Front Porch Books: February 2012 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 and Edelweiss.  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.

Dust to Dust by Benjamin Busch (Ecco):  Benjamin Busch has led what appears to be a rich and varied life.  He's the son of acclaimed novelist Frederick Busch, he's an actor who played cop Anthony Colicchio on The Wire, and he's a U.S. Marine who served two combat tours in Iraq.  All three of those, along with the charred lighter on the cover, were enough to draw me to this book, which the Jacket Copy calls "an extraordinary memoir about ordinary things."  During the composition of Fobbit, I've mostly avoided reading books about Iraq (with the singular exception of George Packer's The Assassins' Gate), but now that my novel is on its way to the typesetter at Grove, I'm ready to step into those waters.  Busch's memoir will be a good place to start because I'm particularly fond of his father's fiction and I have a good feeling that the talent has been handed down a generation.  Here are the Opening Lines:

I was not allowed to have a gun. My parents were fresh from Vietnam War protests, and they had no intention of raising a soldier. My mother was against the idea of toy weapons, and my father quietly supported the embargo. He had been a boy once, though, and was a war baby. His father, Benjamin Busch, had been a sergeant in the Tenth Mountain Division, fighting German troops in the Italian Alps. My mother's father, Allan Burroughs, had been a marine in the Guadalcanal campaign against the Japanese. He called me "Little Son of  Gun," but I continued to have no guns at all.

Blurbworthiness: “Dust to Dust is a wonderful book, original in concept and stunningly written, a soldier’s memoir that is about soldiering and much else besides.  The last two dozen pages are a tour de force, a breathtaking meditation on loss and remembrance, dust to dust.” (Ward Just, author of Rodin's Debutante)

Blind by Belo Miguel Cipriani (Wheatmark):  Here's another memoir which caught my eye (no pun intended).  It's relatively short page-wise, but it's long on poetic descriptions of our world.  Which is not surprising when you learn that Cipriani is writing about his life adjusting to a world of darkness after 2007 when he was attacked and beaten so severely he lost his vision.  He was literally robbed blind. To add a complex layer of drama on top of that, his muggers were his childhood friends.  Okay, now I'm hooked.  Jacket Copy: "Blind chronicles the two years immediately following the assault when, at the age of 26, Cipriani found himself learning to walk, cook, and date in the dark."  Blurbworthiness: "Belo Cipriani's account of profound loss is both riveting and suspenseful, as we traverse with him into a new world." (Amy Tan)

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter (HarperCollins): The first time I encountered Jess Walter, I was laughing so hard I thought I might need a diaper.  It was two years ago at the Montana Festival of the Book in Missoula and Walter was reading a short story about a guy, a couch, and a disastrous love affair.  At least I think that's what I was about.  I don't know, I was giggling to the point where my throat seized up and my ears popped.  So, maybe it was about a gorilla, a taxidermist, and a banana.  It wouldn't have mattered because, based on that short story alone, I can safely say Jess Walter is one of the funniest writers in print these days.  I don't know how much of a knee-slapper his new novel, Beautiful Ruins, will be, but he's already got a good track record of humor with The Financial Lives of the Poets and Citizen Vince.  Beautiful Ruins begins on the coast of Italy in 1962, where Pasquale, a young proprietor of the Hotel Adequate View, a failing hotel on the Italian coast, glimpses a beautiful Hollywood actress filming on location and falls in love. Fifty years later, that same Italian man heads to California to find her, aided by a cynical movie producer and an idealistic young assistant.  Funny or not, Beautiful Ruins has all the right elements for me: Hollywood, the Italian coast, unrequited love, and Jess Walter.

Talulla Rising by Glen Duncan (Knopf): This is one of two sequels I'm looking forward to this year (Justin Cronin's The Twelve, the followup to The Passage, is the other).  Talulla Rising picks up where The Last Werewolf left off.  Jake (the titular lycanthrope of the first novel) is dead and WOCOP, the World Organization for the Control of Occult Phenomena, is in pursuit of his lover, the female werewolf Talulla.  Given my enjoyment of The Last Werewolf, I expect I'll be howling with delight at Talulla.  Jacket Copy:

Talulla, pregnant, grieving, and on the run, must face her werewolf future without Jake. Premature labor under a full moon leaves her near death, but with her newborn son in her arms, she believes the worst is over.  Until the door opens--and a new nightmare begins.  What follows tests her sanity, her motherhood, and her will to survive, in a race against time to recover her lost child, an epic struggle that sees her crossing paths with a psychotic new WOCOP leader, an unlikely human lover, blood-drinking religious fanatics, a pack of London werewolves, and (rumor has it) the oldest living vampire on earth...Talulla Rising pushes the werewolf myth further into new territory to give us a novel rich in action and ideas, delivering in the process the definitive twenty-first-century female of the species.

Hollywood Boulevard by Janyce Stefan-Cole (Unbridled Books): Here's a debut novel that combines several elements that have instant appeal to me: washed-up Hollywood celebrities, noir, and Unbridled Books.  I've always looked forward to cracking open an Unbridled release soon after it lands on my doorstep and Stefan-Cole's novel definitely punches my ticket to Anticipation Land.  Here's the Jacket Copy:

Ardennes Thrush is an award-winning movie star who suddenly and mysteriously quit acting at the height of her fame. She is in Hollywood now, at the Hotel Muse, visiting her husband Andre, a world-renowned director struggling through his latest film. Ardennes, a contemplative woman, is also something of a voyeur, and as she watches the comings and goings in the hotel she begins to fear that perhaps she is being stalked. Her period of anonymity ends after a box of dead roses is delivered to her suite. When a Beverly Hills detective comes to investigate, a powerful attraction turns unexpectedly unprofessional and quickly carnal.  When the stalker turns out to be real, Ardennes's private journey escalates into real danger, and we watch rapt as she searches her past for the answer to how she brought herself here.

Girlchild by Tupelo Hassman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux):  This year marks the centennial of the founding of the Girl Scouts of America.  You can celebrate by gorging on Thin Mints and Tag-a-Longs, or you can read Hassman's debut novel about young Rory Hendrix who lives in the Calle de las Flores trailer park in Reno, Nevada.  Rory is so obsessed with the Girl Scouts, if you cut her veins, she bleeds green.  Hassam's novel is eye-catching--starting with that wonderful cover design of a library card poking out of a pocket overlaid on a green grim picture of what could be Rory's trailer.  Inside, the chapters are most short and acute observations of grade-school life.  This one is going straight to the To-Be-Read pile!  Here's the Jacket Copy:

Rory Hendrix is the least likely of Girl Scouts. She hasn’t got a troop or even a badge to call her own. But she’s checked the Handbook out from the elementary school library so many times that her name fills all the lines on the card, and she pores over its surreal advice (Uniforms, disposing of outgrown; The Right Use of Your Body; Finding Your Way When Lost) for tips to get off the Calle: that is, the Calle de las Flores, the Reno trailer park where she lives with her mother, Jo, the sweet-faced, hard-luck bartender at the Truck Stop. Rory’s been told that she is one of the “third-generation bastards surely on the road to whoredom.” But she’s determined to prove the county and her own family wrong. Brash, sassy, vulnerable, wise, and terrified, she struggles with her mother’s habit of trusting the wrong men, and the mixed blessing of being too smart for her own good. From diary entries, social workers’ reports, half-recalled memories, arrest records, family lore, Supreme Court opinions, and her grandmother’s letters, Rory crafts a devastating collage that shows us her world even as she searches for the way out of it.

Blurbworthiness: “This first novel is not like anything you or I have ever read.  Something between a shocking exposé, a defiant treatise, a prose poem, and an exuberant Girl Scout manual, it is always formally inventive and bursting with energy.   Yes, this is an insider’s report confirming the worst you ever allowed yourself to think about lowdown trailer parks.  And yet somehow Tupelo Hassman’s book is also a testament to joy and beauty, and to the saving power of language wherever it gets a foothold.  She has irrepressible high spirits, which flow forth in this case as brilliance and lyricism.  Tupelo Hassman loves life in spite of everything, and you can’t help loving this novel and her.”  (Jaimy Gordon, author of Lord of Misrule)

Mudwoman by Joyce Carol Oates (Ecco):  The phenomenally prolific JCO (who, I secretly suspect is a robot cranking out words 24/7) lands another novel in our laps.  This time, it's about "the tension between childhood and adulthood, the real and the imagined, and the 'public' and 'private' in the life of a highly complex contemporary woman."  Here's more from the Jacket Copy:

Mudgirl is a child abandoned by her mother in the silty flats of the Black Snake River. Cast aside, Mudgirl survives by an accident of fate—or destiny. After her rescue, the well-meaning couple who adopt Mudgirl quarantine her poisonous history behind the barrier of their middle-class values, seemingly sealing it off forever. But the bulwark of the present proves surprisingly vulnerable to the agents of the past. Meredith “M.R.” Neukirchen is the first woman president of an Ivy League university. Her commitment to her career and moral fervor for her role are all-consuming. Involved with a secret lover whose feelings for her are teasingly undefined, and concerned with the intensifying crisis of the American political climate as the United States edges toward war with Iraq, M.R. is confronted with challenges to her leadership that test her in ways she could not have anticipated. The fierce idealism and intelligence that delivered her from a more conventional life in her upstate New York hometown now threaten to undo her. A reckless trip upstate thrusts M.R. Neukirchen into an unexpected psychic collision with Mudgirl and the life M.R. believes she has left behind.

The Lifeboat by Charlotte Rogan (Little, Brown):  Each month, it seems I get at last one book that comes to my house with the outward appearance of something I need to read At All Costs.  It's like a confident, smart, funny, gorgeous person entering the room at a cocktail party--you can't help but be drawn by the magnetic allure.  Last month, it was The Evening Hour.  This time around, it's Charlotte Rogan's debut novel The Lifeboat.  These are books which make me wish, for the hundred-thousandth time, that I was a professional reader, a bon vivant who was paid to sit around and read non-stop for nine-hour shifts.  Maybe then I could whittle down my To-Be-Read tower of books which teeters dangerously on the corner of my desk, swaying in the breeze from my slightest cough.  Right now, The Lifeboat sits at the summit of that stack.  From the time it walked into the room a week ago, I couldn't take my eyes off of it--starting with the gorgeous cover, and continuing with the Jacket Copy:

Grace Winter, 22, is both a newlywed and a widow. In the summer of 1914, the elegant ocean liner carrying her and her husband Henry across the Atlantic suffers a mysterious explosion. Setting aside his own safety, Henry secures Grace a place in a lifeboat, which the survivors quickly realize is over capacity. For any to live, some must die.  As the castaways battle the elements, and each other, Grace recollects the unorthodox way she and Henry met, and the new life of privilege she thought she'd found. Will she pay any price to keep it?

I should also mention that I'm a big fan of Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat; Rogan's novel seems to share some of the movie's moral-dilemma qualities.  Here are the Opening Lines (from the first chapter):

The first day in the lifeboat we were mostly silent, either taking in or refusing to take in the drama playing itself out in the seething waters around us. John Hardie, an able-bodied seaman and the only crew member on board Lifeboat 14, took immediate charge. He assigned seats based on weight distribution, and because the lifeboat was riding low in the water, he forbade anyone to stand up or move without permission. Then he wrested a rudder from where it was stored underneath the seats, fixed it into place at the back of the boat, and commanded anyone who knew how to row a boat to take up one of four long oars, which were quickly appropriated by three of the men and a sturdy woman named Mrs Grant. Hardie gave them orders to gain as much distance from the foundering craft as possible, saying, "Row yer bloody hearts out, unless ye want to be sucked under to yer doom!"

A Stranger on the Planet by Adam Schwartz (Soho Press):  I can't speak for the rest of Schwartz' debut novel, but I sure liked the Opening Lines:

      My mother met Eddie Lipper in the Catskills on July 4, 1969, and married him in Las Vegas sixteen days later. She claimed they were pronounced man and wife at the exact moment Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. I didn’t believe her, but I was twelve years old that summer and would have welcomed just about any man into our lives. My mother was thirty-five, and I know the same was true for her.
      We were a family of four: me; my mother, Ruth; my twin sister, Sarah; and our younger brother, Seamus—a name recommended to my mother by our neighbor Mary Murphy from County Cork. My name is Seth. Seth Shapiro. Ruth said she selected all of our names because she wanted our initials to represent how strongly we were connected: SSSSSS. She called us her chain of love. She was right, of course—the four of us were deeply and painfully bound together—but over time I have come to see these letters as an ideogram for silence.

Here's the Jacket Copy for what looks like a pretty damn good book:

In the summer of 1969, twelve-year-old Seth lives with his unstable mother, Ruth, and his brother and sister in a two-bedroom apartment in New Jersey. His father lives with his new wife in a ten-room house and has no interest in Seth and his siblings. Seth is dying to escape from his mother’s craziness and suffocating love, her marriage to a man she’s known for two weeks, and his father’s cold disregard. Over the next four decades, Seth becomes the keeper of his family’s memories and secrets. At the same time, he emotionally isolates himself from all those who love him, especially his mother. But Ruth is also Seth’s muse, and this enables him to ultimately find redemption, for both himself and his family.

From Animal House to Our House: A Love Story by Ron Tanner (Academy Chicago Publishers):  My wife and I live in a Craftsman home built in the early 1920s and over the years we have put a good amount of "sweat equity" into a few remodeling projects (and when I say "we," I mean "my wife, with some applause from the sidelines by me").  The two of us have nothing on Ron Tanner and his wife Jill, however.  Back in 2000, Ron and then-girlfriend Jill discovered the house of their dreams: a landmark Baltimore brownstone that had belonged to a notorious fraternity.  The result is, as the subtitle says, a love story between a man, a woman, and a house.  Here's the Jacket Copy:

It was condemned property, had sat abandoned for nearly a year, and was such a wreck that no one would buy it. But Jill wanted the house and Ron wanted Jill. So he bought the 4,500-square-foot ruin. Neither he nor Jill knew anything about house repair or renovation. The bank gave them six months to get the house up to code. The neighborhood historians told them flatly, "You'll never bring that house back." Ron's realtor said, "This house will eat you alive." Ron's mother said, "Why do you always do things the hard way?" Impulsive and quixotic—and with two marriages behind him—Ron inspired little confidence. His life had been a series of mistakes and wrong turns. He recognized that taking on this wrecked frat house could be the biggest mistake of his life and he wondered if this time, in what seemed his final reach for love, he had reached too far. As soon as he and Jill started working on the house, they were at odds every day and it became clear to them both that the project would very likely ruin them financially and emotionally. Panicked, flirting with bankruptcy, and barreling through disasters, they had to learn how to live, love, and work together—and succeed against seemingly insurmountable odds.

Tanner's book, liberally illustrated with his own charming sketches, is something like "This Old House Meets The Bachelor." If Tanner had had a camera crew following him around, he would have had a killer reality show on HGTV.

The Sincerest Form of Parody: The Best 1950s MAD Inspired Satirical Comics edited by John Benson (Fantagraphics Books):  Like many a young boy in the 1960s and 70s, I grew up on a regular diet of Mad magazine.  I also grew up on a diet of pink Hostess Sno-Balls and Orange Crush.  Of the two, Mad was certainly the more nutritious.  I loved Dave Berg's "The Lighter Side of...," Sergio Aragones' "A Mad Look at...," Don Martin's gags, Al Jaffee's back cover fold-in, and especially Mort Drucker's film spoofs (A Fistful of Lasagne, Dirty Larry, The Poopsidedown Adventure, et cetera).  The latter were my first introductions to film criticism--this is how to poke holes in the pretensions of Hollywood, I thought.  Of course, a word like "pretensions" didn't pass through my 12-year-old mind--I was too busy picking myself up off the floor from my giggle-fit.  And now, Fantagraphics has packaged some of the best movie parodies in this ripely-colored book.  But these aren't Mad comics.  They're the imitators which popped up on newsstands in the 1950s--comic books like Whack, Nuts!, Crazy, Bughouse and Unsane.  As Jay Lynch writes in his introduction to The Sincerest Form of Flattery, "The Mad clones never topped the Mad comics for pure, uncut satire.  But to me, even the worst of them was more enjoyable and unpredictable than those from the other genres of comic books of the 1950s...they were still enjoyable in the same sense that it would be interesting today to see Rush Limbaugh try to do a George Carlin routine."  Most of the comics in the pages of this book are understandably dated for today's web-weaned generation who may have never heard of I, Jury ("My Gun Is the Jury by Melvie Splane"), What's My Line? ("What's My Crime?"), or Come Back, Little Sheba ("Come Back Bathsheba"), but that doesn't drain these parodies of their punch.

An Unexpected Guest by Anne Korkeakivi (Little, Brown):  In her debut novel, Korkeakivi channels the day-in-a-life structure of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway into what looks like a fascinating plot.  Here's the Jacket Copy:

Clare Moorhouse, the American wife of a high-ranking diplomat in Paris, is arranging an official dinner crucial to her husband's career. As she shops for fresh stalks of asparagus and works out the menu and seating arrangements, her day is complicated by the unexpected arrival of her son and a random encounter with a Turkish man, whom she discovers is a suspected terrorist. More unnerving is a recurring face in the crowd, one that belonged to another, darker era of her life. One she never expected to see again. But it can't be him--he's been dead for 20 years....

I particularly like the novel's Opening Line: "Time rained down on Clare."  Simple, clever and full of tension.  I expect good things to rain down on readers in the next 277 pages.  Blurbworthiness: "Anne Korkeakivi writes wonderfully about embassy manners, food, and Paris, and she writes even better about the darker world that threatens to disrupt not just Clare's seating plan for dinner but her entire life. An Unexpected Guest, like its heroine, is a novel of great elegance, enormous surprises, and unexpected depths." (Margot Livesey, author of The House on Fortune Street)

Caring Is Creepy by David Zimmerman (Soho Press):  To paraphrase Jerry Maguire, Zimmerman's novel about the summer in the life of a troubled teenage girl who flirts with strangers online had me at "hello."  Here are the Opening Lines:

      The most dangerous thing I ever did was tell a grown man my real name. I typed it for him. Lynn Marie Sugrue. When it happened, it didn’t seem like anything at all. Hardly something worth worrying over. Me and my best friend Dani were down in her basement bedroom on a night hot and thick enough to push in against the window screens. We were playing our favorite game of the moment, a sort of online combination of crank phone call and blind man’s bluff, but it was really more of a scheme to try out being bad in a place we thought it wouldn’t count. We just never expected to be the ones wearing the blindfold.
      So this is August of 2005 in Metter, Georgia, population half of nothing. A million miles from anywhere good. So this is me and Dani, just turned fifteen and a couple weeks away from our sophomore year at Metter High. So this is me fucking up my life like you wouldn’t believe.

The Water Children by Anne Berry (Simon & Schuster):  I also like the Opening Lines to Berry's novel which will be released in the U.S. in May.  These sentences do a good job of setting the watery scene for the rest of the book:

It is the recipe for a perfect day. The sun beats down from a cloudless blue sky. The air fizzes with heat and salt. The sea glitters and shifts and curls and breaks along the three-mile stretch of pale, gold, Devonshire sand—Saunton Sands. It somersaults over mossy rocks and tangled tresses of tide wrack. It sends the beach into a nervous, excited jitter. The seasawing cry of gulls rises to a crescendo with their swoops and nose-dives, then quiets as the curved beaks snap at darting fish. Apart from a few surfers riding the breakers, and sporadic clusters of people guiltily enjoying their mid-week leisure break, this coastal paradise is deserted.

Here's the Jacket Copy from the UK edition (which, frankly, I prefer to the more muddy one from the U.S. publisher):

Four lives. Four defining moments which will bring them together. Owen Abingdon is haunted by nightmares of the Merfolk. He believes they have stolen his little sister who vanished while he was meant to be minding her on the beach, but he was only a child himself. Is it fair for his mother to blame him? Catherine Hoyle's perfect Christmas with her cousin from America was blighted when they went skating on thin ice and Rosalyn nearly died. Somehow, instead of being praised for raising the alarm, Catherine gets blamed. Sean Madigan grew up on a farm in Ireland. Learning to swim in the Shannon was his way of escaping the bitter poverty of his childhood, but it also incurred his father's wrath. He flees to England, but his heart belongs to the Shannon and her pulling power is ever near. Unlike the other three, Naomi Seddon didn't fear the sea. She'd been orphaned and placed in a children's home in Sheffield and cruelly abused. The sea offered her a way out and she revelled in its cruel power. The "water children" meet in London in the searing hot summer of 1976 and Naomi uses her siren's charm to lure Owen, Catherine and Sean into her tangled web of sexual charm and dangerous passion. A holiday in the Tuscan mountains with a flooded reservoir and its legend of the beautiful Teodora who drowned there brings this emotional drama to a powerful climax.

This Will Be Difficult to Explain: And Other Stories by Johanna Skibsrud (W. W. Norton):  I still have Skibsrud's prize-winning novel The Sentimentalists sitting high in my To-Be-Read pile, but in the meantime I'm looking forward to dipping into this new collection of her short stories.  Take a gander at the Jacket Copy:

In the Scotiabank Giller Prize–winning author Johanna Skibsrud’s new book, nine loosely connected and hypnotic stories introduce an unforgettable cast of characters. A young maid at a hotel in France encounters a man who asks to paint her portrait, only later discovering that the man is someone other than who she thinks. A divorced father, fearing estrangement from his thirteen-year-old daughter, allows her to take the wheel of his car, realizing too late that he’s made a grave mistake. A Canadian girl and her French host stumble on the one story that transcends their language barrier. Youth confronted with the mutterings of old age, restlessness bounded by the muddy confines of a backyard garden, callow hope coming up against the exigencies of everyday life—these are life-defining moments that weave throughout the everyday lives of the remarkable characters in this book. Time and again they find themselves confronted with what they didn’t know they didn’t know, at the exact point of intersection between impossibility and desire. In This Will Be Difficult to Explain Skibsrud has created a series of masterful, perceptive tales.

Let's Pretend This Never Happened: (A Mostly True Memoir) by Jenny Lawson (Amy Einhorn Books):  I recently stumbled upon Lawson's popular blog, The Bloggess, and--as they say in Hollywood and Amway brochures--my life will never be the same again.  Why was I wasting so much of my internet time dillying and dallying when I could have been coming straight to the Bloggess for the web equivalent of Our Daily Bread?  One will never know.  But here's one thing I do know: Lawson's words grabbed me like a snoutful of cocaine right from the Opening Lines of the book's introduction:

      This book is totally true, except for the parts that aren't. It's basically like Little House on the Prairie but with more cursing. And I know you're thinking, "But 'Little House on the Prairie' was totally true!" and no, I'm sorry, but it wasn't. Laura Ingalls was a compulsive liar with no fact-checker, and probably if she was still alive today her mom would be saying, "I don't know how Laura came up with this whole 'I'm-a-small-girl-on-the-prairie' story. We lived in New Jersey with her Aunt Frieda and our dog, Mary, who was blinded when Laura tried to bleach a lightning bolt on her forehead. I have no idea where she got the 'and we lived in a dug-out' thing, although we did take her to Carlsbad Caverns once."
      And that's why I'm better than Laura Ingalls. Because my story is 90% accurate, and I really did live in a dugout. The reason why this memoir is only mostly true instead of totally true is because I relish not getting sued. Also, I want my family to be able to say, "Oh that never happened. Of course we never actually tossed her out of a moving car when she was eight. That's one of those crazy things that isn't quite the truth." And they're right, because the truth is that I was nine. I was sitting on my mom's lap when my dad made a hard left, the door popped open, and I was tossed out like a sack-full of kittens. My mom managed to grab my arm, which would have been helpful if my father had actually stopped the car, but apparently he didn't notice or possibly thought I'd just catch up, and so my legs were drug through a parking lot that I'm pretty sure was paved with broken glass and used syringes.

From looks of it, Lawson is like David Sedaris, but with hair-curlers.  I'm prepping my throat for laughter even as we speak.

The Dark Side of Dickens

The Biography Project, Day 38

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Charles Dickens the Writer was a genius but Charles Dickens the Man was an asshole.

I've now reached the point in Claire Tomalin's Charles Dickens: A Life where the nasty side of his nature can no longer be denied.  In fact, at one point Tomalin warns the reader: "You'll want to avert your eyes from a good deal of what happened during the next year, 1858."

On this day, the 200th anniversary of Dickens' birth, it may seem a little sacrilegious to pause in our adoration of the writer whose works, the Economist once pronounced in 1852, "are [as] sure to be sold and read as the bread which is baked is sure to be sold and eaten."  It is, in fact, a little troubling to me that his bicentennial fete arrives just as I'm reading about Dickens the dick.

If you prefer the "happy hearth and home" version of the novelist, you might head over to Google where you'll find a cartoonish representation of scenes from the books as today's "Google Doodle" on the main search page:

While we may best remember Dickens for the caricature of Mr. Micawber or the tear-sopped sentiment of Little Nell, the truth of the Dickens household is much harder to swallow and taints the reputation of his literary works.  So, if you want to honor the joyous spirit of Dickens in your hearts, like Scrooge does with Christmas, then I urge you to look away now, as Tomalin suggests.

Make no mistake, my love for Dickens' novels runs deep and unshakable, and so it pains me to re-type these passages from Tomalin's biography in which he demonstrates an unforgivable callousness toward his children and an even more egregious attitude toward his wife Catherine.  I'm not out to be a pedestal-smasher, but I can't go through this year-long Biography Project wearing blinders.  I know there are even harder, idol-crushing revelations in the other biographies I plan to read (see: Carver, Raymond), but the dark side of Dickens is especially distressing to me, the lifelong worshipper at his feet.

Even though Dickens became one of our best chroniclers of domestic life in 19th-century England, perhaps he was not best suited for family life himself.  Some writers are better off without the distractions of family (certainly not me--I cherish my wife and three children--but there are other artists who are more cut out for the solitude of an ivory tower).  Dickens was so dedicated to his art that eventually everything else of consequence (paternal duties, husbandly fondness) was shoved to the sidelines.  His imagination was a dynamo at the hot, humming center of the engine that drove him to write at such a rapid pace.  In one letter to his friend Miss Coutts, he writes, "I have been so busy, leading up to the great turning idea of the Bleak House story, that I have lived this last week or ten days in a perpetual scald and boil."  To touch Dickens the man at work was to be burned by his focused fever.

He was, Tomalin tells us, a man who often overreached his physical limits: "Dickens kept going by taking on too much.  He knew no other way to live, and no day went by in which he did not stretch himself, physically, socially and emotionally."

He was, as Tomalin tells us in detail at agonizing length, a pretty rotten father to his ten children.

There was...the feeling that he had too many sons needing to be educated and launched into the world, boys he found noisy and difficult to communicate with, boys who seemed to be inheriting the worst characteristics of both sides of the family--indolence, passivity and carelessness with money.  He disciplined them hard at home, insisting on tidiness and punctuality, gave them tasks and inspected their clothes, which led to "mingled feelings of dislike and resentment" and whispers of "slavery" and "degradation."

And there is this comment in a letter on the occasion of the birth of his son Plorn (full name Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens): "on the whole I could have dispensed with him."  It is jaw-droppingly awful in nature.  I don't care how strictly-run Victorian households were at the time, there is little excuse for such a cold-hearted statement.

But Dickens' affair with Ellen Ternan, an actress 27 years his junior, was the straw that would break his family's back.  He first met Ellen, affectionately known as "Nelly," when she, her mother, and her sister helped him stage a production of The Frozen Deep, the melodrama he and Wilkie Collins wrote in 1857.  The play is a fictionalized version of the doomed Franklin expedition to the arctic.  On the stage, Dickens played the self-sacrificing explorer Wardour; Nelly was his lover waiting for him to return from the frigid north.  When Nelly held Charles' head in her lap during the final overwrought scenes where his character is dying, it planted the seed for a love affair which would soon move off the stage into real life.  As Tomalin writes: "It led to changes in every aspect of his life: the wing of a butterfly flapped, and a whole weather system was unsettled."

He separated from Catherine, treating her cruelly as he banished her from their home, and split their children's loyalty in the process.  Until his death 12 years later he sent Catherine only three short letters, all in reply to inquiries from her, and did not even contact her when one of their sons died.  It was an emotional earthquake that cracked the foundation of the home.

It also took a toll on Dickens physically, Tomalin notes:

He was always able to sparkle, charm and command admiration, but he aged in appearance now and began to look older than his years. The keen and lustrous eyes were sinking in their sockets and losing their brilliance, lines appeared across his brow and his cheeks were cut across by diagonal furrows. His hair thinned, his beard grizzled....And through these years bad health wore away Dickens' strength, neuralgia, rheumatic pains, unspecified but unpleasant and persistent symptoms he associated with bachelor life, trouble with his teeth and dental plates, piles. Then first his left foot, and then his right, took to swelling intermittently, becoming so painful that during each attack he became unable to take himself on the great walks that were an essential part and pleasure of his life. Presently his hand too was affected. The decline was resisted, denied, fought against, but not to be stayed.

Those "unspecified but unpleasant and persistent symptoms," by the way, were most likely gonorrhea, Tomalin speculates (with some compelling evidence).  There was no hiding the physical and spiritual decline of Charles Dickens. As he neared the end of his life, his body was reaping what his spirt had sowed.   A family friend who had known him since 1840 went to hear him read A Christmas Carol in November 1858 and found he had "withered and dwindled into a smaller man."

In that turbulent year when Tomalin urges us to look away, Dickens went half out of his mind:

His daughter Katey said, decades later, that there was misery at home and that he behaved like a madman, although at the time she found it impossible to protest. She saw her mother humiliated, ordered to call on the Ternan family at Park Cottage, and urged her to refuse, to no effect, and Catherine went. There is another story of an engraved bracelet Dickens had made for Nelly being wrongly delivered to Catherine.

Dickens' reputation was stained as his domestic troubles came to public notice (though the affair with Nelly would be a closely-guarded secret until well after his death).  His shocked readers learned he was less Bob Cratchit and more Paul Dombey (the hard-hearted father of Dombey and Son).  In a letter to a family friend, Dickens wrote, "Constituted to do the work that is in me, I am a man full of passion and energy, and my own wild way that I must go, is often--at the best--wild enough."  I have to agree with Tomalin when she writes: "You can feel sorry for him as he struggles, but it is impossible to like what he did."

As I mentioned, my heart has been heavy as I've read these pages of the biography.  Today, I'll be celebrating the genius not the asshole, but if there is any cake to be had, it will be dark chocolate with bittersweet frosting.

My First Time: Andromeda Romano-Lax

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 Andromeda Romano-Lax, author of The Detour (out next week from Soho Press),  a novel about art, adventure, and second chances, set in pre-World War II Italy.  Romano-Lax is also the author of The Spanish Bow, a New York Times Editor’s Choice and one of Library Journal’s Best Books of 2007.  She lives with her husband and children in Anchorage, Alaska, where she co-founded and now teaches for a nonprofit organization, the 49 Alaska Writing Center.  Visit her author website here.

My First Time Hearing Fiction's Call

I tried writing some fiction in my late teens and early twenties.  But then my tastes veered sharply toward travel writing, features journalism, and literary essays.  I was so passionate about creative nonfiction that by the time I graduated college, I read little else.  I worked as a freelance journalist.  I wrote one work of literary nonfiction and thought—until a day in early 2002—that I was on my way to writing a second.

Ten years ago this month, I traveled to Puerto Rico to visit the archives of a world-famous cellist, Pablo Casals, who had taken a public stance against fascism in his native country of Spain.  In the months following 9/11, I was both fascinated by politics and in need of a heroic story, and Casals’s life fit the tale I was determined to tell.

But in Puerto Rico, my research took a surprising turn.  I stumbled across a letter that questioned the stance Casals had taken, a stance that required him to sacrifice his own happiness for a cause.  I also read more broadly about the time period and discovered that this particular artist’s dilemmas and experiences were not unique.  I found myself with fewer answers and more questions than ever: troublesome for the kind of writer I was at the time, but exciting for the new kind of writer I’d soon become.

Nonfiction can be both flexible and complex, but I found myself—unexpectedly—wanting to tell this story an entirely different way.  I wanted freedom: freedom to include other people and places, to mix the imagined with the historical, to include characters who wouldn’t necessarily have met in real life.  Luckily, there was no James Frey impulse in me.  I did not feel tempted to lie in my nonfiction.  Instead, I felt a giddy impulse to jump the nonfiction ship altogether.  The story itself seemed to be directing me away from my own preconceptions and toward its optimal, novelistic form.

That was exciting, but also intimidating.  I hadn’t been reading much fiction for the last decade.  I didn’t have a clue how to structure a novel.  I didn’t even know where to begin.  My husband, who had been supportive of the idea for the nonfiction book concept, threw up his hands and laughed.  We were already living simply, and now I was turning my back on the one thing that I knew— sort of— how to do.  If I planned to write fiction, a vow of poverty was in order.  My husband and I officially declared ourselves “downwardly mobile.”

That spring, I learned what all apprentice novelists know: begin anywhere.  As E.L. Doctorow has said, writing a novel is like driving a car at night: you only have to see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.  The first few scenes I wrote didn’t end up in the book.  A character who led me into the story later disappeared.  It took me many pages to find the right approach, voice, and even setting—and another 18 months to do the research that was required, in Spain and France.  But somehow, I never doubted it would come together.

Perhaps my lack of doubt was made possible by my exceedingly modest expectations.  I couldn’t picture this first effort ever being published or read.  Still, with the joyful determination of naïve youth—such happy days!-- I was ready to let the story lead the way.  I also supplied myself with intense, remedial education, ashamed I had lived in the literary dark for so long.  I kept a fiction log, in which I recorded every novel I read and what it had to teach me, what aspects of craft I admired and what I was still puzzling over or hoping to do differently in my own work.  I attended conferences and workshops.  I pitched the first fifteen pages, and later a hundred pages, to an agent, who would end up representing and selling the book.  But most of all, I just kept listening: listening to the story itself, and how it needed to be told.

I don’t think I’ve ever been as good a listener since.  Like any convert, I’ve become a zealous, wholehearted devotee to fiction.  It’s what I most love to read, and what I most love to write.

But I do try to remind myself: that project worked because I was paying attention, and I was willing to jump out of my rut.  Now, when I’m working on a new story idea, I at least try to consider: would this be better in a different form, does it need to be long or short, would it work better as a screenplay?  Am I telling it from the right point of view; have I chosen an effective narrator?  And, as far as my continuing education: am I doing everything I can to improve my own writing and reading skills?  The impulse does not come from wanting a book in a bookstore (and good thing, since there are fewer bookstores every day).  The impulse comes from the story itself and from the desire to discover the story’s best form, as well as the impulse to better understand, through fiction’s empathic lens, our place in the real world

To my utter astonishment, my first novel, The Spanish Bow, was published in 2007.  It’s been translated into eleven languages.

My second novel is about to be published.  It tells the story of a five-day Italian road trip that changes the life of young German art lover in 1938.

But the title of that second novel—“The Detour”—tells my own writer’s story as well.  Ten years ago, I took an entirely unexpected detour from nonfiction into fiction.  I haven’t looked back.

Soup and Salad: Super Bowl Books, "The greatest blog post about blurbs in the history of publishing," Dani Shapiro: Get Out of the Way, Stay the F*ck Awake, Sundays With Nathan Englander, The Greatest Books of All Time, Hierarchy of Book Publishing, Why You'll Never Find a Title like "Sucky Book," When Mommy and Daddy are Writers

On today's menu:

She should be holding a book in her other hand

1.  Are you ready for some football...novels?!  You’ve got your chips and Ro-Tel-and-Velveeta dip prepped.  You’ve painted your face blue and red.  You’re wearing your best pizza-stained jersey and you and your best buds are already clinking beer bottles in a pre-coin-toss toast to victory.  You are ready for the Big Game.  But have you done your literary football homework?  Today at Book Riot, I go into a huddle about the quintessential Super Bowl XXLVI novel: Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes.  (Last year, I kicked off Super Bowl Sunday with a look at the classic Chip Hilton books.)  And while you're at Book Riot, check out Victor Wishna's list of The Best Football Books That Aren't Really About Football.


2.  Galleys of my novel Fobbit went out to about a dozen authors this past week in hopes they'd say nice things about the book which Grove/Atlantic could then use in its publicity campaign.  I'd already gotten one nice blurb from Aaron Gwyn (author of The World Beneath) who called Fobbit "the first major work of fiction about America's war for Iraq."  But....does anybody care about blurbs, those endorsements which sometimes border on over-the-top enthusiasm?  Nicole Krauss took a good deal of ribbing for her operatic praise of a novel by David Grossman: "Very rarely, a few times in a lifetime, you open a book and when you close it again nothing can ever be the same. Walls have been pulled down, barriers broken, a dimension of feeling, of existence itself, has opened in you that was not there before. To the End of the Land is a book of this magnitude."  At The Millions, Alan Levinovitz delivers a robust history of blurbs (stretching back to ancient Rome and moving forward to Rebecca Skloot with a stop along the way to visit Ralph Waldo Emerson's blurb for Walt Whitman: "I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great Career").  It is, bar none, the best review of blurbs you'll read all year.  And you can quote me on that.


3.  At her blog, Dani Shapiro has some very inspiring words about "getting out of our own way," which apply not just to writers but anyone who goes around practicing self-sabotage.  Here's how it begins:

      Here's the way an ideal writing day goes: I wake up early and do the knapsack/lunchbox/breakfast/off-to-school thing and my family toodles down the driveway while I still have a clear, unperturbed mind. I make my second cappuccino of the morning and climb the stairs to my office where I do a quick email check, find nothing aggravating, then a scan of the news, and by eight a.m. I have settled in to work. I turn the software program "Freedom" on, disabling the Internet on my computer, in the event that the lure of checking Facebook or Twitter proves too much for me. I work, uninterrupted, for a couple of hours. I head back downstairs, take the dogs out for some air, then throw ingredients for a stew into the slow cooker. Back upstairs I go. Another hour or two of work on my book. A one-hour yoga break at lunchtime. Revision, and the business of writing in the afternoon. By the time four o'clock rolls around, I'm spent, feel good about the work I've done that day (not to mention the dinner in the slow cooker, the yoga) and I drive to my son's school to pick him up, cheerful and available for quality family time.
      How often does a day like this happen? Well, I had one yesterday, which is why this description is so fresh in my mind. But really--how often? Probably about once every two weeks, if I'm completely honest. Something usually gives. I struggle with getting to the page in the morning, and it's noon before I begin to accomplish anything. I get sidetracked by a disappointing email, or an exciting email. It almost doesn't matter what the content, a full in-box is always over-stimulating. I don't get to the yoga mat. I don't make dinner. My work suffers. Four o'clock rolls around and my head feels like it's about to pop off my shoulders, and when I pick my son up at school, I am in a fog, emotionally unavailable and hating myself for it.

4.  It was only a matter of time before Mad Magazine got around to parodying bestselling children's literature: Stay the F*ck Awake.


5.  The New York Times gives us Nathan Englander's Sunday Routine (Note: puppy-dog alert!):

I’m a workaholic. So I really tried this year to take off that week between Christmas and New Year’s. I enjoy working. I like to write; that’s what I do. So inevitably I want to work some in the afternoon....Not that many writers really have a good grasp on sanity, but the only way to aspire toward sanity is to build a routine.

6.  The Atlantic tabulates The Greatest Books of All Time, as Voted by 125 Famous Authors based on responses found in The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books.  The usual suspects show up--no huge surprises--but it's still fun to take a look at rankings like these if you are list-obsessed (which I am).


7.  Speaking of lists, Paul Bogaards' "Hierarchy of Book Publishing" had me laughing and nodding in agreement.  Brand-name authors like Stephen King and Jodi Picoult are on the top rung.  Others farther down the chain include George R. R. Martin (#5), Literary Agents (#11), Laura Miller when she is cranky (#46), Laura Miller when she is not cranky (#47), the Steig Larsson estate (#75), 12-year-old in Iceland operating BitTorrent site and netting 50 grand a day selling pirated editions of Stieg Larsson (#87), book publicists (#98) and You (#100).


8.  My agent was allergic to the title of my novel.  This threw me into a tailspin and I spent several days fretting about "Fobbit"and wondering if I was too close to it after a six-year relationship to ever give it up.  I even went so far as to put it out to Quivering Pen readers for alternate title suggestions.  Thankfully, Grove/Atlantic seems to like "Fobbit" and it's stuck to the cover as we go to press.  Other authors, however, haven't had as much luck with their titles.  At Beyond the Margins, Randy Susan Meyers tells us that in her "unscientific study," only 17 percent of authors got to keep their original title:

Robin Black wrote, “My original title was YESTERDAY’S NEWS. Random House rejected it on the theory that you never give reviewers a title they could, if so disposed, use against you. (Which is why you don’t see more books out there called things like, “SUCKY BOOK.”)  And then there are the titles you didn’t know were taken: Cathy Marie Buchanan: “The original title for THE DAY THE FALLS STOOD STILL was THE RIVER WIFE. Sadly, my agent let me know Jonis Agree had just published using the title. Broke my heart for a hundred years.”

9.  At his blog Many Thrones, One Pretender, Michael Magras has this nice reflection on what it's like for a child to grow up with parents who are both writers (Magras' wife also writes fiction):

      Our son is one of a handful of five-year-olds in Maine with writers for parents. He has spent much of his childhood listening to Mommy and Daddy discuss their respective manuscripts, offer suggestions for improvements to each other’s work, and wonder aloud whether anyone other than two or three trusted readers will ever see the novels we spend months and even years crafting. More than most children, he is aware of the joys and frustrations that are a part of creating fiction—the thrill one feels when moribund passages come to life, and the hours of sleep lost when one, two, three months’s writing and rewriting has to be discarded, and self-doubt is all that’s left.
      Actually, he doesn’t see the insomnia. But he does see the stacks of printouts and the backed-up files and the ideas for future stories scribbled on legal pads. We write when he’s at school or asleep, but occasionally we need to edit when he’s around. That means he’s been a witness to Daddy’s mad dashes toward his laptop to type up a good idea before the idea disappears forever, and Mommy revising her ninth draft during his bath time.

Sometimes They Come Back: Stewart O'Nan's The Night Country

Happy Birthday to Stewart O'Nan, who--if he doesn't mind my saying so--just keeps getting better with age.  As O'Nan blows out the candles on his cake today, he'll have good reason to celebrate.  His newest novel, The Odds: A Love Story, has just hit bookstores, libraries and Kindles and it's as good as anything he's already given us.  I'll have a full review posted here to the blog sometime in the coming week or two, but for now I give you my highest endorsement.

I also give you this review of O'Nan's haunting novel, The Night Country, I wrote more than eight years ago for January Magazine.  If you aren't already reading O'Nan's books, then you are, sadly, in the majority.  O'Nan is this nation's greatest under-appreciated living novelist.  He's criminally under-read and deserves a much wider audience than he usually gets (though his previous novel Emily, Alone earned some good critical attention).  Start with The Odds (it's very short), then move on to Songs for the Missing, The Names of the Dead, Last Night at the Lobster (another quick read), Snow Angels and The Circus Fire (a non-fiction account of the Hartford, Connecticut tragedy).  Or, after reading this review, maybe you'll want to pay an immediate visit to The Night Country....

*     *     *

Every small town in America has a tragedy that goes something like this: a car full of teenagers crashes on a dark road and young lives turn to legend.  Maybe some live while others die horribly, maybe they're on their way home from the prom, maybe they've been drinking, maybe they're stone sober and an evil patch of black ice is the culprit.  Whatever the circumstance, the teen car crash is a sad part of our nostalgic culture.  In death, the teens take on a grandeur and status they probably never enjoyed in life, their legacy a smiling yearbook photo and a small white cross erected by the side of the road.  In the Wyoming town where I grew up, a sweet-faced girl, one year younger than me, died when her brakes failed on an icy turn less than two miles from her home.  Even today, I can't picture that stretch of road without the words "snuffed out" coming to mind.

Avon, Connecticut knows all about candles prematurely snuffed.  The town's latest tragedy took place on Halloween night when a Camry loaded with five teens wrapped itself around a tree on a country road, instantly killing three, leaving another severely brain damaged and the fifth miraculously unhurt.   Now, exactly one year later, the town is painfully reliving the memory of that October night.

That's the premise for Stewart O'Nan's novel The Night Country, a tale that literally haunts the reader from page one.  The story is narrated by the ghost of Marco, who died in the crash along with Toe and Danielle.  The trio of restless spirits roams the town, watching over their parents, their friends, the police officer who responded to the crash and especially the survivors, brain-damaged Kyle and unscratched Tim.  In the course of the 24 hours covered by the novel, Brooks the cop will try to come to grips with decisions he made a year ago, while Tim will put into motion a plan he's been plotting for the past five months, an act he thinks will bring him peace and redemption.  The ghosts serve as our guides and Greek chorus as we watch the day's events unfold.   In O'Nan's hands, the sentences pop and crackle and are never less than enthralling:

Brooks remembers jumping out of the Vic and running for the tree and the Camry -- unbelieving--and then stopping once he'd gotten there, his training evaporating at the sight of us. (Because the car was small and we weren't pretty.) His first instinct was to look around for someone else who could help. In the backseat a boy's voice was trying the same hurt vowel sound over and over, a cat meowing.

As in his masterful The Circus Fire, O'Nan displays an uncanny knack for describing common tragedy--there, the 1944 Hartford fire; here, the Halloween car crash which killed three teens nobody cared about while they were still alive (now "we're the kids in that car wreck").  Like Ray Bradbury (to whom the book is dedicated and whose influence whispers across each page), O'Nan uses the horrible, chilling events of our lives to show how we humans continue to press on undaunted through this mortal coil.

O'Nan's imaginative vision is intriguing, convincing us we're overwatched by ghosts--the just-killed and the long-dead, who haunt our steps, trail their foggy fingers through our heads.  Parenthetically interrupting their narration, O'Nan's teenage ghosts are sardonic and wise ("One week we're history, martyred gods, then forgotten"), as if the afterlife has given them X-ray vision into the hearts of the living.  Witness the book's hypnotic opening words:

Come, do you hear it? The wind--murmuring in the eaves, scouring the bare trees. How it howls, almost musical, a harmony of old moans….Come with us, out into the night. Come now, America the lovesick, America the timid, the blessed, the educated, come stalk the dark backroads and stand outside the bright houses, calm as murderers in the yard, quiet as deer. Come, you slumberers, you lumps, arise from your legion of sleep and fly over the wild woods. Come, all you dreamers, all you zombies, all you monsters. What are you doing anyway, paying the bills, washing the dishes, waiting for the doorbell? Come on, take your keys, leave the bowl of candy on the porch, put on the suffocating mask of someone else and breathe.

The Night Country drives relentlessly forward to a conclusion that seems inevitable, though we wish it weren't.  As Tim and Brooks hurtle toward one final intersection, we secretly hope their paths will split and that everyone can go home--unredeemed, yes, but also still alive.

O'Nan knows that very few things in life turn out the way we'd hoped, so why should fiction be any different?  In The Night Country, just as in the world beyond books, there are impulsive, regrettable last-minute decisions.  There is the slippery road, the short yelp of brakes, the acrid stench of burnt rubber and the sudden sad silence that continues to haunt long after the last chapter is written.

Friday Freebie: The Evening Hour by Carter Sickels

Congratulations to Carl Scott, winner of last week's Friday Freebie, The Crown by Nancy Bilyeau.

This week's book giveaway is The Evening Hour by Carter Sickels, just released by Bloomsbury.  I've already expressed my enthusiastic anticipation of Sickels' debut novel, so your appetite should already be fully whetted (if, in fact, you haven't already gone ahead and clicked through to order the book).  But for those out there who still need a little more convincing, here's Aryn Kyle (author of The God of Animals) to tell you why The Evening Hour may be one of the first great must-reads of 2012:  "In this stark, beautiful debut, Sickels writes with gentle grace and cutting honesty about characters as wounded as the condemned land on which they live. The Evening Hour is a raw, aching book that gleams with moments of unflinching truth and unexpected tenderness, casting light into dark corners, revealing both damage and dignity. It's a stunning novel."  Need more convincing?  Try this: "A refreshing cry from the populace, Carter Sickels' The Evening Hour captures the spirit of America's New Feudalism. The setting is West Virginia and Heritage Coal has a monopoly: on the land, on the lives of the people who work for them, and on the families who live downhill from the toxic sludge pond. Life is hell and survival is all there is. Some have the Bible, some have booze and pills and sex, and some still dare to have a dream."  (Tom Spanbauer, author of The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon) 

What's that you say?  Your arm still isn't twisted?  Okay, Mr. Dubious-pants, here's the plot summary:

Most of the wealth in Dove Creek is in the earth--in the coal seams that have provided generations with a way of life. Born and raised here, twenty-seven-year-old Cole Freeman has sidestepped work as a miner to become an aide in a nursing home. He's also a drug dealer, reselling the prescription drugs his older patients give him to a younger crowd looking for different kinds of escape. In this economically depressed, shifting landscape, Cole is floundering. The mining corporation is angling to buy the Freeman family's property, and Cole's protests only feel like stalling. Although he has often dreamed of leaving, he has a sense of duty to this land, especially after the death of his grandfather. His grandfather is not the only loss: Cole's one close friend, Terry Rose, has also slipped away from him, first to marriage, then to drugs. While Cole alternately attempts romance with two troubled women, he spends most of his time with the elderly patients at the home, desperately trying to ignore the decay of everything and everyone around him. When a disaster befalls these mountains, Cole is forced to confront his fears and, finally, take decisive action--if not to save his world, to at least save himself.

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

In what subject did Sickels earn his master's degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill?  (Visit the author's website to find the answer.)

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 Feb. 9--at which time I'll draw the winning name.  I'll announce the lucky reader on Feb. 10.  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.

The Death-Virgin Meets the Grim Reaper

In February 2005, I was a death-virgin.  I'd deployed to the Middle East with the 3rd Infantry Division as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom.  As a nation, we were young in the war.  Within the unit, some of us were also infants when it came to the business of bullets and bloodshed.  A minority population of the division was untested in combat while the rest of the nearly 3,000 soldiers were on their second tour of duty to Iraq.  They'd been there, done that, got the T-shirt.

By this point, I'd served in the active-duty Army for seventeen years, but I'd never "gone to war."  Panama, Desert Storm, Bosnia, and Afghanistan had all carried on without me (though I did come close to deploying in 2003--even received orders to report to Fort Benning, Georgia for overseas processing, but a previously-undiagnosed hernia kept me stateside).  Now, however, the time had come and I had to go.

In January, I flew to Kuwait with a duffel bag stuffed with three sets of uniforms, a bag of toiletries, my memory-foam contour pillow, a framed photo of my wife and I on our wedding day, and The Complete Works of Charles Dickens.  I thought I was ready to for a year-long camping trip to the desert but, as it turns out, I wasn't prepared for the daily barrage of death.  I was unwise to the ways of the Grim Reaper who, I was soon to learn, tirelessly walked the streets of Baghdad, his awful face hidden in shadows beneath the black hood, his blood-specked scythe swinging through the air non-stop.  I didn't know he'd soon be following me everywhere, sitting with me in my office cubicle as I typed press releases, walking beside me as I returned to my hooch, eating with me, showering with me.  He was my uncomfortable companion and I resented him for even being there in the first place.  And yet, I had no say-so in the matter.  Death will go where he wants to, and to hell with anyone who tries to stop him.

IED in Baghdad, 2005

Since I was part of the division's "advance party," I remained in Kuwait as the staggered waves of incoming soldiers, who arrived in flights known as "chalks," spent a couple of weeks training and getting acclimated to the sand and heat before heading north to the urban battle of Baghdad.  I worked out of a large tent whose canvas walls were buffeted by desert winds.  The two dozen of us who sat at the folding metal desks in the room found our sanity eaten away every day by the non-stop soundtrack of hiss, moan, whistle, hiss, boom, pop.  It's as if we sat inside the billowing sails of a clipper ship rocked by trade winds.  There was no relief.

As the 3rd Infantry Division soldiers flowed north into Iraq, I soon found there was little relief from the death reports sent back to us by those who were setting up the division's headquarters at Camp Liberty.  It started as a trickle, then became a stream, and turned into a river long before summer arrived.  Eventually, the terms KIA (Killed in Action) and WIA (Wounded in Action) would become part of my lexicon, the three callous letters slipping too easily from my tongue in conversation, stripped of all meaning and certainly bearing no connection to soldiers whose bodies had been shredded by bombs.

Several times a day, I pulled out a little green book in which I made notes for the daily journal I was keeping--scribbled diary entries which would later be transmogrified into the fiction of Fobbit.  I watched, I listened, I absorbed.  As the canvas walls of my temporary office in Kuwait moaned and popped, I--the death-virgin--was keenly open to all these new, raw experiences.

Years later, when it came time to write it all down, I chose fiction as my avenue of approach.  It allowed me to stuff the truth into a sack which flexed and grew, even as it condensed and thickened.  I could use my imagination to make my point sharper and clearer.  The result--the 350-page book now known as Fobbit--is a satire, a wild exaggeration of events, a dark cartoon that, I hope, is somehow more truthful than any memoir I could ever write.

And yet, many of the notes I took down in 2005 remain in Fobbit, some transcribed almost verbatim.  Here, for instance, is a scene from early in the novel where Staff Sergeant Chance Gooding Jr. is working out of the Division Tactical Operations tent in Kuwait and gets some bad news.  Gooding is a public affairs soldier (PAO) and, like me, he is a death-virgin, a late-career non-commissioned officer on his first combat tour of duty.  These are words which started out as journal notes, but were later pumped full of fiction steroids....

from Fobbit

Once, when Gooding was still down in Kuwait, waiting to deploy north to Iraq and join the rest of the division which had already been in-country for three weeks, a captain from the G-2 Intelligence section walked up to him in the makeshift Tactical Operations Center and said, “You PAO?”

Gooding had looked up from the Dickens novel he was reading, then quickly got to his feet, heart pounding. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Thought you should know we just got word from up north.  Division took some fatalities earlier this afternoon.  A vehicle out on patrol rolled over into a canal in south Baghdad.  Two dead on impact.  Another one trapped in the wreckage.  Two other soldiers jumped in to rescue the vehicle crew, but they got swept away.  Monsoon season up there is a bitch, apparently.  Anyway, last I heard, we’ve got three dead and two missing.”

Gooding dog-eared a page in A Tale of Two Cities with trembling fingers and said in a hoarse voice, “Thanks, ma’am.  I appreciate you letting me know.”

Back then, he’d slumped against the wall, reeling from his first deaths as a public affairs soldier serving in his first war.  He pictured the humvee tipping, tumbling into the water, the two soldiers on the bank, shouting, acting on instinct, jumping into the water, misjudging the current and getting sucked down into the muddy swirl of the Euphrates (in his mind, the canal had become the mighty Euphrates), their mouths trying to snatch air, but filling instead with dirty water.  He pictured those two soldiers flailing against the pull of the water, soon losing all strength as their lungs filled with the Euphrates, and their limp bodies floated downstream, their personnel files quickly pulled from the division’s records and labeled “Killed In Action,” their ghosts quietly falling out of company formations, their names laser-etched on a memorial plaque back in Georgia.

Not many days and three U.S. KIAs later, Gooding had written in his diary:

February 13:  This is how a death is announced.  In the midst of the hum and buzz of idle boredom in the Division Tactical Operations Center, you hear one officer, bent over the back pages of The Stars and Stripes, ask another, “What did you get for 17 Across?”  Two people are arguing about which Matrix movie was the best.  Another soldier in his early 20s is surfing the Internet looking at engagement rings and wondering aloud what difference a half carat made in the quality and price and—most importantly—a chick’s response to the bling.  Then, like a blade swishing through the air comes a sudden sharp voice from the other side of the room, cutting through the growl-buzz of the generator and the fist-thump of wind against the tent walls.  You look over and an NCO is pressing a telephone receiver tighter against his ear and saying, “Repeat that last transmission.  What did you say?”  He waves his hand at another NCO to get him a pen, whereupon he scribbles on an index card.  Two or three others cluster near him, heads are pressed in a tight circle, one head pops up and catches the eye of the battle captain sitting in his leather office chair at the front of the room.  He rises from the chair—he’d been watching a NASCAR race on the TV—and walks over to the growing knot of huddled heads.  At this point, something like cold fear creeps around your heart like icy vines.  The information on the index card is read back into the phone for confirmation, then the battle captain grabs the card and strides to the front of the room, yelling, “ATTENTION IN THE DTOC!  ATTENTION IN THE DTOC!”  All sound and motion in the tent stops.  Someone mutes the NASCAR race.  The battle captain reads from the index card: “We have reports of one IED in the vicinity of Scania along the convoy route.  One KIA.  Battle-damage assessment still being made.  That is all.”  He reads it as carefully and dispassionately as someone quoting stock market prices, then he turns and writes the information on a large sheet of paper taped to the wall at the front of the room where all significant activities—the loss of an M-16, the arrival/departure of a convoy, the publication of an operations order—are recorded.  As you watch him write with the magic marker, the conversation-buzz of the room gradually returns to its former volume.  Some drop their heads in sorrow, shaking them back and forth as if that will counteract the loss and bring the KIA back to life, or at least change his status to WIA.  But the magic marker ink is permanent, seared there by the heat of an IED blast.  No wounds can be reversed.  The battle captain returns to his leather chair.  A couple of officers return to their crossword puzzle.  Someone turns up the volume on the TV and the NASCAR race resumes.

Finding a Home in Richard Ford's Rock Springs

Outside the public library, the wind was scouring the streets of Livingston.  Again.  It was nearly 8 p.m. and God’s furious wind machine had been at it since 6 a.m. that day.

Actually, that’s not entirely true.  In Livingston, Montana, the wind never stops; it only pauses to take another deep breath before it blows metal trash cans a-clattering down the alley and snatches the toupee clean off the Rotary president’s head as he stands on the street corner talking to the PTA treasurer whose dress flies up and everyone learns the rumors about her thong underwear are, disappointingly, untrue.  On really bad days, featherweight toddlers who haven’t been tied down by precautionary mothers are sucked skyward, never to be seen again.

So yes, Livingston really blows.

On this particular night in 1987, I was temporarily safe from the wind, but my hair was still bedraggled from the long walk between my house on D Street and the public library nine blocks away.  I sought shelter in the middle of the adult fiction section.  It was warm and breezeless in the library; but inside my head, a wind still howled.

I was 24, just out of college, married, the father of two children with a third on the way, and about $200 this side of being broke.  Our budget was so lean, Jack Sprat looked like a glutton.  To conserve gas, I walked to work, head down and collar up as the hard winds of south-central Montana scraped the streets.  I was distracted, disconcerted and on my way to a depression that would grey my life for a number of years.

The ink was still fresh on my English degree from the University of Oregon and I was constantly going around fanning the flames of my ambition to be a Great Writer—a fantasy which, even at that time, I knew was hollow.  Despite my higher education and la-ti-dah literary airs, I’d ended up at a minimum-wage job: the copy editor at the town’s newspaper.  I worked 10-hour days five days a week, which left almost no time to write the Great American Novel.  I thought about my novel a lot, but I had yet to write a single sentence.

On the night the wind blew me into the library, I was looking for consolation and inspiration.  I came there not knowing what I’d walk out with, but I knew I wanted to read a great piece of literature--one that would make my heart pound, my palms sweat and the little hairs on the backs of my hands stand up.  I wanted fiction that would take me away from my life.

Little did I know I was a character straight out of Richard Ford’s stories.

I roused myself from my gloom and looked at the shelf just above my head.  Rock Springs.  The title on the spine glowed in the fluorescent light and I thought of burning bushes, parting clouds, choirs of trumpets.  I reached up, took the book in my hands, and opened it to a random page.

I swear to all that is holy, these are the words my eyes fell on: "This is not a happy story. I warn you."  That’s how "Great Falls" opens.

The words were like an opera aria and this is what the diva was singing in my ear: "This writer knows you." I had never heard of Richard Ford before that night, but somehow he had wormed his way into my life. The hairs on the backs of my hands stirred, the dusty ten-foot stacks leaned overhead like trees, and the front door of the library banged open as another person stumbled inside.  I kept turning pages, skimming the opening paragraphs to the other stories in Rock Springs.

      I was standing in the kitchen while Arlene was in the living room saying good-bye to her ex-husband, Bobby. I had already been out to the stores for groceries and come back and made coffee, and was drinking it and staring out the window while the two of them said whatever they had to say. It was a quarter to six in the morning.
     This was not going to be a good day in Bobby's life, that was clear, because he was headed to jail.
          --"Sweethearts"

Narratively-speaking, these openings are rather flat, loaded with exposition, and documentary in nature. It's as if each narrator was sitting across from you in a diner, elbows resting on the Formica-topped table, and unspooling the story of his life--stark, naked facts at first, but then gradually turning more complex and colorful as the teller becomes engaged in the telling.  These were lives as grim and bleak as mine and it made me happier than you can imagine to find them here on the page.  They were me, I was them.

Later, this would become one of my favorite opening paragraphs in Rock Springs:

      All of this that I am about to tell happened when I was only fifteen years old, in 1959, the year my parents were divorced, the year when my father killed a man and went to prison for it, the year I left home and school, told a lie about my age to fool the Army, and then did not come back. The year, in other words, when life changed for all of us and forever--ended, really, in a way none of us could ever have imagined in our most brilliant dreams of life.
          --"Optimists"

These first lines in the stories of Rock Springs give just enough intriguing detail and turns of phrase that you read the second paragraph, and the third, the fourth, until you finally reach the end and then circle back around to that first paragraph to take a second look at how confidently Ford sets up an entire story's worth of character and conflict in a remarkable economy of space. There are entire worlds in these few words.

They are enough to keep you standing deep in the stacks of a library for nearly an hour--until the muscles in your lower back start to throb, until the librarian announces the building will be closing in fifteen minutes and patrons should bring all materials to the check-out desk at once, until the winter night wind rises in pitch and intensity, warning you of the threadbare walk home.  I knew there were bills waiting for me on the kitchen counter, diapers needing to be changed, and a wife wondering where I’d been all evening.  But, for the moment, all those cares burned away like sun-warmed fog.  I was in Rock Springs and I never wanted to leave.


This article originally appeared at Book Riot.