Other People’s Books

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Race Writings 2: Stay Free

This is the second writing about race I’m posting in honor of our current civil rights movement. This is more recent. It’s a review of Steph Cha’s Your House Will Pay that I published in The Rumpus in January, 2020. I’ve noticed lately that a lot of people are saying that we need to have a conversation about race, but then going no further. Cha’s book (and, to a lesser extent, my review of her book), shows how conversations about race can work.

The title is a reference to a song by The Clash, not to a maxipad. The full review is below.

Your House Will Pay cover

Stay Free

            When we first meet 44-year-old Shawn Matthews in Steph Cha’s Your House Will Pay, he’s standing in a prison parking lot with what remains of his family, waiting to pick up his cousin Ray. The sun beats down on them, but they don’t retreat to the air-conditioned car out of respect for the gravity of the moment. Ray has been down for ten years. He’s free now. Everyone involved is filled with a mixture of optimism and dread. As a reader, you feel it, too.

It’s a tender scene. It’s also one I’m used to witnessing from afar in my real life. My wife is a prison psychologist. Occasionally, when I’ve dropped her off for work in the morning, I’ve seen some facsimile of this: a nervous, joyful family picking up their father/brother/son who suddenly has a new chance to rebuild his life. I feel optimistic for these guys as they leave the prison. At least they have a family that cares enough, that has resources enough, to come pick them up.

When I catch the train out of San Luis Obispo, I often see California Department of Corrections vans dropping off men who’ve just been released from prison. These are the guys who don’t have the family or resources. The men change, but they have a similar look. They’re usually discharged in black sweatpants, a plain white T-shirt, and a black hoodie. They always have a paper grocery bag full of whatever they’re taking out of prison with them. They’re almost always black.

These guys look so full of hope that I get a little hopeful for them, too. Maybe this time, they’ll stay free. I’m silently rooting for them. I’m also trying not to think about how steeply the odds are stacked against them. Imagine being that black man, boarding a train in clothes that most people wouldn’t wear outside of their house. All of your stuff is in a paper bag. You don’t have much cash. In a few hours, you’ll be in a town with lousy public transportation, a giant homeless population, and a police department that will forever see you as a suspect and an easy arrest. On top of that, you’re starting the journey in San Luis Obispo, a city that has 532 African-American residents, just over 150 African-Americans enrolled in the state university in town (a full 0.7% of the overall student body), and about 1,200 African-Americans living in the prison that’s next door to the university. And this is a city that’s often cited as the happiest one in America. And this is a state that’s supposed to be the most liberal, the most progressive, the least racist.

I see scenes like this play out often. Every time I do, I wonder if there are real ways to have a conversation about the racism inherent in a state (and nation) that disproportionately incarcerates black men. But also, more generally, I wonder how we might talk about race in a meaningful way.

Steph Cha’s Your House Will Pay opens the door to this conversation. The story follows two protagonists, Shawn Matthews and Grace Park. Shawn is an ex-con, ex-Crip from South Central Los Angeles. After his own prison stint, he has his life on track. He works for a moving company. He lives with his long-term girlfriend and her three-year old daughter. They have a good relationship. While he no longer has an immediate family, he’s close with his aunt (who raised him), and his niece and nephew. As his cousin Ray is released from prison, Shawn hopes to help him assimilate to life in Palmdale. Shawn also carries the weight of a heavy memory: His sister Ava was murdered when she was a teenager. The Korean American shopkeeper who killed Ava was convicted of manslaughter but served no jail time. Because the case happened in the wake of the Rodney King beatings in 1991 and because Ava was black, her murder was a bit of a media sensation. In 2019, Shawn just wants to move on.

Grace Park, in the meantime, is living a sheltered life that revolves around her Korean-American community. She’s a pharmacist in her parents’ drug store. She lives with her parents in Granada Hills. Grace isn’t close with them, but she feels responsible for taking over their business and carrying on their legacy. In the meantime, her sister Miriam hasn’t spoken to her mother in two years. No one will tell Grace what their conflict is, so Grace is stuck in this world of secrets. When a violent crime strikes the Park family, the secrets start to leak out.

As one would expect in any novel with co-protagonists, Shawn and Grace are on separate courses steering toward each other. Through Shawn and Grace, Cha constructs a Los Angeles sharply different from most representations of the city. Beaches and palm trees are nowhere to be seen. Hollywood and the film industry are a vague presence on the outskirts. The white world that we’re so used to seeing in representations of LA is cast to the margins. Instead, we visit Los Angeles as most of the residents of the greater metropolitan area do: through diverse neighborhoods where clusters of immigrants, migrants, and marginalized—many of whom are brown or black—struggle to get a foothold in the middle class. In the liminal spaces where those marginal communities overlap, we see the regionally specific prejudices that develop. Cha unpacks the legacy of tensions between African-Americans and Korean-Americans that traces back to the racial unrest of the early 1990s. Much of this tension is rooted in actual events. Even the murder of Ava is a recreation of the real-life murder of Latasha Harlins by the shopkeeper Soon Ja Du on March 16, 1991. Cha is faithful to what actually happened, right down to the shopkeeper’s manslaughter conviction coupled with no jail time.

Despite its roots in the early ‘90s, Your House Will Pay is a very contemporary novel. Everyone is online; Twitter shapes some of the characters’ actions. Grace goes viral at one point. Cops shoot unarmed black kids and the media moves on from the killing at the same rate that ESPN moves on from yesterday’s scores. It feels like the novel is taking place right now—and in a sense, it is. Most of the events occur between June and September of 2019, which would have been the future for Cha when she wrote the book (which was published in October 2019). This creates a sense of immediacy. The book’s conflicts can’t be dismissed as part of the past. The characters’ actions matter because they impact the world we live in right now. The issues matter because they’re issues we’ll face when we wake up tomorrow.

Many of these events are difficult to discuss in a review because each of the book’s four sections is based on a reveal. It is, after all, a crime novel. Instead, I’ll focus on a moment that demonstrates the novel’s richness: At one point, the Park family is in the news. Grace, who has built her life around anonymity, has no idea how to act under the spotlight. She’s harassed by a white activist who sees himself as a journalist. As she tries to escape, she slips and cuts her lip. In her anger, she lashes out at the activist. He films it. In her anger, she says something mildly racist. The video of her tantrum goes viral.

Cha presents the scene with a delicate touch. On the one hand, the reader understands why Grace would lose her temper. She’s under undue stress. She’s a small woman being hounded by a large and threatening man. She’s confused about recent events in her life, and she’s being expected to process information way too quickly. As a reader, we feel for her. At the same time, stress and confusion don’t make racist outbursts any less racist. Grace masochistically reads all of the social media reactions to her tantrum and:

For the first time in her twenty-seven years, Grace felt herself hated. Her whole body burned, her skin crawling with a hot itch she couldn’t scratch away. Hers was a modest existence—her social circle had always been comfortably small, her opinions vague, her presentation inoffensive.

            Another way of framing Grace’s self-perception is this: she’s always been the model minority. By acting as such, she’s avoided much of the scrutiny and hatred that many brown people can’t avoid. At this moment, though, Grace is confronted with the fact that she’s still not a part of the dominant race in a racist society. She’s still other. She’s disobeyed the culture’s demands of her otherness, and now she’s being punished. Of course it’s confusing for her.

She turns to her sister for solace:

“Do you hate me, too, now?” [Grace] asked.

“Of course not.”

“But you think I’m a racist.”

“Grace, I think everyone’s a racist.”

In that simple reply, both Miriam and Cha shift the paradigm for how we need to talk about race in this country. It stands to reason that, if Miriam thinks everyone is a racist, then she includes herself. What if we all started from this point? Instead of asking if anyone is a racist, we all admit that we all are. If you’re drinking in a dive bar at 9:00 AM on a Tuesday, you’re an alcoholic; if you live in a country where, in the happiest city in the most progressive state, two out of every three African-Americans is incarcerated, then you live in a racist country. Our culture is bigger than all of us. It’s the ideological air we breathe, the food we eat, the water we drink. It shapes our views. So, as a member of this culture, is Grace a racist? Yes. Is Miriam a racist? Yes. Am I a racist? Yes. Are you?

And could we, by starting at this point, shift focus away from “racist” as an identity and instead examine the actions, the language, and the institutions that perpetuate racism? Could we move beyond judgment and into a place where real progress can happen?

When Grace goes viral, everyone in the novel is quick to judge her, to call her a racist, to attack her. In doing so, no one has to look inside himself or evaluate his culture very deeply. Instead, they can scapegoat Grace. This is something we do in real life all the time. We’re all a little thankful for knuckleheads like U.S. Representative Steve “Since When Did White Supremacy Become a Bad Thing” King. His racism is so much worse than ours and his power so much greater than ours that we give ourselves a pass. For Miriam, though, no one gets a pass. More importantly, judgment isn’t so much the point. Racist actions must be redeemed.

And, really, redemption has to be the goal. In this sense, Cha taps into the Christian traditions of her characters. Your House Will Pay isn’t a religious novel. Sure, the characters attend church and one of the main characters is named Grace, but Grace is no medieval allegory. She doesn’t mimic God’s grace by learning to love those who deserve it the least. Catholic grace isn’t the goal. Nor is vengeance—the primary idea from the Old Testament our society clings to. (And what is our prison system but an act of vengeance?) Vengeance creates an endless loop. Instead, after her racism goes viral and comes to define her, Grace seeks to redeem herself. She begins the process of understanding what beliefs she still holds that she needs to release. She allows herself to be imperfect. And she starts down a path of action that allows her to be an imperfect person working for positive change.

And this is just one part of Your House Will Pay. The novel is by no means didactic. As I’ve said, it’s a crime novel. Like all of Cha’s work, the novel starts with a slow burn and builds into a wildfire. By the time you get to the last hundred pages or so, there’s nothing to do but watch it burn down everything you thought you knew about Los Angeles. And, like the massive wildfires that have been burning through Southern California for the past few winters, you’re left with both devastation and the promise of new growth—the drive to build something new and better.

 

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A Lure for the Devil

I wrote a piece on one of my favorite forgotten crime novels for the Los Angeles Review of Books. You can read it here.

Gunn_Deadlier Than the Male cover

The novel is bonkers (as you can read about in my article). French philosopher Gilles Deleuze named it as one of his favorites in his incredible essay, “The Philosophy of Crime Novels.” I talk about both of these things, plus femmes fatales, truth, sex, murder,  and all kinds of interesting stuff.

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The Next Mass Shooting

All these mass shootings have inspired me to post a book review I did for FlagLive in October 2018 for Lisa Brackmann’s Black Swan Rising. Brackmann’s novel is probably the best approach to a conversation about what happened last weekend that I can think of. Scroll down past the cover to read the review.

Black Swan Rising

Think about the next mass shooting. Not the one that happens every day, in which two or three people die unspectacularly in another state, and we don’t even hear about it. I’m talking about the next big one. Think about the next time someone brings an AR-15 or two into a place where we could imagine ourselves—or where we could imagine our children—and opens fire, killing dozens of people who shouldn’t die that day. We all know it’s going to happen. Maybe not this week or this month, but in the next year, for sure. And think about what you’re going to say when it happens. Because this is the important point: you already know. You have already reacted to this event. Your opinion is already formed. All of our opinions are. We have our tweets ready. The NRA has drafted their next speech. Political teams on both sides of the aisle have their press releases ready. Television news teams have stock mass shooting footage waiting in a folder on their computer and “experts” on speed dial. The experts have already formed their arguments. Bumper stickers have been printed. They’re already stuck.

I’m not just talking about mass shootings, here. Pick any issue in which battle lines have been drawn and trenches dug. Think about the next time a man in power is accused of sexual assault. We’ve already exonerated or convicted the man, dismissed or believed the woman.

We don’t even need the shooting or the assault. We could have the argument right now. The same nothing would change.

But let’s say, hypothetically, that we want to live in a world where men don’t mow down dozens of strangers with assault rifles or feel entitled to women’s bodies. How do we have a real conversation about change?

This is the challenge that Lisa Brackmann embraces in her latest thriller, Black Swan Rising. The novel begins with a woman being harassed before she’s even named. Sarah Price works social media for a congressional campaign. She also has a secret past. They, whoever they are, have found her. The harassment has started all over again. She wonders if her past could derail her boss’s reelection campaign. Meanwhile, across town, local TV reporter Casey Cheng is covering a mass shooting when she gets shot. As part of her recovery, she sets out to investigate the aftermath of mass shootings. Her investigation reveals that her shooter aligned himself with a misogynist, neo-Nazi movement. There’s every reason to believe that more shootings are on the way, and both Sarah and Casey are targets.

All of this is established in the opening pages of the novel. Brackmann sets up a difficult tightrope for herself to walk. Sarah and Casey could easily become mouthpieces for the author; the book could easily become preachy and dull. It could feel like one more voice shouting at us from an entrenched position. Brackmann—the author of the New York Times bestseller Rock, Paper, Tiger—is too skilled for that. First, she makes Sarah and Casey feel real. They’re both flawed, confused, and trying to move through incredibly difficult circumstances. Sarah is not at all sure she has the courage to do what she needs to do. Casey may have too much courage. They both may end up dead. More to the point, you care about them staying alive. Second, even though the novel is built around a political campaign, the presumable Democrat (parties are never mentioned) is sweet and caring, but also has violence issues and carries a gun. The Republican banks on racism but has a big heart. Both are at times likeable and despicable. The campaign comes to take a backseat to Sarah and Casey’s intersecting stories. Complicated issues are raised and moral decision must be made. And there are guns. So many guns. And shootings. Always too many shootings. Also, as a respite, there’s a lot of baseball and good craft beer. Through it all, the plot moves like a roller coaster. You get pinned to your seat and flung at increasing speed down a track that feels like it could throw you at any second. It’s exciting. You find yourself at the end way too quickly.

The ending itself is a surprise and a risk, but, for me, totally satisfying. It leaves me realizing that I lost myself in the book, but once I was done, I couldn’t help meditating on this culture of toxic masculinity that we’re living in. I feel like I learned something about what a woman has to navigate, about where she finds support and where there is none, and about the institutions that protect and nurture bad behavior by men. I feel a little more ready to more ready to have a conversation that’s deeper than two sides shouting at each other across a battlefield.

 

 

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Doc, the Dude, and Marlowe

Lebowski screenshotHave you ever watched The Big Lebowski and wondered to yourself, where does the Dude fit in the spectrum of constructed masculinity from Philip Marlowe to Doc Sportello? Have you ever wished there were a Pynchon scholar who could explain to you the ways in which writers rewrite famous texts, and how they revise them? Have you ever wished someone would really explain the specifics of how our culture teaches males to act like men? If so, you’re in luck. I just did all that.

Of course, I know most people don’t really ask those questions. But I do. I do a lot of scholarship. The University of Georgia Press published my book on Thomas Pynchon last summer. I’ve had a handful of articles in peer-reviewed journals lately. I’m proud of all that stuff, but there’s a downside. It’s hard to share it. Most of the peer-reviewed articles are behind a paywall. Only students and academics can access them. And my book on Pynchon is really important, but it also costs $60. I wouldn’t spend sixty bucks on a scholarly tome on Thomas Pynchon. Actually, I would. I have. Many times. But I have a hard time asking others to do that.

Anyway, bringing it all around, I’ve recently published an article in Orbit: A Journal of American Literature. It’s on all the things I wrote about up in my first paragraph. And Orbit does things right. They don’t charge people to read their journal. They don’t charge scholars to make their work open access. And still they find a way to get the top scholars in the field to vigorously peer-review everything they publish.

So long story short, if you want to read my article on masculinity in Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, the Coen brothers’ The Big Lebowski, and Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe novels, you can read it here.

And, while you’re there, you can read the review that one of the top Pynchon scholars in the world did of my book (it’s the fourth review; you have to scroll down).

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Mercy of the Tide Review

I’ll admit that sometimes I review books by friends and acquaintances of mine. I do it often, actually. It is somewhat nepotistic in the sense that I choose my friends’ books as the subject of my reviews instead of books by strangers. It’s not nepotistic in the sense that I won’t review a book anything but honestly. Whether I know you or not, I say only what I genuinely believe in my reviews. That said, here’s my review of Keith Rosson’s book Mercy of the Tide. You can read the review in its original form here.

Rosson Mercy of the Tide

There’s a sense of impending disaster. The guy from TV is president. Moscow and the KGB threaten the American way of life. The doomsday clock ticks ever closer to midnight. People far from DC and national politics struggle to live lives without feeling overwhelmed by a sense of powerlessness.

I’m talking, of course, about the alternate 1983 in Keith Rosson’s new novel The Mercy of the Tide.

The Mercy of the Tide opens in a sheriff’s office. A religious wingnut drops a mutilated seagull onto Sheriff Dave Dobbs desk. For the wingnut, the seagull portends something ominous and otherworldly coming to destroy this small coastal Oregon town. Dobbs feels slighted by the dead bird on his desk. Dobbs’ deputy, Nick Hayslip, grabs the wingnut and roughly evicts him. Dobbs and Hayslip aren’t interested in an abstract menace. Dobbs life was recently shattered when his wife Junie was killed in a car accident. Nick, for reasons that emerge later in the novel, is also devastated by this accident. Elsewhere in town, Sam and Trina Finster, the children of the woman who drove her car head-on into Junie Dobbs’ car, are trying to pick up the pieces after the loss of their mom.

Such is the backdrop for the novel. Something wicked is in the distance. Because this 1983 isn’t the one that happened but one that might have happened, nuclear apocalypse is still a looming threat. Trina, despite being nine, is obsessed with the threat. She believes the end is near. No one can comfort her. Her father is a commercial fisherman with no interest in international politics and little interest in raising his kids. Sam looks out for his kid sister, but he’s seventeen. The time is approaching when he should leave the confines of his hometown and reach for something bigger. The fact that Sam’s such an outcast doesn’t help matters. And what’s going on with this mysterious menace leaving mutilated animal corpses along the coastline?

The novel that unfolds somewhat defies genres. The mysterious menace lends a bit of a horror feel to the book. The small town cops forever driving in the rain gives it an air of noir. But Rosson’s willingness to show the consequences of the tropes of horror and crime novels take this out of genre fiction. When characters get killed, their death isn’t just a plot point. We care about the deaths. We mourn them, along with the characters in the book. When there’s a fight, the characters get hurt. They carry their wounds into subsequent chapters. The reader is never let off the hook.

At other times, The Mercy of the Tide feels like literary fiction. There are rich descriptions of coastal Oregon in a time that’s passed, and the depth of Rosson’s investigations into class, gender, disability, and anger go far beyond anything you’ll find in most mass-market paperbacks.

And it’s the anger aspect that carries the book for me. Understanding what anger is and how it operates may be the most important tool in navigating the next few years, because the one thing we see all around us today is a reason to be outraged. We seem to be trapped in an endless cycle of anger, and our anger is often justified. For Dobbs, there’s real reason to be angry. He lost his wife. Nick’s relationship with anger is valid, too. In both cases, though, they demand a form of payback. Whatever payback they get will prove to be unsatisfying. Their drive to enact that payback will doom them. But they hang on to it.

Sam Finster feels the anger early. He redirects it onto anyone and everyone. When his sister wipes out mud-sledding down a hill, his desire for payback leads him to laugh at her. Then he comes to his senses. He runs to help her and pulls her into his arms. As Rosson writes, “She was a slight weight that leaned against him, a weight nearly inconsequential. Christ, like she was mostly jacket. He felt blisteringly ashamed at his earlier resentment—he would take care of her. He would protect her. He would pick up Gary’s slack. She was so little, and she was nine, and afraid, and they had only each other now. He thought, I’ll do anything to make her safe.”

This scene occurs early in the novel, but it sets up the power of the book. We can watch characters consumed by their anger, their lust to make someone pay. We can watch anger destroy them as the world races toward a potential apocalypse. We can release that anger, let ourselves grieve, and learn what it means to love. We can be human and waver between those contrasting impulses. We can find ways to take care of ourselves and one another; we can find meaning even when we feel powerless and hope is hard to find.

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Go-Between Review

This is the April installment of my Flagstaff Live column. You can read the original here.

Brackmann Go-BetweenI have a love/hate relationship with crime novels. I love the heavy plots, the journeys into society’s seedy underbelly, the challenge of staying one step ahead of the mystery. I love how tough they are. I hate that most crime novels these days have cops, FBI agents, and the like as protagonists. I grew up a “white trash” kid, then became a punk rocker. Most of my associations with cops were as a kid or young adult getting harassed, shaken down, or cracked in the head by them. After suffering so many humiliations at the hands of the law, I can’t enjoy a book that makes those guys the heroes. Especially when the bad guys are so similar to the people I grew up with. So I mostly read old crime novels, stuff by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and writers like them, writers with a distrust of the system and of the wealthy, writers whose protagonists are outsiders just trying to make it. Where, I often wonder, are the contemporary equivalents?

Then along comes Lisa Brackmann’s Go-Between.

Go-Between begins with Emily, a restauranteur in Arcata, California who seems to have made her peace with her shady past. She employs undocumented labor and has a customer base of pot growers, but she tries to keep an arm’s length from everything and everyone. The one glaring exception is Emily’s boyfriend, Danny, a pilot who augments the cost of his plane by occasionally loading it with weed and hauling the cargo out of Humbolt County. He plans one last flight—a “minimum risk, maximum reward” haul that predictably lands him in jail. His arrest coincides with the return of a federal agent named Gary. Or “fucking Gary,” as Emily frequently calls him.

In another life, Emily was a pawn in one of Gary’s schemes. Now he’s back to move her around the chess board. He’ll hold Danny in jail for as long as he needs Emily. When he’s done with them, he hints that both Emily and Danny will be released. The project Gary has in mind is simple. He wants Emily to go to Houston and keep an eye on Kaitlyn O’Connor. Kaitlyn was the victim of a horrific carjacking that left her husband and son dead. Now she’s the public face of a tough-on-crime organization called Safer America. Safer America manages a lot of dark money and some important initiatives are on the ballot in the upcoming election. Emily just needs to keep Kaitlyn on message through the election season. What follows is a thrilling chess match between Emily and Gary. It moves the reader across the dark squares of power, money, and special interests that tend to run public policy on a state and national level. Gary is a complex villain. He’s charming and slippery. It’s never clear whose interests he serves (beyond his own) or how much power he has. Issues that we debate ideologically—specifically marijuana legalization and mass incarceration—are stripped from their moral standpoints and reduced to matters of money. Kaitlyn is inscrutable. She could become the Sarah Palin Gary wants her to be, or she could make a 180° turn once she learns her real role in power and money, much like Elizabeth Warren did. Emily’s motivations waver between the greater good and saving her own hide. Everyone involved—the reader included—loses a little bit of innocence.

Toward the end of the novel, Emily and Kaitlyn visit a law-and-order convention that looks eerily like any other trade show. At the core, the convention is full of consumables sold to consumers. The whole scene forces the reader to ask the question: what is all this law and order really about? Brackmann’s novel raises issues Michel Foucault explored in Discipline & Punish more than forty years ago. First, if the purpose of prison is to reduce crime, then we have to admit that three hundred years of incarceration (and thirty years of US mass incarceration) have failed. So, like Foucault and Brackmann do, we have to ask what purpose all this punishment and incarceration really serves. We have to investigate who profits off it. We have to become critical of the stories that do little more than promote the myth of justice in our justice system.

This becomes the real power of Go-Between. Brackmann goes beyond the simple and harmful morality tales of good cops and evil criminals. She investigates the very nature of crime. She explores who really profits from it. And she does all this in a kick-ass thriller that’s nearly impossible to put down.

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The Assignment Review

I write a bi-monthly review column for Flagstaff Live called “Words That Work.” This is a reprint of my June column. It ran on June 15, 2017. You can read the original here.

Durrenmatt AssignmentA few months ago, the US dropped something called the Mother of All Bombs on Afghanistan. It created an explosion the size of a small nuclear weapon, killed 94 members of ISIS and a handful of civilians who had the misfortune of being ISIS-adjacent, and made it through one quick news cycle during which most Americans responded by saying, “Wait. You mean we’re still at war in Afghanistan?” Yes. We are.

Shortly after that, the presidential budget came out with cuts to everything we love and a large increase to the military budget, which is already up around $600 billion and larger than the next 12 largest military budgets combined. All of this leads to a question that doesn’t get asked nearly enough: if we’re spending this much money building weapons and armies every year, don’t we have to do something with them? In other words, if we have this many people’s livelihoods based on warfare, don’t we have to generate warfare?

I don’t know the answer to that question. I’m just here to review books, and works of fiction, at that. Still, works of fiction are the places where we can take on these larger, somewhat philosophical questions. And fiction’s response to my questions about the Mother of All Bombs and military budgets lies in Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Assignment.

The Assignment begins with the murder of an internationally-known terrorism expert’s wife. The terrorism expert flies her body, in its coffin dangling from a helicopter, from the North African country where she was murdered and raped to Switzerland. The coffin is dropped into the ground straight from the helicopter as part of a spectacular funeral. Documentary filmmaker F. films the whole affair. After the funeral, the terrorism expert offers to hire F. and her crew to go to North Africa and document their investigation into his wife’s murder and rape. F., despite her best judgment, agrees.

Once F. gets to Africa (the specific country is never mentioned, but any of the five nations that border the Mediterranean will do), she realizes that she’s in way over her head. First, she is ushered by the chief of police through a performance of the investigation. At no point does F. think the police chief is actually investigating the murder. Instead, he’s using her film crew to produce the impression that the police have done everything they can. Second, she’s enlisted by the head of the secret service, who is at war with the police chief because the police chief wants to lead a military coup. And from there, F. is just a pawn shuffled across a desert chess board.

The investigation into the murder never takes a back seat in the novel, but the murder itself pales in comparison to all the other mischief that power brokers are engaging in. F. struggles to understand her role and why she continues to play the game, all the while getting more entangled. Along the way, she meets a war photographer who maybe wants to kill her, but at least takes the time to explain to her what she’s gotten into. He tells her that this North African nation’s “principal source of revenue was a war with a neighboring country…a war that had been creeping along for ten years now and no longer served any purpose except to test the products of all the weapons-exporting countries.” He goes on to say that, “since the stability of the market depended on weapons exports, provided these weapons were truly competitive, real wars were constantly breaking out.” For the war photographer, wars like the one currently raging in Iraq and in this North African desert, exist solely to keep the military industrial complex running. Everything F. has seen proves this point.

The heartbreaking and ironic thing about reading The Assignment in 2017 is realizing that it was written 31 years ago. One of the wars Dürrenmatt criticizes is the Iran/Iraq conflict, in which Reagan’s Special Envoy to the Middle East, Donald Rumsfeld, helped bolster the power of a little-known autocrat named Saddam Hussein. Part of the deal brokered between Rumsfeld and Hussein was a cooperation agreement to limit the military might of Syria. Of course, at the same time, the US was selling weapons to Hussein’s enemy in Iran so that the US could fund the Contras in Nicaragua.

Three decades later, only the names have changed. This is why Dürrenmatt—a Swiss author who wrote mostly during the mid-twentieth century and died in 1990—is still so relevant today. His novels transcend the immediate and explore the larger frameworks of how society operates. The Assignment goes beyond that, beginning with a Kierkegaard epigraph and folding Kierkegaard’s views of the abyss into the plot. It’s a novel that is as thrilling as it is deep.

Someone at the University of Chicago Press has seen fit to bring several of Dürrenmatt’s works back into print. Whoever it is, we all owe this person a debt of gratitude. I recommend any and all of Dürrenmatt’s books, but definitely start with The Assignment.

 

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Liberal University Professors

Holocaust Memorial BerlinMy university has a running column in the Ventura County Star on Sundays. Our public relations person asked me to contribute a column recommending books for the summer.  She also wanted me to make it newsy. So I did what everyone in the news is doing. I started with Donald Trump. This was my original first paragraph:

Here’s an experiment you can try at home. Starting tomorrow, see how long you can go before encountering a reference to Donald Trump. After the first, time how long before the second comes along. You’ll be stunned by how incessantly everyone talks about Trump. It’s like we’re all in a room with a small child wielding a knife. We know he’s just a narcissist trying to get us to pay attention to him, but we still have to pay enough attention to not get stabbed. We keep thinking someone is going to take the knife out of his hand. But, no. That’s not going to happen any time soon.

This situation can cause anxiety for anyone. Perhaps it’s causing some anxiety for you. If so, I can help. I can’t take the deadly weapons out of the narcissist’s hands, but I can help with the anxiety.

I sent it off to the PR person. She liked the column, but she didn’t like the part about Trump being a small child wielding a knife. She feared that some of the university’s donors would be offended. So she rewrote the first paragraph for me. This was her version:

Here’s an experiment you can try at home. Starting tomorrow, see how long you can go before encountering a reference to Donald Trump. After the first, time how long before the second comes along. You’ll be stunned by how incessantly everyone talks about Trump. For or against Trump, it’s a continual topic of conversation.

Those against him may feel like we’re all in a room with a child who has a knife and we must pay attention or be stabbed. Those who support him may feel they are constantly under attack themselves.

Either situation can cause anxiety for anyone. Perhaps it’s causing some anxiety for you. If so, I can help with the anxiety.

Not to be a prima dona, but I couldn’t let this opening stand. This tone isn’t me, and I wouldn’t let my name be associated with these ideas. I disagree with the whole idea of “for or against Trump” being equally valid positions. Trump is following the playbook for establishing a totalitarian regime. He has scapegoated an entire religion and tried to ban members of that religion from entering the United States. His nationalist rhetoric has led to unconscionable attacks on immigrants. He has marginalized academics, intellectuals, and the free press. These are the first three steps that every totalitarian leader takes: scapegoat a minority population, heighten nationalist feelings, and silence opposition.

The next step is to push for a war to solidify this ideology.

It’s personal to me. My wife immigrated to this country. I’m an academic. Trump’s stances are stances against me and my wife personally. I teach at a university that is largely comprised of white women (another group he has attacked) and Latinos. His attacks are directed at my students. The guy even took my sister’s health care away. Her premiums went from $190 a month to $1300 a month when he insisted on trying to repeal the ACA, then refused to fund parts of it.

None of this is okay. If you support Trump and you feel attacked for your support, that’s a good thing. I honestly believe most Trump supporters are better people than Trump is. If you’re one of his supporters, I hope you do feel attacked and this leads you to rethinking your attack on politically precarious populations.

I didn’t say all this to PR person. Instead, I wrote a compromised third opening. You can read it and my five recommendations for good books here.

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Slab Review

Of all the novels I reviewed over the past few years, Slab was the strangest. It defies form and easy characterizations and sounds impossible, but it was mostly fun. This review originally ran in Full Stop.

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Early in Selah Saterstrom’s Slab, the narrator and protagonist, Tiger, tells the story of her life-changing striptease. After reading a book on profound women, Tiger decides to pay homage to Helen Keller. She buys a thrift-store Holly Hobbie dress and an Ace Hardware bucket to use as a prop. The deejay introduces her as “Miss Killer.” Tiger stumbles on stage with her eyes closed and performs the most famous scene from The Miracle Worker. She tells us,

The performance ended when, having completed the transformative contact with the pole/well, I arched a joyous backbend. The music came to a halt. I popped up, raised my bare chest to the audience, arms open. Water, I said.

As I read this scene, I couldn’t help placing myself in the audience for the striptease. Tiger works in a low-rent club in rural Mississippi. It’s the kind of place that only people who’ve spent an inordinate amount of time on the working-class side of the rural South would know firsthand. For better or worse, I’m one of those people. I have no trouble picturing myself at a chipped-linoleum table with a can of yellow American beer in front of me and poverty and desperation oozing from the dark paneled walls and buzzing neon signs, watching a stripper grope across the stage in a fantasy only accessible to her. It’s an intimate moment. A poignant one if you can release the illusion of a complete understanding and just recognize that something powerful and painfully human is being communicated to you.

On a meta level, this scene is instructive to the reader. You’re in the audience. Tiger is on a stage — more literally a slab among the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina — performing for you. Sometimes she tells you what she has in mind and gives you an interpretive framework to understand her art. Sometimes, you’re in the dark and just have to go with it. Either way, you can find comfort knowing that Tiger (and Saterstrom) have a method to their madness. It all makes sense — not necessarily to you — but to Tiger at least. And, at the core of the performance, Tiger is out to entertain you.

Any summary of the book will elucidate the challenges it presents to its reader. The novel is laid out like an extended playbill. Each chapter is a scene in a performance by Tiger while she stands on the slab of a house washed away by Katrina. Ostensibly, Barbara Walters is in the audience for this performance. At times, Walters asks questions or Tiger addresses her directly. At other times, it’s easy to forget Barbara Walters is there and Tiger abandons traditional narratives. One chapter is titled “Tiger Draws Some Rebel Flags.” The chapter consists solely of illustrations of rebel flags. Another chapter is titled “Tiger Riffs on the Classics: Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep.” It’s a prose poem that surrenders story for language play:

I am inside the fourth degree
(do you mind if I smoke for the remainder
of the seduction (Soul mothers I am inside
the seduction) I am inside (the fourth degree) watching,
mind if I smoke inside the remainder of the remainder
of the remainder of the seduction) . . .

The whole novel plays with form. Some pages are only a sentence or a paragraph. There are sections laid out like stage directions that give no stage directions. The “Players” section of the playbill gives little information about the players. Slab could be categorized as a novel or an extended prose poem or a script for an impossible-to-produce performance art piece. It’s all of those things and more.

Any summary of Slab is also a bit misleading. Works that sound difficult typically sound like a chore to get through, and Slab is not chore. It’s fun from beginning to end. Because it’s so inventive, so different from standard novels, comparisons are hard to come by. The closest I can come is Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America. Both works have a poet’s ear for language and a comic’s feel for timing. Both are disjointed but somehow whole. Both have a tendency to dazzle and frustrate the reader. When I finished my first read of both, I knew second, third, and possibly more readings of the books would come.

Beyond all the experimentation, Saterstrom’s (and Tiger’s) talent for storytelling carries the work. Saterstrom gives voice to one of the American untouchables. It’s a complicated, beautiful, whimsical, troubling, and heart-breaking voice. It’s a voice that you can’t turn away from, not because it’s a spectacle, but because it’s art. Tiger tells the tale of how she went from a poor, rural stripper to a performance artist, but this is no rags-to-riches story. There’s no reason to believe that the transformation happened anywhere outside of Tiger’s head. All of her work as a performance artist is done in low rent strip clubs. She starts in rags and ends in rags. By her own description, she’s “a stripper who worked in what could only be called a ‘sub-genre’ way.” And, despite the temptations her occupation holds for a novelist, Saterstrom resists any urges to make Tiger a spectacle or a metaphor. Tiger is a deep, rich character. She has close ties to her reconstituted family. She understands the complexities of American South, interacts with troubling views on gun ownership, racism, and Confederate fetishes, yet still feels an affinity to her southern Mississippi homeland. She mourns her grandfather’s suicide. She meditates on dogs. She struggles as an artist and a woman. For all the distance she creates by telling her story on a slab while the reader sits in the wreckage of Katrina, Tiger feels human. Saterstrom’s ability to make Tiger so human carried me through my first reading of the novel.

Saterstrom’s choice to set this novel against the backdrop of Katrina is telling. She doesn’t discuss the storm much directly. She avoids tales of want and looting, starvation and death. Still, this context undeniably surrounds the novel. It raises questions about Katrina and its place in our collective memory. Certainly, we’ve faced bigger and more destructive storms in our lifetimes. As global temperatures continue to rise, we’ll face more of them. Yet Katrina — which was neither the first or worst of these recent storms — haunts us. And Tiger as the narrator to this storm helps explain the undercurrent of this haunting.

We have a term for women like Tiger. It’s white trash. Thirty years of political correctness have eradicated every longstanding, hateful term from our speech except white trash. Understanding Tiger as trash — a disposable person — helps explain the real tragedy of Katrina. The storm wouldn’t have done nearly as much damage if the levees around New Orleans had been repaired when they started to falter years before Katrina struck. And they probably would’ve been repaired if wealthy people lived near them. The aftermath of Katrina could’ve been mitigated if a combination of state and federal agencies had reacted like they did when Hurricane Andrew pummeled wealthy sections of Miami in 1992 and Hurricane Sandy hit the shores of New Jersey and New York in 2012. In short, the disaster would’ve been far less of a disaster if, culturally, we didn’t classify poor people as trash and see them as disposable when nature lays waste to their homes and leaves them with nothing but the slab once the water recedes.

During a short stint in juvie, Tiger takes a class in the art of Japanese flower arranging. She learns that, “At the moment of its extinction, the flower is perfect. It is in accordance.” Her teacher tells the story of a monk who gathers the debris from a storm and makes an arrangement of the trash on the temple altar. The monk explains, “I am practicing the art of decay appreciation.” These ideas, in a sense, give passage into Slab. Saterstrom is gathering the detritus of Katrina, narrating it through someone who is culturally viewed as trash, examining the rural American South on the verge of its extinction, and practicing the art of decay appreciation.

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Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs Review

As long as I’m posting old reviews that I’ve written, I want to include this one I wrote for Electric Literature. It was for a wild and inventive book by a Swedish writer. It’s one of those books that made me want to read everything the author has written. I hope this book did well enough to encourage future translations of Lina Wolff’s work.

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Lina Wolff begins Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs with a character telling a first person narrator a story: “‘It was a Friday two weeks ago,’ Valentino told me on one of the days he drove me to school. ‘Alba Cambó and I met up at ten that morning and went for a spin in the car.’” As a reader, you don’t know who the narrator is. You know nothing about her (him?) other than what’s expressed between Valentino’s dialogue. She goes to school. Valentino gives her a ride. It’s not clear who Valentino is. The focus of his story is Alba Cambó. You don’t know who she is, either. For the next ten pages, Valentino tells a story of major, life changing events that occurred on that ride two weeks ago. The story is exciting. It’s gripping. It’s so interesting that you almost forget that Wolff is giving you no ground to stand on as a reader.

When I read the first chapter, I was fully invested in what Valentino told me about Alba Cambó, fully invested in their lives, but also struggling with this lack of a foundation. Who was “I”, the narrator? Why did she disappear after the first ten pages of her own novel? Why didn’t she respond to anything he said? Why didn’t she interject with her own feelings, her reactions, or even what she saw outside the car window? What was her relationship with Valentino? Why did he feel so comfortable sharing incredibly intimate details with her? Why is Alba so important to both of them? Should I be reading more into this? Do the names matter? Is Valentino supposed to harken romantic notions of a dashing silent film star? Does Alba’s last name carry symbolic weight: cambó, literally, “she bent”?

After a page or two of these questions, I had to make a decision: do I follow this author whom I’ve never heard of into uncharted reading territory or do I abandon this book for something more familiar, more comfortable? I knew that sticking with the novel would require a certain amount of trust. I would have to forego my typical expectations and reading patterns and just go with the flow of this novel. Valentino’s story was interesting enough. The fact that I cared to ask all of these questions so quickly mattered. I trusted Wolff and kept going. It was the right decision.

Part of the joy of this novel lies in all that is unknown. The back cover gives almost no sense of what to expect from the pages within. The title is misleading. It was possible for me to enter into my reading completely in the dark, then wait for Wolff to gradually turn on one light after another. She is a master at this. She controls the information in very compelling ways, giving just enough to intrigue, then letting us get lost in the characters before what’s going to happen happens. She’s so good about revealing the information slowly that I’m hesitant to even review this novel. I’ve already told you too much. You’re better off buying the book and reading it before you read another written here.

And now that I’ve done my due diligence in warning you, I’ll carry on with this review. Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs has nothing to do with Bret Easton Ellis. It’s just the name of a dog that a minor character, Rodrigo, talks about, a dog that the narrator never meets. It came from a brothel where all the dogs are all named after famous authors. Rodrigo buys the dog as part of his plan to repair his deteriorating marriage. If there’s a literary allusion at all, it’s simply that looking toward Bret Easton Ellis isn’t the best way to fix your relationship. This is a warning that you probably don’t need — who looks to Bret Easton Ellis for relationship advice, anyway? In the brothel, the prostitutes feed rotten meat to the dogs when johns are cruel. The back cover tells you as much. Neither are dripping with significance in the novel.

The misdirection continues in the very nature of the novel. It’s written in Swedish and by a Swede, but there are no Swedish characters and no reference to anything Scandinavian. It takes place entirely in Spain and follows Spanish (and one Italian) characters. It would feel Spanish except that the translator is English and he uses English colloquialisms. Araceli’s mother is “Mum,” their apartment is a “flat,” friends are sometimes “mates” and colors are “colours.” All of this adds up to something beautiful and global in the same way that Lee Van Cleef in a Spanish desert that was supposed to be the American West and fighting Italians who were supposed to be Mexicans all made sense in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

Once all of these typical expectations are abandoned, you can get to the heart of the novel. Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs follows an eighteen-year-old narrator named Araceli. She lives with her mother in a crumbling two bedroom apartment in Barcelona. Not much is happening in their lives. Araceli attends a school for translation and interpretation even though she has no real talent for this and no real job opportunities on the horizon. Araceli’s mother is a government employee who eschews relationships but enjoys trysts. A short story writer named Alba Cambó moves into the apartment below them. At first, Araceli and her mother are intrigued by Alba from a distance. They buy the magazines that feature her short stories and read them. Gradually, they get to know her and her servant, a central American named Blosom. Alba, Blosom, and Araceli’s mother grow closer. The introduction of Alba’s new love, Valentino, only serves to strengthen their ties. The fact that Alba is dying — which she reveals to Valentino in that opening story of his — enriches their bond. Because she is a generation behind them, Araceli becomes the outcast of the group.

The novel moves forward, meanders, and backtracks through the stories of these women. While Araceli is the narrator and this is ultimately her story, she spends much of the novel in the background. She’s a character we’re familiar with in film: the best friend, the one whom the story is never about, but who shows up at a café to say to the protagonist, “What’s wrong? You haven’t been yourself lately?” At least, Araceli seems to see herself as somehow not worthy of a story all on her own. So Valentino tells his story, Rodrigo tells his, Blosom tells hers, Araceli witnesses the adventures of her mother and her more glamorous best friend and her famous downstairs neighbor, and we even get to read one of Alba’s short stories in a chapter all its own.

This discursive aspect of Bret Easton Ellis is reminiscent of The Savage Detectives. I know that, in about a decade, Roberto Bolaño has gone from obscurity to worldwide fame to the cliché reference point for all Latin American fiction. I don’t mention him lightly or make this comparison in passing. Wolff’s work reflects Bolaño like Haruki Murakami’s The Wild Sheep Chase reflects Raymond Chandler novels. In both cases, authors take something incredibly original and put it into a context so unexpected that the second work is brilliant in its own right. In this case, Wolff has learned something about how to tell a story from Bolaño. The Savage Detectives is revolutionary in the way it chooses to approach protagonists. The reader never gets too close to Ulysses or Arturo. We instead get the stories of everyone who encountered the pair — old friends, passing acquaintances, lovers, editors, enemies. Because we can never see the work of the two poets or read their thoughts or even get a chapter in which they’re the clear cut main characters, we have to reconstruct them in our mind from a series of tangential points. It’s never a clear view. In structuring The Savage Detectives this way, Bolaño touches on something unique to twenty-first-century identity construction. We’re starting to construct our own identities through tangential points — posts crafted to maximize likes, pictures or videos with no context that sometimes vanish after a few seconds, ideas restricted to 140 characters and shaped in hopes of retweets. Bolaño’s Ulysses and Arturo are hidden and guarded because they live the lonely, disconnected, and sometimes passionate lives of artists, not because they’re social media addicts. Regardless, in both cases, identities come to be hyperaware of how they’re viewed from the outside.

Wolff shifts this. Our protagonist is also our first-person narrator. Her hyperawareness of how others view (or more often, ignore) her becomes all the more poignant. She’s not searching for meaning in her life because, clearly, there’s not much hope for that. She’s not sharing much of her internal struggles, her ideas or dreams or feelings, because no one in her life seems interested in hearing them. Those around Araceli are dismissive of her to the point where Araceli seems to guard herself from what’s going on inside. Within this dismissal lies the real feminist power of the novel.

The only stories men will listen to in the novel are Alba’s. She writes dark stories about men who meet humiliating or violent ends. Her longest is about a mysterious place called Caudal. She describes it as the last town on the road to hell. The townspeople are the last remnants of an era on its way to becoming bygone. In many ways, they demonstrate the worst parts of our own personality, kind of a collective id that has forgotten how to have fun. A specter of death hovers over them. The cemetery is the town’s most prominent landmark. A new priest enters the town with hopes of reviving it. The town, instead, destroys him.

Even the men who don’t get humiliated or killed come across poorly in Alba’s stories. Still, men love the stories. Araceli seems to learn something from this. When she tells her own story, she finds way to show men in honest, if humiliating, ways. She lets them lead themselves to their own dark ends. Similarly, like Alba does in her stories, Araceli finds a way to keep the women prominent in the stories. The men can take the lead and carry on to their logical conclusions. The women, in the meantime, learn to operate on the margins. They work together and get stronger through this work. They confront their isolation and nurture one another. They leave situations that feel untenable. They reject patriarchy in blatant and subtle ways. As Araceli grows and changes around these women, she learns to tell her own story. While it may not matter much to the people around her, Araceli’s story matters to Araceli. As you read the novel, it matters to you, too.