I began writing NAME, my vampire novel, on July 7, 2010 and completed the first draft on August 7, 2010. It is 20 chapters and 125 pages. I wrote NAME to pay my rent.

~ Joseph Young

Brian Kiteley’s earlier novel Still Life With Insects has been a favorite of mine for years, but in some ways I think I liked The River Gods even more. The novel develops in fragments, traversing about 1000 years of history in a variety of voices. At first it seems to be offering a portrait of a town, but as it goes on that pictures becomes much broader until it’s a complex image of an entire country seen through a local lens — as recognizable historical figures alternate with the author’s own family and, presumably, more fully fictional narrators, Northampton, Mass. becomes embedded in national and global politics, philosophy and literature, the broader American story of destruction and violence in the name success, and cultural changes from witchcraft trials to the sexual revolution and AIDS. What the voices share is a sense of a loss — some of them are, in fact, ghosts — and a connection to Northampton whether lifelong or fleeting, whether they are in town at the time of narration or at war in Africa or traveling in France. The River Gods reminded me a great deal of Angus Peter Campbell’s Invisible Islands, another story of place told in fragments that also makes what seems at first look an out of the way, irrelevant place and establishes it at the center of a much bigger world.

The unnamed narrator of Lee Rourke’s novel The Canal sets out to embrace boredom, saying, “It is the power of everyday boredom that compells people to do things — even if that something is nothing.” That tension between boredom as drive to action and boredom as stasis was the core of the novel for me, because as the narrator tries to repeat his (in)actions each day — sitting on the same bench by the same stretch of canal, with the same woman and watching the same swans and office workers — he struggles against changes internal and external alike. There’s a recurring focus on transportation, from the airplanes he is a knowledgeable enthusiast of, to the canal itself, to cars and buses and even walking. And all of those, in one way or another, become destructive — whether on the large scale like 9/11, or more localized acts of violence. The narrator embraces boredom and aims for stasis, but he also says, “ And as our world becomes increasingly boring, as the future progresses into a quagmire of nothingness, our world will becoming increasingly more violent. It is an impulse that controls us. It is an impulse we cannot ignore.” Violence is the inevitable outcome of ANY action, even the action of inaction, and all progress and change are creeping toward destruction in time. On the other hand, DENYING boredom leads one to “superfluous activity,” eventually violent, so we’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t. The best hope is an infinite recursion of inactivity and self-extraction, such as the narrator tries to create by sitting at the canal, but unlike the static loop he manages to create in a game of Pong (probably my favorite passage of the novel), actual stasis isn’t easy to come by.

I wondered, while reading, what a truly “static” novel would feel like, how dull it might be, and what kind of action it might lead me to as a reader. Because The Canal itself ISN’T boring, ratcheting up its sparse plot and raising the stakes as the story proceeds. Maybe a story arisen from boredom cannot succeed if it is actually the enactment of boredom. Yet I was always aware that by the novel’s logic some destruction is necessitated by the actions of writing and reading — a violence against the “real” world, perhaps, committed by stripping away its trappings to create something so tidy and constrained as a novel. It never let me forget that it was constructed, not something natural, because of its nameless, mostly veiled characters (eventually represented by empty, underlined spaces where names are conspicuously absent). As readers, we demand forward momentum and the familiar trappings of drama even from a novel about avoiding them, and the tension of being suspended in such a contradiction pushes us to ask new questions and reach new ideas. Like an infinite recursion of Pong which isn’t quite a “game” any longer, and is waiting for us to find a new word.

As others have said, the pieces collected in American Gymnopédies aren’t “stories” so much as moments, perhaps the germs of stories or even the longing for stories. I liked how each moment is grounded bodily and materially, because for such short fragments most of them offer a real sense of physicality and presence and that prevents the collection from becoming too ethereal even while it is otherwise ambiguous. At the same time, most of the stories feel like moments en route to somewhere else – characters look over fences to long for what’s in the distance, they stop at hotels before reaching their real destination, and they daydream through the dark tunnel of a cereal box. So each story ends up feeling both grounded and untethered at the same time, an alluring and sometimes jarring sensation, and one that is increased by the book’s lack of geographic detail. Although each story is named for a city, there’s rarely any detail of those cities offered so I found myself wondering what about a moment was specifically “Duluth” or “Atlanta” or “Boston.” There’s an occasional street name but that’s about it, so rather than the cultural details of place we’re offered a purely experiential landscape, one in which cities only exist as our private, minute memories of and encounters with them and in which one place is more or less the same as another except for what might happen to us there (if anything does). At first that lack of clear geography felt like a missed opportunity to me, and I wished Scott Garson had made these places more particularly themselves, and though it stopped bothering me as I fell into the daydream state of the collection, that’s what I mean by a “longing” for stories. These moments almost seem to wish they meant more, or were clearer, and I felt like I was trying to make sense of a larger landscape by focusing intensely a whole bunch of individual points that may or may not be connected. My impulse as a reader was to project my own knowledge of these cities onto the stories, trying to fill in the gaps, but they resist that so firmly that I never stopped feeling adrift, and got used to the feeling instead.

The word jargon, meaning meaningless jabber, comes from the French for twittering birds. But in truth, the twittering of birds is never meaningless. The birds twitter for a reason — and it won’t be a frivolous reason. As you become more aware, you start to get a feel for the reasons for things. All natures acquires meaning. You realize then — and it is perhaps the most important thing to realize — that simply to be alive and aware in such a world as this is a privilege. If people in high places felt this, the world would be very different. You don’t have to be a pro, or even spend a weekend in a swamp, to see the truth of it. You just have to take an interest and be alert. The point of this book is to nudge people who feel in a general way that birds in particular, and nature in general, are kind of interesting to the point where they start to feel the meaning of it all. After that — well, life can never be the same again.

~ Colin Tudge, The Bird

I have met with hundreds, if not thousands of people who have formed their opinions of my appearance, habits, language, and every thing else… They have almost in every instance expressed the most profound astonishment at finding me in human shape, and with the countenance, appearance, and common feelings of a human being.

~ Davy Crockett

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People feel fame gives them some kind of privilege to walk up to you and say anything to you — and it won’t hurt your feelings — like it’s happening to your clothing.

~ Marilyn Monroe

As long as I’ve lived in West Berlin, I have treated the structure that is considered a state border over there and a tourist attraction over here as simply an inconvenience. For the first time now, I decide to visit the Wall. I see a tour group climb out of a bus and then take the stairs to the lookout tower. Up top, a few of them put binoculars to their eyes and begin waving. What they see is a tour group on the other side of the Wall just climbing out of a bus run by the same travel agency. They wave back, and people in both groups now train their sights on the watchtower standing between them. What they see there, once they’ve focused their glasses, are glasses just being focused.

~ Peter Schneider, The Wall Jumper

With all these Russian spies in the news, is anyone else thinking about those late days of the Cold War & and the Wall, and how much they still matter to who you are and how you think of the world? Maybe it’s only me, because I happened to watch this on PBS the other night.

I have left out the wattle — because it wasn’t there. I have also neglected to mention the heart-broken old mate, with his grizzled head bowed and great pearly drops streaming down his rugged cheeks. He was absent — he was probably “Out Back.” For similar reasons I have omitted reference to the suspicious moisture in the eyes of a bearded bush ruffian named Bill. Bill failed to turn up, and the only moisture was that which was induced by the heat. I have left out the “sad Australian sunset” because the sun was not going down at the time. The burial took place exactly at midday.

~ Henry Lawson, “The Union Buries Its Dead”

It was hard to read Wolf Parts without seeing the shadow of Angela Carter, who has “owned” the Red Riding Hood story for so long. Like Carter’s versions of the story in The Bloody Chamber, these fragmentary retellings by Matt Bell explore it from different angles. Power shifts from predator to prey and back again, and sexual, gender, and community identities are tried out in different combinations. Whereas Carter’s versions were more narrative and linear, Bell’s are a kind of Golberg Variations: repeated language and images tried out in different shapes, adding up to a virtuoso display much more than its individual parts might suggest. There’s also a meta-level to the stories that strikes just the right balance between self-awareness and subtly. In the repeated occurrence of characters changing their voices and bodies, wearing disguises and mimicking each other, there’s a provocative inquiry into the nature of storytelling and of tearing this “familiar” (soon unfamiliar) story apart to see it from other perspectives, even inside out through the ribs and guts of the wolf as Grandmother does. There are, the book proves, many “Ways to cut yourself out from inside a wolf or, in other circumstances, to cut your way back in.” So although I began reading Wolf Parts thinking, “But hasn’t Angela Carter already done this?” I shook that suspicion off quickly because this is very much it’s own book, and deserving of a place beside The Bloody Chamber on the Red Riding Hood shelf.

Over and over while reading Pathologies I had the same reaction. I read a story and thought, “Ha ha, that’s funny,” and felt like I’d got the point. Then I finished the story and thought, “Hang on, that’s more than just funny…,” and reread it to enjoy the many layers William Walsh packs into each very short piece. These stories read quickly, giving the illusion of easy understanding, but they become more complex and subtle as you read. Most are pared-down portraits of characters, honing in on their strangest quirks not to reduce them to laughingstocks but to make them more nuanced than those quirks at first seem to allow. I was reminded of Gary Lutz’ fiction in how powerfully they get to the heart of a character, and have a “simple” surface that belies the complexity beneath. But rather than the skewed syntax of Lutz, the stories in Pathologies accomplish this by offering precisely the right detail at precisely the right time.