THE LITBLOG CO-OP

Steve Stern responds to the Angel of Forgetfulness dialogue

Earlier this week, Dan Green (The Reading Experience) and Derik A Badman (MadInkBeard) held a dialogue on this autumn’s Read This! selection, Steve Stern’s The Angel of Forgetfulness . Read part 1 and part 2 of the dialogue, as well as Dan's initial post about why he nominated the novel for the LBC.

Now Stern himself drops by with a response.

Dear Dan Green,

First, I wanted to thank you kindly for your championing of The Angel of Forgetfulness. Thanks to you, rather than dying all at once, the book is taking its time, like a character in a Yiddish melodrama, who lies down, gets up, sings a song, lies down again, and generally takes an unconscionable amount of time to expire. I'm ordinarily pretty shy about making observations regarding my own work, and besides, your review and subsequent comments are much too incisive for me to improve on. But my silence seemed to me a bit ungrateful, so I'll try to weigh in with a comment or two.

In reading your dialogue with Derik Badman (an actual name?) [yes. - ed.] I was troubled by his reservations about the three-tiered narrative, and thought I'd make a stab at clarification.

Mocky's tale, the tale of the fallen angel, was the original kernel of the novel, which--when tossed into the fluid medium of composition--resulted in the concentric narratives of Nathan and Saul. Derik complained that for him Mocky's story (including, I assume, that of his half-angel son, Nathan) was the least compelling. I hope this isn't the case for most readers, but I understood the risks involved in conceiving a narrative as removed from the present and from normative reality as is Mocky's.

That's why I began the book with Saul, whose milieu of recent history would be most familiar to contemporary readers. In this way I meant to create an echo effect, with each of the three narratives resonating the others, so that the time and space between them was at least figuratively dissolved.

The idea being that the three separate worlds occupied by the characters in The Angel are all finally the same, one fictive menage a trios. The chaos of the Sixties and beyond inhabited by Saul is married to Nathan's turn-of-the-century immigrant scene, which is married in turn to the mythic realm of Mocky and Nachman--just as heaven and earth, the poles between which all these characters oscillate, are ideally wed in the alembic of (God help us) art and literature. But Derik seemed to feel that after Saul, whose experience is anchored to the more or less contemporary world, Nathan and Mocky's stories came with diminishing returns. Again, I hope this isn't true for most readers, but I'm aware that the farther the narrative is removed from the present, the more shadows can accrue and the sepia tones obscure.  The archetypal element that Nathan and Mocky inhabit is necessarily a shadow realm, which—though it potentially deepens the mystery of the present—is in danger of being entirely eclipsed by the noisy here and now.

Derik also took issue with the circularity of Saul's narrative.To my mind this was an inevitable function of his flight from an obsession that threatened to separate him from his moment in time. Like Jonah making a detour through the belly of a whale before returning to God's mandate, Saul is compelled to flee from a fear that ultimately chases him back to himself.

Finally, I suppose it's stating the obvious to say that The Angel of Forgetfulness is in large part about the act of story-telling itself. With that in mind, if I still have your ear, may I express a tentative manifesto?

Okay, I believe that a story, if it's truly kosher, should function as a kind of cosmic template, its language tracing a prototypical pattern the way a rubbing traces the relief on an ancient tomb. Then thanks to the conjuring power of language, the story stirs the inanimate; the tomb sculpture rises up and walks abroad like a golem aspiring to humanity. Of course, in the bracing old legends golems have the strength to overwhelm us and elude our control.

A book may echo The Book more sonorously than the primary noise, a rude awakening but an awakening nonetheless. In the hands of the ideal storyteller, a narrative is a map leading back to the narrative's own source, and as in the process of Tikkun, which is the reparation of the rift between heaven and earth, the words return the sparks like a guilty Prometheus to their original flame. 

The flame illuminates those places in our consciousness that have since gone dim, but unlike the burning bush, this flame can consume; revelation implies the peril of immolation.  (Kafka: "A book should be an axe to break the frozen sea within." Or a flame to melt it.)  This is the flame that gave Adam, whose formless clay was the original golem, his brief vision of eternity, the light that allows us, here at this darker end of creation, to view the earth in all its manifest beauty and terror from the vantage of Paradise. Then we quickly close the book, extinguishing the flame, though we remain vexed and disturbed ever after by the memory of its stupefying brightness. 

That's what I think; thanks again for indulging me—
Steve Stern

Editor Paul Slovak on The Angel of Forgetfulness

Paul Slovak is the vice president and associate publisher of Viking. As an editor, he’s worked with writers like Steve Stern (author of The Angel of Forgetfulness, our LBC Autumn Read This! pick), William T. Vollmann, and T.C. Boyle. (The LBC even has it on good authority that Boyle introduced Slovak to his wife.) He also serves on the board of the Center for Book Culture, which is responsible for the Dalkey Archive as well as the Review of Contemporary Fiction.

Here Slovak talks about his history working with Stern and the experience of editing The Angel of Forgetfulness.

I thought perhaps it might be best for me to talk a little bit about my history working with Steve Stern, and my editing role on the new book. I’ve been working at Viking Penguin since 1983, and in 1986 we published his story collection Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven. I was then a publicist and I did the publicity on the book, and I suppose what most struck me then were three things -- his miraculous, one of a kind sentences, “sentences to die for” as a reviewer for the Washington Post put it; his ability to marry realism with fantasy, and the entertainment value of his stories, the sheer pleasure they provide to the reader (he is not unlike T.C. Boyle in that regard). Steve’s then-editor left Viking and he kind of fell off the map for a little while, but a collection of his novellas was published by Scribner in 1994 and his editor at Scribner came to run Viking and when she left, well before Angel was turned in, I took over as Steve’s editor. Despite good intentions I hadn’t really looked at any of his other work.

I can’t really say there was any kind of shift in how I experienced his writing as I moved from being the publicist to the editor – he was still same Steve Stern, with the same magical prose and the same delirious imagination. I knew right away that this was the most ambitious thing he had ever attempted and that made the novel a lot of fun to edit. I had seen portions of the novel in earlier drafts and given feedback, some two years before the final manuscript was delivered, so I knew what he was up to and where he was going and when it came in it was already in pretty good shape; he’s a pro and I would have been surprised if it wasn’t. To be honest I suppose as someone who was always a bit disappointed to have been too young to truly be a part of the 1960s (I was born in 1956) I was most drawn initially to Saul’s story, and was really pleased that Steve had the idea of marrying that to the original kernel of the novel (Mocky’s tale). 

The manuscript was long, and I suppose the most significant work we did on the book was some trimming here and there, some of which I specifically recommended to him and some of which he did on his own at my prompting. In regards to the narrative structure, I marveled in general at how well he kept all those balls in the air; I did point out to him some places where I as a reader got a little bogged down or where the action slowed down a bit. There were many other smaller queries and suggestions which I scribbled into the margins of the manuscript. So it was a three page or so editorial letter and a long working lunch and that was all we needed. 

I probably did a little more work on Steve’s manuscript that I would do on T.C. Boyle or William Kennedy or Maureen Howard (all of whom hand in manuscripts that are very clean and need little work) or William T. Vollmann (now there’s a guy who likes to have free rein as an author, though I have managed with a couple of his books to save a few trees) – but not that much more. When you have someone who writes as well as Stern does it makes the job a little easier. I take a lot of enjoyment in editing; first novels in particular, when you might have three or four passes, can be a great learning experience for both an author and an editor. I also edit a lot of nonfiction and that presents its own challenges. As for whether editors still function in the hands-on way, I personally know a lot of editors who do; I also hear the stories of the editors who pass books along to assistants to be edited, who don’t edit books very closely or thoroughly or passionately. That’s not the way I work.

Some words about publicity

Hi--Ami Greko here, a publicity assistant over at Viking Penguin. It's great to be asked to comment on the LBC site, since I'm so enthusiastic about this format for promoting and discussing books. I was thrilled to hear that Steve Stern's novel had been chosen for the Fall pick, because it meant that this intelligent, noisy, and demanding group of people (demanding in a good way, of course) was going to be recommending The Angel of Forgetfulness to anyone who would listen.

This particular noisy group is what’s got me so excited about the where literary fiction is going. I guess from the outside it can seem a bit dismal to push literary fiction--especially in the case of Steve Stern, where you’d think that the sheer number and enthusiasm of his reviewers would send the entirety of readers in this country barreling into bookstores. I mean, honestly, shouldn't you be able to relax and live solely off your royalties after Harold Bloom calls you "a throwback to the Yiddish sublime"?

But that’s what this young, starry-eyed publicity assistant sees as so great about the LBC. If they’re coming from a blog that you follow regularly, book recommendations can take on a much more personal tone, almost on par with a suggestion from your favorite bookstore. So in addition to all of this mainstream praise, which is incredibly important, there can also be a personal, also important voice in your ear that insists you pay attention to a book. For me, this realization hit halfway through Rainbow Stories––when I realized I was only reading the book because so many bloggers had mentioned William Vollmann that I had to see what all the fuss was about (and now I'm up to my eyeballs in 1,000-page novels––thanks, Ed).

To me, this seems like the best way to get novels right into the hands of people who are the most interested in reading, buying, and talking about them. It's exciting, and it makes my job exciting.

And, just a note: be sure to check out the LBC tomorrow—Paul Slovak, Steve Stern’s editor and publicist will be here to share some insight into the creation of The Angel of Forgetfulness.

Too Many Hippies, Just Enough Angels

The Angel of Forgetfulness is ruined, as so many things are, by damn dirty hippies.

Okay, put down your incense. I was checking to see if you're paying attention.

I enjoyed Steve Stern's book (full disclosure: it was a very close second as my own Read This! choice), particularly the mythic storyline where an angel takes the back stairs to Earth and fathers a son who becomes obsessed with an actress, and so on. (As opposed to my fellow LBCers Derik and Dan, in their much more thoughtful and coherent dialogue on the book, who seem to like the fantasy story least of all.)

If I was trying to place this book in a continuum, I'm not sure exactly where I'd put it. So I'll steal someone else's placement. You know the way clubs sometimes fill their monthly music calendars with descriptions of bands that aren't this meets that, but more: "If you like Neutral Milk Hotel and have a soft spot for Bauhaus, you'll love She Wants Revenge"? Michael Dirda, in his review of Stern's book, does something similar putting him in the following illustrious company: Stanley Elkin, Cynthia Ozick, Michael Chabon, Mark Helprin, Melvin Jules Bukiet and Philip Roth. He goes on to say why:

All of these might be thought of, very loosely, as innovative and restless practitioners of contemporary American-Jewish fantasy. They draw on Jewish tradition and folklore, the legacy of Sholom Aleichem, Kafka and Isaac Bashevis Singer, the verbal razzmatazz of Yiddish.

And that sums up nicely what I really admired and responded to in this book. It mixes the fantastical story of Mocky the Angel with a living and breathing portrait of Nathan and Saul's experiences of two very different New Yorks (bound together by the same woman), and Saul's later adventures in communes. The angelic story, the story's lost and found narrative, is what holds everything together  -- it's the one thread that the book falls apart without, for me at least. This is a book filled with strange, lonely characters, always on the move, always caught between at least two worlds.

I suppose I need the ethereal to balance out the presence of the world with all those hippies. Kidding, again. Well, sort of.

Anyway. Are there any story-within-a-story books or American-Jewish fantasies any of you want to recommend or discuss? Writers left off the list? You hate Neutral Milk Hotel?

Angel of Forgetfulness, a brief dialogue, part 2

(Continued from yesterday)

Derik: Ah, Saul's self-imposed isolation. That reminds me of something else I had wanted to say, a connection I did see amongst the narratives: Saul's self-imposed isolation, Nathan's socio-economic isolation (poor immigrant), and Mocky's metaphysical isolation (literally, he's a metaphysical creature in a physical world).

As for Saul's discover of his connection to Nathan and his heritage--and perhaps I am just seeing foreshadowing and thematic unity--I thought that was a big part of the first section of the novel. His walks and talks with Aunt Keni not to mention the erotic/romantic undertones, gave him that connection to the heritage and Nathan. He loses it with her death, and then spends the rest of the novel getting back to that point without her aid. That isn't exactly getting nowhere but still feels circular. Even so, this kind of roundabout way of getting a very small distance is more satisfying to me than a more dramatic change.

Your description of Saul's discovery: "the Jewish heritage of storytelling, of making sense of a very troubling and often hostile reality through fable and fantasy," pulls a lot of it together for me. This is why rereading is useful before discussing a book (particularly in public). I am a bit disheartened to feel the drag of another novel about writing. The fantastical storytelling of Nathan, used to seduce a woman, becomes another novel. I feel that something is lost there (and then I start thinking about Derrida, Rousseau and the primacy of orality and I really get confused).

As for Mocky's story, I wonder (and this is something to ask Stern, I guess) if he considered actually putting Mocky's story within Nathan's, as Nathan tells the story. I would have felt more connection to it that way, I think.

Anyway... I also wanted to note how much I enjoyed the section of the narrative involving Saul's commune farm. I'm young enough to have missed the sixties and have no memory of the seventies, so the failed hippie commune utopia is something that interests me in an historical way. Stern's telling of this section is at the same time dreamlike and so down to earth.

I must also note Stern's use of the comma to give those large sentences structure. I love good comma use.

Dan: It is true that Saul is introduced by Aunt Keni to the cultural heritage of the Lower East Side and that he has to return to it later. But it's his rediscovery of Nathan's manuscript that seems to awaken Saul's own imagination. It allows him to move from mere acquaintance with Jewish history and traditions--which he has further acquired through his own academic work--to an active engagement with its literary forms. I don't know if you'd call this a "dramatic change," but it is a change.

Although The Angel of Forgetfulness is a "novel about writing," this description only goes so far. Writing--storytelling more generally--represents the human ability to transform perceived reality into more satisfying imaginative forms and to transcend immediate circumstances by, at least temporarily, giving oneself over to this kind of imaginative transformation. The story of Nathan telling Keni the story of Mocky the fallen angel, and in the process also captivating Keni to the extent that she falls in love with Nathan, is an example of the way "story" indeed trumps "life."

Your own enjoyment of the "commune" section suggests, however, that Stern's interests go beyond just contructing an intricate metafiction (although AOF is that as well). His portrayal of this period of Saul's life is as discerning an account of how and why the counterculture arose and then collapsed as you're likely to read (at least in fiction).

Perhaps what I most admire about Stern is his colorful but assured prose style. So I'll end with this quotation from the commune section:

"In the beginning we were staggered by the magnitude of what we'd undertaken: how could we have deliberately marooned ourselves in such inimical surroundings? We were overwhelmed by the persistence of nature, with its venomous plants and reptiles, the bloated blood ticks that clung to our armpits and ears like paste pearls. We were disappointed in Billy Boots, who, having brought us here, refused to play the part of leader and instead kept his own counsel. There were tarantulas and wolves, no-necked neighbors who burned crosses and barns: there was a wilderness that defied our best efforts to find soothing precedents, Lord of the Flies being the most obvious literary model. We felt alone in all creation. "First things first"; we repeated this brainless mantra, though we hadn't a clue where to begin. But there was the fire to build and the tents to secure, the coffee to boil; there were children, no less, in need of assurance and shoes. So we grimly set about the necessary tasks as if, though there was no immediate danger, we were locked in a life and death struggle with the elements."

Angel of Forgetfulness, A brief dialogue, part 1

As one of the ways we're working to make this blog more active, we've decided to post dialogues between two or more of our members on each of the nominated books. The form these dialogues take will be changing, as we work out how best to discuss the books at hand. We're start off this week with a brief exchange between Dan Green and myself (Derik Badman) on our Read This selection, Steve Stern's The Angel of Forgetfulness. We'll post the second part tomorrow.

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Derik: I find starting out difficult. What to say first? Stern's Angel of Forgetfulness starts out with what amounts to a novella in itself. I was quickly interested in Saul and his isolation, his seemingly deliberate isolation. The major part of the novel follows Saul from one isolation to another: from the historical isolation he experiences on his walks with Aunt Keni, to the microcosm of isolation in Billy's house, to the societal isolation of the farm commune, to his academic isolation in New England, and his romantic isolation from Miranda. Matthew Arnold said that we are all islands, and Saul's life is like a island disconnected from any moors, travelling here and there but never getting anywhere.

In the end I felt like Saul really didn't get anywhere, and that's one thing that really attracted me to the novel. Too often narratives end with a pat closure of threads, as movie trailers so often say: something "will change their lives forever." Stern avoids this. After all the years and places, I felt Saul just ended up right where he started, in Aunt Keni's run-down fading ghetto.

In the end, it was the other narratives in the novel that disappointed. The story within the novel of Nathan and his travails and the novel within the story within the novel of Mocky the fallen angel left me wishing for... well, less. While the angel that loved the world so much he stayed is a fine counterpoint to Saul's isolation from the world, I never felt that aspect. Too often the Mocky's story had already been summarized in Nathan's story, leaving me with the feeling of an echo. That these two inner narratives are considerably smaller in length (more and more as the novel progresses) says that Stern did not perhaps not consider them as important or large in the story, yet I still ended up feeling that they took up too much space, or maybe not the right kind of space. The connections (beyond that of the plot device for the story within the story existing at all) seemed all too slight for me.

How did you feel about the different narrative levels, Dan? I'm curious if you found something more holding them together.

Dan: I like your description of Saul's various forms of isolation. It's a very apt account of Saul's situation, although I have to say I disagree that Saul "really didn't get anywhere." When he finally sits down to read "The Angel of Forgetfulness," he discovers a connection to both Nathan Hart and his own Jewish heritage--a different kind of connection than he's had through scholarship alone. He discovers that his isolation has been self-imposed (even though he has also found himself in a situation vis-a-vis Miranda Pratt that's eerily similar to Nathan's with Keni: sort of a schlemiel trying to woo the beautiful girl from above his station).

This is perhaps why I saw a closer relationship--a very deliberate echo--among the three stories than you did. (Some readers might think Stern takes too long to make the relationship clear--although there are lots of parallels and overlaps throughout the unfolding of the three stories--but I think leaving their connections less obvious until the end actually does pay off; it makes one want to go back over the stories again in order to more fully appreciate the way Stern has aligned them.) Because, in my reading at least, what Saul discovers most strongly is the Jewish heritage of storytelling, of making sense of a very troubling and often hostile reality through fable and fantasy. "Assured that I had my deceased aunt's blessing," he writes, "I began to feel that my task amounted to an authorized collaboration between myself and the vaporized journalist. I was engaged in writing a kind of pseudoepigraphon, already picturing the title page. . .I was in the tradition, wasn't I? Like Moses de Leon, who had plundered the apocryphal texts of Shimon bar Yohai and embroidered them beyond recognition for his Book of Splendor. As a scribe, I was also a fabulator. . . ." Saul finds his place as a writer of fiction rather than a dusty "scholar."

I found Nathan's story very compelling in its own right as a depiction of the Lower East Side a hundred years ago, although I would agree with you that Mocky's story, at least, does come close to wearing out its welcome. Still, if I were to read it on its own, I think I'd like it. It's only as the third level of narrative--taking us even farther from Saul's journey--that it sometimes provokes impatience. And I would argue that it's necessary to have this story in full, since it's Nathan's inspiration as a storyteller that's important for Saul.

(Cont. Tomorrow)

A Final Nomination: Maps for Lost Lovers

My nomination, Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers, is the story of a year in the life of a Pakistani community located in an unnamed English city. At the center are two couples: Shamas and Kaukab, the novel’s protagonists, and Shamas’s brother Jugnu and his lover Chanda. Before the events of the novel take place, Jugnu and Chanda, who have been living together outside of wedlock, have disappeared. Chanda’s brothers are suspected of having committed an honor killing, and are arrested for murder near the beginning of the novel.

It brings to life the whole diasporic community in the neighborhood referred to as Dasht-e-Tanhaii (the Wilderness of Solitude or the Desert of Loneliness) by its inhabitants, but Maps focuses on the interior lives of Shamas and Kaukab. Shamas, whose family’s spiritual history is scrambled (the story of his father, with whom the ambiguity originates, is breathtaking), is a cosmopolitan and a skeptic, but at the same time an important and respected leader within his community of emigrants. He’s also a devoted husband to the pious Kaukab, despite her faith to Islam and her bitter resistance to the very forces of Westernization and secularization that Shamas is so open to and enriched by.

To Aslam, and probably to most of his English and American readers, the culturally hybrid Shamas is the more accessible of these characters, the one easiest to identify with. (The couple’s children, who are thoroughly Westernized, are crucial but minor characters.) But one of the eye-opening things about the novel is that Shamas is not the more sympathetic or the more compelling. While it’s true that he has a broader range of experience and a more open mind, the evidence of my gut tells me that Kaukab is the richer and more engaging character here—the emotional hook of the novel, however much a reader like me may feel a kind of solidarity with and admiration for Shamas’s receptive stance to the world in all its variety.

In many ways, Dasht-e-Tanhaii seems to have been plucked whole from Pakistan and plunked down on English soil. The community is remarkably self-sufficient, surprisingly successful at warding off incursions of the culture that surrounds it. Kaukab embodies this insularity, which in Aslam’s humane rendering is psychologically intricate. Kaukab takes the claims of the outside culture on her husband and children as a personal affront; at the same time, being fiercely proud of the faith, culture, and people she represents, she is terrified of appearing parochial or unrefined to the few whites she encounters.

Aslam’s depiction of her interior life gives the reader access to that pride. Kaukab has some wretched ideas and some deplorable moments when she acts on them, for instance when she beats her daughter with shocking brutality in one indelible scene. But—and I found this hugely surprising and hugely interesting—some of the most affecting moments in the novel for me, moments that struck me like a bolt, were when other characters paid small acts of kindness to Kaukab, a woman stranded in a sea of misunderstanding, trying to reconcile a mother’s utter love with a good Muslim’s utter faith, and experiencing her children’s drifting from Islamic articles of faith and Pakistani social mores as personal rejection.

Aslam is great at unearthing rich psychologies like Kaukab’s in an emotionally potent way; he’s great at interiors. But that’s a bit misleading, since another distinction of his novel is the way it reflexively looks outward to see in: a great deal of what we know about the characters is divined through detailed representations of the world as they see it. The thickly descriptive style through which Aslam achieves this will, I imagine, prove overly rich for some readers. Seven metaphors and similes on the first page alone sounds alarming, doesn’t it? But—apart from the fact that many of them are stunning—metaphoric language is more than a vehicle here, and certainly more than just ornament. It’s close to being a provisional philosophy.

The metaphors and similies that carpet Aslam’s prose have individual beauty and collective significance, evoking a world in which hardly anything isn’t strikingly like something else—a world of underlying connectedness. Juxtaposed with the divisions and strife that characterize the social world the novel depicts, this connectedness comes to seem a necessity, and those who attend to it—Shamas and Kaukab included, the murderers not—are small heroes doing everyday justice to both the variety of the world and its unity.

So it’s striking that the long chapter toward the end of the book that unfolds the mystery of Jugnu and Chanda’s disappearance, giving us a moment-by-moment account of their murders, is comparatively devoid of the metaphoric language that dominates the rest of the book. This relatively reportorial account is the one sustained section of Aslam’s novel to step outside the master idiom of always analogizing. As a result, reading this stark chapter feels like stepping into a forest defoliated.

Maps for Lost Lovers is a book that not only rewards slowness but pretty much disallows haste, which classes it with writers, like Henry James and Shirley Hazzard, who top my personal pantheon. Ultimately Aslam caught me up in his characters’ plights and the whole transplanted world of Dasht-e-Tanhaii. But I initially became attached to the book for its cabinet-of-wonders vision of the world—the metaphors that crowd the pages and run from lush to bracing, hotly exuberant to coolly precise. It feels a bit like a return to a child’s-eye view. In fact, at one point Shamas muses that “the eye that in the adult sees the rough material for metaphors and similes all around it, comparing one thing with another, that eye was already half open in the child.” Aslam's book implicitly suggests that these acts of likening things, even on the tiniest scale, are humanizing.

If you’d like to participate in a discussion of Maps for Lost Lovers, we’ll be conducting one in this space beginning October 24^th.

Another Nomination: Mutual Life & Casualty

I heard the buzz first: Elizabeth Poliner’s reading at Politics and Prose had created quite a stir. There was a story that took place in the women’s fitting room at Loehmann’s, a friend said, you would have loved it.

Loehmann's? I remembered the store as a mecca for rock bottom retail prices when I was growing up, but as a setting for literary fiction? Trust me, my friend said, it works.

Poliner’s Mutual Life & Casualty does feature Loehmann’s as a setting, as well as the small Connecticut suburb of Wells, where the Kahn family, the only Jewish family in town, is living amid a nest of WASPs.  The Kahn home sits just “yards from four corners, the crossing of route 27 with main street, the main intersection in town.” The Kahn house and family are quite literally sitting at a crossroads, and the times they are a-changin'…

“That fall my father was planning to vote for Richard Nixon. Like my budding atheism, this too was against my will. And my mother planned to duplicate his vote. Hers was a choice based on duty and loyalty to my father, not her own feelings, which in the fall of 1972 she had yet to discover.”

With Mutual Life & Casualty we're in the narrative territory of a novel in stories, which is always a big hit over at my blog, The Happy Booker. David Huddle's Story of a Million Years, and the newly released and emotionally wrenching Mother of Sorrows, by Richard McCann, are a few of my favorites of this genre.

To make this novel format work successfully each story must be strong and able to hold its own within the framework of the narrative. Poliner's book does that easily, and what emerges from her stories is a compelling, multilayered mosaic of the lives of women—a thoughtful and quiet depiction of deep-rooted family roles and their stranglehold on the everyday.

The wives and mothers in Poliner's book are true Desperate Housewives: confined, constrained and feeling the effects of suburban isolation, a full froth of discontent percolating just beneath the surface. Sitting around making decoupage projects, or counting meals—“only 6,432 meals to go!”— or daring to wear a pantsuit or bare a midriff —this is the stuff of daily life. It all may seem pretty tame now, but this book is very much of a time (beginning in the early 70's), and Poliner captures and renders that time with accuracy and a deft touch.

When Daniel, the Kahn family patriarch, who is larger and louder than his wife and reads two different newspapers daily, questions his wife Naomi about her trendy clothes, he asks “where do you think you’re going?”

She responds, "I am going nowhere. But this is what I wear, what I choose to wear, while I am going there!”

Amen, sister.

If these themes sounds a bit too Helen Reddy-ish for you, then ML&C may not be your cuppa. Sure, you could look at this work as a history lesson, but don’t expect didacticism and polemics, this book is more about the internal struggle and strife of women in their self-assigned roles. The storm brewing here is a quiet one, played out in living rooms, bedrooms, and yes, even fitting rooms—the small interior spaces of women's lives.

The characters in ML&C are, for the most part, ordinary women leading ordinary lives: teacher, mother, daughter, wife, divorcee. What proves extraordinary is Poliner’s clear-eyed ability to write about these lives, their loves and losses, missteps and fumbling false starts, in a way that elevates them into something that is larger than the sum of its parts.

The housewives in this book talk daily about  “everything,” a codified word that holds several meanings:

“Yet “everything” defined something else, less definable, like a mood.  It had to do with how these women were doing. “How are you doing?” they’d ask each other daily. “I’m doing okay,” I’d hear Mom sometimes say, or, “I don’t know. Too much to do, I guess. I feel…” There was always something compelling and ever-changing about the “everything” they were always after."

The Kahn daughters, Carolyn and Hannah, who come of age against the backdrop of their parents ailing marriage, narrate many of these stories, and their mother's choices—married young, no career, shopping as cure-all— effects each differently and deeply. Individually, the daughter's stories stand on their own: carefully crafted, richly observed and effective. Yet when read together, they create a layered work, filled with poignancy and insight.

To be honest, ML& C was a book that snuck up on me. Through the interconnectedness of the stories, the voices of the Kahn sisters, the mutual lives of women, I was slowly drawn in. The casualties in Poliner's book often live under the same roof, in a home that lies at the intersection of past and future, a place where stories serve as legacy and are passed along with each generation.

If you like your novel narrative served straight up, with a single point of view, or if you're looking for a neat and linear time line, with a plot that moves from point A to point B, then this is not the book for you. Simply put: Mutual Life & Casualty is a book filled with stories told in the voices of women, some major characters, some minor notes, and some that repeat the same plot points, all coming together to form a resonant chorus, a compelling and complex tale that deserves to be heard.

If you're interested in Mutual Life & Casualty, we will be hosting a week-long discussion starting October 17th.

Another Nomination: Our Napoleon in Rags

I started looking for books to nominate the moment I found out I was a nominator for this round of the LBC. At first, I thought I should probably try for something that was sort of fantasy-ish or science fiction-ish, because that's the general focus of my own weblog, The Mumpsimus (with a heavy emphasis on the -ish). So Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners was at the top of my list for a while, because it's smart and delightful. But there were a few reasons it didn't quite seem to fit our criteria, so I then thought about Jane Alison's magnificent Natives and Exotics, which I found intellectually engaging and beautifully written.

And then there was Kirby Gann's Our Napoleon in Rags, a book that is not as delightful as Magic for Beginners and not as intellectually engaging as Natives and Exotics, nor is it by even the ishiest stretch of the imagination SF or fantasy. Nonetheless, it was a book that haunted me for days after I first read it. I read it again right before I had to announce my nomination to the group, and felt more certain than ever that this was the book I wanted to be associated with this quarter.

I think I first heard about Our Napoleon in Rags via Mobylives, but I don't actually remember. I had never heard of Ig Publishing before reading the book, and I know I'd never seen it in a bookstore. It was just one of those books that happened to find its way to me, by luck or magic or happenstance, with the aid of an online bookseller and my devoted friends in the post office.

I have to be honest: there were moments when reading Our Napoleon in Rags when I thought it was going nowhere, adding up to nothing, and in all likelihood a waste of time and paper. This was the fault of mistaken expectation about what sort of book I was reading. The novel begins well, with opening paragraphs that drop us right into the book's central setting:

The nights at the Don Quixote -- that sumptuous dive -- held darker than nights elsewhere, even if the club sat huddled within the smacked heart of the city. As in the rest of America (and for most Americans), this heart rarely became an object of attention and care, more fretted over than attended to, arteries hardening without complaint, a condition forming without the host's knowledge. Like the biological heart, one remained aware but avoided the subject. One leaves the heart alone and hopes for the best.

We are in Old Towne, the broken-streetlight district in Montreux where dark house-stoops offer no welcome. Most of the light that sparked through the leaded wave windows of the Don Q was of the flashing variety, red and blue and sometimes white -- vascular colors. The regulars called the Don Q the heart of Old Towne, thus making it the heart within the heart.

The problem for me when I first began to read it was that I came to the book expecting the one promised by the description offered by the publisher, which begins:

Can one man change the world? Haycraft Keebler, self-appointed savior of humanity, believes his mission is to inspire the people to rise up against the powers that be. And he will use any idea that springs from his bipolar mind -- distributing a "revolutionary" newsletter, covering debris and trashcans in gold, instigating a bus crash -- to achieve his goal of social equality for all.

Thus, I thought I was about to read a kind of cross between A Confederacy of Dunces, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and Les Miserables.

Once I figured out what the book actually was, and stopped measuring it against my expectations, I began to truly enjoy it. It is not so much a novel about one character -- Haycraft is important, yes, but so are many other characters -- as it is a novel about a milieu, and, we discover at the end, a novel about memory and impermanence. It is not nearly as comic as I originally expected it to be, though there are funny moments. It is more of an elegy than a ballad, more sketchbook than mural. It is not a grand and rollicking satire of America or Capitalism or Other Important Things, nor is it, as the publisher's description ludicrously goes on to say, about "the hot button issues of mental illness, homosexuality, police violence, and racism". Aside from the unfortunate linking of homosexuality to mental illness, police violence, and racism, this description is entirely inaccurate because while those "issues" are present in the book, they are there not to be commented on or parodied or have the imbrications of their ideoscapes problematized -- they are there, instead, because the book portrays particular people in a particular place; it is a portrait of ways of living and dying, a portrait of how people pull joy and even moments of triumph from the general struggle of getting through each day. Think Chekhov, not Gorky.

The chapters in Our Napoleon in Rags sometimes read like unfinished short stories, and at first this is disconcerting. It seems at times as if Kirby Gann is trying to show us how sensitive he is, how attuned to nuance, and a reader who did not finish the book could be excused for thinking so. The story grows by the accretion of details, images, and moments, some of which overlap, some of which are left hanging, like late nights only hazily remembered.

Also, the ending changes everything. I won't reveal what it is here, because it's worth discovering on your own, but the last couple of pages of the book require us to re-evaluate everything that has gone before. I enjoyed reading the book a second time quite a bit, because I could read it with the news from the ending in mind, and this showed the narrative to be quite cunningly constructed and more complex than it appeared on a first reading.

The ending has proved frustrating for some readers, and while I like it a lot, I certainly can understand how people find it contrived or annoying. Novels are, by their nature, contrived (or else they wouldn't be either fiction or art), but what each reader is willing to suspend their disbelief for differs from each to each. I didn't feel the ending gimmicky, because I liked the effect it had on the book, and I thought it pushed the novel's incidents toward multiple interpretations: how much credence do we give to different characters' ideas of changing the world, and how much do we care about such idealism ourselves? Our Napoleon in Rags haunted me long after I read it because I found myself returning to questions it raised in my mind about delusion, imagination, generosity, regret, affection, love, and, well, yes: changing the world.

If you're interested in Our Napoleon in Rags, we will be hosting a week-long discussion of it starting October 10.

(A word or two about) Autumn 2005 nominee 10:01 by Lance Olsen

Hello, it's your old pal the Rake here to discuss my nominee for the Autumn 2005 LBC selection, 10:01 by Lance Olsen.

Now what can I say about 10:01 that hasn’t already been said?

Quite a bit, in fact, because not as many people have heard about this book as should. I count one review—mostly negative—at PopMatters and a handful of glowing customer blurbs at Amazon. And to be completely honest, I probably wouldn’t have heard about it either—or its publisher, Chiasmus Press—but for a person (who took the LBC to task for picking Kate Atkinson) bringing it up as a novel worthy of attention.  (Good sir, I haven’t searched for your name, but feel free to take credit for pricking up my ears.)

By the time my copy arrived, I’d plowed through a fair number of obscure books and hadn’t come to one that I’d heartily recommend.  So I started with the 10:01 blurbs—always dangerous ground—and read this description:

Walter Benjamin envisioned the underground Paris Arcades as the quintessential 19th century industrial dream space. In 10:01 Lance Olsen provides us with the Millennial version: the Mall of America, in Bloomington, Minnesota, large enough to contain seven Yankee Stadiums. Each page headlines a different character or set of characters randomly flung together in a movie theater there in mid-afternoon. They interface (often freakishly) with each other; with the Mall's blandishments; with the images on the screen; with their own fantasies. At the climax the theater and its inhabitants suddenly implode, perhaps out of the ultimate logic of late industrial capitalism. Or they don't implode but are sucked irresistibly into the black hole of American make-believe. Olsen has written a cunningly original docufiction of the American psyche post-9/11 and perennial.

Walter Benjamin?  The ultimate logic of late industrial capitalism?  Docufiction?

Yeah.  Well.  OK.  Even if I stuck around for the entire 200 or so pages, I’d be able to knock this one out in an afternoon and forget about it, on to the next.

But it happened that I started to quite like what Mr. Olsen had going: A friendly little book, acessible, smart, funny, even a little goofy at times—there are a coupla cartoon rednecks here that might surpass even the belt-buckle-broad comedy sensibilities of one Jeff Foxworthy—but one that always managed to sneak in some unexpected nugget of insight or bit of lovely writing. 

10:01 starts like this:

MIDAFTERNOON IN A MOVIE THEATER in the Mall of America. Glary lights before the show make everything seem stark and unfinished to Kate Frazey, a bony aerobics instructor relieving herself of her shocking-pink ski jacket, bunching it on the folded-up seat beside her, and sitting in row three, seat nine, seeing herself as she does so as if from a crane shot among these other filmgoers filtering in and settling down around her. Kate, blond hair so dark it is almost the color of high-fiber breakfast cereal, is Franz Kafka's great-great granddaughter, although she carries no awareness of this within her. She doesn't know her great-great grandfather once had an affair with another bony woman, Grete Bloch, friend of Felice Bauer, to whom Kafka was briefly engaged. Kate doesn't know Grete had a son about whom Kafka never learned, nor that his son was supposed to have died while a child, but was adopted by a Jewish businessman and his wife, and brought to New York in the thirties. Whenever Kate dreams, it is about the plots of Kafka's work, which she has never read because she believes there are already too many stories in the world. Kate dreams that two strangers in top hats and frock coats are always knocking at her door, wanting in. That she is a ninety-pound weight-loss artist dissolving in a cage full of hay in the town square in Prague. That she is a muscular hare darting through a wet field at night and that, no matter how fast she runs, no matter which direction she chooses, the beautiful hounds sleeping within the castle miles away will awaken the next day and chase her down. This is why Kate doesn't sleep unless she has to. This is why she hasn't slept for two nights, why she leans forward now, elbows on knees, concentrating very hard on keeping her glistery brown eyes wide open.

That’s the type of passage that makes me want to say that this book isn’t for everyone.  (But I won’t.)  Still, I think you either like this type of thing or you don’t.  Take, for example, this:

Thirty feet above Celan Solen skitters a mouse through the warm darkness flooding the ventilation system.  Tucked into the mouse’s breast immediately behind its heart is the soul of Remedios the Beauty, a young woman from a small village in Colombia.  When she was alive, Remedios the Beauty used to drive men mad with the sweetness of her scent, part orange, part cinnamon.

At the risk of assuming something about the General Reader, I’m saying that that’s the type of passage that either drives you away from a book or reels you in.  Me, I was reeled in.

The charms of 10:01 are not necessarily hard-won—there’s enough humor and character to keep you cheerfully speeding along—but on the other hand the little mysteries of the text and deeper philosophical underpinnings seem to be there, too, if you wish to dig.  (See this interview with Olsen, for example.)  You might also wish to simply ponder why quote unquote actor Josh Harnett is a character in 10:01, but my point is that he’s not in the book simply to amuse; Olsen’s a little more crafty than that and after a little bit more.

I’ll bet—and sort of know—that this book will be polarizing, and I can understand why a person might just want to toss it across the room and fall into the reassuring and waiting arms of, say, Richard Ford.  Olsen’s not as deliberate as Ford, and not seamless.  But I’d recommend him for just that reason, and to all readers who like to sink into a book and let their minds get a little untidy.  As a friend of mine used to say, It ain’t gonna cost you nothing to find out, either, because the whole book’s available as a hypertext presentation here.  (I recommend the paper copy, of course, but the hyper version gives you a good—if somewhat recontextualized—idea of what Olsen’s up to.)

Thanks to the LBC’s methods and madness I know about 10:01, a novel that cheers me up in the way that a truly novel novel can—it gives a bit of a lift that comes from knowing that the world of the possible, at least as far as literature is concerned, is larger than I’d thought.  And I now know of Lance Olsen, who has a bunch of other books out there to explore—to wit, "six novels, four critical studies, four short-story collections, a poetry chapbook, and Rebel Yell: A Guide to Fiction Writing, as well as editor of two collections of essays about literary innovation."

For me, this little LBC endeavor has turned up some real finds, and for that I'm thankful to be a part of it and to be following along.  If this round helps a bunch of hungry readers track down a book they’ll enjoy as much as I enjoyed 10:01—or The Angel of Forgetfulness or Stephen Dixon's Old Friends—then we've lived up to the task.

Now please stay tuned for more discussion of this title and the other nominees, coming soon. And if you'd like to join a discussion about this book, we'll be kicking it off October 3rd.