A Birthday Card to Some of My Favorite Writers

According to my Facebook alerts and this morning's Writer's Almanac e-mail, today marks the birthday of Thomas McGuane, Jim Harrison, Ayelet Waldman and the late great Grace Paley, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Naguib Mahfouz.  Lots of people are celebrating birthdays on December 11, but I was struck by this confluence of authors all on this one day.  Their parents must have been busy and--presumably--happy in the late-winter darkness of March in their respective birth-years.


Thomas McGuane
b. 1939
Wyandotte, Michigan

I've had the pleasure of meeting Mr. McGuane and, as I mentioned in an earlier blog post, the guy loves to laugh:

He'll be in the middle of a sentence when it starts somewhere just below his lungs, rolls upward, and breaks out over his teeth, often chopping off the trailing words of that sentence. I'd have expected nothing less from the man who once wrote: "That food was so bad I can't wait for it to become a turd and leave me" (the short story "Dogs"). As much as his fiction is peppered with wry, sly humor, so is the man.

The opening lines of his short story "Gallatin Canyon" from the collection of that same name aren't necessarily funny, but they are a good example of McGuane's unique style which moves along at a clip yet is also couched in language which feels like it belongs to another century:

      The day we planned the trip, I told Louise that I didn't like going to Idaho via the Gallatin Canyon. It's too narrow, and while trucks don't belong on this road, there they are, lots of them. Tourist pull-offs and wild animals on the highway complete the picture. We could have gone by way of Ennis, but Louise had learned that there were road repairs on Montana Highway 84—twelve miles of torn-up asphalt—in addition to its being rodeo weekend.
      "Do we have to go to Idaho?" she asked.
      I said I thought it was obvious. A lot rode on the success of our little jaunt, which was ostensibly to close the sale of a small car dealership I owned in the sleepy town of Rigby. But, since accepting the offer of a local buyer, I had received a far better one from elsewhere, which, my attorney said, I couldn't take unless my original buyer backed out—and he would only back out if he got sufficiently angry at me. Said my attorney, Make him mad. So I was headed to Rigby, Idaho, expressly to piss off a small-town businessman, who was trying to give me American money for a going concern on the strip east of town, and thereby make room for a rich Atlanta investor, new to our landscapes who needed this dealership as a kind of flagship for his other intentions. The question was how to provoke Rigby without arousing his suspicions, and I might have collected my thoughts a little better had I not had to battle trucks and tourists in the Gallatin Canyon.

Jim Harrison
b. 1937
Grayling, Michigan

Two years and about 220 miles separate McGuane and Harrison, but the distance between their literary styles is far shorter.  Like McGuane, Harrison's sensibility is founded on his Michigan upbringing and his fiction features male characters who are often cut adrift, looking to find their way through a bumpy, hairpin-curve world.  Both men now spend at least part of their time in Montana and the two are friends.  Harrison started his career as a poet and, according to Wikipedia, began writing fiction after he fell off a cliff while bird hunting.  During Harrison's recovery, McGuane suggested he try his hand at a novel.  The result was Wolf: a False Memoir.

To my discredit, I haven't read as much of Harrison's fiction as I should have--in fact, I've only read one novel: Sundog--but his books fill an entire shelf of my bookcase, waiting for me to finally get around them.  I'd probably start with one of his most famous works: the trio of novellas collected in Legends of the Fall.  Here are the opening lines to the title story from that book:

Late in October in 1914 three brothers rode from Choteau, Montana, to Calgary in Alberta to enlist in the Great War (the U.S. did not enter until 1917). An old Cheyenne named One Stab rode with them to return with the horses in tow because the horses were blooded and their father did not think it fitting for his sons to ride off to war on nags. One Stab knew all the shortcuts in the northern Rockies so their ride traversed wild country, much of it far from roads and settlements. They left before dawn with their father holding an oil lamp in the stable dressed in his buffalo robe, all of them silent, and the farewell breath he embraced them with rose in a small white cloud to the rafters.

Ayelet Waldman
b. 1964
Jerusalem

Like John Grisham, Waldman is a lawyer-turned-writer.  Unlike Grisham, her novels are funny.  At least her "Mommy-Track Mysteries" series is a hoot; her other work is decidedly more sober (novels like Red Hook Road and Love and Other Impossible Pursuits).  It appears that Waldman has no plans to write any more of her mystery series featuring Juliet Applebaum, "part-time sleuth and full-time mother."  And that's a real shame for those who like their detective novels as messy and interesting as a new mother's diaper bag.  Here are the opening lines to the second book in the series, The Big Nap:

I probably wasn't the first woman who had ever opened the door to the Fed Ex man wearing nothing from the waist up except for a bra. Odds are I was not even the first to do it in a nursing bra. But I'm willing to bet that no woman in a nursing bra had ever before greeted our apple-cheeked FedEx man with her flaps unsnapped and gaping wide open. You could see that in his face.

Naguib Mahfouz
b. 1911 (d. 2006)
Cairo

Of the six authors celebrating birthdays today, Mahfouz is the only one I haven't read.  Normally, I'm not all that keen on political writing, but there seems to be an intensity to Mahfouz' work that draws me in.  As a consequence of his outspoken support for Anwar Sadat's Camp David peace treaty with Israel in 1978, Mahfouz' books were banned in many Arab countries.  They were banned, that is, until he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988.  Funny how awards can suddenly make pariahs credible.  Like Salman Rushdie, Mahfouz lived under a series of death threats in the latter part of his life.  In 1994, Islamic extremists stabbed him in the neck outside his Cairo home.  He survived, but the nerves in his right hand were permanently damaged. After the attempted assassination, Mahfouz was unable to write for more than a few minutes a day and consequently produced fewer and fewer works before his death.  I have three of his novels on my shelf: Midaq Alley, Miramar, and The Thief and the Dogs.  Here are the opening lines from the latter which is about a Marxist thief who seeks revenge after his release from prison:

      Once more he breathed the air of freedom. But there was stifling dust in the air, almost unbearable heat, and no one was waiting for him; nothing but his blue suit and gym shoes.
      As the prison gate and its unconfessable miseries receded, the world—streets belabored by the sun, careening cars, crowds of people moving or still—returned.
      No one smiled or seemed happy. But who of these people could have suffered more than he had, with four years lost, taken from him by betrayal? And the hour was coming when he would confront them, when his rage would explode and burn, when those who had betrayed him would despair unto death, when treachery would pay for what it had done.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn
b. 1918 (d. 2008)
Kislovodsk, Russia

Sometime around 1974, my aunt gave me a dog-eared, creased paperback copy of Cancer Ward.  She was a registered nurse and so I thought this was some sort of training manual she was passing along.  I took the book from her hands with a mixture of importance and apprehension.  The red cover was barely hanging on like a loose tooth and there were more than 500 pages--far more than my 11-year-old mind could comprehend reading at that time.  But read it I did.  And, as the saying goes, my life has never been the same since.  Apart from the Bible, it was the longest book I'd ever made it through in my young reading career to that point (with the Holy Word of God, I'd petered out in Leviticus, somewhere around the forty-seventh "begat").  Furthermore, it was interesting and, yes, a little depressing, but I stayed with it the whole way.  It wasn't until last year that I finally read Solzhenitsyn's much-slimmer classic One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and while I was profoundly moved by that book as well, it will always be Cancer Ward which has a special place in my heart.  Here are the opening lines:

On top of everything, the cancer wing was Number 13. Pavel Nikolayevich Rusanov had never been and could never be a superstitious person, but his heart sank when they wrote "Wing 13" on his admission card. They should have had the ingenuity to assign number 13 to some kind of prosthetic or intestinal department.

Grace Paley
b. 1922 (d. 2007)
The Bronx

Here is another writer who shaped the course of my life as a reader and a budding author.  This time, it didn't take 550 pages; it only took 790 words.  More specifically, the short-short story "Wants" which I believe I first read in an anthology edited by Irving Howe and Ilana Wiener Howe (Short Shorts) sometime in the 1980s.  As with 99% of the people who have read "Wants," I sat there frozen after the last word, mouth dry, heart drumming.  I knew I'd just experienced a level of craft I could never achieve.  (The other 1% of "Wants"'s readers, by the way, are dead...and how they managed to read the story from their coffins is beyond me.)  A few years ago, I read Paley's Collected Stories and my first impressions were confirmed: she was not only a remarkable artisan of words, she was a fierce feminist and a staunch believer in the resiliency of the human spirit.  There will never be another Grace Paley, which is a good thing.  I'd hate to see strivers hurt themselves trying to climb up to where she stood above the rest of us.  The opening lines of "Wants":

      I saw my ex-husband in the street. I was sitting on the steps of the new library.
      Hello, my life, I said. We had once been married for twenty-seven years, so I felt justified.
      He said, What? What life? No life of mine.
      I said, O.K. I don’t argue when there’s real disagreement. I got up and went into the library to see how much I owed them.
      The librarian said $32 even and you’ve owed it for eighteen years. I didn’t deny anything. Because I don’t understand how time passes. I have had those books. I have often thought of them. The library is only two blocks away.
      My ex-husband followed me to the Books Returned desk. He interrupted the librarian, who had more to tell. In many ways, he said, as I look back, I attribute the dissolution of our marriage to the fact that you never invited the Bertrams to dinner.

Join the club

Last year, I posted my Christmas wish list here the blog (My Christmas Greed) and found one of those items--the Kindle cover--under my tree.  Over the course of the year, I also added most* of the books on that list to my library, plus dozens of others I didn't know I wanted until they landed in my hands.

Last week, I sat down with a pen and a large, legal-sized notepad, all set to compose another "Dear Santa (Wife)" letter.  I sat there for 15 minutes staring at a blank page.  I couldn't come up with anything I really wanted.  Sure, there are plenty of things I "need," including snow tires for my car, a filing cabinet to hold all the rough drafts of my novel and stories, and a new pair of slippers,** but when I look around me, cheesy as it sounds, I already have everything I want.  Let's review this past year: I've sold my book, I have a loving and supportive wife, I've made dozens of new friends, I have more books than I could ever read in five lifetimes, and--materially-speaking--I just received a new HP laptop computer for my wedding anniversary (did I mention I have a loving and supportive wife?).  I lack for nothing.

So, this year, I'm feeling more altruistic and less self-centered, more Bob Cratchit than Ebeneezer Scrooge (pre-ghosts).  Lately, I've noticed a lot of small, independent presses and book blogs offering holiday specials.  If you really want to warm the Christmas cockles of my heart, consider donating to one of these book-related causes:

Your local independent bookstore is the place to start, especially today since Amazon's Jeff Bezos has launched a mortar round straight to the heart of IndieLand with his boneheaded announcement which encourages shoppers to use Amazon's smartphone app to scan items at brick-and-mortar retailers before buying online; in return, these retail spies will receive a $5 credit to spend at Amazon.  I'd say that's $5 of blood money.  I'll admit I use Amazon more often than I should and I appreciate its convenience and I'm totally in lurve with my Kindle, but this....this is beyond the pale.  It makes Ebenezeer Scrooge look like a rank amateur.  It's so unbelievably, brazenly asinine that it's spurred a grassroots Occupy Amazon movement.  My suggestion for the 2011 Amazon Smackdown: browse Amazon first, find a book you like, print out that webpage, then take it into your local bookstore and tell the clerk, "I was just browsing Amazon and I was wondering if you have a copy of this book I could buy here...."

The Engine Books Book Club is a great way to support a brand-new small press.  Join now for 2012 and receive one copy each of Echolocation, Into This World, Half as Happy, and a fourth title to be announced soon--all for the low, low price of $55 (using my best Ron Popeil voice). Each book will be shipped at least two weeks before the public release date. If you join by the end of 2011, they'll even include a free copy of any of the current Engine Books titles: Other Heartbreaks, On the Outskirts of Normal, or Shambles.

Press 53 is offering special book-bundles for the holidays: six poetry titles for $53, five short-story collections for $53, and a three-poetry/three-short story mix for....wait for it....$53.  Pick up books by Pinckney Benedict, Meg Pokrass, Joseph Mills, Andrew Scott, Anne Leigh Parrish, Valerie Nieman, Tom Sheehan, or any one of the other Press 53 authors.  As an added incentive to buy from Press 53, from now until December 17, with any purchase at www.Press53.com they'll send a book to an active-duty soldier requesting books through www.AnySoldier.com at no additional cost to you. Help Press 53 bring a little holiday cheer to an overseas soldier through the comfort of books.

The annual issue of Narrative is now available, either bound in a paperback or downloadable as a PDF.  In these 332 pages, you'll find a new short story from Alice Munro, "To Reach Japan," in which "a young mother casts herself out of one life and into another, like a message in a bottle tossed in a sea to reach the far shore."  There's also Amy Bloom's new story, "A Portion of Your Loveliness," and a David Guterson Christmas tale of a Jewish family vacation, "Hot Springs."  Other contributors include Sherman Alexie, Jim Harrison, Jayne Anne Phillips, Robert Coover, and Rick Bass.

Dzanc Books is ready to stuff your stocking with a variety of Yuletide deals:  a gift subscription to the Dzanc Books eBook Club—you can buy those on your list a three-month, six-month, or one-year subscription at rates that are substantially lower than the price of buying three, six or twelve eBooks (the next year's selections will see story collections and novels by newcomers and classic authors like Nadine Gordimer and Stephen Dixon); gift certificates to Dzanc Creative Writing Sessions for that struggling scribe in your life; or take advantage of their limited-time Buy One, Get One Free sale.

Graywolf Press is having a special "Howlidays Sale."  Between now and Dec. 19, take 25% off your entire order, plus free shipping.  Just enter the code HOWLIDAYS11 at checkout.  Offer does not apply to pre-orders, but that should be no problem because there are plenty of current and backlist titles from which to choose.  Need some specific suggestions?  Okay, how about starting with Alan Heathcock's Volt, Shann Ray's American Masculine, Melanie Rae Thon's In This Light, Tomas Transtromer's Nobel Prize-winning poetry, or Jane Kenyon's Collected Poems?  There's plenty more where those came from.

Join The Nervous Breakdown Book Club where, for just $9.99 per month, you'll get a new book delivered to your front door.  As a frequent, faithful listener of the Other People podcast, I can vouch that TNB founder Brad Listi has exquisite taste when it comes to picking authors and titles.  If you've found yourself nodding in agreement with the books I recommend here at The Quivering Pen, you will fit right in with the crowd at the TNB book club.  Past selections have included books by Jonathan Evison, Stewart O'Nan, Darin Strauss, Greg Olear and Joshua Mohr.  There's always something fresh and tasty coming from TNB, so why not start the new year right?



*All except the boxed set of Chekhov tales, the Jean Arthur biography, Pride of Baghdad, Mr. Peanut and The Tiger.  But don't worry, you still have 14 shopping days left to fulfill my Christmas dreams.
**Which has sort of become like the Fathers Day tie joke around here at Christmas; I always unwrap a new pair of Dearfoams on Dec. 25.

Friday Freebie: The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt by Caroline Preston

Congratulations to Lauren Roberts, winner of last week's Friday Freebie: Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin.

As part of last week's contest, I asked readers to name their favorite Dickens novel.  Here are the results of that unscientific poll, in order starting with the top vote-getters:

Great Expectations

Bleak House

Our Mutual Friend

A Tale of Two Cities

Nicholas Nickleby

Oliver Twist

David Copperfield

A Christmas Carol

This week's book giveaway is The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt by Caroline Preston, which is among the best fiction I read all year.  It's certainly the most unique novel, telling the story of a Jazz Age ingenue almost entirely through her scrapbook.  Ecco Books has gone all out in the production of this book, recreating scrapbook pages filled with items like magazine ads, candy bar wrappers, college pennants, dried flowers, and many other artifacts of 1920s pop culture.  You can read my full review here.  Other reviewers agreed with me that Preston's novel is a marvelous treasure to be found in the midst of the e-book revolution.  Here's what NPR had to say about The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt:

Preston has stuffed her account of a 1920s flapper-in-the-making full of treasures, from scanned images of vintage tarot cards and bits of lace and lizard skin to Parisian maps and ticket stubs from Coney Island. The concept is a simple one — young girl from New Hampshire goes to Vassar in 1920, finds herself as a writer in Greenwich Village in 1924, moves to Paris in 1926, and returns home to America to find a husband in 1927. It is a plot that cribs from Fitzgerald's novels and Jazz Age stories, A Moveable Feast, Thoroughly Modern Millie and, most recently, from Woody Allen. But the narrative is neither the hook nor the driving force of the novel. What Preston has created is historian's catnip; a tale of the Roaring '20s illustrated in the dazzling language of trinkets and baubles, strung together by the typewritten words of a bubbly every-girl.

If you'd like a chance at winning a copy of The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt, all you have to do is answer this question:

The genesis of the novel began when Caroline Preston was digging through boxes of keepsakes in her mother's attic and found, among other things, marked-up pages from a novel sent to her grandmother from Sylvia Beach.  What is the name of that famous and controversial novel?  (You can find the answer on Preston's website.)

Email your answer to thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line.  One entry per person, please.  Please e-mail me the answer, rather than posting it in the comments section.  Despite its name, the Friday Freebie runs all week long and remains open to entries until midnight on Dec. 15--at which time I'll draw the winning name.  I'll announce the lucky reader on Dec. 16.

Front Porch Books: December 2011 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, 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.  Note: most of these books won't be released for another 2-6 months; I'm just here to pique your interest and stock your wish lists.  Cover art and opening lines may change before the book is finally released.

A Land More Kind Than Home by Wiley Cash (William Morrow): Any debut novel that's compared to Tom Franklin's Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter and carries the endorsement of writers like Ernest J. Gaines and Bobbie Ann Mason, is like a fishhook in my eye; I'm going to be reeled in--or, in the vernacular of Cash's novel, I reckon I ain't gonna pass this one by.  A Land More Kind Than Home pivots on the death of an autistic boy at a North Carolina church led by a snake-handling ex-con-turned preacher named Carson Chambliss.  The boy's death is witnessed by his nine-year-old brother Jess, whose voice is one of three narrating this literary thriller which, according to the Jacket Copy, is "thick with stories and characters connected by faith, infidelity, addiction, and a sense of hope that is as tragic as it is unforgettable."  Opening Lines:

I sat there in the car with the gravel dust blowing across the parking lot and saw the place for what it was, not what it was right at that moment in the hot sunlight, but for what it had been maybe twelve or fifteen years before: a real general store with folks gathered around the lunch counter, a line of people at the soda fountain, little children ordering ice cream of just about every flavor you could think of, hard candy by the quarter pound, moon pies and crackerjack and other things I hadn't thought about tasting in years. And if I'd closed my eyes I could've seen what the building had been forty or fifty years before that, back when I was a young woman: a screen door slamming shut, oil lamps lit and sputtering black smoke, dusty horses hitched to the posts out front where the iceman unloaded every Wednesday afternoon, the last stop on his route before he headed up out of the holler, the bed of his truck an inch deep with cold water. Back before Carson Chambliss came and took down the advertisements and yanked out the old hitching posts and put up that now-yellow newspaper in the front windows to keep folks from looking in. All the way back before him and the deacons had wheeled out the broken coolers on a dolly, filled the linoleum with rows of folding chairs and electric floor fans that blew the heat up in your face. If I'd kept my eyes closed I could've seen all this lit by the dim light of a memory like a match struck in a cave where the sun can't reach, but because I stared out through my windshield and heard the cars and trucks whipping by on the road behind me, I could see now that it wasn't nothing but a simple concrete block building, and, except for the sign out by the road, you couldn't even tell it was a church. And that was exactly how Carson Chambliss wanted it.

Blurb-worthiness: "This novel has great cumulative power.  Before I knew it I was grabbed by the ankle and pulled down into a full-blown Greek tragedy."  (Gail Godwin, author of Evensong)

Waking by Ron Rash (Hub City Press):  Tarrying in North Carolina for one more minute, I should also mention another book which came across my desk this month: Ron Rash's new book of poems.  To be honest, I wasn't aware the author of Serena and Burning Bright was a poet; but, dipping into this collection, I've been pleasantly surprised by what I've found.  Waking takes us to places like Watauga County, Goshen Creek and Dismal Mountain (which lies "gray and still as any gravestone").  Jacket Copy:  "In his first book of poetry in nearly a decade, Rash leads his readers on a Southern odyssey, full of a terse wit and a sense of the narrative so authentic it will dazzle you.  As we wake inside these poems, we see rivers wild with trout, lightning storms, and homemade churches, nailed and leaning against the side of a Tennessee mountain."  Serena was one of my favorite books of the past decade (and perhaps even has a spot on my Top 25 Books of All Time), so I come to Waking with great expectations.

Carry the One by Carol Anshaw (Simon and Schuster):  Take one wedding reception, add a car filled with stoned, drunk, and sleepy guests, then stir in a dark road and a little girl.  Mix well and bake for 270 pages.  Anshaw's new novel has all the ingredients of a gripping domestic drama, one which spans twenty-five years in the lives of Carmen Sloan and the other revelers at her wedding reception as they deal with the tragedy of that night.  Judging by the Opening Lines, the language here is precise and lovely:

So Carmen was married, just. She sat under a huge butter moon, on a windless night in the summer of 1983, at a table, in front of the remains of some chicken cordon bleu. She looked toward the improvised dance floor where her very new husband was doing the Mexican hat dance with several other large men, three of them his brothers, other Sloans. Matt was a plodding hat-dancer; his kicks threw the others off the beat. In spite of this lack of aptitude, he was waving her over, beckoning her to join in. She waved back as though she thought he was just saying hi. She was hoping to sit out this early phase of her marriage, the mortifying dances segment.

Blurb-worthiness: "Reading this book, I felt like I was watching someone cross a tightrope with the same relaxed, assured stride they would use on solid ground.  Anshaw is in such graceful command that her story about three gifted, wounded siblings almost doesn't feel like fiction.  The traumatic accident that derails the characters' lives as young adults is a sort of echo of the childhood damage they've already lived through.  The ways that they do and don't survive this are variously tragic, stark, and beautiful, but always utterly convincing.  Along the way, the generous Anshaw doles out psychological acuity, antic humor, cultural critique and profound wisdom as the merest casual asides.  It can't be as effortless as she makes it look, but it's a pleasure to soar with her, for a while, on that high wire."  (Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home)

Echolocation by Myfanwy Collins (Engine Books):  Since its debut earlier this year, the small-but-scrappy Engine Books has proven to be one of those publishers who seek out quality fiction which might have otherwise not found a market of readers.  Like a vinter who only bottles a few pressings of wine each year, publisher Victoria Barrett is a true believer in quality over quantity.  Not since Dzanc Books came on the scene have I been so excited about a new indie press.  You probably won't find books like Collins' debut novel in the front-window display of your local bookstore or featured on Amazon's home page--you'll have to do some legwork to track down Echolocation, but I assure you it will be well worth the effort.  I'm lucky enough to have an uncorrected proof of Echolocation sitting in front of me and, reading the Opening Lines, I find myself immediately drawn in to the story of two sisters and their dying aunt:

      When the slip of saw through trunk was buttery, liquid, and verging on gentle, Geneva was moved to tears. Her body felt as though it were cutting through the tree: the rings, the history of droughts and hailstorms, the sap that could have been her own blood, dripping, weeping at her feet. It felt like a betrayal, this taking of saw to tree. But Clint was out of work again. They needed money.
      She was down by the quarry, just off the old logging road, claiming a patch of ground Auntie Marie had given her for a wedding present--her dowry. "Don't tell him, though," Marie suggested about the wooded acre. "Keep that land to yourself." Geneva had thought of using the trees for sugaring as Auntie Marie had proposed but now it was too late. She was taking the trees for cheap firewood to sell to tourists at a road-side stand. Such a waste.

After only two paragraphs, Collins has already established a domestic tension which seems like it will carry readers through the rest of this short novel.  My engines are already revving.

Wayward Saints by Suzzy Roche (Hyperion Voice):  Like Myfanwy Collins' Echolocation, Wayward Saints is a novel with characters who brashly break that old Thomas Wolfe rule and discover they can go home again.  Written by a member of the sister-trio The Roches, this debut also has the zesty spunk of another garage-band novel which recently landed on my front porch: Tyler McMahon's How the Mistakes Were Made.  Check out the Opening Lines:

It was a Tuesday night at Crud, a club on the outskirts of the city, and the place was packed with skinheads and their girlfriends. Donal Hogan had said it was "a bit dungeonesque," but worse than that, it was a piss-hole toilet.

Here's the Jacket Copy which further highlights the quirky delights of Wayward Saints:

Mary Saint, the rule-breaking, troubled former lead singer of the almost-famous band Sliced Ham, has pretty much given up on music after the trauma of her band member and lover Garbagio's death seven years earlier. Instead, with the help of her best friend, Thaddeus, she is trying to piece her life together while making mochaccinos in San Francisco. Meanwhile, back in her hometown of Swallow, New York, her mother, Jean Saint, struggles with her own ghosts. When Mary is invited to give a concert at her old high school, Jean is thrilled, though she's worried about what Father Benedict and her neighbors will think of songs such as "Sewer Flower" and "You're a Pig." But she soon realizes that there are going to be bigger problems when the whole town--including a discouraged teacher and a baker who's anything but sweet--gets in on the act.

The Starboard Sea by Amber Dermont (St. Martin's Press):  My advance readers' edition of Dermont's debut novel carries the weight of endorsements from literary power-hitters Justin Cronin ("a hymn to the bittersweet glories of youth") and Marilynne Robinson ("there is a vibrant lucidity to her language, a daring music").  While I'm impressed by the blurbs, the proof of the pudding is how well Dermont dances to that "daring music" on the page.  I read the first paragraph.  Then I read the first chapter.  I was hooked.  Get on board when the book releases in March and you'll see what I'm talking about.  In the meantime, here's the Jacket Copy:

Jason Prosper grew up in the elite world of Manhattan penthouses, Maine summer estates, old-boy prep schools, and exclusive sailing clubs. A smart, athletic teenager, Jason maintains a healthy, humorous disdain for the trappings of affluence, preferring to spend afternoons sailing with Cal, his best friend and boarding-school roommate. When Cal commits suicide during their junior year at Kensington Prep, Jason is devastated by the loss and transfers to Bellingham Academy. There, he meets Aidan, a fellow student with her own troubled past. They embark on a tender, awkward, deeply emotional relationship, until a major hurricane hits the New England coast and Aidan’s battered body is found on the beach in its aftermath. School officials rule her death a suicide, and Jason is horrified to draw the parallels between Aidan and Cal. He gradually realizes that Aidan’s death was neither suicide nor accident, and is determined to uncover the terrible secret that has been buried by the boys he considers his friends. Set against the backdrop of the 1987 stock market collapse, The Starboard Sea is an examination of the abuses of class privilege, the mutability of sexual desire, the thrill and risk of competitive sailing, and the adult cost of teenage recklessness.

Kingdom Come by J. G. Ballard (W. W. Norton):  While I'm only familiar with the late J. G. Ballard's work through the movies Empire of the Sun and Crash, his fans are rabid and many.  Kingdom Come, making its first appearance here in America, will likely send them into hysteria.  Which, coincidentally, is one of the novel's themes.  Here's the Jacket Copy:

A violent novel filled with insidious twists, Kingdom Come follows the exploits of Richard Pearson, a rebellious, unemployed advertising executive, whose father is gunned down by a deranged mental patient in a vast shopping mall outside Heathrow Airport. When the prime suspect is released without charge, Richard’s suspicions are aroused. Investigating the mystery, Richard uncovers at the Metro-Centre mall a neo-fascist world whose charismatic spokesperson is whipping up the masses into a state of unsustainable frenzy. Riots frequently terrorize the complex, immigrant communities are attacked by hooligans, and sports events mushroom into jingoistic political rallies. In this gripping, dystopian tour de force, J.G. Ballard holds up a mirror to suburban mind rot, revealing the darker forces at work beneath the gloss of consumerism and flag-waving patriotism.

And here are the Opening Lines:

The suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world...

Hystera by Leora Skolkin-Smith (Fiction Studio Books):  For anyone who was of impressionable age or older in 1974, April 15 was one of those days which pressed its thumbprints into our consciousness.  That's the day Patty Hearst suddenly became more than a household name, she became legend when security cameras caught her toting an M1 carbine during a bank robbery.  Twelve days earlier, she'd released a videotape telling everyone to start calling her "Tanya."  We now know Hearst was likely suffering from Stockholm Syndrome and was under the sway of her kidnappers, the Symbionese Liberation Army.  At the time, however, we were just shocked and confused (yes, even 10-year-old David Abrams).  We were still reeling from the betrayal of Watergate, and now this?  That's the kind of America in which Leora Skolkin-Smith has set her new novel.  Here's the Jacket Copy:

Set in the turbulent 1970s when Patty Hearst became Tanya the Revolutionary, Hystera is a timeless story of madness, yearning, and identity. After a fatal accident takes her father away, Lillian Weill blames herself for the family tragedy. Tripping through failed love affairs with men, and doomed friendships, all Lilly wants is to be sheltered from reality. She retreats from the outside world into a world of delusion and the private terrors of a New York City Psychiatric Hospital. Unreachable behind her thick wall of fears, the world of hospital corridors and strangers become a vessel of faith. She is a foreigner there until her fellow patients release her from her isolation with the power of human intimacy. How do we know who we really are? How do we find our true selves under the heavy burden of family and our pasts? In an unpredictable portrait of mental illness, Hystera penetrates to the pulsing heart of the questions.

Blurbworthiness: "Inside a psychiatric ward in the 1970s, Leora Skolkin-Smith's Hystera takes you on a ride through the wilderness of a young woman's emotional trauma and breakdown, and seizes upon the intricacies of mental health, our phobias, and fears around it.  Brilliantly envisioned, this story of passion, and familial dysfunction, bears witness to an exquisite reknitting of a young woman's soul, told in language that is brave, startling and ultimately tender and wise."  (Jessica Keener, author of Night Swim)

The Leopard by Jo Nesbo (Knopf):  I have yet to crack open any of Stieg Larsson's tattooed-dragon-girls-who-kick-flaming-hornet-nests novels, but from all I've heard, Jo Nesbo's dark Nordic mysteries will serve as a nice hors d'oeuvre in the meantime.  Here's the Jacket Copy for the newest Nesbo: "At the start of The Leopard, we find Inspector Harry Hole hiding away from the world, smoking opium in the squalor of Hong Kong's back alleys.  A pretty young police officer drags him reluctantly back to Norway to pursue another serial killer, this one more twisted and vicious than the Snowman" (of Nesbo's previous trans-Atlantic hit).  The Leopard certainly has some of the creepiest Opening Lines to cross my desk this month:

      She awoke. Blinked in the pitch darkness. Yawned, and breathed through her nose. She blinked again. Felt a tear run down her face, felt it dissolve the salt of other tears. But saliva was no longer entering her throat; her mouth was dry and hard. Her cheeks were forced out by the pressure from inside. The foreign body in her mouth felt as though it would explode her head. But what was it? What was it? The first thing she thought when she awoke was that she wanted to go back. Back into the dark, warm depths that had enveloped her. The injection he had given her had not worn off yet, but she knew pain was on the way, felt it coming in the slow, dull beat of her pulse and the jerky flow of blood through her brain. Where was he? Was he standing right behind her? She held her breath, listened. She couldn’t hear anything, but she could sense a presence. Like a leopard. Someone had told her leopards made so little noise they could sneak right up to their prey in the dark. They could regulate their breathing so that it was in tune with yours. Could hold their breath when you held yours. She was certain she could feel his body heat. What was he waiting for? She exhaled again. And at that same moment was sure she had felt breath on her neck. She whirled round, hit out, but was met by air. She hunched up, tried to make herself small, to hide. Pointless.
      How long had she been unconscious?
      The drug wore off. The sensation lasted only for a fraction of a second. But it was enough to give her the foretaste, the promise. The promise of what was to come.

The Street Sweeper by Elliot Perlman (Riverhead):  Big, chunky novels the size of family Bibles can go one of two ways: they can be an unendurable, unending slog through increasingly hard-to-turn pages; or they can be so engrossing that you're lifted out of time, space, and distraction, completely erasing the weight of that seven-pound book in your hands.  I'm not sure which Perlman's new novel will turn out to be, but given the pedigree of his previous bestseller, Seven Types of Ambiguity, I'm willing to give it a whirl.  Here's the Jacket Copy:

Lamont Williams is a paroled felon looking to turn his life around, working as a street sweeper at a large city hospital and searching for his estranged daughter. Adam Zignelik is a struggling, nontenured professor, paralyzed by looming failure, his life falling apart around him. He discovers a cache of recordings of previously unheard voices reaching out from a horrific past, voices that can both save his career and bring him back to the woman he loves. At the same time, Lamont forges an unlikely friendship with a dying man, who, having lived through those horrors, has a crucially important story to tell and to preserve. The worlds surrounding these two men, their families, their pasts, their potential futures, swirl in and out of history as the forces of the Holocaust, the American civil rights movement, Chicago unions, and New York City racial politics combine in a thrilling cross- generational literary symphony. The acclaimed author of Seven Types of Ambiguity, Elliot Perlman weaves the narratives of Lamont and Adam-and their myriad connected friends, lovers, and families-into an ambitious, masterful depiction of the power that memory has over our lives.

The Lost Saints of Tennessee by Amy Franklin-Willis (Atlantic Monthly Press):  A divorce.  A dog.  A drowned brother.  A road trip.  These are the elements upon which Franklin-Willis builds her debut novel.  I'm susceptible to men in coming-of-middle-age novels.  Maybe I can relate to this period of re-evaluation and an unsettled view of the future because that's where I find myself standing these days.  When they're done right--flowing with beauty and craft--these novels spark a couple of wires inside me.  The Lost Saints of Tennessee looks like it just might start a fire in my soul.  Here's the Jacket Copy:

Driven by the soulful voices of forty-two-year-old Ezekiel Cooper and his mother, Lillian, The Lost Saints of Tennessee journeys from the 1940s to 1980s as it follows Zeke’s evolution from anointed son, to honorable sibling, to unhinged middle-aged man. After Zeke loses his twin brother in a mysterious drowning and his wife to divorce, only ghosts remain in his hometown of Clayton, Tennessee. Zeke makes the decision to leave town in a final attempt to escape his pain, throwing his two treasured possessions—a copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and his dead brother’s ancient dog—into his truck, and heads east. He leaves behind two young daughters and his estranged mother, who reveals her own conflicting view of the Cooper family story in a vulnerable but spirited voice stricken by guilt over old sins and clinging to the hope that her family isn’t beyond repair. When Zeke finds refuge with cousins in Virginia horse country, divine acts in the form of severe weather, illness, and a new romance collide, leading Zeke to a crossroads where he must decide the fate of his family.

Blurbworthiness: "The gifted novelist, Amy Franklin-Willis, has written a riveting, hardscrabble book on the rough, hardscrabble south, which has rarely been written about with such grace and compassion. It reminded me of the time I read Dorothy Allison’s classic, Bastard out of Carolina."  (Pat Conroy, South of Broad)

The Bits and Bobs of a Life: The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt by Caroline Preston

I never really understood the scrapbook craze of the early 2000s—you know, the factory-produced, mass-marketed “hobby” characterized by rubber stamps, paper stencils and tubes of glitter.   My wife and I have been “scrapbooking” since we first started dating.  If you go to our upstairs guest bedroom and pull down a large book with swollen pages, you'll find a pair of movie theater ticket stubs for Flashdance and a small bouquet of dried violets.  It's the artifact from a particular night of young, heady romance.

That’s why I could never wrap my brain around the new era of scrapbooking.  It’s a mystery why otherwise-perfectly-sane women would want to collect scraps of made-in-China crap and paste them in large albums, each of them looking nearly identical to the ones made by a thousand other scrapbookers with glitter-sparkles caught in their hair.  These aren’t true scrapbooks, they’re merely excuses for (primarily) women to gather, gossip and glue.

(Lest you think I’m spouting male chauvinism and petty disdain for all things frilly, please bear in mind that this is coming from a man who went through a serious cross-stitching phase, circa 1987-1995, and who would still be needling long into the night if it weren’t for my failing eyesight and ever-dwindling hours for “hobbies.”   So, yes, I’ve been a frequent Jo-Ann’s shopper.)

This modern pre-fab scrapbooking is nothing like the scrapbook of Jazz Age ingenue Frankie Pratt.  In a self-same-titled novel by Caroline Preston, Frankie’s pages burst into life with postcards, sheet music, wine labels, playing cards, charm bracelets, gum wrappers, swatches of fabric, photographs and ads for freckle cream.  The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt is subtitled “A Novel in Pictures,” but it really should be called “A Novel of Ephemera.”

When we first meet her in 1920, the titular heroine is a spunky high school senior with worldly ambitions.  The first page of her scrapbook is headed with the paper label “The Girl Who Wants to Write.”  On the next page is a picture of her father’s old portable Corona typewriter (“Mice had chewed the case but it still works!”).  And from there, we’re off on a whirlwind tour of Frankie’s life as a blossoming woman, all of it told completely through items in her scrapbook and the occasional typed comments.

Preston, whose previous novel was Gatsby's Girl, does a remarkable job breathing life into Frankie through the material objects she collects.  We follow her as she heads off to Vassar, tries the bohemian life in Greenwich Village after graduation, finds work writing for True Story, travels to Paris aboard the S.S. Mauritania where she meets some Russian princes and a “spinster adventuress,” and eventually rents a room above the famed Shakespeare & Company bookstore run by Sylvia Beach.  Along the way, she falls in love twice, has her heart broken an equal number of times, and comes to learn what true love really is by the last page of the book.  It’s less Fitzgerald and more Faith Baldwin, but that shouldn’t stop anyone from falling deeply in love with this book.

It’s impossible for me to describe in words just how well The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt really works, so I’ll let the pictures do the talking.  Here are a couple of random two-page spreads from the novel:

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

I should also note that this is a book to be bought in hardcover and not in e-book.  It would be nearly impossible for electrons to reproduce the dazzling effects of these full-color paper-and-ink pages.

Leafing through The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt is like opening a 90-year-old time capsule from a cornerstone of Jazz Age culture.  For example, Frankie types:

The most congenial spot for the unemployed is the Automat in Times Square. Search the want ads, read a novel, scribble on a story without any dirty looks from a waitress. Sit undisturbed from 8 until 6—like going to an office. All that’s required is spending a nickel every few hours on a bowl of oatmeal, an egg salad sandwich, a slice of pie (lemon meringue highly recommended), and yet another cup of coffee.

As we turn the pages of Frankie's scrapbook, the artifacts accumulate:  The Charleston.  Vogue patterns.  Marcel-waved hair.  Lillian Gish in Way Down East.  A Radiola (“It runs on batteries & is totally portable. It only weighs 39 pounds.”).  Cigarette holder (“to brandish like a rapier”).  Josephine Baker at the Folies Bergere.  Lucky Lindy in the sky.

Through this dizzying, dazzling array of bits and bobs of 1920s pop culture, Preston not only takes us on an authentic Time Machine odyssey, she so completely immerses us in one character’s life that in all honesty, I’d have to say Frankie Pratt was the most vivid and memorable of all the fictional population I encountered this year.  Preston does this with a minimal amount of words and almost entirely through magazine ads, movie tickets and matchbooks.

And isn't this true of all of us?  In the end, aren’t we merely the sum total of our possessions?  We may not be able to judge a person by the color of their skin, but surely we can know them through the contents of their scrapbook.

Moby-Dick in a Southern pond: A Miracle of Catfish by Larry Brown

When we think about how the notion of "work" is portrayed in fiction, we probably go immediately to the tried and true: policeman, fireman, butcher, baker, candlestick maker.  Fueled by everything from the early readers of Richard Scarry to the latest Dilbert cartoon, labor in literature nearly always goes for the high-profile jobs.  Every now and then a novel will come along that accurately portrays life for the majority of us who spend our days staring at the grey fabric of cubicle walls--books like Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris or Personal Days by Ed Park.

But who ever thinks of a catfish farmer?

Larry Brown did and the result is a wonderful portrait of the modern working man in A Miracle of Catfish, Brown's posthumous novel published in 2007.

A recent series on critics' "favorite book about work" at the National Book Critics Circle's Critical Mass blog started me thinking about the late great Larry Brown and his last novel.  In A Miracle of Catfish, Tommy Bright is the down-on-his-luck owner of a fish-stocking business who, in the course of the novel, clandestinely slips a giant catfish named Ursula into 72-year-old Cortez Sharp's newly-dug pond.  A Miracle of Catfish is filled with more than a dozen memorable characters, but I particularly enjoyed the scenes involving Tommy and his big red truck compartmentalized with tanks holding crappie, largemouth bass, bluegills, and bream.

Here is just one moment from Tommy's life when he's working late at his office out in the barn, agonizing over bills, balancing the books, and fretting over supplies needed to keep his fish alive:

He was too old to start over. He was fifty-seven. He ought to be thinking about retiring instead of all this bullshit. Hell. A man got old and tired. He got tired of the things that happened to him on his job. He'd lost count of the times he'd been finned by catfish, but he remembered the worst ones. The one that got him all the way through the thumb that day in Hot Springs. The one he stepped on that day in Batesville, Mississippi, and drove the fin up under his big toenail. He had very nearly shit on himself for real when that one happened. But hell. Everybody had something on their job to worry about. Firemen risked getting burned up. Ironworkers had to deal with the reality of falling to their deaths. Getting finned was a part of Tommy's life. You just tried to minimize it as much as you could. It helped to wear leather gloves.

Let us now praise the overlooked and overworked fish farmers of the world.

For more of the virtues of Brown's novel, here's a review I wrote for January Magazine shortly after the book came out:

Moby-Dick in a Southern Pond

Sometimes it's the unexpected loss of a great talent that fills us with regret and pangs us like a sore tooth.  When a writer like Larry Brown dies of a sudden heart attack at age 53, we mourn his passing with a series of "what ifs" and "should haves."  Yes, we knew he smoked like a chimney (ironic, considering he was a former firefighter) and that he probably drank as hard as the characters in his novels and short stories, but somehow we thought his pen would go on forever.  Sadly, that was not to be.

When the heart attack felled him the day before Thanksgiving in 2004, Larry Brown left behind a devoted band of hardcore fans who compared him to a modern Faulkner, a Southern Raymond Carver, a force of nature unto himself.  No one was better at describing the worn-out lives of lower-class Americans (except Carver himself).  The Day the Words Died was a sad one for those who knew him personally and those who knew him only through books like Father and Son, Big Bad Love, Joe and Fay.  However, he left behind more than mourners--he also left a nearly-finished sixth novel.

His publisher, Algonquin Books, has now delivered Brown's parting gift to our bookshelves.  A Miracle of Catfish is not just Brown's last book, it's his best.  Yes, it's raw and incomplete, but it's filled with so much pathos and longing and downright beautiful writing that you just know Brown was pouring everything he had into these pages.

In her editor's note, Algonquin's Shannon Ravenel says, "The first-draft manuscripts of his books were nearly always so polished stylistically that my job as editor mostly involved showing him the places I felt the novels would benefit from trimming.  He was, as a novelist, likely to write more than he needed.  Having honed his skills on the short-story form, he reveled in the wide spaces that novels offer."

Here, in A Miracle of Catfish, Brown runs wild and free in those wide open spaces and it's a joy to watch him cram as much as he can between the two covers.  Ravenel tells us she trimmed this book down from a 710-page manuscript and here and there we do feel the loss of some material, but Ravenel has apparently not cut out any vital organs.

Set in rural Mississippi, A Miracle of Catfish sprawls across a year in the life of about a dozen characters, including 72-year-old Cortez Sharp who digs a pond and fills it with catfish, a down-on-his-luck fellow named Tommy who runs a fish-stocking business and who secretly slips a giant catfish into Cortez's pond, eight-year-old Jimmy who lives down the road from Cortez and whose sole happiness in life is riding his new go-kart, and Jimmy's daddy who knows he's "nothing but a fuckup, would never be anything but a fuckup, and never had been anything but that."  Eventually, these lives--including Ursula, the Moby-Dick of catfish--intersect in ways great and small.

Most of the characters are stuck in the rut of blue-collar depression, both economic and mental.  As he keeps hitting the snooze button to delay getting out of bed and going to his soul-grinding job at the factory, Jimmy's daddy (who is never known by anything but this label) laments: "He's going to have to fix his life somehow because it's not working the way it is.  But what's he going to do?  What's the first move he's going to make?  What's he going to do today that's going to be different from yesterday?"

Jimmy's daddy is in a tailspin throughout the novel.  Right down to the last time we see him, we're pretty certain he's not going to pull out of it.  Bad luck, bad choices and ignorance cling to him like a stink he can't wash off his hands.  He's responsible for a man's death at the factory (gruesomely, beautifully described by Brown), he experiments with and regrets adultery, he beats Jimmy and disappoints the boy at every turn, he drinks to excess, and his only entertainment seems to be sitting in his bedroom watching hunting videos with such a salivating passion you'd think they were soft-core porn (and yet, when he finally gets the chance to go on a real hunt with his work buddies, he proves to be an impotent and negligent failure).

It's his son, however, who draws most of our sympathy.  He's a naive dreamer who always looks on the sunny side of life even as he's literally being beaten down.  He's a simple, almost unbelievably ignorant boy, but we're drawn to him, rotten teeth and all.  Late in the novel, Jimmy has an encounter with a horny German Shepherd that is at once both pitiful and hilarious.  Brown carries the punchline through several chapters, but knows enough not to wear it thin.  Young Jimmy is, after all, the closest we come to a main character and it's onto him that we project most of our pity.  Here's a son who continues to bear a slavish devotion to his father even though the worthless fuckup is too lazy to fix the chain on the go-kart, never takes Jimmy to a Kenny Chesney concert as promised, and nearly kills the boy when he tosses him into a lake to teach him how to swim.  Jimmy is a brave, sweet kid, even if he is unwise to the reproductive abilities of dogs.

There are some big scenes which stand out thanks to Brown's maestro method of delivering sharp, sudden violence (as when the factory worker is crushed to death) but it's the smaller moments which are the novel's pay-off.  If this is a first draft, then Brown's skill with words is all that much more impressive.  The beauty is in the details, whether he's describing the mechanics of a stove factory assembly line, or leaving us in awe of a monster catfish:

She was not a behemoth. She was a beauty. She was the nightmare fish of small boys and she came from the depths of sweaty dreams to suck them and their feeble cane poles from the bank or the boat dock to a soggy grave.

Brown takes pleasure in compiling the everyday minutiae of life.  If you're the kind of reader who doesn't want to spend a whole chapter watching a man slowly filling a pond with buckets of fingerlings ("the water came flowing out in a wide tongue and the little catfish came swimming with it"), then this is probably not the book for you.  The author takes his time, creating his huge mural with tiny brushstrokes.

Brown's world is one where you can pull up to a rural convenience store and find "a toddler standing in dirty underpants on the gravel out by the gas pumps eating cigarette butts."  It's a place where a washed-up, burnt-out man lives in a "grassless mobile home that was no longer mobile, merely home" and eats "lighter-fluid-flavored hamburgers" washed down with a six-pack.  It's country Brown knew like the veins on the back of his hand, a tucked-away part of the state where "dirt roads" led all through the woods on the other side of the railroad tracks and "little juke joints were scattered all up and down them, places where people gathered on weekend nights to listen to electric guitars and drink homemade whiskey and Budweiser."  He makes it as authentic and pungent for the reader as the next-best thing to being there.

I get the feeling that, had Brown lived to see the novel to completion, this would have been a much longer book, a hefty culmination of all that his career had been building to--in short, a southern-fried masterpiece.  As it stands, it comes just shy of achieving that status.  Mind you, it is still great and wholly satisfying.  Like a three-hour movie that's so absorbing you don't even notice your bladder pains until the end credits roll, A Miracle of Catfish keeps you glued to every one of its 455 pages.  And yet, I often found myself wanting more.  Some of the plot lines fray and fizzle and are outright abandoned, while others build to a climax that never really comes.  I suppose much of that is due to Brown's untimely departure from life.  Had the good Lord given him just one more year or even six months, I think it's safe to say we would be holding a work of genius in our hands.

As always, however, we cannot judge what could be, only what is.  More than just a footnote in Brown's career, this is a story that sings and hums and whistles with a choir of voices, from throats burned by whiskey and cigarette smoke.  To put it simply, I didn't want this novel to end.  And I can say that about very few books these days.

The best way to describe Brown's writing is to take a page from his own book where he describes Cortez's dreams: "They had color and light and texture and dialogue.  And mood.  Lots of mood.  Sometimes it was blue lights and a smoky bar.  Sometimes it was wood smoke and a campfire."  That's Larry Brown for you.  Mood and texture, light and color, as real as pea gravel spitting out beneath your tires, as heartfelt as regret in a soured marriage.  Goddamn, he'll be missed.

My First Time: David Harris Ebenbach

My First Time is a regular feature in which writers talk about virgin experiences in their writing and publishing careers, ranging from their first rejection to the moment of holding their first published book in their hands. Today's guest is David Harris Ebenbach.  His poetry has appeared in, among other places, Beloit Poetry Journal, Agni, The Iowa Review, Subtropics, and Mudfish.  His book of short stories, Between Camelots (University of Pittsburgh Press), won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize and the GLCA New Writer’s Award.  Recently awarded fellowships to the MacDowell Colony and the Vermont Studio Center and an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council, Ebenbach has a PhD in Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an MFA in Writing from Vermont College.  Find out more at www.davidebenbach.com.

My First Day as a Writer

It was frustration, maybe even desperation, that drove me to writing.  I was six or seven years old.  I was also full of stories—stories that were mostly about Smurfs and stuffed animals and space warfare; but I was a kid, and they were stories I really wanted to tell.  The problem was I didn’t know how.  Like a lot of kids that age, my idea of a story was something with a few words and a lot of pictures, and my models were the Minott brothers—my best friend Nicol and his older brother Alex—who lived down the block and were already showing signs of being gifted visual artists, pouring a lot of talent into their high-action comic strips.  I drew comics, too, but without any of that talent—and so I couldn’t exactly express what I wanted to express.  That grated on me.  And so the day came when, after struggling and struggling to draw things the way they looked in my head, I finally gave up and decided to just write the story down first and worry about the pictures later.  It was pretty easy.  After all, I had written stories before, in school, though I had never thought of them as being complete without pictures.  To my surprise, though, on this day I liked what I wrote, a lot, even without illustrations—and, more importantly, I liked writing it.

That was the turning point.  It’s not that I never drew again—but on that day I realized, for the first time, that my most natural, comfortable mode of engaging with the world was not going to be visual art—it was going to be words.

Writing is not, of course, the perfect art form.  In fact, it has a lot of disadvantages; it’s much less concrete and sensory than other art forms, for example—just try describing music so that someone else can really hear it—and it can only do one thing (one word) at a time, whereas other forms can hit you with a lot of different things simultaneously.  No—writing is not perfect.  But it suits me.  It fits me.

I think art is partly about finding your fit.  I often meet painters, for example, who just think in terms of line and color and always have, dancers who talk with their hands and by moving their bodies, musicians who go through their day hearing rhythms in the world that I don’t, writers who have to use words to make sense of anything.  These artists are generally able to express themselves in other ways, just like a lot of folks can shift passably into a second language in a pinch—but there’s a big difference between a language you can speak and a language that’s a part of who you are, that allows you to talk about absolutely anything you need to talk about.  A lot of us gravitate to one art form or another because in that art form we’ve found the mode of expression that’s most deeply our own.

And so that was the day—a day that started out feeling like a failure, actually—when I began to settle into writing as a lifelong vocation, and not just a vocation but also, more broadly, a way of being in the world.  I do still struggle to express myself, to make words do what I want them to do.  But it’s a good struggle.  It’s my struggle.  It’s who I am.

Friday Freebie: Charles Dickens by Claire Tomalin

Congratulations to Libby Kessman, winner of last week's Friday Freebie: My Father's House by Ben Tanzer.

This week's book giveaway is Charles Dickens by Claire Tomalin.  I could think of no better time to offer up this big beautiful biography than this season of gifting.  Dickens loved All Things Christmas and eventually commercialized his own literary nook of the holiday.  A Christmas Carol, the first of Dickens' "Christmas Books," is much more than the quaint Yuletide artifact we've turned it into; it's also one of the author's most powerful social sermons.  As Tomalin writes in the biography:

The book went straight to the heart of the public and has remained lodged there ever since, with its mixture of horror, despair, hope and warmth, its message--a Christian message--that even the worst of sinners may repent and become a good man; and its insistence that good cheer, food and drink shared, gifts and even dancing are not merely frivolous pleasures but basic expressions of love and mutual support among all human beings.

Dickens--the man, the novelist, the family scalawag--has enough facets to his personality to be the subject of half a dozen separate biographies (and, indeed, the number of books about him is well over 10 times that number), but Tomalin seems to have bottled his lightning quite nicely in this one volume:

Everyone finds their own version of Charles Dickens. The child-victim, the irrepressibly ambitious young man, the reporter, the demonic worker, the tireless walker. The radical, the protector of orphans, helper of the needy, man of good works, the republican. The hater and the lover of America. The giver of parties, the magician, the traveler. The satirist, the surrealist, the mesmerist. The angry son, the good friend, the bad husband, the quarreler, the sentimentalist, the secret lover, the despairing father.

In his review for TIME magazine, Lev Grossman writes:

I didn’t read Tomalin’s biography because I’m a Dickens guy, although I like his novels well enough. I read it because Dickens was an alien, or at least an extreme human outlier, and thus inherently interesting. His brain just didn’t work like other people’s. It’s ironic, or at least strange, that his work has come to stand as a kind of baseline, middle-C of mainstream Victorian melodrama, because he himself was not a mainstream individual. Not at all.

And what of the biography itself?  In The Observer, William Boyd praised it with all the enthusiasm of a Fezziwig jig:

What is so valuable about this biography is the palpable sense of the man himself that emerges. Tomalin doesn't hesitate to condemn Dickens when his behaviour demands it, yet she writes throughout with great sympathy and unrivalled knowledge in the most limpid and stylish prose. She has the gift of being able to set a scene and a time with compelling vividness. This is a superb biography of a great writer – and is a beautifully produced book, it should be said, with copious illustrations.

I have a new hardback copy of Charles Dickens to put in the hands of a reader this Christmas season.  So if you've harbored great expectations for reading Tomalin's biography, now is your chance.  All you have to do is this:

Tell me the name of your favorite Dickens novel (or, if you've never read any of his books, then the one you think you'd enjoy the most).

Email your answer to thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line.  One entry per person, please.  Please e-mail me the answer, rather than posting it in the comments section.  Despite its name, the Friday Freebie runs all week long and remains open to entries until midnight on Dec. 8--at which time I'll draw the winning name.  I'll announce the lucky reader on Dec. 9.