Most people probably think of the desert in terms of its emptiness, but my own sense of the desert is really quite the opposite. Part of this ecstatic sense that so many people talk about when describing their response to the desert has to do with the fact that when you remove trees, buildings, billboards, highways and all the other encumbrances from your line of vision, your consciousness becomes overwhelmed by the sheer abundancy of what you’re encountering. Suddenly you look out and you’re not seeing 10 yards ahead of you, or 100 yards, or even a mile, but maybe 20 miles or more. There’s so much incoming data, but so little in the way of a framework that allows you to contextualize this data, that the mind short circuits. So, yes, on the one hand the desert is empty of civilization — it forms a kind of mental frontier where all the projects of civilization run into the ground, where all this excess of signification, of intention and pretension in culture is drained away. But that absence allows you to experience directly something far grander: the desert as this vast aesthetic spectacle. For me, anyway, this sensation is literally mind-expanding.

~ Larry McCaffery @ EBR

The task of effectively conveying an oral storyteller’s expansive humor to readers was more problematic than most of the writers who originally undertook the attempt probably realized. Walter Blair observed that “if an author merely set down the golden words of a fine storyteller, a funny thing happened on the way to the printer: they turned to dross.” The challenge for writers was to transfer a tale to print without abstracting it from the context of performance, in which every word is accompanied by gestures and expressions of the speaker, who may in turn be responding to the gestures of listeners in the audience. Mark Twain, one of the great literary yarnspinners, referred to the problematic undertaking as “an attempt to use a boat on land or a wagon on water.” The emergence of a hybrid literary tall tale during the first half of the nineteenth century provides a case study of the formal and stylistic concerns that accompany such an inauspicious attempt. Furthermore, it is a case study that is of particular interest to students of American social and literary history, because while the assimilation of oral forms by their literary progeny occurs repeatedly throughout the history of narrative, this is one instance in which artistic concerns surrounding the birth of a literary genre were raised and answered almost exclusively by Americans. Europe has its own forms of narrative fantasy, like the German Lugendichtungun (poems of lying), and certainly tall humor exists in European folklore, but the tall tale as a literary experiment remains essentially an American phenomenon.

~ Henry B. Wonham

At nighttime, we felt the penguins come in. They padded down the hallway and filled all our dreams. Too many people lived in our tiny apartment: me, my husband, and our twin little boys. My husband was tall and narrow like always. He curled around the sleeping boys at night, who were plump as loaves of bread. The penguins were short and squat too. My husband had fantasies about lying on the floor with a bee-bee gun, waiting for them to slip in the cat door.

The penguins entered our apartment this way night after night. They barked and molted, mated and fought. They didn’t care when we watched them, standing shocked in our robes.

Did anyone else have nighttime penguins? We got a babysitter and went to a town meeting to find out.

~ Jen Gann @ Annalemma (art by Shen Plum)

I’d read all three of the chapbooks collected in Prose. Poems. A novel. before, but rereading them together made the text fresh. Each chapbook on its own enmeshed individual lives and moments in history and landscapes, and that’s even more powerful here because the scope of time is extended. But I was also struck by the “reverse” narrative as the narrator heads east from California to Nevada to Atlanta, undoing manifest destiny as he leaves behind the wild west (and wild youth) for a slower, more settled life. Jamie Iredell’s book is a catalogue of decisions and of consequences met and avoided — to have another drink or not, to intervene in a fight or let it go on, to drive down the far side of a mountain in a snowstorm or head back to town — and the implication is that all of history, and all of progress, is equally dependent on those minor moments that may not seem like much at the time. While the present narrator is only suggested throughout the book rather than clearly established, there’s a strong sense of looking back on life wondering how he arrived at what seems to be a stable position. There are also some really stirring echoes to remind us that nothing’s so simple — the recurrence of the Donner Party in the western sections, and the complicated racial history of Georgia and the South throwing even his “quiet” new life into darker relief. All of that’s reflected in the prose, too, especially as the narrator actively, immediately revises what he’s said even while saying — replacing one description with another in the course of a few sentences, or starting a story with one point in mind only to decide on the page that it turns out to mean something else. So while there were a few points at which the stories of drinking, drugs, etc. became repetitive in a way they didn’t reading one chapbook at a time, even the “banality” (perhaps too strong a word) of that repetition furthered the sense of every moment, and every word included or left out, mattering more than it seems at first glance.

I read the edition of We’re Getting On with a seed paper cover, but also with only a single novella in it rather than a few other related stories included in the longer edition (I think). Rather than dismiss that “gimmick,” though, I think it matters to the text — it’s a story about a narrator determined to undo not only his life, but the history of human progress and civilization as he understands them, including human language. So the book being designed for destruction matters beyond mere gimmickry. In fact, while I suspect I will eventually read the longer edition, I’m hesitant because this one is so conceptually coherent and self-contained, text and context aligned, and I wonder how the story will be altered in that other package.

I’m also hesitant to say too much about the story directly. It’s powerful, largely because the narrator is so absorbed in his own vision, and his own arrogant assumptions about what it means to be “wild” or “human,” and the hypocrisies of his approach. He’s methodical, rigid, and demanding, and yet startlingly self-unaware (or should that be “un-self-aware”? Whichever.) Though he’s roped others into his project, largely through fear, it’s apparent that his real reasons are personal and traumatic rather than philosophical, which may be the case with all would-be cult leaders. So for a story and narrator all about becoming LESS human, and less fragile and frail, in the end it’s an inescapably human story about an inescapably fragile man.

From An Island

Fogged in all day, the long, low horns announcing
the passing of another ghostship.
But we see nothing. It’s as if a curtain had been dropped.
Go back into yourself, it says. None of this matters
to you anymore. All that drama, color, movement —
you can live without it. It was an illusion,
a tease, a lie. There is nothing out here but smoke
from the rubble that was everything,
everything you wanted, everything you thought
you needed. Ships passing, forget it.
Children bathing, there’s no such thing.
Let go, your island is a mote of dust.
But the horns of the ghostship say, remember us,
we remember you.

~ James Tate

In the provocative, off-kilter image of the afterlife offered in Cloud 8, most differences from “real” life are banal and fairly useless — the narrator can walk for as long as he wants without getting tired, and lots of people look like Abraham Lincoln. Beyond that, it’s all pretty familiar: lousy apartments, dull jobs, and painful loneliness in an unnamed crumbling city (not necessarily Cleveland, but close to the way I imagine that town — the author’s home — in some regards). It’s a vision so far from more familiar rosy idealizations of Heaven that the supposedly reassuring notion of a “better life to come” is hollowed out, and we’re forced to wonder as readers why we put up with such misery as workers and spouses and human beings while we’re alive, if not to be rewarded for our endurance when we pass on. This isn’t a didactic or heavy-handed novel by any means, but that still comes across as a pretty ferocious critique in its own quiet way. As the narrator says at one point, “I guess I expected more from death.” Instead, he gets an afterlife with all the tedium of actual living, but without any of the choices — even the illusory ones — that make our lives feel like our own. Stylistically, Bailie’s spare, straightforward style (which I really admire) suits his story well because it avoids making melodrama of what easily could go in that direction; Cloud 8 reminded me of Jim Krusoe’s fiction that way, not to mention that Krusoe’s novel Erased employs its own imaginary version of Cleveland as a city of the afterlife.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I’ll also mention that I’m not quite an impartial reviewer. I’ve never met Grant Bailie in person, but I did edit and publish his serial novel New Hope For Small Men.

Not long afterwards I left, got into my car, drove the familiar streets back toward the house where my wife and dinner were waiting, heard a song I liked on the radio, pulled into an intersection less than a block away, and promptly lost my life.

Do you want to know about the squealing tires, the breach of traffic law, the blood and dying that followed? Or the fact that I was not wearing a seat belt? What thoughts flowed through my brain as the blood they traveled on became less and less? Does dying, violence, the sound of breaking glass, and first aid interest you? It does not interest me. Not anymore.

~ Grant Bailie, Cloud 8

So we live exclusively in relation to others, and what disappears from our lives is solitude. Technology is taking away our privacy and our concentration, but it is also taking away our ability to be alone. Though I shouldn’t say taking away. We are doing this to ourselves; we are discarding these riches as fast as we can. I was told by one of her older relatives that a teenager I know had sent 3,000 text messages one recent month. That’s 100 a day, or about one every 10 waking minutes, morning, noon, and night, weekdays and weekends, class time, lunch time, homework time, and toothbrushing time. So on average, she’s never alone for more than 10 minutes at once. Which means, she’s never alone.

~ William Deresiewicz @ Hermitary

I Curse The River Of Time has a lot in common with Per Petterson’s other novels: a narrator fairly unmoored and adrift, digging through memories to make sense of how the past has arrived at the present. This time, that back-and-forth between past and present isn’t limited to a specific series of memories, but rather a number of memories from various times in the narrator’s life, which makes for a somewhat jumpier flow between scenes but makes the character’s mental chaos more tangible (it’s most similar to In The Wake, in that sense).

Protagonist Arvid has hitched himself to failures in both his political and personal lives, and at the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 finds himself questioning all the choices that delivered him where he is — almost divorced, losing his mother, caught between social classes, a committed if ineffective Communist when it no longer matters, and not quite an adult at 37 (most of which is clear in the opening pages, so I shouldn’t be spoiling anything there). He’s discovering, if not quite accepting, that there’s a point in life when it’s no longer possible to become a different version of yourself than the one you already are, which resonates with the issues of working class politics and “escape” through literature and learning that are at the core of Arvid’s relationships and tenuous identity. The ease with which Petterson weaves together the political and personal lets a story full of “big ideas” avoid being didactic or oppressive, but I think that’s also helped by the fact that as much as Arvid defines himself by his Party affiliation, most of his active Communism happens in the margins. As does much of his life, because he seems to be perpetually arriving at the wrong time, insisting on going where he’s not wanted, and proving his own existence by making others confirm it when there’s no way to ignore him. Who Arvid thinks he is, or wants himself to be, then, isn’t really who he is to anyone else — and it’s those moments when we see Arvid as others might that he really becomes complex as a character.

Unlike Petterson’s other narrators, though, who are sympathetic in their flaws and mistakes, Arvid seems a bit static and even a little pathetic: he’s got the same problems in the present he had in the past, and seem particularly troubled by that as he still looks for someone else (his mother, mostly) to fix things for him. All he really seems to want is for nothing to change, whether it’s the stasis of social class or the preservation of his marriage or avoiding the mortality of his mother. He has a habit of closing his eyes, childlike, to avoid the unpleasant, and daydreams of falling into blackholes to avoid what he’d rather not face. In fact, Arvid’s mother was the more interesting character — she’s the center of his universe, and the center of the novel, too, because unlike her son she has made difficult choices and has lived with them bravely. And though it takes a bit of awkward authorial “cheating” to get there, the gradual revelation of how she views her own son was, for me, the most crucial, powerful thread. So ultimately, while the questions the novel asks and explores are compelling, and as engrossed as I was, at times I wished to get out of Arvid’s head in a way I haven’t with Petterson’s other protagonists. But I don’t mean that to sound accidental: all along, and especially in the flashes of perspective from other characters, the Arvid’s one-dimensional narration seemed intentional and controlled, and I trusted the author, so that frustration never made me want to stop reading but instead added another layer to engage.