Neil Serven

This is not a complete list by any stretch, but I’ve fallen well behind. There were re-reads in the mix, too—Frederick Busch’s Sometimes I Live in the Country, and W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants, and Michael Tisserand’s biography of George Herriman, which might need its own post. 

American Salvage, Bonnie Jo Campbell

This collection was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2009, having received much acclaim for its depiction of an under-represented Middle America—small-town folks of limited means struggling to make do. Knowing this, it’s somewhat of a challenge not to regard the characters as though they are creatures in a cage. If the book had been published now, they would certainly be compared to Trump voters—there is the right combination of frustration with themselves and suspicion of anyone who might be in a position to offer a solution.

The title, of course, alludes to more than the salvaging of machine parts or the useful portions of a slaughtered animal, though those things do occur here. The stories seek to pit characters against the strictures of economy and geography and addiction. But too many moments have been stripped of what ought to have been a more informative nuance. When Campbell writes of a character named Jim Lobretto, “He might have left the can outside the door while he paid, but knowing his luck, some bastard would steal it,” it’s not clear whose voice we are reading; the free indirect style is not apparent elsewhere in the story. There are a number of similar instances where the language leans on arbitrary swearing to remind us that these are frustrated characters long past the point of caring what someone from out of town might think. It’s as though we should expect them to want to be elsewhere, with a wide-angle awareness of their options, which I suspect is not how people in such situations actually live.

 Where I’ve Been, and Where I’m Going, Joyce Carol Oates

I have never read a Joyce Carol Oates novel. I read some stories in school, though I can’t remember what they were, and I have read her essays and reviews. I read her warm and effusive encomium to Hill Street Blues that was published in TV Guide in 1985; it formed the basis of an essay I wrote on the magazine’s onetime role as a critical evaluator of television. I saw Foxfire once on cable. Jenny Lewis is in that one; she’s a singer now.

I had hoped that the Hill Street Blues essay would be included in this collection. What is here is a miscellany of book reviews, scholarly essays, and introductions to both Ms. Oates’s and other writers’ works. She is, of course, a wise reader with a great depth of knowledge of traditions ranging from myths to poetics and painting to her pet interests, boxing and serial killers. I was glad to see essays here on Fitzgerald and Grace Paley, whom I’ve recently read, and of course John Updike, who arose to fame concurrently with Oates and who has been viewed as a rival in both profligacy and relevance.

The first section, “Where Is an Author?” takes on broader challenges about art and the challenges faced by the artist as she takes on fear, sin, and victimization. “Art and ‘Victim Art’” is a response to a 1995 essay by Arlene Croce in The New Yorker objecting to the dance show Still/Here by Bill T. Jones, in which images of cancer and AIDS patients are shown. Croce struggled with the task of reviewing a show “from which one feels excluded by reason of its express intentions, which are unintelligible as theatre”; as a work of art, it rendered itself “undiscussable”:

The thing that “Still/Here” makes immediately apparent, whether you see it or not, is that victimhood is a kind of mass delusion that has taken hold of previously responsible sectors of our culture. The preferred medium of victimhood—something that Jones acknowledges—is videotape (see TV at almost any hour of the day), but the cultivation of victimhood by institutions devoted to the care of art is a menace to all art forms, particularly performing-art forms.

I have heard the same disparagement spat forth for what is called “Therapy Art”—the effort to utilize art to reassume control, to touch upon and rewrite pain, as though apology for daring to put forth one’s contribution were sewn into the lining. It is not a coincidence that a lot of such art is created by women; Frida Kahlo’s paintings and Plath’s The Bell Jar might unfairly attract this label.

The revulsion of victimhood and the seeming embrace of victim identity seems to inflame a lot of the criticisms of our contemporary activist organizations, such as Black Lives Matter and the Women’s March on Washington, in our present dialogue. Writing in 1995, long before such organizations flourished, Oates sees a problem:

The very concept of “victim art” is problematic. Only a sensibility unwilling to grant full humanity to persons who have suffered injury, illness, or injustice could have invented so crude and reductive a label.

There’s an acceptance that aggressors—in war, in capitalism, in sex relations—are entitled to all of the complexities that humanity entails; victims are simplistically reduced to what they have been stripped of or denied. But with art and criticism that imbalance steers a warped conversation:

Through the centuries, through every innovation and upheaval in art, from the poetry of the early English Romantics to the “Beat” poetry of the American 1950’s, from the explosion of late-19th-century European Modernist art to the Abstract Expressionism of mid-20th-century America, professional criticism has exerted a primarily conservative force, the gloomy wisdom of inertia, interpreting the new and startling in terms of the old and familiar; denouncing as “not art” what upsets cultural, moral and political expectations. Why were there no critics capable of comprehending the superb poetry of John Keats, most of it written, incredibly, in his 24th year? There were not; the reviews Keats received were savage, and he was dead of tuberculosis at the age of 25.

Another Brooklyn, Jacqueline Woodson

I have more Brooklyn novels than I can read, and I have read plenty, from Alfred Kazin to Hubert Selby, Jr. (but not Jonathan Lethem), but this one uses a poet’s language to bring the streets alive. It makes its center the heartache of adolescence, barely disguised from the author’s childhood. As crushes slip from August’s grasp and friends become pregnant, the tone of the neighborhood shifts:

From that window, from July until the end of summer, we saw Brooklyn turn a heartrending pink at the beginning of each day and sink into a stunning gray-blue at dusk. In the late morning, we saw the moving vans pull up. White people we didn’t know filled the trucks with their belongings, and in the evenings, we watched them take long looks at the buildings they were leaving, then climb into station wagons and drive away.

The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson

A well-liked book that is about bending genre as much as gender. As Nelson writes about building a relationship and family with her fluidly gendered partner, she reads herself with a poet’s critical eye, citing thinkers ranging from Gilles Deleuze to Lucille Clifton to Wittgenstein. It’s an intense mashup, interspersing the theoretical with domestic, intimate scenes, and turns what would normally be abstruse queer theory into very real art. It is most remarkable when even its quotidian moments invite a socio-critical lens.  Commenting, for example, on an old family photo emblazoned on a ceramic mug:

But what about it is the essence of heteronormativity? That my mother made a mug on a boojie service like Snapfish? That we’re clearly participating, in a long tradition of families being photographed at holiday time in their holiday best? That my mother made me the mug, in part to indicate that she recognizes and accepts my tribe as family?

Scrapper, Matt Bell

Set in “The Zone,” the abandoned center of Detroit, Scrapper conveys with gloom and angst the haunted vastness of cities. A young man named Kelly rummages through old homes, factories and warehouses to strip them of their copper, gold, and whatever other scrap metal he can find and resell on the black market. So much of the book lives in its dark internality, not just because Kelly works alone but because he’s instinctively a nonverbal creature. This allows Bell to stuff the book with long, creeping paragraphs of thought and memory, though the chunks don’t always reveal much, instead seeming to set the mood with their murmur:

Kelly thought the world wasn’t full of special objects, only plain ones. Nothing was an assembled special, nothing and no one, but the plainest objects could be supercharged by attention, make nuclear by suggestion. He could pick up the same object in two different houses and in one sense a completely different thrumming. What he wanted was anything loved.

Kelly is a former wrestler, and in his echoing head, and his attraction to fitness as an escape and for control, he has a spiritual twin in the ex-soldier Skinner in Atticus Lish’s celebrated novel Preparation for the Next Life. His attentions turn to the pursuit of justice after he discovers a 12-year-old boy chained naked to the bed in one of the houses. The tension that unfolds in the remainder of the book relies on the reader’s investment in the revenge that Kelly seeks toward the boy’s abuser. In a city that is full of holes and bereft of order, though, revenge does not feel like an honest motivator.

 Hunger: A Memoir of My Body, Roxane Gay

I bought Hunger while vacationing in Portland, Maine, and finished it before the vacation was over, it’s that good a read. It is also a memoir that holds up its responsibility of having something to say. The primary topic of the book, Gay’s struggles with obesity since childhood, allow for more open digression on the portrayal of bodies and eating in mass media and the facile approaches that our medical industry takes to nutrition. It is searing and honest, particularly with its slow looks at triggering events, in particular the author being the victim of a gang rape by neighborhood boys at the age of twelve. In reaction, the preteen Gay finds comfort in food:

What I did know was food, so I ate because I understood that I could take up more space. I could become more solid, stronger, safer. I understood, from the way I saw people stare at fat people, from the way I stared at fat people, that too much weight undesirable. If I was undesirable, I could keep more hurt away.

The chapters in Hunger are short, and the sentences patient and for the most part contractionless, so the tone is one of reflection. The social aspects of having a large body invite a number of angles, and Gay takes on all of them. “There are so many rules for the body,” she writes in a chapter on The Biggest Loser, “often unspoken and ever-shifting.” She writes about the “unspoken humiliations” that come with a judgmental gaze at an oversized woman. “They can plainly see that a given chair might be too small, but they say nothing as they watch me try to squeeze myself into a seat that has no interest in accommodating me.” There are sighs from passengers when she boards an airplane. And there is society’s temptation to correlate a lack of control in one’s body to lack of discipline in one’s character.

The Autograph of Steve Industry, Ben Hersey

This novel from Magic Helicopter Press, by a local author, came recommended to me by a friend at AWP. Set in Massachusetts, it covers every local landmark I ever knew in my childhood, from Kelly’s Roast Beef to Richdale to Route 1 South to yes, even candlepin bowling.

Playing that bingo game is only part of the fun of reading The Autograph of Steve Industry. Its narrator is the frontman of a rock band called The Steamrollers, and his marriage to Saundra, the mother of his young daughter, is on the rocks. Providing the framework of the book is a set of odd and feckless survey questions that the narrator uses as a jumping-off point, in many cases hardly provided “answers” in the traditional sense at all. Steve’s inclinations are torn between angst, rage, and pathos—a desire to do his friends and loved ones good without sacrificing what little he knows to be true about himself. A novel about an adult man who makes a fetish object out of his own aimlessness might sound frustrating, but the energy of the novel resides in the electric voice that Hersey gives Steve, one that riffs and buzzes like a guitar.

The Autograph of Steve Industry is excerpted here and here.

How to Get Into the Twin Palms, Karolina Waclawiak

This book is set in Los Angeles, but it’s a different kind of Los Angeles from the one laid out by golden dreamers or even Spanish-speaking immigrants, it’s the Los Angeles that’s nestled amid the freeways and motels and low-slung apartment buildings. The narrator is a Polish woman, Anya, who calls bingo games at the bingo hall and seems to exist among a community of strangers without really interacting with them. She lives across the street from the exclusive title nightclub and becomes obsessed with its Russian owners and clientele, literally watching parking lot trysts from her balcony. Los Angeles is a show to her and she seems, for some reason, to want a part. She finds a way in through Lev, a somewhat gruff Russian gangster-type who provides both sex and challenge for Anya. There are multiple levels of alienation and exclusion at play here, and the disjointed narrative—which at times pinballs between languages–creates a mood of ill communication and driftlessness:

I stood up and stared at him. Gathered the half-smoked, crushed cigarettes in my hand and started walking away from him.

“You were walking in front of your window. Nearly naked. What could I do?”

I don’t know why but looking at him—his face swollen and ruddy—I wanted him to work harder.

He should have begged.

I didn’t answer him but just kept walking. Toward the alley and toward the dumpster. He followed me, close. I could hear his steps, his attempt to get in line with mine. He was following me to the dumpster. I crossed pavement and dumped the cigarette butts in the bin, turned on my heel and stared at him.

“All that for a few cigarettes?”

I had embarrassed myself by being overly dramatic.

“You American girls are all the same.” He started walking away.

“Like what?”

“Zanudi.”

I searched for a Polish translation. Something similar.

Zanduzać.

Nudzić.

It all meant the same.

Boring.

This Is Not a Confession, David Olimpio.

I’ve met Olimpio twice, and got this book signed by him at AWP last spring. These linked essays are mostly about his childhood and family, and they are explicit about incidents, most notably the sexual abuse that the author suffered at a young age by a babysitter. And while the title invites the kind of self-questioning that Magritte similarly prompts, making you wonder if you are reading a riddle, there’s also a suggestion that we as a reader are not being invited to make judgments. This is just what is. This is what happened.

Olimpio sifts and strains the language in these pieces so that the irony of the title does not tinge what is inside. The first set of essays are about time and relativity, which tacitly brings to the surface questions of memory and distance and immediacy. He does not shy away from details about his babysitter’s abuse, nor the extramarital relationships he undertakes as an adult, and the juxtaposition of their telling invites an interpretation of behavioral cause and effect. Some of the stories are, frankly, what might be called TMI, and in some the journey doesn’t generate enough of a lesson to pay off. He remembers whole conversations in a way I have found suspect in the work of other memoirists, as though he knew when he was having the conversation that he would later be writing about it, but this could also speak to the effect of what the writers trains himself to observer and remember, especially when working from experience. If this is indeed not a confession, with whatever odor of guilt that word connotes, there’s some other fair motive for justifying their sharing, even if it’s the author’s chance to clear his head.

An excerpt from This Is Not a Confession can be found here. 

And as I have a walk around, other things sound like they’re ready to fall apart, like the refrigerator rattling only because (perhaps? hope to God?) a pickle jar is jammed against the compressor. I hear scratches and try not to think about what has nested in the walls.

I have a new story, “Potatoes in Minutes,” up at Bodega as part of Issue #59, alongside poetry by Cassie Duggan, Dacota Pratt-Pariseau, and Barbara Tramonte.

Anyone who knows me will see a lot of real life in this story. “Potatoes” was one of two stories I workshopped at last year’s Catapult Online Fiction Workshop taught by Justin Taylor, and I’m pleased that it’s found a good home.

Thanks to Melissa Swantkowski and the editors at Bodega for picking this up.

But in its best years, TV Guide was more than a guide; it allowed you to participate in the cultural conversation of television even through those shows you never watched, like you might read The New York Times Book Review about books you don’t ever plan to read. Before the Internet was available to host this conversation, TV Guide was the document that brought it to the masses, physically and metaphorically denser than the gossipy, photo-filled space-holder we find in the supermarket today. Its editors were determined to ensure that Americans embrace television as serious, even highbrow art.

Up at Electric Literature today I am thrilled to have a new essay about a magazine that was can’t-miss weekly reading in my formative years: TV Guide. 

This piece is new critical territory for me and I’m grateful to editor Kelly Luce for giving it an excellent home.

If they liked you, they’d remember you. And every once in a while a kid pops back in to say hello. A little fuller in the face, a little more run-down. Out of the Army or Marines with erect posture, rounder head, clearer gaze. The women thicker in the hips, more sass, more sashay.

They shake hands with their old principal and say hey there, Mr. Rush, you’re lookin’ good, and they chat Edwin up, because they want to retrace things and show him they’re different people now, they talk a different game.

At Prick of the Spindle today I have a new story, “Head under Water.” It’s by far the longest story I’ve ever written, and “new” is a bit of a relative term, as it turns out that according to my records I’ve been working on the story in some form for over eleven years. It’s undergone several substantial revisions and at least three title changes. I’m glad for it to have found a home in what is definitely its final form, and I’m grateful to editor Cynthia Reeser for picking it up.

Last November, when we visited Montreal, we made a trip to Librairie Drawn & Quarterly, an edgy bookshop known for its sweet selection of graphic novels. This is from Mile End, by Michel Hellman, which I have been reading slowly with Bing Translate close at hand. Though I took five years of French in school and two more semesters in college, I don’t hear it well enough to maintain a conversation. Reading the words essentially as captions to illustrations has provided a fun and useful way to brush up on my French and learn about life in the Mile End neighborhood of Montreal (where Librairie Drawn & Quarterly happens to be).

Perhaps with cartoons on the brain, yesterday I went for a walk into town and came back with Michael Tisserand’s Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White, an exquisitely designed brick about the curious life of the man who created Krazy Kat and Ignatz Mouse.

Herriman was born in New Orleans, of Creole descent to a family that took pains to hide its African-American heritage. That peculiar backstory seems to inform a lot of the mischief and anarchy that came through in the Krazy Kat comics. This is going to take me a while to get through.

Last Friday night, in Amherst, I attended a reading by Porochista Khakpour, author of the novels Sons and Other Flammable Objects and The Last Illusion.

Born in Tehran, Khakpour immigrated with her family to the United States as a young child. It was interesting to hear her stories of growing up in a bilingual household and discovering her love for literature by way of the western-canonical writers she thought she was supposed to like (Shakespeare) before discovering the ones that spoke to her (Faulkner).

She told about growing up in a country that, in the eighties, went out of its way to telegraph its hatred for her people, a country where FUCK IRAN buttons were sold in grocery stories.

Khakpour read an essay originally published in Guernica titled “Camel Ride, Los Angeles, 1986,” about a childhood trip to the Los Angeles Zoo and her father’s stubborn insistence that his children enjoy a ride on a camel, notably his refusal to see the implications of a Middle Eastern family riding a camel for the amusement of westerners.

Out loud he said, “Are you ready? Come on, everyone! This is what you’ve been waiting for!”

What we’d been waiting for was more likely a place where we could be like everyone else, rid of a certain yellow and maroon script, rid of rides on the backs of things or just the idea of us riding on the backs of things, especially that thing. We were somewhere else altogether.

The Last Illusion adapts a tale from the Persian Shahnameh and projects it onto a backdrop of post-Y2K and pre-9/11 New York City. The main character, Zal, is a “bird boy” who was raised in a cage by his mother. He is rescued by a psychologist named Hendricks, who specializes in the study of feral children. In the original poem from the Shanameh, Zal is an albino child, whose paleness causes his parents to abandon him on a mountain.

At the same time, an illusionist named Silber seeks to perform one final stunt—to make the World Trade Center disappear. Intrigued by Zal’s freakish tendencies, he ropes the boy in as an assistant. Zal has odd birdish habits—such as eating insects covered in yogurt—and a desire to fly, a talent that Silber had demonstrated in his earlier spectacles. Zal’s girlfriend, Asiya, has odd eating habits as well–she’s an anorexic–and she experiences premonitions of disaster that cast a surreal pall. The reader, of course, knows exactly the disaster of which she speaks. So we get a novel that interweaves themes of flight and escape, showmanship, and the establishment and rebirth of identity against forces both resistant and inevitable. For that reason it reminded me of Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.

Khakpour has a memoir coming out next year, titled Sick, about her battle with late-stage Lyme disease.

I have a new essay up at Catapult this week, the first long personal essay I’ve ever published. It’s called “My Father, the High Line“:

Given the opportunity to boast of a prize catch and back it up with evidence, along with some cat-and-mouse hijinks to boot, my father remained forever silent, leaving us to discover the story only after he was gone, folded along with his tube socks.

I’m grateful to editor Mensah Demary for picking this up, and for his editorial guidance.

For no reason other than coincidence, three recent books I have read have touched on the subject of death and grief in modern and interesting ways. Or maybe calling it coincidence is a lie. A good amount of my own writing lately has been about parents and grief, and the physical and emotional residue that a parent’s death leaves for the next generation.

Each book has a death in its center, the vortex around which the book propels. In one book the deceased is a father; in another, a wife; and in the third, a close friend. I enjoyed all three to varying degrees.

Michael Kimball’s Big Ray came up during my Catapult Fiction Workshop in response to a story I had posted there, and that book happened to be sitting on my nightstand at the time, so I moved it up in the queue.

In Big Ray, the residue comes from the complicated relationship between Danny, the narrator, and the title character, his recently deceased father. Ray is a large man who can slide toward cruelty with heartless ease. Following his divorce from Danny’s mother, he stops taking care of himself, growing morbidly obese and gambling away his retirement savings.

The story is told in vignettes, with no real dialogue to speak of; little by little a life is sketched in, one of a man whose presence, it becomes apparent, could eat up all of the energy in the room. As Danny adds in more flashes of memory, some chilling realizations come to light. It’s an honest indicator of how death often causes us to regard our relationship with a person in wide angle for the first time.

My father used to do this thing when we were in public and he didn’t want to be seen yelling at me or hitting me. He would put his arm around me and rest his hand on my shoulder in a way that must have looked affectionate to anybody who saw it. Then he would grip some muscle in my shoulder so hard it would make me seize up. The gesture must have made him look like a good father, but I wouldn’t be able to move or talk or even scream out in pain.

There aren’t a lot of happy memories in Big Ray, but there are a lot of occurrences that shift the burden of the relationship onto the much more mindful Danny; it is as though he is retracing a path wondering where, if at all, things might have changed for the better. The reflections turn up a lament not for the father that Danny lost but for the one he never got to have.

Paul Lisicky’s The Narrow Door is a celebration of the bumps and stretches of a friendship between two strong personalities, the author and the novelist Denise Gess (Good Deeds), that grew when both were struggling to establish themselves as writers, as well as his relationship with his former lover, a poet known here as M.

Gess battled recurring cancer for much of her adult life and succumbed in 2009. Because she and Lisicky are both writers, meeting when he is a grad student at Rutgers and she’s a teaching assistant, already with a novel, their relationship, when not maneuvering around sickness, builds precariously on encouragement, envy and confession, resentment, and forgiveness. Lisicky handles ably what is essentially the responsibility of writing for two voices. From the tone of the email correspondence they exchange, the heaviness of their sighs, the prolonged silences, the reader is let in on the high plane on which these two personalities coexisted.

The correspondence allows us to hear from Gess in her own words, for which it is clear she had a gift of projecting intimacy. Both share the writer’s playful, teasing code. In spite of illness, Gess carries on a string of affairs, including one with a married man known here as Famous Writer, which positions her as a passionate giver and unapologetic taker in contrast to the author’s cautiously treaded marriage to M. She finds the energy to get up and dance on the night of Barack Obama’s election in 2008; when she talks to another writer, her face brightens “as if promises and little deals are being passed back and forth.” She and the narrator cook a meal together, “a fifty-fifty thing, and the fact that we can move, without bumping or getting in each other’s way, seems like a beautiful thing.” Her heart sinks when her editor hates her second book and she can’t hide her bitterness when the author gets accepted into an exclusive writer’s conference, during which Lisicky writes, “But at every turn I’m thinking about Denise. Not just what I’ll reports back to her, but what I’ll withhold from her: I don’t want her to think I’m having too good a time.” There are misbehaviors, breaks in the spell, and efforts to mend without the embarrassment of full apology.

The third book, Tom McAllister’s The Young Widower’s Handbook, might be the most straightforward of the group. It also has the most modern sensibility, as it approaches grief from the angle of performance—the feeling that, in this day and age, we cannot even take on the task of hurting and healing without tinging the process with some kind of irony.

Framed as a road novel, The Young Widower’s Handbook follows a young man named Hunter Cady, whose wife has suddenly passed away. It happens when Hunter and Kait were still feeling out their dreams, finding traction. After Kait’s body is cremated and the insurance check cashed, Hunter finds himself alone in a new silence:

When he opens his eyes, he see thousands of ghosts in his home, each one a vision of Kait at a different stage of their shared life; they crowd into the house shoulder-to-shoulder and some are cooking and some are sleeping and some are dancing and some are hanging pictures and everywhere around him there are Kaits. Kait in the wallpaper and bubbling in the water supply and buzzing in the wiring in the walls. He calls out to her but she doesn’t respond. His voice sounds like it is underwater.

Eventually Hunter settles on an action plan: to take Kait’s ashes with him on a cross-country road trip, visiting all of the destinations they had talked about visiting together. The book then becomes a road trip novel, with Hunter encountering eccentrics along the way, and though it risks becoming one of those overstretched narratives in which a young, troubled character shirks his responsibilities, it rings true by avoiding easy solution and letting a sense of memory and emotional obligation be the driving force. Hunter takes selfies with the urn and posts them on social media, his friends reacting initially with support, then concern. Kait’s family grows impatient. Apart from his parents, who are limited in their willingness to empathize, Hunter has no sounding board: no bro-buddy or brother who can lure him toward an unserious perspective. We realize by the end that such a character wouldn’t have belonged because Kait was Hunter’s best friend.

What rings particularly true about The Young Widower’s Handbook is the expectation of behavior foisted upon us when someone close to us dies, when you feel others watching your every move. It it has wise observations regarding how we grieve in the Internet age, when there’s this perceived responsibility to show others that we are okay when we are not, or following the path of progress that is expected of us. Grief is idiosyncratic; frustratingly, no two routes are the same, which clashes with the impulses of those around us to guide our consolations along what is standard and predictable. There’s somehow this impression that we are violating the sanctity of another soul if we attempt to do something that makes our grief personal and ours.

At the New York Times, an informative look at the career of Paula Fox, who has died at the age of 93. A writer of books for adults and children, she was best known for Desperate Characters, a novel that had been out of print when it was picked up in a library at Yaddo by Jonathan Franzen, who wrote about it in a 1996 Harper’s essay. I wrote about the book here.

A number of Fox’s novels were subsequently re-released after Desperate Characters, including The Western Coast, for which the introduction was provided by another of my favorite writers, Frederick Busch. That one is now on my wish list. I was also intrigued by the bit of trivia that Fox was briefly the sister-in-law of Clement Greenberg.