Neil Serven

My reading so far in 2015 has been scattered across the board, as I continue to catch up on New Yorkers and wander in and out of Little Women and, in January, dipped into a couple of long-put-off books by local friends. In between, I’ve been getting to know the selections from One Story.

Toward the end of last year I realized that some of my lit journal subscriptions had lapsed, so I looked around for new ones to try out, and decided I should take a look at this one. Five issues in, I’m really glad I did.

There aren’t many outlets around for long-form fiction, particularly in print, where space limitations make it a challenge. The five stories I have read from One Story show off a range of narrative structures, including:

-First-person present tense that reads like third-person, with asides for expansive ancestral backstory (Issue # 197, “North” by Aria Beth Sloss);

-Exposition and commentary from an untrustworthy first-person narrator (Issue # 201, “All Lateral” by Matt Sumell);

-Second-person history of a woman’s life measured out by her history of boyfriends and lovers (Issue # 198, “An Inventory” by Joan Wickersham);

-A helicoptering third-person-omniscient story of manners set at a party honoring a wealthy South African businessman (Issue # 200, “A Party for the Colonel” by F. T. Kola).

In Sloss’s story, the narrator is the daughter of an explorer with ambitions to reach the North Pole via hot-air balloon; she tells a story she was not around to witness, because she was in utero during the events. We learn in the first line that the voyage toward which the story builds up ended in tragedy:

My father made it as far as Little Iceland. That was the name of the iceberg they found his notebook frozen into, interred like a fossil.

So what we get is a tale regaled in second-hand fashion, with its ending spilled from the start, but that deftly wields the present tense to create intimate scenes of domestic tension:

My mother sits across the table from him, smoothing the napkin across her knees. She pretends not to notice how quickly he eats, moving his fork mechanically back and forth until his plate is clean. When dinner is done, he gets up immediately and goes to the little desk by the window and sits down. Opens his notebook to a new page.

Supplies needed for the construction of a balloon, he writes.

(I love the elision of the subject in the final line of the first paragraph. It is typical of the pacing here, which is one of the story’s strengths.)

Sumell’s story is right up my alley, its narrative pushed forward by a voice out to cause damage with a number of acidic lines:

He lit a cigarette. “Hate to lose you,” he said, exhaling smoke out of only one nostril. “Everybody likes your dog.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Let me know when you get back and I’ll see what I can do.”

“I appreciate that too,” I said.

It should have ended there but didn’t, because Tommy spent the next few minutes telling me about a chili cook-off he went to before we finally shook hands and I rushed off to pack the truck with whatever and the dog bed and headed north.

Like Jim Gavin’s Costello, Sumell’s factotum narrator is resigned to a life passing him by and has his character informed by wry observations of others. He gets off on being unapproachable and unapologetic:

But then she asked what I did for work, and I told her.

“I pump fuel at the marina fuel dock for eight dollars an hour, but mostly I read magazines and eat sandwiches, or watch my dog laze in the sun and lick pelican shit off the cement.”

The look changed, got scrunchier.

We are eventually clued in that the narrator is not immune to emotional challenge—there is something he does care about and it is almost taken away from him.

Wichersham’s story is about the decisions of youth, tinged with reflective wisdom and not a small amount of ruefulness. Which means that while the second-person ostensibly puts the reader in the position of the decision-maker, the story reads more as a series of received actions, in the manner of a This Is Your Life-style reminiscence:

By now you had begun to gaze at Boy 18, who was in your English class in the spring of junior year. You liked his quiet, sprightly, manly dignity. He had a way in class of reading poetry aloud that conferred on each poem the tone it required. “Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving”—you don’t remember anymore who wrote the poem, but you can still summon up the mournful bell-toll of his voice reading it. He had delicate yellow hair, pale blue eyes; every day he wore a tweed sport coat and a white shirt, while the other boys were all dressing like lumberjacks and stevedores. He had an air of sadness, you thought, but it was somehow a pragmatic sadness, as if he were saying, “Yes, life is pointless, but then why not just get on with it?”

Strangely, the one story out of these five that I didn’t care for was by the far-best-known author, Ann Beattie (# 199, “And Then Someone Came From So Very Far Away”). It is about small-town New Englanders of late middle age, and pie recipes and farmers’ markets and the antagonisms that arise when the narrator’s sister visits from Pennsylvania. Although the story touches upon heavier themes such as drug addiction, I feel that its heft is supplied by too many internal thoughts and suppressed slights:

“When did chicken and fish become ‘protein’?” Prue said. “At the same time hair conditioner and gels became ‘product’?”

Her sister could be amusing. Her complaints were often bemused observations. What did Prue complain about, really? Prue, in spite of her childhood tendency to just give up difficult things if she didn’t see the end in sight, was funnier and a better observer than Nona. It had always been true.

October’s reading was light due to the baseball playoffs, so I’m bundling it with November.

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, Elizabeth Smart. I can’t remember why I bought this book—it may have been the title, which promised some kind of magic urban realism (you’ve noticed, I have a fondness for books about women living in the city). And what flickers of information we get toward the plot does provide that. But since this is prose poetry, a term that I had never really considered until I gave this book a try, the effort of forwardness is meant to be secondary to image and language, even though there is an inchoate plot based on the author’s life (Smart’s affair with the poet George Barker, with whom she bore four children).  Smart is more interested in taking us down routes where the lights are so bright they distract us from where we are going, but I found it hard to enjoy the journey without some clue as to where I was being taken. There was a point where I gave up and just imagined I was closing my eyes in my balcony seat, listening to a symphony.

Green Mountains Review, Vol. 26,  No. 1. Picked this up at the Brattleboro Literary Festival; I had been meaning to check out an issue, and this one happened to include a number of familiar names. There is a special feature on Tony Hoagland, presenting 14 new poems and critical appreciations by Mark Halliday and Tony Hart.

The square page dimensions of GMR are well suited for flash fiction, and there are good selections here by Sean Lovelace and Lou Beach (who also designed the cover and an eight-page selection of Surrealist artwork). Among the longer stories, the two I particularly liked were “A Kind of Extinction” by Jaimee Wriston Colbert and “Breakup Blog” by Lee Ann Roripaugh.

Colbert’s story is about the preteen daughter of Tea Party activists (aptly named Fortune Hopewell), who is also a petty thief (of all things aquamarine, her favorite color). She considers herself a neighborhood spy and is somewhat enchanted by her beatnik neighbor and her science teacher, who each present opportunities for thought challenging to the family doctrine. She has a job taking care of her convalescent grandmother. Her eldest sister was killed in a motor-scooter accident; her other sister has taken to meth addiction, and her parents’ activism seems born less out of reflexive anger to these developments than a wish to deny the necessity of personal interrelationship in their healing (they refuse casseroles from the neighbors). Colbert is great at filtering the buzz through Fortune’s limited third-person POV:

Fortune’s Dad calls him the Beatnik on the Hill and Mum says, For crying out loud, there’s no more beatniks, you think it’s the fifties? Then Dad points out that he looks like a beatnik, with those billowy white pants and his pointed beard, and he wears jewelry, Dad says. Plus he’s a jazz player, which as far as Dad is concerned is no kind of music and certainly no kind of work. Their property abuts the Beatnik’s only his goes up the hill and theirs is flat downhill, which means the Beatnik gets the view of the Susquehanna River and the hills beyond while the Hopewell house is hunkered in the trees where not even enough sunlight beams in to melt the ice from their driveway in the winter.

Lee Ann Roripaugh’s “Breakup Blog” follows a trend I’ve been seeing lately of second-person present-tense narratives, with the ‘you’ not as an agent so much as a kind of absorptive reactor. The ‘you’ in this case is the subject of a slander perpetrated by an ex (here called The Plagiarist) in her electronic journal:

You have to hand it to the Plagiarist. Despite the icky title, it’s a pretty snappy format. First the plagiarist talks a lot about her feelings with both hair-shirt verve and martyred solipsism … And then—either the best or the worst part, depending on how you want to look at it—the post concludes with a zippy little featurette called Reasons to Get Over Her, in which the Plagiarist catalogues one new thing each day that’s wrong with you … You need to stop reading The Plagiarist’s blog. Need. To. Stop. You know this. Your friends agree. So does your therapist. But it’s like looking into the distorted mirror of the funhouse effect on your MacBook’s Photo Booth: fascinating/horrifying/ fascinating/horrifying.

Slice #13, Fall ‘13/Winter ’14. Every issue of Slice has a theme, and this issue’s theme is “The Unknown.” I probably would have taken this to mean “unknown” in an ostensible, Time Life Mysteries of the variety, and its attendant themes: outer space, the supernatural, death and the afterlife. Rather, many of the stories here are about people embarking on new stages of their lives with uncertainty: new motherhood, a childhood spent in Poland. It feels like somewhat of a safe interpretation, especially given the publisher’s note at the beginning:

New writers are often urged to write what they know. The suggestion, of course, is that you shouldn’t start with writing about the foibles of 18^th-century French aristocracy if you grew up on a farm in North Dakota. This is good advice, though if we never wrote anything but what we knew for sure, we’d be writing nothing but blogs about what we had for dinner.

Among the fiction, Helen Phillips’ “The Wedding Stairs” plays with a fun premise, the forbidden access to the downstairs room where caterers at a wedding reception carry out their operations.  My favorite story was Scott Lambridis’ “Laurent,” about a prostitute and her client-cum-lover, using their fascination with a local serial killer of prostitutes to cover up their bleaker terror at their uncertain futures. The prose sings with urban shoe scrapes and hints at the characters’ evident pasts:

“Look at them,” said J. She sipped the cheap coffee, watching one of the girls, a young one with a clip in her hair. “How cliché, a whore and a policeman in love. They’re all talking about how sweet her relationship is, they might even have the child, he’s going to leave his wife.” The others put their arms around the girl, drew her into their cocoon of bodies until she disappeared. She watched the men now—the ones she knew, the ones she didn’t, reading newspapers of their own. “Do you think that could be him? Do you think he reads about himself?” she asked, pointing to a man with legs folded and only a green hat visible above his newspaper.

“Look at that headline, blaring loud as day,” said M. (Laurent had strangled another on the footbridge between the four theatres of the Flats.) When the man snapped his newspaper down, J. folded into M.’s armpit.

“We have to leave,” she said. M. laughed.

There are some silver-tuna interviews as well, with Rick Moody, Francine Prose, and Penguin editor Allison Lorentzen, among others.

Varieties of Exile, Mavis Gallant. Many of the stories in this collection are set in Montreal, where Gallant was born, though she lived most of her life in Paris. Montreal is one of my favorite destination cities, and at four and a half hours from where I live, one of the most accessible to me. Its bilingualism and independence from the rest of North America, its proto-European streak (on one trip they had a film festival with Godard movies projected, without subtitles, on the side of a warehouse), the fact that everyone there is somehow young and beautiful and tireless, give it a feeling of exoticness at a reasonable price.

The stories in Varieties of Exile were selected by the American novelist Russell Banks, who, due to his part-Canadian heritage, admits of “an abiding affection if not an outright preference for the North American stories, if only because Gallant has attended there to lives that are familiar and matter greatly to me and rarely make it into literature.” Interestingly, Gallant writes of the city as though expecting an American audience, or at least, an audience that would not be very familiar with Montreal and its outsider identity. We are reminded when conversations shift between French and English, that hockey players are considered celebrities, and that, in one particular instance, Quebec is unique in that its blue laws allow grocers to sell beer.

Gallant often wrote multiple stories about the same characters at different stages of their lives, and Banks has taken care to group several of them together. I was most drawn to the stories of Madame Carette and her daughters, intelligent Berthe and flighty, naïve Marie. Berthe is written off early as a spinster, and in “A Chosen Husband,” the family anxiously awaits a marriage proposal for Marie by an awkward visitor:

His French was slow and muffled, as though strained through wool. He used English words, or French words in an English way. Mme. Carette lifted her shoulders and parted her clasped hands as if to say, “Never mind, English is better than Greek.” At least, they could be certain that the Driscolls were Catholic.

…

Of course he was at a loss, astray in an armchair, with the Carettes watching like friendly judges. When he reached for another chocolate, they looked to see if his nails were clean. When he crossed his legs, they examined his socks. They were fixing their first impression of the stranger who might take Marie away, give her a modern kitchen, children to bring up, a muskrat coat, a charge account at Dupuis Frères department store, a holiday in Maine. Louis continued to examine his bright Driscoll hair, the small nose along which his glasses slid. Holding the glasses in place with a finger, he answered Mme. Carette: his father was a dental surgeon, with a degree from Pennsylvania. It was the only degree worth mentioning. Before settling into a dentist’s chair the patient should always read the writing on the wall.

Gallant’s writing is alive with subtlety while showing off its cosmopolitan awareness, with dialogue that dresses characters in layers of complexity and skepticism. Varieties of Exile is one of three collections of Gallant’s stories brought back into print by NYRB Classics.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky. Second read, in anticipation of the film, currently sitting in our TiVo queue. The first time I read it was just after it was published, in 1999, and without all the references to mix tapes, the apparent lack of Internet (it’s set in the early nineties), photofinishing shops, and gay characters preferring to remain closeted, it would be hard to believe the book is fourteen years old. But teenagers are still reading it, the book has been banned from not a few high schools, and now it’s a film, directed by the author.

Does it read differently the second time around? As an older reader, I think I am more accepting of the blurriness of message; that Chbosky is willing to give his hero a fair chance from the start. Charlie is a freshman who comes under the wings of two very accepting seniors, a brother and a sister who appreciate his intelligence, sensitivity, and yearnings, as well as an English teacher who cultivates his writerly potential with extra reading assignments. He comes with a lot of demons: a close friend recently deceased, a sister suffering abuse at the hands of her boyfriend, an aunt with a troubled past, and some hints at mental illness. These are revealed in a series of letters to an unknown friend that is supposed to be us, but that, due to their searching internality, read more as diary entries. His perceived isolation tends to make him magnify these demons.

Which is to say that for a wallflower, Charlie isn’t exactly getting trounced. Even from the beginning, things seem to progress for him on a social level that probably would have made the high-school me envious. I was seven years out of high school when I first read Perks, with a lot of lingering resentment, and I suspect I wanted the book then to be something it wasn’t, perhaps be a little more defeatist and angry. The pressure put on the book to be the MTV Generation’s answer to The Catcher in the Rye (MTV Books is the imprint that published Perks) might have inflamed that. Chbosky resisted those temptations, and the result is a nuanced book with lasting heart.