Dwight Allen writes meticulous, witty fiction about dysfunctional underachievers. The dual protagonists of his funny and warm new novel from the University of Wisconsin Press, The Typewriter Satyr, are two rudderless ships colliding in the night. Oliver Poole, middle-aged typewriter repairman, and Annelise Scharfenberg, thirtyish community radio show host, seem at first to share little in common aside from fragile befuddlement. Set in a pastoral make-believe Wisconsin town called Midvale (hilariously mirroring Madison’s blend of corporate pragmatism and pothead eccentricity) during the escalating indignities of George Bush’s second term of office circa 2004, Oliver and Annelise’s love affair is neither inevitable nor remotely convenient for either individual. Oliver is already married with four sons and Annelise is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. The abuse angle is more than a little daring on Allen’s part, especially given that no less a talent than John Irving was defeated by similarly queasy material at the center of his 2005 novel, Until I Find You. Irving’s approach was fetishistic and muddled with slapstick, which felt grotesque and out of place. Allen, on the other hand, has struck the perfect tone, respectful of his characters and his readers, and bringing depth to the narrative instead of derailing it. The Typewriter Satyr, like Allen’s short story collection, The Green Suit (2000), and his luminous first novel, Judge (2003), is beautifully constructed storytelling that’s built to last.
The summer 2009 issue of Wisconsin People & Ideas has scored a fascinating interview (unfortunately not posted online) with Lorrie Moore on the eve of the September release of her new novel, A Gate at the Stairs. Interviewer Alison Jones Chaim, director of the Wisconsin Book Festival, opens the proverbial can of worms by confronting Moore with, “You have a history of declining to discuss whether certain elements in your work are autobiographical, even though people often want to know.” Moore of course cleverly proceeds to evade and dismiss the subject, while Chaim to her credit doesn’t back down. The result is a crackling, sometimes tense give and take on the topic of how fiction writers transmute lived experience into literature. Discussing her role as a creative writing professor at the University of Wisconsin, Moore is unexpectedly revealing:
I’m sure as a teacher I’ve entered into biographical musings myself. The best students know what is interesting about their lives and know how to use it. But sometimes students are avoiding what is most interesting because it is also the most difficult. Sometimes, as a teacher, I’ve attempted to say to a student, “Here’s what I know is interesting about your life and what you might want to think about when embarking on a fictional tale.” But these are dangerous waters …
Also worth checking out in the issue is the first-place winning story in the magazine’s annual fiction contest, “Deference,” by Nancy Jesse. It’s a sharply written Vietnam-war era story about a mother and son struggling to keep a family farm running in northern Wisconsin. The draft board beckons. The son has literary and academic aspirations. Mom has other ideas. Creating a twist ending that is both surprising and plausible isn’t easy, but “Deference” manages a “Gift of the Magi” double-reversal that satisfies on both counts.
Versatile British film director Peter Yates gave Steve McQueen one of his defining roles as a laconic steely-nerved San Francisco cop in Bullitt (1968). Yates did something similar for an aging Robert Mitchum in The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), a film finally getting a long-overdue and much-anticipated DVD release. Rather than a signature role for an emerging superstar, the part of hardluck hood and Boston mob gunrunner Eddie Coyle is low-key and unassuming, ideally suited to Mitchum’s disaffected persona. Disaffection was Mitchum’s stock-in-trade, reflecting a kind of no-bullshit post-WWII cynicism and emotional guardedness. In his fifties when Eddie Coyle was made, Mitchum’s sagging jowls seem finally to have caught up with the smartass defeatism behind his jaded line readings. He appears in only a quarter of the film, but it’s a great performance that haunts the story even when he’s off screen. Call it a disappearing act. Mitchum disappears in the role and the role disappears in the movie, dimming in the end to darkness like a burnt-out taillight on a ’68 Ford Galaxie.
George V. Higgins’s 1970 novel—a stunning debut for the author, a former journalist and attorney who died in 1999 at 59—has only improved with age, a must-read for fans of the movie. Find a copy of the 2000 paperback reissue with Elmore Leonard’s introduction, in which he states flat-out that The Friends of Eddie Coyle is “the best crime novel ever written.” It’s also first-rate literary fiction. (One of the chapters originally appeared in the North American Review.) Higgins didn’t much care for being pigeonholed as a genre writer, as he discusses in his still relevant and useful 1990 writer’s manual, On Writing:
Regardless of whether you relish the prospect, every reader who encounters your prose, whether amateur (your friends and family) or professional (heartless editors if you’re unlucky, brilliantly insightful editors if you are blessed), with the first sentence will automatically commence the process of categorizing it, subjectively determining—often if not usually quite erroneously—where it belongs in the stream of current writing (I learned this the hard way: my first published book was categorized as a “hard-boiled detective story”—it was not—and most of the others since have been critically rated by reference to the same ill-chosen scale, thus neatly deflecting the general reader—the reader I have in mind—while deceitfully luring the crime-story addict. This leaves many in the first group cruelly deprived of acquaintance with my genius, many in the second group feeling themselves meanly bilked, and me with much smaller royalty checks than I would prefer to receive).
Higgins relied heavily on dialogue, seemingly naturalistic yet stylized wiseguy lingo, in a manner that would influence not only Elmore Leonard, but also David Mamet and Quentin Tarantino (who borrowed the name “Jackie Brown” from a character in Eddie Coyle).
F. Scott Fitzgerald was never well-served by Hollywood. It was a love/hate relationship that he explored in seventeen acerbic short stories about a down-on-his-luck screenwriter named Pat Hobby. Then there was last year’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a big-budget film not without charm, but with scant connection to the Fitzgerald story upon which it claimed to be based. He was better served by Frances Kroll Ring, his 22-year-old personal secretary during those final months before his death from heart failure in 1940 (at age 44, like Chekhov, which seems more and more unbelievably young, especially as I grow older) when he was working on his never-to-be-completed Hollywood-themed novel The Last Tycoon.
Frances Kroll Ring
David Ulin in the Los Angeles Times has written a wonderful profile of Ring, now 92 years old. In 1985 she published a brief self-effacing memoir of her time working for Fitzgerald, Against the Current: As I Remember F. Scott Fitzgerald. The book was made into a solid 2002 Showtime movie titled Last Call. British actor Jeremy Irons might seem an unlikely candidate to play the Minnesota-born Fitzgerald, but he’s very effective in the role. The young Frances Kroll Ring is played with appropriate doe-eyed innocence by Neve Campell.
Also of interest is an article and accompanying video documenting a recent visit by the remarkably spry amanuensis/author to a class of literature students at the University of Missouri.
Caffeinated and jittery, I’ve been on a ragged Denis Johnson high the last couple of months reading Tree of Smoke, his 2007 National Book Award-winning Vietnam War novel. There were moments early on when I wasn’t always convinced that it was the book I wanted it to be, having thoroughly enjoyed the unhinged quality of his 1997 novel about pre-Proposition 215 marijuana harvesting in California, Already Dead (memorably panned by Michiko Kakutani as an “inept, repugnant novel”). Tree of Smoke, said to have been ten years in the writing, is a more controlled work, its pacing methodical, its moments of madness born of deeper narrative immersion. (Kakutani was kinder; B.R. Myers was bent out of shape.) There’s a King Lear-like eye-gouging dead center in the middle of the book that’s breathtakingly brutal; ditto a sexual assault by U.S. soldiers of a Vietnamese woman, late in the novel, by which time we’ve come to appreciate the derangement of servicemen stretched beyond sanity by multiple tours of duty, one of Tree of Smoke’s many pointed parallels to our current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It’s not a flawless work. Johnson strains a bit trying to elevate the novel’s Colonel Sands—a WWII vet and instigator of a rogue PsyOps Vietnam mission code-named Tree of Smoke—into a kind of mythic Kurtz character. Heart of Darkness and, unavoidably, Apocalypse Now, hang rather heavy over the novel’s final section involving a journey deep into primordial jungles in search of a rumored Colonel Sands-in-hiding. In fairness, an argument could be made that allusions to Conrad and Coppola are as valid as Shakespeare’s leaning on Homer and Ovid for added metaphoric ballast. Johnson’s novel ultimately stands on its own as an impressive work, as ambitious and singular in its way as Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano or Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky. It restores one’s faith in the literary novel much as Johnson’s masterful Jesus’ Son (1992) re-energized the American short story form.
Charles Baxter’s excellent New York Review of Bookspiece on the fiction of Katherine Anne Porter isn’t freely available online, but it’s worth seeking out. The Library of America has just published Porter’s Collected Stories and Other Writings. Here’s an insightful snippet from Baxter’s review focusing on “impulsive behavior” in Porter’s stories and as a compelling component of short story writing in general:
Her tales tend to take place on a small dramatic stage with characters who find themselves claustrophobically entrapped. These protagonists typically discover themselves to be at a logical or emotional stalemate at the very moment when they must make a decision; if they don’t make such a decision, it will be made for them. Refusing to do what the moment demands, they enact a buried impulse, often violent, or they go into a kind of impersonal delirium quickly followed by remorse. The reliance of her characters on impulse puts them rather neatly within the short story genre, which as a form tends to downplay history in favor of sequences in the present tense. Dramatized impulsive behavior requires very little background material to be plausible, and short stories thrive on it. […]
The problem with impulsive behavior, her characters discover, is that it reveals another distasteful and incompatible self unknown in daily life, whose desires are—for one reason or another—unpresentable. The question then quickly becomes whether anyone can live, can coexist, with that (unfortunately genuine) self once it has been revealed. The answer is usually “No.” Porter’s understanding of this throttled condition is of a very high order, and it is here, I think, that she can be compared to the greatest of short-story writers, particularly in what may be her finest story, “Noon Wine.”
Along with “Noon Wine,” which Baxter discusses at length, he rates four other Porter stories as “unsurpassed in American literature in their genre”: “Rope,” “Flowering Judas,” “Old Mortality” and “Pale Horse, Pale Rider.”
Baxter is in agreement with critics who say Porter’s 1962 novel, Ship of Fools, has deservedly fallen out of favor. She spent twenty years writing it. The book became a bestseller and made her rich and famous in a way her short stories never could have done. But its reputation has suffered and it’s rarely read or discussed today. Baxter suggests that a moralizing tone had overtaken Porter’s fiction and sucked out the artfulness. Possibly. I’d like to think Ship of Fools might yet get a second life. In fact, one could argue that Stanley Kramer’s lousy film adaptation has done more to dampen interest in Porter’s novel than the novel itself. To Kill a Mockingbird, a novel from the same era, has an insufferably high-handed moral tone about it, but the book was turned into a supremely entertaining movie that’s still frequently screened in classrooms as an adjunct to the text.
Our CBR review of her 2002 chapbook Pencil Test referred to Karla Huston as “one of Wisconsin’s most arresting contemporary poets.” Since then she has won the Main Street Rag chapbook contest for Flight Patterns and published Virgins on the Rocks with the University of Wisconsin’s Parallel Press. Just out for 2009 from Centennial Press is her latest collection, An Inventory of Lost Things. Visit Karla’s website for ordering info. She graciously agreed to read two poems for us:
*
Pencil Test / Karla Huston
In 1969, I tucked a pencil
under a breast and when it failed
to cling, I went braless. Brassieres
uncoupled, and everywhere women
waved them like flags, filled
incinerators with nylon and lace.
Later I wore a nursing bra, flap
agape, nipple pulsing while my baby
sucked, and I wrote notes on what not
to forget. One night the neighbor boys
watched through tilted blinds, rubbed
their crotches and spilled their own
milk under a tree in the yard.
Years later when the Wonderbra arrived,
I tried it, felt cables and wire
cantilevered against my skin
to lift and point even the most
desperate tissue. Today they tell me
they need additional views of a routine
mammogram. As the doctor pulls out
the slides, some taken years earlier,
I learn the history of my breasts.
I stare at the brilliant panels, and there it is,
a transparent web and outlined
in red pencil, the sinister cell, thick
and alarming. As I press fingers
to the circled spot, my worst
fears alight there and flicker.
“Pencil Test” was published in Pearl (2003), in the chapbook Pencil Test (Cassandra Press, 2002), Silt Reader (2004) and in the chapbook, Flight Patterns, winner of the Main Street Rag chapbook contest, Main Street Rag Press, 2003.
*
Flight Pattern / Karla Huston
Four mourning doves huddle atop Hemingway,
a five by five litho hung high in the commons.
Someone let them in, a senior prank, a tradition,
the kids said. The birds wait captive and afraid,
sitting on Papa’s head to roost and bobble.
Sometimes one flies down the hall, helter skelter,
too close to the talking heads below.
Another searches for light through windows,
finds only the trick of glass. Kids below
hurl shoes, empty soda bottles, anything
to scare up some action. The birds oblige,
flying down and into the hall, screaming
mercy mercy have mercy.
Hemingway stares, his cap cocked, while he considers
every word. He knows about farewells
to arms, hills filled with white elephants, how the sky
can become a cacophony of bells.
This place is filled with killers, he seems to say
and later, the birds will be shot while blood
and feathers fall like the last day on earth.
“Flight Pattern” was published in the Wisconsin Academy Review in 2002 and in the chapbook, Flight Patterns.
Wells Tower’s short story collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, is getting raves. Must-read books are piling up on my coffee table and in the literary Netflix queue in the back of my mind. I’m tempted to bump Tower to the front of the line. If I do, it’ll be because of Deborah Eisenberg’s beautifully written review in the New York Review of Books. Her piece is filled with provocative thoughts on fiction and fiction writing. Here’s Eisenberg discussing how plot functions differently in a short story vs. a novel:
It could be said, as an expedient, that the plot of a given piece of fiction is a phantom organism—an embodiment and enactment of the author’s preoccupations and obsessions—and that this organism is what allows us to experience the piece’s deep pleasures: its insight, its beauty, its mystery, its power—whatever are the essential properties of the piece; that a plot, like a grammatical structure, is an expression of innate relationships in the mind. Long fiction has room to fill things in whereas short fiction, due to the stringency of selection it imposes, tends to demand a more active role from the reader, who must supply a chargeable receptivity, a medium in which compressed signals can unfold and send an associative web of sparks flying out between them. And it seems to me—to make yet another broad and possibly somewhat rickety generalization—that because a work of short fiction must so quickly and unerringly present evidence of the world that lies under its surface, the plot of a good story is likely to be a stranger, more volatile, and more evanescent sort of thing than the plot of a novel.
Together Through Life is the Bob Dylan album I’ve been waiting for without even realizing it: lean and bluesy with a Tex-Mex kick courtesy of Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo on accordion. While I admired the “career resurgence” trio of albums that began with Time Out of Mind (1997) and continued with Love and Theft (2001) and Modern Times (2006), I must confess these are albums I’ve rarely returned to. I’ve already listened to Together Through Life more times than any Dylan in years. No question I’ve found my soundtrack for the summer of 2009.
Instant classic: “I Feel a Change Comin’ On,” as melodic and open-armed as “Lay Lady Lay.” (There’s some typically Dylanesque confusion about the lyrics: Rolling Stone’s review of the album quotes and scrutinizes a line from the song as “you are as whorish as ever,” claiming that Dylan “growls it like a compliment.” However, an online lyrics site scans the line as “you are as porous as ever.” Porous seems the more likely choice in context, but not definitively. The aforementioned online lyrics site is on shakier ground in rendering another line in the song as, “I see my baby comin’ / and she’s walking with the village beast,” where “beast” is pretty obviously being sung as “priest” on the CD.)
I love great beginnings. Take a look at the opening paragraph of Eudora Welty’s “A Visit of Charity” (from the Collected Stories), a wonderful story that famously was rejected 13 times by various magazines in the early 1940s, including The Atlantic Monthly and Ladies Home Journal. It was finally published in a small literary magazine for which Welty was paid $30. “A Visit of Charity” is about a hapless Campfire Girl hoping to earn a few extra merit points by making a perfunctory visit to a local retirement home.
It was mid-morning—a cold, bright day. Holding a potted plant before her, a girl of fourteen jumped off the bus in front of the Old Ladies’ Home, on the outskirts of town. She wore a red coat, and her straight yellow hair was hanging down loose from the pointed white cap all the little girls were wearing that year. She stopped for a moment beside one of the prickly dark shrubs with which the city had beautified the Home, and then proceeded slowly toward the building, which was of whitewashed brick and reflected the winter sunlight like a block of ice. As she walked vaguely up the steps she shifted the small pot from hand to hand; then she had to set it down and remove her mittens before she could open the heavy door.
One of the remarkable aspects of this passage, and indeed of the story as a whole, is the point of view employed by the author. We’re in the third person, of course, but note that Welty has chosen to dispense with any omniscience that might pull us comfortably into this girl’s state of mind and into the story. There’s a disquieting lack of empathy, seemingly on the author’s part. Yet, this emotional coldness is quickly established as the story’s central theme. Isolation, and images of isolation are reinforced throughout the paragraph. The day is cold. We’re on the outskirts of town. Moreover, the nameless girl (Marian, we learn shortly) is painted for us almost cruelly in terms of bland typicality. We’re told she’s wearing “the pointed white cap all the little girls were wearing that year.”
This young person clearly is no spirited free-thinker; even her walk is described as “vague.” She represents a sort of blindly dutiful, socially conditioned innocence. She is, in other words, ill-prepared for and blithely ignorant of the devastation of old age, of failing health, of loneliness and death, all of which are symbolized and foreshadowed in this opening passage by the image of a monolithic retirement home which Welty conjures as a kind of sinister internment camp. Not only does the ugly building resemble a “block of ice” in the harsh winter sunlight, but the “prickly dark shrubs” planted in front of the building suggest barbed wire.
You might think this sets the stage for a grim tale that sentimentalizes the elderly as oppressed victims of abuse and neglect. However, “A Visit of Charity” is in fact one of Eudora Welty’s masterful little black comedies. Dickensian sentimentality is nowhere to be found. The two old women upon whom the young girl attempts to impose her charity are bitter and mean-spirited. Old age isn’t merely an inconvenience for them, it’s a black hole of delusion and despair. The old women bicker among themselves, they whine and say hateful things to one another. The girl is mocked and insulted by them, treated with the same kind of indifference that the story seems to imply we collectively treat our elderly in and out of society. But Welty steers clear of easy symbols and this never remotely resembles a screed on the theme of ageism. Her adjectives set a tone of discomfort and unease. The implications are ultimately ambiguous, if deeply pessimistic. Youth and old-age alike seem unavoidably blighted by ignorance and folly.
Some commentators have seen the girl’s journey as a kind of allegory of a Persephone-like character descending into the underworld. The story ends with her outside of the retirement home biting into an apple, which has led others to see a biblical theme at work, of innocence tarnished and sent packing into the fallen world. Welty, who had little regard for academic critics—she was essentially self-taught as a writer—said the impetus behind the story was simply her own childhood memories of being creeped out by old ladies in retirement homes. She was being disingenuous, however, by that response. On other occasions she spoke of the care she took with every word in a story like “A Visit of Charity,” looking to bring out echoes of myths and fairy tales (the girl’s red coat, for instance) and biblical lore. Eudora Welty has been called a writer’s writer, in part, I think, because we as writers can learn so much from her work, from the choices she makes as a stylist and as a storyteller. Her best stories have a powerful impressionistic quality in which tone, imagery and character become indistinguishable from plot. “Action is character,” F. Scott Fitzgerald liked to remind himself.
Dwight Allen writes meticulous, witty fiction about dysfunctional underachievers. The dual protagonists of his funny and warm new novel from the University of Wisconsin Press, The Typewriter Satyr, are two rudderless ships colliding in the night. Oliver Poole, middle-aged typewriter repairman, and Annelise Scharfenberg, thirtyish community radio show host, seem at first to share little in common aside from fragile befuddlement. Set in a pastoral make-believe Wisconsin town called Midvale (hilariously mirroring Madison’s blend of corporate pragmatism and pothead eccentricity) during the escalating indignities of George Bush’s second term of office circa 2004, Oliver and Annelise’s love affair is neither inevitable nor remotely convenient for either individual. Oliver is already married with four sons and Annelise is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. The abuse angle is more than a little daring on Allen’s part, especially given that no less a talent than John Irving was defeated by similarly queasy material at the center of his 2005 novel, Until I Find You. Irving’s approach was fetishistic and muddled with slapstick, which felt grotesque and out of place. Allen, on the other hand, has struck the perfect tone, respectful of his characters and his readers, and bringing depth to the narrative instead of derailing it. The Typewriter Satyr, like Allen’s short story collection, The Green Suit (2000), and his luminous first novel, Judge (2003), is beautifully constructed storytelling that’s built to last.
F. Scott Fitzgerald was never well-served by Hollywood. It was a love/hate relationship that he explored in seventeen acerbic short stories about a down-on-his-luck screenwriter named Pat Hobby. Then there was last year’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a big-budget film not without charm, but with scant connection to the Fitzgerald story upon which it claimed to be based. He was better served by Frances Kroll Ring, his 22-year-old personal secretary during those final months before his death from heart failure in 1940 (at age 44, like Chekhov, which seems more and more unbelievably young, especially as I grow older) when he was working on his never-to-be-completed Hollywood-themed novel The Last Tycoon.
Caffeinated and jittery, I’ve been on a ragged Denis Johnson high the last couple of months reading Tree of Smoke, his 2007 National Book Award-winning Vietnam War novel. There were moments early on when I wasn’t always convinced that it was the book I wanted it to be, having thoroughly enjoyed the unhinged quality of his 1997 novel about pre-Proposition 215 marijuana harvesting in California, Already Dead (memorably panned by Michiko Kakutani as an “inept, repugnant novel”). Tree of Smoke, said to have been ten years in the writing, is a more controlled work, its pacing methodical, its moments of madness born of deeper narrative immersion. (Kakutani was kinder; B.R. Myers was bent out of shape.) There’s a King Lear-like eye-gouging dead center in the middle of the book that’s breathtakingly brutal; ditto a sexual assault by U.S. soldiers of a Vietnamese woman, late in the novel, by which time we’ve come to appreciate the derangement of servicemen stretched beyond sanity by multiple tours of duty, one of Tree of Smoke’s many pointed parallels to our current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Charles Baxter’s excellent New York Review of Books piece on the fiction of Katherine Anne Porter isn’t freely available online, but it’s worth seeking out. The Library of America has just published Porter’s Collected Stories and Other Writings. Here’s an insightful snippet from Baxter’s review focusing on “impulsive behavior” in Porter’s stories and as a compelling component of short story writing in general:
Wells Tower’s short story collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, is getting raves. Must-read books are piling up on my coffee table and in the literary Netflix queue in the back of my mind. I’m tempted to bump Tower to the front of the line. If I do, it’ll be because of Deborah Eisenberg’s beautifully written review in the New York Review of Books. Her piece is filled with provocative thoughts on fiction and fiction writing. Here’s Eisenberg discussing how plot functions differently in a short story vs. a novel:
Together Through Life is the Bob Dylan album I’ve been waiting for without even realizing it: lean and bluesy with a Tex-Mex kick courtesy of Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo on accordion. While I admired the “career resurgence” trio of albums that began with Time Out of Mind (1997) and continued with Love and Theft (2001) and Modern Times (2006), I must confess these are albums I’ve rarely returned to. I’ve already listened to Together Through Life more times than any Dylan in years. No question I’ve found my soundtrack for the summer of 2009.
Coffee Spew 