie...what they are like and why their marriage fell apart and why...they are still friends.

Also part of the best part is a character study of Mack...told in flashbacks, of how his ineptness with people leads to a life as a petty criminal and to having a hidden agenda for this last trip with his ex-wife, who, incidentally, has a new man, a city slicker, in her life.

There's lots of suspense and action in this tale as Mack reaps the consequences for falling helter-skelter into a life of crime. But what I enjoyed most was how Ron Carlson makes me wonder whether I liked Mack or not...small-time sucker of a crook...but in the mountains...more of a sovereign. Decide about Mack for yourself...you'll enjoy the challenge. 

Also, Mr Carlson, I'll make a big concession. The mountains of Wyoming have it beat over Central Park. But city slickers and east-of-the-Mississippi types, don't think this isn't your kind of book. One of the reasons I wanted to write this review is to prove you wrong. It's great storytelling and unputdownable.

-DH

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Delicate Wives, from My Father's Tears by John Updike

It's not easy being a writer these days, you see just how hard it can be to get attention from the mainstream, especially when the old masters deliver stories like 'Delicate Wives'. When the shelves are filled with stories from John Updike and John Cheever, it makes it very hard to justify why someone would sit down and write short stories of their own. Sure, we all have something to say, but, after a while, is it any different than the instructions on the back a shampoo bottle?

I've said this before, Updike and I have only just gotten to know each other, (how a dead man can know someone still above ground is a mystery to me) and it's rather disturbing how intense the stories in My Father's Tears are to read. It's also hard to spend so much damn time praising these stories, but that's my problem.

I love how it starts, "Veronica Horst was stung by a bee..." We quickly realize that Veronica is the old lover of our narrator Les who is hearing a story from his wife about Veronica's low tolerance to bee stings, but Les is listening and pretending he's nothing more than an friend of Veronica, which he and his wife Lisa are. Veronica is married to Gregor, and over time we learn that Gregor is the better husband when Les thinks about how Gregor saved his wife from the bee sting, Les doesn't think he could have pulled it off. Updike tends to these characters so carefully, Les talks about his affair while he looks down on Veronica from his office window, and finally catches up to her on the street. These little details make for such a smooth portrait, simple and urgent. By the time Les and Veronica talk turkey over lunch Les is miserable with loneliness as he has long ago admitted to himself that he married the wrong woman, but as it turns out, can do nothing about.

-JR

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The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats

Jonathan Evison: As somebody published by little old Soft Skull, I understand firsthand the challenges an indie press faces in garnering exposure for its authors. But the good presses are committed to the cause, working tirelessly in the face of limited resources and merchandising hurtles in order to find readers for their authors. Dzanc is such a press, and Dan Wicket and Steven Gillis are just such tireless workers. Over the past two years, Dan has been sending me a pretty steady diet of Dzanc authors, from Roy Kesey to Peter Selgin to Kyle Minor to Suzanne Burns, and I'm always very impressed by the quality of the work, and the editorial voice of the press. Last week, Dan sent me what may be my favorite Dzanc title yet, Hesh Kestin's The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats, which is slated for release in November, and distributed by Consortium. I'm seriously rooting for this title to break out and find the audience which it deserves-- the audience which I know exists.

I LOVED this book, and perhaps the most persuasive argument for the veracity of such a claim, is that I can't stand the premise of the novel. I have little tolerance for the well worn turf of gangster stories (and that includes the Godfather saga). I'm not a prig, but I'm sick to death of crime stories sullying the virtue of honor by romanticizing a bunch of brutes--be they Italian, Irish, Black, Chinese, or Jewish. But Kestin has subverted the iconic gangster masterfully with the character of Shusan Cats (known to the print media as Shoeshine Cats), around whose legacy the novel revolves. Shoeshine's story is really narrator Russy Newhouse's story. Russy is a boy genius wannabe playboy grad student at Brooklyn college who is unwittingly chosen in 1963 to be the heir to crime boss Shushan Cats. Both men are unlikely gangsters on the surface (cerebral and compromisingly sentimental), and both are fascinating characters, as are a half-dozen of Kestin's ancillary characters. The long and short of The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats is that Russy comes to discover the hitherto inexplicable reasoning behind his calling to organized crime as the story progresses, and in the meantime discovers himself, all against a masterfully drawn background of an America in the throes of its own growing pains.

Hesh Kestin writes like Budd Schulberg-- with sharp, quick, hard-nosed sentences, a ton of atmosphere, and a male gaze capable of withering granite. Anybody who loved What Makes Sammy Run? will devour Kestin's debut novel. Pencil this one in for November.

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The Waiter, Jay McInerney, from How It Ended

I'm not the biggest Jay Mac fan in the world, probably because of some strange kind of envy, he's had his finger on the pulse of Manhattan for a long time, and seems to write from high tower about the elite class I'm not part of. When I was in Rome I remember that Bright Lights, Big City was required reading on campus and to be honest I couldn't see what all the fuss was.

Then as time went on, and I had a chance to see him read from his collection Model Behavior alongside Rupert Thomson who was reading from his fantastic novel Soft! (AICN review)This is when I discovered he was a Raymond Carver (probably where my envy comes from) disciple so I sat up and listened. More years lifted off my shoulders and I found myself at a book release party for The Big If by ridiculously talented Mark Costello and Jay Mac was in attendance wearing a lime green suit. Then I read A Disorder Peculiar to the Country by Ken Kalfus, which was a great take on 9-11, and right after that I read The Good Life, which compared to Kalfus and his evisceration of that event, is tame, but showed some signs of life.



I'm interested in Jay Mac as a hip modern prose stylist, so I'm diving into his new and collected stories, How it Ended. I've read three so far, and the best, if you want to call it the best, (I'd have to read them all to say that for sure) is 'The Waiter' a small narrowly focused missive that Jay Mac says he wrote recently. It's a tale of a middle class kid who wants to be rich, he is sitting on the sidelines of life while he tries to gain some experience to pour into his fiction, he's a student too. I was impressed with Jay Mac's talent for making the non-wealthy seem so...well...without. He has a funny take on how Europeans see Americans, how we lack subtly and think that we need to educate our writers, instead of just letting them write. When the line fuck me like a waiter springs to life, it sounds a lot like, I'm studying to be a writer.

I suppose there is room for Jay Mac on the shelves of those who "know" the difference between Three Cups of Tea and high literature, but in hardcover these stories will survive on a collectors shelf...for sure. I've heard that Jay Mac has recovered a book that was stolen from him years ago and he forgot writing it...I wonder if we will see that next.

-JR

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