Ploughshares Fall 2021

Ladette Randolph (editor) Ploughshares Fall 2021 (2021)
Ploughshares is a quarterly literary collection of short fiction. Most contributions are approximately novella length, so this is going to be a long one. If you need to dash to the kitchen to grab a few cans of Kestrel and a packet of custard creams, I can wait.

Okay, in vague order…

I'm kicking off with Afsheen Farhadi whose The Mexican Detective takes its time, creeping up on the reader without giving away too much of where it's going despite the obvious focus on bereavement; and once everything has fallen into place, it leaves a lasting evocation of the unreality which tends to surround the death of a loved one, mapping a borderland in mythic terms - in this case by the seemingly implausible agency of a Mexican detective who admits he's mostly just a guy who attends a writing class. The aforementioned borderland incorporates Mexican streets terrorised by knife wielding infants, and I've always enjoyed reality described by that which is found beyond its outer limit.

Christie Hodgen's Bush v. Gore hits a lot of buttons for me, being set in Texas - albeit Dallas rather than San Antonio - with a regular gal, probably the author, abruptly stranded within one of those dysfunctionally over-moneyed families with which I'm now somewhat familiar thanks to the stepson. My bunch are of generally lesser toxicity than Phyllis and the gang, but not one of those people got where they are by playing nice; and the point at which our narrator finally pops, dumping an entire paragraph of home truths on her hosts - page 113, if anyone's wondering - is so satisfying that I had my wife read it too. The entire psychodrama is set against the backdrop of George W. Bush defeating Gore in Florida, or kinda sorta maybe defeating Gore in Florida. Why the election played out as it did seems adequately explained by the family dynamic of Jack, Phyllis and the rest, which in turn goes some way towards accounting for what happened more recently in November 2016.

Yxta Maya Murray's When the Prophet Gazed upon the Face of the Lord is incredible, and one of the tightest, most powerful pieces of writing I've read all year. It orbits - I suppose you could say - the true story of a partial nuclear reactor meltdown in Simi Valley, California back in 1959, additionally taking in the tangential horror of Nazi rocket scientists and other elements found so far beyond the edge of daily existence as to impinge on the spiritual, in this case the religion of corn, stone knives, and the Centzontotochtin of old Mexico. The reality of the tale and its telling is such that it's difficult to imagine it consciously composed and directed as a fictionalised narrative, such is its power.

Talking of which, Mona Susan Power is a member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and a Harvard graduate who was awarded the PEN/Hemingway prize for her novel, The Grass Dancer. Here she contributes Goodreads Warrior which tells how of a young Native American man from a town near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation gets into Harvard to be taught by a teacher whose last collection of short stories won the PEN/Faulkner prize, whatever that is. Whilst I very much like the theme of what it takes a Native to get ahead in such institutions, I had trouble getting past this one being writing about what it's like to be a writer - a genre I dislike because it feels self-involved and dishonest on some level. It probably doesn't help that our guy's own literary efforts, which appear nested within the narrative, aren't anything special and are conspicuously consistent with Power's own narrative voice, which is freewheeling and would, I suspect, better suit something a little less recursive.

A Procession of Beasts and Men is Will Schluter's first short story - according to the byline - and if it's a mostly decent effort and not lacking in poetry, most of it seems to comprise descriptions of the domestic texture through which his character moves without any obvious sense of direction. Accordingly, there are some long fucking sentences here.

Not unlike those waves of electric pole and line that rose and broke in a steady stream all the way from West Texas through New Mexico and into a rest stop just south of the headwaters of the Rio Grande where she ditched the Volvo for a Pinto left idling at a gas pump and urged that baby up up up and into the Rockies as that one cassette played over and over on fuzzy speakers because the car's broken antenna wouldn't pick up a radio signal that didn't give way to static after about three and a half seconds but the electric line never stopped no matter how high she went and that one song kept on playing Josie's on vacation far away as the woman not yet named Josie approached the crest of the Great Divide and the waves of post and line seemed to transfer into her own body starting in her abdomen and continuing on down through her pelvis over and over again until she felt the emptying that soaked her leggings and the whole carseat under them and she knew her water had finally broke up there among the snow-capped peaks.

I appreciate the reason for the absence of a pause anywhere in the above, but this sort of thing doesn't always work, and here it slows everything down which is, I suspect, the opposite of the desired effect. Additionally, Schluter strives to create mood by means of sentences broken into inactive segments. Such as this. Where a comma would work a whole lot better than a full stop. Never mind.

Having known Nick Sweeney since the nineties, I'm probably biased regarding his contribution, although you wouldn't actually be reading these words if I'd thought it was crap so make of that what you will. The Émigré Engineer is really a novella and the longest story in the collection, which is as it should be given the scale of the tale, trailing its main guy from his bloody coming of age during the Russian Revolution, to Paris, then small town America between the wars. It's about an engineer, one who forges with his hands, making his way by sheer bloody minded force of will in a difficult and occasionally fucking ridiculous world, as told with a satisfyingly nourishing cadence and a sense of the physical which reminds me of a folk tale or even Gogol, albeit without quite the same level of surrealism. I mainly know Nick as a friend of my friend Eddy and as - much to my excitement - a man who once auditioned for Adam & the Ants. I've no real idea from whence his interest in eastern Europe is derived, but he channels it like a native, I suppose you would say. My recent reading has brought me to the surprising conclusion that, despite the last few hundred years, the heart of our world has generally been that expanse of land between the Baltic, Adriatic and Caspian seas for the longest stretch of human history, with the rest of us fiddling about around the edges; and as an immigrant myself, and friends with at least one former Russian Jew, I recognise a lot of The Émigré Engineer, although thankfully not so much the more harrowing episodes. Nick Sweeney taps into something fairly fundamental here, yet without the need for anyone honking away on a trumpet.

Joan Wickersham's Mortal Enemy was an odd one for me, not least for being listed as non-fiction in the index - presumably through being directly autobiographical - which implies the potential for a technical discussion of scaffolding. It's an account, and a fairly harrowing one, of a one-time friend evolving into a violently bipolar stalker. The problem, which is possibly my problem rather than anything to do with the author, is the initial setting of writers, writing courses, and literary discussion amongst students at Yale, the sort of thing which hits me as vaguely adjacent to Wickersham's own assessment of a novel written by her mortal enemy.

The prose sounded like Bobby, Bobby eager to tell the world about itself, but what he knew about the world he'd learned from reading other books by men eager to tell the world about itself. He wrote in clichés. Every sentence congratulated itself for being that sentence.

This is why Charles Bukowski recommended time spent at the race track. To be fair, Wickersham writes without either cliché or sentences congratulating themselves, and the account begins to feel distinctly more vital once we move on from prestigious colleges and trips to Paris. It's honestly a respectable piece and one I'm glad to have read because I'm sure many of us have known Bobby at some point or other, although that whole deal of an insight into the lives of writers usually brings me out in hives which, as I say, is possibly just me.

Leslie Kirk Campbell's The Man with Eight Legs and Julian Zabalbeascoa's What We Tried to Bury Grows Here were both entirely decent without inspiring me to write about either, which is why I haven't.

I don't actively seek out new writers as any sort of official policy because I already have too many books stacked up on the to be read pile, some of which admittedly may be garbage, but these anthologies are always a pleasure when I make the time and I highly recommend this one, not least on the strength of the contributions from Afsheen Farhadi, Yxta Maya Murray, Nick Sweeney and Christie Hodgen.

Ludmila's Broken English

DBC Pierre Ludmila's Broken English (2006)
Still aglow from Vernon God Little and having regarded it as the greatest novel I'd ever read, I rushed out and bought a copy of this, Pierre's second novel, the day it hit the shops, or specifically the day it hit Waterstone's on Oxford Street. In fact I was so quick off the blocks that I found I'd bought a copy signed by the author without even meaning too. I guess I might even have met the man himself had I made it to Waterstone's before five in the evening, but Marian had decided we should make a day of it, like couples do, so it's probably a miracle that we actually made it to the store before closing time. Marian bought something from the self-help section, a book with a title like How to Better Manage Your Money or How to Not Spend Money on Shit You Don't Actually Need, something along those lines. It cost twenty quid, the irony of which was, as ever, lost on her.

In the wider world, Ludmila's Broken English met with a lukewarm reception as I recall, that difficult second book by someone with a lot to live up to, although it probably didn't help that most of the critics had apparently mistaken Vernon God Little for Tom Sharpe does Deliverance.

Ludmila, like her predecessor, is darkly comic, but with significantly less chance of anyone mistaking the gallow's humour for an episode of Filthy, Rich & Catflap. Also problematic, I would guess, would have been the broken English of the title, conjoined twins, now separated, respectively named Blair and Gordon, and blatantly based on Tony and Mr. Brown. Weirder still is that they seem to be the offspring of Ted Heath, although I suppose politically speaking it's not such a massive leap for something so obviously satirical. The novel is about their progress and eventual meeting with Ludmila, Blair's bride to be from the former Soviet Union and now inhabitant of a homeland comprising mainly grinding poverty and explosions. So the frame to which these characters find themselves bolted is frankly fucking ridiculous, and I know I found this aspect a bit of a stumbling block first time around, as I guess did most of the reviewers; but fifteen years later, sat in a country run by a man who has just told us to inject bleach, the sledgehammer elements of the narrative seem less obstructive. In fact they remind me a bit of Gogol, which is odd.

This time around, the parallels - not least Tony Blair and Gordon Brown - seem more like starting points than direct statements in and of themselves, although Pierre has Blair's woolly speech patterns down to a tee; and their exchanges are wonderfully horrible, Harold Pinter writing Hancock's Half Hour as one of Francis Bacon's more biologically distraught canvases. Everything is cutting and witty and darkly poetic, and this is probably part of the problem: lacking the grounding in directly experienced reality which clearly informed Vernon God Little, the narrative becomes relentless, even exhausting - a great idea which didn't quite fit the frame. A lawn dart tossed blindfold at Ludmila's Broken English will find ruthless, devastating prose every single time, but the whole lacks plasma, a written medium by which the material is delivered. My guess would be that the pressure of Vernon blowing up as it did could be to blame, but who knows?

Ludmila's Broken English is, roughly speaking, about neoliberalism and more or less everything that's been wrong with the world at least since the fall of the Berlin Wall. It's argument is clearly stated with all due venom and without sermonising. It's only real failure is that it should have been better.

The Overcoat and other Tales of Good and Evil

Nikolai Gogol The Overcoat and other Tales of Good and Evil (1842)
Gogol is one of those authors upon which I took a chance, despite having no strong reason for wanting to read his work beyond the vague possibility that it might be decent. I haven't read too many Russian writers, and nor am I excessively well read once those cinematic pages float up onto the calendar to reveal that we're now back in the nineteenth century; so I'm out of my depth here, and that itself is enough to inspire curiosity.

Happily, I've found that I like Gogol. His writing is funny without cracking jokes, jovial without any Stilgoe-esque nudging or winking, and the stories he tells are fucking peculiar with a gentle absurdity which seems to foreshadow Tony Hancock, Monty Python, Samuel Beckett, Kafka, Dadaism and possibly even Reid Fleming - World's Toughest Milkman. His stories tend to be monologues, direct addresses given by the author and accordingly subject to the whims of idle conversation; so he'll change his mind, or tell you something didn't happen despite previous claims that it did, or not to worry if you don't understand the story because neither does he and he wrote it. His descriptions fly off down all manner of blind alleys to no obvious narrative purpose except perhaps for sheer delight in the absurdity of the appearance of a policeman somehow ending up as an anecdote about a neighbour's dog.

Having only a vague idea of what was happening with the novel during the nineteenth century, I don't really know where Gogol fits for sure, but I gather the folksy quality of his narratives may relate to a more general swing towards realism in literature, as distinct from tales of the comings and goings of Lords and Ladies. Indeed, Gogol's labouring over plausible itinerants, losers, and failures approaches grotesque levels of detail equivalent to the drawings of Hogarth, not least thanks to his apparent fixation on biological transmogrification, the old man scrunging into the sorcerer of The Terrible Vengeance, the roving eyes of The Portrait, or the star of The Nose which takes leave of its face to become an important man about town. It's satire which pushes and pulls at the limits of reality to see if it will break, and in doing so echoes our own unsteady relationship with those institutions which comprise society, but without sloganeering or, for that matter, the joyless grunting and grimacing of Dostoyevsky.

I liked both Dead Souls and The Nose, - which I have in the form of a chapbook - so it's good to know that they weren't in any way anomalous, and that there's a lot more where they came from,  most of it seemingly at least as weird, perhaps even weirder.

The Nose

Nikolai Gogol The Nose (1836)
A man goes into a cafe and orders a bread roll. When the roll arrives, he discovers a foreign object within, specifically a human nose. Elsewhere, an academic gentleman realises that his own nose is missing, leaving just smooth, blank skin at the centre of his face. The nose is seen about town, dressed as an official, somehow passing itself off as a person and acquiring quite a reputation. Eventually it returns to our guy's face.

The story is riddled with inconsistencies, not least being how the nose in the bread roll figures in any of this, and of course the issue of scale; but that's because it's a story, for fuck's sake. It can do what the hell it likes. Gogol says as much himself in wrapping up the tale with an admission that he doesn't actually understand any of it, adding that it seems absurd, but then daily life is itself absurd. In directly addressing the reader as part of a tale of nebulous reality, Gogol might be seen as foreshadowing all sorts of stuff more recent and more familiar to members of this congregation, but then again, it was 1836, so maybe it's simply that the novel was yet to settle into its current habit of pretending to present a window on reality with author as no more than the individual cranking the handle of the projector.

Either way, I really have to read more by this guy. I'm not even sure why I'm only getting around to it now at the age of fifty-three.

Dead Souls

Nikolai Gogol Dead Souls (1842)
Here's another one picked up as part of a vague ongoing effort to edumacate myself with regard to literature 'n' shit, the hook in this instance being that I'd heard of it because Joy Division had a song presumably named after it, albeit a song which Nine Inch Nails did better. Interestingly enough, there doesn't seem to be much common ground between Gogol and Ian Curtis pleading for these dreams to be taken away, specifically the dreams which point him to another day. Indeed, the work of Joy Division seems at quite a remove to Gogol's dark yet amiable chortlefest. So as not to appear completely superficial, I would additionally like it to be taken into consideration that the chap on the cover of this edition vaguely resembles my friend Andrew, and that seemed like another good reason to read the thing.

In case it isn't obvious, my understanding of literary history is sketchy at best, and particularly sketchy when it comes to nineteenth century Russians. I read Crime and Punishment but I didn't like it much. Thankfully Dead Souls is written with a lighter touch, despite what might be anticipated from the title. Key to understanding what is going on here is the setting of rural serfdom in Tsarist Russia, a system in which commoners were regarded as part and parcel of the land upon which they lived, and therefore property of the landowner. Said landowners were required to pay tax upon their incumbent serfs, with the numbers being based on the most recent census figures, regardless of how many listed on the most recent census remain amongst the living. Our man Chichikov discovers there are economic advantages to ownership of a large quota of serfs, and so travels the countryside buying the deeds to those who have snuffed it, but whose deaths have not yet been taken into account by the most recent census. In other words, it begins as a satire on economics and the capitalist systems which allow for this kind of absurdist number crunching, expanding gradually into a farcical critique of class, privilege, and society built on the flimsiest of mutually observed concepts. In fact, it's almost Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle with better jokes and founded on the basic suggestion that we, as readers, might like to consider waking the fuck up every once in a while.

Thus these two citizens lived off by themselves until, now, toward the end of our story, they've popped up like faces in a window, and they've popped up like that to help me answer, in all modesty, the accusations of ardent patriots who, up until now, have been occupied in philosophical speculation or in the accumulation of money at the expense of the mother country they love so dearly. They don't give a damn whether or not their actions are harmful to the country; the only thing that worries them is that someone might say they're harming it.

No, it's neither patriotism nor even honest emotion that lies at the root of their accusations. Something else is concealed here. Why beat about the bush? Who's going to tell the truth if not the writer? So here goes: You're all afraid of a probing eye, afraid of looking thoughtfully into anything; all of you prefer to let your blank stare skim the surface of things.

The great success of Dead Souls is in its bumbling and overly fussy thrust, with Gogol - if we assume this to be a generally faithful translation - utilising the rambling tone of a folk tale strewn with absurdist tangents, obsessive conversational detail, and authorial interjections mulling over the actual telling of the story; so even when we're not quite sure what's happening - because Chichikov's motivation often seems obscure - we don't mind too much because there's plenty of other stuff to consider.

In some respects I suppose you might say it's like Dickens but without the cloying sentiment, although Dead Souls has sentiment of its own, presumably informed by Gogol having written the novel in Italy, flavouring his narrative with an exile's regard for his homeland which is both affectionate and faintly acerbic.

Legend has it that Gogol wrote a follow up to this, his best selling hit single, but this time incorporating characters with redeeming features; then destroyed the thing in a fit of self-recrimination. Personally I'd say the allegorically dead souls of the book do their respective jobs very well and have no more need of redeeming features than the novel ever required a sequel. Would that the Joy Division version had been so witty.

Crime and Punishment

Fyodor Dostoyevsky Crime and Punishment (1866)

Well, I suppose it serves me right for trying to broaden my horizons, to branch out and generally embiggen myself through the magic of proper literature sans airbrushed spacecraft on the covers. Crime and Punishment may well be deserving of its reputation, but I was bored shitless for the most part. I suppose it must be me, because no-one on the internet seems to have a bad word to say about this particular translation, the work of one Sidney Monas - indeed, this version is praised as definitive in a few places I've looked. I'm no stranger to the long-haired books section of the library, so I'm fairly certain of my not being entirely stupid, at least in so much as I can tell that there are readers considerably less perceptive than myself out there, but nevertheless I found Crime and Punishment a tremendous bore.

I spoke to my mother who told me that she had found it similarly turgid.

'I'm just not enjoying it,' I said.

'I don't think you're supposed to enjoy it,' she suggested.

Similarly, my friend Andy Martin opined that Dostoyevsky, like Gogol and Pushkin, is one huge yawn from start to finish, and Andy is both well and widely read.

I'm not saying either that Crime and Punishment is without merit or that I hated every minute, but some chapters were distinctly more engaging than others, and the more yawnsome sections became such a slog as to mean that it became pointless my reading them during the bedtime shift. I generally read for an hour after I get up each morning, and then for another hour before I go to bed. For some reason I am better able to appreciate detail in the morning, although the difference is rarely so pronounced as to make for books which I can't read at all in the evening, but this was one of them; and so it really began to drag out as I took to reading Danny Baker's autobiography and then an L.Ron Hubbard novella before bed - you know, reading for pleasure.

I've enjoyed Danny Baker's radio shows for many years, and have appeared on one of them at least twice. Going to Sea in a Sieve (2012) relates the best part of his younger years growing up in and around Bermondsey and Deptford in south-east London up until his first television appearances. It retains his typically ripe turn of phrase as heard on the wireless, and makes for a genuinely fascinating read even beyond the wisecracks, not least because it turns out that I know a few of the places in which he grew up; and I'd even go so far as to say that Going to Sea in a Sieve represents a valuable time capsule of both an era and a specific kind of childhood which probably doesn't happen any longer, what with your downloads and your pornotubes and what have you. Belly laughs alternate with moments of surprising profundity.

It was George Currie, the fantastic wiry guitarist from Dundee that now stepped forward as spokesman for the band.

'Why don't you fuck off?' he reasoned.

Obviously I'm quoting that as an example of the former.

If I have any criticism, it is that the tone occasionally veers into the as told to territory of the ghostwritten celebrity footballer biography, as I said to my famous friend, Adge Cutler of the chart topping Wurzels pop band; but I suspect this may be just a natural interference pattern resulting from what is essentially a conversation set down as prose. In any case, it's not a massive problem, and Going to Sea in a Sieve makes for one hell of a livelier read than Crime and Punishment.

Returning to which, I got through Crime and Punishment in the end, which at least suggests it has some discernible value above those few novels on which I've given up with just a hundred or so pages left, Robert Heinlein's fucking abominable Stranger in a Strange Land for example. Cheating, I consulted Wikipedia every few days in order to work out what I had just read:

Crime and Punishment focuses on the mental anguish and moral dilemmas of Rodion Raskolnikov, an impoverished ex-student in St. Petersburg who formulates and executes a plan to kill an unscrupulous pawnbroker for her cash. Raskolnikov argues that with the pawnbroker's money he can perform good deeds to counterbalance the crime, while ridding the world of a worthless vermin. He also commits this murder to test his own hypothesis that some people are naturally capable of such things, and even have the right to do them. Several times throughout the novel, Raskolnikov justifies his actions by comparing himself with Napoleon Bonaparte, believing that murder is permissible in pursuit of a higher purpose.

Most of this I already knew. Some of it seemed unclear, and I remained unable to see quite how the novel was doing that which it supposedly does for about three quarters of the book. The translator's afterword suggest this to be a novel concerned with the gulf between ideology and human nature, which makes it sound a lot more interesting than I found it. I can see it in passages such as:

'I'll show you their books. It's always the influence of the environment with them, that's all they know! They love that phrase! If society were constructed normally, therefore, all crimes would disappear at once because there would be nothing to protest against and we'd all become righteous in a flash. Nature doesn't count; nature gets chased away; nature's not supposed to exist! They won't have mankind developing along some living historical path to the end, turning finally of itself into normal society; but on the contrary, a social system emerging from some kind of mathematical brain that's going to reconstruct mankind and make it in one moment righteous and sinless, quicker than any life process, no living or historical path needed! Instinctively they don't like history, and that's why.'

Unfortunately I found instances of such clarity few and far between, islands amongst page after page of rambling dialogue of ambiguous consequence, sometimes with one person holding forth before another for the duration of an entire chapter, complete with aggravating self-conscious digressions of are you still listening? or you must think I'm going on a bit, old fruit and the like - no fucking kidding.

Oddly, just as some modern novels read like television drama - the work of authors who would rather be writing for their favourite medium, but can't either because they're too shit even for television or all this time they've been sucking the wrong dicks; Crime and Punishment reads in part like a stage production set down as print due to prohibitive length, and in a couple of places it reads as though the narrative is aware of this to some extent. There is a scene in part one, chapter four wherein Raskolnikov encounters a vulnerable and obviously drunken girl in a park, and notices a seemingly villainous dandy lurking nearby with apparent ignoble intent. Raskolnikov discusses both the girl and the dandy with a policeman even as said dandy continues to lurk as though stood to one side of a stage, ready to resume his advances on the destitute girl. In part three, chapter five Razumikhin is described standing with his back to the audience, which feels like a theatrical allusion. Of course, unless I'm just imagining this layer of artificiality, it may itself be a deliberate evocation of the theme of ideology or hypothetical structure imposed over that which exists.

The above may of course all be complete bollocks, given that I'm reading a translation, and that I failed to really engage with it after the first few chapters. There are some interesting and arguably quite important ideas, poorly expressed - in my possibly limited view - which is a shame because they might also serve to explain why the Soviet Union went tits up once they made Joseph Stalin head boy, so it's a pity some of those guys apparently couldn't get to grips with this one either.

You're better off with Danny Baker.

At least I was.