BILLY TWITTERS AND HIS BLUE WHALE PROBLEM Written by Mac Barnett and illustrated by Adam Rex

Of the four guys here at the blog, I'm probably the best person to review a children's book.

My son is almost four years old and I read books to him every night, sometimes more than once, and most nights he picks the books we read. My greatest achievement in the realm of reading books to my son was when I taught him to say the world 'philharmonic', which is from the book Jake the Philharmonic Dog (I've read this book a million times), which isn't nearly as good as Billy Twitters and his Blue Whale Problem.

Illustrator Adam Rex has a great earthy style that is at times both inquisitive and interesting in its ability to show children as they really are: sometimes alone, other times asking their parents questions and many times trying to figure out how to be a kid. Artwork in children's books is often silly and splashy; Rex makes everything seem plausible, erasing the illusion of a drawing, which made me believe that Billy Twitters really did get a blue whale delivered to his home while he slept. His parents are trying to teach him responsibility, so they order him a blue whale. It's implausible and impossible; but perfect for a kids' picture book. Billy has to take his blue whale to school, and along the way we learn a thing or two about whales. My son thought all whales had teeth, and was very interested to learn that instead they have baleen, which is made out of the same stuff as human fingernails. On the second reading, my son realized that whales have his fingernails inside their mouths...not exactly...but he caught on.

There are few instances where the blue whale is compared to other creatures: a dinosaur and a prehistoric shark. Both garnered keen interest from my son, but I thought these comparisons were a little bit wordy and hard to pronounce in an otherwise fluid and funny narrative. I like how Mac Barnett writes; it's even keeled and approachable, and easy for a kid to listen to. My only bone to pick with the book is the use of the word "stupidest" by Frank Grunner, another student in Billy's class. As a parent I often have to censor myself; besides the hurricane of four, six, and nine letter words that fly out of my mouth constantly, I have to be careful of the word 'stupid'. Kids repeat everything they hear, and this word is tough to avoid. A minor point in an otherwise great book. I might just be sensitive to the word.

The true test of any children's book is how a child reacts to it. I read Billy Twitters and his Blue Whale Problem to my son twice this evening, and when I was done I started to page through it while I wrote this review. My son got out of bed and took it back from me and set it down next to him while he went to sleep. We'll be reading this book for a long time to come.

-JR Read more!

THREE GUYS STATE OF THE UNION ROUNDTABLE

JE: In the wake of a grim BEA, as the death toll continues to mount in all ranks of the book industry, from writer to editor to indie bookseller, I thought it was high time for all four Three Guys to convene and converse over virtual beers about the state of publishing and the state of books in 2009, as writers, readers, professionals, and consumers. It's fashionable (and not unreasonable) to saddle fiscally irresponsible corporate publishers with the burden of responsibility for the current conditions of book culture. But who else might share the responsibility? I might argue that writers are just as much to blame, that the sentence is killing the novel, that the literati needs to quit cowering in dusty academic circles and engage a larger culture. What do you three guys see as the biggest threat to book culture?

JR: I certainly can point to short attention spans of the common reader. Literary novels, as least the ones I read, don't ever engage the common reader, the man or woman interested in getting emotionally involved in a book between LAX and JFK. There is a certain percentage of readers out there who do like literary novels, but it's less than you'd think. I believe printed books would be dead and buried if it weren't for the big splashy thrillers and kids in peril books that crowd the superstores and airport racks, books as entertainment, books as identifiable substances within your own life. With this in mind it's the gate keepers who are hurting the industry. The agents, the editors, the money men who down size five good employees two days before Christmas when the company fell short of it's %15 profit goal. I look at every catalog of every US publisher and I see 90% commercial tripe. Whether its fiction, genre, or non fiction, it's all based on the lowest common denominator. FSG didn't even have a booth at BEA this year, they are the premier literary house in the world. Consumers are more interested in reality television then they are intellectual property, and advertisers are forcing the hands of networks by saying this: "real people, when you lock them in a room and promise them money, are far more interesting than any drama you can write, that's what we want to advertise." We're very close to human sacrifice on television. Which speaks to my point about the loss of interest in the common reader, there are too many things offered and going on for them to want to read a book, they'd rather watch some two bit whore shake her ass on television and taunt a dozen sleazy men into loving her than read a book. I know people in my family who haven't read a book since high school, that's brutal. But it's reality. Is this the fault of the writer who scratched, and kicked his way into print, with his own version of reality? Or is it the gatekeepers? When agents and editors don't even respond to a well crafted query letter from a prospective author who is trying to sell a literary novel, then what does that say? Do they know what the public wants to read? If so why are return rates so high? Why are good people losing their jobs every day at Big League Publishers? Where does that thought process come from? Is this why low cost independent publishing has flowered? But even then, there are indie publishers that have their own agenda and exclude people just like big publishers...which makes them no better. They went into margins because they couldn't get access at a wide audience and end up becoming what they ran from.


DH: JR's post could be unpacked as if it were a Zip file. There's so much in there. Is most of what's published based on an appeal to the lowest common denominator? No, because there are too many different denominators. What I've always loved about publishing as a business is that it allows for the greatest diversity of output. There is a book out there to meet every reader's needs or desires. We live in a country where you can read quilting mysteries...and why shouldn't you if you happen to love quilting? I recently came across a scrapbooked-themed mystery. I'm gratified that scrapbook hobbyists are finally being covered in the mystery genre. As for readers with short attention spans...it's hard to think of a potential literary reader as having a micro-scaled attention span if they can recall the plots of every episode of Star Trek. Now JR or I could argue that those ST fans would be better off, really more fulfilled, spiritually and mentally, if they devoted their precious time and energy to Spinoza's Ethics or the novels of Jonathan Franzen instead...but that's a matter of persuasion. True cultural authority can't command and it doesn't whinge, it persuades. Blogs can persuade. That's what we're trying to do on Three Guys. We're hoping that if we get excited about a book we might lead some readers to it. We might even be able to teach the more general lesson that you can get excited about a book. That's also what Jonathan is doing when he holds those great book/camping conclaves every summer in the Great Northwest. The downsizing in our business, our cultural enterprise, saddens all of us. Marching around the last BEA...passing by the microscopic Random House booth...be careful, if you blinked you probably missed it...was a reminder of what a deluge we are facing as patterns of distribution change.But don't blame publishing's gatekeepers. Their decisions just reflect the best assessment that they can manage of market conditions. Change the readers...persuade them to be stronger readers, make the blogs their steroids...and the gatekeepers will rise to the occasion since they will have to. Some of them want to...just give them an excuse.


JE: I think the good indie houses-- Soft Skull, Akashic, Dzanc, Melville House, Algonquin, Norton, etc-- have the right idea. Dynamite editorial standards, fewer titles, and more author support. And most importantly, they're helping their authors sort out the demand, selling books the old fashioned way-- one book at a time, connecting their authors with readers, generating word of mouth, getting booksellers in on the conversation early. I still believe books made of paper sold in brick and mortar stores can work, if it is done right. As one well known agent anonymously observed in Poets & Writers recently, you don't hear a lot of talk about cutbacks and financial issues at Norton. And little old Soft Skull had their best year ever in 2008! And Algonquin just printed their two millionth copy of Water for Elephants! And how did they do it? By creating buzz with Indie booksellers. And who is they? One rep and one marketing person, basically. And when is the last time you walked into Powell's in Portland? The place is a zoo! It's a destination. Maybe what we need is less published novels and more great novels? Enough with the sentence, already. How about engaging readers with a great story? How about allowing readers to get inside the story, instead of holding them at arms length in the name of literary pretension? Most of the new fiction I read just doesn't feel lived. Period. And it's not compelling because it feels like artifice. It feels crafted, or overworked, or counterfeit. I'm usually all too aware that somebody is writing the damn story. Hell, I'd rather watch Deadwood or Madmen any day of the week than read most new novels. Sorry, but that's the truth. Some of the best writing is going on in cable television, because television has finally learned the benefit of creating a good working environment for writers where film has mostly failed, and publishing has—/ahem/—also come up short in recent decades. Maybe we're losing some of our greatest novelists to the greener pastures of TV? We're certainly losing our readers. Fuck that. I still believe in the novel!

JC: I think you're hitting around the edges of about a half dozen different problems in the industry, all in one tidy rant, JE. First you have the giants vs the indies - the great small presses are lean operations with a connection to stores and readers. Their list supports their internal structure; whereas for many larger pubs, the publishing has to support an already existent monolithic entity. Indy lists are small, their books are tightly edited and I think they have realistic expectations and directed efforts for each book they release. Don't misunderstand me, the majors publish some great books, and a lot of them - hell, look at the Knopf fall list - it's amazing! I sometimes get the feeling that some pubs have, say, 30 great, sellable, readable books, and know that won't reach the sales quota they have budgeted for them, so they ask: how many more books do we need to hit our number? 50? 100? More? And they publish those mediocre, derivative, near plagiaristic books that are a lot like something that was a hit three years ago in hopes that they will get their "number." And if they don't make it, it's the hatchet for someone. It's the money machine, and once you get caught in it, it's hard to get out.

It's hard for a major publisher to be nimble and reactive, with high fixed costs necessitating continued expansion of lists. And you're right about more great novels, too. But don't forget that there are a lot of ways to be a great novel, but even more ways to be a lousy one. The greatest obstacle is getting the right books to the right readers, which of course, is why everyone loves an independent bookstore, a few Riggios and Bezos excepted, of course.

JE: Great points. I love that you called me out on my publishing rant, JC. Like most zealots, I tend toward oversimplification. Here's another one: however many ways there are to write a great novel, they all have one thing in common while you're reading them, at least while I'm
reading them: the experience feels credible, or in some way lived. It doesn't feel written, so much as alive. Too much literary fiction I read feels written to me.

JC: Let's talk about TV and TV writing some more, because I think there is a completely different dynamic to novel writing, in that it is much more intensely collaborative, in contrast to the more solitary novel writer. On a writing staff, you might have the experience of 4 or 6 or
however many very good writers bouncing ideas off each other, one-upping each other, improving each scene. Take a musical perspective, Lennon's ok, McCartney's ok, but together they are great, because they have someone to say - that's crap Paul, start over, or try it this way. And don't let Yoko sing, John, please. A few people are Dylan, but even those need an editor. If you don't believe me, give "Mozambique" another listen. Certainly there should be some back-and-forth with a novelist's early readers, and hopefully the editor, but so many books seem to be sloppily edited, waffling on in pointless detours and unreadable prose that I wonder sometimes how many books are published nearly as delivered, after a quick copy edit and a marketing meeting. TV produces about a few hundred new programs per year, depending on how far down the cable ladder you are willing to go. Yet it has the same copycat and quality control problems we complain about in publishing.

JR: Right now I don't think the writing for a novel is much different that what you see on TV. The writers at 'Madmen' have used a simple flashback component to their stories, Don Draper has been running from his past for years, and now it's catching up to him, mostly in his regrets. Novelists that worked on 'The Wire', and that last season had a batch of front running writers with critically praised novels on shelves. I think the beginning middle end, identifying the engine is something that crosses over to novels from television, and editors and agents start to look for that, especially when it entertains. In my experience of trying to market my own novel, that's what I hear. But then John Irving's last novel was 600 pages too long, he is indulgent and self absorbed. I don't think 'Until I Find You' would be published by a first time writer. It goes on tangents that are 200 pages long. No one can get away with that unless your established. I've tried to read 3 novels recently and they are murky at best, I can't get past page 100. Am I suffering from watching too much episodic television? Am I to blame when I look up from the book I'm reading at page 100 and I don't know what's happening or why I should care? Recently I've watched two great shows made in Canada, 'Intelligence', about a drug dealer and his law enforcement counterpart dueling it out, and a CSI type show called 'Da Vinci's Inquest', which is far more cut and dry than 'Intelligence' (both take place in Vancouver, and Seattle). But there is a pacing to that kind of writing that is missing in novels. You see less scatter-shot writing in novels today, less fat. When the New Yorker does a profile of Nora Roberts, well...the times for literary novels are tough. I will say this, the slow release of character detail on 'Intelligence' is some of the best writing I've ever seen, it reminds me a lot of Marathon Man,three stories wrapped in one. Which begs the question; "how many stories can be told...before writers just repeat themselves?"

JE: I don't think the problem is that you're watching too much television, JR, I think the problem is that most literary novelists don't create and manage enough tension in their work, something genre writers, and good television writers can't afford to overlook. You've got to have something driving the story besides words and insights and observations and narrative tropes and voice. In order to keep an audience riveted to a story, you must have some form of tension at work constantly. I'm not suggesting that every scene needs to be a confrontation. Most of the tension can involve internal conflict that need never be stated, rather suggested or dictated by a character's situation. Also, I think that among literary novelists there is often a concerted effort to frustrate traditional (Aristotelian) story arcs, which is admirable. The problem is, that after tens of thousands of years, folks process stories a certain way. We respond to rising action, we expect climax and denouement. With West of Here, I tried to frustrate traditional story arcs by playing with time and sequence and dozens of limited points of view, and comics, and even a multi-verse which allowed me to create multiple realities. But in the end, I was totally beholden to the old story elements of rising action, etc. As for the how many stories can you write without repeating yourself question, I can't say. But I can say that I think an expansive writer with self-conscious characters can work the same theme endlessly without repeating themselves.

DH: JR and JE are playing different language games. JR's is realism, his "that's the way it is" brings him close to the technical requirements of teleplays with their emphasis on dialogue and action. The best TV can be a toolbox for the serious novelist. Just add the most powerful descriptive skill this side of Mars and you have a good working model for the kind of writing that JR likes and writes himself. Reminds me of Shakespeare. Julius Caesar is a good example. There is an incredible amount of action in Julius Caesar--it's paranormal. Real life doesn't move that fast. (Shakespeare would have written great teleplays.) On the other hand, Shakespeare can also do the kind of interior exploration of character and life's meaning that is alien to how television works. But there is this duality of genre in Shakespeare. Some critics think that in Elizabethan times, Shakespeare was read more than he was performed. Julius Caesar becomes a novel. I suggest you try it sometime. Shakespeare plays make great novels. JE's language game is idealism: He is playing with our conventional perceptions, our angle of vision. It's altering states...seeing reality as a construct that the writer or reader might be able to bend. It's trying to get inside people's heads. I apologize for using a musical example. JE reminds me of Brahms; a conservative artist who was highly experimental. He played with the conventions of composition (ie. storytelling) a lot. But he always respected those conventions in the end. J's, let me segue to my pet peeve before I stop with my post. I've hinted at it already. It turns out that JR and I have been throwing out the same galleys lately. For two guys who have very different attitudes, it's a wonder that we agree so much. But the "literary" rejects are beside the point. What disappoints me is how little historical and cultural perspective there is in contemporary American fiction. Am I weird because I can tell the difference between Brahms and Wagner or because I know the plot of Antigone? It seems we've moved backward in engaging the rest of the world both in the now and the then. Both Hawthorne and Melville did better, let alone Mark Twain and Henry James. There is such a McSweeney's-like vogue for being a hot-stuff writer these days. But apparently that attitude doesn't include knowing anything about what has happened farther than two or three feet from your own ass. I stretch the point. I can think of the counter-examples myself...but history and culture are wide and deep...an ocean of story...where are they in American fiction?

JE: DH, you're not weird because you know the plot of Antigone. You're just weird. Who else is going to compare me to Brahms? And can I just say that I think the term "realism" is something of a misnomer? Why do the pessimists get to appropriate reality? Anyway, I've gotta' go pet my bunnies. Anybody have any closing remarks for this week?

JR: I hope the gatekeepers realize that the system their trying to sell into is broken. Hardcovers will soon go away, Harper Stuido's idea of a 50/50 profit sharing plan will soon take hold, and twitter is not going to save anything. Unpublished authors, no matter how good their writing is have realized that they have to go it alone, and find other outlets for their voices to be heard. The chains are dead, and the deal of "loaning books" that they have with the big NY publishers is about to collapse. James Frey told me that there is room out there for everyone, I disagree...there isn't room out there for what's being published now. Read more!

Nick Laird Interview, Glover's Mistake

Nick Laird is a wonderful writer. I reviewed this great book a while back...go here for the review. I'm pleased to present this interview.

Jason Rice: Before you wrote your first book, Utterly Monkey, you were well known for your poetry. What was the jump like from writing in that form to a large canvas like a novel?

Nick Laird: Well, the first two books only came out a few months apart in Britain and Ireland, but yes, the poetry came first. They’re very different beasts. The baggage restrictions are different, and I can’t really write them close together, in the same week or whatever. Poetry tends to be about one’s relation with oneself or with the world, and fiction’s more of a social forum, different characters glancing off each other. I find you need a bit of decompression between them or else the poetry starts to explicate too much and become narrative, and too much poetry infects the fiction, makes the sentences too plangent, everything too heightened and ambiguous. All those rules can be broken of course, but that’s the gist of it for me.

JR: Utterly Monkey sounded like it was inspired by the time you spent working in an office. Have you spent much time in the art world, either here in New York City or in London where the action for Glover’s Mistake takes place?

NL: Not really. I have a friend who runs a gallery in Rome and I’ve watched him in action with artists and buyers. And I do like to look at art. I live in Chelsea in New York at the moment, and I drop in at art galleries pretty frequently. I went round a few yesterday in fact. I just moved here from Italy, where I was living for a couple of years, and I spent a lot of time there visiting palazzos and sunless churches looking at classical and renaissance art, at altar pieces and religious paintings. My tastes are pretty catholic; I like a wide variety of stuff, though a great deal of modern work misses the mark for me. I was looking at Chuck Close’s tapestries yesterday (he has a massive one of Brad Pitt, for example) and I just think it’s all a bit hackneyed and weak. All wink-wink irony that does nothing, goes nowhere, and is complicit in whatever it’s meant to be satirizing. But it’s only the good stuff survives anyway. I’m sure if you were wandering around looking at hundreds of Rembrandt’s contemporaries most of the stuff would seem pretty feeble too.

JR: There is a definite change in the voice you write in from your first novel to the second, can you explain the difference? What were your intentions when you sat down to write each? They say that people have their entire lives to write their first novel, and the second can sometimes be a disappointment. This is not the case with you, but there is a very bold maturity and a sense that you are moving into a serious intellectual character examination with Glover’s Mistake.

NL: I suppose your second book is dictated in some senses by your first. It’s a correction of it or a steering away from it. I felt the first book was fast, masculine, raucous, a little slapstick in some ways, optimistic, light, and I wanted the second to be more feminine, darker, and to have room for characters to think. I wanted there to be less action. I think it’s common enough in debut novels for the writer to overdo the plot, as they’re scared of boring the reader. I wanted GM to be a smaller thing, a three-hander that was a little creepy, a little insidious.

JR: I loved David, the anti-hero of Glover’s Mistake. Not only is he unappealing in almost every way, but he isn’t likeable at all. Zoë Heller talks about writing characters that are not likeable. In all three of her novels there isn’t a day that goes by without some heavy cloud cover. Do you think writers today are trying to catch an audience and sell a book with characters that are likeable? Is it possible to write fiction with characters that are just like everyone else…essentially flawed on the outside and strangled by a low self-image?

NL: Well, I think when a reader says they didn’t like a book because they didn’t like the characters, they actually mean that they couldn’t recognize anything of themselves. At least I hope that’s the case. The alternative is just silly. You don’t have to have dinner with the characters. Maybe they mean they didn’t care what happened to them, but you don’t have to like a character to feel interest in them or have some emotional response to them. I’m not interested in writing “likeable” characters per se. That kind of thing’s a red herring. I wanted them to be believable, I suppose, and interesting. And I wanted to write nice sentences. Anyway, my favorite characters in fiction are not exactly likeable. Raskolnikov. Humbert Humbert. Ignatius J. Reilly. Keith Talent.

JR: In the book David is a teacher. I know that you’re also teaching creative writing at Columbia. Without boiling the water around the subject, what’s that like? Do you sometimes find yourself looking at the fiction presented to you by your students and thinking about their storytelling ups and downs, as they might mirror your own? What kind of things do you hope to impart on your students?

NL: I was teaching Irish Poetry. I wanted to widen their ideas about what poetry was and could do, but I’m not sure whether I succeeded.

JR: Glover’s Mistake is a love triangle. For a long time it’s two sided, Ruth, a successful artist and James Glover, a bartender and a man of faith, who seem to be as perfect together as Oranges and Peanut Butter. I thought the relationship was off to a rocky start with nothing more than passion holding it together, but it seemed to go to another level. How did you come to these characters, what pushed you to write them?

NL: Not sure really. I knew I wanted to write about a young man and an older woman, which is a dynamic not really covered that often in fiction. It’s only in recent history that women have been independent enough (which means having their own money) to be able to form relationships with younger men, and I wanted to write a bit about that. I wanted to try to write a classic set-up that had shifted in some way, that could only be written now, at this moment in history – hence the internet stuff and the slightly odd nature of the roles.

JR: David is a true cynic. A man that seems hobbled by his insecurities and filled with a kind of rage that only comes out at odd times. His voice is very cutting and unforgiving, but he sees the forest through the trees essentially a larger picture that will result from his actions. Was this hard to accomplish while trying to write a love story?

NL: Yeah, David is a bit torn. He ends up hating what he wants because he can’t have it. Aesop’s fox and the grapes. I wanted him to be aware of himself but not entirely. It’s David’s story really: a kind of lack-of-love story.

JR: There is a wonderful sense of the ridiculous, when you describe the London art world and the cultural side of their lives. Especially when Ruth, James and David go to a piano concert. David sees it for what it is, and James and Ruth see it another way. It’s almost as if you think there is a kind of pompous arrogance to those worlds. Maybe outside the walls of a gallery or museum “art” would just be something else, like car dealerships, or video game parlors.

NL: Don’t take my view to be the same as David’s. I like modern music. There’s pomposity and arrogance everywhere of course, but David is always watching his own reaction to things and trying to have “the right one”.

JR: Ruth seems to be aligned with a feminist ideal that David finds woefully unattractive and he even makes quiet remarks to himself that she’s not as intellectual as she thinks she is. Is this David’s insecurity you’re playing on or your feelings about artists in general?

NL: No, no, David’s insecurity, and Ruth’s. I don’t have any feelings about artists “in general”.

JR: I was wondering whom your favorite living contemporary writers are? And when you sat down to write either Utterly Monkey or Glover’s Mistake was there a book that you kept at your elbow for inspiration? I know Jonathan Franzen keeps novels he admires nearby while he writes.

NL: No book in particular. I know some writers refuse to read anyone else when they write in case it “infects” them or whatever but I’m not worried about that. If I get stuck, occasionally I’ll open someone’s book and remind myself how to make a sentence, but mostly I’d get up and go for a walk. I like lots of writers. The list is endless really.

JR: Mr. Laird, it’s been a pleasure talking to you. Thank you for taking the time. Do you really write with earplugs in your ears?

NL: I do, yes. I wear earplugs for about 22 hours out of the 24. Especially in this cacophonous city. And at the minute I’ve a perforated eardrum (something to do with having a cold on a flight from Pisa to New York last week) so now I’ve got to do weird things with cotton wool and Vaseline.

-JR Read more!

The Blindfold Test - Barry Schechter - What I'm Reading Right Now

I'm halfway through this debut novel and I'm really liking it; I'd suggest you check it out. It's a little paperback from the up and coming Melville House out of Brooklyn.

It's about a man who has been followed his entire life by a secret sector of the government; an imaginative Hoover spin off that's called the Breather program. But why is Jeffery Parker a suspect, and being followed? He mistakenly attended a rally in his salad days and now realizes that everything he's ever not done, that's right, not done, is due to this secret group that's gone around and prevented him from getting what he wants. The pitfalls of his life are due to one wrong turn, he zigged when he should have zagged, and has to pay for it over his entire life. There is a wickedly funny opening scene that needs to be read three or four times. It's a great way to start a novel, unconventional and totally worth your time.

This is an interesting book that I've been reading off and on over the last few weeks, and there is so much going on in the world of books right now that it's hard to focus on one thing. As soon as I do, something else I really want to read arrives on the doorstep. Stay tuned for a full review of this great debut. To put a finer point on it, this book is a trade paperback original, and in these penny pinching times, a good deal.

-JR Read more!

Ziggurat by Stephen O'Connor

I've always loved the word "ziggurat". A Mesopotamian temple...sort of zig-zagged...where those strange Middle Eastern agricultural gods, obsessed with sex and human sacrifice, were worshiped.

Stephen O'Connor's New Yorker story begins with a girl in a bar playing a computer game about the tower of Babel called Ziggurat. You're supposed to build the tower before this blueish guy, representing the creator, knocks it down. Now throw in a minotaur; hanging out in the bar between bouts of human consumption. The bar is really part of the minotaur's labyrinth.

You know this labyrinth. You walk through it everyday. It consists of half-noticed rooms, maybe even your own, the endless corridors of parking garages, dive bars and pool halls, your local 7/11 ( I don't know, maybe) and every other anonymous space that you can think of. SO lists cathedrals, bus stations, diners, bowling alleys, subway tunnels....

It's an endless maze, the home of the half-bull, half-man minotaur and his food is you. O'Connor is so sly...his minotaur doesn't have horns...he's just a big lug of a guy with an insatiable appetite for eating people.

Girl and minotaur spend some quality time together. It's like one of those reality shows where a woman goes on a nightmare date. Here's a cool bit: whenever the girl and the minotaur enter a diner, there are always two cups of coffee waiting for them on the counter. Divine providence has a great sense a humor thanks to Mr. O'Connor.

Here are some touchstones that I thought Stephen O'Connor was hitting: Picasso, Becket, Herman Hesse's The Glass Bead Game, Milton, the Bible, Thomas Mann. I could have included King Kong. Is it all just me being kick-started into mythic overdrive because of SO's story?

But the tale's compass is a relationship...how turning to someone else can change you...and what a dangerous opportunity it is when you let that happen.

Stephen O'Connor's wonderful "Ziggurat' is a ziggurat...a tower of Babel and a labyrinth in itself. Can you find your way out of it? In the June 29th issue of the New Yorker.

-DH

Read more!

Leaving Tangier by Tahar Ben Jelloun

Tahar Ben Jelloun's novel is a systematically organized piece of work. There are 40 chapters. Most of them are named after a featured character. It's like Van Gogh painting a canvas. There's that brilliant yellow again and, at another place, cinnabar green. Then you step back and look at the whole canvas: wheat field, mother with child, sunflowers...whatever.

Most of those characters just want to get out. I can't say how accurate the picture we get of Morocco is in this story. But there are societies all over the world that have been shut down by their own corruption; reducing options for the majority of the population who are imprisioned inside.

We'll focus on Azel who is trapped in Tangier. He's a local boy who has made good: done all the right things. He has a law degree now, but no job. There are no prospects of one either.

He's a handsome guy, a ten, popular as hell with women. But he just screws around a lot. You can't settle down if you can't afford to...but maybe he doesn't want to.

It's hard to figure out what Azel wants. Maybe he doesn't know. He wants to walk away from it all.

He gets his chance with Miguel, a wealthy, gay Spaniard. Miguel is Azel's first class ticket to Barcelona. Azel tells himself that being gay, for Miguel, is just a job. 

So Azel gets to Spain by playing Miguel's bitch. We might even be happy that he got to a better place if we could forget about that part. But Tahar Ben Jelloun (winner of both the Prix Goncourt and the International IMPACT Dublin Literary Award) doesn't let us forget it. Miguel holds a party and Azel is asked to make a dramatic entrance in drag. He despises the idea but does it anyway. It's like watching a stampeding cow hurtling off a cliff.

Azel's sister, Kenza, also ends up in Spain thanks to Miguel. Having more sense than her brother, she tries to establish her economic independence as soon as possible. But there's a great little scene where flipping open a guy's wallet upends her romantic fantasies about living abroad.

Stay-at-homes fair worst in Leaving Tangier. Malika, one of Azel's neighbors, is told by her father that, at fourteen, she has had enough education. I guess there's nothing more chilling than having opportunity's door slammed shut in your face by your own parents. She is sent to work at the local shrimp factory where her fingers are rendered invisible by the brutal labor.

I used to carry a charm against the evil eye in my wallet. It was from a friend who brought it back from Istanbul. But when I got a new wallet, I lost track of it. I hope that doesn't make me vulnerable. 

The evil eye is an old Greek/Turkish superstition: that someone can lay an evil wish on you. The charm is supposed to dispel the bad karma that's heading in your direction.

That's the old world explanation provided for the bad fortune that so many characters experience in Leaving Tangier. It's the envy...the jealousy...visited upon anyone who is bright or shows promise.

But it's the leaving that's the real assault...it's exile...sometimes exile from oneself. Pulling up roots is a difficult thing. But you have to have roots to pull up in order to truly leave. 

-DH

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Happyland, J. Robert Lennon, Part 1

I first discovered J. Robert Lennon when I bought a copy of Mailman after reading a great review on Bookmunch.com. I didn't like it. Then as time went on I heard about Pieces for the Left Hand, when I got that in the mail from Granta. I was stunned, and went on to review it in my monthly column at AICN. Pieces for the Left Hand is a book that should be taught in creative writing classes, and could be a bible for wanna be writers everywhere. Essentially it's short stories about small towns and the people who occupy them, it's just been re-released by Graywolf Press in paperback alongside his new novel, Castle.

There are no shortage of J. Robert Lennon fans in the literary community. When I heard he'd written a novel that couldn't find a publisher I had to get my hands on it. The only place I could find a copy of Happyland was in Harper's magazine. It was serialized over the course of few issues, and each week I made a trip to my local library and made a copy of the story. I was eager to read it, and I don't know why I let it sit untouched for over a year. There is a rumor going around that the reason it can't get a publisher is that Happyland is about a real person, and it's just a rumor, it's all fiction...trust me. But there is an interesting article here.

In the next couple weeks I'm going to talk a little bit about the story of Happyland and as luck would have it, J. Robert Lennon was kind enough to agree to answer a few of my questions about this wonderful story. If you'd like to read the first installment go here: Harper's

Happyland, Part I. July 2006 Harper's Magazine.

This is a conventional story, as much as there are only a few types of story ideas out there; stranger comes to town (this is that idea), man vs himself, man vs man, man vs animal, it goes on, I just can't remember all of them, and when I'm at a loss for one I just watch a David Mamet movie.

I'd say for sure that Happy Masters is a bitch, selfish, absorbed with her own deluded fictions and poised to take over the town Equinox, New York as her own and make it in her image. Happy is a doll and children's book mogul, and has it in her head to take over this quiet little college town from it's residents and make it into Happyland, full of life-sized replicas of the environments depicted in her children's books. Happy marches to the beat of her own drum, as it's financed by her wealthy husband whom she only has time for when it's fair weather.

Mr. Lennon does a masterfully quick job at getting all of the main players into motion in this meaty first part of the story. Happy lands on Equinox will both feet and starts buying up the town, piece be piece, person by person. What is even more exciting to watch is how Lennon gets each person into the readers head. Librarian Ruth Spinks who will be Happy's nemesis, the owner of the local bar Dave Dryer is pessimistic to Happy's ideas, to say the least. Both of these people instantly dislike Happy and don't waste time mincing their words. We then get a slice of Reeve Tennyson, President of the local College, who has come to Equinox under suspicious circumstances, it's a sweet little bit of gossip, and one that most likely will come back to haunt everyone involved. It also showcases Lennon's talents as a sublime writer, weaving little bits of information about each person, dipping his toes into their pasts just deep enough to keep your interest but never slowing the story down. Finally, what would a story about a egomaniac like Happy Masters be with out an adoring "I'll do anything to work for you" fan. Janet is a withering college girl, something of a weak chinned shadowless blade of grass, and Happy sees her as a way to massage the most important part of this community, the College.

Happy is nearly dragged under and devoured by an angry mob of townsfolk, but is able to placate them with smoke and mirrors and empty promises. Once Happy has figured everyone out, she starts to wield the power only the wealthy are capable of. This is a glorious start to a wonderfully entertaining story.

Jason Rice: Where did the idea for Happyland come from? And can you give truth the rumor that it's based on a real person? Is that what's holding up it's publication in book form?

J. Robert Lennon: No, the book isn't based on a real person, and that's not the holdup--the book was inspired by a real-life semi-takeover of an upstate New York town by a former doll-company mogul, no secret about that--but Happy Masters isn't anything like the real mogul, as far as I know. The situation was from real life, but all the characters are invented. As far as its not having come out in book form...what can I say? It's a literary novel, and they're hard to sell. I'm still confident it'll happen someday.

JR: I loved your cast of characters in the first section, especially Reeve, he seemed so perfectly suited to be running a small town college. There is a great sense of authenticity to your characters, how hard is that for you to develop?

JRL: You mean perfectly unsuited, right? Which I guess is to say, perfectly suited for a satirical novel. no, inventing and developing characters is my favorite thing to do--it's inventing things to happen to them that's always a challenge. It's hard to develop a story in a way that makes it seem like something that actually might happen, not something that I want to happen. In the case of Happyland, I just threw those considerations out the window and went with the most entertaining (to me, anyway) plot twists I could think up.

JR: Happy Masters has plans for this town, and as it sits right now at the end of the first section it seems as though she's had her way with everyone and is going to get her wish, to buy the town right out from under everyone's noses. Will any real foil to Happy arrive on the scene in the coming chapters? You've told me that you had to drop a few characters from this story before it went to publication at Harper's?

JRL: Yeah, a few people fell by the wayside in the Harper's version, but even in the unabridged one...let's just say that Happy is her own worst enemy.

JR: There is a small town feeling to your writing, a loneliness, a solitude that is sometimes lost in the suburban ideal. I wonder if you find a sense of anonymity in these settings, and if so, how does it shape your writing and characters?

JRL: I love small towns, and the strange way things can develop in them, when everyone knows everyone else too well, and people are forced to grow inward rather than outward. Ruth, the librarian in Happyland, feels this more powerfully than anyone else--she both loves and hates living in a small town. I suppose I'm the same way--I couldn't wait to leave my small town when I was 18, but somehow I keep ending up in new ones, c'est la vie!

Stay tuned, I'll talk more about Happyland next week, and hopefully J. Robert Lennon will give us more of his time...

-JR Read more!

The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht

If you are going to find The Tiger's Wife believable, in the current, fiction issue of The New Yorker, then you first have to believe in the tiger. Tea Obreht has to win the reader's confidence immediately or the game is up. I wish I could understand how writers do this. 

Have you ever been absorbed in a story and then doubled-back...marvelling at how you got sucked in?

April, 1941, Eastern Europe: Germans power-bomb a city and the animals in the citadel, the local zoo, are left to starve. The tiger lies impotent in its own waste, dying of thirst. 

When a wall is breached, the beast crawls away. Now imagine the decimated city...from an animal's point of view...how a rotting city smells...and tastes...fresh corpses fall from the trees like fruit...or like snacks from a Pez dispenser. The unacceptable and abnormal, like the sight of a tiger walking down your street, becomes believable.

November, 1941: a mountain village is snowed in and safe from the Nazis until the spring thaw. But it's not safe from the devil. Vladisa, the herdsman, has seen him up on the ridge above the village, gnawing on a lost calf.

TO's story contains: a narrator of archival events so the POV is wide and deep, dialogue that doesn't need attribution...no he said, she said...because it's just village talk...a central character who's a deaf mute...so no dialogue at all...but that doesn't stop her from being the foil on which the story turns, a book within the narrative...in this case it's Kipling's Jungle Book, some wonderful folklore, like a witch's hut that perches on one giant chicken's leg, the devil (perhaps), one tiger.

It's terribly promising to read a short story, by a kid who was born in 1985, that contains so many ingenious devices. I especially loved TO's way with voice. Her narrrator tells the story of their grandfather, who appears as a boy, raised in a remote mountain village by his grandmother. The talk of the village folk functions like some crazy mix of a greek chorus and the National Inquirer. 

The deaf mute is a Muslim woman, an outlier in a village of Christians. She's the wife of the butcher, Luka. The National Inquirer would be thrown into overdrive by the rumors about these two. Why has he married her? So he'd have someone at home who could keep her mouth shut? It looks like he beats her...and there's the rumor that he's married her as a cover so he could play around with guys.

I want to confess that I'm in my element in a story like this. My father was a boy in a Greek village much like this one; and he grew up as a teenager in Turkey and Egypt. He would tell me the village stories...although never one about a tiger. 

Mahfouz, Pamuk and Kazantzakis: If you tap on their names, you'll see that I've recommended a book by each that's offers you the tales, the beauty and the particular wisdom of the part of the world that my father knew so well and that comes off as such an entertaining read in The Tiger's Wife by the gifted Tea Obreht. In The New Yorker, this week.

-DH

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Adland – Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet

A sneak-peak courtesy of Bill Thomas at Doubleday.

JE: By way of a preamble, let me just say that James P. Othmer is one of the funniest writers at work today. Period. His keen eye for the absurdities of the modern world rivals the likes of George Saunders and Sam Lipsyte. You could sharpen knives on Othmer's sentences.

Prior to his 2006 debut novel, The Futurist, Jimbo was honing his mad skills in the advertising racket, as an exec at Young & Rubicam. And though I daresay it was a colossal waste of his talents, I, for one, am glad he endured it, or we wouldn't have Adland, a hilarious and insightful chronicle of the rise and fall of a modern ad man.

Here's a little taste of Adland, which will be released in September:

"The greatest problem with communication is the illusion that it has been accomplished." --George Bernard Shaw

Hello, Kitty

Turd-shrinking cat food.

This was what me and six relatively sane adults were talking about, or getting an education about, at seven o’clock at night, hunkered over a tinny speaker phone as siren wails rose up from the gloomy crevasse of Madison Avenue seven floors below, drowning out the voices of six other presumably sane adults, enlightened turd-shrinking cat food experts all, hunkered over a tinny speakerphone of their own. In Tokyo.

It’s a big deal over there, a Japanese-accented speakerphone voice told us, the shrinking of the animal turds. I thought that this is probably because they live in cramped quarters in Japan, tiny, immaculately maintained structures where every extra fecal milligram matters. I thought for a moment about the brilliant, white-smocked team of scientists and chemists who had been charged with creating the product -- the careful measuring the various turds with calipers, comparing and contrasting shape and consistency to previous samples – and I decided that their job was only slightly more humiliating than the one I was about to be given.

As the briefing continued, I began to conjure a product demo. I envisioned an animated shot of the inside of a cat’s intestine, where an alarmingly-enflamed log magically shrinks, changing from an angry, large, home-wrecking orange mass into a tranquil, adorable little lavender-colored turd that wouldn’t think of encroaching upon one’s precious Japanese personal space. I thought of Turd vs. Godzilla, engaged in mortal (to the extent that shit has a life) combat, high above the flashing video billboards of the Ginza District.

Maybe, I thought, we could ask the animators behind The Power Puff Girls to design it. That could be cool. Then, a more rational part of me thought, No. It would not be cool. It could never be even remotely cool. There is nothing cool about cat shit or, for that matter, anyone who has anything to do with the calibration of its size or shape or the style in which it might be animated.

Technically, I was in this meeting because my new boss, a Manhattan-based, French global creative director liked the doctoring I had performed earlier in the week with a Brazilian hairball formula script. I wish I could remember more details about the Brazilian hairball formula script (did it involve a thong, caipirinhas and hairballs at Carnivale?) but sometimes the brain does the conscience a favor and builds a wall around moments that can potentially destroy the soul.

Technically, I was there because my Brazilian hairball scriptectomy was all the proof my new boss needed to get me on the phone with a group of people from an island nation six thousand miles away who were breathlessly waiting to hear my thoughts on how to save their bullshit cat shit commercial.

But the real explanation for how I ended up in this meeting is much more complicated. Twenty years worth of complicated, the short version of which is that a once enthusiastic and promising young copywriter turned cynical, existential creative director, was in his mid-forties and burnt, his 125 year-old telcom client gone (recently absorbed by another telcom client with an agency of its own), the person who courted, hired and championed him long gone, and his employer had run out of places to put him.

More than once I had mentioned to the manager of the creative department that, if there happened to be another round of layoffs coming, and if they were looking for volunteers to take some kind of package, I had a “friend” who might be interested in starting another chapter in his life.

But I was told, No way. After years of thinking I was going to get laid off, I was suddenly, if not indispensable, worth keeping around. Maybe I wasn’t an ad legend but I was a “writer’s writer”. An “in-house poet”. And suddenly deemed beloved, apparently, by someone who mattered. It’s as if they thought that anyone talented or crazy enough to want to leave a high-paying job in this economy must be truly special and just the kind of person they couldn’t afford to lose.

The plan, I was told, was to put me to work as the North American Creative Director for our huge packaged goods client -- A.K.A. the world’s largest maker of stuff you put in your medicine cabinet (not to mention turd-shrinking, hairball-eliminating cat foods) --where there was plenty of work and a short term need for senior leadership, until another assignment came along that was a better fit for my skills.

So there I was, thinking, This cat food is not about the cat at all. It’s all about the owner, who could care less about what chemicals his beloved Tuffy-san ingests as long as the turds are tidy. Thinking, These people are incredibly stupid, but then again they were smart enough to figure out how to make me fix their Honey I Shrunk the Turd spot. And thinking, In addition to going to People Hell for this, now we’ll surely have to do time in Pet Purgatory.

And this favorite, even though I knew the answer: How did I end up here?

I looked at the account guy next to me who multiple degrees, had done some kind of fellowship in London and had a sharp, seemingly rational mind. Then I looked at the creative team across from me that had been led to believe that the cynical old bastard across from them was going to become their boss, their unwanted mentor, two funny, talented and much abused young men, one of whom had hung out in college with the guys who made the film Napoleon Dynamite and who could make art out of an email newsletter about a Central Park kickball league, and I wondered what they thought of all this, Why were they here?

Here’s what happened: In twenty years I went from earnest, wide-eyed junior copywriter to big agency golden boy to disillusioned, bitter, corporate burnout, then, briefly, back to golden boy, then to capable veteran and finally back to corporate burnout, but this time without the bitterness or disillusionment. Because really, there is no reason for a rational adult to be disillusioned with advertising. With medicine, or art, or the Peace Corps, maybe. But saying you’re disillusioned with advertising is like saying you’re disillusioned with politics, or the porn industry.

What did we expect, fulfillment?

During my career I survived some 14 rounds of layoffs, downturns in the industry and the economy, takeover threats, IPOs, 16 creative directors, 13 CEOs, the demise of one great agency and the ongoing collapse of another.

For this I was given more money than I ever would have made in my father’s well-intentioned career of choice for me: mason’s laborer and, if I played my cards right, bricklayer.

Because of advertising I got to travel the world and meet many smart, talented and powerful people, from CEOs and artists to Four-Star Generals and Carrot Top.

Because of advertising I got to follow and occasionally lead and make hundreds of friends for life. And I got to dedicate too much of my life than I’d care to acknowledge thinking about things like turd-shrinking cat food.



After 20 years of shoveling concepts into the idea furnace, I was done.

It helped just a bit that I had recently finished a novel and had gotten an agent. This was indeed promising but I had finished novels before and had agents before, one of whom died, one of whom quit weeks after I signed with her, and one of whom told me that she was leaving the industry to go to clown school *1. So it’s not like I was all set or anything.

*1 Perhaps the lowest point of my literary career was when I asked her if she could, “You know, do both.” Represent me in between tiny tricycle riding and clown makeup application classes.” As long as she remembered to take off the red nose and giant floppy shoes for face-to-face meetings it was cool with me. This was also, in some ways, a high point. Because if you’re still compelled to write after your agent has abandoned you for a remote chance at a career in the circus, it’s not because you think you’re going to be a bestselling author. It’s because you like it.

Near the end of the conversation with the Japanese, I looked up to see everyone on our end of the call staring at me. The turd baton was about to be passed to the U.S. team, and I was to be its anchor man.

“Do you have everything you need?” asked someone from the other side of the world. I shook my head yes, but couldn’t stop myself from asking, “Does anyone?”

From ADLAND: Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet by James P. Othmer, coming from Doubleday in September 2009. All rights reserved. Read more!

Jonathan Franzen, Good Neighbors, New Yorker Summer Fiction Issue

I've waited a very long time for something substantial from Mr. Franzen. Of course I'd be lying if I said his last two outings were worth the wait, Discomfort Zone didn't achieve the lofty heights I'd set Mr. Franzen on, and I whipped through it hoping it would be over and I'd forget it. How to be Alone was rehash, essays, something to feed the masses.

'The Corrections changed the path of my interests in reading, writing and contemporary American fiction. It hit me at the right moment, and I remember being riveted to the page, absolutely blown away by the incredible story. I gushed when I met Mr. Franzen at a signing, pre-9-11, pre-Oprah, and he couldn't have been more confused by my feelings that I wanted to get amnesia so I could read 'The Corrections' again. "You can always read it again." Is what he said. I also told him it's not his fault he got picked by Oprah. He gave me a very long look. Since then I've gone on to read everything he's written, Twenty-Seventh City and Strong Motion are capable by any writers standards, but could in no way prepare you for the book that got him thrown out of Oprah's tea party.

Clearly 'Good Neighbors', the center point of this years New Yorker Summer Fiction issue is a taste of Mr. Franzen's next novel. I have no doubt that this is the hint I've been waiting for all these years. A friend of mine told me that his next novel was going to center around a married couple in contemporary society, which is exactly what's happening in this story. This isn't a short story, it's an updated sandblast of Cheever country, a complete revision of the suburban ideal. Good Neighbors echoes Rick Moody, which of course echoes Cheever, but this is more Updike in scope and detail (introducing people as you detail other people), like the fine novel of Updike's I'm reading now, 'Couples', a book 41 years ahead of it's time. It is very hard to believe that novel ever saw the light of day, and it was published a year before I was born.

We meet three couples who are neighbors, almost side by side. Patty Berglund and her husband Walter - they seem stoic, have a lovely daughter and son, both who are doted on by stay at home mom and supported by a go to work dad. Seth and Merrie Paulsen seem to be on the outside looking in. They hover around Patty and Walter, never really getting in the thick of the neighborhood gossip, which unfolds in typical Franzen fashion, slowly, peeled away, step by step. We get to know Patty and Walter, their good side, sometimes reflected by Seth other times by Merrie.

In the middle of all this is single mom Carol, who has a daughter that will blossom in the upstairs bedroom of Patty and Walter's home, with their son, Joey. Carol is white trash, has a city job, and a daughter that's prime rib. It's amazing to watch these people angrily weave their way around each other, only to explode when they have the misfortune of coming in contact. Walter is the sensible corporate "earner" of the neighborhood, Ramsey Hill a suburb of St. Paul. This could easily be Cheever's Shady Hill, Franzen licks the ice cream cone of the early 00's with Gore and liberalism, a common thread in his writing for the most part, but here he uses politics as a flaw, like a DUI or a shop lifting charge that would come up on a background check.

Carol finally meets Blake and he brings a level of unwashed "whiteness" to the neighborhood, and Patty can't take it. There is a tirade half way through this story that Patty unleashes on anyone with in ear shot that will have you rolling on the floor. This is where suburbia goes sideways, the noise, other people, the crowds, and the traffic. Mr. Franzen unwinds Patty under minuscule neighborly pressures. Walter gets shut out from this emotional tidal wave, his son ignores him, tries to be an adult before his time, and argues every point tooth and nail. Fathers and sons in Franzen's world don't always get along; sometimes the fathers refuse to believe their sons even exist.

Mr. Franzen has once again brought to light something that will separate him from the pack, a tightly wound evisceration of modern day suburbia (The Corrections is about a family, Twenty Seventh City is a drama, Strong Motion is earthquakes). People living on top of other people, because there are too many people in the world, and sometimes smart people who read the New York Times have no choice but to suffer the faults of their neighbors. The noise, the selfish attitudes that are apparent in every way shape and form, seem to bubble nicely in the most banal corners of this story. We divert slightly when Walter's mother dies, at first an annoying sidetrack, but soon it becomes a necessary relief for Patty.

Mr. Franzen makes an astute comment at the start (not an exact quote, but close), about Patty and Walter being super guilty liberals, who have to forgive everyone so their own good fortune could be forgiven. Patty and Walter lack the courage needed to hold this privilege. It's an insight that whisks by like a passing cloud, taken for granted but it is one of the most important aspects of this fantastic novel excerpt...I mean story. I wonder if Franzen dislikes people as much as he writes about people who are unlikeable?

-JR Read more!

We Give Away the Signal

The Three Guys are giving away three free copies of The Signal by Ron Carlson. The copies will be mailed to you by the publisher.

Send us an email requesting your free copy to our official email address: threeguysonebook@gmail.com. We will say yes to the first three people.

Just one thing: don't ask on one of those blogger "no-reply" email addresses or by using some other email address where we can't email you back.

We had a guy who won a free copy of Kyle Beachy's "The Slide" but he submitted his entry in no-reply mode so I couldn't get back to him. 

Trying to be a nice guy, I looked for him on Facebook. I actually thought I had found him but I wasn't sure. Then I thought: Why am I going through all this? So I gave "The Slide" to the runner-up instead. That's what runners-up are for.

-DH

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Love Affair with Secondaries by Craig Raine

Feel sympathy for Piotr, married with three sons, in Craig Raine's new story in the June 1st issue of the The New Yorker? He has betrayed his wife, Basia, in their own apartment.

Piotr is sleeping with the poet Agnieszka. She likes to tell all in her verses so Piotr is worried that he going to appear in her next volume. Well, if you know a writer then you are taking certain chances.

So I was enjoying myself trashing Piotr but Craig Raine puts a stop to that. Piotr is worried that he may succumb to his family's predisposition to cancer. His mother had died of the disease in her late 40's.

Early on CR mentions Agnieszka's signature eyeglasses. This detail comes up again later. When the poet is about to make love to Piotr; she has to take them off. This is a small effect but having been set up so well; it comes off as sheer finesse. There is no irrelevant detail in Craig Raine's prose style.

Every descriptive passage is put to work. Agnieszka brings her own fringed blanket, in her tote bag, to her sexcapade afternoon at Piotr's place. As for Piotr, he has an erection before he's even touched her. Maybe it's that blanket, some kind of Pavlovian conditioning.

"Secondaries" in the title refers to secondary cancer growths. This is the only story I've ever read where characters having cancer can count as a tactical maneuver. This is the love affair as warfare with a take-no-prisoners attitude. Read it here:

Craig Raine, Love Affair with Secondaries

-DH

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Emerging Writers Network Reviews JR

You are invited to check out the review of Jason Rice's short story Friends on the very strong Emerging Writers Network...one of the best sites on which to keep up with contemporary fiction.

What's especially cool is that you can then follow the EWN link to JR's story on FailBetter.com...another one of the coolest lit websites on the planet.

Jason moves in only the best literary circles these days. Best wishes to our friend.

Review of Jason Rice's Friends

-DH Read more!

The Ron Carlson Interview

Ron Carlson's The Signal is on-sale on June 1st. I had a chance to talk to Ron about the book. RC is awesome:

Dennis Haritou: Ron, you have written a novel without a roof. Your characters are almost always outdoors. Why make that creative choice?

Ron Carlson: I never ever thought of it that way – no roof! And I didn’t think of it when I was writing as an artistic choice. I worked to keep the story simple and each scene led me to the next – even if the next was in the past – and most of those scenes in Mack’s life are out of doors. I spend a lot of time indoors and I long for summer and camping have always cherished my time like that, so the book operates out of longing also, I expect. I wanted to camp, so I wrote one.

DH: The Signal is framed as a trek through the Wyoming mountains. How is it that a camping trip can be a journey of discovery? I'm a non-camper; so that's where this question is coming from. What do your characters learn when they go camping?

RC: The thing that is not teachable or ever described very well in story or song (or film) about camping is that you never rest. You don’t fix up a campfire and sit around having coffee or whiskey or whatever. You are always gathering wood, stoking the fire, trying to drink your coffee while sitting for a second on a sharp rock or an uneven log before you get up to set up a clothes line or sort your gear for tomorrow or find the damn flashlight. The fire doesn’t cooperate; I’ve never seen a real campfire in a film – all those phony fires. They make me sick. However, camping is relentless and demanding and you get into a kind of flow dealing with all of the necessities. Want clean water: figure it out. It is a throwback life, a dear thing, a fresh new planet. You always surprise yourself with your capabilities. We need to get you out of the house.

DH: Your detailed descriptions of the expedition that Mack and Vonnie go on is like a syntax of the wilderness...with trailheads, meadows, forests and lakes as punctuation. For the reader, it's as if this trek from Jackson Hole was real and The Signal could function as a map. I'd like to pack up my kit and take this specific hike right now...even though I'm a total city slicker. How close is your description of the route taken by Mack and Vonnie to being real geography and how much of it lives only in your imagination as a writer?

RC: Let me just say honestly that I’ve been to the Wind River Mountains four times for a week at a time and I’ve been camping in the Uinta Mountains of Utah dozens of times, and I conflated all of those trips, defaulting to the Winds, which are a much more rugged and vast range. But, I moved everything around and I omitted the need for one reservation permit (if you go to the real Cold Creek) and frankly I got carried away at moments in the rocks and in the trees. I did actually see my dear friend Blair Torrey catch a fish while he was standing on a glacier point over a lake in those mountains; I saw it rise to his fly through the clear water.

DH: Mack and Vonnie, are the couple, on the verge of separation, who decide to take one last anniversary hike into the mountains. Their relationship may be virtually unraveling as the reader watches but you can't be sure. You put these two close partners together in the wilderness, by a lake and a campfire, and let them talk to each other. The reader has to wonder: What's going to happen between them? As the writer, did you wonder about that too?

RC: Yes, I did. I wrote all of their scenes with care, by that I mean skill and affection. People part ways and still love each other, I know that as a fact. I wanted their relationship to be real, and I listened closely.

DH: Let's talk about Mack a little more. He's insular, not a people person, can't be a phony...he doesn't have the social skills for it. He's loyal and courageous, even when he's afraid...but he's a petty criminal. He's quite a mix...a great puzzle for the reader to try and figure out. Do you see his criminality as related to his lack of citified social skills. Is he a crook because he doesn't fit in?

RC: When I saw how Mack was flawed, I wondered if I would have to put in the causes, the smoking gun. I think necessity pushed him to the edge of trouble and then wear and tear did the rest. He is quite a mix. He is a guy who made mistakes and knows it; it’s part of his muscle now.

DH: I admired how you mentioned on the first page of The Signal that Mack drives his dead father's old Chevrolet. Of course, you could see it as a sign that Mack doesn't have the dough to buy a new car. But the moving flashbacks with his dad on their guest ranch explain a lot about why you have to like Mack. Mack's father seems like the light that may fail in Mack's personality...the moral center. Later in his life, Vonnie seems to be his salvation from isolation and a new moral compass. Mack also finds himself in his relationship with nature. How do you see him?

RC: I appreciate that reading. It’s clear he reveres his father who was a scrupulous man. And it becomes clear that he has the talent and guts to measure just how far he falls short of his father’s standards. He would like to have Vonnie – for many reasons – but he knows too that he can’t base a life or dedicate a life or fix himself for her; it’s got to be for himself, rough a go as that may be.

DH: The Signal is a lean, mean story-telling machine...realistic but with a heart. The experience of reading it reminded me of reading Cormac McCarthy more than any other writer. I don't know what you think of that comparison but what contemporary writers do you like?

RC: For the work I cherish, you’d have to work to outdo Mr. Tom McGuane and Cormac McCarthy and Bill Kittredge in his last novel in the way these writers evoke a world, even when they are being spare, the contours of the moments take life.

DH: Publishing these days seems rather compartmentalized. In my recent review of The Signal, I tried to break it out of any Western regional interest pigeon-hole. Do you visualize who your audience might be when you write a story? What kind of feedback, if any, are you hoping for and what kind of readers?

RC: I have no real sense of the marketplace. I certainly didn’t write it for region or envision any niche; I wanted to write a good working story. I’m not going to complain about being a western writer. I’ve already had the finest moment a novelist can know in that when my son Nick was staying with me last month he came in the kitchen and said he’d stayed up and read the book that he loved it and we talked about it over breakfast -- along with our travel plans for the summer. This is the larger purpose of fiction.

DH: I could see Mack as a continuing character and could imagine other stories about him. Have you given any thought to writing a sequel or do you think of The Signal as a stand-alone work? Are you working on your next novel yet?

RC: Whoa. A sequel. I never even thought. The mountains are still there, and after an inquest or two, Mack would be free to give the ranch a good go again. And I know some good, original campfire stories. I’ll dream on it.

DH: Thanks very much, Ron. The Signal is close to near-perfect storytelling. No one should miss it.

RC: I enjoyed this. And I appreciate it.

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