Fractured Heavens: A Review of Janice Lee's The Sky Isn't Blue

Many would argue that the main goal of literature, like most other forms of art, is to entertain. After all, we’re frequently so bogged down with the stresses and struggles of real life that we rely on these creative efforts to generate enriched escapism in which we become and interact with drastically dissimilar people in wildly different worlds. While that’s all well and good, perhaps a greater purpose of literature is to give meaning to those very same hardships, to allow us to explore our (and others’) deepest desires, fears, and confessions in the most eloquent and relatable ways possible. In her newest collection, The Sky Isn’t Blue, Janice Lee does just that, proffering a plethora of unrestrained revelations and reservations that evoke a sense of fragility, bravery, and honesty akin to Joni Mitchell’s Blue or Kaufman and Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Although it can feel a bit self-indulgently opaque and artsy at times, there’s no denying the beauty and weight Lee pours into each examination of her innermost being.

Lee (who, among many other things, is the Executive Editor of Entropy, where “earlier versions” of several of these works first appeared) views these pieces as essays, yet they often feel more like prose poems, written in paragraphs yet packed with dense, lyrical phrasing and stream-of-consciousness structure. Either way, there isn’t a wasted chapter in the lot, and the vast majority of them will leave you speechless with empathy, wonder, and introspection as you follow her investigations into the connections we make to each other, the cosmos, and even ourselves.

The opening section, which appears before the first official selection, gives a good impression of both the style and substance Lee aims for with The Sky Isn’t Blue:

In every manner of space, there is an intimate and crucial rivalry between open and close, between time and memory, between myself and yourself. The further we walk together, the further we walk in parallel, that distance between us that wavers, minuscule on some days, and incredibly vast on others, but always and certainly there, that distance persists.

The entire sky between us.

The entire sky between us.

Arguably the most prevalent and impactful subject Lee touches upon in her anthology is the death of her mother several years ago. She writes about and to her mother regularly, as if to exorcise unspoken views and hold onto a bond that, in some ways, is still very much there. In “Backpacking, Point Reyes, Driving,” for instance, she ponders how this loss has affected her entire history and outlook:

I look back and see my life divided up into three periods. First, the period before my mother’s death: a past that is difficult to remember, almost a daydream, figments of another life with mountain ranges that separate my current self from all else that dwells back there. Then, a period of flatness and depression: utterly content and comfortable yet without happiness or joy. Then a period after an intense heartbreak. The details are extraneous. What matters is that I have trouble remembering anything from past periods of my life. As if they happened in other lifetimes, or not at all.

Elsewhere, she scatters smaller fragments of the same mourning within other contexts, such as in “Los Angeles,” where whimsical ruminations about the city lead her to the following conclusion: “The confession isn’t the desire for death, though there is that too, but that you miss your mother… But in the light there is mother, there is that untraceable wound that began with birth.” These excerpts demonstrate one of the greatest feats of The Sky Isn’t Blue: Lee’s ability to represent the ways in which our cognition sometimes acts of its own accord, dispelling memories and emotions in the midst of seemingly isolated activities. In other words, we rarely have control over how our environment determines our thoughts and feelings, so all we can do is learn the embrace the randomness of it all.

Just as death sparks a myriad of responses, so too does mature [un]requited romance, and Lee does a fantastic job of capturing this as well. Interspersed throughout the sequence are confessions (directed at an unnamed lover) that are extraordinarily poignant, subtle, and gorgeous. In “Tide Pools & Rain”, she expresses a need for that kind of intimacy again, both physically and emotionally. In doing so, she pinpoints a precise kind of longing known to anyone who’s ever loved and lost:

I think of a touch, fingertips along the small of my back, fingertips running parallel along my spine to reach my shoulders, my neck, my face. I think, fuck, I miss that. I miss that. I miss a feeling, a certain feeling, a feeling of saying I love you. I miss saying I love you more than anything in the world.

Similarly, “Spaces in Transition” begins with a reaction to how our partners begin as nothing and become all-encompassing:

The mornings in bed when you turn over to see someone there, a sleeping body you barely recognize. Who is this person lying next to you and what is this overwhelming feeling you have? For a moment you don’t recognize this person who has somehow managed to infiltrate your life so seamlessly. Three months ago they didn’t even exist. Today, they have taken over everything, become everything, are everything.

“Tide Pools & Rain” also finds her commenting with brilliant simplicity on the necessity of confessional writing while also addressing the aforementioned sole detriment to The Sky Isn’t Blue (that the fancifulness of its language sometimes impedes its messages): “To miss feelings and the feelings of saying certain words. Because words matter. Because word can never match the complexity of what is felt but words are the only approximation we have.” Here, Lee acknowledges that emotions are often too complex and intangible to represent accurately and completely; rather, the most we can do (which she does) is signify them within creative outpourings.

Even at its most abstract and impenetrable moments, though, Lee’s devastating truths about what it means to be alive still pierce through. It’s often said that ignorance is bliss, yet how many artists really delve into the inverse relationship: that creative and critical thinking is torturous, for the more we question ourselves, others, and the skies that surround us, the more we allow existential crises to disappoint and scare us. Alas, it’s all a part of the human condition, and Lee’s The Sky Isn’t Blue does a tremendous job of letting us know that no matter how we feel or what we think, we’re not alone.

A Review of Jamie Iredell's Last Mass

When I decided to take a look at Last Mass by Jamie Iredell, I was expecting some kind of recovering Catholic memoir. I knew Iredell wrote fiction from The Book of Freaks and Prose. Poems. A Novel., but I also knew about his nonfiction I Was a Fat Drunk Catholic School Insomniac. Mind you, I hadn’t had a chance to read any of Iredell’s full-length works, so I was pretty much going on faith.

As a side note, I should mention that I do have a certain Catholic fascination, having been raised Lutheran. That’s part of what drew me in just on my original impression. Lutheranism is only so far distanced from Catholicism, some things having been removed and some left with just the logic behind them removed. It’s confusing, but not as confusing as that first time I went to a Catholic service as a kid and everyone performed without being told, perhaps by secret radio signals or pheromones. In my Lutheran services, you were told exactly when to stand, when to sit, when to open your hymnals. In that Catholic service, everyone just knew.

Anyway, I came to Last Mass expecting certain things. And, true to when I expect things, Last Mass turned out to be much more complex. Memoir? History? Reflection? I’m just going to call it a book and move on from there. After all, in a series of paragraphs Last Mass flips between Iredell’s formative years as a young Catholic in California, the history of Father Junípero Serra (a significant force in the early missionization of California, after having been involved with the Spanish Inquisition), Iredell’s personal problems while trying to write the book, and larger reflections on the Church and world:

Father Palou relates a story that occurred not long before Father Serra’s death: a band of natives he calls the zanjones were reported coming up the Carmel Valley towards the Mission, all of them armed. A detachment of soldiers sent from the Presidio in Monterey came for protection. They were gathered at this time six padres at San Carlos, together there for the eminent founding of Missions San Francisco and Santa Clara. These priests all feared for their lives, but not the blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra. He kept the other priests up all night with his excitement over what he assumed would soon be his death at the hand of murderous heathen. He told them stories to reassure them, but he talked fervently, expectantly, of his death in the service of his Lord.

How did Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus feel while taking Jesus down from the cross? This thirteenth Station—unlucky number for an unlucky man. In Michelangelo’s Florentine Pietà—said by some to depict a Michelangelo self-portrait in the male figure holding Jesus’ body (Joseph of Nicodemus)—Jesus seems to grow out of the marble, rock out of rock. Michelangelo abandoned the project, which was finished by his pupil Tiberio Calcagni, a lesser, and today and unknown, artist. Michelangelo’s / Nicodemus’s / Joseph’s face, though carved of solid marble, looks old and soft as old man’s skin, caring for the dead body in his arms.

Wait wait, but I forgot: at the gate stood the first two guards, with submachine guns slung over their shoulders. A third guard in the yard carried a shoulder-holstered nine-millimeter. I knew this was sketchy but I went ahead because I could not walk away at that point. I had to follow through. Inside the cinderblocked cube that was the “store,” on the dirt sat the black and white TV going static and then to picture on a Mexican telenovella. This oddly reminded me of the Playboy Channel on my parents’ TV all those years ago, though now I would certainly not get turned on, and the cocaine would ensure that. The lone lightbulb swung overhead, no shade. Behind the card table the Man sat, this Tony Montana-ish mountain of cocaine piled. I’m not kidding; there had to have been a half-pound of coke piled on that card table. The Man sweat so bad it pooled under his eyes and his knee bounced constantly. He dipped the corner of a credit card into his mountain about every forty-five seconds and that corner disappeared up one nostril, and the next dip up the other.

Iredell interposes the confusion of growing up Catholic in California with the well-intentioned but horrifyingly brutal account of one of the men who brought Catholicism there and helped make it what it is today. He doesn’t attack the Church (in my view), but he certainly doesn’t hide what it has done, or his own shortcomings. He seems to question, and how could he not? He doesn’t appear to be devoutly religious now, but it doesn’t seem like a person raised in the Church ever truly leaves. The Church was a part of shaping who Iredell is just as it was, along with Father Serra, in shaping modern California. Good, bad, or an indeterminable and inseparable mix of the two, its unchangeably part of the modern identity.

The conclusions in Last Mass aren’t heavy handed either. To me, it seemed as if things were too complicated for easy conclusions to be drawn. It’s easy if you separate out what ended up being the willful ignorance of sophisticated cultures and the both intentional and unintentional obliteration thereof, but such a separation is artificial and doesn’t reflect the full reality. Iredell instead seems to present the complexity as complexity so the reader can puzzle over it in its fullness. Last Mass has some great lines, but it’s the structure that I really love. That single arc coming together from those individual differently pointing paragraphs was something I wasn’t expecting, and I love how it comes off. Last Mass kept me right in the moment on every page, engaged without being forced. I’d definitely recommend checking it out.

Trouble & Troubledness: A Review of Juliet Escoria's Black Cloud

One of the main reasons I read is to feel, and I definitely got that from the stories in Black Cloud by Juliet Escoria. I mean, if writing didn’t move us…why keep reading? Without emotional involvement, there is no engagement. Without engagement, we get bored and drift off. My life is boring enough. I don’t need that in fiction. However, I certainly wasn’t bored by the stories in Black Cloud. Anything but.

Of course, as one might expect from the title, the feelings (without considering the complexity with which they are evoked) are frequently unpleasant. Consider this portion from “Trouble & Troubledness” (which I certainly hope isn’t happy for you):

One day my mom yelled at me for something that made no sense and so I ran outside. The thing swirled up, the empty black thing, growing from the pit of my stomach, tendrils reaching into my arms. My vision went hot and I wanted to jump into the ocean and swim out far until I couldn’t come back.

I flicked the blade out. I wanted to make a heart in my calf. My skin got whiter as I cut, and then the whiteness filled in with blood. I carved each line three times, just to make sure it went deep enough. The blackness shrank.

I wiped the blood away with the meaty part of my palm. I licked my hand clean. It tasted like copper and dirt. My leg hurt, but I felt tough on the inside, like I could hide the thing inside me. My jeans stuck to the blood but later it scabbed over, and when the scab fell off there was a perfect and even heart-shaped scar.

Presuming you aren’t some kind of monster, the above evokes pain and horror. However, it is also powerful and moving.

After all, dwelling only on good emotions while ignoring the bad is an attempt to hide from life. It may make things nice,’ but it shuts out the vast majority of experience. It’s reductionistic and escapist. Perhaps like the main character of “Trouble & Troubledness”(if you’ll even consider excusing me for venturing to make this kind of a comparison), sometimes we just need to feel. Anything.

No, these stories aren’t primarily about joyful feelings, though there is some in there. As the section headings indicate (including: resentment, confusion, apathy, guilt, disgust, spite, revenge, fear, powerlessness, envy, self-loathing, and shame), these are principally darker aspects of human existence.

The section headings may sound a bit simplistic at first, but you still can’t see what is coming just because the supposed emotion to be involved is announced. There is more of a twist on the recited theme than that, a variation or perhaps deeper exploration. For example, one section is titled “Powerlessness” and then the story “I Do Not Question It” goes on to detail two recovering addicts, best friends and occasional lovers, who seem to both save and destroy each other throughout their history:

I was scared to drink the kava because I had never done it before and because I knew I would like it because it will change how I feel. But Zachary peer pressured me into coming here. Which is funny, considering when I had one year sober, he called me and told me he would send me heroin in the mail because he knew it would turn me into a junkie, like him. I hung up on him and started to cry. This was the last time we talked until he got clean again.

It is not fair, to Zachary, to tell you that story, with- out telling you that he was instrumental in getting me clean and helping me stay that way – despite and maybe because of the phone call about heroin. When I got sober, my thoughts would get to churning and until nothing made sense anymore. “Stop thinking,” he would tell me, so I stopped. It worked. It’s harder than it sounds but it’s easier than you might think.

The characters evidence powerlessness at times, in facing their own addictions as well as in their ties to each other, but also power over the exact same things at other times. It’s an investigation of powerlessness, but in a much more multi-faceted way than a mere dictionary definition of the term would suggest.

Regardless, using sparse and elegant prose, Escoria makes the reader feel. Moreover, even when the reader feels is terrible and frightening, Escoria finds a way to make it beautiful. These are powerful stories. Read them and be moved.

A Deep Private Ocean: A Review of Joseph Riippi's Because

I want to fly to LaGuardia. From there, I want to ride a dirty bus and an empty subway train to Brooklyn and pace the wet streets glossed with streetlight until I find where Joseph Riippi lives. When I find him, I want to buy him a drink. After that, I want to punch him, and then buy him another drink. Then, before I leave, I want to become his friend. Let me explain.

Joseph Riippi’s Because is a litany of his personal desires, a catalog of his wants, and because of that, it’s deep, beautiful, disorienting. The cover says it’s a novel, but I’m not buying that. It is more of a long prayer, a meditation, a love letter to life, perhaps a cathartic self-examination or the schematic diagram of what it means to be a human being. You might even call it bipolar-memoire; the comparative overlay of a life half-lived with the life not yet lived but hoped for. Riippi didn’t write this book as much as he must have unzipped himself from chin to navel and bled it out:

I want my great-great-grandchildren to know who I was. I want them to read this. I want them to know about the wife I loved, the places I lived, the things I did. I want them to know that I had a full head of hair and that baldness does not run on my side of the family. I want them to know they should watch themselves with alcohol, because their blood was born with a craving. I want them to know they should watch themselves around knives. I want them to know how I died, if it will help them.

There is reminiscent sadness, certainly, but there is also plenty of warm hope and genuine optimism:

I want us to swim together until we’re too tired to float, and then paddle exhaustedly back to our front door. I want us to spend every weekend like this. I want us to spend our lives like this. I want us to always call out to one another. I want us to relive this over and over throughout the week. I want our children to call us on weekends and ask, How was your morning surf? as we sip our tea and espresso, dripping and exhausted in our kitchen, at our island, smelling of salt and licking our lips and smiling.

I found the read a bit hard at times, but always worthwhile. Since Riippi writes in stream-of-consciousness mode, his thoughts always swirling and eddying, doubling back upon themselves, a reader must do without the usual reference points. It’s the equivalent of being dropped in open waters. There are plenty of inspiring sights, night skies packed with stars, expansive yet dizzying as well. The endless waves of one man’s thoughts. Treading water in the middle of the Riippic Ocean. It’s rare to see such intimacy, such humanity exposed. I can say, without spoiling anything for future readers, is that he confesses deeply. Riippi writes, more than once, his expectation:

I want you to understand why I am writing this. I want you to listen to me.

And I feel like I do know him now, which is why I want to fly to New York City and find him and buy him a drink, to thank him for writing this book. I want to punch him because he wrote the book I should have written, a book that we all should write for ourselves at the coming of middle-age, when it’s time for us to reach some semblance of peace with the first half of a lifetime lived for better or worse, but more importantly, to re-evaluate our hopes for the dwindling road left to travel. I wouldn’t punch him that hard, by the way.

And then I’d buy him another drink, to apologize for my bit of writerish jealousy. And then, before I left Brooklyn, I’d make sure I was friends with Joseph Riippi. Because after you have read this book and toured the chambers of the guy’s heart, you really have no other choice.

It Was Not Something I Would Do Again, Except that I Probably Would: An Interview with Gabriel Blackwell

Shome Dasgupta: Wonderfully, you have two books coming out in 2012 — Shadow Man: A Biography of Lewis Miles Archer (CCM, 2012) and Critique of Pure Reason(Noemi, 2012) — what’s going on behind the scenes? Is it hectic managing the release of two books?

Gabriel Blackwell: It’s maybe appropriate that these two books are both coming out at roughly the same time; I wrote them more or less in parallel. Still, that doesn’t make it any easier to deal with them now that they’re almost here. I really have no one but myself to blame. I make my own work — nothing that I’m doing now is “required,” and I could probably just be taking it easy and letting things play out the way they’re going to anyway. But I can’t bear leaving things entirely up to chance. I don’t know if there is an ideal reader for either book, but if there is, I want the book to find her, somehow. I only know how I find books to read, so I’m trying to do the kind of things that would get my own attention; presumably, I’ll find other readers like myself. You can see the problem — doing things in this myopic kind of way is very limiting. Fortunately, I’ve had a number of really kind, really generous people help me out and offer opportunities that I wouldn’t have thought to ask for, and maybe together we’ll get the books into people’s hands.

SD: Did you find any similar obstacles while working on both of these books? Was one harder to write than the other? What were the differences or similarities in the experiences of working on one book compared to the other?

GB: Critique of Pure Reason seems the easier of the two now because it was mostly done by the time that I realized that it was an it. At that point, I had been working on what it would be for four years, and all but three of the pieces had been published or accepted for publication. My work on it last spring leading up to me sending it to Mike Meginnis at Noemi was a matter of putting the various parts together in a way that made meaning out of the whole. But thinking about it in that way discounts the four years of work that went into its components. It’s deceptive, I mean, but when I think about Critique as a book, that’s usually what I think about — the process of ordering it, rather than the process of composing it.

Shadow Man was very different. It felt difficult throughout because of how complex it ended up being, and because of how concentrated my work on it had been by comparison with Critique. By the end of my revision process, I was reading through the entire book each time I changed a line, just to make sure what I was changing wouldn’t disturb something earlier on. I sat at my desk for ten, eleven hours at a stretch. I gave myself acid reflux. I had to sleep sitting up for weeks. It was not something I would do again, except that I probably would.

SD: While writing, editing, and revising — what did you learn about the process? What stuck out to you that you hadn’t thought about before?

GB: I learned as much in the two years I worked on Shadow Man as I did in the two years I spent in graduate school. Maybe more. There’s no substitute for creating and revising something so sustained. It is its own pedagogy. But, because I finished it very early in 2011, and because I’ve since finished another book (The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised-Men), I’m not sure that I can remember specifically what I learned while writing Shadow Man. I learned how to write Shadow Man, and I would guess that all of what I learned is on its pages somehow. Very little of that learning carried over to NDFIM. Even the processes of composition were radically different — I wrote my first draft of Shadow Man in three weeks or so; it took me more than a year to complete a draft of NDFIM.

SD: Just by reading the excerpts of your upcoming works, it looks like there was some heavy research being done (in particular, Shadow Man) — how did this play a role in your works?

GB I’m not a big fan of hermetic stories or novels, honestly. I prefer work that has something to say to the world around it, that acknowledges that it will never really get its readers’ undivided attentions. I try to create parasitic works, building on others’ creations—not just acknowledging the reader’s life outside of the book but (so I hope) pointing in fruitful directions for his or her distraction. Obviously, I have to know something of those other creations if that’s going to be successful, so I do research.

SD: You have so much going on — your own writing, teaching, being the reviews editor for The Collagist, writing for Big Other, and you do so much more — how do you manage your time? What is your schedule like when you’re writing?

GB: This isn’t a life that I would have wished on my younger self, but it seems fine for now. I learned late how dedicated I needed to be to be a writer I’d want to read, and I feel like I’ve been trying to catch up ever since. There is no substitute for working with language on a daily basis, even if it isn’t your own; honestly, it seems better to me that it isn’t my own, often. I don’t need to be more prolific (though there are plenty of writers who are, and who are fine writers), so, even though my work for The Collagist or Big Other takes away from my typing time, I don’t necessarily think of that as a bad thing. I think I’d prefer that I was different from story to story, and that seems to me to require that time passes. If I can spend that time working with language, all the better.

As for my schedule, it varies a little. When I’m typing something, I usually get up early and write before work so that I can spend the late afternoon / evening taking care of my other responsibilities. If I put those off for too long, they take over my schedule and it becomes difficult to find time to write. So I have to be very disciplined. I very rarely take a day off, but I don’t think that makes me different from most of the writers I know — like I said, it seems necessary to be working with language in some way every single day. The few times I’ve tried to “do nothing” for a day have been disasters.

SD: What’s it like being a reviews editor?

GB: There are substantial rewards — I get to work with some really smart writers, find out about books and publishers I never would have known about otherwise, and help get the word out about some really great books. I don’t know if it’s perfect for me or if I’ve perfectly adapted myself to it, but either way, it feels completely natural now, two years into it.

SD: Do you have any book recommendations? What have you been reading lately? What are you looking forward to checking out?

GB: I’ve been so pressed for time lately that I read while walking the dog — I read Christopher Priest’s The Affirmation, Amber Sparks’s May We Shed These Human Bodies, and Brian Carr’s Vampire Conditions walking around my neighborhood—and I’m doing research for a new book, so most of what I read at home isn’t exactly by choice. But I’m trying to make time for Michele Disler’s [Bond, James], Mike Kitchell’s Variations on the Sun, Kellie Wells’s Fat Girl, Terrestrial, Elena Passarello’s Let Me Clear My Throat, and Matthew Vollmer’s Inscriptions for Headstones.

SD: Who are some authors you find yourself admiring? Why? What is it about them or their works that appeal to you?

GB: This seems like a question whose answer would get out of hand in less than a sentence, so I’ll just say that I seem to have totems for each book I write, and for this latest one, those totems are David Markson and Christopher Priest. I’m not sure what that means or if it means anything at all.

SD: What about journals? Which ones do you find yourself reading regularly?

GB: I read Conjunctions cover to cover. I also look forward to new issues of DIAGRAM, [out of nothing], Puerto del Sol, Tin House, Black Clock, and Artifice. And I’m really looking forward to the second issues of two new magazines, Uncanny Valley and Unstuck. I’m sure I’m forgetting dozens of others.

On Michael J. Seidlinger's The Sky Conducting

I was sitting at a bar with a friend and when I went out to smoke he looked at my copy of The Sky Conducting.

After I came back in he said, “There are a lot of good lines in this.”

I agreed. The book is formed from one-sentence paragraphs that pile on top of each other, much like you might see in Nietszche, Wittgenstein, Markson, Noah Cicero, or Sam Pink.

It begins with instructions regarding how to read the book, like you would get for a piece of modern technology. Seidlinger seems to be saying that that novel can be “modern” too — it can be complex and advanced enough to require instructions. After reading this book, I couldn’t agree more.

The instructions discuss breathing while reading the text. This reminded me of the art piece “Body Pressure” by Bruce Nauman. Are the instructions to be followed, or broken, or both?

At first, I found some of the messages to be not very subtle. The premise of this book is that America “dies” . . . literally, like its collective heart stops beating. But then I realized there was a lot of playing around with the semantics of the abstract, ideological words that pervade our culture.

Similarly, I initially wondered about the “good” aspects of American culture that were being overlooked in the text, but this passed as well, because as the book progresses we get less abstraction and more humanity from the main characters, who are mostly all American (no pun intended).

The novel allowed me to reflect on how we are part of a stationary mimesis. The post-apocalyptic premise serves as a sort of metaphor for the nihilism/pessimism/stasis of the recession. Our dreams are equally hope and fiction, inspiration and irreality.

One of my favorite lines: “After all the talk about the end of the world the grand irony was that it actually happened.”

There is a lot of confronting the reader. Everything about this novel is confrontational.

A lot of times post-apocalyptic shit can be bleak as fuck, but Seidlinger balances both humor and humanity.

Sometimes technology has agency in this novel, and that gave me headaches. Of course, another one of my favorite lines was, “Headaches are good because they mean the mind is still working.”

There is a lot of black market trade in this book, and yet somehow it all seemed calmer and more humane the everyday American market we know. It seemed people related to people as people more, and that they were more direct in their relationships, in this book, whereas in the “real-life” marketplace people relate to cashiers and salesman and producers and consumers and customers and managers and middlemen. In today’s legal, and increasingly digital, markets we seem to relate more to abstractions than to humans.

By the end of the book the past tense takes over, there is no more present tense. This is how America is becoming. We can’t talk about the future, because we don’t know if we can believe in it.

The Empire That Once Was America

I’m a huge fan of dystopian/apocalyptic novels, mainly because — if crafted by good authors — they unravel an elegantly-weaved prescience into a gloomy and fast-approaching future we’ve recklessly created ourselves for ourselves. Think of Bradbury, Atwood, Gibson, Orwell, and of course Huxley’s Brave New World. In short, I am a fan of the Folly of Man, and all in favor of technology flipping the tables on us served in the form of a well-organized, worldwide revolution (helmed by the HAL 9000, naturally). I’m perfectly at peace knowing we’ll get what we deserve.

Michael Seidlinger’s new novel The Sky Conducting presents us with an America not too far destined; a country on the down slope of an empirical, majestic, and dirty decline, where all systems (political, social, familial, and otherwise) have failed. The America we find in The Sky Conducting has passed judgement on and eviscerated its own organic vital functions; the ultimate act of cutting the nose off to spite its face. All that remains is a whisper of an arrogant empire, which comforts itself with melancholia and the fossils of domestic symmetry.

People have fled the country in gargantuan migrations, having ruthlessly and obtusely consumed all the land’s resources, leaving behind a ravaged, nutrient-deficient land (figuratively, as well as literally). Those we once called our neighbors, our friends, our family have become precious commodities, scarcely found on the continent. But despite the vastness, the horrible depletion and deforestation of America, one family has stayed behind in their home, unable to move on. By rebelliously inhabiting this skeleton of a country, they must forge themselves a second chance. Ahh, America, where everyone gets to tap dance themselves to the top again in a second act. Maybe.

Seidlinger’s prose is an exercise in brevity, with sentences, phrases, and dialogue coming at you like short jabs to the ribs, to the kidneys, to the jaw . . . advancing the story seamlessly. I liked the construction of the language, as well; building blocks stacked upon building blocks in short passages, making up the chapters.

Given my pessimistic outlook on the empire that once was America, this novel resonated and almost served as a mirror to all of those still waving flags and proclaiming that we are living in the world’s greatest country. I see them as noisemakers rattling sabers, banging on drums, yelling indoctrinated slogans into megaphones, all trapped on a bus that has quickly begun to slip into a deep ravine.

I read this book concurrently with one of literature’s heavyweight dystopian allegories: Jose Saramago’s Seeing. It made a great one-two punch and set me in a beautiful, savage landscape not too far from where we are today.