Adam Wilson, What's Important is Feeling

In college I read Karl Marx and snorted cocaine.  The Marx I didn't much understand.  The cocaine contextualized.

I lived with four other guys.  We weren't a classless household.  Some were subsidized:  parentally, governmentally.  Others worked campus jobs.  This one roommate – Spine, we called him, because he didn't have one – was from that town in Connecticut where the mansions come pre-equipped with bowling alleys.

Spine was our procurer, doled to the rest as he saw fit.  He took payment in the form of term papers.  I was caught in an ouroboros of needing drugs to complete Spine's papers, and writing papers to pay for drugs.  Spine was getting Cs across the board but didn't care.  He had a gig lined up after grad, at a cushy desk selling commercial real estate for some blueblood uncle. ("Some Nights We Tase Each Other," p. 59 iPad iBooks e-edition)

Adam Wilson's debut novel, 2012's Flatscreen, possessed a mixture of humor and wry commentary that made me curious enough to see how his first collection, What's Important is Feeling, would work these elements into a more compressed narrative space.  What I discovered was a collection of stories that utilized a familiar set of conditions to create stories that more often succeeded than not in their execution.  Although I am a decade or so older than most of the protagonists, their experiences did remind me of my time at college and immediately afterward, and connections like this certainly played a role in my overall enjoyment of the stories.

The majority of the stories feel with frustrated, confused adolescent and young adult lust and emotion.  The first story, "Soft Thunder," encapsulates this in its opening paragraph:

No one knows who slept with her first.  Besides, sleep isn't the right word.  What we did:  pressed lips to closed lips, tried to slip in some tongue; buried her beneath us on carpeted floors and futon mattresses; fumbled for buckles; felt her dry skin against our sweat-wet hands; said, "Don't cry"; wiped tears with our T-shirts; kept on because she said, "Don't stop." (p. 6)

"Soft Thunder"'s tale of directionless late-teens trying to live the rock'n'roll lifestyle, whatever that might actually mean, is in turns humorous and morose.  Wilson does a good job in fleshing out his characters.  Told from the perspective of a 17 year-old, Benjamin, the story explores the mixture of privilege and rudderless action of a group of young Jews who form a band, Soft Thunder, and whose web of connections to a troubled immigrant girl, Kendra, form the core of this story.  At first, Kendra exists more as a foil for the boys, acting simultaneously as a muse and as a source of hidden tension between the bandmates.  Yet by the story's end, what seemed to be just another story of teens confused by lust and driven apart by a young woman has morphed into something different.  It isn't a seamless transition, but it works for the most part.

The second story, "The Long In-Between," is the only one written from a women's perspective.  It is a mirror of sorts for the passions explored in "Soft Thunder," but in this case, there is no troubled youth, but instead a twenty-something young woman and a two decades-older former professor of hers and their unequal, occasionally exploitative relationship.  In this tale, even more than the others, Wilson examines some of the internal contradictions that secular American Jews have with their ethnicity, especially in regards to the Israeli-Palestinian situation.  It has an interesting twist ending, but otherwise is one of the weaker tales in the collection.

One of the strongest tales is "We Close Our Eyes," where a high school boy has to confront the return of his mother's cancer, his father's nocturnal absences, and his younger sister's sex tape being leaked to the student body.  This description might sound rather hum-drum, as such familial conflicts (OK, maybe not the sex tape part, but that is minor compared to the first two) are often the fodder of contemporary fiction stories, but Wilson does a good job of developing the protagonist's character and his confusion is illustrated well.  There are a few twists, however, that also help in making this more than just another sad "coming of age" tale.

The story I quoted at the beginning, "Some Nights We Tase Each Other," is perhaps the most emblematic of What's Important is Feeling's stories.  It is a tale of strung-out college kids, desiring something that they do not understand themselves, finding fleeting parallels with the material they study, before just drifting, drifting away from whatever it was that they thought they wanted.  The humor here accentuates the vague heartache that many of us perhaps recall from our college years.  Yet like the other tales, there is a sense of dissipation by tale's end, like a dream fading before we can grasp its import.  What is left is a sense of dissatisfaction, but of a sort that is hard to put into words.

The eponymous story differs from the others in that it is not set on the East Coast and while the first-person PoV does display some of that confused lust of others, the focus is more on a crazed set of actors and film personnel who have assembled in Texas to film a movie despite a clash of personalities and desires.  Wilson here penetrates more deeply into his characters' neuroses and conflicts, presenting with little comment a memorable menagerie of "lost" souls who do not realize the plights in which they are caught.  It is my favorite story and one that I suspect might point to a new direction for Wilson to follow.

Despite liking most of the stories, like the characters at the end of their tales, I felt an odd sense of deflation after completing What's Important is Feeling.  Although Wilson is a sound narrative plotter that mixes humor and disaffection adroitly into his stories, there was perhaps too much uniformity in these tales.  It is not simply a matter of similar characters or situations, as many writers have mined deeply their environs, but rather more that with the exception of "What's Important is Feeling," that there just really isn't even a substantial variation in theme.  Read separately, most of these tales might engender a chuckle or a sigh, depending on what past self the reader recalls.  However, when read as a collection, the overall effect is numbing, draining many of these tales of their ability to make us "feel" because we had already experienced this before in a slightly-different form a story or two prior.  What's Important is Feeling is perhaps best viewed as a snapshot, of where the author is before he "matures" and takes his promising mixture of narrative elements and makes something memorable out of them.

K.J. Bishop, That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote

The wolf cut him off with an impatient snarl. 'Art is lust!  As a man I collected art and thought myself above the crowd.  As a beast, without a man's talent for self-flattery, I acquired a better understanding.  Art is the voluptuous language of the senses.  The artist is a pornographer.  The connoisseur is a voyeur.  Art is a euphemism that permits humans to indulge all their lusts, however base or alarming, while imagining that they are using their highest and holiest faculties.  Man can't decide whether he wants to be an angel or an ape.  Art lets him be both.' (p. 30 e-book, from "The Love of Beauty")

It has been nearly ten years since the publication of Australian writer K.J. Bishop's first book, the excellent novel The Etched City.  That novel, which contained elements of the late 19th century French Decadents (it is no accident that a quote from Lautréamont's "Poésies" is the epigraph), was one of my favorite novels when I first read it in 2003.  Ever since then, I have eagerly awaited Bishop's next book, with only a few short fiction pieces to sate temporarily my appetite for more.  Therefore, it was with great surprise and pleasure last month when I was offered by the author herself an e-copy of her December 2012 self-published story collection, That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote (from what I understand, a print edition may come out later this year).

That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote contains 19 stories over a little more than 200 iPad e-book pages that span Bishop's writing career, from 1997's "The Art of Dying" to two 2012 stories that are original to this collection.  The stories, as Bishop discusses in the notes at the end of the book, run the gamut from Decadent-influenced pieces to those inspired by some of M. John Harrison's Viriconium stories to Borgesian fables to others that are melds of other disparate elements.  In the 1999 story "The Love of Dying" (quoted above), there is a transformed wolf who speaks of his former life as a man, who became ensorcelled, first in mind and then in body, by the woman he then loved:

'I was a man once.  I wronged a woman.  I thought myself ensorcelled by her loveliness, but the only spell was the spell of my own lust.  To punish me she enchanted me in truth.  She turned me into a beast in body and mind.  The one thing I retained of my human nature was my desire for beauty.  The woman was not only an accomplished with, but a great ironist.' (p. 29 e-book)

Here, this seeming "beast" is not so much an allegorical representation of the depravities of human nature as he is of the desire for refinement, for a beauty that is beyond the grasp or even ken of human experience.  There is something about art, about beauty, that entrances humanity.  We lust for it, or at least for its representations.  If we cannot possess the winsome wife or the dashing, gallant husband, then a representation of virility or charm is the next best thing.  Bishop here explores the tangled connections between lust and love, between desire for possession and desire for creation.  It is a very fine line in life and here in her tale, the deeper implications of these alternating conflicting/complementary desires are explored with a subtlety that few authors manage to achieve.  The conversations with the beast echo those between The Rev and Gwynn in The Etched City, with much of the power found in the later novel on display here.

There are also nods to The Etched City's Gwynn in the proto-story "The Art of Dying," which was Bishop's first-completed story.  In it can be found a working out of themes and images that later appear in the novel.  There is a decadent quality to the story, as Mona's fading from life and her lingering embrace of death serves as a counterpart to the staid, almost stodgy bourgeois life which exists around her.  As she and Gwynn carry Mona toward her awaiting tomb, Vali has an experience that goes beyond time and toward something quite different:

She fell gradually into a sense of timelessness, as if Time were a woman and she a babe on Time's back, and Time had put her down, until she felt as still and untroubled as the tombs themselves and sensed a mysterious familiarity with the stars.

As she grew more deeply immersed in this state she came to an understanding that the universe was alive.  It breathed with the breath of multitudes, and it did not know loneliness. If it loved, there was nothing of need or desire in its love.  The priests of this country would say that the night's ravine was alive with God, but she couldn't imagine their God inhabiting that enormous tranquillity.  The state of grace flowed without regard for custom or for its own alienness to everything it touched. (p. 12 e-book)

This sense of the numinous pervades several of her later fictions.  There is no resolution, nothing that can be explained, only feelings that are derived from these fleeting contacts with the inexplicable.  This weird quality, of there being something unexplainable and yet often desirable, inhabits the nooks and crannies of most of Bishop's fictions here.  The reader senses it, but can't quite describe what she herself might be experiencing.  Bishop's stories puzzle and tantalize the more the reader considers the import of the fictions being read.  Bishop's careful placement of images and dialogue creates an almost hallucinatory effect within even the more mundane-seeming stories of hers.  The characters tread that narrow path between being empty vessels that will receive within them these transformative events and active actors who cause themselves these transformations of image and spoken word into something different than what first appeared to be the case.  Despite there being differences in tone and narrative between these 19 stories, there is a uniformity of quality that makes That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote one of the best short fiction collections I read in 2012.  Its deceptive narratives will entrance readers, perhaps lingering with them for days or weeks after the final story is read.  If literature is art and art is lust, then perhaps we are left lusting for more fiction from Bishop in the near future.  Highly recommended.

George Saunders, Tenth of December

"Are we being honest?" he said.  "Or tiptoeing around conflict?"

"Honest," I said, and his face did this thing that, for a minute, made me like him again.

"It was hard for me because I felt like a shit," he said.  "It was hard for her because she felt like a shit.  It was hard for us because while feeling like shits we were also feeling all the other things we were feeling, which, I assure you, were and are as real as anything, a total blessing, if I can say it that way."

At that point, I started feeling like a chump, like I was being held down by a bunch of guys so another guy could come over and put his New Age fist up my ass while explaining that having his fist up my ass was far from his first choice and was actually making him feel conflicted." (p. 177 e-book, from "Home")

George Saunders' latest collection, Tenth of December, is my first full introduction to his writing, although I am familiar with his name and have meant for some time to try his fiction after seeing several writers cite him as an inspiration and a help in their own writing.  What I discovered was a writer who can make the serious comic, the surreal feel ordinary, twisting and tweaking dialogue and narrative to shape the ten stories here (originally published in Harper's Magazine, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, The New Yorker, and Story Magazine) into forms that continually grab the reader's attention because of Saunder's gift for prose.

The characters that inhabit Saunders' stories have their own unique takes on the situations in which they find themselves.  In the first story, "Victory Lap," Alison Pope serves as a counter to some of the rather insecure and yet adventuresome male classmates of her.  It is one thing to voice her ambivalence to them, yet another to do it in vivid, sparkling prose in lines such as these:

She felt hopeful that {special one} would hail from far away.  The local boys possessed a certain je ne sais quoi, which, tell the truth, she was not très crazy about, such as:  actually named their own nuts.  She had overheard that!  And aspired to work for CountyPower because the work shirts were awesome and you got them free. (p. 10 e-book)

Here, Alison's pretensions are on full display.  The mixture of high school French with her later use of "ixnay on the local boys" feels like something that someone young, somewhat better educated than her peers, and who wants to escape from her mundane live might voice.  But even more than this, she also presents a hilarious and yet all-too-true portrayal of male teens, with their named junk and modest yet enthusiastic post-school work aspirations.  It is this attention to the little quirks of the characters that makes Saunders' stories a delight to read at the sentence level as well as at the larger narrative level.

There are plots within Saunders' stories, many of them revolving around the characters' desires to find their places in a world that at times seems to be dark and frightening.  It is no accident that many of them are adolescent or young adults, as their mindsets allows for a greater sense of urgency regarding the "important issues" that older adults might find to be quaint or overblown after the nth re-experiencing of these acute mini crises.  Yet Saunders never has a condescending attitude toward these characters and their situations.  He shows their confusion, their heartbreak (such as the scene quoted at the beginning of this review from near the midpoint of "Home"), and their desire to wrest some sort of meaning from life.  At times, this means little, quiet triumphs occur by story's end, such as this one from "Escape from Spiderhead":

From across the woods, as if by common accord, birds left their trees and darted upward.  I joined them, flew among them, they did not recognize me as something apart from them, and I was happy, so happy, because for the first time in years, and forevermore, I had not killed, and never would. (p. 79 e-book)

But not all stories end on such a poignant, optimistic note.  Sometimes, the characters falter and are left searching.  There is a sense of looming disaster, perhaps due to some hitherto hidden character flaw or, as is more often the case here, the selfish action of others have dismayed, if not destroyed, the characters, such as is expression at the end of "Home":

Find some way to bring me back, you fuckers, or you are the sorriest bunch of bastards the world has ever known. (p. 190 e-book)

This may not be García Márquez's eponymous colonel saying "Shit" at the end of No One Writes to the Colonel, but it is close in terms of narrative power.  So much repressed anger and frustration is released in the final scene that this singular sentence encapsulates the entire narrative's power in a short, sharp burst of frustrated anger and depression.  Yet these moments of despair are balanced out elsewhere, such as the titular "Tenth of December," which contains a moment that is so strange, so odd, so surreal out of context that when read in context it cannot help but make most readers smile:

Allen had – Allen had said it was great.  Asked a few questions.  About the manatee.  What did they eat again?  Did he think they could effectively communicate with one another?  What a trial that must have been!  In his condition.  Forty minutes on the manatee?  Including a poem Eber had composed?  A sonnet?  On the manatee? (p. 235 e-book)

Some stories require a big bang, an explosive denouement in order to be memorable.  Saunders' stories here, however, work around those quiet moments where the characters face strange and baffling moments in which they must sink or try to swim.  His deft use of sometimes bizarre imagery and dialogue isn't done to separate the characters and their situations from our own, but instead to make us pay closer attention to what is transpiring.  Combined with plots that are effective in their subtle presentation, Tenth of December is a memorably poignant story collection that may already be of the best to be released in 2013.

New and forthcoming e-book collections/novel that you should consider reading

Sometimes, the end of the year sees the (re)issuing of interesting collections and novels.  Recently, I have received or been offered four e-book collections/novel and although I have to date have completed only one of them, each of these intrigues me enough that I wanted to bring these to your attention, especially if you have e-readers/tablets and don't mind reading e-books (I believe most, if not all of these will see print editions in the near future).  Each of these have either been released since the first of the month or will be released by month's end in a variety of e-formats. 

Nir Yaniv, The Love Machine & Other Contraptions. (Infinity Plus).  Released in late November in both print and e-book editions, Israeli writer Nir Yaniv's debut English-language collection, The Love Machine & Other Contraptions, has been translated by various writers, from Lavie Tidhar to Yaniv himself, into English.  The stories here cover a wide range of ground and as this is the only one of the books that I've read before writing this post, I can safely say that I enjoyed this one quite a bit.  Uncertain if I'll be able to write a formal review before Christmas, but perhaps I'll have more to say by New Year's Eve or maybe early January 2013.

Amos Tutuola, Don't Pay Bad for Bad. (Cheeky Frawg).  Released in early December in a variety of e-formats (Amazon, Wizard's Tower Press), this is a collection of some of the late Nigerian writer Tutuola's shorter fictions.  Will be reading this one later this week, as I've been meaning for ages to read his The Palm-Wine Drunkard and now I have no excuse to put off reading his work.  Review either late this month or in January.

K.J. Bishop, That Book your Mad Ancestor Wrote (self-published by Bishop).  Released so far only on Amazon US and UK, with a print format planned for next year, this is an intriguing collection that came on December 13.  I read and enjoyed Bishop's The Etched City soon after its Prime Books edition was released several years ago, so I am very curious to see how a collection of her short fiction reads.  Hope to have an e-copy shortly, with reading to take place before Christmas and possible review by early January at the latest.

Leena Krohn, Tainaron (Cheeky Frawg).  Scheduled to be released very shortly (before month's end, I believe) at the same places where Don't Pay Bad for Bad is being sold, this is the e-book reprint of Krohn's first short novel to be published in English translation.  I believe that in 2013 some more works by her and other Finnish writers will be released by Cheeky Frawg in an e-book anthology called It Came from the North:  A Finnish Fantasy Sampler and possibly another novel of hers.  I have an e-copy of Tainaron now for review purposes and will be reading it this weekend, likely for review in January if not before then.


Let me know which, if any, of these titles interest you the most and I'll see about bumping up coverage a little bit.

Query regarding 2008 anthologies and story collections

In about a month's time, I'm going to begin writing a series of posts focusing on what I consider to be the best fiction that I've read in 2008 (mostly devoted to books released this year). I know there'll be quite a bit devoted to covering anthologies and short story collections and while I already have a dozen or more in mind for coverage, I can't help but think that I might have overlooked a few. So here's a chance for you, dear reader, to nominate certain anthologies/story collections for me to consider. And to make it extra fun, I won't even tell you which ones I've read and/or own.

So...willing to help a reviewer out, please?

Best of 2007: Anthologies and Story Collections

I made it my goal this year to read more anthologies and short story collections by particular authors. Although I still have a few stories here and there to finish in some of these, I have read enough of the following to justify splitting this into two separate categories, one for anthologies and one for collections by one or two authors. I'll announce my Top 3 picks in each category on Monday in my Best of 2007 writeup.

Anthologies:

Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (eds.), Best American Fantasy

George Mann (ed.), The Solaris Book of New Fantasy

Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss (eds.), Interfictions: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing

John Klima (ed.), Logorrhea

Keith Brooke and Nick Gevers (eds.), Infinity Plus: The Anthology

Kelly Link and Gavin Grant (eds.), The Best of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet

Peter Wild (ed.), The Flash


Story Collections:

Margo Lanagan, Red Spikes

Sarah Monette, The Bone Key

Richard Parks, Worshipping Small Gods

Michael Cisco, Secret Hours

Cat Rambo and Jeff VanderMeer, The Surgeon's Tale and Other Tales

Tim Pratt, Hart & Boot & Other Stories

I have some very tough decisions ahead. Oh, and in the coming days, do expect some reviews of some of those works above that I have yet to review here.