Giving Thanks for Books

At this uncertain and unsteady Thanksgiving, I am grateful for many things: family, health, a stable job, and the food I’m about to eat in T-minus two hours. Somewhere on that list, though, are the thousands of books which line my basement walls. They are my comfort, my inspiration, and my escape hatch (down which I frequently find myself sliding these days). Where would we be without the music of words?

Bookish recently asked several authors (including yours truly) to name the one book for which they’re thankful. I could have plucked any number of books from my shelf. I mean, just a casual perusal yields this harvest of books which have comforted, inspired, etc. over the years: A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor, The Collected Stories of Raymond Carver, Rabbit, Run by John Updike, Jimmy Corrigan by Chris Ware, Rock Springs by Richard Ford, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer, and The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. I could go on and on, but Bookish demanded a single book and so I tried to narrow it down as best I could. My response:

Just one book? Impossible. Narrowing it down to just one shelf of my nearly 40 shelves? Next to impossible. Maybe I could pick just one author out of the dozens who’ve held sway over my imagination for 50 years? Doable, but still difficult. Okay, okay, okay… (takes deep breath, stares long and hard at his library) I’ll choose… David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. I could have easily picked ten others from my Dickens shelf (one of the longest in my library), but I’ll settle on this bursting-at-the-seams bildungsroman about a thinly-disguised C.D. as D.C. who makes his way from abused waif to accomplished author over the course of three inches of pressed and bound pages. I am particularly thankful for Dickens’ masterful marriage of plot and character whose happy union always sharpens both my imagination and my pen—never more so than in the personages of Betsey Trotwood, Steerforth, all the Peggotties, Mr. Micawber, Dora, David and, oh, the shudder-worthy Uriah Heep. David Copperfield is a triumph! And God bless us, everyone! Oh wait, that’s from another favorite of mine.

Click here to read the picks from my fellow authors

What books are on your most-thankful list? Let me know in the comments section below.

The Truth About Raymond Carver

Raymond Carver (left) with his brother James

James Carver would like to set the record straight.

Over the years, his brother Raymond’s life has been distorted by those who’d like to hitch a ride on the famous writer’s coattails. “Everyone seems to have an agenda when writing about my brother,” James writes in a personal remembrance published at Electric Literature today, on what would have been Raymond Carver’s 78th birthday had he not died (much too early) in 1988. The essay, which has the Carveresque boiled-down title of “Reflections on Raymond Carver and My Family,” is an earnest, simply-told collection of family memories and includes several never-published photos of the Carver family (which Electric Literature has allowed me to reprint here, along with a brief excerpt below).

Though it’s unclear why younger brother James feels the sudden urge to purge the record of myths and lies, he casts a wide net when it comes to finding the source of rumors, including pointing a finger at Ray himself: “Ray embellished his childhood in interviews as well as in writings. He misrepresented facts, making our home life seem worse than it was. Perhaps he wanted to make his climb to fame appear more remarkable, or perhaps alcohol abuse clouded his memory.” James also blames John Updike for helping to taint the legacy by saying (at Carver’s memorial service, of all places) that Raymond grew up in a house of abuse and alcoholism. “Updike innocently picked that information up from others,” James writes. “This is how incorrect information perpetuates itself. If a lie is told often enough, it becomes the truth.”

He would probably be the first to admit he regrets the way he treated his sibling at times. In Carol Sklenicka’s biography (which James says is “the only serious and credible one written so far”), she describes the time when, shortly after Ray’s first wife Maryann kicked him out of their house, he turned to his younger brother for help:

Ray tried to live in an apartment by himself and hated it. Then he asked his brother, James, if he could stay in his Santa Clara apartment while James and his wife were on vacation. Concerned that Ray’s drinking, smoking, and partying might lead to damage at their home, James and Norma declined Ray’s request. Ray took it hard. He told his friends, “My brother forsook me, he forsook me”—lingering over the biblical phrase as much as he did over the wound. From their mother, James later learned that Ray never forgave him. He would come to regret putting “material possessions before my love for my brother.”

The Electric Literature essay seeks to mend some of those broken bridges and it can be quite moving at times, serving as a sort of eulogy—one which James perhaps wishes he could have delivered at his brother’s funeral. Instead, we can be grateful to Electric Literature for allowing us all to share in these small, good moments from a family’s history.

Here is just one of those memories from the time the Carvers lived in Washington state. To read the rest at Electric Literature, click the link at the end...

In Yakima, we had the best years of our family’s life. Our decline began in 1956, the year our father quit the Cascade Lumber Company in Yakima. He had been there for fifteen years or more, never missing a day’s work. Up until that moment, dad always paid his bills on time and provided his family with a good living. He was responsible, working since he was fourteen or fifteen years old and supporting his parents when they needed his help. Our family was living in a nice bungalow on Summitview Avenue, the better side of Yakima. We were settled, happy and doing well. Then dad’s brother Fred, who had been an institution at Cascade, was fired.

Our father quit Cascade and accepted a job as a saw filer with his brother, Fred, in Chester, California. That move started the decline of the Carver family, a slow insidious unraveling that cost all of us almost everything. Dad’s health began to deteriorate when he got blood poisoning from a saw while working for the Collins Pines Lumber Company in Chester. It caused our mother grief and hardship, forcing her to work full time to support the family when my father became too ill to work. It greatly affected my life, as I was in and out of many schools, with no roots, no friends and no permanency. I had wanted to attend the University of Washington, in Seattle and had taken all necessary preparatory courses in high school. If we hadn’t moved to California, I most likely would have graduated from the University of Washington, with my father’s help, and lived in Seattle. The move also affected Ray and Maryann’s life together for many years into the future. If Dad had not left Yakima, he might have been able to have helped them financially; maybe their lives wouldn’t have been such a painful financial struggle for all those years; it may even have averted Ray’s alcoholism.

Ray and I lost our beloved father in Crescent City, California, in June of 1967. Dad was working as a saw filer for Simpson Timber Company. The night of his death, he ate a big dinner and went to bed early. He didn’t wake up the next morning. Mom found him cold and blue. The doctor was called. Dad’s heart had failed; he was pronounced dead and taken to the local morgue. Fortunately, I was with my mother, between college semesters. We were both in a state of shock. We immediately called Maryann in Sacramento. She called Ray, who was in Iowa, enrolled in the university to work on his master’s degree. He withdrew from school and came to Crescent City. After arrangements were made, we all followed the hearse back to Yakima. It was our father’s last journey.

Click here to read the rest at Electric Literature

Jigsaw Lives: Chris Ware Builds Stories

My bags were packed. Into my suitcase, I’d neatly arranged the folded flags of shirts, squares of underwear, my shaving kit, my slippers, a corkscrew for an emergency bottle of wine, and a clump of white socks which, with their balled cuffs and trailing streamers of feet, looked like sperm swimming upstream. I was ready for a week-long business trip during which I’d work hard for eight hours of the day then retreat to the bland sterility of a hotel room where I’d eat a lonely salad, call my wife, take a bath, and wonder if it was time for that emergency bottle of pinot noir.

One thing remained: choosing the stack of books—always too large and over-ambitious—which I’d bring along with me on the trip. I stuffed a bookbag with Dashiell Hammett novels, a biography of the actress Jean Arthur, two poetry collections, four literary journals (Tin House, Ecotone, etc.), a Hardy Boys mystery, and A Little Life (which is awfully thick for a book with the word “little” in its title). I was almost ready. Only one book remained, but it was too big to fit in the bookbag, so I balanced it on top of my suitcase while I started loading my other bags in the car.

On one trip back inside, I found my wife standing in the hallway, staring at the book on top of the suitcase. “What is that, a puzzle?”

“No, honey. It’s not a puzzle. It’s a book which I’ve been meaning to read ever since I bought it at Powell’s three years ago when I was there giving a reading for the Fire and Forget anthology and I don’t know why I’ve been putting off reading it for so long but I figured now would be the best time to read it, sitting in my boring, depressing hotel room, reading a graphic-novel-in-parts about equally lonely and depressed people and I can’t friggin’ wait because I have a feeling it will be one of the best books I read all year.”

That wasn’t actually my answer. All I told my wife was, “No, that’s a book called Building Stories by Chris Ware.”

Like I said (in my head), I don’t know why I’ve put off reading Building Stories. Was I waiting for the rainy day? Did I want to save Building Stories for later, like it was a much-anticipated delectable dessert? Was I worried about having to spread out the box’s contents all over the breakfast nook table and read it in full view of my wife? Not that she’d care, but I wanted my time with Chris Ware to be intimate, solitary, and free from distraction. A hotel room would be perfect.

And now, as I sit here at the end of the week, it has been the ideal homogeneous environment in which to finally explore the lives in Building Stories’ apartments. When I’m reading Ware, I am deep-sea diving into his world and nothing—not the lure of the internet, not the slippery crunch of lettuce from my sad little salad, not even a phone call from my wife (forgive me, honey)—can pull me from that inky universe.

The packaging is indeed shaped like a puzzle box, but instead of holding 1,000 interlocking jigsaw pieces, the reader is greeted with pamphlets, posters, and books (one which resembles a “Little Golden Book” which most of us read as children). When I put out the call on social media a week ago asking, “Where should I start?” the nearly-universal answer was “Anywhere.” It’s true, there’s no “right” order in which to read Building Stories...but being a man of honed habits, obsessive compulsion and an ongoing habit of creating To Do Lists (updated and rearranged daily), I decided to take the materials in the order in which they were stacked inside the box. When I was finished with one piece, I carefully laid it inside the open box top so that I could easily reassemble it into its original shape. I sometimes wonder if the hotel maids took a glance at the dissected book and started browsing Ware’s apartment building as they were vacuuming my room’s carpet.

I’m not quite through Building Stories and I’m still processing what it all means, so this won’t be a full, legitimate review, but I can tell you that it will turn out to be among the best books I read this year (if not the best). Inside this box, not much happens, but at the same time everything happens. Ware distills a life experience down to the confines of a single panel. The thickness of a line, the subtle hint of a new color, a shift in point-of-view can bring about a shock of emotion. Entire two-page spreads like the one above are devoted to silence, and yet each panel speaks a thousand words.

Ware doesn’t just build a story, he makes you feel the lives of his characters—in this case, a single woman with one leg who runs a flower shop, wonders if she’ll ever be fulfilled in life, bathes in regret, eavesdrops on her neighbors, reluctantly goes out to dinners with her friends, spends hours lying in bed staring at the ceiling, navigates the choppy waters of conversations with her mother, hates herself in every self-doubting moment, and loves her cat much too deeply. We also meet some of the noisy neighbors (a husband who may or may not be abusive), a widowed plumber who comes to fix the woman’s toilet (and it turns out he used to live in her very apartment), and the elderly landlady who herself has a very rich backstory. Occasionally, Ware includes a cutaway of the apartment building and when we hear from the hundred-year-old house, its thought-bubbles are some of the most heartbreaking of the entire book.

All in all, Building Stories is a visual feast, an engaging series of linked short stories, and one of the deepest emotional experiences you’re bound to have this year.

But, like I said, this is only a midway-through-the-book review. I’m still processing its many facets.

I thought I’d also take this opportunity to share three of my earlier reviews of Ware’s other books as part of my ongoing quest to make sure everyone on this planet has read Chris Ware at least once. Jesus had his twelve apostles, Chris Ware has me. These reviews were written many years ago for other websites (including January Magazine) and, frankly, they’re dated, occasionally redundant and not my finest hour of literary criticism (not that any of my hours of criticism could properly be called “fine”), but from them I hope you get a sense of my enthusiasm for Ware’s work. Here then, are my reviews (in order of how much I liked them) of Quimby the Mouse, The Acme Novelty Library, and Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth.

*     *     *

Chris Ware can do as much with a few lines of ink and delicately-colored shading that writers like Raymond Carver or John Updike can in a few hundred words.

Ware, a graphic novelist whose Fantagraphic books include Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth and The Acme Novelty Library, is a masterful genius at describing heartbreak, anger and anguish—especially the kind you find in Updike’s suburbia territory. In the tight confines of his pastel-colored panels (vulgarly called “cartoons”), he captures a universe of pain, drawing us in with the kind of emotions with which we can all identify.

In his newest book, Quimby the Mouse, the titular rodent experiences typical teenage anxiety when he sits up in bed one morning and says, “Oh gross. Today’s the day I have to give that speech in class. It makes my wiener feel funny...My stomach hurts, I bet I really am sick.” Later, sitting at his school desk, he grumbles, “If I’d barfed, I could’ve stayed home.”

In another sequence, a juvenile Quimby discovers he has super-powers, which enable him to fly, turn his arms to rubber and shrink down to “insect size.” He uses his powers to escape the every-adolescent’s-nightmare game of dodge ball, play hooky, and peer into the girls’ locker room. In the end, though, he’s still saddled with living the life of a worrisome, hormonal boy.

Quimby the Mouse is full of these quick, brilliant peeks at human nature. Some episodes are titled, “Empty Stomach,” “I’ll Do Anything, Just Please Let Me Stay,” and “I Am a Sickness That Infects My Friends.”

The “quick peeks” might be the book’s only shortcoming—the oversized volume (11-by-14 inches) is little more than a scrapbook of Ware’s existential doodlings. Brilliant as they are, these bits of miscellany never add up to the kind of narrative flow we found in Jimmy Corrigan where we suffer through all of Jimmy’s ups and downs as he reunites with his long-lost father. Quimby, by contrast, is all over the place, a wondrous jumble of what Ware calls “Self-Conscious Text Pages, Advertisements, and Space-Filling Nonsense.” The mind boggles and the eyes cross as we strain to take it all in. [Ed.: The same could be said for Building Stories, but I guess I got used to it.]

Ware of course, knows this and even labels one page “Incomprehensible Cartoon Strips.” Quimby the Mouse won’t be everyone’s slice of cheese. The panels are laid out in such a way that it’s hard to follow the flow and we often wonder if Ware’s train of thought has jumped the tracks. Eventually, by staring at the page long enough, we’re able to absorb a sense of the abstract emotions Ware is driving at: the loneliness, the regret, the mortality, the you-can-try-and-go-home-again-but-it’ll-never-be-the-same feelings that well up in most of us around the time we hit age 35. [Ed.: Or 52.]

I guess you could say Quimby the Mouse is a journey of the senses, a maze-like trip into the self-conscious subconscious. The most appealing, and accessible, portions of the book are when Ware draws his mouse during that turbulent, transitional period of adolescence, back when we thought life had definite answers (“When I was really young, I asked my mom why all old movies were in black and white. She said that back then, everything was in black and white. I took her really literally, and until I was six or seven, I thought color was some weird modern invention.”).

At other times in the book, Ware draws Quimby as a two-headed mouse—either a pair of Siamese twins or a dual personality. One half of Quimby is always imagining the other half meets with a violent end: decapitation, deflation (like a balloon-head), starvation, and so on. The episodes, bizarre and full of black-and-white cartoon blood, aren’t the book’s strongest moments, but they do serve to remind us that Ware is a tortured soul struggling to understand the all-too-real world outside his hand-drawn boxes. Just like the rest of us.

*     *     *

Those of you who have been holding your breath waiting for Chris Ware’s next great graphic novel can release at least a tiny puff of oxygen. He’s back in fine fettle with a new volume of contemporary angst in the signature pen-and-pastel world he’s created over the years.

While The ACME Novelty Library #16 may not be as full and complete as Ware’s earlier masterpiece from 2000, Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, it’s at least a satisfying hors d’oeuvre to snack on until the main meal arrives. If nothing else, it’s more tantalizing and thought-provoking than the majority of contemporary novels out there, graphic or otherwise.

In the time since Jimmy Corrigan came out, Ware hasn’t released very much new material. Instead, Fantagraphics Books has been issuing collections of his Acme Novelty Library compendiums from the series of the 1990s, which include short vignettes about baby boomers mulling over their troubled childhoods, short gag strips, and complex, intricately-worded advertisements which graphically and textually resemble pages from the Sears and Roebuck catalogs of the early 20th century.

This is all well and good, but what die-hard fans really long for is something meaty like Jimmy Corrigan, a deep probe into worlds normally described by the likes of Raymond Carver or John Updike. In an earlier review, I wrote that the 380-page book contains vivid passages of “pain, desire, hope, humiliation and the sweet surprise of forgiveness and reconciliation.”

Though smaller in scope and page-length, The Acme Novelty Library No. 16 follows similar suit. The graphic novel is more like a novella with a couple of short stories.

The main narrative follows Rusty Brown, a fat grade-schooler with a halo of orange hair, and his terminally-depressed father, Woody Brown, a schoolteacher who is “sleeping through his life” in Omaha, Nebraska.

On the surface, nothing much “happens" in “Rusty Brown”—the kid and his father go to school where they are separately picked on by bullies and plagued by suicidal thoughts. But scratch beneath the pastel exterior of Ware’s world and you’ll find a universe of raw emotion. This is literature in its finest hour. I just wish the hour weren’t so short.

Running simultaneously with Rusty’s story, along the bottom of the page we see Alice White and her little brother Chalky getting ready for their first day at a new school which turns out to be the one where Woody and Rusty are already having their bad days. Eventually, the lives of the characters intersect and nearly connect. The rest of their story will have to wait for the full-length version of “Rusty Brown,” I suppose.

The Acme Novelty Library No. 16 also contains a one-page episode of a stick-figure version of Ware himself babysitting his daughter while fretting over whether or not readers will appreciate his metaphors and allusions.

And, oh yeah, there’s a brief treatise on the life cycle of snowflakes. This is a mixed stew of ingredients, but Ware brings everything to a full, delicious simmer.

The final pages are further proof of Ware’s talent as he illustrates the lives of tenants in an apartment building. The entire section is done with nothing more than cutaway diagrams and wordless panels showing the residents going about their daily routines. [Ed.: Obviously, a preview of Building Stories.]  And yet, his pictures really are worth a thousand words. There are few better chroniclers of contemporary American life than Chris Ware.

*     *     *

The only thing separating Chris Ware from William Faulkner is the fact that Ware draws his characters with ink and uses little balloons for dialogue to tell his story of one dysfunctional family’s sound and fury.

To the best of my knowledge, Mr. Yoknapatawpha never drew a comic strip; but if he had, the results surely would have been as powerful as what’s on the 380 pages of Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth.

Actually, the term “comic book” cheapens Ware’s magnificent artistry. Calling Jimmy Corrigan a comic strip reduces it to the dime digests of our childhood. This is about as far from Archie and Jughead as you can get. Some people call Ware and other artists like Art Spiegelman (Maus) and Ben Katchor (Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer) “graphic novelists.” That’s fine, but when it comes to something as profound as Jimmy Corrigan, I think I prefer the term “illustrated novel.”

As you hold this volume of “comic strips” in your hand for the first time, you may not realize it, but you’ve got something as deep and genuinely moving as anything you’ll find in the words of John Updike, Raymond Carver [Ed.: Him again?!] or any other contemporary scribe bound by the rigid, old-fashioned black-and-white prison of text. The story here is complex and multi-layered in ways that “traditional” American literature often aspires to (and just as often fails). Once you step inside Jimmy’s pastel world, don’t be surprised if you have a hard time finding your way out again. In fact, this book is the kind that can’t be adequately described (though I’ll try). It must be experienced.

So, let’s start with the experience...The hardcover edition of Jimmy Corrigan has the strangest and cleverest dust jacket I’ve ever seen—it looks like the aftermath of a horrible paper-folding accident at the bindery. Unfold it and you’ll discover a collage of seemingly-random panels showing what looks like a family tree of sorts, a doctor’s report of a patient (“36-year-old male who has arrived with acute muscular sprain to right foot following a fall”) and instructions for making paper dolls. You can read the microscopic text now if you like (“With the many recent technological breakthroughs in pictorial linguistics [as exemplified by airline safety cards, battery diagrams and feminine protection directions], such heretofore-dormant skills of Comic Strip Apprehension [or CSA] are being reawakened in the adult mind,” etc.), but you’ll really appreciate it when you return after finishing what’s inside. (By the way, Ware’s tiny-print writing is as smart and funny as anything you’d find in Dave Eggers’ copyright page disclaimers).

Look on the front cover, lower right corner, and you’ll find these words: “A bold experiment in reader tolerance, disguised as a gaily-colored illustrated romance in which TINY PICTURES seem to COME ALIVE, DANCE, SING and WEEP.” Dancing, singing and weeping—yep, that’s what I was doing by the end of my Jimmy Corrigan experience. Well okay, I’m not exactly what you’d call a “weeping man,” but if I was, then I’d be a sobbing wreck by the end of the book. In these 380 pages, you’ll find pain, desire, hope, humiliation and the sweet surprise of forgiveness and reconciliation. Ware’s satiric tone on the dustjacket and inside covers is a bit misleading—there’s nothing riotously funny about the pathetic, boring life of Jimmy Corrigan. Sure, there are moments of great humor, but overall this is the serious stuff of the most intense Oprah show you can imagine.

Ware knowingly juxtaposes the soul-scraping agony of Jimmy’s family history with the “gaily-colored illustrations” and while it took me some time to adjust to the fact that this is not a “Sunday funnies” yuk-it-up, I was soon immersed in Jimmy’s world.

And here’s what you’ll find in Jimmy’s world…

The book tells the tale of three generations of Corrigans—all of them named James: James Reed Corrigan (b. 1883), who is beaten and neglected by his father, a crippled, bitter Civil War veteran; James William Corrigan (b. 1921), a Marine vet, bartender and deadbeat dad; and our “hero,” Jimmy (b. 1941), a virginal Chicago office worker who is terrified of women. Jimmy is a therapist’s dream come true: he’s painfully shy, tongue-tied, full of neuroses and has a set of “mother issues” that would make Norman Bates look like a patsy. Jimmy lives by himself, talks to his mother every day on the phone whether he wants to or not (he usually doesn’t), eats Cap’n Crunch for breakfast and either picks his nose or bites his nails (it’s hard to tell from Ware’s depiction). He rarely speaks in complete sentences; most of his word balloons are filled with just the nervous “Ha ha” or “Uh.”

One day, he gets a letter in the mail which begins “Dear Son, I think it’s about time we fellas get to know each other, what do you say?” Jimmy’s life turns into a Tilt-o-Whirl. He hasn’t seen his father since he was 6, and his vague memories get the man confused with, alternately, Superman or a serial killer. Eventually, the two men do meet and the story turns into an excruciating inward journey toward healing wounds. As they work through their issues, Ware delves back into the Corrigan family history and we witness 9-year-old James I’s rough childhood which has a glorious and heartbreaking climax at the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition.

[Note: Jimmy Corrigan is not for young eyes—profanity, sex and lots of toilet-sitting all have a place in the narrative.]

The tale unfolds like a surreal Walter Mitty, only this time Jimmy’s daydreams are filled with lurid images of cruelty and humiliation. In one sequence, he imagines he has a son, a gigantic Superman shows up and plucks their house out of the neighborhood, his son is killed, he realizes he’s on a theater stage and then there’s some business about a horse he must kill. Symbolism abounds as Ware gives subtle weight to the simplest objects: a peach, a crutch and most especially the Columbian Exposition, a fair which was designed in honor of the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the New World. The exposition celebrated where America had come from and looked ahead to where it was going; and the same goes for the Corrigans—though Jimmy has absolutely no idea what’s ahead on his perilously icy road.

Visually, Ware is at the opposite end of the spectrum from R. Crumb. Ware’s panels are light, airy and simple while Crumb’s are thick and heavy (though Ware and Crumb do explore the same themes of dysfunction). In Jimmy Corrigan, you might be reminded of the “clear line” artistry you see in The Adventures of Tin-Tin. Jimmy III, in fact, reminds me a bit of Henry, the bulbous-headed comic strip kid who never said a word—except, of course, Jimmy’s an older version of Henry, one with jowls and a Prozac prescription.

Ware, whose work has appeared in Raw magazine and was previously collected by Fantagraphic Books in a series called The ACME Novelty Library, is an artist of the highest caliber, using simple lines and muted colors to present a world that leaps off the page. At one point, James I is on his way to see the Columbian Exposition for the first time, but he wonders whether this is just another of his father’s broken promises. These worries are cramped into tiny, postage-stamp-sized panels. Then suddenly there’s a bird’s-eye view of the palatial exposition grounds filling the entire next page. To call it “breathtaking” is a gross understatement.

Another thing I liked about Jimmy Corrigan was the use of sound effects. Ware shows he’s really listened to the world around him and he transcribes that music onto the page. Here, for instance, is the sound of a man nervously playing with the pop top of a soda can: pk pk pk; or, turning on a faucet: tsssssh; or inserting a set of keys into the door: chngle chng. Details like these set Jimmy Corrigan apart from anything else you’ll read this year.

My one and only quibble with the novel is that it’s sometimes hard to follow the flow of the action. Ware crowds your vision with panels of varying sizes, occasionally guiding you with arrows, but there are times when I got them out of sequence and had to backtrack to the start of the page. But that’s such a minor quibble in the face of the big picture. There is far too much beauty at stake here—both visually and textually—to be nitpicking.

Ah yes, the text—another quality of Ware’s to admire. Every so often, especially in the 1890s story, the panels are scripted with a narration composed of obsolete language. Just listen to some of the poetry Ware employs:

on this humid morning, [the city] shimmers with the smell of cattle, chocolate and garbage

and, when James I, anticipating another beating from his father, is sitting alone on the back porch with his head on his knees:

A distant roll of thunder and cooling breeze bearing the slur of neighborhood voices emerging from the stale house heat. Crickets, fireflies…all ruined by a stomach-turning sense of dread. It makes his toes hurt (and the familiar sniff of his own kneecaps which always precedes any punishment). SOMETIMES if he pushes on his eyeballs hard enough he sees pictures—red splotches and patterns of purple green sparkles, silvery smears.

Now you see what I mean about Faulkner?

It’s rare that literature as deep and moving as this comes along and I hope that by now I’ve convinced you to at least consider running out to your neighborhood Books-R-Us to hunt down Jimmy Corrigan. In the space of three panels, Ware is able to convey what some novelists struggle to describe in entire books: the heartbreak, the struggle and, finally, the glimmer of hope in our dark, dull lives.

Front Porch Books: December 2014 edition

Front Porch Books is a monthly tally of books--mainly advance review copies (aka "uncorrected proofs" and "galleys")--I've received from publishers, but also sprinkled with packages from Book Mooch, independent bookstores, Amazon and other sources.  Because my dear friends, Mr. FedEx and Mrs. UPS, leave them with a doorbell-and-dash method of delivery, I call them my Front Porch Books.  In this digital age, ARCs are also beamed to the doorstep of my Kindle via NetGalley and Edelweiss.  Note: most of these books won't be released for another 2-6 months; I'm here to pique your interest and stock your wish lists.  Cover art and opening lines may change before the book is finally released.  I should also note that, in nearly every case, I haven't had a chance to read these books.  I'm just as excited as you are to dive into these pages.

Suitcase City by Sterling Watson (Akashic Books):  Sterling Watson wastes no time in filling us in on the downward spiral of his main character in his new novel's Opening Lines:

Jimmy Teach left professional football at the age of twenty-four, and his life went into a fast fall. He squandered money on bad friends and foolish business deals and the drink and drugs that went with them. He lived hard and the months passed and it became a slow suicide. He woke up one morning in a car he didn't own in the driveway of a fashionable house in Atlanta with a policeman at his window. Teach had no idea who owned the house or why he had come to it. He had passed out with the engine running. A half-open window and an empty fuel tank had probably saved him from a blue-lipped death.

It's a great expository start to what looks like a white-knuckled thriller.  The publisher mentions Alfred Hitchcock and Carl Hiaasen in the same breath in the press materials which came with my copy of the book, so there's that hook which is already dragging me to shore.  Here's more from the Jacket Copy:

A man gets himself into a little bit of trouble, then a little bit more, then a lot. And then his whole world becomes a nightmare. How does he get himself out of this mess of his own creation? The answer involves the end of an extramarital affair, reconciliation with a daughter he has neglected, and a deadly encounter with a man who comes out of the past bearing bad news and the keys to a new life. Set in Tampa, Florida, in the late 1980s, Suitcase City captures the glitter of the high life and the steamy essence of low places in the Cigar City.

Blurbworthiness: “Sterling Watson is an American treasure.  If this taut literary crime novel doesn’t center him on the map, we should change maps.”  (Tom Franklin, author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter)

A Higher Form of Killing by Diana Preston (Bloomsbury):  By all appearances, this is not your typical military history book.  As you can see by the triptych on the cover design, A Higher Form of Killing takes three distinct modes of lethality--poison gas, the torpedo, and zeppelin attacks--and looks at "six weeks that changed the world" during World War I.  I'm fascinated by this micro-examination of warfare and am really looking forward to reading Preston's account of 1915.  Here's more from the Jacket Copy:

In six weeks during April and May 1915, as World War I escalated, Germany forever altered the way war would be fought. On April 22, at Ypres, German canisters spewed poison gas at French and Canadian soldiers in their trenches; on May 7, the German submarine U-20, without warning, torpedoed the passenger liner Lusitania, killing 1,198 civilians; and on May 31, a German Zeppelin began the first aerial bombardment of London and its inhabitants. Each of these actions violated rules of war carefully agreed at the Hague Conventions of 1898 and 1907. Though Germany’s attempts to quickly win the war failed, the psychological damage caused by these attacks far outweighed the casualties. The era of weapons of mass destruction had dawned. While each of these momentous events has been chronicled in histories of the war, celebrated historian Diana Preston links them for the first time, revealing the dramatic stories behind each through the eyes of those who were there, whether making the decisions or experiencing their effect. She places the attacks in the context of the centuries-old debate over what constitutes “just war,” and shows how, in their aftermath, the other combatants felt the necessity to develop extreme weapons of their own. In our current time of terror, when weapons of mass destruction—imagined or real—are once again vilified, the story of their birth is of great relevance.

By looking at where we've come from, maybe we'll see where we're headed.  In other words, will we ever learn from the past?  Probably not.  But it's worth a shot anyway.

I Refuse by Per Petterson (Graywolf Press):  2015 just got a little brighter with the news that we'll have a new Per Petterson novel in our hands soon (April, for those of you marking your calendars).  Any release of a Petterson book from Graywolf Press here in America is cause for celebration.  I Refuse, in particular, looks like it will satisfy long-time fans (like me) and possibly entice some readers who've never encountered any of Petterson's previous books (Out Stealing Horses, To Siberia, I Curse the River of Time, etc.). As TIME magazine once noted, “Reading a Petterson novel is like falling into a northern landscape painting—all shafts of light and clear palpable chill.”  Check out the Jacket Copy for I Refuse:

Per Petterson’s hotly anticipated new novel, I Refuse, is the work of an internationally acclaimed novelist at the height of his powers. In Norway the book has been a huge bestseller, and rights have already been sold into sixteen countries. In his signature spare style, Petterson weaves a tale of two men whose accidental meeting one morning recalls their boyhood thirty-five years ago. Back then, Tommy was separated from his sisters after he stood up to their abusive father. Jim was by Tommy’s side through it all. But one winter night, a chance event on a frozen lake forever changed the balance of their friendship. Now Jim fishes alone on a bridge as Tommy drives by in a new Mercedes, and it’s clear their fortunes have reversed. Over the course of the day, the life of each man will be irrevocably altered.

Refuse a Per Petterson novel?  Hardly.  I'm going to embrace this one with all the fervor of a fanboy.

White Man's Problems by Kevin Morris (Grove/Atlantic):  It seems like every other book which has landed on my front porch the past couple of months has been a short-story collection.  This is not a problem; in fact, it's damned exciting to see publishers are increasingly "take a chance" on short fiction.  I refuse to believe that old publishing adage that "there's no market for short stories"--but that's a diatribe for another time.  What I have here in front of me right now is Kevin Morris' debut collection, White Man's Problems.  Morris, an entertainment lawyer living in L.A., originally self-published the stories before Grove/Atlantic picked it up to bring it to a wider audience.  Here's the Jacket Copy:

In nine stories that move between nouveau riche Los Angeles and the working class East Coast, Kevin Morris explores the vicissitudes of modern life. Whether looking for creative ways to let off steam after a day in court or enduring chaperone duties on a school field trip to the nation's capital, the heroes of White Man's Problems struggle to navigate the challenges that accompany marriage, family, success, failure, growing up, and getting older. The themes of these perceptive, wry, and sometimes humorous tales pose philosophical questions about conformity and class, duplicity and decency, and the actions and meaning of an average man's life. He writes characters and dialogue equally at home in in an office in the Empire State Building, a driveway in Brentwood, or a working class taproom. Morris's confident debut strikes the perfect balance between comedy and catastrophe—and introduces a virtuosic new voice in American fiction.

This Blurbworthiness from Eric Roth, Academy Award-winning screenwriter of Forrest Gump, is enough to convince me to put these Problems near the top of the To-Be-Read pile: “Kevin Morris’s voice is Updike and Cheever and Carver.”

Empty Pockets by Dale Herd (Coffee House Press):   I had a Breece D'J Pancake Moment when I got a copy of Dale Herd's collection of "new and selected stories" from Coffee House Press.  Like Pancake, Dale Herd is a voice from a distant decade (primarily the 70s in his case) who seems to have slipped off the literary radar for far too many years (at least my radar hasn't had many Herd blips recently).  Unlike Pancake, who committed suicide when his talent was at full burn, Herd is still with us and, thanks to Coffee House Press, he's pinging back on our radars, loud and clear.  Empty Pockets collects stories from his previous books--Early Morning Wind (1972), Diamonds (1976), and Wild Cherries (1980)--and tops it off with 19 new short fictions.  Most of the stories are very short--a page or a paragraph at most--while others take a little more time to burrow into Herd's characters.  Here, for instance, are the Opening Lines to the book, the story "Eric" in its entirety:

She had a kid asleep in the bedroom. I asked her if she wanted to ball and she said yes. She got her gun six times. I told her I was selling my car and all my belongings and buying a sailboat and sailing to Australia. I said she could go but she’d have to pay. How much she said. A dollar thirty-seven I said. She said not bad. Then she said how much for Eric. I said ten thousand dollars.

Man, there's a lot to love in that handful of sentences whose blood tingles with the jazz of Hemingway and Carver.  In a review of Herd's three collections (filed under "Neglected Books") in a 1983 issue of American Book Review, Lewis Warsh wrote: "(S)ome of Herd's best stories are simply speeches, people saying what on their minds....Herd keeps himself at a distance from his characters--there's nothing blatantly autobiographical about his work--but it's a professional distance, he's at least as close as the next room.  His art is the ability to create authentic voices, while packing the greatest possible intensity into the smallest possible space."  Here's some more great Blurbworthiness for Herd's work, from a 1976 review in the San Francisco Review of Books by Keith Abbot: "Diamonds is an apt name for Dale Herd's latest book of prose.  The tale are often quite short, and are formed by great pressure."  Please join me in re-discovering this gritty, unsparing and fresh (!!) voice from the past.

White Tiger on Snow Mountain by David Gordon (New Harvest): You've gotta love a story collection that begins with something called "Man-Boob Summer" (Opening Lines: "I was spending some time at my parents' place that summer.  I was thirty-eight and out of ideas.").  By all appearances (i.e., "from my quick page-skim"), David Gordon's White Tiger on Snow Mountain proceeds to get even better from that point on.  Here's the Jacket Copy:

Thirteen hilarious, moving, and beautifully brutal stories by David Gordon, the award-winning author of Mystery Girl and The Serialist. In these funny, surprising, and touching stories, Gordon gets at the big stuff—art and religion, literature and madness, the supernatural, and the dark fringes of sexuality—in his own unique style, described by novelist Rivka Galchen as “Dashiell Hammett divided by Don DeLillo, to the power of Dostoyevsky—yet still pure David Gordon.” Gordon's creations include ex-gangsters and terrifying writing coaches, Internet girlfriends and bogus memoirists, Chinatown ghosts, and vampires of Queens. “The Amateur” features a cafe encounter with a terrible artist who carries a mind-blowing secret. In the long, beautifully brutal title story, a man numbed by life finds himself flirting with and mourning lost souls in the purgatory of sex chatrooms. The result is both unflinching and hilarious, heartbreaking and life-affirming.

Blurbworthiness: “I wish I could read this book forever, and maybe get David Gordon to narrate the events of my own life.  He is the funniest, most intelligent companion.  This book got me reinterested in everything—men, women, heartbreak, cities, language, stories.”  (Rebecca Lee, author of Bobcat and Other Stories)

Hit Count by Chris Lynch (Algonquin Young Readers):  Here's a young adult novel that's as timely as a news story you'll read about the next NFL linebacker plagued with memory loss, depression and, at its root, chronic traumatic encephalopathy.  No matter which side of the field of controversy you line up on, it's hard to deny that concussions are a serious health matter that impact not just professional football players, members of the military or daredevil bikers who refuse to wear a helmet--they're a problem for all of us in one way or another.  National Book Award finalist Chris Lynch (Inexcusable) tackles--pardon the pun--this subject head-on in Hit Count, set on the high school football field where brain trauma is particularly worth guarding against.  Take a look at the Jacket Copy:

"I hit him so hard, the clash of helmets and pads sounded like a gunshot across the field. I crushed him with the hit, held on to him, and crushed him again when I slammed him into the ground...I had arrived." Arlo Brodie loves being on the football field, getting hit hard and hitting back harder. That's where he belongs, leading his team to championships, becoming "Starlo" on his way to the top. Arlo's dad cheers him on, but his mother quotes head injury statistics and refuses to watch. Arlo's girlfriend tries to make him see the danger; when that doesn't work, she calls time-out on their relationship. Even Arlo's coaches begin to track his hit count, almost ready to pull him off the field. But Arlo's not worried about collisions. The cheering crowds and the adrenaline rush convince Arlo that everything is OK--in spite of the pain, pounding, dizziness, and confusion. In Hit Count, Chris Lynch explores the American love affair with contact sports and our attempts to come to terms with clear evidence of real danger.

Orhan's Inheritance by Aline Ohanesian (Algonquin Books):  What does a man drowned in a vat of dye in Turkey have to do with an old woman in a Los Angeles retirement home?  This is the question which fuels Aline Ohanesian's intriguing debut novel.  As Algonquin Senior Editor Kathy Pories says in a "Dear Reader" letter at the start of my advance copy of Orhan's Inheritance: "One of the huge rewards of being an editor is that moment of surprise when you begin to read a manuscript and realize that a writer has caught you; you start reading and you can't stop.  From the minute I started Aline Ohanesian's debut novel, I was transfixed."  Dip into the Opening Lines and you'll see what Pories is talking about:

They found him inside one of seventeen cauldrons in the courtyard, steeping in an indigo dye two shades darker than the summer sky. His arms and chin were propped over the copper edge, but the rest of Kemal Turkoglu, age ninety-three, had turned a pretty pale blue. Orhan was told the old men of the village stood in front of the soaking corpse, fingering their worry beads, while their sons waiting, holding dice from abandoned backgammon games.

While I stopped reading after a page or two, I only did so reluctantly (all those other books demanding my attention); but I could see how, if I had a more relaxed expanse of time in front of me, I'd want to immerse myself in the vat of Ohanesian's prose.  There are such lovely images in that opening paragraph--even while talking about this poor man's death.  Here's the Jacket Copy to hook you, the time-on-her-hands reader, into the novel:

In her extraordinary debut, Aline Ohanesian has created two remarkable characters--a young man ignorant of his family's and his country's past, and an old woman haunted by the toll the past has taken on her life. When Orhan's brilliant and eccentric grandfather Kemal--a man who built a dynasty out of making "kilim" rugs--is found dead, submerged in a vat of dye, Orhan inherits the decades-old business. But Kemal's will raises more questions than it answers. He has left the family estate to a stranger thousands of miles away, an aging woman in an Armenian retirement home in Los Angeles. Her existence and secrecy about her past only deepen the mystery of why Orhan's grandfather willed his home in Turkey to an unknown woman rather than to his own son or grandson. Left with only Kemal's ancient sketchbook and intent on righting this injustice, Orhan boards a plane to Los Angeles. There he will not only unearth the story that eighty-seven-year-old Seda so closely guards but discover that Seda's past now threatens to unravel his future. Her story, if told, has the power to undo the legacy upon which his family has been built. Moving back and forth in time, between the last years of the Ottoman Empire and the 1990s, Orhan's Inheritance is a story of passionate love, unspeakable horrors, incredible resilience, and the hidden stories that can haunt a family for generations.

Compulsion by Meyer Levin (Fig Tree Books):  Meyer Levin's blockbuster 1956 novel about the Leopold-Loeb child murder case of 1924 gets a handsome reissue from Fig Tree Books.  As famed prosecutor and author Marcia Clark says in her new introduction to the book, "Before In Cold Blood, before The Executioner’s Song, Meyer Levin’s Compulsion was the standard-bearer for what we think of as the nonfiction novel.  I was eight years old when I read it for the first time.  I’d found the paperback, already yellowed with age, on a nightstand.  Though I could not possibly grasp the depth of the storytelling or recognize the beauty of the prose, the experience proved to be indelible.  The story haunted me from that day forward."  Compulsion is one of those mid-century books which have lingered at the edges of my "must read someday" list; but this fresh package of the book might just urge me to read it sooner rather than later.  Here's the Jacket Copy for those of you who are unfamiliar with the story:

Part of Chicago’s elite Jewish society, Judd Steiner (the fictional version of Nathan Leopold) and Artie Straus (Richard Loeb) have it all: money, smarts and the world at their feet. Obsessed with Nietzsche’s idea of the superhuman, both boys decide to prove that they are above the laws of man by arbitrarily murdering a boy in their neighborhood — for the sheer sake of getting away with the crime. Compulsion is narrated by Sid Silver, a budding journalist at the University of Chicago and a fictional surrogate for Meyer Levin who was a classmate of Leopold and Loeb and reported on their trial himself; like Sid, Levin became enmeshed in the case while covering it. Early on, a pair of Judd’s horn-rimmed eyeglasses is found at the scene of the crime. Authorities slowly begin to unveil other pieces of evidence that suggest the young men’s guilt. When their respective alibis collapse, Artie and Judd each confess. Fearing an anti-Semitic backlash and anxious to be viewed first and foremost as Americans, the Jewish community in Chicago demands steadfastly that justice be served. Desperate, the Straus and Steiner families seek the counsel of the famed Jonathan Wilk, who is based on his real-life counterpart Clarence Darrow. Wilk hires a slew of psychoanalysts and begins to construct a first-of-its-kind defense: that Artie and Judd are not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect. Here, too, the novel’s documentary qualities shine through as the narrative shifts into a deftly paced courtroom drama where the legal and psychiatric delineations of insanity— and even more controversially for its time, homosexuality— are introduced.

The Mountain Can Wait by Sarah Leipciger (Little, Brown):  The mountain may be able to wait, but I can't.  After reading just a few sentences from the Opening Lines of this debut novel by Canadian writer Sarah Leipciger, I'm already racing to finish the other books at the summit of the To-Be-Read stack (aka Mount NeveRest).  Check 'em out for yourself:

      The night was still black when Curtis pulled his Suburban away from the curb and turned toward the mountain highway, leaving his apartment, his sleeping street behind him. He would have preferred to ride his bike but the tire was flat and anyway it was too cold, and rain was coming. He would find some side road up the mountain where he could park and stay warm until the sun rose, and then he'd hike for as long as his legs could carry him. Ascend to a place where the view was different and things that towered and loomed down here would narrow to pin shadows and then to nothing.
     With his windows rolled down, he tickled the curves slowly, and the high that had been fading in him came back up. Calm poured through his body and the wind was music. The cold, dewy air tasted like spring moss, like pine. The needle on the speedometer slipped across seventy kilometers and he slowed down to forty. But minutes later, when he glanced at the needle again, it was back up at seventy. The road began a long-curved descent and he pulsed the brakes.
     He engaged the dashboard lighter and lifted his right thigh, and wedged his fingers into his back pocket, feeling for his small tin box. It wasn't there. He reached farther and excavated the gap in the back of the seat. The road was a tunnel. He glanced at the emergency-brake pocket but saw only a badly folded road map and a refillable plastic coffee mug that he had stopped using because he'd lost the lid.
     Her face in the headlights flashed like a coin, the features etched in silver blue. She was an instant, the sulfuric flare of a match, and though he had time to hit the brakes his foot found the accelerator instead. And there was a dull slap. Something white seemed to pause in the air. The sound of a broad, square nose of metal pummeling muscle and bone was flat and without ring. He stopped the truck with its nose pointing into the middle of the road and, confused, felt for his tin in the other pocket, as this somehow still seemed important.

Are you with me?  Are we going to the Mountain together?  Here's the Jacket Copy for those of you who remain on the fence:

Tragedy erupts in an instant. Lives are shattered irrevocably. A young man drives off into the night, leaving a girl injured, perhaps fatally so. From that cliffhanger opening, Sarah Leipciger takes readers back and forward in time to tell the haunting story of one family's unraveling in rural logging country where the land is still the economic backbone. Like the novels of Annie Proulx, this extraordinarily lyrical debut is rooted in richly detailed nature writing and sharply focused on small town mores and the particularities of regional culture. Marrying the propulsive story of a father and son who, in the wake of catastrophe, must confront their private demons to reach for redemption with an evocative meditation on our environmental legacy, The Mountain Can Wait introduces Leipciger as a talent to watch.

Blurbworthiness: "In this assured debut novel Leipciger beautifully captures the tender and mercurial relationship between father and son, Tom and Curtis Berry.  These are characters you care about, flawed and haunted by regret, existing in the harsh yet undeniably radiant world of the Canadian Rocky Mountains.  Leipciger writes with great compassion and precision, her language is an exquisite mix of muscle and grace.  The Mountain Can Wait resonated with wonderful imagery which will stay with me for a very long time."  (Michele Forbes, author of Ghost Moth)

The Folded Clock: A Diary by Heidi Julavits (Doubleday):  On a shelf in the musty, dusty basement of my home here in Butte, Montana, there's a red three-ring binder, its plastic cover sticky with age and ancient spilled soda.  Inside that binder are more than 200 pages of typewritten diary entries by yours truly, a transcript of my life between the ages of 16 to 20.  If I had an ounce of bravery and/or a momentary lapse of judgment, I'd get up from the desk where I'm currently writing this blog post, descend the three flights of stairs and excavate that diary so I could give you a taste of how truly terrible a writer and how incredibly silly a person I was back in the 1980s.  But I won't.  Because I'm a coward.  Heidi Julavits, on the other hand, is courageous enough to return to the journal she kept as a kid and take a look at a life which undoubtedly seems so oddly foreign to her 2014 self.  The Jacket Copy reveals all about The Folded Clock (which is such a great title, isn't it?):

Like many young people, Heidi Julavits kept a diary. Decades later she found her old diaries in a storage bin, and hoped to discover the early evidence of the person (and writer) she’d since become. Instead, "The actual diaries revealed me to possess the mind of a paranoid tax auditor." The entries are daily chronicles of anxieties about grades, looks, boys, and popularity. After reading the confessions of her past self, writes Julavits, "I want to good-naturedly laugh at this person. I want to but I can't. What she wanted then is scarcely different from what I want today." Thus was born a desire to try again, to chronicle her daily life as a forty-something woman, wife, mother, and writer. The dazzling result is The Folded Clock, in which the diary form becomes a meditation on time and self, youth and aging, betrayal and loyalty, friendship and romance, faith and fate, marriage and family, desire and death, gossip and secrets, art and ambition. Concealed beneath the minute obsession with “dailiness” are sharply observed moments of cultural criticism and emotionally driven philosophical queries. In keeping with the spirit of a diary, the tone is confessional, sometimes shockingly so, as the focus shifts from the woman she wants to be to the woman she may have become. Julavits's spirited sense of humor about her foibles and misadventures, combined with her ceaseless intelligence and curiosity, explode the typically confessional diary form. The Folded Clock is as playful as it is brilliant, a tour de force by one of the most gifted prose stylists in American letters.

In the Opening Lines of The Folded Clock, Julavits asks, "What is the worth of a day?"  We're about to find out.

The Tusk That Did the Damage by Tania James (Knopf):  The striking image on the cover of Tania James' new novel is just the first thing to love here.  That elephant demands you pay close attention to what's about to happen.  Go a little deeper and you'll encounter these Opening Lines:

      He would come to be called the Gravedigger. There would be other names: the Master Executioner, the Jackfruit Freak, Sooryamangalam Sreeganeshan. In his earliest days, his name was a sound only his kin could make in the hollows of their throats and somewhere in his head, fathoms deep, he kept it close.
      Other memories he kept: running through his mother's legs, toddling in and out of her footprints. The bark of soft saplings, the salt licks, the duckweed, the tang of river water, opening and closing around his feet. He remembered his mother taking him onto her back before launching herself from the bank. In this way, their clan would cross, an isle of hills and lofted trunks.

The Jacket Copy lets us know this is going to be an unforgettable novel in so many ways:

From the critically acclaimed author of Atlas of Unknowns and Aerogrammes, a tour de force set in South India that plumbs the moral complexities of the ivory trade through the eyes of a poacher, a documentary filmmaker, and, in a feat of audacious imagination, an infamous elephant known as the Gravedigger. Orphaned by poachers as a calf and sold into a life of labor and exhibition, the Gravedigger breaks free of his chains and begins terrorizing the countryside, earning his name from the humans he kills and then tenderly buries. Manu, the studious younger son of a rice farmer, loses his cousin to the Gravedigger’s violence and is drawn, with his wayward brother Jayan, into the sordid, alluring world of poaching. Emma is a young American working on a documentary with her college best friend, who witnesses the porous boundary between conservation and corruption and finds herself in her own moral gray area: a risky affair with the veterinarian who is the film’s subject. As the novel hurtles toward its tragic climax, these three storylines fuse into a wrenching meditation on love and betrayal, duty and loyalty, and the vexed relationship between man and nature. With lyricism and suspense, Tania James animates the rural landscapes where Western idealism clashes with local reality; where a farmer’s livelihood can be destroyed by a rampaging elephant; where men are driven to poaching. In James’ arrestingly beautiful prose, The Tusk That Did the Damage blends the mythical and the political to tell a wholly original, utterly contemporary story about the majestic animal, both god and menace, that has mesmerized us for centuries.

I'm excited about a lot of upcoming 2015 fiction, but The Tusk That Did the Damage is probably at the top of my list right now.  Blurbworthiness: “The Tusk That Did the Damage is one of the most unusual and affecting books I’ve read in a long time.  Narrated by a poacher, a filmmaker, and, most brilliantly, an elephant, this is a compulsively readable, devastating novel.”  (Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything Is Illuminated)

Recipes for a Beautiful Life by Rebecca Barry (Simon & Schuster):  I'm going to leave you with what is my MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK of 2015.  Walk with me for a moment and let's have a little chat....Has this ever happened to you?  You read a story, a book, a poem, and you are so swept up in the writing that you immediately make an emotional connection with the author and put that person at the top of that rarified mental list you keep--you know, the one where you immediately start building a pedestal.  You decide right then and there to purchase everything that author writes from that day forward.  Every so often, you might go back and re-read that debut novel or that sole collection of short stories just to remind yourself how great this author really is, and you keep checking publishing industry announcements and lists of new and forthcoming books on the web.  Then you sit back and wait, flicking frequent glances at the calendar, hoping for news of the next book to come from this new Most Favorite Writer of yours.  But two years pass and nothing.  Three years go by and still, radio silence.  Five years, six years....crickets chirping in a barren field.  You turn gloomy, become depressed and vow never to fall in love like this again (but of course you do).  Does any of this sound familiar?  That's what happened to me with Rebecca Barry.  I lost my heart to her debut collection of short stories, Later, At the Bar, published in 2007.  The linked stories revolved around the barflies of Lucy's Tavern in upstate New York and were rife with the kind of drama found in soap operas and country-western songs: failed marriages, one-night stands, terminal illness, scrapes with the law, loneliness, bitterness and pent-up anger.  I sang its praises elseweb, calling it "inspiring fiction which just happens to be set in a room filled with smoke, sad songs and slurred words."  I simply couldn't wait for the next thing to come from Ms. Barry.  But, as I outlined above, I endured a long, empty-handed wait.  I was all prepared to send out a Literary APB for her, like I did with Jon Billman.  UNTIL a couple of weeks ago when I saw an e-galley of Recipes for a Beautiful Life was available on Edelweiss.  I couldn't click "Download" fast enough.  As it turns out, this new book isn't a novel or a short-story collection, but a memoir (mixed with recipes) of Barry's life with her husband and two boys.  In this case, real life might just be better than fiction because it will help explain where Barry has been for the past seven years.  The Jacket Copy shines a light:

When Rebecca Barry and her husband moved to upstate New York to start their family, they wanted to be surrounded by natural beauty but close to a small urban center, doing work they loved, and plenty of time to spend with their kids. But living their dreams turned out not to be so simple: the lovely old house they bought had lots of character but also needed lots of repairs, they struggled to stay afloat financially, their children refused to sleep or play quietly, and the novel Rebecca had dreamed of writing simply wouldn’t come to her. Recipes for a Beautiful Life blends heartwarming, funny, authentically told stories about the messiness of family life, a fearless examination of the anxieties of creative work, and sharp-eyed observations of the pressures that all women face. This is a story of a woman confronting her deepest fears: What if I’m a terrible mother? What if I’m not good at the work I love? What if my children never eat anything but peanut butter and cake? What if I go to sleep angry? It’s also a story of the beauty, light, and humor that’s around us, all the time—even when things look bleak, and using that to find your way back to your heart. Mostly, though, it is about the journey to building not just a beautiful life, but a creative one.

I hope I haven't made Ms. Barry blush with all this talk about literary longing and pedestal-building.  I mean, I wouldn't want to embarrass her into another seven-year silence.

One Perfect Ending

by Lee Upton

It’s a wonderful and rare event to come across a perfect ending.  Recently I discovered one: the six words that conclude “The Faber Book of Adultery,” the opening story by Jonathan Gibbs in The Best British Short Stories 2014.  I admire the story’s ending not only because it closes the narrative in a wonderfully gasp-worthy way, but because it’s a perfect little story in itself:

This can’t be what it’s like.

What precedes those words is a sex scene.  The story’s protagonist, an academic as well as a writer, views adultery as the overriding subject compelling the achievements of a previous generation of writers: Roth, Cheever, Updike, Yates.  Half stunned by a flirtation that’s turning into action, Mark edits in his mind each sensation as it occurs, as if he’s writing a story.  His actual participation in adultery unfolds not out of lust so much as out of curiosity, his desire to cannibalize experience for his own writing, and his naïve conviction that an earlier generation led lives infused with more sexual daring—and wrote better fiction as a consequence.

As Mark describes and mentally revises each hollow, predictable moment, experience curbs his faith in fictional depictions of adultery.  After all, what he’s experiencing bears no relation to those scenes of extramarital affairs in books.

This can’t be what it’s like.
We’re sometimes told that we read to allay loneliness, to create recognition.  We read a story and think an experience has been captured.  We think, Yes, this is what it’s like.  We might even think, A portion of my life is echoed in this story.  And yet, and yet…we may feel otherwise.  No matter what fiction depicts, we sometimes find ourselves saying, “This can’t be what it’s like.”  Our own experience is all so complicated.  Or, it’s all so uncomplicated.

Even taken out of context, the concluding statement in “The Faber Book of Adultery” resonates:

This can’t be what it’s like.
Only six words, each of one syllable.  Two contractions: “can’t” and “it’s.”  The words “not” and “is,” tucked in the pockets of those contractions.  Simple, quiet, nearly invisible verbs of being: “can,” “be.”  An unnamed referent.  The word “this,” like a finger pointing to something near.  Not like “that.”  No, “this.”  The close-at-hand.  That ending word: “like.”  The broken bridge to a comparison that isn’t stated.

The antecedent for this is “adultery”—and perhaps more.  And what is “it” in “it’s”?  What can’t adultery be like?  And the tone of the entire statement: disbelief?   Or certainty?

The story could have resolved into a brittle little social comedy, except that hovering at the periphery are children liable to be damaged by their parents’ infidelity.  The story’s opening paragraph mentions that, while the adults’ party is underway, children are sleeping.  In the final scene of the story—a story with many symmetrical moments—Mark edits his way into an affair while a child is still asleep upstairs, or presumably asleep.

The story contains plenty of more full-bodied sentences than its short final sentence, including this gorgeous one about drinking whiskey: “The taste of it spread, making his mouth glow, as if he’d been given a very gentle anaesthetic, or stung by a swarm of infinitesimal and ultimately benign bees.”  A depiction that rivals Kingsley Amis’s descriptions of hangovers.

There’s also the following comical wonder, for Mark is more aroused, after all, by his own efforts during the writing process than by the actual physical requirements of adultery: “He pushed even harder, hating himself, but wanting above all to find some way of expressing himself, his intentions, his delicate reservations, past history, world view, thoughts on the nature of signification, the problem of endings, Wittgenstein, Kelly Brook, the de Stijl movement, the novels of Michel Houellebecq and Chris Cleave, any or all of this.”

But for all that such sentences offer, the concluding sentence is especially convincing for its brevity, and for its air of wonderment mixed with disappointment: This can’t be what it’s like.  With those words the story has ended with a seemingly simple negation—preceded by an account of second-by-second sensory impressions so ultimately fine-tuned and yet banal that they would deflate the sexual ambitions of a goat.

The ending doesn’t just close the story; it holds the story in suspension.  For what is “This,” after all?  Although “this” surely must be adultery, “this” could also be the story we’ve told ourselves most recently about our own lives, or the story we’ve been reading.  Those final words suggest that the search for what a life is “like”—its shape, its meaning—can’t be exhausted, even by good books.  The ending is perfect because, in more than one sense, it doesn’t end.

Lee Upton is the author of The Tao of Humiliation: Stories (BOA Editions, 2014), and a forthcoming book of poetry, Bottle the Bottles the Bottles the Bottles, this year’s recipient of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Open Book Prize.  She is a professor of English and the writer-in-residence at Lafayette College.