THE LITBLOG CO-OP

Taking Chances

In Skin, Kellie Wells follows up with an aspect of writing that she had shown earlier with her short story collection, Compression Scars - she is a writer willing to take chances.  The stories of the people living in What Cheer, Kansas are not what you might typically find in novels.  As Meg Sefton so elequently put in an earlier comments section:  (Skin) " ... is about spiritual exploration, a dream world, the possibilities inherent in imagination and what is not on the surface of our lives, but what we share in our humanity and our commonality with the planet."

It is perhaps the combination of this spiritual exploration and the fact that the world has a dreamlike feeling about it, or almost a magical aspect to it, that was most surprising to me.  Wells doesn't come out and blast away with religious dogma at all.  She instead allows her various characters to explore their own individual faith and spirituality based upon their own situations.  There are teenagers, Duncan and Ivy, exploring their burgeoning relationship, while dealing with the fact that Duncan is a living time bomb based on the compression scars his body has as a result of an earlier accident.  There is also Charlotte McCorkle, slowly losing it and believing that she is responsible for the death of her husband, even though he's not dead, but instead in a nursing home across town.  Wells also has a Deacon hitting the wall in terms of accepting his life and faith, a highly imaginative little girl and her mother and grandmother and their interactions, and others - and each brings something to the table in terms of exploring faith and spirituality.

Wells brings all of these together and does so with language and a vocabulary that challenges the reader.  She infuses her writing with many biological terms and phrases that sent me wandering to dictionary.com more than a few times.  She also has a great hand at metaphors and similes, which I tend to enjoy.  An example:  "The sparse and occasional vegatation that poked through the otherwise bald ground looked like two days of beard growrth sprouting on a lumpy, featureless face."

The combination of the writing, the unique topics Wells points her readers towards, and the risks she takes in her fiction are what kept my attention once I began reading Skin, and kept it there through the end of the book and further.

LBC Podcast #1: Edie Meidav

Nominator:  OGIC

Nominee:  Edie Meidav, Crawl Space (also featuring the amazing Scott Esposito!)

Subjects Discussed:  Dancing about architecture, Humbert Humbert, antiheroes, character names and wordplay, Nabokov, the memory of environment vs. its inevitable change, balancing secondary characters against a complex protagonist, the real-life inspiration for the wastrels, writing in sheds, various notions of "crawl space," cross-graphs, visual elements contained within text, on being edited at FSG, "throwing out crazy trees," discarded subplots, drowning babies, mining abandoned material vs. moving forward, and introducing loaded guns in the first act.

Backup Link:  (MP3)

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

the nobility of your endeavor

Dear Litbloggers of the Coop varietal,

thanks to you and Ed Champion for the invitation to guest-blog.

I must tell you, first, my great appreciation of your individual and shared endeavors. Somehow a half-remembered quotation by Henry James comes into my head, something stoical and grand and, surprise, Jamesian about doing this labor one does, in the dark, for its own good. "We labor in the dark --" etc. Unless I'm misremembering it, which is not altogether unlikely. More significantly: this recent immersion I have had, within the world of your individual and collective blogs, makes me more optimistic than I have felt in a long time about the state of writing, reading, and the intelligence of at least a good sector of the public. Which, in this time of crazed aggression, makes this despairing pacifist somewhat cheerful. We may go down grasping our vases in Vesuvius or whatever, but at least we're raising aloft some kind of thing of beauty -- with our last gasp of vitality or community.

I always loved what Benedict Anderson says in his book IMAGINED COMMUNITIES (with its title that gives away the thesis) about the stitching-together of readers each book does. When I gave readings from my first novel, THE FAR FIELD, for whatever reason, apart from acquaintances and friends and so on, my audience tended toward being composed of lonely older bearded men with glowing eyes and brilliant and teenage savants (perhaps tending toward the socially challenged end of the spectrum) with their thumbworn copies at hand: so why was that?

And do I reveal too much with the foregoing?

Last night, when reading at Book Passage near San Francisco, I chose not to do my standard paperback-tour reading schtick for CRAWL SPACE and instead, for my own listening pleasure, chose to moderate a panel of some smart friends/literary acquaintances, calling the event, perhaps too glibly, Dispatches from Dystopia. Sylvia Brownrigg (whose great book THE DELIVERY ROOM should be published in the States, but apparently is too dark for us Americans, despite its great reviews in England; Carolyn Cooke, whose THE BOSTONS is one of my all-time favorites; and Joshua Braff, who is working on a new novel after his comic debut with THE UNTHINKABLE THOUGHTS OF JACOB GREEN).

Book Passage treats its writers as royalty, and when you're done with your reading, the booksellers present you with a giftwrapped box containing a massive amount of stationery embossed with your name. I haven't had embossed stationery since I was a thirteen-year-old, and seeing the gift made me remember, again, how the impulse to write came out of my love of reading, yes, that whole thing you all know about, the private intimacy of being close to someone else's soul through his/her words, but the desire to write also came out my love of all things related to letter-writing. As a wee girl of the sea-monkey breed of optimism, I wrote letters to so many people. As I read all your blogs, I think most bloggers must share this love of letterwriting, finding your ideal readers and so on.

Never mind imagined -- with this Litblog Coop, there is a real community you have stitched together: cross-referential, intertextual, alive with personality -- and it is impressive. With a kind of samizdat spirit, and despite the toppling towers of books you must have deskside, all from hungry publishers (which could make books start to seem like so much detritus, as I remember from the days when I worked as copy editor/book reviewer at certain unnamed New York publications), you make books matter again. And do so by coopting the very medium which was supposed to spell the demise of books. (I felt this, as well, btw, when I had live conversations with your Ed Champion and Scott Esposito, a document of which I think Ed is posting online in this space or in www.edrants.com tomorrow.)

While I've taught writing for years, in New York and Sri Lanka and California, I have in darker moments wondered, when among writing students, whether all we teachers of "writing" "workshops" perpetrate a mad hoax, some kind of folie au groupe, or however one wants to put it; that our students will end up having a reading public. A reading public?

Though the optimist in me tends to feel every book will find its rightful readership somehow, the darker side makes me quote this thing I believe Don Delillo said (sorry for my faulty memory -- I'm writing offline, having stolen away from moving boxes to a loud cafe for the morning) about how, in an era when the terrorist has coopted the narrative space, writing in the margins of a dying art (the novel) gives one greater freedom.

I see such promise in so many of these writing students who are coming up, with their apocalyptic or tribal ideations, and generally feel hopeful about whatever next book they or I or anyone else I love will write, all premised on an idea that there will be a warm world of readers awaiting. So: your work as bloggers helps me speak a bit more in good faith, whether to the other writers or to myself. No kidding.

Okay, that little homage to the smartness of your work from this one appreciative writer aside, I will be able to respond more specifically to some of the more recent comments on CRAWL SPACE which I've read on the actual LitBlog site once I can get online later today. We're in the middle of a move from California to New York, which is one part of the delay (Ed had suggested I do this litblog Thursday and Friday of this week).

For now, please know that everything I've read that you've written -- whether positive or questioning -- has been incredibly useful for me: the depth with which you have been considering my odd character Emile Poulquet, and the implications of the aesthetic choices I made while writing CRAWL SPACE, makes me want to send a thank-you note to each of you on some kind of stone tablet, never mind any fancy embossed notecard.

Because why do we write if not to communicate? What's behind this graphomaniacal compulsion? And therefore: how satisfying to be traveling the diverse geography of your blogs, with all their questing vales and ecstatic peaks. Seriously. This sounds naive but so what -- before, I had read litblogs in a kind of random, glancing way, but having explored all of your, I now feel I discovered some Middle Kingdom, or, say, the multi-tiered world of dwellers beneath the New York subways.

Whew, that was a mouthful. Sorry for the logorrhea!

And -- with great respect for you and your enthusiasms, and to your continued thriving,

Edie (Meidav)*

*though I wish I had a 40s-ish title like your OGIC, Our Girl in Chicago, but as I'm in northern California right now and returning to upstate New York this week, what could it be? Our Girl of Dystopia? And anyway, can one self-dub as OUR girl? I think not, right?

Crawl Space: the evil inside

A few of us have noted here that Emile Poulquet is evil. Lucky for him, he’s constructed a history for himself that omits the reality of his Vichy functionarydom -- late in the book, when he reveals he sent his best friend to the camps, he cannot express regret:

I did not think through the implications of my checkmark. But my pen was capable and confident. Israel Horwitz Lisson. I checked it. A single stroke of the pen. . That was all.

He is definitely evil. But as OGIC noted, Poulquet is also charming and old-world and a fascinating narrator.

Yet it seems to me that the book does much more than reveal Poulquet’s inner workings. As it opens, he has skipped out on his trial: he is evading authorities, broke, connecting with no one for fear of being detected. He’s fallen into the same circumstances as the Jews in his Vichy prefecture. “Crawl Space” the title refers not just to Poulquet’s late hideout, but to his life lived after WWII: marginal, watchful, dark and cold.

Could it be that Poulquet’s real punishment has been his post WWII life? Did Poulquet stop being human when he checked those names? Does he deserve the opportunity to “get some living in” that the wastrels provide him? If Poulquet is evil, is the resistance fighter who executed his compatriots less so? Does one wastrel kid's betrayal of Poulquet have any moral connection to Poulquet's betrayal of thousands of Jews, or is it justice, or both?

For me, these questions make Crawl Space, which is a beautifully written work, all the more engaging.

For want of a nail...

• For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
• For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
• For want of a horse the rider was lost.
• For want of a rider the battle was lost.
• For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
• And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

Our Girl in Chicago (I like spelling out OGIC on occasion) has really eloquently laid out the complexities of this ambitious novel. Asking readers to identify with a “bad” person is not a new tactic. We willingly do it in Lolita, as OGIC notes. Still, it tests our ethics.

In one of several subplots, the narrator and war criminal meditates on the apparent madness of a local resistance hero. Did he really turn bad? Was his turn connected to ergotism (a madness caused by eating grain infected by the fungus ergot, I learned)? Was that ergotism linked to Emile’s own actions as a local official?

Of all the things that he is responsible for, this one is more of a stretch than many others. After all, he enthusiastically orders the deportment of dozens, hundreds, of Jews. Still, he meditates on his own complicity (and guilt) here. As in the old nursery rhyme “For want of a nail,” perhaps for want of good flour, the resistance leader was lost. While Emile doesn’t mourn this, we are meant to see the link and to think about the reach of Emile's guild.

Part of the diabolical nature of this meditation on complicity, however, is that it works the other way, too. Emile’s skill in wondering if he’s responsible for Paul’s madness is partly egotism. And his self-justification works in the same way. Over and over again, he wonders how things might have changed if he had not been teased by Paul’s wife, Arianne, in the schoolyard. The cruelty he suffers in boyhood is another kind of nail, digging at him, spurring him on, offering him an excuse.

All of this has got me thinking about the ethics of fiction. How far are you willing to follow a narrator? What makes an exercise in sympathy for the devil into art? What keeps it a mere exercise? Do you have a favorite anti-hero or one so evil he (or she) made you turn away?

Scattered thoughts on Crawl Space

Good morning! OGIC here. I first posted about Edie Meidav’s Crawl Space over there. Herewith are a few further observations that didn’t make the cut for that first post.

• Emile Poulquet's mind, though warped and morally atrophied, is also quick and discriminating and very richly responsive to whatever he encounters. So Meidav gives us the enlightening spectacle of his old-world, very nearly premodern sensibility making sense (or sometimes not making sense) of, for instance, punked-out homeless teenage girls—or show us his highly xenophobic mind encountering people from other places whom he finds he not only likes, but needs—and further contradictions. All of these encounters are fascinating. And since Emile's mind is so sharp, and he is very feeling on certain registers, you feel acutely the waste and the shame. This may seem strange, but one book I have thought about in relation to Crawl Space is Lolita, only because of the way in which both books' narrators are such perverse and troubling characters and at the same time such fascinating, charming, and erudite guides to their own emotional damage.

• One of the guiding interests is of course to find out what makes Emile tick—someone who could do what he has done, consigning thousands to deportation and probable death. It's not primarily a question of why he did it—though we are certainly interested in that, and we get glimpses of the constellation of experiences, the feelings, and especially the lacunae of feeling, that made his actions during the Occupation possible. It's also a question of how having done that then affects someone: the processes of guilt, self-justification, and simply imposing some kind of sense on a world that vehemently renounces you. For Emile, accepting that judgment would void him of a self.

• The subject matter of Meidav's novel is so sensitive and demands so much attention—just to answer the question of why you want to read a book told from the perspective of this kind of person, with all the associated risks (i.e., you might empathize with the person)—that it’s easy to neglect to say how beautifully this novel is crafted. I'm afraid my post last week did give this quality short shrift. When I reread this book in preparation for posting about it, as I do when I’m reading a book for review, I kept a running list of pages with particularly beautiful or striking things, and my list for Crawl Space goes on and on and on. The character is witheringly snobbish, but he’s a funny and perceptive snob. The way Meidav has occupied this figure and imagined his experience is astonishingly meticulous and absolutely engaging.

• This spring, while rereading Crawl Space, I saw the Jean-Pierre Melville film Army of Shadows, which was made in 1969 but released in the US for the first time this year. It is about people working underground for the French Resistance, the other side of the wartime story that Meidav’s novel tells. It's a devastating film that shows how thoroughly that shadow fight against the occupation forces brutalized these people—it required that they become remorseless, even vicious, at any hint of betrayal. The people in the film are heroes, yet it is unclear what they are achieving in real terms, and along the way their fight kills or dehumanizes them—or both. It’s the other side of the coin from Emile Poulquet’s story. And in fact, some of the most interesting material in the novel is its view of the Resistance from the point of view of a collaborator. Emile is acquainted with some key Resistance figures, and moreover romantically obsessed with one. At a critical point in his history, these acquaintances actually help get him his job as prefect, imagining that he sympathizes with their cause and will use his authority to help their efforts. They couldn’t be more wrong. He not only won’t put himself at risk, he finds their politics to be so much moral puffery. So the book and the film turned out to be a thought-provoking set of companion pieces.

I would love to hear from anyone who has read the novel or is reading it now—the comment box is open for business!

Contest Winner Named

If you recall back at the beginning of the Spring 2006 Read This! Discussion period, we posted a notice that everybody that participated in the discussions of the five books that were nominated would be eligible for a random drawing - the winner of which would receive a full set of the five titles.

Out of the many folks leaving great comments during that those discussions, Rebecca Jane is the one whose name was the one pulled and she will soon be receiving copies of the five books!  Thanks to everybody who joined the conversation last time around - here's hoping we'll see the same level these next four weeks.

Skin by Kellie Wells

I first became aware of Kellie Wells' writing just before she was awarded the Flannery O'Connor Short Fiction Award from the University of Georgia Press for her story collection, Compression Scars.  I made sure to order a copy of it at the time, and consider it one of the best story collections that I've read in the past decade.

Wells has an ability to merge religious confusion and moral ambiguities, and then toss in a biological element seamlessly that strikes me as very interesting.  The title story of that collection is actually included within Skin as a single chapter, very early on.  And the compression scars of this title are an indication of what to look for in Wells' writing - an affinity for what is going on beneath the skin as she often writes about blue skin, veins, organs deep inside the body, and the flowing of blood. 

Skin is set in What Cheer, Kansas, and is part of the University of Nebraska Press' Flyover Fiction Series, celebrating writing of the Midwest.  The novel is set up so that each chapter is told from one, or occasionally two, of seven characters' perspectives.  While setting her novel in what one might assume would be a pretty plain location, Wells has given her readers some interesting characters - Duncan, a boy with compression scars across his body, just waiting for the moment they decide to expand and end his life;  evangelist Ansel Dorsett, a deacon suffering what appears to be a mid-life crisis; Charlotte McCorkle, who believes she's killed her husband, though he's across town in a nursing home; and then there's Ruby Tuesday Loomis, the child who dreams of fruit growing from her body.

Between this group, Wells conjurs up a story that is a bit magical, a bit fantastical, and at times possibly more surreal than some readers will enjoy - but she does so with a lyricism and vocabulary that is a joy to bounce through.  While allowing things to perhaps extend a little too far mysteriously, she reigns the story back in with her title's motif of Skin being  both what that which keeps us whole, as well as that which makes us vulnerable. 

She is a writer willing to take some chances - both in her story, and in her language - a trait I believe deserves a little attention.

After the jump is a small excerpt from Skin - please come back the week of July 31 - August 4 when we'll be discussing Kellie's novel.

White Spirit by Paule Constant

Not surprisingly, I suppose, my choice was again for a work in translation, Paule Constant's White Spirit. I was not familiar with Constant's work, and one of the things that made me curious about it was the fact that she is apparently very well-known and highly regarded in France -- Prix Goncourt winner, etc. etc. Prize-winning doesn't necessarily mean all that much, but I find it interesting how the highly regarded in one culture translates (or doesn't) in another. (Several of Constant's books are available in English, but even I hadn't come across more than her name, which suggests to me a continuing obscurity.)

What attracted me to the book was also that it promised to offer a different look at the colonial experience. I certainly wasn't disappointed in that regard: White Spirit is a black comedy which doesn't try too hard to be 'about' colonialism but goes after and easily hits all the obvious (and some of the less obvious) targets along the way.

Among the biggest differences with American satire is in the approach to class and capitalism. We're used to consumer-excess satire in the US, but Constant puts the focus on a different level. The driving engine of the feeble economy in the book is the banana industry, though in Constant's world there is no demand for it abroad, leaving behind "a banana anarchy, a banana menace, throwing the ecology, the economy, and society into disarray". The exploitation of the plantation workers, and their final revenge is also nicely handled in the book, as one of the storylines running through it.

The store that the young innocent, Victor, is entrusted with running -- African Resource ! -- is worse than a joke, the last pit of capitalism, a garbage dump where what is not only useless but downright dangerous is unloaded on consumers willing to buy literally anything (because there is almost nothing else): capitalism simply for its own sake (and to the obvious detriment of the consumers caught in it). The contrast with the enterprising local, Queen Mab, who sets up her store under the overhanging roof, is also a clever one: she sells useful things -- but only in the smallest quantities: "flour by the spoonful, beans by the piece", etc.

Constant won me over with her opening scenes, the grandmother who raised Victor preparing him for his great adventure abroad. In these scenes -- the suit she buys, paying their respects to her employers -- she captures a specific ordered way of life that we, the readers, can see as misguided but that nevertheless works on some level -- the glue that holds this society together. Class is a big part of it, and one of Victor's problems is, of course, that his adventure promises to transcend these boundaries -- he's to be a director of a branch of African Resource ! -- but it's not that simple (and too good to be true). (I wonder how much of a barrier this is to American readers, who don't have these class hang ups (or consciousness) .....).

Constant's sweep is broad and relentless. I was worried that the 'White Spirit' idea (a caustic substance that whitens skin) would dominate too much, but it's really only a fairly small part of the book: the white spirit she's writing about is everything the Europeans have brought (and some of what they've left behind). And she brings it all together well, such as the religious influence -- the proselytizing Father Jean mutating into the abomination that is Brother Emmanuel (the priest's refusal to baptize Emmanuel leading him to take drastic action -- with all its perverse results), a white spirit (as the religion brought to the area was) turned on itself, adapted to a place it does not belong (leading, of course, to the baptism of the monkey ...).

I had some concern about the monkey (on the cover, and a prominent part of the book description), but I shouldn't have. There are two monkeys, actually, and while their fates are a bit hard to take (Constant doesn't let much of a sentimental streak show, and her 'Happy End' (so the last chapter) doesn't extend all that far) she uses them well. As with all her ideas she doesn't overdo it, not trying to milk an idea (be it the local bordello, African Resource, or the monkey(s)) to death. (Readers will also be happy to hear that Constant re-uses some characters in some of her other books, and Alexis is apparently released from his fate in another novel !)

Victor is perhaps too much of an innocent in this world (and book) -- too simple a character -- and Constant's approach too episode-based, but the resulting larger tapestry impressed me greatly: a different world and different perspective than I'm used to, and the detail and invention is very well done.

CRAWL SPACE by Edie Meidav

Laura Demanski, otherwise known as OGIC of About Last Night, discusses her Summer 2006 nomination of Edie Meidav's Crawl Space.

Some antiheroes are more anti than others. Emile Poulquet, the antihero of Crawl Space, is a Vichy war criminal and an absolute of his kind. Poulquet is a man divided along seemingly a hundred internal fault lines, and so too will be the reader of Edie Meidav’s rich and troubling novel, a searching inquest into the banality of evil. A provincial bureaucrat during the French Occupation, Poulquet was complicit in the deportation of thousands to Nazi death camps. Now, decades later, his face surgically altered, his conscience rattled but intact, he is on the run from the authorities and drawn like a moth to a flame to his old prefecture of Finier.

Poulquet is not clearly remorseful; if guilt dogs him at all, it manifests itself in self-pity and what he calls a cousin to guilt, the desire for vindication. “What did that mean, anyway, ashamed,” he asks. “Shame depends wholly on others. Who cared if I toted shame around like some battered private trophy, proof of my inner good, my bewildered soul? Wasn’t it more heroic to wander the world lacking an audience, the society of brothers and sisters which shame and its absolutions automatically offer the renegade?” Indeed, his crimes are so great and his name so despised that it's hard to imagine anyone in his position could own them directly and fully. Poulquet's relationship to personal agency is so troubled that he carries around a small pendulum to decide everyday questions such as where to go and what to eat. His relationship to his hated name is similarly fraught; as the novel proceeds, he increasingly refers to himself in the third person and scrambles to remove instances of “I” from the last will and testament he carries around with him. Meidav depicts with authority—with virtuosity and unlikely beauty—the gnarled consciousness and wizened moral sense of this unrepentant war criminal, who loathes himself and his pursuers in equal measures but in different modes. It's a thoroughly haunting portrait.

While his actions are surely monstrous, Poulquet's inner thoughts and justifications are not so much those of a moral monster as those of a moral idiot. Looking back on his guilt decades later, he remembers his actions as those of, simply, an official excelling at his desk job: "I started to authorize the deportation of those possessing even just an eighth of jewish blood in their veins. And how many families there were! In this manner, our numbers grew, our totals swelled. Soon enough, we heard compliments of our office from Bordeaux."

Poulquet lacks all capacity to draw a connection between the abstract numbers in his ledgers and actual human lives; indeed, his willing abetment of mass murder seems spurred by what is absent in him rather than by any positive quality of viciousness or hatred. Certainly, his festering French nativism and anti-Semitism reinforce the choices he has made, but they don’t seem to motivate those choices nearly as much as the simple allure of doing what is expected of him, not making waves. “It had been encoded in our national ethics as a point of pride, the requirement to be a good bureaucrat,” he says in his defense.

And yet on other registers this moral idiot is educated, clever, refined, even charming. And the novel he tells, while wrenching and discomfiting, is a glittering, seductive piece of writing even as it puts the reader in the tenuous position of entering into this warped but inviting consciousness. Every turn of phrase is precise and many are surprising and beautiful. A relationship between Poulquet’s silver tongue and his moral emptiness is possibly suggested: as a born bureaucrat who puts his work of counting, compiling, and recording above all larger considerations, Poulquet is focused on the details at the expense of the big picture, on abstractions at the expense of the real things they represent. The names he processed as prefect “became like alphabet blocks to me, items to be stacked or eschewed, the satisfaction of order in the signing away of names, in the cross-checking of lists, the tearing-off of the carbon sheet, the procedure we had developed, the inky scent of returned carbon copies, the commendations from Bordeaux and even Vichy, our hay-colored padded envelopes and well-shined filing cabinets all placing me firmly in the center of a certain universe.” There is a rigid beauty to be found in the details, and this is in some sense an aestheticizing disposition.

At the same time, Poulquet is terribly capable of empathy and protectiveness toward individuals he knows personally, such as the Jewish mistress who became a pawn in his power struggle with two members of the Resistance. Why “terribly” capable? Because his feeling moments make trouble for the reader, who would prefer a simpler villain. Not so. Capable of love, Poulquet is also capable of being betrayed. His flight from trial and likely conviction is also a flight toward the woman he has always been obsessed with, Arianne. It is to find her that he travels to Finier, where he finds shelter and friendship—something like home—with a motley group of vagabonds who call themselves the Wastrels. When his betrayal occurs, it is piercingly painful despite being, beyond any doubt, far less punishment than he deserves. It is disturbing to feel so keenly the pain of someone like Poulquet. But Poulquet’s broken life, his moral myopia and the ravages it has facilitated, themselves provide the measure of why it’s human to do so.

This is a brave and spellbinding novel.