Omega Woman: Marlen Haushofer's THE WALL

[Somehow, the full version of this, which was posted, got replaced by an earlier version. Urgh.]

I knew nothing of this novel till I saw the trailer for the film:

http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/independent/thewall/

Published in 1962, The Wall is the only work of Austrian writer Marlen Haushofer's to have been translated into English. It's unrelenting.

The story's initiating event, established in the first pages of the book as it's established in the first moments of the trailer, comes when a woman visiting friends in the Austrian countryside awakes in the morning to find the friends have not returned and a transparent wall has blocked the road. This wall, after some investigation, seems to have no end, and every form of animal life on the far side has frozen in place, dead.

That's it. Our protagonist quickly sizes up her situation and sets to preparing for an uncertain period in which she must provide food and other necessities for herself, the dog and cat who live on the property, and a single female cow. Other animals live on this side of the wall, but they are non-actors, prey, or predators in relation to this small family circle. In Robinson Crusoe–fashion, the narrator takes the contents of her own diary and turns it into a reconstructed narrative of survival, recounting everything from haymaking to beangrowing to the illnesses that afflict the tiny group. Interspersed throughout, and integrated beautifully into the tone of tense description and observation, are more philosophical thoughts prompted by the terrible isolation, thoughts honed more sharply because they come from a point after certain sad events which the narrator mentions often, though she doesn't encounter them directly till near the end.

What is a human without other humans? What is a human without something to care for, some project to engage in? And, she wonders, what does it mean to be human if humans are the cause of the wall? Is this what we do, destroy one another out of our confusion?

Though the plot is little more than a succession of days and minor events, the profound isolation of the character lends to every moment a vividness, a clarity the narrator recognizes as missing from her former life of time and tasks, and this pulls the narrative along, that and a sense of unease about such a depopulated world. She is now dedicated to that which is necessary, but also acutely aware of what is beautiful, what touches her, and what endures after the last human observer is gone. There is an arc to the narrative, both dramatic and intellectual, so the work does have more shape than my description might suggest, and it's more riveting than the reader might expect.

That Flem: Faulkner's THE HAMLET

As a novel, Faulkner's The Hamlet is something of a cobbled-together affair, built in part of some free-standing stories, but it's also expansive about elements that don't seem central to whatever the larger plot might be, thus confounding those looking for a novelistic experience. Nevertheless, there's a narrative arc at work, a moral trajectory that tracks an immoral trajectory, the progress of Flem Snopes in taking what he will from the people of Frenchman's Bend.

I read this novel during my freshman year in college for a course in 20th-century American literature, my prior reading of Faulkner having included things I'd loved ("The Bear," the long version) and a novel I'd failed to get through (The Sound and the Fury). I knew of the other two novels in the trilogy (The Town and The Mansion), but until recently, I didn't own both of those. Now that I do, I though I'd try the entire "Snopes sequence."

I recalled only three moments from The Hamlet: a teacher who has developed a terrible crush on a student puts his face to her vacated classroom seat; a mentally retarded man is observed in an indelicate situation with his one true love, a cow; and Flem Snopes, in response to something done by Ratliff, the sewing machine salesman, spits on the ground. The grotesque sexuality aside, the gesture by Snopes summed up the novel for me: Snopes did what he would, brushing aside anyone who got in his way.

Rereading the novel, I find Snopes's evil to be less direct than I remembered. He is rapacious, but like a force of nature. He doesn't run wild, unlike the wild horses he unloads on the town through an intermediary; he also doesn't possess the kind of seductive charisma as Eula, the nymphet who draws men the way a magnet draws filings. Rather, he is smart and methodical, though never overtly so. He brings to the town an absurd and never-ending series of relatives—even Ratliff, the moral center of the book, can't keep track of them, which means the reader is also at a loss—and they seem more an expression of the vegetative advance of his family rather than expressions of his will. They often complicate matters for him, in fact. Yet Flem pushes onward, working hard at what job he aims to do yet also possessing a kind of effortlessness that never reveals how hard he's actually working and how far ahead he has planned.

Snopes doesn't intend ill toward anyone, but that's why his brand of evil is so distressing: there's no motive except acquisition. Bad things will happen to people, but Snopes hardly sees the people except as means to his ends, and the ends constantly shift beyond what anyone might expect—as indeed there can be no "end" to acquisitiveness.

Faulkner gives us some of his finest writing, and some of his finest comic writing. The chapter describing the beautiful, vacant, disturbingly voluptuous Eula, daughter of the prosperous Varner clan, is worth endless rereadings, as Faulkner rhapsodizes in tones both horrified and elevated, presenting Eula as a jiggling mass of flesh that won't be contained and a kind of goddess. Naturally, once she's found pregnant and, thus, somewhat damaged good, she ends up with Snopes. Other astonishing scenes include sale and escape of the wild horses (Faulkner slowing down the action, accelerating it, reversing it—whatever he needs to do to capture the terrific and baffling violence); a murder and its aftermath, as the murderer can't seem to properly dispose of the body or the weapon; and the loving pursuit and abduction of the cow (another love goddess) over many miles and days.

Through it all run themes of desire without check, the way even the smallest amount of money can bespeak a person's whole self, and the careless violence of both nature and humans. It's a great performance that embraces a variety of narrative styles, a symphonic piece that, though it drops its familiar motifs for long stretches, never forgets, as Snopes never forgets, that the long game is what matters, that everything returns and comes to fruition in the final movement.

Space Seed: THE SPARROW, by Mary Doria Russell

It's a surprise, following my reading to D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, to find another book equally saturated with sex, but here it is, Mary Doria Russell's debut science fiction novel, The Sparrow.

I came to the book because in the wake of a friend asking about it, I saw the book described in terms of the theological question, "Why does God allows evil?" The book does not, in fact, confront that issue. Rather, though the main character, Fr. Emilio Sandoz, lone survivor of a mission to another world, angrily asks about the will of God, the question is misplaced, and I don't know whether the author or the character is more mistaken about the book's point. The long-suffering priest isn't really asking about why God allows suffering; after all, he didn't need to go to Alpha Centauri to pose that question. Instead, he's really asking about his own attempts to divine the will of God, and in the end, his complaint is less about what happened to his friends than about why all these horrors happened to him, making this, ultimately, a book about placing oneself at the center of the universe. I don't think the author realizes this.

The book's premise is that, following a coherent signal of music from another world, the Jesuits launch a mission at breakneck speed, sending a group of colleagues (all tangled in a web of healthy desire) and other specialists toward the source of the interstellar singing. These events are told in the past tense, as, 40 years in the future, when the book begins, we've already seen Fr. Sandoz come back alone and mutilated, the focus of an investigation that's less about why everyone's dead (no one really seems concerned about that) than about the state of affairs in play when the good padre was located by another Earth team.

The book has the strengths and weaknesses of typical genre writing. Characters are clearly delineated with rapid gestures; the plot is briskly explained; there's a nice use, from the beginning, of suspenseful beats; the writing is efficient. The book truly is a page-turner: the prose isn't either clunky or dense enough to slow you down; you definitely want to know what happened next . . . until rather late in the book, when you'd rather not know, because you've already been told that everyone's going to be killed. Even so, Russell shifts perspective from a moment-by-moment approach to one in which events are reconstructed, thus sparing you some of the worst moments, filtering them through the reactions of the characters. Point of view is, in fact, a weak area, or at least an area over which she demonstrates inadequate control. She opts for a multi-person omniscient POV, so we can slip into anyone's thoughts; it's the most difficult POV to pull off, the POV favored by Tolstoy and Morrison, and it requires a deft touch. Russell awkwardly and abruptly drops out of one person into another, nevertheless leaving us in the dark about the thinking of even the main character at many times, so the technique functions to alternately enhance and prohibit understanding.

Since she wants to use suspense to drive the plot, Russell leaves characters unaware of things they ought to notice, things that we notice. It's, again, a standard approach in genre fiction, the withholding of information until it's too late. Some of it works well, but sometimes, you see the seams. The science came across, to this non-scientist, adequately handled, but you have to roll your eyes at the notion that first contact is planned by people who haven't any clue as to what they're doing, the whole thing reminiscent of Reed Richards et al sneaking into the spaceport to steal a rocket ship because they just can't wait. I suppose some analogy to the Jesuit missions among the Native Americans is intended, but, really, those folks went with as much knowledge as possible rather than as little as possible. Once you get past the goofiness of the premise, Russell's on safer ground with human interactions and cultural differences. She's an anthropologist, and this is her territory. Characters are a bit too jokey and casual, dropping way too many current references for my taste; they should be much more terrified than they appear to be. However, Russell's easy way with characters and dialogue does make it easy to connect with most of the people, even when they stay two-dimensional, so their loss hits us hard.

Sex and desire are the source of conflict and the subject of much reflection and outright discussion. The characters are far more forthright in discussing these matters than any humans I know, and, early in the book, it seems that this particular angle is overworked. However, human sexuality is a crucial theme that Russell is working, and though the Jesuit interrogators seem a bit more dense than they need to be, the theme is brought to fruition, resulting in a thoughtful connection of the personal and the cultural.

The book received an extraordinary amount of praise when it came out. I think it does pretty well what a lot of other genre fiction doesn't do well, to wit, approaching its subject in a literate, thoughtful way . . . and without flubbing the third act.

Wild World: Lawrence's LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER

D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover: That was strange.

Everyone knows the story. Lady Chatterley’s husband, Clifford, is paralyzed from the waist down due to blast in the Great War. Though she doesn’t seem to miss the sex, having seen what all the fuss was about in her youth, and she was never that keen on it anyway, she starts looking for someone or something to connect with physically, and after a brief and unsatisfying few romps with a family friend, she catches sight of her estate’s gamekeeper stripped to the waist and splashed with water, and after that, the lady just can’t help herself. Though the story is often remembered as an attraction of opposites or a scandalous bridging of the gap in social class, that’s more in the perception of others than in the facts; in truth, Mellors, though born in the working class, is educated (Mellors often speaks "broad," slipping into his lower-class accent, but he's slumming, doing it partly for effect and partly to comfort himself) and has been an officer, and Lady Chatterley, though of the landed classes, doesn’t wear easily the mantle of her husband’s title and expresses strong sympathy for the workers.

It’s a love story, replete with scenes of explicit sexuality and largely inexplicit sex, but larger crises are at work in the novel than the crisis caused by the affair. WWI has physically and emotionally damaged everyone involved, but Clifford’s inability to either stand or produce children is Lawrence’s way of saying that the entire class structure is hobbled and impotent. Intellectual discussions take place in the Chatterley’s Wragley Hall, but they’re weightless, modern in the worst possible ways (and strangely reminiscent of Brave New World, as these colorless upper-class twits discuss making children in bottles). As for the outer world, industrialization is stripping away whatever was beautiful in England. It’s also causing encroachment on the estates of old, which can no longer survive, and though the loss of these estates is painted in morbid tones, it’s clear that Lawrence doesn’t truly bemoan that world's demise. Sterile, out of step, and inward, the old England has nothing to recommend it, but neither does Lawrence find anything to recommend the world to come, nor the lower classes bound to inhabit it. They have babies, and they’re not a bad sort, but they’ve become unmannered, their lives governed by money (a foul word in this novel) and gossip.

I was often reminded of Orwell’s 1984, which, for all its interest in the politics and psychology of fascism, also has some of Lawrence’s concerns and solutions. Life too sterile? Go off to the woods for a romp among the flowers. Worried about the future? Eventually, this present structure will fade. But Orwell’s characters are all in the Party, making it easy to forget, for much of that novel, that most people are leading rather different lives than the protagonists. “Salvation will come from the proles,” Winston Smith thinks, but Orwell doesn’t tell us much about them, keeping them at arm’s length. Lawrence shows us something of working-class life, and the ability (and marked tendency) of the working classes to reproduce is pushed in the face of Lady Chatterley, who does want a child. And though salvation won’t come from “the proles,” we’re given to understand, in the novel’s strangely melancholy ending, that a return to honest work, and an embrace of some sort of honest relations between the sexes, will at least make life feel meaningful.

As most know, what got the novel in trouble was all the sex. Three pages in, Lawrence is waxing about the female orgasm. You have to sympathize with Lawrence, who wants to write about sex but doesn’t have any literary model to follow. In the early going, he seems to struggle with how to talk about it, even saying “orgasm” and “crisis” in the same sentence as if they were two different things. He often says that Lady Chatterley is moved “in her womb” or “in her bowels” when she feels sexual stirrings. There’s an odd vacillation between bluntness and euphemism. I think, though, that what Lawrence wants to have happen is for the language to become more direct as Lady Chatterley herself comes to embrace a more vivid sexuality than she’s previously known. Thus, though sex enters the story early, the scenes gradually become more explicit and the characters grow more comfortable with the language and with their own bodies. It often reads goofily, but it works better than I initially thought it did.

Further, the book is tonally ragged. It's funnier than I expected. There are sharp exchanges and clever observations, but there are also just silly moments in which you feel Lawrence’s revealing honesty. The characters are hard to picture, as Lawrence’s descriptions seem inconsistent. Characters speak inconsistently, too, allowing Lawrence to vent his spleen about some subject and then, moments later, take it all back. And the book ends without completing what would appear to be its climax, leaving the characters suspended between the choices they’ve just made and the consequences. That follows 40 pages of jumping about in a rushed way that doesn’t fit with the rest of the novel. Perhaps he just wanted to be done, having put everyone though quite enough hell.  

Drop by Drop, History's Weight: Rachel Seiffert's THE DARK ROOM

Though billed as a novel, Rachel Seiffert's The Dark Room is in fact a triptych, each of its three stories examining a different era in Germany's recent history—the early years of WWII, the aftermath of defeat, and modern life—in order to unpack German culpability and guilt. The questions raised by the stories might by applied to any culture which has, at some point, participated in terrors: How does one assign culpability? Is it transmissible? Can it be forgiven? How guilty should any one person feel, regardless of their proximity to the events?

Seiffert provides no direct answers, only questions that lead to other questions. Even when it appears she's about to provide a kind of moral formula, she refuses to yield to any such statement. The book reminded me, in this, of Toni Morrison's Beloved, a novel that confronts American slavery only to conclude, in part, there is no way to successfully confront such horrors, no matter how fine our intentions.

This is not a multigenerational family novel; though we move through time, we're never allowed that kind of continuity. We never see what we might expect, a familiar face from a prior tale. Instead, the book is bound together by its themes and by geography, a kind of moral topography like something out of Dante. The cities send forth their young men, defend their border, receive the Allied bombs, empty of people, endure years of deprivation, and rebuild atop mounds of memories.

Photographs form a motif that binds the tales. "Helmut," the first story, tells of a physically handicapped boy who learns, via a generous employer, the trade of photography. From his childhood documentation of the comings and goings of trains he moves to the documentation of the life of his city, learning how to capture its beauty even as he uses the evidence of his photographs to track the departure of the city's residents. The story's one weakness, though I suppose the author doesn't see it this way, is Helmut's naiveté. I'm fine with the idea that he supports the Führer and spouts his pronouncements, but he fails to truly see how people are being treated even as he's photographing them. It's meant as irony, the camera framing what he sees but also distancing him from his subject, but the execution of the idea strains credulity.

Photographs appear in the second story, "Lore," when young Hannelore, a child of privilege who must guide her siblings to safety in postwar German, joins a crowd of people studying photos from the death camps. Here again, reality is both documented and problematized: Who are these people? Are the photos staged? What possible narrative could they support? The characters themselves, Lore and her family members as well as the young man who joins them in their journey, prompt similar questions: In what context are we to see them? What have they done? What do they deserve? Lore doesn't even understand the context of her own life, though she'll gain some knowledge of it by the end. (This story was adapted for a new film, which is what led me to Seiffert's book.)

After reading that long middle tale, it was hard for me to enter the new reality of the final story, "Micha." (A shifting narrative focus is what led me to stop reading the recent novel The Twelve Tribes of Hattie; though well written and full of vivid characters, the shifts in perspective that created a structure of a linked series of short stories kept me at arms length, and I had to stop reading. Though no characters bind the tales in The Dark Room, Seiffert won me over, three thematically connected stories being more compelling for me than a dozen connected ones.) The third story here provided me with some resistance, Seiffert's drip-by-drip approach to narrative finally feeling too slow, but once the story gets going in earnest, I flew along (perhaps too quickly, the terse but frequent dialogue and repetitious movements of the character allowing for skimming). Micha (Michael) wants to find out whether his grandfather, a member of the Waffen-S.S., participated in atrocities. Here we enter the problem of modern Germany, surely divided between those who want to move on from the past and those who want to remind everyone about it—and Seiffert does not make the morality of the situations simple. In Belarus, in search of "the truth," Micha meets a local man and his wife with their own complex past. Now the camera surfaces again, but what is pictured and what cannot enter that picture bespeak the limits of both vision and forgiveness.

At times, the narrative would have benefited from a shift in pace or some stylistic variation. However, Seiffert's largely direct, moment-by-moment style suits these tales, as one of their subjects is the slow accumulation of detail and where those details lead us, whether we are witness, victim, participant . . . or reader.

Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked, by James Lasdun

Despite the title, and despite the first of this memoir's four sections, James Lasdun's Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked is not solely a tale of obsession and threat. If that's what you're expecting—and the book certainly sets you up for such expectations—you'll be disappointed. What I took to be a digression about D.H. Lawrence in the second section was really an announcement as to the book's true nature. Thus, assays into Lasdun's family history (especially his father), anti-Semitism, Sir Gawain, and the swamp of Israeli political become much of the book, the pursuit via internet by a former (clearly unhinged) female student slipping to the margins. And when Lasdun, mostly known for his (terrific) short fiction, says on more than one occasion that he ought to mention now something he failed to mention before, thus undermining our confidence in this chronology of creepiness, you aren't meant to fault the misleading structure of the book but rather, I think, recognize the Lasdun has taken this awful aspect of his present life and shaped it so it can fruitfully address larger issues.

In truth, we're never allowed to set aside "Nasreen," the former writing student who becomes obsessed with Lasdun, and whose infatuation turns, as such things do when humans become objectified, into bilious hatred. Even when Lasdun shifts to other matters, his aim is to show how Nasreen's endless, invective-filled e-mails become for him a pair of lenses on the world, lenses that he cannot remove. So Lasdun's concern about the amorphous issue of "reputation," his tense reflections on his responses to any attractive woman, his dream-life, and an article he researches on construction of a temple in Jerusalem's Old City—all are altered by Nasreen's narrative about terrorism, rape (both real and metaphorical), and plagiarism.

What comes through is Lasdun's personality. He's certainly naive in the early days of the relationship, though he's no fool; another writer, however, might have made himself seem either more insightful or more the victim. Lasdun, who's English, doesn't react as one imagines most Americans might, with anger and a desire for vengeance. He's a quiet sort who knows the pestering has become a prosecutable assault, but he's more driven by anxiety and dread and an unwarranted hope than the desire to fix the problem.

The story's end reminds me of Anne Sexton's poem "The Awful Rowing Toward God": "This story ends with me still rowing." The attacks, via e-mail, wikipedia, Amazon, and through colleagues, have been dialed back, but they haven't altogether ceased. Lasdun's temperament, though, allows him to see his story as part of a larger history of desire and violence; his intellect, which got him into this mess, allows him to stay sane.

The Enduring Chill: Jan Costin Wagner's ICEMOON

German writer Jan Costin Wagner's novel Das Schwiegen was made into a movie in 2010 (The Silence, German); recently a trailer for the movie popped up, so evidently it's now in release in the States. Made curious by the film, a dark mystery about a missing girl, I sought out Wagner's work at the library and found Icemoon.

This is one of those mystery novels that makes me think I could write mystery novels . . . as long as there's no mystery. Very little actual detective work is done by the Finnish police detective who connects two murders; in fact, he works largely by hunch, often drifting from his work due to his despondency over the death of his young wife. Readers know who the killer is from the outset. There's some mystery as to his motives, but that's not a puzzle that leads to him being caught. If you're looking, then, for a novel of detection, don't look here. This did frustrate me initially, but then I chose to judge the book for what it aimed to be rather than what I'd expected.

The true mystery in this novel is death. Detective Kimmo Joentaa is with his wife when she dies, and he obsesses over both her memory and her last moments. He gets close to death, but can't truly enter the experience. This motif connects him to the killer as well as to other characters. Death is unfathomable and irreversible, and so it frustrates both the intellect and the intentions of every character—even the murderer.

There's much about the novel that reminds me of Swedish writer John Ajvide Lindqvist's vampire novel, Let the Right One In. It's the same cold landscape (though here the daylight is long, as it's summer), the same separation of narrative that tends to isolate the characters, the same tendency to create character and plot threads that feel (and perhaps are) digressive, and even, at one point, the same concrete apartment building, backed by trees and facing a playground. 

The book flies by: The language is spare, the syntax straightforward, the details compressed. Also, it's not as long as it appears, relying on one-sentence paragraphs (a standard suspense-story form) to keep the tale artificially clicking along. 

The book is involving, and its characters linger. The mysteries at the heart of it, though, remained unsolved.

Signifying Nada: THEY LIVE (Carpenter) and THEY LIVE (Lethem)

In a converse of the usual advice, I proclaim: Watch the film, then read the book.

1988's They Live, which seems to beg for a concluding exclamation (in like fashion to the superior 1954 monster flick Them!), is a shaggy John Carpenter construction, a B-movie masquerading as a better B-movie than it turns out to be, a story of an alien invasion that turns out to be not a metaphor or symbol but the underlying truth about class warfare in the '80s.

And then there's Jonathan Lethem's They Live, the first book in the Deep Focus series, a set of books about film written by terrific writers who aren't film critics. Lethem—who loves the movie both in spite of its defects and because of the way the defects themselves entertain you and raise interesting questions—walks you through the film, breaking it into small segments, slowing down for key moments, analyzing oddities of plot and character and concept. It's a pleasure, and the film itself provides fertile ground for some weedy reasoning.

Though aware of the film (I still remember the original ad campaign, and I knew the basic premise that one man can suddenly see that the world has been taken over by "ghouls" who walk among us), I'd never seen a frame of it, and I started reading Lethem's book in the belief that I didn't need to watch the film to appreciate the text. But Lethem's details, and the way he describes his own love for the film, made me seek it out. There it was, in HD glory, on youtube. I thought I would go back and forth between film and book, but Lethem gives away key plot elements (few though there be) before he gets to them, so I watched the rest of the movie in toto, then turned back to the book.

I can't, in this space, comment as fully on the film as Lethem does, but I would like to provide some response to it. The difficult thing to get my head around is that this was made by the guy who did one of my favorite films, The Thing. Though that movie has a few tell-tale moments of awkwardness, mostly in the dialogue, by and large it's tight, professional, and utterly involving. The actors are great, the space feels real, and the threat is believably horrifying. There's a minimalist soundtrack that's effectively haunting. The practical effects remain a hallmark of how to make the fantastic believable in the age before CGI. How did Carpenter go from that to They Live? Certainly the low budget is one factor, and Lethem constantly mentions budget as a means to explain the narrow set of locations for the on-location shoot, the unimpressive "ghoul" makeup, and the lack of acting talent (aside from Keith David (of The Thing fame), who's mostly quite good, and Meg Foster, who is flat and unreadable). But is that valid? Hitchcock intentionally shot Psycho on the cheap, using his TV crew and a smaller budget. Does Psycho look like it was shot by undergrads? No.

Even when They Live is at its smoothest—smart framing of a shot, a nice pan, a seamless use of its one clever effect—it feels off. "Rowdy" Roddy Piper is partly to blame; from the first shot, he is so obviously a person trying to act rather than an actor. (As Lethem comments—or, if he didn't, he thought it—the character's lack of a name, only revealed in the credits as "Nada," suggests not only that he's a blank slate but that Piper's casting is a nod toward a kind of lumpen, amateur-hour verisimilitude.) Other non-actors litter the set, screaming with their very presence, "A friend of somebody's sister!" The script, pseudonymously by Carpenter, is built entirely of leaden lines. The sound is muddy and the editing jumpy. There's one great shot setting up one surprising moment; otherwise, it's like a toss-off TV movie from the '70s. And the story is oddly structured, taking its time in the first half hour, lurching into a shoot-'em-up for a few minutes, retreating into slackness, inserting the longest two-man fight in film history (purportedly; it certainly feels like it), seeming to build toward greater excitement, drifting instead into lazy sci-fi blahness, then ending weakly (and with a sardonic, poke-in-the-eye coda).

Lethem captures all of this and helps you see what's worth discussing about the film. He does it, too, with a minimum of "film language" (diagetic being the one exception; he unhelpfully, for non-film people, defines it in the notes at the back rather than at the time he uses it) and a minimum, too, of mere snarkiness or cleverness. He honestly wants to understand what's compelling about this misbegotten creature, and he wants you to join him on the sofa to talk about it.

I look forward to reading more books in the series. And I look forward to watching that goofy film again sometime with a bunch of friends.

Depths and heights: Robert Olmstead's COAL BLACK HORSE

On the back cover of Robert Olmstead's 2007 Civil War novel, Coal Black Horse, author Richard Ford refers to the book as a "fable." This may seem nitpicky, but I think it's important to challenge that description in order to get at the kind of tale Olmstead has actually told.

Technically, a fable involves anthropomorphized animals. (Orwell labels Animal Farm "a fable," but he's being cheeky, since it's more of an allegory, given its particular historical referents.) This book is no fable, but the use of that term made me wonder whether some other familiar term would fit. The story of a boy who sets out, at his mother's oracular insistence, to fetch his father back from the war, the novel unreels increasingly brutal horrors before our formerly innocent protagonist, who, by the end, has certainly been altered, in ways necessary if not virtuous. Is it a "parable"? Arguably, though a parable ought to contain a moral lesson, and I think Olmstead means to resist anything transparently informative; still, a parable could also be viewed as a story that tells us something about "the way things truly are," so perhaps that'll do. Robie, the young boy, does discover how the world moves and the frailty—physical and moral—of the people who move upon it. I think the book may also be a "fairy tale," for though it lacks supernatural beings, the boy resembles those innocents who set off at the start of a story only to find the world changed from what they thought it to be; additionally, against all reason, the boy (and the titular horse) manage to not get themselves killed, the boy certain early on that he'll live to tell this tale, and the charm that encompasses boy and horse as they journey out and back seems lifted from a story of the fantastic. Fairy tales too, though typically told to the young, often contain no moral beyond "Beware."

It occurs to me, while writing this, that the book may rather intentionally follow the pattern of Dante's descent into hell. Each circle Robie enters, each new encounter, exposes him to some new human horror, and surely the scavengers, both men and beast, moving among the fields of the dead at Gettysburg resemble the demons doing Lucifer's work in the deeper pits of the Inferno. Early on, it becomes evident that Robie is following a downward path in a story that can only get worse as it proceeds. (So when he returns home at the end, still with his guide, is he now in Purgatorio, the next stage of Dante's journey, a place of suffering that is, however, not utterly without hope?)

As with Olmstead's Far Bright Star, which I read in 2009, the novel is densely poetic, most tremendously during times of great violence. This can get confusing, as the complex syntax and use of abstruse language sometimes work against clarity; the result, though, is to slow down the violence, so that no matter how swiftly it comes, the impression is of something momentous and drawn out. Olmstead's vocabulary is rich, and he had me reaching for the dictionary at least a dozen times; he also uses words creatively, constructing adjectives and verbs from other parts of speech. Even so, the book reads smoothly; it's beautiful writing that's carried along, in the manner of Cormac McCarthy, by a narrative voice like God's from the whirlwind . . . or like Lear's into the storm.

The language is rich with nouns, with words having to do with the earth, growing things, parts of horses and human bodies; even as the narrative plunges into the depths of human suffering, the language transcends by refusing to transcend, refusing to leave behind mortal things. The boy's eyes reach upward, too, seeing stars and constellations, watching birds and changing skies, but the boy sees things for what they are and does not see signs of another, better world. The story is a grim one, and the protagonist at times participates in the grimness, but he also works to bring coherence and peace to this shattered world, which is just what Olmstead's writing achieves.

PKDick's "High Castle": Alt-history and motorcycle maintenance

I had to read it. A friend had referenced it in relation to a new short story of mine (he assumed I'd read it), and it's often mentioned as an important book in the history of science fiction . . . and I own it, having just bought the novel last year.

When I'd finished Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle, one place my post-reading ruminations took me was to Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a novel I deeply disliked when I read it and which has not been improved by the fog of memory. Perhaps my own education in philosophy was shoddy, but I didn't think the book did a good job presenting a History of Western Thought, which seemed to be its primary purpose. The bigger problem, though, was that there wasn't much of a story; additionally, the main character didn't do much—he just talked about philosophy, though not in a way I found interesting or particularly coherent. 

Plot and character. If Aristotle is right on this (as he sometimes is), those are the primary elements of a good narrative. (He applied this to tragedy; and he's talking about plays, since novels don't exist yet.) In these two matters, The Man in the High Castle falls woefully short, though I believe I understand its strengths, even if they don't move me to much praise. It's a novel of ideas. The people in the novel talk about ideas, think about those ideas, and act on those ideas. But rather than characters, the people seem like means to advance or consider a concept; and by the end, the concepts have become muddled by the plot itself.

The book is set in a world in which the Axis powers won WWII; following the victory, the Germans and Japanese split the U.S. between them, with the middle of the country and the Mountain States somewhat left to their own devices. The Nazis got overzealous in their efforts to remake Africa, we're told, and turned it to ash. The story takes place in San Francisco and Colorado, the two venues tied together by Frank Frink and his ex-wife, Juliana. 

Dick uses this set-up to explore issues of authenticity and the weight of history, both indirectly and directly. (Perhaps no other writer would have seen these as the issues to explore in this context, and it's possible that the strange-bedfellows pairing of the alternate-history conceit with this particular set of ideas is at the heart of why the novel seems, to me, such a misfire.) Several of the characters are in disguise: a Jew who changed his name (though "Fink" to "Frink" seems a weak effort); a Japanese general assuming an alias; a hired assassin who seems to be a working-class truck driver. There are characters at opposition with themselves: a German who questions everything about being German; a white American who has adopted the manners and speech of the Japanese overlords. People change their hair-color, struggle with their culture, imagine themselves in a fortress, imagine other worlds. Japanese and Americans both consult the I Ching, a Chinese text. (Oddly, there's no mention of a cult of the emperor continuing past the end of the war.) Throughout, people respond variously to a popular book, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, an alternate-history novel (written by "the man in the high castle") that imagines the Axis powers losing WWII—though with an outcome that looks nothing like our own world. (Though the novel is quoted from at length, it's not an especially vivid text.) Characters question the character of their own cultures and judge the other cultures. Japanese collectors hanker after "authentic" Americana even though the provenance for such artifacts is questionable. A man holds a lighter that was owned by FDR—he has the paperwork to prove it—though we know that the paperwork itself is fraudulent.

The ideas are interesting, but they don't cohere into a plot with a satisfying arc or resolution. The conclusion is stiff and unconvincing, and it comes in the last few pages. Seeing that there were only a few pages left, I worried that, like an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, a complicated explanation was going to be shoehorned into a quick final scene. However, Dick instead undercuts the scene, has people act in oddly formal ways, and deflects questions with a final jab at questions of authenticity and reality. 

Stylistically, the book is annoying. Much of the novel consists of characters' reactions and reflections, but Dick almost never allows himself to paraphrase a character's thoughts; instead, we get each character's fragmented running commentary. I can read Joyce and Faulkner; I can handle stream-of-consciousness writing. That's not what this is. This is stream-of-talkativeness, stream-of-blather, stream-of-chattiness. It strikes me as a lazy way for Dick to spew out ideas, letting people ramble on. Some of what they say is interesting, but it often reads as merely erratic nonsense, full of emotions that lack adequate external or internal prompts. The worst examples of these internal narratives come from Robert Childan, the white seller of Americana; Tagomi, his potential client; and Juliana, the one person who manages to reach the man behind the controversial novel. Throughout the book, Japanese characters speak a clipped English, English that often lacks its articles. There are non-idiomatic constructions, novel uses of words, and struggles to say what's meant. While that makes sense, it doesn't make sense that someone's internal narrative would suffer from the same problems. Why is a native Japanese thinking in broken English? Why is Childan, who has adopted this speaking style in order to fit in with his customers, thinking this way? These are grating, amateurish choices. Juliana's internal voice simply falls apart as the character, introduced so solidly, becomes a set of inexplicable choices and reactions.

I flew through the book—initially, because it was involving; later, because one could move through the characters' increasingly redundant or circular internal blather rather rapidly. As the characters—especially Juliana and Tagomi—lost all coherence and became jumpy sets of responses (like something out of a slapdash pulp novel by Van Vogt), the only thing holding my interest was the man behind the book-within-a-book. But then he turned out to be a let-down, also neither compelling nor coherent, a rushed and incomplete aspect of a novel that aimed for great things but that didn't evince the necessary care to reach those great things.

J.F. Powers, Tale Teller

First, my thanks to those who've bought the Kindle app versions of my stories from Asimov's Science Fiction, the bundled "Helping Them Take the Old Man Down" and "Clockworks" and the 99-cent single, "Unearthed." I'm glad to get the stories out to those who missed them the first time around; it's nice, too, to see the (unexpected) surge in purchases for the two older stories. I'd like to hear from readers, so send me a note if you found something you appreciated in the tales. Selling them directly in this way, rather than second-hand, through Asimov's, I feel a greater sense of responsibility toward the "consumers" and hope they feel the expenditure was worth it. If you liked the work, consider providing some comment (or just a thumbs-up) at Amazon; you might even provide a link via Facebook, if you feel so moved. 

So.

Between the draft-with-gaps of two days ago (on my newest short story, "Vox ex Machina") and the complete-if-ragged draft of last night, I felt so put off by the story's opening, I had to read a writer whose style would set me right—not someone with an overwhelming voice that might affect my own, but someone whose constancy in prose reminds you how the basic architecture works. Thus, to J.F. Powers ("The Forks," The Stories of J.F. Powers).

I first came upon Powers in college. It's possible (at a distance of 30 years, the recollection is a muddled palimpsest of images) that my mistaking him for John R. Powers, the Catholic humor writer (Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up?) who became popular in the '70s led to my initial exposure. I think some mention of Powers's novel Morte D'Urban, possibly in Commonweal, the Catholic journal, led me to him. Flannery O'Connor mentions him in her letters. Whatever the originating source, I believe I ended up taking one of his short story collections from the college library as well as Morte D'Urban, which won the National Book Award. Later, I'd read Wheat That Springeth Green, Powers's final work, which I gave as a gift to my pastor.

For someone raised Protestant, Powers presents difficulties: many of his stories concern the mundane happenings in the lives of Catholic priests in their rectories. Think of them as Jane Austen–style tales meant to illuminate the complexities of navigating the social complexities of celibate male life. Catholics can easily picture the setting and the ways priests of a certain era dealt with them and each other; for non-Catholics, much of the cultural and even spiritual subtext is absent. The goal for the characters, rather than marriage, is some firmer grasp or more clear understanding of the status quo. They inhabit a world they think of as unchanging, though really it's a brief period in American Catholic culture. As such, the stories now present the same problem to the current generation of Catholics as they would to non-Catholics: the particularities of the rectory-bound life is, while not completely passed, much altered and of little relevance to Catholic life and thinking.

Ah, but the stories. Even if you don't catch every interpersonal nuance or non-surviving cultural reference, you should be taken in by the strength of the prose in service to detailing how characters see (or fail to see) themselves. It's been too long since I've read Powers, so a generalization based on rereading once story is dangerous. Nevertheless: Where most short stories deal with some sort of movement, by the protagonist, toward a recognition, Powers relies on the recognition being experience by the reader rather than a character. The stories are ways to peel back layers of personality, using moments of gracelessness (rather than grace) to get at something fundamental about a character. The stories are not Catholic in a religious sense, but only in a cultural sense. Secular actions move stories along and are, in the end, all the characters have to show us as we stand in judgment. 

"The Forks" is a good example of this style. A younger priest finds himself under the thumb of the monsignor with whom he shares the rectory. The monsignor is a man of thwarted ambition, a man of judgment and habit who knows how things are to be done. The young priest must decide how far he can push against the older man's proscriptions—and that's about the length and breadth and depth of the tale. The tone of the story is refracted through the younger priest's eyes; it's especially sharp when we're given his back-handed praise of the monsignor:

"Father Eudex could imagine just what kind of bishop Monsignor would be. His reign would be a wise one, excessively so. His mind was made up on everything, excessively so. . . . For him, the dark forest of decisions would not exist; for him, thanks to hours spent in prayer and meditation, the forest would vanish as dry grass before fire, his fire."

The story is a small delight built on an accumulation of small delights. And the confidence of Powers's prose put me in the right place to finish my own story's draft. One or (more likely) two more go-rounds on "Vox ex Machina," then I'll send it to some writer friends for a look-see.

"Unearthed" available on Kindle and for Kindle app

My most recent "Old Man" story is now available via Amazon (for 99 cents!). The story ran in the September 2012 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction.



http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00AW5CDQM

Ungoogleable: Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

First to the weaknesses of Robin Sloan's first novel, all of which are ironic:

For a book about books, there's little sense of what it's like to read a book, and little reading of actual books. Most of the books here, all hardbound tomes, are texts to decipher rather than stories to read.   The contents seem to be irrelevant (I may have missed something here) except insofar as they lead to the next book in a cycle. The one book that, as a story, is important (though you know all along that it will factor into the endgame) only becomes crucial when listened to—and although I know the importance of reading aloud, the experience of listening to a book on tape seems mispraised, and the book being listened to isn't well written enough to even be interesting when read aloud.

Additionally, the writing in this novel is . . . brisk. It does what it needs to do, but there's not a single sentence over which one might linger. The writing is clear, but not worth attention as writing.

Finally, the argument in favor of books and bookstores seems built on their accidents rather than their essence (if I may be so Aristotelian). All of us who love books do, in part, love their appeal to the senses, and all of us who love bookstores have attachments both sensual and nostalgic to the experience of bookstores and the books we purchased there. However, that's not quite the same as arguing in favor of books as books or for the continued existence of bookstores (and Mr. Penumbra's is, for much of the book, ill-supplied with good reading material).

Moving on to what I liked . . .

What the book does well is manifold. Though the writing isn't special—and relies on the kind of clichés of suspense you've seen many times before—Sloan does a great job incorporating the latest language of social and online discourse in a way that sounds natural. This, I think, is a major achievement. One reason Stephen King's narrative voice grates so on me is his self-conscious dropping of brand names and working-class codewords; it's an insistent style that's never felt smooth. Sloan manages to pull off something similar, a style that slides high (though not very high) to low smoothly, sounding contemporary without sounding forced.

Sloan clearly loves both the world of Google and the world of "OK," Old Knowledge, the "facts" that will die if we don't save all the books but also the facts that inevitably die with the passing of any one person. People throughout the novel display incredible skill in searching through the power of Google and the massed computing of many countries, but the human element often trumps this great mechanistic might.

Sloan moves between the real world (the Google campus) and invented facts about the world (a fictional ubiquitous font) with slick cleverness. Characters matter-of-factly describe real-world details that aren't at all true, pulling us into the narrative Sloan wants to tell without letting slip how much of it is fantasy. Well played.

The story itself is something of a poor man's Umberto Eco, a bit of Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum, but without the density or breadth or on-display literateness. Like both of those books, part of the point is that the solution to huge mysteries is usually less interesting than the search, and that these mysteries we create often miss the greatest mystery, which is ourselves, our own fragile life here. Sloan fashions a quest narrative that raises questions about the value of human endeavor, and it's not a question he raises only to dismiss it. It is, in fact, the true conflict of the novel, as every character is engaged, in one way or another, with making a mark on the world, establishing a name, aiming to endure. These are ideas worth reflecting on, and Sloan studies them from several angles in order to arrive at his conclusion.

And now I must address further my disappointments. The puzzle of the book is fine, and Sloan takes us to fun places to explore that puzzle, but aspects of the solution feel like a cheat, and I'm unconvinced by the final solution, which seems not only muddy but, if I understood correctly, not likely to have been achieved in the century it was set in steel. Also, and more problematic, the protagonist gives a slide show at the end of the novel . . . and only one of the slides is described, and that one as a sort of by-the-way. It's as if Sloan thought his publisher would be putting in some color plates for us to view, but those never made it to the printer. It's one more puzzle in a book filled with them.

In conclusion: I enjoyed it, it reads fast, and the author does some fine work, but in retrospect the book feels thin and not the best way to have spent my time.

Bolaño: Dances with other writers

Two stories in Roberto Bolaño's collection The Insufferable Gaucho (2003; 2010 English trans.) draw directly from major writers who shaped his work, and it's instructive to see how Bolaño manages these dances.

The title story's protagonist, a retired judge, Pereda, knows he's reenacting a Borges story, "The South," a useful bit of intelligence to convey to the reader, who can then find the story on her bookshelf. Though I hadn't read "The South" until after reading "The Insufferable Gaucho," perhaps it's worthwhile to begin with the Borges to best understand how Bolaño uses it. A brief tale, told largely in broad strokes before arriving at the one momentous scene, concerns Dahlmann, an Argentinian with German ancestors, who, after years of a professional life in the city decides to move to a large ranch in the country, an estate he recalls from his youth. Before he can do that, Dahlmann hits his head and endures treatments that seem like Kafkaesque tortures rather than helpful medical treatments. In the end, released from his torment, he arrives in the country, and, through an inadvertent set of actions, finds himself, at the story's end, about to face a drunk in a knife fight he will certainly lose. "Reality is partial to symmetries and slight anachronisms," Borges writes, and the story turns on such elements that seem to carry the protagonist forward toward something ironic and inevitable.

Bolaño's protagonist, aware of how fate can grind you down, in part because he's read Borges, nonetheless embarks on a similar journey, wanting to resurrect the family's rural estate. Though the landscape is surreal, prowled by carnivorous rabbits who race trains and attack travelers, and the judge has to wait for money sent by his former housekeeping staff, Pereda throws himself into the task of reviving the estate, employing, despite their relative uselessness, a host of gauchos and gathering people to himself. Unlike the protagonist of Borges's story, this man pushes back against the direction in which history seems to be moving. By the end, Bolaño has inverted the narrative: Pereda's son is a writer, and when Pereda returns to the city to see young writers gathered in pointless discussion at a familiar café, he challenges one of the men, confident of his success in a knife fight. The stories contain other parallels, but Bolaño's is, I think, both a comment on the different cultural moments out of which the writers emerged as well as a comment on how writers use their materials. Certainly Bolaño constructs more of a "story" rather than a "tale," but he also grants his aged leading man some agency: like Bolaño, he is aware of a literary and iconic past; like Bolaño, he refuses to be helpless in the wake of such a past. Since the gauchos in Bolaño's tale are harmless, the title itself may be a rebuke to the gaucho of the Borges tale, a motionless symbol of a man who, at the crucial moment, tosses Dahlmann a knife he shouldn't pick up.

"Police Rat," another long story in this brief book, has its origins in "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk," Kafka's last completed story. (A line from the Muirs' translation, "So perhaps we shall not miss so very much after all," is the Bolaño collection's epigraph.) Though "Police Rat" doesn't mention Kafka or his story, the narrator, Pepe the Cop, tells us early on that he's one of Josephine the Singer's nephews. Kafka's story—which employs mice rather than rats—is a rumination (perhaps) on the relationships between an artist and her audience. Most mice simply "pipe," but Josephine sings, or at least she tells her fellows that that's what she's doing, or that's what they believe . . . or want to believe. The story, which is more a portrait of this relationship, floats ideas and then backs away from them; describes situations and then cautions the reader about the descriptions; posits motives from which it retreats but then reasserts. Josephine moves from being, at the outset, clearly someone special to, by the end, a shadowy and even unpleasant figure, so that the narrative arc is one of increasing uncertainty by the narrator, who finds he can neither defend her nor the idea of an art form. (Mice, after all, have no sense of music.)

Bolaño expands Kafka's mental circlings by moving to include all of human nature in the dark plot of "Police Rat." Kafka, too, asks why the mice do what they do, but Bolaño's rats, more capable of self-awareness (and more likely projections for human readers), don't simply lie to themselves about the realities of hope; instead, they work to construct the lies that hold society together, and like characters in a '70s police movie, those in charge possess ulterior motives while even the bit players seem to be in on the true nature of the world, leaving Pepe the sole seeker of justice for the innocent. It's a terrific story with far more narrative momentum than Kafka's piece, and it's not at all necessary to have first read "Josephine," or to read it at all. Like "The Insufferable Gaucho," the story not only takes into account a preceding storyteller, it also raises questions about how stories function for us to both reveal and conceal.

Those pesky third acts: MacLeod's NIGHT SESSIONS

A recommendation on the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction forum led me to order from the library Ken MacLeod's science fiction novel Night Sessions. Knowing nothing of the book at the outset, I enjoyed having no clue as to its direction in the early chapters, in which, in the near future, a future of space elevators and sentient robots, a preacher to robots meets with fellow religious conservatives; English police investigate the possible murder (by bomb) of a Catholic priest; and a nature preserve in New Zealand hosts both a creationist dinosaur display and refugee robots.

The book moves pretty quickly, and the writing is smart and interesting, so I flew through it. Though it seemed to have several possible directions it would take, the novel is largely a police procedural; unfortunately, our copper protagonist tends to be a step or two behind the reader at every point, so much of what transpires in the latter half of the book doesn't come as much of a surprise. Still, the plot does pull one along.

More compelling than the plot, though, are the novel's ideas and backstory. Whether you call them the Faith Wars or the Oil Wars, some tremendous conflict, centered at the biblically infamous plains of Megiddo, led to a clamp down on religious intensity in the U.S. and U.K. Churches still exist, but they have no part in public discourse; still, religious fundamentalism (of the Christian kind) continues to thrive in pockets. What MacLeod does well is provide credibility to characters who believe in a young Earth; they don't see themselves as anti-science, but as interpreting scientific data in a way biasing biblical rather than, say, Darwinian (or geologically commonsensical) conclusions. Another huge element in this world is the accidental sentience that's come to some of its robots, a sentience that has not only raised ethical problems but that has resulted in beings with their own existential and theological questions. MacLeod doesn't spend much time on this background material, letting us know what we need to know as the plot maintains pace. It's effectively done and leaves some areas to the imagination while also keeping us informed.

The novel's conclusion ties all the aforementioned elements together, but without the attendant drama the resulting events require. Some of it's exciting, but the truly big moments end up feeling small.

The biggest let-down comes in an area that, for much of the book, is well done: the theology. One of the major players in the tale, a man who preaches to robots, experiences a last-minute realization about the nature of the Bible because another character points out a single biblical contradiction. Given that the guy works at a creationist playland, he'd have to be aware of the obvious contradictions and inherent problems in the two side-by-side Genesis creation accounts and, presumably, have worked out some kind of double-think or intellectually dishonest set of logical steps to deal with those problems—just as every other biblical literalist has to do. That a single contradiction in the texts, undermining the notion of Moses' authorship of the Torah, would have such a devastating effect is an oddly clunky way for MacLeod to overturn this fellow's convictions, and the reversal feels as pat (and flat) as the rest of the conclusion.

Nevertheless, I want to praise what MacLeod has done well (and I understand he has several fine books): the novel contains interesting characters (though the robots tend to have more personality than the humans), the writing is smart and enjoyable, and the tale is built on thoughtful premises. I recommend the writer, and, had the ending felt less rushed, I would heartily recommend the book, which I can only laud in part.

What makes a short story memorable? (No answer here.)

These days, most short stories, unless I teach them, slide off me. (Whole novels do as well, in truth.) When I consider all the stories I remember well, most of them come from when I was young and, as we say, with literal accuracy, impressionable. I know I read some Bradbury stories only once, but still they left their marks. Most of those that stayed, though, I read more than once. The same is true for the Harlan Ellison read in later high school. And then everything by Flannery O'Connor stuck. Much that I read of Updike.

Was it only the newness of these things as my affection for fiction deepened? So few collections in the years since have had such an effect on me. Chris Offutt's amazing collection, Kentucky Straight, comes to mind, though I don't think, half a dozen years later, I can talk about any individual story. Why is that? I keep hoping I'll come upon such memorable nonfiction again. (I'm sure I'm forgetting, at the moment, some more recent things that have actually clung to my brain. I know I enjoyed James Lasdun's It's Beginning to Hurt, and George Saunders and Jim Shepard have successfully planted flags in my head. Still: Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?)

I'll certainly remember the Harlan Ellison story I just finished. Recently reading about Ellison, I saw that his story "The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore" ran in the 1993 edition of Best American Short Stories, edited by Louise Erdrich. Especially since I'm teaching American literature (and one of Erdrich's books is on my curriculum), I was drawn to the story for its title, though the idea that it might connect with my curriculum didn't pay off.

The story, told in brief vignettes, involves a man name Levendis who slips through time taking actions which are alternately brutal, helpful, and timeline-changing. In a device that appears purposeless, each vignette is introduced by "LEVENDIS" and a colon. Almost immediately, I was  reminded of Shirley Jackson's terrific "An Ordinary Day, with Peanuts" (a couple takes turns doing random good and not-so-good acts), and Ellison at one point makes it clear that Levendis has read the story as well. (This contributes not to the tales cleverness but to its clunkiness.) The piece has some nice moments, but there's no synergy to the thing, no sense that it accrues strength as it goes on. It's mostly Ellison riffing on an idea, which, yes, is fun, but left me wanting more. The prose bothers me in the way Stephen King's prose bothers me, in the way the author slips into casual speech—not because it's the best way to get the point across but because, I feel, the writer is trying to establish some down-to-earth cred. This rings false to me. Nevertheless, the story stuck with me (more in its overall idea than its particulars; I think John Kessel's "The Pure Product" gives some of the same idea much more heft and power). Unfortunately, for my money, Ellison ruins what's good about the story—its enigmatic refusal to pin down a predominant purpose—in the author's note at the end of the collection. Ellison talks at length about the recent death of Avram Davidson and of his long desire to get into such a fine literary collection. That's all good stuff. But then he wants to tell us the "point" of the story, undercutting his own work. I often say to students that the author is not always the go-to person when you want to know a story's purpose, and this may be such a case; I think, rather than the "randomness rules" theme Ellison sees, there's much in the story about the nature of the writerly imagination. Whatever Ellison thinks the story is about, he should have avoided saying it.

I read several stories in Jeffrey Ford's acclaimed collection The Drowned Life. Reading the title story late at night did not aid in the appreciation process: I kept nodding off. That wasn't the story's fault, but every time I picked it up again, I found that what had come before had found no traction. That is, I think, the story's fault. It feels aimless, and while I found much of the imagery interesting, the piece didn't seem to accrue meaning as it went forward, nor did its components become more clearly analogous to anything in the real world. As with Ellison's story, the writing had some of that "rough" contemporary phrasing which is an authorial stance I find tiresome. The weight of modernity (or something) makes our hero slip "under," entering a watery world he needs to escape. The best elements—and they're quite memorable—have that quality of the dreams that wake us: the distress of being unable to retain information, unable to reach a destination, unable to back out of a path on which a dream has led us. The piece felt more as if it simply ended rather than resolved, but the later scenes, full of dread, were excellently rendered. "A Few Things About Ants," however, had an even more fragmentary structure that resulted in less synergistic success. I'll have to read more of the stories to see whether the non-story is a standard approach for Ford.

Having heard Donald Ray Pollack, author of the collection Knockemstiff (the actual name of his home town in Ohio), interviewed on Fresh Air, I ordered his collection from the library. A self-taught writer, Pollack spoke of how he learned to write by copying, word for word, stories he liked; he'd carry a copied story around with him for a week, then copy down another one. Assuming one has a good ear and good taste, it's a fine method of instruction. The collection's first story, "Real Life," stars a little boy whose father taught him "how to hurt a man," and on the night in question, the boy receives, from this unpleasant specimen of humanity, something that passes for love. It's an unsurprising turn—we've seen it before—but Pollack is smart enough to make the scenes of brutality feel startlingly real and off-kilter, and he's also smart enough to push the story past the more familiar resolution to involve the mother in a scene that complicates further our understanding of these people. The collection's second story, "Dynamite Hole," takes an unexpected approach to its story of brutality and confusion by refusing to first establish sympathy for its inhumane main character. Not that we dislike him from the outset, but the character pulls us into his visceral responses and unappealing life before we can form any judgment. Then Pollack complicates our horror by making the character human (though not humane) in two moments at the end. I'm looking forward to reading more of this collection.

The only story I've read from Krys Lee's Drifting House is the first one, "A Temporary Marriage," which, though it has interesting characters (a South Korean woman who has, for reasons that are unclear, lost her daughter in a divorce; the odd and awkward man, a divorced Korean living in America, who takes her in so she can hunt for her daughter), proceeds in unsurprising ways for most of its length. But the woman's past is hidden for a reason, and she turns out to be not what we expected, so that the story rewards rereading once we understand that, like Mr. Rhee, we've been living with someone keeping her true self concealed.

Lastly, in my ongoing revisiting of Bradbury, I reread "The Dwarf," from The October Country, a collection I've always loved and made even better through Joe Mugnaini's illustrations (the image for "The Dwarf" looks like something Gahan Wilson might have done). It's hard to read this story now and not feel discomfited by its treatment of the "dwarf" in question. Mostly, it's one character who treats him badly, inverting his hopes after the man's girlfriend tries to do "Mr. Big" a good turn, but the way the story largely reduces the character to a symbol feels, in our more aware times, unpleasant. True, Bradbury grants the man his humanity by the end, but the genre, with the kind of "toughness" you'd see in dime-store fiction, doesn't allow much more.

And so I wonder why some stories work and other don't, why some stay with me and other slip away, even as I'm working on several pieces of my own. "About the Author" has, I'm aware, much of the randomness of the Ellison story: Does it add up to anything? Must it? Must I know exactly what? My next "Old Man" story, which I've set aside while I focus on some shorter, easier (one hopes) things, makes narrative demands on me that other stories haven't, and I want the work that goes into it to pay off for the attentive reader. Then there's "Vox ex Machina," a story that is writing itself (except in how it's going to play out at the end); it seems like the kind of tale people will remember. Isn't that what a writer wants?

Rereading Ray Bradbury (Pt. 3): Melancholy's medicine

The collection A Medicine for Melancholy, first published in 1959, contains a broad range of stories published over the previous ten years in venues from Playboy to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction to the Saturday Evening Post. The collection contains some of Bradbury's most-remembered (not just by me) science fiction tales: "The Dragon," "Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed," and "All Summer in a Day." In addition, "The Wonderful Ice-Cream Suit" became a play.

Because the stories were written over the course of more than a decade, you can spot the shifts in Bradbury's style. It's hard to trace precisely, because some of the publication dates are missing, but that tendency to have voluble characters who, like Bradbury himself, go on and on about their big ideas, increases with the years. Earlier, it's the narrative voice that allows itself all that energy, and that works pretty well, and is typically balanced by Bradbury's sense that he should keep the narrative compact. By the end, the narrative voice has largely been shoved out of the way to allow the characters to go on at length, much as Bradbury allowed Faber and Beatty to prattle away in Fahrenheit 451 (an initially shorter piece he'd somewhat awkwardly inflated to novel length).

I reread the collection's first four stories—"In a Season of Calm Weather" (a man longing to meet Picasso comes upon him making elaborate drawings in beach sand), "The Dragon" (two men from the Middle Ages await a beast that rides through the mist; we learn it's a train crossing the time-twisted moors), "A Medicine for Melancholy" (an 18th-century English lass finds that it's sexual longing that ails her, though Bradbury is marvelously discreet), and "The End of the Beginning" (a man mowing his lawn waits with his wife for the launch of their son's rocket)—as well as "Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed," from later in the book. Each story has its pleasures. Though very little happens in "In a Season of Calm Weather," and I don't think Bradbury does a great job of conjuring the images Picasso etches on the beach, there's a nice sense to it of the fragility of art. "The Dragon," short and to the point, does exactly what it ought to do. "A Medicine for Melancholy" hurries itself along with characters shouting and speaking ridiculously, but it's a good tale with clever turns to it. "The End of the Beginning," like "The Machineries of Joy," is dominated by "philosophical" talk and introspection; brevity of speech and conciseness of prose would have helped enormously.

The best of the bunch, and one of Bradbury's best stories ever, is "Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed," one of his Martian tales. It runs too counter to the predominant narrative of most of his other Martian stories, so it couldn't have fit into The Martian Chronicles. Rather, it's an alternate history of the colonization of Mars, in which everything we take with us to that planet is changed—our plants, our ideas, our bodies. There's a creeping sense from the outset that something terrible is going to happen, and Bradbury both follows that sense to its conclusion while subverting it beautifully. Then he adds one more narrative twist to send us in another direction and comment on what's gone before, planting, too, one more tiny turn at the end. It's a masterful story that avoids the verbal windiness of many of the other pieces. The writing is, like the best of the work in The Martian Chronicles, tight and evocative. He moves the story forward quickly, but pauses to give us haunting moments and disturbing exchanges. The writer of this story is the one to learn from.

Another End of Childhood: Wyndham's THE CHRYSALIDS

Much as in Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End (and in John Wyndham's own The Midwich Cuckoos), The Chrysalids posits a future transformed by children putting their minds together in ways adults can't.

Following a Tribulation (given the evidence, a nuclear war) that took place possibly thousands of years in the past, life has become simpler and narrower, at least for people living in Labrador. There's government and civil society, and a steam engine appears to be this culture's technological leap. People are aware that there was a former world of great marvels, but these Old People brought ruin upon themselves; the predominant view seems to be that the destruction wrought was ordained by God, and given that the most notable surviving texts from the former time are the Bible and some much later religious text, what has emerged in a culture like that of the Puritans, focused on family, fearful of what might be in violation of the Creator's will.

"The mutant" is the greatest evil: any deviant plant or other lifeform should be destroyed. As even one of the heterodox characters points out, such a position is reasonable given that, in the wilder regions south of our setting, nature has sprouted forms at odds with existing species, and, if you're going to be cultivating plants and practicing animal husbandry, you ought to exercise control over biological developments. But is every new form evil? A breed of giant horses is accepted by the government, and the local leader—and father or David, our protagonist—thinks this represents a moral failing by pragmatic politicians.

The real problem is for humans who don't follow "the true form," a form preached about and sung about, the human form that the Old People and the people of the Bible possessed (though, as is pointed out, the Bible is unclear about how exactly its humans look). David's first best friend, Sophie, has an extra toe, leading to his first rift with his father and his people. But that's just a hint of the larger rift to come, as David, and others, discover telepathic abilities. To say more is to give away too much of the plot, but Wyndham manages to set in motion a host of plot threads that all converge pretty well at the end. It's a satisfying story.

How Wyndham tells the story, however, is a mixed bag. There's nothing special about the voice: it's pretty standard, calm, clear storytelling in the English style, with some dramatic beats tossed in. It reads smoothly. Much of the story is conveyed through summary, as David describes the passage of years or the long development of a relationship. The most important relationship in the novel, David's with his lover, takes place almost entirely in passing, vague references, then in summary, until we finally see the two of them together, which doesn't help us see the relationship in the profound terms David does. There are several good scenes in the novel (though one takes place for which David clearly isn't present), but much more exposition and—because of the central premise of telepathy—dialogue between and among people who can't see each other. Even when people are together, they tend toward lengthy pronouncements and explanations, again undercutting the drama.

A few times, Wyndham seems aware of this problem, as David, stuck "listening" to someone's "thought-shapes," tunes the person out or comments on their problematic tone (since people projecting their thoughts can't read the doubtful reactions of their listeners). Even so, the dialogue is interesting, not as stiff as such a structure might lead you to expect.

An enjoyable book all around. It has elements of the other two Wyndham books I've read (Day of the Triffids contains things that don't grow as they ought), but the story is better. Triffids felt aimless and odd; The Midwich Cuckoos had a narrator watching things at arms-length. David isn't a memorable character, but he has relatable conflicts such as how to take what adults are telling him, and whether to conceal things from his parents. The book also takes a strange philosophical path at the end which may not actually be the writer's point of view, and David questions whether he's going from one autocratic perspective to another, though, by the final scene, he seems to have dropped that question.

Too tidy: O'Nan's THE NIGHT COUNTRY

I've often referred to Stewart O'Nan's novel A Prayer for the Dying, telling my students it's the one "serious" book I know that uses second-person narration, the "you" being the novel's major character while also, by implication, the reader. ("Choose Your Own Adventure" stories present us with the "non-serious" example, the "you" there being expressly the reader-as-protagonist.) Students think it would be strange to read such narration for the duration of a novel, but my experience was that, after the initial surprise, you pretty quickly slip into seeing the novel as simply possessing a third-person limited narrator, the "you" being a grammatical hiccup that is actually the equivalent of he/him. I suppose that book's plot twist (the character is lying to himself about something) seems more disturbing because there's the implication that you, not only the protagonist, have failed to perceive something you should have perceived, but I don't know that the surprise would have been less effective in the usual narrative style, and in fact I wouldn't say there's anything thematic or insightful achieved by O'Nan's ploy. Still, I enjoyed the novel and remembered it.

I came to The Night Country because, in the wake of Ray Bradbury's death, it was mentioned as an homage to Bradbury (to whom it's dedicated). For most of the novel, I couldn't see that, but at the end, I suppose one is meant to recognize how the plot is a long-playing variation on Bradbury's classic short story "The Crowd." (A man realizes through newspaper photograph—and later first-hand observation—that accident victims are surrounded by the same people forming an instant crowd; the crowd, it turns out, consists of people who died in previous accidents. Obviously, the protagonist can't be allowed to live with this information.)

The plot of the novel is this: One year ago, on Halloween, five high school kids drove into a tree; three died—Chris called Toe, Danielle, and Marco, who narrates—and two lived—Kyle, whose head injuries have turned him into an infantile version of himself, and Tim. It's clear from early on that Tim means to reenact the events of that day, including the crash, finishing off himself and Kyle. The other major character (Kyle's mother has a minor but important role, but is a bystander to the key events) is Brooks, a police officer who carries around a load of guilt about the events of that day. It's also made clear early on that Brooks's guilt, which has led to the breakup of his marriage and his general uselessness as a police officer, is justified; we're not, at first, told explicitly what he did that makes him culpable, but enough hints are dropped that the type of thing he did—pursuing the kids' vehicle in such a way to cause the accident—is obvious, making the exact details, when they arrive, underwhelming.

Much like A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving, The Night Country intentionally telegraphs its ending and then, largely, doesn't veer from its foreordained outcome. Irving's novel frustrated me for many reasons, but I found the plot structure especially frustrating, as I kept expecting Irving to twist the story in some way that would render the outcome simultaneously inevitable yet surprising, true to what had been predicted while playfully out-of-alignment. Instead, it all occurred just as had been foretold. The Night Country suffers from the same problem, though O'Nan tries to make the journey more suspenseful by withholding the precise details. Less than halfway through the book, I realized it wasn't compounding events and observations in a meaningful way, but I plowed ahead, hopeful for the conclusion.

Irving's novel, though, does give us some engaging characters, even if some of them aren't terribly credible. O'Nan's characters are as jammed into their trajectory as the plot; in fact, saying they have a "trajectory" beyond the plot is misleading. Every character is stuck, the dead as well as the living. No one has any interest or design outside the accident; it has consumed everyone. I suppose that's a point O'Nan wants to make, but reading about characters who can't develop and who seem either planless or locked into plans that rise out of despair is not interesting or moving. This could work for a short story, and in fact the whole plot could have been dispensed with much more quickly, since nothing much happens—which is one of the book's ideas. In The Plague, Camus painted characters who are stuck in repetitious lives, but they don't see themselves that way, and the plot and prose pull us through that novel; O'Nan's novel simply fails to thrive. It's hard to even see what aspect of it was satisfying for the novelist, since, once he's established his characters and their situations, the story is essentially done. After the opening, it's an exercise.

The novel seems to be embarking into interesting storytelling territory by giving us a dead narrator who tends to speak collectively, including his friends in an authorial "we." But that conceit falls away pretty fast once the dead characters differentiate themselves; unfortunately, we learn little about any of these ghosts beyond the first and final facts. The narrator is the least well-defined character in the novel. That's a problem. Why was he chosen to tell this story? All of the ghosts are helpless, unable to truly alter what's going to happen, but they do have some minor talent at redirecting people's attentions or making animals run into their paths. (Mostly they're hauled around by whomever is thinking about them at the time.) There's some panic when they realize that Kyle, who isn't dead, nonetheless has a ghostly, "real" self who shows up but doesn't interact with them. This true Kyle, evidently the aspect of him that has died, evinces the ability to move objects, but this plot element, introduced as possibly altering events, has no payoff. The end, too, which should produce a few more ghosts, seems not to, so the climax doesn't result in much of a denouement. You're just done. Then there's a Slaughterhouse-Five ripoff in which history is made beautiful by being rewound, but it seems tacked on rather than integral.

Severely disappointing.

In which I'm interviewed

The sound is punky a few times, but stick with it, as it improves. This is my third time being interviewed by Ric and Art at the Book Cave, who talked to me about each of my previous "Old Man" stories.

That fourth participant is Art's bird, Billy, who clearly wants to contribute to the discussion.

The Book Cave Interview

Right-click on the MP3 (two-finger tap for MacBook users) to download the podcast.