THE LITBLOG CO-OP

The Glorious Discussion, Part Two

[In which Kassia, Max, and Sam continue their discussion of All This Heavenly Glory. Warning: at least one participant engaged in actual research. We promise it won't happen again.]

[Sam] Both of you mentioned how the narrative seemed to race. Happened to me too, though I can't say exactly why. Just out of curiosity, I turned to my shelf of writing manuals and asked Auden's favorite question: "Here is a verbal contraption. How does it work?"

Well, hell, I actually never found the answer. Maybe it's all those digressions and changes of direction:

"Charlotte and Rachel go out to the terrace (actually an unfettered black tar roof partially shaded by a large water tower) to fill up the plastic baby pool, which they're admittedly past the age for, but they figure they can cool off and splash around for a laugh.

However, I did come across a funny parallel in Herbert Read's 1928 neglected masterpiece, English Prose Style. In the chapter, "Sentences," Read provides many examples of long, stately sentences, models of balance and the careful deployment of emphasis — none resembling Crane's. But then Read adds:

"Not all long and complex sentences have the architectural harmony of the period. Many such sentences are often in the nature of an agglomeration of inconsistent and unrelated clauses, and should really be split up into several sentences. There is an extreme example in a letter of Swift's, which shows that Swift could on occasion write like a servant girl:

"Last year a paper was brought here from England, called a Dialogue between the Archbishop of Canterbury and Mr. Higgins, which we ordered to be burnt by the common hangman, as it well deserved, though we have no more to do with his Grace of Canterbury than you have with the Archbishop of Dublin, whom you suffer to be abused openly, and by name, by that paltry rascal of an observator; and lately upon an affair, wherein he had no concern; I mean, the business of the missionary of Drogheda, wherein our excellent primate was engaged, and did nothing but according to law and discretion.'"

Funny, huh? I guess our idea of how a spunky young woman would write hasn't changed much in the past 80 years. Only we value spontaneity a little more highly than old man Read did.

But the narrative style in ATHG is a little more complicated than "girl tells her own story." Don't know if you noticed, but of the 17 stories in ATHG only four are in the first person — the ones that take place in the present day. Stories set in Charlotte's youth are told in the third person. (There's also a story told in the second person, just to keep you guessing.)

The third-person stories are kind of a puzzle. They are third-person, but also really imbued with the adult Charlotte's language and perspective. As a result, they feel (to me anyway) as if Charlotte was telling these stories from behind a veil, full of feelings about the events she describes in her past, but for some reason distant from those feelings too. The third-person stories left me uneasy in a way the first-person stories don't. Either of you guys feel this way?

[Kassia] I have discovered a new appreciation for 18th-century servant girls, if they indeed wrote in such a manner. I like your description of Read's sentences (though I thought we agreed that real bloggers don't do research) as "long, stately sentences, models of balance and the careful deployment of emphasis, none resembing Crane's." Well-balanced sentences are surely indicative of a well-balanced mind, and while I cannot presume to speak for Crane's mental state, it is clear that Charlotte Anne has not achieved the mind-like-water state.

The use of third- versus first-person point-of-view seems to tie into a comment I made about gaps in CA's history. Much of what happens in her life is off the page, and since it's clear that Crane made a deliberate choice to divide the timeline by POV, it makes me wonder why CA, the character, has to hide so much of her childhood. She is much more open about Rachel and Karen Pink-Park than she is about herself -- the stories featuring her mother feel especially distant to me. It is interesting that one of the final stories, where it appears that CA has finally gotten it (whatever it is) together, is written in third person, though it's chronologically later than most of the other stories.

One thing I must say I admire about Elizabeth Crane: her memory for the ephemera of the seventies, eighties, and nineties is awesome. Click-Clacks -- the debates I had with my mother over those (right up until she confiscated the ones I talked my grandmother into buying -- apparently they were dangerous to younger siblings, which is something I'd already factored into the equation). These are the details that ground this story in place and time. Amy up the street had a Beautiful Crissy doll (she had all the cool dolls), you have to love a guy who actually listens to Yo La Tengo, and, well, haven't we all watched the Donny & Marie Show (or your generational equivalent thereof)?

[Sam] Stay away from me with those click-clacks ...

Kassia, I really wasn't conscious of gaps. But I don't think I followed the story line as carefully as I might have. I remember being really surprised when I read the jacket copy after finishing the book:

"Here are the events that make up a life: a junior high-school fashion crisis, a best friends betrayal, substance abuse, recovery, finding a satisfying career, dating fiascos, the perfect relationship, the illness and slow death of a parent ... In her lifetime Charlotte encounters hope and disappointment mingled with faith and desperation, laughter on the heels of weeping, the success assuaging the pain of the most embarrassing failures — her path both all her own and instantly familiar."

Was this the book I just read? I think I was too wound up in the language, and humor, and quirks of the narrative to step back and think about Charlotte as a traditional struggling heroine. Maybe I would have gotten there eventually, but I'm not sure. It's hard to always bring to books the sympathy they deserve, isn't it?

[Max] Sam, your quoting the book jacket copy of ATHG illustrates a point I've been thinking about lately, one that (and you'll forgive me for this) plays a part in the James Frey fiasco that's been unfolding: it's really hard to market and sell books. When compared to other forms of entertainment, books don't have much going for them. There are no movie trailers or TV commercials, no radio airtime or MTV, and no guest appearances on talk shows. Excepting a very small percentage of authors who do get the star treatment, the most a typical book gets in the way of publicity is the book itself. The way the book looks and what is written on the back cover is hugely important to how a book is received by the buying public, and that's an awfully small canvas to work with - and so perhaps we try to label a book memoir instead of fiction to make that book jacket more appealing.

An aside: When I worked at the bookstore, I met a young woman author (I can't remember her name) who was just devastated by the pastel pink "chick-lit" book cover that her publisher had put on what, to her, was a serious work of fiction about a female protagonist.

But getting back to ATHG (I think discussing this book causes *us* to digress), I was struck also by Sam's analysis of the narrative voice of the stories in this collection. Though I didn't think about it when I read it, now I wonder what the collection would have been like had all the stories been in the first person. So much of ATHG seems to dwell inside Charlotte Anne's head anyway, I wonder if the book would have felt too internal if the book had been all first person. On the other hand, it seems that the first-person stories lend themselves more readily to Crane's experimental tendencies.

[Kassia takes advantage of technology to get the last word] I know more than a few of those women who received pink covers and felt like they'd been misrepresented or pigeon-holed (though we all know there's no crying in publishing). And in reviewing the jacket copy in relation to the book, I wonder if there was some sort of notion on the part of the publisher of reaching out to the chicklit market. Then, for whatever reason, this marketing plan seemed to fall through. There is a notion that you can't always market literary to the genre crowd and vice versa. Which I think is a shame. We need to reach as many readers as possible, and most of these divisions are artificial to me.

All This Heavenly Glory, LitBlog Style

Welcome to Glory week (Buffy fans, wrong place, but stick around, we're a fun bunch)!. Kassia, Max, and Sam spent the weekend debating the finer points of craft and style and, we're proud to say, sentence structure. Yeah, we're going to bring Jonathan Swift into this discussion. And servant girls. You can't talk about All This Heavenly Glory without a discussion about servant girls. Our only hope is that we don't scare Elizabeth Crane (blogging, almost live, here on Wednesday).

[Kassia] When Max introduced Elizabeth's Crane's All This Heavenly Glory, he keyed in on two main elements of this book: the style and subject matter. Interestingly, he noted that "Crane's writing is the main character" -- and while I want to get back to the characterization of Charlotte Anne and "the genre whose name" Max dares not speak (so mysterious!) -- I want to talk about the idea that a writer's style and voice can serve as the catalyst of a novel (or a novel-in-stories as this is probably more properly described).

From the first page of "Ad", I felt like I was racing through the book. Sure, I idled a little bit around "Jesse Jackson, He Lives In Chicago" -- a reader, after all, does need some time to regroup -- but I feel like I was propelled by the author, not the story. Clearly, I'm not complaining, except for maybe about the fact that I stayed up late to finish the thing, but as I reread Max's comments, I find myself wondering if Crane's style makes it easy to mask weaknesses in the story, most notably some character development -- and does it really matter if that's the case?

[Max] I think "racing" is the right word. I thought it was pretty daring of Crane and her editors to launch us into the book that way, and, as a result, the rest of the book really feeds off of that energy. To your point about whether Crane's writing masks weaknesses in character development, I'll concede that perhaps Charlotte Anne isn't terribly distinguishable from a lot of other female protagonists out there, and that the supporting cast doesn't get as much stage time as it perhaps should, but I also think that you can look at the idea of style and subject matter in another way when it comes to this book. Crane's style - which to me was this great blend of the conversational and the complex - felt to me rather fresh when viewed against the rest of the literary fiction landscape. I wonder if we, as readers, see a coming of age story about a woman with all the typical love troubles, family troubles and work troubles, and we find it hard to imagine that this book really could be daring. Along with some solid, straightforward stories, Crane gives us some rather experimental ones as well (not unlike Ander Monson's, in fact, in their tendencies toward lists and stream of consciousness). But I feel like it's hard for me and for other readers to believe that a book about this character that follows this storyline could be daring and experimental, and yet when you look at the writing itself, this book is anything but typical.

[Kassia] You make an excellent point about the difficulty of seeing a coming-of-age story about a woman with the usual litany of woman troubles (this is, by the way, not the same thing as female problems, though I've never been entirely sure what those might be) with anything but a "been there, read that" attitude. I read a lot of the genre-that-we-will-name-later in the early days, mostly because I believed the editors when they said they were looking for stories that pushed the boundaries. This did not turn out to be as true as one would hope. In many ways, Charlotte Anne is a typical women's fiction heroine (right down to the younger man fantasy!).

And in far more ways, she is not typical. These type of stories are traditionally very linear and often focused on a finite period of time. There seems to be a real fear of letting an author run wild; yet Crane's publisher took this risk, making this a great read for those who wouldn't pick up this type of story and for those who feel like screaming at the thought of another, okay, I'm going to say it, chicklit novel covering the young woman/job troubles/man troubles terrain. I will point, by way of example, to the title story, "All This Heavenly Glory". This felt like a real woman having a obsessive meltdown over a guy, not a character who can't be too insane because we have to like her, and likeable women are not psycho.

In addition to adding experimental stories and breathless sentence structure (not to mention the extreme use of parentheticals within parentheticals), Crane bounces back and forth from childhood to adulthood, picking up pieces of CA's life and tying them to other stories. I got the sense she wrote without a definite order in mind, then put the stories together after, but this comes mainly from certain mentions of the fates of other characters, such as Rachel.

I noticed that Crane took an approach in character development that I'm not sure I like -- I've seen it in other books recently as well, and it may like first-person present tense, something I just need to get used to -- where she tends to pick up her character's story during those moments in between life-changing events. I felt that a big omission, from a reader's standpoint, was CA's alcoholism. This was something big enough to be mentioned twice on the cover flap, yet I didn't the get the sense that CA was any more or less an alcoholic than the average person.

Tune in tomorrow for more Glory. Jonathan Swift makes the promised guest appearance (with the servant girl) and at least one Click-Clack confession is made.

LBC Podcast #2: Elizabeth Crane

Nominator: C. Max Magee

Nominee: Elizabeth Crane

Subjects Discussed: Mashed potatoes, Jonas Hanway, umbrellas, comparisons with Elizabeth McKenzie's Stop that Girl, writers named Elizabeth, blatant autobiographical fiction vs. entirely invented fiction, Owen Wilson, the influence of pop culture upon Crane's writing, numerology, three-minute films, Maury Povich's sadism, writing for Nerve, the horrors of blueberry bagels, the influence of David Foster Wallce, Michiko Kakutani, the credibility of "by the way" in dialogue, being categorized as chicklit, dicklit, Nick Laird, on being reviewed, the pros and cons of being a woman writer, New York vs. Chicago.

Backup Link:  (MP3)

(A co-production of the LBC and The Bat Segundo Show)

Novels and Indexes

Pull a biography from your shelf and flip to the back. In almost every case you'll find an index there, a listing of access points to the interior of the text. You can go back and find information about the subject's time at the university or something about his or her siblings. Pull some of other non-fiction book from your shelf. You'll find indexes in most of them too. Now try a novel, maybe a few, maybe all of them. Find any indexes? Probably not, maybe a small handful (I have less than a shelf full and I've specifically searched them out).

Convention tells us that novels don't have indexes; novels don't need indexes. What about in your reading group last week when you couldn't remember that great passage... it was while the protagonist was on vacation... but... where was that in the book? In the middle somewhere? Time to start paging through and skimming the text. Better hope it's not a 900 page William Gaddis novel.

Indexes in novels have their uses, but not many novels use them. A number of novels use indexes as a way to blur the fictionality of the novel. With an index the novel might appear less fictional (Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando, subtitled "A Biography," has an index). Others use indexes as parody (Lucy Ellmann's Sweet Desserts) or as embellishment on a theme (Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves' index mirrors the labyrinth at the center of the novel with its indexing of every occurrence (or so it seems) of even the most banal of words (a column of tiny references to "so"). JG Ballard even wrote a story that is all index to a novel that doesn't exist ("The Index"). The rarest of examples actually have useful indexes (Perec's Life: A User's Manual has more than one).

But some novels use indexes not only as they are meant to be used (information access) but as clues and addenda to the work itself. Nabokov's Pale Fire is a classic example. Brian Boyd (in his Nabokov's Pale Fire) found numerous clues to the novel in the winding references of its index.

Anders Monson's Other Electricities has an index, and I believe it follows in the footsteps of Nabokov's. Not only does it provide paths back into the book, but it helps organize themes and it might provide information left unsaid in the book proper. Unless I missed something on my reading, the index tells us a little more about some of the stories in the book.

Matt has discussed reading the stories out of order; the index would provide an alternate method of reading the book in a non-linear way. What if we traced all the references to ice? or God? What if we just wanted to revisit a passage we really loved?

Monson's Editors

Sarah Gorham, Editor-in-Chief:
Ander Monson submitted his manuscript Other Electricities to the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. Peter Rock was one of the first readers and plucked it, as well as the winner Edith Pearlman, from the slush pile. Both manuscripts, along with a few more from the other first readers went along to the judge Joanna Scott. To tell you the truth, we were rooting for Ander's book, but were satisfied with the judge's choice as well. Since Sarabande publishes finalists too, we grabbed OE faster than you could blink an eye. In our mind, the book was ambitious, strange, moving, inventive, and very very cool. We loved it, but also felt the structure was a little messy. There were threads of this and that intimating connections between stories, and we thought these could be tied up a bit. We suggested a map to keep the characters straight, for example. My suggestions were macro, Kirby took over for the micro edit. Ander generously agreed to many changes and rewriting. The result was something wondrous to behold. This book was a perfect example of something we do because we love innovation and unusual talent: take a chance on a book that might not fit into the mainstream and give it the full Sarabande treatment. We're delighted to see how much dialogue has surrounded this title, and how much wonderful press it has received. It's great, and the book is more than deserving.

Kirby Gann:
The manuscript of Other Electricities stood apart from the usual manuscripts we receive because of a number of factors that we only rarely see coalesce in the same writer: an energetic, sometimes even manic prose style that, while capable of wild flights of lyricism, reveled in its own exactitude of language; inventive structures that did not come off as coy or overly contrived; philosophical and emotional depth combined with ribald humor; and, finally, that rarest of gifts—a unique vision.

My first read-through left me fumbling for what to do as the book’s line-editor. It was a pleasure to read, but the original manuscript sprawled a bit more than the published version, and confusion became a risk. Thus the editing process turned on how to maintain the book’s expansive reach, with its many characters—an entire community, really—while at the same time tightening its focus, limiting the number of strands a reader would have to keep in mind as he or she read further into the collection (or novel, as the author prefers it). Although we loved the more playful aspects of the manuscript (the diagrams, maps, et cetera), there were many more examples of these in the original version, and Ander and I worked on trying to employ these in ways that would only enhance his prose accomplishments, and not detract from them.

All in all, I believe Ander pulled it off beautifully. I cannot think of another work of fiction that “functions” in quite the same way as Other Electricities: how the stories and people seem to fold over and into one another, the deeper one reads; how the author evokes absence and explores its ramifications in so many ways, as he does also with distance, and emptiness, and, of course, cold. It’s a ghostly and sad and wintry book, appropriate to its milieu of the U.P., and yet there’s so much hilarity and fervent love of life in it, too. To balance so many concerns in such a short space—a mere 164 pages—is a feat I don’t believe many writers can do.

Interview with Ander Monson

The following is an interview with Ander Monson, author of Other Electricities, and the poetry collection, Vacationland.  Ander is editor of DIAGRAM, as well as a professor at Grand Valley State University.

Dan:

Hello Ander, thank you very much for taking some time from your busy schedule to respond to some questions today.

Ander:

Not a problem. It’s late, my wife’s asleep, I’m in my great antique Sleepy Hollow chair watching snow come down.

Dan:

You are the wearer of many hats – fiction writer, poet, essayist, teacher, and editor, not to mention (I believe) book designer, at least on a recreational level if not more.  Are there spreadsheets all over the house and car keeping you on track in all of these endeavors, or do you utilize some other method?

Ander:

True. My attentions are many. I have lists and little hats. A lot of caffeine. A flexible schedule and probably too much work ethic, if you define work as anything I enjoy doing that has a potentially literary result. I try to let what I’m doing spill over into my other projects as best I can—thus creating a strength from what could appear otherwise to be weakness.

Dan:

You grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and then found yourself in school in Alabama.  How big of a shock to your system was that?

Ander:

I was looking for something different—a departure from the midwest, where I’d mostly lived (aside from Saudi Arabia), and Alabama seemed like too odd of a project to pass up. And there’s plenty weird down there, my favorites being the Cross Gardens, the Coon Dog Cemetery, and the Ave Maria Grotto, with the world’s attractions in miniature, to scale, made from bottle caps, and tiny tiles, and marbles, and such. Really awesome stuff actually. But much about the deep south is similar to the far north—the isolation, the rural life, the wilderness, the importance of weather, the extremes of temperature. I found it to be similar in a lot of ways to the Upper Peninsula—the two are much more alike than they are like coastal culture. Still, being down there, away from snow, was what really started to crystallize the projects (Other Electricities, Vacationland) for me, in my memory, my mythology.

Dan:

When you attended the Alabama MFA program, who were your professors?  Do you find yourself using any of their methods while you teach today?

Dance, Dance, Dance...

to the radio. My last little salvo. I'm working on a Book Notes feature for one of the lit/music blogs I read regularly, largeheartedboy <http://www.largeheartedboy.com/blog/archive/book_notes/>, and I thought I'd note that. Therein I'll talk in more detail about a suggested soundtrack to the book (mostly Low songs with a few others). Which is either very interesting or completely not. I gave a reading in Madison, Wisconsin, one of my all-time favorite cities, last summer, and when I came in before the reading, they had Low playing on the radio. A nice touch. Thanks to Avol's Books, and thanks to you for reading and thinking about Other Electricities and the other work you do for lit.

Film, Dear

I think I'll talk a bit about these two ideas brought up in the discussion--

The Dear... bits: I'm not sure I want to resolve the speaker of these, exactly. I'm trying--here and elsewhere in my work--to preserve little bits of irreducible mystery/complexity. So I don't want to just go ahead and say well this is who's speaking, or whatever, partially because I may or may not be right (now that the book's published, it's not exactly mine anymore--it's yours), and because it doesn't resolve perfectly in the book itself, so I want to entertain the negative space that can encompass a couple contradictory readings. I can, however, speak to my intentions, and I see the voice as being either the mother (who is herself a mystery--probably dead, though possibly gone to Canada, and her postcards on the website serve, I hope, to complicate this--and maybe that's a metaphor regardless, Canadian as dead (at least to these characters--I should say I have nothing against Canada, since where I'm from we're practically Canadian, we get their TV, their sports, much of their culture, but the space North of the border is this big Other up there--white space, the unknown, my own personal Congo/Heart of Darkness or whatever). The voice of the mother (though again it's possibly some even weirder thing speaking, a sort of greek chorus in the book, or the place, or the town, or the Paulding Light, which is real, by the way (you can see a bizarro low-budget film in the style of the Blair Witch Project at: <http://pauldinglight.com/>)) (and sorry for my nested parentheses, which might be a big ridiculous, but I like them) is one of the few times in the book where there's real solace offered to Yr Protagonist, or to the other characters. I wanted the book to be cradled, in a fashion, by this stuff outside of and bigger than the book, these radio waves, this intricate network of etheric whatever, by love or by family, themselves irreducibly complex. As a side note on irreducible complexity, I like this idea even though it's been co-opted by the Intelligent Design crusaders, which is sort of sad. I don't want to echo that...

Regarding film, I do think that this could translate well. Not to a blockbuster sort of thing, obviously, but there's a lot of the visual happening. I think of films like A Simple Plan or The Sweet Hereafter, in their way, or something like Tales from the Gimli Hospital, though I find the style of that film a bit hard to take in the end. If I had the skillz to attack the project, I would totally go after it. Though I don't have quite that level of hubris. I would score it with music by Low, who get a nod in the acknowledgments--that's the soundtrack to this work in my mind. I would love to be able to do some more fun multimedia thing with it, but that's even a couple orders more complicated than the idea of just doing two-dimensional design, or just of writing fiction to begin with, which is in itself insanely complicated when you look at it closely enough.

One of the things I really like about hearing people talk about my work is finding these other texts that have somehow eluded my spotty reading habits, things that should be essential reading for me. So thanks for this.

On The Formal

Hello everyone. Thanks for the thoughtful commentary so far. It's interesting to see Perec come up in the discussion as a possible influence on OE, as he's not someone I read before very recently (not sure why, since he seems like such an obvious fit with several strands of my work). Only in the last month or so have I started to enter his world, and I've become very enamored of his work, particularly Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. There's a sensibility--all that order, the formal structure pressurizing and guiding the content, one among many ways to order experience, place, the world--that I am rapidly falling in love with.

A lot of the conversations surrounding the book (both here and elsewhere in Q&A sessions, reviews, and such) have focused on the role of what readers often seem to see as the maybe-extraneous structures throughout the book, surrounding it (physically, often, the circuit board tracing diagrams, surrounding and punctuating the text), bookending it, and such. It seems like that's one of the big questions readers have (or try to address themselves): how these other materials (the extras) affect or interact with the "real" book, the narrative at its center. You can guess that I don't see these things as separate at all (and increasingly I'm noticing, what with graphic novels and all, and the increasing transparence and ease of writers designing (as well as writing--if there is a difference) their own books (InDesign, Quark), more and more books that are playing with these ideas. You see it in a big way with the McSweeney's crew and the way that Eggers et al are enjoying playing with the different sections of the book, and their interest in design. I get less interested, though, when it edges into self-indulgence, which is a risk of what I'm doing in OE, of course, too).

The book itself is very obsessed with structure--finding ways to deal with and order grief, despair, these otherwise irreducible human experiences--and I see the structures as one of several lenses through which readers can approach the book. One thing I was thinking about in its creation and revision was trying to find other ways of satisfying readers, of creating a rich, complex reading experience without simply relying on narrative arc. Partly that's a weakness in my own writing, I think, my inability to get into (or disinterest in) straightforward narrative, and as such my use of what can come across as trickeration, but in my writing I have tried to tie the formal innovations and constraint as closely as I can to the emotional content--the heart, if you want--of the story. So the structures in OE aren't just a head game, but come out of this central desperation, this big white space at the heart of it. Form is a major subject of the book, I think, and a subject of a lot of my work, most recently this book of weirdo essays I've been working on. Some of that comes out of my interest in the visual, in the artifact of the book, and in design, and mathematics. I like to think of Other Electricities, in one way, as math + desperation. Or, given desperation, math following directly from it. I like these kinds of equations, ridiculous as they may be. They're nicely (and hopefully usefully) provocative.

So Static

I just lost a much better version of this post. Growl. Anyway, welcome to a new year of the LBC. Please participate, please? We are wrecked with insecurity. (I'm kidding. Or am I?) (This was charming in the original post.)

The boys spent the weekend having this fabulous discussion, batting emails back and forth like crazed Cheshire Cats (I invoke because I heart), while I was too lame/busy/exhausted to weigh in. So, this book, this Other Electricities book by Ander Monson. What did I think about it?

I fucking loved it.

I know, I know, I'm not exactly known for my measured responses to things I cotton to, and I cottoned to this. (In fact, my three favorite books from this round were pretty much a statistical tie in my heart.) Is Other Electricities a story collection? Yes. Is it something more than a story collection? Yes, definitely. Is it a novel? Maybe ... but that doesn't really matter to me. One of the things I responded to most about the book is that it doesn't feel like a conventional novel or a novel-made-up-of-stories (like, say, Kevin Brockmeier's The Truth About Celia). It reminds me of a kids' toy, one of those mirrored kaleidoscopes or prisms that fractures the person or people you're looking at into dozens of different images. We see the characters in Other Electricities like that, from so many different angles  -- sideways, through the funhouse of time, from the inside out, being reflected off other characters or other stories. The book as a whole is the toy. The prism. The link.

(This analogy isn't that great, but it amuses me because Monson loves diagrams!)

It's this depth of connection that places these imaginary people all so solidly in this very cold place (Michigan), trapped with their own individual losses and memories, which are always overlapping or drawing back from the town's collective loss and memory. These feel like people who really have spent a long time together in a very cold place (again, Michigan). The weather is a heavy physical and psychological presence throughout the book, in a menacing, preservative way, not a frustrated-meterologist way.

I have a special soft spot for Harriet, the plow driver with a reaching soul. And for Yr Protagonist and his brother, always straining to see the floating light of Paulding. Hell, I'm enchanted by the floating light of Paulding itself (who among us hasn't stalked such a light on some random hillside?). More, I am enchanted by this icy little universe Monson has diagrammed.

Matt (I believe) said that he felt an emptiness from this book, but that it might actually be quietude. I can completely see that side of things, but at the same time I must admit to being left with a feeling of fullness. I chalk it up to the candor that radiates from these characters and this world. Despite all this cold, all this isolation, there is transparence and truth. Yr Protagonist has only to clip into your phone wires to hear what you're talking about and to who. Everyone knows about that girl who died. Or the story of the other one who died even before that. Everyone carries the same stories in their pockets like stones.

I'm rambling (this really was much better before) and still looped on cold medicine, so I'll leave you with one of my favorite short short stories in the book -- even though it's not about Harriet. Hopefully, the author won't mind, because I think he's coming by here in a couple of days and what's to stop him from kicking my ass? Anyway, I can't think of a better way to convince you to read the book, or give you something to react to. Plus, it's instructive. Behind the cut.