Jonathan Franzen
Farrar, Straus & Giroux ($28)

by Tim Jacobs

For those who like their fiction burly and tough, and have an abiding fascination with the difficult (to use Yeats’s phrase), Jonathan Franzen isn’t your man—he eschews the difficult and has declaimed in an essay on William Gaddis, “Mr. Difficult,” that literary fiction needn’t be challenging to be resplendent art. His latest novel, Freedom, exemplifies this point of view, as it breaks no new ground in the area of narrative technique—the book, in fact, very much recalls its predecessor, The Corrections (FSG, 2001), which won the National Book Award for its well-written and accessible portrayal of the dysfunction of an American family.

Franzen’s fiction is best when it explores relationships. He is good at dramatizing the trivial, tricky, tender, and toxic aspects of our personal relationships and understands the complex ways we fall in and out of love with ourselves, others, pursuits. He skillfully articulates the intricate ways that relationships are held together like a Macgyver invention, with found twine and chewed Juicy Fruit. And he knows how to create compelling characters that feel like real people who suffer silently.

Freedom charts the rise and fall of a typical, middle class St. Paul, Minnesota, family, the Berglunds: Walter and Patty and their kids, Joey and Jessica. While the Berglunds have plenty of typical familial discord, little actually happens in the way of plot. Franzen, it seems, is a believer in the dictum that character is plot. It’s primarily the story of Walter and Patty’s courtship, marriage, infidelity (Patty’s), separation (six years), and eventual reconciliation after Walter’s post-marriage love, his executive assistant, Lalitha, is killed in a car accident—the dramatizing of which is farcical and syrupy. En route, plenty of neighbors fill in the background, as do the modest doings of the children.

While the novel is putatively about the Berglunds, this is singularly Patty’s story. Much of the narrative is delivered through an autobiographical manuscript that Patty writes—tediously in the third person about herself—at the supposed urging of her therapist, who never appears in the novel (neither does any mention of the therapeutic sessions, oddly enough, for someone who is supposedly depressed). After only twenty-six pages of perfunctory introductory material in which an array of largely unimportant characters are paraded, we are immediately forced into Patty’s turgid, self-indulgent autobiography, Mistakes were Made, for 161 dreary pages—and for another thirty pages for her “Conclusion” later on—that are nearly enough to put off the adventurous reader.

In the autobiography, we get Patty unplugged: we understand that she’s the misfit of her family because she’s an accomplished high school and college basketball player in an unathletic family; we learn that she is date-raped during high school; we follow her through her college years at the University of Minnesota; we get her jejune infatuation with Richard Katz, Walter’s college roomie (and, later, a famous rock star); and Walter Berglund’s infatuation with Patty, as well as the courtship, wedding, and blahblahblah of the Berglunds’ collective life. It’s pretty dry reading, of course, because Patty is no writer, and Franzen couldn’t dress up Patty’s prose because then it wouldn’t come off as Patty’s. Still, the voice of the autobiography and the unnamed third-person narrator’s voice in the novel proper are almost indistinguishable, which is a glaring stylistic flaw. But the main problem with the autobiography is that Franzen overrelies on it to deliver the bulk of the novel’s events and backstory. It’s unsubtle writing and a tired metafictional conceit that makes the novel feel as though it was composed in haste, which is disappointing considering the nine-year wait since The Corrections and that Franzen himself has remarked in interviews that he wrote Freedom in a year.

The rest of the novel is devoted largely to Walter’s machinations to protect the cerulean warbler, a songbird close to extinction, through modest federal political intrigue, lobbying, and a Virginia coalmine (it’s complicated); and Walter’s son Joey’s devious move to partner with a shadowy figure to supply used—that is, unserviceable—trucks and parts for the Iraq War effort, which makes Joey a fortune but causes him a good deal of guilt. He attempts to assuage his guilt with a large and morally ambiguous donation to his dad’s political cause. Pushing Wimsatt and Beardsley aside for a second, it’s at times interesting to try and divine what Franzen thinks himself about our self-interest via Freedom. The novel feels occasionally angry, and yet the easy and happy dénouement undermines any implicit critique it may be after.

So readers may ask: what is the point of it all? The quotidian doings of any family become tedious quickly; there must be some larger obtainable point for this exhaustive engagement with the Berglunds and their rock star chum. Unfortunately, the title doesn’t provide much of a clue: “freedom” doesn’t get enough attention for the reader to take it up meaningfully, though the word/concept is deployed explicitly about a dozen times or so. Are we being asked to consider what it means and how we obtain it in our “everything is permitted” era? Are we being enjoined to consider our own freedom via the freedom the characters have to screw up endlessly and yet make whole their lives again? Possibly.

Franzen’s work can be classified as American social realism; he writes large novels that satirize contemporary America, replete with all the recognizable markers and issues of our time. The problem is that their engagement with the cultural issues—here, the Iraq War, the Bush-Cheney administration, special interest groups, the environment, materialism, catty neighbors, relationships—is superficial and stale. There is, of course, real artistic value in dramatizing our silliness and ignorance at a slight remove, but the trotting out of our cultural ills quickly becomes a litany of familiarity.

Franzen’s pal David Foster Wallace once remarked in an interview that “ (what’s engaging and artistically real is, taking it as axiomatic that the present is grotesquely materialistic, how is it that we as human beings still have the capacity for joy, charity, genuine connections, for stuff that doesn’t have a price?” This is the missing element in Franzen’s angry social satire. In Freedom we get the familiar discussions of houses, renovations, Volvos, generational anger, politics, war, and the geist of cultural emptiness. But to dramatize the ways that, as Wallace described, we can as human beings push our nostrils above our cretinous little concerns—that we don’t hear much of in Freedom.

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Alta Ifland
Ninebark Press ($16)

by Matthew Thrasher

Is Alta Ifland a real person, and if so, does she know real people? Her recent collection of short stories, Elegy for a Fabulous World, doesn’t provide any easy answers. Half memoir, half fantasy, the collection sprawls across two continents and a lifetime, tracing a cast of characters who are barely alive and objects that are barely inanimate. There’s milk that transforms into Miruku, a Japanese man named for the substance; near-sentient office buildings in Los Angeles; and the mystifying Adelaide Bauer, who launches into orbit upon breaking her decades-long silence. Instead of a family tree, Ifland has constructed a ghoulish arboretum of nowhere men and women—people who languish in an incomprehensible void, somewhere between Ukraine and the United States.

Of course, conventional biography is hardly one of her interests; as Ifland tells us on her website, she was “born in a lapse of time, my hand clinging to a dandelion, my feet gripping a vine leaf, my nose on my back, an eye on my ankle.” Yet for every story about being born in a chronological black hole, there is one about a tumultuous cross-cultural marriage (“The Wedding”); for every tale about a boy whose esophagus buds a sapling (“Harry and the Tree in His Lung”), there is another about an ill-fated love triangle between academics (“The Girl, the Professor, and the Wife”). It’s hard to believe, then, that Ifland is not trying to communicate some sort of meaningful experience, one that happened to an actual person in an actual time and space.

The catch is that these brief transmissions of human emotion occur only when you least expect them—in the most unreal stories. Ifland’s American foster parents and Eastern European aunts and uncles are real, but they don’t cry like it, talk like it, or live like it. Rather, they gurgle cryptically on the page, rarely moving beyond the farcical and never conveying the kind of emotional knock-out punch that such trope figures of transcultural memoirs are intended to deliver. In the end, readers turn to figures such as Harry, whose bizarre tree-in-the-lung-predicament generates a rare pathos that eludes Ifland’s more traditional, biographical prose.

Joyriding through Ifland’s world of nonsensical ephemera is no simple task, but it might be worth it just to get in on the joke. In “Random Bus,” Ifland is at her most perplexing, but she is also at her most irreverent. Less a story than a rumor, the narrative unfurls as a furtive exchange between no one and anyone—two nameless heroes who swap the great question of the memoir (do you remember?) for that of the elegy (do you know?). The premise is simple, riffing off the question “have you heard of the random bus?”—a delightfully erratic vehicle that wafts its way through an anonymous urban landscape. Chances are you haven’t.

Moments like these are not only surprisingly emotive; they are tongue-in-cheek responses to the collection’s starker moments as well. “My Life as an Orphan,” for instance, recounts the brutal experience of blending into the Styrofoam melting pot of American consumer culture. This requires much more than just a transfusion of hearts and minds; it mandates a whole cosmetic as well—a cultural facelift that remodels the “scowling mug” of the East European orphan into the neurotic smile of the nuclear family member and the fast food employee.

Such ostensibly familiar stories are legible only in conjunction with their off-the-wall counterparts. By the collection’s end, we no longer care who Alta Ifland is, but we do care about the questions she raises. After all, how can anyone remap a foreign face if they can’t map their own bus routes?

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Kang Kyǒng-ae
translated by Samuel Perry
The Feminist Press ($16.95)

by Sun Yung Shin

From Wǒnso Pond is a novel that tears the veil off a society struggling to transition from a traditional, agricultural way of life to a modern industrial economy. Kang Kyǒng-ae delivers a portrait of the ordinary individuals whose lives are torn apart in the machinery of this transition, which in many ways continues in contemporary South Korea. Here she patiently describes one character’s moment-by-moment attempt to earn a living as a day laborer:

The best workers managed to stack up fifteen or sixteen [bricks]. They put a piece of burlap over their backs, then cut off another strip of burlap, attached it to the ends of the wire, and strapped the bricks onto themselves before standing up . . . And when he looked down at his hands, he saw that they were scraped and bleeding . . . Only then did he notice, to his horror, that each brick had tiny little spines that were stabbing him.

Kang Kyǒng-ae was writing and publishing in the 1930s and ’40s, a time when Japan held a repressive and brutal colonial rule over the Korean peninsula. This novel, her second, gives the reader the daily lives of her characters—their external challenges and the resulting internal turmoil. The novel is structured chronologically and chapters switch perspectives between a handful of main characters, each representing various elements of Korean civilian society: Sǒnbi, a hard-working orphaned girl from the country who must work for a middle-class family who exploits her, and who eventually moves to the city and begins work at a large spinning mill as part of an all-female indentured labor force; Ch’ǒtchae, a young man from the same village whose name ironically means “first,” who goes to the city to become a day laborer; and Sinch’ǒl, a college student who is involved with the bourgeois daughter of S ǒnbi’s employee, and who eventually becomes a “fallen intellectual” and joins the labor movement at the cost of losing his family, his position in society, and his opportunity to have a wife and family.

Government officials and politicians are noticeably absent from the narrative. Kang avoids authorial judgments of politics and policies, letting her characters’ inner thoughts show the dilemmas that result from the abuses of power and the inequities of the distribution of the means of production:

Ch’ǒtchae had lost tenant rights to his fields. The magistrate said that the township office was supposed to help all the farmers enjoy a better life . . . Does that mean I’m no longer one of the farmers? he wondered. I mean, Tǒkho is mayor of the township, and yet isn’t he the one who took away my land? And all because I broke some so-called law by smashing a wagon . . . the law . . . the law . . . Hell, I’ll probably be breaking the law if I don’t do what the magistrate said today either. . . . The law . . . The more Ch’ǒtchae thought about it, the more his doubts about it seemed to creep under his skin. . . . Ch’ǒtchae still tried hard to abide by this ‘sacred and unbreakable thing called the law, but for some reason as the days went by, he’d become increasingly caught up in it.

Kang was born in 1906, one year after Japan made Korea a protectorate, followed by official annexation in 1910. She died six years before the official beginning of the Korean War. Her novel was serialized in 120 episodes in the Tonga ilbo (East Asia Daily) newspaper, still in operation today, and wasn’t published in book form until 1949 in North Korea, and it wasn’t available in South Korea until much later. The Tonga ilbo was a paper sympathetic to opposition movements and supported the kinds of narratives offered by Kang and others that exposed the human costs of rapid industrialization. Here Kang describes Sǒnbi’s first lesson at the Taedong Spinning Mill:

The noise coming from the generator and the rotating waku was so ear-splitting that it was almost impossible to concentrate on the factory floor. . . .
From here at station No. 500 the line still stretched into the distance, with hundreds more stations. Her face flushing in the heat, Sǒnbi watched as the thread tips were drawn up and out of the cauldron. Kannan’s hands were already bright pink, scalded by the boiling water. Her fingers were white and swollen.

The novel’s main arc brings us through the characters’ trials and tribulations—each trying to survive in the new economy and each coming to class-consciousness, which brings the warmth of solidarity and the strength of purpose, but at great cost and little hope for actual political or economic gains. We see the risks and actions taken by these ordinary people in order to expose the mistreatment and lies at the Taedong Spinning Mill. The men help from the outside by passing information, and on the inside, the women are at constant risk of being raped and are subject to interrogation, intimidation, continual economic exploitation. There is also the ever-present risk of illness and death because of the extremely dangerous working conditions. One of the great strengths of Kang’s novel is the sensitive way she portrays the emotional lives and friendships of the women caught up in these impossible circumstances.

If Kang could have lived to see the realities of not just the Korean peninsula, still divided today, but the entirety of human civilization and its widening gulfs between the wealthy and the poor, she would, I hope, conclude that her literature is as important as ever. Human trafficking for sex and labor, including the trafficking of children, is at an all-time human high and is estimated at 27 million persons worldwide¹, despite our species’ progress in knowledge, technology, and procedural democracy. According to the U.S. State Department, in the U.S. alone “some 18,000 to 20,000 people are trafficked every year.”² Novels such as From Wǒnso Pond give details and dimensions to the suffering endured by millions of exploited workers and indentured persons around the world, still working in conditions no better (and often worse) than those depicted in Kang’s story.

Kang ends her novel, ultimately a tragedy, with this plea: “People have fought for hundreds and thousands of years in an effort to solve [these human problems]. But still no one has come up with a solution! And if that’s the case, just which human beings will actually solve these problems in the future? Just who?”

¹ http://www.dosomething.org/tipsandtools/11-facts-about-human-trafficking
² http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17897131

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Roberto Bolaño
translated by Natasha Wimmer
New Directions ($16)

by Joshua Willey

It’s a relief to know there are still enough people reading fiction to support trends such as the Roberto Bolaño craze of the past few years. The great Viscerealist, may he rest in peace, took the English-language literary scene by storm first with small volumes such as By Night in Chile, then with the landmark volumes The Savage Detectives and2666. Now New Directions, always a patron saint of masters on the verge of obscurity, is fleshing out translations of the bulk of his catalog. Regardless of whether or not you’ve tackled the major works, the fifty-six short chapters which compose Antwerp are crucial to an understanding of the Latin sensation, while at the same time finding the writer working in a mode unique not only in his corpus but in contemporary fiction in general.

It’s debatable whether or not Antwerp is actually a novel, but if we admit it to the category, it is Bolaño’s first, marking a crucial turning point in his career from poetry to prose. As his lasting importance is undoubtedly as a novelist, Antwerp serves not only as an example of early style but as a sort of road map. Bolaño was thematically consistent and the central concerns of 2666’s 912 pages are here in 96. Though Bolaño claimed that he should have been a homicide detective, his descriptive precision and sense of aesthetic drama betray the faculties of a filmmaker.

The poet Bolaño is still close to the surface here. He’s years of desk time away from the narrative lucidity and focus of 2666. He actually appears willfully unconcerned with narrative, as least in the traditional sense. Rather, we have the juxtaposition of images that are so powerful they manage to create their own interstitial logic. The noir archetype is strong in Antwerp, but it’s a noir tinged with an irrationality you’d never find in Raymond Chandler or James Ellroy, let alone in Jules Dassin or Billy Wilder (though you might find it in Bolaño peers such as Paul Auster or Haruki Murakami). Waiters walk along a deserted beach, uncanny scenes unfold deep in the woods, people get on and off highways, go in and out of rooms.

Bolaño said Antwerp was the only novel he felt proud to have written. Was he joking? If not, why did he wait over a decade to release it? One obvious answer: nobody would have published it. Antwerp is a bit like a celebrity gossip magazine. Nobody would care about these pained paragraphs if Bolaño had never taken up subjects like Mexico City in 1968 or the Juárez murders. But sometimes the works that seem most minor, most flawed, can reveal a writer’s message just as compellingly as a masterpiece.

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Daniel Kehlmann
translated by Carol Brown Janeway
Pantheon Books ($24)

by Salvatore Ruggiero

Daniel Kehlmann’s new work, Fame, may be one of the few examples of a collection of stories that when brought together actually constitute a novel. The nine tales and their respective characters only become stronger and more lucid when seen through the alternate lenses Fame has within. Kehlmann’s book is an exercise in writing without a core, where there is no easily perceptible overarching protagonist that threads the entire narrative together. It is also an exercise in congealment, but one where the adhesive is the reader’s perception.

In the first episode, “Voices,” after many protestations from his wife and child who claim that he’s unreachable, Ebling finally decides to get a mobile phone. Immediately though, he starts receiving phone calls for a man named Ralf. The callers all have different voices, young and old, male and female. And Ebling can’t figure out why he’s receiving someone else’s messages. It only becomes worse when a woman begins to threaten him with ending “their relationship” unless they meet for dinner. In the vein of a Paul Auster novel, Ebling might take on this Ralf personality as he agrees to this meeting; but he then chooses not to show. Yet like an Auster novel, Ebling is aware of his actions due to these mistaken phone calls and the concept of doubling. The narrator states that as Ebling was watching soccer with his son, “he felt an electrical prickling, it was as if he had a doppelgänger, his representative in a parallel universe, who was entering an expensive restaurant at this very moment to meet a tall, beautiful woman who hung on his words, who laughed when he said something witty.”

Moreover, the second episode, “In Danger,” starts with a novelist exclaiming: “A novel without a protagonist! Do you get it? A structure, the connections, a narrative arc, but no main character, no hero advancing throughout.” And herein lies the central conceit. The speaker is Leo Richter, “the author of intricate short stories full of complicated mirror effects and unpredictable shifts and swerves that were flourishes of empty virtuosity.” He feels that he can get away with such a novel concept for a novel because “this was now the age of the image, of the sounds of rhythms and a mystical dissolution into the eternal present—a religious ideal become reality through the power of technology.” There is an optimism here that seems not to have pervaded contemporary literary culture. Metanarrative has always been a part of the prose tradition, from Cervantes’s Don Quixote to Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage, but in Fame, there is something that makes the meta-aspects of the novel feel fresh, as if just discovered.

The rest of the stories bounce off each other, using characters and tales hinted at in other chapters. The phone calls that have been mistakenly going to Ebling finally catch up with the intended receiver, the famous actor named Ralf, who now feels as if someone has stolen his life. A blogger writes an overly long post in order to discuss how he wants to be in a Leo Richter novel. A character in a Leo Richter novel prepares herself for death only to be disallowed such a termination. A self-help author who everyone seems to be reading decides that he wants to retract everything he’s ever written by committing suicide.

Fame appears to have a laissez-faire attitude as it allows its plots and characters to move where they want to move, yet the reader is constantly reminded of the author’s presence, that things can be changed on the author’s whim. Everything is at the mercy of the creator. And yet even the creator succumbs to his own feelings and, more frighteningly, to technology:

How strange that technology has brought us into a world where there are no fixed places anymore. You speak out of nowhere, you can be anywhere, and because nothing can be checked, anything you choose to imagine is, at bottom, true. If no one can prove to me where I am, if I myself am not absolutely certain, where is the court that can adjudicate these things?

What do we do when there is no solid ground, when we can’t define the world around us? Such ponderings make this book quite a leap from Kehlmann’s previous novel, Me and Kaminski, which feels lighthearted by comparison. Both are works that search for authorial presence and authorial definition. They seek a subject, but the subject is always evasive.

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Joshua Mohr
Two Dollar Radio ($16)

by Adam Hall

At the start of Joshua Mohr’s newest novel, a young woman named Mired (pronounced “Mee-red,” though her emotional state suggests otherwise) is planted in a dental chair getting all of her broken teeth replaced. The first of Termite Parade’s three rotating narrators, Mired likens herself in the novel’s first line to the bastard child of Dostyevsky, Sylvia Plath, and Eeyore, which perfectly maps the ley lines of the author’s ambitions—namely, Dostyevsky’s moral self-flagellation, Plath’s desperate longing, and Eeyore’s cartoonish nihilistic depression. What Mohr supplies this orgy is a thoroughly modern spin on all three that explodes with pyrotechnic prose.

First, the teeth: one second, Derek, Mired’s boyfriend, is carrying an intoxicated Mired up the stairs to their apartment; the next, Mired lies bruised and bloodied at the foot of the stairwell. In his quest for redemption for what he sees as an unforgivable crime, Derek and a broken GPS head to Reno, only to fall prey to a band of loquacious softball players’ vindictive bladders in a passage that calls to mind the absurdity of Kafka and the humor of A Confederacy of Dunces. Mired, meanwhile, abandoned by Derek mid-operation at the dentist, inventories her “Mount Rushmore of Male Failures” while her injuries heal; as she catalogues all the exes who have failed her, she decides to call the one ex that didn’t. And Derek’s twin brother, Frank, the third narrator, an ambitious would-be auteur who yearns to expose humanity as a mob of veiled animals, debates whether or not to tell Mired his brother’s damning secret$mdash;that Derek dropped her on purpose$mdash;and how best to use the revelation for his art.

While the narrators share Mohr’s penchant for dazzling turns of phrase, they are also allowed their own distinct voices: Mired’s despondent ruminations come across as elegiac and resigned; Derek’s chapters burn with a self-pitying rage that threatens to consume him (the titular parade of termites eating Derek’s heart from the inside are his metaphor for the all-pervasive shame); the coldly detached Frank frequently breaks the fourth wall, addressing the reader and christening himself a self-styled “Reliable Eyewitness.” Mohr’s triumvirate of protagonists pine for external validation, some sign that with time they can eventually find the right path. But even youth holds no solace, as Mired bitterly relates: “And the fact that I was relatively young didn’t matter, didn’t hatch the tiniest respite. Why would being young matter if I’d proven time and again too dense to learn from my mistakes?”

Termite Parade flaunts the big burning heart on Mohr’s sleeve, wildly tossing it about to light the way in a relentless search for answers to the unanswerable: How do you forgive the unforgivable? Can you ever really forgive yourself for such a sin? And most importantly, what’s the difference between actual redemption and self-delusion? In the scope of Mohr’s unrestrained vision, Derek and Mired find the only redemption worth attaining is brutal, uncompromising, and never guaranteed.

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Jon Fosse
translated by Damion Searls
Dalkey Archive ($12.95)

by Alison Barker

In Aliss at the Fire, Norwegian writer Jon Fosse has created a deceptively slim (100 pages) novel that unequivocally calls bullshit on the conventional wisdom that if you wait long enough, time will heal the pain of grief. Over twenty years ago, Signe’s husband Asle rowed out onto the fjord one dark, cold October evening, and he never came back. Signe? She waits. And waits.

Time does nothing but fuel Signe's longing and confusion—her anguished thoughts have conjured other past tragedies so that she shares her husband’s ancestral home with a giant, swirling collage of sad ghosts. “It’s she and he who live there, no one else lives there, she thinks . . . just the two of them.” And yet, she watches his dead relatives traipse around the house, re-enacting past tragedies in kaleidoscopic array: the night that a great uncle goes out into his small boat and drowns, and the night Asle’s great-grandfather plays by the fire and tumbles off the pier as his mother, Aliss, scrambles to save him.

Textually, Fosse encloses the reader in Signe’s cyclone: sentences run on for pages, indirect pronouns float far from their objects, and Signe’s speech often slips into others’ perspectives. Past inhabitants of the house emerge mid-sentence amidst internal monologues which trace and re-trace the events of her husband’s disappearance: “she sees herself standing there in front of the window and looking out and then she sees, lying there on the bench, Aliss take Kristoffer off her breast.”

Fosse seems to be saying that loss is not something to forget and heal from, but a trapdoor into the time-space continuum. Signe is tethered no longer to her husband, but to the mystery of a husband she never quite understood, and to the “immeasurable depths” of the fjord where he perished. To some extent, this is a story of what happens when one person in a codependent relationship dies— the survivor wanders around talking to herself, senselessly repeating tasks for her absent other half. Signe can’t quite figure out where her memories of Asle end and she begins—she chants unconvincingly: “she is she. And he is he.” She doesn't stop trying, though. She constantly interrupts her memories to regain control over them. She blurts out, “just stay gone.”

Dalkey Archive, who also published his Melancholy (2006), situates Fosse next to Bernhard and Beckett on the literary family tree, and as a dramatist, he’s often lumped with fellow countryman Ibsen. But Fosse gnaws at words, while Ibsen embroiders. His circling repetition better recalls Harold Pinter, whose characters' sparse phrases collide repeatedly until emotional truths surface.

Unlike other stories about women defined by their desire, Aliss at the Fire is remarkable because female longing propels a quest to accept mysteries of the past. Fosse presents grieving as a painful act of self-determination, more healing than any greeting card platitude can offer. Bruise yourself with this book in small doses, and once it's finished with you—though it never really ends, as evidenced by the missing period at the end— a small, deep ache will persist.

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by Mark Gustafson

Essay: Theater of the brain.
—David Shields

The high-velocity technological maelstrom that we are caught up in—this wired, channel-changing, information-rich, DIY culture (amateurs all) in which attention spans are decreasing as notions of the self (a wiki?) are in transition if not disarray—is the main territory Ander Monson (editor of the online journal Diagram, and publisher of New Michigan Press) explores in both of his new books, The Available World (Sarabande Books, $14.95), a collection of poems, and Vanishing Point (Graywolf Press, $16), a book of essays provocatively subtitled: Not a Memoir.

There is a lot of overlap in Monson’s two books, and no reason not to identify the “I” of the poet with the “I” of the essayist. Traversing familiar ground from previous books, there are references to his delinquent past, the death of his mother, a car crash, and his (fictional) armless brother. We also encounter the giant paint ball in Indiana, Icarus from Greek mythology, and the ridiculously available thoughts of actor/blogger Wil Wheaton.

✧ ✧ ✧

Randomness may be a virtue of the new nonfiction, but apparently not in book structure. In Vanishing Point, there are three “Assembloir”s, assemblages of excerpts from one hundred memoirs; also, five essays are entitled “Vanishing Point,” with various subtitles; “Exteriority” is offset later by “Interiority,” and the central essay, “Solipsism,” is focused on “me,” the axis on which any memoir spins. In The Available World, witness the iteration (both in poems and sections) of the abstract notion of availability. Self-consciously elegiac poems, and others styled as sermons, are looped as well.

✧ ✧ ✧

The poem and the essay are more intimately related than any two genres, because they’re both ways of pursuing problems, or maybe trying to solve problems. . . .
—Patricia Hampl

The best poems here are those that get at existential anguish, perplexity, or some other human emotion. Like “Some of Us Have Fewer,” about his mother, and “I Have Been Trying to Make Something Happen,” and “Work-Related Injury Sermon.” In the last, one stanza reads:

I would like to file one claim at least
over my life’s rush (as my life rushes
out of me and down my shower drain
in dreams) that entitles me to one free moment.

Here is the wish to rise above the din, to be free from the excess, the hyperconnectivity, the virtual reality that obviates a sense of the passing of time and denies the inevitability of death. In “Ordinary Experience” he asks, “What is it and where can I get it?” In “Trace” is the stand-alone line “What’s a VCR?” This kind of question may eventually greet many of the details in Monson’s new poems, as they are sprinkled—almost like the ubiquitous product placement in movies and TV—with Roombas, Wikipedia, Law & Order, Internet Explorer caches, Mariah Carey, and the like.

“It’s True, I Love the Shape of Steam” shows Monson at his best, on the beauty of everydayness:

I think steam
comes off everything
in mornings, winter,
especially the stutter
breath of the bereft,

comes up from the ground
on sudden warming
when whatever wetness lingers
dissipates in brightness.

Yet The Available World as a whole fails to bridge the gap convincingly between the worthwhile offerings of the digital world and its pernicious inanities.

✧ ✧ ✧

Monson has a flair for the good final sentence. “I would like some kind of notification / that I am not alone.” “Let us find our way back to what light there is for us remaining.” “There is a world underneath this world / and it opens its hands to us just often enough / to keep us far away and coming back.” Sometimes this rescues the poem, or ties it together, a ribbon with a bow. Sometimes the poems seem to run out of steam; then, like a deus ex machina, a killer last line is too little, too late.

✧ ✧ ✧

If it doesn’t sing, it’s not poetry.
—Monson, at a recent reading in Minneapolis

✧ ✧ ✧

From “On Basketball”: “your / amber-screened Tandy, least sexy of all / conceivable IBM-compatible computers, / with Jordan vs. Bird: One on One. / It is 1988. You’re probably a douche.” Is this singing?

✧ ✧ ✧

The wordplay in many of the poems is overdone. A few examples: “it puts out and puts you out. / It puts the lotion in the basket. / It putts passably”; “a nascence, luminescence—maybe an effervescent / bubble bath”; “Ingress is easy. But egress / (like that of the egrets) is elusive.”

✧ ✧ ✧

I hear veiled shout-outs in The Available World to David Shields, John D’Agata, and David Foster Wallace. Even to Leonard Cohen. Speaking of old guys, the few mentions of lycanthropy (which I realize causes Dungeons & Dragons geeks to light up) put me in mind of Jim Harrison, another Michigander. He famously swears that one night at his cabin in the Upper Peninsula he briefly turned into a wolf. I love Jim Harrison—I have even made the pilgrimage to the Dunes Saloon in Grand Marais, MI, on Lake Superior—but he is, it must be said, a shameless blurber (more than 200 are documented [seeHarrison’s bibliography] in the last twenty years!), and the one on TAW is typically fatuous. It is difficult to imagine Harrison—who still writes in longhand and calls himself “a Quasimodo in a world without bells”—truly “engrossed” in Monson’s primary subject matter.

✧ ✧ ✧

Hacking is at heart a creative activity. It is first, simply, an exploration, an opening up, of a system. A kind of problem solving. . . . Most hackers who illegally access computer (or other) systems do it not to break the law but because we want access. Because we see a system and we are not allowed inside it. Because we see that apparently impenetrable tower and we want to know what rests within its walls.
—Monson, “Essay as Hack”

✧ ✧ ✧

Announcing that Vanishing Point is “not a memoir” seems intended to keep us wondering: Is it or isn’t it? Or, more to the point, what exactly is a memoir? Also, even if the essay already is a hybrid form, there is further hybridization here: many words in the text are accompanied by a superscript dagger, that glyph being the invitation to visit Monson’s labyrinthine website (not glitch-free, by the way), enter the word, and see down which rabbit hole you go. Although the book can be thoroughly enjoyed on its own, a variety of bonuses come with the interactive option. Usually more meandering (me-Ander-ing!) text, some photos, a pleasing video (Monson walking around the abandoned Indianapolis airport). At times this “orbit of muchness” seems excessive, gaseous. But, much to his credit, Monson is trying to stake out a position that includes both paper and digital.

✧ ✧ ✧

The opening essay, “Voir Dire,” is wonderful, zeroing in on matters of truth and memory: fact-checking; considering the unreliability of eyewitness testimony (Monson’s jury duty is front and center; what might “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” mean to a nonfiction/memoir writer, or to any of us?); his confusion about the cause of his mother’s death, leading to his own unnecessary colonoscopy; his task reading essays for a national prize. Monson says: “what we remember—all of it—is fiction, variously true or edited. It is constantly being reedited to fit our version of events with what we think of ourselves, the narratives we use to define our lives and give context to action, and we might as well admit it.”

✧ ✧ ✧

“Vanishing Point: Former City” is about Grand Rapids, Michigan, which Monson recently left for Tucson. I lived in Grand Rapids for almost ten years (until early 2005), but it seems a different place from the one he portrays here (and in his terrific previous essay collection,Neck Deep and Other Predicaments). Mine was, to be blunt, a homophobic hotbed of religious, social, and political conservatism. (I could go on about this forever.) About his, Monson wonders why it doesn’t figure more prominently in literature and story. (We could ask Sarah Palin, who kicked off her Going Rogue tour there.) In his recent AWP talk, Monson discusses the difference between writing about and writing a place. Writing about is “making a claim on truth, veracity, verisimilitude.” I wonder: Is he intentionally being obfuscatory, or is he blind to it?

✧ ✧ ✧

Does Monson have substantial social/political critique to offer, of anything? Especially given his often enthusiastic involvement with trash culture (marked by commercialism and consumerism) and with the network giants—virtual if not outright monopolies like Google, Wikipedia, and Facebook—the answer is, Hardly. Although he purports to be exploring/mining/excavating, via poem and essay, the effects of this brave new world, I see mostly unquestioning acceptance, hive-mindedness, even collusion. He may defend himself by saying he only describes what he sees, and what he thinks about what he sees. Might he think more about what he thinks about what he sees? Who’s running the show? Monson indicates his distaste for the “moral essay” of old; it bores him, he says, and he wants to “sex it up,” which he does exceedingly well. But where’s the hacker to bridge the gap to the ethical?

✧ ✧ ✧

Hackers became heroes to a generation of teenagers, and had all sorts of motives, but their most distinctive trait was a tendency to show off.
—Mark Bowden

✧ ✧ ✧

In another “Vanishing Point,” Monson is playing a video game on his laptop at Panera Bread. There are traces of judgment. Being in that generic place, in a suburban locale indistinguishable from any other, is, he says, like being in a video game. “This place is fluid, replaceable. Fragrant. We are protected. We are barely aware of being anywhere.” I hear the poet. Give us more!

✧ ✧ ✧

“Exteriority” is what Monson calls a designed essay. Viewing the page as a two-dimensional object, this designer gives us a text without margins, justified, the first and last letters on each line partially truncated, as though not containable. “Solipsism” is another example. It begins with 1003 instances of “Me.” The design includes marginalia and footnotes, one of which has its own marginalia. Such concrete explorations of textual possibilities may strike some as gimmickry; I think they are delectable. (I also happen to love footnotes.¹)

✧ ✧ ✧

Monson loves Doritos. He mentions in “Transubstantiation” the near ubiquity of high-fructose corn syrup and other chemical strings in packaged food, and says: “The organic, local, slow food movement responds to this, but its presence as a reaction suggests the dominant culture, that the key innovation of food technology over the last decade is to recognize that consumers still want the experience of eating food that looks like food but we don’t really care how much it actually is like food.” Here again he seems to yield to banality, to the suck and sell of consumerism. Monson writes: “I might as well work for them, get a commission.” On the website, see “artificial”: “artificial flavoring tastes really fucking good. Doritos taste really fucking good. . . . You get it, right? The corn chip is the life. The artificially flavored corn chip is the memoir.” That is almost enough to turn one’s stomach.

✧ ✧ ✧

At his recent appearance in Minneapolis, Monson read “Geas.” It begins: “Gary Gygax is dead.” Oh no, more Dungeons & Dragons crap, I thought. All of Monson’s self-confessed dorkiness is on display. But the essay dazzles. A lyrical ending describes driving in Arizona with a three-inch grasshopper on his windshield. “It slowly climbs to the top of my car, beyond my vision, beyond anyone’s vision or capacity for understanding, and disappears.” It’s another gorgeous last sentence, yet this vanishing may embody Monson’s failure to really wrestle with the emptiness at the core of so much of digital life. “It’s obscene, so splayed, so there, such a fact.” This stance doesn’t help us to hew to any standards, to try to decide what’s good, genuine, or at least interesting. Even if the grasshopper incident never really happened, even if what it represents seems beyond our comprehension, nevertheless it deserves, it demands, that we persist in making the attempt—an attempt (an essay) at problem-solving, a hack, an effort to cross that gap.

✧ ✧ ✧

Every man’s work . . . is always a portrait of himself.
—Samuel Butler

✧ ✧ ✧

Which brings us to “Ander Alert,” documenting his online search for others who share his unusual name. Monson mentions that there are four blogs he regularly reads in the morning with his coffee. “I imagine the writer Gary Snyder would find this sad . . . He’s opposed to that kind of immediacy—or perhaps I should call it intermediaricy. I asked him . . . whether he self-Googles, a term that I had to explain. Perhaps he just wanted to humiliate me. He is a cruel man. He probably gets up and contemplates the pines and the breeze and the eroding earth for an hour.” Well, probably he does, and it’s one reason for the endurance and import of Snyder’s five-plus decades of written work. Monson evades the question that the contrast in their early morning rituals begs.

✧ ✧ ✧

In the final essay, “Vanishing Point for Solo Voice,” Monson admits: “I’d like to find the courage not to tell my story. . . . the harder thing for lots of us, is silence. Or at least discretion. Restraint.” But he is flying to Minneapolis, locked in a holding pattern, enjoying the capacity to listen to the in-flight cockpit communications with air traffic control. “I am not just I, I am one of many Is, many stories on the plane . . . I listen to the chatter, evidence of a human interaction, a life summoned up by just a voice. I am nowhere now. I am in the air. I am everywhere at once.” Another lyrical ending. This situation, being party to a conversation in which he doesn’t belong, avoiding solitude, is similar to others in which we all find ourselves occasionally. The question is, is this our gain or our loss?

✧ ✧ ✧

There are two unusual words (though common in programming language) that Monson (in both books) is way too fond of: “asymptotically” and “iteration.” He really likes the notion that virtual reality and the other kind can never quite intersect. I suspect he likes it even better that, of many of the endless loops in which we are caught, his use of “iteration” is the most obvious. (Is this irony?) Their overuse (seemingly every other page) bores the X out of me.

Moreover, here and there Monson flashes his credentials by telling us that he studied some ancient Greek in college. That’s great. But if you have the balls to use the actual Greek word in a text, be sure you and the publisher get it right! Any student who has made it through the first week of beginning Greek could spot the mistakes (in Vanishing Point, p. 74, and in Neck Deep, p. 80). What’s he trying to prove? Monson’s intelligence is obviously agile, and formidable. Sure, writing for publication is a kind of bragging, showing off, and writing about “me” even more so, but enough is enough.

✧ ✧ ✧

Behind every essay I write is this hacker persona, this desire for punkrockitude, the trickster impulse.
—Monson, “Essay as Hack”

✧ ✧ ✧

How do I love Monson? Let me count the ways. 1) the sheer concatenation of observations and ideas; 2) his obsessiveness; 3) his humor; 4) his regular flashes of brilliance; 5) his wildly telescoping vision; 6) his playfulness; 7) self-deprecation in healthy tandem with self-assurance; 8) the whole Scandinavian/Yooper/copper mining/snow thing; 9) his love for footnotes and marginalia; 10) his reminders that the physical book, letters, punctuation, etc., are all technologies, all ingredients of his art. “I expect to see a little fucking craft,” he writes about reading memoirs. There is a lot of fucking craft in Monson’s (not a) memoir, and plenty on his website, too. I see/hear less of it in the poems.

✧ ✧ ✧

Bearish, lovable, ebullient, Monson steps to the podium and begins to read. The clicking of his brain is almost audible, and fascinating. And it’s the strangest thing; as he holds his book in both hands, his arms, bent at the elbows, begin flapping up and down. It’s like he’s a chicken trying to fly, but in vain. Now that I think about it, he seems most often to stop short of the precipice—where the more interesting stuff lies—from which I wish he’d take a leap. Then he might find out he’s not a chicken, but some other kind of bird, a soaring raptor, maybe.

 

¹ A really good footnote is like a Herodotean digression, a meander through an otherwise hidden pathway leading, often, to something entirely unexpected. One returns to the text a changed person, with a heightened awareness of parallel/competing reality.

Click here to purchase Vanishing Point at your local independent bookstore

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Click here to purchase Neck Deep at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2010 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2010

Born in Western Colorado and raised on a fifteen-acre farm, Paolo Bacigalupi attended Oberlin College, where he decided to major in Chinese—a choice that enabled him to teach in China and visit such countries as India, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan. He drew upon his experiences in the Far East, as well as writing environmental columns for High Country News, to write short stories that were eventually collected in Pump Six and Other Stories (Night Shade Books, 2008). Bacigalupi followed this impressive debut with a novel, The Windup Girl (Night Shade Books, 2009), which has already snagged several major awards, including both the Hugo and the Nebula. A science-fiction novel set in a dystopian future of Thailand where foods are genetically made to feed a world starving from bio-engineered plagues, The Windup Girl offers intriguing themes to ponder. As in any good book, however, the main focus is on the multi-dimensional characters, especially the “windup girl” of the title, a genetically designed geisha girl named Emiko. Although programmed to obey, used primarily as a sex-toy, and with the defect of a herky-jerky body that overheats, Emiko might be the most human character in the novel. Bacigalupi’s latest publication is the young adult novel Ship Breaker(Little, Brown, 2010), in which he brings his unique vision to younger readers.

Allan Vorda: Terry Bisson gave you a backhanded compliment for your writing when he says, “Luckily, he has an unpronounceable name.” Can you tell us a little about yourself?

Paolo Bacigalupi: Well, I'm not Italian. Let's start with that. Or at least I'm so watered down that I've got no legitimate claim to the culture, despite the name. This seems to cause great disappointment for anyone who comes across my name before meeting me—I'm more exotic in print, apparently. As far as my background: I was born and raised in rural Colorado. My parents were hippies who wanted to get back to the land, and I grew up on fifteen acres of apple orchards and hay fields and a lot of sagebrush and juniper trees. I attended Oberlin College where I studied Chinese. I picked the language for no good reason, but I thought that an educated person should speak more than one language and I was sick of studying Spanish, so I went rooting through the course catalog and came across Chinese. I thought, Hmm, I've heard Chinese is hard. So I picked it. And it really was hard, horribly hard. But I stuck with it, and because of that one casual choice, I ended up spending a fair amount of time on the other side of the Pacific, and some of my most formative years in China. I'm traveling less now, but my wife has family in India, so we at least get a chance every few years to go over for weddings and such.

AV: Christy Tidwell wrote an article called “The Problem of Materiality in Paolo Bacigalupi’s ‘The People of Sand and Slag,’” which focuses on the meaning of posthumanism. She concludes by saying: “A truly ethical posthuman future would, as Sherryl Vint has argued, be an embodied posthumanism and it would also be a posthumanism that is post-Humanist and post-Cartesian, a posthumanism that neither defines humanity in opposition to nonhuman nature and the environment nor defines nonhuman nature and the environment in terms of the human. Bacigalupi presents a strong argument for precisely this by revealing what happens in the absence of such an ethical and embodied posthumanism.” Do you agree with this assessment? Does your story have a moral premise in light of an amoral future with a lack of ethics?

PB: This is one of those moments when I realize that my education is lacking—I had to read your question a couple times to get all my humanisms and posthumanisms straight. At root, my assumption is that humanity is intertwined with nature. We are part of it, and the more we pretend otherwise, the less human we become. In “The People of Sand and Slag,” humanity has transcended all the things that require us to partake of what we might call ecosystem services. They live off sand and mine waste and don't notice the loss. They don't need nature, and that has implications for how they interact with their world. I'm not sure that the characters in the story are less ethical than present-day humans, they're just more sharply defined.

AV: Ursula K. Heise states in “From Extinction to Electronics: Dead Frogs, Live Dinosaurs, and Electric Sheep,” that there is “the possibility of a different relationship between species: one that no longer privileges the right of humans—feminine or masculine—over those of all other life forms of life, but that recognizes the value and rights of nonhuman species along with those of humans.” This takes into consideration such characters in your fiction as human and posthuman—centaurs, bio-jobs, animals, and windups. Based on the relationship of the characters in “The People of Sand and Slag,” the future for humanity does not look promising. What is your vision of the future for mankind in the 21st century and beyond?

PB: I think—if we're honest with ourselves—that we all know that we will be making do with less, even as we try to convince ourselves that we've actually got more. We'll enjoy less open space, fewer species and less diverse ecosystems, less clean water, less clean air, less ecosystem resilience, less cheap energy. Life today is probably as good as it gets. Of course, we could actually start planning and preserving and living as if we've got a long-term interest in the planet—as if we're embedded and part of a much larger web, which I think is what Ms. Heise is referring to—but we haven't showed any signs of change so far. I'm betting we're going to stay selfish, and hand our kids a shitstorm.

AV: I am curious if any of the following writers had any influence on the writing of “The People of Sand and Slag”: Ursula K. LeGuin (The Left Hand of Darkness), Dan Simmons (the Hyperion quartet), and Harlan Ellison (“A Boy and His Dog”).

PB: I've read The Left Hand of Darkness and “A Boy and His Dog.” I got about fifty pages intoHyperion. I can't say exactly how those things might have tied into the final story; everything is mulch. What I can say specifically is that I was inspired by a news story of a dog living in a superfund site in Butte, Montana, and by an argument that I had with one of my bosses about human ingenuity and his confidence that we humans are so clever that we'll always keep thinking our way out of every problem. Those were definite seeds. The rest of it is all probably fertilizer of some sort or another, but I can't really say how all that works.

AV: There’s been increasing demand for grains as our planet’s population has doubled since the 1960s. What do you see as the dangers of genetically produced grains, which is a theme in “The Calorie Man” as well as The Windup Girl?

PB: I see genetically modified food as being worrisome in any number of ways: (1) we don't really understand the technology very well. GM research seems to be running forward willy-nilly and we risk letting genies out of bottles that we don't understand; (2) companies want to replace existing seeds with their own profit-generating seeds, often in conjunction with their herbicide products, which have their own cascade effects; (3) it seems to encourage monoculture planting, which strikes me as shortsighted; (4) I don't like it when my food is owned by corporations who, let's face it, aren't in the business of feeding people, but are in the business of generating quarterly profit. They may talk about feeding people, but that's PR—they're about profit and they're about control. You don't patent genetic material to feed people, you patent it so no one else can have it and you can make money off of people's need.

As far as the question of addressing the ever-increasing demand for food, it strikes me that GM tech is the shortsighted solution to the larger problem of how we deal with the fact that we as a species are overtaxing our planet's ecosystems. GMOs seem like a successful bid to squeeze a bit of blood from the stone, but at some point, we still face the fundamental question of how we deal with runaway population growth.

AV: Short stories from Pump Six such as “The Calorie Man” and “Yellow Card Man” are precursors for characters and themes in The Windup Girl. When did these the ideas coalesce into the larger work?

PB: Actually, the novel's seed came first. I created a short story that just refused to work. When I showed it to a friend of mine, she commented that it felt like a dwarf star, with too many characters and too many plotlines all jammed against one another. It was more like a novel, compressed, and needed to be a novel, uncompressed.

At the time, I was burned-out on writing novels, having written four, which didn't sell, so I was horrified at the suggestion. Instead, I went back to the short story and started harvesting interesting bits. “The Calorie Man” was an attempt to explore part of the world—the GMOs and peak-oil world—without anything else getting in the way. “Yellow Card Man” was a chance to do a character study, and fill in the back-story of one of the characters.

At one point, I thought I could probably harvest stories out of that one packed short story for years. It looked like there were at least a dozen other possible stories just waiting to be mined. Instead, I finally got up the guts and wrote The Windup Girl. All told, from the initial story idea to the final version of the book I think it was something like five or six years. Three years of serious work on the novel, and then all that other time while I hid my head under the bed and avoided it.

AV: Since The Windup Girl is set in Thailand, tell us how your time in Asia affected you and your writing. I have to say the country is absolutely beautiful and I have never seen people as jaidee (good-hearted) as those in Thailand.

PB: The Thai people really are wonderful, and the people I met were very warm both to me and to one another. If there's one thing I really regret about The Windup Girl, it's that the book doesn't sufficiently illuminate that facet of Thai culture. My stories are almost always about the worst of humanity, extrapolated. Broken worlds, and broken people. There were things about Thailand that I loved, but I wasn't sufficiently clever to find a way to illuminate those positive layers in my larger narrative. It makes you aware of how storytelling can illuminate, but it can also distort.

AV: What writers have influenced you and your writing?

PB: When I was first learning to write, writers like J. G. Ballard and Cormac McCarthy and LeGuin and Hemingway and Gibson inspired me and drove me to try to excel. For The Windup Girl, it was sort of a crash course in Thai literature, mostly in translation: Botan and S. P. Somtow and Kukrit Pramoj and Chart Korbjitti, among others. It was exhilarating to be taking in so much writing that I'd never encountered before, but sometimes it was frustrating as well. I found myself wishing more than once that Chart Korbjitti had a more nuanced translator—I couldn't help feeling that the transition to English did some damage to his voice. And it frustrated and frightened me that I couldn't learn enough Thai fast enough to read it myself. It emphasized how much on the outside I was going to be as I tried to write The Windup Girl.

AV: One of the themes throughout the novel has to do with the worldwide susceptibility of grains to blister rust and ivory beetles. Was this concept partly developed due to the spread of beetles in your state of Colorado, a spread that was triggered by global warming?

PB: It was one of the inspirations, yes. I used to work as the online editor for an environmental journal, and it is terrifying to be immersed in the details of our changing world. As far as rusts go, look no further than Ug99, a wheat rust that is destroying crops in Africa and the Middle East, and looks likely to attack wheat crops world-wide unless we engineer a solution. One of the things that interest me about our food supply is that it is a monoculture. Billions and billions of people all depending on monoculture to survive. And monocultures are vulnerable. So I use news stories and then extrapolate to what the world would look like if those stories proved out. Unfortunately, many of my worst imaginings don't seem nearly as far-fetched as I used to think.

AV: It seems there is an anti-farang (Westerner) message throughout your novel, as when Hock Seng states: “We’re working for ourselves, now. No more foreign influence, yes?” Is this sentiment something you developed for your story, or is this something you detected when you were in Thailand?

PB: I developed it for the story, based on the way I've seen people behave when they're put under pressure by outside forces. The Thailand of the future is very much beset by farang agricultural companies. My assumption is that we all get a little more nationalistic when we're fighting for survival.

AV: Your characters are not the stereotypical ones we meet in most novels. Anderson Lake seems like he might possibly be a hero early in the novel, but he is a hard one to read. Jaidee seems to harbor conflicting feelings toward his wife and Kanya. Characters like Carlyle, Raleigh, Akkarat, and General Pracha are hardly respectable or honorable, but the only truly evil person, or so it seems, is Gibbons. Perhaps the most moral or ethical character with feelings is The Windup Girl Emiko. How did you come up with these multi-dimensional characters?

PB: I don't think anyone wakes up in the morning and decides, “Today, I'm going to be the bad guy.” We just end up there, and we've all got a good excuse for why we failed to live up to our higher ideals. I actually think most of the characters in the book are heroes. They're all trying, and they're hanging onto their ideals as best they can, whether it's Tan Hock Seng and his dream of rebuilding his wealth and a family, or Jaidee and Kanya trying to protect their country. Anderson Lake came from a place where people starved and where rock candy was such a childhood treat that it still remains in his mind to adulthood. If you remember starvation, staying out of starvation by any means necessary doesn't seem so crazy. I don't judge any of the characters too harshly. I doubt I'd do half as well as any of them in the circumstances that I throw them into.

 

AV: The Windup Girl has genetically made cheshires, described as “a high-tech homage to Lewis Carroll,” and megodonts, which seem to be a DNA-reproduction of the extinct mastodons. What was your inspiration for these creatures?

PB: I wanted to use megodonts because I wanted to illustrate the connection between calories and joules—the connecting tissue between food and energy—in this world. And, let's face it, a giant elephant-like creature is pretty fun when it goes crazy in a factory. Cheshires were a way to illustrate the unforeseen consequences of an invasive species. Something that initially seems harmless and entertaining turns out to have ecosystem consequences as it tears through the songbird population. And, of course, invisible cats are cool, too. I try not to deny myself the fun of creation as a writer.

AV: You portray the religious sect called Grahamites in a fairly bad light, as most are fat while the rest of the world is starving. Did you choose the name from Billy Graham and his followers? What do you see for the role of religion in the future?

PB: Grahamites, at root, are believers. All that's good in that—in that they want to protect the natural world—and all that's bad in that, because they do tend to get carried away and burn things down. I don't really view them as a commentary on religion per se, except that I think religion will continue to adapt to the needs of its parishioners. Religion drives people to fanaticism, but so does politics. So does economics. The people who celebrate the genius and wisdom of free markets are just as crazy as the ones who tell you Jesus is the only way to salvation. Let's face it, we've never been a very logical species.

AV: There is a scene in which Kanya takes the elevator down into the bowels of the Quarantine Department, perhaps suggesting Dante’s Inferno. Why is the Quarantine Department looked upon negatively, since it helped Thailand survive while the Empire of America no longer exists and the Asian nations are broke and starving?

PB: The Quarantine Department is a frightening place. I don't think it's looked down on so much as feared, because of the kinds of genetic material it works with. I actually based some of the Quarantine Department's underground labs on descriptions of the CDC's own biological containment facilities.

AV: How did you come up with the concept of The Windup Girl? It’s interesting that Emiko, a genetically produced creature, is perhaps the most human of all the characters in your novel.

PB: I've always been interested in people who are required to serve someone else. It shows up in my short story “The Fluted Girl,” and it shows up again with the bioengineered soldier named Tool in my new young adult novel, Ship Breaker. I only recently noticed that I keep returning to this theme. I think, at root, I'm interested in what makes us loyal—what binds us to other people. As far as Emiko's original inspiration, she came to me during an international flight. A Japanese stewardess caught my eye, because she was moving with a strange sort of herky-jerky motion. I almost thought she was acting a role because the movements were so robotically stylized. I couldn't get the image out of my head.

AV: Gibbons is the mad geneticist who pictures himself as some sort of god, a Conradian Kurtz with little empathy or feeling for mankind. He says: “If we wish to remain at the top of our food chain, we will evolve. Or we will refuse, and go the way of the dinosaurs and Felis domesticus. Evolve or die.” How do you see this character?

PB: Gibbons is the ultimate pragmatist. He looks around at the world, sees what's wrong, and then adapts to it. He's not sentimental about loss or change. He just does what he has to do in order to survive and to please himself. And he is powerful. When he claims a sort of godhood for the changes he can inflict on the world, and in fact has already inflicted, he's not mad, he's stating a fact. The thing that's scariest about him, to me, is that he might be right. We may already be past the point of sentimentality for nature or what we used to have. From now on, it's adapt or die.

AV: Your use of the Thai superstition of ghosts and Kanya’s ongoing discussion with Jaidee’s ghost recalls John Burdett’s use of ghosts in his novel Bangkok Haunts.

PB: I haven’t read Bangkok Haunts; I was actually more inspired by some of S. P. Somtow's short stories. But I liked the presence of ghosts in Thai folklore and I wanted them there, as another part of Jaidee’s and Kanya's world. I've always sort of felt that the soil of different countries emanates its own rules of reality and you need to respect that when you journey to those shores, so having active phii(ghosts) in the story seemed like a good way of acknowledging a different country.

AV: Kanya speculates that Jaidee might be reincarnated as a windup, a fascinating concept.

PB: I'm really interested in how religion adapts to the changes that science and technology introduce. At least since Copernicus, science has challenged religious cosmology, and forced adaptation. Windups challenge almost all of our religious conceptions of soul—given their hybrid, manufactured nature.

AV: The rape of Emiko by Somdet’s men is a powerful scene. How did you develop this degrading and violent moment in the book?

PB: I still feel a little uncomfortable about that scene and the first one where Emiko is introduced, but it seemed like the reader needed to be in the room during her abuse, so that her later actions would seem acceptable. I have no idea how I wrote it. My wife sort of looks askance at me as well.

AV: Violence also ensues when the ghost of Jaidee tells Kanya, “What good is a city if the people are enslaved?”—and of course when Emiko goes against her training and kills Somdet and his men.

PB: We all hit breaking points, moments when we decide to stop going along, and change paths. So much of the world wants us to obey and not make waves, to be good workers and consumers and soldiers and parents and children and what have you—even when it goes against our own best interest, and even the best interest of others. I like it when characters make cathartic changes, and act according to their truest selves. And I like pushing them to that breaking point.

AV: Let’s talk about your newest book. What was the inspiration for Ship Breaker? Did you consciously write it as a young adult novel?

PB: There were a couple things going on. One was that I write a lot of science fiction for adults that focuses on questions of the environment and sustainability, and pretty soon I realized that while adults will often nod their heads in agreement at what I write, they aren't going to make a change in their lives—we're simply too fixed in our positions to accept the sort of change that's necessary. Kids, on the other hand, haven't made all of our dumb decisions about cars and mortgages and jobs yet, so it seems possible to influence them more readily. So, yes, Ship Breaker was always going to be aimed at teens. The actual inspiration for the novel came from watching a documentary about Edward Burtynsky calledManufactured Landscapes that featured ship breaking operations in Bangladesh. I was so struck by the imagery that I couldn't get it out of my head.

AV: A key element in the book is Nailer’s and the crew’s belief in Fates, luck, and superstition.

PB: One of the things you figure out eventually is that there's no rhyme or reason to why one person ends up living a life of privilege and another person doesn't. We get born to whomever we get born to, and then deal with the consequences. Short of a sort of karmic worldview, whatever we're born into is random, and in many cases the opportunities that come before us are random as well. But the other side of that equation is what we do with whatever opportunities we have, and what opportunities we're willing to create through work and force of will. It's always a combination. For Nailer, he's feeling his way into the question of how much he can change the cards he's been dealt.

AV: As in The Windup Girl, there is the theme of slavery in Ship Breaker with the half-man Tool. When asked why he doesn’t obey as trained he responds, “They made a mistake with me. . . . I was smarter than they prefer.” What is the impetus for using this as a social metaphor in your fiction?

PB: I'm interested in characters who don't do what they're told. Most of society asks all of us to do as we're told. To be good workers, to be good consumers, to be good, to stay in our place, and not to break out or think too many dangerous thoughts about why our world is the way it is, and why we're participating in many of its horrors. I keep wondering why we're all so obedient, and maybe that's making its way into my fiction.

AV: The issue of slavery is also present with Nita “Lucky Girl” Patel who has a true owner-slave mentality based on her family’s treatment of half-men—she believes that “genes are destiny” and opines, “we treat [them] well.” Is there an analogy to be made with the half-men characters to the issue of slavery as it occurred in the United States?

PB: I wasn't consciously aiming for that, but I think that wealth provides a certain sense of privilege and ownership and entitlement, whether or not there's actual slavery involved.

AV: The half-men such as Tool are described as a “genetic cocktail of humanity, tigers, and dogs.” How did you develop this creature and the role they play in Ship Breaker?

PB: Tool's archetype has been with me for a long time. I recently re-read “The Fluted Girl” and it turns out that he's there in a different form, as Burson, the head of Madame Belari's security. For me, the half-men provide a lens to examine questions of loyalty, because they are engineered genetically from dog DNA to obey, but also to play with questions of nature versus nurture, which are very much on Nailer's mind as he tries to figure out who he is in relation to his father.

AV: Indeed, the idea that “genes are destiny” worries Nailer a great deal.

PB: We all get certain things from our parents—some are taught, some are genetic—and yet, we are not clones. And yet the ghosts of our parents haunt us. If our parents were abusive, we fear becoming so ourselves, because sometimes we do repeat the failures of our parents. If they were addicts, or couldn't relate with others, or failed to succeed in life, or if they succeeded too well, our parents loom large. For Nailer, whose father is so powerful and awful, and who is growing up under the exact same pressures that his father grew up in, there is a strong chance that he will become precisely the monster that his father represents.

AV: Both here and in The Windup Girl you often reverse male-female stereotypes. Overall, your female characters are usually stronger, whether mentally or physically, than most of the male characters. Why do you use this theme so consistently in your fiction?

PB: I don't really see it as a reversal, I guess. Strong female characters don't mean male characters are weak. What I think I'm trying to do is show characters of both sexes who are strong in a variety of ways. The thing that makes Blue Eyes dangerous to Nailer is that she's a fighter and an adult who is bigger than he is, but the thing that makes the girl Sloth dangerous is actually that she's smaller than Nailer and she's smart—someone who could take his job away from him. Pima and Sadna are both strong physically, but so is Tool, the ultimate masculine figure. Nailer isn't as strong as a lot of people, but he's quick and he's a thinker. I just like to see lots of people showing their strongest aspects, and sex isn't necessarily the determinant for any of those things.

AV: Nailer’s father, fueled by amphetamines and alcohol, is the embodiment of evil: he breaks Pima’s fingers and scavenges a ship before getting medicine to save his son’s life. What made you choose this unorthodox father and son relationship to drive the underlying themes of your story?

PB: I've always hated the idea that children owe their families, and particularly their parents, anything. Our children didn't ask to be born. We decided to create them for our own selfish reasons. So I don't think our children owe us for their care, for their feeding, or their education. That's their right, and we owe it to them for dragging them into our world.

Even more, I hate the idea that because someone is family, they deserve greater respect or obedience or care than a friend, regardless of their actual behaviors. Too often, it seems like family relationships and obligations and the cliches that we use to describe them are used to justify abuse. Family doesn't matter. Marriage doesn't matter. Day-to-day good behavior, does. I wanted to make the family relationship conditional on good behavior, and when that good behavior doesn't exist, I'm happy to see family broken in favor of something better.

AV: It’s ironic that the uneducated Nailer is able to defeat his father due to a half-man, who teaches Nailer how to read.

PB: The written word is powerful. I come back to that, again and again. It gives us access to so much information, assuming that we have the keys to that initial code. Without it, we're dependent on slower oral traditions, and have no indexes for information. The area where I live in rural Colorado has a fair number of kids who were never taught to read and are ignorant because of it, and it ticks me off, so I was happy to slide that bit my own values into the action of the book.

AV: Can we anticipate a sequel for Ship Breaker?

PB: Yeah. There's definitely going to be a sequel. Some characters will return, and new ones will show up. Tool is definitely coming back, though.

AV: What can your readers look forward to with your next work of fiction?

PB: After the Ship Breaker sequel, it's a little up in the air. I'm contracted to write another couple science fiction novels for adults, and I’ve got some more young adult ideas as well, but if I talk about them, they'll sound stupid, and then I won't have the guts to actually write them.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2010 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2010

Referring to a recent statement that the recording artist M.I.A. made in Interview magazine, Edwin Torres advises that if you wake up in the morning and want to do something easy, then something is wrong. That work ethic has led Torres to become a trailblazer, be it through his radical text and performance works or his award-winning graphic design; he is an artist who can transfigure a solo cabaret out of an old suitcase, and he harbors a midlife exuberance that many would envy. The poet/performer Rodrigo Toscano calls Torres a “one-man poetic theater phenomenon,” a virtuoso who has performed at every major space in New York City, including Central Park, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art, as well as on MTV. His books and CDs include The All-Union Day of The Shock Worker(Roof Books), Fractured Humorous (Subpress), and Holy Kid (Kill Rock Stars), and a new book,YesThingNoThing, is forthcoming next year.

His latest book, In the Function of External Circumstances (Nightboat Books, $14.95), may be his most interesting yet—calm but unafraid. It’s a sectioned work that turns mere readers into diary-voyeurs. Torres also considers it the “first book I’ve ever really composed.” I sat down with Torres at a bar in SoHo to talk about some of our favorite poets, musical acts, designers, and the Slam movement.

KLW: Who might make a list of your top five favorite recording artists?

ET: Five out of a thousand: Prince, Bjork, Roxy Music, Arvo Part, John Lennon.

KLW: Definitely five on my iPod. What about poets you love who aren’t your friends?

ET: Five out of a hundred: Harryette Mullen, Charles Bernstein, Mark Strand, Brenda Hillman, Marianne Moore.

KLW: Interesting—there’s a huge amount of space between, say, Bernstein and Strand.

ET: Well, I’ve never wanted to fit into a single space or category. I find inspiration in a multiplicity of spaces.

KLW: What about graphic designers (dead or alive)?

ET: El Lissitsky is one of my all time kings! He used photography and collage during Russian Constructivism with a discerning eye towards freedom and innovation. His “Prouns” (ground-breaking creations between architecture, painting and drawing) were visionary minimalist structures of a world that could not exist but made you question balance and groundlessness. Bradbury Thompson, who used the new technology of the four-color lithographic process in the ’50s as license to experiment with bold design in the way computers are used now. Tibor Kalman left his stamp on anything he touched. And of course Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, the Bauhaus photo-designer. Maybe my age is showing but I think a lot of designers nowadays have it too easy; there are loads of contemporary designers who can pull out a brilliant logo or poster here and there, but sustained over a lifetime . . . that’s a different story.

KLW: Is it as gratifying doing design work as it is writing poetry? What similarities do you find between the two mediums?

ET: The external circumstances I allude to in my book allow for a finality of movement once you accept what is and isn’t yours to control. Creative energy is a vibration, moving through you, which I’m thankful to experience however it comes out. When I get on stage and feel connected to my external vibration, my reaction is a visceral oneness with the universe, with the audience, with the energy they give me. The writing of the work is a deeper stirring of the pot, the formula unleashed once it’s spoken.

While graphic design has its focused drive, its ability to clear out the filter for the message to live in two dimensions, there is a complexity to the reach of language that I don’t get in graphics. A similarity between graphics and poetry would be communication, in its purist form. The poem’s line and all the depth implied, the geometric shape and all the simplicity implied. Each one brings a different focus to what I’m saying. But poetry is my soul.

KLW: So, do you receive more pleasure composing poems for the page or for the stage?

ET: When I was traveling with the Nuyorican Café poets during the ‘90s and spoken word was a hot topic at the time, reporters, not knowing what to make of all this burbling energy on the stage, would trip over themselves trying to attach meaning to the experience.

When I get asked about comparing page with stage, I’m always brought backstage to a stained-glass cathedral in Salisbury, England, with TV cameras in our faces—we were treated like strange rock stars over there, with the press at once confused and fascinated. I’ve since realized that the pleasure I get in poetry is the connection with the audience, a kind of Interactive Eclecticism. This way of entering a performance first occurred when my friends asked me to come perform at really small venues. They’d say, “Hey, come tell those jokes that you tell.” I learned as I went, learned as I presented more of my work. And good friends will tell you when you stink.

But, now, it’s not like it was in the early ’90s. Now, there’s so much competition to become great right away. Then, the punk mentality was still in the air. Now, Patti Smith is considered retro. The filter’s harder to come by. I learn from John Cage—no intention.

The fascinating aspect of a poem’s creation, to me, is that its life on the page gets to have a rebirth when experienced on stage. The entirety of poetry—its difficulty, its mystery, its colloquial and invented language, its broken craft, the re-imaginings lurking within the mistakes, the sound, the outcome—all of poetry is what turns me on. My pleasure, your gift, one action—if that doesn’t sound too treacly.

KLW: How and where do you compose most of your poems? I ask this because some of my friends accuse me of writing “on the go” too often, but many of the poems from In the Function of External Circumstances strike a similar chord.

ET: If someone’s accusing you of writing too quick, they’re just jealous! How great to catch the speed of everything around you. Sometimes I catch the raw drive of the poem in a few journal pages “on the go” and then compose it on my computer keyboard much later when I transcribe it. And some of them take years to finish. I like infiltrating the ‘labored’ works with bits of spontaneity. But I also don’t analyze the process; don’t want to know why something works—the mystery keeps the breath silent.

KLW: When and how did you first decide to incorporate your own written words with audio?

ET: My performances in the early ’90s, in which I was truly a one-man show, gave me the impetus to experiment because no one said I couldn’t. In my crammed studio apartment, when my two cats were my only overhead, I placed tape recorders next to each other to capture low frequencies, in a lo-fi attempt to mimic Eno’s recordings of worms . . . I was a very lonely boy then. This became a way to pass my days as an outsider to the world, by staying in. I guess I nurtured my own privacy.

I had friends but enjoyed creating stuff in my too-crammed apartment that no one ever came to. My extension into the world happened onstage, so whatever I created at home made its way onstage. And in the ’90s, it was easier to make performances for small audiences without feeling that you were a failure. Over time, you discover the incredibly cool neighborhood record store, the radio station, the people that guide you towards where your hearing takes you. I think Bart Plantenga’s radio show on WFMU, “Wreck This Mess,” was a huge influence on me. It was where I first heard words recorded with music in totally interesting ways, theater, performance, Firesign Theater, strange European sound artists . . . Bart’s show encompassed everything I was ready for then. He’s actually still doing his show in Amsterdam, I believe it’s syndicated on the web. Kenny Goldsmith replaced his show on WFMU.

I kept finding “new” things, codes for avant-garde, all the way back to the Dadaists. Even Ernie Kovacs, just seeing people do wacky stuff. But I had a work ethos—and I wanted to bring the everyday man into language poetry. I much liked that the performer could be the stagehand. That blew my mind. Stuart Sherman would bring out a suitcase, open it up and interact with visual puns. The artist became the invisible worker and back and forth like that.

KLW: I love how personally motivated and ruthlessly lyrical In the Function of External Circumstances feels. Can you tell me about the sections that the book is divided into? Do they represent variant ideas in the sense of what you were saying about the merging of performer/stagehand, etc?

ET: Thanks for that. The book’s life gears itself through body awareness. This collection sort of magnetized itself as it took shape. I know I wanted the wild diary section to be in the center, as a way to root the book in travel. The first section can be seen as an introduction using brief poems to bring in a sense of the book’s voice. Once we’re in, the next section allows love to mold into the contours of the pages. The diary section catches transformation in process. The fourth section is a departure, a sort of cleansing of the palette after the heavy diary section. A graphic tone is introduced here also, which brings in the idea of the sensory, the skin in its title functioning as reader’s/book’s/poet’s skin. The last section is a coda set up by the Flaubert poem. I don’t really see the book as a ‘selected’ although the scattered range of the pieces could seem stitched together. Each poem relates to its neighbor, a governing body in control of the dynamics. The thematic intimacy in the book was an afterthought—I was just hoping to have some sort of flow. As far as the lyrical intent, music and rhythm are apparent in all my work. I can’t escape from the lyric, a topic I wrote about in my poem “The Impossible Sentence.” But I also am not interested in standing for one or the other poetic ideal, the poem is what it needs to be . . . I guess I’m a commoner. In the words of Lennon, “a working class hero is something to be.”

KLW: Slam poetry has become incredibly popular. Yet the slam movement still gets lambasted by some parts of the academic microcosm. Any thoughts on this?

ET: When I was involved in the slam scene, the poets were writing for an audience of poets; we had a gathering of ears that were tuned into the subtleties of language and structure. So each week, for maybe eighteen months, the poets were riding on this enormous wave of creative exploration, trying to outdo each other more in writing than performance. The stage was an afterthought, a vehicle for the content. When the stage became the content itself, when the audience changed to money-paying non-poets, slam became more popular but less challenging poetically. Now it serves as a great accessible entry point for a wider range of people who may never have thought of poetry as a cultural force, let alone entertainment.

KLW: Given your artistically radical drive, did MTV make you feel like a sellout at all?

ET: No way, I was ecstatic to reach such a large audience. Didn’t re-mix the poem for mainstream consumption, happy to have a sound poem like “Peesacho” appear in its original form in front of pre-Def Jam twenty-something hipsters.

KLW: Has “the audience” really expanded that much?

ET: Poetry’s audience has remained, I think, in the same relation since the beginning of time . . . there’s just more people now, so the same proportion will be interested in what poets have to say. And the same larger chunk will avoid poetry like the plague.

KLW: Are words more sounds or concepts?

ET: I posted an entry on the Poetry Foundation’s blog based on this question:http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2010/04/magic-maker/

KLW: What about translation in the semiotics era—any theories, personal or intellectual?

ET: Translation is beyond me—all respect to good translation! Here we have an original poem lived in the life of the poet. Once translated into its new language, an entire life has been re-imagined . . . how could it not be an entirely different poem? I once “translated” a Bonanza TV episode that was running in Barcelona, so it was dubbed in Catalan, which has a beautiful register between Spanish and Portuguese. I could re-hear what Ben and Hoss were almost saying and pretended to translate wildly inappropriate sentences like, “but men are slaves in March,” bringing me to a sort of appropriated poetry in the misplaced juxtapositions—using sound and the actor’s gestures to invent narratives that didn’t exist based on familiar translucencies of my history with a language I barely know. But that’s as close as I get to theory. Sound is where I jump on translation . . . a visual homophonics, an interpretation more than a translation.

KLW: Because it is logically incorrect, how is it possible for one man to be “a variety show”?

ET: Ah, but every human is a variety show! Look at that balancing ball of light whirling over the bean . . . look at ’em two-handed arms holding that podiatrist . . . I am merely a reflection of my own heyyawannas. I suppose unleashing creativity in the guise of total embarrassment could count as entertainment, but to paraphrase the 1980s, “perfpo-langpo-latinos just wanna have fun.” Play and fun can be scary for people who insist on maintaining the cultural elite. I feel an obligation to wreck pre-existing poetic notions, and part of that involves doing my own stunts. If that means the poem needs to be sung a bit, chanted, grueled, incised, gestured, mimed, or kissed . . . so be it. However, I’m wary of belittling the work via the novelty of “variety.” Age has taught me how to coax a poem into its being and what tools to use when; wherever, possible I try to get out of my own way.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2010 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2010