Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
Frank Bascombe joined the New Daddy club recently, and I want to kick off today’s column by congratulating him on the birth of his baby boy. It’s a great thing, and I’m sure he’s having a blast in New York right now. And he still finds time to put together another great column for us. Niiiiiice.
So there’s this really cool imprint of Roaring Brook Press called First Second that is launching a comic book/graphic novel line of titles out into the world. I thought a quick highlight was in order. The nice people at St. Martins Press sent along an exquisite brochure that highlights the Spring ’06 list. Jessica Abel gives everyone a primer on exactly what a graphic novel is, complete with illustrations. Which is followed by a A.L.I.E.E.E.N : By Lewis Trondheim, The First Extraterrestrial Comic Book in print on the planet earth, which asks the question: ‘What do alien kids read?’ Then Calvin Reid from Publishers Weekly discusses his life as a comics reviewer, which should give you a good idea as to what’s really going on in the comic/graphic novel world. My favorite is coming in April, ‘The Fate of The Artist’, by Eddie Campbell, ISBN – 1-59643-133-4. I love the image of the hair being put back on the dog. Tanya McKinnon gives her thoughts on ‘How Graphic Novels Open Up the World’ and among other things in this very insightful preview is Joann Sfar and her book ‘Vampire Loves’. There’s even a librarian’s point of view on ‘Why Graphic Novels Belong in Libraries’.
To check out more, click here.
Just some stuff to look forward to but don’t worry, I’ll still be reviewing forthcoming fiction and this month is no different.
It’s Not A Secret Unless I Tell Someone
Pieces for the Left Hand by J. Robert Lennon
Granta
This author came to me as a surprise over at Bookmunch.com, where it’s just books, all the time. I stumbled upon Mr. Lennon for the first time a year or so ago. They were on to him because W.W. Norton was just releasing his novel, ‘Mailman’. Countless accolades were being thrown upon his writing (mostly in the UK), but they wanted to talk about this strangely luminescent little collection of stories, or as it’s described on the inside of this book, 100 anecdotes. Not a single story in this book is of the traditional style or length that you’d commonly recognize as a “short story”. What’s most hypnotic about his style, and what you’d be hard pressed to find anywhere else, is the brevity in which the humor and poignancy flow out towards the reader in such a short period of time. The collection is broken up into seven sections. None of them intertwine or connect in any way, but in a strange way they do because for the first time in many years, probably dating back to Raymond Carver (yeah, sure there are other writers who do this, but I love Carver…so relax), these stories investigate suburban America in all its strangely unique, mundane details.
For me to discuss one hundred different stories effectively would be a waste of time, but a section towards the middle entitled ‘Parents and Children’ is especially thrilling. Three stories, ‘The Mothers’, ‘The Fathers’ and ‘Sons’, are quick little eviscerations of the family unit, how abusive parents pass on their deficiencies to their children, which can only be seen in their grandchildren. Each story is no more than two or three paragraphs long and in that small, tight space a lot of things must happen. Why say something in two hundred and forty pages, when two pages will do?
The section that leads off the collection, ‘Town and Country’, is Lennon at his best; the rest of the anecdotes are polished slivers of excellence, stunningly mischievous and savagely potent in their realism. ‘Rivalry’ and ‘Election’ are brilliant, the cement mailbox, the election and the disappointment, the realities of life and the small crevasses that each person in these stories has painted themselves into is all at once simple, but somehow complex and overt. Towards the end of the collection a couple entertains a young man and his girlfriend (who are just visiting), giving them dinner and insights into the college town that they live in, only to find out that these kids are strangers who happened upon the unwitting couple and took advantage of their kindness. A few lines later, the real couple that they were expecting shows up, and the hosts are sorely confused and embittered at being duped.
To discuss this collection further would spoil it for you. Please, please, please take a moment and go buy this book. Savor each story; take your time with them, as this is a fantastic and thrilling example of incredibly inventive writing. My hope is that J. Robert Lennon will gain a wider audience and get a steady and reliable American publisher who’ll bring his work into bookstores everywhere.
The Futurist by James P. Othmer
Doubleday
It’s nice to see a big time publisher, actually, the biggest of the big time publishers, taking a little bit of the money they carpet the floor and paint the walls with and toss it behind a piece of speculative fiction, and I mean that in with every possible compliment in mind. ‘The Futurist’ is a book that will have one of two things happen to it.
1. It will become a smash hit that everyone will have to read. Much like the ‘Da Vinci Code’. (Everyone needs a dream).
2. Many people will talk about it and never read it and this great story will be lost on the tabula rasa that is the American reading culture. Since fiction, American novels in particular, are on every endangered species list right now. (You think I’m lying? Try to find a literary agent to represent a novel, let alone a publisher to buy it.)
3. People will read this review, pre-order this little gem and will be thanking me in June of 2006 when it hits shelves. Which is what should happen.
I hope, really I hope that this book in its very tidy and succinct narrative flow will become a touchstone for the society we now live in. There are parts of this story that directly reflect Jonathan Franzen’s masterpiece, ‘The Corrections’. I’d go on about that book, but I’ve made that case enough times already. Franzen would be proud to read Othmer’s views on the future, culturally significant and relevant in their predictions. But ultimately Kurt Anderson and ‘Turn of the Century’ are the models for this book. Anderson took his story of the lonely genius trapped by his own wit and boy wonder powers to incredible heights of glory (everyone missed that book). But to say ‘The Futurist’ sounds and looks like these two books would be doing it a disservice. It’s an incredibly original and highly readable story about the zeitgeist in us all. We meet a cinematically likeable main character, flawed, hampered by his own intelligence and his extreme wit who’s a globe trotting expert in everything that’s about to happen.
Meet the Futurist. His name is Yates.
And it’s safe to say that this book will kick your ass.
Yates predicts the future of society: the cultural trends, the lifestyles, and people pay him to do this. He gets this information not from a computer program he’s created, or from a crystal ball, but from his own cynical and highly immoral mind, albeit an oddly repressed mind. He just looks around and makes snap judgments on what he sees. Simple when you think about it. He’s paid ridiculous sums of money from equally ridiculous but colorful characters that Othmer has peppered along Yates’ path as he bounces carefully from one global hot spot to the other. The savvy Bill Thomas, Mr. Othmer’s editor, has done us all a great service in publishing this book, and I’m happy to report that it just might pay off. Yates is likeable but only in an envious fashion; he’s taking advantage of the banal stupidity that permeates the world. Yates predicts that people will be traveling to space, to live, vacation, etc., and then suddenly the Russians decide that it seems completely plausible to do just that. The spine of this story revolves around a doomed space station that Yates feels directly responsible for, which echoes Yates and his human side.
As the story starts, his girlfriend has just left him for a history teacher, forgetting of course that Yates doesn’t believe in history, he only knows the future. He’s not interested in what’s happened, only what will happen. In Johannesburg, he witnesses a bloody riot at a football match which sets him off on a Jerry McGuire-like tantrum that causes the opposite effect, making him even more popular for telling the king he has no clothes on. He’s in town because to be apart of something called Futureworld... it’s a conference of people trying to predict of all things... the future.
From here we dip into one of the more incisively brilliant sections of this book. I need to direct your attention to page 60, the last paragraph of the chapter (too long to reprint here) and what could possibly be the most ‘right-on telling’ of our society, right now. Yates has a Bill Gates-like friend who lives in Greenland and is fantastically rich. So rich that he makes Bill Gates look like, well, like someone who’s making minimum wage by comparison. Campbell is his name and his viewpoints on fantastic wealth - and how it really hampers you, and you’re never given any idea of what to do with yourself once you become wealthy - are used as a mirror for a malady that many people suffer from, and that is anticipation. You’ve looked forward to something for so long that you forget how good it is when it’s finally arrived because you’re looking forward to something else, so the thing you’re doing now and its emotional value have deserted you. Othmer manages to toggle between Campbell, Yates, and the simplistic materialism that has destroyed the society we all live in. And dare I say this isn’t even the finest section of the book. Milan. How the section in Milan soars, and the Fiji chapter: the waves, the surfing, the sacrificing of the virgin… It’s all here, every portion of the human condition: wealth, greed, ego, religion, science and its failures, human or accidental in nature. The Futurist, I mean, Yates… is a man on a mission. Of course it wouldn’t be a mission without a Deep Throat to inspire/threaten him, but I’ll leave that treasure for you to find. I wouldn’t want to spoil the future.
Music Through The Floor by Eric Puchner
Scribner
I had really high hopes for this collection of short stories. In general I’m a fan, and was even planning on reviewing it alongside the Best American Short Stories of 2005, but scuttled that idea when I finished this book. Mr. Puchner is certainly one of the more talented writers that have come along in a while, but he’s not at the top of his game, not yet. Most story collections have one or two clunkers among them and this book is no different. There is a very simple, easygoing style to the passions that exude from these pages - the people, the sadness and the sorrow that first time writers seem to be most keen on. Mr. Puchner is a teacher at Stanford University, and thanks Tobias Wolff in the acknowledgements; you can see the world-class talent rubbing off on Mr. Puchner. He’s not to blame for this; it shows a great respect for the medium. Clearly he’s a Wolff protégé, if the first story shows us anything, it makes that point very clear.
In ‘Children of God’, we meet a man who’s taking care of children with special needs, or retards, as they’re called in the opening paragraph. There is an inherent pity that you feel for this man as he gets children of special circumstance from one place to the other, and finally into the unwanted arms of their parents. Wolff has mined this emotion over and over again, especially in his last book, ‘Old School’. In ‘Animals Below Here’, we meet some of the more annoying children, all normal, healthy and well adjusted, except that they’re pining for their dead dog Zoomer. I didn’t find the kids believable enough to really enjoy their silliness and arcane chatter, which is a Puchner specialty. He often seems to be occupying a child’s mind and thus continues to exploit its simplistic conclusions and fairy tale hopes and dreams. Their mother has reappeared after many years in Alaska, and in the company of their father who’s a deadbeat, jobless lay about, she seems almost mercurial, displaying a careless impatience that stumps even the most seasoned reader. ‘Child’s Play’ glows with near perfection as Puchner reveals the coming of age tragedy that befalls all little boys, getting bullied and living in an adult’s world while imagining your own. All of which make these vignettes seem more powerful as we follow them with a curious fascination. The story that’s gotten the most attention from the reviews I’ve read (all glowing) is the driver’s ed. students who get carjacked during class. All at once funny, sad, and remote, the women and men who populate this collection seem to be under the spell of the author’s prodigious talents and almost clairvoyant ability to disrupt the flow of descriptive narrative with obsessive inner feelings. ‘A Fear of Invisible Tribes’ is probably the best story in this mostly solid collection. It announces to a world almost void of new fiction a fresh talent who might still be finding his way through the current murky literary landscape.
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Great work as always, man. Thanks, and best to you and the family.
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