THE LITBLOG CO-OP

What Is She Doing In There?

Admit it -- you don't really wonder. You go to work every day, you say "hi" because you can't not say "hi", even on those days when you'd rather keep your head down, and if you're not carrying a clipboard, there's no way to pretend that other person isn't there. On those days, even the unrelenting dull gray of the carpet is more welcome than idle conversation -- the same conversation every day! How was traffic? Do anything interesting last night? Me? Nah. You? Nah. -- with people you forget the moment the clock strikes five. Or six, as the case may be.

So you don't wonder about her, the one who has been there forever. Unless she's a kook, then you say, "Can you believe her?" And someone else, the one who pulled you away from online poker, saying, "You've got to see this," says, "Who has the time? Who has that much time?" Because you're looking at little packs of corporate coffee, arranged in precise rows like soldiers girding for battle. The first row will be gone before nine a.m. Sacrifice. There are always losers (though, you think, if you're in early enough, you'll take one from the fourth row back; screw with their minds, that's your plan). It's coffee, you think. Isn't there more to life? This is the woman, you know, who stacks the little fake creamers into pyramids every morning. And maybe you worry just a little bit because the creamer thing is weird, but the coffee thing, should you call the cops?

You don't because it's her, because she's always doing something that causes whispers. In the meantime, that other one, the one whose cubicle is just a s'kosh off the main drag, she comes in and does her thing and leaves and comes back the next day. Someday, you think, if you think about her at all, she won't be there at all. Maybe there will be a quiet retirement, maybe hushed whispers, spreading the tale of how she was found dead. Nobody noticed, not for days, because, well, who would? Or maybe one day she didn't show up, didn't die, and nobody noticed. It's a big office. These things happen.

Never once do you think that she, that woman whose sweaters seemed from another life, though you're always thinking that it's damn cold and she looks warm, did anything of note in her life. She never found passion, never felt hot and shivery at the sight of a man -- a black man, she being so white, but, well, you don't know that she held quite radical thoughts once upon a time -- so much so that she engaged in a passionate affair. And then found the guts to confess her sins to her husband. Well, you wouldn't know the reasons why, would you? Though if you asked, maybe she would have told you the truth. Mentioned that birth control in those days, well, she was young and married and women, they had kids and birth control? It was a different time and she should have been more careful -- he should have been more careful! -- but it all worked out all right. Except for the part where she had to confess. It destroyed that little secret, that little thing she had. It was hers, but so it goes.

Her life, if you consider it all, is certainly dull. What sort of adventure, what sort of imagination, could she possibly have? Those things are for the young, the wild, the living.

What you don't know, my dear, because you never ask, even though you chat politely all the time, is that she's looking at you and not seeing lost youth. You are her current passion, her current love, the one she's pinning hopes and dreams on. This, too, shall pass, she knows. But you? You'll never know. And some day, you'll be her, just off the main drag, a curiosity if someone cares to notice you.
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What you wanted me to tell you to read the book? Read the book. Seven Loves. Valerie Trueblood. In stores now. Buy it.

Seven Loves Week and Book Giveaway!!!

Here we go: this week we’re talking about Valerie Trueblood’s debut novel Seven Loves. Here’s what’s on deck: LBC members will be posting their responses to the novel throughout the week. I’ll be posting my interview with Valerie Trueblood on Wednesday. She’ll be guestblogging on Thursday--we hope this’ll give you a chance to ask her any follow-ups you might have from the Wednesday interview (it’s a good one!)--and we’ll have a podcast of an interview with her on Friday.

To get the ball rolling, we’re turning things over to you. We have a few copies (how many? we’ll know later in the week…) of Seven Loves to give away to the best comments on these two questions:

a plot contest:
The novel tells the story of one woman's life through the story of seven "loves": not the most important people, but each one illuminates something different about her character--so, there's an office crush, or the kindly but shady van driver from the nursing home. Do you have favorite novels or stories that, by zeroing in on what seems to be a "minor" relationship, get at the heart of a character?

a structure contest:
Ulysses is set in a single day; Time's Arrow moves backward; Seven Loves gives us a parade of relationships. What's your favorite unconventionally-structured novel? What's the form and why do you love it?

Write your responses in the comments section. The shining stars among them will get a free copy of the novel!

What's Ahead

Here's what's in store at the LBC for the next three weeks. 

Our discussion of Valerie Trueblood's Seven Loves begins next week, with a group discussion, a guest blogging appearance from Trueblood, a text-based Valerie Trueblood interview (conducted by the divine Anne Fernald), and the first of three podcast interviews with our nominators and nominated authors (our ongoing collaboration with Pinky's Paperhaus and The Bat Segundo Show).

The week of January 29 has us veering down the cinematic rabbit hole: it's devoted to Stephen Graham Jones' Demon Theory, and it's more than just horror movies and footnotes.  We'll have group discussion, guest blogging, a text-based interview (conducted by the grand Mr. Wickett), and another podcast. 

Then on February 5, we'll be rolling out our Read This! pick: Ngugi wa Thiong'o's The Wizard of the Crow.  Group discussion and a podcast interview are in the cards, and there may be more.  Keep watching the skies.

We'll also be giving away a few free books at wildly unpredictable moments, perhaps unleashing contests at strange hours.  So do stay on your toes. We'll try to get some sleep if you do.  And thanks for participating with us!

Stephen Graham Jones's Demon Theory

Blame it on Dokken. Or, more specifically, George Lynch's skull and crossbones guitar.

I was never much of a horror movie fan. But in 1987, I became obsessed with Dokken's Dream Warriors video. It was the title song from the A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors film and the video featured a young Patricia Arquette in addition to the mind-blowing (at least to a 15-year-old kid in Kentucky who just wanted to rock!) guitar. After repeated viewings of that video, I rented the first three Nightmare movies and watched them, back-to-back-to-back, on the small television in my bedroom. In spite of my previous indifference, it was fascinating to watch the horror franchise morph over the course of the sequels.

So I was probably pre-disposed in some hair-metal-teenager with a VHS-video-rented-from-a-grocery-store way to enjoy Stephen Graham Jones's Demon Theory.

A three-part novelization of a feature film trilogy based on an unathorized bestseller inspired by the case notes of a doctor (who may or may not have existed) at mental hospital, Demon Theory is ambitious, challenging, quirky, not-for-everyone, humorous, and even educational if you want to learn about horror film history, the etymology of the term "BFE," the legality of three-wheelers, and the ingredients of cucumber-cream soup.

The tale begins on Halloween night when Hale and six medical school colleagues rush to his mother's aid at the dilapidated country house where his sister suffered a horrific accident years ago. The young doctors (some in lust, but none really in love) don't find Hale's mother but they do encounter the carnage, monsters, and incredible, almost unbelievable, plot twists of a mid 80's slasher flick. The book then continues through two sequels, both honoring and satirizing the gyrations needed to keep a horror film franchise alive. All the while threading footnotes upon footnotes upon footnotes.

The reclamation of those dreaded academic tools has been ongoing amongst literary hipsters for some time now. Jones continues the modern usage of footnotes as a mechanism to "layer meaning, to introduce 'play,'" into a novel about demons and death. The last word of that quote is crucial. Instead of simply using the footnotes to support the main text, in many instances, Jones uses them to playfully subvert the primary point. They often provide comic relief during lengthy scenes of violence and gore. Taken as a whole, the footnotes in Demon Theory are, among other things, a grimoire of horror film trivia and hair metal esoterica.

Twenty years after my weekend immersion in the world of Freddy Krueger, I still haven't managed to get a skull and crossbones guitar like in that Dokken clip. But I did become equally fascinated by Stephen Graham Jones's Demon Theory, absorbing the book in one marathon sitting. Now, if there was just a music video for it...

Valerie Trueblood’s Seven Loves

Next week, we’ll be talking about Valerie Trueblood’s novel-in-stories Seven Loves, my nominee for this quarter’s Read This! selection.

When I was in high school, I read Pride and Prejudice. I wanted to be Elizabeth Bennett (and thought I was well on my way) and marry Mr. Darcy. But when I read Emma, I blushed so fiercely my scalp tingled. I wanted to be Lizzie, but I was more like Emma: bossy, self-important, and headstrong. Austen had nailed me and I knew, to my discomfort, that she was great, a writer for me. I needed to attend to her: she did more than flatter me and feed my dreams; she taught me a truth about myself that I might not have seen otherwise.

Seven Loves had me blushing on the first page:

In the café, a white-haired woman is smiling at a little girl at the next table, who grins back playfully all during breakfast. The child’s mother, in a suit, silk blouse, and sneakers for the walk to work, has noticed the attention to her daughter. On the way out, she says to the older woman as they pass her table, “Should we keep her?”
The woman, May, sits very still, blank. “She is pretty cute, isn’t she?” prompts the mother in the same bright, practical voice, turning the child by the shoulders now with her fingertips.

I have been that mother, alas, “bright” and “practical,” proud to be in public and presentable with a presentable child, oblivious to the worries and preoccupations of others. Trueblood had nailed me and I was hooked.

In this opening scene, the other, May Nilsson, is the book’s center. The competent working mother disappears off-stage and we spend the rest of the chapter with May: ageing, worrying about her health, and surprised to find that she has a crush on someone at work, a blowsy divorcee.

The great and original conceit of the novel is signaled by its title: we gradually learn about May’s life through the stories of seven people whom she has loved. Some loves are central, some, while apparently peripheral, are surprisingly powerful. The prose is beautiful without being ornate. The emotions are strong and affecting. The structure, clever and complex, does not feel like a trick but like a fresh and powerful way to explore one woman’s life and loves.

If you’ve already read Seven Loves, what was the moment when the book grabbed you?

If you haven’t, do pick it up. Either way, we’ll be talking about it all next week and we look forward to your stopping back by to hear more.

WINTER 2007 READ THIS! — WIZARD OF THE CROW BY NGUGI WA THIONG’O

The Litblog Co-op is pleased to announce its Winter 2007 Read This! Selection: Wizard of the Crow by Ngugi wa Thiong’o (Pantheon, 2006). The weeks ahead will include a chat with the author and discussion of the novel by members of the LBC.

We will remind you of the other considered titles over the next two days, and have week-long discussions and posts by LBC members taking up the pros and cons of each title. Wizard of the Crow will be discussed the week of February 5, three weeks away, which you gives you plenty of time to find the book, read it, and join the discussion.

Now we present Carrie Frye, who nominated Wizard of the Crow, as she explains why you should Read This!

Appearances can be deceiving, observes a character midway in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s masterful, biting, and very funny novel, Wizard of the Crow.

Indeed, the line could serve as the motto for the “Free Republic of Aburiria,” the fictional African nation in which the novel is set. The country is under the control of a dictator, a man known simply as the Ruler, whose own political career owes something to an ability to dissemble: “He was first widely known during the colonial times for seeming meek and mild-mannered to every white man with whom he came into contact.”

Suffice it to say, the Ruler is neither meek nor mild-mannered, and Wizard of the Crow takes up at a post-colonial time where, having ascended “the mountaintop of power,” the Ruler presides over a topsy-turvy country where nothing is as it seems, a nation where the police are hard to distinguish from the thieves and crippled beggars can run when necessary.

In Wizard of the Crow, statesmanship looks a lot like stage craft. Rallies in support of the Ruler are choreographed with the care and precision of a large-scale theatrical production. However, the novel, instead of fighting the absurdity, revels in it, with story lines rife with mistaken identity, far-fetched coincidence, and characters in disguise (there is even a fake mustache or two).

This is a big, complex book — some 766 pages of story. All I hope to do here is introduce it, and I look forward to discussing it more fully with my LBC comrades — and with other readers — in a few weeks. I first heard of the novel last fall, from a New Yorker review by John Updike. Since nominating the book, Wizard of the Crow has shown up on numerous “best of the year”-type lists (including The Washington Post’s). Critical notice is wonderful, yet I worry that a book like Wizard of the Crow — a novel that is long, satirical, and set in a foreign nation that is not Ye Old Picturesque England (three strikes! ) — being more admired than read. And that would be a shame, because Wizard of the Crow is a book that deserves a large audience. I urge you to pick it up and read it.