Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
Frank Bascombe is a patient man. He's put up with all sorts of sad excuses from me about why I haven't put up his latest column, and I'm so tardy at this point that I've got two months worth of material here, edited together as one piece.
So here he is... our man in New York, the one who reads everything in the publishing world before it gets published, back with another list of books worth taking about, both pro and con.
It's been a tough time for everyone in this country, and especially here in New York where everyone knows someone or is that someone who's been laid off. The unemployment line is getting longer even as I write this column. Focusing on what's happening is a healthy thing to do, but let's also look ahead at what's around the corner, a step up and out of this recession, since positive thinking is sometimes all you have left. This fall season has seen many books come and go, and The National Book Award went to Mr. Franzen for his masterpiece THE CORRECTIONS even though he threw the middle finger at Oprah. Hoping that something amazing will happen right this second in the book world is a long way from it actually happening. Perhaps Franzen wrote the book of the century. Is that possible this early? Is it this generation's GREAT JONES STREET? Or did it even overshadow UNDERWORLD? Personally, I say you can have Delillo and his incomprehensible warped views. Some of the books here are stand-outs, others are just start-ups, but whatever happens to them, you must give them a try. They're down the road apiece, and certainly something you can look forward to. As always, what follows is what I like to call...
IT'S NOT A SECRET IF I DON'T TELL ANYONE
HENRY'S LIST OF WRONGS by John Scott Shepherd
From time to time, you stumble across something that looks like everything else at first glance, but upon further inspection is very revealing and completely engulfing. It happened to me recently with this tight little story of redemption from John Scott Shepherd, a guy who happens to be a screenwriter and a former advertising executive living in Kansas City, a quiet little bed of creativity tucked away in the Midwest. This novel seems to be a personal new frontier of story telling for the author, the way Richard Price grew up with THE BREAKS and LADIES MAN so many years ago. It's certainly not anything outside the norm like Palahniuk's FIGHT CLUB, or the incredibly visceral masterpiece by Craig Nova, INCANDSCENCE, but this guy has put up a good fight just the same and some props need to be paid.
What's wonderful to see in this sea of banality is a character that has four sides and operates in the three dimensional world. He's not holding anything back, but Shepherd certainly shows a broad stroke of restraint. He presents someone that I guarantee everyone will be able to identify with, a geeky kid who's got his heart set on the unattainable prize of the most beautiful, stunningly fantastic best looking chick in his high school class. He pines for her, and then suddenly as if by magic or some unseen hand, he gets his wish; she agrees to go to the high school senior prom with him. Just like that he's got everything that an eighteen year old kid could want, which seems very cool.
But Henry Chase lives in a house of ghosts; his father is dying in the back room with a bad case of the "Big Casino", and his mother and her sister are drinking their lives away. This is all set up for us in the first chapter, and if you can put this book down after this opening scene, then you're a lost cause. Go back to Danielle Steel and John Grisham.
What follows is the next ten years of Henry's life, sprinkled out over the rest of the book, put together like a puzzle where the picture on the front of the box only comes into full focus after all the pieces are put together. Shepherd holds much of this story under his thumb, giving just the bare minimum, but at the same time drawing a picture of Henry as the master of the universe with a driving force that in his mind justifies his every action. Shepherd takes the reader on a tour of the King Kong of assholes: Henry Chase is "The Assassin" and tears everyone down around him with such force and unbridled conviction that it seems he's never going to take his foot off the gas.
Shortly after completely destroying a long time family institution in his hometown, Henry meets his female match in the woman whom he discovers is cleaning his bathroom in his hotel room. If there is a weakness in this story, it's that Henry comes off as a little too callous with Sophie, who really is a saviour of sorts. But then again, his history with woman consists of Elizabeth, the prom queen who may still have his beating heart in her hand, and his mother, who's been in love with the bottle for Henry's entire life, to his great loss. The title of this book comes from the "list" of terrible things Henry has done in his life, and Sophie is there to help him make them right. By making amends for everything on this list, going back across his memory, Henry will clean his soul of all its piss and vinegar. This is the masterstroke that Shepherd manages with great ease. Everyone should regret not what they did, but what they didn't do, right? Well, Henry is regretting things he did and feels that his past is catching up to his soul, so he wants to go back and make it right with the people he wronged. That's right... not go back and make it right with the people who wronged him, since that would be vengeance, right? This is a book about redemption, in Henry's mind and ours. John Scott Shepherd is a very smart, talented and savvy storyteller. HENRY'S LIST OF WRONGS will leave you thinking about a great many things, and there are parts of this book that are truly inspired. On the whole it kicks much ass. I was left breathless through out most of it, and I'm sure you will be too.
THE SOUND OF THE TREES by Robert Gatewood
In his debut novel, Robert Gatewood shows his talents as not only a novelist and writer, but as a seasoned storyteller. THE SOUND OF THE TREES is an adventure tale set in the newborn American West during one of the most exciting and violent times of the last hundred years. Gatewood presents his hero in the form of a young man savagely thrust into adulthood, at the hands of an abusive father and a country that's about to break loose into a new and exciting time.
Trude Mason and his mother set out on a life saving adventure that highlights the profoundly stunning and beautiful American West. Bound and determined to find a new life in Colorado, the twosome travel through the deserts of New Mexico in search of a farm and a new beginning during the tumultuous 1930's. What they come upon is an America that is moving forward almost as fast as time itself. The industrial revolution plays a supporting role in this story; Trude learns first hand that both his father's ways and his childhood are disappearing all around him, and the only thing on the horizon is newly paved roads. Automobiles and the ingenious pursuits of men pop up at every turn and leave Trude in a constant eye opening state of mind.
Robert Gatewood uses the English language like a set of handmade carving tools. He shapes each thought and sentence with care and grace and with perfect pitch, and he sprinkles engaging interior monologues throughout. His descriptions of the American West and the animals that take Trude through this brutal and raw landscape are unlike anything you're likely to read. Gatewood uses old family tales and an elderly landowner to provide Trude with a moral compass and guidance that he eventually makes his own.
Trude finds himself in a love affair that can never be, and up against impossible odds and the will of men much stronger than he. What's most exciting about this story are the wild turns it takes, and the men who await Trude at every stage of the journey. Robert Gatewood describes a world in the infant days of unexpected change and metamorphosis, a society that has yet to determine right and wrong and creates a place where every experience is new, not only to our hero, but to the reader as well.
YOU ARE NOT A STRANGER HERE by Adam Haslett
It's been said that to be a writer you must write, or at least start somewhere. Haslett starts where most people do... at the beginning with a tight little batch of tales that delve not only into his past, but into something a little darker and less accessible, his sexuality.
Hyped up by his publisher to be the groundbreaking set of stories that we've all been waiting for (personally I think it's been here all the while and is called AMONG THE MISSING by Dan Chaon), it is possible that the hype it deserves is not at all the hype it will get. Haslett is no dummy, and that's putting it lightly. Seeing is believing, and reading some of these stories, you'll swear that the ghost of Toby Wolff and Alice Munro are lurking just past each page. You may think that Ray Carver has had direct influence on Haslett, but I think it's more along the lines of inspiration. You'll get what I mean when you look straight down the barrel of the lead story, "Notes to my Biographer," which takes an older man down the wandering path of life with staples of rediscovery under each seat he finds himself in. Frank Caldwell Singer, an outcast from his own family, drives his car cross country to show up unannounced at his children's homes. Sort of like if that lost grandmother of yours showed up, and as you're driving by on your way back from the store you see her drive past your house, and some part of you hopes she'll give up and leave. He bullies his gay son, and taunts him for not trying to be Jewish even though he is. Haslett has a set of morals, and likes to play them like so many useful keys on a piano. On top of being ashamed of his heritage, his father asks him about his sex life in front of his grown son's boyfriend, which conjures up bad memories for anyone who reads it.
There really are only two other stories in this shortish collection worth mentioning. "The Good Doctor" seems to be a candidate. A health care worker who seems to be more like a welfare officer takes in a horrifically run down family while on a house call. The resident adult female seems to be coming unhinged. Frank, the good doctor of the title, wants to get to the bottom of her problem, but she only wants medication to flatten out the problems. What ensues is a battle of wills between the Doctor and the professionally medicated. How you end up convincing yourself that staying sick is safer than getting better actually makes sense by the end of this. Haslett causes great happiness with his misdirection and streams of conscious thought that run wild. In "Reunion," Haslett prevents a homosexual man from inciting sorrow from his co-workers by allowing him to vanish into his life ending illness. What's most remarkable about this tale is the absolute solace the main character feels in his inescapable loneliness that he's induced or had handed to him. The rest of this book reminds all of us of the power of the short story and the masters at it who've come before. Haslett owes Alice Munro a deep debt of gratitude for the non-linear inspiration, and countless others for keeping the short story torch burning.
STAY by Nicola Griffith
If you took all the crime fiction you could find, stacked it up next to your easy chair, and slowly read through it all, I can guarantee you'd never, ever come across Nicola Griffith. She's been slogging away in the margins of the crime/sex/carpenter genre for years, and it's a strange mix. The field of crime writing has been filled with men for a long time, and in recent years, picked up on by women, who for the most part are doing it justice, even if some of it is big bland cookie cutter fiction. A sub realm of this world, lesbian fiction as it was presented to me, is a place where Griffith is a big star and her books are read far and wide. At the same time, her older brother (so to speak) and fellow crime writer Andrew Vachss is dug so deep into the scary child molesting avenging angel character that is "Burke" that he finds his books as marginalized as Griffith. The comparisons don't stop there. Reading STAY, I really could not stop thinking of Vachss. Sure, his stuff is much darker and further along the path than Griffith in terms of nasty behavior, but they're cut from the same garbage bag all the same.
In STAY, we're presented with a character that is coming from a long line of disappointments, mostly with relationships. Her lover was wildly snatched from this mortal coil in the most violent of fashions, and in turn, "Aud," as she's known through out the book, turns inward, only communicating with her lover's ghost. She's a woman bent on self-reliance, control, and actively fueling her inner demons. She turns all of her tears and anger towards her home in the woods and the land surrounding it. The first hundred or so pages of this novel turn out to be a riveting read; after that, it's anyone's game.
Aud is approached by an old friend and begged to retrieve his wife from the heart of New York City where she's so miraculously disappeared. After a long section of debating, which is laden with repairs to her log cabin, the dialogue so laced with carpentry references that Bob Villa could have been a consultant, she takes the job, promising her milquetoast friend that she will bring his wife back. Into the belly of the beast we go. She stalks her prey, a man who determines customer-shopping habits and increases retail traffic by setting up stores based on his research, which is flawless and detailed, making him the best at this one of a kind job. After a little research and some very convenient breaking and entering, we learn that the man in question, Geordie Karp, is not a nice man, especially between the sheets. At first you think that Griffith is plain old man bashing because of her portrayal of his desires. But we come to find out after a very quick and brutal execution style encounter that she's the one who needs some help. What's so frustrating is that this story peaks too early. Aud catches her man and makes quick work of him; leading up to this, she engages the reader brilliantly. The interior monologues Aud has are severe and heart wrenching and well used. After she puts Geordie in his place, she takes her catch back to the woods and winds up between the sheets herself, turning from detective to lover in a matter of pages. She discovers more about Geordie Karp than needs describing here; to do so would destroy the suspense of the book, what little of it there is. If Griffith could just swap the first and last halves of this troubled novel and find some guts in which to edit out some of the ridiculously trite love scenes and overly simplistic moral preaching, she may have something that could stand alone from its past genre series. Griffith isn't really taking any chances with STAY, and it certainly breaks no new ground in its portrait of a woman gone "core". She shows us man at his worst and people at their most obtuse; I just wish she did it with a hand that was a little more cloaked and a lot less lecturing.
THE FUNDAMENTALS OF PLAY by Caitlin Macy
I've never understood the fantastically wealthy, these people who are so far from ever worrying about money or wondering if it will run out or where it came from. What I do know is that these people are live in a world all to themself, one that is filled with only the rich and well educated, one which bears little semblance to reality for most of us. They all, for some reason, have to have a house in Newport, Rhode Island, which is funny because if you took those mansions off the hill, you'd have a spectacular place to summer. THE GREAT GATSBY was a fantastic commentary on this part of society, and one that is a direct inspiration to Caitlin Macy with its arresting trade paperback cover of a man sitting in an ugly green suit on a sofa whose day has long since passed, all of which will probably inspire you to pick up THE FUNDAMENTALS OF PLAY.
What I really dig about the wealthy is how their children are always portrayed as severely fucked up. Just look over to the Fox network and the unreality that is PASADENA, or to Bret Easton Ellis and his snap shot of Los Angeles wealth which has a different suntan lotion quality that the East Coast blue bloods lack. There, too, the rich kids are lazy, drug addicted, drunken sailors on a non-stop spending spree. Macy has drawn an intimate picture of the best of the best when it comes to the wealthy, the East Coast New York rich.
We meet our hero, George Lenhart, who is struggling in the bowels of a New York Investment firm, trying to run with the rich. Trouble is, it becomes really obvious really fast; if you don't have the cash, you'll run out of gas when traveling with people who can afford to take a cab everywhere in the city. What's nice about our narrator is that he's not pretending to be a rich kid of privilege. He's not milking his friends dry of their cash. What's most disturbing and what angers me is how best friends like Chat Wethers (such a East Coast Bennington prep school tag) and the magnetically appealing Kate Goodnow use him as a dose of reality they'll never experience. If you went to college on the east coast, you most likely will identify with these people, or at least recognize them.
Kate and Chat seemed destined to marry and pool their fantastic wealth, mixing their very special genes, and generally making a great stew. They keep George around for amusement, and when it's time to take the summer off, George returns to work while they relax in their privilege. It's almost a shame when Macy injects a foil. George reacquaints himself with Harry Lombardi, the rough around the edges old friend from boarding school. Harry, who all during school was laughed at for being a classically untrained dufus, has somehow stubbed his toe on a career made of money. Harry introduces himself around and snatches Kate right out of the hands of Chat, which, while witnessed by George who is himself longing for Kate, is a bit unrealistic. Then again, I suppose those things happen. At the drop of a hat, Kate practically magnetizes to Harry and his softhearted smarts, leaving George and Chat to wonder just how silly it is to try and love her.
Macy has given us a four-color presentation of a part of society that is easily mocked, and that mocking seems well founded. We spend time in the "early" years, at the school before college, the one we all call high school, and they call boarding school. We find out Kate longed for the bad boy sailor who broke her heart carries a torch to this day for that loser. This story is not unlike anything you've read before. Kate finds Harry exciting because of his company that's about to change the world, an Internet company. You don't need me or some Indian guide or an atlas to tell where this story goes. What's most exciting about this life is that it's told to us at all. Why do we need to hear about it from George's perspective? In the end, it seems such a standard point of view to tell it from, and boring. Macy is talented and from time to time shows it here, but overall, you're left feeling like you saw this coming, just like Harry and his obviousness and the fall of the second industrial revolution.
MAN WALKS INTO A ROOM by Nicole Krauss
Sometimes it's the front porch that gets you to come in. I knew immediately that something had to be cooking when I opened my mail and saw this manuscript staring up at me. It's the title that really smacks of smarts, wit and humor. After that, it's all down hill, even if it is a very smooth ride at that. Nicole Krauss sets up an original and witty story with some standard story telling techniques.
1. Give the reader something early on that will later apply to the story, but only indirectly.
2. Give the main character an illness that leaves him only on the road to discovery.
3. Make the reader work for it.
Nicole Krauss has made up a rich tale full of detail, sorrow, patience, and warmth. Samson, who knows nothing about himself, learns more about his life at the same time as we do; we're made partners from the get go. Samson has amnesia, to be specific. When a doctor persuades him to come out to his clinic, he sums it up like this;
"He said you were found senseless in the Mojave Desert; you had a craniotomy to remove a juvenile pilocytic astrocytome; you have no memory except of your childhood, and though you are capable of making new memories, you display little or no desire to remember".
This ailment is life long, and the discoveries he makes are impossible to handle. He may have been a good husband, but he doesn't know. He can't remember when his mother died, if at all. He has no idea how any of this happened. On top of it all, as his wife tries to reel him back in, he refuses, enjoying himself as a blank slate. Krauss tells a tale of a man discovering himself and what holds him together so well that you almost wonder if this happened to you, what would you do?
His wife leaves him, and why shouldn't she? All of the memories, experiences, and life long enjoyments he's had with her are gone. He takes up with one of his students; apparently he was a fantastic creative writing instructor. Suddenly, the aforementioned doctor who is breaking ground in memory transplants makes it clear that Samson is a perfect candidate. For lack of anything to do, Samson tries it out. He moves off to the very desert he was found in at the start, minus the tumor on his brain which took with it all of his memory, and he basically turns himself over to the good doctor. At the heart of this story are Samson's memories as a child. Krauss perfectly describes the grass on the lawn, the orange juice in the kitchen, the sounds of your parents coming home... all those things that magically make you who you are.
Imagine not having to have to worry about all the things in your life you have to worry about, thanks to memory. Your past, the previous night's cocktail party, your memories of an ill-spent college life, all the times you zigged when you should have zagged. A bad marriage, a horrible relationship-ending event, death, both family and otherwise. All these tragic events, they go on and on. This story shapes a life and turns it into an adventure of discovery. You end up with two very specific questions when finishing this book: what is your life if not a shared group of memories, and does it exist if you can't remember it?
Again, I want to thank Frank Bascombe for all his hard work since we introduced this column earlier this year. He's a good guy, and being in New York, he's had a lot to deal with this year. Like Mr. Beaks and Gray Haven and many of our other favorite people, Frank's continued dedication to the work he does here at AICN proves to me how resiliant people can be, and he makes me very proud to be an editor. Can't wait to see you in 2002, Bascombe. Now go watch some sports and have a Happy New Year.
"Moriarty" out.
