Category: Literature

Popcorn Press is scary hungry again!

Enterprising Wisconsin micropublisher Popcorn Press is once again sponsoring an ambitious October literary contest. Last year, press owner and editor Lester Smith accepted vampire-themed poetry and fiction submissions during the month for an anthology, Vampyr Verse, readied by Halloween and, within a matter of days, delivered to the public in a quality printed edition. This year’s theme is “the hungry dead,” which doesn’t preclude vampires, but widens the cemetery gate to include zombies, ghosts, and, in the words of the contest website, “other dead things that want to eat you.” Find all the details and contest rules, as well as an easy-to-use online submission page, at hungrydead.com.

October 6, 2010

Lester Smith, literary contest, Popcorn Press, The Hungry Dead, Vampyr Verse
Verse Wisconsin Reading at Avol’s Bookstore

Verse Wisconsin co-editors Sarah Busse and Wendy Vardaman joined six other poets—Karl Elder, Fabu, Susan Firer, Max Garland, Derrick Harriell, and John Koethe—for a stellar Book Festival reading at Avol’s Bookstore in downtown Madison on Thursday, September 30th. Below is a video of the closing poem of the evening, a new work, John Koethe’s elegiac meditation on the 1960s, “ROTC Kills.” Wendy Vardaman’s interview with Koethe in the latest issue of Verse Wisconsin can be found online at the VW website.

October 2, 2010

2010 Wisconsin Book Festival, Avol’s Bookstore, Derrick Harriell, Fabu, John Koethe, Karl Elder, Max Garland, Sarah Busse, Susan Firer, Verse Wisconsin, Wendy Vardaman
Freedom

Freedom
Jonathan Franzen
Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2010

Reviewed by Bob Wake

Jonathan Franzen’s zeitgeist-straddling Freedom has arrived with such outsized fanfare—most notably the Time magazine “Great American Novelist” cover—that backlash was inevitable. The binge and purge cycle of praise and resentment went several rounds before Freedom was even available in bookstores. NPR’s Alan Cheuse declared that the novel was “quite unappealing.” The New York Times trumpeted it as “a masterpiece.” I think I’ll go with compulsively readable, deeply felt, and often very, very funny. Like The Corrections before it, Freedom mines the psychology and behavior of an American family with the kind of acute detailing that elicits continual shocks of recognition. The characters are so intricately three-dimensional that they have the fullness and richness of close-up film acting, as if we’re witnessing dazzling Oscar-worthy performances.

Franzen is fifty-one years old, roughly the respective ages of his psychically bruised married couple, Walter and Patty Berglund, at novel’s end. By which point—page 562 (a mere six pages shorter than The Corrections)—we feel deliriously and somewhat exhaustively connected not only to them but to their lovers, siblings, children, parents, neighbors and co-workers. The Berglunds meet while students at the University of Minnesota, Patty privileged from New York on a basketball scholarship, Walter of in-state modest background with political and policy wonk aspirations. Their college years are beautifully evoked, as is the secondary verging on primary character of Richard Katz, Walter’s roommate in school, and a charismatic rock musician whose life will stay entwined with Walter and Patty’s for decades to come.

Freedom is stylistically elevated with a brilliant strategy that turns one of Franzen’s “Ten Rules for Writing Fiction” advice on its head. That is, rule number four: “Write in the third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice offers itself.” Nearly 200 pages of Freedom purport to be a manuscript written by Patty Berglund—at the behest of her therapist, whom we never meet—about herself … in the third person. A first-person voice, in other words, masquerading as a third-person voice: “It’s not so fun to be on a road trip with a driver who considers you, and perhaps all women, a pain in the ass, but Patty didn’t know this until she’d tried it. The trouble started with the departure date, which had to be moved up for her.”

On the one hand, we come to recognize this as a dissociative mechanism on Patty’s part, the result of a high school sexual assault. But it’s also a means for Patty to step outside of her character and try to recast her experiences and relationships as pure narrative. Storytelling to pinpoint and separate objective causality from subjective dysfunction. Which, after all, is Franzen’s job here as well. It’s a fairly high-stakes literary gambit, a spritz of postmodern intertextuality. It also brings Patty Berglund spectacularly alive on the page. (At least one reviewer, Charles Baxter in The New York Review of Books, doesn’t buy it, claiming that Patty “hardly seems capable of writing the Franzenian sentences with which her autobiography is speckled…”)

Franzen had to perform a lot of twisty pretzel logic to make the metaphoric locutions on the theme of “corrections” work throughout the earlier novel. Lots of authorial heavy lifting for little payoff, since it was hard to take much from the metaphor other than something ultimately really reductive, i.e., that death is the final “correction” to life. The theme of freedom, however, is infinitely malleable and wondrously adaptive to situations both personal and political, the borders of which are porous. As individuals, we, like Richard Katz, may invariably meet a moment of despondency when we contemplate suicide, a freedom allotted us as sentient beings. (“He was pretty sure that nobody would miss him much when he was dead. He could free Patty and Walter of the bother of him, free himself of the bother of being a bother.”) But just as Katz rejects the notion of suicide in favor of life in all its messiness and conflict, we feel that Franzen’s literary heart is moving in a similar direction, away from the chic dead-end despair of The Corrections, toward something enduring and good in the human spirit.

September 11, 2010

Alan Cheuse, Charles Baxter, Freedom, Jonathan Franzen, Patty Berglund, Richard Katz, The Corrections, Walter Berglund
The Macomber Affair

So I read a top-notch Hemingway short story this evening, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” Even with the big game hunting claptrap, it’s sharp nasty fun on the topic of gender politics. (“How should a woman act when she discovers her husband is a bloody coward? She’s damn cruel but they’re all cruel. They govern, of course, and to govern one has to be cruel sometimes. Still, I’ve seen enough of their damn terrorism.”) I’m deeply bummed to find out a 1947 film based on the story isn’t available in any form on video or DVD. The poster for The Macomber Affair says: “GREGORY PECK makes that Hemingway kind of love to JOAN BENNETT.” Gotta find this movie …

September 2, 2010

Ernest Hemingway, Gregory Peck, Joan Bennett, The Macomber Affair, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber
Every Natural Fact: Five Seasons of Open-Air Parenting

Published in June by Duluth-based Holy Cow! Press, Amy Lou Jenkins’s Every Natural Fact: Five Seasons of Open-Air Parenting has a blurb from me on the inside front cover. One of the book’s chapters was a runnerup in Rosebud‘s X. J. Kennedy Award for creative nonfiction in 2007, which I co-judged with editor Rod Clark. Here’s the blurb: “Her vivid imagery mixes a naturalist’s precision with a spiritual seeker’s poetry”—Robert Wake, author and editor of Cambridge Book Review Press and co-judge for the X. J. Kennedy Award for Nonfiction. And here’s my complete write-up on Jenkins’s piece, titled “Close to Home,” from 2007:

In “Close to Home,” writer Amy Jenkins uses the occasion of a Wisconsin nature walk with her 11-year-old son DJ to weave a meditation on the topic of death. “It is July second,” she informs us, “the date of a full moon in the month that Buddhists believe the dead return to visit the living.” Mother and son together catch sight of a majestic buck moving through the forest. (“His coat was caramel with cream trim, and scratched from shoulder to rear as if keyed by an angry hoodlum.”) They discover the remains of a decaying fox carcass. “Everything dies,” DJ remarks. Jenkins struggles to find the proper parental response: “Right here is the place where I’m supposed to have the answers, I thought.” We are deep in the woods now and Jenkins movingly shares with us that her stepfather died from prostate cancer two years previous. She and DJ nursed the old man in his final days. Suddenly the essay deepens as a testament to loss and remembrance. “The entire forest,” Jenkins writes, “is a composition of bits of organic matter that came from life feeding on death.” Her vivid imagery mixes a naturalist’s precision with a spiritual seeker’s poetry. “The woods felt so busy today,” says DJ, “like we were not alone.”

August 30, 2010

Amy Lou Jenkins, Every Natural Fact: Five Seasons of Open-Air Parenting, How Cow Press, Rod Clark, Rosebud, X. J. Kennedy Award for Creative Nonfiction
Houdini Pie

Houdini Pie
Paul Michel
Bennett and Hastings 2010

Reviewed by Bob Wake

Seems as if everyone recently in the vicinity of our living room coffee table and its disorganized sprawl of books, magazines, CDs and stained coffee cups, spotted my review copy of Houdini Pie and, with a smile, said the name aloud. The title of Paul Michel’s engaging debut novel set in Southern California during the Great Depression evokes tall-tale whimsy, something wide-eyed and nostalgic, perhaps even slightly disreputable. Larry Cyr’s distinctive cover design seals the deal with its infinite sky-blue background and lone sepia-toned Dead End Kid pitching a baseball. Only it’s not a baseball. It’s a pickaxe flung heavenward.

Houdini Pie is at heart the coming-of-age story of 24-year-old Hal Gates, semipro ballplayer and bootlegger’s son. Hal growing up, like any dutiful son, is drawn again and again into his father’s shady enterprises (“waiting for the umpteenth time for the coast to be clear”). The novel follows Hal’s grudging involvement in a crackpot search for Hopi Indian treasure rumored to be buried in tunnels beneath the streets of Los Angeles. Maybe, just maybe, it’s not a hoax. After all, there’s a real-life Hopi Indian chief with a map and a femme fatale for a daughter. There’s a geologist with a Flash Gordon gizmo for locating gold. There’s a psychic. And let’s not forget the psychic’s daughter.

Sounds zany like a screwball comedy from the selfsame era. And it is. (Some of the novel’s craziest material is purportedly true, according to Michel in a fascinating Author’s Note.) But what really distinguishes Houdini Pie is that Paul Michel doesn’t write zany. His prose is lean and unfussy, artful in period detail and the construction of believable characters. His third-person narration expertly deploys alternating points of view, which allows us to get up close and personal with an unusually large cast of characters. Here, for instance, is Edith, the psychic, taking in her first baseball game along with her daughter, Isabelle, who’s developed an enthusiasm for the sport (and for the Sheiks’ young pitcher, Hal Gates):

The ballpark was small by ballpark standards; fewer than four thousand seats, but to Edith it seemed enormous. The playing field was a vast carpet of grass so green it seemed painted. The ball players, in gray or white flannel uniforms, stalked its perimeter. Some swung bats at imaginary pitches; others played catch, a few made quick, sprinting forays onto the field, a dozen steps forward then back, retrieved on invisible leashes. Isabelle’s excitement was infectious as she pointed things out—the drink and peanut hawkers beginning their descents into the stands; the grounds crew laying down the white chalk lines, the black-suited umpires clustered behind home plate like a coven of witches.

Michel is a veteran short story writer with dozens of literary magazine credits over the last fifteen years. For a first novel, Houdini Pie is structurally ambitious and plotted with a clever eye for withholding information and building suspense. A bootlegging episode gone disastrously wrong early in the novel, for example, becomes clear a hundred pages later. There are incidents in which characters appear in disguise unbeknownst to us until climactic revelations. All in all, Houdini Pie is a triumph of independent small press publishing (kudos to Seattle’s Bennett and Hastings). What’s needed now—while we await another novel from the author—is a collection of Michel’s short stories.

July 29, 2010

Bennett and Hastings Publishing, Houdini Pie, Larry Cyr, Paul Michel
In Envy Country

In Envy Country
Joan Frank
University of Notre Dame Press 2010

Reviewed by Bob Wake

There’s not a false note in Joan Frank’s short story collection, In Envy Country, winner of the 2010 Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction from the University of Notre Dame Press. Her stories combine rapturous surface detail and harrowing psychological acuity. Frank’s characters, like most of us, can’t resist measuring themselves against those friends, family and business associates who seem blessed with beauty or success, privilege or power.

“The very beautiful owned a secret,” declares the forty-year-old narrator of “Savoir Faire, Savoir Vivre,” a displaced Californian in Paris (“trying to write, and to read all I can”), where she has met up with a former high school friend, a professional swimmer from Sacramento, whose sister Nikki, a painter, had been “the most dazzling girl in school.” Sipping wine cocktails in a French café, the two women reminisce and commiserate, sharing their nearly morbid fascination with the unbearably gorgeous Nikki. (“You could never come to terms with beauty like that, but even at fourteen you could see that the world was ruled by it.”) As we learn of the rise and fall of Nikki’s fortunes, the birth of a daughter, a broken marriage, artistic struggles, and finally “showing her age, like other mortals,” we’re asked to consider beauty as an abstract force, troubling and destructive to all who fall within its orbit. “Beauty torches the place,” the narrator insists.

Perception is a prism that changes with the light. In Frank’s stories, a character’s epiphany is no sure bet or shortcut to the truth of the matter. Her characters always respond in character. Point of view is everything. We’re uncertain at times where to place our allegiance. Reader anxiety is half the fun here, but it requires a willingness to step outside of our comfort zone. Frank works unsettling magic with awkward social situations like dinner parties and family gatherings, all of which invariably erupt with repressed hostilities and dark revelations.

In the title story an ostentatiously wealthy couple argue and storm out of their mansion at dinnertime, leaving their guests—a married couple of modest middle-class means—to watch the oven as well as the argument itself framed in the picture window like a silent movie. The visiting couple find themselves reevaluating their own marriage. In “A Thing That Happens” a dinner party is derailed when two guests describe an experience from a recent European vacation: the different way men vs. women respond to the sight of a twentysomething blonde with enormous breasts (“way out of proportion to the rest of her… like a neon sign… a wheelbarrow”). The men, predictably, are delighted, whereas the women’s gaze is fraught with anger and, yes, envy. (“Because that is what men want.”) The anecdote, told by an aging couple, is set against the short story’s central character, a young woman coming into her sexuality, whom we meet in the opening sentence: “Sara Bream gathered her breath so that her pillowy twenty-year-old chest, in its soft China-blue sweater, filled to even greater, lovelier loft: she let it out slowly and forcefully.”

Frank’s range is impressive. She can write funny and sharp about modern office politics (“A Note on the Type” and “Betting on Men”), craft a heartbreaking coming-of-age tale about growing up in 1960s Sacramento (“Rearview”), and even take us on a wildly disturbing transgressive visit to a Spanish sex club (“Sandy Candy”). While In Envy Country hasn’t received the high-profile attention of, say, Wells Tower’s Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, or Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Olive Kitteridge, Joan Frank’s provocative short story collection is fully deserving of similar praise and wide readership.

June 10, 2010

Elizabeth Strout, Everything Ravaged Everything Burned, In Envy Country, Joan Frank, Olive Kitteridge, Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction, University of Notre Dame Press, Wells Tower
Sacred Bond

Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker:

Was Jesus one with God in the sense that, say, Sean Connery is one with Daniel Craig, different faces of a single role, or in the sense that James Bond is one with Ian Fleming, each so dependent on the other that one cannot talk about the creation apart from its author?

May 23, 2010

Adam Gopnik, Daniel Craig, Ian Fleming, James Bond, Sean Connery, The New Yorker, What Did Jesus Do?
Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself
David Lipsky
Broadway Books 2010

Reviewed by Bob Wake

In the sad days following the suicide of 46-year-old writer David Foster Wallace in September 2008, when the Internet seemed to spontaneously erupt with eulogies far and wide, novelist Steve Erickson wrote: “There are no statistics to prove it, but the anecdotal evidence is that he may have influenced the upcoming generation of writers more than almost anyone else.” There’s his narrative style, certainly, discursive and intellectual, yet brimming with colloquialisms and concise twelve-stepisms. The dizzying footnotes. The convoluted self-consciousness unfolding like Chinese boxes of innerspace, compulsive, chatty. A humane and witty voice both inviting and wounded. George Saunders’s New Yorker short story from last year, “Victory Lap,” with its hypertext parentheticals is only one of the more recent examples of Wallacean influence.

David Lipsky’s Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace is not unlike one of those always fascinating Paris Review author interviews. Supersized, of course, befitting the author of Infinite Jest, the still notorious big fat dystopian novel of twining plots converging on addiction and recovery, cinema and suicide, tennis and terrorism. Lipsky’s book, apart from some graceful introductory material, is essentially a 300-page transcript—from what must have been a mountain of cassette-tape research for a Rolling Stone profile that subsequently wasn’t written—of Lipsky’s conversations with the writer during the last five days of the 1996 book tour for Infinite Jest.

Because Wallace—suddenly and explosively famous—was written about and interviewed extensively during and after this book tour, some topics of conversation will be thematically familiar to fans: the cigarettes and chewing tobacco that often got the better of him (“I’ve got a raging nicotine problem. That like that I really need to quit, at least the chewing tobacco. It makes your fucking jaw fall off. You know?”); John Updike is overrated (“And you just have to wade through so much purple empty writing to get to anything that’s got any kind of heartbeat in it. Plus, I think he’s mentally ill”); Stephen King is underrated (“He’s got an almost Salingerian feel for children”); the influence of filmmaker David Lynch on his writing (“I mean, most of the word surrealism is realism, you know? It’s extra-realism, it’s something on top of realism. It’s the one thing in a Lynch frame that’s off”).

He talks about the too-easy resort to irony and ridicule that he finds in David Letterman and Rush Limbaugh. “I don’t know what’s going to come after it,” he says, “but I think something’s gonna have to.” Lipsky then asks Wallace to speculate—“What do you think it will be?”—and Wallace’s answer is startlingly prescient of an Obama-like appeal to civic virtue and our better instincts:

My guess is that what it will be is, it’s going to be the function of some people who are heroes. Who evince a real type of passion that’s going to look very banal and very retrograde and very … You know, for instance, people who will get on television, and earnestly say, “It’s extraordinarily important, that we, the most undertaxed nation on earth, be willing to pay higher taxes, so that we don’t allow the lower strata of our society to starve to death and freeze to death.” That it will be vitally important that we do that. Not for them, but for us.

Wallace struggled in his teens and early twenties with drug addiction and clinical depression, successfully overcoming the former while keeping at bay if never fully banishing the latter. Lipsky’s resurrected transcripts give us Wallace speaking openly about his past while cautioning that “there’s certain stuff about this that I won’t talk about.” To the extent that he feels remorseful about having pressured Wallace to the point of irritation in hope of some juicy disclosure about a rumored dalliance with heroin (“Why is this of particular interest?” Wallace asks, in a tone described as “annoyed”), Lipsky makes clear that he was himself feeling pressured by his editors to take this tack. All in all, his role as archivist and tour-guide is impeccable and heartfelt. Lipsky, like so many of us, clearly shares a deep sense of loss, as in this bracketed aside in response to Wallace recalling his troubled college years: “Wouldn’t it be great to fall in through this transcript, back to that house, and tell him to live differently, explain to him how it was all going to go? It’s suddenly odd that this isn’t possible.”

May 12, 2010

Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, David Foster Wallace, David Letterman, David Lipsky, George Saunders, Infinite Jest, John Updike, Rolling Stone, Rush Limbaugh, Stephen King, Steve Erickson, The New Yorker, Victory Lap
Franny and Zombie

You know that photo of an angry wizened J. D. Salinger at a car window? Remind you of anything? Why, of course. The graveyard zombie at the car window in the opening scene of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.

J.D. Salinger (1988)

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

April 8, 2010

George Romero, J. D. Salinger, Night of the Living Dead