Stacked

Language. I am using it right now. And now. And even now. In The Flame Alphabet the words used to communicate become painful, become lethal. Children become weapons, their burbles make adults sick, their teenage tongues cause more anguish than their angst normally allows. Parents hide from their beloved offspring, people struggle to understand each other, and mostly they strive to survive against their instincts - to connect with others, to speak. Communication is a difficult thing. Most of us aren’t very good at it, as hard as we try. There are always things left unsaid, things we say that hurt, that are wrong. But in the world of Ben Marcus he is the commander of language, he controls the words on the page. This book is at least half great, half frustrating. He writes to confuse and illuminate, to address a myriad of ideas (family, language, illness, cure, genius, survival) that somehow come together, but also leave the reader uncertain and even unsatisfied. Marcus, has not created a perfect book, but it’s compelling and strange and unsettling. He’s a wily devil.

I don’t know if it’s somehow my fault for reading so many of them or the damn writers for writing about it, but here are just so many books about death and dying and the various ways it can go down and bring people down. Stephen Gauer’s debut novel Hold Me Now  is one of those books. A hate crime, a killing gets people down in this book. It’s tough. There are complicated emotions, and strained relationships, and loneliness and sex to pacify emotions and drink to further pacify emotions and desire for revenge, for peace, for something to hold onto, but there are no heroes here. Because that just makes sense in hard times. That we can have people that are important in our lives, but no one can save us from our hard feelings. That we have to muddle along. That we have to take responsibility for our feelings, for our actions. So fine, I’ll take partial blame on this whole death book situation, because sometimes the eyes and mind want to read what they want. Sometimes, it’s on me.

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?

You Deserve Nothing is really about what it means to deserve things. Alexander Maksik uses school as his backdrop, a place where there are always questions of who deserves to be rewarded or punished, ignored, nurtured, loved, loathed. Education isn’t black and white, just as morality, the content of works of literature and conversations about them have varied meanings to various people. We all gots our own opinions about how we interpret texts, emotions, ideas. And based on those opinions we have our own ways of acting, engaging with others and judging people too. Maksik never gets judgey. He leaves judgement in the capable hands of, what I hope are, thoughtful readers. He makes it possible to sympathize and question his characters. Nice touch.

Also there are teens. Smart ones and sassy ones and ones that are smart and sassy, but also some that are not interesting and some that just don’t give a heck and some that are working on giving a heck. Man, stories about teens are so good. Teens are always so confused and confident in equal measure. Maksik understands this well. And it makes for some very excellent reading. C’mon, buddies. Read up.

Mythical, realistic, dramatic, strange, tigery, creepy. These are some words to describe what Tea Obreht has going on in The Tiger’s Wife. There are sad animals. There are sad people. There are odd couplings and odder happenings. There are gossipy townspeople. There are different time periods. There are plots that you think will go one way, but end up in another, bloody, or funny, or unbelievable way. There are a lot of stories here. Many stories. All filtered through the protagonist, or through her grandfather or through her grandfather and then through her, like if you double sift flour to make it fine as face powder. Even though sometimes I got confused and would wonder who all these new mystical or real characters were, the writing was delicious as a homemade cookie. Could have used a glass of milk though. This young lady seems to know what’s she’s doing. And I didn’t want to set this book on fire, as I did with another popular novel that also had a tiger character. I think it came out about ten years ago. Not that I’m into naming names or anything.

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.

Oh yeah. That’s the stuff. If that stuff is being so sad it feels good. If that stuff is clumped like well-worn sweat socks in your chest and you can’t quite breath through kittenish sobs. If that stuff is truthful. If that stuff is funny. If that stuff is full of thoughtful emotional imagery that reveals tight storytelling. If that stuff is grief in many forms. If that stuff is writing that makes seamless shifts between characters in a novel with multiple narrators. If that stuff makes you wonder what the hell we are supposed to do with ourselves when we love and don’t love people, when we lose and are stuck with people. Cheryl Strayed, you have given me the stuff. Torch is some highly wonderful stuff. Please write more books about how hard and easy and normal and abnormal stuff is, Ms. Strayed. It will make other stuff easy.

FYI - there is also a Kenny G cassette tape in this book that will make you happy-sads-what? It’s really wonderful.

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.