Monday Review: Helen Humphreys' Coventry

Coventry: A Novel


Reviewed by Kelly Hand

Helen Humphreys’ Coventry is as austere as the wartime city whose destruction it chronicles. It seems appropriate to call this slim book a novella, yet its style draws as much upon the short story tradition of creating characters without extraneous details as it does upon the expansiveness of novels. Yet Humphreys’ background as a poet is also evident in her scene-painting of a city transformed by German bombs, and she manages to weave history gracefully into her fictional narrative.
The primary focus in this story is Harriet, who moves to Coventry as a young bride during World War I only to lose her husband at the Battle of Ypres soon after. We encounter her first on the night in World War II that will haunt her forever, as she relives the pain of loving and losing. Having remained in the town as a widow for the decades between the wars, Harriet does an elderly neighbor the favor of taking over his “fire watching” duties atop the Coventry Cathedral, where men armed with buckets stand ready to protect the historic building in case German bombers bring flames down upon it. Harriet is willing to don this masculine disguise partly because she does not expect the catastrophe that occurs that night, but Humphreys suggests that her disregard for gender norms and her fearlessness contribute to her survival.

On the day in 1919 when Harriet sent her husband off to war, she encountered a young woman, Maeve, sketching the Coventry cathedral and felt an instant camaraderie with her. They talked about meeting the next day, but it never happened. During her fire-watching duty on November 14, 1940, she meets a young man named Jeremy. When the cathedral erupts into flames from a German bomb, they walk through the devastated city together. As they make their way into the countryside, encountering eerie scenes of life interrupted, Harriet and Jeremy develop an intimate bond that reopens the wounds of the past. Ironically, it is this emotional pain that reunites her with Maeve.

Offering us in its final pages a glimpse of the reconstructed and memorialized cathedral, Coventry suggests that the identities of people as well as places depend upon the bittersweet intermingling of past and present. After attending the 1962 reopening ceremony, Harriet sends a postcard to Maeve, who reflects upon the connection they share: “This is what she and Harriet do—pass the memory of that night in November 1940 back and forth between them.”

However, we have a vague sense that there is more to this relationship for Harriet than there is for Maeve. Humphreys’ failure to make sense of what this relationship means for Harriet is the book’s main weakness. One wonders about repressed homosexual desire, but then feels petty for coming to that conclusion. If Coventry were longer, and if Humphreys practiced less narrative restraint, it might be less elegant, but it would probably be a more satisfying read.
***

Kelly Hand grew up in Los Angeles and now lives in Washington, D.C. She recently completed her first novel, Blind Girl's Bluff, a coming-of-age story about a homeschooled fifteen-year-old girl who discovers a passion for painting after her anarchist father suicide bombs a post office, leaving her orphaned and permanently blind. Having revised her novel with the help of a writing group formed with classmates from The Writer's Center, she contributes regularly to the group's collaborative blog, http://www.sixgreatbooks.com/. She has a B.A. in literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz and a Ph.D. in English literature from Indiana University.

Monday Review: The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson

The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson: A Novel


Jerome Charyn
W.W. Norton & Company
348 Pages
Published February 22, 2010
ISBN: 0393068560

Review by Matt Bondurant

I wanted immediately to hate this book. The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson? Really? What’s next, Jane Austen’s Titillating Diary? Edith Wharton Bares All? The cover image, if you haven’t seen it, is a silhouette of a slim, attractive woman in an obvious nineteenth century gown that is see-through, as if we are looking at an x-ray, and we see the sexy poet herself in her frilly, saucy knickers. There should be an outcry. There isn’t.

I am not familiar with the work of Jerome Charyn, in fact I’ve never heard of him before. Michael Chabon, a writer I greatly admire, claims he is “one of the most important fiction writers in America today.” The thing is, the guy can write. From the first pages, the first person of voice of Emily is immediately charming. Young Emily is infatuated with the Caliban-like handyman named Tom, and watches him save a small fawn from deep snow: “But Tom the Handyman keeps the stunned little doe above his head & tosses it into the air as you would a sack. And what seems like an act of consummate cruelty isn’t cruel at all. The little doe unlocks its legs and starts to leap. What a silent ballet before my eyes!” It is an elegant and adeptly rendered scene and I am hooked. But the novel never gets better than that moment.

So much time is devoted to Emily’s doomed and comically redundant love affairs. She falls for several rascals, all of them lovable rogues, dangerous and a bit thorny, each with a heart of gold and a deeply sensitive intellect masked by their cavalier manner. They drink, steal, fight, study philosophy, skulk through the woods in the dark, hang about the railroad depot, and seem to turn up every few years just in time to sweep Emily up after she ends up in the gutter or a tavern. They share endless nicknames: Daisy, Domingo, Kangaroo, Mouse, Enobarbus, Currer, Thief, and trade coy Brontë and Shakespeare references. As her eyes begin to fail, Emily has a tendency to stagger around and pass out in various (nefarious) parts of town. Inevitably one of her suitors/protectors/lost loves shows up to rescue her. More witty banter of the nineteenth century sort ensues: “‘Sir, would you consider marrying me? I am tiny, that is true. But I can cook and mend your socks.’ I heard the lilt of his laugh again. I could tell that I had pleased him. ‘Never,’ he said. ‘Marriage is not a mouse.’”

Nobody would expect or demand the bottom of Emily’s poetic cupboard or to see what currents of air moved the fibers of her soul; that is task beyond the skills of the mortals that presently inhabit the world. No, the truly relevant secrets of Emily Dickinson remain shrouded in snow. But in Charyn’s book there is so little mention of her poetry at all that by halfway through it becomes disconcerting. Emily makes passing references to being struck by “lightning,” which is likely an apt metaphor. But in the first one hundred fifty pages, the word poetry, the craft, her writing, all of it is only mentioned in passing a couple times. In the final thirty or so pages, another lovelorn suitor (this one seduced by her published work) speaks to her of poetry and there are mentions of her famous little bound collections. We get one brief scene that suggests the origin of a Dickinson line when Emily with her failing vision spots her darling thief/lover Tom in the street: “I could not mistake the syllables of his blond hair. And for the first time in this metropolis my lightning struck like an earl. The sounds came to me. That blond Assassin in the sunlight.”

But little else. I can understand why Charyn would want to avoid the topic. In a first person work from the perspective of Emily Dickinson, how could you possibly approach the subject of poetry, much less her poetry? Even as a creative exercise it seems to tempt the old gods. I wouldn’t do it, either. But it seems as if the novel is intended to present Emily as a witty, thoughtful old maid with a few romantic dalliances who also happened to write a few poems in her spare time (though we never see any of it). It speaks of a motive that I thought was already tired and clichéd by this point: Emily Dickinson was a real woman! She wasn’t just an icy recluse living in the attic scratching out poems nobody saw! She fell in love and had feelings, too! Doesn’t everybody know this by now? It is the kind of thing you talk about in your undergraduate survey of poetry class when Dickinson’s time comes up.

It is fair to say that Charyn nailed down a fine approximation of her prose voice, a subtle linguistic portrait that never feels forced or too nineteenth-century. I do not doubt that many will fall in love with Emily’s voice as presented by Charyn, and perhaps experience a strong chord of empathy as she endures her love-trials.

***
Matt Bondurant was born and raised in Alexandria, Virginia, and attended James Madison University where he recieved a B.A. and M.A., and received his PhD from Florida State University, where he was a Kingsbury Fellow. He is a two-time Bread Loaf waiter and staff member, and a Walter E. Dakin Fellow at the Sewanee Writer's Conference. His short fiction has appeared in The New England Review, Gulf Coast Review, The Hawaii Review, Prairie Schooner, and Glimmer Train, among others. He has also published poems in such journals as The Notre Dame Review and Ninth Letter among others. His two novels are The Third Translation and The Wettest County in the World. He currently teaches at the University of Texas-Dallas. Find him online at mattbondurant.com.

Monday Review: Now Write! Nonfiction

Now Write! Nonfiction: Memoir, Journalism, and Creative Nonfiction Exercises from Today’s Best Writers and Teachers

Edited by Sherry Ellis
Tarcher/Penguin
332 Pages
Published December 24, 2009
ISBN: 1585427586
$14.95

Reviewed by Hildie Block

Somewhere between Bird By Bird by Anne Lamott and The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft by John Gardner comes the new Now Write! Nonfiction. While many writers may have moved beyond the support provided in some of the classic workshop books like Bird by Bird – others find the academic writing in Art of Fiction too lofty and far removed from the act of writing. (Who isn’t put off by the idea that The Grapes of Wrath was not destined to be a great book because it used the classic stereotypes of a “bad guy” – instead of making all of the characters complex and well rounded)?

Similar in style to books like Lamott’s Bird By Bird or Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within, Now Write! Nonfiction approaches topics in memoir, journalism and creative nonfiction. The book contains short one to two page chapters about a concept in writing, and then a quick specific exercise to help you explore that concept. The chapters are written by various popular nonfiction writers, like Lee Gutkind, the father of creative nonfiction, Gay Talese, Dinty Moore, and American University MFA professor Myra Sklarew.
This is the second Now Write! – the follow up to the popular Now Write! Fiction, which both do well and have a large following. Both students and instructors alike may find this easy-to-follow book handy to have for workshops and during the time in between. Some topics of interest that are covered: how to turn an experience into a personal essay, starting points for writing (words, evocative images, memories, photographs), and exercises to deepen or liven your story and make it meaningful. Chapter titles include: “Riffing” –which contains a list of words for riffing experiments: “What Was That Like?” “Your First Kitchen,” “Stepping into Photographs,” “The Author as Character,” etc. The over eighty chapters and exercises are split into sections with titles like “Get Writing,” “Characterization,” “Revision” “Truth in Nonfiction,” “Dialogue and Sound,” “Place,” and “Craft.”
***

Hildie S. Block, MA writing, Johns Hopkins. Writing instructor at American and George Washington Universities. She's the coeditor of Not What I Expected: the Unpredictable Road from Womanhood to Motherhood, published in 2007. She's published about 50 short stories in literary magazines like Gargoyle, Cortland Review, The First Line, San Francisco Review, LIterary Mama, Motherverse, The Imperfect Parent, and elsewhere. Her essays have appeared places like PopMatters, In the Fray, Organic Family, and elsewhere. Her blog for writers is http://hildieblog.livejournal.com/. Click here to see Hildie's workshops at The Writer's Center.

Monday Review: Graphic Europe: An Alternative Guide to 31 European Cities

Graphic Europe


Graphic Europe: An Alternative Guide to 31 European Cities
Edited by Ziggy Hanaor
Cicada Books
288 Pages
Published: April 2010
ISBN: 0956205305
 
Reviewed by K.E. Semmel

This post originally appeared on the Art and Literature blog today. Thank you to Art Taylor for allowing me to repost it.
 

Summer Travel
With summer nearly here, it’s time to make your travel plans. If you’re heading to Europe, you can either dust off your overused Fodor’s or your Rick Steves, or you could treat yourself to a new kind of travel guide: Graphic Europe: An Alternative Guide to 31 European Cities.

Your Average Tour Guide, This is Not



The foreword explains: “Graphic Europe is intended to be a beautiful object, but also one that is a usable, functioning travel guide.” By those standards, readers will judge. So you, a judging reader, hold the rough spine in your hands and stare at the cover. There you see 31 city names in 31 different fonts and sizes. Next you flip through the pages slowly, then faster. You see the colors and shapes and images explode before your eyes. Is this a beautiful book? Ja, si, oui, yes—whatever language you choose, this is a gorgeous book. The editor, Ziggy Hanaor, is right about that. But is it usable? If you’d like that answer now, skip down to the subheading below “Places to Eat, Stay, and Drink, etc.” In the interim, I’m going to write about something else.

Authenticity
I don’t really know who Ziggy Hanaor is (a quick web search—I didn’t see her bio anywhere in the book—revealed that she’s the editor of other books, Making Stuff for Kids and Breaking the Mould: New Approaches to Ceramics, among them), but what she’s put together here is a really fun, mold-breaking book. The special touch, she writes in the forward, is that the illustrations by the graphic designers are “a personal interpretation of the cities in which the individual designers live.” It’s that personal touch that’s the very heart of this incredible book—one of the coolest, most original travel guides on Europe I’ve ever seen. If you’re looking for the traditional places found in most common tour guides, I suggest you avoid Graphic Europe. But if you’re game for something altogether different, this is the book for you.

Altogether Different
I’m not a graphic designer, and I realize I don’t have the necessary language to explain why I love the book, but I love and admire beautiful designs, the work of true craftsmen and women. It’s the lines, the color, the fonts, the shapes, the weird angles, the way of seeing something old anew. Fresh images, that’s what I like. Imagine more than 30 of the best designers in Europe coming together to create a mosaic. All each designer had to do was concentrate on his or her own city. And in concentrating on their city they found its pulse, its glowing center, and designed it for the world to see. What’s altogether different about this book is that it flips travel writing on its head, asking the natives of a city to carve the shape of it for others to see.

Places to Eat, Stay, and Drink, etc.
In Graphic Europe you’ll find personalized designs by homegrown artists, native sons and daughters who love their city and want to show it off to the world. But while design tastes vary for each designer—radically and happily—each city is sectioned off very practically with the same simple elements like any good travel guide. In this book they are Places to Stay, Eat, and Drink (bars), plus Shopping, Galleries and Culture, Walks and Architecture, and Events. The result of this structure is a balanced and helpful summation of some of the most interesting things tourists—especially those who are a little hipper—might want to check out next time they’re in Europe. To answer the question of whether Graphic Europe is “a usable, functioning travel guide,” you must know by now that my answer is a resounding jawohl!

Cities
As much as I would love to, I don’t see how I can talk about individual cities. How can I talk about just one? Or two? This is a book you have to hold in your hands and really experience; my words could never approximate the power of seeing it as the art object it truly is. (Luckily for me, since we live in the 21st century you can see exactly what I mean at the book’s Web site right here, and I can avoid clumsily trying to describe it.) But here’s the wonderful thing about this book: There’s something for everyone here. It can simply be a book you love to flip through because it’s just so visually interesting. It can be a book that you look to next time you fly to, say, Riga, because you want to find out what to do there. It can be a combination of the two. No matter how you look at it, this book works. I won’t say it works for everybody all the time, especially for “events,” because the events here are dominated by graphic design events, but it works. On your next trip to Europe you may want to tug along (or put on your e-reader of choice) a traditional tour guide just in case, but Graphic Europe is far and away the one travel guide I would highly recommend to anyone going to Europe, whether for the first or fiftieth time.

Monday Review: Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives

Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives
by Brad Watson
Pub. Date: March 2010
Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Format: Hardcover, 272pp
ISBN-13: 9780393057119

Reviewed by Jason DeYoung

Aliens are adult men estranged from their families. They are also young, lusty women road-tramping. Aliens are women who abandon their lives for their kooky dreams, and they are also strange children who peek in windows from darkened trees or watch you like a feral animal behind pool fences. Aliens are people whose lives ache from isolation or separation from that which they most covet. Or that’s the way it is in Brad Watson’s new book Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives, a solidly built collection of short stories.

By far, the best story in this collection is “Visitation,” a story free of any artificial resolutions. It tells the story of Loomis, who travels every three weeks or so to see his young son who lives in California with his mother. The father and son stay in a run-down motel and make cursory visits to San Diego tourists’ sites, trips that usually lapse into awkward conversations that go nowhere. These visitations seem to prove to Loomis what a terrible parent he is. Their interactions are set against the backdrop of the other motel customers—the uncouth, “Gypsy” couple who scream and seemingly abuse their children.

Other stories are filled with the same kind of sadness, but often Watson finds the humor within. “Vacuum” is told from the perspective of three young brothers who scheme to make their mother happy as she goes through the first painful stages of divorce. But they’re young, clueless boys, and their schemes are marked with missteps and odd outcomes. In “Are You Mister Lonelee?,” the narrator struggles with what he calls the death of his wife, but in reality she has run off to join Majestic 12, a kind of hybrid art collective/biker gang.

These stories also take risks in their narrative form. In the novella-length title story, Watson coddles the reader for nearly twenty pages with a story about teen pregnancy before unexpectedly dropping in the book’s only actual appearance of visitors from outer space—or at least they claim to be. At this point, the story ceases its banal teen pregnancy narrative to explore much more interesting territory. And “Ordinary Monsters,” the most daring piece in the book, is not a story per se but a collection of short-shorts about odd events—a woman discovers a group of gorillas in her woods, an elderly couple sips scotch as their plane shears apart, a pack of wild pigs are seemingly possessed by the spirits of their human hunters.

There’s much to like in this collection—poetic prose, top-notch storytelling. Watson looks upon the weird and the ordinary with the same artistic eye that made his first collection, Last Days of the Dog-Men, so good. But in the end we still know these characters, these aliens, as Watson writes in the coda to “Ordinary Monsters”: “We were all just normal people, before we changed. Pretty much locked into our lives.”
***

Jason DeYoung’s fiction has appeared most recently in Painted Bride Quarterly, Gargoyle, and Harpur Palete.

Review Monday: Sudden Fiction Latino: Short-Short Stories from the United States and Latin America

Sudden Fiction Latino: Short-Short Stories from the United States and Latin America
Edited by Robert Shapard, James Thomas and Ray Gonzalez
W.W. Norton
March 2010
ISBN: 039333645X
Review by Tara Laskowski

It is no surprise to readers of literature that short-shorts, or flash fiction, can pack as much punch in their brevity as the longest of novels. Sudden Fiction Latino is a collection of these short-shorts, featuring writers from the United States and Latin America. It includes more than 60 stories, all 1500 words or less, by established writers and newcomers.

Here you’ll find treats by authors who you may have only read in longer forms, such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Isabel Allende and Junot Diaz, alongside up-and-coming authors such as Luna Calderon and Andrea Saenz.

Flash fiction has surged in popularity lately, with several well-established publications (many online) dedicated exclusively to the form — whether the 1,000-word limit story you’ll find at journals like Wigleaf, or “twitter-fiction” (140 characters or less) at places like Nanoism. In this collection, you find that same kind of diversity—everything from magical realism to a striking reality, traditional storytelling to abstract mystery.

In Dagoberto Gilb's "Shout," for example, we get a gritty glimpse into the life of a migrant worker and his struggle to support an ever-growing family: "She was struggling getting dinner together, the boys were loud and complaining about being hungry, and well into the fifth beer, as he sat near the bright color and ever-happy tingle of the TV set, his back stiffening up, he snapped." Another story, "Miss Clairol" by Helena Maria Viramontes, tackles the reality of a 10-year-old's world growing up with a single mom still on the prowl. "The only way Champ knows her mother's true hair color is by her roots which, like death, inevitably rise to the truth."

Both of those writers are based in the United States, but some of the stories from outside the States bring a playfulness of language and realism to them that stand out. Mexico's Socorro Venegas gives us "Johnny Depp," the story of a man without a shadow who believes he is a movie star. Of course, Gabriel Garcia Marquez doesn’t disappoint in “Light is Like Water,” where his mastery of magical realism comes alive in a wonderful bite-sized story about two boys who go sailing on a river of light in their apartment. And Argentinian writer Raul Brasca's micro-story "The Test" reads like a fairy tale. Here are the opening sentences: "'Only when it is cut down will you have my daughter,' the sorcerer said. The lumberjack looked at the tree's slender stem with a self-satisfied smile."

Some of the best stories deal with what happens when Latino culture clashes with white culture. In "The White Girl" by Luis Alberto Urrea, a graffiti artist comes across a banged-up car in which a girl died, finds her bracelet, and can't get her out of his head. There's also the really clever "Day Ah Dallas Mare Toes" by Luna Calderon, where a young girl tries to understand the way her teacher perceives her heritage and the way her own family deals with honesty and love. This last, in particular, has such a delightfully poignant voice it immediately draws you in and keeps on running, as in when the narrator says, "Miss Wilson said that we had to build an altar for a deceased relative because it's Dia de los Muertos next week. 'Cept she said, 'Day Ah Dallas Mare Toes.' Cici Ramirez and I cracked up, but not loud. We both pretend like we don't speak Spanish. But we do, and the way Miss Wilson said it was hecka stupid."

These stories, as a whole, create a rich, vibrant conversation with colorful characters that the reader may have never met before. The illegal immigrant. A homeless man on the street corner. A woman who never wears clothes. The gangster. The result is wonderful—a collection of writing that continues to surprise and has something for everyone.
***

Tara Laskowski was the 2009 Kathy Fish Fellow and writer-in-residence at the flash fiction journal SmokeLong Quarterly, and is now a member of their editorial staff. She earned an MFA from George Mason University and works as a media relations manager and social media coordinator for the university. Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in numerous publications online and print. Her story "Ode to the Double-Crossed Lackey in 'Thunderball'" was nominated for Dzanc's Best of the Web 2010. She can be found online at http://www.taralaskowski.com/.

Monday Review: The Millionaires by Inman Majors

The Millionaires

by Inman Majors
WW Norton, 2009
480 pages
ISBN:



Reviewed by Kate Petersen

Even if the book jacket didn’t proclaim this a southern Great Gatsby, it doesn’t take a reader long to see that in his third novel, The Millionaires, Inman Majors is invoking that cautionary tale of what sudden money can do to you. “You can have old money, and you can have no money, but you damn sure can’t have new money,” quips a character early on, and when Majors takes us to the gates of the inevitable party, and the “great house glows like a tiara to greet guests who ride up the long and curving drive,” you can’t help but think: Gatsby.

The Millionaires follows brothers Roland and J.T. Cole, hardscrabble country boys born to a dry-goodsman-turned-banker who establish a banking empire in the fictitious town of Glennville, in eastern Tennessee. The novel spans Roland’s 1978 gubernatorial campaign, the brother’s ultimately successful bid to bring the 1983 World’s Fair to Glennville, and the rise of their banking empire against the backdrop of the U.S. savings and loan crisis. To run their campaign, the Cole brothers hire Vanderbilt golden boy and veteran politico Mike Teague, who’s connected in Nashville and provides the establishment credentials the backcountry brothers lack. Majors has created a big, believable world here.

But beyond the familiar plot points of a new-money fable, want—the centrifugal force at the heart of Gatsby and other American class novels—is largely absent here. One never doubts that the brothers want the Expo to happen, and for it to be a success, but it’s never clear whether they want it to go because it’s good for business, for the sake of the win, or to prove something to someone.

Late in the novel, Roland tells Teague during a nighttime tennis match that seeing his father “getting the high hat” from city bankers rubbed him the wrong way as a young man. But as a motive, this seems too dilute to support the empire it inspired. There are scenes that suggest Roland wants to get back to the land where he was raised, and that J.T. yearns for the simple appraisals of boyhood [“his father knew they wouldn’t always do their best [but] that he would love them anyway”], but these scenes seem more diversions from the brothers’ political and business escapades than their fuel.

Majors has crafted a world that is all ambition but very little want, save the prolific affairs the men engage in. And even there, Majors undercuts any allowance for real desire. When J.T. muses that the only reason he could cheat on his wife whom he loved and respected “came down to an undue fondness for strange pussy,” Majors seems to say: this isn’t desire, this is the fast lane. And Teague’s old affair with Valerie, a power-player in Nashville’s political circles, is explained by her ability to let him play a Fallen Man when they first took up. But if this was want, it’s historical, and like ruins, we are made to guess.

The women here, mainly wives and mistresses, are a spirited bunch, undifferentiated in their agreement that life is easier for their men. Inasmuch as they have desire, it is a reflexive one: a desire to get back to the time they were the most wanted thing. None of them are anymore, not even Teague’s “Cool Customer” Valerie. The Cole’s mother and sister are interesting peripheral characters, but Majors never really seems to find a place for them beyond humanizing the swindling duo.

Perhaps because the story is such a straightforward one—ambition which o’erleaps itself—Major’s near-constant shift in point of view end up feeling more vertigo than verity. Moving often between characters’ vantages, Majors sweeps frequently into a too-formal omniscience (think the overly-basso voiceover in certain romantic comedies): “Setting, yes, setting and a quick update. For time has passed like invisible ink into air.” Within a single scene, that omniscience—“Now the eye did not know where to go”— would tilt to the second person—“You walk in a crowd”—only to slip back into limited third in the next paragraph.

This ever-shifting point of view, coupled with Major’s experimental use of scene formats (studio format of a screenplay, subheads, and an unrhymed poem with line breaks) make a reader feel that neither she nor the characters on the page are to be completely trusted with the story. Like the hand in the dollhouse, you’re never allowed to forget for very long that Majors is setting the scene for you.

And that’s a shame, because these characters (bank fraud aside) should be trusted. They are intelligent and well-articulated people, especially Teague, whose loyalties and sensibilities made this reader sorry every time the narrative moved away from his limited-third charm.

But despite these weaknesses, Majors well-shaped plot and quick dialogue keep the reader engaged. His prose is lyric, luminous at times, and when he isn’t telling us what to look at, Majors can make us nostalgic for memories that aren’t even ours, the way a football game on an afternoon in early fall makes the men “feel a kind of happy longing, loose-limbed and prodigal, hand to wallet more readily than usual, memory and moment merged as nearly to perfection as this life allows.”

***

Kate Petersen’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Iowa Review, The Pinch, Brevity, The Collagist, Quarterly West, Phoebe, Pearl, Best of the Web 2009, and The Fourth Genre: Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction. She lives and works in Boston at a nonprofit organization working on health care reform, and writes for Postscript and Health Policy Hub.

Monday Review: Monika Fagerholm's The American Girl

The American Girl
by Monika Fagerholm
Other Press
Released February 2010
507 pages


Reviewed by Kyle Semmel

In recent years, Scandinavian writers have provided readers around the globe with some interesting novels—novels that, to the overwhelming delight of their publishers, also happen to sell tons of books. Names like Per Petterson (Norway), Henning Mankell (Sweden), and Stieg Larsson (Sweden) come to mind. Go to Stockholm and you can even take a tour of Larsson's "fictional" city. But with the booming worldwide popularity of especially Mankell's and Larsson's detective fiction, the question arises: Is there room for other, less traditional Scandinavian voices to break through in the United States?

That's a question Finnish author Monika Fagerholm's newly released novel The American Girl may soon answer. Widely acclaimed in Europe, Fagerholm, who is part of the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland, is not yet a household name in the United States. Though her novel Wonderful Women by the Sea (1997) was published in the U.S. and was even shortlisted for the prestigious International IMPAC Literary Award, it's The American Girl and next year's sequel, The End of the Glitter Scene (which has been nominated for Scandinavia's most important literary award, the Nordic Council Literature Prize, and will also be published in English by Other Press), that may truly bring her widespread American recognition.

Or not.

Like many popular Scandinavian novels to reach these shores, The American Girl uses some elements of the mystery genre in its genetic coding. But let me be clear at the outset: this is a book that defies convention and is difficult to categorize. If you think you're picking up a quick, easy beach read—if you think you're picking up a novel modeled on Mankell—well, you're absolutely, definitely not.

At the book's start, the American girl, Eddie de Wire, has drowned in a marsh in the "district," a region near Helsinki populated with some fairly strange, insular characters, and Eddie rapidly becomes part of local lore. Enter Sandra Wärn, Sandra's father—referred to as the Islander—and Sandra's mother, Lorelei Lindberg. They move into the large, mysterious house the Islander builds for Lorelei in the district—"the house in the darker part of the woods." One day Sandra finds a lone girl, Doris Flinkenberg, sleeping at the bottom of their empty swimming pool. Like Sandra, Doris is an odd girl with a troubled past, and Sandra knows that it was "the right time for the first meeting, one of the most important meetings in Sandra's entire life."

This meeting marks the beginning of the girls' friendship--a friendship that serves as the driving force of the novel. Though The American Girl toggles back and forth between characters and scenes—and does so in a way that will challenge you at times—the novel is, ultimately, their story. They are smart, imaginative girls attracted to solving the mystery surrounding Eddie de Wire's death, and together they form a deep bond that is only severed by a tragedy involving one of the girls.

The American Girl is, at its core, not a mystery but a coming-of-age story, a kind of YA novel for grownups, combining the breathless immediacy of young adult literature with the darker knowledge of adulthood you find in, say, the best of Joyce Carol Oates' novels. To be sure, this book is decidedly not a young adult novel. Far from it. It is a sprawling, slowly unraveling narrative that would probably be a slog for young readers. For adults, however, there's much to appreciate. But it remains to be seen if it can generate the kind of hyper-buzz that recent Scandinavian novels have generated here. Still, Monika Fagerholm's is a unique voice that deserves a wider readership.

And with translator Katarina E. Tucker, a past winner of the American-Scandinavian Foundation Translation Prize, her work gets a loving and faithful touch. American readers who prize the pleasure in a good novel told slowly, who chew thoughtfully on the language and the structure of stories told unconventionally, may find in The American Girl a rare treat—to be continued next year in the sequel.
***

Kyle Semmel is the publications and communications manager of The Writer's Center and administrator of First Person Plural. In addition to his work at TWC, he is a writer and translator (under the name K.E. Semmel) whose work has appeared in Ontario Review, The Washington Post, Aufgabe, The Brooklyn Review, The Bitter Oleander, Redivider, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere. His translation of Jytte Borberg's classic Danish story "Englene" will soon appear as "Angels" in The New Renaissance. His interview with internationally acclaimed poet Pia Tafdrup is in the current issue of World Literature Today. For his translations of Simon Fruelund’s fiction, he received a translation grant from the Danish Arts Council.

Monday Review: Towers of Gold

Towers of Gold: How One Jewish Immigrant Named Isaias Hellman Created California

By Frances Dinkelspiel
376 pages (paperback)
St. Martin’s Griffin, New York
$16.99
Published January 2010

Reviewed by Linda Singer

With sumptuous description and meticulous detail, Frances Dinkelspiel traces the exciting history of California through the biography of her great-great grandfather, Isaias Hellman. Born in Reckendorf, Bavaria in 1842, Isaias’s multi-layered life allows us a close view of the pioneers whose skilled determination and personal risk-taking were critical to the early development and formative years of the State of California.

Because they are Jews, Isaias and his younger brother Herman leave Reckendorf seeking refuge from European persecution, first in Los Angeles and later in San Francisco, where they find comfort and safety in places where no attention is given to religion. Both brothers become large benefactors to synagogues in northern and southern California and continue throughout their lives to be socially, economically, and politically involved organizing and acting as leaders of these newly founded Jewish communities.

Between the years 1859 when a penniless Isaias Hellman arrives in Los Angeles and 1910 when he becomes, as Dinkelspiel puts it, “a major investor and promoter of at least eight industries... banking, transportation, education, land development, water, electricity, oil, and wine...,” Isaias amasses a fortune worth approximately $38 billion in today’s currency. The intricacies of his numerous business dealings and the diversity of his friends and financial partners leaves one’s head reeling.

Personal as well as public image was very important to Isaias Hellman. More importantly, he was a family man with high principles and enormous integrity. Numerous times, and often at serious personal risk, he stood up to his foes as well as his friends to stabilize a vulnerable infant economy. Repeatedly he contributed huge sums of his own fortune to bolster, improve, protect, and grow California’s economy while mobilizing his peers to do likewise.

How monumental the task undertaken by Dinkelspiel to assemble overwhelming amounts of data accumulated from stacks of letters, diaries, and cartons to reconstruct this larger than life man.

At times it is a bit difficult to keep all the “players” straight. Their vast fortunes, complex business transactions, frequently changing personal interactions, and alliances are nearly impossible to grasp and hold onto as one weaves through the very fabric of early California politics and economics. Nonetheless, this is an exceptionally well-documented and eloquently written biography of a key figure in the history of the state; a superb read, especially if California is near and dear to your heart.

Find the book here.

Monday Review: Pull Up a “dandy plastic chaise lounge,” and Don’t Mind the Dozing Cat

Modern History: Prose Poems 1987-2007
by Christopher Buckley.
Tupelo Press, (2008), 99 pp. $16.95
Reviewed by Catherine Keefe


If each book has a corresponding wine varietal, then Christopher Buckley’s Modern History: Prose Poems 1987-2007 is an Old Vine Zinfandel, a nuanced and intense California delicacy produced from the sparse fruit of aged gnarled vines.

Modern History, Buckley’s 16th book of poetry, begins with bold tones. “No one says I look 55,” then blossoms in little bursts on the tongue like “pear-colored afternoons, in the pepper / scented mists of eucalyptus,” finally mellowing on the palate, “We have our images of ourselves, like the full gold moon floating / on the surface of the sea.” Its substance is clear from the opening, “Eternity (being a condensed spiritual and aesthetic biography).”

What if, on the practical side, the universe—and so time-space—

does curve back on itself like a huge quesadilla? We’re going nowhere.

Buckley’s triad of reflections, queries, and elegies is scented and scored by surf, fog, “umber hills,” and “yucca blooms.” It moves forward while simultaneously turning back on itself, as if the poet peers into the elongated rearview mirror of a “metallic-green ’58 Chevy bellowing up East Valley Road,” his own reflection superimposed upon the receding landscape.

This morning, I’m taking time off from the world to
be in it, to turn back—in star time—an instant, to 50 years ago when
my mother took me after a nap out to the free, green republic of the
park, from our turquoise stucco apartment...

I’m not calling Buckley an old poet. “Turning 59” would argue chronologically against that. But in Modern History, Buckley considers his legacy within the universe and Poetry, “write something someone will want to read before they die,” while taunting a lifetime of studies. “What earthly good is any theory, all of it so hypothetically referential.” Mortality roars.

The only way to the proof is through the EXIT—like all the principals at the end of Hamlet strewn across the bloody stage—an outcome that will not in the short run advance your station in life—all the physics at work, visibly and invisibly, strategically opposed to your extended stay on this mortal coil.

Modern History is Buckley’s quest for a place within “the incomprehensible all about us,” filtered through time and memory with a coda of uncertainty. But then again, it’s as much about the ubiquity of Brylcreem and Duck-Tails on postwar American male teens, the pleasures of surfing, Santa Barbara, stars, academia’s tedium, Pythagoras, and logic meditations.

Our unsanctified bodies, long past their sell-by dates, will flake away
like chalk across the blackboard, working through their numerators or
denominators, accounts overdue—dry as the dozen magnolia leaves
scuttling across the patio like crabs.

Buckley asks straight out, “Outside of Time, will poems matter?”

After reading Modern History, one can answer “yes,” and accept “the blue and silver stars pasted on my stiff collar” for getting it right. The true gravitas of “words whose sum total equaled beauty” is the vintage of the poet who understands that “God’s not sitting in the back room waiting for us to produce another theory.”
***

Catherine Keefe teaches at Chapman University in Orange, CA. She is the editor of the soon-to-be-lauched journal dirtcakes. Check back with First Person Plural on Friday as she discusses the journal.

Monday Review: Transition by Iain Banks

Transition
by Iain Banks
Orbit (U.S)
ISBN:9780316071987

Pages:416

Reviewed by Brenda Clough

Opening a novel for the first time is like getting into an unfamiliar car. You're going to be spending some time here. Are the seats comfortable? Is the engine going to turn over and run smoothly?

In this analogy, Transition by Iain M. Banks is a high-end Porsche. This is not your father's Oldsmobile! You are sitting behind the wheel of a powerful and sophisticated vehicle, but it is not a cushy ride.

You have to pay attention to get the full benefit out of Transition. Multiple viewpoints, hops through time and space, a complex plot delineated by unreliable narrators -- it takes a little while to get used to the fast, challenging ride. But this baby was built by a master artificer. Banks never loses control of his story, a convoluted account of intrigue and betrayal among interdimensional travelers in an infinity of alternate Earths. And wow, there's a powerful imaginative engine under the hood.

The pure virtuosity of the novel makes it less accessible. This work was not written for newcomers to the science fiction genre, and is not suitable for younger readers (if it were a movie it would definitely be R rated, shading towards X). But if you can see what the writer is doing, it really is a pleasure to watch the whole thing come together. If you are an experienced driver and there are no radar traps, sometimes a Porsche is the perfect vehicle.

Brenda Clough has written seven novels, including her most recent, Doors of Death and Life. Her short stories have been published in numerous magazines, including Analog SF Magazine and the anthology Starlight 3. Other work has appeared in SF Age, Aboriginal, Marion Zimmer Bradley Magazine, and many anthologies. She was a finalist for both the Hugo Award and Nebula Award in 2002. Her next workshop at The Writer's Center is Writing Science Fiction & Fantasy in February. Find her on the web here.

Monday Review: James Ellroy's Blood's a Rover

This SATURDAY, James Ellroy will read at The Writer's Center. If you're planning on coming, remember that the reading starts at 7p.m. This is a pretty hot event, so you might want to consider registering early, right here. Seats are limited. Here's a special, extra-long Monday review/essay to get us properly juiced.


Blood’s A Rover by James Ellroy
Alfred A. Knopf
Reviewed Ryan Sparks





It’s not the size of the head of a sledgehammer that gives it its weight and danger; it’s the mass. All those individual molecules forged together tight and inseparable and heavy. The same goes for James Ellroy’s sentences. And Blood’s a Rover, his latest novel and the final volume of his Underworld U.S.A. trilogy, is a heavy mother full of those tiny, elemental sentences. And after writing a couple million of them over his career, he’s more than mastered the effect.

In Blood’s a Rover, as in his other recent books, it’s almost a necessity to move the action along so fast, to pronounce so much detail with so few syllables: Ellroy’s scope is massive. The novel careens through four of the most volatile years in American history, 1968-1972: the end of the birth pangs of revolt and protest, the last gasp for automatic respect for authority, the first test drive of the new American Identity. Those sentences need to hustle.

Ellroy long ago proved that he had the balls to recast the noir novel as something beefier, sexier, and headier than anyone thought possible, and now, with the completion of this trilogy, he’s brought that same fearlessness to historical fiction. The language is racist and racy, which always seemed to fit his fifties-era gumshoe novels, but seems to be toeing the line in a book that is preoccupied with the black uprising in America and black subjugation in Haiti. Almost every racial epithet for blacks and Hispanics makes a cameo somewhere in the book, and almost always from the narrator, not just a character using the ubiquitous parlance of the times.

But for Ellroy, being sensitive to overt racism is our problem, not his. Neither is his firm denial to assign Right and Wrong labels on the characters he takes seriously, whether they’re Communists, exiles, right-wing toadies, or perverts. His take on historical fiction isn’t—like so many others who make their living at it—to conceive a likeable hero and buff him with a modern polish who tut-tuts through period pieces and affirms our contemporary separation from outdated prejudices. Ellroy knows that today is not so different from yesterday, that White Fear is running as hot as it ever was and we just play it closer to the vest. Ellroy knows political ideologies are paper masks for our irrational emotions. Ellroy knows that history would prefer to be uncategorized and unbridled, so he tells it like it was.

Ellroy brings in two minor characters to chronicle their own difficulties in jiving their personal desires with what is expected of them from the groups they serve. Marshall Bowen, a black police officer recruited by Dwight Holly and the FBI to infiltrate and discredit a Black Panther-like group, takes turns working for and against The Man as well as running toward and diverging from black stereotypes. Karen Sifakis, a hard-left activist without the guts for human collateral damage struggles magnificently as Dwight Holly’s mistress. Karen and Dwight take turns leading a tango of political subversion and diversion. Ellroy recreates these two characters’ journals, giving us further license to peep and pry into the conflicted psyches of the era’s population. Their diary entries are always a great breather from the mainline bop of the rest of the book, and provide an alternative to the willful motives of all the hard white men who have otherwise dominated the entire trilogy.

Ellroy is an old man now, and he is wiser and craftier than ever. Blood’s a Rover, like each of his last six novels, contains its own lifelike maze, something that tunnels dark and dirty, overwrought with dead ends and tough choices. Ellroy invites you to mourn the ones that die in search of an exit and reminds you that the survivors are not always the lucky ones. And while it sometimes seems that the mad arena of convergence and complexity is what occupies Ellroy, what he’s boastful of, the true follower of his logic knows that that’s not the case.

What Ellroy revels in are the moments when two of his characters meet at the corners sprinting from separate chambers and the deception, the horror, or the confessions they share. The Old Man knows greed and lust, but he prefers heartache and sacrifice. The Old Man seduces us with pulp but then keeps us in bed until morning with the substance. We don’t read Ellroy for the chase or the blood or the shock. Any lech with a typewriter can give you that. We read him because he’s the only one doing what he does. And now that he’s finished with the flash and trash of the sixties, it’s only a matter of time before he sets his sights on some other sinister age and winds up with that sledgehammer for another swing at greatness.
***

Ryan Sparks is an American writer working out of New Orleans. His rhythm-based work appears frequently on the Santa Fe Writers Project Journal, www.sfwp.org.

For more Ellroy information, check out this interview with Ellroy by member Art Taylor (who interviewed Ellroy for the fall Carousel). Or check out the Washington Post's review here.

Monday Review: E.F Benson's "The Room in the Tower"

Edward Frederick Benson (1867-1940) was a prolific English author of more than 100 books (including 70 works of fiction). Largely forgotten today in the United States, he is perhaps best known in the UK for his Mapp and Lucia novels about life in the fictional city of Tilling. Originally published in the 1930s, these books were later resurrected and formed the basis of popular 1980s film adaptations on the BBC. During the course of his career, Benson—the son of the Archbishop of Canterbury—nurtured an interest in the supernatural; he published more than fifty “spook” stories, many of which are considered classics in the genre.

Among Benson’s classic ghost stories is “The Room in the Tower.” Published in 1912, this frame tale involves an unnamed narrator who is haunted by a recurring dream that ultimately proves all too terribly true. In it, the narrator finds himself “set down at the door of a big red-brick house” and then sits to tea with the gloomy family of a schoolmate named Jack Stone. Each time the dream recurs, it ends with the mother, Julia Stone, announcing to him: “Jack will show you your room: I have given you the room in the tower.”

That room in the tower, it’s easy to surmise, is where you don’t want to be lodged for the night. It’s a predictable outcome; long before we reach the end we know the dream will one day be played out in the narrator’s life. But this is not the kind of ghost story you can measure the creep value of by the shocks of its plot twists. Instead it’s in the slow, deliberate way in which the author delays your inevitable trip into the room in the tower—and in the ghoulish thing you find lurking there.

-reviewed by Kyle Semmel