Staff Pick: Two Crime Novels

Staff Picks
April 14, 2011 | 1 book mentioned 12 3 min read

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I’ve been thinking lately that I should be reading more crime fiction. I’ve never been against it—in theory I’m in favor of anything good, regardless of genre, although I’ve never taken to werewolves—but I haven’t actively sought it out.

But since my second novel keeps getting categorized as crime fiction, my illiteracy in the genre that I’ve apparently been shoehorned into has become slightly uncomfortable. “What kind of a book have you written?” people ask.

“Um,” I say, “I guess it’s a sort of literary crime novel?” (I know. Awkward. But if you set out to write literary fiction and end up getting reviewed in Spinetingler Magazine, what are you supposed to call it?)

“Oh!” they say. “Have you read [insert name of high-profile crime writer whom I haven’t read but obviously should have if I’m claiming any sort of association with the genre]?”

The most recent books I’ve read in the genre confirm my long-held suspicion that attempting to categorize books by genre does readers a disservice; these books are no less literary than any of the other great books I’ve read this year, they just have crimes and/or guns in them. For your reading pleasure, two books you might consider reading even if you don’t think you like crime fiction very much:

1.
coverSavages by Don Winslow: I think this book is perhaps best described as a Tarantino film crossed with a prose poem. It’s violent, beautifully written, and experimental, and I’ve never read anything like it. Structurally, it’s a dizzyingly intricate 290 chapters, the first one only two words long (1. “Fuck you.”)

Ben is a brilliant botanist who’s partnered up with his best friend, Chon, to produce and distribute the best pot on the West Coast. Chon, a former Navy SEAL who brought unspeakably high-quality marijuana seeds back from Afghanistan, has a girlfriend named O, but she sleeps with Ben too. Everyone’s in their twenties. The trio lead lives of hedonistic ease in Laguna Beach, until a vicious Mexican cartel arrives on the scene to stage a hostile takeover of the business.

The shifts in perspective are interesting; Winslow shifts back and forth within his central trio and then moves outward, until we’re reading short chapters from the viewpoint of practically every thug who populates the pages. The effect is fragmented, but effective. What I found most startling about this book was Winslow’s willingness to abandon conventional form and slip without warning in and out of a sort of loose poetry—

Slicing through SoCal
Cutting through a California night
The freeway (5) is soft and warm and
Welcoming
But for Ben
The green exit signs are like steps climbing up a scaffold
Toward O.

The cartel kidnaps O to speed up the takeover negotiations. The body count is considerable. The book’s practically impossible to put down.

2.
coverSnowdrops by A.D. Miller: Snowdrops is as quiet as Savages is loud. The book opens with the early-spring discovery of a body; a snowdrop, in Moscow slang, a corpse hidden all winter under heavy snows. It appears with the first thaw in front of Nick Platt’s apartment building.

It’s apparent from the first pages that a complicated crime is being played out, something slow and deadly unfolding over weeks and months; evidence of it is all around us even as we can’t see how the pieces fit together—until, of course, the trap snaps shut in the final chapters and the significance of the body in the first chapter falls devastatingly into place.

Nick Platt is a British lawyer who lives and works in Moscow in the early 2000s. One day in the Metro he meets a young woman, Masha, and quickly falls in love. His narration takes the loose form of a confession to his soon-to-be-bride, years later—“You’ve wanted to know why I haven’t talked to you about Russia”—although the deeper he goes into the story, the less certain the wedding seems.

Masha asks for his assistance in helping her aunt, Tatiana, move to a new apartment. The real story here isn’t the crime; it’s the extent to which we’re willing to lie to ourselves, to ignore the obvious, in pursuit of happiness or companionship or love. A lonely man in a foreign city, courted suddenly by a beautiful young girl, is willing to suspend disbelief even when her story begins to crumble and lies start showing through, even when he’s half-aware at every turn that he’s complicit in something dreadful and that everything is wrong. An intriguing debut, suffused with an atmosphere of dread.

is a staff writer for The Millions. Her most recent novel, Station Eleven, was a 2014 National Book Awards finalist. She is married and lives in Brooklyn. www.emilymandel.com.

Staff Picks

The Mad Music of Kevin Barry’s City of Bohane

Staff Picks
May 31, 2012 | 1 book mentioned 9 4 min read

Thank you, Kevin Barry, for reminding us that the people in the book business are not all idiots simply because they remain locked in slavish pursuit of The Next Hot Young Thing. Your first novel, City of Bohane, is proof that every once in a long while the slavish pursuit leads to the discovery of a genuine gem, a new writer like you who pops onto the scene fully formed, spewing poison and wit, able to use the English language as a weapon and a tool and a toy. There’s music and magic in your prose.

The fictional city of the novel’s title is located in the West of Ireland. It’s the middle of the 21st century and this wind-battered burgh, pierced by a foul black river and surrounded by a boggy wilderness known as the Big Nothin’, is brewing with bad portents. Logan Hartnett, aka the Albino, aka the Long Fella, is the fearsome kingpin of the reigning gang known as the Hartnett Fancy, but he’s been hearing whispers. An old rival, the Gant Broderick, is said to be coming back to town after a 25-year absence, his intentions unknown but presumed to be less than benign. Worse, the residents of the cliff-top slums known as the Northside Rises, are chafing under the Fancy’s rule, itching for a change of administration. Worst of all, Logan’s wife Macu (for Immaculata) was the Gant’s former lover, and now she’s thinking about abandoning Logan, maybe going straight, maybe going back to the Gant. What’s a ganglord to do?

Don’t let the nifty set-up mislead you into thinking this is yet another mechanical piece of plot-driven fiction. Though there’s plenty of action — and more than a little of the old Ultra Violence — the real star here is Barry’s language, the music of it. Every page sings with evocative dialog, deft character sketches, impossibly perfect descriptions of the physical world. Kevin Barry is, of course, Irish to his bones.

Here, for instance, is how a pot-stirrer from the Northside Rises name of Eyes Cusack got his handle: “Eyes was named so for good reason. He saw the city through tiny smoking holes set deep in a broad, porridgy face.” Girly, Logan’s irrepressible 90-year-old Ma, has spent the past the past 30 years “buzzing on off-script tablets, hard liquor and Hedy Lamarr pictures.” The Gant Broderick has “a pair of hands on him the size of Belfast sinks,” and he came up rough-like: “His father was a no-good Nothin’ quaffer. His father was half his life nose-deep in a bowl of Wrassler stout and sentimental as a sackful of ballads.” Here’s what a certain fishmonger does inside a shotbar: “He shlepped back a couple of mulekickers and tried to paw the plastik bazookas off the Ukrainer barkeep.” Typical lout.

The city of Bohane is itself a character, as well as a molder of character. Here’s a warren of vice on the southside: “Smoketown was hoors, herb, fetish parlours, grog pits, needle alleys, dream salons and Chinese restaurants…All crowded in on each other in the lean-to streets. The tottering old chimneys were stacked in great deranged happiness against the morning sky.” And here’s the malevolent river: “…it is a black and swift-moving rush at the base of almost every street, as black as the bog waters that feed it, and a couple of miles downstream the river rounds the last of the bluffs and there enters the murmurous ocean. The ocean is not directly seen from the city, but at all times there is the ozone rumour of its proximity, a rasp on the air, like a hoarseness. It is all of it as bleak as only the West of Ireland can be.”

Clothing is important to Barry as a revealer of character. Here’s what a sociopathic killer named Fucker Burke wore:
Silver high-top boots, drainpipe strides in a natty-boy mottle, a low-slung dirk belt and a three-quarter jacket of saffron-dyed sheepskin. He was tall and straggly as an invasive weed. He was astonishingly sentimental, and as violent again. His belligerent green eyes were strange flowers indeed. He was seventeen years of age and he read magical significance into occurrences of the number nine. He had ambition inside but could hardly even name it.  His true love: an unpredictable Alsatian bitch name of Angelina.
And here’s what Fucker’s homicidal sidekick Wolfie Stanners wore:
Black patent high-tops, tight bleached denims with a matcher of a waistcoat, a high dirk belt, and a navy Crombie with a black velvet collar. Wolfie was low-sized, compact, ginger, and he thrummed with dense energies. He had a blackbird’s poppy-eyed stare, thyroidal, and if his brow was no more than an inch deep, it was packed with an alley rat’s cunning. He was seventeen, also, and betrayed, sometimes, by odd sentiments under moonlight. He wanted to own entirely the city of Bohane.
But it’s not to be his. For all its testosterone, the novel is orchestrated by three quietly powerful and cunning women — Girly, Macu, and charismatic Jenni Ching, a girl of old Smoketown stock, proprietress of the Ho Pee Ching Oh-Kay Koffee Shoppe, who rises above the violent flailings of the men and brings together her own fighting force of “a half-dozen wilding girls.” They’re the future of the city of Bohane, a place much like the world we live in today, where tribes will forever rise while other tribes fall, where violence is bred into the wind and the water, and where all any person can hope for is enough style and guile to survive.

Thank you for all of this, Kevin Barry. Please keep the mad music coming.

Image Credit: Bill Morris/[email protected]

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| 1 book mentioned 9 4 min read
Staff Picks

Gone in Thirty Seconds: On Michael J. Arlen’s Advertising Drama

Staff Picks
February 2, 2015 | 1 book mentioned 6 min read

DVR and subscription services have somewhat emancipated TV viewers from the tyranny of the 30-second ad, though once a year viewers willingly embrace our bondage during the Super Bowl, last weekend’s Carnivalesque ritual in which trips to the bathroom were timed to avoid commercial breaks. Whether you found the ads uplifting or deflating (to use a topical word), now would be a good time, while Sunday’s commercial orgy is fresh in your mind, to read Michael J. Arlen’s Thirty Seconds, his classic account of the making of an AT&T spot.

In Thirty Seconds, Arlen, then television critic for The New Yorker, chronicles the filming of “Tap Dancing,” the first of five commercials for AT&T’s long-distance phone lines. (Arlen’s father wrote the massively popular 1924 novel The Green Hat, the opening scene oh which happens to have the sensual, dreamy quality of a high-end perfume ad.) The N.W. Ayer advertising agency came up with the company’s “Reach Out” campaign and its accompanying ditty, which melodically encouraged both telephone users and subway gropers to “Reach out, reach out, and touch someone!”

According to its architects, the 1979 campaign sought to reinforce the notion that long-distance calling is “an easy, non-traumatic experience.” How did it accomplish this? By “selling emotion.” The “Tap Dancing” commercial consists of five “vignettes.” In each, two people share a moment of remote rejoicing: a tap dancer rings his granddaughter from backstage and listens to her practice her steps; a hockey player missing his front teeth calls his similarly chomper-challenged son after winning the championship game; two women, one white, one black, chat on the phone while doing yoga headstands; a cowboy, having just competed in a rodeo, calls a female jockey, who has just competed her race; and a newly shorn Army recruit phones his father, a barber, from his barracks.

That’s 10 scenes to cast, shoot, and splice together into a 30-second ad guilting viewers into making a long-distance call to their mother, old friend, parole officer, whomever. The eminently moral ad execs insist, however, that they have done their best to keep the “obligation level” light:
You can suggest in an artistic manner that a person might feel better for making a phone call to a faraway friend, but it wouldn’t be right to suggest that something terrible will happen to the person if they don’t make the call…
Formally, Arlen constructs his book around a sequence of short, punchy episodes, or rather vignettes. Arlen is primarily an eavesdropper, briefly profiling the actors, setting the scene and then letting the dialog of the principal players drive the action. That dialog has a Sorkinesque quality, all the more so because it’s endowed with that same blend of seriousness and triviality. During one shoot, Gaston, an advertising executive in the creative group, notices a glass of milk precariously positioned on a television set. He and the director, Steve, discuss the potential backlash:
Steve says: “[The glass of milk] looks good. A nice quality.”

Gaston: “I know, but then the phone company gets letters saying, ‘How could you leave that milk there? The kid is going to spill the milk on the set, and the house will go up in sparks, and all those people will be burned to death.’”

Steve: “They’d say all that?”

Gaston: “All that.”
It’s comforting to be reminded that before the Internet, concerned citizens were perfectly able to vent their outrage.

Every so often, Arlen will hazard a brief authorial intrusion, but his withering ironic presence is felt most conspicuously through his absence. Take the following scene in which the team scouts locations:
Steve says: “I like this house. It’s a little upscale, but it photographs very well.”

Gaston says: “We could do the white yoga here.”

Linda says: “Wouldn’t the black yoga be better?”

Jerry says: “I’m not sure it reads black.”

Steve says: “Don’t worry. We can fix the downstairs room like a black girl’s apartment, whatever that is. You know, give it a condominium look.”
I suppose Arlen could have interrupted here to consider whether advertisers must adapt to their target audience’s prejudices to be effective, or whether they actively perpetuate racism by shaping those prejudices. Instead, Arlen follows the discussion as it casually segues into finding the house that “says tap dancing” to the director. Arlen’s reticence strikes me as even more damning, perhaps because the four-line exchange blindingly illuminates the workings of racism more than any cultural analysis could.

Arlen treads just as lightly with the notion that “reality” is a nothing more than a filmic effect to be achieved. When an actress questions why a rain machine operated by a man named Billy is needed when it is actually raining outside, she is told: “That’s God’s rain…It doesn’t show up on film. We need Billy’s rain.” Omnipotent though the Lord may be, some extraordinary feats remain beyond even His power.

One of the book’s pleasures is watching the participants’ obsess over such details, be it finding the perfect “generic emblem” for an imaginary hockey team or determining how a soldier should call home: “[The phone] might be better not by his bed. I mean, would it look military with the guy lounging in the sack?”

Each participant demonstrates a sincerity about his or her calling that is as touching as it is risible. The director, Steve Horn, is renowned for not being “afraid to deal in human emotion.” He studied Italian Renaissance painting at Columbia, a foundation he claims serves him well in constructing his tableaux vivants. Time and again he is faced with conditions that would ruffle even the most phlegmatic of Quattrocentro painters. During the yoga scene, a toddler, Lily, is supposed to imitate her upside-down mother and topple over in a comical, endearing fashion. In some takes, however, Lily stays exasperatingly upright: “Damn, I wish she’d fallen down then. Why won’t she fall down?” As the exhausted director sighs at the end of another frustrating shoot involving a stubborn cat and its bumbling handler: “You know, sometimes those little human touches just about break your back.”

One N.W. Ayer man describes leaving the Packaged Goods department to take on the “greater emotional texture” of AT&T’s Long Lines account. An actor avows that attending commercial acting school was “a very important step for me. Very significant.” When pressed to explain why, he says that while it’s difficult to put into words, it taught him how to hold a sheet of copy during auditions. An actress is more expansive on the art of commercial acting:
I’m proud of what I do, and I think it’s refined my craft tremendously. Mainly, it’s tightened my technique, and it’s taught me how to cut out extraneous stuff. I mean, it’s a very demanding form, because you’ve got only thirty seconds in which to establish a character…
However, some ads aren’t worth the money or the chance to further refine her craft: “I won’t do those brutal pesticides that poison the environment, and I won’t do douches…”

Casting poses its own challenges: “Llamas are terrific. I like llamas, except they spit.” Thus is the career of one talented camelid cruelly curtailed. One young lady auditioning for the yoga role has better manners than a llama but is passed over because she reminds the casting team of “some Procter & Gamble girl,” and thus is presumably more suited to feigning ecstasy over laundry detergent than performing sensual yogic postures with a phone stuck to her ear. (Or at least that’s how I interpreted that classification.) There are a handful of reliably heartwarming grandmothers but a dearth of new, or rather old, talent: “The trouble is each grandmother has been used so many times.” The team faces a similar shortage in its search for the toothless hockey player, for the understandable reason that “there just aren’t any actors who want to appear on TV with missing teeth.” (They cast a real hockey player instead.) Finally, the discussion over a candidate for the rodeo cowboy captures the wry tone of the book’s many clipped exchanges:
Jerry says: “He might do.”

Steve says: “He’s too Southern.”

Linda says: “He’s from Jackson Heights.”

Steve says: “I mean, he looks Southern. He says barnyard to me.”

Linda says: “I’ll bet he’d be surprised to know that.”
Our fascination with the dastardly tricks of subliminal advertising notwithstanding, the ad industry primarily trades in the blatantly manifest. The same ad executive who claims that “in thirty seconds, everybody notices everything” also admits that one should never “worry about being too obvious visually.” The latter statement partly explains why the “Reach Out” campaign spots, which can be found on YouTube, look laughably hokey today — then again, so will most contemporary commercials in 25 years. After reading about the ridiculous effort that goes into making such schmaltz, one wonders what the commercial would have looked like had the N.W. Ayer advertising team phoned it in. Surely not much worse?

Arlen frames the commercial’s release as ironically as he does everything else in the book. “Tap Dancing” first airs on the Johnny Carson show during an interview with the tennis star Roscoe Tanner. When Carson goes to break, the commercial comes on, sandwiched between a Volkswagen ad featuring Wilt Chamberlain and an amateurish spot for a local car dealership. Arlen resumes transcribing the Carson interview: another ad come and gone.

In the book’s most interesting, Mad Men moment, director Steve takes a post-shoot drive, which prompts him to reminisce about his father:
You know, driving always has a nice feel for me, even in traffic. One of the things I remember from long ago — it must have been right after the war: my dad would take us all out driving on the Belt Parkway every Sunday. Every Sunday afternoon, we’d all get in the car, and he’d drive us up and down and around the goddamn Belt Parkway. I guess it was his idea of a family thing to do. I guess he also really loved that road.
It’s a wonderful story — moving, funny, and a little sad — made all the more stirring by the contrast with the manufactured familial bliss and “human emotions” in which Steve traffics. The sly Arlen manages to sneak in a vignette that actually reaches out and touches someone.

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12 comments:

  1. i just got into literary mysteries thanks to “Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer” by Wesley Stace. I never knew the genre could be so satisfying. These look great. You make a strong case for “Savages”

  2. Great post. I came across “Savages” thanks to its inclusion in the Tournament of Books this year and also found it hard to put down. I’ve checked out a couple of Winslow’s older books from the library and hope they end up similarly satisfying.

    I used to read a good bit of not-so-literary crime fiction in my teenage years thanks to the sorts of books my dad would read a lot and pass on to me, but I grew away from the genre as my tastes turned a bit more literary the past couple years. Books such as Savages, though, have drawn me a bit back into the genre, and I even find a great deal of entertainment in cozier mystery series such as the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series that aren’t necessarily the brainiest or most challenging, but at the same time don’t patronize the reader.

  4. Thanks for reinforcing my wanting to read Savages, and for putting Snowdrops on my list. I have two thoughts to extend what you said.

    Could much of what is called literary crime fiction be better called literate crime fiction? Literate meaning it doesn’t patronize the reader, insult the language, or strain credibility. It doesn’t have to be on the bleeding edge of what it means to be human, or reconstruct how we tell stories, to justify itself. The literate telling of a good story, about bad people, good people, and some who blur the boundary, is justification enough; calling Rankin, McDermid, Connelly, Mosley, Minna, or Mankell writers of literate crime fiction is sufficient praise for now.

    A useful distinction others have made is between crime fiction and noir fiction. In crime fiction, the crime upsets the moral order; in the end, the crime is solved and the order restored. In noir, no absolute moral order is recognized, and the partial demands of society, family, and the individual will fight for dominance. The Singer’s Gun seems to me to be more noir-ish than crime-ish, but still literary.

  5. Emily,
    Thanks for the heads-up on the latest from Don Winslow. Your mention of the weed-growing botanists reminds me of the only Winslow I’ve read, “California Fire and Life,” which is about sleazebags who set arson fires and the people who try to catch them. Terrific stuff. And it reminded me that the best novels are rarely about people stewing in their juices; they’re almost always about people who do actual work. I’m thinking about wheat-threshing in “Anna Karenina,” bomb de-fusing in “The English Patient,” glove-making in “American Pastoral,” to name just a few.
    Bill Morris

  6. I can’t wait to read Savages. It sounds a bit like the novel Baked, Mark Haskell Smith’s pot-crime-romp through LA, which is a super fun read.

  7. One of the most compelling crime thrillers that I have read is Power of the Dog by Don Winslow. Winslow used to be a DEA guy but left in disgust and then wrote Power of the Dog about the Mexican drug wars. This was in the nineties! When I read it a couple of years ago I thought one of the scenes was a bit too much…but then the next week, in the news, the exact same scenario was reported! This guy has seen it all.

  8. I love crime novels in general – right now I’m finishing Breeders by Barney Rostaing, and I like it a lot. You made “Savages” sound like an absolute must-read, so I think I’ll pick up a copy as soon as I’m done with Breeders!

  9. “The most recent books I’ve read in the genre confirm my long-held suspicion that attempting to categorize books by genre does readers a disservice; these books are no less literary than any of the other great books I’ve read this year, they just have crimes and/or guns in them. ”
    I couldn’t agree more – assigning labels can sometimes have the unintended effect of missing out on a great book or a great experience. Thanks for these two recommendations, I have added them to my summer reading list. Have you read Skylights and Screen Doors by Dean Smart? I would define it as un-categorizable as it is part memoir, part true crime, part just great writing. Another example of how genres can be misleading.

  12. These days crime fiction is the only stuff I read. Thanks for the reccomendations. I will look out for both Snowdrops and savages.

    I have had enouogh of reading the ‘classics’ to impress others and ‘improve myself’.
    I want my daily adrenalin rush and the only way is through crime fiction!

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Adventures in Self-Publishing: Dallas Hudgens’ Wake Up, We’re Here

Staff Picks
April 27, 2012 | 1 book mentioned 9 5 min read

1.
Dallas Hudgens’ short story collection Wake Up, We’re Here arrived, as do half the books I read these days, as an unexpected package on my doorstep. This one’s special, the note from the publicist said. As a general rule, I’m skeptical of such claims, and I have to confess that I’m generally less drawn to story collections than I am to novels. But I happen to know the publicist in question as a freelancer of exquisite taste who only takes on projects that interest her, so I moved the book to the top of the towering pile of books that’s presently threatening to avalanche all over the floor of my office and took it with me on the subway a week later.

And you know, the publicist was right. Dallas Hudgens’ Wake Up, We’re Here is easily one of the best books I’ve read this year.

Some of Hudgens’ work is reminiscent of the fiction of Joshua Mohr, whose three excellent novels to date — Some Things That Meant the World To Me, Termite Parade, and Damascus — chart the lives of the damaged and the down-and-out in America. Hudgens’ stories often involve the clinically nervous, the unable-to-make-it-in-the-world, the damaged and the addicted. In the opening story, “Target,” a middle-aged bar musician enlists his anxiety-plagued daughter to drive the getaway car in a stolen electronics scam. In “Zamboni,” perhaps the most dazzling piece in the collection, a man with a history of drug problems, alcoholism, and petty criminality struggles to find a way to live in the world in the months following his mother’s death; he cared for her for some time before she succumbed to brain cancer. It must have been hard, a friend suggests, being her primary caregiver. “No,” Serge replies, “it was okay. I liked it, you know. It was an honor.” The work is filled with such unexpected moments.

Hudgens excels at character development; days after reading the stories I find myself still thinking about Serge, the violence-prone man trying to find his place in “Zamboni”, and Tek, the heartbreakingly awkward musician caring for his senile father in the story “Sounding Brass.” The language is beautiful throughout (“Her neck was long and fragile, a soft note from an instrument that touched his skin.”) Hudgens doesn’t shy away from the brutality of life on earth — the illness, the decreptitude, the humiliations and the teen suicides — but the grittiness is never gratuitous, and his stories are infused with compassion and hope. Happy endings are by no means assured or even particularly likely, but redemption is possible, and the endings of nearly every story in the collection surprised me.

Who published this thing? Hudgens’ bio listed a couple of books published by Scribner, but the imprint on this one was listed as Relegation Books. A small press, I assumed, but I couldn’t find it online. Had Hudgens published the book himself? I’d noticed that the book seemed not to have been copy-edited (“’Give me ten mintues,’ he told her”), but on the other hand, the book looked approximately a thousand times more professional than any of the other self-published book I’d ever seen, and I’ve seen that kind of typographical error in books published by the largest publishers on earth. I emailed the publicist. Yes, she said, he’d published it on his own.

It’s extremely rare for The Millions to cover a self-published book, but that’s not a matter of editorial policy, and my personal feeling on the matter is that all that actually really matters is whether a given book’s any good. In the case of Hudgens’ short story collection, I think the writing’s remarkable. I was curious about why a guy who’d published two novels with Scribner would strike off on his own, so I wrote to the author.

2.
Hudgens published two novels with Scribner, and then they declined their option on Wake Up, We’re Here. He was disappointed, but he understood: publishing is a business, and Scribner was making a business decision.

Short story collections can be a tough sell in the United States. Conventional wisdom is that they tend to sell fewer copies than novels, which of course might be a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy: it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that short story collections have, generally speaking, fewer resources directed toward them by skeptical marketing departments who’ve been told that short story collections don’t sell very well. An editor at a recent party I attended told me rather wistfully that he tries to publish a couple of short story collections every year; the implication was that he’d publish more of them if he could.

Hudgens told me that he’d always been drawn more strongly to short stories than to novels. The collection meant a lot to him, but he realized there might not be an audience for his book. Perhaps, he reasoned, this was the end of a particular moment in his life. Perhaps the period of his life wherein he published fiction was drawing to a natural close. “I was grateful to Scribner,” he said, “and especially my editor, Brant Rumble, for the opportunity to publish two novels.

I thought I’d accepted the fact that I hadn’t found an audience for the story collection. I also thought it made sense to step away from writing and to focus that energy somewhere else. But it was hard to stop writing. After a couple of months, I went back to work on the stories. And, of course, the more I wrote and the more I worked on the collection, I found myself hoping again that there might be an audience for the book.

He thought perhaps a smaller publisher would be a better fit for the collection. He started querying, but had singularly bad luck: the one small publisher who expressed an interest went out of business soon after. He tried submitting the stories to journals and magazines, in the hopes of attracting the attention of other publishers, but — this part’s baffling to me — none of the stories were accepted for publication.

This was when Hudgens began to consider publishing the collection himself. He’d long been interested in the idea of publishing his own work, and ereaders and advances in print-on-demand technology had somewhat lowered the distribution barrier. “I’d spent quite a few years asking editors and publishers to take a chance on my writing,” he said. “It felt like the right time to take that chance myself.”

He hired an editor and a cover designer, and set about learning the details of print-on-demand and purchasing ISBN numbers. He came up with a name, Relegation Books.

Since I have the trade name and business license, I sometimes think that it would be nice to keep Relegation Books going in the future. I don’t know if it would be possible to operate as a small press and publish other writers, but I like to think of Wake Up, We’re Here as the test subject. It’s still early in the process, and I’m learning as I go along. If nothing else, I’ll be able to share my experience with other writers who might be considering this approach. The experience, so far, has been very satisfying.

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| 1 book mentioned 9 5 min read
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Staff Pick: The Water-Method Man

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November 25, 2010 | 1 book mentioned 2 2 min read

For me, John Irving was a phase, one that coincided with frequent showers, acute anxiety about body hair, and pining after floppy-haired young men.  John Irving was the novelist of my teens.  I don’t think it’s immaterial, the way he smolders in his jacket photos, his knowing, virile gaze framed by that fratty, bountiful hair. Teenagers are very suggestible.

I felt a little wistful this summer, revisiting The World According to Garp and finding myself unmoved.  The novel, which was once a revelation, now seemed a little bit smarmy and ludicrous.  Maybe this is the way  today’s teens will feel one day when they happen across a Bieber photo.

Fortunately, I can still count on The Water-Method Man.  It’s also ludicrous.  But it doesn’t try too hard, it’s up-front about its protagonist’s foibles and phallic preoccupations, and it’s still one of the funniest novels I’ve ever read.  

Chapter 1 introduces Fred “Bogus” Trumper, lapsed graduate student, urology patient.  Chapter 2 introduces Merrill Overturf, Trumper’s one-time familiar, one of the unsung heroes of literature.  The memory of Merrill succors Trumper during his doctoral days:
Among his other kicks, Fred Bogus Trumper likes to remember Merrill Overturf, the diabetic… Such escapism.  Listening to Merrill, in Vienna–while looks out of his Iowa window, through a rusty screen and a fat katydid’s wing; he sees a slow-moving, beshitted truck, brimming with hogs.
As the novel progresses, we learn of Trumper’s financial problems (“Please refrain from sending me further form letters about your famous Rising Rate Scale, and your awkwardly veiled threats of ‘constables'”), his woman problems (Biggie, Tulpen, and Lydia Kindle), his dissertation problems (a translation of Akthelt and Gunnel, from the original Old Low Norse), and, critically, his dick problems (his urinary tract is a “narrow, winding road”).

Trumper’s trials are legion, but he muddles his way through; his triumphs over adversity culminate in Throgsgafen, a free-spirited kind of holiday gathering in the best tradition of Akthelt and Gunnel (and the early seventies).  As the novelist points out, “our own tame, dry-turkey version of Throgsgafen is indeed an embarrassing substitute.”

I love The Water-Method Man.  Consider it my best suggestion for a holiday pick-me-up—a panacea for turkey fuck-ups, family dust-ups, and TSA feel-ups.

In the spirit of Bogus, Happy Throgsgafen.  And, in his words, here’s “wishing you… infinite varieties of Hope and Freedom From the Fear of Doom.”

Staff Picks
| 1 book mentioned 2 2 min read
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Staff Picks

Staff Picks: Everything Matters! and Big Machine

Staff Picks
October 22, 2009 | 1 book mentioned 1 2 min read

Much of Everything Matters! by Ron Currie Jr. is narrated by an all-knowing entity who speaks in the royal we, and tells our hero, Junior Thibodeau, all sorts of pertinent information: for instance, that his father prefers not to talk and that the world will be obliterated by a comet in 36 years.  What does one do when born with the knowledge of the apocalypse?  This premise might sound absurd, and I guess it is–but it’s also aesthetically fascinating.  The narrator is not only introducing this world to us, he is introducing it to Junior.  The usual reader-character roles have been flipped: instead of me feeling like Junior, Junior feels like me.  And then it flips back, and I’m with Junior, in his world, in his emotional landscape.  It’s a real pleasure to watch Currie braid this omniscience with Junior’s much narrower (and human) perspective, and for the action of the novel to absorb its all-knowing voice in the interest of narrative drive.  Structurally, the book ends twice, as if our author were testing out narrative possibilities, the roads not taken, and including them in a single novel.   How does one choice, one action, affect the next?   This is a fun question, and the reader gets to discover the answer(s) along with Junior.

Big Machine by Victor LaValle is a very different book, but it’s got that same risk-taking playfulness. It’s smart, it’s really funny, and the world I was pulled into, like Currie’s, was fascinating and weird.  The African-American narrator, Ricky Rice, is a former heroin addict with a harrowing past who is called to Vermont to become a “paranormal investigator,” as the book jacket calls it–this is a difficult novel to explain! Ricky Rice is probably one of the best voices to come out of literature in the last…oh, ever, probably.   He compares a very small man to a bunion, and says stuff like, “Taking heroin is like sinking into a tapioca hammock.”  I loved him. Unlike Currie’s novel, Big Machine is fairly straightforward, first-person storytelling, although the risks LaValle takes are no less big.  His are on the level of plot and tone, for he balances the supernatural, the mourning of family members, race relations, and religion with equal dexterity.

If Big Machine goes off the rails somewhat by the end, and if its horror-novel roots take over a bit too much for my taste, I forgive it, because, like Everything Matters!, it’s ballsy.  Both Currie and LaValle aren’t afraid to dispense with the everyday rules of the universe, and they still manage to hold onto lyricism and authentic characterization.  Both of these books were wild and weird, but they also were heartbreaking.  They don’t fall into the clever-trap.

These two novels represent a real freewheeling lust for the original in contemporary fiction.  I’m excited to be a writer, working in their wake.

Staff Picks
| 1 book mentioned 1 2 min read
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