The Once-Never-Before-Explored World of Ch*ck L*t

I don’t read chick lit.

I’m not sure I’ve ever done it once (though I did pretend to read Bridget Jones’s Diaryback in college just to have something to discuss with a girl I liked. It didn’t work out).

You know, I’m not even exactly sure if the term “chick lit” is derogatory or not. An epithet. I find myself saying “chick lit” in hushed tones when in the mixed company of people that might either read it and/or write it.

Then a friend of mine who reads it recommended a friend of hers who writes it and soon I was engrossed in Nancy Goodman’s new book Surprise Me!, my eyes opened to this once-never-before-explored world of ch*ck l*t.

OK, so Surprise Me! is indeed a novel about a woman — a chick — who struggles to find Mr. Right amongst three suitors. It has lots of short chapters and snappy pillow talk-type dialogue. Naturally, it has a bright pink wedding cake on its cover. Sounds like standard chick lit fare, right? But though it does have a light and breezy finding-love angle, in a way, that’s secondary to a story that is actually a lot more inventive and deep. It’s that story which I enjoyed most about the book and where it truly shined.

The novel’s protagonist Genie Burns, an incredibly compelling character, runs a company called Surprise Enterprises (with a partner and perhaps one of these aforementioned suitors), that plans surprise parties for people. Oh, if companies like Genie’s really existed, they’d make for a great reality TV show. The surprise parties Genie plans and throws throughout the narrative add a welcome dose of zaniness and humor to the book. More importantly, though, is the crux of Surprise Me! which is the detailing of Genie’s emotional eating issues and how she overcomes them.

Nancy Goodman herself is a former sufferer of emotional eating, food obsessions, and binging and has long wanted to help women overcome similar issues. Her first book was a serious self-help release on the matter, It Was Food vs. Me . . . And I Won, which despite a major publisher release never really latched on with the public. Still wanting to spread her message, Goodman figured an enjoyable chick lit novel might actually work better and came up with Surprise Me!

Now I may not really know chick lit, but I’m a sucker for books that seem breezy and lightweight upon first glance but are actually deep and inspiring at their core. In fact, that’s what I tried to do with my first novel How to Fail: The Self-Hurt Guide. But while my book was a seemingly “breezy and lightweight” offering full of promiscuous sex, voracious alcohol use, and lots of lots of foul language — masquerading a message of pursuing one’s unique dreams to find success and happiness in this world — Surprise Me! is a lot more, ahem, palatable for a general audience.

I’m a guy and while I read a lot of different things, I like “guy” books. Those are the kinds of books I write too. So I would seem to be one of the last people in the world who would fall in love with Surprise Me! Yet I did.

That’s the magic of it. Surprise Me! is not your typical chick lit. Even as I still don’t know if I’m allowed to use that term!

The Creation of a Girl: Lidia Yuknavitch's Dora

I have been waiting for Lidia Yuknavitch’s novel Dora: A Headcase since reading her memoir The Chronology of Water last year. In the memoir, Yuknavitch traces her journey from an abusive childhood and a troubled young adulthood to a middle age of acceptance, but above all, she rewrites what it means to be a woman and a girl in a culture that seeks to keep us silent. She gives voice to the corporeal experience that we girls and women are taught to shroud in shame. She locates creation and destruction in the body. She writes of her scars without flinching. She tells the stories that break the façade of the girl.

In Dora: A Headcase, Yuknavitch creates a girl who takes back her story. The character of Dora is based on the teenage girl at the center of Sigmund Freud’s 1905 case study on hysteria. Freud treated Ida Bauer, who he named Dora in the case study, for aphonia, the loss of voice. Despite her telling him otherwise, he attributes Dora’s hysteria to her unresolved sexual feelings for Herr K., a friend of the family who made advances towards her when she was fourteen. He also traces her symptoms to her repressed desires for her father and his lover Frau K., Herr K.’s wife. In the case study, Freud writes Dora’s story for her. In the novel, Yuknavitch gives Dora her voice.

Yuknavitch’s Dora is a seventeen-year-old punk teen in contemporary Seattle. She is on the cusp of adulthood, but adults treat her as a dependent minor without her own agency. She has suffered from bouts of aphonia after her father’s friend, Mr. K., propositioned when she was fourteen; he backed off only when she drew a pocketknife to her neck and cut a smile into her skin. Much to her frustration, she has yet to have sex. She faints when she becomes physically intimate with another, including her friend Obsidian, a girl from the Coeur d’Alene reservation with whom she is in love. With her posse of queer and misfit friends, she stages art attacks around Seattle. The adults consider these teen behaviors acting out, and Dora’s father sends her to the best shrink he thinks his money can buy, an elderly man she calls Dr. Sig.

“It’s not therapy. It’s epic Greek drama. You gotta study up. You got to bring game,” Dora says of her sessions with Sig. She knows that as a man in a position of authority, Sig has the power to tell her story over hers. And she knows that Sig views her problems through the lens of unresolved sexual issues. So she makes up outlandish dreams that hinge on objects that Sig thinks of as symbols of sexual repression. She likens the cracks on his office ceiling to vaginas. When he asks if she masturbates, she replies, “Do you?” and insists that he has to tell his intimate secrets before she will tell hers. She always carries a Dora the Explorer purse with her, modified with pins and skeletons. Inside the purse, she hides a recorder and tapes it all.

“I consider it my duty to beat Sig’s story of me,” Dora says. She wants to make a mix-tape of her sessions with Sig and snippets of punk music and play it at a rave. That is to say, she wants to recite Sig’s words in her own art. She wants to tell her story in her own voice. She knows that Sig is writing case studies of his patients. But she discovers that his publicist wants to turn the case studies, and in particular her story, into television for the money. Her pathologies would be broadcast on television for mass entertainment. Against her will, she would be portrayed as a “teen little monster girl,” a rebel bad girl who would serve as a catharsis and a warning for parents who believe in their right to absolute control over their children.

In her anger, she plots revenge. She makes a film instead. With the help of her posse, she sets up Sig and captures a horrifying, embarrassing, and absurd sequence involving his dick. She splices these scenes with images of the homeless, cuckoo clocks, nuclear explosions, humping buffaloes. “It’s a movie about everything. This world we live in. The bodies we’re stuck with. The lives we get whether we want them or not. How hard you have to work just to get through a fucking day without killing yourself.” To combat the invisibility of girls and women in the culture, she adds images of female artists who blew up the conventions of their media and made their own art. She considers the consequences of her actions, but she also says, “But you know what I think about more? I think about all the times in my life I didn’t understand what the fuck was happening and no one bothered to explain it to me.”

The plot of Dora: A Headcase is over the top. The pace is manic. It teeters between absurd comedy and the thrill of a chase. I often laughed out loud. Comedy in Dora is not just about entertainment; Yuknavitch uses farce to expose the hypocrisies of our institutions, in particular that of the family and its control over girls’ lives. Dora’s father suffers a heart attack. Her mother disappears to Vienna. At the same time, a raw cut of her film goes viral. Sleazy men stalk Dora and offer her money for her footage and when she refuses, their tactics become more violent. Amid all these traumas, Dora literally loses her voice. Her voice comes back to her as she defends the integrity of her art and her friendships. From the wreckage of her hijinks, Dora recreates herself. From the wreckage of her language, Yuknavitch creates a girl who demands, “I just want my stories to be mine.”

The City as Humanity’s Conception of Nature: David Rhodes's The Last Fair Deal Going Down

David Rhodes opens his first novel, The Last Fair Deal Going Down, by having its protagonist, Reuben Sledge, state that the book is a “chronicle of myself hidden in the grayness of a story of the people and the city itself.” The city in question is Des Moines, Iowa, and its people are as murderous, amorous, and plain as the citizens of any other. These traits are in no small part due to Reuben’s family moving to Des Moines — the Sledges are predisposed toward talents both utilitarian and chaotic. One brother is an incredible mechanic, another a Midwestern Don Juan.

I’m intrigued by the idea of cities, and have been ever since I was brave enough to live in one. A child of small-town Ohio, I’m more aware and used to nature than people. Living in a warren of them I got the feeling that a city is perhaps one of the most natural expressions of humanity we can create. They are created environments, organisms. Cities have spirits — the right ones do, anyway. Rhodes’ depiction of Des Moines is as a complex, preternatural city. There is a key idea here I’ll get to shortly.

I picked up David Rhodes’ The Last Fair Deal Going Down while on an ill-conceived excursion to San Francisco. I found the book at City Lights, was intrigued by the title — one of my favorite songs by Robert Johnson—and dug the Milkweed cover, which is a clear picture of heavy, dark mammatus, possibly over Iowa, but every bit as likely to be Nebraska. The back cover was a little vague, suggesting a very urban story, only slightly indicative of the supernatural. I quickly found the back cover to be, to put it mildly, inaccurate. Reuben’s opening statement is a much better précis. It’s an autobiography, a family history, a mystery, at times dry and others effulgent. There are cannibals. There’s a phantasmic horse. An involved diary of a stalker. Haunting the pages more than anything, though, is the “city within a city” which exists below Des Moines proper. It’s this city which exemplifies my feelings about the nature of cities, the how and why we build them.

Rhodes’ “lower city” comes as a complete surprise. The back cover does not do the idea of it justice. The reader quickly finds it is not metaphorical but literal, supernatural. It is a deep hole in the ground, streets leading into it as though it were only a warp in the cities fabric — a place of higher gravity. Covered in fog, no one has ever truly seen the city, and the people who enter it never return. Things are lost in the lower city. People, cars. The Sledges live with the hole beginning in their backyard and every so often they hear the sound of something opening in the fog. Discovering the city is part of the point of the book, and so I’ll only say a little more. What does it say about the people who built the place that it was necessary, that its pieces and parts were needed for its function? Who would build such a place? Cities are something like organisms, and that which does not make a city stronger is soon dissolved, eaten, and replaced. This lower city seems to be an organ designed to lure and contain the souls of the lost. Not to wax too poorly poetic about it.

The Last Fair Deal Going Down seems to contain as much of everything as Rhodes could fit. How he makes it work is a mystery to me — and perhaps he doesn’t. Perhaps I was just charmed. But the book is charming, very much so. This was Rhodes’ first novel, and for that you may find the spine of the book buckles, that whole sections could and should be cut. I loved every ludicrous moment. Every turn was unexpected, and the book itself seemed to be evolving as I read it, becoming what it needed to be — a story somehow independent of the need for a reader, simply needing to be told. And there’s a reason for that. I found the book to be a different beast from what I had bought according to the cover, and again different from what I had read in the beginning, and on and on until I reached the end, when the book took on a final shape, or perhaps its true shape was revealed.

Thinking back on it Rhodes had, for me, captured precisely what I look for in a city and in a book; a spirit. He created for Des Moines a spirit that runs through the pages, that captures everything, the life and death of its people, and that in a way understands its own creation, is reflexive. In my head, as twisted and tangled as the book itself is, I see it — the book, somehow — complementing the city in the same way the lower city does. These three things are inextricably linked, each of them necessary to the next, each horrible and beautiful, and both of those things because they were made by us, by Rhodes, by people. The city as humanity’s conception of nature.

Hey, Have You Ever Visited A Crumbling, Bilious, Post-War Hydropathic

In Britain, there is a long and boring tradition of novels about World War I, AKA the First World War, AKA The Great War. In my head, these mingle with the longer and even more boring tradition of novels about World War II. There are novels about the Blitz and the Home Front and the trenches and blackouts and evacuation, and I have not read a single one of them because I am not interested in World War I or World War II. I would go so far as to say that I actively avoid novels about wars — any novel, any war. I hate that shit. But then I saw Elaine di Rollo’s Bleakly Hall.

The Wonderland-esque cover drew me in, as well as the title (so dramatically dreary, so Gothic), but when the blurb informed me that the novel is set in a crumbling, bilious hydropathic, I was hooked. The story jumps between the hydropathic (in the novel’s ‘present’, after WWI) and the trenches (in the ‘past’, during WWI). Both settings seemed so real I could taste them. In a few years, if someone says to me “hey, have you ever visited a crumbling, bilious, post-war hydropathic?” (because I imagine that in a few years I will have achieved my goal of having the sorts of friends that ask those sorts of questions), then I’ll genuinely believe that I have. Bleakly Hall is that vivid.

Not surprisingly, I fell a little bit in love with the elusive and aristocratic Captain Foxley (because my other main goal in life, after having friends who ask bizarre questions, is to have a name like Lady Kirsty Foxley). But the real heroes are Monty and Ava, two women who worked as nurses on the front line in Belgium and have now found themselves thrown together again at Bleakly Hall. All the characters are exaggerated, myth-like constructs, and yet each one lives and breathes so that I can imagine them outside the pages of the book. These characters are all real people. They must be, because I don’t think I’ve ever read fictional characters I believed in so strongly.

Although the scenes set during wartime are darker, in that there’s blood and death and hideously gory injuries, the modern scenes feel more grim. There’s a certain glee to Monty and Ava’s manic yet heroic escapades, and Captain Foxley is a wartime hero. Afterwards, lost and aimless at the hydropathic, they are all so much sadder. The Hall may be bleak, but its inhabitants make it that way.

Bleakly Hall has everything I want in a novel: beautiful prose, believable characters, an intense setting, and an interesting plot. I love it so much that I wish I hadn’t read it, so that I could go back and read it for the first time. And like its characters, in reading the novel I have come away a changed person. I’ve now read many books set during the world wars — I particularly recommend those by Pat Barker and Sarah Waters — and I’ll be seeking out more. None of them have lodged in my heart like Bleakly Hall, but I’ll still keep looking. Thanks, Elaine di Rollo, for making me love that shit.

Strange Ballet On the Page

All show, no tell. That’s the best way I can think to describe Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s work. Terrence Malick adapting Beckett. Extreme minimalism. Delicate maximalism. Strange ballet on the page.

I’m recommending Reticence here, but all show, no tell could easily be said of the Parisian Belgian’s work as a whole. Reticence, published in France in 1991 and just now being issued in English by Dalkey Archive, doesn’t stray greatly from the more recently notable Running Away and The Truth About Marie. Like those works, the prose is more pacing than plot, more action than emotion, more supposition than exposition. Drop a Toussaint novel into a writing workshop and show your students how to crack a table into rational and emotional halves.

The “story” of Reticence is quite simple. Our narrator and his young son (still sleeps in a crib, no language or mother) spend a few nights in a small fishing village, the idea being to visit a writer friend named Biaggi, who keeps a house there. Something holds our hero back, though. An “initial reticence” takes over, so consuming he can’t sleep, and in the midst of this reticence he becomes convinced Biaggi knows he’s in town. In fact, he’s convinced Biaggi is following him, even having him watched by the proprietor of the hotel.

By nights, our hero sneaks about the village, leaving his son to sleep alone. Struggling with misgivings about seeing a friend is apparently a greater motivator than fear of leaving his infant son. In one of his first insomniac outings, our hero spies in the night water a dead cat floating with a piece of fishing line out its mouth:

“The way it was floating it was impossible to see its face, and it was only when the current caused its body to pivot slightly that I saw it had a fish head in its mouth, from which a broken bit of fishing line protruded a couple of inches. And it was precisely this piece of line that made me think later in the evening — at the time I’d just looked at it without giving it too much thought — that the cat had been murdered.”

So much depends upon a murdered cat. With our hero full of questions, the answers he accepts are never quite waterproof enough for us readers to accept. So cycles of crisis-conflict-climax repeat again and again and again, and suspense piles and piles and piles, no dramatic beat ever completely resolved:

“How else to explain the fragment of fishing line in its mouth? How could such a tough and resistant bit of line be cut by the animal itself? And how, supposing it had indeed managed to cut the line, to explain the presence of a trolling line just a few feet from the side of the pier when it should have been out at sea anywhere from thirty to sixty feet underwater? Why, above all, was the end of the line cut so cleanly, as if with a knife, if it’s not because once the cat had been caught in the trap that Biaggi had set the night before — because Biaggi was in the village, I was now sure of it. . . .”

The human mind is only half rational. Why not visit his friend? Because he doesn’t feel like it. Why doesn’t he feel like it? Because he’s reticent. Why is he reticent? I don’t know, but here’s a book about what reticence can drive a man to do. And this makes Reticence, like all of Toussaint’s books, beautifully unsettling, and happily irrational. Running into a friend may as well be a life and death affair. And really, “giving it too much thought” can make anything a matter of life and death. Six degrees of separation from fishing line to murder.

If this were a book of Envy or Sexual Attraction or True Love, no reader would question the rationality or motives behind the narrator (although the better parents in us might judge him for the nighttime walks). What Toussaint shows us in each of his books — showing again and again and again, cinematically — is that nothing need happen for drama still to exist. A literary Malick, Beckett with a bigger prop department. Nothing needs to be told for a reader to want to listen. Great writing does not need a story.

There Is A Strange Magic At Work Here: Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Equal parts history lesson and modern American comic-book epic, infused with the tragic voodoo magic of the Dominican Republic, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Waois, simply, sprawling. Junot Díaz presents his sophomore effort, a literary whirlwind (and this 11 years in the making following 1996’s much-heralded story collection, Drown), with grace and aplomb. The novel follows ghetto nerd Oscar, fat and girl-desperate in Northern New Jersey, the only Dominican in the New World with no game besides Dungeons & Dragons:

“You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto.”

The novel follows Oscar’s headstrong sister, Lola, a runaway and independent. The reader is whisked away from 1990s New Jersey to the Dominican Republic of generations past, exploring the narrative of Oscar and Lola’s mother, the narratives of their grandparents, of those who lived through the era known as the Plátano Curtain, a time when Rafael Trujillo ruled the country mercilessly. For 30 bloody years Trujillo controlled the Dominican Republic as one of history’s most ruthless dictators. And it seems his hold has lingered long after his 1961 assassination: this is the fukú, the curse that has preyed on the family.

“That’s our parents’ shit,” reasons Yunior, the novel’s (main) narrator and tour guide, Oscar’s one-time roommate, Lola’s one-time boyfriend. It is Yunior — who first appeared way back when in Drown — who makes this book what it is: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize. It is his voice that carries the narrative, all the narratives, and it’s a near-shame to have to unmask Yunior this way, as if robbing the reader of the surprise artistry that is inherent in this voice.

But it must be said: Díaz is nothing short of masterful in his treatment of the womanizing Yunior, Oscar’s foil by most accounts. This only becomes clearer as the novel rockets on, becomes clearer still on second and third reads, how Díaz adroitly layers this characterization into the story, as this voice moves from omniscient narrator to flesh-and-bone character. Such care the author has taken with this voice, and an easy voice it would be to overkill at that, charged as it is with comic books and street Spanish. But this is why The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a modern American masterpiece, because therein lies the real story.

This is a novel as far-reaching as it is intimate, from the Dominican to New Jersey, from generation to generation, an immigrant epic. There is a strange magic at work here, as the reader discovers soon enough that Oscar is not long for this world — but that is nearly beside the point.

Peter Markus's We Make Mud

But us brothers, we knew what it meant to be better than dead. We knew that when things die they sometimes just then begin to live.

It is moments like this within Peter Markus’s We Make Mud that make you read and reread sentences over and over. So simple and so understated, but, in many ways, those two sentences are at the very heart of this novel in stories.

Told in plural first person with the occasional transition to singular, a story about two brothers who call each other Brother, not Jimmy or John, which, as we’re told by them, are their names. There are a few other characters, but mostly it is the brothers. The most noticeable thing about this book, these stories, is the prose. It is not the kind of prose that shimmers ecstatically. It is deliberate and in such a way that it changes what you thought fiction writing could be. Not because it’s maybe somehow the way everyone should’ve always been writing, but because, for the first time, you realize that writing can look like this, can feel like this. There’s a distinct rhythm to the words and the syntax and grammar of the sentences should be awkward, but somehow manage to never be. Repetition is usually seen as a bad thing in prose, but these stories delight in repetition, and it works to a dizzying degree. And the book is built on this repetition of phrases, of scenes, of revisiting variations of already told stories. And that’s part of it, too, not only to repeat, but to vary, in the way that jazz uses variations on a theme to expand upon the initial melody.

And it turns this novel into rituals and prayer. It is a prayer. It is a collection of fairy-tales in the most serious of ways. There is violence, but it is never for the sake of violence: it becomes ritual. And the repetition is part of this. It is a prayer about childhood and what it means to have a single place, a river, be the entire world. Told by brothers who are children, reality bends and blurs and the impossible becomes common, either as daydream and fancy or actuality, the reader never knows for certain. It is a book that surprises and delights even as it becomes ugly and course but more so as it shimmers and grows, glowing.

We are brothers. We are each other’s voice inside our own heads. This might sting, us brothers will say to each other brother. Us brothers, we will raise back the hammer in our hand. We will drive that rusty, bent-back nail right through Brother’s hand. Neither of us brothers will wince, or flinch, or make with our mouth the sound of a brother crying out. Good, Brother, Brother will say. Brother will be hammering in a second nail into us brothers’ other hand when the father of us brothers will step out into the back of our backyard. Sons, our father will call this word out. Both of us brothers will turn back our boy heads toward the sound of our father to hear whatever it is that this father is going to say to us brothers next. It will be a long few seconds. The sky above the river where the steel mill sits shipwrecked in the river’s mud, it will be dark and quiet. Somewhere, though, the sun will be shining. You boys be sure to clean up back here before you come back in, the father of us will say. This father will turn back with his voice and go back away into the inside of this house. Us brothers, we will turn back to face back with each other. Us brothers will raise back with our hammer, will line up that rusted nail.

There are so many more moments I wish I could put in this review as I found myself highlighting almost whole pages. Because it is not the sentences themselves that hit hard, but the images that Markus builds over the course of five or ten or forty sentences: surreal, surprising, dark, beautiful, grotesque, magical.

We Make Mud is a great and short book.