Fiction Mondays: Middlesex

Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex was one of those books I started to read while I was in college, only to be interrupted when the school year started up.  I enjoyed the two-thirds of it (approximately) I read several years ago, so this summer I reread it.  I actually think I liked it more than I did on my first attempt.  Maybe approaching it with more experience as a reader and a writer added to the enjoyment.  The voice of the narrator and the presentation of the story unfolding across several generations was a tough trick to pull off, and Eugenides definitely accomplished this feat.

The story is narrated by Cal Stephanides (born Calliope), a Greek-American raised in Detroit in the 1960s and 70s.  Cal begins the story by explaining that he was born twice, first as a girl and then, fifteen years later, as a boy.  The opening is half David Copperfield and half Tristam Shandy; We get hints of Cal's conception and birth, but before that story begins, the novel's action leaps backward and forward in time.  Forward to the adult Cal, living as a man in Berlin, and backward to the war between Greece and Turkey in 1919, where Cal's story began in his grandparents' genes.

I don't think it spoils anything too much to reveal that Cal's grandmother, Desdemona, and his grandfather, "Lefty" are siblings who marry one another (acting like strangers) while they flee their war-torn village. On a boat to America, Lefty pretends to court Desdemona, and they are married by the ship's captain. When they get to America, they move to Detroit, where they live with a cousin who keeps their secret.  Lefty begins to work at Ford's factory, and Desdemona eventually finds work with the Nation of Islam. They have a son, Milton, who joins the army to impress the girl he goes on to marry, and the family witnesses the rise and fall of Detroit in the 20th Century. They get into the restaurant business, starting franchises of "Hercules Hot Dogs" across the country (the hot dogs are sliced so that they "flex" when they're cooked). They make enough to move to the suburbs and join the upper middle class, and the parts of the story that take place in Grosse Point are about maintaining one's identity through shifting situations (a recurring theme through the book).

For the first third of the book, Cal is more of a presence than a character.  We see him as an adult, explaining his life in Berlin, working for the State Department, and he explains the genetic anomaly that made him a hermaphrodite. As the family's backstory unfolds, Cal interrupts, omniscient and wry, throwing in allusions to Greek myth and previews of what occurs later in the book.  I loved the narrative voice in the story, and having read both this novel and The Virgin Suicides, I think it's a voice the author is getting better with.  It's really engaging, and there's a warmth and intelligence behind it that draws you in and compels you to follow the story.

This is a very ambitious novel, as much about a transgendered character as it is about the experiences of American immigrants in the first half of the 20th Century.  It's about putting down roots in a place, transforming to become a citizen, and the idea of transformation echoes between each narrative unfolding over the course of the story.  Even outside the story of Cal's own transformation, the changes in Detroit (most notably the 1967 riots) affect the direction of the story.  Eugenides attempts to draw lines between past and present, personal and national history, and on the whole he succeeds.

The last scene, which turned out to be my favorite in the book, reflects on Cal's place in his family after he starts to live as a male. The story comes back to a Greek funeral tradition, mentioned early in the book, in which a man stands guard at the house.  It was a resonant way to end the story, and I'm glad that I finally finished reading this book, even if it did take a few years to get back to it. 

Fiction Mondays: Year of the Flood

Margaret Atwood's Year of the Flood, the second book in her dystopian "MaddAdam" trilogy, is almost more terrifying than the first because it's more familiar.  While the first book, Oryx and Crake, documented a not-so-distant future destroyed by environmental catastrophe and genetic experimentation, the sequel reaches a little further into the past, bringing the story uncomfortably close to our own time.  There are characters in this book who remember the old ways, who know the actions that have led to the destruction, and who may have the best shot to put it back together.

While the plague documented in Oryx and Crake raged through the world, a religious group known as the God's Gardeners were hidden away from society, convinced that the mysterious illness was the "waterless flood" promised by God in the book of Genesis.  This book explores the group's history and way of life, and the reasons they survived while so many others perished.  The two protagonists are Toby, a longtime Gardener holed up in a high-end spa, and Ren, a young woman who grew up as a Gardener and is quarantined in a sex club called "Scales 'n' Tails."  Atwood shifts between past and present in both characters' stories, overlapping until their paths intersect in the post-plague world.

In Toby's story, we get some glimpses into familiarity: she grew up in a house with a white picket fence, in an idyllic country setting, before the growing suburbs, her mother's death, and her father's suicide due to financial troubles forced her to go into hiding with the Gardeners.  When she joins the group, she spends years convinced that she doesn't believe their teachings, even as she becomes one of their leaders.  When a dangerous man from her past learns she is a member of the group, she's forced to go into hiding, where she continues to act according to Gardener beliefs even in her new life.

Ren, meanwhile, gets taken to "the Compounds" (where the giant, evil corporations are based) as a teenager, where the Gardeners' beliefs are pushed out and she finds herself at odds with her mother as she grows up.  Through her backstory, we start to see familiar characters from Oryx and Crake, getting glimpses of the plot from another angle.  Her section is filled with sudden moments of recognition, where the events that led to the plague are witnessed by a character who is much less involved than the characters of the first novel.  In the same way that Toby and Ren's plots intersect and weave together (and apart) in the course of the novel, the way the Year of the Flood plot gets mixed in with Oryx and Crake's is really well-done and believable.

The novel departs stylistically from the first novel, which gives Atwood a chance to draw in her other interests (like poetry and religion) as she writes about the God's Gardeners and their leader, Adam One.  They're a (mostly) vegetarian group, mixing science and theology to arrive at a kind of theory of existence.  A lot of their beliefs make perfect sense, and I think Atwood's intention was to make the group a believable entity, a belief system that could easily take root.  They're mostly harmless, and their survival rate is much higher than that of the regular population.  I get the sense that in the final book, it will fall to their surviving members to decide how to handle the new species roaming the earth after the "waterless flood."  Each section in this book is named for a Saint's Day or a Feast Day, with named saints drawing in famous figures from religion and ecology in equal amounts.  There is a sermon by Adam One and a song, "from the God's Gardener Oral Hymn Book" before returning to Toby and Ren.  I can see how Atwood's hymns were inspired by William Blake, and her take on theology echoes his in certain ways.

I am really looking forward to seeing how she ends the trilogy.  At the risk of spoiling anything, I will say that the end of this book, which overlaps and expands upon the ending of Oryx and Cake, leaves the characters on the precipice of a new kind of world, one which they can remake or ultimately destroy.  Read Oryx and Crake first, and then check this one out.

Fiction Mondays: The Lacuna

I'd never read Barbara Kingsolver before (even though The Poisonwood Bible is supposed to be excellent), but when I heard about her most recent novel The Lacuna, it sounded like something I had to check out.  I originally bought it as a Christmas present for my girlfriend, who is a big fan of Frida Kahlo, a major character in the book, and she raved about it.

The story moves from Mexico after the first World War to Washington, DC during the Bonus Army era, back to Mexico for Frida's rise to fame and visit from Trotsky, and finally back to America in the wake of his murder, where the protagonist comes under investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee.  It's a whirlwind plot, all centered around a character named Harrison Shepherd, a writer who began as a cook in Mexico and came to work for the U.S. State Department, transporting paintings during World War II.  Kingsolver doesn't tell the story in the usual way, though: the story is presented through journal entries, letters, newspaper clippings, and archival notes that record Harrison's journey around the continent.  Through this method, she presents a character whose internal world is constantly hidden away from his public life.

The title of the book describes this disconnect, and the word "lacuna" is used throughout the novel in a variety of ways.  The first is simply a cave in a cliff: a missing piece that Harrison follows as a child to discover a tucked-away Aztec ruin.  But it also means a missing piece of a manuscript, and in the case of Harrison, it's a missing notebook that documents Harrison's expulsion from school (for "improper acts" with another boy).  Throughout the book, the idea of the lacuna appears in a variety of ways: letters between characters where the reader only sees one half of the conversation, or a statement made over and over that the most important piece of a story might be the piece that's left out.  In trying to reconstruct his life through his letters and diaries, Harrison's stenographer, Violet Brown, hopes to fill in that piece.

This is an unabashedly political novel, as much about Communism and World War II as it is about art and fiction.  In fact, the driving force is how these things become intertwined.  It's Harrison's association with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera that initially exposes him to Communist ideas, and the same association that brings him to work for the State Department, moving artwork from Washington, DC to Asheville to keep it from being destroyed during the war.  And it is in part the same association that brings him under scrutiny during the Communist "witch hunt":  When Harrison becomes a well-known novelist, his history in Mexico is discovered, as is his association with Trotsky and Rivera.  By the time his trial is underway, it doesn't matter that Trotsky opposed Stalin.  All Soviet Communists (in the eyes of the committee) are the same.  The politics in the novel aren't contained to history, though, and there was a great line about how the radio made it so that the loudest talkers, and not the most knowledgeable, ended up finding the widest audience.  If this isn't Kingsolver calling out pundits, I don't know what is.

The format, telling the story in a less direct way, is risky, and for this book, it pays off.  Considering how important the public portrayal of Harrison becomes as the novel goes on, approaching from the viewpoint of his diaries, intermingled with real newspaper clippings, embedded the story in the real world as well as his emotions.  And getting a lot of the story told in Harrison's voice makes for a really engaging read.   I think it's a challenging feat to pull off, and there's a chance your readers will lose the plot between journal entries, but I think Kingsolver is a talented enough writer to give you the story that lives in those gaps, and I think that's what this book is really about.

Fiction Mondays: Work in Progress

As promised last week, today I've got parts of a new story, fresh out of editing.  I think I'm becoming a better editor, and as a result my stories are getting leaner and (I think, at least) better.  Here's the opening of a story, currently titled "The Wolf," about two men who hear from their long-absent mother only on holidays, and what happens the day they don't.  The title is only temporary, until I think of a better one.

Sam stood by the kitchen counter, slicing a loaf of Italian bread into half-inch cubes when Dave came in holding the blue three-ring binder. Sam kept cutting, as though this task required his complete concentration, and didn’t look up at his brother until he had chopped most of the loaf and swept the cubes into a glass bowl. He carried the two ends, which he had not diced, to the table. He sat down and handed one to Dave.

“This is good bread,” Dave said, sinking his incisors into the round piece and tearing it like it was a piece of meat. “It’s really crusty and chewy.”

“It’s from the bakery in town. Need any butter, or olive oil?”

“No, that’s all right. Plain is fine.” Sam looked across the table, not yet starting on his bread. He had a habit, carried over from childhood, of watching Dave eat first, at least for a minute or two. It was strange, like seeing himself eat. Once, when he was very small, Sam even managed to convince himself that by watching his twin, he could fill his own stomach.

Dave had let his hair grow long and his beard had filled in, so they didn’t look like each other as much as they once had; for Sam, it was like seeing what he would look like if he lived outside for half the year, without regular access to hot water or a barber. It wasn’t that Dave looked dirty—the Park Service expected him to be presentable and professional—but Sam could see his discomfort in dress shoes, his glances into the backyard like he could not wait to get back out. Sam took a bite of his bread and looked at the tabs sticking out of the binder, each of them labeled. He wondered if it had gotten much thicker than the year before, or if it was just his imagination: considering the information inside, he wouldn’t be surprised if he dreamt it into a larger, more mythical collection.

“Do we have to break out the binder already? That can’t wait for dessert tomorrow?”

The binder is Dave's record of everything they know about their mother, from the phone calls to photographs of strangers who might be her.  This next scene is Sam's last memory of her before she left, and is one of my favorite scenes.

Rhea sat them both on the kitchen counter, the spot where she always placed her sons when she prepared them to leave the house; every morning she would have them sit there, Sam on the left and Dave on the right, to inspect their faces and fingernails.  It was the same counter where she gave them haircuts, looking from Dave to Sam to ensure her work was even.  Tonight, she sewed their shirts together, a seam that began two inches above the waist.

“Don’t move,” she said.  “If you wiggle around, the stitches might come undone.”  She took an ashtray from the kitchen table and examined the cigarette she had left there a few minutes earlier.  Satisfied that it was still lit, she took a long drag and regarded her sons.  “I don’t know why I didn’t think of this sooner,” she said. 

She finished sewing and tugged at the seam a few times before standing up straight, pleased with her work.  “Get your pillowcases,” she said.  “And hop down together, would you?  I don’t want to have to sew you up again.”  The twins shuffled off of the countertop and shambled, conjoined, down the hallway.  When they returned, Rhea told them they were going with the neighbors, that she would see them when they came back later that night.  She kissed each of them on the forehead and said she loved them, shepherding them outside.

Three hours later, after an evening of wandering the neighborhood with Margaret, the woman next door, and her children, the boys returned home to find their father sitting on the porch, drinking whiskey from an empty jam jar printed with Tom and Jerry cartoons.  The porch light cast sharp shadows across the lawn, the only illumination on the dirt road.  Sam knew almost instantly, before Margaret even put her hands on their shoulders, that he would remember this moment for the rest of his life, the exact instant he and his brother, fused at the waist, transformed into pair of motherless freaks.

So that's about the first half.  I'm really happy with it so far, but like I said, the title is giving me some problems.  I am open to suggestions.

Fiction Mondays: Arkansas and an Update

Last week's book was John Brandon's Arkansas, a novel that exists somewhere between literary fiction and neo-noir.  Or maybe it doesn't exist between them at all: it's a blend of the two.  The book follows Kyle, Swin, and Frog, three characters involved with the drug trade in the South whose stories run towards each other and intersect violently.

Swin Ruiz is a college dropout who still considers himself something of an intellectual.  When he runs out of money, he finds himself working with Kyle, who isn't the brightest, but is more suited to a life of crime.  The two become drug runners for Frog, who installs them at a state park where the ranger is his employee.  They never meet Frog, but he's an important character, with a significant portion of the book allotted to his backstory.  Every other chapter is written in the second person, forcing you to identify with Frog, whether you'd like to or not.

Swin and Kyle spend their days at the park, working for the ranger, Bright, between runs.  He's a strange character, with a collection of half-empty whiskey bottles and a box full of burnt bones in his house.  They have to do random work around the park between visits from Bright's other boss, a woman who dresses only in pink and gets a cut of the drug money.  While they're kind of idling around, Swin meets Johnna, a nurse who he begins dating.  The narrative, which is kind of loose and episodic, threatens to slow down at a few points early on, but the sections with Frog drive things forward leading to the moment things go wrong for Kyle and Swin.

You could say the idea behind the second half of the novel is that a criminal can be undone either by his stupidity, by emotions, or by chance.  When Bright is killed by a runaway, Swin and Kyle do their best to carry on without him, but neither one knows enough about the situation to really lead.  Everything they do leads Frog to suspect their motives, and as his backstory races toward its intersection with their plotline, you just know things are going to end poorly for them.  I guess the big surprise is what becomes of Frog at the end of the novel--if Kyle and Swin are destroyed by their own stupidity, Frog is nearly killed by his emotional investments in his employees.

But maybe the idea isn't just about what destroys the characters, because it's also about what saves them.  Kyle and Swin, Frog and his closest employees: they are family, in a strange sense.  Kyle and Swin realize this late in the novel and know they are the only ones they can depend on, to carry on their stories and to protect one another.  Frog is almost driven to madness when he realizes this about his own story.  If there's any redemption for the characters, it's through the people they have randomly wound up with. 

Brandon's writing is really engaging because it is so spare.  He seems to only want to give you enough to have a complete image of these characters, and his description of their actions and their internal monologues is at times off-putting because it is so clear and to the point.  Putting Frog's sections in second-person was a really wise decision--he would be a really difficult character to identify with in third-, or even first-person.  Brandon has a new book, out this summer, called Citrus County.  Based on the strengths of Arkansas, it is definitely one to check out.

Now, the update: I am going to post sections of a new story here next week!  It's one I've been editing for the past week, attacking with red pen.  And I'm really excited about it.  Check back here next Monday for at least part of it.

Fiction Mondays: Carter Beats the Devil

Despite being a little busy with moving, I found time in the past few weeks to read, from start to finish, Glen David Gold's Carter Beats the Devil, a book that has been on my radar for several years.  It's one of those books that I would look at every time I was in the bookstore, read the back cover of, and tell myself I had to read it eventually.  Finally, I decided it was going on my summer reading list, and I am so glad I made that decision.

The book is pretty big, somewhere around 650 pages, all of them bursting.  There are reprints of posters from magic's heyday around the turn of the century, and a playbill in the beginning of the book that turns out to be something of a table of contents.  The story revolves around Charles Carter, a real-life illusionist who was a contemporary of Houdini and Thurston, diving back into his life story and the events surrounding the death of President Harding in 1923.  As he begins his career, Carter meets the Marx Brothers (back when they were still Julius, Adolph, and Leonard on the vaudeville stage), as well as "Borax" Smith, a real-life business magnate; he makes a nemesis, Mysterioso, and is promoted by Houdini, leading him to worldwide fame and success.

Much of the book revolves around the aftermath of President Harding's death, with a large section delving into the hapless Secret Service agent who is investigating Charles Carter.  The agent, Jack Griffin, is desperately trying to regain his reputation after failing to prevent the assassination of McKinley.  While Griffin is kind of a moron, he does manage to make one great discovery, and toward the end of the novel, Carter calls him "the greatest audience member I ever had."  I don't want to spoil anything, because there are so many great twists and turns, but the last third of the book is extremely exciting, and revolves around a technology invented by a young man named Philo Farnsworth.

I really loved this book, and it made me think of two others: Water for Elephants and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.  I love when a work of fiction creates a world that's so large and encompassing that it surpasses the idea of historical fiction--I don't know what you'd call it, really, but some books just have this way of pulling in people and events from history and making you believe they really interacted with these fictional characters.  It almost seems more real than history, in its way.  Whether it's Kavalier and Clay at a party with Salvador Dali or Carter the Great receiving a motorcycle from BMW's co-founder Max Friz, I really enjoy when a story jumps off of the page and wanders into the real world.  What is interesting about this book's connection to Kavalier and Clay is that the two novels were published around the same time, are both enormous, and were both written by authors who graduated from the MFA program at the University of California at Irvine.  Must have been something in the water.

I could not stop reading this book once I picked it up.  It has mystery, suspense, and perhaps most importantly, wonder.  That's kind of the theme of the novel, I guess, this idea of a loss of wonder and how it is regained.  For a long time in the middle, Carter is depressed and detached, so much so that he often feels he is looking down on his life happening.  What saves him is his ability surprise and to be surprised, his ability to elicit wonder.  I think this makes him a really admirable character, and is a characteristic that comes through in the writing: through the book, there are some incredible feats of misdirection and surprise, the work of a writer who is something of a magician himself.

Fiction Mondays: American Gods

I recently finished the first book on my summer reading list, Neil Gaiman's epic American Gods.  And when I say "epic," I mean it: the story involves a man tangling with gods, going to the afterlife, and making a long journey to several "sacred" places in America.  I loved this book for its story, its characters and the weird sense of humor Gaiman brings to creating characters out of larger-than-life beings.   He's an author who really creates a universe with his writing, and it's a universe I like to visit.

The novel revolves around Shadow, who is recruited by a man named Wednesday to protect him while he's on a mysterious mission.  That mission turns out to be recruiting other gods, from every imaginable pantheon, to take a stand against the "new gods" who are taking root in America.  There's a war coming, Wednesday tells Shadow, between the gods the immigrants brought over and the new gods, like the Internet and Media.  They travel to recruit Easter, Anansi, Czernobog and a large contingent of obscure and half-forgotten gods and legends.  There's a brief meeting with Wisakedjac, the Algonquin trickster-god, and Johnny Appleseed.  With every god introduced, I was more and more impressed with the breadth of research that must have gone into this novel, the amount of knowledge just barely hinted at throughout the story.

One of my favorite moments in the book seems like something of an easter egg, there specifically for readers of Gaiman's Sandman series.  Shadow walks by a seemingly-homeless woman with multi-colored hair and a dog, and he gives her a dollar.  She looks confused by the money.  She's Delirium, one of Gaiman's "Endless," and the dog is the guardian she inherited from her brother, Destruction.  I love a book where an author's other stories can wander in without fanfare or distraction from the plot, and Delirium's presence almost seemed like a reminder that the story of the Endless went on, even if the comics ended.

Gaiman also handles his plots really well in this novel: there's an extended subplot involving an idyllic town and disappearing children, and it reminded me very much of Stephen King.  I won't spoil anything by talking about it, but the way it wraps up was one of my favorite twists in this very twisty book.  And it of course has everything to do with the story of the gods that makes up the main story.

There is a theme, repeated through the book, that "this is a bad land for gods," and I think one of the ideas behind this book is that it's not necessarily true.  For the gods that populate the novel, the greatest fear is being forgotten, and I think this book is an exercise in reminding readers that they still exist somewhere, and there is a wealth of information out there keeping them alive.  Maybe they're not actively worshiped anymore, but they are not forgotten.  America might be fickle, and might not know where to put our faith at times, but there is a curiosity and an imagination that might mean these gods can continue to live among us. 

(Non) Fiction Mondays: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

I don't know about runners; long-distance runners, I mean.  I know there's a British "kitchen sink" movie called the Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, and I've known the occasional marathoner, but as a group, I have to admit that I'm wary of them.  Maybe it's because the ones in my neighborhood are so unpleasant, acting like the sidewalk was specifically made for them and they're just temporarily allowing you to walk there (and god forbid you walk a dog there).  So it was with this bias that I started reading Haruki Murakami's memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.

I guess the book is almost more of an essay collection, Murakami's thoughts as he trained for the New York City Marathon.  But I can see where calling it a memoir is accurate: Murakami's life as a runner began with his life as a writer, and so this book acts as an examination of where and how those aspects of his life intertwine and affect one another.  It contains my favorite Murakami legend, the one about how he became a writer: he saw a batter hit a home run and suddenly knew he could write a novel, so he did. 

For a writer who tends to keep his history and personal life kind of guarded, these glimpses into Murakami becoming a writer were really interesting for me.  I mean, there is the Murakami I know from The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore, but on a level of where he comes from and what aspects of his life led to his becoming a writer, he can be kind of a mystery.  Here, he talks about owning a jazz club, the way his life was before he became a novelist.  In his non-fiction, you can kind of see which parts of him have entered into characters and how his mind works.

I liked this book for the thoughts on writing much more than the thoughts on running, and I can see why Murakami chose to use one as a metaphor for the other.  Writing is a solitary activity that requires more endurance than talent: it's a frustrating occupation, and you need to practice every day if you don't want to burn out quickly.  I agree with him when he says there are writing muscles, that you can work to strengthen these day after day.

I'm still on the fence about runners; after all, I didn't expect Murakami to change my mind about the entire sport.  But I do feel that this book gave me a deeper look at Murakami the runner, and Murakami the writer, who were the same person all along.  And it made me want to start an exercise regimen, because I could use that kind of structure and working out daily would be good for my overall health.

But it won't be running.

Fiction Mondays: Summer Reading

I'm about two hundred pages into Neil Gaiman's American Gods, which is kind of an ideal summer book: epic, but not too heavy, it's a road trip into an America where the old gods are just trying to scrape by in the face of new forms of worship.

I spent last week trying to figure out what I'm reading this summer, and this book has sort of kicked off the season for me. So today, I present my summer reading list (constantly under construction). One quick note: a lot of these are paperbacks, because sometimes a hardcover is just too much to lug around in the summer.

1. Neil Gaiman, American Gods
2. Glen David Gold, Carter Beats the Devil
3. A.M. Holmes, This Book will Save Your Life
4. Jonathan Lethem, Chronic City
5. Edward P. Jones, All Aunt Hagar's Children
6. Margaret Atwood, Year of the Flood

So that's a pretty good list, I think. What else should be on there? Leave recommendations if you'd like!

Fiction Mondays: The Manual of Detection

Hello everyone! Sorry for the unannounced week off--I had several story deadlines the Friday before last, and my brain melted for an entire week after. Plus, I'm getting ready to move, so that's keeping me pretty busy. Finding an apartment is HARD.

So I'm back, and this week, I want to talk about a mystery novel which is really more of a fable (in the Calvino sense), Jedediah Berry's debut, The Manual of Detection. This book caught my eye when it was out in hardcover, and I finally picked it up when it came out in paperback, and I really loved it. It's a magical realist take on the noir genre, which doesn't make much sense when I say it like that, but really works in the world the author creates.

The plot revolves around a clerk in a large detective agency (clearly modeled on the Pinkerton Agency, complete with a large eye and the slogan "Never Sleep"), George Unwin, who is forced to act as a detective when the agency's superstar, Travis Sivart, goes missing. I can't really discuss much of the plot without giving too much away, but the mystery leads him to discover that some of the most famous cases, including "The Oldest Murdered Man" and "The Man Who Stole November Twelfth," were solved incorrectly. His efforts to correct them lead him to a dream-world and a vast conspiracy.

Berry takes the tropes of film noir and hard-boiled mystery and bends them to create a setting that is both alien and familiar. The action occurs in a city that is perpetually dim and rainy, where the old ways of criminals have been replaced by an element that is more devious and dangerous. All of the old elements are present--each detective is assigned a Girl-Friday type assistant, there's a femme fatale, the detectives are loners who frequent dive bars and carry revolvers--but once the plot gets rolling, these things turn out to be much more complicated than they appear. Travis Sivart, the missing detective, just wanted somewhere he could retire, out in the country, and Unwin's new assistant is a narcoleptic whose involvement in the agency is much deeper than it initially appears to be.

The book is divided up into chapters from the Manual of Detection, the book within the book that each detective is issued. There are chapters on interrogation, on nemeses, and a chapter that was cut from later editions, on a technique to enter dreams to solve a mystery. This book-within-a-book structure is where I really noticed the Calvino references, mostly If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, a book about trying to read a book. The book becomes very important to the plot of the novel, and, fittingly, the story ends in the eighteenth chapter, "On Dream Detection." It can be tough to pull off a dream sequence in a story, let alone several, and I think that making the plot revolve around the dreams of the protagonist and the entire city is a very bold move that pays off for Berry in this novel.

That's all I've got for today. Enjoy the long weekend.

Fiction Mondays: Check out My Story!

Today's post is a short one--book reviews will continue next week, when I'll be writing about Jedediah Berry's excellent The Manual of Detection. Today, though, I have news: in case you missed it over the weekend, I have a story up on Opium Magazine's website! Go check it out!

Fiction Mondays: First Drafts

It's kind of strange how stories come together at different speeds: even when you have two stories of the same word count, one may take months and another get knocked out in a matter of weeks. I have one in a notebook that I keep adding too, trying to see the shape of the story I'm telling; I mostly write it while I'm on breaks at work, and it's a slow process of discovery. The idea was initially built around two scenes, but the further into it I get, the more story there is between those scenes.

Last week, I wrote the entire first draft of a short story. I started it on Monday and finished it yesterday. The story is about twins whose mother ran off when they were kids and now calls only on holidays. I jumped into it with a few images and a small line of description, and the story came together incredibly quickly. For a first draft, I'm really proud of it. It was one of the fastest drafts of a story I've ever written, and when I re-read it, I was surprised to find that I really liked the shape of the story. Of course, it needs a lot of work, but I feel like I got the framing done now I can go in and start to work on the smaller details.

The other story feels more like I'm drawing the blueprint as I go, and I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. It's a first draft, right? So what if it ends up with no doors and four chimneys?

Fiction Mondays: Her Fearful Symmetry

Last week, I read Audrey Niffenegger's Her Fearful Symmetry, the long-awaited follow-up to The Time Traveler's Wife. What impresses me about Niffenegger's stories is their ability to successfully fuse genre and literary fiction; The Time Traveler's Wife was a love story wrapped in science fiction, and the new book is unabashedly a ghost story. It's true to what I think is a fundamental rule in good genre works: establish your rules and then see how your characters operate within them, but what brings the book into literary territory is how well her characters are developed, even the one who passes away in the first chapter to later return as a ghost.

Niffenegger widens her scope in this book, pulling a lot of characters and plots together really successfully. The bulk of the story follows Valentina and Julia Poole, who inherit an apartment in London from their Aunt Elspeth. The two are "mirror twins," seemingly identical but actually opposite--Valentina's heart is on the wrong side, for example. When they move to London, they eventually meet their upstairs neighbor, Martin, a crossword-puzzle maker suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder; and their downstairs neighbor, Robert, a PhD student writing his thesis on the nearby Highgate Cemetery. He was Elspeth's lover, and spends the first half of the book in a deep depression over losing her. Eventually, they realize that their apartment is haunted by Elspeth, who eventually manages to communicate with the twins and Robert.

The book, now that I think about it, is about being trapped. Each of these characters finds themselves stuck. Martin's disorder makes him unable to leave his apartment, even though he wants to go to Amsterdam to reconcile with his wife. Robert wants to move on and finish his thesis, but he is mixed up with the twins and Elspeth. Elspeth herself is stuck in the apartment as a ghost (there are other ways she is trapped, but one of those is a big twist at one point in the book.) Valentina wants to get away from Julia but can't.

It's also about twins, and what can sever the closeness between twins. The title is kind of a puzzle--it's borrowed from William Blake, and is a line from "The Tiger"--but I'm not sure who it refers to. Elspeth the ghost? She's a twin, but for most of the book she is not very fearful. But later, she is. And then there's the preceding line, "What immortal hand or eye," which leads me to think it does refer to Elspeth.

I'm not sure this novel had the emotional depth of The Time Traveler's Wife, but I did like to see what the author did with a wider cast of characters. I also enjoyed the geography of this book, where the apartment building was its own character, as was Highgate Cemetery. The characters' tours through the graveyard made me really want to visit, and the last scene in the graveyard (I won't spoil anything) inverted the ghost story formula really well, making the graveyard a place of tragic beauty. This might be Niffenegger's greatest strength as a writer, her ability to make a very tragic moment really beautiful. It's probably best exemplified by a scene early in the novel, when Martin's wife decides to leave him: she doesn't want to ruin any spot in the apartment by leaving a note there, so she suspends it from the ceiling, so that it will appear to be floating in the air when he finds it.

Fiction Mondays: It's That Time Again

I mentioned a few months ago that I was getting back to writing short stories, and last week I realized that even though I have a few polished stories sitting here at home, I don't have any out there, making the rounds to literary magazines. This is a problem--finished stories, or stories I feel are finished, aren't doing anything just hanging around the house. So this week, it's time to start mailing (or e-mailing) them out again. Any suggestions for new and interesting venues to send these stories out to?

I know I was trying to get a book review a week up, but this week the only thing I read was Ghosts by Paul Auster, which was pretty interesting, but was really more of a long short story. It's about a detective watching a man who might be watching him back, and the confusing situation they find themselves in. It had a lot of elements of City of Glass, in which a detective gets so deep into a case that he starts to lose his own identity and question his reality. It's written in a really odd way, as though it's someone years later who only heard about what happened, and it has a lot of nods to itself as a story, which is a big theme in Auster's work.

I have some books at home I'm really excited to read and talk about, including Wells Tower's Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned and Audrey Niffenegger's Her Fearful Symmetry. With any luck these will be reviewed here next week and the week after. And then there's my ongoing reading of Ulysses, which I really like, but probably won't get done by mid-June (unless I quit sleeping and working and just spend hours of every day with it). But who knows? Maybe I'll read two hundred pages of it next week.

For now, I'm off to work on other stories. I just got through the first edits of one called "Hey Mercury," which I first had an idea for a long time ago and has finally come together, and I'm working on a first draft (handwritten!) of another one that doesn't have a title just yet.

Fiction Mondays: How "Catching Fire" is like "The Empire Strikes Back"

First off, an announcement: I have a bunch of really exciting posts lined up this week, including a review of a Hold Steady concert (and a bit about Record Store Day) on Wednesday and a belated review of “An Education” on Friday. Be sure to check in to read these upcoming posts.

Today is also exciting, mostly because I get to really stretch out my geek brain while I talk about Catching Fire, the second book in Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy. The book is slower-paced than the first, with less emphasis on the games themselves, but I think it accomplishes what middle books in trilogies should really excel at: it continues the themes and ideas started in the first, action-packed book, and sets up the excitement to come at the end of the series.

Don’t read on if you don’t want the book spoiled. Instead, go read the first two books and come back to see if you agree with me.

While I was reading Catching Fire, I had a sudden moment of realization: the book worked so well as the middle of a trilogy because it seemed full of references to and themes from the mother of all second chapters in trilogies: The Empire Strikes Back. So instead of a full review, I’m going to look at some of the similarities.

Rebel Defeat: In Empire, the rebels get slaughtered. From the battle of Hoth through the end of the movie, it is clear that the Empire is better-funded, better-informed, and more dangerous than the rebels had originally thought. In Catching Fire, the protagonist Katniss Everdeen realizes very early in the book that the Capitol’s leaders know more than she does and are capable of destroying anyone who might stand up to them.

Training: In Empire, Luke goes to Dagobah, meets Yoda, and starts training to become the hero he needs to be. Katniss begins training once she realizes she must take part in the Hunger Games for a second time, but the training is for more than just the games: it’s to make her into the leader the revolution needs. Her trainer isn’t quite the sage figure that Yoda is; he’s a surly drunk named Haymitch who is the only prior champion from her District. But like Yoda, he knows more than he lets on.

The Reversal: When Luke leaves Dagobah, he races off to Cloud City to rescue his friends, only to find a mess that finds some very strange Allies. Not a direct parallel, but when Katniss gets to the games, she finds that the situation is more complex than she knew, and survival will require her to cooperate with someone she isn’t sure she can trust (Lando Calrissian?). But there’s an even bigger twist at the end that sets up the next book.

The Ending: Catching Fire ends with one of the two heroes, Peeta, kidnapped by the Capitol, and Katniss having her left arm tended to in the sick bay of a large vessel. Which is pretty much exactly how Empire ends: Han Solo missing, Luke being repaired, the hope of a rebel resurgence on the horizon. It’s not quite hopeful: there’s a lot in both of these stories that still needs to be done, and you can’t help but wonder at the end of Catching Fire how the residents of District 13 will react to the arrival of the rebels.

So if Catching Fire is The Empire Strikes Back, then will Mockingjay, the third book, share DNA with Return of the Jedi? I’ll bet on it, but a slightly modified sequence of events. The rebels will work with the natives of District 13 (Ewoks), Katniss will travel to the Capitol to rescue Peeta before the rebels destroy the city (Luke goes to the Death Star), and at the end, everyone will dance the yub-nub. That’s just my prediction, anyway.

Fiction Mondays: Short Novels

Even though I’m reading Ulysses, I want to keep up with my book-a-week schedule, so my solution? Short novels! Maybe even novellas, eventually. It’s a real change of pace for me, but I am really interested to see how these shorter books work. Who knows? It might even inspire me to someday write a shorter novel of my own.

Last week, I read Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, which is about the murder of a young, idealistic man in Vietnam in the 1950s and the potential for a supposed innocent to cause untold destruction and suffering. The story follows Fowler, a jaded and cynical reporter, as he deals with the fallout of the murder of Pyle, the American of the novel’s title. But things are not so simple: Pyle stole Fowler’s girlfriend. And before he died, he had started to channel money to a “Third Force,” which he believed would defeat the communists and secure American allies in the region.

What really surprised me in this book is the certainty that Greene had, even in 1955, that America could not win in Vietnam. Over and over, he dismisses (through Fowler) the notion that the United States could come to the region and spread democracy. He believes that Pyle is foolish for believing this will be the outcome, for thinking that channeling money to a rebel force will cause anything but more bloodshed. It’s strange to read it after the war was fought, and in the middle of another war to spread democracy. I wonder what people thought of his predictions in the 1950s.

I thought the book was structured really well; it jumps really smoothly between Fowler’s memories of Pyle and the aftermath of his death, leading to the moment of overlap that you know will occur at the end. I don’t know if the characters were strong enough for me—at times they seemed more like archetypes than actual people. You had Fowler, the old man who was a little world-weary and seemed to have just given up, and the Pyle, the enthusiastic but ultimately naïve young man who thinks he’s going to save the world but ends up causing more trouble than he anticipated. They seemed to embody ideas about containment versus isolation during the Cold War era, and at times I found that this really detracted from the story.

This is the second Graham Greene novel I’ve read, and I definitely preferred the other one, Brighton Rock, to this one. I think the biggest difference for me was that the character in that book, while deranged and evil, was so compelling that you couldn’t help but be dragged along on his criminal escapades, and The Quiet American was the complete opposite. Without a really interesting plot, these characters would have been unbearable stand-ins for different philosophies. The plot alone moves you along, which I think is fine for certain genre novels, but there has to be something more. I mean, Greene also wrote The Third Man, which has a really engaging plot as well, but what makes that movie memorable is the mysterious character of Harry Lime and the way he is presented to the audience. He’s a compelling character within a strong genre plot, which is more memorable.


Meanwhile, back in Pennsylvania....

Just a small update on my own writing: a few short stories are coming along really well, and it's looking like I'm going to be heading off to graduate school in the fall. More details to follow when I've made a final decision.

Fiction Mondays: Drown

Junot Díaz’s “Drown” was on my to-read list for a really long time, so I finally bought it and got around to reading it. I loved “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” and the short stories I had read, like “How to Date a Whitegirl, Blackgirl, Browngirl, Halfie,” were so intelligent and engaging and funny that I knew I had to read the whole collection. The book didn’t disappoint.

Junot Díaz’s greatest strength, I think, is his voice. The stories are often in the first-person and feel so natural, like you’re hearing them told rather than reading them. This is a tough trick to pull off, I think. It requires a really delicate balance of details to remain realistic, and I think Díaz excels at providing enough information to really flesh out his characters without making it seem like they’re noticing things that no real person would notice. Not that the details are scant in any way: there are small things in all of the stories that the characters notice because of how he develops them, whether it’s the pool table deliveryman who notes the details on all of the models because he’s trying to save enough money to buy one for himself, or a guy going through a breakup at the same time as the woman in the apartment underneath his, who knows her route around the apartment because it mirrors his own.

There’s also an excellent sense of place in these stories. The ones that take place in New Jersey travel on the New Jersey Turnpike or the Garden State Parkway, or they take the bus to Paramus, while the ones in the Dominican Republic evoke the place so well that I can see it even though I’ve never been there. Díaz has a real talent when it comes to setting; the story “Boyfriend,” about the breakups on separate floors, was one of my favorites. It used the layout of the apartment so well, and gave the story a geography that made it incredibly concrete and visual.

I don’t know if I’d call it a collection of linked stories, exactly; while many have the same characters and background, there is a lot of variation and a number of stories that involve separate characters altogether. The connections between the stories are really interesting, though. There are themes of missing fathers (or fathers who vanish and then return), and a recurring question of what it means to be financially stable. While the stories that take place in the Dominican Republic often touch on how the poorer characters scrape by, the New Jersey stories find them a little wealthier, but there is always a price. There’s a character who supports his mother by selling pot, but he worries that she might find out where the money comes from, and he has higher aspirations; the pool table deliveryman has a stable income, but used to steal money from the register to buy presents for his girlfriend.

Díaz is a really powerful writer, and his ability to develop characters makes these stories resonate long after you’ve finished the book. Even in the most broken characters, he has such a huge amount of empathy toward them that you can’t help but hope things will turn out for them. The second-to-last story in the book, which revisits a character seen in the first story, takes a deformed man and makes him into an odd kind of hero, running around his town and trying to perform good deeds. It kind of acts as an explanation for the rest of the characters in the stories: yes, they can seem like monsters at times, but their intentions are not necessarily malevolent. It just takes a different way of looking at them to understand what they’re trying to do.

Fiction Mondays: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

I mentioned last Wednesday that I was reading Murakami, and I have now finished “Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World”. My head hurts a bit, because there’s a lot to wrap my mind around, but I think I liked it. It’s not as great as “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” or “Kafka on the Shore,” and it’s very much a science fiction novel, which I honestly was not expecting going into it. I never really think of Murakami as a sci-fi writer; he’s more of a magical realist to me, someone who writes about normal people who stumble into a weird, sinister other world. That’s all in “Hard-Boiled Wonderland,” but the protagonist is not at all “normal,” and the setting is a futuristic version of Tokyo where two kinds of computer specialists are warring over information. There are hints of advanced technology and a large portion of the story involves altering humans with a module that is implanted into the brain to run a computer program.

I guess what it seems like is a Murakami story set a few years later than most of his other work. While many of the familiar elements of his books are there (including a well-like structure that leads to a bizarre netherworld), they are warped and transported. The detail in the book that made me think of this was that the unnamed protagonist explains that he used to have a wife and a cat (another recurring Murakami element), but that they left him. First the wife, then the cat, exactly like in “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.” It could be the same character, ten years later. In that time, the world has gotten a little stranger, the weird parts of the earlier story becoming prevalent parts of society.

What I did really like was the structure of the book; it’s split into two sections, reality and myth. The chapters alternate, with the connection between them becoming more and more apparent. Strangely enough, I found myself thinking of the current season of LOST, with the narrative divided between an on-island timeline and a “flash-sideways” timeline. The writers of the show haven’t yet revealed how these two plotlines link to each other, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it worked out to be a lot like Murakami’s book, where the character has to decide whether to escape to his “real life,” or to keep living in the myth. Only on LOST, it isn’t so clear which is which.

Haruki Murakami is one of my favorite writers, and it’s been a while since I’ve read one of his books. His fictional world has become so familiar, and I was glad to be back in it, to see where he would take the story. There were a lot of unexpected things in this novel (and I don’t just mean all of the crazy sci-fi stuff; that kind of stuff is almost expected in a Murakami novel) and I loved the forays into old movies, Russian novels, and Bob Dylan songs throughout the book. I think I’m going to check out his nonfiction book, “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.” I’d be interested to see if he sheds some light on his own themes, the way Chabon did in “Manhood for Amateurs.”

I also started a new project last week: reading "Ulysses." I'm trying to space it out so that I finish it on Bloomsday, June 16th. That's the day the novel takes place, and it will require me to read about 50 pages a week. So far, so good. But don't worry: I'll be reading other books along the way. If you want to join me in this big reading project, let me know. I just finished the first section (The "Telemachiad") and now I'm onto the second part. And yes, I know it's another book with connections to LOST. But they've thrown so many literary references in there that it's hard to find a book that doesn't somehow connect.

(Non)Fiction Mondays: Manhood for Amateurs

Last week, I read Michael Chabon’s “Manhood for Amateurs,” a collection of personal essays about the author’s experiences as a father and as a man in general. I was kind of wary about reading it—sometimes learning too much about an author’s personal life is detrimental to how much you like their writing—but after the first few essays, that feeling dissipated. At some points, I think reading these essays even shed some light on some aspects of Chabon’s novels.

The book is broken down into thematic sections, each sticking to the format of a “handbook” of sorts for being a modern man. The section titles include “Techniques of Betrayal,” "Patterns of Early Enchantment, and “Tactics of Wonder and Loss”, which I thought was a clever way to tie essays together. The essays themselves cover a lot of ground, touching on everything from memories of Chabon’s grandfather’s basement workshop to the merits of raising children who are, well, geeks.

But not just geeks: that same essay is where Chabon gets the book’s title. He says he is raising a family of “amateurs,” kids who are extremely interested in things like Dr. Who and Star Wars, who really love diving into these things with abandon. It’s a use of the word “amateurs” I hadn’t ever thought of, but it makes sense in its way. An amateur, whether it’s in sports or arts, is someone who is only there because of passion. I devour comic books and LOST and such because they get me excited and I like to talk about them and think about them.

While some of the essays are better than others (there's one about the author's "murse," or man-purse, that I'm still on the fence about), the absolute best essay was called “The Story of Our Story” and it’s about Chabon’s younger brother. As an older brother myself, the essay, which was about the stories we always return to, the ones we know by heart and still tell one another, reminded me a lot of the worlds my brother and I liked to create when we were younger, and about how we have these shared memories that we each remember differently. “My life story really began when I had someone to tell it to,” Chabon says.

This is a quick read; the essays are each only a few pages, but they’re mostly really interesting, and Chabon has an engaging voice and eye for detail that are common to his fiction and nonfiction. This is the second book of his nonfiction I have read, and I think it’s even more enjoyable than “Maps and Legends,” which I read last year. If you’re a fan of “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay,” “Wonder Boys,” and Chabon’s other novels, this book serves as a kind of companion piece, where you can see the same themes and concerns visited in a different format. And if you haven’t read those novels, go read them.

Fiction Mondays: Autograph Man

This week's book (yes, I'm trying to read a book every week) was Zadie Smith's "Autograph Man," her follow-up to "White Teeth," and a book that seemed to suffer from ridiculously high expectations. It seems to be a pretty common occurrence for second novels when the author's debut was insanely great (see: the reviews of Joshua Ferris' "The Unnamed"), but I tried not to let the critical reaction influence my reading at all. Here's a confession: I love second novels like this. They're like second albums, the long-awaited follow-ups that everyone agrees will never be as great as the first one. So I tried to go into this novel without expectations, so I could take it for what it was.

The story follows Alex-Li Tandem, a Chinese-Jewish-British collector of Autographs, in the week leading up to the anniversary of his father's death, when he is expected to perform kaddish in front of his friends and family. Along the way, he tries to obtain an autograph of Kitty Alexander, a 1950s film star, and to make up with his girlfriend, who has a broken finger because Alex wrecked his car while she was his passenger.

The story is about a character who is looking for redemption, but it's a take on that type of story where the character actively rejects redemption or tries to avoid it. He's drunk or stoned for a large portion of the book; he alienates the people around him; when his girlfriend has to go in for surgery, Alex leaves for New York. Every time you think he's going to have a relevatory moment, he screws up (my personal favorite is a time when he decides to go to the bar and drink alphabetically instead of going home). He's like the protagonist of Flannery O'Connor's "Wise Blood" in that he knows exactly what he should do to be a better person and actively does the opposite thing. It's an odd character type, and one that could have been really alienating from another author, but Zadie Smith moves the story forward with such momentum and surrounds Alex with such a great cast that it makes it more exciting--while you read it, you wonder if she will pull it off, and how it will be done.

It's difficult to discuss too much of the plot without revealing too much, but I will talk about the structure and the religious aspects of the book. The novel is divided into two sections (well, three if you count the long prologue and four if you count the epilogue), each corresponding to a different religious idea. The first section is called "The Kabbalah of Alex-Li Tandem," divided into ten chapters that correspond to the ten "sefirot," which I took to understand from the novel's forays into discussions of mysticism as ten aspects of God in humans. They're the steps a person has to take to achieve mystic enlightenment. The second section is called "The Zen of Alex-Li Tandem," and is based on a story involving a bull. It's not really elaborated on, but if I can guess (based on my own reading of Zen Buddhist books), I would say it's a metaphor for enlightenment--going out and seeking the bull, taming the bull, and carrying it forth into the world seems to correspond to achieving enlightenment and going through life in that manner. Maybe I am wrong, though.

The real meaning of this religious structure and the mysticism doesn't become clear until the last few pages of the book, when Alex's personal history and his friend Adam's forays into mysticism finally converge in a really beautiful moment where Alex shows some hope that he's not completely irredeemable. The ending is really interesting, and again I won't spoil it, but it's a scene that ties all of the characters together (and this is something Zadie Smith tends to do, isn't it? There's that scene at the reveal of the supermouse in "White Teeth," and that scene of the character's reading at the end of "On Beauty"...) while also exploring the religious themes and the nature of the past and present.

It's a quick read, a really interesting book. I can see why it didn't fare so well with critics; I mean, it's not as fantastic as "White Teeth," and it doesn't have that complexity or the giant cast, and at times it seems like some of the supporting characters aren't as fleshed out as they could be. But at the same time, it's a novel that, despite its flaws, has a lot of passion, a lot of belief in why the character's story needs to be told. It kind of ties into this thought I had recently about which sticks with you more, the story that is technically perfect and polished to the point of austerity, or a story that's a little messy but obviously cared-about by its writer and with genuine passion? I think I'd rather have the mess than a hermetically-sealed perfect story anytime.