Category: Literature

Read (and Listen to) Another Unpublished Fragment from David Foster Wallace

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Yesterday, we linked to an unpublished fragment by David Foster Wallace, and included the original audio from which it was transcribed. The Chief Howling Fantod himself, Nick Maniatis , was kind enough to point out that the fragments have been available for a few years now thanks to the transcription efforts of Matt Hale. You can get the pdf here, but we’ve gone ahead and reproduced our favorite section of the fragments (the audio is great too).

2nd FRAGMENT (Different boy mentioned in this; utterly different boy)

It is this boy who dons the bright-orange bandolier and shepherds the really small ones through the crosswalk outside school. This is after finishing the meals-on-wheels breakfast tour of the hospice downtown, whose administrator lunges to bolt her office door when she hears his cart’s wheels in the hall. He has paid out-of-pocket for the steel whistle and the white gloves held palm-out at cars while children who did not dress themselves cross behind him, some trying to run despite WALK DON’T RUN, the happy faced sandwich board he also made himself. The autos whose drivers he knows he waves at and gives an extra-big smile and tosses some words of good cheer as the crosswalk clears and the cars peel out and move through, some joshing around a little by swerving to miss him only by inches as he laughs and dances aside and makes faces of pretended terror at the flank and rear bumper. The one time that station wagon didn’t miss him really was an accident and he sent the lady several notes to make absolutely sure she knew he understood that and asked a whole lot of people he hadn’t yet gotten the opportunity to make friends with to sign his cast and decorated the crutches very carefully with bits of colored ribbon and tinsel and adhesive sparkles and even before the six weeks the doctor sternly prescribed, he’d given them away to the children’s wing to brighten up some other less lucky and happy kid’s convalescence and by the end of the whole thing he’d been inspired to write a very long theme to enter into the annual Social Studies theme competition about how a positive attitude can make even an accidental injury into an occasion for new friends and bright new opportunities for reaching out to others and while the theme didn’t even get honorable mention he honestly didn’t care because he felt like writing the theme had been its own reward and he’d gotten a lot out of the whole nine-draft process and was honestly happy for the kids whose themes did win awards and told them he was 100-plus percent sure they deserved it and that if they wanted to preserve their prize themes and maybe even make displayed items out of them for their parents, he’d be happy to type them up and laminate them and even fix any spelling errors he found if they’d like him to and at home his father puts his hand on Leonard’s shoulder and says he’s really proud that his son’s such a good sport and offers to take him to Dairy Queen as a kind of reward and Leonard tells his father he’s grateful and that the gesture means a lot to him but that in all honesty he’d like it even more if they took the money his father would have spent on the ice-cream and instead donated it either to Easter Seals or, better yet, to UNICEF to go toward the needs of famine-ravaged Biafran kids who he knew for a fact had probably never even heard of ice cream and says that he bets it’ll end up giving both of them a better feeling even then the DQ would and as the father slips the coins in the coin-slot at the special bright-orange UNICEF volunteer cardboard pumpkin bank, Leonard takes a moment to express concern about the father’s facial tick again and to gently rib him about his reluctance to go in and have the family’s MD look at it, noting again that according to the chart on the back of his bedroom door the father is four months overdue for his annual physical and that it’s almost eight months past the date of his recommended tetanus and T.B. boosters. He serves as hall monitor for period’s one and two but gives far more official warnings than actual citations. He’s there to serve he feels, not run people down. Usually with the official warnings he dispenses a smile and tells them you’re young exactly once so enjoy it and to go get-out here and make this day count why don’t they. Heroes UNICEF and Easter Seals and starts a recycling program in three straight grades. He is healthy and scrubbed and always groomed just well enough to project basic courtesy and respect for the community of which he is a part and he politely raises his hand in class for every question, but only if he’s sure he knows not only the correct answer but the formulation of that answer that the teacher’s looking for that will help advance the discussion of the overall topic they’re covering that day, often staying after class to double-check with the teacher that his take on her general objectives is sound and to ask whether there was any way that his answers could have been better or more helpful. The boy’s mom has a terrible accident while cleaning the oven and is rushed to the hospital and even though he’s beside himself with concern and says constant prayers former safety, he volunteers to stay home and field calls and relay information to an alphabetized list of concerned family friends and relatives and to make sure the mail and newspaper are brought in and to keep the home’s lights turned on and off in a random sequence at night as officer Chuck of the Michigan State police’s Crime Stoppers public school outreach program sensibly advises when grown-ups are suddenly called away from home and also to call the gas company’s emergency number, which he has memorized, to come check on what may well be a defective valve or circuit in the oven before anyone else in the family is exposed to risk of accidental harm and also, in secret, to work on massive display of bunting and penance and Welcome Homeland World’s Greatest Mom signs which he plans to use the garage’s extendible aluminum ladder—with a responsible neighborhood adult holding it and supervising—to very carefully affix to the front of the home with water-soluble glue so they’ll be there to greet the mom when she’s released from the I.C.U. with a totally clean bill of health which Leonard calls his father repeatedly at the I.C.U. payphone to assure the father that he has absolutely no doubt of (the totally clean bill of health), calling hourly, right on the dot, until there is some kind of mechanical problem with the payphone and when he dials it he just gets a high tone which he duly reports to the telephone company’s new automated 1618 Trouble Line. He can do several kinds of calligraphy and has been to origami camp twice and can do extraordinary free-hand sketches of local flora with either hand and can whistle all six of Telemann’s Nouveaux Equators and can imitate any birdcall Autobahn could even ever have thought of, don’t even mention spelling bees. He can make over twenty different kinds of admiral, cowboy, clerical and multi-ethnic hats out of ordinary newspaper and he volunteers to visit the school’s K-through-2nd classrooms teaching the little kids how, a proposal the Carl P. Robinson Elementary principal says he appreciates and has considered very carefully before turning down. The principle loathes the mere sight of the boy but does not quite know why. He sees the boy in his sleep, at nightmares’ ragged edges; the pressed checked shirt and hair’s hard little part, the freckles and ready, generous smile; anything he can do. The principle fantasizes about sinking a meat hook into Leonard Steel’s bright-eyed little face and dragging the boy face down behind his Volkswagen Beetle over the rough new streets of suburban Grand Rapids. The fantasies come out of nowhere and horrify the principal, who is a devout Mennonite. Everyone hates the boy. It is a complex hatred that makes the hater feel guilty and awful and to hate themselves for feeling this way and so makes they involuntarily hate the boy even more for arousing such self-hatred. The whole thing is totally confusing and upsetting. People take a lot of Aspirin when he’s around. The boy’s only real friends among kids are the damaged, the handicapped, the slow, the clinically fat, the last-picked, the non-grata. He seeks them out. All 316 invitations to his eleventh birthday Blow-Out Bash—322 invitations if you count the ones made on audiotape for the blind—are off, sent printed on quality velum with matching high-rag envelopes addressed in ornate Philippian calligraphy he spent three weekends on and each invitation details in Roman Numerated outline-form the itinerary’s half-day at Six Flags, private Ph.D.-guided tour of the Blanford Nature Center and reserved banquette-area-with-free-play at Shakey’s Pizza & Indoor Arcade on Remembrance Drive, the whole day gratis and paid-for out of the paper and aluminum drives the boy got up at 4 a.m. all summer to organize and spearhead, the balance of the drive’s receipts going to the Red Cross and the parents of a Kentwood, MI third-grader with terminal spina bifida who dreams above all-else of seeing Landry and Greer and ‘Night Train’ Lane live from his motorized wheelchair and the invitations explicitly call the party this: A Blow-Out Bash in balloon-shaped font as the caption to an illustrated explosion of good cheer and good will and no-holds-barred, let-out-all-the-stops fun with the bold-faced proviso: Please, no presents required in each of each card’s four corners and the 316 invitations—sent via first-class mail to every student, instructor, substitute, aid, administrator, custodian and physical plant employee at C. P. Robinson Elementary—yield a total attendance of nine celebrants, not counting parents and L.P.N.s of the incapacitated, and yet an undauntedly fine time was had by all was the consensus on the Honest Appraisal and Suggestion cards circulated at party’s end. The massive remainders of chocolate cake, Neapolitan ice cream, pizza, chips, caramel corn, Hershey’s kisses, United Way and Officer Chuck pamphlets on organ tissue donation and the correct procedures to follow if approached by a stranger respectively, kosher pizza for the Orthodox, biodegradable napkins and dietetic soda in souvenir Survived Leonard Steel’s Eleventh Birthday Blow-Out Bash, 1964 plastic glasses with built-in crazy-straws the guests were to keep as mementos all donated to the Kent County Children’s Home via procedures and transport that the birthday-boy had initiated even while the big Twister free-for-all was underway, out of concerns about melted ice cream and staleness and flatness and the waste of a chance to help the less blessed and his father, driving the wood-paneled station wagon and steadying his cheek with one hand, avowed again that the boy beside him had a large, good heart and that he was proud and that if the boy’s mother ever regained consciousness as they so very much hoped, he knew she’d be just awful proud as well.

 

Read (and Listen to) an Unpublished David Foster Wallace Fragment

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Read an unpublished fragment of a story (or novel?) by David Foster Wallace at  454 W 23rd St New York, NY 10011-2157 (uh, that’s a blog, not, like, an actual physical address (although I guess it could be an actual physical address to. But, you don’t have to go there to read the story. Just click on the link. You know how the internet works, don’t you?)). Not sure who actually transcribed the piece (maybe the folks at 454?), but die-hard DFW fans will likely have heard the author read it himself. If you want to hear it, download it here (it also includes a hilarious reading (also unpublished) about a perfect boy who everyone hates). Here’s the first paragraph of the audio transcription–

Every whole person has ambitions, projects, objectives. This particular boy’s objective was to press his lips to every square inch of his own body. His arms to the shoulders and most of the legs beneath the knee were child’s play but after these areas of his body, the difficulty increased with the abruptness of a coastal shelf. The boy came to understand that unimaginable challenges lay ahead of him. He was six.

The Ask — Sam Lipsyte

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I listened to the audiobook version of Sam Lipsyte’s hilarious, wistful, mean, and devastating novel The Ask last week. I invented chores and took any scenic route available when driving to get more of the book faster, frequently laughing out loud, or grimacing, or even feeling weird and shameful pangs of remorseful identification with the book’s protagonist and narrator, Milo Burke. I’m going to do my best to unpack the book’s themes–particularly the way it simultaneously eulogizes, valorizes, and mocks the American Dream–but first I need to get something out-of-the-way, a mea culpa of sorts.

As I mentioned, I listened to the book, but I don’t have a copy, so, shamefully, I can’t really quote any of Lipyste’s marvelous sentences. He is a master stylist, capable of zapping our dead modern idioms with the kind of alarming twists that highlight just how vacant language has become. Lipsyte also has a gift for rhythm, tone, and cadence, and he’s a master of the deadpan punchline. While the sentences in his last novel Home Land sometimes felt overly fussed over, straining under their own polish, The Ask showcases an effortless style that both seduces and repels. Lipsyte reads The Ask audiobook himself, yet lets the tone and cadence of his words dictate the tone and timbre of his voice. It’s all very good. And you’ll have to just take my word for all that as I have nothing to quote now (I’m sure I’ll re-review the book when I pick it up in paperback, though).

The plot is rather thin: Milo Burke, who once aspired to being a celebrated painter, now works for the grants department of a mediocre liberal arts college. His job, essentially, is to beg wealthy parents and alumni to donate massive gifts of cash to the school — this is “the ask.” Or rather, that was his job before he got fired for losing his cool with the spoiled brat daughter of a major patron. This leaves Milo moping around Queens, drinking too much, and pissing off the wife he is slowly becoming estranged from. Which is a shame, because he’s trying to be a good husband and father to his young son; despite his own shitty childhood–boozing, philandering father, emotionally absent mother–Milo is doing his best to give his family the American Dream. He’s more or less abandoned his own dreams of being a painter, and along with it, the weird faith he located in the various theorists–Marxists, feminists, deconstructionists, etc.–who informed his art school years. Much of the novel finds Milo pondering not just on the value (or lack thereof) in his liberal arts education, but also on the friends and anti-friends who he slummed with in those days. Just as the narrator of Home Land dwells on his high school days, Milo Burke can’t quit thinking about his college years in The Ask.

That past returns in the form of Purdy, a rich kid who slummed with Milo and his druggy art kid friends back in their college days. Purdy is incredibly wealthy even after the stock market crashes of the late 2000s, and has Milo specifically reinstated by the university to officiate an intended “give” (the answer to “the ask”). Purdy’s real intention though is to turn Milo into a kind of bag man, a go-between to deliver large sums of cash to Purdy’s caustically embittered illegitimate son Don, an Iraq War vet who’s lost both his legs to an IED. This arrangement thrusts Milo into Purdy’s surreal world of privilege and power, but also puts him into contact with a deranged, maimed, and deeply, deeply hurt young man who will, essentially, change the way that he examines the world and his role in it.

I’m now going to gloss over much of the book: there are many, many very funny situations, strange characters, and wonderful little insights. And now that theme I mentioned: the death of the American Dream.

Late in the novel, Milo calls America “Dead America.” Earlier in the novel, he complains that America never got to be Rome; that America is a dying, crumbling empire that never even got to revel in its hedonist excesses. Milo is keenly aware that his own white, white-collar, privileged, urban existence as a liberal-arts-educated American puts him in a position of greater material comfort than 99.9% of the rest of the people in the world, yet this fact does nothing to assuage his despair–in fact, it exacerbates it. Milo is ashamed of his despair, too-cognizant of its implications. His shame becomes a meta-, self-referential shame, and it leads to Milo essentially surrendering any power or agency he might have claimed in the universe. His liberal arts education and his own sensitivities render him feckless and bitter, always grumbling over the cosmic injustice of modern, Dead America. He is a walking, rambling critique of power, yet–as his wife likes to point out–he never does anything about the injustice he perceives. It’s only after interacting with Don that Milo begins to see an inroad to agency.

Don is, it must be said, a miserable, caustic human being, a racist blackmailer, and perennially cruel to anyone who extends a hand. He’s also performed the most real “give” in the novel–he’s lost his legs for Dead America, sacrificing his own mobility and freedom (those constituents of the dream) for the freedom of others, or at least for the illusion of other people’s freedom. Don’s toxic behavior makes him utterly repellent and thoroughly anti-heroic, but in Milo’s identification with the young man–and in Milo’s willingness to lose financial security and familial stability by essential siding with Don over Purdy– there is a glimmer (just a glimmer) of redemption and agency for Milo. Don embodies everything about America that Milo (and presumably Lipsyte) hates, yet he has also answered “the ask,” both literally and symbolically. The novel invokes then not just scathing ironic attack on the American Dream, but also a pity that reveals an intrinsic (and perhaps childish) wish to believe, a wish to make Dead America live again. The novel ends with Milo reclaiming (or maybe just claiming) some degree of agency, beginning with getting back an old war knife his father had given him, a clear symbol of paternal, phallic power (the kind that his liberal arts education told him was bad, bad, bad). And yet there’s no resolution, no pat answers–how could there be? Instead, the novel ends in another crisis–not Milo’s this time, but Don’s. But I won’t spoil that, because, hey, you’re going to read this now, aren’t you? Very highly recommended.

Blood Meridian Contest Winner Announced

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Big congratulations to Michael Cooke, a librarian from Flower Mound, Texas who is the winner of our Blood Meridian contest. Michael will receive a copy of the 25th anniversary hardback edition of Cormac McCarthy’s seminal anti-Western/awesome Western courtesy Biblioklept and Modern Library. Michael had the unfair advantage of being from Texas, and he totally cheated by sending in a baker’s dozen postcards, which was totally awesome. Cheating and being evil is the core of Blood Meridian. Each of Michael’s stark, garish, gritty, surreal, or just plain wicked postcards came with a wonderful corollary quote from the novel. The postcards come from Michael’s personal collection; he’s had some of them for years, and they’re from all over the place, several came from New Mexico, Cormac McCarthy’s chosen home. Here comes the weird–

“Money” — Lydia Davis

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“Money” by Lydia Davis, from Samuel Johnson Is Indignant, collected in the forthcoming volume The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis—

I don’t want any more gifts, cards, phone calls, prizes, clothes, friends, letters, books, souvenirs, pets, magazines, land, machines, houses, entertainments, honors, good news, dinners, jewels, vacations, flowers, or telegrams. I just want money.

“Three Figures and a Dog” — Roberto Ransom (A Single Sentence Animation by Andre da Loba)

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Andre da Loba animates a sentence from Roberto Ransom’s “Three Figures and a Dog.” Published in Electric Literature No. 4. Here’s the first paragraph–

He liked to be in the chapel at dawn, and also in the afternoon when something similar, though not identical, occurred. For that to happen, he had to leave home when his wife got up to milk the cow. He’d finally wake himself up by putting his hand into the bucket next to the well and wiping his face. He usually carried a loaf of bread, a piece of onion, and sometimes a little cheese, wrapped in a handkerchief. He’d leave his brushes, pencils, paints, and other tools in a corner of the chapel, behind some stones that hadn’t been used during its construction. He didn’t paint at that hour. He was waiting for the right color. He’d observe the sky and mix paints in a small clay vessel, smudging them with his finger, measuring quantities, adding water or oil or, on one occasion, wine. He imagined that if the wine was his blood and the blue of the sky he was seeking was the Virgin’s color, and the Virgin was his mother and if he and the Virgin were of the same blood, then maybe…

Albert Dubout’s Charming Illustrations for Don Quixote

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Überblog A Journey Round My Skull has posted (another) fantastic set of illustrations for Don Quixote, this time by French cartoonist and illustrator Albert Dubout. See some of our favorites below, but check out A Journey’s post for more (including a link to all 381 images from the book)–

“Riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s” — Stephen Crowe Illustrates Finnegans Wake

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First Line - Stephen Crowe

At Wake In Progress, Stephen Crowe has given himself the daunting task of illustrating James Joyce’s novel/linguistic black hole Finnegans Wake. It’s pretty cool stuff, and we love projects like these (see also: Six Versions of Blood Meridian and One Drawing for Every Page of Moby-Dick). Crowe’s site makes an interesting if different companion for the ongoing project at Ulysses “Seen.” Good luck to Stephen–keep them coming! (and thanks to @RhysTranter for sharing). More images–

Page 8 - Stephen Crowe
Page 8 - Stephen Crowe
Page 19 - Stephen Crowe
Page 16 - Stephen Crowe

The Mike Hammer Novels — Mickey Spillane

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Online auctions allow book-lovers to engage in what could be labeled “biblio-sharking.”  Some poor sap needs to clear out his basement to make room for a foosball table or a Jacuzzi, and readers take his books for an extraordinary profit. While the seller may hesitate to dispose of their treasures, I’ll readily pay negligible sums to compensate him for his losses.  So, if your rumpus room means more to you than fiction, please please please place your ads on Ebay.

Some poor mug did just that last week, allowing me to take home 18 detective novels for five clams and nominal shipping and handling charges.  Because anthologies were included in the package, I scored twenty-four books for about thirty cents apiece.  Ed Biblioklept, kept busy for weeks at a time supervising hooligans and future delinquents of America, has granted me permission to review one of my purchases, the New American Library’s collection of Mickey Spillane’s first three Mike Hammer novels—I, the Jury, My Gun is Quick, and Vengeance is Mine.

Spillane sold hundreds of millions of detective and spy stories during a long career, and the Hammer stories guaranteed him an interested and rabid following.  Although private dick Mike Hammer finds himself in any number of slippery situations, Spillane’s central character, rather than any individual plot twist, is what makes these stories both convincing and compelling.

Hammer is the archetypal square-jawed detective, but he demands that you listen to his recollections of a case because he’s clever, resourceful, and vulgar. Although indelicate by today’s standards, Hammer is a tough guy for his times, beguiling dames who are used to getting just what they want, burning through decks of unfiltered Luckies, and drinking brandy for breakfast.  What’s timeless, though, is his belief that bad guys are afforded too many protections by an impotent system of justice and that once all the pieces are put together, one extraordinary man performs a public service by putting a few slugs in the guts of murderers.  In each of these stories Hammer begins unraveling the mysteries only after someone close to him has been killed.

This was the first collection of detective stories I’ve ever finished, and each page dragged me further into a black and white world filled with villains, vixens, and corrupt politicians.  The reader becomes an unpaid extra in a B-level film noir.

Hammer explained to me, a snob, the enduring popularity of the literary detective: “You’ve forgotten that I’ve been in business because I stayed alive longer than some guys who didn’t want me that way.  You’ve forgotten that I’ve had some punks tougher than you’ll ever be on the end of a gun and I pulled the trigger just to watch their expressions change.”  Mind what you think.

Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question Wins the Booker Prize

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The Guardian and other sources report that Howard Jacobson has won the 2010 Man Booker Prize for his novel The Finkler Question. The novel, which we haven’t read, is apparently a comic piece about love, loss, Jewish identity, and male friendship. The win is perhaps something as an upset, as many folks had Tom McCarthy’s C pegged as the favorite (last week bookmaker Ladbrokes even suspended betting on the Booker after bets on C crowded out the competition). Read our review of C here.

“By the Mouth for the Ear” — William Gass on Good Writing

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More from The Paris Review’s vaults. In an interview from 1977, William Gass weighs in on the oral/aural aspects of literature–

I think contemporary fiction is divided between those who are still writing performatively and those who are not. Writing for voice, in which you imagine a performance in the auditory sense going on, is traditional and old-fashioned and dying. The new mode is not performative and not auditory. It’s destined for the printed page, and you are really supposed to read it the way they teach you to read in speed-reading. You are supposed to crisscross the page with your eye, getting references and gists; you are supposed to see it flowing on the page, and not sound it in the head. If you do sound it, it is so bad you can hardly proceed. It can’t all have been written by Dreiser, but it sounds like it. Gravity’s Rainbow was written for print, J.R. was written by the mouth for the ear. By the mouth for the ear: that’s the way I’d like to write. I can still admire the other—the way I admire surgeons, bronc busters, and tight ends. As writing, it is that foreign to me.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Death Mask

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William Burroughs Shoots William Shakespeare

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“David Was A Big Sweater” — The NYT Profiles Karen Green, David Foster Wallace’s Widow

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Dear Dr./Bolinas Lagoon -- Karen Green

The New York Times profiles Karen Green, David Foster Wallace’s widow. The article details Green’s new art show Sure Is Quiet at the Space Arts Center and Gallery in South Pasadena,California. The article is worth reading in full, of course (it’s actually quite moving), but here are some of Green’s own words from the piece, on Wallace and her art—

David was a big sweater, and I just remember the sweat marks on his pillow when I changed the cases.

. . .

I wanted to redirect my anger, which is useless and fuels nothing, by invading my own privacy and then covering it up.

. . .

There’s been so much chaotic conversation in my head . . . I’ve been thinking, thinking so much. I wanted to take all the chaotic stuff and make it quiet.

. . .

David could be the great artist in the household, I didn’t care . . . I’ve been accused by academic friends of not having the right dialogue with the art world — not being knowledgeable about what’s cool, what’s desirable out there right now. But I’d rather work at Starbucks and make what I want.

. . .

I kept making art because I didn’t know what else to do, and that’s what I’ve always done . . . I felt everyone else was so much more advanced in the grieving process.

. . .

I really was thinking about language, the power of it . . . The power of David’s work, for example, which meant so much to people. But when you get as sick as he was, everything loses meaning.

. . .

You can be charmed and fooled by language .  .  It doesn’t stop, but it’s never enough.

Angels — Denis Johnson

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Angels, Denis Johnson’s 1983 début novel, begins as a small book about not very much and ends as a small book about pretty much everything. Johnson has a keen eye and keener ear for the kinds of marginal characters many of us would rather overlook all together, people who live and sweat and suffer in the most wretched, unglamorous, and anti-heroic vistas of a decayed America. The great achievement of the novel (beyond Johnson’s artful sentences) is in staging redemption for a few–not all, but a few–of its hopeless anti-heroes.

Take Jamie, for instance. Angels opens on this unfortunate young woman as she’s hauling her two young children onto a Greyhound bus. She’s leaving her cheating husband for relatively unknown prospects, lugging her children around like literal and symbolic baggage. Jamie should be sympathetic, but somehow she’s not. She’s someone we’d probably rather not look at, yelling at her kids while she drags on a Kool. Even she knows it. Of two nuns on the bus: “But Jamie could sense that they found her make-up too thick, her pants too tight. They knew she was leaving her husband, and figured she’d turn for a living to whoring. She wanted to tell them what was what, but you can’t talk to a Catholic.” Jamie finds a closer companion, or at least someone equally bored and equally prone to drinking and substance abuse, in Bill Houston. The ex-con, ex-navy man is soon sharing discreet boilermakers with her on the back of the bus, and she makes the first of many bad decisions in deciding to shack up with him over the next few weeks in a series of grim motels.

The bus, the bus stations, the motels, the bars–Johnson details ugly, urgent gritty second-tier cities and crumbling metropolises at the end of the seventies. The effect is simply horrifying. This is a world that you don’t want to be in. Johnson’s evocation never veers into the grotesque, however; he never risks tipping into humor, hyperbole, or distance. The poetic realism of his Pittsburgh or his Chicago is virulent and awful, and as Jamie drunkenly and druggily lurches toward an early trauma, one finds oneself hoping that even if she has to fall, dear God, just let those kids be okay. It’s tempting to accuse Johnson of using the kids to manipulate his audience’s sympathy, but that’s not really the case. Sure, there’ s a manipulation, but it veers toward horror, not sympathy. (And anyway, all good writing manipulates its audience). Johnson’s milieu here is utterly infanticidal and Jamie is part and parcel of the environment: “Jamie could feel the muscles in her leg jerk, she wanted so badly to kick Miranda’s rear end and send her scooting under the wheels, of, for instance, a truck.”

Jamie is of course hardly cognizant of the fact that her treatment of her children is the psychological equivalent of kicking them under a truck. She’s a bad mother, but all of the people in this novel are bad; only some are worse–much worse–than others. Foolishly looking for Bill Houston on the streets of Chicago, she notices that “None of these people they were among now looked at all legitimate.” Jamie is soon conned, drugged, and gang-raped by a brother and his brother-in-law; the sister/wife part of that equation serves as babysitter during the horrific scene.

And oh, that scene. I put the book down. I put the book away. For two weeks. The scene is a red nightmare, the tipping point of Jamie’s sanity, and the founding trauma that the rest of the novel must answer to–a trauma that Bill Houston, specifically, must somehow pay for, redress, or otherwise atone. The rape and its immediate aftermath are hard to stomach, yet for Johnson it’s no mere prop or tasteless gimmick. Rather, the novel’s narrative thrust works to somehow answer to the rape’s existential cruelty, its base meanness, its utter inhumanity. Not that getting there is easy.

Angels shifts direction after the rape, retreating to sun-blazed Arizona, Bill Houston’s boyhood home and home to his mother and two brothers. There’s a shambling reunion, the book’s closest moment of levity, but it’s punctuated and punctured by Jamie’s creeping insanity, alcoholism, and drug addiction. Johnson’s signature humor is desert-dry and rarely shows up to relieve the narrative tension. Jamie hazily evaporates into the background of the book as the Houston brothers, along with a dude named Dwight Snow, plan a bank robbery. Another name for Angels might be Poor People Making Bad Decisions out of Sheer Desperation. Burris, the youngest Houston, has a heroin habit to feed. James Houston is just bored and nihilistic and seems unable to enjoy his wife and child and home. On hearing about the bank robbery plan, Jamie achieves a rare moment of insight: “Rather unexpectedly it occurred to her that her husband Curt, about whom she scarcely ever thought, had been a nice person. These people were not. She knew that she was in a lot of trouble: that whatever she did would be wrong.” And of course, Jamie’s right.

The bank robbery goes wrong–how could it not?–but to write more would risk spoiling much of the tension and pain at the end of Angels. Those who’ve read Jesus’ Son or Tree of Smoke will see the same concern here for redemption, the same struggle, the same suffering. While Jesusian narratives abound in our culture, Johnson is the rare writer who can make his characters’ sacrifices count. These are people. These are humans. And their ugly little misbegotten world is hardly the sort of thing you want to stumble into, let alone engage in, let alone be affected by, let alone be moved by. But Johnson’s characters earn these myriad affections, just as they earn their redemptions. Angels is clearly not for everyone, but fans of Raymond Carver and Russell Banks should make a spot for it on their reading lists (as well as Johnson fans like myself who haven’t gotten there yet). Highly recommended.

Three by Lydia Davis

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The massive new volume The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis doesn’t come out until later this month, but you can read the first three stories in the book now at Picador’s website. Read “Story,” “The Fears of Mrs. Orlando,” and “Liminal: The Little Man,” all originally published in Break It Down.

“The book educates you about the book” — NPR Profiles Philip Roth

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In case you missed it: NPR’s All Things Considered spoke with Philip Roth about his new book Nemesis earlier this week. From the profile–

Nemesis is Roth’s 31st work, and at age 77, he still continues to take risks with his narrative style. In Nemesis, he doesn’t reveal the identity of the narrator until well into the novel.

“It just dawned on me as I was writing along,” Roth explains. “The book educates you about the book.”

Though Roth developed the novel’s narrative structure unexpectedly, he was motivated to do so by a novel that continues to inspire him: Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. In the novel’s first scene, the reader is introduced to Charles Bovary, Madame Bovary’s husband-to-be, as a schoolboy. The scene is narrated by the collective voice of his mocking classmates — a voice that then disappears.

“Well, I don’t have the guts for that,” Roth says, laughing. “That’s what made Flaubert Flaubert, you know. But indeed, it is from the charm of that opening of Madame Bovary that I took my lead.”