Neil Serven

Big Fiction #4, Summer/Fall 2013. This issue includes the winner of the Knickerbocker Prize, “Sandy and Wayne” by Steve Yates, and the first runner-up, “Half-Boy” by Sandra Gail Lambert. The winners were chosen by Lauren Groff.

Both stories are alive in their directness of place and selective dialogue. The title characters in “Sandy and Wayne” are, respectively, the chief highway inspector and lead foreman on a road construction project in Arkansas. Each character has reason to put up a veneer: Wayne, defense of his men and project; Sandy, digging in to maintain her authority in a workplace dominated by men. There is a Midwestern honesty in their conversations as they shift from posturing to relaxed flirting to fear of an uncertain future as the job winds up.

“Half-Boy” resides in buggy and swampy Florida, where people keep snakes as circus pets and the legless protagonist, a female posing as a male in hopes of finding work, needs to take extra care not to get eaten by alligators.

The Fun Stuff, James Wood. Wishlisted it and received it as a Christmas present last year, which turned out to make little sense from an economic standpoint, since Wood is slinging his hash for the New Yorker now and many of the essays here I had already read in that magazine. (It seems an unfair discount to call them reviews.) But it was good to read them again. Wood is not in the business of simply evaluating authorial talent; rather, he is trying to chip away at the ice for some kind of revelation about what makes literature sublime, whether it be an underbubbling lyricism in word choice or reminiscent allusion to a past master.

It doesn’t hurt that Wood’s tastes seem to align too well with my own—he finds “a cunning combination of the quiet and the loud” in W. G. Sebald, “pungent realities” opposing “playful fictionalizing” in Aleksandr Hemon, and “shallowness” in Paul Auster (I hated The New York Trilogy). There is less of a cohesiveness here than in The Irresponsible Self, which was subtitled On Laughter and the Novel and set out, in twenty-three essays, to analyze and appreciate comic narrative and its methods: unreliable narrators, moral ambiguousness, the burnout of hysterical realism. The Fun Stuff seems more of an arbitrary collection released to please non-New Yorker subscribers perhaps looking for more of Wood’s writing after How Fiction Works. Either his thorough note-taking or incredible memory for phrase and image allows him to connect dots across generations and contextualize authorial choices apparently intended as homages (conscious or not); to take one example, Wood makes note of Hemon’s use of “blood-red fezzes,” in his story “The Accordion,” which happens to echo the same exact phrase used by Joseph Roth in his novel The Radetzky March (1932). That even a well-read critic could even think to make this association is bewildering, and might make a reader believe he is showing off his intellect, but these kinds of observations also lend the authors and their works under review a level of awareness as attempts of art, given their due place on the timeline as participants in the conversation.

After Claude, Iris Owens. An Advance Reader’s Copy that I won from NYRB Classics as part of a prize package. Lisa Zeidner, in The American Scholar, calls Harriet, the narrator of After Claude, “so unreliable she makes Humbert Humbert look like Thurgood Marshall.” Harriet tells us she has just left the boyfriend whose name is in the title, the “French rat,” though we quickly learn that he, a documentarian for French television, was the one who dumped her, the final straw being her negative reaction to a film they watched together about the crucifixion of Jesus. (“Some skinny guy schlepping a hunk of wood that weighs a ton up a steep hill for the express purpose of getting nailed to it, that was beautiful?” she tells him.) Harriet’s inability to handle any sliver of resistance leads to every stimulus being judged in absolute extremes: a cab driver speeds “as if he were rushing plasma to a beheading”; the streets are filled with “drunken bums hanging around, competing for nickels with hippies in hairshirts, rehearsing the plague”; an ice cube tray is “welded into the freezer like King Arthur’s sword.”

Meanwhile, Harriet uses all of her wit to fight her inevitable eviction from the apartment; having burned bridges with her two best friends (again, over blown-out-of-proportion annoyances), she has nowhere to go. The last third of the book takes a rather bizarre turn as Harriet, once installed by Claude in the Chelsea Hotel, immediately tries out a new target for her dependency, a counterpart more whacked that she: her Chelsea neighbor, Roger, who tries to persuade her to join his harem. Harriet’s verbal defenses lose their acuity against Roger’s conniving charisma, to which she partly succumbs by pleasuring herself in front of him. Such a sinister twist doesn’t match up with the promising energy of the narrative that brought us there. By the end, I wanted Claude back.

Domestic Apparition, Meg Tuite. A novella in stories, Domestic Apparition is the angst-filled tale of Michelle, an impressionable girl growing up amid characters she is wary not to endow with her full trust but that still comprise the targets of her fascination. Older sister Stephanie is an open lesbian who clashes with her conservative father; brother Nathan is a savant who argues with nuns in Catholic school about the infallibility of popes. A longer story, “Brenda Stantonopolis,” profiles a troublemaking friend who implicates Michelle in her misdeeds. The narrative is spiked with tossed-out revelations meant to surprise, but that on occasion get lost amid the other details, as though narrator Michelle herself is not aware of their weight:

[Nathan] was working on composing an opera about fish when he was around ten. He sat at the piano for weeks hitting random notes and putting little fishtails up and down his music sheets. It was called, “Dance of the Rainbow Trout,” and when the three sisters and a neighbor performed it in our basement it took over an hour to get through. My parents got drunk on martinis.

…

Adel had always been fragile. She threw herself in front of a truck once when we were around thirteen because a new girl from school and I had gone to basketball practice without her.

Although there are times when the book seems trapped in its own tunnel of memory, lacking the perspicacity one might expect of an adult reflecting back on her past, we do see Michelle’s character accumulate layers of complexity that make sense as products of her relationships documented in the earlier stories.  By the time she is an adult installed in a hotel service job, Michelle is wise enough to see through her supervisor’s proud language and unearned sense of authority.

Kino, Jürgen Fauth. An AWP purchase from the Atticus Books table. The German-born Fauth is a film critic for About.com (as well as the founder of Fictionaut), and Kino adeptly demonstrates the author’s literacy on the subjects of film and Germany history in the 20^th century by way of its themes of memory and rewritten pasts.

The novel has the tightly plotted framework of a mystery, and doesn’t waste time in laying out the important points. A newly married woman, Mina Koblitz, arrives at her New York apartment to discover that someone has left a print of Tulpendiebe (The Tulip Thief), a silent film directed by her grandfather Klaus (nicknamed Kino) and long thought to have been destroyed by the Nazis along with his other films. While her husband Sam is hospitalized with a case of dengue fever, Mina is encouraged by a local film scholar to travel to Berlin, then to Los Angeles, to piece together the fates of the remaining films and the story behind their disappearance. Kino’s journal, written in the last years of his life, turns up, and at one point Fauth alternates excerpts from the journal with current-day narrative to create a complex weave of suppression and denial amongst Kino’s surviving family, particularly his son (Mina’s father Detlef) and widow (Mina’s grandmother, the salty, distrustful, and somehow remarkable agile (even after waking up from a coma) 92-year-old Penny). The overlap between the flashbacks to the Third Reich and the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq is not a coincidence.

The book employs an ample amount of German phraseology, all covered in a glossary at the back, yet some of which is explained in concept within the text even though it doesn’t need to be (e.g.,  Schadenfreude). I sort of wish the author had resisted this temptation; I think leaving these phrases unglossed within the text would have lent the narrative more authenticity. Similarly, some of the paragraphs seem to linger a beat or two too long in their internal reveals:

“Oh, your father?  Detlef the Dullard? That’s what Klaus and I called him, did you know that? Not when he was around, of course. Jesus, he was a boring child!”

Mina looked down at the rug, at a gob of spit that had not yet been absorbed. Her father was not whom she’d come  to talk about, and the mention of him made her defensive. She wanted to protect her idea of Kino. A megalomaniac, that was fine. But maybe she didn’t want to hear the rest, after all.

I admit not having read any of Tom Clancy’s books, not even The Hunt for Red October.

But his best achievement might have been to get otherwise stolid, nonverbal men to enjoy reading, and that is a pretty great thing. His death, announced today, comes as somewhat of a shock given his relatively young age (66) and voluminous output up until the end. He has a new title, Command Authority, due out December 3.

Banned Books Week ends tomorrow, and this year I didn’t celebrate by reading Tropic of Cancer or Lolita like I’ve done in the past, only because my nightstand stack is already too high and I didn’t feel like switching gears.

Other than sparking an important annual discussion about censorship and free expression, and giving booksellers a marketing hook for their backlists, what does a week celebrating banned books accomplish now? Most of the time, people who object to a book nowadays know they aren’t going to see it banned. Most objectors only think that going public with their disgust is somehow a revolutionary act that will stand even with that performed by the person who wrote the book. All that does is point out how little the objectors know about how revolution works.

People want to make news and be heard. This is why we still keep hearing about school boards removing books from school libraries because they contain elements so ubiquitous in other media: sex scenes, witchcraft, heresy, or, God forbid, people comfortable in gay relationships. Interest in the book rises and kids who never planned to read it to begin with go scope it out on Amazon. Then the objector gets mocked, and in some cases, such as this week in North Carolina, the board relents and its members cover their asses after being embarrassed. But people still want to make news and be heard, so the cycle continues year after year.

There is an echo of Internet spoilage here. The objector is analogous to the commenter who thinks his or her dashed-off trolling somehow leverages off the more carefully composed work they are disparaging. It speaks to a gross distrust of readers young and old not to make their own fair critical assessments, but then the objectors are never forced to own to that. Free speech only works when it polices itself. It is a vital tool for knowing who the assholes are in this world.

Two weeks in and I’m liking the new design. I like the selective way it was imparted, only in those sections that needed a little breaking up. The Table of Contents had always bugged me with its floating italic names, and while some of the initial web reaction seems to take umbrage with the inclusion of more photography in the About Town section, I think it gives a browser something new and interesting to look at that wasn’t there before. The written descriptions of the artists featured in the galleries around the city only told you so much.

I think the change I like the most is the graphical representation of the title of the short fiction, now integrated with the photographic image on the facing page. It gives the art department a chance to have a little fun, and would seem to solve the problem of awkwardly longish or punctuated titles that didn’t take well to the  magazine’s classic house font (e.g., “The Semplica-Girl Diaries”).

As New York Magazine wryly notes, “Apparently the diaeresis lives on, so readers will be able to comprehend words like “coöperate” and “reëlect” without turning to Google.” I assume the same fate awaits the acute accent in “début” and “élitist.”

Tonight’s Final Jeopardy!:

Classic Films
The first scene of this movie was shot on the first day of filming, October 2, 1960 at 5 A.M. at 727 5th Avenue at 57th Street in New York City.

A: What is Breakfast at Tiffany’s?

I own the film on DVD, and perhaps the most remarkable thing about the scene is how empty the streets are when the taxi carrying Holly Golightly pulls up. I haven’t checked my copy, but I believe there’s an interview with Blake Edwards in the extras in which he says that the lack of traffic was an uncanny stroke of luck. Edwards’ widow Julie Andrews confirmed as much at a celebration of the film’s 50^th anniversary in 2011:

She said that in filming Tiffanys, [sic] Edwards said he had an amazing stroke of luck. He shot the iconic opening sequence of Hepburn staring in the window of the legendary jewelry store shortly after dawn in the hopes of getting a key scene without any traffic- a feat that would have been impossible even in 1961. Nevertheless, the minute the cameras started rolling the traffic disappeared for a couple of crucial minutes, allowing him to get the shot he needed.

I am fond of both the book and film, though they don’t belong in the same conversation. Turning Capote’s unnamed first-person narrator (we only know him as “Fred” because he reminds Holly of her deceased brother) into George Peppard’s dashing leading man, with the made-up character name Paul Varjak, shifts the focus from dreamy writerly obsession to a more standard formula of man’s pursuit of woman and his dismay at her complicated past.

She kept her promise to Mr. Yunioshi; or I assume she did not ring his bell again, for in the next days she started ringing mine, sometimes at two in the morning, three and four: she had no qualms at what hour she got me out of bed to push the buzzer that released the downstairs door. As I had few friends, and none who would come around so late, I always knew that it was her. But on the first occasions of its happening, I went to my door, half-expecting bad news, a telegram; and Miss Golightly would call up: “Sorry, darling—I forgot my key.”

Though I like the gag of Huckleberry Hound getting a sort-of cameo in the mask shoplifting scene, coyly alluding back to the theme song’s lyric.

At Farrar Strauss Giroux’s Work in Progress blog (via Matt Bell), author Nelly Reifler (Elect H. Mouse State Judge) on her disdain for neat endings:

We writers have the urge to wrap up our stories, to provide our characters, ourselves and our readers with a sense of completion. For a while I had trouble ending my stories because I thought that I needed to somehow contain or recap everything that had unfolded in the preceding pages; I thought an ending had to be the end. It was befuddling for me. I hoped that in my fiction I was talking about the awkward, ineffable, eerie, and unresolvable aspects of life, and coming to a conclusion felt contradictory to what I understood as fiction’s purpose. It felt like lying.

To my mind, a story’s ending ought to acknowledge the ever-moving quality of life; that is, I want it to engage change rather than finality. Your final word and the void following it on the page are as close as you’ll get to conclusion. The best endings to stories have a sense of hovering in space and time; even a dark ending can be uplifting, exhilarating, as long as it seems to hover in space and time — because then it reflects life to us as it is: unresolved, eternally unresolvable.

One of the lessons I took away from the Barrelhouse workshop is that a story should be a journey—it should take the protagonist (and reader) to a situation different from where they started. There needs to be something important at stake for this to happen—you can’t just have a character quit a job or end a relationship when they can then just as easily go back to the starting space in either circumstance. But it is also naïve to think that there will not be ramifications to the decisions made during the course of the story after the story has ended. It is still a challenge I face as I confront my parking lot problem in my own writing.

Booth #5. I already wrote about my two favorite stories from this issue, Matthew Baker’s “Tête-á-Tête” and Andrew Hudgins’ “Raymond Snow,” here. “Raymond Snow” is a part of a series called “Winesburg, Indiana,” that also includes stories by Michael Martone, Claire Vaye Watkins, Lee Marvin, and Porter Shreve. There is also an enlightening series of mini-essays called “How I Write” by Chris Offutt, Kim Addonizio, Pam Houston, Josh Neufeld, Katharine Rauk, and Matt Bell, as well as interviews with Chuck Klosterman and Charles Simic. Most importantly, the front and back covers feature an awesome painting, by Kevin Cyr, of a graffitied ‘80s-era GMC Vandura, by far the best cover I have seen on a literary journal, ever.

Fierce Attachments, Vivian Gornick. I came very close to throwing this book away before I read it, and I probably still will. But it’s not a bad book. It sat in a box of books I meant to give away for a long time (I received it as a giveaway long ago at my old bookstore job), and in that time it got mangled and twisted, but it seemed like a straightforward read, and after enjoying Renata Adler’s Speedboat, I guess I’m on kind of a kick for books about women making their livings as journalists in New York City.

Fierce Attachments is a memoir about Gornick’s growing up in Bronx tenements with her mercurial mother, with whom she has a challenging but loving relationship. There is also an unstable but influential neighbor who takes to a life of prostitution after her husband is killed at war. The second half of the book chronicles Gornick’s relationships with three different men in her twenties and thirties. It is admirable that the male characters in the book don’t provide its fulcrum, but it is strange how they seem to appear with some resistance on the part of the author—we don’t even realize that Gornick’s father has been living with the family until he dies, her brother is a nonentity, and we don’t meet her first husband until they are getting married in her mother’s living room. The tension arises as the teenage Gornick matures into an educated, well-spoken independent adult woman opposite a mother and neighbor who each fell into roles as young widows that, in disparate ways, dictated their later paths.

I am chronically suspicious of memoir, particularly as writers like David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs have made careers out of managing storehouses of impossibly acute micro-memories, all wax-sealed with the bonus points of having (supposedly) legitimately happened. And though I didn’t find this out until after I finished the book, Gornick apparently received criticism after some of the content of Fierce Attachments was revealed to be less than true:

Gornick admitted she had “composed” some of the walks and conversations with her mother in the memoir, and had also invented a scene that involved a street person and her mother. She said this matter-of-factly, and said she considered memoir to be in the genre of “personal narrative,” not journalism.

I can’t say this surprises me, and not because the conversations felt “staged,” but they were so impossibly specific in their line-by-line detail, and in their swift, convenient narrative propulsion. I cannot remember much about the conversations I had yesterday, though I suspect they involved a lot of roundabout talking, tacit nods, and irrelevant digressions. Which is why when I read an author’s remembered take on something from the past, whether recent or long ago, I automatically have to think some adjustment for the reader has taken place. It has to be, or else every other writer in the world is leading a much richer and more interesting life, one more worthy of acute observation, than I am.

One More Year, Sana Krasikov. A blurb on the back of One More Year calls Krasikov “as good as Junot Diaz and Jhumpa Lahiri were at this stage of their careers,” and the obvious tie to those two writers manifests itself in the mixed-American immigrant experience, with most characters originating from the Ukraine (where Krasikov was born) or Soviet Georgia (where she grew up) and now making new urban identities for themselves in the United States. There are the same imperfectly rounded speech patterns; there is the same incongruity of characters that arrive at each other through bent circuits—relationships of necessity and abuse and their own rules. People marry for green cards; mistresses meet the wives whose marriages they are wrecking. Krasikov has an ear for lyrical, non-interfering prose and gentle metaphor, making this a fluid read.

The Furies, Janet Hobhouse. I read most of this book while sitting in an inflatable rafting tube off Hero Island in Lake Champlain, and it is somewhat miraculous, in more than one respect, that the book didn’t end up at the bottom of the lake. It is another memoir , this one disguised thinly as a novel, about a woman growing up in New York to become a writer (cf. Adler, Gornick; I swear I am not doing this on purpose), though it also takes place in England (the protagonist attends Oxford) and focuses primarily on her relationship with her mother. It was left unfinished when Hobhouse died of ovarian cancer in 1991 at the age of 42.

The title led me, perhaps unfairly, to expect a narrative guided by cosmic mystery. Helen’s childhood is spent trying to please and keep up with her loving but often delirious mother, whose wish to be her daughter’s everything is foreshadowed by Hobhouse with fit apprehension:

“All at once she’s there, opening the taxi door, which hits the sun so light smites like a hero’s wound on the windowpane and on her, sunlight and shining blackness breaking into the swaying greenery as she gets out and crouches and opens her arms. I walk and then run, colliding with her and taking in the feel of her cool cheeks and warm dress, of her glossy dark hair, her mouth and neck, warm and damp and scented faintly with Blue Grass. And she, in her ritual of repossession, removes from me this warm May day my beret, my sweater, my bloomers (“Why are you so bundled up?”), my shoes and socks if she could. But she stops there and holds my clothes in one hand and me in the other as we get back in the taxi together. She smells the top of my head like a mother cat, brushes my hair out with her fingers, tousles me, unpins me, unbuttons me as far as she can and then, only then, she  says, “Where shall we go?”

Helen’s family is not rich, but her education is endowed, and she struggles to explain herself to the families of her wealthy friends from boarding school. Later, Helen’s adolescence is shaped by tacit complicity with an artist grandmother and clashes with a father in London who expects her to live “Britishly” when she comes to live with him. As an adult, she pursues relationships with men that feel like they are there to fill holes, including an affair with a writer in her building whom we know to be Philip Roth. (“I admired the sparseness of his living arrangements, the just so and no more of his furnishings, the blandness of what he had on his walls.”) Apropos of nothing, guess which writer has a long quote on the back of the book.

The ending mudslides beyond the grasp of cosmic power into unconscionable misery: an ill mother who, feeling herself a burden to her daughter and others, commits suicide; a house that gets mysteriously torched; and a fatal cancer diagnosis. Hobhouse, fortunately, seeks out comfort in domestic metaphor: at the boarding school she is frightened of “being left in a puppyhood of confusions”; adolescence “set[s] up inside me a disturbed housekeeping, not quite upheaving the works”;  the hospital is “a place that would take you out of your garden-party clothes, hide your lipstick and turn you into gray, rumpled bedding.”

Aside from an introduction by Daphne Merkin for the NYRB Classics edition, there is a 34-page prologue by Hobhouse that details her (Helen’s) family history dating back to her great-great-grandfather. By this and other decisions of curious attention, we are reminded that The Furies is Hobhouse’s attempt to tell her story with the sense of completeness and urgency that is to be pressed out of one’s final words.

Red Weather, Pauls Toutonghi. Red Weather continues the theme of immigrant identity in America, and could easily be taught in a course alongside One More Year, though Toutonghi’s book has more comic indulgences. The narrator, Yuri Balodis, is the 16-year-old son of Latvian immigrants settled in Milwaukee in 1989. The Berlin Wall is falling. Yuri’s father, an overnight janitor at a car dealership, has become a true believer in American capitalist democracy, so when Yuri falls in love with an intelligent girl peddling The Socialist Worker outside of Milwaukee’s remaining factories, his heart is easily persuaded to forsake all that Rudolfi has proselytized about the American dream.

The book is backed up by some comprehensive research. Toutonghi gives us an informed lesson the history and geography of Milwaukee. I also like that the book isn’t afraid to name brands—we get talk about the corporate histories of local companies like Pabst and Tropic Banana. But at times the first-person narration is too intelligent for even precocious Yuri, and again, the dialogue from the non-native English speakers trickily invokes a lot of the roundabout phrasings expected of someone who has only recently mastered English.

A good amount of muscle hangs on the skeleton of immediate plot, which hinges on an impulsive and irresponsible decision that Yuri makes partly to impress Hannah. The resolution is only delayed when relatives from Latvia come to visit. But Yuri finds maturity (and comes to accept complexity in his beliefs) though his developing bond with them, particularly his cousin Eriks, an aspiring rock musician who relays the cruel realities of collectivism in his home country.

While I was out of town, safely removed from the noxious gases of the Internet, I learned secondhand of the passing of Seamus Heaney.

I came to his work via a course on New Critical Theory at Merrimack. I would like to think it says more about Heaney’s power of image than it does any of my teenage sensibilities that the poem of his I remember best is the one about the drowning cats, the ‘scraggy wee shits.’

Matt Bell ends his tenure as editor of The Collagist with an exclamation point of an issue as Gabriel Blackwell and Matthew Olzmann are set to take over as co-editors-in-chief.

For the Fiction section Bell invited past contributors to the magazine to submit new work, and so Issue Forty-Nine contains stories by Brian Evenson, Tina May Hall, Robert Kloss, Sarah Norek, Amanda Goldblatt, Brian Kubarycz, Evelyn Hampton, David Hollander, Amber Sparks, Robert Lopez, Kate Petersen, Jonathan Callahan, and Kate Wyer, as well as the usual rich selection of poetry, nonfiction, novel excepts, and book reviews.

I have always liked The Collagist for getting right what many electronic lit journals do not: the value of selection. It has a clean design that segregates out each month a handful of stories, poems, reviews and essays that are chosen not just for their merit but for how they fit with each other. The issue then becomes a product of its own, as opposed to a continuing aggregate that isn’t much different from a blog.

Three stories I’ve got bookmarked from The Collagist are Tessa Mellas’ “Dye Job,” from Issue Forty-Four; Sarah Malone’s “Bridal Discount,” from Issue Thirty-Six; and Tara Laskowski’s “The Etiquette of Arson,” from Issue Thirty-Three.

American Short Fiction has posted the winner and finalists for its Camera-Flash Fiction Contest.

People who stopped by the ASF table at AWP Boston were given their choice of one of eight vintage photographs on which to base a piece of flash fiction. The winning story is “After Taking on the Milk Challenge the Earth Bear Learns Something About the Nature of Human Experience” by Caleb Curtiss:

This is what cattle looks like before it becomes a carcass, his father, who’d just finished using what looked like a machete to peel primal cuts of beef from the bone and tendon that held them, said. It was the Earth Bear’s duty to sort what was left of the animal into three metal cans labeled Edible, Inedible, and Bones. These buckets and their contents were what he thought about as he sat watching cowboy after cowboy being thrown to the ground like plaid handkerchiefs.

The other finalists are Lauren Becker, Joanna Kenyon, Kevin Fink, Amy Butcher, and Shawn Huelle.

I selected number 8, the only color photo in the bunch, with the people doing the jigsaw puzzle on the coffee table, because it reminded me of photos from when my mother was young and raised my older brother as a toddler, but then I never got around to writing my story because I left the photo at the bottom of my tote bag, amongst the beer coozies and promotional cards, and forgot about it. Maybe I’ll still give it a whirl. I’m a little disappointed that one didn’t prompt any of the finalists, though it is interesting that the same photo was used for three of the six featured stories.