Trailer Park Tuesday: The Greatest Show by Michael Downs

Welcome to Trailer Park Tuesday, a showcase of new book trailers and, in a few cases, previews of book-related movies. Unless their last name is Grisham or King, authors will probably never see their trailers on the big screen at the local cineplex. And that's a shame because a lot of hard work goes into producing these short marriages between book and video. So, if you like what you see, please spread the word and help these videos go viral.

If you were to do an archaeological dig of the notoriously large and teetering To-Be-Read tower of books on my desk, in one of the upper geologic layers you'd find a copy of Michael Downs' collection of linked short stories The Greatest Show which recounts, in part, the haunting tragedy of the Hartford, Connecticut circus fire of 1944.  I'm attracted not only to the story (which was told so well in Stewart O'Nan's The Circus Fire) but also to Downs' writing.  Like this from the story "Ania":

At that moment, a flash of orange appeared on the other side of the big top, then rose up the wall of the tent. Ania thought it must be part of the performance, it seemed such a miraculous thing. But the crowd fell quiet, and then a thunder rumbled from all around and someone yelled "Fire!" and the thunder exploded, flames charging up and across the billowing roof of the tent, people rushing from the bleachers, knocking chairs underfoot. A trapeze artist jumped from his platform, and Ania watched him twist through air to the sudden ground.

For his trailer, Downs worked with circus artists who read snippets from the stories.  There's a nasally-pitch to the clown's voice which bothers me, but the rest of the video is great.  The calliope-music soundtrack and the entertaining acrobats reading incongruous sentences is especially effective.  Like when the contortionist says, "I was thirteen when my father told me he once shot a circus elephant.  'Through the eye,' he said."

My First Time: Keija Parssinen

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 Keija Parssinen, author of The Ruins of Us.  She was born in Saudi Arabia and lived there for twelve years as a third-generation expatriate.  She earned a degree in English literature from Princeton University and received her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she held a Truman Capote Fellowship and a Teaching-Writing Fellowship.  The Ruins of Us, her first novel, was published in January 2012 by Harper Perennial in North America and by Faber & Faber in the UK, Ireland, Australia and South Africa. For The Ruins of Us, she earned a Michener-Copernicus Award, and the book was named National Geographic Traveler's Book of the Month for January 2012.  Her short fiction recently appeared at Fivechapters.com.  She lives with her husband on the edge of a quarry in Missouri.

My First Incendiary Novel

We hear conflicting reports about the power of words in modern society. There’s the playground taunt we’ve heard from childhood, where we learn words can “never hurt” us, unlike, say, a baseball bat. But then in high school, an English teacher inevitably lays out that famous 19th century claim that “the pen is mightier than the sword.” I recall thinking the adage sounded noble but a tad outrageous, picturing an army of scribes setting on some medieval city, brandishing their feathered instruments belligerently.

As an adult, though, I see that Mr. Bulwer-Lytton was on to something when he wrote the famous line. Words, and more to the point, books, are dangerous. They are banned and censored, their authors exiled.  They can influence opinion, and in so doing, damage (if not destroy) corrupt governments, bad businesses, hypocritical politicians. Words emerge from the ether to give body to thought. With even the merest suggestion of a book, sometimes, fear and anger follow, often taking the form of offense.

In graduate school, while writing and researching my first novel, The Ruins of Us, I encountered a range of negative responses to my efforts, from gruff phone calls to out-and-out email attacks. Those responses marked my first experience with angering or antagonizing people through my creative work, and it was unsettling. The book is set in Saudi Arabia, where I was born and grew up, and where my mother grew up before me. I had questions which dealt primarily with human rights, plural marriage, Sharia law, and religious extremism in the Kingdom.  When I posed those questions, the Saudis, Arabs and Arabists I consulted sensed criticism of Saudi culture and were hesitant to provide answers for fear of giving me, an American, more ammunition for the perceived Western assault on Eastern tradition and society.

To some people, I had merely to say, “I’m writing a book set in Saudi Arabia…” before they would react defensively. Others, after learning more about the plot, would launch into lectures about why the subject of my book was offensive. Upon learning the bones of my plot, one Saudi who was a long-time family friend said despairingly, “I thought you were going to write a nice book promoting what is good in Saudi society.” And then there was an American woman living in the Kingdom--who’d been married to a Saudi for years--who took it upon herself, in our introductory email exchange, to launch into a tirade against “Americans who just want to Saudi-bash” and say that she hoped my book wouldn’t be “that kind of trash.”

Of course, by that point in my academic career, I knew that books could be incendiary; I’d just never considered that mine would be. The minor kerfuffles that attended my research scared me, leading me to wonder just what I was getting myself into by writing this particular book, with its political subject matter and divisive setting. I’m an amiable person who wants people to think well of me (who doesn’t?); I don’t take pleasure in debate, preferring peaceful discussion to stridency. Before grad school, such conflict was a non-issue. The novel had always been a way for me to explore private questions I’d had about Saudi Arabia, a place that had long obsessed me and from where I’d been unwillingly estranged as a repatriated American. The writing was a deeply personal exercise; without an audience, I couldn’t truly offend, and there was peace in that existence.

But with grad school came an agent and a finished draft, and suddenly, publication was a possibility. In my final year at Iowa and the year proceeding it, as I continued to receive hostile or non-responses to my research inquiries, I had to face the fact that I might just publish a book that angered some people. The idea horrified me, and my panicked mind went immediately to Salman Rushdie and the Ayatollah’s ludicrous fatwa; to the Turkish government’s warrant for Orhan Pamuk’s arrest; to Naguib Mahfouz’s stabbing by a man who’d never read a word the Nobel laureate had written. People angered by literature did some pretty nutty stuff, it seemed. Did I want to be targeted, or arrested, or stabbed? Certainly not! Was I getting ahead of myself and being paranoid and grandiose? Certainly! As a debut novelist, there was nothing quite so bracing and terrifying to me as an audience.

Still, I wrote the book. I had to, compelled by the same obsession that drives all writers to create. If I didn’t write it, it would burn me up. While I was sad to let our family friend down, and mildly concerned about the people I might hurt or insult (or had already), I also knew that no good book can be propaganda, and that if a book angers people, on some level, it succeeds. I knew, too, that when people start to try to impose rules on writers it looks an awful lot like censorship. Books must be allowed to deal with the unsavory, the difficult, the extraordinary--all the complicated things that make societies, and people, interesting. Plural marriage, extremist religion, and authoritarian government in the Kingdom happened to fascinate me, and so those threads emerged in the book. Yet I also wanted to better understand America’s role in the region, family life in Saudi, as well as the effects of the internet on a closed society. In The Ruins of Us, those themes, too, are present.

In a recent article for Vanity Fair about his friendship with the late Christopher Hitchens, Rushdie recounts how Hitchens once quoted Heine to him, in a correspondence about the infamous fatwa: “Where they burn books they will afterward burn people.” Books, from the most explosive to the most light, must be allowed to exist, or else our fundamental freedoms of thought and expression are compromised. If I hope to be any kind of writer at all, I must think proudly, rather than wincingly, of the first painful time my writing gave offense. I must embrace truth over popularity, an imperative that means struggle and freedom all at once.

Sex and Sensibility: Gertrude and Claudius by John Updike

Come, follow me down these winding stairs to my basement.  Step over here and look at my bookcases, all 29 of them.  Ignore the other 28 and concentrate on this one bookcase and, in particular, these two shelves.  Do you see that?  All those Rabbits and Bechs with their sex and Protestant crises.  Irrefutable proof that John Updike is a master of my universe.

Today is Updike's birthday--had he lived, he would have been blowing out 80 candles on his cake--and so my thoughts turned to his books and their influence on my own writing.  Rabbit, Run is the book which first grabbed me, back when I was a junior in high school.  You must believe me when I say that as I sat there in my cramped desk in English class holding that yellowed and musty paperback book in my hands, the rubbery ping of Rabbit Angstrom's basketball literally sucked the breath out of my lungs.  It was a tipping point for my soul (grandiose as that may sound).  I'll have more to say about Rabbit, Run at a later date when I can form more coherent thoughts, but for now here's a review of one of Updike's late-career books, Gertrude and Claudius, which I wrote twelve years ago, back when the author still had about a dozen more books left in him.

*     *     *

To Updike or not to Updike.

That is the question some readers will ponder as they consider the prolific author’s nineteenth novel, Gertrude and Claudius, a densely-worded tale of the events leading up to Hamlet.

To those indecisive readers, I say, “Get thee to a bookery!”

Updike is at his finest hour in these pages, delivering a fresh view of the Hamlet tale that will especially appeal to lovers of the Bard.  Updike’s narrative focuses on the years prior to the first “Is that a ghost I see before me?” scene of Shakespeare’s play.  Using ancient texts as well as Shakespeare’s Quarto versions as his basis, Updike begins with Gertrude forced into marriage with King Hamlet.  An “ample, serene, dewy and sensible girl,” she resists the political union at first.  However, a night of Nordic sex, written with Updike’s typically delicate earthiness, soon changes her mind and she lends her heart to the king.

Waiting in the shadows, however, is her brother-in-law Claudius, a well-traveled warrior who falls for Gertrude the moment he sees her.  He tries to stay away from Elsinore castle, busying himself with foreign wars, wine, women and song, but eventually he returns and finds himself more in love with Gertrude than before.

Adultery ensues, of course, and as anyone familiar with Updike’s eighteen other novels knows, he’s not shy in describing such matters.  The sex in Gertrude and Claudius is moist and sensual in a manner more suited to Danielle Steele than Shakespeare.  Updike has never been one to blush at descriptions of bedroom matters and here he recreates medieval couplings with a 21st-century lustiness.  The adultery between Gertrude and Claudius is vivid and unforgettable.

Ominous music begins to play in our heads as familiar events begin to unfold: the king begins to suspect his wife and brother, Hamlet is sent away to school, Yorik dies.  It is a chilly kingdom, made colder by royal sin.

We all know what happens next: the sleeping king in the garden, the poison in the ear, the final bloody family feud.  The novel doesn’t cover the events of the play, but stops short at Act I, Scene 2 where Hamlet mutters, “A little more than kin and less than kind.”  The final paragraphs, in which Claudius envisions a rosy future, are a rousing symphony of irony, told only as Updike can.

We don’t see much of the young prince—he makes an appearance in the final pages, but beyond that, we mostly hear Gertrude referring to him as “isolated,” “brooding” and “quirkish” (and that’s when he’s five years old!).  You won’t learn much about the character of Hamlet (Shakespeare does a good enough job of that, in my opinion), but you will get to know the play’s more peripheral characters: Gertrude, Claudius, Hamlet Sr., and Polonius (who, in true fashion, goes around dispensing homilies like “Unease, Your Majesty, is the human lot, even for the most exalted.  The pampered foot most feels the pinch.”).  Polonius turns out to be not such a doddering old fool after all and Gertrude is less conniving than Shakespeare would have us believe.

The novel is a bit slow out of the starting gates.  Some readers will have trouble with the long, meandering paragraphs; others will be confused by the unfamiliar names given to familiar characters.  In a Foreword, Updike notes that the names are taken from ancient legends and thus Gertrude=Gerutha, Claudius=Feng, Hamlet=Amleth, and so on.  To make matters tougher, Updike switches spellings between each of the novel’s three parts.  But if you bear with him, you soon settle into the rhythm of the archaic construction.  After all, wasn’t it Hamlet himself who said, “words, words, words”?

Contemporary novelists have re-visioned old texts before—Norman Mailer and the New Testament (The Gospel According to the Son), John Gardner and Beowulf (Grendel), Updike himself and Nathaniel Hawthorne (S.)—but this is by far the best I’ve read yet.  Updike’s language mirrors Shakespeare’s with a fresh contemporary spin.  The images, and the words used to describe them, are earthy, dank and greasy.  Here’s Gertrude doing her own Hamlet-ish monologue as she ponders her future between husband and lover:

O the days, the days in their all but unnoticed beauty and variety—days of hurtling sun and shade like the dapples of an exhilarated beast, days of steady strong cold and a blood-red dusk, tawny autumn days smelling of hay and grapes, spring days tasting of salty wave-froth and of hearth-smoke blown down from the chimney pots, misty days of sifted sunshine and gentle fitful rain that glistened and purred on the windowsill like a silvery cat…days of high ribbed skies like an angel’s carcass, December days of howling sideways snow

(and so on for many more phrases of this full-bodied paragraph).

Such heady sentences like that might turn away some readers. I, on the other hand, happen to really enjoy Updike’s brash use of English, his sentences that feel at once unfettered and tightly controlled.

Here’s another passage with tasty language that got my writer’s blood simmering as Gertrude (Gerutha) disrobes for her husband on their wedding night:

By the snapping firelight her nakedness felt like a film of thin metal, an ultimate angelic costume. From throat to ankles her skin had never seen the sun. Gerutha was as white as an onion, as smooth as a root fresh-pulled from the earth.

Updike certainly has a tough row to hoe in today’s market whose bookstore browsers have grown used to taking their Shakespeare in DiCaprio-sized bites.  Can he, the scribe who once shaped a generation with a character named Rabbit, pull another hare from his hat of literary tricks?

The answer comes trippingly off my tongue: “Aye!”

Love in a Time of Potato Famine: My Dream of You by Nuala O'Faolain

In honor of St. Patrick's Day, I dug back through my review archive and found this report I made on Nuala O'Faolain's prize-winning novel My Dream of You ten years ago.  I also found a series of questions I'd written for Ms. O'Faolain and remembered I had once planned to interview her.  It was around the time of this novel's release in 2001 and, as I recall, she was very busy with publicity and a book tour here in America.  She graciously responded to my email and asked if we could postpone the interview until a later date.  Sure, I said, not a problem.  Sadly, we never had that conversation.  I never followed up and we both got busy--each of us writing our own books (hers were published, mine were not).  O'Faolain was diagnosed with cancer in February 2008 and died four months later.  I'm certain she would have been a wonderfully engaging conversant and I regret not picking up the phone to hear her sparkling candor come through the receiver.

I am not a middle-age woman trying to figure out how, where and why all the good years of sex vanished.  I don’t have hair the color of overcast skies, the corners of my eyes aren’t roosts for a flock of crows, my blood hasn’t been recycled through my body more times than there are stars in heaven.

But for one week, I was all of those things.  For seven days, I slipped into the skin of Kathleen de Burca, the journalist on a passion-quest in Nuala O’Faolain’s debut novel My Dream of You.  I felt the ache in Kathleen’s bones, the stabs to her heart, the squeeze in her lungs as she goes in search of love in the twilight.  Ms. O’Faolain (who bears more than a passing resemblance to Kathleen) is to be commended for causing a still-this-side-of-40 male to so completely inhabit a paper-and-ink character with breasts and menopausal issues.  I know Kathleen.  And, after your 530-page relationship, you will, too—no matter if you’re 20, 70, Catholic, Jewish, or have hair on your chest.

Stories like Kathleen’s are too-easily dismissed with a sniff and eye-roll as “women’s fiction” and are either anointed by Oprah or filmed as a Lifetime Television for Women movie (or both).  But there is more to My Dream of You than meets the bodice-ripping eye.

This is a romance, yes; but it is one that is filled with such elegance, honesty and energy that it quickly ascends to something greater than another drop in the mid-life crisis pool of books.  It is a story for any of us who have grasped at second chances, and prayed our fingers weren’t too slick with nervous sweat.

O’Faolain, a former television producer and writer for The Irish Times also went close to the bone with the character in her first book Are You Somebody?: The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman: herself.  The memoir of growing up in lower-class Ireland was not as tragic-gritty as Frank McCourt’s Angela's Ashes, but it was no less compelling as O’Faolain described the neglect from her alcoholic mother and, later, the years spent trying to find both a career and a love life in male-dominated Irish society.

In Are You Somebody?, she writes, “A woman past the age where she might be contemplated as a sexual partner is hardly seen.  She turns into a silhouette.”

This is the shadow world Kathleen inhabits when we first meet her in My Dream of You.  Most of her journalism career has been spent writing for a travel magazine in London, a job which has allowed her to jet around the globe, always on the run from herself.  When her best friend and colleague dies, Kathleen is suddenly cut adrift.  Nearing fifty, she’s reached the point where she starts to take a long hard look at her perpetually single life, examining past flings and committed relationships with a longing gaze.  We bear with her through scenes of loveless sex—sad, painful episodes which lower her dignity as a woman.  “Make it not too late!” she prays in desperation as she sets off a physical journey to Ireland and a spiritual sojourn to the soul.

She goes to Ireland in search of answers to an 1856 court case, Talbot v. Talbot, which has always intrigued her.  It concerns the alleged adultery between and English landlord’s lonely wife, Marianne, and their Irish servant, Mullan.  During the country's infamous Potato Famine, the two lovers cross class lines in what witnesses describe as a passionate affair.  After being away from the Emerald Isle for thirty years, Kathleen travels to the scene of the crime, Ballygall, and starts poking around the long-cold ashes of the Talbot affair.  But in so doing, she stokes the fires of her own memories and starts wondering, “Is it too late for true love to find me?”

Like A.S. Byatt’s Possession, the book shifts between Kathleen’s investigation and testimonial narratives from the Talbot trial.  Kathleen begins writing her own book about the affair and it’s not hard to make the link between herself and the way she describes the 19th-century lovers: “They must have seemed like luscious fruit to each other.  Their bodies must have ripened on each other.”  Or this particularly sensual paragraph:

The habitat of their passion, where they roamed like two animals on a great plain, was silence. Not perfect silence—there were always the sounds of the household and sounds coming in from the estate. Sheep, penned in a far yard, the creak of turf carts coming in from the bog. But the couple were habitually mute. Except that they panted and grunted when they forgot themselves in each other. Then afterwards there was peace, and silence again. And after that, she lived in a hot dream of him.

The story is given to us in language which barely has any clothes on the words.  The simple language is only occasionally overwrought and just this side of cliché; but most of the sentences flow free as the River Shannon.  There’s an undeniably compelling passion O’Faolain imparts to everything her pen touches.  And I say “pen” rather than “keyboard” because I can only imagine her writing the book’s first draft in longhand—that’s how intimate she makes this reading experience.

Through Marianne and Mullan, Kathleen comes to find her purpose in life—the whys, wherefores and whims of sex; and through her characters, one can guess, O’Faolain reaches conclusions about her own place in the world.  In this way, My Dream of You is a very wide-awake examination of one writer’s life.  This is therapeutic fiction in one of its finest hours.

Is My Dream of You a perfect book (whatever that is)?  Not entirely.  It’s too long for its own good and many pages are squandered on Kathleen returning to the same lovesick conclusions.  But these are easy to forgive when you’ve got such a remarkable character, and an author who generously heaps dollops of herself on every page.  Kathleen lingers long in the memory and it’s not easy to slough off the skin in which O’Faolain has encased the reader—even for us fortysomething males.

Friday Freebie: Echolocation by Myfanwy Collins

Congratulations to Chris Long, winner of last week's Friday Freebie, Contents May Have Shifted by Pam Houston.

This week's book giveaway is Echolocation, the "stark and stirring" (Publishers Weekly) debut novel by Myfanwy Collins which was just released by Engine Books.  Here's the plot summary:

Cheri and Geneva grew up on "a little patch of nothing made up of dairy farms in the valleys and boarded up iron-ore mines in the mountains, a town of old folks waiting to die and young people dying to leave." Now, Cheri has fled that life for the city, leaving Geneva behind to care for their aunt as she succumbs to cancer. Her death draws them together, forcing them to face their past--and each other. When Cheri's mother turns up with a strange baby and a dangerous secret close behind, the choices that follow will push all of them beyond boundaries they never thought they'd cross.

I've mentioned Echolocation once or twice here at the blog and Collins herself has written about her "first time," so you should have no excuse for not already having the novel at or near the top of your TBR pile.  But just in case you need one more little nudge, I'll let the book speak for itself.  Here are the opening lines to Chapter 4:

      The air was sharp with frost not yet burned off by the low sun as Geneva walked to the mailbox. Gray trees along the roadside creaked in the wind, bare branches scratching out the blue from the sky. A single crow let out a continuous, ornery caw, rippling the morning's stillness. She wasn't sure why she bothered to collect the mail at all. The box would be loaded with bills--for stock, for dairy, for newspapers and magazines, for heat and electric that kept the store warm and buzzing. At first it seemed the perfect legacy that Auntie Marie left the store to Cheri and her, but now the reality of the situation--no money in the till and less each day as the convenience store in town gained popularity, back taxes and bills piling up--left her feeling as though she were skating for the first time and couldn't get her feet to move in the same direction so that time and again she ended up on her ass. And though she had agreed to stay and help out, Cheri was nothing but an added burden--out all night, sleeping off a hangover during the day. Geneva had to prod her to do the bare minimum.
      She would have thought that life with Clint where they were always one step ahead of the bill collectors would have prepared her for this new life of want, but it hadn't. Things should have been easier.

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

What's the title of Collins' next book, which is coming from Pank Little Books later this year?  (You can find the answer at the author'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 March 22--at which time I'll draw the winning name.  I'll announce the lucky reader on March 23.  If you'd like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week Quivering Pen 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 Facebook wall or by tweeting it on Twitter.  Once you've done either or both of those, send me an additional e-mail saying "I've shared" and I'll put your name in the hat twice.

Great Beginnings: The Book of Jonas by Stephen Dau

When I woke up this morning, I discovered the Kindle elves had dropped another gift on my device: Stephen Dau's debut novel The Book of Jonas.  I'd pre-ordered it a few weeks ago and looked forward to the day when it would arrive.  According to the compact synopsis at Amazon, The Book of Jonas is a novel about "a young Muslim war orphan whose family is killed in a military operation gone wrong, and the American soldier to whom his fate, and survival, is bound."  I'm backlogged with reading assignments right now, so I don't know how soon I'll be able to sink into it, but I promise a full review once I do.  For now, I give you the unforgettable opening paragraphs:

      They arrived like a thought, tracing contrails across the deep sky as though writing out their intentions in letters too big to be fully seen from the earth. Or they flowed low and fast over the hills, their great machines arcing silently from horizon to horizon, so fast that they were there and gone before the roar from their engines caught up, screaming the news of their arrival even as they disappeared.
      In the village they tried to make sense of it.
      The imam said that the Americans were like the lion who had stepped on a thorn and then went about making a great noise, roaring at the world from his pain. But it would soon pass, he said, when the thorn dried up and fell out, when the pain ebbed, and then tranquility would be restored.

Laughter on the Battlefield

It’s true, war is hell.  But in the right hands—holding the pen askew at just the right angle—war can also be funny as hell.  As long as there has been a military machine—and self-important leaders turning the crank which turns the cogs (soldiers)—there have been novels poking fun at armies clashing on the battlefield (and in certain Strangelovian “war rooms”).

You may say, “There’s nothing hilarious about people dying for their country.”  And you’d be right.  It’s not funny, and I don’t intend to mock those great men and women—some of whom I knew personally—who have died during Operation Iraqi Freedom, Vietnam, World War II and all the other conflicts past, present and future.  But I also believe that people need to be startled into hearing and seeing the truth—I keep going back to Flannery O’Connor’s explanation of why she used grotesque humor in her fiction: “To the hard of hearing you shout and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.”  Telling a war story with comic characters large as billboards is just one way to make the truth stick.

If we make ’em laugh, maybe they won’t feel the twist of the knife in their gut, right?  That’s what I kept telling myself as I worked six years on my novel Fobbit, a book I’ve started calling “a dark cartoon about the Iraq War” as a way of answering people in short, telegraphic fashion when they ask what it’s about.  (I also keep a smart-ass response in my back pocket: “Oh, it’s about 400 pages.”)

When I tell people I’ve written a funny book about war, I’m always braced for a reaction I never get: scowls, accusations of being anti-American, or threats of bodily harm.  Instead, people usually say, “How cool!  Can’t wait to read it.”  Readers, it seems, want to laugh about war...even if that laughter is bitter.  Here are some of my favorite novels in which the humor runs as dark as the blood spilled in battle.


Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

The Mother of All War Satires, the Ur-text of funny fatalism, the Eden of Laughter.  No one has pinned military idiocy to the mat better than Joseph Heller.  The tangles of red tape, the complicated cogs of bureaucracy, the nonsensical rules carried out by battalions of buffoons—it’s all here in the episodic story about a World War II Army Air Force crew stationed on the island of Pianosa in the Mediterranean Sea.  I read Catch-22 for the first time when I was on a plane bound for the Iraq War where, as an active-duty soldier, I would spend the next year sweating out the Baghdad heat, writing Hellerish press releases, and reading brick-sized novels in my few hours of “downtime.”  As a way of preparing myself for combat, I made Catch-22 the first book I read on that deployment.  I studied it like an owner's manual for military operations, a field guide for surviving the war with my sanity intact.  It's unlike anything else I've ever read: slapstick on one page, horror on the next.  It’s an indictment of corporate America, a howl at conformity, a circus of words.  Heller could be spit-take funny in one paragraph, but chillingly sober in the next.  He had a point to make and he did it not only with jokes and circular repartee, but with convincing arguments for pacifism.  As Harper Lee once said, "Catch-22 is the only war novel I've ever read that makes any sense."

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

“All this happened, more or less.”  I love that opening line of Vonnegut’s masterpiece because it points to, as Stephen Colbert would say, the “truthiness” inherent to all war satires.  Vonnegut, of course, was more than a little “semi-” in this semi-autobiographical novel about optometrist Billy Pilgrim who is captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge, suffers through the horrors of the Dresden bombing of World War II, and is kidnapped by extraterrestrial aliens from the planet Tralfamadore.  Billy becomes “unstuck in time,” which allows Vonnegut to play fast and loose with narrative structure.  “It is so short and jumbled and jangled,” Vonnegut writes in the first chapter, “because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.”  No, but there are some laughs to be had, even though it’s laughter through gritted teeth.

MASH by Richard Hooker

It is almost impossible to read Hooker’s 1968 novel about the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital staff’s misadventures during the Korean War without Alan Alda looming large in your mind—or, going farther back to Robert Altman’s film, Donald Sutherland.  But if you can set Hollywood aside for a moment, you’ll find a bitter-sharp view of the American military machine.  Like Heller, Hooker based his novel on his own wartime experience as an Army doctor (Hooker, by the way is a pseudonym—his real name is H. Richard Hornberger).  Captains Hawkeye Pierce, Duke Forrest and “Trapper” John McIntyre have nothing but scorn for authority and take every opportunity to play the subversives around camp.  Excessive drinking, regular poker games, and the encouragement of dentist Walter “Painless Pole” Waldowski’s suicide are only a few of the non-stop hijinks.  There's also a healthy amount of golf, sex, and 4 p.m. martinis "served in water glasses filled to the brim."  It’s like Uncle Sam decided to enlist the Marx Brothers and send them off to war.

The Pearl of Kuwait by Tom Paine

This novel, which came out in 2003 just as Coalition Forces were launching the invasion of Iraq, was sadly overlooked by readers at the time.  But what they missed is a novel best described as “a totally cool surfer dude has a gnarly Lawrence of Arabia Meets Huckleberry Finn-ish experience in the (First) Gulf War.”  By the time the picaresque adventure of two Marines on a mission to rescue a Kuwaiti princess finally winds down, The Pearl of Kuwait has done an awesome job at making us alternately grin at and grieve over the Desert Storm combat experience—but mostly grin.  For those willing to laugh at the crazy antics of Saddam Hussein (circa 1990), The Pearl of Kuwait richly rewards with its one-of-a-kind voice—the laid-back patter of Marine Private Cody Carmichael, our unflappable guide through a series of AWOL adventures he shares with Private Tommy Trang, a Vietnamese-American whose head is filled with romantic notions of bravery—none of which have to do with computer-guided weapons systems, but rather charging across the sands waving a sword while yelling “Death to the infidels!”  Trang, a memorable character on the order of John Irving’s Owen Meany, barrels his way through the book and into our hearts with his uncompromising heroism and die-hard love for Kuwaiti Princess Lulu who he and Cody save from drowning one night when the two Marines are pearl diving in the “piss-warm waters of the Persian Gulf.”  What follows is a series of zany adventures which include tangling with a lunatic Saudi colonel (who also happens to be Lulu's fiancé), disrupting a wedding feast, banding together with dancing Bedouins, organizing the Democratic Resistance of Kuwait, and plotting to assassinate Saddam.  There’s never a dull moment in Cody's breathless, stream-of-mellow-consciousness narrative.

A version of this article originally appeared at Book Riot

Trailer Park Tuesday: On the Road

Welcome to Trailer Park Tuesday, a showcase of new book trailers and, in a few cases, previews of book-related movies.  Unless their last name is Grisham or King, authors will probably never see their trailers on the big screen at the local cineplex.  And that's a shame because a lot of hard work goes into producing these short marriages between book and video.  So, if you like what you see, please spread the word and help these videos go viral.

Lolita.   Naked Lunch.   A Confederacy of Dunces.  These are all landmarks of 20th-century literature which share at least one thing in common: I've never read them.  Add Jack Kerouac's On the Road to that list.  That's right, I've never snapped my fingers to his beat.  Even my daughter is ahead of me on this one--last summer, she borrowed my battered paperback copy of On the Road and returned it to me three weeks later, breathless and eyes all a-glitter.  She'd loved it so much, the front cover literally fell off.  I never really understood the big deal about Kerouac.  It's almost like he's president of a secret clubhouse and I don't know the password.  Maybe Walter Salles' movie will help me crack the code.  The film has been a long time coming--since 1957 when Kerouac wrote a letter to Marlon Brando, saying he could play Dean Moriarty while Kerouac himself would play Sal Paradise.  Nothing ever came of that and the project languished until Francis Ford Coppola bought the rights to the book in 1979.  Over the years, several attempts were made to get it off the ground.  Coppola hired writers like Barry Gifford, Michael Herr and Russell Banks and toyed with casting Brad Pitt, Ethan Hawke and Colin Farrell.  Still, On the Road languished at a rest stop.  It wasn't until Coppola saw Salles' 2004 movie The Motorcycle Diaries that the current project clicked into place and filming began in 2010.  The trailer has two personalities--a frenetic jazz-soaked half which shows how Paradise and Moriarty meet, and a more somber poetry-infused half which should appeal to the book's fans as it shows On the Road's legendary scroll coming off Paradise's typewriter and a voice-over which recites: "The only people that interest me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like roman candles across the night."  The movie stars Garrett Hedlund, Sam Riley and Kristen Stewart (with the tease of a topless scene in the front seat) and opens later this year after making its bow at the Cannes Film Festival.  What do you think?  Will On the Road burn like a roman candle, or will it fizzle and flop?

My First Time: Kevin Barry

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 Kevin Barry, author of the new novel City of Bohane, which was shortlisted for the Costa Book Award in the first novel category and is now available in the U.S. from Graywolf Press.  Barry was born in Limerick in 1969.  His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story, Best European Fiction 2011, and many other journals and anthologies.  He also works on plays, screenplays, and graphic stories.  He now lives in County Sligo in the west of Ireland.

My First Time(s)

My first time....
attempting to write a short story is an occasion I can date precisely--August 17th, 1977.  My family was holidaying on Achill Island off the west coast of Ireland.  We were staying in a small, malodorous caravan, and for entertainment, we had just a tiny transistor radio.  Late on the night of August 16th, the deejay broke in, mid-record, to announce, very huskily, that The King, Mr. Elvis Aaron Presley, had passed away.  My parents and siblings at once fell weeping into each other’s arms but I--a small but stiff-lipped lad--was moved to the more austere response of memorious art.  Next morning, at first light, I put pen to paper, and I composed a story in which the Soul of Elvis rose up from the (considerable) dead meat of his earthly remains and ascended into the skies above Memphis, and was absorbed, somehow, into the body of a seagull.  I did not lower myself to explain what a seagull was doing as far inland as Tennessee.  And anyway I soon had the bird light out on an eastward course, and it crossed the black Atlantic, and it came to hover above Achill Island, where it communed joyously with a holidaying Irish family.  Elvis, in other words, Lived.


My first time....
writing a short story that to some degree worked happened late in the autumn of 1999.  In the way of young aspiring writers, I was in an evil garret, nursing a wicked laudanum habit, and huddled miserably above an enormous Dell laptop (period detail).  I was, of course, limp with the usual ambition and neglect.  I was toying, none too gaily, with a short story about the various passengers on a transatlantic flight from Seattle to London.  Not a great deal was happening in the story.  So I suddenly decided to crash the plane.  It was forced into an emergency landing in the Arctic Circle and, period detail, I remember checking in A REFERENCE BOOK if it was indeed the Arctic, and not the Antarctic, that I meant.  I noticed, as the story descended with the plane into lurid melodrama, that I was sitting up a little straighter in the chair--I was starting to have fun.  So next the passengers started to freeze to death, and their only chance of staying alive was to form into a huge concentric circle on the ice and to begin circling endlessly for body heat, like penguins.  It was the first time a short story of mine had surprised me--I hadn’t anticipated a penguin element sneaking in.  I titled the story “The Penguins” and it would be the earliest of my stories to appear in my debut collection, “There Are Little Kingdoms.”


My first time....
writing a novel that ascended from the desk--unlike the dead meat of a couple of previous efforts--was when I set to imagining what a small, west of Ireland city might look like (and sound like) sometime in the middle of the 21st century, if it had resource only to Victorian-era technology, and if it was occupied by homicidal gangs of (extremely fashion-conscious) teenage sluts and sluggers battling for control of the city’s vice and narco trades.  I had the scene set but I couldn’t quite begin the novel because I didn’t know what the city was called.  But then, one night--and again we must descend into melodrama--I had what I can only describe as--ahem--A Vision.  I awoke--this was early in the October of 2008--about 3 a.m., and I was trembling deliriously, and I was in a fever sweat, and I sat bolt upright in the bed, and I cried aloud the single word “Bohane!”  Of course my darling spouse turned drooling from her shattered sleep, kicked me viciously and said, “oh go the fuck to sleep, would you?!”  But I managed to reach a (quivering) hand to the bedside table, picked up the pen and made the note.  The novel City of Bohane appears this spring from Graywolf Press.

Photo by Hugh O'Connor

Book Radar: Tom Wolfe, Stephen Dobyns, Andrew Sean Greer

Book Radar rounds up some of the latest publishing deals which have caught my eye, gathered from reports at Publishers Marketplace, Galley Cat, office water-coolers and other places where hands are shaken and promises are made. As with anything in the fickle publishing industry, dates and titles are subject to change.


It looks like Tom Wolfe's long-discussed, much-anticipated novel about immigration will finally be published this October.  At least that's what Amazon has posted on its page for Back to Blood.  It also carries this full-to-bursting plot synopsis:

As a police launch speeds across Miami’s Biscayne Bay--with officer Nestor Camacho on board--Tom Wolfe is off and running. Into the feverous landscape of the city, he introduces the Cuban mayor, the black police chief, a wanna-go-muckraking young journalist and his Yale-marinated editor; an Anglo sex-addiction psychiatrist and his Latina nurse by day, loin lock by night--until lately, the love of Nestor’s life; a refined and oh-so-light-skinned young woman from Haiti and her Creole-spouting, black-gang-banger-stylin’ little brother; a billionaire porn addict, crack dealers in the ’hoods, ‘de-skilled’ conceptual artists at the Miami Art Basel Fair, ‘spectators’ at the annual Biscayne Bay regatta looking only for that night’s orgy, yenta-heavy ex-New Yorkers at an ‘Active Adult’ condo and a nest of shady Russians.

Back to Blood has been lobbed like a shuttlecock across the net in media reports since at least 2008 when the New York Times broke the news that Wolfe had decided to leave his long-time (42 years) publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux for a reported $7 million advance from Little, Brown.  Wolfe didn't comment on the move, but he did have this to say about the book: “Two years ago when I got the idea of doing a book on immigration, people would say, ‘Oh, that’s fascinating,’ and then they would go to sleep standing up like a horse. Since then the subject has become a little more exciting, and in Miami it’s not only exciting, it’s red hot.”  So, what do you think?  Will the octogenarian's next novel be hot as a bonfire, or will it fizzle like his last novel, the campus romp I Am Charlotte Simmons?


Here's another plot description that sets my radar to beeping and blipping:

[The novel] is set in a small Rhode Island town where a newborn baby is replaced by a snake in its hospital bassinet, a mysterious stranger is shot dead and scalped and large, ornery coyotes have taken to roaming the streets.

That's for The Burn Palace by Stephen Dobyns (The Church of Dead Girls) which will be coming from Blue Rider Press, an imprint of Penguin, sometime in winter 2013.  Ornery coyotes are always good.


The plot description for Andrew Sean Greer's next novel, Many Worlds, doesn't exactly set off the sprinkler system for me, but I have full faith that the author of The Story of a Marriage and The Confessions of Max Tivoli will pull off another dazzler.  Here's the brief synopsis which appeared at Publisher's Marketplace: "a young woman living in 1985 receives electroconvulsive therapy for her depression and, as a result, travels through time to parallel worlds where she is forced to confront the uncertainties of love and the unpredictable consequences of even the most carefully considered choices."  In an interview with the Haighteration blog last summer, Greer elaborated a little more on the story, saying it was about "three different versions of her life, one in which she's living in 1918, one in which she's living in 1941, and one in 1985. So she gets to see how her life would have been different if she had been born in different times."  Many Worlds will be coming from Ecco sometime in 2013.

Friday Freebie: Contents May Have Shifted by Pam Houston

Congratulations to Fran Chennells, winner of last week's Friday Freebie, Sweet Talk, the short story collection by Stephanie Vaughn.

This week's book giveaway is Contents May Have Shifted, the new novel from Pam Houston.  I've already buzzed about Contents here at The Quivering Pen, but I still haven't had the chance to read the book.  So, I'll let Rebecca Barry step in to be our guide.  Here's how her review at the San Francisco Chronicle begins:

One of my favorite things about Pam Houston's work has always been that her characters are such romantics. I mean that in the best possible way: Even as they sleep with the wrong people, even as they understand their complicity in their own heartache, even as they are gritty and broken, they believe in love. It's just that they don't expect, or even want, to get it in the same package that everyone else does. Contents May Have Shifted, Houston's new novel, is no exception to this. Told in a series of first-person vignettes, the book revisits some of the themes Houston wrestled with in earlier works, including Cowboys Are My Weakness the conflicts that surge between men and women as they try to love each other, a woman's quest for self-knowledge and personal freedom--but its narrator is older and arguably more comfortable. Her eye on the world, while still keen, has softened, and it's becoming clear to her that some unavailable mavericks (alas!) might just be narcissists. The story follows a writing teacher and ranch owner named Pam as she survives numerous near plane crashes, travels the world (Bhutan, Laos, Turkey, Australia, Tunisia, etc.) falls in and out of love, and tries, through numerous New Age healers, to release herself from the psychic and physical damage done by an abusive father. Houston is a wonderful writer, and her graceful vignettes are by turns beautiful, slyly funny and heart-stopping.

If you'd like a chance at winning a copy of Contents May Have Shifted, all you have to do is answer this question:

Which two of Houston's previous books have featured animals in the title?  (Fans of Houston will find this a ridiculously-easy question, but if you really need help with the answer, you can find it at her 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 March 15--at which time I'll draw the winning name. I'll announce the lucky reader on March 16.  If you'd like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week Quivering Pen 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 Facebook wall or by tweeting it on Twitter.  Once you've done either or both of those, send me an additional e-mail saying "I've shared" and I'll put your name in the hat twice.