The Limits of Author Interviews

The usual practice, when invited to write the introduction to an anthology, is to praise its contents. How refreshing to come across an introduction that finds most of the volume under discussion wanting (and manages also to achieve resonance well beyond the book under discussion):

Some of the Americans in this book are perhaps a little too eager to explain themselves. All that has ever really happened to them, one feels, is the experience of being writers. When they talk about themselves, these "selves" become sacred objects. As so often happens with Americans, the terror of failure hangs over them ... By contrast, Blaise Cendrars seems carelessly bountiful of everything, and recounts his life, his friends, his many countries and adventures simply as anecdote and observation, for the pleasure of talking about them. His interview makes an extraordinary impression on us who are saturated in literature: this is not merely a writer seeking to be a writer, this is a man who has lived.

-Alfred Kazin, in the introduction to Writers at Work, The Paris Review Interviews, Third Series, 1967.

What's Wrong with The Bonfire of the Vanities

I'm a fan of Tom Wolfe's, if by that you mean a fan of his classic journalism - The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and The Right Stuff, both of which I read in high school. And though I don't agree with his anti-Modernist ranting in The Painted Word and From Bauhaus to Our House, I enjoy his brio.

What soured me on his work was The Bonfire of the Vanities, in part because I found his ideas about what novels should be terribly limiting. What with all the hoopla over his Harper's essay on this topic that presaged the appearance of "Bonfire," and the subsequent barrage of publicity that accompanied the book's eventual publication, I began to realize that Wolfe was an aesthetic and moral bully. And truth be told, when I read the book in 1988, I wasn't terribly impressed: it was engrossing, but it was populated with thinly-drawn characters, mere counters to be moved around the board in the service of Wolfe's satire. It didn't stick with me.

How satisfying, then, to learn that I wasn't alone in my feelings about it when I ran across Terrence Rafferty's respectful demolition of Bonfire, which came out at the time. Rafferty begins his review by addressing the bold panache with which Wolfe debuted as a novelist:

... he's not about to come on all insecure and timid and terrified of committing a gaffe, as if he were just another eager arriviste. Bearing this gigantic book, he crashes the novelists' party, and it's as if a professional wrestler in full signature regalia had suddenly appeared, waving his arms and declaiming and hurling people to the floor: he makes a big impression.

The book, Rafferty says,

... allows Wolfe to show off his talents as a listener and an observer: he knows how to cram scenes full of visual and verbal details without slowing the momentum of the narrative, so the novel seems rich and generous while we're reading it. But why does it feel so thin when we're done with it? Dazzled by the flamboyant performance, we may still wonder, when the wrestler has finally left the room, what the hell that was all about.

Aye, laddie. Done and dusted.

Don DeLillo's Pseudonymous Novel Reviewed

One of my favorite all-stops-out novels is Don DeLillo's Amazons: An intimate memoir by the first woman ever to play in the National Hockey League, published in 1980, under the pseudonym of Cleo Birdwell. You rarely see it discussed anywhere, but it's one of the funniest things I've ever read. I'm not up to describing its varied pleasures, but lucky for you, I am able to direct you to a recent review. If you're a fan of plot or moral seriousness, skip it. Otherwise, here are your orders: acquire it ASAP. You'll likely have better luck on Advanced Book Exchange than Amazon (ironically), but use whatever works for you. Should you run across it in a used bookstore and find yourself wrapping your fingers around it just as someone else does the same, be ruthless. It's worth it.

Rebecca West Trashes T.S. Eliot, Somerset Maugham, and The New Yorker

I love it when a writer expresses a strong opinion about a colleague. You don't see it much now.

INTERVIEWER: Are you interested in T.S. Eliot's writing?

[REBECCA] WEST: Goodness! T. S. Eliot, whom I didn't like a bit? He was a poseur. He was married to this woman who was very pretty. My husband and I were asked to see them, and my husband roamed around the flat and there were endless photographs of T.S. Eliot and bits of his poetry done in embroidery by pious American ladies, and only one picture of his wife, and that was when she was getting married. Henry pointed it out to me and said, I don't think I like that man.

INTERVIEWER: What about the work of Somerset Maugham, whom you also knew?

WEST: He couldn't write for toffee, bless his heart. He wrote conventional short stories, much inferior to the work of other people. But they were much better than his plays, which were too frightful. He was an extremely interesting man, though, not a bit clever or cold or cynical.

[...]

INTERVIEWER: Have you ever had a close relationship with an editor, who has helped you after the books were written?

WEST: No. I never met anybody with whom I could have discussed books before or after... And I very rarely found The New Yorker editors any good.

INTERVIEWER: They have a tremendous reputation.

WEST: I don't know why.

--From pp. 259 and 261 of The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1.(Philip Gourevitch, ed.)

Wodehouse Updated via Kyril Bonfiglioli, circa 1972

I don't trust a book review that compares an author to P.G. Wodehouse: it's never apt. For example, Paul Murray's An Evening of Long Goodbyes. Sure, the narrator's British and he's featherheaded and feckless, but that book is so freighted with sadness that it's a ridiculous comparison. But recently I stumbled on a book that was described by a reader as "Like Wodehouse on acid," and for once, the comparison is dead-on.

Item:

He greeted me with his usual surliness: dealers in illegal firearms almost never smile, you must have noticed that. [p. 47]

Item:

(I yield to none when it comes to eyebrow-raising; I was taught by my father himself, who could have eyebrow-raised for Great Britain had he not been so haughty.) [p. 105]

Item - our narrator is speaking figuratively of a verbal skirmish he has just lost:

'Thank you, yes,' he replied. My attack was wiped out. I felt just like an infantry subaltern who has thrown away a platoon against a machine-gun emplacement he forgot to mark on his map. (Listening to the Colonel's remarks afterwards is not nearly so unpleasant as sitting down to write twenty letters to next-of-kin while the people in the Orderly Room pretend you're not there. The worst bit is when your batman brings you your dinner to the foxhole or bivvy-tent, saying 'Thought you might be too tired to dine in the Mess tonight. Sir.' But I reminisce.) [p. 131]

Item:

The clerk droned legally for a while; Jaggard put on a joke-policeman voice while he read bits from his notebook about how he had proceeded from here to there on information received ... but I must not trouble you with such minutiae: I am sure you have been in magistrates' courts yourselves. [p. 165]

Item (in which our hero is on the losing end of a shoot-out in a factory that butchers pigs):

Had I been a religious man I should probably have offered up a brisk prayer or two, but I am proud, you see: I mean, I never praised Him when I was knee-deep in gravy so it would have seemed shabby to apply for help from a bacon-factory. [p. 178]

From Kyril Bonfiglioli's1972 After You with the Pistol.

Rebecca West Does Ian McEwan Justice

I've never understood why people revere Ian McEwan's novels. How gratifying, then, to come across this 1981 interview with Rebecca West, in which she skewers his novel, The Cement Garden:

Rebecca West: ... I do think modern novels are boring on the whole. Somebody told me I ought to read a wonderful thing about how a family of children buried Mum in a cellar under concrete and she began to smell. But that's the sole point of the story. Mum just smells. That's all that happens. It's not enough.

Interviewer: This is a new Ian McEwan, isn't it?

--From pp. 261-2 of The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1.(Philip Gourevitch, ed.)

Thomas McGuane Trashes Faulkner & Talks about How Writing Movies Affected his Fiction

[Interviewer]: Has your involvement with screenplays affected your notion of fiction writing?

Thomas McGuane: It's made me rethink the role of a lot of the mnemonic things that most novelists leave in their books. The worst about these things is probably Faulkner, who frequently had his shit detector dialed down to zero. We all read Faulkner in a similar way: we move through these muddy bogs until we hit these wonderful streaks, and then we're back in the bogs again, right? Everyone agrees that Faulkner produced the greatest streaks in American literature from 1929 until 1935 but, depending on how you feel about this, you either admit there's a lot of dead air in his works or you don't. After you've written screenplays for a while, you're not as willing to leave these warmups in there, those pencil sharpenings and refillings of the whiskey glasses and those sorts of trivialities. You're more conscious of dead time.

--Thomas McGuane, quoted in Alive and Writing: Interviews with American Authors of the 1980s,by Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory, University of Illinois Press, 1987, p. 217.

Ivan Doig on Entertainment Fiction

I don't believe you have to be goosing the reader with outlandish surprises all the time, the notion that fiction has to be hyped up -- Ho! Here comes an axe murderer! Huh! Here's a Russian submarine! Jesus! Here's a killer comet from outer space! Life is vivid enough in itself. Look what happens to people as they go through their years. Everybody's got a story, everybody's got drama, good times and bad. There's a lot of intrinsic drama, and I think it cheapens fiction by having artificial sweetener in the plot all the time.

---From 1987's At the Field's End: Interviews With 22 Pacific Northwest Writers,by Nicholas O'Connell, p. 303.

On Oregon Scenery -- Too Showy, Perhaps?

Poet William Stafford on the natural beauty of Oregon:

In some ways, let me say, the most minimal scenery is my kind of scenery. This is too busy a place. I stand it very well. It doesn't make me nervous. It's just that it's superfluous. Any Kansan knows that Oregon is a little too lavish.

---- from At the Field's End: Interviews with 20 Pacific Northwest Writers, Nicholas O'Connell, ed., p. 235.

How Cockroaches View the Rapture

In tracking down more info about Charles Johnson on Wikipedia, I ran across an excellent, compelling review of his novel about Martin Luther King, Dreamer, at a website called Pretty Fakes. There was also a review of a Donald Harington novel which should not be missed. It's a novel in which not just one character, but all the characters are cockroaches ...

Why Genre Fiction? --Why Not?

Almost a week ago, I quoted a paragraph from Cormac McCarthy to give an example of what's missing from a diet solely composed of genre fiction. But genre fiction tugs at me like the moon tugs on the ocean. Why? Here's as good an explanation as any I've seen:

After all, quite a few literary masterpieces spend much of their turgid wordage being almost as contrived as any crime novel you’ve ever raced through. On page 13 of my edition of “The Wings of the Dove,” Kate Croy is waiting for her father to appear: “He had not at present come down from his room, which she knew to be above the one they were in.” But of course she knew that, knew it so well that she wouldn’t have to think about it; she is thinking about it only so that she can tell us. If a narrative is going to be as clumsy as that, can’t it have some guns?

From "Blood on the Borders," by Clive James.

Travels in Absurdistan

Now that the summer issue of The King's English is out, I've been trying to catch up with all the submissions that have come in -- not a job, by the way, that I do alone. (Thanks Bill, Mark -- and of course to the Czarina.) One thing I never see enough of is submissions from outside the United States. We get a decent number from India, and we've certainly received one or two from many other countries, but nothing like the volume we need in order to have a reasonable chance of getting top-notch work.

Fortunately, you don't have to look far to satisfy my desire for writing from elsewhere. Check out Christopher Hitchens' review of an anthology of recent writing from Iran. If you're not quite ready to embrace other cultures, maybe you'd prefer this cranky (as in, crank alert) review examining a legitimate question: why do we romanticize "primitive" people as peaceful, living in harmony with the land, etc., when in fact they were and are just as contentious, warlike, and rapacious as contemporary western culture?

Meanwhile, in completely unrelated news, the world's biggest fusion reactor -- that's right, fusion, not fission -- is being built right now in France. Check out what one of the physicists says about it: "We think it's going to work. We have to, or the politicians wouldn't give us the money."

Svidrigailov Circa 1977

Philip K. Dick must've been thinking about Dostoyevsky when he wrote this exquisite image:

"Her heart, Bob Arctor reflected, was an empty kitchen: floor tile and water pipes and a drainboard with pale scrubbed surfaces, and one abandoned glass on the edge of the sink that nobody cared about."

It comes from his 1977 book, A Scanner Darkly -- the entire text of which, incidentally, you can find online (no doubt illegally), though I ran across the quote on page 94 of the 1991 Vintage edition.

Now compare it to Svidrigailov's chilling vision of the afterlife in Crime in Punishment:

"Eternity [says Svidrigailov to Raskolnikov] is always presented to us as an idea which it is impossible to grasp, something enormous, enormous! But why should it necessarily be enormous? Imagine, instead, that it will be one little room, something like a bath-house in the country, black with soot, with spiders in every corner, and that that is the whole of eternity. I sometimes imagine it like that, you know."

--Feodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans. Jessie Coulson, (W. W. Norton & Co., (c) 1975), pp. 244-245. (Compare to the Constance Garnett translation.)

True, Dostoevsky and Dick are talking about different things -- the fate of the soul in the afterlife vs. the state of a particular person's soul in this one. But one has to allow for this, I think, since their different concerns exemplify the historical trajectory of literature's concerns in miniature. What both images have in common is an absolute terror of the mundane; the echo is remarkable. (I always thought Svidrigailov had it about right -- another instance, as in Milton, where the bad guy [Satan, the nihilist Svidrigailov] is so pungent and interesting that the good guys can't compete.)

Don't bother with reading Scanner, by the way. It's flabby and meandering, much like conversation with an addict, Dick announcing his insights into drug culture and the blurred roles of dopers and cops solemnly, without the surprising veer of his usual narratives. I much prefer Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, The Man in the High Castle, and Dr. Bloodmoney (which really has nothing at all to do with Dr. Strangelove, except the title). Even his slighter novels usually have an element of surprise, a spark missing from Scanner's leaden, misogynistic narrative. I've just shared with you its brightest moment; now go and read something else.

Top Ten Online Stories 2005 Reviewed

Tomorrow, May 1st, the Million Writers Award run by storySouth will name the top story of the year (chosen by reader vote) from the top 10 notable stories storySouth's editor chose from a list of approximately 130 notable stories for 2005 selected by a panel of judges. (Five of the stories The King's English published last year were -- ahem -- notables.)

"Famous Fathers" by Pia Z. Ehrhardt (Narrative Magazine) should be our pick as the best story of the lot, but we just can't get there. The main character is the daughter of the mayor of Texadelphia, and her problem is that she wants her father's attention and can't seem to get it. Thwarted, she embarks on a sexual adventure/love affair with one of her father's employees. Her recklessness intrigues, and the writing is head-and-shoulders above any of the others in the top 10 -- Ms. Ehrhardt is clearly in control of her material, and her voice -- but it left us cold. Perhaps it's the narrator's disconnection from anyone around her, her father's never-punctured remoteness, and her mother's odd absence that leaves the characters largely obscure and the story unsatisfying.

You could do a lot worse than to choose "Diamonds and Lemons" by Omar Beer (Fiction Warehouse) as your favorite story of these top 10. In it, Paul and Margaret are engaged to be married when Margaret dies in a car accident. The story shows its readers (rather than telling them, and thank God for an author who trusts us this much!) how Paul makes his way through life, noting its details without latching on to any. When Paul goes to dinner a year after the accident at the home of Margaret's parents, Donald and Janine, Janine becomes upset and Donald and apologizes to Paul, his guest:

He took his drink from the bar and swirled it with his hand. He sat down ... "She just gets a little wound up." Donald took a small drink.

Paul held his. "Should I go?"

"We're not there yet," Donald said softly, patting the air with his hand. "She'll be back down in a few minutes." He flipped through channels, lapped back around to the news station, stopped.

That's nicely done, that "not there yet," and Donald patting the air - it conveys just the right amount of detachment, that of a man who knows his wife and relies on her displays of anguish to cover his own. Ultimately, the story feels flat: Paul leaves the story as he began it, having confessed to doubts about marrying Margaret that were after all hardly surprising. Even the title demonstrates the problem. "Diamonds and Lemons" is a lovely title, but it is, like Paul's scattered, uncommitted experience of life, fatally unrevealing.

Another story in the top 10 that's worth a read is "Two Lives" by Michael Croley, which appeared in Blackbird. Cleverly constructed, a story of plangent regret, it suffers two fatal flaws - its primary narrator is a writer (ho-hum); and it lacks dramatic power. Even the story-within-the-story, about a young boy's father who loses his livelihood and must sell moonshine to keep his family in food, cuts away once the going gets tough.

But I didn't choose any of those as my favorite. Instead, I chose Richard Bowes' There's a Hole in the City", which appeared on the Hugo-award-winning SCIFICTION website before it was rudely shut down for good by its parent company (you can still access the story, though). Bowes' piece is a ghost story, set in the chaos of 9/11 - the slow revelation of the mystery pulls you along. It's strangely similar to Terry Bisson's "Super 8" of 2004, which made storySouth's top 10 last year. Bisson's is better -- it's longer and more sophisticated and because it's also about people haunted by friends from their crazy, student days, it makes Bowes' piece look like a knock-off -- but they both have the virtues of being told in a plain, direct style that counterbalances their spookier aspects, and evincing the supernatural with subtlety and trust for their readers. And, judging from the votes so far, it appears that other readers agreed with me that Bowes' piece is tops.

I think it's significant that Bowes' piece is entertainment fiction, not literature -- most of the other top ten stories could not even compete at this most basic level. A few of the stories struck me as interesting only because they were set in exotic (to us in the U.S.) settings -- Anjana Basu's The Black Tongue" (Gowanus), "Wedad's Cavalry" by Mohja Kahf (MWU: Muslim Wake Up) , and "Nang Fah Jam Laeng: Angels in Disguise" by Cynthia Gralla (Mississippi Review) all fell in this category. You can skip Basu's piece entirely, unless you're curious about what a novel excerpt looks like. Even if it's not intended to be one, it's paced like one, and has all the resolution of an opening chapter, and all the focus on witches and its setting in India can't save it.

"Wedad's Cavalry" details a young Saudi Arabian wife's quest for an orgasm and how her female friends educate her. Though it has some entertaining passages -- the delicious irony of the narrator's second husband, a fundamentalist Muslim, making warm, sweet love to her while detailing all the religious justifications for taking pleasure in it -- it's sloppily written (note the clumsiness of the dialogue at the outset, much of which is there for the reader's sake, not the characters') and the basic question of why it's set in Saudi Arabia in the mid-1980s is never addressed. Set in Saudi Arabia, fine - but why that particular time period? Everything the author describes seems, from my admittedly ignorant point of view, to be typical of Saudi Arabia now. This begs the question, and makes the reader suspect that it's set in the 1980s because the story is autobiography masquerading as fiction.

Gralla's piece is unsatisfying in the extreme. Set in Bangkok, the only thing of interest is its setting; the self-absorbed narrator never engages with anyone, and nothing happens to her. It's supposed to be about seeking solace and healing from a place, I think, but when you're done, you say to yourself, Who cares?

But stories set in less exotic locales weren't necessarily any better. Witness "The Rules of Urban Living" by Kara Janeczko (Anderbo). Told from the point of view of a woman living in an apartment house, it consists entirely of musings about the etiquette of, well, urban living - how we pretend we can't hear other people's private lives through thin walls, and yet we draw conclusions (often false) based on what we hear as well. "Urban Living" is also supposed to be about the end of an affair, but the narrator is so detached from everything and everyone around her, her experience so abstract, that the story can do nothing more for its readers but inspire a longing to move to the country.

Even better-known writers suffer from self-absorption, like John J. Clayton (his delightful "The Man Who Could See Radiance" has been aired on Selected Shorts on NPR), and his infuriating "Light at the End of the Tunnel" (Agni) proves it. "Light" exists in a perpetual postmodern uncertainty that can only be described as coy. Ostensibly about the death of the narrator's brother, one of a group of 12-year-olds taken by a camp counselor into the Hoosac Tunnel through the Berkshires and killed in a train accident, the story includesthe history of the tunnel, speculation about the camp counselors who led the campers into the tunnel ... but the narrator keeps hedging, refusing to allow the reader to get comfortable with any of the details, because they're all conditional: maybe it happened this way, or that way, or maybe it didn't happen at all. So it's not clear if the 12-year-old campers survived or not, because the narrator won't even tell us for sure if they existed; or even if his brother Joel exists. Which is why it's infuriating to find the narrator recalling the near-accident in the train tunnel the morning after Joel's wedding only to write, "Or there is no Joel; I grew up with my missing brother more real in my life than anyone." Infuriating, yes, but that's not all. Clayton has the temerity to finish up with a sententious paragraph about how much it matters whether or not the train comes through that tunnel with the children inside it, whether there's an accident or not, it matters, "either way, the same: nobody's life ever again the same." Which is horseshit. Of course it matters, but it's an obvious point and it's small details like whether or not the narrator has a brother to lose in a train accident that matter more. If he doesn't have a brother, and there was no train accident, then all Clayton's doing is using his power as a narrator to jerk his readers around. Rubbing our noses in the fact that he's in charge of making up the fictional world his readers are agreeing to pretend exists is pointless and manipulative. I'm not necessarily a hound for realism, and I do like postmodern work as much as anyone -- I like Fowles' two endings for the French Lieutenant's Woman, I like Pynchon's main character dematerializing 3/4 of the way through Gravity's Rainbow, and I think John Barth's "Lost in the Funhouse" is as perfect a metafictional story as has ever been written -- but for God's sake, commit to something. Otherwise, it's just writerly games, and no fun for the reader. Reminds me of Tim O'Brien's idiotic In the Lake of the Woods, which abuses the narrator's position of knowledge mercilessly to tease and needlessly confound the reader. Since O'Brien's point in that book is the unknowability of "the truth," it's particularly irritating that the main obstacle to the reader's ability to make up his/her own mind about the truth -- or to draw his/her own conclusions about its subjectivity -- is the narrator/author.

After Clayton's piece, it's a relief to turn to "Down and Out in Brentwood" by Neal Marks (Crime Scene Scotland), which is a slick little piece of crime fiction. You'll like it a lot of if you're a fan of Elmore Leonard. In fact, you'll be right at home: the narrative voice and the angle of attack are obviously an homage to Leonard, right down to the references to Detroit. The only thing it's missing is a Sig Sauer. Not a bad piece, but I suspect Marks can do better working in a more original vein.

Considering all 10 of the top stories, I'd say that many of their authors chose detachment as a theme, which is too bad, because detachment also made many of these stories weaker than they should have been. This is a common problem for writers. Most of us like to be observers, and that necessarily flavors our fiction. The problem is, readers aren't really interested in the aperçus of writers. It's conflict and engagement they want from the characters they read about. It's the hardest thing in the world to create characters that care about something passionately enough to wrestle internal as well as external conflict, and still make your story realistic. It's less difficult, though not by any means easy, to do this, as Bowes does, well enough to merely entertain. (Literature is often distinguishable from entertainment fiction because it does not entirely depend upon its plot to interest the reader, and can be re-read without spoiling its pleasures.) So here's to 2005's top 10 authors, and all who set their sights on bigger game.

Call Me Hypocrite

A while back, I complained about the fact that writers aren't more inventive: when authors find a stable, compelling voice and mode of telling stories, they rarely deviate. I decried this on the theory that different stories demand different voices and approaches, and that part of what readers expect from writers is a new way of seeing things. If there really are only seven plots, as Christopher Booker argues in (you guessed it) The Seven Basic Plots, then it's up to authors to relay their stories in the most inventive, varied ways possible. And part of the skill of being a writer, it seems to me, is to avoid getting too comfortable in any one combination of voice and point of view.

Well. I was soon to be hoist by my own petard.

A couple of weeks ago, desperate for something diverting to read, I picked up a Terry Pratchett novel, Monstrous Regiment. Those of you familiar with Pratchett know that he's a very funny man. I don't pretend to have read all of his books -- his oeuvre is quite large -- but based on those I have read, I'd say he's not particularly inventive in the way that I describe above. His charm comes in his ability to elaborate endlessly on the Discworld he's created. Most fantasy writers create a world and then find themselves stuck with characters and mores that grow increasingly rigid, until the whole thing groans creaking to a halt, and the author has to create an entirely new world. Not Pratchett. From within his Discworld, he's fearlessly found new characters to write about, on topics as varied as the postal system or what it's like to be Death, though his overriding theme is human folly and stupidity. From his abiding rage, he is able to spin endless jokes and riffs on contemporary culture, while never failing to be entertaining.

So imagine my disappointment when I opened Monstrous Regiment and found that it was ... earnest. Oh, there're occasional jokes (there's a vampire in it who has, like a reformed alcoholic, sworn off human blood - he's a member of the Temperance League), but all in all, it's a fairly bitter story about sexism and the stupidity of war (and humans for waging it). So it was entertaining enough, but it lacked the usual Pratchett brio. As author of over 20 novels, he's got a right to flag occasionally, of course. But man, was I mad that he dared to write a book that was halfway serious. What I wanted was the old Pratchett, the usual Pratchett, the one I was comfortable with. It's not clear that he was experimenting with something new, by the way, just that he was angrier and maybe sadder than when writing other books, but the effect was the same: he blazed a new trail, and I was damned if I was going with him. Put me in mind of T.R. Pearson, whose voice in The Last of How it Was and other earlier novels is peerless and quite mannered; but when he began to deliberately break it down in a later novel, Cry Me a River, and meld it with contemporary details and a less mellifluous voice, he lost some of his charm for me, no matter how much I admired him for his daring.

Which just goes to show you: that's why writers aren't more inventive.

Buy Lisa Moore's Book Now

Like most literature fans, I don't read a lot of short story collections, and once I do, I don't re-read many of them. This is partly a pragmatic decision (who has the time to re-read everything?); but not many deserve re-reading, either. Then again, those that do deserve it don't necessarily inspire it: Dubliners, for example, is arguably the most famous short story collection ever, but I've not cracked its spine since I first read it 23 years ago. Compare that with my experience with Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son: I tore through it in an afternoon, but I could never really put it down, so to speak, until I finally gave in and re-read it over a year later.

Which brings me to Lisa Moore's 2002 collection, Open, which was a bestseller in Canada and a finalist for the Giller Prize there, but was largely unnoticed here in the States. (I have my public library to thank for bringing it to my attention: thank you, thank you, Multnomah County.) One could say that my decision to re-read Johnson and Moore and not Joyce says more about my reading tastes than their relative merits -- and you'd have a strong case. Moore's collection, at any rate, appears at first glance to be disappointingly homogeneous. Almost all of the ten stories are first-person (and those that aren't may as well be), the main character is always a woman, usually middle-aged with a child or step-child and an emotionally remote husband to whom she is nevertheless almost helplessly attracted. Even the stories' greatest strengths -- their sensuous, room-wrecking imagery and their odd fusion of past and present -- are unvarying from story to story, which is the sort of thing that usually causes my heart to sink.

With all that said, though, I found myself re-reading Open within a week of finishing it, and suggest you get started on her too. If you're a fan of the monotonously sequential or you're deaf to imagery (so to speak), then skip it. But if you've got an ear for voice and like stories that appear to be relentlessly allusive and indirect, than Moore should be on your bedside table by nightfall.

The stories in Open are fragmentary, non-sequential, unpredictable, and rely heavily on repeated imagery to convey their emotional undercurrents. Here's the section I found when browsing the book at the library that convinced me to check it out:

I guess I should read the Manifesto. The literary critic who spoke before you at the conference said it was an authorless tract. That Marx repeatedly tried to make it sound as though it came from thin air, or rose by itself from the people, spontaneously. He was willing to claim the bad poetry of his youth that even Penguin didn't want to publish. But the Manifesto just was. Just passed through his pen.

Tell me what happened? Did you meet somebody? (from "Mouths, Open," p. 29)

You don't need to know that the narrator and her partner (the "you" mentioned in the second sentence) are in a relationship, and that the narrator's partner is turning away from her -- it's abundantly clear. The longing in the second paragraph, the abrupt juxtaposition, is poignant. Marx's delusion, his attempt to remove his fingerprints from his own work, suggests fertile parallels: perhaps the narrator's partner is attempting to dissociate himself from his own work (the life he's built with the narrator, or his responsibility for breaking them up); or perhaps the narrator is trying to remove herself from the pain of his rejection by accepting that it "just is," that it's historically inevitable.

Much of Moore's fiction works like this, by suggestion and juxtaposition. In this way, she is able to dramatize how memory can radically impinge upon the present - many of her characters seem to live in an unstable storm of past and present, a cinematic montage of moments flashing by. In some stories, like "The Way the Light Is," she makes her debts to the cinema explicit; in others, like "Mouths, Open," she uses the technique and expects her readers to follow. She can pull this off because of the sheer sensuousness of her imagery and the sharp turns she takes to pull the reader through the story.

Like a poet, she is prodigal with her images: at an outdoor party, "a paper napkin flutters off the table and dips, like a dove shot out of the sky, a gash of lipstick on its breast" (154). Or this:

Melody comes out with a bottle of orange juice. It has stopped raining. Steam lifts off the asphalt and floats into the trees. Sky, Canadian flag, child with red shirt -- all mirrored in the glossy water on the pavement at our feet. A car passes and the child's reflection is a crazy red flame breaking apart under the tires. The juice in Melody's hand has an orange halo. A brief rainbow arcs over the wet forest behind the Irving station (8).

She can stumble, too, as she does here, when the narrator of "Craving" describes a childhood friend's dexterity in handling adolescent boys:

She could suss out the swift-forming passions of the gang of boys we knew, and make them heel. She knew the circuit of their collective synaptic skittering and played it like pinball (62).

I have trouble imagining "passions" coming to "heel," but more than that, "circuit of their collective synaptic skittering" isn't nearly as concrete as her imagery usually is - it's abstractly interesting, but works better for its sound than its sense. (Nor can I imagine playing a "skittering" like "pinball," but that's comparatively minor.) Sure, I'd've liked to see her edit this sort of thing out, but it's a mark of the sheer fertility of imagery that her stories don't suffer from lapses like this one - she knows her next one will be better, and so does the reader.

Her opening story, "Melody," is impressive because it tells four stories in one, almost all indirectly: the narrator, a teenager, slowly awakens to desire, sexual and otherwise, as she carelessly betrays her friends, including Melody, who has an abortion after getting pregnant by an older man; the narrator's subsequent marriage and five years of grief after her husband dies; the mistake of her second marriage to a rich dentist; and the wrenching power of Melody's reappearance in her life at 40. (Actually, the piece may contain fewer than four stories or it could be more; like all of Moore's work, it's hell to summarize.)

Other pieces are weaker -- "Grace," for example, the novella that closes the collection, is wonderful but shows the weakness of applying her technique to longer fiction: it's exhausting, after a while. One stops taking in the imagery and the connections and begins longing for closure. But there are many standouts here. "Craving" is about an old theme - the destruction of romantic illusion - but does it well. The narrator is at the dinner table with two old friends she hasn't seen since her teens, and their respective men:

She's thinking, Remember the guy on the surboard in Hawaii? I felt total abandon. An evanescing of self, my zest uncorked.

Yes, but if you had kept going, it wouldn't have been abandon. He wouldn't be a man swathed in the nimbus of an incandescent wave, muzzling the snarling lip of that bone-crushing maw of ocean with a flexed calf muscle. He would be one of these guys at the table, half drunk and full of mild love (62-3).

Perhaps the best story of all is "The Way the Light Is," in which the narrator is making a short film inspired by a poem by John Steffler. She describes the poem as being about "the elusive," and tries to do this by filming her friend Mina, who affects nonchalance that her husband sleeps with other women but unintentionally keeps revealing her pain. The narrator describes the video her own husband took of their son's birth, a series of jumpcuts of the contractions (the camera was shut off during all the peaceful, happy moments in between) and then the bloody, terrifying complication that follows. She and her son survive, and then she writes, ostensibly about Steffler's poem, "Everyone knows what it means to want something with such intensity you crush it in your haste to have it. " But of course she's talking about giving birth, and her friend Mina's longing for her husband, and even the way in which artists always fail to entirely grasp what they're reaching for, and so for that story alone, the book is worth your while.

Why Aren't Writers More Inventive?

Why is it that writers are prized for their ability to reproduce the same sort of thing over and over in the same key? Once I discovered the charm and brilliance of J.P. Donleavy's voice in The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B., I expected him to reinvent himself with the same verve in each of his novels. Imagine my disappointment when I learned that his remarkable voice, so hard-won, had ossified ever since he first revealed it in The Ginger Man. (And it's not like the man was content to write his To Kill a Mockingbird and then fall silent; he's written a heckuva lot in the same voice.) Similarly, most short story collections make an author's tics, thinness of experience, or powers of invention glaringly obvious. (I hope this is mostly an illusion -- in other words, that authors are generally more versatile than they appear in print and must appear more homogeneous to satisfy readers and sell books -- but I'm doubtful. Even the most disciplined writer can't help but betray himself or herself; we never kill all our darlings.) You can't read Russell Hoban's Kleinzeit and Riddley Walker without being impressed by how completely he revinvented himself - subject matter, voice, tone, and even orthography are all different. That's what writers should do from book to book, I think. But even Hoban suffers from this problem, as much of his opus is stamped from the same mold.

The 920-Word One-Liner

Don't we read fiction for robust pleasures like character, gorgeous language, and tragedy so pungent it slashes the hands? Damn right we do. Then why do writers (and editors) think they can get away with hanging a story on a gimmick?

Case in point: Theodore Ross' 920-word one-liner, "The Somalian Smokes It Up," in the July 2005 issue of Pindeldyboz. In such a short story, you wouldn't think it would take Ross three paragraphs (285 words, if you must know) to explain how the main character got nicknamed "The Somalian," but it does; and just when it appears that something's about to happen, the story flames out in a joke: having seen a beggar defecating in the open street, the Somalian concludes (in a tortured point-of-view shift), "Isn't that just the way of things in Cambodia, his home: someone always shitting on the Promised Land." Sheesh. This from an editor at Harper's. Read it yourself and tell me you're not disappointed.

Another case in point: Debra Broughton's "Colour of Friendship," appearing in the January 2005 issue of Word Riot. This time, it's a different kind of punchline, the sort used in detective fiction and spooky movies all the time: the main character is the one who committed the murder, though in this case you only realize there was a murder at the very end. --Oops, I think I gave away the ending again.

The problem, see, is that these stories aren't genre stories, where gimmicks and guessing games are part of the deal. Both of the stories I've mentioned so far are both presented as literature, and guess what, kids? A higher standard applies. A good rule of thumb is that literature is worth reading more than once. If it can only stand up to one reading (because the second time through, for example, you already know that Bruce Willis' character in Sixth Sense is actually dead), you're probably not writing literature. If your entire story relies on not telling the reader something critical -- not just the minor misdirections of any storyteller, choosing her pace and order of events; no, I mean, for example, when you showed your main character walking out on her boyfriend and you deliberately didn't tell your readers that she'd just stabbed him to death -- if your story rests on that sort of dishonesty, you should realize that your story's not going to be worth reading twice.

One last example: "Self Defense," by Michael Hartford, also in Pindeldyboz' July issue. Again, this is a different kind of one-liner, old as time: the main character, a normal, suburban dad, is provoked beyond endurance by his wife, who keeps shooting him with a squirt gun at their son's birthday party. In the story, much is made of attempts by the politically-correct to separate squirt guns from real guns (the ones in the story are made in the shape of animals, and the manufacturer calls them "squirters"). But scratch the surface, it seems, and we find humanity's primal impulses locked, loaded, and staring us in the face. Never mind that we know nothing, really, about the relationship between the husband and wife in this story - to understand the hostility they unleash, it's supposed to be enough, apparently, that she keeps criticizing his choices for the party (what food to serve, how to cook it, whether or not to give out the squirt guns) and that he keeps ignoring her.

Even if these stories were better than they are (when was the last time you read a story like "Self Defense," where a calm, ordinary day in the suburbs turns violent?), they'd still be weak, because they're designed only to shock the reader with the punch, if not the punchline. Are their characters presented with real conflicts that will, no matter the choice they make, cost them something they love? No. Are the stories distinguished by blazing language or formally challenging? No. These are easy stories to write, simple in concept and simple to execute. It's the curse of the short story form -- it's hell to write a great one, but it's easy to write one O. Henry would've been proud of. Try extending any of these for 20 pages, and they'd fall flat. Don't we all write and publish stories that fall flat? Absolutely. But let's not set our sights so dadgum low.

--Benjamin Chambers, Founding Editor

Lonesome Lonesome

Roderick Leyland’s, “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” (Eclectica, April/May 2005) starts off with a bang:

It’s a bugger when you bungle your first brain transplant. Isn’t it? Yeah, he knows what I mean. Blood, grey matter, bone fragments… Blimey! Was I on a learning curve! That’s what they say, these days, isn’t it? Not, I’ve got it wrong; but, I’m on a curve. I know the kind of curve I prefer. Don’t you, dear? Cor, look at her blushing under the pancake. I wear pancake too, love, but I’m not one of them. No, it prevents the lights burning me out, sweetheart, and stops me looking like a corpse. Who said, That wouldn’t make any difference? You wanna come up here, son, and try yourself? Yeah, you’re very brave, down there in the dark. Big gob, small dick.

This paragraph packs an awful lot into a few short sentences: it announces that the piece is going to be formally challenging, establishes the speaker as a stand-up comic, and gives him a particular sort of persona—he is vulgar and sexually aggressive, the sort of man who uses humiliation as a tool for seduction, who is able (or, more importantly, wants his audience to believe he is able) to shame a woman into bed and her boyfriend or husband into a sort of grinning acquiescence. (As for brain surgery and corpses, well—we’ll get to those later.) The stage seems set for turnabout—at some point, the reader suspects, our crude comic will get his comeuppance but good.

We are not disappointed. The voice, it turns out, belongs to one Ronnie Lonesome, the emcee of what appears to be a second-rate variety show. (Indeed, considering the allusions to blonde dancers, it appears to be vaudeville or even burlesque, which seems a bit strange, given the obvious contemporaneity of the piece.) And Ronnie Lonesome, of course, is only a stage name—and a clever one at that, invoking as it does not only the character’s loneliness but also, since it is taken from an Elvis Presley song, the sexual magnetism of The King. Our protagonist’s real name is Desmond Robinson, and over the course of the next seven or so pages he will indeed get what’s coming to him.

It is a clever stroke to make Lonesome a comic, because it naturally allows the piece to take the form of a modified dramatic monologue, typically the provenance of poetry, or, well, drama. The trick with dramatic monologues is to have their speakers unintentionally reveal something about themselves that they won’t or can’t state outright. (Robert Browning was a particular master of this—see, for example, his poem “My Last Duchess.”) And a performer with a shtick like Ronnie’s seems particularly ripe for this sort of treatment; we look forward to watching him hang himself with a rope woven entirely of his own words.

Does this actually happen? Not exactly. “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” defies our expectations in a number of ways, some satisfying, others not. The good news is very good indeed: Mr. Leyland is a gifted plotter; there are clues as to what is actually going on with Ronnie Lonesome scattered throughout the piece, but not until three-quarters of the way through does the bigger picture come into focus. Once we know the whole story, it is a pleasure to go back, find all the hints the author has dropped, and see how cleverly and seamlessly they have been fitted into the larger context of the work. For as it turns out, Ronnie Lonesome has bigger problems than mere boorishness—there is a tumor in his brain, which, we are led to believe, will likely kill him. Hence his opening joke about brain surgery, and the subsequent (better) joke about the make-up preventing him from looking like he’s dead. Ronnie also seems to suffer from olfactory hallucinations—he perceives odors that aren’t really there. Thus we get an early riff about odd smells and pretentious celebrity chefs.

Of course, the precarious state of Ronnie’s health transforms his bluster into something sympathetic—we see it not as the ranting of a cranky misogynist but instead as a dying man’s sad attempt to hold on to his self-respect. He is struggling to convince himself that he is virile, entertaining, popular; most of all he is struggling to convince himself that he is brave. One of the strongest bits in the piece stems from this struggle—here, Ronnie is talking to himself in the privacy of his dressing room, ostensibly preparing new material:

…she [Ronnie’s doctor] says [of the tumor], It’s the size of a pea.

I say, Get your specs on, girl. Listen: when I walk in the showers, heads turn.

Desmond, she says, it needs treating.

I say, Then give it a night on the town. What d’you reckon: limo, dinner at the Ritz, a box at the theatre and a suite in a Park Lane hotel?

It’s all swagger and desperation—but it’s funny swagger and desperation. Denial is certainly at work here, but it’s of an interesting variety: chosen, as opposed to reflexive. You can’t joke about something you don’t acknowledge in the first place; Ronnie’s brand of self-defense is more subtle (and, one could argue, more admirable) than the ordinary sort.

The problem is that many of Ronnie’s jokes aren’t this good. Here’s a sampling from his actual act:

…Oh yeah, that paper: New Pop Weekly. Now then, every week they print a list of the Top Sixty. Have you heard some of these?

Wanna Grapple with your Tackle, by Vicky Virago and the Vixens.

Want that Hunk in My Bunk, by Kathie Klutch and the Crampons.

You’re in my Flat, by Mick Manse and the Maisonettes.

On and on they go, these cryptic little puns, for eight more entries—three-quarters of a page out of seven pages total. Now compare this to the act of another comic, overheard in fragments by Ronnie when he is off-stage—a comic whom the story sets up as genuinely unfunny:

“No, she says, I don’t want to stroke your cat. I asked for a Marmite sandwich!”

Yes, Ronnie’s act makes more sense, but only a little more. For the piece to be completely effective Ronnie would have to be consistently, crudely funny—or he would at least have to be crudely funny when the author wanted him to be. The problem is one of control. It’s not that the voice gets away from Leyland, exactly; Ronnie never lapses from character. Rather, the words he actually says aren’t enough to carry the full weight of the piece, and so Leyland is forced to invoke other devices to bring his message home. The most distracting of these are what we might think of as stage directions, italicized bits of business which supply context, sometimes unnecessarily. Early on, they seem harmless enough:

Ronnie approaches the front of the stage, almost falling into the orchestra pit, and becomes conspiratorial.

There’s a minor problem with this—Ronnie’s voice might sink to a conspiratorial whisper, or his tone might turn conspiratorial, but for he himself to turn conspiratorial is jarring, as if we’ve become suddenly and inappropriately privy to his state of mind—but it doesn’t do much damage. By the end of the piece, however, the situation has grown more dire. Here is one of the last of these stage directions:

Ronnie continues to stand on the stage looking into the auditorium, waiting. The audience is attentive. People have gathered in the wings.

And another:

Silence has invaded the theatre and occupied everyone.

Something has shifted here—not Ronnie himself, but his story’s setting. The theatre has taken on the quality of a nightmare; the audience has come to resemble supernatural judges. Certainly, facing the prospect of death at the hand of one’s own brain is both absurd and menacing, but it still doesn’t make sense, given the rest of the piece, for the circumstances to suddenly become surreal. But Leyland needs to bring his story to a climax, and since Ronnie’s words alone won’t suffice, this is the method he falls back on. Indeed, by this point in the story, Ronnie is at a loss for words: he is having an episode of some sort, and his speech is comprised of disjointed snippets, memories and garbled fragments of other comics’ acts and appeals to the audience. It is undeniably moving, but it is also something of a cop-out. Since Ronnie’s brain is failing him at the story’s end, Leyland has the opportunity to stuff Ronnie’s speech full of things the comic, in his right mind, would never say—and he uses the opportunity in ways that ultimately diminish the piece. Ronnie, it seems, has never gotten over the death of his mother, and what surfaces here at the very end of his act appears to be a memory of her death as seen through the eyes of a young child.

It went quiet, my mum was still, and I couldn’t wake her. I shook her but she just lay there, warm. They said leave her, she needs rest now, but she never woke. And that’s God’s truth.

Now, this is certainly a heartbreaking bit of prose. The problem is that there has only been a single, fleeting mention of Ronnie’s mother up to this point, a mention so brief and devoid of detail that the reader has no sense of Ronnie’s emotional connection to her. The effect of this deathbed memory therefore ends up seeming rather contrived—it is as if the author did not quite trust the work he had already done and therefore felt he needed to play the "dead mother" card in order to drive home the point that Ronnie is scared, sad, and lonely.

This is a shame, since Ronnie’s fear, sadness, and solitude would have been manifest without bringing up his mother. After all, the spectacle of a man dying so publicly, and yet so terribly alone, is about as sad as you can get. Given the over-the-top nature of Ronnie’s voice, it might have been wiser to exercise restraint in constructing the piece’s actual events—it might have been wiser to trust us to find the pathos in the story for ourselves, rather than hanging it before our eyes in neon letters.

Still, there is great deal to admire in “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” not the least of which is Mr. Leyland’s psychological penetration—Ronnie Lonesome himself is a wonderful creation, simultaneously so self-deceiving and so very self-aware. It’s quite a balancing act Mr. Leyland attempts, and, if he does not fully carry it off, we still have a great time watching him try.

--Bill Bukovsan, Associate Editor

Top Ten Online Stories of 2004 - Update

Check out Terry Bisson's spooky little entertainment, "Super 8." Fun ride.