Paul Beatty
Farrar, Straus and Giroux ($26)

by Calista McRae

The Sellout opens in the hallways of the Supreme Court, where the narrator—the defendant in an impending trial, and the sellout of the book’s title—is fortifying himself with an especially potent joint. His explanation of his crimes forms the core of this bristling, exhausting, constantly funny novel: he has been keeping a slave and has been trying to reinstitute segregation in his home town.

Paul Beatty’s satirical novel is not easily summed up. Simultaneously gleeful, irritated, and resigned, its targets are all over the place, though a sophisticated humor smooths out the book’s cumulative anger, as well as its gruesome melancholy. The old man who becomes the narrator’s slave, for example, was one of the original comedians of The Little Rascals; he is equally ridiculous and mournful.

This satire is also ambivalent about comedy itself. While the goal of laughter is to puncture and expose, when Beatty’s characters laugh, the act is inane and fake as often as it is tonic. The most vivid emblem of complacent laughter occurs a few pages from the book’s end, at an otherwise black open-mic standup night: one white couple arrives late, and laughs too loudly and too knowingly.

And yet, comedy and delight vibrate in every corner of this book, from single phrase to plot. The narrator grew up in a ten-block neighborhood zoned for agriculture despite its position in the inner city of Los Angeles; named “Dickens,” it is also known as the “Murder Capital of the World.” When Dickens is taken off the map by richer areas that want “to keep their property values up and blood pressures down,” the Sellout discovers one of his first projects: to reinstate its boundaries. (Borders are a recurring theme in Beatty’s novels; in 2008’s Slumberland, the narrator tried to restore the just-toppled Berlin Wall.) There follows a barrage of jokes about Los Angeles, and about places and politics more broadly. Take, for instance, an extended passage on sister cities: “Some cities marry up for money and prestige; others marry down to piss off their mother countries. Guess who’s coming to dinner? Kabul!” The narrator finally tries a city matchmaking system, which offers Dickens three potential companions: Juárez, Chernobyl, and Kinshasa. Each rejects Dickens.

Within such set-pieces, all kinds of verbal humor contend for attention, from the miraculously apt to the miraculously absurd. An officer of the court is “a proud Budweiser of a woman with a brightly colored sash of citations rainbowed across her chest.” The celebrity intellectual who replaces “slave” with “dark-skinned volunteer” in Huckleberry Finn, and who rewrites The Adventures of Tom Soarer, uses an African-American presentation software known as “EmpowerPoint.” Driveby shootings have become harder to anticipate: “with these new hybrid, silent-running, energy-saving automobiles, you don’t hear shit,” and the gunman can clear out “while getting fifty-five miles to the gallon.”

Such passages suggest that language is a centrifugal force in this novel, but language also holds all these disparate performances together. Even the longest of Beatty’s sentences can be read out loud, with ease. As with the comedy of Dickens himself—or that of American satirists such as Flannery O’Connor and Junot Diaz—it’s hard to refrain from doing so.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2015/2016 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015/2016

Sven Birkerts
Graywolf Press ($16)

by Scott F. Parker

If you wanted to reduce Sven Birkerts’s Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age to a nice, digestible nugget of information, the subtitle gets you pretty much there. You can assume, rightly, that the book argues for art in the face of the Internet’s onslaught on our attention. Somehow, you intuit, Birkerts will make a distinction between art and the Internet that establishes a meaningful difference between, say, reading a single bound codex line by line and navigating infinite hypertext at your whim. If you’re not in a hurry, you could glance back at the title and notice a possible pun on the word subject. You might wonder if Birkerts is hinting that the way our digital culture is constantly changing the subject on us actually has the effect of changing the subject (i.e., you, me, him, or the self in general).

Now that you’ve decoded the book’s title, part of you might be thinking: do you really have to bother reading the whole thing? There are so many other books, articles, who-knows-whats out there, so much information coming at you in your various feeds and streams and clouds, why get bogged down? You can move from idea to idea. You can be free—infinite. This is pretty much how I read the Internet. I can’t bear to click on an article because I’m more interested in what other articles might be out there.

Here’s the thing about taking the time to sit down and actually read the words in this book instead of just assuming you get the point (even if you do): Changing the Subject not only argues but also embodies and performs its central claim that art is a necessary antidote to information. The proof is in the experience. To turn oneself over to an essayist is to see the world through someone else’s eyes. In the case of reading someone like Birkerts who sees clearly into his subject, it is to become (for a time) smarter than oneself.

And now subject points in at least three directions. Birkerts’s subject is the intersection of art and information; it is also his experiencing self; it refers as well to the reader’s self as she tries on his point of view. In a way, perhaps, the question has already been begged. If reading is old-fashioned, the notion of an individuated self may be too. Birkerts thinks so in the book’s first essay: “The realization of autonomous selfhood is no longer our primary beckoning ideal—if it ever was.” As connection continues to replace reflection, the self gets distributed across the various networks in which we enmesh ourselves

So who’s going to want to read this book? In class this morning, I caught my best student tapping away at a screen in the back row. This isn’t one of these students who is merely fulfilling a requirement, who communicate with all their being that truth or morality or whatever is not really worth getting worked up. No, my best student—the one whose comments are most insightful, whose readings are most penetrating, the one who asks engaged questions of her classmates and her teacher as well as of herself. There she was tapping away in her private bubble. Maybe it’s true that if she weren’t bored she wouldn’t have taken her phone out, but how can a classroom compete with literally anything she can imagine? That may be the core of the question of attention. In the old model of self it is a virtue to put one’s attention outside oneself, to concentrate on something that may not be immediately gratifying but that may pay off greater rewards later; under the new model there is no such thing as “outside oneself.” What’s the difference, from an eighteen-year-old’s point of view, between the information coming out of her teacher’s and her classmates’ mouths and the information available on her device?

For Birkerts a difference exists: “For, you see, contemplation is not a subset category, not just one kind of thinking among many. It is the point of thinking, its alpha and omega. Contemplation directs itself at the existential, which is to say, at that which pertains to the possible why of our being.” This is the central question of our existence, and the Internet can only ever respond to it by changing the subject. What if being human just doesn’t mean what I think it means anymore? What if the medium is the message? What if technology is never neutral? Merely to raise such questions puts one in a defiant camp out of step with the times. How much easier to go with the flow, the forward march of what Max Frisch (via Birkerts) calls technology: “the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.”

The counterargument that usually gets made is that Plato was against writing for the same kinds of reasons, and just look how naive he was. There are always those who are afraid of technological development and they always look foolish in retrospect. Never mind the tenuousness of taking one of Socrates’ arguments as Plato’s final position on the subject. What’s really misleading about the Plato-Luddite argument is that it depends on a false analogy between the writing revolution and the digital one. While writing externalizes—and thereby overrides—thoughts and memories, it simultaneously preserves (or even establishes) the self, whereas the digital revolution, in diffusing it, spreads the self out into nothingness.

If the latter prevails, it seems likely that the self we generally take as a locus of singular identity will come to be seen as a historical accident or a stage in development. But this is not a given. Development, progress—these are not givens, they just appear so when we think we seem them in the rearview mirror. The future is not the past extended. The forces of history are forces of history, and the future is up for grabs. If we decide that the self is something worth preserving, we can choose to curb the reaches of the digital revolution. And if not we, at least some of us.

Changing the Subject is a rallying cry. “To achieve deep focus nowadays is to strike a blow against the dissipation of self.” It is to preserve the self, to draw out the historical moment. Those of us who care about reading and reflection will be drawn in, empowered, reassured; we will find ourselves in the best company. Those who are inclined not to read Birkerts in the first place may well miss everything he’s saying.

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Adrian Tomine
Drawn & Quarterly ($22.95)

by Steve Matuszak

Killing and Dying could almost be the title of a long-lost noir featuring Richard Widmark as a streetwise tough struggling to survive in a chiaroscuro urban landscape of moral ambiguity, all while torn between his love for a woman and his .45. With his penetrating new collection of short stories, though, cartoonist Adrian Tomine has in mind something more ordinary, albeit no less agitated by conflict. Taking his title from words used to denote those extremes of stand-up comedy—roaring success and abject failure—Tomine signals his interest in exploring the ebb and flow that makes up the daily surge of human endeavor, in turn creating a book brimming with well-observed detail and aching humor.

The first story of Killing and Dying, “A Brief History of the Art Form Known as ‘Hortisculpture,’” focuses on Harold, a horticulturist who decides to become a “hortisculpturist.” Typical of the protagonists in the six stories that are collected in the book, Harold is unhappy with his life and, gripped with restlessness, strives to make it more fulfilling. Relaxing in a bath after a hard day that included being condescended to by a woman for whom he works, Harold is inspired by designer and landscape architect Isamu Noguchi to dedicate his life to the development of a new art form, a combination of horticulture and sculpture that involves plants growing out of a clay sculptural base. Harold’s heated description of hortisculpture at a party provokes the acquaintance with whom he’s speaking to equate it, rudely though perhaps aptly, with a chia pet.

The retort is the first sign of the resistance to hortisculpture, which will include openly hostile criticism, that Harold will face over the years. His defensive response—“Well, I suppose that’s how one might describe it . . . if they were talking to a child,” a slur that quickly devolves into Harold offhandedly referring to the man as “someone who is essentially a glorified bank teller”—signals Harold’s future struggles, as over-confidence comes up hard against self-doubt, fueling the anger with which he lashes out at the world, including his family. The results are pretty funny.

The ache of the heart that produces the kind of dissatisfaction experienced by Harold—driving one to do something, anything, to quell it, but missing the mark as often as hitting it—lies at the heart of most of these stories. In the title story, for example, fourteen-year-old Jesse sets in motion a bruising family drama when she tentatively suggests to her parents that she might be interested in pursuing stand-up comedy. While her mother fervidly encourages Jesse, registering her for a class in stand-up with the unpromising name “Junior Yuks,” her father is much warier, seeing indecision in Jesse’s decision, telling his wife, “I just think we could be a little more selective about which of her . . . whims we choose to encourage. I mean, whatever happened to that two hundred dollar ukulele? Or those trapeze lessons? That really paid off!” And in the story “Go Owls,” one of the best in the collection, that unease leads to the pell-mell establishment of an unstable, quickly abusive romantic relationship.

The impressive variety of stories in Killing and Dying signals Tomine’s further growth as a storyteller. In the early 1990s, when he was just sixteen years old, Tomine revealed himself in the handful of mini-comics he self-published to be a comics prodigy with an eye for telling detail and an adventurous willingness to experiment. By the middle of the first decade of the 2000s, with the publications of Summer Blonde, an engaging collection of stories about romantically challenged twenty-somethings in California, and Shortcomings, Tomine’s abrasively funny novella about race, romance, and rants, his talent had matured; the books’ themes of loneliness, alienation, and the desire to connect were told with admirable restraint and humor. Still, Tomine’s imagination, rich as it could be, was limited to protagonists who were roughly his same age and social class. The stories weren’t autobiographical—he had, as he claims in the introduction of his collected mini-comics, “learned the useful trick of taking a personal experience and veiling it with a sex change or two”—but one was left with the nagging suspicion that they were only one step away.

However, with the stories in Killing and Dying, Tomine shows a greater ability to “veil” his experience, allowing him more leeway to explore his characters and their actions with openness and honesty. The stories feature a range of characters and situations: a middle-aged small-time drug dealer with more secrets than he cares to share with his new girlfriend; a Japanese mother returning to America to salvage her marriage; a lonely veteran haunting an apartment where he used to live; and a young woman trying to escape her life after she is continually mistaken for an internet porn star.

Tomine’s reach is also reflected in his art, which is as varied as the stories. “A Brief History of the Art Form Known as ‘Hortisculpture,’” for example, is drawn in a cartoony, “big foot” style common to daily newspaper strips, an association emphasized by the story’s structure, comprising recurring sections of six black and white, four-panel sequences—which almost always end in a gag—followed by a full page strip in color. It’s a formula familiar to anyone who reads the classic daily comic strip reprints that have proliferated in the past decade. Telling his story like a comic strip renders Harold’s pain comic—making it easier to bear—and familiar, something common that comes into and leaves our lives every day.

In “Intruders,” on the other hand, the book’s final story, Tomine employs a thick line, images menaced with shadow, appropriate for a story in which a soldier, “between [his] second and third tours,” runs away from his unwelcoming family to spend his nights in a motel and his days sneaking into an old apartment, daydreaming there, even eating lunches he had packed and brought along, until a surprise encounter leads him to reconsider his secret visits. “I walked up the block, into the stream of oblivious, happy people with their families, their shopping, their chatter,” he tells us in the final panels of the book, “And starting right there, I tried my best to become one of them.” And we believe him, the ending almost optimistic. But it is undercut by our knowledge that he doesn’t succeed. We know he goes back to the war, to his third tour, borne by the ebb and flow of life back to that place of killing and dying.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2015/2016 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015/2016

Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic
Translated by Kirsten Lodge
Artwork by Sascha Schneider
Twisted Spoon Press ($21.50)

by Jeff Alford

First published in 1900 and hailed as a fundamental work of Czech Decadence, Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic’s A Gothic Soul is an essential volume of anxiety-riddled philosophy—one to shelve prominently alongside comparable masterworks like Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground and Camus’s The Stranger. Steeped in suffering, the narrator of A Gothic Soul calls himself the “last scion of a venerable chivalric family” and drifts between melancholic feelings of nihilism, faithlessness (in both God and society), and anti-nationalism. Devastatingly, the narrator makes continuous attempts to fill these newly discovered voids within him: he discounts God but hopes to discover a creed with which he can connect; he disconnects himself from society only to project the potential of friendship and love upon strangers he sees. Throughout A Gothic Soul, “life clamors around him but brings him neither joy nor torment:” the narrator seeks a way to connect his soul to the world, unaware that his mantle of gloom may be exactly what’s keeping him from enlightenment. As Karásek explains in his forward, “fear of himself . . . is what pushes the hero to escape from himself, to flee from himself, that is what spurs him on and shatters his piece of mind, and the impossibility of escaping himself is what destroys him.”

“This psychological problem,” continues Karásek, “replaces the plot and storyline found in other novels.” This is a surprisingly succinct explanation for such complicated prose. A Gothic Soul expands in a fever dream of abstract ideas: in one moment, the narrator bemoans his incongruence with God, and pages later he’s erected an empty church, in his mind, and lurks among the gilded icons. But inevitably, he denounces the place: “you have preached mortification and asceticism,” he tells the church. “You have terrified the world with the gaunt faces of martyrs, instead of delighting it with a smile.” He tries to find solace in these new hypothetical environs, but, like all the narrator’s flights of whimsy, his dreams of “a distant metropolis” crumble in as inquisitive and delirious a haze as they were built.

A Gothic Soul wrestles with emotion and hopelessness in a way that maintains a remarkable relevance more than a hundred years after its original publication. Early-twentieth-century malaise is a well-worn theme in European literature of that era, but Karásek transcends his contemporaries by creating a mind in desperate need of waking up from that sorrow; in so doing he finds a harrowing emotional resonance in his narrator’s depression, one that powerfully reflects today’s darkly mantled society. “In addition to this life,” Karásek’s narrator “led another, which he carefully concealed from everyone. It was a life of doubts and fantastic phantoms.” Of course, this “second life” is problematic, but Karásek writes of it in a way that understands the need to withdraw, and by doing so shows like-minded readers that they’re not alone:

Sometimes he would be overwhelmed by such melancholy that he would weep in secret without even knowing why. Then he would give himself over again to extraordinary hopes. It was as though everything in the world had an alluring magic for him. He knew that at some point a life of beautiful dreams and beautiful reality would begin, a golden, exquisite life like a work of art, a proud jewel, covered with precious stones.

Despite the narrator’s restlessness and the “impossibility of escaping himself,” there’s hope among those fantastic phantoms. If withdrawing into that second life reveals the “alluring magic” of what the world could become, perhaps that recession is a necessary step towards personal clarity.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2015/2016 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015/2016

Collected Poems
Rainer Brambach
Translated by Esther Kinsky
Seagull Books ($21)

Seasonal Time Change
Michael Kruger
Translated by Joseph Given
Seagull Books ($21)

by Peter McDonald

Founded in 1982 in Kolkata (Calcutta), India, Seagull Books publishes work in English by authors from around the world, specializing in African, French, German, Swiss, and Italian writers in particular. They also offer a rich selection of writings from Middle Eastern authors in diaspora who have emigrated to Europe, usually under threat of imprisonment or worse. While senior editorial credits go to the Seagull staff in India, the books themselves are translated by exceptional scholars from around the world, then are printed and bound in the United States. The enchanting artwork of the dust jackets, often created by students at the Seagull School of Publishing in India, makes their books even more distinctive. While the dust jackets of the two books covered in this review are perhaps less riveting than most, their muted and quiet design lend themselves perfectly to the direct and unadorned poems of the respective poets within.

Michael Kruger and Rainer Brambach are both German-speaking poets, and though born a generation apart, and in temperament and upbringing utterly dissimilar, they still share a sensibility toward their craft that is remarkably concise, unadorned, and bitingly candid. Several of their poems are so similar in tone and brevity, were they to quietly get legs and take a seat in the other’s book, most English-speaking readers would never notice the sleight.

Kruger, born in Wittgendorf, Saxony during World War II of middle-class parents, grew up in Berlin—first under allied bombing, then during partition as post-war Germany split in two. Kruger has been a regular on the German literary and publishing scene in Munich since the 1960s. Now retired, his distinguished career as chief literary scion at Carl Hanser Verlag and as editor of the literary magazine Akzente place him at the heart of modern German letters. He has written extensively, and been interviewed often, on a topic dear to him: the prospects of publishing in the digital age. He is vociferous in championing German publishing in all formats.

Seasonal Time Change: Selected Poems, Kruger’s latest book to be translated and published in English, presents almost exclusively short poems in which the beauty and iniquities of nature often mirror the unvarnished ironies of human endeavor, and is an accessible, excellent introduction to Kruger’s poetry for an American readership. Most poems in Seasonal Time Change are well under a page, precise in image, deft, witty, and wryly jaundiced in their view of the poet’s world caught between a desultory urban idyll and nature’s unsentimental image. Take these lines from the opening poem “My Desk in Allmanshausen”:

In the house beside mine, just up the hill,
lived Mussolini’s foreign minister
before he was captured and taken to Italy and
hanged.
And further on was Hilter’s favourite poet,
Hanns Johst, whose words were obviously
inspired here.
I look at cows, squirrels and horses;
at the open window I hear the distant Autobahn.
No one’s forcing anyone
To accuse humanity of doing good.

We can only marvel at Kruger’s sly inversion of the trope of humanity’s goodness with the shadow of Hitler and Mussolini up the road as mnemonics to humanity’s horror. As if in response to his own quiet reflections of such a past, Kruger echoes the theme in his poem “Twilight:” “Farewell lurks in every footprint. / You have to get in line, / into the queue of pebbles at the lakeside, / for the sake of a higher justice.”

By contrast, Brambach, born of a poor piano tuner and a mother who took in washing, lived most of his life as a recluse, working as a gardener and day laborer. He had little to no formal schooling and though he actively shunned literary recognition throughout his career, he was still well read and invariably curious about the literary trends of the day. Born in 1917 in greater Basel on the German side of the Upper Rhine, he was horrified as a teenager in the 1930s by the rise of Nazism. Barely a month after his conscription into the Wehrmacht in 1939, he fled Germany, crossing the Rhine by footbridge to surrender himself as a prisoner of conscience. He spent the war in internment and when released at war’s end, Brambach made Switzerland his adopted home, living outside Basel until his death in 1983.

Brambach’s published output is modest; only two bound volumes of poetry in his native tongue are in the library catalog. Timely then that this Collected Poems comes to us as the first volume in translation to fully present this worthy poet to an English-speaking audience. While largely forgotten on the international scene today, in Switzerland Brambach remains an important literary figure much admired for his often melancholic, always insightful little poems that present the bucolic landscapes of his adopted country in disquieting light. Concise they may be, but they leave room on the page for the mind to linger in contemplation. Here is “Dog Days” in its entirety:

Slowly the wells are running dry
The stray dogs are looking for water
The spice seller is nodding off in his shop vault
Nobody is buying pepper
Outside the knife grinder’s leisurely turning his wheel
He chases the dogs away without a sound
He observes the seller
He waits
This is the time of sharpened blades.

Brambach’s keen eye for the simple image, as here, often betrays an unease with the world that can seem at times to perch motionless like a bird of prey on the still point of his poems, only to fall with talons upon the unwary reader. Here it is, a lazy late summer day, a knife grinder at leisure, stone wheel turning . . . still he waits in this disturbing “time of sharpened blades.” We might ask the obvious: Waits for what? In “Caution Should Be Called For” Brambach posits another profound question: “What pushes you to write poetry? . . . the ravens will come back—black preachers / without oil in their voices.” One gets immediately the uneasy melancholia of his life’s work.

Both poets, it could be argued, share a recognition that each in his separate birth year came into a world at war; a realization, too, that their homeland putatively and literally started both conflagrations. Throughout, it is as if each in his inimitable way deals with this dark heritage by coming to his poetry with guilt by association, attempting to make amends in their small poems for a world gone astray. “Unfaithful letters,” says Kruger in the poem “Nights on the Terrace:” “cannot distinguish / between Heaven and Earth. / You can still hear the world / above the closed books.” These tomes may well be those of Germany’s own garrulous history weighing heavily, such that he, like Brambach, seems determined to write a new world into existence above the closed sheaves of the past. Perhaps in agreement, Brambach’s last untitled poem of the collection states: “Never put to paper and yet unforgotten . . . our childhood years, they won’t come back.”

Much of the praise for these fine books in English must go to Brambach’s translator Esther Kinsky and Kruger’s translator Joseph Given; they have captured in a foreign tongue the native German with poise and precision. Seagull Books, too, is to be commended for its fine command of book-making, design, and for its perspicacity in publishing worthy world authors to a largely new English-speaking audience.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2015/2016 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015/2016

Meagan Brothers
Three Rooms Press ($15.95)

by Jay Besemer

What makes us love who and what we love? What makes us who we are? Do our loves make us who we are?

In Weird Girl and What’s His Name, Meagan Brothers’s crisp, compassionate novel for young adults, all of these questions are explored from various character perspectives, not least those of the two protagonists. Lula and Rory are high school juniors in a midsize town in the southern U.S. They are passionate fans of the X-Files, among other sci-fi mythspaces, and so inseparable that they are frequently mistaken as a romantic couple, even by their families. But their relationship doesn’t exactly fit into that sort of box; Rory is gay, and although he is out to Lula, she secretly nurses the notion that eventually he will take their obvious love into a more physical and socially legible realm.

Things become unstable when Lula discovers some things Rory has been keeping from her. These are vital plot points, which I won’t expose here, but the discovery of these communicative omissions on Rory’s part tips Lula into panic, as they emerge in the context of some struggles of her own. Lula and Rory’s failure to communicate catalyzes the young woman’s cross-country flight, at the end of which she hopes to find her mother. She succeeds, eventually, but the experience is not what she wanted it to be. No one waves a magic wand, validates her existence and lovability, and fixes her. Like the rest of us, she must learn how to do that for herself.

Communication failures and blocks figure heavily in the overall story, manifesting in plausible and varied ways within several character relationships. Yet there’s a great validating force at work in this book. One amazingly well handled area is the portrayal of Lula’s mom, an actor who chose not to raise her daughter herself. Lula’s experience of this choice is honored; she feels it as a rejection, and thinks of her mother as selfish in that regard. But it does not feel as though the author herself agrees with her character, which is refreshing. Brothers’ treatment of all her characters seems similarly fair-minded, giving them depth and complexity—even Rory’s mother, an alcoholic whose homophobic rage results in Rory’s expulsion from his home. Her behavior is not excusable, but will certainly be recognizable to many readers, and her own suffering is obvious.

Through her journey Lula comes to understand that her own desire is fluid (or at least is not entirely dependent on physical attributes or gender), but she can’t quite believe she’s good enough for anyone else:

“Deep down, I want . . . I want somebody who sees me. I mean, really sees me. Sees everything I am, even all the horrible things I am. My dirty mouth and my stupid X-Files action figures and my total failure at graduating from high school and my messed-up mom and my crazy grandparents. I just want somebody who sees all that but . . . loves me anyway.”

This desire and this insecurity are so strong, so basic to everyday human self-doubt, that their direct portrayal is vital here. Similar compassion and accuracy is present in the way sexual identity is folded into the overall calibration of selfhood that is so very important to young people. Rory and Lula aren’t who they are because they are gay, questioning, queer or whatever. The things that happen to them, and the choices they make, are not reduced to some artificial causal relationship that casts sexual identity as a personality determinant rather than one element of self. These kids are complex people: vulnerable and brave, stubborn and giving. Indeed, the complexity of personality, identity and desire is a very present theme here, and the characters themselves often engage it. Here’s a great example, as Lula and a friend, Seth, discuss the mysterious allure of various fandoms:

Seth paused, kneeling on his carpet. He shook his head. ‘Why do we love this stuff?”
“What, music?”
“Anything! Why do we love anything?”

Lula’s rich answer is a bit later in the conversation:

“Like, why do any of us become obsessed with the stuff we become obsessed with? The stuff that kind of defines who we are. Is it some kind of destiny, or more like a flash of inspiration?”

We need to love as much as we need to be loved. No matter who we are, we seek the experience of joy, and the inexplicable resonance or validation of whatever gives us joy, whether it’s Star Trek, Indian food, stock car racing, or water ballet. That’s why mockery or dismissal of these touchstones can feel so threatening.

This is not a “gay book for teens.” It’s a book inclusive of teen readers—yes, queer teens and geeky teens—many of whom will recognize themselves and their challenges in its pages. Adult readers will certainly recognize themselves in this book as well, from many different angles and in many different phases of life. We can all gain some insight from Sam Lidell, English teacher extraordinaire:

“ . . . if you haven’t figured it out by now, then let me assure you, Lula—nobody’s normal. And pretty much everybody you meet in life is trying to figure out how to be a so-called ‘normal person.’ As if it’s some fixed point that you reach, like zero degrees Celsius. But everybody’s just who they are. Weird, flawed, good at some things, bad at others. There’s no one single person who’s doing everything right all the time. Trust me on that. There is no such thing as normal.”

This is part of the compassionate work of Weird Girl and What’s His Name. It’s a story in which nobody really “gets it right”—except, paradoxically, by blundering along and living anyway, in spite of all that so-called failure.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2015/2016 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015/2016