novel

[REVIEW] Ghosts of America by Caroline Hagood

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(Hanging Loose Press, 2021)

REVIEW BY DAKOTAH JENNIFER

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Why can’t women write great American novels? What does it mean to be a woman, rewritten by the male gaze, actively striving to tell your own story, imbue your own importance, all while the American canon makes you a fragile, breakable, sexual thing? Caroline Hagood’s Ghosts of America: A Great American Novel demands much of all celebrated, American male writers. Norman Roth III, also known as “Herzog,” is a professor, Vietnam veteran, and well-known American author, visited by the ghosts of women who were the subjects of the novels he’s written.

Herzog, a white male professor and author, the spitting image of lackadaisical literary success, is introduced as a painfully honest man, who takes almost nothing seriously, especially not women. His novels on Jaqueline Kennedy and Valerie Solanas have not only received critical acclaim, but “gotten [him] laid since the 1980s. Because what is literary academia if not the overweight, ugly, balding white guy’s tenured ticket to young tail?” Herzog is a sort of caricature of a lazily patriotic, white, aging, authorially academic, lewd male American man. He speaks profoundly then immediately undermines it with a vulgar, superficial quip or lack of care.

Hagood’s feminist look at the idea of the canon, at the male American writer and erasure of female traumas and histories, is artfully done through the simultaneous retelling and condemnation of the author in one. In the format of A Christmas Carol, Herzog is visited by these women he’s subjectified to the male authorial gaze, and made silent as they retell their stories. Much of the piece feels like a class, a history lesson, but one that is so vital. frequently ignored, unseen, deprioritized. Hagood’s women retell their stories, restore their tongues into their own mouths, relieve themselves of the trauma and the triumph of living through it. We begin to hope that this sort of reckoning Herzog gets becomes an epidemic– that historical women everywhere who were made into objects just for the story will get a change to haunt the authors who imposed their gaze.

Herzog spies on a nude neighbor, defiles women in every other sentence, burdens us with his… personal habits, and seems oblivious to the women he’s used to garner his awards and “get laid.” In all, he’s a self-interested, oblivious academic who still has some profundity to him, and in that way, he is a perfect archetype. He is not only his cruelty but also pensive thought and understanding. In one moment he is recounting when he, “Cut [his] hand on broken glass while sloshed, then rubbed it around on my typewriter paper like something good would ever come of it,” and in another, he writes, “a whole history of building empires on others’ backs. The language of equality in our Constitution was never a promise, but just a super clever and sneaky way of controlling the greatest number of people.” Herzog is not unintelligent, and that perhaps, is what is most truthful about the paradox of it all– he is bright and sexist, he is not uninformed, he is uninterested in knowing. Hagood crafts Herzog’s character, however coarsely, into the perfect mirror image of every man known and unknown who gained praise writing about women who were nothing but tools.

Jackie Kennedy is the perfect pious woman–survivor of tragedy and still standing. A warrior written as a fragile woman made into a First Lady by her husband and broken by the same hand. Jackie’s story is given the most time and is the most informative, and for good reason– Jackie speaks out as a hero, the main character, the protagonist victor, instead of the supporting actress society, and Herzog had seemingly made her. Jackie does not start when John F. Kennedy enters her life, and though she is changed by his death, she does not stop when he leaves. She is “already dead,” but she continues to live, and that is her heroic story, not her downfall.

Valerie Solanas is the woman made crazy by her story. She is the newer sort of woman, who understands, “and yes men are also abused and have to survive it, but I’m not qualified to write that book.” Her more modern take, her futuristic way of being, makes her seem eccentric, but through Hagood’s intricate prose we see that Solanas is not crazy but a visionary–a woman who speaks what she sees, a woman who has been harmed by the male world she attempts to live in. She says, “Nobody knows this, but to be defiled is to attend your own funeral, but you’re on the ceiling and nobody can see you,” and its lines like these that strike us within– Hagood speaks through the characters into women. You feel it deep inside, and suddenly, you are Valerie or Jackie or Medusa or Philomela– Hagood has a sneaky way of making all women one, with just a line or two. Hagood, in contrasting Solanas and Kennedy, allows for both extremes of women– the crazy woman and the perfect woman– and shows us how, through the very same author, they are both inadequate, weak, fragile, sexualized in all the wrong ways. It is not only a compelling story but a strange sort of belonging.

The piece is subversive, entertaining, and informative, in that order. Once Jackie appears, the narrative captures the reader and keeps them. Herzog, though he seems to intentionally be this way, is quite an uncomfortable and hateable character, and grinding through his introduction proves to be a challenge. The male gaze is critiqued, revised, and therefore closely examined through a sort of isolated reckoning– this book is not only a literary work, but an act of revision and restoration.

Ghosts of America: A Great American Novel reframes the ghosts of America as women, true heroes alongside valorized men, and rewrites the consistent wrongs of the canon. In short, through almost fragmented chapters, Hagood’s quirky story takes a gander at redemption– for the canon, for women, for America.

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Dakotah Jennifer is a twenty-year-old black writer currently attending Washington University in St. Louis. Jennifer has been published in Across the Margin, HerStry, Popsugar, The Pinch Journal, Voyage YA, Protean Mag, Apartment Poetry, Paintbucket.page, the Grief Diaries, The Confessionalist Zine, Oral Rinse Zine, and Ripple Zine. She was accepted into the Juniper Writing Workshop at Amherst, The Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and the Writing Workshops Paris with Carve Magazine for the 2021 year. She won Washington University’s Harriet Schwenk Kluver award for the 2018-2019 year and The Dramatics of St. Louis Prize for the 2020- 2021 year. She has also published two chapbooks, Fog (Bloof Books) and Safe Passage (Radical Paper Press).

“When is a Body Not a Body?”: an interview with Rone Shavers

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(Clash Books, 2020)

INTERVIEW BY NAYA CLARK

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Silverfish, by Rone Shavers is an experimental novel that details a slice of life in the dystopian Incorporated States of America: a country much like our own, but one in which the corporatization of culture results in the commodification of human bodies. The central characters are Angel, a code-switching, artificial intelligence robot, and Clayton, a human “combat associate” whose job is to hunt, kill, and capitalize on “primitives,” those unaccounted-for humans who live outside of the advanced technological realm. Together they use each other’s knowledge, consciousness, language, coding, and lack thereof to achieve liberation.

Rone Shavers writes in multiple genres. His fiction has appeared in various journals, including Another Chicago Magazine, Big Other, Black Warrior Review, PANK, and The Operating System. Shavers’ non-fiction essays and essay-length reviews have appeared in such diverse publications as American Book Review, BOMB, Electronic Book Review, Fiction Writers Review, and The Quarterly Conversation. He is fiction and hybrid genre editor at Obsidian: Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora, and he teaches courses in creative writing and contemporary literature at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York.

In this interview, we discuss code-switching, experiential writing, language, euphemisms, and Afrofuturism.

Naya Clark: One of the most recognizable elements of Afrofuturism within Silverfish is code-switching. Angel would often quote renowned Black figures and mention of African deities are made throughout the book. Why were those added?

Rone Shavers: Well, if I had to describe myself, that’s what I am: a code-switcher. I’m constantly code-switching—you might hear me do it at some point during this conversation. I do that, and at other times I do what a friend of mine, Vershawn Young, calls “code-meshing”, which is blending different kinds of language styles together, rather than switching from one style to another…

NC: For people that code-switch, like you and I, it’s effortless in conversation. It just happens. When placed in an experimental novel, how did you decide when to implement code-switching, so that it translates accurately?

RS: One reason was sort of pragmatic, and the other was a bit more abstract. I’ll speak about the pragmatic one first. First off, if I’m writing from the Angel’s consciousness, from the Angel’s point of view, and the Angel has access to all this information, then of course, that information is going to come out in a very particular sort of way, such as in its original form. It doesn’t have to be mediated through the use of a standardized, proper English. If it’s all just part of an archive of knowledge, then the Angel can simply access it as is. That said, the more abstract reason I wrote in the way I did is that I didn’t necessarily want to filter or translate those things that didn’t necessarily need to be translated. Code-switching normally happens when you recognize a situation in which a thing can’t be said in any other way because of the context in which you say it. And because code-switching is so contextual, if you don’t get it, you won’t get it. Not unless you take the time to figure out what it means. All to say that I want the reader to have to do a little bit of work. That’s part of what makes the book experimental.

NC: I do appreciate that you didn’t over-contextualize those moments. Code-switching happens randomly. It’s not something that can be necessarily timed or described or monitored. It just happens.

RS: Yeah, you can also say that it’s highly referential. In fact, I’d say that in order to code-switch, you have to first be aware of the codes. Admittedly, it’s a little cheesy of me to put it that way but well, it’s true. 

NC: On the opposite end of the spectrum, Silverfish is very technically written and matter-of-fact. Some people have compared it to Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael and My Ishmael, because they both provoke the reader to go back and re-digest a cut and dry, objective point of view of the human experience. Was that intentional?

RS: Part of my intention in the book was to create these layers of references. I really enjoy the sorts of texts that you can read, re-read, go back to and read again. And where each time you read them, some new fact or tidbit comes out of it. What I am interested in is the idea of networks, networks of reference and communication, and inserting Silverfish into that network. Do you remember Willy Wonka’s everlasting gobstoppers? Sometimes what popped up in my head while writing was that I was making an everlasting gobstopper…

NC: …Layers and layers…

RS: And each one, a different flavor.

NC: I consider Silverfish a philosophical text, as it touches on many layers of consciousness, and the concept of freedom, and the “I”.  Also, as an Afrofuturistic text, how do you think Black identity and the “Black body” ties into this subject?

RS: Blackness, Black, and the Black body are three different things. What is Blackness? Ask 10 different people and you’re going to have 10 different definitions. And as for the black body, well… Wait, can you tell me the connection you made? What you saw in the book?

NC: Well, Silverfish exists in a dystopia where a fleshly human body has a price and is a resource. I think a good example of this is the [Colin] Kaepernick situation. When he, as a body, was an athlete, he’s useful and makes money. But when he, as a Black person, has a statement to make, then he’s no longer valuable.

RS: Yes, absolutely. But when is a body not a body? It’s when the body becomes a substitute for a bigger idea. In Kaepernick’s case, the bigger idea is police brutality against BIPOC. When he knelt in protest against police brutality–and how ironic his kneeling now seems, given what happened to George Floyd!–the reaction against him was so visceral because he gave the fact of racial inequality a physical form. He made an abstract concept concrete. And as we all know, up until his protests, his value as a gifted athlete was his cultural value. So, you’re right. He was just another body who was supposed to, as race-baiting television host Laura Ingram infamously said about Lebron James, “Shut up and dribble”, even though the sport is somewhat different… Really, that’s one of the ways the book leans into Afrofuturism. In America, the black body has repeatedly been used as a money-making resource. In fact, the black body is still commodified. I mean, if you want to consider Kaepernick’s case, then let’s be totally clear about it. It’s not that he’s no longer valuable, it’s that he now carries a negative value. It’s the fear that he will cost the NFL money that keeps him blacklisted. To the owner of a professional sports team, the athlete is basically just a positive or negative revenue asset. That’s what commodity capitalism’s all about.

NC: This reminds me of when Clayton and the other combat associates were assigned tasks that involved thinking, using clues, and human critical thinking abilities. It was associated with a certain paygrade.

RS: You can see echoes of that same idea in the Angel. Basically, as long as you are functioning like a machine or doing a job in which a machine can one day replace you, then everybody’s calm and everything is copacetic. But the minute you begin to question that way of being, it’s assumed that you must be malfunctioning somehow. That you’re wrong, off, out of your lane…

NC: In Silverfish humanity is described very objectively, similar to Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael. Why do you feel that’s the most effective way of describing the human experience?

RS: I don’t really write from an emotional state. Emotions are so fleeting and spongy… I’m not big on evoking an emotional response out of a reader because I don’t know who my reader is going to be. Instead, I like to give space for the reader to have his or her or their own emotional response. They might read the work as funny. They might read it as tragedy. They might read it as horror. I don’t know. Unless they tell me, I’ll never know… I’m always going to be more excited and drawn to ideas, even if it’s dime store philosophy, than I am attracted to emotions. I’m just not that sort of writer. Emotions are fashionable, meaning that they wax and wane according to particular moments in time. But still, I don’t hate emotional fiction. I just think that there are tons of other writers who can evoke emotional responses so much better than me.

NC: It seems that you trust the reader to be intelligent enough to have their own perspective. Another thing about the language is the fact that in this world, they use the word ‘primitive’ with a negative connotation, almost to describe an enemy or an unwanted way of life. Why did you choose ‘primitive’ specifically?

RS: I remember being taken aback the first time I heard somebody use ‘savage’ in slang. I was floored by all the connotations. So yeah, there’s a definite emphasis in the book on euphemisms and how we use them. Also, I really wanted to highlight how dependent the language of commodity capitalism is upon using euphemisms. The two are so incredibly intertwined. For example, you really start to see it if you specifically look at the language of start-up tech companies. They all make mention of ‘angel’ investors, someone who’ll come in and prop the company up by giving them millions of dollars… There are all these little euphemisms that pepper the different characters’ speech throughout the book. For instance, the soldiers are called ‘combat associates’, and they often talk in euphemisms and don’t even realize that they’re doing it… But I think I’m getting slightly off-topic. I chose ‘primitive’ because it’s the mirror opposite of ‘civilized’, which is the other word often mentioned throughout the book. And of course, civilized is a word that carries its own fraught, connotative weight. It’s a euphemism that’s used in really classist and racist ways. 

NC: Speaking of angels, I wanted to understand why that was used for the AI as well. Can you elaborate on the reason why you decided to call this form of AI an angel?

RS: It’s the irony of it. This thing is going around killing everything in sight! It goes back to my previous statements. Calling a cyborg that kills in the name of capitalism an “angel” is, in itself, an ironic euphemism. There’s that, and there’s also the fact that “angel” is one of the most overused terms in the English language. We’re always running around, using the word willy-nilly: ‘Oh, you’re such an angel for doing that’, ‘You sleep like an angel’, angel face, angel eyes, angel dust, angel hair pasta, etc. I could go on, but if you haven’t guessed already, I’m sort of into playing with all of the different ideas that swirl around language, the philosophy and uses of language and stuff. Those are the kinds of things that really interest me.

NC: Another component I noticed in Silverfish is the theme of getting AI to trust humans, as opposed to the other way around. The idea that AI feeds on what you feed it, and what you feed it is what you get back in return. Was that intended?

RS: In Silverfish, the Angel tells Clayton, “You’ll have to think differently,” but she doesn’t exactly or explicitly tell him how or what to think. What the Angel says is basically something to the effect of, ‘I will give you the tools to rebel, to think outside of the box, but you’ll have to do it by yourself.’ I framed it that way because it’s about what one can do with the concept of language. And for Clayton, at least, he decides he can use language to communicate. But language is fallible, you can make mistakes with language. Language is not a perfect way of communication. One of these very common fantasies is that, somehow, we’ll stumble upon an ideal means of communication, where we can be understood without the use of language. That’s why there’s such an attractive strength in concepts like empathy, which avoids language altogether and substitutes direct feelings instead. I mean, we all know that language is an incredibly invaluable tool, something that won’t let us down, but still, people are always going to be able to lie. They’re always going to be able to fudge things. The whole fantasy is that we can somehow have a pure form of communication. We’ll never get there.

NC: In terms of Afrofuturism, I think that’s another reason ‘primitiveness’ maybe applies, because for a long time, people were seen as primitive for those sorts of miscommunications. But it is also futuristic to be able to communicate without language.

RS: I don’t really see it as communicating without language. Because again, that’s a fantasy. I see it more as using language against itself in a very clever way. What I mean by that is… Well, in any society in which you are not a part of the dominant culture, in which you’re a member of a marginalized group, you’re often forced to learn how to speak the dominant culture’s language just as the dominant culture speaks it. But then something really interesting often happens. While still speaking the dominant culture’s language, the marginalized begin to strategize alternate ways of verbal communication that rely upon the use of dominant culture language, but actually makes the language say something entirely different. In other words, they begin to invert and subvert certain sounds, words, and meanings, so that the words they use convey something else. In the Western hemisphere you can see this all over the place. Particularly among Black and Brown people, who have had to devise various language strategies in order to overturn essentialist dominant culture tropes. Basically, BIPOC have had to learn how to remix language in a way that works to ensure not only their agency and culture, but also their very survival. Now, in terms of Afrofuturism, maybe it’s correct to say that BIPOC culture turning language against itself is Afrofuturistic, maybe it’s not. In either case, I agree with you that there’s nothing primitive about it.

NC: Thanks for working with me on that. Was there anything that I didn’t ask or bring up that you want to clarify or mention? Or you want readers to know?

RS: Maybe just the obligatory word about creative writing. A really good piece of writing advice I got when I was in school that I still cling to is to assume that the reader is as smart as you are. Let them come to the conclusion that they need to come to. You have to have enough trust in the reader to be able to come up with some of the answers to things themselves.

[REVIEW] The Purple Lotus by Veena Rao

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(She Writes Press, 2020)


REVIEW BY KIRAN BHAT

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We begin the pages of Purple Lotus in transit, or in travel. The main character, Tara Raj, is a young girl on a train heading to Mangalore. Though “peanut shells and crumpled newspaper [strain] over the floor,” and “stink of urine [emanates] from the toilets three compartments down the corridor,” Tara is a little girl filled with wonder, and hope. She sees her mother with “her hair coiled into a neat bun – like Belle in Beauty and the Beast,” she notices the presence of the child in her mother’s belly like “a birthday balloon,” she describes the passing landscape dotted with, “dark clouds too, smudges of dense black ink that threatened to let their wrath loose again.” Do not be fooled. We spend actually very little time in Tara’s childhood, as the chapter immediately after morphs Tara into an adult, having landed into Atlanta, after having been arranged to marry an Indian-American she barely knows. Yet, in the same way that Rao has taken extra care to decorate her language with the right amount of detail, but never too much so as to render her language garish, Rao has started off our imaginary of Tara as a child for a reason. The journey to loving oneself is long, the journey to understanding yourself is just as hard. A superficial read of Purple Lotus would make it appear like the biography of a woman who dealt with constant gaslighting, spousal abuse, and denigration, during her marriage, and found recognition in herself later on in her divorce. At the same time, I think Rao is attempting something much bigger here. Rao is trying to tell the story of the innate smallness each and every one of us have in a society, culture, or family, and yet to remember that, despite that smallness, we offer a vastness of our own to the world.

One of Rao’s great talents at play in Purple Lotus is her ability to reveal the full depths and feelings of a character in an extremely small space. A few days after Tara is brought to Atlanta, she lays in bed, jetlagged, thinking about whether to call her parents or not. Her husband Sanjay has called her, but she does not understand what he said. Later at night, he confronts her. Tara quite earnestly explains that she could not understand his accent, which causes Sanjay to scold her. After insult upon insult, he roars, “‘Aren’t you supposed to have a master’s in English literature?’” and Tara’s instinct is to escape to the bathroom. “She couldn’t let him see the tears. She felt so stupid. She had already rubbed him the wrong way. The tears flowed, hot and earnest.” These handful of lines do pages of work for Rao’s characters. They reveal the lack of compatability in Tara and Sanjay’s worldview, they foreshadow the further toils and turmoils that Tara’s marriage will result in, and they are just simply relatable. Anyone who has been a migrant to the US will know where Tara is coming from, and instantly feel a connection with her inability to fit in.

Another talent of Rao’s is to imbibe the immediacy of an image or sensation into the reader using language. Much like Jhumpa Lahiri, Rao writes about food in a way that not only makes the reader salivate, but also educates them about the importance of food to culture and the building of relationships. For example, in an effort to make their marriage more amenable, Tara tries to learn how to cook Italian and Mexican food. “Her first attempt at making veggie lasagna was a disaster, but her refried bean enchiladas turned out better—the cheese had melted sufficiently, the sauce was still bubbling when she pulled the dish out of the oven, and the chopped black olives and cilantro added aesthetic appeal to their plates.” Ignoring the fact that Rao’s sentences make me wish I had some Mexican food right in front of me, what is important to the narrative is that Sanjay responds to Tara’s hard work by saying, “It’s good,” and still going out to eat most nights elsewhere. Tara savors what little positivity Sanjay gives her, but to the reader, it’s very clear their relationship is going south, or has been south since it has started.

As per the affair, and what happens after, this is where Rao starts to stumble. It was so obvious that Sanjay was cheating on Tara that I would have almost liked to have seen the story go in another direction for subversion’s sake, and while Sanjay appeared like a well-drawn Indian-American initially, his abuse later on reveals him as a character of very little subtly or three-dimensionality. One wonders, is there anything Sanjay likes to do other than rag on Tara and cheat on the side? A similar problem seems to exist for a lot of the other characters Rao introduces. Tara’s Russian neighbour Alyona often comes off as a generic Eastern European immigrant, with very little detail that reads true to anyone who knows Russian culture well, and Rao’s second love interest Cyrus seems to only exist for Tara to dote on. In fact, it’s such a shame to see Rao’s flimsily realized side characters, because Tara is so strongly developed, and realized, and even real.

Still, all writers are learning their craft, and Rao is no exception. No matter what misgivings I have about certain aspects of the novel, Rao’s prose is so well-paced and structurally formed that hundreds of pages can be read in a few hours, and there’s a lot in her writing that is not only likeable, but courageous, and commendable. Purple Lotus proves Rao to be an apt writer of character study and an effortless storyteller. I’d recommend it first and foremost to people who are fans of the expansive storytelling of Tayari Jones, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni or Jhumpa Lahiri, and then to anyone who wants to add to their bookshelf of growing Atlanta literature.

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Kiran Bhat is a global citizen formed in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, to parents from Southern Karnataka, in India. He has currently traveled to over 130 countries, lived in 18 different places, and speaks 12 languages. He is primarily known as the author of we of the forsaken world… (Iguana Books, 2020), but he has authored books in four foreign languages, and has had his writing published in The Brooklyn Rail, The Colorado Review, Eclectica, 3AM Magazine, The Radical Art Review, The Chakkar, Mascara Literary Review, and several other places. His list of homes is vast, but his heart and spirit always remains in Mumbai, somehow. He currently lives in Melbourne. You can find him on @Weltgeist Kiran.

[REVIEW] Luster by Raven Leilani

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FSG, 2020

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REVIEW BY CARISSA CHESANEK

Raven Leilani’s Luster is a smart and bold exploration of self-worth and self-appreciation wriggled from a love triangle gone strange and a sense of urgency to understand the world around us. This short book is both sexy and sad, angry but funny, with impressive literary prose that is blunt and mischievous, luring you with little intention to let go. In Luster, there are vital essences buried deep within the core, more visible as you peel back the droves of sticky layers. And once the characters and their world are slowly revealed, we find there is very little that’s different from our own. These themes and revelations allows us to understand the impact of those around us and the startling influences that make us who we become.  

Edith, who goes by Edie, is a black woman in her twenties working as a managing editorial coordinator in publishing and living in a run down Brooklyn apartment with a roommate she shares very little connection. Much of Edie’s lackluster in life can be credited to the art she no longer creates, not after her last chilling portrait of her dead mother sprawled on the floor wearing only one shoe. Her desire to create is still there, but so is the distraction of sex, which she falls victim to, often tittering oversexed, and later categorized as “sexually inappropriate” in the office. Her escapades or escapes can be hard to endure with constant displays of demeaning ridicule and unsettling exploitation. With Eric, an older white man she met online, it’s no different, comparably worse with his blatant confessions of violent fantasies that lead to aggressive behavior. It’s clear that Eric and his chauvinistic demeanor dominates Edie, guiding her through this destructive manipulation of class and sex. But this story is not tired or trite, because there is also Eric’s wife, Rebecca, the master with all the rules, who takes us on an unexpected path.

Leilani shifts from past to present with assertiveness, giving us valid insight to Edie’s childhood and her relationships with men at an early age. What’s interesting about Edie is her self-awareness, her revelation of bad relationships that stem from the nonexistent one with her father: “This was the contradiction that would define me for years, my attempt to secure undiluted solitude and my swift betrayal of this effort once in the spotlight of an interested man.” We then learn of Clay, the mixed race older man who played off Edie’s innocence and grief with carefully fine-tuned tactics of a chronic abuser.

Rebecca, a medical examiner for the VA, is as interesting and complex as they come. She’s agreed to an open marriage but seems less than keen on the idea, and yet, she invites Edie to stay in the home without Eric’s knowing. There is something sinister here, the appeal of shock value toward her husband perhaps, but there’s also Akila, the adopted twelve year-old black daughter, who paves more questions into Edie’s appearance: Why is she really invited here? The prolonged uncertainty and swaying companionship between Rebecca and Evie is complicated but not all obstructive. It is because of Rebecca’s unusual hospitality that Edie has a new and inspiring space to start creating once again.

Leilani has given us a novel of our times with prevalent topics circling social movements of Me Too and Black Lives Matter. Discrimination based on gender and race are transparent with pay gaps and sexual abuse, socioeconomic status, and racial profiling. The lives of Eric and Edie are parallel in their social and economical differences which are as alarming as they are informative. We can learn when we are aware. This book paints an accurate portrait of society’s many weaknesses while also spotlights potential hope. In a world where we’re actively searching for that one great muse, often times we can find it staring back at us in the mirror.

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Carissa Chesanek is a New York City-based writer. She holds an MFA from The New School. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Cagibi, BookTrib, CrimeReads, Booklist, among others. She is a non-fiction reader for Guernica magazine, a member of PEN America’s Prison Writing Committee, and volunteer at Center for Fiction.

“No Content Warnings”: a conversation with Laura Sims, author of LOOKER

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(Scribner, 2019)

INTERVIEW BY JO VARNISH

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Laura Sims, author of the critically acclaimed Looker (Scribner, 2019) opens up about her debut novel, her process and her feelings on content warnings.

 

Jo Varnish: The paperback edition of your novel, Looker, comes out on October 1st. How would you describe the novel and its central themes?

Laura Sims: I’d describe it as a literary character study first and foremost, though it also has the fast pacing and dark storyline of a psychological thriller. It shouldn’t be confused with a typical thriller, though; it doesn’t make the expected genre moves—like plot twists and shocking revelations. The novel follows a woman whose life has recently imploded; in the wake of this, she becomes fixated on her neighbor, a famous actress who seems to have everything the narrator wants and believes she will never have: a stable, loving family, an exciting career, a beautiful home, status and wealth. In her obsession, the narrator acts out in increasingly unacceptable ways…and things go very badly.

Through the narrator’s situation, the book explores how toxic our culture of looking at others—whether in real life or on social media—can be. My narrator is particularly vulnerable and embittered by circumstance, but I think anyone can relate to comparing themselves to someone else and feeling decidedly “less than.” In my narrator’s case, some of this feeling can be attributed to how societal standards for women impact her life. She isn’t checking certain boxes women of her age and station are “supposed” to check, so this adds pressure and ultimately has disastrous results.

JV: There are some biographical similarities between you and your narrator.  Like her, you used to live in Brooklyn, and also like her, you taught creative writing to adult students at a city school.  How do you react to the inevitable questions of author-narrator merge?

LS: I just heard Phoebe Waller-Bridge address this question/issue in an interview. When asked how autobiographical “Fleabag” was, she said: “Women can make things up. It’s not all a diary.” That cracked me up—and also resonated with me. I think it’s true that women get questions about author-narrator or life-fiction merge far more often than men, as if it’s assumed that our imaginations are so limited, our lives so constricted, that we must rely on autobiography for our creative work. I definitely share some autobiographical facts (and a lipstick shade) with my narrator, and we all know that fiction writers do draw, to some extent, on their lives for their writing, but in the end: it doesn’t matter. The character and her story exist independently of the facts and circumstances of my life, and the work should be received, valued, and understood solely as a work of fiction.

JV: Where did you draw your inspiration for Looker’s story and characters?

LS: Living in Brooklyn was a huge inspiration for the novel, because of the way you live pressed up against people from all segments of the socioeconomic spectrum: middle-class families, homeless people, longtime working-class residents, and even celebrities. It was interesting to think of the different worlds we inhabited, all within a relatively small space, and what that kind of proximity might do to someone who perceives herself to be steps away, yet forever separated from a richer, better life. There was one particular day when I was walking home in the dead heat of August, lugging fifteen grocery bags from the store and girding myself to carry them up four flights, when a beautiful actress walked by. My immediate reaction was to envy her seemingly effortless elegance, and to wonder if she had ever carried grocery bags uphill in her life (probably not, I decided). That’s when another woman’s voice, bitter and raging at the world, popped into my head. She couldn’t stand seeing this entitled, richly dressed woman walk by so unencumbered, so carefree. She admired, despised, and envied her in equal measure. I went home, sat down, and started to write in that woman’s voice. The other characters around my narrator came pretty easily, as they were loosely inspired by ‘types’ in my Brooklyn neighborhood.

JV: Is the object of the narrator’s obsession a reflection on our fascination with celebrity insofar as she is a famous actress?  Further, was your decision not to name the actress or the narrator a comment on our culture’s interest in surface at the cost of deeper identity?

LS: It can definitely be read as a reflection on our fascination with celebrity, though it wasn’t intentional. In our culture of constantly looking at celebrities, they seem an easy target for fixation, especially for someone who’s in a vulnerable state of mind. It’s potentially harmful to both parties—the looker and the looked at. It’s even dangerous—or unhealthy, at least, for people who aren’t particularly sensitive or damaged. To always be looking at others’ seemingly flawless lives can make our own lives feel thin and dreary by comparison—even if the seeming flawlessness is nothing but a show.

I didn’t intentionally leave my characters unnamed. It was something that happened naturally as I was writing the book, but looking back I see how their namelessness fits with Looker’s focus on how intertwined perception and identity can be. The actress is trapped by the narrator’s perception of her as “the actress”; she isn’t allowed to be more or less than that. And the narrator’s namelessness blots her out, just as she blots herself out, or perceives herself to be blotted out by society. But her namelessness is also useful because it erases the distance between reader and character and helps create the raw, even uncomfortable, intimacy that some readers have described.

JV: The narrator has a complicated relationship with her pet, Cat, who she refuses to return to her ex-husband. What do her changing feelings for Cat tell us about her mental state?

LS: As it shifts from one extreme to the other, her relationship with Cat reflects the moods and stages of her mental decline.  She begins by seeing Cat as a nuisance, then shifts to loving her, adoring her, even, when she realizes Cat can be used to manipulate her ex-husband. When things deteriorate further in the narrator’s life, she becomes impatient, unkind. And then her final, most vicious act signals to us that she has finally crossed the line into what many would call madness.

JV: I was surprised to learn how strongly some readers have reacted to the narrator’s treatment of Cat. I know “content warnings” are increasingly used on Goodreads and elsewhere.  How do you feel about such warnings?

LS: Yes, I was surprised, too. The moment in the book they’re responding to was the hardest scene for me to write, but it was also the most crucial; inevitable, I’d have to say. She had to do it. She had to show us just how far she’d come from her reasonably ordered, societally acceptable life: very far. I was happy to learn that people felt discomfort, anger, even outrage in response to that moment; it constitutes a powerful reaction to the book, and isn’t that what fiction and other art forms are for? To provoke, in the most general sense: to provoke thought and emotion. I find that ‘content warnings,’ in the sphere of literature, interfere with that crucial relationship between artwork and audience. They neutralize any potential threat to a reader’s state of mind, and in doing so they neutralize the work itself. Make it bland and safe for everyone, so that we may as well be watching a network sitcom (though they’ve come far in recent years) rather than reading a complex work of fiction.

JV: I find it impossible not to empathize with the narrator.  Dealing with infertility and the breakdown of a marriage are understandably unsettling, and likely trigger her breakaway from reality. Was creating compassion for her intentional?

LS: I wouldn’t say it was intentional, but I did feel very deeply for her. I didn’t want her to be a two-dimensional villain. (I don’t think of her as a “villain” at all.) My hope is that readers will feel some measure of compassion and empathy for her—as you did—and will see in her some basic human desires: to love and be loved; to connect; to transcend the rigors, indignities, and monotony of everyday life. Maybe she heads down strange avenues in hopes of satisfying these desires, but the desires themselves are universal.

JV: Tell us about your process as a writer.  What does a writing day typically look like for you?  Over what time period did you write Looker?

LS: On my best, most productive days, I head to a co-working space in town right after the school bus leaves. I try to work for several hours in the morning there, when my focus is sharpest. Then I devote the rest of my day to family business, schoolwork (see below), exercise, errands, etc. But I find it really important to preserve and protect those morning hours when I can. It also depends on what stage I’m in of the writing process. Right now, I’m editing a finished draft, and while the morning hours are helpful, I end up working outside of those hours, too. I can’t stop working. But when I’m struggling my way through a first draft I need more structure to stay engaged. I find drafting painful and editing intoxicating and FUN.

I wrote Looker over a period of about three years. At the time, I was working on other creative projects, too: a young adult novel that never saw the light of day and a poetry book. I was also teaching part-time and getting my Master’s degree in Library & Info Science. (Still getting that degree, by the way. Almost done!) But Looker was my side project, my passion project—I couldn’t stop returning to it, and worked on it whenever I could. One of the things that’s been hardest about moving forward after Looker is trying to recapture that feeling of working on something that no one knows or cares about, in a kind of protective secrecy. It’s something new authors don’t talk about enough: how hard it is, after being seen, to go back and work on something in the same cloistered way you did before you’d published your book. I realize it’s a good problem to have, but it’s been a challenge nonetheless.

JV: For readers who loved Looker, what would you recommend they read next?

LS: There are several books that inspired me (in some way) in the writing of this novel, and I’d highly recommend them because they’re also some of my favorite contemporary novels: The Days of Abandonment, by Elena Ferrante, Dept of Speculation, by Jenny Offill, and Notes on a Scandal, by Zoe Heller. I wasn’t consciously drawing on these books when I was writing Looker, but thinking back, I know they were influential. Also The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Reading that in college had a profound impact on me; it’s the ultimate tale of a woman’s downward spiral and the societal forces that hastened it. I’d also highly recommend Helen Phillips’ new book, The Need—it’s very different from Looker, but plays with genre, too, in that it’s a literary novel with a science fiction storyline and thriller pacing. It’s compulsively readable, beautifully written, and terrifying. Three of my favorite things.

JV: What are you working on at the moment?

LS: I’m working on a novel—well, to be honest, two novels. I’ve got complete drafts of both of them and am working to make them readable before passing them to my agent, who will help me whip them into shape.

JV: Lastly, Looker has a cinematic feel on reading.  Are there any plans to bring your story to the big screen?

LS: Not to the big screen, but to the small screen! Emily Mortimer and Alessandro Nivola’s King Bee production company, along with eOne, have bought the rights to Looker. Emily will star as the narrator and produce. The screenwriters are working on the screenplay now; I can’t wait to see how they adapt it.

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Laura Sims’s debut novel, Looker (Scribner), was published to critical acclaim in early 2019; The Wall Street Journal called it “a sugarcoated poison pill of psychological terror” and Publishers Weekly called it a “chilling and riveting debut.” Sims has also published four books of poetry, including, most recently, Staying Alive; her first poetry collection, Practice, Restraint, was the winner of the 2005 Fence Books Ottoline Prize. In 2014, she edited Fare Forward: Letters from David Markson. Sims has been the recipient of a US-Japan Creative Arts Fellowship, and her poetry and prose have appeared in The New Republic, Boston Review, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Gulf Coast, and other journals. She lives in New Jersey with her family.

 

Originally from England, Jo Varnish now lives outside New York City.  She is assistant editor at X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, and her short stories and creative nonfiction have recently appeared, or are forthcoming, in Okay Donkey, Ellipsis Zine, Brevity Blog and others. Jo has been a writer in residence at L’Atelier Writers for two years, and is currently studying for her MFA.  She can be found on twitter @jovarnish1.

[REVIEW] Nobber by Oisín Fagan

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(John Murray Originals, 2019)

REVIEW BY SHASTRI AKELLA

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Nobber has an exceptional opening act, one that removes the conditional out of John Gardner’s oft-quoted idea that all great novels begin either with a stranger arriving in town or a character taking a journey. Oisín Fagan’s novel begins with four characters taking a journey, and then the novel shifts point-of-view: these strangers arrive in the town of Nobber, and their arrival is shown through the eyes of the locals. The novel, at first, shifts perspectives from one chapter to the next, bringing Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying to mind, but as the story progresses, the point-of-view starts to shift within chapters, and at an increasingly dizzying pace, leaving readers with the distinct impression that Nobber is the schizophrenic monster-protagonist and we are stuck inside its head, an experience that anyone familiar with a small town and its incestuous intimacies and flawed loyalties will recognize. It is a setting that in Stephen King’s works is often the source of horror and that, in Fagan’s hands, also has a distinctly Dickensian feel, the claustrophobia of the setting accentuated by the epic scale of the narrative that plays out in such a tight space.

The novel is set during Ireland’s black plague, but its temporal distance does not make its characters feel any less familiar. de Flunkl and his men are on the move in pursuit of real estate in a time of economic slump; their goal, to buy property on the cheap so they can sell it for a higher value once the plague has ended, holds a strong presence in literature set during the Depression. The men have two encounters as they are about to enter Nobber: the first one is with a band of Gaels, a people who have been displaced from their lands and into the wilderness, and who are now perceived to be ‘savages’. The tension of the prolonged dialogue between the men and Gaels, made possible with the assistance of a translator, William (who is a part of de Flunkl’s retinue), hints at social tensions that, in the present political moment, feel close to home (no matter where, geographically speaking, home is). The second encounter, which I will focus on, brings up a striking instance of the animal dysmorphia that runs like a thematic thread throughout the novel. On the outskirts of Nobber, the men see “a cruciform of wood…on it, thickly laid like a skeleton’s musculature, are reams of dead crows, and they give the form a certain plumpness and lifelikeness from a distance.” The crows, which at first de Flunkl assumes are dead, are “nailed into the wood”. As Harold, another member of the itinerant group, persuades de Flunkl to retreat, warning him that such a ghastly sight can bring no good tidings their way, one of the birds starts to flap its wings, and several others follow suite, and a horrified de Flunkl realizes that they are, in fact, alive. The cross, they notice, is topped with a peasant’s cap, a detail which becomes a lens to read the broader narrative implications of the sight.

Throughout the novel, Fagan uses animal dysmorphia alongside a disintegrating human psyche to place the human and the non-human on a level plane. The conjunction becomes a powerful device to show how the victimized responds to a loss of control by distorting the reality of someone less powerful then themselves. A character who enters Nobber with two lambs, two calves, and a badger (all of which are stolen or captured), reflects: “if animals are jumbled up too greatly in species, and confined too closely, disastrous things happen…Beasts, who should emerge into the synechdocal perfection of predator and prey, too closely combined begin to act in an erratic and unpredictable manner. Both of the lambs think one of the calves is its mother. One of the calves thinks [he] is its mother, and the badger, who should prey on the lambs, instead wishes to prey on him.” Earlier in the novel, a local of Nobber is approached by four men who are naked and who have “sheep skulls tied to their heads.” Mary, a Gael who is kidnapped by Colca (another local of Nobber, and one of the more notorious characters in the novel), kills a horse, but this act of cruelty too is inseparable from human depravity. Colca, as readers find out, practices bestiality, and the novel hints at him having sexual contact with the horse. Rather than the plague taking a toll on both man and animal, it messes with the minds of the humans who then act against the animals.

The action of the novel, once de Flunkl and his men arrive in Nobber, takes places almost exclusively inside the houses of locals. Behind each locked door are an unlikely pair or group of people who parry for power. At times the dead and the dying are trapped in the same space, and the corporeal effects of the plague create for tremendous moments of body horror like the following one:

 

“Dervorgilla’s arms, held above her head, are shivering with such force that they are almost a blur. Amidst the matted hair of her armpits are swollen protuberances with smooth surfaces. The swellings are hairless, yellow and thick, one under each armpit, like hidden apples growing out of her. One of them is covered in stale pus that has erupted at some former point. Around each buboe is a purple circular bruise, perfect as the concentric ripple of water…[And] Tedbalt[‘s] putrid carcass is decomposing, sunken beneath his work clothes. Steam rises off him, blending the little light above him into a wavy mirage, and his face is covered in a blanket of sleeping flies.”

 

In the final act the action shifts to the town center, bringing all of its residents together. Colca becomes the focal point of everyone’s anger. Throughout the novel, he enforces a curfew on the people of Nobber to keep the plague from spreading. He kidnaps a Gael and hold her hostage as his ‘wife’, and he has an abnormal relationship with animals. Yet, the conversation he has with his mother and her grief as she watches the plight her son is subjected to makes us wonder if the vigilante form of justice is deserved. And in the process dehumanizing Colca, the people of Nobber dehumanize each other.

Christopher Higgs (2017)  poses the rhetorical question of ‘what does it mean to be human?’ and then responds to it to the following effect: “one is not born a human, one becomes human,” for to be human is “not a natural fact. Instead, it is the result of a certain history, a certain civilization, which has resulted in [his or] her current status” (8). Being human, Higgs notes, is a social construct. He adds that “we must not be fooled into believing a human is a human and a monster is a monster outside of or isolated from social and historical contexts” (9). If the notion of what it means to be human has historically been a patriarchal construction—the patriarchy placing a boundary around what it means to be a human civilization and deciding on the laws of governance that decide who qualifies and who disqualifies—then dehumanization, as Peter Grosvenor (2014) states, is the “psychological capacity to relegate people to the status of non-human animals, and to deprive them of the protection normally accorded to fellow humans by moral codes” (154). Thus, “to become a human,” Higgs states, “one must participate in a system of belonging…one becomes human by sacrificing autonomy in favor of participation…those who are human make this agreement. To break this agreement is to become Other” (31). As a socio-cultural construct humanity is, Higgs notes, an act of membership. The shifting points-of-view in Nobber show how each character is, in turn, dehumanizes/is dehumanized. In the face of the plague, the system of belonging that the locals of Nobber participated in, and that the Gaels were kept out of, has fallen apart, leaving the former with no familiar system to work within, thus reducing them all, in status and behavior, to non-human animals. Their treatment of animals is reflective of their own psychological and social condition.

The novel is highly relevant to our current sociopolitical and environmental reality: where on the one hand, the surge of right-wing regimes has narrowed and tightened the boundaries of the systems of belonging that keep some people in and everyone else out, environmental collapse, on the other hand, is on the brink of erasing all such known systems, creating new ways of life—a hitherto unknown chaos—where those who dehumanize the Other also dehumanize each other because the system that once held them together has fallen apart. Indeed, the locals in Nobber dehumanized the Gales until the plague hit them and then they started to dehumanize each other. One need look no further than the fact that Syrian refugee crisis that began because of an environmental disaster created mass migration into Europe, and the attitudes towards these migrations in turn caused a split between the U.K. and the rest of Europe, precipitating the coming about of Brexit.

I began with a famous literary tenet, and I would like to end with one. Ursula K. Le Guin once remarked that all fantastic narratives ultimately address the ills that ail our present social reality, ills that have become background white noise to us and that, therefore, when exaggerated and placed in strange new spaces, far removed from our reality, startle us into paying attention. That, I think, is where the genius of Fagan’s novel lies. In making us pay attention to the black Plague in the 1300s and showing us how some complex, well-wrought characters react to it, it makes us pay closer attention to our own disintegrating reality, to those around us, and ultimately to ourselves. It interrogates the systems of belonging we participate in and it creates a powerful experience of empathy for our future selves who might no longer have access to those systems and who will, as a result, be Othered. And seeing our future Othered selves might exactly be what we need to empathize with the Other in the here and the now. Nobber is an ode to precarity, one that I think will live beyond its generation, serving as both an instructive allegory and a highly readable work of fiction.

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Shastri Akella earned his MFA in fiction at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst) where he is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature. His story won the Bridging the Gap fiction contest at the Slice Writers’ Conference in 2018. His works appears in Guernica, Electric Literature, The Common, Rumpus, World Literature Today, LA Review of Books, Danse Macabre, and European Stages, among other places. He is currently seeking agents for his novel, The Elephant Songs, queer novel set in 1980s India with an an interracial love story at its core.

[REVIEW] Kansastan by Farooq Ahmed

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(7.13 Books, 2019)

REVIEW BY J.D. HO

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One of the important projects of contemporary writers of color or writers belonging to marginalized religious groups is to reclaim and rewrite histories that have largely been recorded and imagined by the majority. Farooq Ahmed’s Kansastan is one such reclamation. Ahmed weaves an alternative narrative of Kansas during the Civil War. His unnamed narrator lives in Imam Bahira’s mosque, slaughtering goats and doing other chores, while around him Kansans defend the state against Missourians. Like a less wholesome Forrest Gump, complete with leg braces, our narrator meets historic figures like the abolitionist John Brown. While the setting is America during the Civil War, on the border between a free state and a slave state, Ahmed incorporates narrative elements from the Qur’an and Islamic history, drawing in particular on the story of Hajar and her son Ismail, ancestor of the Prophet Muhammad. Muslims populate Ahmed’s novelistic universe, and the mosque stands without comment in Kansas. In the Civil War period, Muslims were, in fact, present in the U.S. because a significant number of slaves came from Islamic regions, but that aspect of history is not directly addressed in this narrative.

The narrator of Kansastan at one point proclaims: “If I inherited the mosque, I could retell our stories!” Thus, the main character ostensibly shares a goal with the novel itself. But what is the purpose of retelling and reclaiming history? The tone of Kansastan leans more toward satire than historical illumination or giving voice to unheard witnesses. The retellings seem to be important primarily to gratify the narrator’s ego. In the text, the narrator often feels overlooked, unjustly treated, incorrectly perceived. His sense of injustice increases with the arrival of a woman named Maryam, whom the narrator claims is his aunt. The members of the community regard Maryam’s son, Faisal, as a healer and prophet, while the narrator is the butt of jokes. When Faisal strikes a geyser in the parched landscape, the populace shower him with gratitude, but the narrator complains that no one acknowledges the fact that he was the one to make Faisal play the game that led him to discover the well. That link, he says, “was lost between the storytellers and the told.” The narrator exists only as “the cripple” in songs about Faisal. To combat that injustice, the narrator schemes to take over the mosque by defeating his oppressors one by one.

We know little of our narrator’s past, though we know he is an orphan, that he has a malady that prevents him from walking easily, and that he possesses some knowledge of the Qur’an, though that knowledge is perhaps as unreliable as he is. He doesn’t know Arabic, and calls “ignorance—my shield and my sword.” Despite the character’s ostensible religion and time period, he smokes cigarettes and marijuana (which he calls his “analgesic seasonings”), commits murder and rape, and is generally unsympathetic. In this he resembles some of Vladimir Nabokov’s narrators, whom we are not necessarily supposed to like or trust, and who often have an exaggerated sense of self-importance and a shifty moral compass. Ahmed’s narrator is similar. He seems to bend facts to cast his ethically dubious actions in a positive light. He is our storyteller and our archivist, the compiler of all the information we know about the novel’s world.

As I began this novel, I had trouble getting my bearings because there is little exposition of the factions and historical background of this particular universe. I found myself wishing for more world-building and exposition. I turned to the Qur’an for direction because Kansastan so constantly references the Qur’an and the people in it. Though my reading of it is incomplete and certainly not deep, the Qur’an helped in two ways. First, as I looked up many of the novel’s quotations from the Qur’an, I began to question the narrator’s knowledge of scriptural context. Second, thinking about how to read the Qur’an was helpful for thinking about how to read Kansastan. In his introduction to my version of the Qur’an (Oxford), M.A.S. Abdel Haleem states: “An important feature of the Qur’anic style is that it alludes to events without giving historical background.” Haleem goes on to say that the Qur’an relied upon its readers’ knowledge of events that were, at the time, current. Ahmed employs a similar style, perhaps purposely leaving the particulars of the Kansas–Missouri conflict vague in order that readers will treat the novel as contemporary fable—or satire. Though Ahmed draws upon the Qur’an and the story of Hajar and Ismail, he does not create straightforward parallels.

From an editorial perspective, I think Kansastan tries to take on too many narrative tasks at once. Its satirical elements often clutter the narrative in a way that decreases their effectiveness. (References to Kansas-specific insider jokes, for instance, are worldbuilding, but not in a meaningful way.) But Ahmed possesses the skills to wield a satirical blade, as when the Imam says, “Whom ye war against, I war against,” and much later Faisal says, “If the Lord be for us, who can be against,” echoing both Romans 8:31 and George W. Bush after 9/11.

Another purpose of retelling in the form of satire is to attempt to make sense of—or find relief from—the present, and I think that is where Ahmed’s aim lies. In mocking disability, religion, and the fight against slavery, Kansastan treats nothing as sacred, revealing a deeply pessimistic worldview. The point may be that the particulars of factions and history will do nothing to make sense of the events of our times or the narrator’s. If our murderous and narcissistic narrator is on the side of abolitionists, what does that say about the other side? Perhaps both sides are Fanatics (the narrator’s term), and both sides believe they are right, but, as readers standing outside the narrative, one side’s fanaticism is indistinguishable from the other’s.

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J.D. Ho has an MFA from the Michener Center at the University of Texas in Austin. J.D.’s poems and essays have appeared in Georgia Review, Ninth Letter, and other journals.

[REVIEW] Bloomland by John Englehardt

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(Dzanc, 2019)

REVIEW BY DAVID TROMBLAY

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Bloomland, the winner of the 2018 Dzanc Prize for Fiction, explores the cyclic American cultural phenomenon of an all too real mass shooting set at a fictionalized southern university nestled in an evangelical stronghold where God and guns are routinely spoken of in the same breath and with the same reverence. Though the setting is masterfully crafted and given intimate nuance by Englehardt, Bloomland could also have the thinnest veil dragged across its pages and become Anytown, USA, all too easily unnervingly. Therein lies the first of countless gripping details waiting between the novel’s pages. Englehardt strikes at the unfortunately understood universality of this story by whispering to the psyche of the reader, saying, “this is what real endings look like, after anxiety erodes into routine.

This conversation—which has spent too much time in the mouths of talking heads following the week’s latest and greatest presumably unavoidable tragedy—is examined through the unfolding lives of a trio of characters including a student struggling to find a life of which they are willing to subscribe to, a widowed professor, and young man who is made listless by an emptiness and unknown yearning which he sets out to eradicate at any cost. The cost is interrogated by a trinity of narrators who attempt to talk the three characters through the descriptive, prescriptive, and speculative, events that led up to, unraveled during, and followed that fateful day.

“Later I understand you’re opening up to me, telling the story of your life like it happened to someone else, like the things you’ve experienced are not singular, but part of a cycle that is always repeating and reinventing itself.”

Englehardt employs these second-person narrators expertly while reminding the reader there is an “I” behind the tragedy to help usher the survivors who are left alive to move on afterward. Not doing so would be a grave mistake and no different than what America has been inundated with by the media following the endless string of mass shootings of recent history. By leading the reader through these knotted lives while using the “you” and “I,” Englehardt presents the question of who are “we” to sit back so apathetically and serve as an audience to what is quickly becoming history’s most grotesque spectator sport, leaving you to “…wonder if the scariest thing about all this is not that life can’t return to normal, but that it already has.”

It should not surprise readers that this book does not end with a cheery conclusion, but envelopes a meticulously scaffolded reflection of the current American society, one so willing to send thoughts and prayers when the time arises, yet simultaneously waiting for it to be their own turn, as if it is merely inevitable.

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DAVID TROMBLAY is a native of Duluth, Minnesota. He served for 10 years in the U.S. Navy, deploying to Iraq, Eastern Europe, and Africa. He is currently studying English Literature and Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Superior. His essays and short stories have appeared in Minerva Zine, The Nemadji Review, and Yellow Medicine Review. His first novel, The Ramblings of a Revenant, was published in 2015.

[REVIEW] Headlong by Ron MacLean

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(Mastodon Publishing, 2019)

REVIEW BY WENDY J. FOX

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Well into Ron MacLean’s Headlong—originally published in 2013, and reissued this year by Mastodon Publishing—Nick Young, needing something to help him channel his anger and worry, does what he says he used to do in the old days to get through it: he writes.

Nick is a washed-up journalist who has returned to his hometown to help his father after a stroke, and it is with a journalist’s nose for uncovering a story that MacLean develops this novel over a hot Boston summer. Middle-aged and divorced, it’s clear Nick would probably not have left his life in LA (despite there not being much to leave) if he thought he had any choice in the matter. He’s unemployed bordering on unemployable, and not a single women enters his orbit without her appearance being commented on. He’s grossly fond of the word “sexy.”

Yet, MacLean’s steady hand manages to balance the floundering, can’t get out of his own way, occasionally lecherous Nick with an important story about activism, friendship, and family.

The novel follows the thread of a labor dispute that ignites into violent protest, pitting radicalized youth against corporate scions, and ups the already high stakes of what it truly can mean for families when workers are striking by weaving in the unsolved murder of two union janitors, a complicated friendship with a close friend’s son, and a police department who protects their own.

Against this backdrop, Nick is coming to terms with what it means to him to be a journalist again, and while he fights it, his muckracker instincts will not allow him to let go of any lead, and he begins to cover the story in earnest, landing a feature and a column. At the same time, he’s sleeping on a futon in his father’s neglected home, the medical bills from the nursing facility are piling up, and his dad, who is not improving, regularly mistakes Nick for Nick’s dead uncle.

Headlong is a kind of modern—and decidedly literary—take on hardboiled crime and detective stories. MacLean’s careful pacing and thoughtful character development lends a novel that could easily veer into the didactic or cliché a layer of empathy, while still keeping the elements of the genre that keep the plot exciting and the pages turning.

Ultimately, though, Headlong is a book about what it means to have idealism, to lose it, and to start to find the thread of it again. It is a novel about having been young and not being young any more, and it challenges readers to consider mortality and their own choices. What do we think justice, whether it is social, environmental, meted out by a judge or a family member, really means? MacLean doesn’t have all the answers, but he pushes us to understand what we’d give, or give up, to get it, and he writes through all of these questions with an assured, steady grace.

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Wendy J. Fox is the author of The Seven Stages of Anger and Other Stories (winner, Press 53 short fiction contest & finalist for the Colorado Book Award), The Pull of It (named a top 2016 book by Displaced Nation) and the forthcoming novel If the Ice Had Held, selected as the Santa Fe Writers Project grand prize winner by Benjamin Percy. Writing from Denver, CO and tweeting from @wendyjeanfox.

An Interview with Alex DiFrancesco on their forthcoming book, All City

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(Seven Stories Press, 2019)

INTERVIEW BY JESSICA MANNION

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Alex DiFrancesco has had a busy year. Their essay collection Psychopomps was released  by Civil Coping Mechanisms in February, and their novel All City is being released by Seven Stories Press on June 18. While both books are excellent, this interview focuses on All City. It is an important book, and very possibly a prophetic one. All City speaks for the people whose stories do not often get told, much less told with nuance and compassion.

All City takes place in a New York City of the near future. The chasm between the haves and have-nots is wider than ever, and climate change has sent superstorms of increasing violence to the shores of the city, tearing it down with wind and water. Those with the means always leave before the storms hit, but those without resources and means, those who have nowhere else to go, must remain and hold on to what they can by sheer force of will.

The book primarily follows three people, their struggles to survive, to regroup and find security after Superstorm Bernice, and to build new lives in a world that’s a mere muddy remnant of what they knew before. Even after the waters recede, life doesn’t get any easier; there is no new food being shipped in, medical care is practically nonexistent, roads and bridges are destroyed, and the wreckage of the storm is everywhere, bringing with it vermin and sickness. As resources diminish, violence increases, and there are few places where one can feel safe.

Alex lived in New York for about 15 years, but has since moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where they are an MFA candidate at Cleveland State University.

Jessica Mannion: Having just read All City for the second time, I loved it even more. There’s a lot to unpack. In part, I see it as a kind of hybrid love letter to and eulogy for New York City. Can you talk about the changes you saw during your time living in NYC and how living here influenced your writing, and your life as an artist?

Alex DiFrancesco: So now, when I think back to when I moved to New York in 2000, I realize I was a shock-wave gentrifier in Bushwick. I was a white, queer, artist who was specifically moved into a very affordable space at the time by people looking to develop it. I didn’t understand that at the time! I was just out of a small town in Pennsylvania, and thrilled that I could work part time as a lunch server in a little Middle Eastern place, write most of the day, and still pay my rent and have money to party a little. It was the dream, for me, to move to NYC and become an artist. I lived in a dirty loft and had a desk made out of a couple boxes and an old door, and I wrote every day. I was highly suspect about going back to school, and NYC provided so many ways other than that route to become a writer.

I remember in around 2005, I was working at some film-release party on a boat moored in the Hudson (those were the days when Craigslist still had the best odd jobs), and someone way slicker and cooler than me asked me where I lived, and then proclaimed Bushwick as “up-and-coming.” I had this sudden, distinct understanding that I would no longer be able live there, and that I had been the beginning of that process for people who had been there much longer.

I lived in NYC for around 10 more years after that. First I had to move all the way to the end of Brooklyn. Then I moved to Queens. Then, finally, just before I left, a friend was letting me pay way less than she could have charged for a room in the apartment she owned because there was no way I could live there and afford it anymore. What I made had stayed the same, and my rent had tripled.

But ultimately, living and scraping by in New York made me the artist I am today. I went to school at the New School, and learned from some amazing professors. I joined a writers’ group with some of the most talented writers I’ve ever worked with in it. I went to lectures, worked in bookstores, interned in publishing. It’s helped me build my life around the written word in so many ways. I’m sad every day that there’s just no place for me there anymore.

JM: What does All City mean and where did the idea for the book come from?

AD: The term “all city” is old graffiti slang for an artist who has painted in all 5 boroughs of New York. When I wrote the anonymous artist character into the book, I thought about how nearly impossible this would be to accomplish if you were working in the post-collapse conditions of the book. I decided to make him do it anyway.

The book was a mash-up of what ifs, really. I started writing a list of them after Superstorm Sandy destroyed parts of New York City, and also shortly after Bansky did his month-long NYC residency where he guerilla-installed a new project in an undisclosed location every day for an entire month. I’d also been reading a lot about Hurricane Katrina. The ideas just sort of melded together.

JM: The novel is primarily told through 3 characters: Makayla, Jesse and Evann. There’s so much going on with the characters: they are all affected by this Superstorm Bernice, and they all experience displacement and a certain degree of trauma, but because of their social status and circumstances, each experiences / survives / processes that trauma differently. Why did you choose these characters to tell this story?

The first draft of this novel was a super sloppy 40,000 words written during NaNoWriMo. I didn’t really participate in the community aspects of it, but I did challenge myself to write the proposed amount in the month of November. Once I had the list of what-ifs, I started to look at them from different angles. Makayla came first, because I wanted someone who would likely be without many resources besides her sense of community and her relationships. I added Jesse in because it’s very important to me to portray trans lives in the larger context of the world — in such a way that they’re not isolated, but also not in trans-only spaces all the time. Evann felt necessary, too, because you can’t show the have-nots without showing what it looks like to have it all.

JM: Another character – a mysterious mural artist – remains unseen, but his Art starts showing up everywhere in the devastated city like crocuses in the spring. What role does Art play in All City? How have the visual arts influenced or inspired you as a writer and artist?

AD: There are a series of works of visual art in this novel that are all carefully chosen and all mean different things.

Evann, the art collector, is given a Basquiat when she graduates from design school. This kind of started as a joke, because I made her collect Basquiats and first editions of Ayn Rand books. What kind of awful person wouldn’t get the irony there? Then, like a lot of the things I do to amuse myself in my writing, I started taking it seriously. Really, what kind of person wouldn’t get that? Certainly not one like me, or anyone I’d care about. But someone. So Evann was born out of love for Basquiat and Ayn Rand.

There’s a scene where two trans street punks go into The Met to look at Van Gogh paintings, and one of them starts crying because they’ve never seen Van Gogh’s sunflowers and never realized how dead they were. The other one says, no, they’re dead but they’re still moving and full of life, that’s how much life Van Gogh saw even though he was so sad. It’s one of the few times in the book that art is just enjoyed and not commodified.

Then, Evann owns two more paintings that play symbolic roles in the story. She owns Richard Bosman’s woodcut “Full Moon” and John Lurie’s absurdist watercolor “Bear Surprise.” The role of “Full Moon” (which shows one man beating another to death in a boat) is to show Evann looking into a world she has no idea about, but the other characters are all to familiar with. The role of “Bear Surprise” (which shows two people having sex in the woods and a bear yelling “Surprise!”) is because it’s Lurie’s most famous but probably least-skilled painting, which Evann totally doesn’t understand. It’s a little poking fun at her, to have it in there. I also learned while doing research for the novel that Lurie was one of Basquiat’s early mentors, so I felt compelled to write him in because of that connection.

Art is really commodified almost every time it appears in  the book. It’s made for the right reasons, but it’s consumed, often, in ways that are more about the owning it than the divineness of it. I have very silly and almost spiritual beliefs about art and where it comes from, but the art world and the world of the novel are both kind of ugly and gross and highly capitalist rather than about communicating the thing that makes art worth making.

JM: How does All City explore ideas of ownership?

AD: I’m thinking of the ownership of space as the main way it works. There’s a luxury condo, and when it’s not something that the rich want, it’s good enough for the poor. It’s a place they can make a utopia. But then it becomes something that the rich want again, and it’s too good for the people who have made it their own. This is a microcosm of the gentrification of New York, in the book. So really the way ownership is dictated is on the desires of those who have the money to protect their “rights” to a space, not those who work to make it their own.

There’s also something there about the use of graffiti as a way to take and remake public spaces as something belonging to everyone, for everyone’s use and enjoyment. It’s ecstatic and community-based, much like the true community-building that happens in the luxury condo. I don’t think I could’ve told this story without the addition of graffiti.

JM: How does All City explore the concept of hope – about the future, about a better life, about belonging – and who ultimately will see their hopes realized?

AD: Hope is fraught in All City. There are people like Evann who have implicit access to it, when they choose it. There are people like Makayla who make it out of what they have. But I want to say that the last scene is my probably depressive final take. Who gets to see that which is supposed to bring us hope? Who doesn’t? And who are the few people who believe that hope is a starting point, something they saw once, and carry that fire as far as they can?

JM: In part, All City is a story of survival. How do you explore survival and the things some people must endure in order to do so?

AD: Without giving too much away, I think the biggest traumas in the book are one character’s rape, one’s loss of a parent, and one experiencing a hate crime committed against the person they love. These characters all rally, at least for a while, or eventually, to use the trauma they’ve experienced to make the world around them better. It creates empathy in them rather than destroying them — but sometimes it destroys them too. I think the idea that some people choose to make sure that no one goes through the horrible things they’ve been through is the driving idea behind a lot of these characters. They’re not saints, and they’re not perfect — but they’re driven by the fact that traumatic things have happened and they’ve turned them into compassion, which then turns into community and survival.

JM: The characters Makayla and Jesse in other circumstances would often be seen as outsiders of society, but you put them front and center in the book. Why did you choose to tell this story from their perspective?

AD: This is always my goal, to put the outsiders at the inside. I think I have always felt like a bit of an outsider myself, so I’m not really sure how I could sustain an emotional and moral core to a novel without it being heavily focused on characters who see and feel and experience things outside the norm or the default.

Also, it’s a highly political act to write the stories that people say shouldn’t be told. I knew Jesse had to be in there because I’m a trans person, and queer representation means something to me. I was really a bit hesitant to write Makayla because she’s a minority I’m not a part of, she’s a woman of color. Certainly, a woman of color could have written Makayla in another way, and it would be entirely more appropriate for her to tell a woman of color’s story. But I also had been reading so much about the aftermath of Katrina, and the poor people left behind, and it struck me as absurd to try to tell a story of gentrification and climate change and survival from multiple perspectives without characters of color. I took as much feedback as I could get from folks more aligned with her perspective.

But it was incredibly important to me, outside of specific demographic, to tell the story of those who had been left behind, and, more terrifyingly are being left behind. All City is, in some ways, a warning. But it’s also the story of those who’ve been pushed so far out that they’ve had to make their own way, and know what they’re doing when things really go down.

(photo by Emily Raw)

JM: In many ways, Evann is a controversial character; she is probably the least sympathetic and the one who causes the most harm. Yet she would certainly not view herself that way, nor would much of society. How is her perspective important?

AD: I wrote Evann about 16 times. You might recall from when we workshopped this book in our writers’ group, people were referring to her in Snidely Whiplash terms, because she was just that bad. The somewhat less dastardly Evann who ended up in the final pages was born largely out of my wonderful editor, Sanina Clark, pushing me to make her less villainous. Sanina had asked me early on if Evann was a cipher, a stand-in for gentrification, and I said that no, she was a villain, for sure, but I also wanted her emptiness and need for consumption in place of being able to feel anything to be real and human. Sanina pushed me through rewrites to make Evann less of a complete monster, and more of a asshole human, if that makes sense.

In some ways, Evann is the most important character I’ve written thus far (at least to me), because she’s the life most outside of my own, which is what writers are supposed to be creating, I think. With every other character I was able to find something inside myself to return to like a compass when I started to go astray with them. I really had to work to find this place with Evann. I used to take walks in Green-Wood Cemetery to Basquiat’s grave all the time, talking to his ghost and think about Evann doing the same.

But she also plays an important role in the story in that we have to see the other side of this huge divide in the future world. If we see Jesse nodding out in a dirty IRT station from scrounged opiates, we also have to see Evann fucking a guy with pearl studs in his dick, you know?

JM: Your essay collection Psychopomps came out in February of this year. How do these books inform each other?

AD: I think people who read both will see bits and pieces that reflect each other. Sometimes I kind of feel like writing creative nonfiction can be like pulling back the curtain and seeing the little dorky man in a suit working the controllers. That’s me, the little dorky guy in Psychopomps, and All City is like the illusionary Oz.

I’m only half-way kidding. Anyway, read both; keep my cat in her favorite wet food.

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Jessica Mannion is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer. Her writing can be seen in The Literary Review, Alliteratti, and other publications. She also does copy-writing on a variety of subjects.