Padgett Powell’s The Interrogative Mood is a supreme literary stunt: a short “novel” composed only of questions, each of which seems to implicate the reader in a narrative conspiracy as serious and absurd as his or her own life. Ultimately, Powell’s little book can be seen word-machine designed to induce unprecedented states of interior monologue, or narrative drug.
A Year in Reading: Jonathan Lethem
A Year in Reading: Willa Paskin
Who knows why this was the one that broke the spell—readable masterpiece theater, maybe?—but this time, I read it.
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A Year in Reading: Kevin Barry
Here in Ireland, if the short story doesn’t get an almighty kick up the arse about every five years or so, it tends to melt down into puddles of lyric reverie.
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A Year in Reading: Thomas Beckwith
One of my strongest memories involves ducking behind a bush to avoid a patrolling MP. The year is 1998; I’m 10 years old. My friend and I are dueling with cap guns designed to look like Uzis. My friend, a native of Nebraska whose father works in the Army, shoots caps at me through skeletal bushes and over the hoods of cars. We battle our way through a parking lot, and as we do I construct a number of scenarios to explain why, despite our friendly history, we now want to maim each other with high-tech explosives and bullets. I tell myself I’m a young James Bond, hurled abruptly and senselessly into training. I’m a private in the Allied armies caught up in a skirmish in North Africa. I’m a CIA agent, tasked only with taking out “evil” in a faraway, suffocating jungle. I’m all of these things — that is, until my friend tackles me.
“What the hell?” I say. At this point I’m old enough that swears are less thrilling than routine. “What was that?”
“Don’t talk.” My friend gives a signal to follow. I comply, and as we crawl behind a bush and huddle side by side, it strikes me that this is the closest I’ll ever get to real warfare.
My friend says an MP on a road nearby staged firefights like ours as a kid. One day an eccentric soldier, unaware that his cap guns were toys, upheld the safety of his community by shooting the MP in the leg. Ever since that life-marring day, the MP walked with a limp, his gait a jarring reminder of the perils of play-acting too well. It fell to us to avoid him, my friend explained, because the MP “went ballistic” when he spotted young boys using cap guns. I didn’t know what that entailed, exactly, but I knew it was very bad, so I hid my gun under my T-shirt and prayed for the MP to stalk away.
I bring this up now because lately I’ve felt that it helped forge my taste in literature. Not the cap gun incident specifically, but the many incidents like it — I went to school on an Army base for several years, and I grew to believe my time there unavoidably skewed my perspective. To call Army kids your classmates, then as now, meant spending great balefuls of time with rural Heartlanders and Southerners. It meant having friends who blew whole weekends in paintball games with Vietnam vets. It meant that dumb kids brought hunting knives into school on a perilously regular basis. In a lot of ways, I was the odd man out back then, thanks largely to the fact that my parents were both academics, but my classmates often took precedence over the diktats of my tweedy home life. Even now, my parents like to tease me for using the word “dang” till I was 12.
In other words, I was never quite able to reinvent myself as an East Coaster, which is probably why, earlier this year, I fell for Barry Hannah. In an interview published in 2009, Wells Tower wrote that Hannah “drives people to fanaticism,” a statement which ranks with “banned for obscenity” in the realm of powerful endorsements. (Same goes for his line that “any one of Hannah’s sentences picked at random holds more hope and joy than the entire self-help section at the O’Hare Barnes and Noble.”) I read these hosannas and picked up High Lonesome with an urgency reserved for grave injuries. Within the space of three pages, I could see Hannah’s talent for odd phrasing: a role in a college play requires much “dramatic amplitude;” a slacker confesses that “through [him] runs an inveterate refractoriness, almost a will to lose;” and a young boy complains with a juvenile bitterness about the ravings of a “turkey-throated aunt.” Nobody can dismiss these as novel deployments of well-trod constructions and ideas. Instead, they’re signals of a dizzying new dialect, the language of a nation-state of one.
Although High Lonesome had sold me, I knew it was a late-career production. I wanted to see if Hannah’s first collection would hit me as hard as its successor. Unlike High Lonesome, Airships consists of stories so short they rival Donald Barthelme’s for brevity. They’re not as dour as the stories in High Lonesome, and their plotlines are far more calamitous, but the stories in Airships are built with the same knack for joyfully addlepated wordplay. In “Testimony of Pilot,” a young boy, a “violent experimental chemist,” learns “the sulfur, potassium nitrate and charcoal mixture for gunpowder” before his 11th birthday. In “Quo Vadis, Smut?”, vigilantes drink a bottle of gin contaminated with bits of glass. We learn that the glass flakes “burn constantly but do not kill.” In “Return to Return,” a stroke victim coughs out “lengths” of phlegm, and when he later shows up in a vision coupled carnally with a character’s mother, he appears in a cemetery “so [the stroke victim] won’t have far to fall when he explodes with fornication, the old infantryman of lust.”
Everything I quoted here points to a mind that knows the grotesque when it sees it. For Barry Hannah, all human beings, regardless of their station, find themselves inevitably pitched into a battle at birth. His violence is key to why I find his fiction seductive. When I read him, he calls me back, to a time not long ago that nevertheless seems distant, when the people I hung around didn’t care a whit about prestige or the bull of the thinking class. Their fathers were off in Bosnia, and they didn’t need our crap. It’s fitting that Hannah’s vagrants express this better than I can:
There is not even such a thing as a personal soul in many countries. The souls were dead already waiting for Marx, all he was was the final announcement. I am dying for you, I have had hell so you may carry on. Love me, every breathing motherfucker around me. I give you my lungs and heart to eat thereof. I taste like a sword.
More from A Year in Reading 2013
Don’t miss: A Year in Reading 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
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A Year in Reading: Michael Bourne
Take a monastery, make it co-ed with everybody constantly sleeping with everybody else, make the priests a bunch of worn-out character actors from old Law & Order episodes, make the foundational text Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares, sprinkle liberally with stardust and moonbeams, and let simmer for three or four years. Presto! You have the makings of your very own drama school. In her novel Lucky Break, Esther Freud captures both the hilarious self-seriousness and the pie-eyed romanticism of young actors preparing to be fed into the meat grinder of the entertainment industry. In doing so, she has written a sharp, emotionally astute novel about what it feels like to let one’s idealism die a slow, quiet death in the pursuit of worldly success, which is just another way of saying she has written a very good novel about what it feels like to grow up.
Freud, the daughter of the painter Lucian Freud and a great-granddaughter of the great psychologist, studied to be an actress at London’s Drama Centre, which is clearly the model for the intense acting conservatory where the characters of her novel all meet. Lucky Break principally follows three of these young actors — Charlie, the pretty, sexually manipulative one; Dan, the talented Colin Firth-y one; and Nell, the overweight, plucky one — from their first day of drama school through their early careers in theater and film.
Lucky Break breaks no new ground stylistically and harbors no great ambition to speak for a generation. It’s just a good book, one that creates a richly imagined world and peoples it with characters you come to care about as if they were your own friends. That is probably its highest achievement as a novel. Until the last chapter, in which Freud grants plucky Nell a saccharine Hollywood ending, I read Lucky Break the way I might letters from friends: cheering their successes, laughing along with their efforts to make the best of their failures, and nodding knowingly at how their every action seemed to confirm my deepest suspicions about them even when they did things that surprised and saddened me.
More from A Year in Reading 2011
Don’t miss: A Year in Reading 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
The good stuff: The Millions’ Notable articles
The motherlode: The Millions’ Books and Reviews
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A Year in Reading: Charles Baxter
After reading Jay Bahadur’s nonfiction book The Pirates of Somalia, and Janet Reitman’s scary (also nonfiction) book Inside Scientology, I happened to read Haruki Murakami’s newest novel, 1Q84, on assignment. The book has flaws. It’s too long; it can be repetitive; at a certain point you can see that Murakami is simply delaying his various plot developments. The characters often consist of Murakami’s ideas about them. They are slow to come to life, like composite monsters on laboratory tables waiting for lightning to hit them and to bring them awake. And the plot is straight out of The Magic Flute or The Master and Margarita: two people are redeemed and transformed by their love for each other, and they manage to make their way through a landscape of unreality peopled by demons.
And yet, and yet. Murakami’s novel creates a world ruled by cults, and I felt that I was being given a 932 page primer in 1Q84 that helped to explain what I had already read in The Pirates of Somalia and Inside Scientology. We are talking about a way of transforming reality by methodologies that demand a certain kind of rigidly enforced vision and adherence to certain kinds of authority figures in societies suffering massive structural breakdowns. The psychology required by that sort of vision is very much on display in 1Q84. Furthermore, the book is generous in the way that Philip Roth is generous: you get the feeling that everything that Murakami has thought, and felt, and experienced, is out there on the page. Nothing gets held back, not even the ugliness — especially the ugliness. The characters aren’t quite real, but who cares? It’s the kind of risky ambitious storytelling that writers of my generation are often too scared to try. But I’d rather take Murakami’s novel, with all its faults in analyzing an entire society, than a colder and more perfect unambitious novel about another boring family suffering through the death of a grandparent.
More from A Year in Reading 2011
Don’t miss: A Year in Reading 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
The good stuff: The Millions’ Notable articles
The motherlode: The Millions’ Books and Reviews
Like what you see? Learn about 5 insanely easy ways to Support The Millions, The Millions on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr.
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