Driving on the Rim by Thomas McGuane: Redemption on the Range

Like many a Thomas McGuane character, I. B. “Berl” Pickett stands on the outside looking in.  As the central figure in McGuane’s newest novel, Driving on the Rim, Pickett is a doctor in Livingston, Montana and finds himself facing negligent homicide charges after one of his patients dies.

Pickett’s troubles actually began at birth when his mother—“a patriot and evangelical Christian”—christened him Irving Berlin Pickett and so, he tells us in the novel’s opening pages, “my very name illustrates the borrowed nature of my life.”  It’s as auspicious an introduction as “Call me Ishmael” or “My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip.”  Like those Melville and Dickens characters, Berl Pickett longs to understand how he fits into the life around him.  He wanders the windswept surface of the earth in search of meaning, happiness and a warm, moist woman.  This being a Thomas McGuane novel, it is not without its fair share of sex.

And humor.  There are lots and lots of laughs to be had with these pages.  The wit is droll and springs up like a jack-in-the-box.  For example, when Berl is fourteen years old, his itinerant parents drop him off at his Aunt Silbie’s house and the divorcee with a “tigerish sexual appetite” wastes no time helping the boy come of age:

       “Aunt Silbie,” I said, clamping my hand atop my old Samsonite suitcase before she could get at its contents anymore, “I can unpack myself.”
       “I want to help you,” she cried.  I didn’t really feel I could say “please don’t,” and so I stood by helpless as she flung my clothes out on the bed, inspecting them, pinning things to my shoulders with her thumbs for appraisal.  “Don’t move.  This is too important!  This calls for celebration!  You-are-the-first-to-occupy-this-room, my dear, my angel, my pet.”  She bustled out, and when she came back she had a bottle of wine in one hand.  Her clothes she had left elsewhere.  She always called it “disrobing,” though I never saw a robe.

McGuane tosses off jokes as effortlessly as an old ranch hand tying a half-hitch—he makes it look easy, but when we try the knot, the rope only ends up a tangled puzzle in our hands.  Some of the funniest moments are non-sequiturs and completely inorganic to their surroundings, but that makes McGuane’s style all the more appealing.

To make things worse, my neighbors were still fighting and I could hear them all the way across the street.  The man with the bass voice shouted, “There’s cat hair on my ChapStick!”  And shortly after that, “For Christ’s sake, hold the snow peas!”  And back came the woman’s tiny, shrill voice: “I won’t let you spoil one more Christmas!”  This was just too troubling because we were nowhere near Christmas.

Here’s a writer who would make a lively dinner guest, a raconteur who bounces from story to story, taking up a new thread of conversation before the laughter has died down from the last joke.

Driving on the Rim is a lot like that—bouncy and breezy and, in its mellowest moments, exceptionally poignant.  This new novel finds the sharply satiric author of Keep the Change, The Bushwhacked Piano, and To Skin a Cat with softer corners.  The jabs are still there, but this time around they don’t seem as cruel as some of the punches in, for instance, Ninety-Two in the Shade.  You can draw a straight line between Thomas Skelton of that 1973 novel and Berl Pickett, but the latter is a lot more fun to be around.  By his own admission, he’s “self-absorbed,” a “misfit,” and “a feckless professional drawn from absurdity to absurdity by bad impulses.”  His days are marked by a “planktonic drift” which takes him from bed to bed and, thus, trouble to trouble.  The town doctor may wear hangdog like a wrinkled suit, but he seems to be okay with that—and so are we.  You can’t help but love a guy who seeks solace in casting a fly across trout streams: “As usual when faced with troubling things I seemed unable to understand, I resorted to fishing.”

McGuane is also spot-on with his character descriptions (of which there are hundreds in this standing-room-only novel).  Of one girl named Audra, he writes: “She seemed to have the capacity to emit light dew from her skin and add starlight to her eyes at will.”

Doc Pickett’s patients are just as endearing.  One, an old railroad worker, has a recurring motto as he approaches eighty years old: “I just want to see how far I can get.”  Another is even more matter-of-fact:

I got called in to stitch up Jasper Carroll, a fireman, for the fourth time in nine years, each due to being stabbed by his wife.  I don’t think she intended to kill him and he always offered the same explanation: “We was having a discussion and she come with the blade.”

And then there are Pickett’s colleagues:

The senior doctors seemed to bask in their original status as small-town aristocrats, content in their golf, cocktails, and domestic architecture, their thin but emblematic connoisseurship, and their eccentricities.  Dr. Gallagher—now gone—wore his kilt to dinner parties, GP Boland Mercer exercised his wolfhound by tying bacon to the end of its tail, and dermatologist Joe Mariani tried year after year to interest the town in building a bocce court.

You’ll notice I haven’t said much about plot.  There is one, but it’s like a rubber ball bouncing around in a wind tunnel and is not easily condensed to a sensible synopsis.  The novel primarily pivots around the trials and tribulations of Dr. Pickett who must fight small-town gossip and politics to preserve his reputation.  But there’s so much more at work in Driving on the Rim.  At times, it reminded me of a rambling picaresque novel from the 19th century, like Tom Jones or The Pickwick Papers.  The delight is in the telling, no matter how relevant the episode McGuane is describing.

As with most of McGuane’s other fiction, Driving on the Rim is first and foremost a western novel and the landscape is as central to the book as Berl’s quest for redemption.  In fact, it might be the land itself which will eventually redeem him:

And we found in the earth, the land of our beautiful West, what others had found in religion or some world elsewhere.  The land and its wildlife were our miracles, and our gratitude did not extend to prying questions about how these came to be: they were enough.

McGuane falls just short of sentimentality here in these pages—and that’s not a criticism because he’s so good at sneaking little wistful moments past the guards of sarcasm who usually stand watch over his novels.  He makes us wince with laughter, but gives us almost as many reasons to get misty-eyed.  Almost.

In the end, it's the laughter which saves us, and redeems this big-hearted novel.

Friday Freebie: "Panopticon" by David Bajo

Congratulations to Sarah Rocklin, winner of Sena Jeter Naslund's Adam & Eve, last week's Friday Freebie.

This week, I'm teaming up with Unbridled Books to give away a copy of Panopticon, the new novel by David Bajo.  From the book jacket:

As the California borderland newspaper where they work prepares to close, three reporters are oddly given assignments to return to stories they’ve covered before—each one surprisingly personal.  The first assignment takes reporter Aaron Klinsman and photographer Rita Valdez to an abandoned motel room where the mirrors are draped with towels, bits of black tape cover the doorknobs, and the perfect trace of a woman’s body is imprinted on the bed sheets.  From this sexually charged beginning—on land his family used to own—Klinsman, Rita, and their colleague, Oscar Medem understand that they are supposed to uncover something.  They just don’t know what.

That woman's body "imprinted on the bed sheets" intrigued me, so I started reading the first chapter and found this evocative passage where Klinsman, alone in the motel room, is taking pictures of the scene:    

     The double bed was made, but the thin cover, like milk skin, was wrinkled with the pattern left by a napping body, someone primly resting, gathering strength for a night out.  With one arm outstretched, Klinsman held his camera above the bed and took a picture of the imprint.  It was difficult to get the camera right above the pattern because the person who had been there had rested just off center.  The pattern was intricate, swirled but contained like a fingerprint.
     It was a woman.  He could tell from the shape of the hips.  Her hands had been clasped together over her stomach because he could see where her elbows had rested, little cups in the cloth on either side of her form.  The cover was that sensitive, like a kind of photo plate, he thought, some silvery glass.  Her heels, too, had left matching egg cups in the cloth.

If you'd like to have a chance at delving deeper into the mystery of that motel room, all you have to do is answer this question (which is more like a poll than a trivia question this week):

Of the books shown on the Unbridled Books homepage, which one would you be most interested in reading?

Email your answer to thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line.  One entry per person, please.  In order to give everyone a fair shake in the contest, please e-mail the answer, rather than posting it in the comments section.  The contest closes at midnight on Oct. 21, at which time I'll draw the winning name.  I'll announce the lucky reader on Oct. 22.

The Darkest Hour is Just Before the Dawn of Democracy

When I look back at my year in Baghdad, specifically through the portal of my journal, I'm struck by how different a person I was just five years ago.  That David Abrams was wound tight as a clock-spring, swollen with naivete, and hypersensitive to every little thing going on around him.  Sometimes, though, he wrote some pretty good shit.

I've taken a lot of what happened in 2005 and transmogrified it into the fiction of Fobbit.  But here are a couple of entries which come to you direct from the journal, unedited except for preserving some individuals' identities.  The "Referendum," for those of you who aren't CNN junkies, refers to the effort to ratify the Iraqi constitution.  It was one of many historic days I saw that year when thousands of citizens went to the polls, braving terrorist threats and trying to put aside years of Hussein-era brainwashing.  You can read more about the referendum at this Wikipedia page.


October 13, 2005:  I was standing in line today waiting to get my flu shot and I struck up a conversation with a master sergeant who works in the Civil Affairs section.  He was telling me about a sergeant first class in his unit who had just been killed two weeks ago.  “Just a week before it happened, he was hit with an IED and injured his hand.  Walked away with nothing but a minor hand injury.  And just imagine all that he and his wife went through with that, all the trauma associated with getting hurt over here far away from your loved ones and there’s nothing either one of you can do about it.  Then, just a week later, he’s dead.  It sucked, man.  think of his wife getting both of those messages delivered to her in the space of less than two weeks.  It just really sucks, man.”

*    *    *

Lieutenant Colonel W______ came up to me, a bundle of red-inked press releases in his hand.  He was shaking his head.  He’d just come from the chief of staff’s office.  I could tell because he had that “I’ve just been kicked and I’m still numb and tingling with pain” look about him.

“The chief’s latest twist is that he doesn’t want us to put times in our press releases.”

I rolled my eyes, clapped a hand to my forehead.

“I know, I know, but I can kind of understand how it’s a security issue.  He feels like we’re giving too much away to the enemy by specifically identifying when events occur.  It’s a TTP issue.”

Pretty soon, there’s not going to be much left of our press releases for him to chop away at.  I foresee the sanitation of PRs due to Tactics, Techniques and Procedures dumbing us down to the barest element: “A military unit an IED somewhere in Baghdad did something sometime during the month of October.”  And that’s it, that’s the whole press release.  Anything more would compromise our security and put our soldiers in jeopardy.

This follows on the heels of the Iraqi government’s paranoid prohibition of allowing any Iraqi Army or Iraqi Police to talk to the media until after the Referendum.  A complete news blackout for the next week.  This is going to make it tough for us since Corps PAO is pushing us to “put an Iraqi face” on all releases, whenever possible (which, in turn, reverses the previous command of not writing about the IAs or IPs because that was now the job of the Ministry of Interior or the Ministry of Defense [which, of course, is a reversal of the way it was when I first arrived in Baghdad and I was told to play up Iraqi Security Forces successes at every turn]). So, no more credibility-lending quotes from Iraqi military or police in our PRs.  And, whatever you do, don’t allow Iraqi Soldiers to talk to anyone in the media.

“Try telling that to Gen. Jalil (one of the IA Division commanders) who’s setting up a media center right now,” snarled Maj. P_______.

*      *      *

The task force commander has decreed that “Every time a platoon-sized element or larger rolls out the gate, it’s to be a named operation."

Pretty soon, we’ll have “Operation Go To the Bathroom” or “Operation I Just Need to Gas Up the Humvee.”


October 14, 2005:  We’ve been out of paper towels in the men’s room for the past three days.  Rumor has it there’s a nationwide paper shortage because they need all the paper for the ballots in the Referendum tomorrow.  I don’t know if it’s true, but it’s a nice little urban legend that helps us get over our irritation at not being able to dry our hands.

The chow hall has also run out of ranch dressing and ketchup due to the fact that Iraq has been sealed up—no air traffic, no border crossing, no nothing until after Referendum Day.


October 15, 2005:  Referendum Day dawned with something Baghdad hadn’t heard in more than a year: the sound of silence.  No fireballs, no plumes of smoke, no rat-a-tat-tat-tat of machine guns rattling through neighborhoods.  Just the thump of our heartbeats in our ears.  This was the day, this was the moment, this was the hour of decision.

I started off the day on the wrong foot.  I came back from taking a shower to realize that I’d locked myself out of the room.  Damn.  I had to traipse all the way over to the KBR Billeting Office in my shorts and T-shirt to get the spare key.

Before going in to work an hour early, I made sure I had a big breakfast at the chow hall because who knew when I’d have the next chance to eat.  Eggs, sausage, hash browns, a pear, a pastry.  It all filled my belly and got my blood pumping.

CNN’s Christiane Amanpour was there on the overhead TVs in the chow hall telling us that Baghdad had just woken up from an overnight power outage when, she said, insurgents sabotaged a power plant on the eve of the Referendum.  I knew for a fact that it wasn’t true because our Command Information Center had called me the night before to say that one of the electrical plants had experienced a technical malfunction but that it wasn’t AIF-related.  The Anti-Iraqi Forces had other bombs to plot and plant, apparently.  Still, I let Christiane and the rest of the news media believe what they wanted.  It made for much more dramatic TV to say that a power station had been blown up by infidels, rather than a bad fuse just blew, coincidentally on the night before the nation’s biggest day of the year.

I get to work around 6:55.  Two minutes later, they make an announcement over the speakers: “Marne X-Ray, this is Marne Zulu.”

“Marne Zulu, this is Marne X-Ray.  Go ahead, over.”

“Uh, roger.  Just wanted to let you know that the President is voting now.”

I look up at the live television coverage and, sure enough, there are the President and the Prime Minister walking into a bare, non-descript room somewhere in the Green Zone.  They get their ballots from a girl in a head scarf, then they walk over to two podiums which have been set up on a stage at the front of the room.  They vote—a simple checkmark for “Yes” or for “No”—then carefully dip their forefinger into a bottle of ink which will stain them for the next 72 hours as proof that they voted (a low-tech way to prevent ballot-box stuffing).  They hold up their fingers for the camera and smile.

CNN tells me, “The Ministry of Interior says that security is much heavier now than it was in January.”

I sit down at my computer and…it begins.  Within an hour, I start to get the first photos from our brigade journalists.  I immediately throw them onto the press release template, format it, proofread and copyedit the text, then send it to the printer and rush it in to LTC W______, who then rushes it in to Colonel G______, who then rushes it back to us and then I send it out to my media e-mail list.  From conception to release, most of them take less than an hour.  Meanwhile, I continue to get more and more releases and photos from our brigades.  Soon, I have to have one of the junior-ranking soldiers from the Media Operations Center come over to be my runner.  My butt doesn’t even leave the chair—except maybe twice for a quick jog down the hall to take a choked-short whiz before sprinting back to the keyboard.  The whole thing works like clockwork and within 12 hours, I have processed 21 releases and sent 45 photos out to the world (a lieutenant later tells me he saw several of our photos appear on CNN throughout the day).  At times, I’ve got three different releases open and my brain is doing its typical split-screen function as I try to keep everything neatly compartmentalized and organized in my head.  I barely look up from my screen the whole day, except to bark at my runner, “Grab that off the printer and run it in to LTC W______.  Now!”  I have no time for courtesy.  I am a friggin' press release machine.  My arms are levers, my heart is a pulley.

That evening, after the polls have finally closed and the releases have dwindled to a trickle in my inbox, Captain L_____ looks at me and says, “Go sit down and eat dinner before you have an aneurysm.”

I don’t leave the office until nearly 11 p.m.  But I walk back to my hooch bursting with excitement and pride over the job I’ve done today.  For the first time in the 10 months I've been over here, everything went exactly as planned.  It was perfect from start to finish.  I can still hardly believe it.*


*I had good reason for my disbelief.  As anyone** who has paid attention to the news from Iraq since that day knows, the country is still struggling to stabilize its government.  The eel is still greased and elusive.

**Which is about 30% of Americans.

Benjamin Percy's "Refresh, Refresh" does exactly that

I want to talk to you for a moment about words.

All writers use them, but not everyone knows how to place them in a sentence in proper sequence and alignment.  Like a pianist’s finger touching down on Middle C in the midst of an arpeggio, one word can make or break a sentence and could bring about the collapse of an entire story, or make it soar.

Ladies and gentlemen, Benjamin Percy knows exactly what to do with his words.  Though surely he labors long and hard like the rest of us writers slicking our keyboards with sweat, Percy makes it all look so simple on the finished page.  His words, his phrasing, his sentences come at us with unforced ease; and yet they vibrate with energy, and hit us in the right place at the right time.  We never see the southpaw punch coming up on our blind side, but when it does, and after we're done reeling from the blow, we think to ourselves, “Wow, that felt good!”  And then we whip out our highlighters and ballpoints to underline especially good sentences and scribble stars in the margins.

While reading his short story collection, Refresh, Refresh, I was even moved to make this marginal notation: “I hate Ben Percy.  He makes all this look so easy.  The sentences seem to have come out of the birth canal head-first, no umbilical cord wrapped around their neck, no knife-stab of labor pains.  I know that’s not true, but that’s the way it looks on the page.”

I should state for the record that I certainly do not hate Benjamin Percy.  In fact, I love his work and have spent the tail end of this year happily burrowed in all of his books: The Language of Elk; Refresh, Refresh; and The Wilding.  To spend time with Benjamin Percy is to fall in love with language all over again.

It is virtually impossible to turn away once you start reading any one of the short stories in Refresh, Refresh. Here, for example, is how “Crash” opens:

     The doctor tells me a car crash at 60 mph threw Karen forward at 120 times her body weight.  She remembered to buckle her seat belt so that means 1/10th of a second later she came to a stop.  But her internal organs did not.  They collided with her bones and broke open.  Most people die right off the bat, the doctor says, but not Karen.  Karen died minutes later.
     I ask how many minutes later.
     “Beats me,” he says.  “No clue.”
     He says probably she looked okay—probably she even stepped away from the wreck and said, “Thank God,”—but underneath her skin things bled.

Like the eponymous wreck, it was impossible for me not to rubberneck a beginning like that.  I spent a long time thinking about that woman who, by all outward appearances is fine--until she lifts up her shirt and sees "a purplish stain spreading across her distended belly."

His stories are set in central Oregon a land, he writes, that “looks like another planet.  Mars maybe.  The reddish blackish landscape is busy with calderas, cinder cones, lava blisters, pressure ridges, pressure plateaus.”  That’s from “The Caves in Oregon,” which is essentially a haunted-house tale about a couple whose house is built over the mouth of a cave.

The realtor advertised the cave as a “natural basement with cooling properties.”   In the living room there is an insulated steel door.  Somehow, through the cracks around it, the breath of the cave finds its way in, smelling faintly of mushrooms, sulfur, cellar-floor puddles.

Percy’s timing is impeccable—he knows just when to make us laugh and when to make us flinch.  There are moments, many of them, when our breath is stolen by a single phrase or a sentence such as “she will climb into the shower and leave behind a pink ring at the bottom of the tub as she did several months ago when she began to hemorrhage, when she lost the baby.”  Or this startling, spot-on imagery: "the way her anger grows reminds him of an umbrella, a big red umbrella, suddenly sprung."  That seemingly superfluous detail of its color is vital to the surprise of the sentence.

In Percy’s world, even minor characters are memorable—like Seth Johnson, “a no-neck linebacker with teeth like corn kernels and hands like T-bone steaks.”

The stories in Refresh, Refresh mostly center around boys making the rough transition to manhood, married couples struggling to stitch themselves back together after a tragedy, a father looking to set his daughter’s life on the right track (even if it means killing her abusive boyfriend).  Percy’s characters—mostly all blue-collar workers—lead rough lives dotted with disappointment.  They’re primarily seeking redemption, or forgiveness, or even just resolution, good or bad.

One of the most memorable stories, “The Woods,” served as the basis for Percy’s excellent novel The Wilding, just released this month.  Both narratives open with a father pulling his son out of the house, insisting that he come look at something in the woods.  In The Wilding, it’s a bear caught in a tangle of barbed wire; in “The Woods,” the bear is a cinnamon-colored deer which wailed in “a high-pitched sound that lowered into a baritone moan, like pulling in a trombone.”  In both stories, the father instructs the son to kill the animal and put it out of its misery.  This fumbled attempt to induct the boy into the world of men will echo for years.

To this day, some fifteen years later, when I lie in bed in a half-dream, the deer sometimes emerges from the shadows, snapping its teeth, retreating back into shadow as quickly as it appeared.  To this day, I dislike the woods, I dislike hunting, I dislike my father.

Here’s another of my favorite passages showcasing Percy’s use of vivid imagery, this one from “The Killing”:

His daughter, Anne, lives in Salem, in the Willamette Valley, on the other side of the Cascades, where it rains more days than not and moss clings to the trees like a soft green armor.  Compared to Central Oregon, it is another world entirely, so moist and gray, the sky, the sidewalks, as if you could punch your hand through anything and withdraw a handful of squirming worms.

If, like me, you’ve ever lived in western Oregon, you know exactly what Percy is talking about—the wet, clinging air that leaves your entire day feeling damp; even your bedsheets are permanently moist.

Even though Percy transcends genre, a good portion of Refresh, Refresh hums with the dark tones of horror.  One story, “Meltdown,” concerns a son who must learn to live with the fact that his father, the managing operator of a nuclear power plant, brought about the annihilation of the Pacific Northwest.  It is both bleak and beautiful and easily stands with the best of post-apocalyptic lit like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Justin Cronin’s The Passage.

It's the precise language of his details and imagery which makes his stories trigger such a visceral, synaptic response in readers. In “Whisper,” for instance, a hunter falls out of a tree stand while in the woods by himself and lies on the forest floor, immobilized by a broken pelvis:

Words like old and stupid and I wish cycled endlessly through his head and he began to shiver and rock with the pain, and when he did, the bone splinters branched out into his body like frost across a window.  An artery snipped in half.  His skin stretched suddenly and painfully against the pressure of blood trying to find a way out, his scrotum swelling to the size of an infant’s skull.

Notice how just one right word choice—“snipped”—can make his writing burst aflame in our heads.

I know I’m probably exceeding my quote limit here, but when you’re as excited by a writer’s work as I am, then it’s hard to sit still, hands tucked under thighs, and not share the love.  I’ve got one more chunk of beauty to leave with you—this time from the opening of “When the Bear Came”--and it showcases everything I've been trying to explain, how the words fall together in perfect alignment:

     Nothing had happened in a long time.  Every now and then someone wrecked a truck or got divorced or shot a six-point elk or dropped out of college or shipped off for Iraq or bought a thousand-dollar Lotto scratch ticket at the gas station—and you know how those kinds of things get around in a small town like Tumalo—but otherwise, the sand kept blowing, the bulls kept lowing, and the air kept on smelling like it always smelled, like juniper and sage.  Irrigation pipes got moved around.  Barbed-wire fences got mended.  The occasional thunderstorm boiled over the Cascade Mountains and lit a barn on fire and flattened the alfalfa crop and eventually rattled apart into a collection of black clouds that made the sky look full of bears drinking from a big blue bowl.  That’s about it.
     Really, nothing had happened around here since the train came off the tracks and five of its cattle-cars rolled through the mini-mart, leaving behind a twisted snarl of lumber and metal from which bubbled soda pop and blood.  That was five years ago.  The only other thing I can think of is Josh Henderson, who they found at the dump, dead and apparently dragged behind a car—back and forth along a strip of county two-lane—his skin unpeeling against the asphalt in a long red trail that drew crows and magpies from all over the county.  And that happened eons ago, before I can hardly remember.
     There’s the train—there’s Josh Henderson—there’s the Deschutes County Fair and of course the weekend stock-car races and the fat-bellied trout that drift along the shadowy banks of the Metolious River and dozens more diversions, all tiny and meant to distract me from the big spell of nothing that had settled over Tumalo.  So when the bear attacks began, things changed and that was just what I needed.

Bloody Births and Great Beginnings

In reading two of the year's best novels*, Bruce Machart's The Wake of Forgiveness and David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, I was struck by the way in which both authors decided to open with graphic birth scenes.  For those who have been there--as I have for two of my three children--there is very little of the Hallmark stuff--the hazy, Vaseline-smeared camera lens, violins hitting all the happy notes, beaming smiles all around--associated with the event.  Oh sure, there are squeals and giggles, there are tears, there are videocameras shaky with emotion; but there is also the searing pain of being ripped right up the middle, there are uncontrollable farts, there are the waves of nausea and the dread feeling of "What have I gotten myself into?"  And that's just from the father's perspective.  Mothers, I assume, have it just as bad.

Don't get me wrong--I was turned inside-out with joy at the Three Blessed Events which brought three wonderful people into this world.  And I say that not just because Deighton, Schuyler or Kylie might be reading this, but because I was (and remain) truly excited to be a father.

At the same time, those birthing rooms were filled with blood, clammy sweat, and the mind-bending sight of seeing another person emerge from my wife's most intimate geography.  I was filled with a circus of emotions--not all of them pleasant.  Fortunately, all three of my children's births went well (we didn't know about Schuyler's cracked collarbone until weeks later), and the day quickly turned from the agony of labor pains to the ecstasy of holding our labors of love.

But it is not nearly so rosy in the opening pages of the novels from Machart and Mitchell.  Here is life balanced precariously with death in scenes which leave me, the reader, shaking almost as much as the spent mothers.  Before I get to those scenes, however, I turn my natal gaze back to another memorable literary birth scene.  Here is how Charles Dickens introduces us to Oliver Twist:

Although I am not disposed to maintain that the being born in a workhouse, is in itself the most fortunate and enviable circumstance that can possibly befall a human being, I do mean to say that in this particular instance, it was the best thing for Oliver Twist that could by possibility have occurred.  The fact is, that there was considerable difficulty in inducing Oliver to take upon himself the office of respiration--a troublesome practice, but one which custom has rendered necessary to our easy existence; and for some time he lay gasping on a little flock mattress, rather unequally poised between this world and the next: the balance being decidedly in favour of the latter.  Now, if, during this brief period, Oliver had been surrounded by careful grandmothers, anxious aunts, experienced nurses, and doctors of profound wisdom, he would most inevitably and indubitably have been killed in no time.  There being nobody by, however, but a pauper old woman, who was rendered rather misty by an unwonted allowance of beer; and a parish surgeon who did such matters by contract; Oliver and Nature fought out the point between them.  The result was, that, after a few struggles, Oliver breathed, sneezed, and proceeded to advertise to the inmates of the workhouse the fact of a new burden having been imposed upon the parish, by setting up as loud a cry as could reasonably have been expected from a male infant who had not been possessed of that very useful appendage, a voice, for a much longer space of time than three minutes and a quarter.

If anything funny can ever be wrestled from a brutal birth, then Dickens will go for the jocular instead of the jugular every time.

Not so with Machart who opens his debut novel The Wake of Forgiveness with this scene, set in February 1895 in south Texas:    

     The blood had come hard from her, so much of it that, when Vaclav Skala awoke in wet bed linens to find her curled up against him on her side, moaning and glazed with sweat, rosary beads twisted around her clenched fingers, he smiled at the thought that she'd finally broken her water.  He pulled back the quilt, a wedding gift sent six years before from his mother in the old country, and kissed Klara on the forehead before climbing from bed to light the lamp.  He struck a match, and there it was, streaked down his legs and matted in the coarse hair on his thighs--dark and half-dried smears of his wife's blood.
     And it kept coming.  He saddled his horse and rode shivering under a cloudless midnight sky to the Janek farm to fetch Edna, the midwife.  By the time they made it back, Klara's eyes were open but glazed in such a way that they knew she wasn't seeing through them anymore.  Her pale lips moved without giving voice to her final prayer, which entreated the child to come or her own spirit to stay, either one.
     When the baby arrived, their fourth boy, blood slicked and clot flecked, he appeared to have been as much ripped from flesh as born of it.  Klara was lost, and Edna tended to what had been saved, pinching the little thing's toe to get the breathing started, cleaning him with a rag dipped in warm milk and water, wrapping him in a blanket.
     Vaclav Skala stood at the foot of the bed, grinding his back teeth slowly against a stringy mash of tobacco he'd chewed flavorless half an hour before.  He watched Edna, a slight young woman with narrow hips and long hair as black as her eyes.  She bunched pillows beneath the dead woman's shoulder blades and behind her head before resting the baby on his mother's stomach.  Taking one of Klara's breasts between her thumb and finger, she puckered the nipple so the baby could get hold of it.  The little thing threw his hands up about his face and worked his legs beneath the blanket, and Edna held him unremittingly to the breast until he hollowed his cheeks and found it with his mouth.  "It's no hind milk in her yet," she said, "but he might get some of the yellow mother's milk.  We'll be needing a wet nurse.  It's several up country who might do it."
     Vaclav stepped back into the doorway and looked down the dark hallway toward the room where his other three boys were sleeping.  "We'll be needing a hell of a lot more than that," he said.  "Let him get what's left of her if he can.  He's done taken the rest."

That one sentence, "And it kept coming," is especially ominous and communicates a world of pain, confusion and fear in the space of those four words.  The following 305 pages of Machart's novel are every bit as good as those opening paragraphs and if you've been stirred even the least little bit by what you've read here, then I encourage you to click-and-buy at once.  You won't be sorry.

The opening birth scene in Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is much longer and does not lend itself as easily to an extended quote.  It is, however, a graphic example of how a writer can plop readers in a different place, a different time, and by sheer narrative drive make those readers feel like they've been there all the time.  That's how caught up I was in Mitchell's first chapter which describes the scene in a concubine's bedchamber in Japan, 1799.  I was hooked by the second sentence (In the rice paddy beyond the garden, a cacophony of frogs detonates) and quickly hauled into the story.

Inside the house, the concubine Kawasemi is having a hard time in the final throes of her labor: the baby has turned in the womb, only a limp arm protrudes as the midwife Orito does what she can to extract the fetus, with the help of a male doctor (Maeno) who, custom dictates, must remain behind a muslin curtain.    

     Orito clasps the fetus's mucus-smeared wrist to search for a pulse.
     Maeno now asks her in Dutch, "What are your opinions?"
     There is no pulse.  "The baby is dead," Orito answers, in the same language, "and the mother will die soon, if the child is not delivered."  She places her fingertips on Kawasemi's distended belly and probes the bulge around the inverted navel.  "It was a boy."  She kneels between Kawasemi's parted legs, noting the narrow pelvis, and sniffs the bulging labia: she detects the malty mixture of grumous blood and excrement, but not the stench of a rotted fetus.  "He died one or two hours ago."

The scene draws out for several more agonizing pages, with the midwife and doctor debating whether or not to amputate the baby's arm to more easily get it out of the birth canal.  Orito decides to try manually unwrapping the umbilical cord from the fetus's neck and to position the body for a better delivery.  Water is called for, the nervous, hovering housekeeper finally allows Dr. Maeno to come from behind the curtain, strips of linen are given to the mother on which to bite down, forceps are washed and inserted, and then...    

     "What is it you're waiting for?" asks the housekeeper.
     "The next contraction," says the doctor, "which is due any--"
     Kawasemi's breathing starts to swell with fresh pain.
     "One and two," counts Orito, "and--push, Kawasemi-san!"
     "Push, Mistress!" exhort the maid and the housekeeper.
     Dr. Maeno pulls at the forceps; with her right hand, Orito pushes the fetus's head toward the birth canal.  She tells the maid to grasp the baby's arm and pull.  Orito feels the resistance grow as the head reaches the aperture.  "One and two...now!"  Squeezing the glans of the clitoris flat comes a tiny corpse's matted crown.
     "Here he is!" gasps the maid, through Kawasemi's animal shrieks.
     Here comes the baby's scalp; here his face, marbled with mucus...
     ...Here comes the rest of his slithery, clammy, lifeless body.
     "Oh, but--oh," says the maid.  "Oh.  Oh.  Oh..."
     Kawasemi's high-pitched sobs subside to moans, and deaden.
     She knows.  Orito discards the forceps, lifts the lifeless baby by his ankles and slaps him.  She has no hope of coaxing out a miracle: she acts from discipline and training.  After ten hard slaps, she stops.  He has no pulse.  She feels no breath on her cheek from the lips and nostrils.  There is no need to announce the obvious.  Splicing the cord near the navel, she cuts the gristly string with her knife, bathes the lifeless boy in a copper of water, and places him in the crib.  A crib for a coffin, she thinks, and a swaddling sheet for a shroud.

So there you have it.  Two books, two births, two authors sitting in separate rooms bringing their stories into the world the hard way.  Machart and Mitchell certainly know what they're doing.  By beginning with the hard, troubled nativity of their characters, they're setting the stage for the ride readers are about to take.  I could think of no better way to start these novels.


*Full disclosure: I haven't read all of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, having reluctantly set it aside for other assignments which take precedence.  But I know good writing when I see it, and Mitchell is brimming over with it.

Tweeting "Deliverance"

It was the river that made me do it; specifically, the words James Dickey used to describe the river.  I'd barely set foot inside Deliverance when Dickey's prose-poetry began lapping up over first my ankles, then my knees.  Within a matter of pages, I was swept away by the current.

This was not at all what I'd been expecting.

For years, I'd heard Dickey's 1970 novel was a must-read, but like all those other "must-reads" on my list, it had gone unread, the dust on its shelf serenely undisturbed.  Several years ago, I'd seen the movie with Jon Voigt and Burt Reynolds, so I could hold my own in cocktail-party conversations or at beer gardens during writing conferences.  I knew it was about four Atlanta men--Ed Gentry, Bobby Trippe, Drew Ballinger, and ultra-macho Lewis Medlock--and their harrowing three-day canoe trip down the fictional Cahulawassee River in northern Georgia.  I knew it was an outing rife with arrows, whitewater, and sodomy.  I knew Dickey was primarily a poet, but would always be remembered for his fiction (much like Thomas Hardy).  I knew Deliverance was an impassioned protest against the symbolic rape of the land by developers (the Cahulawassee is slated to be destroyed by a downriver dam months after the men raft down its rapids).  I knew it was supposed to be good.  I just didn't know how good.

Narrated by Ed, Deliverance runs along from first page to last in what feels like an unbroken confessional babble, words spilling one after the other in a stream of never-ending imagery and meditation on the human condition.  There is no stopping once you set foot inside.

By the end of the second sentence, as the men unroll a map on a bar table, I had already whipped out my ballpoint pen and started scribbling the margins.

It unrolled slowly, forced to show its colors, curling and snapping back whenever one of us turned loose.  The whole land was very tense until we put our four steins on its corners and laid the river out to run for us through the mountains 150 miles north.

As I read, the novel grew stronger, like it was one of Lewis' muscles flexing and rippling across the page.  Dickey's prose has the same coiled power as the outdoorsman's flesh: "The muscles were bound up in him smoothly, and when he moved, the veins in the moving part would surface."  That sentence is startling for both its homo-eroticism as well as the way the words fall so easily off the tongue.  In that same scene, where Ed and Lewis are bathing in the river, Dickey gives us these wonderful sentences:

The river was very cold; it felt as though it had snow and ice in it, and had only just turned then to water.  But it was marvelously clear and alive, and broke like glass around you and came together unhurt.

A lesser writer would have stopped short, leaving off that marvelous, essential detail of the water "coming together unhurt."  Dickey's talent as a poet is everywhere in Deliverance.  He writes in elegant bursts of language, self-contained images tailor-made for stand-alone quotes.

That is what brought me to Twitter.

My enthusiasm for Deliverance spilled over and I started to share my favorite passages in 140-character-or-less messages on the website (where you'll find me as @davidabrams1963).  In the past, I hadn't made very good use of my Twitter time--mainly posting links back to this blog and the occasional re-tweet of someone else's far more pithy post.  I know entire novels have been composed, snippet by snippet, at Twitter; and now there's even someone with a whole lot of time on his or her hands who is tweeting the complete works of William Shakespeare (@iam_shakespeare).  But for me, the site was just a place for clever Tweeple to telegraph abbreviated enigmas.  (This was before I discovered @SteveMartinToGo and his characteristic wit boiled down to tweets: "Just did CSI cameo. Went well. But got up, saw CHALK OUTLINE. What? Miscommunication about role. EMMY CHANCES DASHED.")  I saw little relevant use for Twitter and thought maybe I just didn't understand it.

But then, I came across a short passage in Deliverance and decided to tweet my enthusiasm: ("'She had good hands; they knew me.'  Best.  Sex.  Scene.  EVER.").  Soon, I was spreading my 140-character love for the book on a regular basis.  As I read the novel, I started evaluating sentences for their ability to squeeze into a Twitter window.  Near the end of the book, my tweets diminished, but that was only because Dickey held me fast to the page and I could not be distracted from that final day's plunge down the Cahulawassee with the shattered men.

Here are the screenshots (bear in mind, they go in reverse order, working back from the end of the novel).

(I got a little confused in the count of "moments" here)

(Bonus: includes a dinner menu tweet!)




(Moment #1 was that previously-mentioned sex scence)

Some of Deliverance's best prose couldn't be tweeted and I was reluctant to break a quote into more than two tweets.  Here are some of my other favorite passages:

The highway shrank to two lanes, and we were in the country.  The change was not gradual; you could have stopped the car and got out at the exact point where suburbia ended and the red-neck South began.  I would like to have done that, to see what the sense of it would be.  There was a motel, then a weed field, and then on both sides Clabber Girl came out of hiding, leaping onto the sides of barns, 666 and Black Draught began to swirl, and Jesus began to save.  We hummed along, borne with the inverted canoe on a long tide of patent medicines and religious billboards.  From such a trip you would think that the South did nothing but dose itself and sing gospel songs; you would think that the bowels of the southerner were forever clamped shut; that he could not open and let natural process flow through him, but needed one purgative after another in order to make it to church.  (pg. 48)

A slow force took hold of us; the bank began to go backward.  I felt the complicated urgency of the current, like a thing made of many threads being pulled, and with this came the feeling I always had at the moment of losing consciousness at night, going toward something unknown that I could not avoid, but from which I would return.  I dipped the paddle in.  (pg. 82)

(On the first night as the men are sleeping in their tent)  I could hear the river running at my feet, and behind my head the woods were unimaginably dense and dark; there was nothing in them that knew me.  There were creatures with one forepaw lifted, not wanting yet to put the other down on a dry leaf, for fear of the sound.  There were the eyes made for seeing in this blackness; I opened my eyes and saw the dark in all its original color.  (pg. 96)

Deliverance is a full-immersion novel, as engulfing and as full of color as the blackness outside that tent, and Dickey surrounds your senses with such breathlessly beautiful sentences that you don't know how deep into the words you've gone until you realize you're not breathing.  This is not the macho back-to-nature adventure thriller its reputation would have us believe, it is something else altogether.  I don't know of any class in which to place the novel, except as a hybrid of the prose and poetry genres, shot through with equal parts Faulkner and Stephen King.  It is gothic, it is meditative, it is horrifying, it is pristine.  It is profane, it is sacred.  And it is never, ever dull.

Friday Freebie: "Adam & Eve" by Sena Jeter Naslund

Congratulations to Margot Mustich who won a copy of Philip Roth's Nemesis, last week's Friday Freebie.

This week's book giveaway is Sena Jeter Naslund's new novel, Adam & Eve.  Naslund is one of those writers who seems to stretch herself with each new book.  She's written about Captain Ahab's wife, the civil rights movement, and Marie Antoinette, each time taking a fresh spin on familiar landmarks of our cultural history.  This time around, she tackles evolution, extraterrestrials and "an ancient codex concerning the human authorship of the Book of Genesis."  I put the novel to the opening-paragraph test:

     A nude couple is standing in the shade of a small, leafy tree.  The quality of the filtered light on their bare skin attracts me, and I stand with them to enjoy the dappled shade.  Through pinholes formed where leaves cross, the sunlight creates globules of brightness on the grass.  My bare toes nudge inside one of those softly defined orbs, but then I remember to look up.
     From the sky, at the rate of 32.2 feet per second, a grand piano is hurtling down like a huge black bird of prey over our upturned faces.  In that moment is a beginning and an end, alpha and omega, Genesis and Revelation.

That's a literal falling piano and it's not spoiling anything to say that it will leave the novel's protagonist, Lucy, a widow.  It sets in motion a chain of events which eventually lands Lucy on "a slip of verdant land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers" where she meets a shell-shocked soldier named Adam and they establish their own Garden of Eden.  I'm not sure, but I'm guessing snakes are involved.

If you'd like a chance at winning a copy of Adam & Eve, all you have to do is answer this question:

What was the profession of Lucy's ill-fated husband Thom?  (The answer can be found on this page)

Email your answer to thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line.  One entry per person, please.  In order to give everyone a fair shake in the contest, please e-mail the answer, rather than posting it in the comments section.  The contest closes at midnight on Oct. 14, at which time I'll draw the winning name.  I'll announce the lucky reader on Oct. 15.

Soup and Salad: Ben Percy Goes All In, Cinthia Ritchie Runs and Weeps, 5 Under 35 Do a Happy Dance, Lydia Davis Gets Knee-Deep in "Bovary," Justin Cronin Talks Craft

On today's menu:

1.  Continuing the Benjamin Percy lovefest* at The Quivering Pen, here's a great essay he wrote for the latest Glimmer Train bulletin: "All In."

I put all my chips on the table.  I went all in.  The story "Refresh, Refresh" was a game-changer for me, not only because of its success, but because it changed my approach to writing.  Now I never hold back.  I dynamite the vault and let all my treasure pour out.  Every story is an "all in" story.

And if you haven't already read his earlier essay in Poets & Writers on the revision process, then click thee there posthaste.

2. Alaska writer Cinthia Ritchie gives us a glimpse into her writing process over the course of a few days:

Saturday
     I run up Flattop with my dog, late in the evening when the sun is setting and the air is filled with that mystery that comes right before dusk.  Running up the steep little incline to Blueberry Hill, around the bend and over to the trail leading up to the saddle.  The wind so strong I can barely stay on the trail.
     At the top the wind is so fierce and loud that I struggle to remain upright.  Running back down in the near-darkness, I feel strong and rugged and completely invincible.
     Two hours later I’m squatting in the dry bathtub sobbing over my novel.  I can’t get the tone right, or the dialogue or the pacing, for that matter.  Nothing works.  The book is a mess.  I am a complete and total failure.

Boy, can I relate!  Except for all that running crap.  Read the rest here at 49 Writers.


3.  The National Book Foundation has announced its annual "5 Under 35" awardees:

• Sarah Braunstein, The Sweet Relief of Missing Children (W.W. Norton & Co., 2011)
• Grace Krilanovich, The Orange Eats Creeps (Two Dollar Radio, 2010)
• Téa Obreht, The Tiger’s Wife (Random House, 2011)
• Tiphanie Yanique, How to Escape from a Leper Colony (Graywolf, 2010)
• Paul Yoon, Once the Shore (Sarabande, 2009)

Yanique's book is the only one currently on my shelf, and I haven't had the chance to read it yet.  What really struck me about the list is its diversity and the fact that some of the smaller presses like Two Dollar Radio, Graywolf and Sarabande are making appearances.  These are the publishers who really deserve the recognition for the good work they're doing on behalf of us, the readers.  I mean, it's impossible to turn away from a novel like Krilanovich's, which is described at the publisher's website as "an incredibly ambitious and original first novel about a 'slutty teenage hobo vampire junkie' crashing the Pacific Northwest's 7-Eleven coffee stations, SPCA kitten rooms, yard sales, and pancake breakfasts at the senior center, in search of her foster-sister, Kim."  You had me at "slutty."

 

4.  Lydia Davis on translating Flaubert's masterpiece: "Knee-Deep in 'Bovary'":

“You’d think, working from one text, that the translations have got to be fairly similar,” Davis says.  “But it’s amazing how different they all are.  Some are fairly close, but then they’ll add a metaphor that Flaubert doesn’t have.  And some are outrageously far away.  Two of the most popular, Steegmuller and Hopkins—they’re not bad books.  They’re well written in their own way.  But they’re not close to what Flaubert did.”

5.  January Magazine recently sat down for a detailed conversation with Justin Cronin.  He gives a sneak peek of The Passage's sequels, talks about developing characters, and says he's now reveling in the lap of luxury (at least as luxurious as writers can get these days):

“The best thing...is that I get to do one job as opposed to 16.  The others books that I wrote were written in tandem with maintaining a pretty active career as a teacher, but also as a freelance writer.  I had to do a lot of work just to put food on the table, and I was certainly not paid so much for those books that that could become my full-time job.  I’m more stability-minded than a lot of people.  So The Passage has given me the opportunity to just be a writer for some extended period of time...I think in some ways that was always the goal.  To be able to point all my energies at one thing.  That’s the most discernible difference.  The other one is that my office has a bathroom, which is really nice.  I used to work in the garage, and now I work above the garage.  I was always the guy peeing in the yard at four in the morning. I was too lazy to go in the house, so now I’m in the lap of luxury up here.”

*And it will keep on keepin' on with a review of the Refresh, Refresh collection as soon as I get up off my lazy butt and write it.  Here's a sneak preview: "Loved it."

We interrupt this blog for a brief commercial

Hey!  Look over there in the top right-hand corner, just under the blog banner!  It's a new button!

That's right, Faithful Reader, you can now subscribe to The Quivering Pen on your Kindle.  If you click the button, you'll be taken to a page where you can order content of this blog to be automatically delivered to your device soon after it appears here.

"What does all this mean?"  I'm glad you asked that question, Eager Consumer!

It means you can read The Quivering Pen on a train, in a car, on a boat, or with a goat.  You can read it in bed, you can even read it standing on your head.  In other words, subscribing to The Quivering Pen will untether you from your computer and make the blog more portable.  If, for instance, you want to go sit in the crook of a tree and read it, or if you want some entertainment while you're halfway up the slope of Mount Kilimanjaro on that bucket-list climb which has come only after decades of putting loose change in a milk jug and then cashing in a couple of IRAs, or if you want to slip away to the bathroom stall at work for twenty minutes at a time and doing so with a lightweight Kindle is so much more convenient and less conspicuous than lugging your laptop in with you--not to mention avoiding the appearance that you're surfing porn on company time; whereas, the Kindle is, you know, a book.  That's what it means.

What it doesn't mean:
1.  You won't have to pay to read it here on the worldwide web, at its regular non-Kindle location.
2.  There won't be separate content between the two versions.  In fact, there aren't two versions.  The Kindle Quivering Pen is just a re-publication of what you find here.
3.  I won't get rich from this.  I only get a small slice of the subscription price ($1.99); Amazon gets the bigger piece.  So, about once every six months, I should be getting a royalty check large enough to buy me a bowl of gruel.  Unless of course you tell a hundred of your friends about The Quivering Pen, and they tell a hundred friends, and they tell a hundred friends.  In which case, you'll all be invited to a weekend party at my Bel-Air mansion.

Now, the burning question on everybody's mind: "Why in all that's good and holy would I pay for something I can get for free?"

Honestly, I'm not entirely sure.  The pinch-penny consumer in me rebels against the very idea.  But I'm hoping there might be one or two of you out there with enough disposable income to take pity on this struggling, starving blogger.

Note: If you do visit The Quivering Pen's Kindle page at Amazon.com and would like to leave a review of your experience here, I'd be ever so grateful.

I now return you to your regular programming....

I Love My Kindle. I Hate My Kindle.

I now have two e-books under my e-belt: The Passage and Freedom.  Both were read on my Kindle and both will most likely make my year-end Top 10 list.  By coincidence, both titles could point, metaphorically, to the way my reading life has changed this past year.  Am I making the passage from "real books" to e-books?  And does eInk offer a certain freedom from ink on paper?

The jury is still out.  The Twelve Angry Men are still debating the issue in the ante-chamber and, at this point, Henry Fonda seems to be the lone holdout in favor of printed books.  For those of you who have seen Sidney Lumet's movie, you know how the story turns out.  And, while I won't spoil it here, let's just say that some of the bloom has gone off the rose since I first gushed about my new gadget a few months ago.  (Cue Henry Fonda: slam knife into heart of Kindle at center of table).

I'm still enthused about the sleek design of the device and the fact it can hold hundreds of pounds of books.  I like the immediacy of buying, downloading, and instantly reading books.  And the electronic search, highlights, and notes features of the Kindle are life-savers to me as a reviewer who in the past has had to spend many frustrating minutes trying to find quotable passages which refused to be found.  There are many things to love about e-readers.

But there are an equal number of things to love about batteries-not-required books.  I do miss the tactile, erotic pleasures of velvety paper, stiff covers and the nose-tingle of fresh ink or bookshelf dust (depending on the age of the book).  I miss dustjackets, cover art, and the gilt-embossed boards of my vintage novels from the Edwardian Era.  Curiously, one of the things I missed most about tactile books while reading The Passage and Freedom was the ability to accurately chart my progress through the pages.  The bottom of the Kindle screen tells me a "location" instead of a page number and informs me that I'm x% of the way through the book.  But that tells me nothing.  Being 84% of the way through Don Quixote and 84% of the way through Of Mice and Men are two completely different things when I calculate the time left for me to finish reading the book.  I have the need to actually see the bundle of read and unread pages pinched between my fingers--84% on one side, 16% on the other.  All of which points to the fact that I'm a very competitive reader--in competition with myself and, in a broader sense, against the clock of my life as I try to read EVERY BOOK EVER WRITTEN before I die.

In the Kindle Kingdom, there's no flipping ahead to find your next stopping place (for me, a chapter break or a white space within the chapter).  Or if there is, it's not as convenient or as quick as riffling paper pages from right to left.  Because my reading life is divided into small 20-minute fragments throughout the day, finding the next stopping place is vital to me.

To the relief of my wife and my already-groaning bookshelves, I'll continue to buy and read e-books.  Turning pages with the click of a thumb or a swipe of the forefinger is fun! fresh! and so tomorrow!  But, honestly, it's not quite the same pleasurable experience.

My current book is an old hardback edition of James Dickey's Deliverance--no dustjacket, just beige boards with the title printed in simple green off-center near the place where my fingers hold the book.  The pages are deckle-edged--sort of like the rippling surface of the Cahulawassee River.  This morning, as I turned to page 111, a dust bunny, trapped by some long-ago reader and forgotten about for years, fell out onto my lap.  I picked it up and examined the hairs, fibers, and the speck of red lint which I pictured coming from a previous reader's sweater.  In an instant, that dust bunny connected me with a nameless, faceless someone who, for all I know, could be dead by now but who had once traveled these same pages.  I'll never have a moment like that with my Kindle.

*     *     *     *     *

I've been collecting links to e-book-related stories for about a month, waiting for the right moment to share them with you.  As I turn (er, click) the last page of Freedom, now seems as good a time as any.  Bear in mind, some of these are more than two months old (geologic epochs in Internet Time) so some of the information might be outdated and seem even quaint from a mere two month's perspective.

1.  The Wall Street Journal looks at the reading habits of e-reader readers.

Since getting her Kindle last year, Leslie Johnson has been reading more often and in more places—like on a kayak.  On a recent trip, the 34-year-old engineer from Albany, N.Y., settled into a science-fiction novel while her husband fished.  "I put it in a waterproof cover," she says.

2.  Author Deborah Willis debates the bound vs. e-book question.  The gadgets pretty much suffer a crushing defeat.

When books become computers, they will no longer be books.

3.  The Wall Street Journal says e-books may not bode well for writers, financially-speaking.  Yeah, but when were we ever in this business for the $$?

     Priced much lower than hardcovers, many e-books generate less income for publishers.  And big retailers are buying fewer titles.  As a result, the publishers who nurtured generations of America's top literary-fiction writers are approving fewer book deals and signing fewer new writers.  Most of those getting published are receiving smaller advances.
     "Advances are down, and there aren't as many debuts as before," says Ira Silverberg, a well-known literary agent.  "We're all trying to figure out what the business is as it goes through this digital disruption."

"Disruption"?  As if the e-revolution wasn't here to stay?

4.  Serialized novel delivered by an app.

     Best-selling authors Neal Stephenson and Greg Bear are looking back to the future.  This month, they launched a story —The Mongoliad— using a 175-year-old publishing model.  Their novel-as-app (or app-as-novel) is coming out in weekly, serial segments, complete with cliffhanger endings and a cheap subscription rate.
     Literary luminaries such as Charles Dickens (The Pickwick Papers), Alexandre Dumas (The Count of Monte Cristo) and Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina) published some of their most popular works in the serial format in the 19th century.
     Today, instead of reading serialized stories in magazines, readers will pay $5.99 at mongoliad.com for a six-month app that gets them a chapter a week zapped to their smart phone, iPad or computer.

5.  The New York Times looks at uneasy marriages split between kith and Kindle:  Of Two Minds About Books.

     Auriane and Sebastien de Halleux are at sharp odds over The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, but not about the plot.  The problem is that she prefers the book version, while he reads it on his iPad.  And in this literary dispute, the couple says, it’s ne’er the twain shall meet.
    “She talks about the smell of the paper and the feeling of holding it in your hands,” said Mr. de Halleux, 32, who says he thinks the substance is the same regardless of medium.  He added, sounding mildly piqued, “She uses the word ‘real.’ ”

6.  Still on the fence about which device to buy?  Kindlerama sorts through some of the pros and cons.

7.  And, finally, giving Kindles a bad name (as well as elbow driving), an Oregon bus driver is caught on camera reading while driving a 40-foot bus.  Any guesses as to what he was reading?

Friday Freebie: "Nemesis" by Philip Roth

Congratulations to Becky Leggieri, winner of Michael Cunningham's By Nightfall , last week's Friday Freebie.

This week's giveaway is Philip Roth's new novel, Nemesis.  This looks like a good one which I'll be cracking open someday very soon.  But don't just take my word for it, here are snippets from three major reviews:

Booklist:  "The fourth in the great and undiminished Roth's recent cycle of short novels follows Everyman (2006), Indignation (2008), and The Humbling (2009), and as exceptional as those novels are, this latest in the series far exceeds its predecessors in both emotion and intellect."

Kirkus Reviews:  "Nemesis presents a revelation as startling as the discovery of a planet or the alignment of a new constellation... Nemesis could be the darkest novel Roth has written and ranks with the most provocative."

Library Journal:  "Roth, one of our greatest American writers, is unrivaled in his mastery at evoking mid-20th-century New Jersey, but it's the thoughtful examination of the toll guilt takes on the psyche, the futility of raging against God or Fate, and the danger of turning blame inward that give this short novel its power."

If you'd like a chance at winning Nemesis, all you have to do is answer this question:

What New Jersey city--which is also Roth's birthplace--is the setting for Nemesis?

Email your answer to thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line.  One entry per person, please.  In order to give everyone a fair shake in the contest, please e-mail the answer, rather than posting it in the comments section.  The contest closes at midnight on Oct. 7, at which time I will place the names of the correct respondents in a vintage potato-chip tin and draw the winning name.  I'll announce the lucky reader on Oct. 8.