BOOK: Got by D

Got (Seven Weapon Arsenal) by D
The Armory (imprint of Akashic Books), New York, 2006

Got is the debut novel from The Armory, the new “urban noir” imprint of independent publisher Akashic Books (Akashic’s tag is “dedicated to the reverse gentrification of the literary world”). The specific genre label seems deliberate, a nod to controversies that swirl around the genre’s other names, “street lit” and “gangsta lit,” questions about the genre’s literary values and social impact.

Which I only mention because it would be disingenuous not to, just as it would be disingenuous to shrug off my white privilege coloring my perspective of a predominantly African-American literary form.

And which I won’t dwell on because it seems patronizing, seems to take a different tone than any teeth-gnashing over the nihilism and questionably literariness of Nick McDonnell or Bret Easton Ellis and its effect on 15- to 25-year-old white kids.

This novel rises above such concerns, or perhaps more accurately blasts past them. It is high-energy, swiftly-paced noir, gritty and violent without being gratuitous, grim but not nihilistic, a narrative pull that understands desperation is another kind of hope.

Got is written in second-person, which works so perfectly for noir that I’m surprised I haven’t come across it before. Second-person is risky, can devolve into gimmick if not handled with a deft touch, and this is the most consistent and effective application I’ve read since Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller.

The immediacy created by the second-person voice drives the story. You’re a college student and part-time bagman for the city’s toughest boss, and, as the story opens, you’re in the middle of a VIP session with your favorite stripper, backpack of your bosses cash at your side. The moment she concludes your special customer treatment, you notice the bag is gone. A foot chase, shotgun blast to the chest, and violent meeting with your boss later, you’re on the street with the rest of the night to retrieve the cash.

The story is a runaway train from there, barreling through forged and broken alliances, old grudges, and wholesale gang warfare. And yet you, the narrator, remain central, never overcome by events. The narrator is a warrior, has fought for a lifetime against inevitability, unwilling to be defined merely by his abusive home life with his parents, the brutal murder of his loving adoptive parents, the realities of getting by on the streets. He is fighting for his conception of himself as a person of worth, a college student, not just another punk. He fights for his right to self-determination.

There is a spirit that pervades this book that violence isn’t inevitable, but the product of choice, even when the choices life lays out are dire. It is a short novel that crackles with energy, yanks the reader out of his seat and into a headlong plunge, but leaves in its wake a deeper resonance, meaning that seethes up out of the muscle memories of the sprint.

reviewed by Jim Jewell, 484 words

BOOK: The Open Curtain, by Brain Evenson

The Open Curtain, by Brain Evenson
Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, 2006

Whenever I profess religious tolerance yet feel like being funny, I add, “Except the Mormons. They’re just nuts.” Somehow it feels safe in a way it never would making a joke about another religion. Partly it has to do with Mormonism’s geographical concentration; one is less likely to offend a Mormon outside of Utah. But, more so, it is Mormonism’s alien nature, its status as Other, shrouded in secrecy.

Brian Evenson’s The Open Curtain places the reader on the fringes of Mormonism, and the effect is a novel that feels of another culture, referring to a shared narrative and values with which most readers are unfamiliar. Yet, the book is less about Mormonism than it is about Mormons whose lives are transformed by the seductive and destructive powers of violence.

The Open Curtain focuses on Rudd Theurer, a Mormon teen whose father committed suicide years earlier. Rudd is the archetypical Object of High School Scorn, isolated from peers and increasingly distant from his overbearing mother, when two events converge to change Rudd’s life: the discovery of hidden letters of his father’s that imply an unacknowledged son by another woman, and a school assignment that leads him to the 1903 murder conviction of William Hooper Young, son of Mormonism founder Brigham Young.

The injection of these two narratives into Rudd’s life begins a psychological transformation, one that Evenson relates through a three-part structure of shifting perspectives that serves to delay discoveries and preserve the elements of mystery in the story. And it works. This is a novel supported not by evocative language but a taut and driving plot and a psychological exegesis of the notions of secrecy and violence tied up in the disputed Mormon doctrine of “blood atonement.”

Which is not to say the novel succeeds on every level. The female characters are shallowly drawn, including the one, Lyndi, from whose perspective we see the novel’s middle act. Lyndi’s motivations never progress beyond a fear of being alone. The only two other women given significant time are Rudd’s overbearing and self-deceptive mother and Lyndi’s bullying and self-deceptive aunt. Perhaps it serves as a comment on women’s place in Mormonism, but they come off as caricatures.

And, in fact, the only reason I’m willing to conjecture this last possibility is the author’s afterword. Too many graduate criticism classes have left me with a sour taste for overemphasis on authorial intent, but I make an exception here. Evenson explains how writing this book accompanied his separation and voluntary excommunication from the Mormon Church, but he goes on to explain his delicacy in relating Temple practices and his respect for the culture. As a result, the novel has a different resonance than it might have coming from a bitter ex-Mormon.

Coming an an afterword, it allows the fact of Evenson’s ex-Mormonism to frame but not define the book, and where it would have failed as a screed against Mormonism, it succeeds as a thoughtful story told at the fringes of that culture.

reviewed by Jim Jewell, 499 words

BOOK: The Exquisite by Laird Hunt

The Exquisite by Laird Hunt
Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, 2006

Using an unreliable narrator is tricky – dangerous and enticing for the novelist. It reeks of literariness, and can become a crutch used to save a shaky story, mask a writer’s lack of control over the narrator, all of which makes Laird Hunt’s masterful use of such a narrator in The Exquisite, Hunt’s third novel, all the more impressive.

One of the effects of the unreliable voice is distance, freeing the reader from any necessity of identifying with or liking the narrator, and that serves Hunt well. The story’s narrator and protagonist is Henry, a mentally unstable, larcenous drunk drawn into a world of odd characters, ersatz murders and twisted identities. Henry is the type of person interesting at a distance, repellant up close.

And yet, even this was insufficient risk for Hunt. The Exquisite is pointedly post-9/11 fiction, set mainly in Manhattan in the aftermath of “the unpleasantness downtown.” The fall of the towers was the catalyst for Henry’s descent into homelessness and fractured self. But, because Hunt handles 9/11 so tactfully, with bits of imagery and brief asides, focusing not on the event itself but with its aftermath, the novel rises above the clambering mass of mediocre art that horrific day has inspired.

Henry, his frail grasp on reality shattered by the terrorist attacks, wanders the city until he is discovered and befriended by Aris Kindt, an enigmatic old man with a fetish for herring and an interesting proposition – help him carry out fake murders of paying customers, themselves so rattled by the attacks as to need to face their own deaths in more detail and proximity. Told concurrently is Henry’s stay in a hospital, of which Mr. Kindt is also, or so it seems, a patient.

Hunt uses the intertwined narratives to exert Henry’s unreliability to its maximum benefit. In the early going, characters sharing names and attributes (though whether they are in fact the same people remains open) shimmer in and out. Job’s identity in particular is fluid, appearing as bartender and orderly and occasionally others, becoming so indistinct as to appear to be more a role in Henry’s head to be filled than a real person. And then there is Tulip.

Tulip’s name is drawn from the novel’s other key figure: a Rembrandt painting called “The Anatomy Lesson” (full title “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp”), which details a seventeenth-century etching of the autopsy of the corpse of a man named, pointedly, Aris Kindt. The painting sits at the center of the question of Mr. Kindt’s identity, as well as serving for the inspiration of Henry’s hospital’s institutionally cold Dr. Tulip, and by extension the winsome Tulip that binds Henry to Kindt.

Above all, however, this novel is engaging, even riveting. Hunt’s language is both tight and evocative, and the themes of death and identity are well-served by Henry’s rambling, troubled, all-but-self-loathing voice. Hunt weaves dark comedy and intricate thematic exploration into a dynamic read that rises above the categories it might otherwise fall into.

reviewed by Jim Jewell, 500 words

BOOK: Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl

Special Topics in Calamity Physics
by Marisha Pessl
Viking Press, New York, 2006

It is impossible to find a review of Marisha Pessl’s first novel “Special Topics in Calamity Physics” that does not mention her attractiveness (and if you were looking for one here, you still haven’t found it). In fact, her looks have been at issue since news broke that another “hot” young author was awarded a six-figure advance for a debut.

While patently unfair to Pessl, I think the attention to her looks is reasonable for two reasons. I wouldn’t have read it but for the publicity photo, an intense come-hither stare enticing one to believe she is slowly unbuttoning her blouse just outside the photo’s frame. But more importantly, this is not only the novel by a beautiful girl, it is the novel as a beautiful girl. We are willing to feign interest in dull and damaged friends, overlook affectation and overanalyze leaps of faith only because we are smitten.

The novel is a mystery slowly unraveled by the narrator, Blue van Meer, an intellectually gifted teenage girl who has spent her life crisscrossing the country with her widowed father, a brilliant and charming professor of political science. Framed as an account of Blue’s life told from the vantage point of her first year at Harvard, it looks back most specifically at her senior year of high school, for which her father briefly halted their parapitetic existence to allow Blue to attend a private school in Stockton, NC. The significance of the story, we find in the opening chapter, will be to unravel the events around the death of one of Blue’s teachers, Hannah Schneider.

As a perpetual new-kid-in-school and the daughter of an aggressively intellectual man, Blue experiences much of life through a filter of books, which Pessl chooses to indicate through Blue’s annotation of her own life story with literary references, some real and others contrived, a quirk that quickly dissolves to affectation. Were all the references real, I’d applaud the work involved, or were the fake references funnier, the wit, but too often they fall unsatisfyingly in-between.

As a whole, the novel reflects our cultural tendency to listen to whatever the pretty girl says. At 514 pages, the book is seriously in need of an iron-fisted editor (a la Gordon Lish). Pessl’s metaphors are often overwrought (“all guests in the hotel… were emptied out into Pace Verdome like cream of potato soup from a can”), and the pace of the novel rambling. The mystery requires so much set-up, and is so quickly dispatched, that its convolutions are unsatisfying, and made no less so by the excrutiatingly contrived final chapter’s attempts to highlight the potential for doubt the novel leaves open.

And yet, as the final chapter clumsily attempts to illustrate, there is indeed substance here, questions of identity and the power of narrative at the forefront, and the writing is at times as alluring as the writer. It is chick-lit meets The Crying of Lot 49, peddled, unfortunately, by editors that realize sex sells better than Pynchon.

reviewed by Jim Jewell, 500 words

BOOK: The Short Life and Happy Times of the Shmoo by Al Capp

The Short Life and Happy Times of the Shmoo
by Al Capp, foreword by Harlan Ellison
The Overlook Press, Woodstock & New York, 2002

My familiarity with the shmoo (plural “shmoon) was tangential at best. I vaguely recalled the shmoo as part of two different Flintstone “comedy hour” re-hashes from the late 1970’s. Only slightly less-removed was a passing mention from the television series MASH. In one later episode, Colonel Potter is painting a portrait of a piece of shmoo merchandising and explains to Radar O’Reilly the shmoo craze that is in full swing back in the states.

My first reaction, decades later, upon picking up The Short Life and Happy Time of The Shmoo, a collection of the shmoo story arcs from the Li’l Abner comics of the 40’s and 50’s, was to marvel that so little has been heard of the shmoo since.

For those unfamiliar, shmoon are cute, gourd-shaped blobs that are, depending on one’s outlook, the ultimate boon to or bane of mankind. Shmoon make loving pets, and are happiest serving people; if you are cold, they will cuddle, if you are bored they will stage races and shows for your entertainment. But, their real benefit is they are so damned delicious. They produce the richest milk, cheese and butter imaginable, dozens of eggs in a heartbeat, and require no sustenance but air. Better still, they reproduce like mad, die of sheer happiness when someone looks at them hungrily, and when fried taste like chicken, when roasted taste like pork, when broiled like steak. Their skin makes durable building materials, their whiskers excellent toothpicks, their eyes perfect buttons. A poor family could live a life of luxury for the gift of six shmoon.

And that’s the problem. Nobody has to work for the measly wages industry provides or buy the inflated, dismal products industry sells, and so industry decides the shmoo must die for the good of us all.

The shmoo were interpreted as a symbol of the expendability of industry by some and the expendability of workers by other, and it is this potentially contradictory nature of the shmoo that makes it such a compelling character. Even to the issue of benefit, they are open to interpretation; the residents of Dogpatch are happier after the shmoon arrive, but also fat and lazy. And it seems a question long pondered – is it in the best interest of human beings to have all they desire acquired so easily?

Harlan Ellison’s quixotic and rambling foreword to the collection both confuses and delights, taking wild digressions (as Li’l Abner was wont to) before settling in to assert that it is difficult for anyone that didn’t live through it to understand the magnitude of the shmoo craze.

I have no reason to doubt it, and instead wonder why that mania played itself out, and how one might go about re-igniting critical academic study of the shmoo. Analysis is surely complicated by Capp’s abandonment of political satire in the face of McCarthyism and subsequent shilling for conservative ideology and politicians, but to my mind that only makes this bizarre little character all the more compelling.

reviewed by Jim Jewell, 500 words

BOOK: Pedro and Me by Judd Winick

Pedro and Me: Friendship, Loss and What I Learned
by Judd Winick
Henry Holt and Company, 2000

I never imagined that I would ever review a non-critical work with MTV anywhere on the cover, much less something six years old and both widely reviewed and officially recognized. But, after a vague and passing reference in some essay, I put the graphic novel of Pedro and Me by Judd Winick on my library reserve list. After it arrived, I was surprised twice: first, to find “of MTV’s The Real World” and a still from the show on the cover, then again when I finally read it.

Pedro and Me is the story of the friendship between Winick, a cartoonist, and Pedro Zamora, an HIV-positive AIDS educator, during filming of The Real World: San Francisco. I haven’t been any kind of regular MTV since my teen crush Martha Quinn left, and have passing impressions at best about the show. None of the impressions are particularly positive.

Yet this novel moved me, nearly to tears (and would have succeeded were I reading it alone in a room, I’m sure). People I cared absolutely nothing about when they were on television drew me entirely into their world when rendered in pen and ink, and in the end I felt enriched for the experience.

I’m a cynical bastard, so these are epic feats.

Pedro and Me succeeds because it tells a story of friendship and loss without any affectation; never does it seem to be trying to do or be anything more than it is. There isn’t an ounce of pretention. Winick’s simple drawing style is matched with a keen sense of visual narrative; sequences and images carry incredible weight without ever being caught trying. In every way (with the exception of one character that looked too much like Bill Cosby for comfort), the art enriches the story being told, never grandstanding the simple honesty of Winick’s story.

Neither does Winick ever upstage the real focus of the work, which is his love and respect for Zamora, whose friendship and eventual loss to complications from AIDS changed the course of Winick’s life. As the narrative voice, it would have been easy, yet Winick brings the same simplicity of style to his prose as he displays in his artwork.

The most surprising effect of this novel for me was the way it humanizes the people of reality television. I find it easy to dismiss participants in reality programming based solely on my extreme distaste for the genre, and yet here is Minick making me care about him, the wife he met on the show, and his friend Pedro.

I had never cared about anyone that participated in a reality show, much less one on MTV, and that Pedro and Me had the power to do so is enough for me to recommend the experience to anyone, maybe especially if you hate reality MTV as much I do.

Reviewed by Jim Jewell, 474 words

BOOK: Foul Ball by Jim Bouton

Foul Ball, my life and hard times trying to save an old ballpark
by Jim Bouton
Bulldog Publishing, Massachusettes, 2003

Recently I was having dinner with my neighbors from down the hall. Gradually, the conversation swung over to my obsession to visiting ballparks. I talked of how I would slide into whatever town just in time to catch the game, survey the bars and restaurants around the facility, party and talk with the locals, enjoy the experience of their stadium, wait until the parking lot cleared, and then leave. A "gonzo" surgical strike, if you will.

They asked if I would write of the history of these stadiums. "God, no!" I scoffed. "Most of these new cathedrals were built with taxpayer money and usually against the people's will. It's the big money that's usually behind the call for new stadiums. It's really quite ugly when you think about it. I love the ambiance and the people, but if you think how this neo shrine came about, it makes you sick." One of the neighbors sighed with whimsy, "I voted no for Safeco Field and the no's won. They still built it." Another chimed in, "With our money."

I thought about that brief interlude while I was reading Jim Bouton's Foul Ball, my life and hard times trying to save an old ballpark. Bouton is of course the former major league pitcher who wrote the famous (or infamous) book, Ball Four, his diary of the 1969 baseball season which took readers into the unexposed (until then) side of baseball.

In Foul Ball, Bouton and two other investors want to preserve an aging ballpark in Pittsfield, Massachusettes and bring an independent minor league team to the field for 2002. Bouton writes in diary form as the year 2001 unwinds. The ballpark in question, Wahconah Park, is labeled as dicrepit and falling apart. There is a team playing in the park for the 2001 season but they are moving to a new stadium in Troy, New York. The local newspaper in Pittsfield is calling for a new stadium to be built so they can keep up with the changing times (yes, even in the minor leagues). The city's main businesses, Berkshire Bank and General Electric, are strongly on the new stadium bandwagon. But Bouton sees history and charm in old Wahconah and goes about being the alternative if the new stadium doesn't pass with voters.

What ensues is an all out war between city government, big business, the media, grassroots organizations, and guys just trying to run a baseball team. Bouton is very honest and straightforward about all the quirks, hypocrisies, testiness, and controversies that occur (including his own). Information, disinformation, who has money, who doesn't have money, editorials and letters to the editor, and dirty little secrets involving GE and the local river all come up. The levels to which people in power would go is the one prevalent theme throughout the book. It is a fun, fast, and disturbing read. All of this for a minor league field!

by Paul Shipp - 488 words

BOOK: Firmin by Sam Savage

Firmin – Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife
by Sam Savage
Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, 2006

Were I to be doing the marketing for this book, I’d be tempted to throw down a phrase like “for anyone who believes in the power of literature.” I’d be lying (of course, I’d be marketing). This is not for anyone, this is not blushing book-love, but rather desperate and clinging. Firmin is a story not of literature’s power to exult, but to barely sustain in the face of inevitable decay. And, it recognizes that the power will always come up short.

Make no mistake, Firmin, our titular hero, is a book-lover. He is also a rat, the thirteenth child of a drunken twelve-nippled mother, born in the basement of a bookstore. It begins with chewing pages to supplement the few drops of wine-addled milk he is able to wrestle away from bullying siblings when he recognizes that he can understand the words. Firmin becomes the introverted reader who believes himself more rich than the world will ever be able to understand, who lives with the pain of recognizing he is, in their eyes, just a rat.

The strength of Firmin’s voice is the driving force of this book. Negotiating emotional honesty with self-deception, he calls himself a pervert and a cynic and is half right. His only moment of normal sexuality is arousal by his sister’s swaying haunches; later the same night he discovers what will become a lifelong obsession with his Lovelies, the women of the porn movies the local theater reverts to at midnight. So, pervert, maybe, but Firmin is no cycnic. He is the committed romantic that tries to adopt cynicism after each disappointment, yet will still and always imagine those he loves to be more than the wrecks we can clearly see them to be. It is his last defense of hope, and as a doomed strategy is most poignant late in the book, when he says of his only friend, “it occurred to me that if you didn’t know better, you could mistake Jerry for just another hooch hound on the long slide to nowhere.”

Firmin’s hope, dim and compromised as it is, grants him a very human voice. The mind that is convinced, when Firmin cites as his favorite opening line Ford’s “This is the saddest story I have ever heard,” that life always ends badly, is overthrown by the heart of a small frustrated writer that finds, in the moments of his life, beautiful and meaningful titles for the life story he knows he will never write.

The impact of the singularity of Firmin’s life extends to the writer, an indulgence I’m rarely willing to make. I would never consider including a book jacket bio in a review, were it not accompanying a photo of an old man and were it not this:

Sam Savage received his bachelor and doctoral degrees in Philosophy from Yale University where he taught briefly. He has also worked as a bicycle mechanic, carpenter, commercial fisherman, and letterpress printer. This is his first novel.

Beautiful.

Reviewed by Jim Jewell, 498 words

BOOK: Hidden Camera by Zoran Zivkovic

Hidden Camera by Zoran Zivkovic, translated by Alice Copple-Tosic
Published by Dalkey Archive Press, Eastern European Literature Series

The unnamed narrator of Zoran Zivkovic’s Hidden Camera, an aging undertaker, arrives home from work to find a blank envelope stuck in the jamb of his door. After much speculation, he opens the envelope to find a ticket to a movie house for a performance that begins within the half-hour. When his attempt to ignore the mysterious invitation fails, he grabs his coat and bolts out the door.

At the theater, an usher seats him directly next to the theater’s only other occupant, a beautiful woman, and the film begins: a short scene of the narrator himself, a few months earlier, sitting and reading on the park bench he visits daily, oblivious to the woman who shares his bench, the same woman who sits next to him in the theater. When the lights rise, the woman is gone, replaced by another mysterious envelope. The narrator, convinced he is the subject of a hidden camera show, plunges back into the night, following the trail of envelopes through fantastic situations and mounting paranoia.

Zivkovic’s writing is somehow spare and incredibly rich in imagery at the same time, as though adjectives would only sully the crisp fancies of his imagination. As the narrator moves from one orchestrated scene to the next, running themes quickly emerge. Purple flowers and childbirth and fish return to announce their intentionality. Zivkovic begins bending reality around the edges, allowing the absurd to seep in with a Calvino deadpan. Whether stunned or seduced, neither the narrator nor the reader cares, as long as the weird and wonderful visions continue.

But, at some point, it is exactly the weird and wonderful that breaks its own spell as the reader struggles to discern which details hold significance. Because this novel is from a cultural tradition not widely published in the US (Zivkovic is Serbian), there is an inevitable question: which of the seeming inconsistencies are narrative and which cross-cultural? Should we read each scene as weird, or just, you know, European?

The question of just what this novel is hangs unsatisfyingly unanswered in the end. The first chapter breaks from the narrator’s colorless description of his colorless existence into decisive and frantic action like a release of potential energy, but just as quickly thwarts this kinetic promise with meandering internal exposition worthy Nicholson Baker. The unreliable narrator at times creates too much distance, as he languishes under misconceptions of which the reader has been long since disabused or wallows in a paranoia that seems insufficient for the situation. And, the slide from absurd to fantastic imparts more significance to the narrative threads than is ever delivered. The ride is so beautiful, the destination almost doesn’t matter, but ultimately the whole amounts to less than the sum of its parts, an exotic confection that could have been much more.

Reviewed by Jim Jewell - 467 words