Chasing Spiders With a Pen: Gary Reilly’s War

by Mark Stevens

I know jackshit about war. In particular, Vietnam.

I had a low draft number but then the draft was cancelled, right when I was thinking about Canada. Or some other escape. Bone spurs? A high school friend had died in Vietnam. It scared the hell out of me.

I’ve seen the movies and I’ve read the books:

Platoon. Saving Private Ryan. Deer Hunter. Full Metal Jacket.

Matterhorn, Tree of Smoke, Dog Soldiers, Going After Cacciato.

But, still, I can only imagine.

I watched the Ken Burns documentary and tried not to throw anything at the television; all those lies.

Goodreads has a list of 280 novels about The Vietnam War. Would that do the trick?

I doubt it. Can art really capture the mental toll of war? I’m sure it comes close, in many cases.

It’s the same with coming home from war. I have no idea what it’s like to come home, to have seen so much death and killing and to have survived. I’m sure surviving is better, right?

The statistics suggest maybe, maybe not.

My friend Gary Reilly knew. He served in Vietnam. He was an MP at an airfield called Qui Nho’n. One year “in country,” not even in combat, and I believe he carried it around with him for the rest of his life.

Gary didn’t talk much about the war when he got home, in 1971. The war was winding down, but war is war. If you’re fighting, you’re fighting. By the end of 1971 “only” 151,000 U.S. soldiers would be in Vietnam; down from a half-million at the war’s peak.

I didn’t meet Gary until 2004, 33 years after he came back from Vietnam.

A couple weeks ago, I emailed Gary’s longtime partner, Sherry, to see if her recollection was the same as mine—that Gary didn’t talk about that year. Sherry agreed. She wrote: “Gary did not like to talk much about being in Vietnam. He would have nightmares sometimes that he associated with Vietnam, but he didn't talk about that much either. Sometimes he would wake up at night, yelling and trying to get the spiders off of him. He would say in his nightmare he was in Vietnam, being attacked by bugs. That was a recurring nightmare. He did talk sometimes about how he never took advantage of an ‘RnR’ that he may have been entitled to because he said once he left Vietnam, he would never be able to return.”

Gary didn’t talk much about those spiders, but he had an outlet: writing fiction. Shortly after returning from Vietnam, Gary took classes at the University of Colorado at Denver. The teachers were impressed with his style. Encouraged, Gary sent one story called “The Biography Man” off to the prestigious Iowa Review. It was published. And re-published the next year in the fourth volume of the Pushcart Prize Anthology. That particular story had nothing to do with Vietnam, but maybe it gave him a boost of confidence to keep writing.

On second thought, I doubt he needed it.

Gary was going to write.

And write.

“The Biography Man” was the first—and only story—that Gary published in his lifetime. (It’s a beauty; I’ve never read anything like it.)

One story—that was it.

When Gary passed away in 2011, however, he left behind 25 full-length novels.

Three of the 25 novels featured a character named Private Palmer, an MP who went to Vietnam and was part of the war. The first, The Enlisted Men’s Club, takes place at The Presidio as Palmer waits for the call up, unsure if it will come. The second book, The Detachment, takes place in Vietnam. And The Discharge finds Palmer at home in Denver trying to find a foothold back in civilization. The books form a seamless trilogy of one man’s journey to war—and back.

I’ve read all three—several times. I still know jackshit about what it’s like to go to war. I don’t have nightmares about spiders.

All three novels feature the war—getting ready, living with it, and dealing with the aftermath. Palmer is jaded. He finds ways to endure, to survive military stupidity and “shit jobs,” as he calls them. Palmer has his avoidance schemes, but in all three books he finds ways to connect with others, to assert or maintain his humanity.

As I write this, there are 1.3 million men and women in active duty in the U.S. armed forces. There are 10,000 stationed in Afghanistan, a war that has been going on since long before I met Gary Reilly for the first time. There are thousands in Bahrain and Kuwait and tens of thousands in South Korea and Japan, which could be a hot spot any moment, and of course now we know they’re in Niger and all over Africa, too.

We ask the soldiers to bear that weight but we really have no idea what toll that takes, thinking daily “what if?” Do they know what they’re getting into? Do they? They’re all okay with dying for the cause, for the country?

Some soldiers look down the barrels of their weapons. They are there to kill. Others are in what’s called “the rear.” During Vietnam, if you served in the rear, you were a REMF.

I didn’t know that acronym, or what it stood for, before a review of The Detachment was published by a book reviewer for the Vietnam Veterans of America: “Reilly gives the reader an immersion in this aspect of the Army throughout this fine novel of service in the rear. I add it to the short list of worthy novels of the REMF in Vietnam. Service in the rear was the majority experience, although it is seldom given respect or space in the Vietnam War canon.”

REMF: Rear-echelon motherfuckers. Support troops.

Gary Reilly didn’t see action. He was pure REMF.

Reilly didn’t see action and, of course, neither did his alter-ego, Palmer. (Even from his close-up vantage point for war, Reilly saw no need to take his fiction beyond what he had seen with his own two eyes; Palmer’s world was no more expansive than Reilly’s own.) Palmer didn’t see direct combat, but he saw the consequences of war all around him. The war came to him.

And took a toll.

We all know about that toll—the mental health, the injuries, the empty holes in families, the lost potential. I won’t go into detail here, only urge—if you’re curious—to read Gary Reilly’s view of Vietnam.

I’m not the only enthusiast of Gary’s work. As mentioned, the book reviewer for The Vietnam Veterans of America wrote a rave. Booklist praised Gary’s work as well. Here’s a note from a review of The Detachment: “Palmer’s mission is so banal most writers would not describe it, but Reilly describes it, and the result is that rarest thing in fiction, originality. His novel is a harsh and startling corrective to those foggy old vets who elevate their undistinguished service into something glorious.”

Ron Carlson raved (“Catch 23 or 24”) as did Stewart O’Nan (“classic.”) Both amazing writers if you don’t know them. O’Nan edited The Vietnam Reader.

Ernest Hemingway said to “write one true sentence” to get rolling. If you wrote one true sentence, you could take it from there. Hemingway was opposed to ornaments in writing.

Reilly left behind tens of thousands of true sentences. Here’s one paragraph from The Detachment:

The building shivers as a soft boom rolls across Qui Nhon, across the evac hospital, across the airfield, and the 109th, and beyond. Palmer sets the paperback down and sits absolutely motionless, waiting for another explosion. The VC must be tossing mortars again. He suddenly wants sky over his head, wants to be able to see everything around him, feels trapped inside this box of a room and wants to get out, to be able to see if there’s somebody he has to shoot at. He’s glad he’s good with the .45. Barely made sharpshooter with the M-14, but then he might be better with the M-16, a crazy spring in its butt to absorb the kick, probably thought up by the genius who designed the briefcase handle. Palmer scoots his chair back and stands up, casually turns and begins strolling down the aisle between the beds where men are sleeping. Nobody but himself seems to have noticed the boom. Maybe it takes more than the gentle shiver of a building to alarm infantrymen. Probably more attuned to real danger than Palmer ever will be.

That was Gary’s writing about war—chasing away the spiders with the work of his pen, one true sentence at a time.

Note: To date, in addition to Gary’s Vietnam novels, Running Meter Press has also published eight novels in The Asphalt Warrior series, comic adventures about a Denver cab driver named Murph. Three of the eight books were finalists for the Colorado Book Award and a reviewer for National Public Radio declared them “huge fun.” More about all of Gary’s work: www.theasphaltwarrior.com

Raised outside Boston, Mark Stevens is the son of two librarians. By law, he was required to grow up loving books. And writing. He was the 2016 Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers’ Writer of the Year. He writes the Allison Coil Mystery Series—Antler Dust, Buried by the Roan, Trapline and Lake of Fire. The last three books were all finalists for the Colorado Book Award. Trapline won (2015). Stevens is president of the Rocky Mountain chapter for Mystery Writers of America and serves on the national board. He also hosts a regular podcast for Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers. Kirkus Reviews called Lake of Fire “irresistible” and Craig Johnson, author of the Walt Longmire novels, said, “Mark Stevens writes like wildfire.”

Front Porch Books: August 2017 edition

The Age of Perpetual Light
by Josh Weil
(Grove/Atlantic)

I look forward to a new Josh Weil book like Donald Trump looks forward to a 2 a.m. Tweet (though my anticipation is decidedly less malicious in intent). From the time I read his debut collection of novellas, The New Valley, to the dazzling dystopian epic novel, The Great Glass Sea, Weil has bound me in a beautiful spiderweb of words. He burrows deep into his characters and, like the cleverest of spiders, draws me closer and closer to the center, where I die in ecstasy. And now comes this new book of stories. From the title to the cover design to the story about an Amish woman discovering the wonders of electricity, light—both manmade and divine—guides us forward into this brilliant fiction.

Jacket Copy:  Following his debut novel, The Great Glass Sea, Josh Weil brings together stories selected from a decade of work in a stellar new collection. Beginning at the dawn of the past century, in the early days of electrification, and moving into an imagined future in which the world is lit day and night, The Age of Perpetual Light follows deeply-felt characters through different eras in American history: from a Jewish dry goods peddler who falls in love with an Amish woman while showing her the wonders of an Edison Lamp, to a 1940 farmers’ uprising against the unfair practices of a power company; a Serbian immigrant teenage boy in 1990’s Vermont desperate to catch a glimpse of an experimental satellite, to a back-to-the-land couple forced to grapple with their daughter’s autism during winter’s longest night. Brilliantly hewn and piercingly observant, these are tales that speak to the all-too-human desire for advancement and the struggle of wounded hearts to find a salve, no matter what the cost. This is a breathtaking book from one of our brightest literary lights.

Opening Lines:  One by one the windows come alight. From up the hill, I watch: the Hartzlers’ old stone house so dark, so still, it might be the new-turned soil of a garden bed—huge, square, black—and in it the orange lamplight blooming. Bloom, bloom, bloom. Mrs. Hartzler lighting the wicks. There: I can see her shape. It goes window to window, a bee drifting, till it reaches the first floor, again, and goes straight to—where else?—the kitchen. My stomach moans. I suck in my gut, tug the rucksack’s belt more tight. On my shoulders I shrug the straps a little higher. Down I start toward the farm.

Blurbworthiness:  “Josh Weil is a lamplighter, the best possible kind. He moves us into each of these earthy, elegant stories and suddenly the light changes in ways we couldn’t have imagined. The Age of Perpetual Light is a special book woven with generosity and grit as it works against the dark to take the true measure of kinship.”  (Ron Carlson, author of Return to Oakpine)

The Grip of It
by Jac Jemc
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

I’m going to start building this year’s Halloween reading list with Jac Jemc’s new novel right at the top. From the mad-seeming black-marker scrawl on the front cover and the equally-childlike drawings of screaming heads overlaid on the cover in a near-transparent layer (tilt the book to see the faces in the light) to a groaning haunted house, The Grip of It is the book to prickle my skin with unease this autumn.

Jacket Copy:  Touring their prospective suburban home, Julie and James are stopped by a noise. Deep and vibrating, like throat singing. Ancient, husky, and rasping, but underwater. “That’s just the house settling,” the real estate agent assures them with a smile. He is wrong. The move―prompted by James’s penchant for gambling and his general inability to keep his impulses in check―is quick and seamless; both Julie and James are happy to start afresh. But this house, which sits between a lake and a forest, has its own plans for the unsuspecting couple. As Julie and James try to establish a sense of normalcy, the home and its surrounding terrain become the locus of increasingly strange happenings. The framework― claustrophobic, riddled with hidden rooms within rooms―becomes unrecognizable, decaying before their eyes. Stains are animated on the wall―contracting, expanding―and map themselves onto Julie’s body in the form of painful, grisly bruises. Like the house that torments the troubled married couple living within its walls, The Grip of It oozes with palpable terror and skin-prickling dread. Its architect, Jac Jemc, meticulously traces Julie and James’s unsettling journey through the depths of their new home as they fight to free themselves from its crushing grip.

Opening Lines:  Maybe we move in and we don’t hear the intonation for a few days. Maybe we hear it as soon as we unlock the door. Maybe we drag our friends and family into the house and ask them to hear it and they look into the distance and listen as we try to describe it and fail. “You don’t hear it? It’s like a mouth harp. Deep twang. Like throat singing. Ancient. Glottal. Resonant. Husky and rasping, but underwater.” Alone in the house, though, we become less aware of it, like a persistent, dull headache. Deaf to the sound, until the still silence of ownership settles over us. Maybe we decide we will try to like the noise. Maybe we find comfort in it. Maybe an idea insists itself more easily than an action.

Blurbworthiness:  “I mean this in the best possible way: Jac Jemc gives me the creeps. The Grip of It deserves a spot on the shelf beside Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, and Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves―not only because it is a masterful haunted house story, but because it, like its literary predecessors, is elegantly written, psychologically rich, and damn terrifying.” (Benjamin Percy, author of The Dark Net)

The Shape of Ideas
by Grant Snider
(Abrams Comicarts)

I have a very short shelf of inspirational books about writing and creativity; right now, the only other residents are Still Writing by Dani Shapiro and On Writing by Stephen King. To that shelf, I am joyfully adding a new member: The Shape of Ideas by Grant Snider, creator of the equally-fabulous Incidental Comics. I am only about one-third of the way through this “Illustrated Exploration of Creativity,” but I am taking it slow because smart, beautiful books like this deserve to be savored. The Shape of Ideas is divided into chapters with headings like Inspiration, Perspiration, Aspiration, Contemplation, Pure Elation and other wonderful “-ation” words. Snider is inventive, witty, forthright, and, yes, inspirational. I am hereby declaring this is the Gift Book of the Year for all creators in your life. It is for everyone who, according to Snider in his Dear Reader note, has ever been mocked “for carrying a notebook to bars, restaurants, and children’s birthday parties,” and those who “have been glared at in class or during an important meeting for aimlessly doodling on scrap paper.” Snider is quick to point out The Shape of Ideas won’t help you tap into a bottomless well of creativity (a non-existent well, he says), but it will provide the kind of long-lasting, deep-drilled inspiration that will keep you going when you think all wells have run dry. Want one more scrap of encouragement before you dip your pen in the ink? In addition to being a world-class illustrator, Snider has a full-time day job as an orthodontist. Dentist by day, artist by night. That kind of dedication, perspiration, and aspiration makes me smile.

Jacket Copy:  What does an idea look like? And where do they come from? Grant Snider’s illustrations will motivate you to explore these questions, inspire you to come up with your own answers and, like all Gordian knots, prompt even more questions. Whether you are a professional artist or designer, a student pursuing a creative career, a person of faith, someone who likes walks on the beach, or a dreamer who sits on the front porch contemplating life, this collection of one- and two-page comics will provide insight into the joys and frustrations of creativity, inspiration, and process—no matter your age or creative background.

Opening Lines:

Blurbworthiness:  “Grant Snider’s work delivers introspection, humor, and inspiration in visually stunning drawings. They are a colorful look into the creative process—from the moments of quiet contemplation to the days of frenzied desperation.”  (Susan Cain author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking)

The Standard Grand
by Jay Baron Nicorvo
(St. Martin’s Press)

Some of the best war literature doesn’t involve bullets, blood, or bombs, but centers around what happens to warriors after they redeploy. Think The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers, Be Safe I Love You by Cara Hoffman, Redeployment by Phil Klay, and Tim O’Brien’s short story “Speaking of Courage” from The Things They Carried. When you’re in the midst of the fog of war, it’s hard to think; the contemplation—and the nightmares—often don’t hit full force until after you’re back among the uncomfortable comforts of home. That’s one reason I’m looking forward to reading Jay Baron Nicorvo’s The Standard Grand; the other is the dazzling and inventive plot which involves an AWOL vet, a cougar, a resort in the Catskills and Senator Al Franken. Good things wait for us in these pages, dear reader.

Jacket Copy:  When an Army trucker goes AWOL before her third deployment, she ends up sleeping in Central Park. There, she meets a Vietnam vet and widower who inherited a tumbledown Borscht Belt resort. Converted into a halfway house for homeless veterans, the Standard―and its two thousand acres over the Marcellus Shale Formation―is coveted by a Houston-based multinational company. Toward what end, only a corporate executive knows. With three violent acts at its center―a mauling, a shooting, a mysterious death decades in the past―and set largely in the Catskills, The Standard Grand spans an epic year in the lives of its diverse cast: a female veteran protagonist, a Mesoamerican lesbian landman, a mercenary security contractor keeping secrets and seeking answers, a conspiratorial gang of combat vets fighting to get peaceably by, and a cougar―along with appearances by Sammy Davis, Jr. and Senator Al Franken. All of the characters―soldiers, civilians―struggle to discover that what matters most is not that they’ve caused no harm, but how they make amends for the harm they’ve caused. Jay Baron Nicorvo’s The Standard Grand confronts a glaring cultural omission: the absence of women in our war stories. Like the best of its characters―who aspire more to goodness than greatness―this American novel hopes to darn a hole or two in the frayed national fabric.

Opening Lines:  Specialist Smith gunned the gas and popped the clutch in the early Ozark morning. Her Dodge pickup yelped, slid to one side in the blue dark, then shot fishtailing forward. The rear tires burned a loud ten meters of smoking, skunky rubber out front of the stucco ranch house on Tidal Road.
       She felt thankful for her bad marriage. It allowed her the privilege of living off base; she could go AWOL without having to bust the gates of Fort Leonard Wood. Her four-barrel pocket pepperbox, a COP .357—holstered, unloaded—rode on the passenger seat.

Blurbworthiness:  “With profound compassion for his outrageously wonderful characters, Nicorvo brings readers to a defunct and decaying Catskills resort where a ghost platoon of vets are surviving among dangers both natural and human-made. Insanely funny, by turns tragic and, ultimately, redemptive, The Standard Grand is a desperate masterpiece of a debut: honest, epic, constantly surprising, and relentlessly entertaining.”  (Bonnie Jo Campbell, author of American Salvage)

Crossings
by Jon Kerstetter
(Crown)

Another promising book about war landed on my doorstep this month and has promptly hooked me inside its pages. Like The Standard Grand, the memoir Crossings reminds us that battles are not fought by faceless robots bent on clinical killing but by men and women with bodies that can bleed and souls that can break. Army physician Jon Kerstetter volunteered for duty in Rwanda, Kosovo, and Bosnia and served three combat tours in Iraq. And then he came home and suffered a stroke. See, no robots here. The military may pride itself on its weaponized machinery, but its heart is still made of flesh and blood.

Jacket Copy:  Every juncture in Jon Kerstetter’s life has been marked by a crossing from one world into another: from civilian to doctor to soldier; between healing and waging war; and between compassion and hatred of the enemy. When an injury led to a stroke that ended his careers as a doctor and a soldier, he faced the most difficult crossing of all, a recovery that proved as shattering as war itself. Crossings is a memoir of an improbable, powerfully drawn life, one that began in poverty on the Oneida Reservation in Wisconsin but grew by force of will to encompass a remarkable medical practice. Trained as an emergency physician, Kerstetter’s thirst for intensity led him to volunteer in war-torn Rwanda, Kosovo, and Bosnia, and to join the Army National Guard. His three tours in the Iraq War marked the height of the American struggle there. The story of his work in theater, which involved everything from saving soldiers’ lives to organizing the joint U.S.–Iraqi forensics team tasked with identifying the bodies of Saddam Hussein’s sons, is a bracing, unprecedented evocation of a doctor’s life at war. But war was only the start of Kerstetter’s struggle. The stroke he suffered upon returning from Iraq led to serious cognitive and physical disabilities. His years-long recovery, impeded by near-unbearable pain and complicated by PTSD, meant overcoming the perceived limits of his body and mind and re-imagining his own capacity for renewal and change. It led him not only to writing as a vocation but to a deeper understanding of how healing means accepting a new identity, and how that acceptance must be fought for with as much tenacity as any battlefield victory.

Opening Lines:  A soldier lies in the sand, blood pooling beneath his head, mouth gulping at the air. His eyes fixed, head tilted off to one side, legs and arms motionless. He’s a young soldier in his early twenties, late teens, a young man who should be a freshman in college or finding a summer job while deciding what to do after high school. In less than five minutes he’ll probably die right there in the dirt, right at your feet. You will carry his bloodstains on your boots and on the sleeves of your uniform.

Blurbworthiness:  “The author’s emergence as a military doctor makes for interesting reading...but what is of greatest value in this narrative is Kerstetter’s ongoing, twofold recovery from a stroke on one hand and PTSD on the other...The author’s medical perspective on his own condition and critical therapeutic moments adds depth to an already solid story. An inspiring memoir.”  (Kirkus Reviews)

Fresh Complaint
by Jeffrey Eugenides
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Jeffrey Eugenides’ short story collection—his first in a writing career which began in 1993 with The Virgin Suicides—is a virtually gallery of great opening lines. I won’t list them all here—apart from the book’s very first lines (see below)—but as one example, here’s the bold, funny start to “Baster,” which originally appeared in The New Yorker:

The recipe came in the mail:

Mix semen of three men.
Stir vigorously.
Fill turkey baster.
Recline.
Insert nozzle.
Squeeze.

Ingredients:
1 pinch Stu Wadsworth
1 pinch Jim Freeson
1 pinch Wally Mars

There was no return address but Tomasina knew who had sent it: Diane, her best friend and, recently, fertility specialist.

Now, that’s funny stuff. The rest of the collection promises even more smart hilarity. No complaints here.

Jacket Copy:  Jeffrey Eugenides’s bestselling novels have shown him to be an astute observer of the crises of adolescence, self-discovery, family love, and what it means to be American in our times. The stories in Fresh Complaint explore equally rich­­––­­and intriguing­­––territory. Ranging from the bitingly reproductive antics of “Baster” to the dreamy, moving account of a young traveler’s search for enlightenment in “Air Mail” (selected by Annie Proulx for Best American Short Stories), this collection presents characters in the midst of personal and national emergencies. We meet a failed poet who, envious of other people’s wealth during the real-estate bubble, becomes an embezzler; a clavichordist whose dreams of art founder under the obligations of marriage and fatherhood; and, in “Fresh Complaint,” a high school student whose wish to escape the strictures of her immigrant family lead her to a drastic decision that upends the life of a middle-aged British physicist. Narratively compelling, beautifully written, and packed with a density of ideas despite their fluid grace, these stories chart the development and maturation of a major American writer.

Opening Lines:  Coming up the drive in the rental car, Cathy sees the sign and has to laugh. “Wyndham Falls. Gracious Retirement Living.”
       Not exactly how Della has described it.
       The building comes into view next. The main entrance looks nice enough. It’s big and glassy, with white benches outside and an air of medical orderliness. But the garden apartments set back on the property are small and shabby. Tiny porches, like animal pens. The sense, outside the curtained windows and weather-beaten doors, of lonely lives within.


Front Porch Books is a monthly tally of books—mainly advance review copies (aka “uncorrected proofs” and “galleys”)—I’ve received from publishers. 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: many 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 mention that, in nearly every case, I haven’t had a chance to read these books.

Front Porch Books: March 2017 edition

Front Porch Books is a monthly tally of books—mainly advance review copies (aka “uncorrected proofs” and “galleys”)—I’ve received from publishers. 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: many 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 mention that, in nearly every case, I haven’t had a chance to read these books.

Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children’s Literature as an Adult
by Bruce Handy
(Simon & Schuster)

As I grow older, I’ve noticed myself traveling backwards through the books of my life. Don’t get me wrong: I love a Lee Child or a Celeste Ng or a George Saunders as much as the next guy, but there’s just something about Dr. Seuss or The Borrowers or Where the Red Fern Grows that flips a switch and floods my head with golden beams of nostalgia. Bruce Handy seems to share my love for retro kid lit, so the 11-year-old David Abrams (who still cartwheels through empty rooms inside this 53-year-old body) simply cannot wait to fall into the pages of this book. Let the wild rumpus reading begin!

Jacket Copy:  In 1690, the dour New England Primer, thought to be the first American children’s book, was published in Boston. Offering children gems of advice such as “Strive to learn” and “Be not a dunce,” it was no fun at all. So how did we get from there to “Let the wild rumpus start”? And now that we’re living in a golden age of children’s literature, what can adults get out of reading Where the Wild Things Are and Goodnight Moon, or Charlotte’s Web and Little House on the Prairie? In Wild Things, Vanity Fair contributing editor Bruce Handy revisits the classics of every American childhood, from fairy tales to The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and explores the back stories of their creators, using context and biography to understand how some of the most insightful, creative, and witty authors and illustrators of their times created their often deeply personal masterpieces. Along the way, Handy learns what The Cat in the Hat says about anarchy and absentee parenting, which themes are shared by The Runaway Bunny and Portnoy’s Complaint, and why Ramona Quimby is as true an American icon as Tom Sawyer or Jay Gatsby. It’s a profound, eye-opening experience to reencounter books that you once treasured after decades apart. A clear-eyed love letter to the greatest children’s books and authors from Louisa May Alcott and L. Frank Baum to Eric Carle, Dr. Seuss, Mildred D. Taylor, and E.B. White, Wild Things will bring back fond memories for readers of all ages, along with a few surprises.

Blurbworthiness:  “Brilliant, revelatory, and endlessly entertaining. I’ve read these books a thousand times, but only now do I finally understand them.”  (Lev Grossman, author of the Magicians trilogy)

Ash Falls
by Warren Read
(Ig Publishing)

A murderer escapes from jail and heads toward his hometown, the titular Pacific Northwest community of Ash Falls. Tension in the town simmers, comes to a rolling boil, overflows the pot and spills with a hot flash into the reader’s lap. Oh, yes, yes, yes: Ash Falls intrigues and tantalizes, pulling me closer and closer into its grip. I cannot escape.

Jacket Copy:  A routine prisoner transfer on a rural highway ends with the bus upside-down in a ravine, the driver dead of a heart attack, and convicted murderer Ernie Luntz on the loose, his eyes fixed on the mountain range in the distance, over which lies his hometown of Ash Falls. Set in a moss-draped, Pacific Northwest mountain town, Ash Falls is the story of a closely connected community both held together and torn apart by one man’s single act of horrific violence. As the residents of Ash Falls—which include Ernie’s ex-wife and teenage son—wait on edge, wondering if and when Ernie Luntz will reappear, they come to discover that they are held prisoner not by the killer in the woods outside their town, but by the chains of their own creation. A tension-filled, multi-character exploration of collapsed relationships, carefully guarded secrets and the psychological strain of living in a place that is at once both idyllic and crippling, Ash Falls is a picturesque and haunting novel that belongs beside the work of such classic contemporary American writers as Kent Haruf, Leif Enger, Smith Henderson and Ron Carlson.

Opening Lines:  He came out of the cage just before dawn and moved quickly down the corridor lined with dozens still asleep, their deep, gouging breaths and heavy snores pushing him on his way. He was dressed in state-issued jeans and a t-shirt under a thin, denim jacket. He wore running shoes, and the men shadowed him as if he were a child, one stationed on either side of him, so close their arms brushed against his as they walked past all the others, down the concrete steps and through three separate rooms, out the metal doors and into the morning chill.
      It hadn’t occurred to Ernie that the sky on the outside of the wall could look so different from the one that spooned out over his cell window. This was the kind of sky that went on forever, reaching in all directions, billowing black and gray cotton, pinhole stars pushing through where they could. He’d had weeks to consider what a move like this could mean for a guy like him, a guy who had done what he’d done. But Christ almighty, the breaking day was surely something to behold from the outside. Before the men ducked him into the back seat, he took in one more breath of the brand new air.

Blurbworthiness:  “Warren Read’s Ash Falls is a rare, multi-faceted treasure: at once a gripping narrative of tragedy and its aftermath and a psychologically rich portrait of small-town life in the contemporary rural West, the novel is above all a nuanced exploration of isolation and the solace of intimacy. All his characters—from an aging mink farmer, to a middle-aged pot dealer, to a single mother, to a gay teenager with an escaped convict for a father—are so real and complex I sometimes forget I haven’t encountered them in the actual world. This is a book to read, read again, and pass on to all your literature-loving friends.”  (Scott Nadelson, author of Between You and Me)

The Last Kid Left
by Rosecrans Baldwin
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

A car crashes into a giant sculpture of a cowgirl. Two dead bodies are found in the trunk. I’ll just stop right there because that alone is enough to put Rosecrans Baldwin’s new novel near the top of my ever-growing To-Be-Read pile (aka Mount NeveRest).

Jacket Copy:  The Last Kid Left begins when a car smashes into a sculpture of a giant cowgirl. The police find two bodies in the trunk. 19-year-old Nick Toussaint Jr. is arrested for murder, and after details of the crime rip across the internet, his 16-year-old girlfriend, Emily Portis―a sheltered teen who’s been off the grid until now, her first romance coinciding with her first cellphone―is nearly consumed by a public hungry for every lurid detail, accurate or not. Emily and Nick are not the only ones whose lives come unmoored. A retired police officer latches onto the case. Nick’s alcoholic mother is thrust into an unfamiliar role. A young journalist who left her hometown behind is pulled into the fray. And Emily’s father, the town Sheriff, is finally forced to confront a monstrous secret. The Last Kid Left is a bold, searching novel about how our relationships operate in a hyper-connected world, an expertly-portrayed account of tragedy turned mercilessly into entertainment. And it’s the suspenseful unwinding of a crime that’s more complex than it initially seems. But mostly it’s the story of two teenagers, dismantled by circumstances and rotten luck, who are desperate to believe that love is enough to save them.

Opening Lines:  Nick Toussaint Jr. clutches a handle of tequila by the neck. A pair of Range Rovers swing around him, playing tag in the rain.
      An orange moon hangs slightly low over New Jersey.
      He mashes the gas pedal. A surge of acceleration fills the hollow in his gut.
      Two bodies lie still in the back.

The Red-Haired Woman
by Orhan Pamuk
(Knopf)

On the surface, Orhan Pamuk’s new novel bears some similarities to Ron Carlson’s 2007 novel Five Skies: a story of blue-collar labor populated with rich characters. I loved Five Skies very much. So, I’m ready to dig deep beneath the surface of The Red-Haired Woman.

Jacket Copy:  On the outskirts of a town thirty miles from Istanbul, a master well digger and his young apprentice are hired to find water on a barren plain. As they struggle in the summer heat, excavating without luck meter by meter, the two will develop a filial bond neither has known before—not the poor middle-aged bachelor nor the middle-class boy whose father disappeared after being arrested for politically subversive activities. The pair will come to depend on each other and exchange stories reflecting disparate views of the world. But in the nearby town, where they buy provisions and take their evening break, the boy will find an irresistible diversion. The Red-Haired Woman, an alluring member of a traveling theatre company, catches his eye and seems as fascinated by him as he is by her. The young man’s wildest dream will be realized, but, when in his distraction a horrible accident befalls the well digger, the boy will flee, returning to Istanbul. Only years later will he discover whether he was in fact responsible for his master’s death and who the redheaded enchantress was.

Opening Lines:  I had wanted to be a writer. But after the events I am about to describe, I studied engineering geology and became a building contractor. Even so, readers shouldn’t conclude from my telling the story now that it is over, that I’ve put it all behind me. The more I remember, the deeper I fall into it. Perhaps you, too, will follow, lured by the enigma of fathers and sons.

Not Constantinople
by Nicholas Bredie
(Dzanc Books)

Strangers (American ex-pats) in a strange land (Turkey) are themselves “invaded” by a family who take up residence in their Istanbul apartment. That’s just the starting point for Nicholas Bredie’s debut novel. From there, Not Constantinople spins into hilarity when a get-rich scheme bonds the two factions together.

Jacket Copy:  Fred and Virginia, two expatriates living in Istanbul and working at the university, come home one night to find their apartment occupied by a family of Greeks. Barred by a quirk of Turkish law from evicting them, Fred comes to a strange kind of understanding with their new squatters; looking to make his fortune before returning to the States, he starts a paper-writing racket with the Greek patriarch, selling term papers to his own university students. Between get-rich schemes and run-ins with Kurdish separatists, Fred watches the transformation of his new city as historic neighborhoods are gobbled up by greedy developers and the city’s rapacious elite. Lauded by T.C. Boyle as “utterly charming,” Not Constantinople is the story of a region in transition and the uncertainty of life in a foreign country.

Opening Lines:  Fred called the police twice. The strangers in the apartment just stared as he dialed. When Fred tried to explain in English, the police hung up. The second time, he tried saying “There are strangers in our apartment” in Turkish. After conferring with one another, the police said yes, there are. It wasn’t the first time his phrasebook had failed him.

Blurbworthiness:  “In spare, understated prose, our author captures the privileged aimlessness and corrupted romanticism of the contemporary white American expatriate. Bredie is a sly and unsparing writer for the post-Hemingway set, revealing a world of travel that is stripped of illusions and glamour.”  (Viet Nguyen, author of The Refugees)

Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays From a Nervous System
by Sonya Huber
(University of Nebraska Press)

I have a very low pain threshold. As in, a quarter-inch paper cut can send me into teeth-clenching, eye-squeezing agony. Just ask my wife—she has a whole suitcase of eye-rolling, head-shaking stories she could tell. So yeah, I’m a wimpy baby when it comes to cuts, bruises, broken bones and stomach aches, but there are many people in this world who bravely swallow their pain on a daily basis, biting down on leather straps to endure much deeper stabs of bodily torment than those caused by my little paper cut. Like author Sonya Huber who lives in “a body with the city-buzz of pain always in the background.” We read, in part, to slip into the minds and bodies of others. In this instance, sinking into Huber’s essay collection might hurt, but I expect it to be enlightening and to give me a much-needed dose of empathy. I’m really looking forward to reading Pain Woman Takes Your Keys. As long as I don’t get any paper cuts while turning the pages.

Jacket Copy:  Rate your pain on a scale of one to ten. What about on a scale of spicy to citrus? Is it more like a lava lamp or a mosaic? Pain, though a universal element of human experience, is dimly understood and sometimes barely managed. Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays from a Nervous System is a collection of literary and experimental essays about living with chronic pain. Sonya Huber moves away from a linear narrative to step through the doorway into pain itself, into that strange, unbounded reality. Although the essays are personal in nature, this collection is not a record of the author’s specific condition but an exploration that transcends pain’s airless and constraining world and focuses on its edges from wild and widely ranging angles. Huber addresses the nature and experience of invisible disability, including the challenges of gender bias in our health care system, the search for effective treatment options, and the difficulty of articulating chronic pain. She makes pain a lens of inquiry and lyricism, finds its humor and complexity, describes its irascible character, and explores its temperature, taste, and even its beauty.

Opening Lines:  Pain moved into my body five years ago. It wasn’t the whack of an anvil or the burn of a scraped knee. This pain sat warmly on the surface of my hands up to my elbows like evil, pink evening gloves, with a sort of swimming cap clenched on my head, with blue plastic flowers at the base of the neck, and a nauseating blur in the eyes. At other times the pain was a cold ache at the knuckles, with a frazzle in the stomach and a steady and oblong ache from hip to hip across the pelvis. It was a rigid, curled twang in the toes like the talons of a predatory bird.  (from “The Lava Lamp of Pain” )

Blurbworthiness:  “This is an important book, a necessary book, a book that, in the right hands, could change how our medical establishment deals with pain. These essays are at once vulnerable and fierce, funny and smart, unflinching and dappled with stunning metaphor.”  (Gayle Brandeis, author of Fruitflesh)

Friday Freebie: Carthage by Joyce Carol Oates and Return to Oakpine by Ron Carlson

Congratulations to Martha Gifford, winner of last week's Friday Freebie: The Game We Play by Susan Hope Lanier, The Freedom in American Songs by Kathleen Winter, and There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya.

This week's book giveaway is a pair of novels by two of our greatest contemporary American writers: Carthage by Joyce Carol Oates and Return to Oakpine by Ron Carlson.  One lucky reader will win both books which are now out in paperback.

A young girl's disappearance rocks a community and a family in Carthage, a stirring examination of grief, faith, justice, and the atrocities of war from Joyce Carol Oates.  Zeno Mayfield's daughter has disappeared into the night, gone missing in the wilds of the Adirondacks.  But when the community of Carthage joins a father's frantic search for the girl, they discover the unlikeliest of suspects--a decorated Iraq War veteran with close ties to the Mayfield family.  As grisly evidence mounts against the troubled war hero, the family must wrestle with the possibility of having lost a daughter forever.  Carthage plunges us deep into the psyche of a wounded young corporal haunted by unspeakable acts of wartime aggression, while unraveling the story of a disaffected young girl whose exile from her family may have come long before her disappearance.  “Oates shows how perilous it is to assign guilt, and how hard it is to draw the line between victim and perpetrator in a blurred moral landscape in which every crime, on the battlefield or on the home front, is a crime of conscience.”  (New York Times Book Review)

Return to Oakpine was high on the list of best books I read last year (but, really, the same could be said for just about any year I read something by Ron Carlson).  Click here to read my full appreciation for the novel.  Here's the publisher's jacket copy synopsis to tell you a little more about the book:  Ron Carlson has always been a critics’ favorite, but Return to Oakpine shows the acclaimed writer at his finest.  In this tender and nostalgic portrait of western American life, Carlson tells the story of four middle-aged friends who once played in a band while growing up together in small-town Wyoming.  One of them, Jimmy Brand, left for New York City and became an admired novelist.  Thirty years later in 1999, he’s returned to die.  Craig Ralston and Frank Gunderson never left Oakpine; Mason Kirby, a Denver lawyer, is back on family business.  Jimmy’s arrival sends the other men’s dreams and expectations, realized and deferred, whirling to the surface.  And now that they are reunited, getting the band back together might be the most essential thing they ever do.

If you’d like a chance at winning both books, simply email your name and mailing address to

thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line.  One entry per person, please.  Despite its name, the Friday Freebie runs all week long and remains open to entries until midnight on Nov. 6, at which time I’ll draw the winning name.  I’ll announce the lucky reader on Nov. 7.  If you’d like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week newsletter, simply add the words “Sign me up for the newsletter” in the body of your email.  Your email address and other personal information will never be sold or given to a third party (except in those instances where the publisher requires a mailing address for sending Friday Freebie winners copies of the book).

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

Trailer Park Tuesday: If Not For This by Pete Fromm

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

You've probably noticed the blog feed has been particularly full of books by Montanans this year.  There's a good reason for that: the Big Sky state has produced some exceptionally-fine literature for our shelves lately.  Painted Horses by Malcolm Brooks, The Ploughmen by Kim Zupan, The Home Place by Carrie La Seur, High and Inside by Russell Rowland, and Tom Connor's Gift by David Allan Cates are all novels by Montanans which made their way onto my 2014 reading list.  Add If Not For This by Pete Fromm (author of As Cool As I Am) to that lineup--well, okay, I haven't read it yet....but I vow to do so before the year is out.  The lovely trailer for Fromm's latest novel certainly gets me in the mood to read this love story of two river rafters who are faced with some very hard challenges.  Here's the jacket copy synopsis:

After meeting at a boatman's bash on the Snake River, river runners Maddy and Dalt embark on a lifelong love affair. They marry on the banks of the Buffalo Fork, sure they'll live there the rest of their days. Forced by the economics of tourism to leave Wyoming, they start a new adventure, opening their own river business in Ashland, Oregon: Halfmoon Whitewater. They prosper there, leading rafting trips and guiding fishermen into the wilds of Mongolia and Russia. But when Maddy, laid low by dizzy spells, with a mono that isn't quite mono, both discovers she is pregnant and is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, they realize their adventure is just beginning. Navigating hazards that dwarf any of the rapids they've faced together, Maddy narrates her life with Dalt the way she lives it: undaunted, courageous, in the present tense. Driven by her irresistible voice, full of wit and humor and defiance, If Not For This is a love story like no other.

The video, produced by the good folks at StraightEIGHT Films, moves gracefully, sensuously--like the deliberate current of a river (with one cutaway to whitewater rapids, which hints at the turmoil of Maddy's condition)--and ends with a series of blurbs, like this one from Ron Carlson: “In If Not For This, Pete Fromm brings us a rich, deeply felt book, so full of kindness and kind people that it’s an absolute phenomenon.”  To paraphrase Maddy, I can hardly wait to launch into this book and get swept downstream.

Every Book I Read in 2013

Taking a cue from some of my fellow bookworms and authors (in particular, Matt Bell, who read an impressive 113 books this past year), I thought I'd share my entire book log from 2013.  I've already posted the statistics from my reading year, but here's the meat which belongs on those mathematical bones.  A couple of other notes: 28 of the 81 books were written by women, 35 were published in 2013, 11 were published before 2000, and four won't be published until 2014.  I've included novella-length stories and children's books because they also figured into the annual tally.

Mormon Boy by Seth Brady Tucker

The Third Son by Julie Wu

Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor by Brad Gooch

Hollywood Unknowns: A History of Extras, Bit Players, and Stand-Ins by Anthony Slide

Why Unicorn Drinks by C. W. Moss

Fire and Forget, edited by Roy Scranton and Matt Gallagher

Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman

The Sensualist by Daniel Torday

I Want to Show You More by Jamie Quatro

Edward Adrift by Craig Lancaster

Red Moon by Benjamin Percy

Useless Landscape, or A Guide For Boys by D. A. Powell

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter

National Treasures by Charles McLeod

The Care and Feeding of Exotic Pets by Diana Wagman

Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

Sparta by Roxana Robinson

Woke Up Lonely by Fiona Maazel

Wild Delicate Seconds: 29 Wildlife Encounters by Charles Finn

The Message in the Hollow Oak by Carolyn Keene

The Sign of the Twisted Candles by Carolyn Keene

The Coldest Night by Robert Olmstead

Death of an American Sniper by Anthony Swofford

The Clue of the Carved Ruby by Helen Wells

Mister and Lady Day by Amy Novesky

The Sun Valley Story by Van Gordon Sauter

Love Slave by Jennifer Spiegel

All That Is by James Salter

Forgotten Dreams by Mark Gibbons

Coal Black Horse by Robert Olmstead

The Tenth of December by George Saunders

The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes

Joyland by Stephen King

Storm by Christopher Cook

The Stick Soldiers by Hugh Martin

Defiant: The POWs Who Endured Vietnam's Most Infamous Prison, the Women Who Fought for Them, and the One Who Never Returned by Alvin Townley

Shrapnel by William Wharton

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

James Fenimore Cooper, Leatherstocking Boy by Gertrude Hecker Winders

Her Last Death by Susanna Sonnenberg

The Alienist by Machado De Assis

Death of an Angel by Frances and Richard Lockridge

Return to Oakpine by Ron Carlson

Falling to Earth by Kate Southwood

Mathew Brady: Portraits of a Nation by Robert Wilson

The Commandant of Lubizec by Patrick Hicks

The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith (aka J. K. Rowling)

The Cineaste by A. Van Jordan

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

At the Bottom of Everything by Ben Dolnick

Romanticism by April Bernard

Familiar by J. Robert Lennon

The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells by Andrew Sean Greer

Songs of Willow Frost by Jamie Ford

On Kingdom Mountain by Howard Frank Mosher

Mayakovsky’s Revolver by Matthew Dickman

How to Tell Toledo From the Night Sky by Lydia Netzer

Field Notes by Charles Butterfield

Eleven Days by Lea Carpenter

Lucky Bruce by Bruce Jay Friedman

The End of the Road by Tom Bodett

Pilgrim’s Wilderness by Tom Kizzia

Still Writing by Dani Shapiro

Pumpkin by Cindy Ott

Inventing the Christmas Tree by Bernd Brunner

London Snow by Paul Theroux

A Charlie Brown Christmas: The Making of a Tradition by Lee Mendelson

Christmas at High Rising by Angela Thirkell

Waking by Ron Rash

How to Shake the Other Man by Derek Palacio

The Martian by Andy Weir

The Dark by Lemony Snicket

Year of the Jungle by Suzanne Collins

The Anatomy of Edouard Beaupre by Sarah Kathryn York

The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate

The Boarding House by Marcia Melton

Western Taxidermy by Barb Howard

Hercule Poirot and the Greenshore Folly by Agatha Christie

The Last Repatriate by Matthew Salesses
The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries edited by Otto Penzler

My Year of Books: Best Fiction of 2013

This was the year I went all Lewis & Clark on my shelves. Authors who'd been on my "gotta-read-someday" list for far too long came out with new books, providing me with an opportunity to "discover" them.  Writers like Fiona Maazel, Andrew Sean Greer, Jamie Ford, J. Robert Lennon and Neil Gaiman provided many hours of joy between the covers.  But for every author I checked off my bucket list, there are triple that number still waiting to be read for the first time: Jeffrey Eugenides, Donna Tartt, Marisha Pessl, Pete Fromm, Anthony Doerr, Bill Bryson, William T. Vollmann and Colson Whitehead to name a few--and don't even get me started on the classics!  (Hello, Hardy, Proust and Wodehouse...).

This year also gave me the pleasure of discovering some new writers and those who hadn't previously been on my radar--fictioneers like Ben Dolnick, Jamie Quatro, and Kate Southwood.  I look forward to reading more of their work in the future.

In compiling this year's "Best Books" list, I limited myself to fiction, but I'd like to give special mention to a couple of non-fiction books which would have made the cut if I'd widened the scope of the list: Still Writing by Dani Shapiro is an absolute must-read for anyone who practices the craft of writing (or who thinks that someday they might take up the pen and jot down a few lines of art); and Pilgrim's Wilderness by Tom Kizzia is a riveting account of one stone-cold crazy patriarch who homesteads in Alaska's wilderness then endangers his family and the entire community when he takes a stand against the federal government (Kizzia's writing is so, so very good--right down to the last shattering sentence which casts the previous 335 pages in a new light).  In poetry, I was bowled over by the stanzas coming from Hugh Martin (The Stick Soldiers) and A. Van Jordan (The Cineaste)--poems about war and movies, respectively.

Without further preamble, here are my Top 10 favorite books from 2013 (in no particular order):

At the Bottom of Everything
by Ben Dolnick
Ben Dolnick’s novel about two childhood friends trying, as adults, to reconcile past mistakes held me in its grip so hard that I found myself at 2 a.m. one night turning pages so quickly my fingers were cross-hatched with tiny paper cuts.  At that point in the novel, Adam had traveled to India in search of his old friend Thomas who was lost, both bodily and in the corridors of his mind.  Both men are in their twenties and are trying to deal with a terrible accident for which they were responsible as reckless teenagers.  Guilt has wracked them each in separate ways and they drifted apart over the years—Adam (the novel’s narrator) is now a tutor who’s having sex with the mother of one of his students, and Thomas seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth.  His worried parents reach out to Adam in hopes he can track him down.  Though Adam resists being pulled back into Thomas’ life, he also knows it’s inevitable.  He tells us on the first page: “I’d spent the last couple of years…ignoring the fact that Thomas needed me, as if his life were a flashing Check Engine light in the corner of my dashboard.”  Dolnick subtly asks big questions: What is our responsibility to the lives of others?  Should we take it upon ourselves to rescue lost souls?  How do we forgive ourselves for bad deeds?  Is it ever possible to move on from the errors of our past?  Another question he might have asked himself: “What is my responsibility to readers who end up bleeding from paper cuts?”  At the Bottom of Everything was probably the most compelling book I read all year.  I couldn't shake it from my system—nor did I want to.

I Want to Show You More
by Jamie Quatro
Jamie Quatro’s debut book, I Want to Show You More, is a profound, weird, funny, sad and wholly-original gathering of short fiction.  Nearly a year after reading it, I’m still thinking of highlights: a church that falls apart, sending its parishioners to live in the woods; an ultra-marathon in which runners carry totems—including a glass-blown penis—in backpacks; and several heartbreaking stories about a family coping with the loss of its matriarch as she battles cancer.  Set in the South—primarily on Lookout Mountain which straddles the border between Georgia and Tennessee—Quatro’s stories take on broad themes like adultery, spirituality, grief and parenting, but it’s the intimacy of the characters which drives the book forward.  There’s a quadriplegic mother at a pool party, a rotting lover’s corpse in a bed, a fair amount of phone sex and at least one frail character’s perilous journey up and down a hilly suburban street in her quest to mail a letter about the Iraq War to President Bush.  Quatro’s style has the terse, stabbing power of Raymond Carver in his finest hour, but at the same time there’s the fuller lyricism of something by Alice Munro, languorously stretching and humming below the surface of the words.  Each time I finished one of the stories, I thought, “Wow, that’s the best one in the book,” and then I’d go on to the next story and find it was the best one.  I ended up closing the book and sighing, “Okay, they’re all the best.”  I can’t wait for Jamie Quatro to show me more with her next book.

Sparta
by Roxana Robinson
Conrad Farrell comes home from the war in Iraq, skin unbroken and all limbs still attached…and yet he is a damaged man, a wounded warrior struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder—like so many (too many) of our returning veterans.  PTSD is at the heart of Roxana Robinson's riveting novel which describes the condition in terms I've never before seen on the page.  Precise as a psychological case history, the book charts the painful journey of Conrad from gung-ho boy to disillusioned warrior to broken man.  Conrad comes from a family that's "bookish and liberal, not martial and authoritarian," with a mother and father who can't understand why their son would want to take up arms in defense of his country.   Conrad, a classics major in college, is drawn to the stories of the ancient world—particularly Sparta, the Peloponnesian War, and the Iliad.  "I want to do something big," he tells his family when announcing his decision to join the Marines.  "I want to do something that has consequences."  Little does he know, he'll be the one on the receiving end of those consequences.  No matter where you fall in the spectrum between hawk and dove, Robinson's novel is powerfully affecting and takes its place on the shelf of essential war literature.

All That Is
by James Salter
At the center of All That Is, James Salter’s first novel in 35 years, stands Phillip Bowman who we first see as a young naval officer in World War Two, then a Harvard student, and then on to a Mad Men life as a book editor in mid-century Manhattan.  He lives, he loves, he advances toward death—nothing too remarkable plot-wise, but the book's power is all in the telling.  Salter's language is beautiful and confident.  How many writers do you know who can carry off describing the span and breadth of one person's life in the space of just one paragraph?  Seemingly minor characters are given full, rich treatments in big, bold strokes.  Admittedly, there were times when I didn't want to like All That Is because it seemed tainted by a thin coating of mysogynism—and that's certainly there to a degree—but then I had to ask myself whether it was truly Salter's feelings toward women or if it was an accurate portrayal of 1960s America and I was just looking back at it through the bias of a more enlightened age.  Maybe it's a little of both (which still makes me uncomfortable), but in the end I was won over by the sheer quality of the writing.  James Salter is hardly a household name—even, sadly, in bookish households—but he's been quietly producing great works of literature since the late 1950s.  In his generous and spot-on review for the New York Times, Malcolm Jones wrote: “Salter is 87, with a reputation so secure he has nothing left to prove.  If there were a Mount Rushmore for writers, he’d be there already.  He could have published nothing, and no one would have thought less of him.”  And yet, here he is in the twilight of a career with what could arguably be his best book so far.  It is full of language distilled down to pure, true sentences.

Falling to Earth
by Kate Southwood
Pivoting off the real-life Tri-State Tornado of 1925, Kate Southwood’s debut novel is a riveting account of wealth, gossip, and ostracism.  The wind's devastation is described in vivid images like “a woman is frozen, screaming under a tree at a child’s body caught high in its branches” and “trees have been snatched out of the ground like hanks of hair.”  Paul Graves, owner of a successful lumberyard, miraculously survives the tornado as the rest of his small Illinois town is flattened.  While the tornado scene (which comes upon us quickly in the first chapter) is breathtaking in its fury, the most fascinating part of the story is how Paul is shunned by the rest of his town for his good fortune (none of his family members are hurt and his house and store are left standing in a landscape reduced to splinters and rubble).  It's a clever reversal of the Biblical story of Job.  Instead of being stripped of everything by God, Paul is divinely spared––and that's the worst thing which could have happened to him.  Kate Southwood's first novel is the start of a very promising career.

Edward Adrift
by Craig Lancaster
Like The Empire Strikes Back and The Godfather II, Edward Adrift is that rarest of things: a sequel that is actually better than its predecessor.  In the case of Montana writer Craig Lancaster's new book, that's saying a lot because I loved 600 Hours of Edward with all the passionate joy of a botanist discovering a new butterfly.  That first novel possessed a distinct voice told by a unique character who immediately endeared himself to the reader: Edward Stanton, a middle-aged man with Asperger syndrome and obsessive-compulsive disorder who lives alone in Billings, Montana and adheres to a rigid schedule, all of it noted in his logbook, including the day's temperature and his most common waking time (7:38 a.m.).  Edward refuses to start his therapy sessions even a minute before the appointed hour (10:00 a.m.), and he watches one episode of the 1960s cop show Dragnet every night (10:00 p.m. sharp).  In Edward Adrift, Lancaster deepens our understanding of 42-year-old Edward who is plowing through the world in spite of (or perhaps because of) his Asperger's.  As the novel opens, Edward is going through a period of upheaval: he's lost his job, his best friend, 12-year-old Kyle, has moved away, and his Dragnet schedule has been thrown all out of whack.  Edward is, as he would say, flummoxed.  When Kyle's mother calls from Boise to say the boy isn't adjusting very well to his new life, Edward makes the bold decision to leave his comfort zone and embark on a road trip that is both hilarious and touching, all of it delivered in Edward's distinct man-child voice:

I'm trying to see what's coming, but that is a silly pursuit. We never know. I don't, anyway. It's all a surprise, and I'm having to learn to live with surprises even though I prefer certainty. Certainty allows you to plan your life, and there are few things I like better than planning. Surprises make you adjust along the way, and I'm not very good at that.

My biggest surprise in reading this book is how much I loved it.  Don't get me wrong--I looked forward to spending some more time with one of my favorite literary characters, but I was, frankly, braced for a Jaws 2 experience.  Edward Adrift turned out to be richer, funnier, and even more moving than my first encounter with the man obsessed with time and temperature.

Woke Up Lonely
by Fiona Maazel
In his praise of Woke Up Lonely, novelist Wesley Stace warns, "Ignore Fiona Maazel at your peril."  It's true--Maazel is a force to be reckoned with....and a force to be read.  I'd ignored her first novel Last Last Chance when it was released (no, "ignored" is the wrong word--"allowed it to be buried in the avalanche of new books hitting me at the time" is more like it), and now I'm regretting that decision.  Woke Up Lonely is a clanging wake-up alarm for literature: "Rise and shine, all you lazy Words--today, we're going out there, and we're gonna be funny!  And smart!  And we'll take the brain by storm!  Let's go!"  How to describe the plot and characters of Maazel's new novel in this short space?  Woke Up Lonely is for those readers who wished George Saunders would write a novel.  It's for fans of filmmaker Wes Anderson who'd like to see his off-kilter brand of humor pinned down to the page.  Woke Up Lonely is for everyone who wished the siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas had been funnier.  Still not good enough for you?  Hmmm....well, try this: there's a cult leader who promises to cure loneliness, there's his ex-wife who's spying on him even though she really wants to protect him from those who've hired her, there's a hostage situation, there's Cincinnati, there's North Korea, there's Kim Jong Il (and his double, and his double's double), there's speed dating, there's a secret passageway, there's an explosion or two, and....there's more, much more.  Maazel throws a lot of spaghetti at the wall and, impressively, only one or two noodles fall off.  While the story and its people were interesting and engaging, I loved this book primarily at the sentence level.  Woke Up Lonely is one of the few books which made me laugh out loud this year.  It also made me cluck my tongue in amazement at what Maazel does with the English language.  A couple of examples:  "She settled under a lamp whose glow helped define the cut of her face.  Very narrow.  Unnaturally so.   A face between cymbals after the clap."  And this: "He had slept but three hours the night before--the couch was a muddle of lump and trough--and the sugar was romping about his blood like it owned the place."  Those two sentences happen by coincidence to be on the same page, but trust me when I say there are more like them throughout the book.  Fiona Maazel romps across all her pages like she owns the place.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane
by Neil Gaiman
Childhood is a scary place, full of under-the-bed shadows, half-ajar closet doors, and--most frightening of all--the inscrutable motives of adults. Think of all those dark fairy tales which pressed their thumbprints into your young, malleable imagination.  Now multiply that darkness by two-hundred-thousand and you'll get the heart of Neil Gaiman's fable for adults.  The Ocean at the End of the Lane is populated with monsters--both the fantastical, many-tentacled creature kind and the human variety.  Most of the outright scary stuff comes in the second half of this slim novel, though there's a sense of unease from the very start as the unnamed narrator revisits his childhood home in rural Sussex, England.  Now in his fifties, he's there to deliver the eulogy at a funeral, but it's also an occasion for him to remember the time when he was seven years old and a series of traumatic events left a lasting mark.  By the same token, the novel will leave a lasting mark on anyone who is fortunate enough to pick it up and enter the world of Gaiman's magical, mystical, fertile imagination.  I began by saying this book is heavy with shadows, but it's really like that piece of dark chocolate you bite between your teeth.  There is, at first, the very adult, black-coffee taste; but let it sit on your tongue long enough and you'll start to taste the sweet notes.  As Gaiman writes in the opening pages, "Childhood memories are sometimes covered and obscured beneath the things that come later, like childhood toys forgotten at the bottom of a crammed adult closet, but they are never lost for good."  Now, think of the last time you dug around in your old toy chest (if, that is, your parents were kind enough to save it for you up in the attic).  Do you remember the rush of nostalgia and the nose-sting of unexpected tears?  That's exactly the kind of experience that waits for you in The Ocean at the End of the Lane.

Return to Oakpine
by Ron Carlson
Is there any pen Ron Carlson touches that doesn't turn to gold?  I've fallen headlong in love with every book he's written (with the exception of the best-forgotten Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald, an early clunker from 1977).  His short story collection At the Jim Bridger is damn near perfect; The Signal is a harrowing story of wilderness survival; and you won't find a better novel about blue-collar work than in the pages of Five Skies.  In his newest novel, Carlson turns a sentimental eye (perhaps too sentimental for some readers) on life in a small town.  Thirty years after they graduated high school, four friends reunite in their hometown, the fictional Oakpine, Wyoming.  Frank, a hardware store owner, and Craig, a bartender, never left.  Mason, a freshly divorced lawyer, comes back to Oakpine from Denver looking for "a change, an end, some new chapter in this old life."  And then there's Jimmy, who left Oakpine for New York City after the tragic death of his brother.  A successful novelist, he's come back to live with his estranged parents because he's dying.  Carlson deftly captures the pull-and-resistance feeling of going back to your roots.  You can go home again, but it's never quite the same, it is?  (I speak as one who recently returned to his own hometown in Wyoming after a 15-year absence.)  As Carlson writes of Larry, Craig's ambitious track-star son who runs the length and breadth of Oakpine on a daily basis, "Anybody with any dignity got out of Oakpine....Larry had no idea where he was going, but he was going, that was for sure."  Somehow, I get the feeling that if you pay a visit to Craig's hardware store ten years down the line, you'll find Larry there behind the counter.  Return to Oakpine is full of sentences that I kept stopping to re-read, savoring Carlson's wordcraft.  For instance, I could practically taste the afternoon of a small town in these fine sentences:

The two men sat in the quiet bar. Suddenly the light dimmed again under a cloud, and it was a moment that went out on them, through the big plate-glass window across the gray street and up above the town in a moment, reaching past the last house and the few bad roads newly bladed into the prairie and the antelope in clusters on greengray hillsides beyond that and then hovering beyond and beyond, the world, their lives, the full gravid sense of afternoon. There was nothing to do or say except ride this part of the day together there, both men feeling the weight register; the men they'd become. It was a beery afternoon in their hometown.

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
by Karen Joy Fowler
Starting with the wordy title itself, Karen Joy Fowler's We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is like that hypertensive friend you meet for coffee and you realize, after a caffeinated hour, that you've never gotten a word in edgewise, but that doesn't really matter because you've been held in thrall by the conversation which has bounded along on a series of breathless loop-de-loops. As this funny, quirky novel begins, narrator Rosemary Cooke, a twenty-two-year-old "meandering" through college, admits she’s always been a “great talker.” As a child she chatters like a chimp in a zoo and really gets under the skin of her parents—a father who’s “a chain-smoking, hard-drinking, fly-fishing atheist from Indianapolis” and a mother who has retreated into near catatonic madness. As she's grown older, Rosemary has retreated into silence after her family experienced a traumatic upheaval. Two of her siblings go missing (at separate times) and the majority of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is about Rosemary’s quest to learn what happened to them. I won’t say much more because surprises abound in these pages and I don’t want to have angry readers come throw rocks at my house because I’ve spoiled things.  Let’s just say, things aren’t always what they appear to be.  We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is thought-provoking, funny, and about as unforgettable as that friend who never stops to take a breath.

~

My Year of Books is the annual backward glance of my literary life.  All this week, I'll be posting lists of the best things I read in 2013.  Be sure to visit the rest of the series (links posted as they're published):

Monday:  By the Numbers
Tuesday:  Best First Lines
Wednesday:  Best Cover Designs
Thursday:  Best of the Backlist
Friday:  Best Fiction of 2013
Saturday:  Publisher of the Year