Stacked

Taking time out from thinking about personal problems to sit beside an artificial lake, termed lagoon, and read through each of the vibrant, powerful and heart-slamming stories in Roxane Gay’s debut collection, Ayiti was the right thing to do. Ayiti is innovative, traditional and mostly it’s just really, really, really awesome. She taps into characters, wrenches their emotions out with sharp language and delivers each piece in a few short pages that keep killing after you’ve finished those few pages. I’m going to thrust it onto all my friends, probably with a bit too much vigour and aggression, but also with a passionate love and some good humour. No need to scare off potential readers. Because this book bashed back into my brain the notion that other people have problems, that the world is unfair and gorgeous and strange and sometimes just unexplained and painful and reading this kind of amazing writing should be required for anyone who is feeling sorry for herself, or isn’t, or is just near the book.

Short stories that span time and place, that aren’t afraid to travel through harsh emotional territory, that canoodle with danger and sadness and strive for forgiveness and love and redemption. That’s what’s happening in Yasuko Thanh’s debut collection, Floating Like the Dead. And now you know.

I’m going through that thing where I realize that I have all these loaner books on the bedside table and for some reason reading the loaner books is way more difficult than reading the books I have gone out and purchased. I’m not good at being that person who accepts a loaner book from a friend who tells me it is great, or when someone tells me I have to read a book and forces it on me. I just want to be all like, don’t tell me what I’ll like, if I want a book I will ask, dammit. But honestly, the books I have here are mostly things I’ve wanted to read and my friends have very good taste and I shouldn’t be an ass about it, but I am and that is just a quirk that I have to deal with. It’s like clothes. I have my own taste and don’t try to change me with your suggestions or free jeans, man! 

Surprise, surprise, I finally settle in to read Ali Smith for the first time and she blows me away with amazingness. Why did I resist her particular brand of storytelling? Probably because of my assiness, that’s why. Moderate strangeness mixed with believable feelings and comic sensibilities and also she can write in the second person without me wanting to lose my shit. The Whole Story and Other Storiesand I had a lovely morning together and I could not be happier that I experienced her view of the world, her stories about people who fall in love with trees, and mixed up sisters. She is doing something special. Her style is so refreshing that I would even read some half stories. Get it? I know. Terrible.

It can be hard to separate an author from his well documented persona (cantankerous and controversial) and it’s even more difficult when he includes himself as a character in his own novel. While he appears in The Map and the Territory Houellebecq is certainly not playing any gimmicky games. Here he manages to engage the reader with his usual biting commentary on humanity and the world we live in; a skewering of the art world, his continued exploration of the highs and lows and strains and strands of relationships, both romantic, familial and professional and all with merely a smattering of misogyny and barely a sex scene to show for it. Art and artists (and writers too) are not perfect, but they can show us the depths of reality with their work. And Houellebecq, as misanthropic as he is, can do that and even create some hard feelings and quality entertainment along the way. I found the book delightful.

I know, right? 

After getting all up in love with her 2009 short story collection, American Salvage, I was pretty darn sure I could extend more love Bonnie Jo Campbell’s way. And then her new novel, Once Upon a River, floated into my heart. I grew up with a river near me and there is a comfort and excitement and strangeness in that moving water. It can go places, you can follow along the shore and never catch it, you can be caught it in, it can flow, be beautiful, destroy. This book tackles all those things. How we move through life to figure it out. How our lives can be gorgeous and be awful and be scary and strange and that we have to decide what the hell we’re going to do about the beauty and fear and rage. Her protagonist is weak and strong, confused, sexual, capable and wholly human. She can really shoot a gun. A variety of guns. For reals. And skin animals and live in the outdoors. She does things I admire, but let’s be honest, I don’t aspire to do, because I am made of stockings and heels. But we need her to do those things. And she’s a girl. Not in that way that we infantilize females by calling them girls instead of women, but a real teenage girl. Girls. They’re real people. Who woulda guessed?

I try not to get deep into learning lessons from novels because then sometimes I end up learning some things that are not for real life times, but mostly because novels are not textbooks, even if they are about a smart and lovely soil scientist/instructor, so technically she could teach me about soil and science and the science of soil. Right. Moving on. But, if I was going to learn something from Claire Tacon’s debut novel In the Field, with it’s vivid small town dialogue and accurate portrayal of adolescent and adult drunk behaviors and also unsexy/realistic sex scenes it would be that it is probably not the best idea to ‘go home again,’ especially to a small town (this is just my own horrible prejudice) because that place has changed and you have changed and you probably don’t fit each other anymore, like that skirt from junior high that would be so cute right now, with all the 90’s throwback, OMG Winona Ryder was so great action, but really it used to fit your prepubescent body, so just no.

This is one of those books where you’re all like, oh, okay, this is kind of a slow start, but the writing is tight and clean and there are some real perceptive moments and this french-author-probably autobiographically-based-protagonist has no name and there’s some funny/serious stuff with this other french totally Michel Houellebecq doppelganger character who hates Islam and wants to bone prostitutes and they’re in Cairo and it’s all very literary but also a bit seedy, but also a a bit ‘traditional’  and sexist but then you get to the end and are so thankful that you read it even though you were worried about how all that Middle East-Europe/France-Islam stuff would play out but it all paid off and the whole thing is kind of exactly what you needed, but weren’t expecting at all.

Kevin Moffett, please write more stories. The stories in Permanent Visitors are heartfelt, but not cloying, legit funny, precise, surprising, but most of all memorable. There were moments when I wanted to crawl inside and high five a character for their youthful wisdom or shield them from their own emotions. Don’t worry little guys, life is hard, and even though you’re in a book, I still want you to be safe. It’s almost like, oh my goodness, the characters are real people. Ba bow!

I have one last thing to add. Extra points for Boone’s Farm wines reference. It wasn’t just for show either. That’s how it’s done, people. That’s how it’s done.

Finally, after years of loving up on the Gaitskill (we haven’t exactly gotten to the bro-last-name-fist-bump stage in our relationship, but I see it happening. Soon.) I’ve made my way to her debut collection, Bad Behavior and it reads like anything but a first. She’s an expert at tapping into strange situations without saddling her characters with quirk that stems from the concept of just bein’ quirky. Impressive. Really. Though there’s lots of it in these pages, unconventional sexual behavior isn’t the bad of the title, but the way the characters in these stories treat each other can be.  And let’s face it, no one wants to read about good behavior. Boring.

Oh, and, Gaitskill, I got a flat of beers so let’s drink ‘em. Fist bump.