The “Machine” in the title of Tracy Kidder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book from 1982 is a minicomputer, but for anyone reading it now, it might as well be a time machine. The Soul of a New Machine takes the reader back 27 years, but in terms of the technology that is central to the book, it feels like we’re going back eons. Kidder’s book, once a riveting look into a fast-growing and mysterious industry, now reads as history. Kidder’s subject is a team of engineers at a now gone company called Data General (it was bought out in 1999). Under the brash instruction of their leader, Tom West, the engineers set out to design a computer even though the head honchos at Data General have put their support and resources behind another group. West’s Eagle group – made up of young, brilliant engineers – comes out on top. Though this book is quite dated now, I enjoyed it for a couple of reasons. Computer technology is so commonplace now that it is a part of our landscape, both essential and taken for granted. It was interesting to look back to a time before we had computers on our desks and in our pockets, when computers were as mysterious and awe inspiring as putting a man on the moon. The book was also compelling as a collection of character studies and a treatise on business theory. Kidder does a good job of putting the reader in the basement of the office building where this computer was born. If you’re interested, an excerpt from the book is available.
The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder: A Review
The Duality of the Human Psyche: On John Lahr’s Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh
Near Touchdown Jesus, a statue nicknamed for his outstretched arms, the smell of pot ambles through the French Quarter. A makeshift band -- clarinet, tuba, and drums -- plays for tips on the corner. A man in a long-sleeve shirt, sits cross-legged in the middle of the street where his friend has already propped a chair. Bells from St. Louis cathedral announce the time: 12 gongs.
“That’s where Tennessee Williams wrote A Streetcar Named Desire,” says a tour guide dressed in all-purple. He’s driving a mule-drawn carriage with signature fleur-de-lis on the back. He points to the Avart-Peretti House at 632 St. Peters Street. After reading John Lahr’s biography Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh, shortlisted for the 2014 National Book Award in nonfiction, I came looking for the playwright. I’ve found one of Williams’s French Quarter homes, red brick, nearly identical to others in the neighborhood. Across the street, a sign for a “boutique smoke shop” reads Pipe Dreams. This sign could probably apply to how Williams felt when he first started writing plays.
While a lot of biographies begin with dry lineages, Lahr puts us at Williams’s opening night of his first big play The Glass Menagerie. Right from the start, there’s tension. For Williams, this is his make-or-break moment, because his very first production Battle of Angels had been a crowd-booing fiasco. Williams is considered an autobiographical playwright, so many of his plays' scenes are dramatized versions of his life. Throughout Mad Pilgrimage, Lahr presents a Williams play, then ties it back to the playwright's personal life. The Glass Menagerie, Lahr shows, depicts his more-than-dysfunctional family.
When Williams was 7, his family moved from his home state Mississippi to St. Louis. During his childhood, his father, a salesman, often drank and became violent. His father, Lahr says, called the young Williams “Miss Nancy,” because he considered the boy effeminate. To keep a distance from his father, Williams clung to his overbearing mother Miss Edwina. Though Miss Edwina protected her son and nurtured his interest in writing, she barely hugged her children and raised them with fire-and-brimstone-esque ideals. As a result, Williams's plays often deal with repression, both physically and emotionally. Lahr tells us the playwright didn’t masturbate until the age of 26, a shocking bit of information, but also valuable insight to helping understand the depth of his plays' characters’ struggles. Williams often turned his work’s gaze toward the male body -- think Stanley Kowalski played by Marlon Brando in Streetcar. In his iconic characters Blanche DuBois (Streetcar) and Brick (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), we see the personification of struggling with desire
“On the one hand there is truth,” writes Virginia Woolf in “The New Biography,” “on the other there is personality.”
When done with “personality” in mind, a biography can mimic a piece of jazz music. Lahr states in the preface that he constructed the book closer to a profile than a traditional biography. In this way, he listens to the music. Texture, seemingly improvisational moments, comes from the layering of different sounds. Elements overlap and knock up against each other. He situates Williams’s many pithy and entertaining letters, the post-office kind, in conversation with diary entries, theater reviews, and interviews. To punctuate Williams’s nearly 15-year relationship with Frank Merlo, Lahr often incorporates the playwright’s poetry:
It was not easy to crawl
against those unending torrents
of light, all bending one way.
And only your voice calling, Stay!
-- “Humble Star”
As the middle child, Williams often compared himself to his siblings. He adored older sister Rose, but while he had writing to escape his mother’s tyrannical spirituality, Rose wasn’t as lucky. Their mother committed Rose to an institution, in which she received shock treatments and an eventual prefrontal lobotomy. Lahr deftly explores Williams's relationship with Rose. She was one of the few people he cared for all his life. He had a tumultuous relationship with younger brother Dakin, who Williams saw as their father’s golden boy. The two brothers butted heads their whole lives, and in the biography we see just how much they seemingly despise each other. By portraying Williams’s personal life in connection with his art, Lahr not only makes a claim for the playwright’s artistic ability, he also gives a touching portrait of a complicated -- and somewhat selfish! -- American icon.
Along with Williams’s family, we hear from many of the people integral to Williams’s life such as Gore Vidal, director and collaborator Elia Kazan, his agent Audrey Wood, and friend Maria St. Just. These voices mix on the page. At times, the book feels close to attending a fancy cocktail party with an A-list invite list. The collage style is effective because Lahr pulls from multiple points of view and recollection. At just over 600 pages long, he crafts crescendo moments and other, softer points to control the rhythm. When analyzing a Williams’s work, Lahr often includes a telling piece of dialogue. These sound bites seem ripped verbatim from Williams’s life.
GLADYS: Your son misses you, Pere.
PERE: That’s likely.
GLADYS: In your mind you have branded him a sissy, and that’s what’s come between you.
PERE: Does he still have on them little velvet knee britches?
-- from a sketch of what was then called “The Big Time Operators”
As a theater reviewer in NOLA, I’ve seen two of Williams’s plays over the past year. A company staged The Night of the Iguana, his last big commercial success, in a re-purposed funeral home on Elysian Fields. Later in the year, I sat in a sold-out audience for Cat on A Hot Tin Roof, which coincided with the yearly Tennessee Williams Festival. The playwright moved to the city at the age of 27. New Orleans became, as John Lahr writes, the beginning of Williams’s “literary adventure and his sexual coming-of-age.” Out from under his mother’s thumb, he explored his queerness in the South. At one point, Lahr notes, he was taking home a new guy seemingly every night.
While Lahr’s play analysis sections might drag for some readers -- especially those unfamiliar with the stage -- this isn’t just a book for the theater-loving set. The biographer guides us through Williams’s work, and he gives us enough of the plot to help us understand the plays' significance. The narrative is interested in the story of American theater, but Lahr also uses Williams’s work to place the playwright in the larger context of U.S. history. His popularity in the late 1940s “registered the spiritual shift after America’s return to normalcy” at the end of World War II. The response to his work often mirrored the social climate of the time. During his six decades of writing, Williams authored over 30 full-length plays and 70 one-acts. He won numerous awards, including two Pulitzer prizes. Hollywood came calling his name, and his audience expanded to the movie-going public. American screen-royalty Elizabeth Taylor starred in the adaptation of his work Suddenly, Last Summer and as Maggie in the film version of Cat. Williams gained access to the most fabulous social circles. He drank with celebrities and the literati alike.
As with any good party, though, the spotlight eventually starts to dim.
Public tastes changed. More experimental and abstract forms of theater became popular. Though still considered one of America’s greatest playwrights, his style no longer felt like a hot commodity. Even his thematic exploration of repressed sexuality, started to seem tame fare for the progressive sexual movement. He eventually, as Lahr says, found himself a “revolutionary in a post-revolutionary” era. Lahr tracks the playwright’s fall with the same keen eyes as his success. The latter section of this biography is compelling as it explores how an esteemed writer deals with failure. Despite poor reviews of his late work, Williams didn’t stop producing. Writing helped him understand his experiences. Without his typewriter he’d die. Williams had dealt with depression through most of his life, and his new has-been status lead to excessive drinking and drug use. We see his extended stay in treatment facility. Lahr’s prose delicately handles Williams’s collapse. With the playwright approaching personal oblivion, the biographer continues to join the life with his work. He won’t let us forget Williams’s genius, and Lahr writes he ultimately “devoured himself for the sake of his work.” This biography becomes more than a portrait of a famous writer who “changed the shape and the ambition of the American commercial theater.” We see the duality of the human psyche, at once tough and all together fragile. It’s an experience similar to one of Williams’s plays.
While the playwright died in 1983, he’s still alive here in New Orleans. In Jackson Square, where Williams would have walked, artists sell black and white painting of Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley. Down the St. Peters Street stands a community theatre which recently produced one of his shows. One of his French Quarter apartments, 710 Orleans Street, is now sandwiched between a property management company and a used bookstore. I had walked passed the front door many times without knowing one of the city’s literary heroes had lived there. It took reading Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh for me to stop and look at his front door. The biography helped me get to better know not only an important writer, but also the city in which I live. Lahr makes Williams feel alive to me. As alive to me as the playwright is here in these New Orleans streets.
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Hard-Boiled or Half-Baked?: A Review of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice
What is actually novel about Pynchon's new novel? For one thing, it gives us a protagonist who is even more apt than its author to digress, to space out, to lose the thread.
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Lethem the Lyrical: You Don’t Love Me Yet
The salient aspect of Jonathan Lethem's latest novel, You Don't Love Me Yet, is that by the end each character has found his and her level. It's quite something: of the seven or so characters there are no winners and no losers. The author's conscientious diplomacy imbues a basically playful book with a certain airy dignity.Hard to deny that Lethem is a virtuoso prose writer. He is a prize fighter sparring with plot lines in a ring of words. Like the best boxers, Lethem masters the ring - makes it his home - and approaches his craft without fear of getting hurt. Language is for him a sweet science. But just as interesting as the stick and move of the words in You Don't Love Me Yet is the nature of the story. I was impressed with the way in which Lethem approached the complexities and complications inherent to crafting a female lead character, one who comes across as rather emotionally ambiguous - as opposed to Good. Or maybe Lucinda, 29, is simply young.Lucinda is the bass player in the band, Monster Eyes, a position she relishes for good reason: she's good at it, self-taught and attuned to the varied musical voices that comprise the group. But she is impulsive, indulgent, and easily taken in by The Complainer, a man she meets over what is meant to be an anonymous call-line for which she is an operator. The implication is that Lucinda is both the creative catalyst of the band and also its Yoko Ono. Although her bass playing is the glue that ties the band's songs together, and The Complainer's words the inspiration for the lyrics in the band's most popular number, her lusty infatuation with the seductive older man corrupts the band's artistic integrity. But along the way Monster Eyes does get a moment in the sun.I "read" this book by listening to it on 5 CDs, performed by the author, unabridged. I use the word performed for good reason. Lethem has innate ability in this area too. He is able to read his work without self-consciousness and with a satisfying definitiveness, a pitch-perfect and distinct voice for each character. Bedwin, the band's guitar player and musical soul, phrases everything he says as a question. It's funny, but it also adds depth to the character, who is shy and introverted. Meanwhile The Complainer speaks in lugubrious platitudes. Because we hear The Complainer's words through Lucinda's ear, one trained for catchiness and not so much profundity, they initially come across as penetrating. But as the book goes on, insights such as "You can't be deep without a surface," in some ways the tart and tangy center of the book's social wisdom, seem trite and tedious. The act of listening to Lethem read his book seemed appropriate because the book is based around sound, the sound of people making music, both literally and, yes, figuratively. I highly recommend the audio version of You Don't Love Me Yet, while wondering if I would have gotten as much out of it if I had merely read it off the page.The book contains one or two very fine descriptions of ensemble music-making (and a not-inconsiderable dose of sexual steaminess, mm). And yet, one provocative suggestion in Lethem's construct is that rock and roll lyrics are often shallow, transparent. The implication is that the resonance of rock lyrics depends not so much on objective quality - complexity, poetic feeling - so much as indelibility, the rhythmic imprint of the words on the mind, a pattern, a universally recognizable hook. And indeed, Lethem isolates and describes exactly that quality of good rock and roll lyrics that appeals to individuals: a song you connect with is "about you." The irony is that those lyrics actually capture a colloquial value that is meant to appeal to many. Rock lyrics are rarely lyrical, but when they're good, you know it. Twist and Shout; Fake Plastic Trees - same principle.My resolution, the turnaround if you will, is that Jon Lethem has written another very readable (and perfectly listenable) book. I could expound on the L.A.-ness of it all, but will instead assume that this setting is an aberrant and tangential element of the story. It really could be New York. And I think no matter where your heart is, it is an appealing kind of tale, made for you, me, the cool kids in Silverlake who play in the band, and everybody else.
The Ultimate Intimacy: On Neil Gaiman’s ‘The View from the Cheap Seats’
Over the course of eight novels, four short story collections, and a series of graphic novels, Neil Gaiman’s greatest work of invention has been himself. The author has 2.42 million Twitter followers, with whom he shares everything from exhortations about human rights to bored airport musings. His messy-haired, leather-jacketed figure appears at Amanda Palmer concerts, on Guardian comment pages, and even at the 2010 Oscars. He is ubiquitous enough to transcend the genre section of bookstores and accessible enough to retweet fans’ Kickstarter pages. Inviting his fans into his life like this takes the mystique out of writing and creates a sense of community, similar to the fandom of John Green. But fans want more: we want to be confided in -- we want to make it real.
Gaiman has made himself familiar and friendly without forging any real intimacy. One advantage of writing in the genres that Gaiman does is that no one ever expects the work to be autobiographical. The 50-something Englishman has never jumped a magical wall in pursuit of a fallen star or come home to find parents with buttons for eyes. Throughout his fiction, only small biographical details have snuck in: the tiny lakeside town that Shadow moves to in American Gods is reminiscent of Gaiman’s Wisconsin home, and the quiet boy who lives vicariously through the books he reads in The Ocean at the End of the Lane is Gaiman as a child -- he’s said so himself. Gaiman controls the narrative, not just of his characters, but of himself, limiting revelations about the latter to the mundanities of daily life and charming childhood anecdotes about reading. But he has been sprinkling breadcrumbs for years in the form of speeches, introductions for anthologies, and newspaper editorials, all of which have been compiled in the 544-page The View from the Cheap Seats.
The book is Gaiman’s first collection of nonfiction, containing everything he’s written from 1990 to the present day, from his now-famous 2012 “Make Good Art” commencement speech to text on the nature of cities from SimCity 2000. Some of the entries might’ve been better left to time, like an odd 1990 piece for Time Out about wandering London after dark that never amounts to much; we might not need two, back-to-back essays on Harlan Ellison. Yet taken as a whole, The View from the Cheap Seats is more than just an assemblage of a man’s clips; it’s Gaiman’s welcome entry into another popular genre: the writing memoir.
Stephen King’s On Writing pulls in people who would never pick up a horror novel; Elizabeth Gilbert wrote a cross between a writing memoir and a self-help book with last year’s Big Magic. It’s not a coincidence that these titles are from well-known and prolific authors, whose writing memoirs offer a rare form of intimacy. King, aside from being a master of the macabre, is an astute grammarian, as revealed by a hilarious rant against passive voice in a memoir that also explores his childhood and addiction. Gilbert may have made her name on a deeply personal memoir, but it had the consequence of making her persona larger than life; Big Magic allows her to peel back the Oprah Winfrey-approved brand to expose the diligent and occasionally frustrated writer behind it all. These books are a way for the bestselling author to remind the reader they were once like them. And even if Gaiman didn’t set out to compile a writing memoir, that’s what Seats is.
For Gaiman, the writing memoir is less about how to write and more about why we need writing. The sections are divided thematically, from music to movies to personal musings. The first is titled, “Some Things I Believe” and includes several pieces in defense of threatened literary entities: libraries, children’s literature, bookshops, and genre fiction. Most of these defenses boil down to one thing. “Somewhere out there is someone who needs that story. Someone who will grow up with a different landscape, who without that story will be a different person,” he writes in his Newbery Medal acceptance speech in this section. Even the sections devoted to things and people he loves -- G.K. Chesterton, Dr. Who, comics, Tori Amos -- transcend pure fandom; they are sharp analyses both of what makes the work so good and why Gaiman needed them in his life when he did. In one of the collection’s most striking pieces, Gaiman interviews Lou Reed right before a 1992 concert, asking questions about his creative process, like “So does the subject of the lyric change for you in retrospect?”
Words are inherently political to Gaiman, and writing and reading are a political act; the book features several defenses of reading as a way to teach empathy and build a better society. As this belief builds throughout the book, it’s not surprising when we come to Gaiman’s first-person account of a Syrian refugee camp in the final section. Why wouldn’t a man who has been writing for 30-some years because he believes words can facilitate change not write about one of the most pressing international humanitarian crises of our time?
This is a writing memoir about why ideas matter, and sharing this with his readers is the ultimate intimacy -- building a connection that is more than a shared fantasy of a boy in a graveyard or underground London. By the end, the biographical details scattered throughout the book don’t say nearly as much about the author as do his influences, motivations, and beliefs. After all, fans fall in love with authors for the worlds they create, and by inviting readers into his own fandoms, Gaiman reminds readers he is just like them. In one sense, The View from the Cheap Seats is Gaiman’s most personal work to date.
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Reign of Terror: Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s ‘Guantanámo Diary’
The CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program was, in every sense, a moral and strategic catastrophe.
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A Stone out of the Mediterranean: Aidan Higgins’ Balcony of Europe
When I think of the books I really love, the ones I rant about and buy spare copies of so I can give them away, I do not associate many of them with the place where I first read them. I extol an author’s language and humor, a particularly memorable character, the ideas that make the book hum, the sense of place imparted on the pages between the covers. For the most part, what I’m reading is much more important than where I’m reading it.
One notable exception to this dates back to 1998, when as a college student I had the good fortune to participate in Semester as Sea (back before MTV sullied the program’s reputation). I had already gotten a taste for travel and the narratives it inspired by authors like Jan Morris and Paul Theroux. Before leaving for four months at sea, I knew I needed the right book. I found it in The Size of the World, Jeff Greenwald’s recounting of his journey around the world without ever leaving its surface. Utilizing any available mode of ground transport, Greenwald put together more than just a travel story, and I will never forget reading it during my time on that ship.
I’m writing this in Granada, Spain, the Alhambra’s foreboding exterior walls hulking above the hills visible from my window. I knew I would be here for close to a month and had this very much on my mind as I ferreted around for a book to bring along. I wanted something big, entertaining thoughts of War and Peace or Mason & Dixon, maybe JR. The end of the harried week prior to departure found me at Posman Books in Grand Central (my first New York City employer), not wanting to rush my decision but also feeling a self-imposed pressure to get home, finish packing, tidy up the apartment and leave town the next day.
I fondled all of the books I had considered but none of them felt right. With my list out the window, I started looking at books I haven’t read by authors I like. This didn’t work either. No stranger to such bookstore dilemmas, I defaulted to books published by houses I admire: FSG, NYRB, Vintage, New Directions, Dalkey Archive. I was getting warmer. Great Russian World War II novels didn’t seem right, neither did woeful contemporary tales of struggling writers. But then a spine that read Balcony of Europe caught my eye. I liked the cover: Roman arches holding up a great black edifice – housing the title and author’s name, Aidan Higgins – seemingly floating on the mountain-rimmed Mediterranean, two semblances of sail boats, triangles of red and yellow. The back cover copy declares the book a long-unavailable masterpiece, based in “a village on the coast of Spain,” which the table of contents pinpoints to Andalusia. I was sold.
Andalusia comprises the bottom chunk of Spain between Portugal and the Mediterranean. It contains several provinces, including Granada and Malaga at the region’s southern most reach. Nerja, where a great deal of Balcony of Europe takes place, is located in Malaga province. While the euro and technology have radically changed this part of Spain compared to the novel’s early 1960s setting, the craggy coastline and hilly interior dotted with remnants of Roman and Muslim conquests remain the same. At its core, this novel is about history, as the W.B. Yeats epigraph attests: “I begin seeing things double – doubled in history, world history, personal history.”
From early 1962 until the summer of 1963 Irish painter Dan Ruttle, the narrator, and his wife Olivia live in Nerja, a coastal village reluctantly awakening to the advent of tourism that helped spur Spain’s “economic miracle.” Attracting expatriated artists, writers and eccentrics eager to live cheap and focus on art and pastimes, the Ruttles work, read, swim and haunt local bars and cafes with other Europeans, Canadians and Americans. Chief among them are Bob and Charlotte Bayless, he a native Californian writing a scholarly book about Shelley and Byron and she a Lower East Side Jew, beauty her greatest craft.
Dan Ruttle and Charlotte Bayless have an affair. And in one sense, that’s the book. But though the affair is physically consummated, it exists mostly in Dan’s mind. He is obsessed by thoughts of their handful of assignations and how national, political and cultural histories cut their characters out of time’s fabric. The ghost of World War II is inescapable: Franco’s unfulfilled pledge of alliance to Hitler; drunken ex-Nazis; American “we saved your ass” bravado; Jewish identity; “American bombers” constantly flying exercises, contrails embroidering the clear skies. There are also Joycean weaves of history, bobbing in and out of myth and time as read from mountains and sea changes.
From what was and what is and what could be, all of the individuals in this book fill time and waste it. Both Olivia and Bob realize their spouses’ infidelities, but most of their reactions only ever exist in Dan’s head, his interpretation of glances and body language, how they echo the first time Bob slept with Charlotte years before in San Francisco. More than once, Olivia does raise the issue of Dan’s none too subtle preoccupation with Charlotte, but he never responds to her. Dan internalizes everything, and is aware of it, asking himself, “Would my sensations be forever intellectual?”
Interestingly, the characters solidify based on wonderfully descriptive and repeated details of physical traits and personalities. Charlotte doesn’t carry change because it is bad for the ovaries; Schiller kept rotting apples in his drawer because the smell inspired him. Such details are reported over and over again, sometimes more than once on the page, other times two hundred pages apart, providing a perspective like a fly’s: multi-faceted visions that form a whole.
Such repetition might suggest boredom or lack of anything better to say, but the opposite is true, as this book insists: “If a thing is boring, keep repeating it.” Nothing is boring or insignificant by virtue of its existence, and characters like Dan Ruttle tower over most fictional figures, able to create a worldview that synthesizes personal quirks with two thousand years of history. His attitude renders him a passive character, to be sure, but for Dan that’s the rub of history, all experiences are a return to a time that is and was, now and forever. Watching a tipsy old man search for a key to unlock a door, Dan thinks, “I sensed his discomfort; he did not want to go in, though by staying out he could not alter anything. He looked for neither truth nor the likelihood, stood there play-acting, making me feel uncomfortable. How well I understood how he felt, deforming himself, deforming habit and custom. But nothing would change.”
Of course, change is inevitable and constant. Today in this part of Spain there are more tourists, no language is uncommon to hear, no one bats an eye at topless sunbathing. But, dinner is still eaten very late, and breakfast is often accompanied by beer, the church bells still clang and the Sierra Nevada stand tall, dimpled with snow even in summer’s hottest months.
There is no doubt that reading this book at home in New York, riding the train and before bed, would be memorable, but reading it here, covering some of the same ground as these characters, makes it lasting. Watching patterns of swifts cross the sky, the movement of sand on the sea floor, flamenco guitar strings plucked as bright and crisp as the sun – these qualities of place have shaped my reading of Balcony of Europe.
The other day I pulled a stone out of the Mediterranean. It has probably not been dry for a very long time. I will return home with this soft, weathered stone, carrying its history, most likely older than human history and our constructs of space and time. In creating Dan Ruttle, Aidan Higgins has deftly distilled a great many ideas into one very important one: a place defines history, but history cannot be contained by a place.
What book has made an impression on you because of where you read it?
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Betting on Quality: On One Story Collected
Earlier this month, the editors of One Story sent out an email blast announcing the publication of the 12-year-old literary magazine’s first anthology, One Story Collected: Stories from the 2014 Literary Debutantes. Aside from the magazine's annual "Literary Debutante Ball," honoring the seven authors featured in the collection, and a reading at Brooklyn’s Greenlight Bookstore, the editors made no other effort to publicize the book launch. If the collection has been reviewed elsewhere, I’ve missed it. The book is being published via CreateSpace, a print-on-demand publisher owned by Amazon, which means that other than a few stray leftovers on Greenlight’s shelves, the book is only available for purchase online.
Yet despite its understated launch, One Story Collected is one of the strongest collections of short fiction I’ve read since Claire Vaye Watkins’s 2012 stunner Battleborn. Not every story in Collected is a gem, but the hits-to-misses ratio is high, and two stories in the collection, Molly Antopol’s “The Quietest Man” and Amelia Kahaney’s “Fire Season,” are lights-out terrific. If One Story Collected is a stethoscope to the heart of contemporary American fiction, the news is good: despite a run of economic shocks to the publishing industry, the muscle that pumps fresh blood into the system is still beating like a tom-tom.
In a subtler way, the collection offers reassuring evidence that there is in fact a functioning system to pump new blood into. In the digital age, anyone can start a literary magazine, but to keep going past the first few issues a journal needs to develop a revenue stream, and for publications with more writers sending in their work than readers willing to pay to read it, it makes increasing sense to monetize the submission process. Hence, the boom in writing contests, and the advent of online journals like Narrative, which offers its content for free but charges a fee for unsolicited submissions.
From its inception in 2002, One Story's co-founders Hannah Tinti and Maribeth Batcha, have been more creative than most in finding novel ways to leverage their journal’s sterling reputation. The pair set up One Story as a non-profit, enabling its donors to get tax breaks, and they have run workshops taught by Tinti and others, sponsored a writing conference on Italy’s Amalfi Coast, and thrown fundraisers like the Debutante Ball that One Story Collected grew out of. One thing they don't do is charge fees for writing contests. (The journal did once run a fee-based contest in 2004, and One Teen Story, the journal’s new young-adult offshoot, runs a contest today, but there’s no entry fee.) In other words, in a digital world that keeps making it easier for writers to submit to literary magazines but harder for those magazines to sell the work they publish at a price above zero, it is refreshing to see One Story choosing to monetize its actual product, the stories it publishes, rather than all the writers itching to appear in its pages.
It helps, of course, that the stories are good. As its subtitle suggests, One Story Collected is not a standard best-of anthology, but a celebration of the magazine’s “Literary Debutantes,” seven One Story authors who published debut books in the past year. The best of the lot, for my money, is the opening story, Antopol’s “The Quietest Man,” a small miracle of compression that manages to fit a novel’s worth of humor and anguish into 24 pages. The quietest man is Tomás Novak, a one-time dissident in Communist-era Czechoslovakia famous for maintaining a stoic silence under police interrogation. Having settled in the U.S., where he has traded on his revolutionary past to eke out a living as a writer and teacher, Tomás has learned that his daughter, Daniela, has written a play about him, which he fears will focus not on his dissident years, but on his lousy history as a father.
The story turns on a fraught weekend Tomás spends with 23-year-old Daniela, who was raised almost exclusively by his ex-wife, whom Tomás fears has good reason to have filled his daughter’s ears with unpleasant stories. The two warily circle each other, each suppressing a secret, as Tomás struggles to extract from Daniela the version of the truth she plans to tell about him, until it dawns on him that he is using the same tactics on his daughter the Czech police used on him. And yet he can’t stop. “Part of me was saddened that my daughter was the kind of person who would crack so easily,” Tomás writes, “that the wall she’d built around herself could be so easily kicked down, but a bigger part of me just needed to know how the play would begin.”
If “The Quietest Man” is a propulsive interior detective story, the success of Kahaney’s “Fire Season,” set in a marginal subdivision on the edge of California’s Death Valley, relies more on its foreboding setting and odd, finely drawn characters. The story opens with 13-year-old Marni gazing at her face, “sloped and shiny as a waxed apple,” in the mirror, “amazed to find that without warning, an endless period of ugliness seems to have finally lifted from her, leaving someone new. Someone altogether better.” Kahaney sets off Marni’s smoldering desire for a neighborhood boy named Pablo with a wildfire burning in the hills that threatens to engulf the subdivision. As the wildfire creeps in, Kahaney writes, the “kids are jangly, squirmy” while their parents “sit like bullfrogs in darkened living rooms, having abandoned their usual puttering efficiency to stare glassy-eyed at muted televisions, lulled by the soft wheeze of air conditioners.” The story, which rises to its crescendo in an unsettling scene in which Marni and Pablo hurl rocks at each other as hard as they can, carries the emotional weight of poetry with the assurance of naturalistic prose.
A studied quirkiness is the stock-in-trade of so much contemporary short fiction, and occasionally the writers in One Story Collected take it too far. James Scott’s meandering “The Strings Attached” takes 26 pages of misadventures with the oddball natives of the all too aptly named town of Tangent to drain the drama from a tale of a man grieving over the deaths of his infant twin daughters. Similarly, Rachel Cantor tries a bit too hard to crank up the wacky in “Picnic After the Flood,” though, in her case, her exertions are redeemed by sure-fire comic timing and the lingering anguish of a single mom hoping not to have her heart broken by a man who seems too good to be true.
The writers in One Story Collected work for their readers’ attention, but there is little of the desperation one sometimes feels when literary authors start tossing in gratuitous murder plots and characters with magical powers, as if the stories of actual people leading actual lives wouldn’t be enough to stop readers from peeking at their Facebook feeds. Thus, David James Poissant’s “Refund” taps into the hot-button issue of parental competitiveness over children’s IQ, but at bottom the story is a simple, and dead-on-accurate, portrait of a crumbling marriage. Likewise, Ben Stroud’s “Eraser” riffs and sallies in all manner of seemingly non-linear ways, but always returns to the core story of a boy coming to terms with the gruff man his mother has chosen as her second husband.
It may seem curious at first that One Story is publishing its first anthology on its own, but Tinti says she and the other editors never sought out a traditional publisher for One Story Collected. “We wanted to test the waters, so [we] just thought we’d try it ourselves,” she wrote in an email. “We’re excited to make these stories available (we’ve sold out of many of these in back issues), and most important, to help promote/spread the word on our Literary Debutantes’ new books.”
This makes an interesting kind of sense. By relying on print-on-demand technology and spending little to publicize the launch, One Story is hedging its bet. If readers find the book and like it, then One Story will have found a new way to recoup its investment in stories it has already edited and published. If, on the other hand, no one buys it, what really has the magazine lost? But if it’s a cautious gamble, it is a gamble nevertheless, one that turns on the quality of the writers the magazine has published, rather than the desire of writers everywhere to be among their number. This is a sign that the editors of One Story believe in the work they've published. In the case of One Story Collected, it isn't hard to see why.
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Taste Is the Only Morality: On Han Kang’s ‘The Vegetarian’
In his insightful book Meat: A Natural Symbol, Nick Fiddes points out we so often confuse “meat” with “food,” often treating them as synonymous. Summarizing recent anthropological work, Fiddes points how Ugandans trade “plantains that would feed a family for four days for one ‘scrawny’ chicken with less than a twentieth of the nutritional value;” Nazi Germany’s “wish to supply its forces with ‘excessive’ standards of protein” (meat) consequently dampened agricultural food production at a key moment in the Allied blockade.
Our ontological trouble with “meat” is at the center of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian which is available to Anglophone readers nine years after becoming a critical hit in South Korea. The novel follows Yeong-he, a young woman who writes speech bubbles for magazines. Shaken by a terrible nightmare, she stops eating meat. She becomes disgusted by her husband who smells like meat and discards her leather clothes. Eventually, she refuses to eat any food at all. She communicates less and less.
The Vegetarian is told from the "close-third" perspectives of three different characters, each one more empathetic but no more capable of “saving” her: her husband, a crude narcissist; her brother-in-law, an aesthete who attempts to incorporate her ethereal presence into his art; and her sister desperate to keep her alive.
Their individual and collective failures are inscribed with Han's deep pessimism. To the Korean newspaper Dong-a Ilbo, Han said, “I wanted to show the extreme core of a dog-eat-dog world.” Han told The Guardian, when she explored Korea's Gwangju Massacre for a novel, her questions were “how can humans be so violent and cruel, and what can people do to counter such extreme violence?” Specifically in how her characters are prone to verbal, emotional, and physical abuse, The Vegetarian is dark, cynical, even antinatalist.
That tone is well-earned, and balanced well with gallows humor. In the first section, Yeong-he and her husband attend a deeply unsettling dinner with his work colleagues. He has given them a tactful, misleading explanation for his wife's vegetarianism. The coworkers respond like a spiteful Greek chorus, threatened by her (inferred and never explicit) moral judgment,
'Well, I must say, I'm glad I've still never sat down with a proper vegetarian. I'd hate to share a meal with someone who considers meat repulsive, just because that's how they themselves personally feel...don't you agree?'
'Imagine you were snatching up a wriggling baby octopus with your chopsticks and chomping it to death -- and the woman across from you glared like you were some kind of animal. That must be how it feels to sit down and eat with a vegetarian!'
The colleagues begin to ostracize him due to his wife’s odd behavior. To erode her defiance, her husband’s reaction is to provoke her family to intervene. Demanding that she conform to social convention, Yeong-he’s father, whose belligerence conjures up the patriarch of Franz Kafka’s “The Judgment,” berates her. The rest of the family cajoles her, as her husband watches.
I expected my wife to say something in her defense, but the sole, silent answer she made to all those glaring faces was to set the pair of chopsticks she had picked up back down on the table.
A small flurry of unease ran through the assembled family. This time, my mother-in-law picked up some sweet and sour pork with her chopsticks and thrust it right up in front of my wife's mouth, saying, 'Here. Come on, hurry up and eat.'
After rushing her to the hospital in his arms, her brother-in-law, a video artist, feels compelled to feature her in his art. Troubled by his own sexual attraction to her, he ultimately exploits her fragility and vulnerability.
Was he a normal human being? More than that, a moral human being? A strong human being, able to control his own impulses? In the end, he found himself unable to claim with any certainty that he knew the answers to these questions, though he'd been so sure before.
In the final section, Yeong-he's sister cares for her sister. Her own complicated feelings, protective and resigned, are beautifully depicted. The novel plays on ideas of martyrdom and sacrifice; her sister comes to suspect the cruelty of the desperate need to sustain Yeong-he's life against her will.
Martyred for what exactly?, a reader might ask. Simply because she doesn't like the taste or smell of something? In the first section, we gain some insight into Yeong-he with brief snatches of her dreams in which she blends into the animal world:
Murderer or murderer...hazy distinctions, boundaries wearing thin. Familiarity bleeds into strangeness, certainy becomes impossible. Only the violence is vivid enough to stick. A sound, the elasticity of the instant when the metal struck the victim's head.
As the novel progresses, her motives become increasingly inscrutable -- in many ways, the novel forgoes any clear thesis on the morality of eating meat. It situates her repugnance for meat in “taste,” an ephemeral but indispensable arrow. As John Ruskin argued in his essay, “Traffic,” “Taste is not only a part and an index of morality -- it is the ONLY morality. The first, and last, and closest trial question to any living creature is, 'What do you like?'”
The language we use betrays just how ingrained taste and our sense of right and wrong are. We feel disgusted (from dégoût, have a distaste for) when banking conglomerates defraud the public. To argue that a person, or groups of people, should not have a taste for something (meat, violence, your love) speaks to that person's fundamental moral maladjustment.
All of which is to say that Han Kang's The Vegetarian is a sharply written allegory that extends far beyond its surreal premise to unexpected depths. The translation by Deborah Smith is by turns elegant and coarse. The narrators are perfectly pitched to their individual voices; they are looking for answers, or perhaps else. Throughout the novel, the characters search to hear or speak “words of comfort.” The narrator says at one point, “Whatever the words were, they hadn't been words of comfort.”
“They were merciless.”
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I used to use this as a text in a technology class I taught back in the early 90’s. Where, I asked students, were the women? (There is a secretary who fetches coffee for the boys). And, more importantly, would women engineers have steered the resultant design in a different direction?
Silence was the usual response.