Yeah nah. This was going strong until about halfway when the mystery-thread took over. Although at first I’d been impressed by Temple’s clearsighted vYeah nah. This was going strong until about halfway when the mystery-thread took over. Although at first I’d been impressed by Temple’s clearsighted view of his characters and their setting, ultimately I needed him to deliver on that set-up for it to really be worth much. He failed spectacularly.
Two points:
1. Do we really need yet another religious-nut villain quoting scripture as he tortures people while believing those tortures will purify them for a higher purpose? To me, the climax was pure Hollywood, which might be fine if Hollywood was what I thought I’d signed up for, but it wasn’t. What I thought I’d signed up for was the laying-bare of a cross-section of some aspect—dark maybe, and not entirely realistic—of Australian culture. Granted some feat of imagination was bound to be involved—I accept that Temple doesn’t necessarily know much about criminals—but did it really have to be so generic, so pointless? Religious nuts? Australia has its share of problems, but I’m not aware that excessive Christian fervour is high on the list. Crime novels are great when they pull apart a society and show what makes it tick. That’s not the only reason they’re great, but Temple’s novel sent all the signals that it would be great after that fashion.
2. (And far more important, as far as I’m concerned:) Along the way, with his repeated insistence on widespread endemic racism, not to mention the hateful character of a crooked racist country cop, he broached a far more pertinent topic which he then proved incapable of satisfactorily exploring. Now I know, believe me, that it’s gonna take more than the well-meaning Inspector Cashin to right the wrongs done by racism in this country, or maybe even to bring down a crooked cop, and as far as The Broken Shore goes I’m fine with that—I don’t require a happy ending—so long as I think it’s been addressed sufficiently. But what Temple does is so flagrant and/or careless I have to question his motives. For 200 pages he liberally doses us with casual racist slurs—“boong” is his favourite—and makes us hate this bastard of a cop, who (it certainly seems likely) is largely responsible for the deaths of three indigenous teenagers. And then? He just drops it. We don’t get a single sentence by way of resolution. Nada. Zilch. Case closed. Now fine, maybe Temple’s trying to say “This is how Australia is: if you kill a rich guy you’re going down, but if you kill three indigenous kids no worries.” And I could accept that if it was adequately signposted. But what the hell happened? An overzealous editor? A paragraph/page/chapter left on the cutting-room floor? Even from the perspective of structure, of entertainment, this, to me, is fatally flawed. I’ll say it again: I just don’t care about the religious nut. I wanna know how it pans out with the crooked cop: he’s a villain I can really believe in, and one that seems, to me, authentically Australian.
Verdict? A brilliant start—great characters, vivid setting, I had high hopes—but the end is an embarrassment. Frankly, it worries me that The Broken Shore is so well-regarded. What does that regard say about Australians? That we hate ourselves, but feel powerless, and would rather hide in Hollywood religious-nut fantasies than work through that hate in the hope of curing it? I hope not. This is a misfire, an average crime novel that could have been much more....more
Good lord but it’s hard to write reviews these days! I seem to have said it all before, and I wonder how I had the gall to say it in the first place. Good lord but it’s hard to write reviews these days! I seem to have said it all before, and I wonder how I had the gall to say it in the first place. But then I read something like Chelsea Girls and I feel as if I have to say something, if only to complete that indirect self-portrait I sketched with all those other reviews. Fact: I love this book. I think it’s genius, at least in parts. I’ve even developed a kind of a crush on its author (no doubt aided by the Mapplethorpe cover photo). I call her Eileen – never Myles. (In contrast, though I loved her book just as much, Janet Frame is always Frame when I discuss her.) I feel a kind of direct or semi-direct link, I guess, to the “real”/inner Eileen Myles, probably as much from the language as what it describes. “I would like to tell everything once, just my part, because this is my life, not yours.” Man, this is raw, but with a tone I don’t think I’ve encountered before. Halfway through it struck me, she’s kind of a Knut Hamsun for the 1980s, half-starving and writing on napkins and stubbornly convinced of her genius. Then later I thought, this could almost be Raymond Carver – the lack of affect, the drunken tragic aspect – except it couldn’t be, not at all, because Carver is so contrived compared to this; Carver is fiction, whereas in Eileen Myles’s case, well, who can tell? There’s a story here, “1969”, about what I presume is (what certainly seems to be) the young Eileen’s real experience of Woodstock and it is brutal. Excoriating. “You can’t force a story that doesn’t want to be told.” I can only presume this story wanted to be told. I say it’s about Woodstock but really it’s about the lead-up to it, about the young Eileen (or Leena) in a sharehouse one summer getting drunk and slowly breaking up with a boyfriend and carrying around Crime and Punishment and hoping she’ll finish it but continually getting distracted by parties and pick-ups and some hopped-up hulk who sexually abuses her in her own home while her friends stand watching.
Who was responsible for the Ice Man showing up? The Ice Man was Jimmy Burns, big, big guy who tended to pin girls (like me) against the wall in front of their boyfriends and say, “You know I think you’re really cute,” and cop a feel and give them a big wet smooch and no one dared lift a finger. It was really terrifying. To be pinned like that by one of the biggest guys you had ever seen who was drunk out of his mind in front of ten of your good friends who just stared in horror. “She doesn’t know I’m teasing. Do ya, Linda?” The Ice Man was reputed to have killed and maimed many kids in Watertown during his wonder years.
Meantime this acid-head named Paul is out on the porch laughing – “a good position to take”, says Eileen, given visitors like the Ice Man. And somehow, because despite that “everything clicked for a moment that summer” and she was suddenly beautiful she doesn’t have a date, it transpires that Paul will accompany her to Woodstock. It’s quite a trip. Before she even gets there she’s drunk, so much so that she flips out in wonder at a young couple’s baby at a roadstop and then blacks out in the backseat of the car and doesn’t wake till next morning, whereupon she drinks warm wine and smokes pot all day and winds up as follows:
Lying on the ground in the mud, in the rain, I felt like the whole place had been turned into a giant mouth. It was terrifying. The sounds of feet traipsing all night long up and down the muddy hills turned into a gigantic rhythm like a mouth smacking its lips continually. [...] A speedfreak with spidery repetitious gestures danced in front of us all night long. Kind of a conductor. Way down at the bottom of the hill the musicians were like dark trees lined in light wavering in front of our eyes. One more, just one more uttered some distant part of my will or mental faculty forcing my attention to stagger along with the entertainment. This was history. It was really horrible but my alternative was to try and sleep on the muddy rag. Impossible.
Lucky for her, Jimi Hendrix offers some last-minute transcendence. His “Star-Spangled Banner” announces “the end of America [...] the thing we were all waiting for and had come to hear”. And then they’re off, Leena and Paul, who have somehow incongruously become almost a couple, back to Boston as conquering heroes, where Leena meets her old (or really, current) boyfriend and “because he was the real world, where I belonged” gets back together with him, and never calls Paul even when they meet one night and she likes him more and more. And then she never sees him again, except for once, and... well you’ll have to read it for yourself. Suffice it to say it’s like a punch in the gut. The whole story. A sucker punch. 1969? How could it have been otherwise? How could we have believed what we were told?
I don’t want to wallow in love for Eileen Myles, especially since, typically, I’m unsure what I love about her so much. It’s true, some stories fall flat here as compared to others, but the whole is also more than the sum of its parts – a kind of jagged self-portrait. “If the end of one’s youth is a thin slice of cheese I ate mine standing in that room,” she writes in “My Couple”, and by then, three-quarters through the book, you know just what she means. In “Violence Towards Women” (what a story!) she writes of a young woman gang-raped at her country-town high school who changes her name, changes cities, and moves on. “They’re all men’s names, what’s the difference. Her name is Jane. Janey.” I was floored. Such a simple truth: they’re all men’s names. Of course! Well, it took Eileen Myles to really bring it home to me.
But it’s not all heavy. I’ll end on a light note. She’s watching a magician at a kid’s party and comes up with this:
He was such a kit magician – wands with banners that said boom on one side and had a picture of a rabbit on the other. I was fascinated by the relative sincerity of his delivery. I started to think of this suburban backyard magician as someone less smart but slightly more successful than most poets I know. It’s not like we can farm ourselves out to bar mitzvahs and weddings like saxophone players can, or this guy. Even a clown can work the kid circuit. How have poets managed so utterly to get no piece of the pie. It’s some kind of trick, a vanishing act that we have performed on ourselves.
Yeah well, not so effectively in Eileen Myles’s case as it transpires, though this book testifies to the hunger years. Sort of. Did I mention the sex? That’s one thing Knut Hamsun’s protagonists never seemed to get much of. But Eileen, once she navigates her way through hetero, goes from sexual strength to strength. And the honesty of this – of her transition from outwardly straight to entirely gay – is another thing I don’t think I’ve ever encountered. She’s scarred by hetero sex, sure, but never really forsakes it, just moves on, and misses aspects of it and doesn’t miss others, but it’s clear she’s thrilled by who she is. Still and all, it’s a sad if exuberant ride. It’s wild. Funny. Graceful and wise. I love this book. I really do. Thank you, Eileen....more
Equal reading event of 2018 for me, along with a Gerald Murnane bender early in the year, though I’d be hard-pressed to say why. For one thing my wifeEqual reading event of 2018 for me, along with a Gerald Murnane bender early in the year, though I’d be hard-pressed to say why. For one thing my wife joined in the reading, at first following and later eclipsing me while I took a short detour through a library book that was soon due. She loved it, though partly because, as she kept saying, Frame reminded her of me. And it’s true Frame seemed familiar, but more like a sister than an alternate self. I left her (Frame) just as she arrived in London, had her first date (aged early thirties) with someone she met on a bus, and spent a night at a writers’ commune, whose inhabitants were impressed she had a book out, even if (as she assured them) it was only published in New Zealand. I think I had to read that far, just to make sure she’d be all right. And when I picked it up again it was pleasure, sweet relief. She makes it to Ibiza, has a lover, keeps on publishing. Her newfound independence is tangible; it grows and grows. And strange to say, I envied her, after all she’d been through. I envied her self-reliance; her self-centredness; her certainty of what she should, could and must do. It’s a hard thing, I guess, to describe the writing life. Hard to make clear what’s at stake. But Frame excels at it. And somewhere half or two-thirds of the way through this epic I realised: it’s about stubbornness, sheer force of will. If eight years in mental hospitals and 200 ECT treatments was the only way to break free from the expectations of family and society, so be it. And the remarkable thing: there is no bitterness. Or maybe a little, in her criticism of her New Zealand mental-health “care” (though not more than a handful of times in those eight years did a doctor talk directly to her, once the spurious label “schizophrenic” was affixed it spoke for itself), but overall her gratitude to the good and kind doctors in her life wins out. Seven of her novels were dedicated to a psychiatrist in England who encouraged her to write, who obtained for her a National Insurance stipend so that she could do so in peace, and her voluntary hospitalisation in London was the opposite of her New Zealand experience – a reversal, a chance to set the record straight. I understand upon her eventual return to New Zealand Frame battled to keep her own story (ie, as it appeared in the press) from overwhelming her fiction. The fact is, that story is one of the all-time great artist’s stories: of overcoming odds, of coming from out of nowhere, of doing exactly what deep down she knew she must do. But no-one could tell it like she does. It seems so effortless; it must have been anything but. “One of the wonders of the world,” Patrick White called it. I can see what he means....more
I’m sorry to say it but this is the kind of fiction behind which you can see the note-taking (Control’s mother, domineering, distant, all-seeing, etc)I’m sorry to say it but this is the kind of fiction behind which you can see the note-taking (Control’s mother, domineering, distant, all-seeing, etc). The characters and their trajectories, as in the first instalment, act as if plotted on a vector diagram (Hmm, now if I tweak this one with just the right force...), with the result that scenes of domesticity played to be moving and/or illuminating (Control as a child with his grandfather, the Biologist at home with her husband in Book 1) only annoyed if not infuriated this reader. Meanwhile there’s a style here, a technique which may prove to have been clever or irrelevant: the interrogating of each previous section by the current section, which then ends abruptly and is interrogated by the next section. An inadvertent result of the author’s working habits, or a strategy (maybe linked to Borges’s idea that history is “what we judge to have happened”)? I’ll cut it some slack since I gave up halfway and maybe missed a revelation, but it also irked me. My overall impression: an intriguing pulp series, something I’d like to have enjoyed. But I’m not surprised to see the author has written a how-to manual for writers, since the whole thing seems constructed as if to a recipe, despite that there’s something maybe thrilling and original at its core. One last thing: in the first pages of my edition, popular UK psychological author Adam Phillips says VanderMeer’s prose is superior to Poe’s(!) Just more evidence—if any more was needed—that some of us will never see eye-to-eye....more
There are many ways a work of fiction can require that we suspend our disbelief, and in most of those ways – on most of those scales - Gilead succeedsThere are many ways a work of fiction can require that we suspend our disbelief, and in most of those ways – on most of those scales - Gilead succeeds. At times in its first half, I found myself “coming to” as from a dream, awaking from the illusion that it really was the true words of an old man speaking to his only son in some indeterminate future. Some achievement, then. But in another sense – in terms of the form in which these words are transmitted – not so much. At about three-quarters through (p. 192 in my edition), after a couple of earlier moments of niggling doubt, I finally judged that Robinson had dropped the ball, when in a pivotal scene the old reverend and his semi-adoptive namesake John Boughton sit and talk in an empty church, and the reverend (who is eighty-something) remembers later, or claims to remember, the conversation verbatim.
This is what makes the epistolary form so hard: whoever writes direct speech in a letter? And whereas the low-to-middlebrow novelist gets away with it, because the pact made with the reader is looser, I don’t think Robinson with her loftier aims can play so loose. And the Reverend John Ames, an ostensibly conscientious teller of truth? I’m damn sure he can’t. At the very least, he’d offer some disclaimer: “Of course I can’t remember our exact words, but it went something like this...” But the fact is it’s lazy to include that direct speech at all. A line of it here or there and Robinson might get away with it. As I said, up until p. 192 I felt chafed by it once or twice – a twinge of worry – but I could handle it. But once she lets go it’s like a trapdoor dropping through the bottom of her construction, into the cold void of unreality below. It’s first draft standard. It’s what you might do just to get the story down so as not to break the flow. But unnatural and arduous as it may seem, you’re going to have go back later and transmit that information some other way. It’s about voice, and in a book like Gilead, voice is crucial; it’s just about the only thing holding the book together. Drop the voice, rip the fabric. Rip the fabric, lose the reader – or at least this reader – straight out into that cold void.
Sad to say, it only gets worse. Until p. 192, my impression was Robinson was aware of the danger, and doing enough, then just enough, to avoid it. But then she gives in. The Big Reveal of pp. 248-264 is, for me, an utter failure: 16 pages of direct quotes of the younger John telling his story. Short of a portable tape recorder, there is just no possible explanation.
Which is not to say I didn’t like Gilead. I liked it a lot, in parts. The travels of the young priest-to-be and his priest-father on the trail of his priest-grandfather in Kansas during the Depression, for eg, and the relationship of that zealot-grandfather with his more moderate son – all that was real to me, convincing, illuminating. And the various musings on morality and faith: many I could not or did not try to follow, but some struck home. Even the second-person address to the child I liked, when it worked. It moved me. But the shaping of it all into a narrative arc, I suspect, took serious effort, and in places (the slow – and to my mind too obvious – build toward the revelation) the result is a little too cardboard, especially in contrast to the impressive natural voice of the narrator.
All up then? It’s a good book, good enough that I hoped it’d be a great one. But it shocks and disturbs me that it received such glowing reviews, since to me its faults are obvious and distracting. And I’m puzzled. Did Marilynne Robinson realise she had failed to exploit the very difficult form she had chosen? Did she just get tired and think “Oh well, it’s good enough”? Or did she honestly think she had kept her pact and remained true to her idea, to whatever inspiration demanded this form in the first place? She strives so hard for verisimilitude in every other way – the historical setting, the tone of Ames’s voice, his psychology – that it’s hard to understand why the form, the actual marks on the page, her direct link to the reader, would seem less important to her. For me, a frustrating failure....more
Jigsaw crept up on me over several weeks and didn’t reveal its true power until its last page. But I won’t call it a revelation, since to suggest thatJigsaw crept up on me over several weeks and didn’t reveal its true power until its last page. But I won’t call it a revelation, since to suggest that Sybille Bedford orchestrated it as such, or withheld information to that end, would cheapen it, and I don’t believe she did. So let’s just say that for 350 pages I had thought I was reading a book about its author’s relationship with her mother, until on page 351 I saw it was something more.
I was filled by a surge of love, impersonal love, as though he and I had become a link in the chain of the brotherhood of man.
With this line my heart broke. I read on, in tears, through 150 plain words to the end. What had happened? How had she done it? I went back, found the tipping point: that line, the hinge on which the whole book had rested. And I realised that somehow Jigsaw had increased its claim on my heart parabolically, from early near-indifference brightened only or mostly by the bizarre nature of the events related, through slow-rising admiration for the surefooted grace with which Bedford painted her settings and characters, to flat-out awe at how she’d quietly insinuated herself and won my love. I’d say I don’t know how she did it but maybe I do. Maybe, against all odds, she was simply herself, and told her story as close to truthfully as basic decorum would allow. But as to how and why that story achieved such power, I’m in the dark.
Against the odds, then, Jigsaw is magic, it’s art, it’s a novel. And it proves that fiction is not the essential component in any of these feats; creativity is. To recreate her strange, neglected, privileged childhood (the neglect and privilege stemmed both from the same thing, her independence), that is Bedford’s humble yet grand achievement. Because after all, the things a writer experiences are not always or even generally those that are easiest to describe. Or yes, let’s say they’re easy, but ease of description does not necessarily, or even generally, produce power. It’s the act of conjuring – from nothing, from dreams, from the mind’s eye – that makes us work at describing. So, generally, I read novels for immersion, and biographies or autobiographies for information. Sybille Bedford immerses us in her subject with the skill of a novelist, and reminds us that fiction and non-fiction are not mutually exclusive but two points on a continuum; and crucially, that wherever you are on that continuum you’re still an artist, so long as you live and breathe your work, and it too lives and breathes....more
I actually think I enjoyed this more than Textermination. I liked the subtlety. Which is to say that while parts of it (the talking-rock compXorandor:
I actually think I enjoyed this more than Textermination. I liked the subtlety. Which is to say that while parts of it (the talking-rock computer, the “hexadex” slang, the excursions into programming language) weren’t subtle at all, in the background, almost as a matter of course, it did something I’ve rarely seen done so quietly: it interrogated itself. These two young egghead twins, see, tell the story in tandem, interrupting and disputing, and asking themselves always how best they can do what they must do, i.e. tell the story. And it’s a beautiful thing, because real-seeming, or as real as the story, a fantasy, requires it to be. Realer, given how easy it would have been for Christine Brooke-Rose to get away without it. Also I greatly appreciate Brooke-Rose’s attention to narrative detail—that is, the detail of how the narrative gets told, of how it becomes. The conversational tone, the conscientious citing and quoting of sources, later on the diarist’s approach; only in the very last scene does she slip, I think, with one of the twins venturing out alone and describing to a recording device much more than he could or would realistically describe. The scene itself is great though, bizarre; it sticks in the mind. The rock computer as messiah, the angry-then-fawning mob. A cartoon, a structural exercise, an experiment in voice, Xorandor reads to me like the work of a writer with nothing to lose, and who doesn’t much care if she “wins” either. Yes, there’s a touch of Riddley Walker, of Clockwork Orange. But while Xorandor’s linguistic experimentation is less bold than either it’s author’s grasp of story is greater. It’s flawed, a little silly, inevitably dated. But it’s unique and brilliant too, and makes me more curious than did Textermination to hunt down its author’s other titles....more
I actually think I enjoyed this more than Textermination. I liked the subtlety. Which is to say that while parts of it (the talking-rock computer,I actually think I enjoyed this more than Textermination. I liked the subtlety. Which is to say that while parts of it (the talking-rock computer, the “hexadex” slang, the excursions into programming language) weren’t subtle at all, in the background, almost as a matter of course, it did something I’ve rarely seen done so quietly: it interrogated itself. These two young egghead twins, see, tell the story in tandem, interrupting and disputing, and asking themselves always how best they can do what they must do, i.e. tell the story. And it’s a beautiful thing, because real-seeming, or as real as the story, a fantasy, requires it to be. Realer, given how easy it would have been for Christine Brooke-Rose to get away without it. Also I greatly appreciate Brooke-Rose’s attention to narrative detail—that is, the detail of how the narrative gets told, of how it becomes. The conversational tone, the conscientious citing and quoting of sources, later on the diarist’s approach; only in the very last scene does she slip, I think, with one of the twins venturing out alone and describing to a recording device much more than he could or would realistically describe. The scene itself is great though, bizarre; it sticks in the mind. The rock computer as messiah, the angry-then-fawning mob. A cartoon, a structural exercise, an experiment in voice, Xorandor reads to me like the work of a writer with nothing to lose, and who doesn’t much care if she “wins” either. Yes, there’s a touch of Riddley Walker, of Clockwork Orange. But while Xorandor’s linguistic experimentation is less bold than either it’s author’s grasp of story is greater. It’s flawed, a little silly, inevitably dated. But it’s unique and brilliant too, and makes me more curious than did Textermination to hunt down its author’s other titles....more
This is a curio, unique and intense, though a casual glance might not reveal its uniqueness. Prose-wise, it’s impassioned, sometimes sophisticated, ofThis is a curio, unique and intense, though a casual glance might not reveal its uniqueness. Prose-wise, it’s impassioned, sometimes sophisticated, often clunky. It has the blunt urgency of the best pulp novels, mixed with a discursiveness which I presume in later books Carpenter learned to hold in check. It’s an uneasy mix, a balancing act, and it works, but only just: the tension heightens and slackens with little sense of underlying purpose, and I got the feeling the young writer was uneasy at the reins; but then again his narrative is a fiery colt and that’s what makes this. Early on there’s a description of solitary confinement (three months of it, in pitch dark) which is frankly stunning. I haven’t been so scared while reading in years – it floored me. Sadly those 5-6 pages are not equalled elsewhere, but I read to the end with enthusiasm even as Carpenter’s power waxed and waned. Probably the scenes involving the protagonist’s marriage were least effective for me. And though I appreciated greatly Carpenter’s courage in depicting homosexuality in prison, for me he didn’t go deep enough. (A more effective/convincing depiction from a similar era, in my opinion, is Chester Himes’s 1952 novel Cast the First Stone – raw power.) That said, I liked it. I liked the journey. An orphanage-raised delinquent with only money, sex, violence and liquor on the brain rises to the task of his own spiritual education – right on! No, Hard Rain Falling is not pretty and rarely virtuosic, but it’s soulful. At its best, it glows, it lives. And it tells a story rarely told....more
This was going great until about halfway, when with CIA subplot stymied it descended ever further toward the absolute epitome of what, to me, is lame This was going great until about halfway, when with CIA subplot stymied it descended ever further toward the absolute epitome of what, to me, is lame in metafiction – all those cardboard, cute Scheherazade and Don Quixote stories, and a neat deux ex machina resolution that felt like betrayal after so long a wait. Admittedly there were warning signs: the abysmal “Sex Education: Act I”, for eg, nearly stopped me in my tracks, though I forced myself to read it imagining it might have some relevance to the novel entire. Add to this page upon page of flat, repetitive, ungraceful exposition and my impression was of 300 dense, decent pages (centring on the yacht trip, the pregnancy, the writer’s block) exploded to 650 with an assortment of tricks, authorial ticks and distractions.
Here’s the thing: I accept that Barth doesn’t “have the answers”, that he bit off a lot with that whole CIA/Doomsday theme, that maybe he’d written it as far as it could be written; ditto the thematically-related industrial waste subplot (though it ended almost before it began). BUT, dramaturgically speaking (as Barth – or quasi-anti-Barth Peter Sagamore – would say), I feel as if nothing could be more phoney than to implicate brother-in-law Willie Sherritt in both said subplots then to not explore that implication, but instead to subject the reader to “Sex Education” Acts II and III and all those cheap-shot Scheherazade-in-the-20th-Century digressions. To me, The Tidewater Tales seems a clear-cut case of cowardice: by slow degrees big questions are broached, only to be swept away by a deluge of trivia. Which I guess answers Barth’s (or Sagamore’s) question after all: What to do as Doomsday approacheth? Not a damn thing, except tell tall tales to distract ourselves from the inevitable.
As to Sagamore’s commenting on shortcomings in the narrative, that, to me, is transparent bet-hedging: Barth wants to break the rules but doesn’t quite trust his readers to get the joke. Which isn’t to disparage the book’s “meta” qualities wholesale: the idea of Sagamore as minimalist with Doomsday-induced writer’s block trying to find a way to “not write” about Doomsday, for eg, I would have loved to see taken to its conclusion. (IE: Not just the conclusion of the spy story, which conclusion I concede may have been reached, but rather the conclusion of the development-of-the-writer story, rather than the avoidance of said story via sundry Quixote/Scheherazade diversions. Not to mention, what a cop-out, to suggest that the book The Tidewater Tales could in any way but superficially resemble the novel of a recovering minimalist of any variety, let alone Doomsday-silenced! Once Sagamore started jotting down the – resolutely un-minimalist – chapter titles as they appear in Barth’s novel, for me, the careful delineation of Sagamore/Barth collapsed; the novel lost a vital dimension.)
But don’t get me wrong: The Tidewater Tales, for its first half, was both cozy and challenging – a near-perfect blend of edifying and escapist, give or take a wayward “Sex Education” script (which I forgave because I respected the left-turn, and the need of it to negotiate an impasse), which I would gladly have enjoyed for another 300 like pages if those like pages had been forthcoming. On the strength of its first half, then, maybe, it’s some kind of masterpiece, but a masterpiece that doused me in sugared painkiller after splitting my head open. I’d prefer to feel the pain. Severely frustrating. ...more
“Time is a straight plantation”, writes Jim Morrison somewhere in his Wilderness: The Lost Writings, and sometimes I think I know what he means. In So“Time is a straight plantation”, writes Jim Morrison somewhere in his Wilderness: The Lost Writings, and sometimes I think I know what he means. In South Australia, a dry land much deforested, when I was a young man of twenty or so, I’d walk often in pine plantations whose geometric formations made them something supernatural: row upon row of straight-trunked trees, not-taken road upon not-taken road, since acid soil and pine needles had put paid to undergrowth and any direction was as much like a road as any other. And always, it seemed, for as long as the ground stayed flat, a glance in any direction could show me where I’d been or where I was going.
Books, in this sense, are some kind of plantation too, and a book like Junkyard Bloom, pertaining as it does, in my mind, to a specific place and time (Tasmania, 1997, my first port of call after leaving South Australia in my early twenties), is a corridor of light down the tree- or shelf-lined rows, beckoning me back to that time which had been shadowed. As if to seal the deal – to make of this small volume a wood-pulp time machine – upon my retrieving it from storage (or let’s say 6-12 months after I retrieved it, since I retrieved hundreds of books at once and hardly knew which to open first), when I first opened it after 10+ years, a flier slid from between its pages proclaiming: MICHAEL ARISTON’s self-published poetry extravaganza JUNKYARD BLOOM will be autobiopsychosophigraphically manifest at CINEMA AFTERDARK 8pm Wednesday July 9th 1997. Upstairs, Wooby’s Lane Salamanca. Complimentary screening of Mad Max II for those who dare!!!, and the wind of time shook the trunks, because I remembered that day, not because I’d been there, but because my first adult experience of snow had left me trapped in my cabin on the far side of Mount Wellington, trapped enough in any case that I couldn’t drive 45 minutes to Afterdark, my favourite and only hangout in Hobart and the only place where anyone in Tasmania knew me worth a damn.
Well, I heard plenty about the show – a two (or was it three?) hour multimedia costume-drama which evidently put my own rudimentary book launches to shame, as did Ariston’s self-promotional efforts: he’d hawk his book at Salamanca Market (and ultimately in markets throughout Australia) and must, surely, have helped brighten that scene plenty with his postpunk polkadot Poe-meets-Pic aesthetic and willingness to make of his artstruck anxiety-ridden self a spectacle, of the sort that I imagine must be priceless in a tiny place like Hobart.
In any case, it wasn’t long before I met Mr Ariston and, if for no other reason than that we both dug Tom Waits and were liable to break into eager renditions of “The Tell-Tale Heart” at first sign of an audience, we became friends, and kept in touch for 7-8 years (he even flew me to Hobart in 2002 to help launch his second book Sunbathe in Moonlight) before falling silent. Since then, from time to time, and as I grew familiar with this phenomenon they called the internet, I’d Google “Michael Ariston” and/or his publishing venture “M.A.D. Press”, and be deflated to find never – not in ten years – a mention of either, and I’d wonder why and what had happened to all that drive and youthful passion, or whether maybe in Hobart they’d only just heard tell of the internet, or didn’t grasp its import considering you could pretty much bellow your poems from the roof of a sandstone in Salamanca and be heard by every Hobartian closer than Glenorchy, where poetry would probably never be at much of a premium anyhow. Sometimes, I’d think to wonder if Ariston and I would ever meet again, since if I’d ever had his email address it had likely been lost with my first, neglected Hotmail account, and though I vaguely remembered a postal address having been affixed to his publications, if he was anything like me that address had changed so many times he was untraceable, and besides that his books – all four of them – were buried somewhere, along with several hundred others, in my dad’s shed in ever-distant rural northern New South Wales, and who the hell wrote letters anymore anyway?
I needn’t have worried, firstly because Michael Ariston, in the course of four publications over eight years – as I see now – never changed his postal address once, and in the eleven years since, I’m betting, probably hasn’t done either; and secondly because, according to the ancient principles of Qi Gung, all energy that sinks must rise. Cut to 2-3 months ago, here in northern New South Wales little over two hours from Dad’s place in a settled (or as settled as I’ve been in 20+ years) home with my books three years unpacked, and I do my annual/biannual Ariston Google only to find the following:
Hobart’s Peg Man spends five years making artwork from more than 30,000 pegs
PEGSpressionism was created by Michael Ariston, a writer who came up with the idea when he was struggling with the distractions from raising three children and looking after four pets in a small house...
(Full article courtesy Australian Broadcasting Commission.)
Genius or folly or both, I really don’t care: the man has a family, looks healthy, has that same – if anything heightened – look of the nefarious mad aestheto-scientist, and he’s working! Most important, as always, he’s far, far from the mainstream, or at least the artistic/literary mainstream of Arts Boards and Age reviews and Are-we-serious-enough-for-you heavyhanded highmindedness which so depresses the living shit out of me in Australian “letters”. He’s, as always, as DIY as DIY gets. It could be, sure, he’ll one of these days “break on through” and sign some contract and get in some bookstores outside of Hobart and – who knows? – even outside Australia, but if so, for sure, he will have paid his dues. Until then, I commemorate the Ariston who once was: who’d dress up as a Chameleon for a reading of his “Debate of Precedence”; who printed 1,000 Junkyard Blooms and sold every one of them, in a city of less than 200,000 people, when the average first novel (let alone poetry collection) in Australia (population 20+ million) is lucky to sell 2,000; who rhymes as though Hart Crane and Yevtushenko had never been invented; who discusses, gravely, Star Wars, Hanna-Barbera, Goscinny and Uderzo and the Mad Max franchise because he knows it’s what it makes you feel that counts, not how it looks on a grant application.
Hell, I’m inspired now: might be I’ll sit down and write the man a letter....more
I don’t think this is a great book but it’s interesting, and it suggests a strange cottage industry of fiction-writing in Australia in the eighties whI don’t think this is a great book but it’s interesting, and it suggests a strange cottage industry of fiction-writing in Australia in the eighties which I’m glad was encouraged.
What’s good about it? The structure – free, gymnastic, skipping from surface to surface of each character like a stone over water. Also the world: Garner’s Melbourne (to me, like Soseki’s Tokyo) is more sensed than apprehended, and at its most vivid when Garner seems least to be describing it. And it’s short, only 90 pages – to me, the most exquisite length for a story.
What’s bad? The symbolism, the overreach, the heightened sense of its own refinement. Bach, Berlioz, Mozart – all are namechecked, but the rock musician – a key character – doesn’t once name his own influences. In a way that’s good, since it heightens the timelessness, but every time a piece of “high art” was mentioned I cringed – too much like a flashing of credentials. So too the language: when it settles into its groove it’s effective, and it’s understandable in her second novel (her first, Monkey Grip, was a stark confessional piece) that Garner would want to test her power, but too much of this is sleight of hand. Ironically, the apparently rigorous editing may highlight this: the impression is of a loose transitional work corseted for professional ends; in a larger literary scene, with less focus on her, she may have felt more free to fail. And don’t get me started on the “local colour”: at one point a character sits up watching the national anthem at station close on late night TV, a National Geographic style flourish I find hard to reconcile with fiction, and upon which neither author nor character offered reflection.
One last thing: at age 20 or so, when I first read this, I liked it. The atmosphere – the family like moles in their burrow. The fable quality. The clash of primitive and refined. I find its lapses embarrassing now, but I’m still rooting for its author, and I’d so rather have its minimal jagged-cum-hazy heightened realism than any number of slick post-Illywhacker “magic realist” tomes purporting to shine a light on Australia. Maybe what frustrates me in The Children’s Bach is that it so very nearly seems universal, but is held back by a sprinkling of Aussie tropes which I can’t help thinking are more for her perceived audience (including the literature board?) than for Garner. A small-scale but impressive piece of work....more
Fantasy is far from my genre but this has something universal, and I like the idea that to control something a wizard first must name it. Of course soFantasy is far from my genre but this has something universal, and I like the idea that to control something a wizard first must name it. Of course some if it’s slightly pat, and the plot amounts to nothing much but wandering about – mapping out Earthsea for future adventures, presumably – but the writing’s sharp and rarely clumsy and sometimes reaches its mythic aspirations. ...more
I read this before Speedboat for no particular reason – because it was close at hand – and despite some confusion re its jagged/jump-cut structure I lI read this before Speedboat for no particular reason – because it was close at hand – and despite some confusion re its jagged/jump-cut structure I liked it a lot. This is one slick, hard-boiled construction, hand-buffed to perfection but retaining all the risk-taking verve of a first draft, able to lurch wildly across the width and breadth of Adler’s concerns without seeming random, the type of book that makes you question your own comprehension before you question its sense. In between, when grief and paranoia subside, there’s time for this:
Here’s what I think is wrong with boring people to no purpose. It’s not just that it corrupts their attention, makes them less capable, in other words, of being patient with important things that require a tolerance, to some greater purpose, of some boring time. The real danger lies, I think, in this: that boredom has intimately to do with power. One has only to think of hypnosis, of being mesmerized. Monotony, as a literal method of enthrallment. So this claim to find art in boredom, for its own sake or as one of the modes of alienation, is not simply a harmless misunderstanding, which finds it avant garde to stupefy. Deliberate, pointless boredom is a kind of menace, and a disturbing exercise of power. Of course, that is not always our problem here.
That last sentence – “... our problem here” – that’s vintage Adler. I mean, whose problem? And “always”? At one point she mentions a diary she kept in her youth, but which when she’d look at it days later would make absolutely no sense to her; Pitch Dark, surely, is a nod to that diary, or contains such nods. But the quality of the prose – every comma considered – and the clarity of her thought ensure it does much more than baffle. Baffle, yes, but thrill, exhilarate, even enlighten. ...more
To ask of fiction that it tell us about the world, I can’t help but think, is to sell fiction short. Fiction, surely, tells us more. About the universTo ask of fiction that it tell us about the world, I can’t help but think, is to sell fiction short. Fiction, surely, tells us more. About the universe, say? Or better, about life. And not just human life, though lacking another shape to adopt fiction’s characters may appear as human; they needn’t though, not at all.
Apparently I started something when I read Barley Patch last year; in the past month or two I’ve read Invisible But Enduring Lilacs and A Million Windows and I’ve just picked up A History of Books. All of these are works from Murnane’s “late period”, written after he gave up fiction-writing for eight years following an aborted draft for a long book which was to have followed Inland, and all mine the same theme with variations, the core of which could be said to be the interplay of memory, reading and writing fiction. A Million Windows, the latest, is, to my mind, the culmination. A manifesto, but at times a baffling one, both tantalising and frustrating, apt to break off at the threshold of its seeming complete, as if it were no more than common sense for the “discerning reader” (a favourite phrase of Murnane’s) to piece together the remainder. But that’s not to criticise the prose itself, which, I’m tempted to say, is just about as clear as prose can be. After all, it’s a hard task he’s set himself, this explication of what makes a narrator “strong” in the Murnanian sense by a (we hope) Murnanian strong narrator. And in at least one important respect, Murnane and I concur almost completely:
I have sometimes tried to explain what I consider a widespread confusion about the nature of fictional personages.
Forget, for now, that (as Murnane ensures us) the “I” of this passage is himself a “fictional personage”; in any case (Murnane also ensures us) he’s most likely reliable (Murnane being unable, in most if not all cases, to abide unreliable narrators, or narrators whom he describes as having “acted in bad faith” (or was it their authors who acted thus? I forget. In any case neither Murnane nor his narrators, we suspect, are likely to repeat this so-called mistake)). The point is he means it, I’m certain. Get this:
Rather than struggling to write about her, he is mostly content to accept her existence as incontrovertible proof that the reading and the writing of fiction are much more than a mere transaction during which one person causes another person to see in mind a sort of shadowy film; that the whole enterprise of fiction exists mostly to enable her and numerous others of her kind to flit from place to place in mind after mind as though many a fictional text is a mere bridge or stairway raised for their convenience of travel.
Now if that isn’t the most beautiful image and concept I’ve read or heard of in the past months I don’t know what is. And Murnane’s is, surely, the most singleminded attempt to allow this travel by fictional personages to occur with minimal interruption, so much so that for its sake he’s happy to disrupt any and every apparent through-line which might have otherwise aided the reader in her or his effort to appreciate the text. Images or potential plot-points which in another work might have borne scrutiny are here often ignored, while scenes and images which seem to do nothing more than note a character’s (or fictional personage’s) passing are returned to repeatedly. At times the structure Murnane hangs it all upon seems close to arbitrary, and Murnane (or his narrator) himself comments as if ironically on the structural notes he has beside him as he writes, having forgotten the import or intention of certain sections and instead leaving it to chance to dictate where he turns next, but always with that goal of facilitating his mysterious creatures/entities in their travel via his work to wherever it is they’re going.
As I read A Million Windows (carefully, in blocks of ten or so pages, with time to reflect on each) I became certain that Gerald Murnane is a unique genius, with all of the positive and negative implications that the word “genius” implies. He (if he’s anything like his narrators) is opinionated, and narrow in his tastes, and defensive of a stance which can hardly have helped his popularity or his critical cache, deriding as it does all “social” or political novels, seemingly all contemporary realist novels, and in fact even (what he calls) “self-aware fiction”, a term which he claims, bizarrely, does not apply to his fiction. But for me, the self-awareness in Murnane’s work is like nectar – gold! I flip through the book to find passages on this or that aspect of writing, then turn back and read the (slightly) more traditionally “fictional” passages associated with them.
On the rare occasions when we discuss authors such as Charles Dickens, we seem to agree that we lack for something that writers of fiction seemed formerly to possess. And yet, if we have lost something, so to speak, we have also gained something. We may be unable to exercise over our fictional personages the sort of control that Dickens and others exercised over their characters, but we are able to turn that same lack of control to our advantage and to learn from our own subject-matter, so to call it, in somewhat the same way that our readers are presumed to learn from our writing. [...] The matters at issue were as follows: could the writer predict with certainty how the personage was about to behave? and, if not, could the personage be said to stand, in relation to the writer, in any way differently from some or another man or woman in the building where the writer sat writing [...]
For me, this is a hard book to review, partly because for all that I love about it, I find something in Murnane’s aesthetic dour. (This video may help clarify a little. Will you look at the place he writes in! And that voice! He could just about be much-reviled ex-Australian Prime Minister John Howard!) But then, that’s the beauty of his style, especially as it matures, that it becomes so shorn of adornment that such considerations hardly matter. And when he gets on a roll – as he does here about page 116, where he relates the (secondhand) story of a hobo and the dog which befriended him – the results are genuinely moving, uncanny, and shot through with that glow of the otherworldly that accounts for so much of my pleasure in reading.
The train slowed; the man saw an open door; the man ran beside the train; the man clambered aboard. As soon as he was securely aboard, the man looked for the dog. He saw it keeping pace with the train and looking up at him. The dog was able to keep pace with the train for as long as it climbed the low hill, but when the train passed the hill, the dog began to fall behind. The man lay in the doorway of the freight van and watched the dog falling further behind. The man later wrote in his autobiography that he had recalled often during the remainder of his life his sight of the dog while it tried to keep pace with the train. He had recalled in particular his sight of the nearer eye of the dog while it tried to keep pace. The eye had seemed to be turned sideways and upwards, or so he had thought, as though the dog had struggled, before it lost sight for ever of the only person who had fed it or treated it less than harshly, to fix in mind an image of that person.
Of course, for a writer who purports to write about the travel of fictional beings, the recurrent descriptions of trains in this work are not coincidental. Nor the butterfly alighting on Machado de Assis’s desk or flying from one side of Casterbridge to another. The best and most thrilling part of Murnane’s project is that he’s alive to the mystery – the shape-shifting ghostlikeness – of his creatures. When last year I reviewed Barley Patch I compared him to Beckett, and again that comparison springs to mind. Compared to Beckett’s late period, Murnane’s is scarcely less focussed, and will, I’m sure, admit of less and less intrusions as it proceeds. If you’re thinking of reading the guy, A Million Windows, I think, is the place to start....more
Woolf. I can’t say as I get her yet, but I’m trying, in fits and starts. A Writer’s Diary has sat by my bed for a good few months now, at times (durinWoolf. I can’t say as I get her yet, but I’m trying, in fits and starts. A Writer’s Diary has sat by my bed for a good few months now, at times (during the sections on To the Lighthouse, The Waves, The Years) leaping into the foreground of my thoughts, but mostly providing a fallback when I wanted to snatch a quick paragraph or two of something that wouldn’t get its hooks in me. And no, at no point did it really get those hooks in, whether through discussion of craft (which I would have loved, but there was little, it seemed, of any deep detail) or lyricism (it was there but I was as inclined to skip as savour it, finding it at times laboured and at times mundane, and never as potent (need this be said?) as in the fiction) or everyday life (this I quickly tired of; I keep a journal too, have done for half my life, and it may be some things are common to all journals; at any rate much here was familiar and slightly crushing – the grind, the frustration, the grey bafflement by routine). That said, there were parts that took some kind of hold of me, Woolf’s struggle over The Years being maybe most compelling: a nerve-shredding cyclical lurching from confidence to dismay and back again and a cautionary tale for those of us prone to obsessive redrafting. Good to see some glimpse of her process, of her perfectionism. Good to witness her doubts, to know she lived them and still finished and moved on. Good to share in any revelations concerning her work. (Even those constant plans and timelines, composed in vain, were reassuring.)
As to my experience of her fiction, it’s been half enjoyable. Mrs Dalloway, years ago, seemed fussy and banal and I left it half-finished. Orlando I put down after a chapter though without malice. To the Lighthouse I read last year to its end; though the reading was a chore at times, images stuck with me (or one image, from multiple angles: the view across the bay, the lighthouse as if shining on one consciousness after another). Also “Time Passes”, I thought, was great. But overall the fussiness, to me, persisted – a skilful engraving but too static, mechanical, or at any rate not quite alive (but no, in retrospect it’s alive; at the time it seemed choked almost, gasping for breath, the grip of Woolf’s style too tight, rigid, close-clutched; though now I wonder if that very rigidity fuelled explosive movement when – as happened at key points, “Time Passes” being one of them – it softened). And most recently The Waves, which I’ve put on hold after 50 pages and may have to start again when I feel like diving in, but which the diary intimates I may like best, for Woolf’s having bent her mind and will to it with such force, in the full flush of confidence, before the torture of The Years, with a sense of both its unique limitations and its power. Whether I’ll ever get over the fussiness I tend to doubt, but that (I hope) I’ll learn to filter it while heeding the full-flowing wellspring beneath is what keeps me going, slowly, at a rate perhaps analogous to Woolf’s own writing habits, which, judging by her diary, were never quite as fast as she kept hoping....more
For those of you who haven’t yet read Chandler, I’m here to tell you, the man can write. You read him for the words, for the atmosphere, not for plot.For those of you who haven’t yet read Chandler, I’m here to tell you, the man can write. You read him for the words, for the atmosphere, not for plot. The High Window itself has nothing special to recommend it; it’s another instalment, one of many roughly equally as good. (First time around The Lady in the Lake was my favourite; my wife, who read them all this year, liked The Long Goodbye.) But it’s the one I re-read last week (cos it’s tight, short, cuts to the punch) so it’ll do.
The Belfont Building was eight stories of nothing in particular that had got itself pinched off between a large green and chromium cut-rate suit emporium and a three-storey and basement garage that made a noise like lion cages at feeding time. The small dark narrow lobby was as dirty as a chicken yard. The building directory had a lot of vacant space on it. [...] There were two open-grille elevators but only one seemed to be running and that not busy. An old man sat inside it slack-jawed and watery-eyed on a piece of folded burlap on top of a wooden stool. He looked as if he had been sitting there since the Civil War and had come out of that badly.
Thing is, Chandler (it seems) could churn out this stuff in his sleep. Every building’s a Belfont Building, or as vivid; every elevator operator a Civil War veteran, or as colourful; every character – from the “long-limbed languorous” showgirl (“From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class. From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away.”) to the “hard boy” (“A great long gallows of a man with a ravaged face and a haggard frozen right eye that had a clotted iris and the steady look of blindness.”) – as realised as can be for as long as their in sight. And here’s the clincher: “in sight”? So who’s watching? Probably the greatest near-non-entity hero/anti-hero short of Kafka’s K., P.I. Philip Marlowe, who puts the “eye” in private eye, whose gaze, thanks to British poet turned Black Mask pulp-magazine workhorse Raymond Chandler’s near-impossible deftness, is as sharp and resplendent as they come. How does he do it? Give this hard-bitten hard-boiled hard-drinking tough guy such eloquence? It’s something to see. And somehow, though (or because) we know virtually nothing about him, this fragile word-edifice that is Marlowe convinces us utterly. We love the guy. Who cares if the plots barely add up, or if by the time they do we’re past caring? When he talks tender to the femmes fatales I defy you (women especially – Chandler, against the odds, and despite low-grade ingrained chauvinism indicative of his times, is a ladies’ man) not to feel a shiver. It’s limited in range; but for the slightest tweaks it never changes, but for what it is it’s of a very high order, beyond Hammett (Chandler’s inventor), beyond genre, unique (despite the imitators) as few so-called genre writers ever have been. When at the end of The High Window he drives the innocent young woman victim to her parents’ home in Wichita and says goodbye, I almost teared up at his laconic summation:
I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again.
Sure, maybe that’s all Chandler is, a poem he’s forgotten. But what a poem! It could break your heart....more
In some ways bizarre, in others commonplace, the focus skewed such that I was never really sure to what degree Spark had it under control, yet it neveIn some ways bizarre, in others commonplace, the focus skewed such that I was never really sure to what degree Spark had it under control, yet it never broke free. To my ears, the present-tense prose is clumsy, threatening to trip itself more than once, and drawing attention, despite obsessive detail, to the cardboard unreality of the story. Still it’s got something – a vision just skewed enough to keep me curious.
There was a time when they would stand and open the door for you. They would take their hat off. But they want their equality today. All I say is that if God had intended them to be as good as us he wouldn’t have made them different to us to the naked eye.
I have to admit I didn’t predict the end, and it could be some part of this will stay with me. If only the act of reading it hadn’t seemed such a chore, who knows, I might recommend it. Deeply flawed....more
There’s a rumour going around that this is somehow “more” than a genre novel, that it’ll challenge your shelving such that you’ll pull it out and won’There’s a rumour going around that this is somehow “more” than a genre novel, that it’ll challenge your shelving such that you’ll pull it out and won’t know where to put it back again. Well I’m sorry to say but there’s no way it’s throwing my shelves out of whack. Genre concerns – plot, suspense, intrigue – are front and centre, characters drawn only to the degree necessary for the whodunnit and relationships between them shallowly explored. Which isn’t to fault it – it’s gripping, and I liked its humble bureaucrat hero. But by the end I felt that familiar sense of having been conned – hell, even Chandler leaves me feeling that way! It’s a ruse: the replacing of “depth” with “the solution”. Who really cares whodunnit? Not me anyway. You wanna waste some time and feel wound-up doing so, try Tinker Tailer. Alternatively, you wanna write your own pulp, sure, take a look. Some of this stuff is gold – a glimpse behind the scenes of the spy racket. But don’t you dare make up a character like Mrs Smiley. One adjective serves for her the whole book through: “beautiful”. That’s not characterisation, that’s avoidance. A solid genre novel....more
I was going to post a real evisceration of this, until I caught myself. Is Amis bad? Not really. If a friend or contemporary (Amis was 38 when he publI was going to post a real evisceration of this, until I caught myself. Is Amis bad? Not really. If a friend or contemporary (Amis was 38 when he published this; I’m 41) gave me Einstein’s Monsters and said he’d written it I’d be impressed by the professionalism at the very least. But that’s just it: the professionalism. Martin Amis, on this evidence, is a man who – probably day after day, in some office, at some desk – crafts impressive, inventive, high-flown yet slang-infused sentences without stopping to consider if they correspond to any deeply felt reality at all (and by “reality” I mean anything that the mind can conceive, so long as it glows). When (in “Bujak and the Strong Force”) he says, “This is the only story I’ll ever write, and this story is true,” I believe him not at all: he only casts his narrator as a failed writer so he’ll have some excuse for the preternatural literate voice, and as to the “this story is true” trick, it takes more than paying lip-service to animate that old paradox. To me, there’s a strong whiff of salesmanship – cute, cheap, vulgar – in every one of these stories, from “The Little Puppy That Could” (“The little puppy came bounding and tumbling over the fallow fields. Here he comes, bounding, tumbling.”) to “The Immortals” (“If I thought the Permian age was the pits it was only because I hadn’t yet lived through the Triassic.”). But why should that surprise me? The guy who received the biggest advance ever for a “literary” novel (The Information, 1995)? Chances are he’s a salesman. ...more
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