Mihail Sebastian
translated by Stephen Henighan
Biblioasis ($17.95)

by Amy Henry

Mihail Sebastian’s The Accident takes place in 1935 in Bucharest, a cosmopolitan city free of stifling social mores. It begins with a chance meeting, in which a French teacher, Nora, is injured falling from the slippery steps of a tram; a bystander, Paul, reluctantly assists her home and helps see to her injury. Almost immediately, they embark on a one-sided relationship that feels predictable and somewhat shallow; there’s little about the characters or situation to draw the reader in.

That is, until the next portion of the novel begins, with Paul on his own, analyzing his previous relationship with Ann, a flighty artist who hides her narcissism under a veil of childish hyperactivity. Desperate to see her, possibly suicidal, he is fueled by a passion that drives the story to a much higher level; it becomes a fascinating character study of Ann, whose behavior keeps him off kilter, and of Paul himself, a lawyer who has become so jaded and angry he’s ceased feeling emotion. Ann draws attention everywhere she goes, causing Paul to react with something like confusion:

In each alien glance that was directed towards Ann, in each greeting, he seemed to see a memory and an invitation. . . . signals that went over his head like so many telegrams in code, which he intercepted without being able to read them, for nobody could assure him that each new greeting didn’t bear a message, an allusion or a proposition.

This section so surpasses the beginning of the book that I found myself wondering if Nora would even reappear. Sebastian leaves many details vague, and his prose underlines the tension created:

Far away and deep down, close to his heart, something stopped in its tracks and waited to break or unravel. It was like being under a heavy anaesthetic: he felt the wound, he felt the skin’s resistance to the blade, and the very precise, very exact rending, and yet it didn’t hurt, it didn’t hurt . . .

The novel then cuts away from Ann and back to Nora, where she and Paul reunite and journey to the Transylvanian Alps for a skiing expedition wherein Nora patiently attempts to resuscitate Paul’s feelings. Nora is a trooper, a sturdy, good-natured woman who is competent in virtually everything—including skiing. But is she too good? It’s as if she senses her position as replacement to Ann, although never knowing her competition. Her tactic is to be gracious and generous to a fault. As she teaches Paul to ski, he finds that his rediscovery of nature through the snow alters his moods, changing who he had become. But who are they, together? Which woman does Paul choose?

Mihail Sebastian set The Accident in the time and place of his adult life, and similarities abound between the novel and own experiences. The timing he chose is relevant because it parallels his own identity struggle in pre-war Romania. Enjoying fame from writing both novels and plays, the Jewish Sebastian (born Iosef Hechter) also worked as a journalist with many noteworthy literary figures. However, Hitler’s ideas found fertile ground in Romania, with Sebastian’s peers distancing themselves from him and publishing anti-Semitic propaganda. The paper’s editor, Nae Ionescu, became a fierce proponent of fascism but added a religious element to its fervor.

Ironically, Sebastian had previously asked his former mentor to write the preface to The Accident, and somewhat unsurprisingly, Ionescu used the opportunity to attack Sebastian and his race, stating, “Iosif Hechter, you are sick. You are sick to the core because all you can do is suffer . . . do you not feel that cold and darkness are enfolding you?” Sebastian recoiled from the remarks, calling them a death sentence, but ultimately allowed the preface to go to print with the book. In her essay “Romanian-Intellectual-Jew: Mihail Sebastian in Bucharest,” Joanne Roberts states that Sebastian “defended his decision to publish the Preface arguing that he had not asked Ionescu for a particular type of Preface and that he could not be party to censorship.”

Sebastian may have considered this an act of defiance to resist Ionescu’s bullying, yet some Jews felt that by permitting the preface to remain he was giving tacit agreement to its contents. Thus, he was alienated from both his peers and his race. The question of true identity becomes a theme in his remaining works, which sadly are few as he died in 1945 after being hit by a truck. The Translator’s Afterword in this volume provides more details about Sebastian’s biography and unites them with several of the book’s themes; Stephen Henighan’s translation is precise and his notes show how closely he studied Sebastian’s life and work.

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Rebecca Wolff
Riverhead Books ($25.95)

by Benjamin Woodard

There’s a sub-genre of New England storytelling that traveled to the New World in ships, its roots dating back centuries to European folktales and works like the Malleus Maleficarum. In this strain, quaint locales and panic toward the unknown are combined with the dark underbelly of magic and the occult. Think Nathaniel Hawthorne or Shirley Jackson, H. P. Lovecraft or Stephen King.

That this variety remains popular today is perhaps a testament to the staying power of the antiquated beliefs of the Puritan settlers, or the allure of the real-life events that unfolded in Salem and surrounding villages in the late 17th century. Whatever the reason, many authors seem to believe that the devil has selected the charming small towns of the northeast to play his games. So it seems appropriate that Rebecca Wolff, whose poetry flirts with images of ghosts and witches in collections like Manderlay and The King, has conceived the fictional central Massachusetts municipality of Wick as the venue for her unsettling debut novel. A tale of adolescent yearning and fascination, The Beginners offers generous nods to these well-told tales while twisting their narratives into something original and satisfying.

Wolff’s heroine is fifteen-year-old Ginger Pritt. A bit of an outcast, Ginger works part time at the local café and spends her free hours devouring books while hanging out with her best friend, Cherry. The duo are pretty much inseparable. They think alike—or at least they used to, because as summer fast approaches, Ginger notices that Cherry is suddenly more interested in talking about boys than playing castle in the town’s old mill (the place where, as Ginger puts it, the two of them are able to be “lonely as one.”). Seeing her friend mature in ways she cannot yet relate to leaves Ginger wondering about her future. “So this is how it’s going to be,” she thinks to herself. “There is a way to grow up, I’m sure of it, that does not require of us this abject absorption . . . in what? In the hypothetical thought processes of a boy—or man—we only know by family name, by house, by car?”

Enter into the narrative a pair of older, mysterious strangers, Theo and Raquel Motherwell. Full of daring banter and a tone of worldly sophistication, Wick’s newest residents quickly take a shine to young Ginger, and before long, the girl can’t stop thinking about them. Charmed by the fact that they’re the first people Ginger and Cherry have ever seen move into Wick, the girls find themselves whiling away the summer days at their home, listening to their stories, even though Cherry expresses hesitation at the Motherwells’ odd demeanor (“. . . those people are so bizarre. Raquel told me the weirdest things about her and Theo. Maybe I shouldn’t even tell you. It’ll just freak you out . . . I know how squeamish you are about boys, and sex, and that stuff.”).

But these outlandish tales do not drive Ginger away—rather, they pull her closer to the Motherwells, and as the warm months pass, Ginger spends an inordinate amount of time by their side, choosing these strangers over Cherry and her own family. When Raquel mentions a family connection to the witch trials of Salem, Ginger begins to wonder if the Motherwells may be witches themselves, and if a spell has been cast upon her, one that prevents her from escaping the magnetism of Theo and his sandy hair, of Raquel and her graveyard anecdotes. Days fold into weeks, events trip over themselves, and before long, The Beginners dives full tilt into the manic obsessions that course through Ginger, transforming the novel into a pulsing fever dream, where situations may or may not be real, narrative threads border on the pornographic, and the world outside of the small bubble Ginger has created is voided. There is a genuine creepiness afoot here. The Motherwells, be they students or sociopaths, lovers or siblings, have the enchantment of a Jim Jones-type over Ginger, and watching her repeat scene after scene with slight variation is fascinating and frustratingly entertaining.

Although Wolff has crafted an attractive story in The Beginners, something remains puzzling about Wick. The author injects plenty of regional touches that will please those familiar with central Massachusetts—old mills, Polish bakeries, and Janine’s Frosty, an actual eatery in real-life Ware, MA—but there are also embellishments that fail to ring true. For example, when Ginger mentions that Wick is “more than ninety minutes away from a large university” early in the narrative, “far enough to be unthinkable for commuting,” the link to the area is lost, as no town in central Massachusetts is this far from such an institution. Small flourishes like this may add a touch of drama and a sense of hardship to the characters, but they also make the setting feel contrived. Ginger’s description of the Motherwell’s house, “a stage set, or even a sketch for a stage set,” could also be a valid portrayal of Wolff’s Wick.

Despite this, The Beginners has enough peculiar energy flowing through its pages to keep the reader’s attention. A meditation on the easily influenced teenage mind, with the added dashes of witchcraft and sexual maturity, this poet’s debut novel is a pleasant and satisfying read.

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Haley Tanner
The Dial Press ($25)

by Erik Wohlrabe

The secret language between best friends is both universal and utterly idiosyncratic to each pair. For the titular characters of Haley Tanner’s debut novel, this language is couched in the vocabulary of magic, codified in endless cascading lists of hopes and dreams, and personified in a nearly unquenchable hunger the two young Russian immigrants have for each other. They share most everything, from secrets and promises to food and help with homework.

Vaclav and Lena meet when they are both five years old. They have spent their formative years in the United States, but have done so cocooned within the confines of Brooklyn’s Russian immigrant community. Already four when his family left a crumbling Russia in the early 1990s, Vaclav nonetheless picked up a good deal of English, both from television and from his mother’s efforts to teach him the language of their new home.

Lena has not been as lucky. She spent her early childhood in the care of a babushka who was not her own grandmother, a miserly old woman who spoke only Russian. Lena’s English is still rudimentary when she meets Vaclav. The pair bond at Coney Island, where they sneak into a magic show and are dazzled by The Great Fredini. Vaclav is determined to become a great magician, with Lena by his side as his lovely assistant.

As the duo prepare to perform their own magic act on the boardwalk, events outside the children’s control force them apart. Lena’s home life with a neglectful, absent aunt comes to a head when Rasia, Vaclav’s mother, discovers how poorly the girl has been treated. Lena is sent away, leaving Vaclav broken-hearted by the loss of his friend.

Seven years later, the now-teenage children reunite and find their connection is as strong as ever, ready to blossom into something like love. But the secret of Lena’s past continues to act as a gulf, separating them. When Vaclav discovers the dark answers, he is faced with a decision about what truth to tell his best friend.

Tanner writes with a giddy passion much like young love. Her prose reflects the stilted, eclectic nature of English filtered through a foreign mind, as we see the world through Vaclav’s and Lena’s eyes. This style naturally transitions to a more confident, formal tone as the children age and grow into their American identities.

The author is capable in conveying the confused emotions of childhood, where things that seem small and insignificant to adults take on dwarfing importance to a child. Childhood rituals take on almost totemic powers, and love and hatred can seem to coexist in the same thought. Taylor presents a sterling example of the paradoxical clarity and confusion of childhood early in the book when Lena is served dinner at Vaclav’s home by Rasia and becomes ill:

The borscht is the color of a dress a queen might wear. The borscht floods Lena’s bowl. The borscht is the color of blood. The borscht is the color of blood, and in it are not pieces of meat, but moles that have fallen off the many chins of Rasia. Once Lena’s mind has taken this turn, she cannot turn back.

She also writes with unusual clarity about the difficulties of motherhood, and how mothers perceive themselves in relation to their children. The distance that grows between mother and child is especially hard on Rasia, who is faced with watching her son grow more and more American, shucking bits of the past his parents have raised him in:

When he was a little boy, they discovered places together. . . .
Now that they do far fewer things together, he is always doing something where she doesn’t know the place. This is something that can make a bruise on a mother, but Rasia tells herself that this is not so different from regular parents of regular American teenagers. But a little, she knows, it is very different.

Vaclav & Lena carries the blessings and burdens of being a first novel. Tanner writes with a hungry ferocity, propelling the reader forward; however, she almost burns the story out in the last act, leaving too many revelations in the hands of a hitherto untrustworthy and largely silent character. Even so, Tanner shows herself to be a writer of marked ambition and comforting humanity, pulling off a wonderful magic trick of story and character in the process.

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Doug Nufer
Les Figues Press ($15)

by Greg Bem

His mind would work as his work would mind: backwards. Rather than every man for himself, himself for every man. Every man could man every everyman. He took The Course; The Course took him. The story of his life was the life of his story, that side flip of a flip side notion that had he (or, I) done everything exactly the opposite, I (or, he) wouldn’t have lost.

The latest book by Seattle’s Oulipo-derived storyteller Doug Nufer, By Kelman Out of Pessoa, is a short and crisp novel about the soft, unspoken sides of gambling, the necessity of personality fragmentation, and the remarkable passivity of obscure diligence. The novel has its center at the Emerald Downs racetrack of Auburn, Washington, a city just south of, and connected at the hip with, its cultured, drizzly neighbor, Seattle.

At Emerald Downs, Nufer sketches the life of three characters born from one. Nufer uses a creation technique, a mode of characterization, famously propagated by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa: the heteronym, in which the characters write each other. First is the dominantly vexing, slightly queer, and dysfunctional father-figure, the inspiring Henderson Will, sufferer of a burden of physical loss and mental handicap:

A stroke of amnesia made him forget what he did. His bosses either didn’t notice or they put up with him until they laid him off anyway. But then he had another mental collapse, where everything got twisted around backwards. Fine. His name is the inverted version of a typical name, with a little play off the will of Will.

The mental collapse has, out of a will for defense or for desire, created the heteronyms Cal Nipper and Kelly Lane, two characters who are immediately identified as additional players in the novel’s game, a strict, rule-bound activity bent and shaped by the season of horse racing.

The premise of the novel—partially derived from Scottish author James Kelman, and otherwise from a maddening enclave of literary predecessors—is ultimately unique. Nufer’s novel is an experiment in constriction, where Nufer as author, as owner of the owner of the heteronym narrators, visits the races once a week, and through him his voices create a narrative that is rich with complexities—insane, confused, and yet loveable.

Henderson, with his desperately fatal creations in tow, finds “The Course,” a social vortex not unlike David Foster Wallace’s tennis academy and Chuck Palahniuk’s self-help groups. The Course, as a scheme that sucks in the souls of our heroes, goes on to teach them a structured, mathematically sound approach to gambling that may or may not be flawed in its success, but is addicting nonetheless. Nufer’s implementation is beautiful in its relationship to the nihilism of the 21st-century brink Americana:

But what is the future? From day one to the end, here we are, doing what we do and saying what we say in response to some rules set down by a spiel in a self-help course on horse race handicapping. (Kelly Lane)

Each piece of the novel builds upon one giant, gently rotating sense of narration. At times the plot is straightforward and at other times there is the “hysteria” of reality in which these characters coexist. The world is expanded through their three different sets of eyes, and yet they all belong to the one. Excitement builds with the bizarre and meta-references to the basis of the novel itself, humorously thrown in to satisfy, stabilize, and provoke those readers who pay attention:

“Go back to the Pessoa. I’m an aspect of the hysteria within you, but this aspect could turn out to be a perfectly well-adjusted character. As you see me, that is. As I develop myself through you as an aspect of the hysteria within me is another story. What I’m wondering is, what is your peculiar hysteria? Exactly what is it that I’m supposed to be an aspect of?” (Kelly Lane by Cal Nipper)

But despite the level of craft and homage to those slick forbearers, Nufer maintains a subtle art in his prose: one moment in the story only means one, singular moment, and thus there is a very realistic distribution in tone. Contextually tonal weight is even in its distribution and vibrant in its diversification. The working of this style to produce elegant juxtaposition and synchronicity reflects the care of Nufer as novelist.

The most wildly imaginable prose is evoked through Henderson himself, the originator of the troupe and yet the most deranged personality of all, the insane ringleader whose slowly developing addiction to gambling is equivalent to his maddening escapades. Where has he lost himself? While his own set of thoughts, his own narration, is conveniently peaceful, his second face reveals the duality between sanity and insanity. As the others speak, there is a disconnection, as if wires had been pulled or crossed or tripped or ripped out of their inputs. The end result is abstraction, poetry, displacement, and it is entirely lovely:

Proud to hose seed, he visited hot spot roadhouses. See his fetid rod hot toad spouses gaining tarnishes straining garnishes while downing the drinks, dial drowning the winks. Still true to his wife, he was more or less oblivious to the trill woo whose strife lore or mess laid siege to him when he made the rounds. While others would raid the mounds, flirting up every skirt, he would be skirting up every flirt, which of course only made him more appealing to those weary of the kitsch of force up wheeling. The tact drove attractive women to follow him with hollow vim, just for the fun of the run. (Henderson Will by Kelly Lane)

Craft and style aside, just what is the book about, really? By Kelman Out of Pessoa doesn’t merely track a disturbed individual and his imaginary friends into a deterministic gambling system; the book presents glimpses into the contemporary Pacific Northwest’s suburban and urban spirals. Through the neighborhoods near downtown Seattle to the river towns soaked in decay and ruin, Nufer’s world is unrelenting. His heroes exist because they need to inhabit this world as much as they need to escape it. These characters, regardless of how they invent themselves, still represent those figures that haunt the sideways, alleys, roads, trails, and all the passages of a very troubled, fatigued landscape.

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Jan van Mersbergen
translated by Laura Watkinson
Peirene Press (£8.99)

by Amy Henry

The “fight or flight” response takes on a new dimension in Jan Van Mersbergen’s new novel Tomorrow Pamplona. For the main character, a boxer named Danny, jogging in the rain isn’t simply for exercise, as we see him accepting a ride out of town with an unusually generous man. Immediately, a sense of tension is palpable. Where are they going? Why is the driver, Robert, so accommodating to the stranger he’s picked up? Is either man in danger from the other? The questions add up as the two journey out of town, and Robert explains that he’s headed to Pamplona to run with the bulls.

With both boxing and Pamplona in the novel one may think of Hemingway, but Van Mersbergen isn’t trying to imitate him or allude to his novels. Instead, he composes a theme of escape: As Danny stares silently through the car window, he observes everything in constant motion, and he seems to notice the world around him for the first time. The setting is significant too, for Pamplona is the destination of many who travel to Santiago for a religious pilgrimage. Is Danny ripe for conversion?

Robert explains his own escape—Pamplona is his week away from the wife and kids, the time he devotes to himself in order to feel alive. Familiar with risk, Danny is intrigued: “ . . . he tries to imagine the dangers of Pamplona. He tries to picture himself facing the bulls. And suddenly he sees how everything in the car is designed to take Robert safely to Pamplona. And back home again.”

Throughout the narrative, flashbacks reveal that Danny left trouble behind, but never fully explain the nature of it. Foreshadowing likewise suggests what may yet happen, and the contrasts between both continue to increase the tension. The two men are never completely comfortable with each other; they certainly aren’t on a buddy-style road trip. Robert tries to place himself in a position of authority, lecturing Danny on parenting, marriage, and the thrill of risk. Danny, for his part, silently listens while reflecting on his own experiences and toying with a child’s small metal car. It underscores the theme of transportation, but also pushes the reader to consider Danny as a child—especially when he accidentally breaks the car.

Van Mersbergen writes sparingly and doesn’t presume to tie up all the threads he’s unraveled. Many questions are left unanswered. He places seemingly random scenes in between carefully scripted interchanges, with the reader forced to guess at the significance—a technique that actually pulls the reader in more tightly. What is the significance of the elderly woman who swims the river at night? How does the boxing promoter, Gerard, fit in? Was Danny set up by false friends? These questions and the descriptions of darkness and shadows along with blinding Spanish light, heighten the suspense without making the reader feel manipulated.

On the way to Pamplona, Danny and Robert meet a restaurant owner who discusses the running of the bulls with the two men. An American boy had been killed, and in a particularly relevant interchange, the man explains how: “He fell and did not know that you must stay on the ground. So he got up again. . . . Everyone knows that if you fall over you should stay down.” For a boxer, staying down after a fall signals defeat. Will Danny run with the bulls, and if he does, can he resist his training and inclination?

The novel offers more than simply a quest motif, although its “road of trials” fits the format. Danny plays a tragic hero with the requisite tragic flaw, but he steps outside the genre with his total resistance to Robert’s influence. If quests had round-trip tickets, that would better fit the structure of this novel. Although the ending doesn’t do justice to the suspense that preceded it, Tomorrow Pamplona takes the reader on a satisfying journey.

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Johan Harstad
translated by Deborah Dawkin
Seven Stories Press ($30)

by Michelle Wallin

With the second man on the moon as his idol, thirty-something Mattias rarely seeks out the attention of the limelight. Preferring to live in the shadows, the humble narrator reveres Buzz Aldrin for his contributions to the Apollo 11 mission while allowing Neil Armstrong to revel in the glory. Wanting to do good in the world without everyone knowing, Mattias lives a quiet life in Stavenger, Norway as a florist for a small, financially struggling nursery, until life changes knock him out of orbit.

Johan Harstad’s first novel to be translated into English, Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You In All the Confusion? is an exquisitely crafted journey into one man’s psyche. Ignoring the disintegrating relationship with his girlfriend Helle, the looming bankruptcy of the nursery where he works, and his growing desire to slip away unnoticed, Mattias lives in denial, refusing to see that hiding from the world doesn’t save one from inevitable change.

When Helle suddenly breaks off the relationship and the nursery closes, an opportunity to vacation in the Faroe Islands arises. Unfortunately, Mattias finds himself early in the trip on a deserted road with soaking wet clothes, a sore and bloody hand, a wallet full of cash, and no idea where he is or recollection of how he got there. A kindly man discovers the forlorn narrator lying on a bus bench and invites Mattias to stay at his halfway house, a place designed for people suffering from mental illnesses who aren’t capable of living independently but who don’t need to be institutionalized. Accepting the offer, Mattias finds a home on the Faroe Islands with a cast full of quirky characters: a girl who rides buses to get random men to fall in love with her; a psychologist who hoards the health records of patients; a scarred photographer who swears never to capture another Kodak moment.

With Mattias as his springboard, Harstad writes about mental illness without invoking the normal slew of stigmas. Mattias’s straightforward narration about heartbreak, discontent, and unhappiness are emotional but Harstad’s writing is far from sentimental. Rather than hide his despondency from loved ones and readers, we see a fresh look at a troubled man trying to make sense of his life and his place in it. Although the novel is pretty much a one-man show, the secondary characters have backgrounds that are eccentric enough to give the dramatic tone of the novel a comedic edge.

While rambling at times, Harstad’s novel ultimately provides a thought provoking and insightful look at an individual, one with reactions and feelings to which readers are likely to relate. Mattias unravels his thoughts and allows us to understand his journey so that we, too, can comprehend what happened in the midst of his confusion, and perhaps put words to some of our own.

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Tod Davies
Exterminating Angel Press ($13)

by Marjorie Hakala

While it is not explicitly aimed at any age group, Snotty Saves the Day is mostly a middle grade adventure fantasy wrapped in a faux academic study. In the foreword, Tod Davies claims to have found the manuscript in the woods with a note from a professor in a country called Arcadia. It is a fairy tale about a rather repulsive little boy named Snotty, with a prologue by one Professor Devindra Vale. The professor’s footnotes accompany the story throughout and give hints of a second story about the cause of Arcadia’s civil war.

Snotty is a twelve-year-old drug dealer and thief who, at the beginning of his story, falls through a hole in the ground into another world. Here, Snotty trades his little finger for a heap of treasure from a man calling himself Aladdin, and subsequently becomes the ruler and Sun God of a society of Giant Garden Gnomes. Snotty goes off with the Gnomes to their stronghold but stays there only a short time before a troop of Teddy Bears break in and spirit him away to join them in fighting the Gnomes.

Things continue on like this. It’s an eclectic universe with no apparent organizing principle, and Snotty himself is a cipher whose character frequently changes. Characters wander in and out of the story, and the prose is often vague. The furniture in the Gnome fort, for example, is all described as “Gnome-sized,” but the book never makes clear how large the Gnomes are. There is also some unfortunate poetry, a ballad one of the Gnomes sings about the book’s climactic battle:

He snarled at us and ran into the fray
A flamethrower just blew him all away
Big Teddy then was left without a shield
We broke her pony’s knees until he yield’d

Meanwhile, in the footnotes, Professor Vale points out each “important motif in Arcadian fairy tales” and frequently alludes to an ongoing war in Arcadia. This conflict is driven by an academic rivalry between two groups, called the Neofundamentalists and New Subjectivists, who have differing ideas about the nature of reality. The New Subjectivists believe in the world’s essential unity, while the Neofundamentalists don’t. Professor Vale further asserts that “stories, especially those told to children, hold the greatest secrets of our universe.” This is the book’s most interesting premise, but it’s poorly explained and oddly executed. By the end, Professor Vale argues that Snotty’s story is literally true, and that it fills in a gap in Arcadia’s history. The moral is not that fairy tales carry universal truths, so much as that one fairy tale, in a fictional country, is actually a true story. That’s a rather less important idea than the book claims it has to offer.

The scholarly trappings won’t be interesting for very young readers, and the book may well have too many talking teddy bears for older ones. It’s an interesting concept and a courageous format, but Snotty’s story fails to carry the day.

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John Donovan
Flux ($9.95)

by Shawn Patrick Doyle

Since few books are ever released in a 40th Anniversary Edition, John Donovan’s I’ll get there. It better be worth the trip. must be considered foundational and timeless. This new edition is packaged with two reflective essays by Bret Hartinger and Martin Wilson, who touchingly relay their own experiences with the book and locate its place in literary history as the first young adult book to deal openly with a homosexual relationship. Even after gay teen literature has gone through a period of increased sales and acceptance, both still claim it as one of the best works in the field. Indeed, the book feels as fresh today as it must have years ago due to Donovan’s skill as a writer.

The novel tells the story of David Ross, a thirteen-year-old whose life is thrown into turmoil when his grandmother, with whom he has lived since he was five, dies of a heart attack. Following the death, the scattered members of David’s family return for the funeral and to decide with whom David should live; lacking any better plan, David moves to New York City to live with his mother, an alcoholic writer who feels her talents are going to waste in advertising. David finds adjustment to city and apartment life overwhelming both for himself and his closest confidant, his pet dachshund Fred. After time, David befriends a popular, athletic schoolmate named Altschuler. The two eventually discover and explore their mutual attraction to each other and share a confused kiss that forces both to confront their identities as a homosexuals at a time when the gay rights movement did not yet exist.

The book’s continued freshness is largely a product of the depth and roundness of its characters. Donovan does a great job of nailing the loneliness and dislocation that thirteen-year-old David feels in a new city; he is someone we immediately identify with and root for. Yet Donovan extends the opportunity to identify with and feel sympathy for every character, including David’s alcoholic, mercurial mother. Even smaller roles (such as the class clown Malcolm and the younger student Frankie Menlo, who idolizes David) feel genuine because Donovan is honest and insightful about their desires and their flaws. Reading through all of these character’s stories, one gets the sense of a real, complex world.

The final quarter of the book is heart-rending due to both a series of tragic events and the weight of the challenges that lie before David and Altschuler. Still, Donovan wisely never drifts towards melodrama or saccharine moralizing. The author offers no easy answers to the obstacles David faces, yet he leaves the reader with the sense that there are answers to be found.

In the records of young adult literary history, I’ll get there. It better be worth the trip. will be remembered for dealing with a controversial topic long before it was acceptable or even fashionable to do so. Yet in grand balance, the fact that makes the novel such a powerful read is David’s relatability as a lost and confused teen. While the 40th-anniversary essays aptly focus on the sense of kinship that gay teens have found after reading about David, I wonder if future anniversary editions of the book might focus on the book’s relevance to all teen readers.

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Gary Indiana
Semiotext(e) ($17.95)

by Justin Maxwell

It’s easy to like Gary Indiana. Any successful novelist who steps up and says “plot is the sleaziest form of ingenuity” has thought through the writer’s craft far enough to be worth reading. And this collection’s thirty-five-year coverage is a strong starting point for anyone unfamiliar with the author’s work. Plus, this collection features just the right kind of sleaze. Indiana is obsessed with the impure side of the human condition: vanity, narcissism, and neglect. These conditions are seen throughout this hefty book; in its many plays, assorted poems, brief fictions, and two interviews, we see Gary Indiana simultaneously angry at and obsessed with cultural station.

Indiana offers a brief primer to his work called “The Theater of the Obvious: An Informal History.” This is a straightforward account of the late ’70s and early ’80s when Indiana was a prolific theater maker. It offers no real definition of a movement or aesthetic, replacing that with a who’s who of scenesters. Given the thickness of the anthology and the publisher’s reputation for critically smart prose, this missing component feels like a shortcoming—the history is more of the era than of a theoretical methodology. But the era is an important one, when the downtown scene’s experimentalism was radiant in contrast to the evils of Reagan’s economic and cultural policy.

We are left with Indiana’s interesting plays to guess at an aesthetic in retrospect, and the collection is best in its drama. The clearest manifestation of what Indiana is up to is in his play Alligator Girls Go to College, wherein a trio of half-women/half-alligators lose their jobs as side-show freaks and attend a community college. One unfortunate reptile makes the ominous mistake of getting involved with the theater, and ends up with the full, starlet wish-fulfillment: discovered by Hollywood elite, plastic surgery in Europe (making her into the classic blond beauty), and huge fame on the big screen. She also ends up with a secretive life in a mansion where she is deeply unhappy. She starts out as a circus freak and becomes another kind of freak: the movie star. Themes of personal corruption and the sleaze of the film industry drive the show. It has a smart sense of the theatrical with the alligator girls; while they might flounce into abstraction in the hands of a lesser writer, Indiana treats them with a simple dignity.

Thematically similar, Phantoms of Louisiana is much the opposite of Alligator Girls. This work is a smart parody of Southern Gothic and the paradoxical culture that engendered it. The soft-spoken language, familial realpolitik, and absurdism are delightfully sleazy. By contrast, in The Roman Polanski Story the sleaze seems obvious, but the work keeps the reader guessing about their assumptions of the obvious, as is often the case in Indiana’s theater. There is much about sex in this play, and delightfully it both is and isn’t what one might expect.

These three plays are quite different, on the surface, from A Coupla White Faggots Sitting Around Talking, the only teleplay in the collection. While one could argue it is the work truest to the name Theater of the Obvious, it is the least compelling read, being too true to its title. However, if the previously discussed texts take the theatricality inherent in sleaze and put it up on the stage, the intimacy of this video work shows real people at the bottom, people on the other side of the cultural coin that we’ve seen flipped in the previous plays.

The short monologue “Roy Cohen” takes Indian’s pitch-perfect sense of sleaze to a wonderfully disturbing climax. Here we get the public persona of the hyper-conservative and homophobic title character; the tension comes because we know the real Cohen is deeply closeted. In the staging, we watch an actor play a gay man who is playing a conservative who is passionately delivering a homophobic monologue in the guise of a speech. The layers of cognitive dissonance are deeply compelling. This is a theater obsessed with the oily film that floats to the top of the culture; it is powerful to read and to watch.

The poems and prose of Last Seen Entering the Biltmore address the same themes as the plays, but often in a more direct and visceral way. In them, Indiana’s frustrations with the vacuous failings of American culture are there on the surface. His frustrations are reminiscent of the Beat movement; in some ways, Indiana is a Beat born after the fatalism of Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, or at least the culture that epitomized it. This supposition comes through best in the collection’s epilogue, a powerful interview titled “The Five Percent Paradox” wherein Indiana says: “The bureaucracies that operate the consciousness industry now only allow 5 percent of originality into its menu items, . . . if you want access to mainstream markets, the bureaucracies tell you what to write, how to write it, and what ideas are acceptable and which ideas aren’t allowed.”

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011