When it comes to baseball, the mind is unreliable and selective in what it remembers. Games and seasons blend into to one another and most second basemen or relief pitchers fade from view forever soon after they leave the diamond for good. Old teams and players live on only as lines of statistics in massive baseball encyclopedias or deep historical databases. Lost, too, are the millions of moments that make up every game. But Roger Angell has been quite good, over the years, at capturing those moments and preserving them as though in amber. And so, in reading his collection of baseball pieces that span more than forty years, one feels a bit like the lucky archeologist who has stumbled upon magnificent specimens so exquisitely preserved as to seem positively lifelike. Angell writes with almost scientific precision: “With the strange insect gaze of his shining eyeglasses, with his ominous Boche-like helmet pulled low… Reggie Jackson makes a frightening figure at bat.” Angell is not just an observer; he is also the ultimate fan, rooting for childhood favorites or for a team whose story has caught his fancy that particular year. Game Time
Game Time by Roger Angell
Nabokov’s Scraps: The Original of Laura
The Other Kind of Country People: On Katherine Faw Morris’s Young God
When There’s Nothing Left to Burn, Set Yourself on Fire: On Rachel Cusk’s ‘Kudos’
Addiction, Apathy, and Sputtering through Life: On Hugh Sheehy’s The Invisibles
The world in Hugh Sheehy’s short story collection, The Invisibles, is a distinct one. It constitutes the American nightmare of the last 30 or so years, including lax gun control, increased dependence on drugs, and more extreme episodes of neurosis about the ability to love ourselves and others. It shows a time when Reagan, Bush, and Clinton became less proper nouns and more belts of alternating plasticity and cheap heavy metal used to persecute the poor, entertain and quell the middle class, and fatten the accounts of the rich. The stories portray a scurvy, jumbled, and faintly resolute country reminiscent of Robert Frank’s photographs in The Americans. People drink, swear, tease, addle, enrage, but mostly drink, getting jacked enough to not be able to watch the only good thing about their life walk away as they stay in a stupor: wordless, detached, and only full of nostalgia for the fists their old friends raised at the people who dared to hurt them.
As the 2012 Flannery O’Connor Award winner for short fiction, Sheehy’s stories perfectly fit in the vein of that Southern writer whose characters hold similar hardened, messy lives bordering on Messianic in her attuned symbolism. Often taking place in the burnt-out, brutal Midwest of small towns with a bar on every corner, these stories throw a documentary-type lens on the reckless youth who grow up to sputter through life — shirking responsibility and unable to imagine a world in which their existence might make a difference. Besides the travails of addiction, there are good reasons for this apathy. A Lake Erie killer haunts the story “The Invisibles,” in which a motherless teenager loses her two best friends to a mysterious menace that goes unsolved. In “Meat and Mouth,” the two eponymous marauders take a teaching assistant and a student staying after school hostage on a snowy Friday when everyone else has left. And fate again intervenes in “Whiteout,” in which the protagonist, a cocaine addict and general ne’er-do-well, is on his way home for Christmas for the first time in 13 years. Getting there during a snowstorm, he sees an overturned minivan on the highway. His decision to help will dictate whether he will make it to his family, an encounter too painful to have for so long.
It might be said, possibly correctly, that trouble seeks the troublemakers or lost souls who have knowingly abused their lives, without knowing how they’ve hurt someone else’s. A fitting karma is a lesson to be learned. A hallmark of these stories is a certain type of slacker behavior grounded in drinks and friends. In “A Difficult Age,” the main characters, Francis (the narrator) and Lionel, sit with Brooke on a riverbank getting away from it all:
We sit together, painless, sharing a pipe, and drum our legs on the bank. Brooke calls us idiots, but more importantly, the autumn is its naked self, bold and inelegant, and hard like a new tooth driven through a baby’s gums. We laugh hard and cry and get scared and laugh hard, and Brooke stares at the pond and shakes her head, drinking wine and being pregnant.
People want to have fun together, and screwing around, as handed down by their parents, getting drunk, and getting stupid are how these characters unwind. But Sheehy couples the desperation with a powerful metaphor, placing the scattershot behavior of the characters against the world they still have to inhabit, as everything, including their choices and any “new tooth…through a baby’s gums” turns and changes. If they don’t grow up, their careless philosophy will infect others.
The characters in The Invisibles might not exactly be asking for their gloomy fate, but often it is the best thing that can happen. In the exemplary “Smiling Down at Ellie Pardo,” Sheehy builds a twisting narrative stretching from a young man’s (Nolan’s) deleterious adulthood to his more hopeful teenage years as he returns home to be again paired with Henry, an old friend from the neighborhood, after a single woman they knew from their high school days has been killed. In one swooping sentence the reader gets the mysterious Ellie described in a flashback:
A feisty Italian who always had a tray of lasagna in the oven or red sauce bubbling on the stove, she jogged back and forth on our street each day, exposing her beautiful legs even to the wicked cold of our winters on the lake.
The alliteration of “wicked” and “winters”, as well as “of,” “our,” and “on” at the end of the sentence makes this evocation full of sound and substance by showing how she lived her life and where it played out. Each of the two men had a different relationship with her back then, and when Henry reveals that he once dated Ellie, it sends the story into another quadrant of psychological ramifications that Nolan tries to reconcile as their grief eventually leads them into a dark woods and an unforeseen but apt confrontation. Though many of the stories have an element of mystery, Sheehy isn’t interested in finding out who did what — he knows the dramatic cornucopia lies elsewhere, with the living and the mistakes they have to examine in light of the dead.
There is a unique sadness to this book. Sometimes there’s a touch of Raymond Carver, whose spirit is reminiscent in the broken down characters who are often missing a parent and pouring another glass. Sometimes early Paul Auster is evident as in a unique variation on the Memento-type story where a classics professor unwinds himself with the help of Ovid in “Translation.” Things are happening faster than ever, but Sheehy slows down and looks to see where and how our innocence was lost. The most important thing to be said of this book is that it’s true, presenting a reality of deteriorating values many face and foster in our country, equally unwelcoming for young men or old.
The Past as Destiny, The Place as Self: Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul
Lacar Musgrove Lacar Musgrove is the associate non-fiction editor of Bayou Magazine, published by the University of New Orleans, where she is pursuing an M.F.A. She has a B.A. in English from Boston University.Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories and the City is a strange and fascinating self-portrait.The first time I read Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul was on a train from Istanbul to Bucharest at the beginning of a two month journey through southern Europe. I’d been living in Istanbul for a year and a half and was interested in the book not as a memoir but as a book about Istanbul. It’s a strange way of writing a memoir, as entire chapters are dedicated not to Pamuk’s life but to Western and Turkish writers and artists who have depicted Istanbul though painting and writing. Pamuk writes of viewing himself and his city through Western eyes, sometimes borrowed, sometimes, he suspects, his own, recognizing his education and intellectual life as westernized.I was delighted to find many of Pamuk’s observations of Istanbul echoing what I had perceived through my Western eyes. I was particularly amused by this:It snowed on average between three and five days a year, with the accumulation staying on the ground for a week to ten days, but Istanbul was always caught unawares, greeting each snowfall as if it were the first.I cannot tell you how true this is. When it snowed my first winter there and my students refused to come to class, I thought it odd. But the next year it happened again, and the people of Istanbul reacted with the same surprise. It happens every year, and every year they are unprepared.The second time I read Istanbul was for a graduate non-fiction survey course, and it was the inclusion of this title on the reading list that solidified my decision to take the course. Upon deeper study, Istanbul revealed itself as an intricately woven portrait of place, memory and self. Pamuk’s narrative of his childhood and adolescence is confessional and his tone humble as he guides the reader with exquisitely subtle steps through this portrait. He handles the portrayal of his adolescent self in crisis with the same clarity and compassion with which he depicts a fallen empire city struggling with decline. Pamuk invites you into the hüzün, the collective melancholy of the city’s people, but does not break your heart with tragedy. Rather, he allows you to bathe in the comfort of it, to feel the resignation, the longing for a more glorious past as he describes old houses one by one going up in flames, the wealth of the city flowing from the old Istanbul families to the newly rich, a city unable to cling to the past but also incapable of defining a future: paralyzed.So what does this book have to offer one who has never been and may never go to Istanbul? You’ll have to look deep to find it. This is a book about extracting one’s identity from the world, about finding the line between self and society and occupying the place where each is served, finding stasis. In a self-portrait in which self and place are inseparable, Pamuk’s struggle is that of reconciling the two. The history, the geography, the buildings, the people tell him who he is. He recognizes himself as, rather than a unique individual, a character shaped of the collective experience. The habits and possessions of his family are not unique, his hüzün, his melancholy, is not his own but the collective hüzün of Istanbul, his life is not only his life but the life of the city. Young Orhan, however, occupies not only Istanbul but a secret inner world, the solitary world of his daydreams, which he expresses, in childhood and adolescence, through drawing and painting. He is tormented by anxiety and guilt over the separation of this inner world, and when painting no longer serves his need to bring the inner world to the outer, he hits a crisis which is only resolved when he learns to occupy both worlds simultaneously through writing, a moment in which he, unlike Istanbul, manages to disentangle himself from the past, “warmed by the flame of my brilliant future.”Through its theme of inner and outer worlds, the text explores the tension between our sense of self and our sense of how others see us. “Once imprinted on our minds, other people’s reports of what we’ve done end up mattering more than what we ourselves remember.” We know ourselves through our own memories as well as the memories of others. At the beginning of the opening chapter he writes, “This book is concerned with fate.” Pamuk fancies himself unique in his struggle, but I would say his metamorphosis is common if not universal, at least in modern Western societies in which the individual is expected to cultivate a discreet identity and is responsible for harnessing his “true” self in order to fulfill a destiny.I understood Pamuk’s point of view through my own experience, not with Istanbul but with returning from Istanbul to Louisiana, my home and my family and grappling with my claim to this place and its claim to me. Having come to view Louisiana through the eyes of an outsider and myself as separate from it, I found myself confronting the truth of my own identity’s inseparability from place and my need to not only claim but defend it. I empathize with Pamuk’s sense of shame knowing how the rest of the country views our poverty, the ignorance of our citizens, the corruption of our government, the state of our infrastructure. Through confronting the connection between my identity and this place, I can accept this melancholy and embrace and the promise of the past’s claim on my destiny.
Rock ‘n Roll Malaise: Dana Spiotta’s Stone Arabia
“Do you need an audience to create work or does not having an audience liberate you and make you a truer artist?” This is the question twenty-something Brooklynite Ada poses on her blog before she leaves Greenpoint to interview her eccentric uncle Nik in Los Angeles for the documentary she’s making. Ada’s film will be called Garageland, she writes, and it “will question what makes a person produce in the face of resounding obscurity.” Turn that question inside-out, and it is just as relevant to Stone Arabia, Dana Spiotta’s third novel: How is fame constructed? Do the famous make themselves for us, their fans and consumers, or do we make them? What do their narratives truly represent, and who do their stories belong to?
Nik is a rockstar, but only a handful of fans — his sister Denise, her daughter Ada, and a small collection of ex-girlfriends and former band-mates — know it. Over the years, Nik has released dozens of LPs to Denise and his few loyal followers, and he’s kept a meticulous record of his career in what he calls the Chronicles, a thirty-volume scrapbook filled with letters, reviews, and other “willful esoteria,” all of his own creation. The rock ’n roll posture gives Nik’s creativity a framework — one that provides cover for his self-destructive habits, but also spurs him to keep producing music long after his early, promising bands fail to make it. For Nik, celebrity is a state of mind.
Nik’s story drives the book’s plot, but it’s Denise who provides Stone Arabia’s narrative lens — and her slow, shapeless days of sorting through bills and checking in on her declining mother couldn’t be further from rock ’n roll. Spiotta writes that the hills of Santa Clarita, the Los Angeles suburb where Denise lives, are “tired” but it seems it is simply Denise who is tired. When Denise begins compiling her own Counterchronicles, her fragmented writings reveal the extent of her mental displacement from her own life. Denise is not an unreliable narrator, but she is clearly an unstable one; there are entire days she can’t account for. She sobs in front of the television while watching the news, and spends hours tunneling through search engine results for more details on the most sensational stories. The ceaseless onslaught of headlines depletes her emotional resources. “It is the feeling that your life has just left the room,” Denise says, broodingly.
In the age of the Internet, when we have an instant portal into the lives (real or imagined) of others through our computers, televisions, and smart-phones, it is a feeling many readers will surely relate to in some form, and this is the novel’s key strength. Stone Arabia’s pull largely lies in its ability to recreate the feeling of media saturation that permeates modern life. Take Denise’s birthday for example:
Ada called me in the morning from New York. She made me promise to look at her blog. She had posted a photo of us and it said, “happy birthday to my mom,” just like that, no caps or anything. Not “happy birthday mom” but “to my mom” because it was really reportage to some audience beyond me. It wasn’t a personal message to me, but a public announcement about me.
Denise stares at her screen for a while; she knows her daughter wants her to post a comment, but she just can’t bring herself to. “I just couldn’t say something spontaneous and pithy and then have it hang there for all eternity,” she thinks. “Those are opposite pulls — eternity and pithy — and if I thought at all about what to say it was even worse.” It’s a familiar dilemma, rendered strangely lyrical through Denise’s eyes. Moments like these repeatedly animate the novel. Again and again, Spiotta perfectly captures the static sound of our televisions and Ethernet cables numbly pumping in more information than we need (or can respond to). And she elegantly depicts the ambivalence this unending electronic stream inspires.
In her debut novel, Lightning Field, Spiotta depicted Los Angeles at its most brutally superficial — and female friendship at its most intimate. This was followed by Eat the Document, a mesmerizing story about a fugitive who reinvents herself in hiding, based on the true story of a real-life 1960s activist and her lover. Stone Arabia is also set in Los Angeles, and is also based on a true story. In the Author’s Note, Spiotta writes that though Nik Worth is a character of her imagination, he’s based her real-life stepfather, “Richard Frasca, a.k.a Jon Denmar. Richard Frasca is not Nik Worth but Richard’s devotion to his own music and Richard’s self-documented chronicle of his life as a secret rock star gave me the idea for Nik.” Most novelists invariably incorporate characters and experiences from their lives into their fiction, but there’s something particularly sly about publishing a work of fiction built off someone else’s semi-ironic, private fiction — particularly when that person is the author’s family member.
It’s a fittingly post-modern back-story for a novel which finds each of its main characters trying to make sense of their world through art/music, memoir, and film. Stone Arabia’s tangled layers not-so-subtly mimic the tangled layers of media we all live in. Obsessed with its obsessions (“Even the most pointless obsession can yield a certain kind of depth if it is pursued unfailingly,” Denise thinks), and enchanted by the tension between private and public personas as well as the blurry boundaries between self-documentation and self-creation, Stone Arabia is a truly contemporary novel. Do our stories bring us closer to ourselves, or do they simply hide and splinter our real identity? Stone Arabia assembles an impressive collage of questions about aging, identity, art and its audience, fame and its construction, privacy, knowing and being known, and how we define who we are.
But as the novel slips from third to first person, from Ada’s video transcripts to Nik’s fake-archives, from blog posts to voicemails to movie rentals to search engine results, its narrative coherence meanders. Surely these are deliberate structural choices, but flattened into prose, the onslaught of technology fractures Spiotta’s story-telling. Spiotta is a writer of keen observation and careful craftsmanship, but — though it summons Lightning Field’s cool disaffection and Eat the Document’s enchantment with secret lives and self-invention — Stone Arabia lacks the grace and fluidity of her previous novels. Denise’s recollections from her childhood and early adulthood with Nik are evocative, but they are strung together only tangentially, and none of the book’s secondary characters stick around long enough to matter much. By the end of Stone Arabia, Nik has concluded The Chronicles, Ada has finished Garageland, and Denise has completed her Counterchronicles, but these works offer no real answer or argument to the questions — both stated and understood — that fill their lives. Ultimately, the interruptions of many forms of media — precisely the kinds of interruptions most novels insulate their readers from — give the book a jagged immediacy that raises more questions than it’s capable of answering.