novel

[REVIEW] If the Ice Had Held by Wendy J. Fox

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(Santa Fe Writers Project, 2019)

 

REVIEW BY MARK H. STEVENS

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We are deep into the If the Ice Had Held, a brisk novel told from seven points of view across more than three decades, when 14-year-old Irene thinks about her mother, a woman she never really knew.

“Irene was not sure she had any true memories of the woman,” writes Wendy J. Fox, “only scraps and fragments she had pieced together from a handful of ragged photographs.”

As a whole, If the Ice Had Held comes to us in those same brisk, jagged scraps and memories. We are given pieces. Shards. And we have the pleasure of seeing the pieces come together as we understand how they connect, as we see the players react, interact, and impact each other’s lives.

Irene, however, is not alone. This is primary Melanie’s story. Of the 37 chapters and seven points of view, Melanie’s story gets 16.

When we meet Melanie, she is working in a non-glamorous corner of the dot-com world. She works in Colorado Springs in “the ground-floor wing of a crumbling office park where the air-conditioning was troubling and unreliable.”  Melanie is restless. She has a constant “feeling of spinning.”  On a road trip, she breaks one of her rules, to never sleep with a co-worker or a customer. She dubs him San Antonio Man. He’s a co-worker. Melanie thinks hard about the quality of her life, her work environment, her home, her relationships. She is a professional adult in a professional world and she is also adrift and searching.

We learn that Melanie is Irene’s daughter and that Melanie’s father was Sammy, Kathleen’s brother. Sammy is the subject of the title—if the ice had held, if Sammy had not fallen in the cold river to his death, Melanie might have been raised by very young teenage parents and then, well, who knows?

Think I’m giving away too much? I doubt it. There is much more to Melanie’s story—what we learn about Kathleen and why she stepped in to supplant Irene’s role as mother, what we learn about the relationship between Kathleen and Irene, what we learn about the stories that were concocted because it was the 1970s and stories were required. What we learn about the first responders to Sammy’s accident, too.

In fact, It was when Fox switched to the one chapter told from the point of view of Simon, the father of a character named Brian, that the novel really clicked into place and I marveled at the kaleidoscopic effect that Fox gives readers of the connections across time, across families, across life.

This is Melanie’s story—maybe? If the Ice Had Held starts and ends with Kathleen. It’s her gesture (much too small a term) that gives the story its spark and its heart. Well, at least, one of them. In a novel riddled with accidents and tragedies, there more than a few lump-in-your-throat moments when fox reveals connections and encounters you won’t see coming.

The story starts with Sammy plunging into an icy river and water seems to ooze its way, in one form another into every scene. The cascading effects from this one accident ripple across time, the proverbial pebble in the pond but the pebble is a human being and the pond is life. its Fox’s writing is cool, serene and stripped clean of sentimentality. She is a dry-eyed documentarian with a keen eye and a terrific ear. The construction of this novel carries an almost David Hockney quality—the farther you step back, the more you see. But it was a singer I heard as the novel layered in connections and details. David Byrne.

If The Ice had Held asks us to wonder, well, how did I get here? “Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground…”

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The son of two librarians, Mark Stevens worked as a reporter for The Christian Science Monitor in Boston and Los Angeles, as a City Hall reporter for The Rocky Mountain News in Denver, as a national field producer for The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour (PBS), and as an education reporter for The Denver Post. He is currently president of Rocky Mountain Mystery Writers of America and hosts a regular podcast, The Rocky Mountain Writer, for Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers.

 

The stories we tell ourselves about our own history: an interview with Michelle Bailat-Jones

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(Ig publishing, 2018)

INTERVIEW BY JO VARNISH

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Jo Varnish: Your new novel, Unfurled, has just been released. Briefly, what is the book about?

 

Michelle Bailat-Jones: It’s a book about a family from Seattle with a secret in their past. In terms of the plot, it’s the story of a young woman named Ella who discovers that the story she’s believed about her life for twenty years wasn’t the right story at all. And maybe she won’t be allowed to know the whole story, or the true story, if such a thing actually exists. It’s about Ella losing her father, the man who raised her on his own, a man she fiercely loved and admired, and about having to go looking for her mother, the woman who abandoned her. It’s also a story about the Pacific Northwest, and the ocean, and fathers and daughters and absent mothers, and imagination and delusion.

 

JV: Tell us about the themes that Unfurled explores.

 

MBJ: The theme of Unfurled is how childhood trauma manifests in one’s adult life, as well as the stories we tell ourselves about our own history and the sense-making work we engage in to function despite that trauma. It is also a mother-daughter book in many ways, despite the apparent focus on father-daughter. And finally, anger is a very big theme in the novel.

 

JV: What was your inspiration for the book?

 

MBJ: I wrote a short story almost twenty years ago about a young woman who loses her father and uncovers a secret while going through his papers. It was set in a gritty, working class neighborhood of the Pacific Northwest, and although that character was much much younger than the Ella of Unfurled, it was the seed of the novel. And then some years ago, I read an article about the ferry system in Seattle, in particular the ferry pilots, and I became interested in that world. At the same time, my fiction is often interested in issues of absence and presence – physical but also metaphorical – and especially how grieving is negotiated within different personalities and family structures. The book grew and morphed over many many years into what it is today, but it grew out of those questions.

 

JV: You wrote Unfurled over an extended period of time. What kept drawing you back to the project? What research was necessary to make the book ‘real’?

 

MBJ: Unfurled is a novel that has taken me almost eighteen years to complete. So in that sense it is difficult to write about how I wrote the book; it would make more sense to talk about how I re-wrote it. Throughout all of these revisions and transformations—all of my attempts to tell the story that was ultimately asking to be told—I changed the lens a lot, sometimes focusing more on John, Ella’s father, or more on Maggie, Ella’s mother. I wrote an entire draft in Maggie’s POV, I wrote several in Ella’s POV but from different points of entry into her story.

Probably the most interesting research I was able to do for the novel involved looking at nautical charts of the Puget Sound. I could literally spend hours going over these charts, learning the names of the passages between the islands and the coves and points that dot the coastlines. These are unusual maps that you need nautical background to understand, so they were very exotic to me, and I found them quite beautiful.

I also took a lot of interest in social services, trying to understand how an individual could vanish for many years at a time. I learned that it is shockingly easy in America for a person to disappear – and this both saddened and intrigued me, and I wanted to explore that idea on the people left behind, what would that lack of control feel like? How does a person negotiate that kind of intangible loss?

 

JV: How does the setting of the Pacific Northwest influence Unfurled’s characters and the action?

 

MBJ: I am a very big fan of fiction that uses setting as an integral part of the characters. I dislike the idea of setting as a character on its own, it’s not that, but just that setting is big, setting has an emotional pull on my characters. This is probably just my own personal feelings on landscape, and most likely comes out of growing up in the Pacific Northwest, with all its looming beauty. But also, the idea that John, the stalwart ferry boat captain, was the kind of person who managed to create a “safe passage” for Maggie or for Ella, through the difficult waters of their lives was key to me, and I tried to mirror this in his work as a ferry pilot and the way the landscape has worked its way deeply into Ella’s sense of self. The ferries in the Pacific Northwest are big hulking workhorses, and I like how they navigate the deeps of the Pacific Ocean.

 

JV: Unfurled is told from the perspective of a single character, Ella, but who tries to grant herself imaginative access to a story that she could not have really known—of her parent’s relationship. What is the effect of this access and how is it meant to inform the reader’s understanding of the story?

 

MBJ: It makes sense to me that children might create a narrative of their parents’ lives and that at some poit that narrative proves to be false. So when John’s death involves learning that her own memories were false ones, I wanted to show how she went about confronting and investigating those memories. What did she believe to be true about her parent’s relationship and how did it influence her own development into an adult? What did it feel like to have to go back over those memories and try to find a line of reality or something really concrete to hold onto? I also think she deserved the chance to re-imagine those memories at some point, something she finally does toward the end of the book.

 

JV: The book is clearly influenced by nautical imagery and scene-settings. Does that reflect a personal interest of yours?

 

MBJ: I’m so lucky in that I grew up spending my summers camping in Oregon and Washington, and learning to fish in rivers and lakes with my own family. I love fishing, I always have. Nature is really important to me, and I think this is really clear in all of my fiction. It was a delight to focus on this in Unfurled. But I have never fished in the ocean – and I always wanted to. As a child in Seattle, we had friends who were into boats and took my family out onto the ocean, even once on a three-week trip up into the Gulf of Alaska, and I loved this so much but my first-hand knowledge is quite limited. The language of sailing is magical, and the science of navigation has always interested me. I really enjoyed researching this aspect of the novel.

JV: At the center of Unfurled is a mother with a mental illness.  What drew you to exploring the effects of her illness on her daughter and husband?

 

MBJ: I have always been interested in how people make sense of their histories, their childhoods. All families, at least to me, are based on variations and versions of stories that are told by different family members. The truth is always situated somewhere near those stories, but no one story can contain the actual truth – if that even exists. In a family touched by mental illness, and one like Maggie’s which involves fantastic and even delusional storytelling, truth becomes even slipperier and I wanted to explore that. But not just from Maggie’s perspective, also from Ella’s and John’s.

 

JV: There are secrets at the heart of Unfurled.  Tell us about the function of secrets in the novel, as well as in family life.

 

MBJ: I think it’s very natural for parents to keep certain secrets from their children. It’s a necessary part of parenting, for safety reasons, for privacy reasons, but when it becomes extreme, as in the novel with John keeping Maggie’s “story” from Ella, it creates a real disconnect. I like to think that this disconnect existed even while John was still alive. This is something that Ella must recognize at some point, that she has internalized this way of behaving between two people who love each other, and this definitely informs her relationship with Neil. I also think that secrets are often based around shame and the image we want others to have of us, so that was interesting to look at in terms of both John and Ella, and where their traumas are located and why they hold them so close to their hearts.

 

JV: Ella is a veterinarian; does her scientific background affect her processing of emotional issues?

 

MBJ: This is something that, I think, came out of how Ella’s character evolved and her resistance to self-analysis. She pretends to be able to look at herself directly, analytically, but she is much more comfortable hiding within the terminology of the one thing in her life she feels competent at: doctoring animals.

 

JV: Michelle, you co-founded L’Atelier Writers, a retreat for writers held in France each summer that is entering its fifth year, you teach fiction writing and you work as a literary translator.  How do these branches of your writing life inform your writing as an author?

 

MBJ: Literary translation is very much like writing, only I don’t have make the story up. In that sense it is actually quite relaxing, even if translation questions can be complicated and make me work hard. I consider it practice for writing as well as an art form on its own, and I cannot imagine being a writer only. L’ATELIER has become a cherished writing community and I’m so grateful to be involved and be able to support a diverse group of writers each year. We have a lot of fun on our annual retreat, but we are also very serious and I’m always impressed with the work that comes from our group. In terms of informing my writing, all these various activities are a way of energizing me with different ideas and connections with people. Book and writing discussions are vital, I feel, and keep me on my toes.

 

JV: You have lived in Switzerland for 14 years. How has your writing been influenced by living in Europe?

 

MBJ: I worry about this actually. I have been greatly influenced, I’m sure, by living outside of the place where I am published. I read a lot of French and Swiss literature, and it is often very different from American or English literature and I cannot help but internalize those narrative structures and find them very familiar, when an American reader might find them disconcerting. The lines are blurry for me. I hope this is a strength, but I also hope I will always read broadly enough to see what I’m doing. I consider Unfurled to be a very American book, but then Fog Island Mountains was hardly American at all. I like the flexibility in that, and I hope I will always be able to do that.

 

JV: Finally, what are you working on now?

 

MBJ: I’m finishing the draft of a novel – and for the first time I’m working in two landscapes: Switzerland and the US. The novel is set in Eastern Oregon and in Switzerland, and I’m maybe a bit superstitious about revealing the plot while I’m still finishing it, so I won’t say too much that’s concrete. Probably because I always do so much re-writing before a novel is actually done. I’m hoping this novel won’t take me eighteen years to finish – although I’m getting close to four or five at this point. But the book deals with radiation physics and ambition, from a woman’s perspective, and it looks at some of the changes in the world, in particular at our current feeling of compromised safety, and how terrorism has become a commonplace concern for people in the west, in a way it wasn’t before, or in a way that we were able to ignore it because it was only happening elsewhere. It’s been a challenging and interesting project, and I’m hoping to finish it up before the end of the year.

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Michelle Bailat-Jones is a writer and translator. Her début novel, Fog Island Mountains (Tantor 2014), won the inaugural Christopher Doheny Award from The Center for Fiction and Audible. Her second novel, Unfurled, was just published by Ig Publishing in Oct 2018. Her fiction, poetry, translations, and criticism have appeared in various journals, including: The Kenyon Review, the Rumpus, Public Pool, the View from Here, Hayden’s Ferry Review, the Quarterly Conversation, PANK, Spolia Mag, Two Serious Ladies, Cerise Press and the Atticus Review. Her translation credits include two novels by celebrated Swiss modernist, Charles Ferdinand Ramuz: Beauty on Earth (Skomlin, 2013) and What if the Sun…? (Skomlin, 2016). Michelle was born in Japan, grew up in the Pacific Northwest of the United States and now lives in Switzerland.

 

Having moved from her native England aged 24, Jo Varnish now lives in Maplewood, New Jersey.  Her work has most recently appeared in, or is forthcoming in, The Bangalore Review and Necessary Fiction. Currently she is studying for her MFA and working on her novel.

[REVIEW] While You Were Gone by Sybil Baker

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(C&R Press, 2018)

REVIEW BY BARTON SMOCK

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What if not so strange bedfellows were soap opera and short story? What if promise is a shape that steals the form of its maker? What if keyhole was the eye of an empty clock? What if one could look long enough at the ceiling and so change the color of heaven? If each, then I would say we may one day have a book like Sybil Baker’s While You Were Gone. In the meantime, we have Sybil Baker’s While You Were Gone.

In different stages of gone-ness are three sisters from Tennessee. Are Claire, Shannon, and Paige. In that order, or not. Each goes from sadness to updated sadness, knowing place as puzzle but seeing differently how a piece can be both missing and extra. As Baker draws them, they are lived-in and in orbit; spirits in a movie about feet touching the earth. Claire, sheltered so early by her belief in free fall; Shannon, silenced by her idealization of reportage; Paige, seeker of a recordable transit. Insomniac acolytes, all. Survivors of synopsis anchored to haunting their individual uprootings. The South is here:  the new, the old, the same, the simultaneous. As is the short attention span of history. As is the subtle and futureless yen a body has for ruin. As is Death, a fourth sister, whose blood has no birthday.

Fathers read of sickness and outside some are singing and this is the church of the unmothered internal. Mind is the dream of memory. Sex claws at the present. Some here are egg-shaped and hiding and asking, sister, can the devoured hear the sound that my stomach is making? I have no answers. There are Fisher Price figures in a crochet dollhouse. I said oh, above this work, and oh again. For I had not guessed doom to be impulsive. For I had not known endings to revive arrival, or grief to put brush before fossil.

As a storyteller, Baker knows revelation is the consoler of plot and that time exists to mourn chronology. As an artist, Baker casts a bite-mark on that vividly tragic fruit as one awed into suddenness and then as three in the twilight of playing dress-up. As a voice, Baker quotes shadows beyond the reach of comment.

I pray you will love this book for its commemorative absences and for its overlapping obscurities. I believe you will for how it navigates so visibly that it trades being spotted for being seen.

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Barton Smock lives in Columbus, Ohio, with his wife and four children. He is the author of the chapbook infant*cinema (Dink Press, 2016) and editor of isacoustic* (isacoustic.com)

[REVIEW] Crudo by Olivia Laing

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(W.W. Norton & Company, 2018)

REVIEW BY S.N. KIRBY

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This is not a book meant to soothe. In fact, this is a book that’s been written without any concern for the reader’s well-being. And why should it be? The year is 2017 and Donald Trump is president, Nazis are on the rise, and nuclear war between The United States and North Korea feels eminent. (No sweat, a year later and Trump will tell a rally in West Virginia about how he and Kim Jung Un “fell in love” that summer—kind of like Kathy Acker.) Everything about the book infects the reader with the same skin bursting sensations of that summer in history and Kathy Acker’s general emotional stasis.

Olivia Laing’s debut novel reads as Virginia Wolf stream of consciousness meets William Burroughs’ propensity for crudeness. Every breath and beat of the book evokes feeling rather than thought. What’s remembered isn’t necessarily what a character said or a particularly witty comment, but rather the emotion that the skin is an inefficient container for the self. Everything suddenly feels too tight, as if we too are inches away from crumbling like the world around us. The title itself evokes a sense that the world and the self are hurtling too fast for the writer to catch up with them both: Crudo. Laing’s book is raw and rough, like a deep dive of the id in motion.

The narrative follows a close third on our radical heroine, Kathy Acker. But even this self is a slipping of psyche—a playful act of creative borrowing. Channeling the spirit of a post-mortem Kathy Acker, there is a continuance of the experimentalist writer’s self. Of course, it’s not actually Kathy Acker. She died in Tijuana in 1997. Or did she? I’d like to think not. Instead, I imagine her slipping in and amongst the pages of Laing’s novel, in pure spirit form.

Like Kathy Acker’s work, Oilivia Laing draws inspiration from the creative borrowing of William Burroughs and Andy Warhol. This combination of influence draws from both the late Kathy Acker, who often referred to Burroughs as part of her artistic lineage, and Olivia Laing, who researched and wrote about Andy Warhol for her nonfiction book Lonely City. In the formation of the prose, Laing inserts the late Kathy Acker’s quotes as the thoughts of the character Kathy Acker in a form that mirrors the stylings of Burroughs’ cut-ups. The character Kathy Acker refers to herself as, “Warhol’s daughter, niece at least, a grave-robber, a bandit, happy to snatch what she needed but also morally invested in the cause: that there was no need to invent, you could make anything from out of the overflowing midden of the already-done, the as Beckett put it nothing new, it was economic also stylish to help yourself to the grab bag of the actual.” It’s all very meta.

The lines between Olivia Laing, Kathy Acker the character, and Kathy Acker the writer are constantly thinning. Trying to find and follow the lines can be a bit of a maddening experience. Olivia Laing just married poet Ian Patterson. Kathy Acker marries an older man, another famous writer. Is Kathy Acker the character a stand-in for Laing? Or is the character Kathy Acker a reincarnation of the late Kathy Acker? Or is the character Kathy Acker just that, a character unto herself? There’s a weird and twisted truth in that she is all three. Call me legion for we are many.

Love may be the dividing point of the self and character. Something about the way Kathy Acker describes her relationship to love and partnership feels authentic to her character alone, “she was like a feral animal, she had no idea what to do with love, she experienced it as an invasion, as a prelude to loss and pain . . . .” There is something wild and feral about her in the way she moves through the world; doing whatever she wants, whenever she wants. There’s little sense of consequence in action, just pure action from the id. When it comes to loving her partner, she shouts and condemns him on whims that seem more set by nature than emotional causality. It was hot. There was a full moon. Kathy Acker is in a state of constant motion because she has emptied herself out so completely, that she becomes a part of the roving rage and chaos of the universe.

This is what makes Kathy Acker the perfect character to tell the story of the summer of 2017. The translucent line between herself and the outside world tunes her into the emotions of the moment. She acts as a living mirror to the feelings flooding the world consciousness. There is a sense of wanting to destroy for the sake of destruction: “A thing people said a lot that year, and especially the year before, x is a trashfire, also I want to burn everything, sometimes eroded to: burn everything.” She feels this so strongly, and often times without any kind of distance. The same ripping and tearing that the world seems to be tuning into on a mass level, resonates within Kathy Acker’s emotional microcosm. Her emotional states are often a reflection of the outside/inside relationship between herself and others. She is fighting, always. Pushing against something, anything with mass, and trying to break free.

So much of the text revolves around the idea of crashing open the self, which unveils an animal-like rawness to Kathy Acker’s actions and emotions. There’s a rather lovely scene where Kathy Acker feels this sensation of wanting to break open with such intense physicality that it pulsates off the page and beats with a wild passion: “She put the claws on the table and hit them hard. It was brilliant, she would have been happy to smash many more things. She hit the back of the crab as hard as she could. Nothing happened. She hit it again. A network of cracks appeared. She pried at it with her fingers, tearing out small white chunks of flesh.” There is something extraordinary feral about this moment that rings true to the same wild, pure id of the world’s consciousness. Everything feels like it’s being ripped and torn apart. Why shouldn’t Kathy Acker want to feel the same way?

Raw emotion spills upon the pages, leaving the reader with a neurotic and itchy feeling. Like somehow, Kathy Acker found her way under our skin in an attempt to crack open the shells of ourselves. I can almost hear her there, pounding away from within. Suddenly, the world feels too hot, too small, too maddening. As for the question of love, well, Kathy Acker has a moment where—in the same carefree, childlike rush of emotion—she says profoundly that yes, she can and does love! Although, I think Kathy Acker knows herself best when she says, “I grew up wild, I want to stay wild.” Something tells me that for a creature such as this, love may be another container, another shell, another self that is meant to be cracked open and freed once more.

—

S.N. Kirby is a graduate of the MFA fiction program at The New School. Her fiction work explores the relationship between man, magic, and nature. She has interviewed musicians across musical genres such as Ray Toro of My Chemical Romance and Beats Antique. Her National Book Critic Circle interviews with Ruth Franklin and Pulitzer Prize winner T.J. Stiles were featured on The New School writing blog. She is a frequent reader at TNS After Hours at KGB Bar. When she’s not writing, you can find her teaching yoga in New York City. If you smell sage burning, it’s probably her.

[REVIEW] Any Man by Amber Tamblyn

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(HarperCollins, 2018)

REVIEW BY S.N. KIRBY

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Amber Tamblyn’s debut novel speaks to a climate where we face more and more revelations about the monsters that haunt our communities with their self-serving path of destruction and abuse. While the monster in this story is infamous for one peculiarity—this time the sexual predator is a woman, who goes by the name Maude—the unfolding of the narrative plays out like so many others our society has seen. Moreover, it is the public’s schadenfreude and salivation at witnessing this private pain that Tamblyn suggests that we, the public, are perhaps just as monstrous as the predators that lurk in dark corners.

Born in the era of #MeToo and the subsequent disclosures of long standing institutional abuses, Tamblyn’s work gives voice to a cast of men healing after a monster (or is she a woman) destroys their bodies and leaves them naked in the humiliation of her abuse. Some are left for dead. Others are left in their shame. The only evidence she leaves is a six-foot long, white hair.

In the narrative, Maude transforms from human assailant to a mythical creature created out of an amalgam of visceral nastiness. She bounces from human to nonhuman not by her actions, but by the descriptions of her as detailed by the men she assaulted. The first victim, Donald Ellis, sees Maude in a moment of second sight as she moves onto her next victim: “Between the parted woods, a small pair of black eyes peer out and a misshapen scribbled hand claws at the bark, it other arm long, dragging in the mud./The creature is headless./It moves.” Adding to this narrative of Maude, the second victim Pear O’Sullivan goes on to call her, “Maude with cankles and demon egg sacks growing in her gums. Hooved Maude . . . Like a fucking burn victim with babies’ decapitated fingers for eyelashes. With breath like rotting fish and a trail of fur running up the back of her legs and two giant claws for tits.” Here there be monsters.

Something about the physicality of her monstrosity and the way it shifts and changes seems to suggest that there is a shifting component to her selfhood. So often the standard narrative focuses on the transformation of the victims—from victim to survivor—but here Tamblyn seems to suggest that in the very act of becoming an assailant, Maude transforms into a monster. Giving pain is just as transformative as receiving it. But the source of that transformation remains unclear. Is it her soul that is corrupted by these acts? Maybe. For now, the mythical quality of Maude’s physical monstrosity gives her an aura of an omnipresent demon, lurking just outside of our reach.

Maude isn’t the only monster in this narrative. In the echoing and reverberations of voice and power in a media obsessed world, the men left in the wake of Maude are confronted with a cacophony of “support” online and on screen. Through tweets and television transcripts, Tamblyn cleverly reveals the level of entertainment, if not pure enjoyment, society derives from these horrific tragedies. While the author isn’t at a Trump level criticism of the media (no fake news here, folks), there is a kind of blame she places on the media outlets for the way they relish in the private horror of these men.

A caller to Donald Ellis’ radio show, yes he gets his own radio hour, speaks to this quite eloquently, “I realize, more than ever, we need to keep fighting and protecting our kids, not just from predators but also from a society and culture that feels kind of predatory ya know? I mean, that lady did the crimes, but we publicized it. We capitalized on it.” Hey, tragedy makes for great ratings, right? Donald Ellis testifies, “I live in a country built on celebritizing its citizens’ grief and amplifying stories of violence and assault for political gain, click counts, or television ratings. Let me be emphatically clear: They. Don’t. Care. About. Us. People who live through sexual assault are a crash on the side of the road, and the American media is nothing more than cars slowing down just long enough to take a peek.” The condemnation is harsh and swift, make no mistake.

While the public focuses on the monster without, the survivors battle the monster within themselves. Because at the core of it all is a story of healing. This is where readers find a there’s a touch of the mystical in the nightmare. Some kind of unseen magic seems to wind its way around the prose and poetry that is untouchable from tragedy. This magic is delicate but resilient. Tamblyn’s novel reminds us that we can live in a world worthy of redemption. While we can’t destroy the monsters, we can heal the ones within ourselves. Even still, in the concrete jungle of New York, Maude lurks and mutters, “Any man will do.”

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S.N. Kirby is a graduate of the MFA Fiction program at The New School. Her fiction work explores the relationship between man, magic, and nature. She has interviewed musicians across musical genres such as Ray Toro of My Chemical Romance and Beats Antique. Her National Book Critic Circle interviews with Ruth Franklin and Pulitzer Prize winner T.J. Stiles were featured on The New School writing blog. When she’s not writing, you can find her teaching yoga in New York City. If you smell sage burning, it’s probably her.

 

[REVIEW] The Incendiaries by R.O. Kwon

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(Riverhead Books, 2018)

REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

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R.O. Kwon’s The Incendiaries is a dangerous novel. It pulls readers in with what appears to be a simple but effective plot, lulls them with a prose that constantly explodes in short bursts of poetry, and then drags them down, wild-eyed and incredulous, into a dark, scary, deadly place where shattered love, religious fanaticism, emotional trauma, and terrorism clash. With a strong religious undercurrent and a triumvirate of characters that allow the story to flow forward at breakneck speed, The Incendiaries is the kind of novel that announces the arrival of a unique, talented voice that is not afraid of the dark.

Phoebe Lin meets Will Kendall during her first month at the prestigious Edwards University. She is popular and likes to partake of the local nightlife as well as most of the social events the campus has to offer. However, despite being outgoing and sociable, there’s something at Phoebe’s core that she never shares: she feels guilty for her mother’s recent death. Just like her, Will has something to hide. He’s a bizarre young man on a scholarship who transferred to Edwards from Bible college after having a faith crisis and works as a waiter at a local Italian restaurant to make ends meet. Despite their differences, the two of them fall in love, but that love is threatened when Phoebe starts spending a lot of time with a secretive cult founded by a man called John Leal, a former student with an enigmatic past. However, the situation goes beyond mere jealousy, and when the group perpetrates a violent act in the name of their convictions, Will is forced to confront the fact that the woman he loves is capable of such a thing while also having to deal with once again being in the midst of the religious fanaticism he worked so hard to escape.

There are three elements in The Incendiaries that deserve a moment in the spotlight. The first is the use of language. This relatively short novel possesses great economy of language, but Kwon made sure that every word earned its place on the page. Short chapters and snappy dialogue help the narrative sustain its quick pace, but the author also manages to inject almost every page with a dose of poetry, and that’s what ultimately makes it shine not only in the moment it’s being read but also for weeks after as it is recalled:

“Once, while hiking with my parents, I’d watched a starling flock in motion, the confusion of birds mobbing about like nets full of fish until they’d lifted, all at once, shape-shifting into a braided coil that flung, agile, whip-tight, into the horizon. Pests, my father said—practical, as usual. But I’d thought it an astonishing sight, God’s design made visible, and that was what Phoebe’s playing felt like: the flight of notes rising into shape, a large purpose made plain.”

The second element is the three characters at the center of the novel, which are very different from each other and used in different ways. Will is the main narrator, Phoebe is the changing mystery/floating question mark, and John is the drop of chaotic poison that triggers bad things. Besides the obvious trinity/religious theme, the interaction between these characters, as well as the way Kwon alternates their voices, makes for some engaging, haunting reading. Also, the way Phoebe changes is almost palpable, but there are signs throughout the narrative. Her thoughts are part of what makes this novel the type that demands to be devoured in a single sitting or at least as fast as possible:

“If I were less selfish, I’d have released the hold I had on him, this love-dazed Will, more child than man. But I wasn’t. I couldn’t. He took the stairs to my suite at a full run. Bruises formed at the tops of my thighs. If I went to bed after he did, Will turned toward me, still asleep. I might put my head next to his, but he’d clamp his hot legs around mine. He hauled me in. I tried not to pull loose; still, I did. He protested. Insistent, not quite conscious, he reached for me again. I listened to his pulse. His soft, thin hairs, dandelions strands, shifted between my lips. I breathed them in. Here’s a wish, I thought. Don’t let me go. Until Will, I drifted; he attached me to this patch of earth. He clung all night.”

Lastly, there is enough darkness here to satisfy fans of creepy thrillers and even lovers of horror fiction. That Kwon keeps her writing comfortably rooted in literary fiction does nothing to diminish the impact of the themes discussed and the awful act in the last third of the book. This courage to take the story into very gloomy, dangerous, bloody places pushes The Incendiaries into must-read terrain. The fact that all this happens on a thick layer of religion is just a bonus and a sharp comment on our current sociopolitical landscape:

“The Lord had peeled the flesh of His corpse. He had spread it as a bloodied veil upon this earth, a flailed red carpet to ease His people’s fall. Others might ask how long, but he could wait. Faith is a long patience. Minutes tremble, he told his group, with the hope of revelation. Each particle of dust breathes forth its rejoicing. The stripped Nozhurst trees spelled out the Lord’s writing, if they’d learn to see it. God is, not was. He, John Leal, had called them as heroes. The Lord had laid His hands upon their heads.”

The Incendiaries is one of those deceptively simple novels that eventually turn out to be a multilayered marvel of interconnected narratives. The tale constantly shifts and, like a scared animal, seems to run away from the light that bathes it at the beginning and ends up curled in the dimmest place available. At once a love story, an examination of guilt and loss, and a sharp look at religious fanaticism once it abandons the realm of discourse and enters that of irreversible action, this novel is a superb debut by an author with an authoritative voice, poetic voice.

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Gabino Iglesias is a writer, journalist and book reviewer living in Austin, Texas. He is the author of the novel “Zero Saints,” the book review editor for Pank Magazine, and a columnist at LitReactor. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.

[REVIEW] A Diet of Worms by Erik Rasmussen

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(Mastodon, 2018)

REVIEW BY PRATIMA BALABHADRAPATHRUNI

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Erik Rasmussen’s first novel,  published by Mastodon, has the most intriguing title I have seen for some time. A Diet of Worms, though, is both historically and theologically relevant.  In 1521, Charles the Fifth convened a council in Worms, commonly referred to as the Diet of Worms, where Martin Luther was asked to defend his beliefs.

I open the first page with two question on my mind:  Why the goldfish?  Why the title?

 

“There are a thousand ways to tell how things happened. But there’s no way to know why. You have to pick a reason out of thin air. Then you have to explain it with the same words you use to talk about your shoe. Why should be like a yawn, something everyone understands immediately.” 

 

The book is intriguing; after one read, I still can recollect my favorite instances: the brilliant conversation the teacher Mr. Brush has with Larry as he consoles Larry, using quantum physics as a starting point. Rasmussen’s dialogue is both brilliant and ludicrous. The author is able to conjure for us the old memories of growing up through his everyday characters, elucidating and illustrating with instances that can be easily visualized. There are no greater-than-life characters. There are no spectacular abilities attached to any of them. There is, however, the institutionalized system of everyday life as it is, and how it influences Larry, who could be the kid living next door. Admittedly, this is his story, with a bullet in his pocket and an ailing father being the son of a gun, the  white noise in the background, the man who eats the goldfish and is gone without a good-bye. This is also the story of Larry’s increasing awareness of life, loyalties, friendships and bonds. Like all teenagers, Larry, too, outgrows his adolescent skins.

 

“When your friend likes a girl, he becomes this whole other person …”

 

Larry sounds real.  So do Joey, Ashley, Alexis, Demaris, Mr. Brush, and anyone else in the book; they all ring true. None of them read as farcical or flat. They all  have their own kind of variable, complex lives. Larry, however, seems to be helplessly caught up in the  buccaneering world around his budding adolescence. There is  no catcher in the rye out there to help him. Friends, girlfriends,  father, fate, life, everything seems to spin out of control, move on, and, for a brief moment that lingers, leave Larry behind.

When I was young, I always was surprised that the immobile train on parallel tracks seemed to move along, until we sped past, and there was just the wide expanse of  world around, through the tiny  window. For me, Larry seems to be the moving train, speeding away until he is  a ferocious blur.

It is however, his journey’s closure that wraps it up for me. Here is where the book actualizes its theological argument. Ironically, it is also when I stumble upon the author’s reasoning for choosing the particular title for his book. Except I have to add that the “Diet of Worms” issued an “Edict of Worms”–and I am left wondering whether Rasmussen will come up with a sequel for this stirring debut. Larry, after all, is only seventeen years old as the novel concludes. Ten days after reading the book, I can still see the story happening in my head: a read that was alternately fast- and slow-paced; an experience in which very often, the words flew off the page.

 

“The path was narrow as your shoelace, and up ahead, ten feet, it disappeared beneath the heel of an enormous night.”

 

The reader can either accept the book as a simple story of growing up or  come to terms with the fact that there are more than one way to read a book. Like Larry points out, when it comes to God, people can argue and go on for hours. I can say the same about books.

Goldfish, do you agree?

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Pratima Balabhadrapathruni is a homemaker, writer, and poet. A winner of the in the Poetry Sans Frontieres contest twice in a row, she also has been chosen for the 2014 IWP workshop in non-fiction conducted by the University of Iowa. Her work has appeared in OTATA, and Haiku Presence, Haibun Today, and other publications.

Unearthing NIGHT SOIL: An interview with Dale Peck

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(Soho Press, 2018)

INTERVIEW BY MAIKIE PAJE

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Judas Stammers knows what it means to be different. He’s intelligent, shy, and unabashedly irreverent. His mother is Dixie Stammers, handcrafter of perfectly spherical, perfectly identical pots that sell for millions of dollars. His ancestor is a nineteenth-century coal magnate who put up a school to take care of a mountain he built at the end of his life. That Judas is a gay boy who yearns for a relationship with one of his schoolmates and has anonymous sexual encounters in a roadside rest area are the most normal things about him. Oh, and he has a vivid birthmark that covers one side of his body. That’s just the surface of Dale Peck’s thirteenth book, Night Soil.

Born in Long Island, raised in Kansas, and now based in New York, Peck began his writing career in the MFA program at Columbia University in the 1980s. His first novel, Martin and John (1993) is considered a gripping must-read about the era of AIDS. Over the years, he’s gained a reputation as a cutting literary critic, with the most notorious of his reviews compiled in his 2004 book, Hatchet Jobs. Peck is a writer well-versed in the eclectic and iconoclast. He has been imparting his, candid, straight-to-the-point insights to students in Creative Writing Program at The New School for several years.

One sunny afternoon this summer, I had the pleasure of meeting up with him in a Brooklyn coffee shop for a tell-all about his new novel.

Maikie Paje: You’ve gone through so many phases in your writing and your style’s changed over the years, so who is the Dale Peck who wrote Night Soil?

Dale Peck: This book came out of a lot of different places, seven or eight different impulses. I wanted to write a difficult book, the hardest book I could possibly write. I always write about family and sexuality, and I wanted to write about race and the environment. I wanted to write something that was very formal on the level of the sentence, maybe demanding a little more attention than some of the other things I write. I don’t think this is a permanent way of writing for me, especially because the narrative is so deeply embedded in the book. It took a lot of planning.
The real first impulse for Night Soil was this crazy thing many, many years ago. I was the prize in a raffle. If you won the raffle, you got to commission a book review from me. You could tell me what the book was and whether I should give the book a good review or a bad review. I was very well-known for writing nasty book reviews at a certain period of my career. So, when this raffle was happening, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom was being published. “You will be asked to review Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom and you will be asked to give it a good review,” that’s what everyone said. The person who won the review was actually a New School student. She wasn’t quite in on the joke, so she said, “I’m going to make it hard for you, you gotta give Freedom a bad review.” I don’t know if you’ve read that book, but it closes with the establishment of this large nature preserve. There’s also a lot of writing about nature in the book that I kind of wanted to offer a different view on. The conservancy in my book started out as a response to the nature preserve in Freedom.

MP: You said, “started out.” Aside from Franzen’s Freedom, what drove the creation of Night Soil?

DP: It was also originally part of a larger book project, a book of eleven short stories and one novella. It was supposed to be the novella. I wanted the whole thing to be about 25 to 30 thousand words and it was very clearly not going to be that. I think the first chapter of that piece is 15 thousand words already. The book of short stories was responding to another book of short stories (because this is something that I often do)—well, essays in this case—called The Twelve Caesars by second century Roman historian Suetonius. One person once described him to me as the Kitty Kelley of Roman historians. There was no competing with Livy, the definitive hagiography of the culture and the people and everything else, so Suetonius decided to do something different—a very novel idea at the time—which was to tell the truth, to describe people in their imperfections. We owe our knowledge of the fact that Caligula and Nero and probably a few other emperors were incestuous to Suetonius. He had a really great eye for detail. The sentence that really got me was that, when he was talking about Tiberius, the third emperor, he said that Tiberius was so strong that he could press his thumb through the skull of a teenage boy. That’s a good detail!

I was struck by a similarity between his characters and a lot of my characters, which is that they have these hero complexes and think that everything would be fine “if you would just do exactly what I said.” It was a long series of projects that I was working on and now I actually don’t know if I am going to finish it or not. Night Soil was going to be the Caesar Augustus story.  The whole reason why Judas has a purple birthmark is because of the color’s associations with the Roman emperor, little things like that.

MP: How did Night Soil go from that original Suetonius response story to the full-fledged novel it is now? What was the process, rather, the evolution like?

DP: At the time I started the book, I thought that I was about to receive this very large check. I thought, “I’m just going to make this book as weird, as dense, as strange as I can, and I don’t care if it just sells three copies! It’s just going to be for me, so I’m going to have fun with it!” I worked on it for six months and it became clear that I was not going to get this particular windfall, so I wrote five or six other books (mostly not under my own name). I came back to Night Soil two or three years ago, and there was no making it more normal. I said, “I like the book” so I was just going to follow its very strange logic where it led me.

Some of my books, I plan out ahead of time and I have a really clear idea of what they’re going to be. But this one was just very incremental; a lot of things were discovered in the course of the writing process which is why it took me three and a half years of writing time plus another five years of background cogitation to get it all together.

MP: Your book covers so many issues and topics at once. Which really came first: creating Judas Stammers or his long, convoluted family history?

DP: Octavian, Augustus Caesar, was adopted by Julius Caesar, but his actual family were the Balbi, which translates into the Stammerers. It was straight up taken from that and I was torn between either calling them the Stammerers or giving one of the characters a stammer. But there’s that John Irving book already and Jonathan Lethem’s narrator in Motherless Brooklyn has Tourette’s so I didn’t want to do any weird vocal tic. I think the first real thing that crystalized for me was Dixie’s pottery. And I knew Judas’s father was going to be missing the whole time, so I just began looking for reasons why he would be missing. I didn’t realize he was going to turn out to be Dixie’s twin brother until fairly late in the book.

MP: That was a crazy plot twist! Would you consider it an unusual choice for you?

DP: You know, in my generation, there was just a lot of incest in our books. It was just a very big thing then. For me, it’s a go-to plot point. I have to not do it but, you know, it’s just such a kick! It was usually very traumatic in the books of my youth, except in the case of Kathy Acker’s very famous book Blood and Guts in High School, in which this father and daughter are having this torrid affair. The daughter loves it. She gets mad when he breaks up with her and ends up marrying some other woman. Dirty, dirty, nasty little book!
I didn’t want to normalize the incest in Night Soil. I wanted you to feel bad for poor Dixie, that her brother loved her so much that he had to run away from her. They slipped up that one time and look what happened!

MP: Let’s backtrack a bit and talk about your setting. You said you based it on a nature preserve. What led you to choose, rather, to create this very specific fictional location and its background?

DP: I was very interested in the idea of writing about regionality in the US without specifying the place. I say that it’s in the South, but I never really say where. The winter, as I made it, is probably a little colder than you get in the South. I looked at a lot of maps of Tennessee for inspiration and I’ve driven though that state a few times. They have nice mountains and it does get a little colder up there than it does in other places in the South. But the setting in the book is not really Tennessee. I wanted to give it a southern but also vaguely midwestern ruralness, with the embedded ideas about race and such.

The idea of going all the way back to Marcus’s time was originally not part of the book, but once I went there, it became endlessly more fascinating. It came to dominate the book. Everything that happened in the front story is because of what had gone on in the past. Researching about coal mining and that crazy age of the robber barons was so fascinating. I had various ideas, but the first line just came to me, as it sometimes does, and it went on from there and I followed it into all these funny places. There was a lot of revision, a lot of stuff I’m always telling students not to do, like knowing what you’re going to do ahead of time to save yourself from having to rewrite everything. I rewrote this many, many times as I tried to work out the kinks. I was very pleased when my editor was willing to publish it because it’s just so damned strange. I was never in a hurry. I took my time with it and let it take me where it was going to take me.

MP: When I think about the past of the South, I think about cotton and tobacco plantations. Why did you choose to write about coal mining? It’s a very loaded topic, so was there a specific motivation for taking that direction?

DP: One of the issues that I had with Franzen’s Freedom is the idea that there happens to be this thing called nature and it’s distinct from human culture. I don’t believe that. Often, when you hear people talking about nature, what they’re really talking about is an artificial construct called nature and I wanted someone to literalize that. Eventually, I came up with this fake mountain range that Marcus Stammers had built. Who the hell can afford to build a fake mountain range? Well, he’s going to have to be someone with an enormous fortune. How did people make fortunes in the 19th century? There are only half a dozen ways and one of the big ones is mining of some kind.
I chose coal because I think coal is a hot-button issue today. We do have a lot of coal in the US but it’s a terrible, terrible way to make energy. On one hand, we can free ourselves from dependence on foreign oil, but on the other hand we’re going to pollute the sky and so on. It’s just a really, really messy, messy business. I did know, once I’d created the conservancy and the coal mines, that I was going to have to destroy the coal mines at the end. A seam of coal that big—people are going to be lining up to get at it, sort of wolves at the door waiting to start drilling again.

MP: How did the idea to destroy the coal mine evolve into creating the Academy? It was where former slaves would eventually become students and teachers. Was it a dig at the so-called white man’s burden or was it a manifestation of Marcus Stammers’ guilt?

DP: I wanted the Academy to be something that had started out as just a complete ruse on Marcus Stammers’ part. Basically, he closed the mines because there was going to be a law suit and he was probably going to lose everything because he’d killed too many workers due to negligence. Even though they were black people and it was the 19th century, he recognized there was a very major threat. He was really old by then and he didn’t care anymore anyway, so he said, “we’ll close the damned mines!” And then he needed a project (when he did something he didn’t do it halfway, he did it a 110 percent), so he started building this mountain range and stream. Then he realized that he’d need someone, something, to take care of it. He didn’t want it to look like a business and so he called it a school. But all the school was really doing was teaching gardening. Then, as it happens, somebody signed on to work for him and had their own ideas about things. Eventually, this other philosophy emerged. There’s a weird moment at the end of Marcus’s life which could have been pure delusion or could have been some sort of genuine breakthrough: he spouted a few words and these people made up a philosophy out of it.

Though everything originated as a white man’s dream with white man’s money, it ends up completely run by black people for black people. And okay, this institution, like so many American institutions, has racist roots and is now being perpetuated by black people. Or have they reclaimed it in some way of their own? I definitely wanted readers to wonder about it, the fact that in a hundred years, no one has ever dropped out, no one has ever run away, everyone just stayed until the end and somehow converted to the cause. Is that a testament to its persuasiveness or to the cultish nature of the project? Again, I didn’t want there to be a super clear answer to that.

In the first draft, I wanted to write something, something at a ‘school’ and I just changed the word to ‘Academy’ and let that sit in my head a while. I wrote the first two chapters before I stopped writing the first time. I put it away for a little while, then probably six or five years ago, I wrote the Parable of the Man Lost in the Snow.

MP: Can you talk about that parable a bit? I enjoyed seeing it at the end of the book, trying to solve it on my own. How did you decide to tie it in with the main story?

DP: Initially, that was just a short story but then very quickly, I realized that this story was enunciating some of the ideas floating around in Night Soil, which was then still very unfinished. I put it in the context of the Academy and began exploring it that way. Writing that really helped me understand what the Academy was doing, at least from a philosophical point of view, and to sort of get back into the book and write the rest of the story.

It’s probably one of my favorite short stories. My last book as well had this sort of a right turn at the end. Like, here’s one narrative, and here’s something rather different appended to it. I don’t know if it’s becoming a pattern. I have half a dozen strange little pieces and I may very well tack them onto the end of various books over time.

MP: Let’s talk about the Academy’s one glaring white student: Judas Stammers. He’s quite the crazy, complex, and irreverent character! Where’d Judas come from? Was he an idea that became a character or did you base him off someone?

DP: I think there’s a lot of me in Judas, especially my dark, dirty urges, then magnified into perversions. I like the challenge of writing a character who is smarter than I am and who is more educated than I am. With Judas, especially from the education point of view, he really knows a lot. It was hard for me to indicate the extent of his knowledge because he knows so much more than I do and also to make it seem very natural in the context of all that. I have a lot of anger at political and social and philosophical injustice in the world. In giving Judas this birthmark, I think he gets so many sympathy points as it were, for this anger that people can tolerate. If you were walking around like that and everyone was staring at you, you’d be really angry too. I think that disarms readers a bit.

In the Kirkus review for Night Soil, the reviewer said that Judas’s birthmark was a symbol of his family’s misdeeds. Even though, on some level, I knew people would think of it this way, I tried not to. There are some things you just know are going to happen. Heather Abel was my student when she was working on The Optimistic Decade and I told her, “you know people are going to think about this as a metaphor for Israel, right?” She said, “No, absolutely not!” When the Times review came out, the reviewer talked about what a lovely metaphor it was for the state of Israel. Heather definitely knew what they thought, but if you write to that, then you make it too one-dimensional. So for me, that tattoo—it was always more of a tattoo in my head in a way than a birthmark—was just a way for Judas to disarm the reader, to get sympathy so that he could be angry without alienating people. He’s already rich and male and white. He’s got a lot going for him. He’s too entitled and he’s just going to sound whiny, but if he’s got this crazy, weird mark covering half of his body, it makes people more sympathetic when he rails against the deep-seated perversity of our culture. People are more likely to listen to him.

As the world crystallized, I thought about how the reader was likely to respond to him. I think legacies can be really deforming when it’s just that overwhelming. Look at the Jacksons, the way that they destroyed their faces in the relentless pursuit of fame—and that’s just pop music. Or think about crazy royals and all the nutty, inbred traditions they uphold. We all just like Harry because he seems relatively like a human being even while he goes through all the motions. I think that someone with a legacy like Judas’s is likely to be a little strange.

MP: How much of the way Judas describes things in technicolor comes from the author’s personal style choices and how much of it is from Judas being simply smart, crazy, vivid Judas?

DP: I’m going to say it’s a little more Judas than it is me. The sentences are not very typical of me. I’ve done them before, but not for very sustained passages like this, never for more than like five or ten pages or one little character who’s part of a much bigger picture. To do the whole thing like that was a lot of hard work, just a lot of revising of every single sentence, every paragraph. It was definitely the character who created himself and created his voice, and I just really tried to listen to that and realize it in a distinct way.

MP: In most writing, you see sentences or paragraphs about beautiful landscapes or scenery and think “oh, that’s the author.” But where did that absolutely filthy rest area bathroom scene come from?

DP: Many years ago, when my third novel came out in 1998, I was reviewed with a writer who just happened to be a good friend of mine, Heather Willis. Our books were described as transgressive and were both panned. They said people who write transgressive books are just trying to shock people. Neither Heather nor I considered our books transgressive, nor were we trying to shock anybody. We were both just trying to tell the truth about our experiences, either personal ones or just the way we see the world. This very square reviewer thought that we were just trying to shock people with weird, crazy things like sexual compulsions or families that beat up their children. It’s just the world that we grew up in, sorry!

I like some transgressive books, like George Bataille’s Story of the Eye. It has these little kids, like eleven- or twelve-year-olds having sex on an altar and raping the priest, peeing on him… It was like early 20th century Marquis de Sade. I wanted to write something that I thought was transgressive in my book. I wanted to show how inculcation in a profoundly western, Greek philosophical tradition could lead you to the level of depravity that Judas reaches. It took a lot of cogs and levers and everything else to get there, but, definitely—100 percent—I want to shock people. I’d never wanted to shock people before, but that was the goal here.

MP: So, the tattoo—see, I’m saying it now, thanks—was meant to attract attention one way or the other. How does that figure into the idea of Judas as a sexual being?

DP: I’ve written Judas as a very modern person in the sense that his sexual orientation isn’t an issue for him. That’s partially because at the Academy, like any all-boy institution, especially all-boy schools, there are going to be lots of boys having sex with each other and most of them will not grow up to be gay. It’s about what’s handy. Teenagers want to have sex, and if all you have are people of the same sex around you then that’s who you’re going to have sex with. Boys have been doing that since time immemorial. Judas was in that environment and he had a mom who didn’t care. Fine, be gay and everything else, but you have this tattoo, this birthmark, and that’s going to make it hard to find people who are not put off—just speaking realistically about how the world works.

Sex in roadside rest areas and public bathrooms, it’s a very timeless gay pastime. It’s fading away by and large. In England, it’s still very popular. I lived in England for three years, and my roommate had a standing date in the fourth-floor bathroom of the South Bank Centre in London. He’d go there every Thursday and meet this guy. After nine months they decided, “why don’t we get a coffee” and dated for a couple of years. But you know, they just had sex in the building while Shakespeare plays were being performed downstairs.

MP: Did you draw on a lot of other real-life stories for Judas’s exploits?

DP: I read a lot of gay literature about cottaging and I actually wrote a story that was inspired by my friend’s adventures in those bathrooms. There was a cemetery he used to go to, too, and all kinds of crazy locations. For good or for ill, gay men will have sex anywhere.

Judas’s was basically a kid with a large mark. It was bound to cause psychological damage. If you’re learning to have sex, it’s not the healthiest environment in which to learn. I hope that the reader can see how much he was enjoying it and how bad it was for him at the same time. To me, the redeeming value of the scene is that it’s tragic. This poor kid has such contempt for the way he looks and can only find sexual pleasure in this environment that reeks of feces and urine. He convinces himself that he’s in a sort of sexual heaven. I know people who really love cottaging, but I’ve never met anyone who cottages in a place like that. I don’t think that for this kid, though, with all his baggage, that this was ever going to be healthy for him. He might be having a good time, but he was still fourteen when he started.

MP: How would you characterize Judas’s relationship with his fellow Academy student, Lovett Reid?

DP: I always knew he was going to end up having some kind of relationship with a legacy at the school. I wanted most of the kids who went there to have come from orphanages, to not have a specific connection to it, but I also wanted a few of the students to be actually descended from the slaves Marcus had working in his coal mines. They had to be very conscious of it. So to be Lovett Reid, whose father forces him to go to this school, which, to Lovett, seems to be a symbol of the enduring legacy of slavery yet somehow seems to his father to be a better education than he’s going to get in a private school—you can imagine his anger. It would also give him an independence because he feels like an outsider at that school. I’d say 360 students or something like that—I worked it all out so it comes out to 444 with the faculty and the teachers—are all living together in this foundry. They all have this shared identity of being orphans, whereas the half a dozen townies all have families to go home to. They’re outsiders, just like Judas is. It seemed that if Judas was ever going to get lucky with a boy in his school, it would be with one of the legacies who also felt like something of an outsider.

There’s just that childlike innocence—they were in upper sixth form, the equivalent of 12th grade—about staring at things that adults are taught not to stare at and being fascinated by things that adults would be too self-conscious or perhaps even too nice to be fascinated by. Lovett just finds Judas’ birthmark interesting. He doesn’t mean to be cruel, but Judas is acutely conscious of the fact that’s what Lovett finds attractive or interesting about him. That, and treating him like this sort of dress up doll. I never really decided if Lovett was gay or not. To me, his identity was just as a legacy at the school. How would a legacy student at the Academy treat Judas, not how a gay boy or a straight boy or even a black boy would—just how would a legacy at that place with all the history like that treat the great-great-great-grandson of the founder. Judas is gay as the day is long, but Lovett, I never decided.

MP: Speaking of characters being full-formed or undecided in the progress of the novel, we haven’t really talked about Dixie Stammers, Judas’s mother and a self-styled potter. How did you come up with her character? Was she inspired by anyone in particular?

DP: Unconsciously, I think that she’s inspired by the mother of an ex-boyfriend of mine who was a potter. She made very beautiful Japanese-inspired porcelain, nothing obsessive. Temperamentally, that woman could not be any more different from Dixie if she tried. I wanted the mother to be some kind of artist, not necessarily to the exclusion of her parental duties, but being a parent was not the center of her existence. Most children define that as a huge betrayal, especially with the mother (which is unfortunate and unfair—the double standard that women get placed in all the time). Fathers are expected to have jobs, careers, and all that, whereas mothers are supposed to just have a supplementary income to support the family. The family is their first love, all that sexist bullshit.

I wanted Dixie to be a great artist of some kind. I didn’t know if great meant talented or just meant being obsessive and individual. Somehow pottery came in because Liz (that ex’s mother) is just the sweetest lady and I used to love the fact she made pots and she used a wheel—obviously Dixie did not —then I just sort of came up with pottery and did some research on certain ancient traditions of that art. I was very surprised to learn that a sizeable chunk of pre-Columbian pottery was made with the coil method, which seemed fairly amazing to me. I don’t know if any of those pots are completely spherical, the Native American ones, but a lot of them are pretty damned close. They are just amazing feats of craftsmanship and so I just began building up what Dixie was making as something like that. Slowly, this idea of identicality and mechanical perfection emerged and took shape. Out of anything that I’ve created, Dixie’s pots are my favorite. I don’t know how I got there, but I find the idea of a person doing this to be endlessly fascinating. It just holds my attention.

MP: Dixie’s strange brand of negligence is a very big part of her character. Was that intentional or a byproduct of her being such an obsessive artist? Or was it something else?

DP: I wanted this neglectful mother. I think I was kind of inspired by the mother in Helen DeWitt’s Last Samurai. I really love the relationship between the mother and son in that book, which is much closer than the relationship between Dixie and Judas but has some similarities in some strains.

I wanted Judas to be headstrong. To my mind, Dixie understood her son better than he did himself. She understood how independent he was. I think it’s probably difficult to look at the product of your incestuous union with your brother with completely neutral eyes, especially when he has this birthmark. Obviously, the chances of this birthmark went up because she and her brother both carry the gene. I looked it up, there’s a 300 million to one chance that someone is carrying the gene, and even if both parents carry the gene, the odds of it are hundreds of thousands to one that both people will pass on the gene to the child for this to happen. You look at the birthmark and you think of it as a sign of sin, but really, it’s just bad, bad luck. It’s the son she had with her brother, the one time she slept with him, and that’s got to make you feel weird.

I think also, Dixie is this woman surrounded by this incredibly male tradition. I don’t even mention the grandfather’s wife’s name, which would not have been important in the family history. It’s all about the men. The men, the men, the men. She’s excluded from this whole tradition, but she’s brilliant, and she explores it. She’s obviously smarter, more talented than her father, and she knows that her son is being steeped in the same tradition. She’s letting him go to the school. She knows that’s part of it and she believes you have to find your own way with that. Maybe it’s tough love, maybe it’s neglect.

MP: Night Soil has a memoir-like quality to it. How far back in Judas’s past is the main story, and does it being in retrospect affect the way that he tells it?

DP: To my mind, the book is being written around now. Judas is almost 20 years older than he is at the time the book takes place. He’s definitely looking back on it from a distance. I can never decide if I think that Judas is completely fucked up or if he’s relatively sane, all things considered. On one hand, maybe he’s completely nuts in his own self-destructive way or maybe he’s found a way to synthesize all this information and history and his physical self into a mode of being that kind of works for him.

MP: You estimated that you worked on Night Soil for six or eight years. A lot of that time included a huge amount of research. What was the most fun thing to research? Was there anything that you struggled with to make this book your version of believable?

DP: I liked learning about pottery. It was very deliberate there at the end when she begins making her own clay. I didn’t look up ways that you can’t do it, but I’m pretty sure you can’t actually do it the way she did, watering down and diluting clay and purifying it. I always liked that sort of flaw in the carpet, as it were, just to indicate the unreality, but then I really invest in it.

When I wrote a book about my father’s experiences on a dairy farm, I invented this entire apparatus that I called the boom collar as a way of locking the cows in place so they don’t run away when you attach the claw to the udders – just a suction tube, really nothing major. But it was terrible. I just invented this whole apparatus and I gave it half a page, but it doesn’t exist. And I love throwing in a little thing like that because I’m not a realist. I like fooling people. I like it when people are reading something and go “is this real?” and they’re reminded they’re in a book.

I did look up lots of other things like how those things work. Some of that knowledge sticks around and some of it goes away, and a lot of it was just looking things up for the sake of the book, for the sake of making Judas sound erudite. My single favorite word in the book is orological, which means mountain building. I discovered it while doing a crossword puzzle after I had finished the book. It went in the very final draft.

MP: With all the twists and turns of events in the book, is there a scene you’d call your favorite, something you loved working on best?

DP: I really love the book, I have to admit. I love the beginning of chapter 4, when Marcus makes the mountains, that particular history. I really love the rest area scenes—so over-the-top. I love the parable.

Oh, you know what I really love? The scene where Dixie’s mother and father and brother see the shadow coming off the mountain. The first time they see Potter’s field, her brother and her father turn around and she sees the deer get out from under the shadow and run off. She has this kind of moment. It’s somewhere in chapter 3. Nothing too terribly perverse going on!

MP: To wrap up, how would you sum up Night Soil?

DP: I tried to pack every damned thing I could in there. I wanted this book to have a lot of layers.
I guess I’d say it’s about intersectionality, to use a very modern word. It’s about what happens when family and race and nature and philosophy intersect with desire and where that takes you. Which is shaping which? Is the desire shaping all these other ideas or are all these other ideas shaping your desire?

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Maikie Paje is an MFA candidate in the Creative Writing Program at The New School. She is a former English teacher from the Philippines and her main creative interests are fantasy, speculative fiction, historical fiction, and literary fiction. Her work has been published in The Philippine Star, Home Lifestyle and Interiors, Blush Anthology, The Inquisitive Eater, and The Rumpus.

 

[REVIEW] Animals Eat Each Other by Elle Nash

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(Dzanc Books, 2018)

REVIEW BY MANDY SHUNNARAH

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Frankie, a young mother. Matt, a Satanist tattoo artist. And a girl with no name but the one they give her: Lilith.

In mythology, Lilith is a she-monster, a demon in the night, a wanton woman on a mission to seduce men, and a stealer of babies when she’s not giving birth to ghostly children of her own. Yet, in folk Judaism, Lilith is Adam’s first wife––before Eve was fashioned from Adam’s rib––who left him after rejecting the tight trappings of obedience. She was not created from Adam, but as his equal.

Thus sets the stage for Elle Nash’s debut novel, Animals Eat Each Other, fresh off the press at Dzanc Books. The nameless protagonist accepts the role of third wheel in a friction-filled three-way relationship with Frankie and her boyfriend Matt. Her presence in the relationship strains Matt and Frankie in ways they thought they were able to endure, but the jealousy and manic infatuation they each feel for Lilith in turns is a danger to all involved.

It would be too simplistic an explanation to say the protagonist doesn’t love herself, though there is a reason why she so willingly gives up her own name––one the reader never learns––and readily adopts the name Frankie and Matt give her, taking on the persona of Lilith as if embodying the name and letting the name fill her to its edges like water fills a tub. She physically becomes this person they want her to be. Lilith loses herself, or what little self she is allowed to develop between her emotionally absent mother and Matt and Frankie’s predation on her. In her effort to fit into a family unit, she succumbs to their ever-changing whims and adapts her personality to please them.

As I read the novel, it occurred to me that how you interpret Animals Eat Each Other says more about you as the reader than about the book itself. The case can be made that Lilith brings her troubles upon herself (through her pursuit of sexually available but emotionally unavailable male partners, through her pursuit of emotionally available female partners that she herself is emotionally unavailable with, through her copious drug and alcohol use and unwillingness to consider a future beyond the next instant gratification) but to follow that line of questioning is to neglect to ask why Matt and Frankie manipulate her and prey on her vulnerability.

They shame Lilith for being intelligent and graduating high school with a 4.0 GPA. Frankie cajoles her into putting on a dog collar and walking around Walmart while Frankie yanks the leash. Matt convinces her to let him give her an at-home, freehand tattoo even though we’re made to believe his skills (much less the cleanliness of his equipment) are subpar. Despite them demanding her attention and body and time, they impose rigid rules on their sex and family life to keep her at bay. They are bewildered and angered by her attempts to draw closer.

Because the novel is from Lilith’s perspective, the reader might wonder why she does what she does, appearing on the surface to court trouble and bring the ill she endures upon herself, when in fact it’s Matt and Frankie whose forces are acted upon her. They are the ones owing an explanation and who should be called upon to answer for themselves. However, that would imply logic to their actions and abuse––whether emotional or otherwise––so rarely follows an objectively logical thought pattern.

The crux is that Lilith is self-aware enough to know that she can do better than Matt, but in her desperate need for acceptance and to be a part of a family unit, she’s willing to accept his mediocrity and even finds the idea of being able to woo him away from Frankie thrilling. Like many women whom our patriarchal society has led to believe are incomplete without the establishment or pursuit of a heterosexual romantic relationship, she is pressured to accepted this man’s mediocrity and is expected to suppress herself to be with him. As Lilith learns, if you don’t know who you are yet, you can be anyone. But that leaves you susceptible to being molded to fit forms you don’t want to fill.

Lilith knows when she’s been made into a caricature of herself for Matt and Frankie’s pleasure, like when she’s faking orgasms and when she’s pretending to be interested in Matt’s discussions of Satanism just to be the sole recipient of his attention for a few moments. Lilith goes along with what Matt and Frankie want and she knows they’re using her and manipulating her, but she doesn’t seem to mind––even though she’s conscious of how wrong their treatment of her is. It makes the reader wonder, what’s she getting out of this? Is avoiding figuring out her future and making decisions for herself really worth all this? How much of herself is she willing to give up?

Lilith’s relationships with other people––whether sexual or platonic––are often transactional, focused on what she can get from them or what they can do for her. Like Patrick, who Lilith uses to gain information on Matt, looking for vulnerabilities in their relationship that she can exploit to lure him away from Frankie. And Sam, Lilith’s boss, who she only wants when she needs sex or attention.

Lilith exploits the other people in her life yet with Matt and Francis she’s caught in her own trap. When she’s manipulating others, Lilith carries an air of being “of the people and above the people” simultaneously––a braggadocio that comes from being smart enough to lie with ease while not being afraid embark on a new sexual conquest as a means of elevating herself above her friends, even if the conquest is not one she cares about objectively in the absence of the thrill of the chase.

In the end, Lilith is dealt a taste of her own medicine. Having isolated herself from nearly everyone who cared for her, she’s left without a support system or plan for the future when Frankie brutally dumps Lilith on the couple’s behalf and forces Matt to go along with it or risk losing Frankie and their child.

While this is a fitting ending, the karmic revenge isn’t as satisfying as one might anticipate. Not because Nash’s writing doesn’t do the scene justice––it does––but because it shows that no one wins when we’re not honest with ourselves and about ourselves. No one wins when a woman puts an abusive man at the center of her life, especially at the demise of nearly all others in her circle. To blame Lilith as the sole cause of the novel’s turmoil is to exonerate the men who are not merely complacent in the destruction of these relationships (between friends as well as romantic partners) but enthusiastic instigators of the drama.

There is nary a character without fault, but our protagonist’s failure to be above reproach should not make her the only party in need of absolution. Lilith is not a witch to be burned at the stake; she’s a pawn in patriarchy’s game that shames women for their voracious sexual appetites while rewarding or ignoring men’s.

Unlike the protagonists in most novels, Lilith hardly changes throughout the book, but by the end, you get the sense that it’s possible she might:

Maybe I was the wrong type of woman, the type that did not deserve to be treated with such tenderness but with the full force of sexualized violence, or a violence that men reserved for other men. I enjoyed so much of the choking, the roughness between us, the bending myself to please him, but also considered that I did not like myself. I could not decide if the two situations, my hate for myself and my desire for pain, were related. To be equal with others you have to add or subtract from yourself, and I found myself unable to do either.

Like many situations that arise as a result of inhabiting a woman’s body, she finds that regardless of what she chooses or if she’s unable to choose, she’s trapped in the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” dichotomy.

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Mandy Shunnarah is an Alabama-born writer now living in Columbus, Ohio. Her essays, poems, and book reviews have been published in or are forthcoming from The Citron Review, Barely South Review, Entropy Magazine, Southern Women’s Review, The Missing Slate, New Southerner Magazine, and Deep South Magazine. Read more on her website offthebeatenshelf.com.

[REVIEW] Eleanor, or the Rejection of the Progress of Love by Anna Moschovakis

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(Coffee House Press, 2018)

REVIEW BY NICHOLE REBER

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Eight of the last 10 books I’ve opened landed in my Donate pile well before page 99. When it came to Anna Moschovakis’s Eleanor, or the Rejection of the Progress of Love, I found a book I nearly imbibed. Most of us do when reading something we can relate to. The book is, in essence, about existential angst of our zeitgeist. However, for me there was delight in reading about sex, sexuality, and the first steps of mid-life during that zeitgeist. So few art forms capture this period of life well from a woman’s POV, and Moschovakis does it in parallel plots.

One prong of the bifurcated plot features the protagonist, 37-year-old Eleanor. It opens with her sitting in a cafe, its staff a little too hip with their veritable clothing of tattoos and piercings. Upon returning from the loo her laptop has been stolen. This leads to a geographical and existential journey rife that may be a mid-life crisis. One might say her laptop is that sparkly youth and the thief represents time. She chases the foreigner who’s likely stolen her laptop, searching for him through Google, email, text, and New York. Along the way, we pass landmark that range from sexual liberation and bisexuality to feminism and childlessness, and from aging and friendships to travel and crumbling traditions. Meanwhile she recognizes that men don’t approach her as readily as she had grown accustomed to in her youth.

“She ran her hand through her hair; a crinkled grey strand appeared in her fingers, followed by a sudden need to be noticed, but only just, only for a minute.”

When the thief texts her a photo of Canada, she seems to understand that chasing after lost youth is pointless. But still propelled by the mid-life crisis, she keeps traveling, gradually coming to terms with her new phase in life, finding new comfort in contentedness and new dimensions to friendships that simply aren’t possible in the know-it-all invincibility of youth.

“…The women to whom she was so fiercely loyal had made choices that were in fact fundamentally different, especially in relation to male authority…and that even though their mutual fierce loyalty might well continue in the face of this difference, it was a difference nonetheless, and one that contributed to Eleanor’s feeling of special loneliness in this moment, as she walked somewhat quickly by five or six male road workers…attempting both to ignore and to interpret the expressions on their faces.”

Meanwhile, the second plot prong centers on a nameless first-person narrator. In this strand Moschovakis demonstrates the growing pains, AKA contradictions, that stem from growth. We morph into our new phases, while elements of the previous one still linger. In that liminal space she still believes the philosophy of the passing generations: to seek approval from male authority figures such as one of her former professors, a critic named Aidan. Yet now, meeting Aidan in her adulthood and as a fellow professor, we see her coming to trust herself more as a writer, knowing when to listen to and when to ignore Aidan’s (a man’s) constructive criticism.

“You could say that I was becoming blurred at my edges. When I worked on my revision, the critic’s marginalia invaded my mind.”

Meanwhile, as her confidence grows, she mocks the commonly held belief that women can’t or shouldn’t write sex, that it’s too emotional. I laughed when she employed the paragraph and sentence structure Aidan said was indicative of romance novels, implicitly skewering him as she write about what  women really think about whilst enduring boring sex.

Eventually, the first-person narrator and Eleanor become one, a woman wise enough to know she doesn’t know it all. Maturing confidence meet acceptance in a way that allows her to accept flaws— in herself and others— and lean toward intimacy.

Moschovakis’s Eleanor, like many books published today, contains essayistic pondering along with plot progression and character development inherent of novels. It combines some lyrical prose, prose poetry, and traditional poetry.

It’s not a perfect book. The last quarter frays into a series of parcels about as long and substantial as a Tweet. Moschovakis might use these staticky fits and starts to parallel social media or our minds on social media, but it was utterly skimmable. Nor did I appreciate the inundation of artistic references; the ubiquity of these came to feel like a crutch for the author, akin to David Foster Wallace’s footnotes.

The end further suffers from a seemingly random geographic jump too. The plot makes clear why she leaves New York City for upstate New York, for Albany, and elsewhere in the country for an event with critic Aidan, but what bring her to Ethiopia? It’s not an unforgivable flaw. In fact, I forgive it because by the time you reach middle age you’ll have been somewhere or done something in your life that you could not have imagined or foreseen in your 20s. You come to a place or a time in your life when you thump your noggin and say, “How the hell did I get here?” However, I may be projecting.

Despite these minor flaws, Moschovakis’s Eleanor, or the Rejection of the Progress of Love offers literary and plot interests on most every page. It’s a book meant for those of us whose sparkle is wearing off and whose lives are beginning to resemble something in a Camus novel.

Moschvakis’s other books are of poetry include You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake and They and We Will Get into Trouble for This. She has also translated books from French.

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Nichole L. Reber picked up a love for world lit by living in countries around the globe. She’s a nonfiction writer and her award-winning work has been in World Literature Today, Ploughshares, The Rumpus, Lunchticket, and elsewhere. Read her stories on a Chinese cult, wearing hijab in India, and getting kidnapped in Peru at http://www.nicholelreber.com/.