Friday Freebie: After Her by Joyce Maynard

Congratulations to Yvonne Jefferson, winner of last week's Friday Freebie: The Residue Years by Mitchell S. Jackson.  Three cheers also go out to Laurie Pitts who won the contest for the Fobbit audiobook.

This week's book giveaway is After Her, the new novel by Joyce Maynard (author of Labor Day and The Good Daughters).  On a personal note, After Her went to the highest elevations on my To-Be-Read mountain o' books (aka Mt. NeverRest) from the minute I read the opening lines of the novel recently released by William Morrow:

      A little over thirty years ago, on a June day just before sunset—alone on a mountain in Marin County, California—a man came toward me with a length of piano wire stretched between his hands, and the intention of ending my days.  I was fourteen years old, and many others had already died at his hands.  I carry the knowledge of what it is to look into a man's eyes and believe his face is the last thing I will ever see.
      I have my sister to thank that I am here to tell what happened that day.  Two times, it was my sister who saved me, though I was not able to do the same for my sister.
      This is our story.

Here's more about what you'll find in the rest of the pages of After Her: Summer, 1979.  A dry, hot Northern California school vacation stretches before Rachel and her younger sister, Patty--the daughters of a larger-than-life, irresistibly handsome (and chronically unfaithful) detective father and the mother whose heart he broke.  When we first meet her, Patty is eleven--a gangly kid who loves basketball and dogs and would do anything for her older sister, Rachel.  Rachel is obsessed with making up stories and believes she possesses the gift of knowing what's in the minds of people around her.  She has visions, whether she wants to or not.  Left to their own devices, the sisters spend their days studying record jackets, concocting elaborate fantasies about the mysterious neighbor who moved in down the street, and playing dangerous games on the mountain that looms behind their house.  When young women start turning up dead on the mountain, the girls' father is put in charge of finding the murderer known as the "Sunset Strangler."  Watching her father's life slowly unravel as months pass and more women are killed, Rachel embarks on her most dangerous game yet...using herself as bait to catch the killer.  But rather than cracking the case, the consequences of Rachel's actions will destroy her father's career and alter forever the lives of everyone she loves.  Thirty years later, still haunted by the belief that the killer remains at large, Rachel constructs a new strategy to smoke out the Sunset Strangler and vindicate her father--a plan that unexpectedly unearths a long-buried family secret.

If you'd like a chance at winning a copy of After Her, simply email your name and mailing address to

thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line.  One entry per person, please.  Despite its name, the Friday Freebie runs all week long and remains open to entries until midnight on Sept. 26, at which time I'll draw the winning name.  I'll announce the lucky reader on Sept. 27.  If you'd like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week newsletter, simply add the words "Sign me up for the newsletter" in the body of your email.  Your email address and other personal information will never be sold or given to a third party (except in those instances where the publisher requires a mailing address for sending Friday Freebie winners copies of the book).

Want to double your odds of winning?  Get an extra entry in the contest by posting a link to this webpage on your blog, your Facebook wall or by tweeting it on Twitter.  Once you've done any of those things, send me an additional e-mail saying "I've shared" and I'll put your name in the hat twice.

William Lychack Recommends: The Lost World of the Kalahari by Laurens van der Post

When a book plucks a chord inside you--the metal harp string humming and going blurry as it vibrates--and you connect with the words on a visceral and/or intellectual level, then there comes a moment when you can't keep that book bottled up inside any longer.  You burst out of the house at a run, or pop your head over the cubicle divider, or dial your daughter's phone number, and blurt out, "Listen, I just read the best book!"  And then, for the next five minutes to an hour, you badger, bug, and berate your poor, trapped audience with the high points of this Best Book Ever.  Has that ever happened to you?  Or am I the only one who loses all sense of social bearing when I talk about books that really matter to me (Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens, Rock Springs by Richard Ford, the poetry of Brian Turner, anything by Lewis Nordan, etc.)?

William Lychack recently wrote me an email which, in essence, reassured me that I am not alone.  Lychack (author of the short-story collection The Architect of Flowers and the novel The Wasp Eater) seems to exhibit this same kind of passionate behavior for at least one treasured book (I'm sure there are others in his personal library which are equally well-worn with love).  Here is his recommendation for the 1958 classic The Lost World of the Kalahari by Laurens van der Post (1906-1996):

Surely, it must be true, everyone has a book that truly changes their lives.  There’s always a context to how this book finds you--a context which probably isn’t that interesting or magical to anyone except you yourself--so I’ll spare you the story of how a stranger handed me this book, how forlorn and lost I must have seemed, how this strange quest of Laurens van der Post’s spoke directly to me.  But I would, if I could, give you a copy of the book, if I saw you in such a state right now in front of me.  And I’d make you wait a moment until I found a brief passage I’ve all but memorized.  I’d tell you that you don’t need any context for it, but then I’d probably say that, in the book, van der Post, who’d dreamed from boyhood of finding the nearly-exterminated Bushmen, had just committed to organizing his expedition into the Kalahari desert of what is now Botswana.  I’d tell you it’s a spiritual quest for him and would thumb through the pages and read the following passage to you:

In fact all the aspects of the plan that were within reach of my own hand were worked out and determined there and then.  What took longer, of course, was the part which depended on the decisions of others and on circumstances beyond my own control.  Yet even there I was amazed at the speed with which it was accomplished.  I say "amazed," but it would be more accurate to say I was profoundly moved, for the lesson that seemed to emerge for a person with my history of forgetfulness, doubts and hesitations was, as Hamlet put it so heart-rendingly to himself: “the readiness is all.”  If one is truly ready within oneself and prepared to commit one’s readiness without question to the deed that follows naturally on it, one finds life and circumstance surprisingly armed and ready at one’s side.

Then I’d hand the whole caboodle of this book to you and simply disappear, just as someone handed a hardcover copy to me.  I was fresh out of college and working in a bookstore at the time on the upper east side of Manhattan--the long-gone Madison Avenue Bookshop--and I had never felt more adrift in my life, trying to find my feet as far from home and the life I wanted to live as I might have ever been.  Maybe I'd recognize some of that same kindred feeling in the way you look, maybe that's why I'd hand the book to you, maybe that's why you'd read it, and maybe that's why it might speak to you in the life-saving way that it did for me.  You never know.  Stranger things happen.

Author photo by Thomas Sayers Ellis

The Legacy of the Ampersand: & Sons by David Gilbert

& Sons
by David Gilbert
Reviewed by Henry Gonshak

David Gilbert’s & Sons is a big, ambitious, at times hilarious novel about the life of the writer, relations between siblings, and between fathers and sons, the financial and intellectual aristocracy of contemporary New York City, and the themes of aging and death, given an added, quasi-sci-fi twist by the inclusion of a subplot about the possibilities of cloning.  Gilbert is a middle-aged, New York writer who’s authored one previous novel, The Normals, and a short-story collection, Remote Feed.  His work has appeared in such mass-market publications as The New Yorker, Harper’s, and GQ.

His new book focuses on a famous, reclusive novelist now in his dotage, A.N. Dyer--who seems based on such other hermitic writers as J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon--and his relationships with his three sons: Richard, the eldest, a former drug addict who has sobered up and become an addiction counselor, along with marrying and raising a family; Jamie, a nomadic, avant-garde documentary film-maker, single and now rather adrift in his life, who supports himself by listlessly teaching a film class at the New School in Manhattan; and Andy, the youngest, only seventeen and attending the snooty New England prep school (based, it seems, on Exeter or Choate) that also educated his two elder brothers, and which provided the setting for their father’s first and most famous novel, Ampersand, which bears more than a passing resemblance to The Catcher in the Rye.  Narrating the novel is Philip, down on his luck as the book begins, having been recently fired as a high school math teacher, and kicked out of his home by his wife due to an affair with a much younger woman.  Philip’s father, A.N. Dyer’s best friend since high school, has just died in the book’s first scene, set at his funeral.

Gilbert’s decision to pick Philip as narrator is problematic, because Philip depicts in detail many scenes at which he isn’t actually present.  However, in time, the reader comes to accept this breach of narrative plausibility.

Many recent critics and reviewers have decried the notable tendency in much contemporary fiction for novelists to write books about other novelists, alleging that this focus is self-indulgent, solipsistic, arguing that it narrows the range of subject matter a novelist can explore.  Tom Wolfe, in a much-discussed, typically hyperbolic essay published in Harper’s in the ‘90s, insisted that novelists should follow the lead of journalists, in the tradition of Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis, and go out into the wide world in search of interesting stories, rather than confining their fiction to their own literary backyard.  Personally, I’ve never bought this argument, because, as a writer myself, I enjoy reading books about my own kind.  But even a reader who adheres to Wolfe’s contention must, I think, grudgingly admit that Gilbert has achieved something fresh through the character of A.N. Dyer.  Unearthing an insight that radically demythologizes the artist, Gilbert makes the claim through his sensitively nuanced and three-dimensional portrait of Dyer that writers are some of the most miserable people on earth.

Dyer is, after all, a man, as he comes to realize in old age, who, thanks to a modest inheritance from his relatives, has never had to work for a living, instead spending his life alone in the cramped study in his Manhattan apartment spinning fantasies in his head.  As a result of his preoccupation with his craft, he has shamefully neglected his two older sons, as well as estranged himself from his once loyal wife, Isabel, who left him many years ago.  Moreover, Dyer feels no affinity, takes no pride in, his legions of fans, most of whom, based on what they gush at him at his rare public appearances, worship not Dyer the man but a mythic image they have concocted in their own minds, as well as interpret his novels in ways that have nothing to do with what the author intended.  Now in poor health and facing the imminent prospect of death, with most of his good friends already sunk in their graves, Dyer finds himself (in a delicious touch) wondering if he might not have been better off following a career in advertising.  By making Dyer such a sad-sack, Gilbert mitigates the considerable challenge of authentically portraying a literary genius.  Gilbert even has the chutzpah to include passages from Dyer’s own novels (particularly Ampersand) sprinkled throughout the book.  While they are not on the level of Salinger, Gilbert’s attempts at literary impersonation are, on the whole, quite successful, revealing penetrating insights about the relationship between literature and life.

Perhaps in response to his disillusionment with his existence as a writer, Dyer has participated in a wild scheme that has the potential to grant him a kind of posthumous immortality.  A couple of decades ago, he was approached by a member of a clandestine Swedish organization who proposed to use Dyer’s DNA to create a perfect clone of the author.  This is the origins of young Andy, upon whom Dyer has lavished affectionate attention he never showed to his older children.  Andy, meanwhile, has grown up to be a fairly typical teenager, though with a maturity and intelligence that belies his years.  Andy has cast his eye on an older woman who works as a curator at a New York museum, hoping she’ll be the female who will help him lose his much-lamented virginity, though in the present action the relationship remains unconsummated.  At the time of Andy’s birth, Dyer had invented a story that Andy was the off-spring of a fleeting affair with a young Swedish au pair--a lie he has maintained to all ever since.  Wishing for their support, Dyer reveals his secret to Richard, Jamie and Isabel, who respond in varying ways, to some extent believing Dyer’s extravagant tale, while also half-suspecting that it’s a delusion springing from the author’s increasing senescence.

What is one to make of & Sons’ departure from realism to dabble in the province of science fiction?  First off, now that a sheep named Dolly has been successfully cloned, human cloning no longer seems so far-fetched, so perhaps there is an element of realism in Dyer’s phantasmagoric claim.  Second, Gilbert never clarifies whether Dyer’s contention is true or false, which casts an intriguing net of ambiguity over the whole subplot.  Finally, I’m pleased that Gilbert, ignoring the limitations of literary minimalism, has written a novel in which all sorts of crazy things happen.  However, it’s regrettable that none of the characters ever mentions what seems an obvious point: namely, that cloning an exact copy of another human being is impossible, because we are all products of nurture as well as nature, shaped as much by our environment as by our genes.  Given that reality, there is no guarantee that Andy will turn into another A.N. Dyer.

Along with its flamboyant plotting, & Sons is a novel that is clearly distinguished by Gilbert’s equally flashy writing style.  The author loves long sentences, packed with numerous intricate clauses, and adorned with often highly ornate similes and metaphors.  Sometimes this penchant leads to over-writing, to sentences that border on the impenetrable.  Take this line about the Dyer’s Swedish nanny and all-purpose helpmate, Gerd: “She was wearing of all things a maid’s uniform, which gave her the distinct impression of being swallowed whole by a leaping killer whale.”  I’ve read that sentence half-a-dozen times, and I still have no idea what it means.  On the other hand, Gilbert’s florid use of language elsewhere leads to passages that are strikingly original and memorable: “Isabel waited a second before ringing, like an actor between 'To be' and everything else.”

A longtime New Yorker himself, who grew up in the city, Gilbert does a good job of portraying the elite of New York, both artistic and financial.  There is a long, wonderful scene set at the Frick Museum, one of the city’s smaller but more celebrated galleries, site of a book party for a young novelist who has just published a best-selling work of fiction about simian intelligence.  At the party, Richard, Jamie, Andy, and A.N. Dyer himself all put in an appearance, along with a famous, coke-head Hollywood actor who is dying to play the lead in a cinematic version of Ampersand–a venture the book’s author strenuously opposes.  Gilbert portrays New York’s literary demimonde in less than flattering terms--as self-indulgent, catty, desperate for attention, obsessed with the commercial bottom line, and terrified by the suspicion that in our computer age books are in danger of becoming obsolete.  This is not the Left Bank of Paris in the 1920s.  However, in an interesting interview that follows the novel, Gilbert denies that his principle aim in writing the book was satirical: “There are elements of that, but I don’t think it’s a social satire, per se.”  It’s true that Gilbert’s characters tend to be too human and complex, too engaging of our sympathies, for & Sons to qualify as satire in the classic sense, where characters are generally puppets the author manipulates in order to exemplify his or her social or political messages.  But, as Gilbert suggests, there are aspects of the novel which are clearly intended to be satirical.

Qualifying the book’s comedy is the theme of aging and mortality which pervades the novel from start to finish.  There are three funerals in & Sons–at the beginning, middle and end–which neatly tie the book together.  But the most distinctive elaboration of this theme springs from a bizarre documentary film project Jamie undertakes, urged on by his former high school girlfriend, now stricken with terminal breast cancer.  The woman convinces Jamie to film her at the same moment every day, 12:01 pm, responding to the seemingly banal question, “How are you?” with an equally banal answer, “I’m fine,” which she maintains even as her illness inexorably progresses.  Strung together, these brief scenes evoke a cumulative power.  Then, after the woman’s death, Jamie decides to push the envelope even further by digging up his ex-girlfriend’s coffin one moonlit winter night, and filming her decaying corpse.  When the finished film accidentally turns up on You-Tube, it immediately goes viral, garnering thousands of hits, much to Jamie’s dismay.  This disturbing and original subplot defies easy interpretation, but it surely says something haunting about the way illness and death shadows our lives.

On the front cover of & Sons, Jesse Walter enthuses: “Big, brilliant, and terrifically funny, it’s a moving story about fathers and sons and success, a dead-on, deadpan retelling of our American literary myth.”  For once, this cover blurb does not seem hyperbolic.


Henry Gonshak is the Rose and Anna Busch Endowed Professor of English at Montana Tech.  His writings have appeared in three book collections and a variety of publications, including The Journal of American Culture, Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice, Response: A Contemporary Jewish Review and Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies.  He also writes a monthly books column, “The Reading Life,” for The Montana Standard, which is distributed throughout southwest Montana.

Trailer Park Tuesday: The Big Crowd by Kevin Baker

Welcome to Trailer Park Tuesday, a showcase of new book trailers and, in a few cases, previews of book-related movies.

Kevin Baker is one of the best novelists around today who can take dry facts from history textbooks and turn them into highly-readable, entertaining fiction.  His so-called "City of Fire trilogy" (Paradise Alley, Dreamland and Striver's Row) brought early 20th-century New York City to blazing life.  Now he moves forward a couple of decades and burrows a little deeper into the city's wormy underbelly with The Big Crowd, which re-examines the greatest unsolved crime hit in mob history--the day a mob informant took a swan-dive from a Coney Island hotel while supposedly under police protection.  As Scott Turow notes in his New York Times review of the book, the titular "big crowd" is made up of the pols, mobsters, union goons and grasping business types who fend off reformers and joust for control of New York in the middle of the 20th century.  "I’ve read few other novels that portray in such a nuanced way the temptations of power, the complex division of control in a great metropolis and the perils of political deal-making," he writes.  As Turow also acknowledges, The Big Crowd teems with characters--at the center of which is Charlie O’Kane, the American dream come to life.  A poor Irish immigrant who worked his way up from beat cop to mayor of New York at the city’s dazzling, post-war zenith, Charlie is looked up to by millions, including his younger brother, Tom.  So when Charlie is accused of abetting a shocking mob murder, Tom sets out to clear his brother’s name.  In the book trailer, an actor portraying a mob goombah tries to explain the complex web of history in the space of 90 seconds.  While I would have liked the guy to dial back the Goodfellas impersonation a couple of notches, I think the concept of the trailer, filmed in newsreel black-and-white, is a clever one.  It's a good way to catch our attention for what promises to be one instance of where crime really does pay....for the reader.

Words After War essay contest & Win a Fobbit audiobook

What's the story behind this picture?  What does it say to you?  How does it make you feel?  Capture your thoughts in an essay up to 500 words and you could win a tuition-paid seat in a workshop I'll be teaching at Marlboro College when I come to Brattleboro, Vermont for the town's annual literary festival.  The workshop is about finding a sense of "place" in stories--whether that's a street in Brooklyn or a lonely mountaintop.

The new literary organization Words After War is sponsoring the contest for the tuition award (a $75 value) and I'm happy to help spread the word to those interested in attending the class on October 4.  Words After War is just one of several exciting new organizations dedicated to supporting veterans and their families through writing workshops, studio retreats and literary mentorships.  Check out this New York Times article by Matt Gallagher (author of Kaboom) to learn more about the group's mission.

The deadline is midnight on September 23, so don't delay!  For complete details on the contest, please visit the Words After War blog.  (You don't have to be a veteran to enter, but the winner will be responsible for transportation and other costs associated with getting to Brattleboro--but, hey, who doesn't want to visit Vermont in October?)

*     *     *

Speaking of contests, here's another one for you:
I have an extra audiobook version of Fobbit to give away to one lucky (?) blog reader.  This 10-CD boxed set was released by AudioGo in the United Kingdom earlier this year.  It's the same version previously recorded and released here in the United States, just with different packaging.  David Drummond does a great job reading my words into the microphone, delivering even the coarsest of four-letter words with enthusiastic gusto.  If you'd like to be entered in the giveaway, simply email me at david.abrams@gmail.com with the words "Fobbit Audiobook" in the subject line and your name and address in the body of the email.  The contest will remain open until midnight this Thursday (September 19).  I'll draw the winning name out of the proverbial hat (or Kevlar helmet, as the case may be) and announce the winner here on the blog Friday morning.

My First Time: Claudia Zuluaga

My First Time is a regular feature in which writers talk about virgin experiences in their writing and publishing careers, ranging from their first rejection to the moment of holding their first published book in their hands.  Today’s guest is Claudia Zuluaga, author of Fort Starlight, a novel which has just been published by Engine Books.  Here's what Elizabeth Stuckey-French (author of The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady) had to say about Fort Starlight: “Claudia Zuluaga knows the real Florida, that wild, un-Disneyfied place where people from all over have come to chase their dreams into tenuous subdivisions on lush and mucky land.  In her stunning first novel, Zuluaga sets in motion a tense, multi-layered drama which plays out in the barely drained swamps, revealing a fragile and beautiful ecosystem of vivid, eccentric, and absolutely believable characters.  Fort Starlight is a stunning explosion of a novel."  Claudia Zuluaga was born in White Plains, New York, grew up both there and Port St. Lucie, Florida, and now lives in New Jersey.  She earned an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College.  Her fiction has appeared in Narrative Magazine, JMWW, and Lost Magazine, and was included in Dzanc Books' Best of the Web series.  She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best American Short Stories.  Claudia is a full-time lecturer in the English department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City.

My First Money

There’s that story about the gold miner who gave up mining a particular mountain, just an inch before he would have hit the gold.  But there are other mountains.  And gold-plated is often good enough.

I had a short-short story that I really believed in and hoped to place somewhere, but I wasn’t having luck.  I submitted it to ten places at once and waited as the rejection letters—both nice and generic—slowly trickled in.  Right before I gave up on that first group of ten and sent to the next group of ten, a friend told me that an editor friend of hers really needed a short short, and he needed it as soon as possible.  He had a blank spot in his literary journal and I got the impression from my friend that pretty much ANYTHING would do to fill it, so long as it was short enough.  Perfect!  So I sent it, confident that he would read it (or simply look at the word count) and immediately snap it into the blank spot and I would finally be on my way.

It was especially disappointing to get that particular rejection.  Even worse, the rejection was neither kind nor generic.  I am not being bitter when I say that I no longer remember the name of the journal, but I do remember what the editor said: “I kept waiting for something to happen, but nothing ever did.”  I had the dramatic reaction of someone who has not yet had their writing validated by publication: I was certain I was the biggest loser on earth.  I’d been here before, of course.  I’d shed a few tears and heaved some heavy sighs as I filed my rejection slips away in my sad little folder.  But this time, since it sounded like such a sure thing, since I had all this student loan debt and, at that time, a very badly paid career as an adjunct professor, well, I questioned every decision I had ever made, and every thought that led me to write this short-short, which I still believed in, damn it.

I cried for a second.  I blew my nose.  I looked over at my eighteen-month-old daughter, gave her a kiss, and filed that rejection slip.  Then I went into the kitchen to open the cabinets and figure out what to make for dinner.

Not thirty minutes later, my phone rang.  I am a call-screener, by nature, so I let the machine pick it up as I got the oregano and garlic powder out.  It was…an editor…at Narrative Magazine.  They wanted to publish the short-short, and heck, they were going to send me a check.  For money.  Not a lot, but still.  Wow.

When the check came in the mail, my husband agreed that it was cause for a commemorative shopping trip.  We went into the city, to a jewelry store in Soho, and I looked around, hoping to look cool as I scanned the glass cases, craning my neck, trying to see the prices (why are they always on the underside?) so that I wouldn’t have to ask.

I found something I liked.  A gold-plated chain with a pendant made of crystal with a moth wing pressed inside.  One side of the wing is brownish, the other purple.  $45 over the amount of my check.  My husband agreed that it was the principal, so I ponied up the extra cash and bought it.

The good stuff didn’t stop there.  Narrative nominated the story for several prizes, including a Pushcart, and then the story was included in an anthology.  This was, of course, worth far more than any bauble.  I’m glad I have the necklace, though.  It reminds me that, if I know something is as good as I can possibly make it, I need to keep submitting it.  It also reminds me that writing fiction is never going to be about money.  I will certainly pay my babysitter more for child-free writing time than I will ever earn from my writing.  That’s fine.

My novel, Fort Starlight, involved many years of drafting, revision, and crises of confidence, but I believed in it more than I believed in anything I’d ever written.  Whenever I started a new draft, I bought some new notebooks, some fresh pens, straightened up my desk, and put that necklace on.  Even now, whenever I do something writerly, I usually wear it, even if it means that I will get a rash on my neck from the chain, which is starting to go a bit green.

Sunday Sentence: We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I've read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.

Scully was appallingly gregarious--so outgoing she was practically incoming.

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

Cracks in a Family's Foundation: The Round House by Louise Erdrich

The Round House
by Louise Erdrich
Reviewed by Lara Smith

Louise Erdrich and I run hot and cold.  Having never met me, she doesn’t realize this.  But it’s true.

My first experience with her was with my book club (The Book Babes) in 2007 when we read The Master Butchers Singing Club.  It was stunning.  It was full of nuggets, rich and hearty, that when consumed warmed your belly.

Our songs travel the earth.  We sing to one another.  Not a single note is ever lost and no song is original.  They all come from the same place and go back to a time when only the stones howled.

Lovely, right?

In subsequent years we read The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse and Love Medicine, but some of the luster had worn off.  All of her stuff is pretty highly acclaimed, yet these didn’t have the same impact.  I didn’t think they were as good and the Book Babes agreed.  Well, except for two of them; there are always dissenters.  And despite this, Erdrich’s The Round House popped up again for possible book club selection (and with very mixed emotions from the Babes).

There was a potential saving grace.  The Round House actually won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2012.

I love NBA winners (and most finalists, Little No Horse, notwithstanding).  The NBAs are like the fun, tipsy, true-color Golden Globes compared to the stuffy and uptight Academy Awards or Pulitzers.  So my hesitation turned to interest, and my interest turned to complete book club advocation when I realized I had mistakenly purchased The Round House while on my last outing to my favorite indie bookseller.  Hmmm.  Premonition?  Or poor book grabbing habits while wandering the aisles?  Regardless, I rallied and campaigned hard.  I secured enough votes for it and it wasn’t even my month to host.

Are you riveted yet?

Are you on the edge of your seat dying to know what I thought?

Or are you annoyed and just wanting me to get on with it?

Fine.

I loved it!  I can’t say enough good things about it.  It’s deserving of the highest praise, even in a year that had Junot Diaz, Dave Eggers, Ben Fountain, and Kevin Powers.  The Round House rocked the house and Louise and I are back on.

So, where to begin?  How about with this:

Small trees had attacked my parents’ house at the foundation.  They were just seedlings with one or two healthy leaves.  Nevertheless, the stalky shoots had managed to squeeze through knife cracks in the decorative brown shingles covering the cement blocks.  That had grown into the unseen wall and it was difficult to pry them loose.

The opening of Erdich’s thirteenth novel is foreboding, hinting of things to come.  It’s 1988 on the Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota where 13-year-old Joe Coutts loses his innocence and his mother.  Tribal enrollment specialist Geraldine Coutts leaves the house abruptly one Sunday afternoon to get a file from her office.  After a disconcerting amount of time has passed, Joe’s father, tribal judge Bazil Coutts, asks Joe where she is.  Unable to answer, they both become worried.

      Even if she’d gone to her sister Clemence’s house to visit afterward, Mom would have returned by now to start dinner.  We both knew that.  Women don’t realize how much store men set on the regularity of their habits.  We absorb their comings and goings into our bodies, their rhythms into our bones.  Our pulse is set to theirs, and as always on a weekend afternoon, we were waiting for my mother to start ticking away on the evening.
      And so, you see, her absence stopped time.

Joe and his father crack the ice of frozen time and go out to find Geraldine.  The good news is that they find her, driving back to their home on from the main road.  The bad news is that when they return to the house, they learn she has been brutally attacked and assaulted.  And at that moment, as Bazil helps her out of the car, Geraldine collapses; falling swiftly into an impenetrable depression.  Unable to share any information about the attack, Joe and his father are rendered helpless.

But not for long.

Joe’s sole mission becomes to solve this horrible crime against his mother.  Seeking support from his three best friends, he makes his way to The Round House, a holy place on the reservation that he believes may be the scene of the crime.  He searches for clues, uncovers evidence and presses his father for details as Geraldine is forced to open up.  Complications arise.  Jurisdiction and criminal oversight become muddied and Joe becomes more focused on understanding how this could happen and who could have done this horrible act.

Joe visits the community’s clergy, Father Travis for guidance.

      The only answer to this, and it isn’t an entire answer, said Father Travis, is that God made human beings free agents.  We are able to choose good over evil, but the opposite too.  And in order to protect our human freedom, God doesn’t often, very often at least, intervene.  God can’t do that without taking away our moral freedom.  Do you see?
      No.
      But yeah.
      The only thing that God can do, and does all of the time, is to draw good from any evil situation.

And we know, even early on, that good does come of this.  Joe is a grown man telling this story.  He’s married and a practicing lawyer.  Getting from that horrible day to the present had to mean good was drawn out of evil.

As with her other stories, Erdrich tackles issues faced in Native American communities, and doesn’t shy away from spirituality and morality.  Her narrative construction with Joe as an adult reflecting on this life-altering summer worked.  She captured the male voice and perspective of a boy who loves his mother and a man reflecting back on a horrific time.  Filling out the story, Erdich has created a cast of characters that extends beyond the Coutts family, and runs the gamut of being endearing, appalling, hilarious and frustrating, with the suspect hiding out on the fringes of it all.  It’s at times nerve-wracking and in the end wholly satisfying.  While the attack on Geraldine was brutal and shocking, the conclusion will take you by surprise as well.  But as I closed the book and allowed the story to settle, I found it wrapped up in what might be the only way the Coutts family could move forward, patching up the cracks in the cement foundation of their home and their family.


Lara Smith, aka One Lit Chick, blogs and writes about books, lit crushes and life as book junkie.  She’s also one half the overly chatty book-reviewing duo Snotty Literati.  You can find her at www.onelitchick.com, where this review originally appeared, and on Twitter.

On the Road Again: Fobbit Book Tour Redux

The title of this blog post really should have been the Walter Kirn-ish "Up in the Air" since there will be more planes than trains and automobiles in this autumn book tour schedule.  Just when I thought it was safe to let down my tray table and recline my seat back, here we go again....

After a summer of recharging my batteries and pretending to do some legitimate work on my next book (while, in reality, doing more blogging, reading, and toiling at the Paycheck Job), it's time for me to head back out on a mini-tour of bookish proportions.  I look forward to meeting you at these appearances--and if you can't make it, feel free to send a proxy and I'll give them a proxy hug (or handshake, as the case may be).  For the complete calendar of events, you can visit my website--which, by the way, I just updated today.  I added links to several earlier anthologies where you can find my stories, including one about fishing with my father in Alaska.  Check out the books on the website's main page.

UTAH
I'm heading down to the Beehive State for a quick, fun weekend.  This will be my first time attending the Utah Humanities Book Festival, but boy oh boy, do they put on a good show.  Just check out this lineup!  You can come hear me read from Fobbit in Provo at the public library on September 28 at 7 p.m.  On September 29, I'll be at the Salt Lake City Public Library at 2:30 p.m.  (Big thanks go out to Chris McClelland who got the ball rolling on this...)

VERMONT
Okay, it's been a lifelong dream of mine to visit Vermont.  Something about the white, spear-steepled churches and the blaze of red-orange leaves has captivated me since I was in grade school.  Finally, thanks to the good people at the Brattleboro Literary Festival, my dreams are coming true.  On October 6 at 2:30 p.m., you can find me on a panel called "Reaching Out: Building Communities of Readers and Writers" (where I'm sure The Quivering Pen will be mentioned once or twice).  I'll be on stage with Erika Anderson, Cynthia Newberry Martin, and Jodi Paloni.  Then, at 2 p.m., I'll be joining Roxana Robinson, author of Sparta, for a reading from our war-based novels at the Centre Congregational Church.  Those of you who read my earlier review of Sparta ("The Quiet Outrage of War") know how much I loved the novel.  I'm very excited to meet Roxana in person.  Bonus: Those in the area have the opportunity to sign up for workshops taught by Pam Houston and yours truly on October 4 at Marlboro College.  Pam will teach students about concise writing (her workshop is already full) and I will be talking about how to create a sense of place in fiction.  Click here for full details on the workshops.

MONTANA
Fobbit has been nominated for a High Plains Book Award and I'm honored to be part of the High Plains Book Festival in Billings.  This year's festival theme is "Women Writing the West" and will feature (among others) Alyson Hagy, Pam Houston (her again!) and Emily Danforth.  I plan to be out there in the audience, drinking in their every word.  On October 26, I'll be reading from Fobbit at 2:30 p.m. in the Murdock Room at the Yellowstone Art Museum.  Before that, I'll be at the Montana Festival of the Book in Missoula where, on October 11 at 2 p.m., I'll be moderating a fiction panel with Jamie Ford (Songs of Willow Frost), J. Robert Lennon (Familiar), Karen Joy Fowler (We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves), and Andrew Sean Greer (The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells).  I guaran-damn-tee it will be a lively discussion.

TEXAS
Regular readers of The Quivering Pen will remember how much I enjoyed my time in Texas during the Fobbit World Domination Tour last year--especially my stop at Brazos Bookstore--so I'm really happy to be returning to the Lone Star State.  (Side benefit: I get to see my lovely daughter, Kylie, during my visit!)  Rice University is hosting a two-day "Veterans Experience" and I'm thrilled to be joined by Ben Fountain (Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk), Karl Marlantes (Matterhorn), Lea Carpenter (Eleven Days), William Broyles Jr. (the television series China Beach, among many other series and feature films like Cast Away), and Bruce Jay Friedman (Lucky Bruce).  We'll be talking about war and words at two venues: Brazos Bookstore on November 4 at 6 p.m. for a book signing and wine reception; and at Rice University's McNair Hall on November 5 at 6 p.m. for a panel discussion.  Though both events are free, you'll need to register for them.  Follow the links to reserve your place.

ALASKA
After a nine-year absence, I'm returning to the Great Land and I'm about as excited as a polar bear in an iceberg factory.  Jean and I lived in Alaska (Fairbanks and Anchorage) for a total of nine years courtesy of the Army and I always said they had to drag us kicking and screaming away from the state when I was reassigned to another duty station.  (That's me, wrangling a king salmon back in the day.)  You can still see our fingernail claw-marks on the Alaska-Canada Highway.  So, yes, I'm very, very happy to be going back north.  I'm starting off the Alaskan Tour in Homer on November 7 at 6:30 p.m. on the Kachemak Bay Campus.  On November 8, I'll be in Fairbanks for a 7 p.m. reading at my alma mater, the University of Alaska Fairbanks (in the new Murie Auditorium).  I'll finish up my time in Alaska down in Anchorage on November 9 with a 7 p.m. reading at Great Harvest Bread Company.

Peering farther into the future, if you're near Rancho Mirage, California sometime around January 15-18, you'll find me at the Rancho Mirage Writers Festival ....where I'll still likely be thawing out from my time in Alaska.

Friday Freebie: The Residue Years by Mitchell S. Jackson

Congratulations to Jennifer Myllymaki, winner of last week's Friday Freebie twin mega-pack of fiction: The Woman Who Lost Her Soul by Bob Shacochis and Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon.

This week's book giveaway is The Residue Years, the debut novel by Mitchell S. Jackson which has just been published Bloomsbury.  For those of you who want a taste of Jackson's writing, check out his earlier contribution to the My First Time series here at The Quivering Pen about desperately trying to get final edits on the novel back to his editor on time:

Picture: it’s near midnight one Thursday in May and my FINAL deadline is Friday.   Picture me drowsing over the aforementioned thick-ass slab despite the fact that I’ve downed a couple of Red Bulls, an extra-strength Five Hour Energy, and uncountable mugs of caffeinated green tea (I don’t fool with that coffee).  Picture me engaged in the kind of last-minute editing that publishers charge extra for and also checking to obsession my watch.  Can you imagine?  Time tick-tick-ticking and turning my nerves into a fireworks show.  Me losing hope by the millisecond that I’d be able to improve the work.  Me trying my damnedest not to overmind selftalks that have digressed from, “Don’t worry, we can make it,” to “ You think we can we make it?” to “Ain’t no way we gone make this deadline, player!”

Click here to read the full, dazzling account.

The Residue Years is no less breath-taking in its linguistic loop-de-loops.  Here are the opening lines:

It's years beyond the worst of it, and it's your time, Mom, a time of head starts and new starts and starting and going and not stopping--of re-dos and fixes, of gazing at full moons and quarter-moons and seeing what before were phantasms for-reals.  If this streak keeps up (it will; why not?), you've got the rest of your life, hell yeah it's a life, minus fatmouthing no-accounts.  You hope--no, we hope (you and your eldest) that this year, next year, and the years after are an age of heartbeats, steady breath, and a healing for your harms.

And now a few words from the publisher on behalf of the novel:

Mitchell S. Jackson grew up black in a neglected neighborhood in America’s whitest city, Portland, Oregon.  In the ’90s, those streets and beyond had fallen under the shadow of crack cocaine and its familiar mayhem.  In his commanding autobiographical novel, Mitchell writes what it was to come of age in that time and place, with a break-out voice that’s nothing less than extraordinary.  The Residue Years switches between the perspectives of a young man, Champ, and his mother, Grace.  Grace is just out of a drug treatment program, trying to stay clean and get her kids back.  Champ is trying to do right by his mom and younger brothers, and dreams of reclaiming the only home he and his family have ever shared.  But selling crack is the only sure way he knows to achieve his dream.  In this world of few options and little opportunity, where love is your strength and your weakness, this family fights for family and against what tears one apart.  Honest in its portrayal, with cadences that dazzle, The Residue Years signals the arrival of a writer set to awe.

If you'd like a chance at winning a copy of The Residue Years, simply email your name and mailing address to

thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line.  One entry per person, please.  Despite its name, the Friday Freebie runs all week long and remains open to entries until midnight on Sept. 19, at which time I'll draw the winning name.  I'll announce the lucky reader on Sept. 20.  If you'd like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week newsletter, simply add the words "Sign me up for the newsletter" in the body of your email.  Your email address and other personal information will never be sold or given to a third party (except in those instances where the publisher requires a mailing address for sending Friday Freebie winners copies of the book).

Want to double your odds of winning?  Get an extra entry in the contest by posting a link to this webpage on your blog, your Facebook wall or by tweeting it on Twitter.  Once you've done any of those things, send me an additional e-mail saying "I've shared" and I'll put your name in the hat twice.

A Fine Literary Tapestry: Someone by Alice McDermott

Someone
by Alice McDermott
Reviewed by Sabra Wineteer

With the publication of her seventh novel, Someone, Alice McDermott enriches her literary tradition.  While A Bigamist’s Daughter—her first novel, published in 1982—ushered McDermott’s writing into the world, it wasn’t until her second novel, That Night, that the acclaimed author established her unique style.  That sophomore novel with its lyrical prose was a finalist for three separate and illustrious literary awards: the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.  Her mark made with That Night, McDermott has continued to delight with each subsequent novel.  At Weddings and Wakes was published in 1992 and earned McDermott her second Pulitzer Prize finalist honor.  Charming Billy followed six years later and won an American Book Award and the National Book Award.  Her fifth novel, Child of My Heart (2002), earned an International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award nomination.  Her 2006 publication, After This, garnered a third Pulitzer Prize finalist distinction.

While McDermott writes consistently what she knows—cutting her last six works from the same cloth, 20th-century working-class Irish Catholic families living in the greater New York City area—she threads each time period and setting with such rich detail and seams together the characters’ narratives with such unique tragedies, that the lives she portrays come to life.  It doesn’t matter if it's Brooklyn or Queens or Long Island during Prohibition, just after World War II, or during the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s.  Each tale resonates deeply.

McDermott’s works earn praise and accolades because all her novels are—with the exception of A Bigamist’s Daughter—extended prose poems.  McDermott’s style is to temper the tragedy of her characters’ lives with prose in shades of purple, to turn ordinary lives and events into extraordinary narratives through her language.  In truth, not much goes on plot-wise.  For this reason, her works are quiet and small, but never meager.  This is most evident in her novels’ opening lines:

That night when he came to claim her, he stood on the short lawn before her house, his knees bent, his fists driven into his thighs, and bellowed her name with such passion that even his friends who surrounded him, who had come to support him, to drag her from the house, to murder her family if they had to, let the chains they carried go limp in their hands.
      ~That Night

I had in my care that summer four dogs, three cats, the Moran kids, Daisy, my eight-year-old cousin, and Flora, the toddler child of a local artist.  There was also, for a while, a litter of wild rabbits, three of them, that had been left under our back step.  They were wet and blind, curled up like grubs and wrapped in a kind of gray caul—so small it was difficult to know if their bodies moved with the beating of their hearts or the rise of their breaths.
      ~Child of My Heart

With such styled prose, McDermott sets the scene and introduces the characters.  Then her narratives touch down on key moments in her characters’ lives—disappointments, tragedies, bewilderments, and shocks—before moving forward in time to the next, like smooth stones skipping across still ponds.  These touchstone moments are reverberating waves; some—like the opening scene of That Night— have stayed with me for years.  Then, in the middle of her novels, McDermott’s touch deftly lightens.  More happens, with less descriptive prose.  The novels’ pacing speeds up and carries the reader through to the end.  At the conclusion of her novels, however, McDermott returns to her prose-poem style, a final resonant stroke:

Trouble piled on trouble, Monsignor thought, as he walked down the center aisle (grateful that this would be a quick and simple ceremony, no messing with candles lit at the end of every pew, as was so much in vogue these days, wax dripping everywhere).
      ~After This

These aesthetic choices can alienate and there is some merit to readers’ criticisms—boring, slow, no plot, murky, unlikable or unknowable characters.  However, I find McDermott’s novels might require a different litmus test, an out-of-the-ordinary literary rubric, if you will.

When a literary novel falls short of its potential, there are numerous ways it could happen.  This is because writers have so many elements—character, plot, point-of-view, setting, pacing, theme, dialogue, description, and voice—at their disposal that a novel can easily become cacophonous.  To make an analogy, I think of these literary elements as musical components.  Whenever a band goes into a recording studio, they often rely on a sound engineer to provide expert mixing.  The engineer’s job is to create the best balance of the musical elements in order to create the desired sound: to highlight the lead singer, the lead guitar, the rhythm section, or balance the various elements to achieve the song’s purpose.  Naturally, a band’s ballad will require different mixing than their mosh pit thrash tune.

Literary fiction should be as mindful of what element it’s trying to showcase.  There has to be one facet that serves as the novel’s foundation and provides continuity through the course of its narrative. This element—whether it’s the premise, the writing style, the plot and storytelling, or some other—must be amped up.  To maintain proper balance, the remaining literary components must therefore be toned down.  Style and storytelling, for instance, are two literary aspects that are in direct competition with a reader’s energies.  A complicated, intricate premise cannot be paired with an idiosyncratic or florid style.  The result is a muddled, overwrought novel.  A simple or slow plot line with equally simplistic writing won’t work either; there is nothing at all to hold the reader’s interest.

When authors find just the right combination of character, plot, point-of-view, setting, pacing, theme, dialogue, description, and voice; when they've amped up the elements that best showcase what the novel is trying to do; when they have toned down the aspects that compete with each other, or simply confuse or overtax the reader—when all of these factors come together, the end product can be sublime.  And this superb achievement is what Alice McDermott manages in the majority of her novels.

Her latest novel, Someone, is no exception.  McDermott returns to the familiar—an Irish-American family living in New York.  They are still strongly Catholic, though, as McDermott puts it, “...churches should have been the touchstone places of our lives, a pair of Catholics such as we were.  But in truth it was the tiled corridors of these old urban hospitals that marked the real occasions of our life together.”  The author also revisits a tried-and-true theme—a coming-of-age tale that doesn’t take place within the confines of childhood and the early adult years, but one that extends well into middle age.

For Someone, the novel’s premise is simple—the ordinary life of Marie, a working class girl from Brooklyn. McDermott spans most of Marie’s life, from the time she is seven and awaiting her father’s return from work on the stoop of their brownstone apartment building to Marie’s old age complaints—a widow living alone, her grown daughters obligated to look after her when she has cataract surgery.  Along the way, McDermott alights upon the significant and memorable moments in Marie’s life, most all of them tragic, disappointing, or confusing.

All the while, the author fastens her narrative to an over-arcing theme—that of the amadan, an Old Irish word for fool.  Marie, with her severe hyperopia cannot see the world close up, both literally and figuratively.  Her eyes need thick-lens eyeglasses to make out the world, and so, too, does Marie require assistance to see her life and the lives around her clearly.  When she doesn’t understand why her heart was broken and who might replace her boyfriend, Marie’s older brother, Gabe, provides both solace and an answer:

      “Who’s going to love me?” I said.
      The brim of his hat cast his eyes in shadow.  Behind him, the park teemed with strangers.
      “Someone,” he told me.  “Someone will.”

When Marie is able to perceive events clearly, she gains insight, “…ordinary days were a veil, a swath of thin cloth that distorted the eye.  Brushed aside, in moments such as these, all that was brittle and terrible and unchanging was made clear.”  At the end of her life, Marie realizes she is an amadan, a fool.

Throughout Someone, McDermott persists with her own unique style and storytelling, striving for sublimity.  As is the case with her other novels, this style is, as Marie herself reflects on the memory of her first love, “…by turns, devastating and thrilling…”  As with her previous five novels, the author doesn’t disappoint her readers with bland descriptions of Marie’s ordinary life, but evokes each scene like a literary magician.

For example, in the opening pages of the novel, Marie recalls an encounter with a neighbor:

      And look, tore her stocking on something.
      She lifted her black shoe to the step where I sat and pulled back the long coat and the skirt.  I saw the laddered run, the flesh of Pegeen’s thin and dark-haired calf pressing through between each rung.  The nail of the finger Pegeen ran over its length was bitten down to nothing, but the movement of her hand along the tear was gentle and conciliatory.  A kind of sympathy for her own flesh, which I imitated, brushing my own hand along the unbroken silk of Pegeen’s stocking, and then over the torn threads of the run.

In describing Marie’s childhood apartment, a Brooklyn enclave of mainly first-generation Irish immigrants in the time of Prohibition, the author makes an otherwise mundane world rich by details.

The apartment we lived in was long and narrow, with windows in the front and in the back.  The back caught the morning light and the front the slow, orange hours of the afternoon and evening.  Even at this cool hour in late spring, it was a dusty, city light.  It fell on paint-polished window seats and pink carpet roses.  It stamped the looming plaster walls with shadowed crossbars, long rectangles; it fit itself through the bedroom door, crossed the living room, climbed the sturdy legs of the formidable dining-room chairs, and was laid out now on the dining-room table where the cloth—starched linen expertly decorated with my mother’s meticulous cross-stitch—had been carefully folded back along the whole length so that Gabe could place his school blotter and his books on the smooth wood.

In descriptions such as these, we see McDermott at her finest, in the literary cloth she has chosen to wear, that of the stylist.  Again, her novels are cut from the same cloth; her plots are mere threads.  The heft of her career, however, is in the intricacy of the finer points, the colors and patterns with which she embroiders her novels, as expertly decorated as Marie’s mother’s cross-stitch.  Someone is the latest addition to the linen of McDermott’s literary work, extraordinary art woven out of ordinary lives.


Sabra Wineteer grew up in Moss Bluff, Louisiana.  She has since lived in England, New Zealand, Germany, Missouri, Tennessee, Texas, and currently resides in rural Pennsylvania with her husband of eighteen years and their three tweens.  Her work has appeared in TWINS Magazine, storySouth, The Rumpus, 7X20, the anthology 140 And Counting, as well as other publications.  She is on the editorial board of the Green Hills Literary Lantern and won the Joyce Horton Johnson Fiction Award.