D. Foy
Two Dollar Radio ($16.50)

by Joseph Salvatore

In his 1993 essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” David Foster Wallace defended a certain poem’s reference to Dick Clark, saying that, though it lacked “context,” it was “a reference we all, each of us, immediately get.” The “we all, each of us” with whom Wallace aligned himself evidently did not include the older generation of his writing professors, who saw such ephemeral fictional techniques as a lazy shorthand for the difficult descriptive work that realist fiction requires. It’s hard to tell if the fictional techniques of writer D. Foy, in his debut novel Made to Break (which is also set in the mid-1990s), would have made Wallace grimace or grin. For here Foy’s characters are “skinny as Fred Astaire,” their eyes have “gone Marty Feldman,” they resemble “Herman Munster’s brother.” They don’t just look like “Klaus Kinski” or even “Nosferatu,” but rather “Klaus Kinski . . . as Herzog’s Nosferatu,” or “the rat from Reservoir Dogs . . . played by Steve Buscemi.” One of his characters is “straight-up Lestat,” another has “Mary Hartman braids,” yet another has “Kris Kringle eyes.” And in a nod, perhaps, to the ur-’90s artifact, the film Reality Bites, our narrator’s feelings are described as being a “Brady Bunch thing.”

Yet what Made to Break demonstrates, and what Foy understands that Wallace’s teachers seemingly didn’t—and what perhaps even Wallace himself couldn’t have foreseen—was how far less worrisome such issues would become to a new generation of writers a couple of decades hence. For as readers will discover, Foy is no lazy technician, nor is his debut novel merely a Gen-X love letter. Employing a highly aestheticized language that calls to mind Hubert Selby, Jr. and Denis Johnson, and privileging the arc of character over the development of plot, the music of voice over the functionality of dialogue, Foy offers up a pre-apocalypse end-of-the-world tale about cannibals, mutants, corpses, survivors, road trips, lovers, and friends.

When the story opens in Oakland, CA, it’s 1995, two days before the New Year. Our narrator, Andrew, and his four closest friends—Hickory, Basil, Lucille, and Dinky—are celebrating Lucille’s new “corporate job” which pays “big-big coin.” But after their “mound of dope” becomes “just a dirty mirror,” they get in Basil’s truck and head to Tahoe, where Dinky’s family owns a cabin. As in all good stories, things immediately go wrong. A rainstorm starts; they run out of gas, have to hike for over an hour; Dinky forgets his key and Basil has to break a window to get in, which emits the stench of a dead bird’s corpse. Back in Basil’s truck in search of pre-made ice for their cocktails, Andrew and Dinky hit a mudslide. Dinky is injured, the truck is totaled, and the roads are empty, but luckily a truck comes along, its driver the aforementioned Nosferatu look-a-like, a grizzled and eccentric denim-clad veteran named Super. When Super drops them back at the cabin, the rain is worse, a flood is coming, Dinky is in bad shape, and the cabin’s phone is dead (it being the mid-’90s there are no cell phones, a plot detail convenient for Foy, but not for his characters). Getting on each other’s nerves, they decide to play Truth or Dare, a game that by novel’s end will bring on irreversible consequences.

The game sequence itself is a marvelous literary set-piece, in which Andrew ruminates on all the secrets he won’t reveal about himself and his four friends: alliances, betrayals, transgressions, family histories, some of them dramatized as flashbacks, all of them the necessary ammunition for long-awaited showdowns: “The world had changed between now and then, but the cabin had not, nor the humans in it. How is it the strangest people we know are nearly always ourselves?”

Playful and crafty with language, Foy creates characters and a world both strange and familiar (“the strangest people we know are nearly always ourselves.”). Talking about the leg he lost in Vietnam (and illuminating the novel’s larger themes), Super, who refers to himself in the first-person plural, describes how, despite such loss, he can still feel a pebble in his boot: “Tet offensive is when the foul deed done been done—well, like we said, after they snatched it off the way they did and throwed it to the dogs what with only a scratch . . . we got to feeling these itches down there, and other pains and whatnots. Our ghost foot they called it. We can feel, all right.”

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2014 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2014

Murray Farish
Milkweed Editions ($16)

by Andrea Wills

Inappropriate Behavior, Murray Farish’s first story collection, draws in the reader with a personal style and gets increasingly weirder until the finale flickers out. The narrative of each individual story is brimming and tumultuous, filled with recognizable people and places that find themselves on the brink of insanity. Farish is a professor in the St. Louis area, and readers will identify with the Missourian brand of backwoodsiness in “Mayflies” as well as the universal graduate student doldrums in “The Thing About Norfolk” and “Charlie’s Pagoda.” Every character encounters some sort of modern-day resistance that prevents him or her from perceived fulfillment.

Farish’s stories aren’t humorless, but they do show humanity through the narrow lens of desperation, which can be draining at times. Characters like Perkins in “Ready for Schmelling” witness unexplainable absurdities (in his case, upper management acting strangely), but the consequences of such spectacles are irrational. Obsessions constantly triumph over rationality, like when the main character in “Lubbock is Not a Place of the Spirit” beats up an old woman in the street because she threatens his confused reality. There isn’t much of a resolution for most of these stories; readers have to reach for meaning, much like the bewildered, stumbling characters.

The title story, which is the final story in this book, drips with gory detail but is otherwise representative of Farish’s work as a whole. Here the Putnams, drowning in debt, struggle with their abnormal son Archie and come to an ending as depressing as it is inconclusive. Yet the way Farish juxtaposes the playfulness and discomfort of Archie’s mentality is so haunting that readers will ignore the fact that it leaves so many open-ended questions.

One interesting aspect of Inappropriate Behavior is its penchant for interconnecting themes and subject matter, such as stalking to the point of court-ordered therapy and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Farish depicts the Midwestern landscape—and by extension, the world at large—as a vortex of negativity and uncontrollable urges. Delicate storytelling connects the outwardly picturesque lives of these characters, and in different dialects and cadences, a consistent message repeats: the human spirit is both easily warped and eternally resilient, a combination that proves beneficial to disaster.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2014 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2014

Sigmund Freud, Minna Bernays, and the Meaning of Dreams
Barry G. Gale
AuthorHouse ($35.99)

by Madelon Sprengnether

It’s not easy to write about Freud, especially if you want to present him in a way that challenges received notions of his character. Freud’s official biography has him as a sober, self-disciplined, and sexually conservative investigator of the realm of the unconscious. This is precisely the image that Barry G. Gale’s novel Belle Vue seeks to upend. Gale imagines that Freud had a sexual affair with his sister-in-law Minna Bernays, not an improbable scenario on the basis of available evidence, yet one that is not generally accepted among dyed-in-the-wool Freudians.

The case for the affair began in 1953, when Freud’s former disciple (and subsequent bitter enemy) Carl Jung reported to Kurt Eissler (the first Director of the Freud Archives in Washington, DC) that Minna had confessed to him an intimate relationship with Freud. Minna never married and lived with the Freud family in their apartment in Vienna (occupying a room that could only be entered through Sigmund and Martha’s bedroom) from 1896 until the family immigrated to England in 1938. More tellingly, Minna is known to have traveled with Freud sans Martha on many occasions. In 2006, another seemingly damning document surfaced: a hotel entry in Freud’s handwriting from the Schweizerhaus in the Swiss town of Maloja, dated August 13, 1898, that reads “Dr. Sigm. Freud u[nd] Frau,” although it is clear from the documentary record that Freud was traveling not with Martha, but with Minna.

What to make of all this? It’s a lot of fun, of course, to imagine a more raunchy, sexually liberated Freud than the one we’ve internalized from his stiff, cigar-smoking portrait. Gale, who has heavily researched the atmosphere of fin-de-siècle Vienna, renders the case for the affair into fiction with mixed results. For the sake of narrative cohesion, he dates Freud and Minna’s intimacy from the spring of 1895—mainly so that he can link it to the momentous summer in which Freud dreamed the “Dream of Irma’s Injection,” the centerpiece of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). He also compresses events (as novelists are wont to do) in order to heighten the drama of Freud’s family life, including its hidden tensions and ambiguities.

Gale has done his homework on Freud’s writings, the trail of evidence connecting him to Minna, and the intellectual and social ferment of the times. He portrays Minna as a free spirit, heavily influenced by the philosophy of Nietzsche and the concept of the “New Woman,” both of which were circulating in the coffee house culture of Vienna. Gale goes so far as to provide her with progressive female friends, such as Helene von Druskowitz, the first Austrian woman to earn a PhD, and Hermine Wittgenstein, elder sister of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

The narrative, which is centered on a single day at Belle Vue (the summer resort to which Freud’s family regularly repaired during the sweltering Viennese summers), includes many flashback scenes, chiefly involving Minna; these serve to elucidate the rising conflict between Martha (heavily pregnant with her last child Anna) and Freud over the attraction between her husband and her sister. Martha’s suspicions throughout the day are fed by her dominating mother, Frau Bernays, leading to a confrontation between husband and wife late in the evening of Martha’s birthday celebration at the hotel.

Gale succeeds in humanizing Freud, whose major biographers tend toward hagiography, but even more importantly he gives voice to the significant women in his life. The documentary record is thin regarding the inner thoughts and conflicts of women such as Martha, Minna, and Frau Bernays. Gale gives each of them their due in imagining their individual subjectivities, making them convincing characters in what must have been at best a complex state of affairs. It doesn’t matter so much if he “has it right” as whether we can take a fresh look at Freud through the perspective of the important and powerful women in his life.

Take Gale’s characterization of Frau Bernays as a sharp-eyed, no nonsense kind of woman who worries (appropriately) about her son-in-law’s ability to support his family and who observes the intensity of the attraction between Freud and Minna long before Martha does. Minna, too, comes to life as a sharp-witted, if somewhat impulsive and unrealistic, advocate of women’s rights. Gale’s greatest achievement, however, is his characterization of Martha, who wins the reader’s sympathy through her loyalty to her husband, devotion to family, adherence to her own principles, and courage in confronting Freud with her suspicions.

On the minus side, the ultra contemporary tone of the dialogue can be irritating: “I don’t like this, Martha. And you shouldn’t either. At the same time he is lovey-dovey with Minna he pushes you out of his bed.” Its occasional weak prose aside, however, Belle Vue will challenge you to think differently about Freud, the complexity of the time in which he lived, and the density of his inner life.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2014 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2014

Alexai Galaviz-Budziszewski
McSweeney’s ($24)

by Scott F. Parker

The short stories of Alexai Galaviz-Budziszewski’s Painted Cities are set less in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago than in the personalized dreamscape adapted from that place by the narrator, Jesse, who serves as a cipher for his environment. In the story “Sacrifice,” about Jesse’s struggles with his wife’s son’s birth father, he says, “But none of this explains who I am. And truth is I am no one.” Most of what we learn about Jesse we learn by what he witnesses in adolescence and now preserves, though much of it is brutal.

Pilsen—arguably the book’s main character—is marked by poverty and violence, gangs and urban blight. It is the kind of place where gunfire erupts at a cotillion, kids pan for gold in fire hydrant water and hide on the roofs of abandoned factories, and a man orders beers after being shot while he waits for the ambulance. Yet the stories recall such incidents with a fondness for those moments of beauty that were sought if not always found, and an optimism that some of the neighborhood’s denizens might rise up from their circumstances. One character, “even though he had been shot the moment he . . . yelled ‘Truce,’ he had made a completely heartfelt attempt at doing something in his life.”

Story after story explores the theme of reality/unreality as the world is distorted through the prism of memory. “My memories compete with reality,” Jesse reports in the opening story, “Daydreams.” Or later in the same story: “all I can recall is what it felt like. I try to piece together image from that.” Despite such preoccupations with the real, the book’s mood is anything but ponderous. The stories are written in a compressed style heavy on vivid scene; a powerful intimacy emerges from the specificity of detail and idiosyncratic logic of Jesse’s private world, through which Galaviz-Budziszewski’s love of the neighborhood becomes apparent.

In the story “God’s Country” we get a sense of why this matters so much when we read about Chuey, a neighborhood boy who develops the ability to raise animals (including humans) from the dead, a skill he claims to have acquired in “Sonora, God’s Country.” Looking back on this period from the vantage point of adulthood, Jesse says,

I still think about raising the dead, every day. Sometimes, in my bathroom, I will find things, a dead spider, a dead ladybug, or, every so often, a cockroach. And just for fun I will close my eyes, open them, and touch the dead body. I’ll hope that my finger will give life, that I’ll feel again what I felt when I was fourteen, when, in this whole damn neighborhood, among all this concrete, all these apartment buildings, church steeples, and smoke stacks, we were somebody.

This is not the kind of book to which the reader complains, “Am I really supposed to believe that a boy from Chicago can raise the dead?” Not when the book itself does just that.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2014 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2014