What Do I Say About This Novel Except That I Really Loved It: Jamie Iredell on Nick Antosca's Fires

It is a relatively simple tale and that in itself can be the hallmark of a great novel. Deceptivity. For the book is deceptively simple. It seems that way: just a college kid, starts dating a girl, has some jealousy issues with girl and past boyfriend / weirdo, ends up as dramatic face-off with ex-boyfriend / weirdo in protagonist’s parents’ home amidst a forest fire. That protagonist is Jon Danfield — perfect suburban white American name for a perfect white suburban American boy — flushed from his Ivy League college campus to the sweltering and curling eaves of his burning suburb’s Maryland landscape. His girlfriend is Ruth, a bit of a sadist. And James Dearborn — again, very white suburban name — plays the part of weirdo / ex-boyfriend who happens to also be a somewhat acquaintance from Jon’s hometown, said hometown currently burning. The first half of the book deals with this little love triangle between Jon, Ruth, and James. Then James and Jon go to their hometown, and to say that all hell breaks loose isn’t hyperbole despite the cliché. Metapahorically, it’s like that. The mountain’s on fire. Smoke billows into the sky. The weather is appropriately hot. And authorities recently discovered a long history of child abduction and sexual abuse, perpetrated by the local high school football coach. Without spoiling too much, things get weirder than that even. This is an all-around good read and perhaps what I’m most blown away by is the fact that Antosca wrote the book when he was, like, three or four years old or something. That is hyperbole, but really, he was very young when he wrote this debut and it’s impressive.

Carry-on Baggage: A Review of Mel Bosworth's Freight

Freight I Found:

If you hang around for long enough and don't destroy yourself properly with gallons of gin or various other poisons or inhalants, you get lucky and come across those good bits that Hansel and Gretel left behind in that scary forest. A few weeks ago on my run through the woods I found a bicycle. It was abused, wounded, and abandoned there in the soil, wet and dirty and rusty (as all found things seem to be), screaming to be taken and nursed back. Shortly after that, I found Mel Bosworth's novel Freight delivered to my door. It was also just waiting there screaming to be taken, but on my porch, crisp and clean, and not at all rusty or abused; wrapped up nicely with a personalized bow. And so I took it.

Freight I Ate:

I devoured Mel Bosworth's Freight quickly (read it in one day), but not without digesting it properly. It sounds like a contradiction of terms, but believe me . . . it settled down just right in one session. I ate Freight without adding any salt or pepper or chili flakes or Tabasco. Because it didn't need any of that. It was perfect as it was served. I ate it alongside a bottle of red wine. And then alongside another bottle of wine. So it could break down properly, you see.

Freight is the elegant, sensitive story of a man who carries things with him. Within him. Around him. And sometimes even above him. Freight is the story of every man. Or . . . Everyman. Sometimes he discards things because the burden gets too heavy or because it sickens him, and sometimes he takes on too much. But he really doesn't discard all of anything. Bits of things remain for him to haul along. Things. You know these things well. They're life. Your life.

The construction of Freight is pretty interesting; it’s crafted as an homage to Edward Packard’s series of Choose Your Own Adventure gamebooks, in which the reader assumes the role of the protagonist and makes choices that determine the main character’s actions and the plot outcome. It only hints at Packard’s concept, however, as the plot doesn’t majorly deviate from its course, despite the cross-referencing and jumping to ideas either foreshadowed or recounted. Being the unmotivated, indolent swine that I am, I chose to not pick my own adventure, and just trusted Mel to guide me through it. For me, the novel settles to a logical construction just fine without the Packard-like literary device.  But that isn’t to say others won’t enjoy re-reading the book in different ways, jumping forward through time, and experiencing the story in a different order. Y’all drink coffee or tea; I drink benzene.

Freight I Destroyed (epilogue):

I did no such thing. Well . . . at least not Mel Bosworth’s Freight; for the book now resides quietly and comfortably on my shelf in my living room, just on top of Louis Armstrong's biography. I don't fear for its safety, though. Satchmo can carry that burden quite well.  Sometimes, but  not too often, it is a Wonderful World.

Reading this novel, you get the feeling this is what Ozzy Osbourne might have documented as “going off the rails in a Crazy Train"

One of the most famous Kōans goes something like: “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” Before you get all worked up and run to the Zen section of your newly-purchased IKEA bookshelf (dare I say, that is one handsome bibliopegy!), relax: Bart Simpson has already figured it out. But now dig this: what is the sound of the last human being left on earth, slowly going insane? Or, rather, what do her thoughts sound like in our heads?

David Markson shows us in Wittgenstein’s Mistress in the form of quick, shifting, one-sentence paragraphs, which Kate, our singular, lone remaining animal on this planet, furiously types out in a beach house on Long Island. Kate’s musings are all over the maps of Western history, arts, and the physical world itself. The novel’s inspiration comes from Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus,” a series of short propositions presented in a logical sequence, culminating in the final decree: “What we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence.”

Pretty heavy, yeah? But don’t despair; Markson gives Kate -- a one-time artist -- this magnificent ability to jumble information about places, people, works of art, into dozens of strange, wonderful, laugh-out-loud amalgams; a brilliant, historical mash-up one almost wishes were visual; worthy of residing eternally within YouTube annals.

For example, there’s the Candid Camera-like story that Rembrandt’s students sheepishly painted images of gold coins on his studio floor, which the Maestro would stoop to pick up no matter how often the trick was repeated. This line of thought continues with Rembrandt’s eventual financial bankruptcy. Kate then riffs off these two anecdotes with the fact that Rembrandt lived in Amsterdam as a contemporary of the philosopher Spinoza, to produce an imagined conversation between the two famous men in a retail establishment: “Oh . . . hi Rembrandt, how’s the bankruptcy going?” “Fine, Spinoza. How’s the excommunication?”

See, this sort of thing isn’t necessarily new; for example, I’ve often imagined a scenario in which Johann Sebastian Bach coincidentally meets up with Sebastian Bach, lead singer of Skid Row, in a roadside diner outside Tucumcari, New Mexico -- both men road tripping through the United States in search of those melancholic times when Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady sped down Route 66, lighting joints and wreaking general havoc.

Only Markson is a brilliant writer who masterfully weaves this barrage of philosophical references and European history into truly funny scenarios, while I . . . have a day job. By the novel’s end, Markson elegantly presents Kate’s immersion in a world that is the embodiment of Wittgenstein’s final proposition.

Reading this novel, you get the feeling this is what Ozzy Osbourne might have documented as “going off the rails in a Crazy Train,” had Sharon advised him to go to University and get an English Literature degree. I know, it’s not fair to the great Oz, but coincidentally he himself is going through his personal version of decay and deterioration. It’s just that his answer involves coloring children’s books whilst mumbling something about a beef burrito at Chipotle.

"If I could only read one book again for the rest of my life, it would be this, Crime and Punishment, always and forever."

I believe I was sixteen when I read Crime and Punishment for the first [four] time[s]. I held the book in my hands, all too many pages of it, wholly unaware that it'd shape everything that came after.

It's a book that scares and intimidates me now because maybe my whole life will be turned over again. Afraid it'll throw me into another existential crises, make me afraid of mirrors and the night again, and so I try, rather unsuccessfully, to avoid it. But I can't, never could: Raskolnikov's as much a part of me as any real world memory or friend or experience I've ever had.

It was the first book to make me really cry, and I wept into it, dropping the tears onto the page as I turned page after blurred page, unable to even look away until the book was finished, just two days after it was given to me. I stared at what I held in my hands and knew nothing would ever feel like this again, that the world outside this cover was changed irreparably, unequivocally. And so the only option was to turn back to page one and so I burned through it once more before the week was finished.

If words can save a life [they can], Dostoevsky's saved mine, even when I wasn't quite aware how much I needed him, needed someone to. It completely destroyed me, dismantled the entire world, the limits of existence, and it spent the next six months or six years reconstructing me, making me hopefully better than yesterday.

If I could only read one book again for the rest of my life, it would be this, Crime and Punishment, always and forever. It may not be as magnificent or perfect as The Brothers Karamazov, but it matters to me more than I can even express. It's so much more than a book or a story: it's my whole life, before and after.

"What I am fine means is please stop talking."

Before I say anything about Kamby Bolongo Mean River, I have to tell you that its author, Robert Lopez, is a friend of mine. I also have to tell you that I edit a journal in which his fiction has appeared several times and will likely appear in the future. In other words, I am completely biased here -- I want Robert’s books to be great, and I think they are great, from his first novel, Part of the World, to his recent book of stories, Asunder, to his second novel, Kamby Bolongo Mean River, which, because I taught it last spring, is the Lopez book I’ve read most recently, frequently, and closely.

I think any book worth reading is worth reading more than once. For me, a first read often involves just figuring out what’s going on, answering the who/what/where/ when/how questions. I might have a strong emotional response on a first read, I might admire language or lines or a whole lot of things, but I can’t really tell how good the book is because I always feel like I’ve missed a lot of the nuances. A second read brings greater depth to a book because it allows me to see and feel more -- of a character’s isolation, for example -- as threads are revealed earlier and woven more subtly than I noticed on the first read. A good book gets better on a second read because that’s when I start to see the purpose and power in its construction, the choices the author made regarding line and language, tone and rhythm, withholding and revelation. Kamby Bolongo Mean River is fluid and funny and moving on a first read, but its exploration of existence and isolation gets smarter, funnier, and deeper every time I read it, and its construction tighter and more satisfying.

The book starts with this sentence: “Should the phone ring I will answer it,” and returns to variations on that line throughout the novel. “Should the phone ring” becomes a kind of touchstone, a way to both ground the story and move it forward, a verbal tic on the narrator’s part that also serves as a kind of reset button and device to propel us forward. Far from being monotonous or irritating, line repetition is one of the great strengths of this novel, the variations revealing character depth and complexity through a kind of evolutionary mutation as the book progresses, the lines taking on the feel of a broken or breaking chorus:

“Should the phone ring I will answer it.”

“Should the phone ring I might let it keep ringing until the machine answers.”

“Should the phone ring I will ask the caller to identify themselves before I say the hello how are you.”

“Should the phone ring I won’t stop the conversation with myself to answer.”

“Should the phone ring I will ask why it is I can’t dial out anymore.”

“Should the phone ring I will let the machine pick up because I have arranged for the machine to tell everyone but Mother to go fuck themselves.”

“Should the phone ring I think I will drop dead all over the floor because it hasn’t rung since I don’t know when anymore.”

“Should the phone ring I will ask Charlie why he and Mother put me here.”

That “here” just referred to, where Charlie and Mother “put” the narrator, is some kind of institution, a hospital or jail, a hospital jail, just a room really, without windows, but with a phone that we initially believe might ring at any moment, that we later think rang just last night, and that we finally know hasn’t rung in years and will never ring again. There are doctors who act more like absurd orderlies or guards or slave drivers as the place comes to feel more like a prison:

“Sometimes when one of them is examining me another one is in the corner reading the newspaper. He is sitting with his legs crossed like he is on a park bench somewhere. I always tell this one to go fuck himself.”

“Sometimes I call the doctor massa because what’s the difference.”

While we know the narrator is incapacitated and institutionalized, we never determine the exact nature of his problem, though we get greater insight regarding his oddness and otherness as the book unfolds. What we don’t get is a diagnosis. And it would be a mistake to try to come up with one, because to diagnose this character would be to reduce him to his diagnosis, and the book is far more interested in a kind of existential isolation that we might all experience, raising questions that fiction so often examines, like, How are we separated from other people? How do we connect and fail to connect with other people? What if we don’t want to connect with other people? How did we get here and why? What happened to me? What happened to you? What happens to everyone? Further, because our narrator has no way to measure the passage of time (“Should the phone ring right now I might say can you at least give me the fucking time of day here”) there’s a kind of horror to a timeless present in which there’s very little opportunity for action. A good deal of the novel focuses on the past, or rather the narrator filtering the past in this nearly empty present, weaving variations on stories about his childhood and his mother and brother Charlie with observations about his present, sometimes using the phone as a device to connect past and present. The narrator is often waiting for a call from Charlie. But the phone only comes to indicate how isolated the narrator is:

“I have often held the phone to my ear and listened to the nothing coming through. The nothing coming through the telephone is the best nothing there is. . . . I am almost always doing nothing it seems. It hasn’t always been like this but it has been like this for as long as I can remember.”

Kamby Bolongo Mean River examines a profound and nearly hopeless isolation, but the book never become leaden or oppressive, and I think there are two reasons for this: First, the prose is as clear as can be, with a lot of air in it, a lightness, and the rhythm and variation in the repetition make for a kind of beautiful song. The other reason Kamby’s not oppressive is because it’s so funny on the page, maybe the funniest book I’ve ever read. And while it’s hard to reproduce the humor here, because so much of it’s based on variation in the repetition and a kind of accumulation of absurd detail -- sandwiches and air conditioning and answering machines and coleslaw and ladles and uniforms and meditation and masturbation and powder and chafing and those “glorious” two years long ago -- I find myself laughing throughout the book:

“Sometimes,” the narrator says, “the doctors have me write poems to see how I’m doing. They tell me to express myself and I tell them it’s hard to do when I chafe like this. . . . The poem I wrote last night was the best one yet.

The answering machine is like a sandwich

My uniform is like coleslaw

So what the fuck is wrong with the air conditioning?”

Another reason Kamby doesn’t feel oppressive is that it ultimately focuses on a struggle for liberation, a movement toward escape or a moment of freedom. Lopez creates a difficult problem for this book by imposing a kind of stasis on it. Yes, the narrator can move in his mind, back to childhood memories of his hometown of Injury Alaska, which may or may not be a real place. And, yes, the narrator can move about his cell, can draw with chalk on his walls and floor, can interact with the “doctors.” But time and action, which are so crucial to movement and development in fiction, are significantly limited as narrative tools in a world in which the narrator can’t move outside of his cell and has no real sense of how much time has passed since he arrived wherever it is that he might be. Voice becomes crucial, because very little action is going to unfold. And voice serves this novel well, as does the book’s fragmented structure and weave. But if a character can’t move, if nothing much is going to happen, if it’s not clear how much time has passed from one section to the next, what can drive the story? As noted above, a strong voice and so much humor keep the reader engaged on the page, as does the exploration of this character’s odd, often fascinating consciousness, but something else is at work that makes the book more than merely funny or engaging.

As readers, we’re actively involved in trying to understand where our narrator is and how he got there and what happened to him in the past and what’s real and what’s delusion. Gradually as the story unfolds, the narrator’s situation starts to feel more oppressive, the narrator’s caretakers more abusive. We come to learn that his clothes have been taken away, maybe a long time ago, that he must ask permission to go to the bathroom, and later, that he’s often manhandled by his keepers:

“[T]wo of them will grab my arms and another two will grab my legs and the four of them will hold me aloft like I am on the rack. This is what it must feel like to be drawn and quartered is what I tell them. . . . They tell me not to struggle but I forget sometimes and struggle anyway.”

It’s the narrator’s struggle that starts to suggest his movement toward a kind of escape. Further, we get the sense of passing time, the sense that the narrator is changing, though we can’t outline anything close to a specific chronology. He says, “I think I have been in the middle of the conversation with myself for thirty-two years now,” and I wonder, Is this conversation with himself his life? Gradually, I start to think, no; maybe the text -- the book in my hands -- is the conversation with himself. Later, he writes, “Saying I am in the middle of this conversation means the conversation will continue another thirty-two years or so I think.” But on the next page: “I am probably two-thirds to three-quarters to almost done with the conversation with myself if you can believe that sort of thing without a calendar.”

Is this merely the thinking of an unreliable narrator in a world with unreliable time? I don’t think so. At this point in the novel, there’s a sense of acceleration toward something. Part of this escalation involves greater revelation of the violence and oppression of his present, which also reflects back on his past, as we learn, among many other things, that he “got stuck in Mother’s tubes on the way out.” There’s now a noise in the narrator’s head, “like a horrible dial tone from a horrible phone that never shuts off.” Woven with the escalating violence and paranoia of his present is the evolving resistance and escape thread. The narrator imagines that “[T]he people of Injury Alaska yearn for me.” There’s a kind of dawning indignation: “If the people of Injury knew I was here they would storm the gates and set me free.” The narrator starts to feel more active than he’s felt before, more an agent directing his own life: “When they let me leave here I want to return to my native home of Injury Alaska…. Back to my people waiting for me.” The fact that the narrator “wants” anything is striking. Has he wanted anything abstract in the present before this? Has there been any suggestion of a possible future before this? And while his hope to be liberated by the people of Injury might be delusional or absurd, the fact that he wants any contact with people or can imagine anyone wanting him or waiting for him suggests that he’s still capable of engagement with humanity and life.

But with that engagement seems to come an ability to see his present more clearly, as indicated in one of the most revealing and naked lines in the book: “I do the same thing here because I’m not getting any better.” This recognition of something being wrong with him, something hopelessly wrong (“I’m not getting any better”) is when his awareness of being enslaved becomes most acute, followed by a yearning to escape that seems no longer joined to the possibility of anyone out there awaiting his return.

I think it’s always sort of ridiculous to say what a book “does” or is “about” because good books do and are about so many things. But one thing Kamby “does” is examine a character’s growing awareness of his imprisonment and subsequent desire to be free, his growing resistance to imprisonment, his growing sense of fight even if that resistance (and freeing of self) takes the form of self destruction. Because once he thinks, “I’m not getting any better,” and starts identifying directly with slaves, that’s when he decides that, “should the phone ring I will let it ring and ring,” and that’s when he reveals the two ways to “do something to yourself,” which is self destruction -- suicide -- and that’s when the people of injury Alaska can “all go fuck themselves if they’re not coming to set [him] free,” and that’s when it occurs to him to “ask Charlie why he and Mother put me here.”

The narrator’s movement toward self destruction is tied to his movement toward self realization or seeing how unbearable things really are, a kind of naked lunch moment that, at least momentarily, sparks a movement toward liberation, toward recognizing a static, meaningless, oppressive present and resisting it, fighting it, even the earlier parts of the novel coming now to seem like resistance based on the narrator’s attempts to create meaning from his stories of the past. And even if the narrator shuts down again, which he will, his ability to become active in his life and to recognize the oppression of a timeless present feels like an  awakening, that awakening as well as the oppression of a timeless present ringing metaphorically or allegorically or universally (existence as a kind of imprisonment) without ever feeling forced or pretentious. The main question of the book -- “Should the phone ring,” should the outside world try to reach in -- is addressed at the end of the novel with a list of possible responses, including “I will return to the good people of Injury as they are waiting,” and “I . . . don’t feel like talking so please leave a message because I am fine.”

Is he fine? No, not really. At some moments, maybe. But he’s completely isolated and often bewildered and incapable of interactions in the present that don’t leave him feeling like a slave or a lab specimen. He is alone. But he listens to himself tell his story, and we listen too. We participate in his struggle to make his story make sense. We laugh at the absurdity of his situation and are horrified by how easily and casually he’s abused, ignored, and forgotten. But he keeps himself alive with his memory and his fight and his voice, with his conversation with himself that becomes a conversation with the reader that seems to indicate someone on the other end of the phone after all.  Even if he can’t hear us, even if we can’t call, even if he doesn’t know we exist, even if the conversation is entirely one sided, we’re there and we hear him.

An Elegy for China

This is not an easy novel to pin down, as it strives to push the boundaries of what constitutes a novel.

Part memoir, part metafiction, part travelogue, part ethnographic exploration, part political, part ecological and environmental, part history of the Cultural Revolution, part the realities of post-Mao China, part folklore, part poetry, part mythology, part nightmares and dreams, part songs and revelries, part seduction, part sexual misadventures, part aphorisms, but, mostly, it's a profound meditation on life.

I read it on my Kindle and was highlighting so often that it became almost ridiculous. So many passages that I wish I could keep in my memory forever. I'd love to post them all in here, but there's just too much, so I'll try to pepper in appropriate ones.

The story of four[?] people referred to by using only pronouns. There is I and You, the novel told in first and second person, shifting between these nearly every other chapter, and then there is He and She, who are externals. Within the novel, it's actually stated best, as an entire chapter is, in a way, about the composition of the novel.

"It's just like in the book where you is the reflection of I and he is the back of you, the shadow of a shadow."

And that sentence there sums up the whole of the characters. If you can call it a plot, it is the Quixotic journey of a wanderer, referred to as I, traveling through the mountains of China, talking to the people of small villages, learning their culture, their songs, their dances. The shift into second person recounts a man wandering through the mountains and the women he encounters and the love he feels, even when he doesn't. Eventually these narratives, which are sort of free floated and meandering become indistinguishable as the novel quagmires [in a good way] and all the threads loosen and bleed into one another, somehow making it better, making all of life captured more perfectly, more beautifully, more fully.

There are great passages of love, of what it means, of what it is, of what it wants to be and how it tries to get there. Some beautiful and some heartbreaking and some absurd and some frustrating: it's perfect. It's one of the most true accounts, I think, of what real love is.

"'Don't, don't say anything!' She holds you in her embrace and you silently merge with her body."

That is the summation of sex in the novel. There's no sensationalism, no graphic descriptions of the act, just odd moments of poetry to capture the perfection of the physical manifestations of love.

"'Talk about something,' she urges by your ear. 'What shall I talk about?' 'Anything.'"

And that there, in many ways, is the center of it all, of what love is in this novel. The will to go on, without reason, just to keep talking, to keep holding, to keep being. And much of the novel is just continuing, even after reason's run out.

There is a powerful sense of nature throughout and the narrator often begins with a reflection on the scenery and this reflection collapses inward into his own psychology, where the mountain mist that surrounds him becomes the ghosts of his past and present closing in on him. He begins with a completely external description that gradually just kind of falls and collapses upon him. They're truly beautiful passages and I've highlighted so many that it's too much to sort through at the moment.

Wandering through the mountains alone, there is a great sense of loneliness in the novel and it is in many ways tragic, as it recounts the environmental suicide caused by bad policies since the Cultural Revolution, and then, too, all the displacement and fear caused by it.

It is, in many ways, I think, an elegy for China. The narrator is very frustrated, frustrated to the point of hopelessness, yet he keeps going. He has lost all meaning, and so he searches for it everywhere, endlessly, It is the story of a man who loves his country but has had his country turn its back on him. He is completely alone, in self-exile, partly to save his life from the government, partly because of this loss.

To quote Beckett: "I can't go on, I'll go on."

It is beautiful and it is epic. It is one of those rare novels that tries to capture the totality of life, and, maybe, gets there.

"Everyone has memories they treasure. Not all memories are worth treasuring."

"I remember you."

I picked up Stephen Graham Jones’s Ledfeather again and opened to that page before it starts where all it says is, "I remember you," and I was hooked all over again, for the third time, never the last time, and the next thing I knew, the sun was rising and my heart was breaking, but in a good way, the way that resurrects you, that shows you everything you forgot to pay attention to, forgot to remember, and I closed it because it was done, again, finished for the third time, and I could’ve turned back to page one and began again, which is how the first two readings happened, in consecutive days, because this book burns you, burrows deep, and smolders, lives, reconnects cells, and balances chemistry.

If I had had this book when I was sixteen, I wonder if things would’ve been different. I wonder if this could’ve saved me the way Crime and Punishment brought me a sort of salvation, though it had to first consume and destroy me. This book, though, Ledfeather, it will save a life, it will change a life, and it will whisper to you across a century, through the forgotten dreams and lives, and the face of Doby Saxon will forever cling to the retinas, his face whited out by headlights, his hand reaching through the windshield, and you’ll fall apart with his story.