Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
I’ve been reading a lot the last few weeks, and I’m thinking about putting together a special AICN BOOKS edition of my own to review the new Brett Easton Ellis, another book that may be the new Coen Bros movie, Bruce Campbell’s new novel, and that amazing, jawdropping KUBRICK ARCHIVES, which I cannot get enough of.
For now, though, check out the latest from Frank Bascombe. For the record, though, the best Coldplay album released this year is actually by a band called Athlete, a record called TOURIST that you should check out. Anyway... here’s Frank:
It’s finally summer, baseball is here, warm weather, and lots of books for your beach bag. I’ve gotten really lucky with the advance material that’s come my way and it would be very selfish of me not to share it a few days ahead of time. If you’ve got a John Irving fan in your life, I hope they can lift his latest doorstop off the shelves, because it’s finally landing in a store near you in a few days. And if you’re looking for something good to listen to, try the new Coldplay, not that many of you haven’t, since it seems to sell more than gasoline. But as a good friend of mine told me recently about said rock band, “Coldplay is great. I love them. They’re just not going to get any better, so I won’t be buying their new album.” Which could directly relate to my feelings on the Irving.
UNTIL I FIND YOU by John Irving
Random House
I’m not your typical John Irving fan and to be honest when this book, all 820 pages of it, landed on my doorstep it caused a moment of pause. I rather liked ‘The Fourth Hand’ and in retrospect don’t think that my praise for it at the time of its publication was completely honest. I wanted to like it much more than I actually did. Perhaps it’s Irving’s prosaic styling that fails to offer a pulse, or his obsession with little boys loving women, all women, that sets me off. I can’t speak to all of his books because they seemed to have passed me by completely. Maybe if I’d read more than ‘Hand’ and this book, along with the torturous ‘Garp’, I’d be a more honest Irving reviewer. I’m not going back to those books and honestly, I don’t think a book reviewer should have to. A book, any book, should stand on its own and be reviewed with that in mind.
‘Until I Find You’ is a simple story about a boy looking for his father, by way of Hollywood, therapy, and copious sex. When I say sex, you have a certain idea in your mind. Actually, you have no idea; this book is filled with Jack Burns and his libido, his penis, and his Oedipus complex, and what a savage complex it is. Typical fan I’m not, I’ve started late in the John Irving career and that may be my problem with his writing, which is just fine with me, since I’m determined to realize that you can’t really like everything.
Women, they love Irving. Not all women, but most of them. The ones I know, anyway. My wife, for example, has praised him for years, and it’s part of that praise which has worn off on me and gotten me to read this guy’s work. Established to the point of ridiculous success, Irving is a heavyweight to be sure; the literary world quivers when his books hit the shelves. So to me it’s like the classics, just because they’re classics doesn’t make them good. Hemingway, overrated. Faulkner, difficult. Irving? Slick and polished, serious and heavy duty, and this guy can spin a yarn a thousand miles long. It’s shocking to say the least, when you think about it.
We meet Jack Burns, a prototypical good-looking, handsome landslide of a talent when he’s just a boy, getting his cuteness dragged all over the world by his tattoo wielding mother. They’re looking for his father, an organist. That’s right, a church organist, you know, he’s supposed to be haunting little towns in the North Sea, leaving a trail of shock and awe in his wake. This part of the story is fast and filled with so much detail and so many characters; overburdened as it is, it manages to move along nicely. Finally, Jack and Mom return to the northeast (Irving Country) to send Jack off to an all-girls’ school, where he meets a nice little vixen that spends the rest of the book holding Jack’s penis in her hand every chance she gets. And you thought you knew about sex. Jack gets one grown up lesson after another about the ways in which one should travel between the sheets, while Mom is laying her fine tattoos on everyone she meets. She became a legend in the North Sea and has returned to the states to ply her craft. The characters that populate this part are more or less the same ones you’ll meet later in the story. Irving stretches Jack’s memory around like the symbol for infinity, and this story folds in on itself without a second of forgotten pleasure, Jack’s or your’s. I’m not sure if this book will play in Omaha, but I have to say that I was pleased with myself for finishing it. Jack Burns becomes a transvestite for no other reason than to titillate the audience, and himself (cinematic sexually confused identities are all the rage; Jack is the leading man/woman of your dreams). How strange it must have been to write a character who’s a ladies’ man in more ways that one. He shows an incredible thespian talent for cross dressing identification and even wins an Oscar for it, and Jack describes more or less Irving’s own experience after ‘Cider House Rules’ won him an Oscar. Towards the end of this story Jack discovers he’s got a sister, which is something that happened to John Irving in real life just as he was finishing this story (an investment banker turned up and it seems that he and John Irving are brothers separated by 20 years). Of course a man who is universally loved by women can’t really have a father, can he? It’s got to be an estranged father figure, unattainable. He had written this book in the first person and took the manuscript back at the last second to switch the whole thing to third person, citing it was too personal as originally written (was it still fiction?). There is so much to think about in this book that when I wonder who is telling the story (Jack, I think), I’ve decided to forget the worry this confusion creates. Not that either of these life lessons mean anything at this point. Irving wrote this book with a fatherless character in mind, but is it coincidence that things have turned out the way they have? What does matter is John Irving’s obvious talent for telling an epic tale of sorrow that is haunted by a truly confused and confessional metro-sexual (and I mean ‘metro’ in the most casual sense). It takes a great deal of sex, violence and nudity to offend me, even then I’m fairly callous to it, but this book fixates on it something fierce, which is ultimately its down fall or a crutch. If there had been a tighter hand on the length of this tale then maybe the penis talk ad nausea could be tolerated.
Controlled Burn by Scott Wolven
Scribner
Short stories are my favorite. If you read this column then you already know that. I’ve been looking for a new talent to rave about, and I think Scott Wolven might just be that guy. After reading a review of this book in a “summer reading” issue of either the New Yorker or New York magazine, which gave this book a huge boost on my radar, I bought it immediately. Quotes from Richard Ford and Anthony Swofford also interested me. I guess every once in a while a book along these lines slips into bookstores, made possible by larger commercial giants, and ends up making little tiny waves. Each story in this collection is peppered with a blistering eye on the detail of men on the brink of something terrible. Either by their own doing or because of something they’re about to do. Drinking, whipping ass, shooting guns, and fighting are the forms of _expression that Wolven has developed for his solitary heroes. And there are many heroes in this book to admire.
At the very start, we’re introduced to a woman whose son is in jail due to her neighbor’s sneaky behavior. During a moment of implosion she decides to exact her revenge on him by cutting down the only two trees that neighbor his lawn and shade his pool. She starts in on his wife and kids with such piss and vinegar that I had to read this story twice. Later on we think that the son she’s worried about, who was in jail but is now out on bail, is doing some nasty things of his own; or it might be a character similar to her son, it’s unclear, but that’s the point. All parallel lines meet at infinity. Men run from the law in this collection and finally slow down for jobs that pay cash, cutting trees or hauling firewood. There’s a story of men fighting each other on the back lot of a lumberyard that will leave you in a state of shock.
Paraphrasing here:
“I should go to the hospital and kick his ass just for losing that fight.” So great.
Then there is nature. It’s all around Wolven and his characters; the forest, the water, and in ‘Controlled Burn’, a fire engulfs a man’s property only to wash him clean.
What Wolven has done here is allow his stories to be populated by men on the fringes of society. They sell crystal meth to get by. Deals go wrong and they kill each other. Men sleep with other women because they can, not because they should. A man arrives home in a drunken state to tear shingles off his roof, then falls on his ass and gets arrested for vehicular homicide, all while the neighborhood watches. It’s not so much what these men do, it’s how badly they want to do it to themselves. ‘The Rooming House’ is a short but not so sweet story about sobriety, spousal abuse, and realizing who you really are and living with it.
In another story, Wolven uses lines like:
“Time is alive, everywhere and never-stopping.”
“Death connects everything. All things that are alive have the same end.”
Sinister and selfish, it’s all the same to Wolven. These stories sizzle and hum. Two brothers find themselves vigilantes after a deaf detective and his partner pay them a visit. They in turn are burdened with the future extermination of a really bad person. In return, “the brass” won’t turn one of the brothers in for a cop-killing crime that haunts his past.
The feeling you get when you read this collection is at first one of shock, then awe, and finally amazement. Scott Wolven has written as good a book as you’re likely to read anytime soon. Colin Harrison at Scribner has done another fantastic job in mining the literary landscape and coming up with a guy like this. This writing is sparse and minimal, and slick as deer guts. I’d be very surprised if Scott Wolven’s next book isn’t a huge hit. Thank goodness for moments like this.
The Normals by David Gilbert
Bloomsbury
David Gilbert can write. He’s not a flash in the pan. His first book, a collection of short stories, ‘Remote Feed’, confirmed that. It was years ago that I read that, five years to be exact, and I wondered if this guy was ever going to write another book?
He has. ‘The Normals’ is shinning proof that the praise he farmed at the early part of his literary career is lasting. This book reads like a cautionary tale for the “now generation”. You know them. They surround you: twenty-something’s fresh out of college or even high school with their hands out, looking for what’s owed them. They want it right now and will settle for nothing less. This group of humans won’t consider a stretch of hard work to get what they deserve. They just want it; they’re owed it, and this is their birthright.
Our hero is a Harvard graduate who’s so in debt with students loans that he’s decided to give up and spend the rest of his life running from this debt. He’s a temp, a lousy lay, and a complete waste of talent. I couldn’t find anything in this book that he was actually good at. I wish the earlier part of this story had gone on a little longer; I liked this loser, if there is such a thing as a likeable loser? Billy Shine steps out of life and into a medical study for an experimental drug, Allevatrox, an atypical antipsychotic for the treatment of schizophrenia. This clinic he’s signed into seems normal, and the people who are a part of his “test group” are pegged normal, which is why they’re perfect for this test. His past haunts him, his debt, years of work to dig out, and in front of him sits easy money and only fourteen days of “testing” to get through to get the greenbacks.
This is where the book takes off. The clinic is a potpourri of slippery personalities and Gilbert’s talents as a storyteller are abundant on every page. We meet the group Billy’s in and they all seem as interesting a group of people as you’ll find at any dinner party, typical characters that haunt the pages of a good book.
And there’s one girl. She becomes Billy’s fascination. This woman is the apple of everyone’s eye, and that’s Billy’s trouble. Meanwhile, Gilbert gets Billy to talk about how life is just bullshit (work for other people, fulfilling their dreams, not his) and how he’d like to do this for a living, you know, get paid to have experimental drugs pumped into you. Eventually he hears about a big paycheck where you actually get killed, a la ‘Flatliners’, and then you’re brought back to life, magically, via a new drug to help ER doctors make more precise decisions. Billy, well, I won’t spoil it. Billy Shine has parents, and the only part of this story that is not set in the hospital is buried in the deep emotional crevasses of his family. Sadness creeps around Billy; his mother is dying of Alzheimer’s, a really sad rapid disease, and Billy is so detached from himself that he can barely get emotionally involved until his father reveals a truly grizzly ending for himself and his wife. This section brilliantly hammers home the realities of being alive, and how life is what it’s all about, you know… living. This story wraps up quickly and sadly Gilbert loses his focus in the last twenty pages. But as I’ve said before, books are really hard to write, especially endings. Ask any writer. David Gilbert is forgiven for that one transgression, in an otherwise brilliant book.
Got something you’d like to tell me?
Thanks, Frank. Can’t wait to check out the Irving for m’self.
"Moriarty" out.
