The Elegant Variation

NYTBR DEBUT

Tomorrow marks my debut in the New York Times Book Review, in which I review James Wilcox's Hunk City.  Here's the opening paragraph:

Change has come to Tula Springs, La. Readers familiar with St. Jude Parish from James Wilcox’s first novel, “Modern Baptists” (1983), may have trouble recognizing the place today. There’s a Starbucks in the Piggly Wiggly. The Sonny Boy Bargain Store, rechristened Redds, is now part of the BurgerMat empire. Romance unfolds in chat rooms, and Viagra-touting spam finds at least one willing customer. The globalized marketplace has pressed its thumb on Tula Springs, uncorking a plethora of brands including Vera Wang, Armani, Dolce & Gabbana and Christian Louboutin. We’ve come a long way from the Ajax Feed and Seed and bourbon and Tabs at Juniors.

You can read the review in its entirety here.

TEV GUEST REVIEW: FINN

Finn
By Jon Clinch
Random House
287 pp
$23.95

WHAT COLOR IS YOUR HUCKLEBERRY?*
BY JIM RULAND

When I was in the seventh grade, St. James’s drama department put on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and I was cast as Alfred Temple, Tom’s competitor for the attention of Becky Thatcher. Tom and Alfred come to blows over her affections and on opening night, Tom tackled me and pinned me to the stage. The violence of Tom’s rough attack caught me off-guard. Needless to say, it hadn’t gone quite like that during rehearsals.

On the second night, I punched Tom Sawyer in the face, and it was on. Alfred Temple, it should be noted, was a teacher’s pet and I was costumed as a cross between Alfalfa and Little Lord Fauntleroy. Alfred is not supposed to know how to throw an uppercut and Tom was pretty irate. On the third and final night of the run, Tom Sawyer and I stole the show with a full-on Jerry Springer-style battle royal. Technically, Tom won, but only because I let him, and only because I had to.

The show, after all, must go on, and on it goes in Jon Clinch’s debut novel Finn, a compelling retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the point-of-view of Pap, Huck’s alcoholic father. At the heart of the novel is the unsolved mystery that Twain left behind for his readers to mull over: How did Pap come to be shot in a room filled with weird paraphernalia? (Clue: Alfred Temple didn’t do it.)

Although Finn’s fate is known from the onset (he dead) and the plot is defined by the parameters established in Twain’s novels, there is a score of delicious twists and turns that a clumsy summary would risk ruining. Suffice to say, the biggest revelation in Clinch’s novel is the writing, which is as muscular and deliberate as the act of poling a skiff upriver.

With prose that is reminiscent of Faulkner’s early Yoknapatawpha novels, Cormac McCarthy's Tennessee novels (particularly Child of God), and of course, Twain, Finn gives us an honest-to-God yarn that’s as pleasing to puzzle over as it is to read. Finn lives in a falling down house by the river and with Clinch’s lush descriptions one can almost smell the gutted cat fish and river rot. There's something magnificently voyeuristic about Finn's crimes happening in plain sight of anyone who happens to be taking the air on an upper deck of a riverboat as it chugs up the Mississippi.

From Twain’s novels we know that Finn is a violent, bigoted drunk and Clinch endeavors to explain how he got that way. There’s no question that Finn is as vile a villain that ever skulked on two legs, but once we meet his father we can’t help but look at him with a glimmering—however faint—of sympathy.

One of the paradoxical aspects of Finn’s personality is that early on he manages to escape the yoke of his father's seething hatred and sets out on a path that is, in its own way, wiser and more compassionate than the road taken by his father. Ultimately, however, Finn repudiates this way of knowing the world and is revealed to be very much his father's son – to the peril of everyone he comes into contact with, and none more so than Huckleberry, the most cherished outsider in American letters.

QUIZTUNES WITH JON CLINCH:

TEV: What was the greatest challenge to re-imagining characters that you inherited as opposed to invented?
CLINCH: The challenge came in imagining a history for characters whom we think we already know and love -- when in fact we don't really know them at all. The Widow Douglas, for example. She's a two-dimensional figure, if that, in Twain's novels. But I wanted to understand her better in order to understand her involvement with Huck (and his mother). So it was important to imagine her in her loneliness, her long widowhood, her own painful childlessness.

Finn himself was of course the greatest example of this challenge. We know from Twain that he's a drunk and a child abuser and a bigot -- but why? As I set out to understand how he ended up dead in that floating house, I also set out to determine how he became the memorable monster that Twain gave us. That process took me back into Finn's youth and his family background, and his story unfurled from there.

TEV: You’ve obviously done a lot of research for this novel about a whole host of subjects: Twain, slavery, life on the Mississippi, etc. What was the most startling discovery?
CLINCH: The biggest revelation was at the heart of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn itself, and Twain left it there for all of us to see: How fragile Huck's existence was, out there in a world that cared almost nothing for him. I remembered this sense of constant peril from my first childhood reading of the book -- the sense that Huck was living on the margins of an adult world almost completely indifferent to him. And in Finn I found myself giving full voice to the dark side of that dark world.

TEV: Finn has a curious relationship with alcohol. He is like Faulkner’s young Ike McCaslin or Joe Christmas. The alcohol doesn’t mellow Finn: it focuses his rage.
CLINCH: Oh, he's a mean drunk all right. But only, I think, because he's mean to begin with. Your choice of the word "focus" is a good one. Finn has a few good qualities, but none of them is at all assisted by his addiction to alcohol.

TEV: Finn is a wonderful scoundrel. The line that resonates for me pertains to his self-awareness, something that common criminals lack and great villains require, a certain willfulness that draws them over to the dark side, along with an astonishing lack of remorse. While giving "full voice to the dark side of the dark world" did you ever wonder if readers, especially Twain enthusiasts, would be able to handle it?
CLINCH: I didn't fear how Twainians might respond to the dark side of Finn -- and in fact it seems from what I've heard so far that the better a reader knows Twain's Pap, the less surprised he is by mine. I think that fans of Twain, then, will by and large believe that I've been abundantly fair to my source materials on that count. Where they may feel differently, though, is in my exploration of the forces that made Finn so tormented. In my reading, his bigotry comes from a conflict between handed-down racism and an impulse toward love -- of a sort -- toward a black woman. Which is certainly credible, but has the side effect of giving us a bi-racial Huck. By doing that to America's favorite white kid, I may have sinned in some eyes. But either way, it's certainly not a failure of courage.

TEV: What are you working on now? Is the Twain oeuvre a universe you'd like to continue exploring?
CLINCH: My new project is a little too rough to talk about yet. There's surely room for more exploration of Twain's world, but I think I'll set that aside for now.

*A Huckleberry can be red or blue. According to Wikipedia, “The 'garden huckleberry' is not considered to be a true huckleberry but a member of the nightshade family.”

TEV GUEST REVIEW: PETROPOLIS

Petropolis
By Anya Ulinich
Viking
336 pp
$24.95

GUEST REVIEW BY STEPHAN CLARK

Marx and Engels asked the workers of the world to unite; Anya Ulinich shows us what happens when they do.

In her promising debut novel, Petropolis, Anya Ulinich tells the story of a young biracial woman who can trace her ancestry back to the Sixth International Youth Festival, when Khrushchev opened Russia's doors to the world and the citizens of a hundred countries came to Moscow under the banner of peace and friendship. As one character notes, "the guests from Friendly Africa were especially popular with the girls." One result of this "internationalist impulse" was a baby abandoned at Moscow Birthing House Number 8. Upon adoption, he became Victor Semyonovich Goldberg.

Victor is not the main character of Petropolis, but his fleeing late-soviet Russia for America does allow his young daughter to assume that role. When the novel opens, during the fall of 1992, 14-year-old Sasha Goldberg is living in Asbestos 2, a small Siberian town named in honor of "a larger town in the Ural Mountains, where asbestos was also mined, the weather was milder, and one could occasionally buy beef in stores." Asbestos 2 is populated equally by felons released from a nearby labor camp and those members of the intelligentsia who first arrived here in cattle cars when the town, then known as Stalinsk, served as the administrative center for the Gulag.

Because Sasha is descended on her mother's side from Leningrad intellectuals, she is urged at the beginning of the novel to find an extra-curricular activity. "Children of the intelligentisia don't just come home in the afternoon and engage in idiocy," her mother declares. But more than anything, Sasha feels like an exile within a population of exiles. Her wonderfully drawn mother is ethnic Russian, but Sasha has "a face the color of wood stain," like her father; and though Sasha has a Jewish last name, the only link to the religion and culture it represents was lost with her father's adoptive parents, who died in a car crash while Victor was still a young boy living amongst the intelligentsia in Moscow. "Perhaps," Sasha realizes, "her parents gave her a Jewish name to take the focus off black-skinned."

Sashsa is guided into art school by her overbearing mother, but it is the young girl's growing sense of alienation, not painting or drawing, that becomes her true extra-curricular activity. This serves as the basis for the novel's extended opening in Siberia, which reads like a beautiful coming-of-age novel that is equal parts absurdist and realist – real-absurist, you could say. Unfortunately, the uninterrupted beauty of this hundred-page section is not matched elsewhere in the book.

The remaining three sections of the novel relate Sasha's experiences in Phoenix (as a "mail-order bride"), Chicago (as "a prisoner of the Talmud") and Brooklyn, the default final destination of so many immigrant stories, where Sasha makes peace with her past and moves off into the future. Increasingly, the story loses its focus as it skips from one point on the map to another. Initially, Ulinich establishes that her character wants to go to America to find her father and learn more about why he left her at the age of ten, but this aim is forgotten for long stretches at a time, and near the end it's abandoned with little struggle and viewed as unimportant.

This leaves the book feeling episodic. In addition to a coming of age story and a quest for father, Ulinich gives us a mother-daughter struggle, a story of Sasha's young motherhood, and then a handful of love stories, along with weighty narrative threads concerning issues of identity, class, religion, and the immigrant experience. The book either needed to be narrowed considerably, or allowed to expand to Tolstoy-like dimensions.

Certainly, the author's ambition is to be commended, as Ulinich shows many of the talents needed to write a great "big book" in the future. Like Zadie Smith or John Irving, other novelists who work on a large canvas, the author of Petropolis moves through and credibly evokes many locales and times, and often interests the reader most when she goes on a narrative detour that takes us into the consciousness of someone other than the main character. She's got a controlled voice that can hit the notes between tragedy and comedy, many of her characters have lives as full as those found in a history book, and her background as a painter can be seen in the precise arrangements of her verbal imagery.

But too often Petropolis struggles in the present. Contemporary Asbestos 2 and Sasha's first love affair is rendered beautifully ("Sasha felt weightless and light-headed, a metal shaving next to a huge magnet"). But when Ulinich takes Sasha to America, the narrative is either reluctant to stay in a place that appears full of narrative possibility (as is the case in Phoenix, where Sasha's fiancé, a man in search of a "mail-order bride," is nothing more than a passing cardboard figure) or it gets bogged down (as is the case in Chicago and Brooklyn) in plot-lines that are less than inspiring and with characters and relationships that fail to emerge as fully drawn as those seen in Siberia.

It's sad that the one relationship that is the least convincing, a love affair between Sasha and a young man in a wheelchair, is given such a place of importance at the novel's end. This leaves this reader wishing for a return to the high notes of the novel's first one-hundred pages. But then again, when an author sends so many fireworks up into the sky, a few are bound to fizzle, and you should be happy to remember those that lit up the night.

Stephan Clark's fiction be found online at The Cincinnati Review, Night Train, The Portland Review, and Drunken Boat. He has an essay in the current issue of Swink based on his experiences as a Fulbright Fellow in Ukraine, and a short story in the forthcoming spring/summer issue of Ninth Letter. He blogs about issues relating to the "mail-order bride" industry, and currently lives in Los Angeles with his Russian wife. No, that's not how they met.

GUEST REVIEW: THINGS KEPT, THINGS LEFT BEHIND

Things Kept, Things Left Behind
By Jim Tomlinson
University of Iowa Press
153 pp., paperback
$15.95

GUEST REVIEW BY DANIEL OLIVAS

There's much to be said for those who pen their first books at an age when many working folks are winding down their careers. Such writers can draw upon decades of experience, giving their writing the kind of nuance and ambiguity that comes with mature hindsight.

For these reasons, one may rejoice in Jim Tomlinson's debut short-story collection, Things Kept, Things Left Behind, for which Tomlinson won the prestigious Iowa Short Fiction Award.

Born in 1941 three weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Tomlinson grew up in a small Illinois town and now lives in rural Kentucky. Perhaps not surprisingly, most of the 11 short stories in this collection have the Bluegrass State as their backdrop and have struggling, working-class folks at their center.

An example is LeAnn McCray, who appears in the two title stories, "Things Kept" and "Things Left Behind." In the first, we learn that LeAnn sometimes "felt restless, strange to her own skin. It was a troublesome feeling, one that would come on her without warning, as it did one Tuesday afternoon in late October."

That day, LeAnn's sister, Cass, needs to talk about helping their stubborn and widowed mother, Georgia, out of debt. Cass suggests that LeAnn ask a mutual friend, Dexter Chalk, for help. The married LeAnn agrees, never letting on that she and Dexter are having an affair. The plan to aid Georgia spirals into an unintended climax, in which LeAnn learns that it's not just the living who have secrets.

In "Things Left Behind," LeAnn's secret affair with Dexter is unwittingly divulged to her husband, Lonnie, by a well-intentioned hotel maid. Because Lonnie is far from a perfect husband and father, Tomlinson allows ambiguity to seep into LeAnn's infidelity.

In "Prologue (two lives in letters)," we are introduced to two young, idealistic teenagers, Davis Menifee Jr. and Claire Lyons, through a sampling of their correspondence spanning 34 years. Thrown together as delegates to the 1963 Congressional Youth Leadership Conference for one week in Washington, D.C., Davis and Claire become close friends in the wake of Kennedy's assassination and political uncertainty. But they take radically different paths. Claire becomes an activist lawyer and eventually a member of Congress. Davis protests the Vietnam War and flees to Canada to evade the draft. Both start families, question their choices, wonder where their youth has gone, and hope for better times. For many readers who have spent a few decades on this good earth, the words of these two Americans may be painfully familiar.

There are other gems in this collection: In "Stainless," Warren and Annie have one last dinner together as they divide up their belongings at the end of their marriage. In "Squirrels," a man is bedeviled by his ex-wife because she is bedeviled by squirrels that invaded her attic. And there are the two brothers in "Lake Charles" who share a bond forged in a horrendous, life-altering childhood accident. In such stories, Tomlinson keeps his observations and humor sharp, his prose lean as a marathon runner.

Sometimes in a Tomlinson tale, it's difficult to tell the winners from the losers, the resilient from the fragile. But his magic lies in the shadows of people's lives, those dark recesses where uncertainty reigns. It's as if Tomlinson holds a mirror up to us and says: It's all a confusing mess, but we will survive because the other option is just too damn scary.

This is unadorned wisdom earned through experience. And it takes a skilled, mature writer such as Tomlinson to bring it to life.

This review first appeared in the El Paso Times. Daniel A. Olivas is the author of four books and is a frequent reviewer for the El Paso Times and the Multicultural Review. He shares blogging duties at La Bloga .

TEV GUEST REVIEW: INLANDIA

Inlandia: A Literary Journey through California’s Inland Empire
Edited by Gayle Wattawa
Heyday Books / Santa Clara University
433 pp., paperback $18.95

GUEST REVIEW BY DANIEL A. OLIVAS

Long the Rodney Dangerfield of Southern California, the Inland Empire sits about an hour east of Los Angeles and encompasses the fast-growing counties of Riverside and San Bernardino.

Far from the beaches of Malibu, it is a tough land, some say, the home of biker gangs and urban sprawl, a land buffeted by the unrelenting Santa Ana (or "Devil") winds that can flip cars and jangle nerves. Tell an Angeleno that you make your home in the Inland Empire and be prepared for the condescending half-smile followed by a wisecrack: "Oh, the methamphetamine capital of the world."

But this era of insult might have come to an end, if Heyday Books and Santa Clara University have any say in it. Inlandia: A Literary Journey through California's Inland Empire, meticulously edited by Gayle Wattawa ($18.95 paperback), is an ambitious collection that finally gives the area its due as a culturally and historically vital component of Southern California.

In the anthology's introduction, Riverside native and National Book Award finalist Susan Straight tells us that she has striven to infuse her writing with "the fierceness we retain in these small places where people loved their own with the vehemence, the stubborn and suspicious and inventive qualities required to survive this part of Southern California."

Straight is not alone in attempting to depict all the complexities and beauty of the Inland Empire and its people. More than 70 authors are represented in fiction, poetry, native legends, journal entries and other writings from the 1700s to the present.

Some of the writers enjoy worldwide fame and have been translated into many languages. We're treated to an excerpt from a 1930 tough-guy novelette, "Blood-Red Gold," by Erle Stanley Gardner, the creator of Perry Mason. And there's the exquisitely creepy essay, "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream" by Joan Didion, concerning a woman accused of murder in the 1960s. Other "big names" abound, including Norman Mailer, John Steinbeck, Joan Baez and Raymond Chandler.

Wattawa includes newer voices, writers who have lived or are living in the region and who feel compelled to chronicle the history and culture of their home through fiction. Kathleen Alcalá, who grew up in San Bernardino, offers the short story "Gypsy Lover," a haunting tale of one girl's attempt to come to terms with her older sister's mysterious disappearance. And in "Georgie and Wanda," Michael Jaime-Becerra skillfully fictionalizes the racial bigotry faced by a young couple in Riverside circa 1956.

Many of the nonfiction pieces are simply heartbreaking. Diary excerpts from George Fujimoto Jr. starkly recount the federal government's rounding up of his family members, who were housed in Arizona internment camps for the duration of World War II. Similarly, Malcolm Margolin's "The Cupueño Expulsion of 1903" details the removal of a native people for their valuable land.

Smaller-scale tragedies are perfectly rendered here, too, as in Alex Espinoza's powerful short story, "Santo Niño," that brings us into the lives of two young women as they battle economic hardship, infertility and strained relationships. And in "hap & hazard highland" by Keenan Norris, a young ex-con tries to reconnect with his old neighborhood as well as with his youthful dreams.

At the turn of each page, there are surprising little shocks as we enter themes radically different from the one before. For example, after the essay "909," Percival Everett's wry and provocative contemplation of Riverside County, out of the blue follows Sholeh Wolpé's poem, "Morning After the U.S. Invasion of Iraq," in which the community of Redlands seems unfazed by the beginning of the war: "The chatter is as always, quiet, / The smiles as always, broad."

No review can fully capture the breadth and spirit of this remarkable anthology. Suffice it to say that each author surprises, informs and entertains. Inlandia paints a complex and compelling portrait of a region that is simultaneously beautiful and harsh, multicultural and alienating, vibrant and destructive. Without question, it is a portrait that commands our respect.

Daniel A. Olivas is the author of four books and shares blogging duties on La Bloga . Visit his Web page at http://www.danielolivas.com. This review first appeared in the El Paso Times.

THE END OF MR. Y

Not too long ago, I complained about PopMatters' review of Scarlett Thomas's The End of Mr. Y, and promised my own official take.  It runs today in the Philadelphia Inquirer.  Here's an excerpt:

That hoary workhorse, "the novel of ideas," gets an invigorating kick in the pants in Scarlett Thomas' imaginative new novel The End of Mr. Y. Among the ideas on offer for our reading pleasure, one can choose from the works of Samuel Butler, Schrödinger's Cat, Erasmus Darwin's Zoonomia, relativity vs. quantum mechanics, the power of prayer, Jacques Derrida, homeopathy, the search for LUCA (the Last Universal Common Ancestor), Victorian science (luminiferous ether, anyone?), Heidegger's Being and Time, and the genetics of laboratory mice. And that's a partial listing.

But The End of Mr. Y is considerably more than a precocious recitation of seemingly disparate ideas. It is, above all, an exhilarating, breakneck narrative that leaves the reader dizzily impressed with Thomas' brio and talent as she takes each new preposterous plot development (an 8-foot-tall mouse god? a secret government plan for mind control?) and makes it utterly convincing.

You can read the rest here.  The book is garnering deserved positive attention among litblogs.

UPDATE:  Harcourt has set up a website for The End of Mr. Y that's worth checking if you'd like to know more about this fascinating title.

A bit of housekeeping.  In honor of this week's release of Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day, TEV will be running three days of devoted posts courtesy of our very own resident Pynchon Scholar Jim Ruland.  There will be no posts on Thursday and Friday and I'll be back in the saddle on Monday.  (Of course, as ever, I reserve the right to randomly pop in from time to time.)  Please do make you sure you check out Jim's work - he's got some awfully cool stuff planned, not your typical bag of Pynchoniana.  And you can use the new email feature (top right corner) if you'd like your posts mailed to you.

Happy holidays one and all.  See you back here in a week.  (Oh, and to all those who've asked, Casino Royale was absolutely terrific.  This Bond fan is pleased, indeed.)

TEV GUEST REVIEW (AND INTERVIEW): DELIA FALCONER'S THE LOST THOUGHTS OF SOLDIERS

The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers
By Delia Falconer
Soft Skull Press
151 pp
$16.00

GUEST REVIEW BY JIM RULAND

Regular readers of The Elegant Variation know that good things do indeed come in small packages. Roy’s Kesey’s Nothing in the World was virtually unputdownable and our host’s obsession with enthusiasm for Sheila Heti’s Ticknor is well documented. Delia Falconer threw her hat into the ring last Spring with The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers, which was released around the same time that the aforementioned novellas came out. Weighing in at a bantam-like 155 pages, Falconer’s haunting prose is every bit as evocative as another novella with a historical subject: Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid.

For a book so slender, The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers is difficult to pin down. First and foremost, it’s a rumination on history, warfare, and its slippery relationship with the truth. The narrative is fainter than one would expect for a book about the Battle of Little Bighorn, an event overloaded with received wisdom passed down through the ages, some of it accurate, some not. Perhaps the best way to approach the book is through a literal reading of its title.

Captain Frederick Benteen is an old soldier coming to terms with his past. History has not been kind to Benteen and his reputation has been slagged by armchair field generals who suggest the outcome of the Battle would have been different if Benteen had accompanied Custer into the teeth of the slaughter. When a letter arrives from a scholar eager to make his reputation by clearing Benteen’s name, the old soldier starts poking through his personal effects and journals from the Indian campaigns.

As Benteen considers what, if any, his response to the earnest young scholar should be, a host of unforgettable characters emerge from the fog of his memories: the recklessly irreverent Handsome Jack, the soulful and reflective Star-Gazer, the bawdy and slightly crazed cook, and the great man himself, Colonel Custer who emits a weird aura every time he appears on the page—call it the vanity of the doomed.

In Benteen’s recollections, the men are seldom engaged in warfare, but rather the hard licks and picks of 19th century Army life. Falconer knows that a soldier’s existence is 90% boredom and thus the men are always talking about themselves: their experience (or lack thereof) with women, their alcohol preferences, their dreams. Their thoughts are as poetic (I don’t think a soul is a good idea if given infinite space) as they are ribald (You quim quaffer! You gusset-guzzling bloomer-bolter! You old tuft-taster!).

These portraits have a startling intimacy about them and though Benteen would never admit it (nor would Falconer capitulate to a formulation so trite), he clearly loves his men. His recollections constitute a meta manuscript, a lush catalog of lost thoughts that had he foolishly followed Custer into the fray, would never have come to light.

Quiztunes for Delia Falconer

TEV: Thanks for taking the time from your travels to talk with The Elegant Variation. You just returned from Japan. Were you there for work or play?

DF: For play. I turned forty a couple of weeks ago and decided I wanted to be in Kyoto on the day, walking beneath the thousands of red torii at Fushimi-Inari. But I wouldn't be surprised if Japan works its way into my work over the next few years.

TEV: You mentioned in an interview that your interest in this footnote to the Battle of Little Bighorn was a happy accident of your research at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming. How did you come to be interested in the American West?

DF: I was led to the west by a long-term obsession with the early beginnings of cinema (Muybridge, Marey, and Edison's cinematograph). When I travelled to Cody I was particularly fascinated by Edison. Some of Edison's first films were of performers in Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. The show (with its stage coaches under siege, stampedes of buffalo and Native American performers) was actually a "western" in almost every sense, except for the fact that cinema itself was yet to be invented. I was struck by the way this sense of nostalgic spectacle seems to have always been married to the idea of the west, even before its conquest was complete. I wanted to capture this sense of hauntedness, of a second shadow world, that seems to have always clung to it. My main character, Frederick Benteen, understands himself as part of a deeply private, shadow-world that the myth of the west has replaced; he contrasts himself to Custer, who is greedy for the spotlight.

TEV: There's this Faulknerian attention to history as a living legacy that permeates the book. As the past comes to life in the memories of your protagonist, he is acutely aware of how history has been represented and misrepresented, and how those representations continue to be perceived. Did you ever feel like the scholar who endeavors to set the record straight?

DF: "Faulknerian" - thank you! I can live with that. I've certainly been a scholar— my first incarnation was as a cultural studies academic–so perhaps that shows. But to be honest I think I have more in common with Benteen. The young scholar believes there is a "right" answer to discover; whereas Benteen, in spite of his smaller, darker self, finds that he's ultimately more interested in human behaviour, in subtext. My aim wasn't to reinstate Benteen as a hero over Custer—well perhaps it was, at the beginning—but I found myself more interested in questions about how we write history, and how we appear to other people and come to be remembered. Are we most ourselves in our heroic moments, or in our gestures, our throwaway jokes? Does history lie in the grand events, like wars, or in the "nine tenths nothing", as Benteen puts it, when we are waiting for something significant to happen? How can history be written to accommodate the weight of ordinary lives?

I've always been very impressed with something Kundera wrote in an essay on the novel: that the novelist's job—and the thing that makes the novel unique - is to create a world where judgment is suspended and characters do things that may surprise us. According to Kundera, the novel's business is not to be dogmatic, but radically skeptical. So is Benteen--there are many things he's done that are repugnant or questionable, but this quality of skepticism gives his life a certain kind of grace. Benteen becomes a kind of novelist, if you like - like his strange friend Star-Gazer. Instead of writing the revisionist history the boy wants, he finds himself searching for a form to accommodate the lives and dreams of all the men he went to war with; one that recognises that the books are made up not only of what they say but of what they are silent about. I like writing fiction because, in order for it to work, I have to try to be like Benteen and put my own quickness to judge aside; to try to find a better self to write out of.

TEV: On one hand, the literal lost thoughts of the soldiers in your book, particularly those of Star-Gazer and Handsome Jack, have the density of poetry; on the other hand, their yearnings and quotidian catalogs could fill several books. Why did you choose the form of a novella for this story?

DF: Two writers were guiding influences as I was writing The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers: W G Sebald and Junichiro Tanizaki. I'm a huge fan of Sebald's, especially the way in which he assumes our knowledge of the Holocaust in his novels and works around its edges to concentrate instead on ephemeral details of trauma and longing. In doing this he completely renews that history's capacity to shock; this is what makes his novels profoundly moving and deeply moral. This idea of renewing history to make it sting appealed to me greatly. In The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi, Tanizaki writes about Musashi's abiding sexual obsession with "woman-heads", the noseless heads of warriors slain on the battlefield and taken as trophies. There is a compelling Japanese elegance about Tanizaki's choice to focus his story on this bizarre detail; and, again, that history seems more alive and human to me because of that choice. Sebald gave me the courage to assume that readers were already familiar with the story of Little Bighorn and to concentrate instead on the human detail, the "seams and spaces in between" as Benteen himself says. And there was something about the west that seemed compatible with an almost Asian approach. The haiku-like brevity of people's speech in Wyoming, for example; and the sense of a shadow-world at its edges. I wanted to emphasise the strangeness of that history, to make it foreign, in order to take the spotlight off Custer and turn the focus onto poignant, ordinary moments.

TEV: What are you working on now?

DF: A new novel—I'm sorry, but I'm superstitious about talking about novels-in-progress, so I can't say anything about it. I realised recently that almost all my writing is in some way or other about the way technologies define our lives: whether these technologies are cinema, or photography (the subject of my first novel), or ancient aqueducts. I'm currently working on a collection of essays, called With the Things of the Earth, about our relationship to the proliferation over the last century of man-made things that now outnumber us. I'm also writing essays, features, and reviews. My current interest is in technological solutions to environmental problems: a couple of months ago I flew down to Tasmania to talk to a scientist who has come up with a new method of preventing road kill. I'm also obsessed by the TV series CSI, and am in the middle of an essay about it.

GUEST REVIEW - THE OPEN CURTAIN

Brian Evenson will be appearing this evening at Beyond Baroque, reading with Maggie Nelson.  Many thanks to Matt Tiffany who alerted us - and who interviews Evenson at his own site - and kindly provides us with this Guest Review.

The Open Curtain
Brian Evenson
Coffee House Press
218 pp
14.95, trade paper

GUEST REVIEW BY MATTHEW TIFFANY

Brian Evenson's own story is as interesting as the stories he invents: When faced with censorship from Brigham Young University, where he was told that he could only continue in his position as assistant professor if he agreed not to write anything again like his first book, Altmann's Tongue, he resigned. The controversy also led to his leaving the Mormon church, and contributed to the end of his marriage. All of that: loss of job, of faith, of marriage, in the pursuit of an ideal in writing.

That sort of backstory makes one sit up and take notice, and in the case of Evenson's latest effort, The Open Curtain, the attention is rewarded. Drawing from the true story of the 1902 murder by the grandson of Brigham Young through the Mormon blood sacrifice ritual, The Open Curtain gives us Rudd, a teenager in the midwest with his own troubled relationship to the Mormon faith. Rudd isn't depicted as all that unusual – father left his mother early on, disinterested in religion while his mother labors to bring him back to church, adrift in the high school years. Evenson gives us those basics early on and then quickly turns Rudd's attention to the murder via a high school research project, in which the student must find a topic that meets four criteria, the last of which asks the student to name a hero. There's no hero in this story, Rudd is told, and it's not acceptable to write about this further. Sound familiar?

Concurrently, Rudd does a little bit of detective work and discovers a secret half-brother, a link to his father. Lael lives close enough for the two to form a relationship, but Lael only seems to tolerate his half-brother's efforts at kinship until Rudd shares his research project with him. As they learn more about the century-old killings, Rudd begins to experience blackouts, and Lael knows something he isn't telling Rudd.

The Open Curtain is one of those books that you want to tell people about, but end up hedging your words – there's always more you could say without giving away the entire story, and yet this is one of those books that you get the most out of without the constraints of a summary read beforehand. The way Evenson builds upon the confusion Rudd goes through as he loses more and more of his present self to the tragedy of 1902 is suggestive of a number of possible psychological explanations. You know that this is billed as a "literary thriller," so at some point the past is going to intrude in a horrific way on the present. Evenson walks a fine line between use of the usual conventions of the "thriller" genre and a more nuanced, deeply thought narrative in such a way that the oft-used thriller narrative devices come as a welcome surprise, a genuine thrill. The third part (the novel is divided into three sections) is absolutely riveting: Evenson gets inside Rudd's head with a risky approach that, in the hands of a lesser writer, would seem contrived and a let-down. At no point is this book either of those.

GUEST REVIEW: THE DISAPPEARANCE

The Disappearance: A Novella and Stories
By Ilan Stavans
Northwestern University Press
130 pp. (hardcover),
$22.95

GUEST REVIEW BY DANIEL OLIVAS

In the preface to The Disappearance: A Novella and Stories, the prolific and often provocative Ilan Stavans informs us that the “three stories in this volume are concerned, in one way or another, with silence—both earthly and divine.” Hopefully Stavans will forgive those readers who discern a different thematic pattern in these well-crafted little mysteries which are—in both tone and structure—reminiscent of tales by Jorge Luis Borges and W. Somerset Maugham.

One can argue that the heart of these stories concerns the question of identity: ethnic, religious, national and cultural. Stavans, a professor of Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College, has often explored this rocky but fascinating terrain drawn from his own experiences of being a Jew of Mexican birth who has moved within the languages of Spanish, English, Hebrew and Yiddish.

GUEST REVIEW (AND INTERVIEW): SHIRLEY WINS

Thanks to Jim Ruland for a week of great reviews and interviews.  Please don't forget to come by Vermin on the Mount Sunday night for the chance to hear these readers in person. 

Shirley Wins
By Todd Taylor
Gorsky Press
188 pp. (paperback)
$13.95

GUEST REVIEW BY JIM RULAND

I’ll be honest: I heart Shirley.

Within the first few pages of Shirley Wins, I was utterly won over by its charming protagonist. Shirley is the caretaker of her granddaughter Rachel, whose mother, Willomena, died while giving birth to her daughter. Now divorced and inching closer to retirement, Shirley spends her free time baking cookies and knitting colorful sweaters. Then one day she is bit by “the puma of physics” and, inspired by an advertisement for a pumpkin chucking contest, begins puttering in her garage.

Shirley constructs a giant slingshot in her backyard and using rocks she’s loaded into a sling she knitted for the purpose, takes aim at the abandoned paper mill across the ravine. Delighted by the sound of rocks plunking off the siding, she goes to work on more ambitious projects and is soon wreaking havoc with her homemade catapult, potato gun, and a howitzer of a pumpkin launcher.

The accomplishments are the result of breakthroughs in the garage that allow her to temporarily master the forces she is trying to control; but there is a limit to her understanding and she pays a heavy price when she gets too careless or cute. For instance, when she loads a bowling ball in a catapult designed for much smaller loads, the contraption literally explodes and her granddaughter finds her in the driveway in a pool of blood.

Shirley is as determined as she is resilient and one of the pleasures of the book is watching her fight through the pain and the failure and the shame as she doggedly tries to “punch back at the world” with her machines. At first glance, it’s an unusual book for a man who has devoted the last ten years of his life putting out quality punk rock zines, but the book is essentially about the painstaking pursuit of something that others may find strange or even downright stupid.

There are a million hoary clichés that can be applied to Shirley Wins. Never give up on your dreams is one. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger is another. But essentially it boils down to a likable old lady who builds a ballistic missile system disguised as a pumpkin launcher, and how many books can promise that?

Quiztunes for Todd Taylor:

You've dedicated your life to punk rock, but the protagonist of Shirley Wins is about as punk as a teakettle. What gives?
True, on the surface Shirley is a marm and modeled after my mother and grandmother. I’m not going to go as far to say that Shirley is in any way, shape, or form a punk rocker, but I think how she approaches all of her projects in the book is how a DIY punk rocker would go about it: use available materials, become your own “amateur professional expert,” and do something that can kill you that your neighbors have no real comprehension of, even if you explain it to them in detail. Also, it’s a reaffirmation of my belief that some of the most influential lifer punks look just like ordinary folks. Descendents, Ian MacKaye (Minor Threat, Fugazi, Evens), Tim Version, Tiltwheel, Circle Jerks, Black Flag, Fucked Up—all look/looked like shopping clerks and don’t put too much salt in the “looking punk” part of punk, but exploded how it’s approached. There’s a ferociousness that’s deceptive because it’s focused inward and not geared to how other people identify a visual threat. Shirley’s intentionally under the radar. So, yeah, you’re right. Shirley’s not punk, but her actions—especially from my framework—falls right line in with that lifestyle.

Shirley builds a slingshot, a catapult, a potato gun and a pumpkin launcher. Have you built any of these things?
No, but I’m a constant tinkerer, I’m always wondering how things tick, and poverty makes me crafty. There are simple things, like I’m currently using milk crates, dowels, and plywood and have made portable, stackable record shelves for all of my vinyl, and I made an entertainment center (which is more milk crates and plywood, but to exact dimensions). I was a tow truck driver for a bit and know how to repair the basic things that break in cars. Many of the parts from Shirley Wins came from my time driving a wrecker, especially visiting specialty part makers and seeing, first hand, how experienced mechanics would troubleshoot problems that drove them nutty. Actually, a friend of mine, Ray, made a variation of the slingshot. Unhappy with water balloons, one day, he loaded up a rock and broke his leg when the rock arced back and hit him. He still limps from it and that was a good twelve years ago.

About a month ago, I wanged the bumper off this lady’s car. It was totally my fault, but the lady was cool. She admitted that her car was crappy, and didn’t mind if the parts weren’t new, just solid. So I scoured three junk yards, pulled all the parts, and with the help of a couple friends, repainted, re-installed, and Boy Scouted the bumper and lighting assembly back to better than new. I’m handy. Shirley Wins was also inspired by the spirit of my grandfather, who helped invent tail hooks for airplanes landing on aircraft carriers, my uncle; who’s a nuclear physicist; and the junkyard genius and many-time land speed record holder Art Arfons. Basically, I’m fascinated with, “How do you crack a nut?” How do you solve a problem that’s not all theory, but a thing that lives in the physical world? And that thing may maim or kill you, but if it works, it’s bitchin’.

What was the most gratifying part of writing this book?
That I wasn’t expecting a novel. It started as a short story, merely as something to do of my own when I had a rare break from putting together Razorcake and the website. Shirley Wins took a life of its own. It became a tremendously long short story, then a novella, then a full-blown novel. It’s nice when something blossoms right in front of you and it doesn’t seem forced.

You've toured with Joe Meno and read with Todd Dills so you know their work pretty well. What's the best/worst thing about reading with these guys?
There’s no worst part. I’m stoked to be in the company of active writers I admire. It’s also one of the rare times—due to the drives—that we can all sit and talk stories and really get into the creative process. And drink beer, read all over the county, and meet new people doesn’t hurt any. It’s great knowing that you’re far from being alone, that there’s an active DIY writing community with invisible tendrils reaching into unexpected places, and that people actually still read books and want to see some folks read from them.

What's next? Fiction or more nonfiction?
Both. I’ve got two interviews in the next issue of Razorcake—Bloodhag and In the Red Records, and, if things settle down a wee bit, I’ve got a novel that’s been an Frankensteinian albatross around my neck for over a decade. It’s 1,200 pages. It needs to be 600 pages at the most, so it’ll take me a good year of weed whacking just to get to the heart of it. This one’s a bit more difficult because it’s more autobiographical.