Joe Boyd
Serpent’s Tail ($18)

by Mark Terrill

At times it seems as though revisionist history is set on reducing the 1960s to a sum lesser than its parts—a sort of bubble of colorful utopian idealism that gently rose on the marketable precepts of flower power, psychedelia, Woodstock, and the hippies; lost altitude with the deaths of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.; and eventually popped in the wake of Charles Manson and his “family,” the grim debacle that was Altamont, and the disaster of Vietnam. But whether you were there or not, on the bus or off, and despite what you may or may not remember, the ’60s were a decade of unprecedented change not likely to be replicated again. Several recent autobiographies and memoirs have done well to debunk the alleged irrelevance of the era, but none so thoroughly and elegantly as Joe Boyd’s White Bicycles.

The decade had many focal points—political, cultural, and otherwise—and certainly the music was one of the most salient aspects and left the most lasting legacy. At the center of this creative and enriching vortex was the young American Joe Boyd. Born in Boston in 1942, Boyd and his brother grew up listening to old blues and jazz records and obscure radio shows, and were heavily influenced in their musical perception by a gift from their grandmother—the RCA Victor Encyclopedia of Recorded Jazz—as well as Chris Robertson’s late-night jazz and blues show on a Philadelphia radio station. In 1960, Boyd and his brother booked and promoted their first show with Lonnie Johnson. The show was a small success at best, but Boyd experienced a sudden revelation that proved to be much more valuable: “Fats Domino is descended from Jelly Roll Morton. Rock ‘n’ Roll is the blues! Popular music is the same stuff I listen to in my room all the time, only newer. I can be a record producer!” And thus Boyd embarked upon his remarkable career.

In 1964, at the age of 21 and recently graduated from Harvard, Boyd brought Muddy Waters to England as part of the Blues and Gospel Caravan, which also included Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, the Reverend Gary Davis, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and others. The following year, Boyd was at the Newport Folk Festival, stage-managing Dylan’s legendary coming out as electrified proto-punk rocker. Back in London, Boyd’s first official recording session in the capacity of producer was for Eric Clapton’s Crossroads. He then went on to produce Pink Floyd’s first single, and they soon became the house band in Boyd’s UFO Club, the psychedelic Mecca he ran with John Hopkins in the heart of swinging London. Following his intuition about the genesis of popular music, Boyd then went on to help engineer the fusion of pop music and British folk, founding, managing, and producing the likes of the Incredible String Band and Fairport Convention. He discovered, produced, and managed Nick Drake, and on a trip to Stockholm in 1970, he was impressed by some Swedish songwriters he heard—two years before they became ABBA. Boyd eventually went on to produce soundtracks for Deliverance (his only “hit” as a producer) and A Clockwork Orange. He also produced the definitive documentary on Jimi Hendrix, as well as the film Scandal. In 1980 he started Hannibal Records, which he ran for 20 years.

Boyd’s lucid and engagingly written memoir shines for several reasons; he refuses to rely on any sort of rose-tinted reductionism or recycled gossip; his dry, straightforward account avoids all hyperbole and yet is underpinned with a wry sense of humor; his uncanny memory and detailed character descriptions ground his narrative with a sold sense of detail, an amazing feat for someone who has survived such a nebulous and mind-boggling epoch. Boyd always seemed to be at the right place at the right time, but, despite his knack for sniffing out the next big thing, he was never able to cash in on his many talents: most of his discoveries were snatched up by the corporate combine in merciless power plays. Nonetheless, Boyd neither indulges in bitterness, nor does he grind any axes, but neither is he afraid to question the critical/sociological aspects of what the “rebellion” was all about: who was rebelling against what, and how it created the fertile context for the sort of experimentation that resulted in one of the most prolific eras in modern music. (There’s also an excellent CD available with the same name, on which Boyd has collected various rarities and B-sides and oddities from many of the artists he produced and worked with.)

So impressive is Boyd’s account that one is left wondering how he managed such a marvelous feat, for which he provides the following explanation: “And as for me, I cheated. I never got too stoned. I became the éminence grise I aspired to be, and disproved at least one sixties myth: I was there, and I do remember.”

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Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer
Harcourt ($17)

by William Alexander

An epistolary novel, The Mislaid Magician is written as a series of letters between cousins Kate and Cecy, and between their husbands, Thomas and James. Intriguingly, the authors created the text—their third collaboration—by writing letters to each other in character. All three novels are set in a magical version of Regency-era England, and several characters from Sorcery and Cecelia (1988) and The Grand Tour (2004) make appearances in The Mislaid Magician—familiarity with the first two novels, however, isn't strictly necessary for enjoying the third.

The plot revolves around a conflict between ancient magics and newly built railroads: Cecy and James travel to investigate the trouble, while Kate and Thomas stay home to mind both sets of children, unaware that trouble will come to them instead. It is nice to see that Kate and Cecy continue to have adventures after settling into happy marriages. Samuel Richardson (one of Jane Austen's influences) set out two climactic possibilities for heroines in his own epistolary novels—marriage or death—and either way the story ends. This tradition is an old one, but not so with Cecy and Kate; happily, their story does not stop at the altar.

Wrede and Stevermer's use of the epistolary form is excellent. The characters cast secretive spells on their handwriting, spill blots of ink across the page, and send sudden warnings well in advance of their explanations (and it is genuinely unsettling to read “your children are safe” if you have no idea why they wouldn’t be). This immediacy makes up for the limitations of the letter-writing device, particularly the fact that characters only ever have the leisure to write letters about life-threatening events after the danger has already passed.

The novel’s flaws are political ones. (YA fantasy does, of course, participate in politics—read Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials if you doubt this.) Cecy and James discover that an ancient spell is being tampered with, either accidentally (by passing trains) or deliberately (by sinister people)—or possibly both. It turns out that the spell binds England together as a nationalistic whole, and has done so for thousands of years, long before the concept of nationalism, or of England, existed. I can’t help but wonder what a Welsh or Scottish character would think of this magical theory of English unity, but no such character ever appears to voice an opinion. We do meet a pugnacious Irish magician, one who is instantly despised by the protagonists for his lack of London-based social graces, and who gets booted out of the story after his first scene. This is a shame; he could probably offer a worthwhile critique.

Any first-person storytelling is limited to the perspectives and assumptions of the narrating characters. Here the perspectives are consistent with both the novel’s historical period and its characters’ social station. Their snobbery is still distasteful, however, as servants are condescended to and foreigners dismissed. Wrede and Stevermer could clearly conjure up a whole chorus of voices and styles between them, so as enjoyable as the company of Cecy, Kate, and their husbands continues to be, the next book might benefit from the addition of contrasting personalities to the mix.

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Gillian Flynn
Three Rivers Press ($14)

by Spencer Dew

Gillian Flynn has an uncanny command of place, recognizing how the mood of a whole town can be conveyed in watery mashed potatoes dyed red by their proximity, on the plate, to a slab of jello. The gritty particulars of the small southern Missouri town that is the setting for Sharp Objects provide more than enough horror for the whole novel, even if there were not a killer on the loose mutilating young girls. Indeed, the gaping, destroyed faces of those girls offer a sort of portrait of the town: obsessed with starched-collar social facades and sweet drinks on verandas, but grotesque just under the surface—claustrophobic, catty, equal parts Victorian Gothic and reckless Americana, laced with crystal meth, peppered with razory teenage sexpots, and reeking from the industrial pig slaughterhouse at the outskirts.

Flynn’s most remarkable gift is that she knows what’s really scary. While we may lock our doors at night to keep out creepers and lunatics, it’s the excruciation of our childhoods and adolescences, our own narrow or failed escapes from parents and roots that haunt the deepest levels of our dreams.

Camille Preaker is our stand-in here, a hometown girl turned big-city journalist, sent back on assignment to investigate the crimes. Chugging bourbon then crunching fistfuls of wintergreen mints to mask the fumes, Camille struggles just to maintain, in exile with her monstrous mother and her thirteen-year-old half sister who alternates between playing with a doll-size replica of the house in which she lives to reigning as clique queen, pretty and predatory. In this book, blood in the sense of blood kin is far, far worse than the liquid that comes out of bodies, but there are gallons of those substances, too. Sex and violence are both manifestations of power, which is what all the nastier characters here want to have. The teenage girl, with precocious cunning, is figuring out these mysteries. Camille, for her part, remembers being much younger, discovering a shack in the woods used by hunters, thick with evidence of sinister connections:

Ribbons of moist, pink flesh dangled from strings, waiting to be dried for jerky. The dirt floor was rusted with blood. The walls were covered with photographs of naked women. Some of the girls were spreading themselves wide, others were being held down and penetrated. One woman was tied up, her eyes glazed, breasts stretched and veined like grapes, as a man took her from behind. I could smell them all in the thick, gory air.

At home that night, I slipped a finger under my panties and masturbated for the first time, panting and sick.

While Flynn’s story propels itself at breakneck pace, the language is luscious, disquietingly addictive. At times, reading this book is like tonguing a loose tooth; at others, it’s like fleeing a drunken hit-and-run with a clump of hair under your windshield wiper blade. No one is innocent in Flynn’s world, and those who manage to survive don’t do so without exertion.

Camille, for instance, has this technique: at thirteen she carved the word wicked into the flesh of her hip. She started letting others do things with her body, too, but it’s the wormy scar-tissue words that remain. Nearly every inch of her skin, just shy of wrists and ankles and neckline, writhe with them: bitch, whore, queasy, punish, favorite. She carries her own adjectives, her own set of myths: “They are often feminine, in a Dick and Jane, pink vs. puppy dog tails sort of way. Or they’re flat-out negative. Number of synonyms for anxious carved in my skin: eleven.” Staying in her childhood bedroom is enough to make her itch for a blade's edge. She jiggles the padlocked door of the cutlery drawer.

Flynn’s genius here is in using spectacular horror to cut closer to the bone of the banal, the shared. There’s a scene in a fitting room that’s painful to read because it is so perfectly true. Camille stifles her scream with a wadded dress, and we, as readers, want to scream along but know that the scream would come out silent, as in a nightmare. With tourniquet-tight construction and barbed prose, this is a deeply disturbing and instantly re-readable book.

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David Marusek
Subterranean Press ($40)

by Rod Smith

David Marusek isn't one to rush a page. The Alaskan science fiction author's first novel—2005's widely praised Counting Heads—evolved over nearly a decade. Thirteen years in the making, Getting to Know You's ten stories and novellas represent all his published short fiction to date. That many ended up feeding the novel only attests to their creator's meticulousness. “I obsess endlessly over my stories,” he writes in a back-cover blurb. “I boil them down to their gooey essence and then boil them again for good measure. I squeeze them onto the page like frosting on a cake. I lay them like traps and bait them with shiny ideas.”

What Marusek doesn't mention about his narratives—mostly depicting domestic life in the late 21st century—is that their extended gestation periods make for thoroughly iterated plots and beautifully developed characters. Not that he's tech-shy: artificial intelligence, cryogenics, space travel, biological warfare, radical life extension, and human cloning all figure in the collection, integrated gracefully and nonchalantly into plot lines and characters' lives. Nor is he stingy with speculation, although “extrapolation” might be more apt: “The Wedding Album” alone offers future enough to spark hundreds of discussions about the potential rights of artificial people. Still, protagonist Anne and her husband Benjamin—sentient digital simulations of a couple on their wedding day, doomed to forget their lives and their relationship at the flick of a switch time and time again—never fail to dominate the Sturgeon Award-winning novella as they travel through decades, then centuries, outliving their flesh-and-blood counterparts as well as the culture that created them.

AI looms even larger in “We Were Out of Our Minds with Joy.” Marusek's account of a magnificently failed marriage between an artist and a powerful politician draws as much vitality from the former's intimate relationship with his loyal “belt valet” Henry—a digital assistant with more personality than a dozen talk show hosts—as it does from any of its meatworld liaisons. A similar human-AI link drives the title story, a tale of treachery and missed opportunities that highlights some of the darker aspects of Marusek's future world, where enhanced intelligence and near-immortality are freely available to anyone with the dough—assuming he or she doesn't get taken out by hostile nanobots, biological nasties, or the security-crazed government.

Captivating as it is, the Counting Heads-related stuff will be mostly old hat to those who have read the novel, but the freestanding stories offer plenty of incentive for all but the most jaded reader. While he doesn't use his home turf as a setting often, he uses it adroitly (as can only be expected from a writer whose home life in the Arctic features regular trips to the outhouse). Marusek's first published story, “The Earth Is on the Mend,” transforms post-apocalyptic survivalist tropes with a brutishly sophisticated meditation on the rebirth of hospitality, while “Yurek Rutz, Yurek Rutz, Yurek Rutz” sidesteps SF conventions altogether in favor of refreshingly accessible metafiction.

That so many of the collection's stories run long is telling, especially given their eventual destination. Fact is, Marusek's predilection for developing his material so thoroughly lends itself to novel writing, as does the pittance most SF publications offer for short fiction. Still, his capacity for invention is such that it's reassuring to think that we might get another collection equal to Getting to Know You a decade or so down the road.

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James Sallis
Host Publications ($25)

by Morris Collins

Collecting stories published over the course of forty years, Potato Tree clearly reflects James Sallis’s distinct, unconventional aesthetic. Inanimate objects come to life, jaguars haunt bedrooms, and orchids compose epic poetry. In the title story, a doctor tells a patient “You just won’t ever know if things are as they seem to you; they could be quite different.” This comment serves as an accurate description of the entire collection.

Although Potato Tree includes forty-one stories in 180 pages, they do not read as flash-fiction, nor are they facile or frivolous. Instead, each contains all the conventions of traditional narratives—plot, character, narrative arc, and setting—but in unusual proportions. As Sallis puts it in his introduction, he “sedulously abjure[s]” conventional plot. “There is,” he writes “so much else of interest.”

Sallis often employs formal innovation to craft stories that seem like shadows of something larger; several take the form of fugues, while others, with their use of stage directions and dramatic conventions, mimic play scripts. Inevitably, these fictions subvert normal genre conventions. While his work is formally unconventional, Sallis takes that old adage, show don’t tell, to a new height. In “I Saw Robert Johnson” Sallis casts a gruesome murder within the frame of a Chaucerian dream vision:

I had no memory of the night, only a vague remembrance of dreaming: trees with the face of my wife, grass mowed down that spoke in the voice of my daughter, a parliament of fowls done up in tight skirts and unbuttoned shirtwaists.

The women had begun dropping off children, and I stood at the window nude, my face blood-smeared, wondering what would happen if they should see me.

Indeed, the idea of “watching,” of sequestering oneself from a world that appears both strange and violent, characterizes Sallis’s work. In “Others,” a man invents lives for himself in newspaper classifieds in order to “know another person, to bridge this awful solitude we’re locked into.” Often in these stories, the distance between the self and others remains unbridgeable; relationships thrum with disaffected sex and resonate with horror.

While Sallis’s thematic concerns have remained constant throughout his career, this collection reveals the development of his style. “Kazoo,” his first published story, blurs the boundary between the literal and the metaphorical: “He’s giving me the eye, so I take it and put it in my pocket right next to the finger someone gave me the day before.” Explosions into outright surrealism occur less often in his recent stories, where the fantastic elements lie further beneath the surface; his protagonists no longer live on the margins of reality, but at the edge of reason. Marvelous imagery and syntax aside, Sallis works at his best when he lays emotions bare, such as in “Three Stories,” in which a man returns home for the first time after his lover has died: “The apartment was small, and mine.” In these later fictions, he chips away the ornamentation and, in stark simplicity, exposes delicate wounds.

Sallis’s oeuvre includes eleven novels, four previous books of short stories, and numerous works of poetry, biography, literary criticism, translation, and musicology. While he may remain best known for his longer works, in Potato Tree a reader will find stories fraught with beauty, solitude, and strange moments of humor, which haunt and stun and bear returning to again and again.

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Yudl Rosenberg
Edited and translated by Curt Leviant
Yale University Press ($25)

by Jessica Bennett

Much of Jewish history in the Christian era has been marked by systematic discrimination and punctuated by periodically brutal persecution. In recent history, the Holocaust, or Shoah, has been the most pronounced example, but it is hardly the only instance of murderous treatment of Jews. Among the most common ways that Jews were persecuted throughout the Middle Ages was through the blood libel: a persistent myth that Jews ritually slaughtered non-Jews (usually children) to use thief blood in the making of matzot for Passover (or to fill the hamentaschen at Purim, or for some other ritual purpose). In spite of the rulings of several popes (beginning with Innocent IV in 1247) that the blood libel was a myth constructed for the purpose of persecuting Jews, unknown numbers were falsely executed—some by mobs, some by courts—because of blood libel accusations. The blood libel fueled several sensational cases in the 19th and early 20th century; Hitler himself used the deceit to support his political agenda. The idea of the bloodthirsty Jew endures even to this day among the most virulent anti-Semites, particularly in the Muslim world.

It isn’t difficult to see why the idea of a magical creature capable of saving Jews from harm would be appealing. In his brief introduction, translator Curt Leviant recounts the ancient history of the golem myth: an artificially created man crafted of clay and brought to life by kabalistic magic. Although Leviant seems to assume a certain knowledge of Jewish history, he is nonetheless enlightening in his explanation both of golem legends in general and of the particular one that inspired Warsaw rabbi Yudl Rosenberg to write these stories, and then publish them in 1909 as a found manuscript. Rosenberg’s “Publisher’s Preface” begins, “Dear Readers! I am herewith presenting you with a delightful and hidden treasure that until now had lain hidden for some three hundred years in the great library of Metz.” The preface goes on to explain that the son-in-law of the Maharal (a renowned religious leader of 16th-century Prague) recorded these “wondrous deeds”; Rosenberg claimed to have merely purchased and published them. Rosenberg, Leviant explains, harbored a love of literature “in a community that viewed fiction as frivolous and utterly outside the Jewish tradition of Torah study.” By publishing the book as non-fiction, Rosenberg produced a bestseller that even the most serious of Torah scholars could enjoy without guilt.

Leviant’s thoughtfully crafted edition, the first to collect Rosenberg’s tales in English translation, provides a perspective on Jewish social and literary history that is both entertaining and illuminating. The stories themselves read as a cross between biblical parables and mysteries, with some mildly comic episodes thrown in. Yossele the Golem serves his master well, and the Jews of Prague are saved from many instances of blood libel and other misfortunes due to the Maharal’s wisdom and the Golem’s strength. In these tales, the Jews always overcome and the evildoers are punished, giving the reader hope that with faith in G-d and adherence to his mitvot—and perhaps with the help of a little magic—their own troubles could come to an end.

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Alicia Conroy
Carnegie Mellon University Press ($16.95)

by Katie Harger

Alicia Conroy’s collection Lives of Mapmakers uses a beautifully written ensemble of narrative identities to reach the book’s underlying themes of temporality, uncertainty, and loss. Though the voice Conroy uses is rarely her own, her message is consistent: nothing will last forever. Her characters come to this realization in various ways, learning to chart their lives according to the instability of place and time. In “The Sun Sails Broad Reach,” Conroy writes that as she continues to move through life, she is “learning to pack lightly for the trip.”

The strongest story in the collection is “The Nameless Season,” which envisions an environmental fluke that eliminates spring. Two teenage sisters watch as buds fall from the trees, the grass refuses to green, and the sun grows hotter and hotter. The emotional effects of the change are as great the environmental ones—as the younger of the sisters emptily hopes for a future that is no longer possible, the older changes her name and screams at bushes that refuse to bloom. Conroy’s predictions about life after significant climate change are chilling. If global warming permanently alters conditions on earth, the generation who remembers what it was like before will surely “with gnawings of envy and nostalgia…recognize the way we played favorites, our cult of summer.” Fortunately for Conroy’s characters, spring brings the world to life again six years after it went away. As a result, their longing for the past resurrects itself in gratitude for the options still allowed by the future.

Other highlights include the title story, in which a map collector dreams of acquiring a work by the sixteenth-century mapmaker Gerard Mercator. Mercator’s story interweaves with the collector’s own, connecting a thread of history between the time of explorers who wanted to know the whole world and the time of explorers who just want a piece for themselves. “All This Talking about God” tackles the unshakable sadness of a woman whose eight-month-old baby has died. Her friends and co-workers tell her it’s part of God’s plan, but she can’t see how anyone could plan for grief. “Right now all I’ve got is milk and tears, blood and sweat,” she says. “Animal things washing through me, things that don’t bear reckoning.” She begins to watch Buddhist nuns sandpaint a mandala they will eventually destroy. Their meditation on its temporality helps her realize that her pain, though it will not always be as strong, is inherently a part of her—“that’s what animals do…we cry out, we endure, and we suffer.”

Conroy’s descriptions spiral rhythmically around the images they project so uniformly throughout this collection that the drastic shifts in perspective, time, and place between the stories call undue attention to the fact that they’ve been written by the same person. In many cases, Conroy’s real-world distance from her topics (riparian mermaids, the lives of female migrant workers) seems to push her toward the themes she works with best and away from those she might explore from a truly altered viewpoint. In a passage that could easily describe her writing style, Conroy writes “I am trying to weave the current skein and the broken threads of my past into a plain and useful blanket.” Lives of Mapmakers is hardly plain. Its gorgeous and consistent style calls for a personal, genuine, and much longer story to match.

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Yasmina Reza
Translated by Geoffrey Strachan
Alfred A. Knopf ($19.95)

by Ryan Rase McCray

Nearly all of Yasmina Reza’s creative output examines a short list of pet themes: the nature of art (in her breakthrough play—appropriately titled Art—three friends squabble over a white painting); the division between the internal self and the social self (nearly 80 percent monologue, The Unexpected Man climaxes in the play’s one exchange); and man’s disillusionment with the world (she titled her last novel Desolation, and has also translated a stage adaptation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis). In Adam Haberberg, her third novel, Reza eschews her usual humor for a more solemn and alienating tone.

Adam Haberberg is a struggling writer who, at forty-seven, is “no longer fond of his book.” To add to his melancholy, he suffers from ocular problems—glaucoma and retinal thrombosis among them—and his wife, Irène, despises him. This is the man that Marie-Thérèse Lyoc, Adam’s old friend from school, happens upon in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. Though “you couldn’t call her ugly, thinks Adam,” nothing about her, neither her looks nor her personality, is particularly endearing. Marie-Thérèse is a successful entrepreneur, running a number of merchandise outlets that sell “fridge magnets, magnetic words” and other tchotchkes.

Adam and Marie-Thérèse decide to go out for dinner, and the novel charts the remaining daylight hours—a long car ride, dinner, cocktail conversations—through Adam’s meandering consciousness. Marie-Thérèse is hardly a close friend, nor even someone he particularly likes, but the sexual tension between the two propels the narrative nonetheless, providing a much-needed counterpoint to Adam’s weightier internal monologue. Reza’s indebtedness to modernism’s stream-of-consciousness technique is obvious, though she clearly lacks Joyce’s linguistic firepower and Woolf’s unnerving control. The text is pared to essentials, yet the sentences are ultimately mere accumulations of detail devoid of the warmth Reza captured so well in Desolation. The protagonists here are so unlikable, with such obvious (though supposedly hidden) disdain for each other, the reader can’t help but feel distanced.

What’s most lacking here is Reza’s incisive humor. Though everyone in Art is miserable, anxious, and/or angry, none is above self-deprecation; characters maintain their integrity and grace by laughing with the audience. But though the momentum of Adam Haberberg continues to the last page, the pacing—especially for such a short book—feels slow, atmospheric, and self-consciously weighty. Because she doesn’t give us any moments of tenderness capable of provoking sympathy, it’s hard to like anyone. Even Albert, the friend Adam calls repeatedly in the novel’s first quarter, is always “getting on [Adam’s] nerves.”

Reza’s previous characters’ humanity surpassed even their worst self-hatred; here the scorn is projected outward. The bond Adam and Marie-Thérèse used to share (another of Reza’s commonly used devices) is barely enough to sustain their awkward time together. But when his best friend and his wife vilify him, the reader can only share Adam’s own outlook: unpleasant boredom.

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Tao Lin
Melville House ($14.95 each)

by Spencer Dew

“Where were you when the towers happened?” someone is asked in Tao Lin’s debut story collection, Bed. The trick there, of the verb, is precisely what Lin is after—a way to capture the larger cultural moment of post-9/11, a moment defined less by planes, fire, and death as by, say, the free movie screenings in Washington Square Park, the missing person posters, the aimless wandering coupled with an urgent search for some sort of meaning. As Lin approaches it, the wake of 9/11 provides a lens for looking at how people get by with the day-to-day of existence: passively, with neutral expressions, via a sort of emotional somnambulism, crackling at times like a sheet of ice bearing too much weight.

Sick poodles, people who don’t give presents, kids listening to audio tapes on how to overcome social anxiety disorder or kids drinking beers in the movie theater watching Garden State: these are the sorts of ciphers Lin shuffles through his text, offering at times a parable of Patriot Act America, “a time of increased lawmaking” in which “things were generally banned.” Paranoia simmers on the back burner. Exotic sea animals beach themselves. There is a rash of low-profile suicides. Yet Lin’s stories hinge upon a sense of things being more or less ignored, peripheral to the particular subjective moment. The current zeitgeist is identified by Lin as “a general drift towards the arbitrary view, the solipsistic and apolitical.” Thus he populates his stories with slackers who slog through life, staying in bed when they can, aimlessly eating, engaging in rambling discourses, dissatisfied but slightly numbed to their dissatisfaction, their lives reduced to “the padded practice of a thing before the real hurt and triumph of the actual thing."

Bed repeatedly addresses the disconnect between desire and the tar pit of reality. The cultural myth of love is presented via accurately preposterous metaphors: an unattainable commodity; a hoax people invest time and energy in perpetuating, like the Loch Ness monster; a flying skeleton cackling cruelly, always out of reach. But Lin’s interest in disconnectedness leads him, ultimately, to focus not on our fluctuating relations to constructed ideals but on the act of writing and the textual surface. His interest is in the dynamic between writer and reader. He highlights seams between moral longing, analysis, and actual lived moral practice, between the neat frame and symmetry of literature and the mess of lived reality. He pushes these issues to the point of paradox: moral action is contradictory, if not impossible. Likewise, realist writing gives us a world “where tea [is] brewed, earnestly, from paint chips, glass shards, and small change,” but that is not our world, where such a mix boils down to poison. The text is at once resolutely earnest and sarcastic in its dismissal of earnestness, committed to moral ideals and ironic in the invocation of such empty and dated concepts.

In Lin’s novel Eeeee Eee Eeee, released simultaneous with Bed, this double play is heightened by prolonged discussions of politics and ethics, traced back both to banal daily decisions (the ubiquitous moral quandary of what to eat, for instance) and to the reflexive critique of writing and reading (via references to the entertainment industry, both movies and books). This text, in the midst of one of its either earnest or ironic discussions, provides a model for thinking about Lin’s own stylistic play:

“What do you think about the president?” Andrew said.

Mark put noodles into his mouth.

“I think he’s smarter than people think,” Andrew said. “He winked on TV. He winked fast, so only a few people would see. I feel like he’s being ironic all the time.” Andrew stopped talking. Mark did not respond. “I mean everyone on TV is being ironic all the time,” Andrew said, “But the president knows he’s being ironic all the time, so he’s twice ironic. You have to be twice ironic on TV to be regular ironic in real life. So if you’re ironic on TV you’re negative ironic in real life.”

This idea of the twice ironic echoes throughout Lin’s approach. He is twice ironic, twice earnest, but also twice nihilistic, twice moral. Eeeee Eee Eeee’s characters wallow in their depression and/or are cleverly detached from that depression. These discontents find themselves making illegal u-turns or philosophizing in circles, angry at existence itself. One of the funniest bits of the novel (and Lin can be a very funny writer) is the splicing in of fragments from a stock trope of our culture, the “killing rampage,” a collective media-based fantasy popping into characters' heads at odd moments: “killing rampage,” “suitcase full of cash,” “high fives on a diamond boat.” The humans in Eeeee Eee Eeee share space with animals. There are talking dolphins and bears who club movie stars to death, plus, as always in Lin’s work, hamsters. These animals give the work a vandalized edge, as if Lin had finished it and just folded it back, scrawled over his own completed sketch, another double play, either wry or straightforward. Lin’s writing is all surface and/or all depth. The prose is like a hamster wheel, spinning: “Whee,” says some human, and then a bear breaks open his skull. Lin writes like Andy Kaufman wrestled: concealed behind layers of surface image, unreadable in intent.

Later in that conversation about the president, Mark responds with an argument that “irony is so privileged.... It’s what happens when you don’t need to do anything to survive—it’s when the things you do have nothing to do with survival.” Yet irony is a survival mechanism as well, anesthetizing and armoring at the same time, and in these texts, in which we as readers are reminded of horrors both individual and international, of greed and corruption, economic control, and in which we are offered rationalizations for why playing chess or practicing the piano, as expenditures of time and energy, as “politically apathetic” denials of other options, are themselves as deadly as war, as murder, snide withdrawal is the safest, most comfortable option.

Comfort is the ultimate goal for Lin’s characters, not some imaginary release from suffering but the temporary succor of ice cream in bed or the soothing retreat into solipsism, something practiced on a grand scale by the writer valorized in one of the novel’s final discussions, Fernando Pessoa. The Portuguese poet is praised by Lin’s characters for his realistic treatment of the problem of suffering, but as a master of stylistic double play he is certainly high in the lineage of which Lin himself is working. Pessoa pursued a paradoxical egotistical “denial of self” on the level of literary practice, writing under various invented personas, yet on the political level he combined uber-nationalism with ego-centered religious fanaticism for a potent fascist stance. To treat Pessoa purely as a stylist is more than a stylistic choice. Yet “how can you be angry at someone else’s assumption or context that was as arbitrarily chosen or adopted as your own?” another Lin character asks, baffled.

These candy-colored paperbacks are designed to maintain that neutrality, to remain undecided in the face of such questions. They both amuse and accuse their amused readers of bad politics, bad faith. The idea of the moral is dangled in front of us and then collapsed. Exertion is followed by failure, and passivity takes the place of any possible action. “Everyone should be impeached... for being so bad at living,” we are told. Except, of course, that such an act is absurd, and would be pointless, incomprehensible and meaningless as a dolphin’s squeals.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2007 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2007

Jim Crace
Nan A. Talese ($24.95)

by Kelly Everding

Of all the possible futures for America, there are few more chilling than the ruined and devolved country imagined by Jim Crace, one in which Manifest Destiny has reversed eastward in a sad retreat to the mother country. One might think this story a sort of vengeful commentary by a British writer, but our revolution happened over 200 years ago and is old news. The Pesthouse makes no mention of how America dried up and turned into a pre-industrial, plague-ridden, lawless version of itself, with a few people holding on for dear life and relying on the new commodities of fear and escape to survive. What matters is who they become in the face of it.

The story begins in the small enclave of Ferrytown, still thriving because they have a stronghold on the only means to moving east: a boat that will take people, horses, and supplies across a wide river and closer to the great sea. However even this small victory of survival gets squashed rather quickly by Crace; he kills the entire town with one giant poisonous belch—probably a pocket of methane gas—from the lake upstream. Only two people avoid the horrific fate of the villagers. Margaret lives because she was taken to the pesthouse situated above the village when she exhibited signs of the “flux,” a plague passed from traveler to traveler. Franklin Lopez, one of the many migrants heading east, was also on the hill above Ferrytown with an injured knee, waiting for his older brother to return for him. Franklin overcomes his fear of the flux and enters the pesthouse to escape a torrential rain, meeting the shaved and recovering Margaret. And so their adventure and friendship begins—forged by loss, desperation, and finally love. Franklin burns down the village of the dead, and they move on ever eastward:

The fire was in the west and not ahead. Hadn’t that always been the prophecy—that mother would abandon daughter to the ashes, that father and son would depart from one another in flames, that before the doors of paradise could open there would have to be a blackened, hot, and utter silence in America, which could be quenched only by the sea and would be survived only by the people of the boats?

There is no union left in this United States, as people are enslaved, beaten, and raped, and families are torn apart. All knowledge of history and industry is gone—great hulking and rusting machines dot the landscape on the road to salvation. And the people are left to forage what they can, barter for food, and foster their superstitions. Margaret must take refuge with the religious order of the Finger Baptists who spurn all metal wares. Their ruling members, the Helpless Gentleman, refuse to lift their hands to do anything because “hands do Devil’s work.” Crace seems to delight in emphasizing the futility and absurdity that arises in the face of desperate times. “Wingless and with withered arms, they’d earn their places at the side of God.”

Yet, however horrible the situation gets in this imagined wasteland, Crace treats his main characters with the utmost respect and affection. He wants these two people to survive. Margaret and Franklin epitomize the true character and integrity of Americans—the guile, the self-doubt, the determination, the necessary love and compassion needed to rise above the feckless and despicable people around them. The Pesthouse is a novel of gorgeous language and exquisite pacing to be sure, but perhaps the most beautiful thing about the book is how Crace really cares for these embattled Americans.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2007 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2007