The House on Fortune Street

Book news! Margot Livesey, who made an appearance on our 25 Books Project for her Eva Moves the Furniture, has a new novel out, called The House on Fortune Street. I was able to see her read from it and bought the book at her reading Tuesday at Porter Square Books in Somerville, MA. It was nice to have something weighty and yet fast-paced for my 20+ hour flight to Korea yesterday. Sort of four novellas that add up to a very full novel, and which elicit a lot of reflection on the characters and the way lives are intertwined. Highly recommended.

Unaccustomed Earth, by Jhumpa Lahiri

So, last week I read an advance copy of the upcoming Jhumpa Lahiri novel. This isn't any kind of formal review, but here's what I thought:

Three of the four best stories you could have found in The New Yorker, including the best one, "Hell-Heaven," which, after reading twice and hearing read once, I'm starting to think may be my favorite story of hers, right up there with "A Temporary Matter." The fourth is the title story.

The book, or at least the advance copy, is broken into two parts. The second part is three linked stories starting with one from TNY. Unfortunately, that one was by the far the strongest, and the rest of the section didn't feel finished to me. Maybe it wasn't. Maybe she was still working on revisions.

I'd put this book between The Namesake (which I think is more an extremely long short story than a novel, and a story that could have just been a regularly long short story) and Interpreter of Maladies (which I loved and which has one of the all time great titles). It's good but not a classic.

Speaking of classics, and as an addendum to this post, check this out: http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/reviews/lone_star_statements.php
Congrats to Fringe on their (our) list, though I can't get behind any best book list that has The Kite Runner on it. The above link is someone's compilation of one-star amazon reviews of best books.

Stay classy, San Diego.

The Quick and The Dead: A Review by Matthew Salesses

This is the fourteenth of a many-part series written by the staff and editors of Fringe Magazine, who will be reviewing books from the Pool as part of the 25 Books Project

"Thoughts are infusorial," says Nurse Daisy, bard of Green Palms nursing home and one of the many characters populating Joy Williams's sharp-as-the-reaper's-scythe The Quick and the Dead.

This idea of the collective unconscious is in keeping with Williams' web imagery and interlocking narratives. The latter includes three motherless girls, a father who sees the ghost of his dead wife (urging him to join her in the next world), a suicidal pianist, an eight-year old who pours sand over her head, a dog murderer who suffers a Jake-Barnes-injury from a parcel bomb, a retired big-game hunter who listens to the music of air conditioners, a stroke survivor with a vivisected monkey in his head, a dog becoming increasingly paranoid, and so on.

The theme of exploration of life and death (as the title indicates) link these narratives, which take place in a fictional American desert town where the heat and landscape contribute to a certain sensitivity toward portentous images and events. As you would expect, characters die, move on, or are otherwise carried off not to return, all except protagonist and misanthrope Alice, who hasn't had her period since she found out the people she thought were her parents are really her grandparents.

My description of the network of characters does not do justice to the conceptual genius trickling through every dialogue and scene in the novel. Williams' characters talk intelligently, movingly, frighteningly, and humorously about life and death and what is or is not beyond; their thoughts, words, and actions connect in a startlingly organic way. This novel stops you in your tracks, lets you start down a new path, then stops you again. The writing exists at this consistently high level throughout—I dare any reader to stop reading after a page of back-and-forth between, say, Carter and his wife's ghost. That is what I liked most and least about the book as a whole.

There is barely room to breathe, barely time for the reader to step back and absorb what he or she has read, with all the information and wit and brilliance. Mostly this jam-packed-ness is extremely satisfying, but, ultimately, I did wish that the arc of the novel was a little more pronounced; I wanted more catharsis. The Quick and the Dead, once it gets you in its grasp, will not release you. Though, for the most part, I don't think you will want to be.

You can read about Matthew Salesses's dancing Christmas turkey at monkeybicycle.com, where it will be posted the day after Blame-the-Empty-Eggnog-on-Santa Day. His fiction is also available elsewhere on the web, or in MAR as the 2007 Fine Line contest winner. He is the assistant fiction editor at Redivider Journal and manager of the monsters under your bed. The monsters in the closet belong to some other guy.

Listening

Greetings from Korea (insert postcard of neon crosses lighting up the Busan skyline here). I've been thinking, probably unsurprisingly, about communication. Maybe it's that I've been reading Joy Williams's The Quick and the Dead, with its fantastically strange dialogue (review pending), or maybe it's just the whole idea of two weddings, one Korean and one American, or maybe it's that I'm revising a story about cannibals that try to stop being cannibals after a little loving contact with a group of Europeans, I don't know. But communicaton seems all the rage these days.

It's a strange thing. We read so much fiction by authors who were ostracized in their youths and who write about ostracized characters, yet it seems especially true in stories that people need people to talk to. (Unless you like those stories with only one character--I generally don't.) This doesn't necessarily mean people really get to communicate, but it means they're trying. I re-read Carver's Cathedral recently, and what struck me about the collection is how much more grace seems offered to the characters than in his earlier stories, and how that grace comes through finding someone to communicate with. I don't mean to say these stories are better--I actually prefer the earlier ones--but stories like "Fever" and "A Small, Good Thing" allow characters to connect in a way that some of the earlier stories don't. This seems to give the book a more hopeful take on life.

So, since I'm in a hopeful mood, full of Christmas spirit and eggnog, I think I'll give my cannibals a chance to connect . . . just before they eat each other. I guess what I meant to talk about was how giving your protagonist someone who will listen to him can be a great thing for fiction, but oh well. Instead, I'll recommend some recent lit mag releases (shameless plugs and more!): Redivider, MAR, Black Warrior Review's sad animal issue. Read.

The First Page

So these days reading slush for Ploughshares and Redivider, as well as working for Fringe, I'm reading a lot of pour-water-over-my-head-to-wake-myself-back-up, clamp-jumper-cables-to-my-nipples-to-wake-me-back-up, boring-as-rust first pages. Lizzie talked about cover letters a gazillion posts ago; I thought I'd do a sequel. Here's some thoughts on the first 300 words, because really, an editor can tell from page one whether the story is going to be good or not at least 90 percent of the time. So print this out, crumple it up, and eat it--that's supposed to work for memory. Three simple rules:

1. do something new.
2. start the story arc.
3. write a brilliant sentence.

Why? Because (1) editors are sleepy and they've probably already read 20 stories by the time they get to yours, (2) the most tiring thing in the world--more tiring than Thanksgiving--is waiting for a story to begin, and (3) the editor carefully reading your opening sentences should be given a reason to continue doing so. I think if I don't get two of these three things in the first page, the monster under my bed ends up finishing the story. He likes to eat paper too, but not for memory. He likes it because "it tastes like smart."

Lonely?

In the Prologue to Strange Pilgrims, Gabriel Garcia Marquez talks about a dream where he goes to his own funeral and sees all his friends there, but when he wants to leave with them, he's told he's the only one who can't go to the after-party. (That's right, in dreams there are always after-parties.) Well, Marquez relates this being-left-behind to expatriation and isolation. Sounds heady, I know, but as a minority and an adoptee, isolation is all up in my writing's business, so I thought I'd talk about it. I thought I'd talk about setting as well, so be prepared for the following mess.

So here's what I'm thinking. Sure, Marquez uses the unfamiliarity of the setting to isolate his characters. Why not? They're pilgrims, after all. But when they really feel isolated is when they run into things that should be familiar to them but aren't. Like when the Prez in the opening story runs into people from his home country who lie to him about their motives.

Marquez also uses the ole pathetic fallacy, where the Prez's thoughts are mirrored by the weather and place. This is okay if you're going for the magical realism thing. Yet what is it Charles Baxter says about the pathetic fallacy--that a setting can be stronger when it doesn't rely on the character? I think there's something damn good to say for that. The character should experience isolation in spite of what's around him. I'm just saying, it gets a little tiresome to see rain when someone's sad, sunshine when happy, no one around when the character feels lonely. Why not let your characters feel lonely when they probably shouldn't? It's more lonely when you're sitting next to someone and still feel alone.

Depressing and serious. I'll try for something more ridiculous in my next post, I promise. Let's just say my dreams are about dinosaurs and The Paris Review. Don't ask.

Flannery O'Connor and Heroes

So this is my first blog attempt and I'm assuming it's going to suck, but stick with me. Good intro, right? Now I'll talk about what kind of food got stuck in my teeth this morning (cinnamon apple sauce) and my favorite kind of toilet paper (whatever that commercial is with those red bears!).... I thought that was how blogs worked? You see, I did a little research. Dwight Schrute's blog is about a time capsule he sent to himself. No, really. I'm actually getting to something literary. Seems to me time's a pretty mysterious mofo. Heard about this study about how people like to see, in their movie trailers, everything that's going to happen in the movie? Not original. Flannery was doing that stuff ages ago. See "A Good Man is Hard to Find." You know damn well they're going to meet the misfit the moment the grandmother, and then the storeowner, mentions it. Or "A Circle in the Fire." Fire's in the title, even, and it's the protagonist's greatest fear. What she really pulled off is making us pant with anticipation (that's right, like a dog) until we get there. Why don't we see this in a lot of writing today (though, yes, there are exceptions like Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex--on our Best Books List)?

Actually, this isn't what I wanted to talk about at all. What I wanted to talk about was dialogue subtext. In "A Circle in the Fire" (really one of O'Connor's fastest moving stories) we've got this woman who's convincing herself the invading boys are only hungry and will soon leave vs. the boys who know exactly what they are doing but pretend to speak politely. The suspense is in waiting for the subtext to come to the surface, for the woman to realize (or let herself realize) what exactly is going on, in opposition to what is being said. That's a whole lot of suspense, a whole lot more than just wondering what physical action will play out. If you look back at pop culture, you'll see this at work in shows like Heroes, where characters will have whole conversations full of disparate subtexts, disparate levels of knowledge (though this is probably easier to do when your characters' identities/super powers are secret). Too heavy? My time capsule would include gay Albus Dumbledore, embryonic research, global warming in a tube, a copy of James Scott's OneStory, an issue of the latest Redivider, my upcoming issue of Mid-American Review, other shameless plugs, etc. And yours?

Native Speaker: A Review by Matt Salesses

This is the fourth of a many-part series written by the staff and editors of Fringe Magazine, who will be reviewing books from the Pool as part of the 25 Books Project.

How could you not love the opening to Chang-rae Lee's PEN/Hemingway award-winning *Native Speaker,* in which narrator Henry Park's wife, having decided to take a break from their marriage, leaves him with a note calling him a "B+ student of life... yellow peril... traitor, [and] spy." Those first two insults are the best (if we're judging on cruelty and humor) but the latter two end up scuba-diving Henry into the cove of his Korean-American identity. It turns out he *is* a spy, at least by profession, and this theme of spying, of cultural mask-wearing, of between-ness, is at the heart of the novel and of Henry's shortcomings in life and marriage.

As the novel progresses, we learn about Henry's job in cultural espionage, going forward in time, while delving into his problematic marriage to beautiful, white, speach-therapist Lelia, going back. Henry's latest mission involves getting close to political up-and-comer John Kwang and taking notes on his activities for some unknown, but definitely shady, client, using their shared Korean heritage as bait. Henry, it seems, is quite good at his job, as his whole life has prepared him for this sort of obsequious fitting-in. The same characteristics that make him good at his job, however, seem to have annoyed Lelia to the point of her leaving to seek out one or more implied affairs in Europe. Henry's faults have also been compounded, we learn, by the death of their only son under a pile of neighborhood kids.

While these plots are intertwined beautifully on a thematic level, the marriage does tend to be more engaging in terms of its emotional connection to the reader--even to this reader for whom the themes of the novel hit close to home--because the connection between Lelia and Henry is filled with a type of intimate longing that is lacking in the relationship with John Kwang. Kwang's political intrigue lends the book forward movement and dramatic tension, but the real key to Henry's character lies in Lelia, and the key to the book comes from the same deep well of humor and cruel truth as her opening note. In their falling apart and coming together is the clash of race and love and identity and understanding, handled with a prose that, at its best, hits hard and fast and can leave you stopping for breath. It seemed to me, turning the pages, that the times I looked away were when I knew Lee had caught me, returning in my head to the net of words and truths it sometimes hurt to read. No lie.

Matthew Salesses is a Fringe reader and assistant fiction editor at Redivider Journal. Google him. Name your pets after him. Seriously. Read books that matter.