THE LITBLOG CO-OP

Hiya to Yannick and Smitty!

Just a reminder: Tomorrow the LBC welcomes Yannick Murphy, author of Here They Come, to the site (*cough* spoonbending anecdotes, please *cough*). On Thursday, return for her interview with Dan Wickett. And Friday, there’ll be a fab Segundo podcast for you to listen to in the cubby.

One last discussion note: From the start, I’ve been confidently noting that the novel’s narrator goes unnamed. Today a person connected to the book kindly reminded me that she does, in fact, get named once in the novel:

I’m the one who shops and I’ve got ten bucks for two days to feed the five of us. Polly at the A & P knows I’ve only ever got ten bucks and she says “How ya doing, Smitty?” Then she passes through a bunch of my items without ringing them up and gives me a wink. I even come home with change. Tom does it too, but his nose is huge and red and usually has a ripe white pimple on it, so I don’t like to stand on his line, but like I said, he’ll do it too and not charge me for some items and wink when he’s packing the bags and call me Smitty.

One Paragraph

Here They Come is so well written that it makes me want to quote page after page and sing the praises of the sentences and rhythms and images and tones.  Instead of indulging myself quite so much, I'll just quote a paragraph and offer some comments.  It's not a paragraph I spent much time looking for -- really, I just flipped through a few pages and this one caught my eye.  The book is full of paragraphs as good as this:

I dial my father.  He's been missing for weeks and I think maybe he's come back.  I imagine him shopping at Balducci's, buying persimmons and shiny egg-white baked bread.  But there's no answer.  I slam the phone receiver down on the floor.  It bounces.  I do it again.  There is now a nick in the floorboard.  I don't put the receiver back in its cradle.  I sit in the chair, my mother's chair.  It gets dark, but I don't turn the light on.  The recorded voice tells me to hang up the phone.  Then it finally stops and the phone is now quiet.  I look through the drawers in my mother's table, the one with all the burn marks on it.  In the drawers are ripped photos.  All the photos are of my mother with her missing arm around where my father used to be, but I can't find the halves with him in them.

There's a fine mix of humor and pathos in this paragraph, with the odd details -- "buying persimmons and shiny egg-white baked bread", the ripped photos -- filling out a moment where the narrator yearns for her lost father, and, by extension, so much else.  She doesn't just feel frustrated, she throws the receiver down; the receiver doesn't just hit the floor, it makes a nick in the floorboard.  But there's more -- the receiver lies there until the recorded voice comes on, a perfect detail of loneliness and emptiness, a literal and metaphorical lack of connection.  And then those photos.  We move from the aural detail of the phone to the visual detail of the photos, a detail that again conveys information about the characters while also creating a rich image.  The photos are in the table "with all the burn marks on it."  The mother's arm is missing, a lost limb, an amputated part of the self that was thrown away along with "where my father used to be".  The narrator is searching for "the halves with him in them", the other half of something that has disappeared, replaced by a recorded voice saying it's time to break the connection.

None of the other books we read this quarter affected me as powerfully and impressed me so deeply with the rich art of their sentences and paragraphs.  Others were more showy in terms of plot or conception, but for me the most impressive books are the ones full of paragraphs as complex and affecting as the paragraph above.

They're Coming For You

Carrie, I find it hilarious that you finished the book all in one big gulp, as you've contradicted Frank McCourt's blurb* right off the bat. Now you have to fight him when the 3 p.m. bell rings. I hear he's a scrapper.

This really is a remarkable book. (Physically beautiful object too, as all McSweeney's books are.)

Most of what stuck with me about this novel has already been cited: Murphy's and the spoon-bending narrator's perfectly harsh yet lyrical voices; the blend of surrealist details and symbols with a very real world and real family; the rambly but focused quality of the prose; the almost grotesque quality of details at times and the simple beauty of them at others; and, yes, the dog. (Though the police horse is memorable for me as well, Kassia.) Often I'm annoyed when an author holds back the narrator's name; it feels too much like a device, but here the character is conjured so perfectly, right from the start, that it never bothered me. Murphy is able to pull off a lot of magic tricks here, and it's hard to figure her sleight of hand, exactly.

In workshops and writing classes, you can't go 20 minutes without someone talking about using different/better/exactly-the-right details. And yet, it's incredibly rare to come across a book where so many of the details line by line actually are memorable and resonant. Not just window-dressing that builds a world but integral to the narrative itself. Where the sensory quality seems true and easily conjured at once.

And the deadpan way in which these are often rendered gave the novel a great sense of humor to me. What could be just tragedy -- the heaps of garbage, the frozen-over toilet in winter, a girl allowing herself to be groped for free hot dogs -- is often less depressing because we are not forced to wallow in the awfulness of it. The narrator refuses that simple a reaction. She is not reflecting the story, so much as channeling it. This is her life and when you're a kid, you don't have a large enough frame of reference to judge that life against others. It's just her life, at this point, she's too young for it to be otherwise. And in that I definitely see a connection to those memorable girl narrators you mentioned in your initial post, Carrie. What makes this such a page-turner (because it is, despite not being plotted in a conventional page-turnery way) is the narrator's breathless recounting of all this as she experiences it, clean of judgment.

The I Capture the Castle connection is thus deemed valid!

*“This is a hell of a book. You might not be able to finish Here They Come in one sitting, but it will haunt you till you do. What detail! What characters! I can imagine both Jane Austen and Raymond Carver pouring over this masterly novel.”  — Frank McCourt, author of Angela’s Ashes

Sentimentality and Craft: Fun Topics!

Damn, you so promised we wouldn't get deep!

Can we not both be right? We are talking about a little girl, and for all her coolness, she's a child, who is revealing her life as it is. Sure, it's filtered through her point-of-view (I must say that I didn't notice the POV shifts as such, which means I was deeply immersed in the reading; I tend to notice craft while reading when the author is failing miserably), but it's a pretty bald recitation of facts.

One thing I did notice is that this story does not, like many novels of this ilk, come off as a "how I became who I am" story. We are not looking back; we seem largely in the present throughout. This isn't a case of a someone lamenting over the scent of cookies, and I think that makes this a particularly fresh look at, well, life.

But as to the question of sentimentality versus sentimentality, our narrator loves her family, deeply. Even her father, maybe even his slut. In her recounting of events, she's oddly protective of her mother. You can be, I think, factual (such a fluid word, makes one love English) and sentimental. I think it's one of the things that makes domestic drama so powerful. You will say anything and everything behind closed doors, but there's a public face that must be maintained.

I find that some of the smaller characters remain with me. Bonnie's boyfriend. Could have been so much more perverted than he was. The Slut, who sometimes seemed to be flailing in a pool she didn't mean to enter. Ma Mere, who, ultimately, was just an old lady and couldn't explain that to the kids who were scornful of her.

Circling back to craft, the story's style is skillfully maintained. Matt discussed the fragmentary structure of the style, and that's a large part of it. Murphy's voice is spot on as well. The first person narrator, who carefully speaks of "we" and talks about "our" various things. It is the voice of a child because it is, to me, the voice of a child parroting the words of her parents. We do this, we do that. We mustn't bother our brother. We should ask our mother. Did you notice the style right away or did it just flow into you naturally?

Impressions, Voices, Fragments

I'm in the perfect position to talk about lasting impressions of Here They Come, because it was the first of the nominees I read this quarter, and despite my best intentions (and oh, do I have a lot of those!), I haven't had a chance yet to reread it.  I've read a lot of things since reading HTC, and what I have held onto from Murphy's book is the narrative voice, which seemed to me to perfectly capture an adolescent tone, which many books with young narrators don't quite get, falling into an adult nostalgia or patronizing simplicity instead. I'm not a big fan of books written in a voice that seeks to recreate exactly how an adolescent would write the book, and I was grateful Murphy didn't go for that approach, but instead chose a heightened lyricism that, paradoxically, felt truer to me to the experience of being young than a more realistic voice would have.

One of the other strong elements of HTC; for me is its fragmentary structure, which supports the impressionistic voice and allows Murphy to let the story wander around, to be a collection of moments and thought-dreams. The chapters are short, and each chapter is made up of sections that are seldom more than a few paragraphs long. In some books, such a form feels like the result of a writer who spends more time watching TV than reading books, but it didn't feel so to me here, because plenty of other elements ground the book -- recurring settings and characters, a consistent voice -- and from the very beginning the sentences tell us that this is a lyrical book, a book that uses a surrealistic tone to convey a realistic story.  Lots of people have said that good fiction makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar, and what has stuck with me most about Here They Come is how well Murphy found techniques to do exactly that.

Here They Come discussion continues: A sentimental question, and characters great and small.

Kassia, I find it funny that you praise the novel for its lack of sentimentality right after I assert that it is “baldly sentimental” at points. This is interesting; can we both be right?

Certainly, I understand what you mean in terms of the 13-year-old narrator (and you remember correctly, she goes unnamed). She is so blunt and level-gazed in her observations. She doesn’t nice anything up. On the guy at the corner grocery who passes her free groceries: “[H]is nose is huge and red and usually has a ripe white pimple on it” — and he gets off easy. Nor does she milk us for sympathy. When the hotdog vendor John is feeling her tits, she coolly sits on his lap and considers how much feel time he should get in exchange for a couple free hotdogs. Shrugs, gets off, wanders up the street.

And yet, I’d maintain that any novel that repeats the exclamation “Fuck, what a dog!” about the family pet is probably going to register as at least a little sentimental. That’s not a diss, by the way. It’s part of what I responded to, that brew of deadpan and emotion. It’s hard to put this into words, but there’s a summoning feeling to this book, as if the author were less interested in telling a discrete story (“here’s how an unnamed 13-year-old girl got fondled, got free hotdogs and got a life”) than she is in calling up an entire epoch (“here’s the whole sprawled constellation of who we were and what it was like”).* And part of that summoning comes out as extravagant emotion. There’s this repeated motif of the kids in the family drowning (or seeming to drown) while swimming — not much of a leap there to metaphor — and the dog rushing out to save them. How could you not then exclaim over such a dog?

You also mention the many characters great and small that populate this novel. There are so many, aren’t there! I loved the narrator’s mother (“merde!”) as well as her sisters — an affinity for deadpan, it’s nice to see, is a family trait — and her temperamental older brother. Beyond their immediate family cluster, John the hotdog vendor stands out for me (and from him, a sense of all the hotdog guys on their corners) — I found him repulsive and moving at the same time. Ma mère, the boozy French grandmother, belted to a chair. Manolo, Rena. Which character(s) stood out for you?

* There are a few places where the point of view in the novel shifts from this strong first-person narrator to follow other characters. We go with the brother and the slut to Spain, for example, and we get the mom’s p.o.v. on a date, I believe. For me, these shifts added to the epoch-ness of the book, the sense that it's calling up multitudes. 

Another, related explanation about these p.o.v. shifts comes from an Amazon reviewer, who makes this great observation, “[The book] reads like a lucid dream of childhood, the sort in which events that you were only told about seem equally as real as things you participated in directly.”

Of Horses and Stallions

I like that description -- a demented New York cousin of I Capture The Castle. What first struck me about the novel is what has remained with me. I suspect I'm going to state this badly, but it was the lack of sentimentality. Our intrepid narrator (is she ever named? I cannot recall if she was) never succumbs to sentimentality, it's all so matter-of-fact.

But even with her dry, sometimes dispassionate, narration, so much information is imparted. You know how they say that babies just lie there, taking it all in? That's the best way I can describe the detailed recitation of facts and impression.

Grooms chop carrots into feed tubs, and further on down the shed row black hot walkers can be heard singing about how they will walk and talk with Jesus one of these days. Our father films a race and asks Louisa and me to go near the rail and take sound of the horses' hooves galloping by. In front of us a horse breaks down. While others continue galloping, this horse stumbles forward on its knees. There is blood coming out of its nose and it is breathing hard. We know they will come and take it to the blue room and give it an injection and put the horse down. It's called the blue room because it's really just four walls with no ceiling. What the horse sees before it dies is the blue of the sky...

It's funny that CAAF notes the dog as a key character, because it is the stallion -- not the stallion from the scene above, but a horse ridden by a park policeman -- that I remember so clearly. This horse, our heroine is convinced, wants to help her. Would help her if he could. This horse could make it all better. I knew that longing and belief as every former horse-mad little girl knows it.

There are characters great and small in this book, and some seemed to fly by while others lingered in my mind. Were there any that stayed with you after the fact?

Here They Come Discussion Week begins

This week the LBC is hosting a discussion of Yannick Murphy’s Here They Come, a marvelous and slightly surreal novel about a young girl and her family in New York in the ‘70s. If you missed it, an introduction to the novel (including a bit of plot summary) can be found here. Today and tomorrow, LBCers Gwenda, Kassia, Matt and I will be enthusing over the book in greater detail, and we invite you to leave comments and discuss along with us. Some other folks may stop by as well, as their post-BEA torpor allows.

On Wednesday, Murphy herself is scheduled to blog here. On Thursday, she is interviewed by “Dashing Dan” Wickett. The week ends with a Segundo podcast with the author, which should be great — I believe the young correspondent was able to meet up with Murphy in person in San Francisco.

To begin: I’ve been looking forward to this discussion. I loved this novel, read it in a great rush one night (turning off the lamp around 4 in the morning) and have been trying ever since to dissect what it is that I enjoyed so much. When recommending it to people, I’ve been describing it as “a demented New York cousin of I Capture The Castle" — although I’m not sure if that description is as accurate as much as it is a shameless attempt to piggyback on people’s devotion to I Capture The Castle in order to get them to try this new book I like a lot.

What interests me about this novel is how on the one hand, the story has these almost Dickensian bones: There is a big family, not enough money in the house and not enough to eat. The narrator is hungry and often forced to head to the street where she observes various colorful characters and city scenes. There are even some baldly sentimental moments, many of them having to do with an amazing dog. And yet undercutting this sense of reading an old-fashioned story you have Murphy’s wonderfully blunt, vinegary prose, which seems to me so modern in line and diction. To choose a paragraph at random: “My father is ripping off the husks. Silk is hanging from his elbows and his forearms like tassels from a cowboy’s suede coat. His slut is amused. She’s sipping wine. Behind her in the window I can see the sun setting over the fields.”

So I’m curious to hear from my fellow discussants, what first struck you about the novel, and what has remained with you? 

LBC Party

Reminder - Quiet Week at the LBC

Just a reminder, with Book Expo at the end of this week, and a healthy percentage of LBC members attending, things will be quiet around here until Monday the 22nd, when we'll return and begin our discussion of Here They Come, the fourth spring 2006 nominee.

Meanwhile, if you haven't had a chance to listen to the three podcast interviews of the prior nominees, go back and take a listen - they are all quite interesting.