Bedouin Salt: A Review of Abdelrahman Munif's Cities of Salt

Books with more than six-hundred pages have always scared me worse than monsters under my bed. Gnashing teeth and claws always seemed less dangerous. On one hand, long books have room for development of feelings, of movement, they can approach the velocity of epiphany and return — but they also have room for digression, for boredom, for too much inclusion of too little important stuff.  I dread the long novel for these reasons.

Yet there comes a time when walking through a secondhand bookstore when fate lunges forward and a book literally lands on your head. Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt struck me. Its book cover was dark colored, its main design looked like more of a smudge rather than a thought out or stylized drawing, and it exceeded six-hundred pages — but I ended up buying it anyway.

It began as some kind of folk tale of Bedouin in the desert of Saudi Arabia, yet somewhere in the shifting of characters emerging and disappearing, mirage like, Cities of Salt lays down an entire history of a people and a region coming into contact with Western Modernization. How is it that for so many pages I remain held in rapture?

For a novel imbued with modernity coming to a region, particularly with oil politics, it doesn’t let on about it. Rather, the narrator behind the storytelling is never revealed, it haunts the reader’s mind to think of where this real feeling and overwhelming voice fits into the tale.  It lulls the reader into the world of those thousand or so Arabian night tales — the politics being present, but happening as part of a larger telling.

Salt is an old seasoning, one we turn to for its power to amplify sweetness or contrast sourness. It has been integral to the way of food preservation, and is needed by the human body for adequate fluid regulation.

But sowing salt into the earth kills it. The edenic scene rich with water and life where this story begins is not the same prosperous industrialized city with which it ends.

In terms of novels and storytelling about oil and oil culture, Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie There Will Be Blood comes to mind, as well as its inspiration Upton Sinclair’s Oil!. These oil epochs shed light on the happenings in the United States in driven narrative form, yet Cities of Salt take the perspectives of a mass of people as threads of different lives woven together in loose knit fashion give the shape of what has passed.

It is not a single kind of protagonist which drives this story — actually, on close inspection Cities of Salt may not have a protagonist at all — as this unwinding and unspooling detail of change by modernity’s implementation and construction in the Arabian Peninsula falls into place. This story is very much invested in the politics and culture surrounding the advent of oil, and the coming of foreigners to collect it.

The people begin to believe that the depths of the earth are better than its face, when oil is worth more than life giving water. The people give up their old selves in the coming age. Beginning in the desert oasis of Wadi al-Uyoun, the family of Miteb al-Hathal cracks the porcelain perfection of gold and oil, and scatters the remains as Miteb rides away into legend and myth.

The Wadi is destroyed and disappears forever.

It is not a single kind of antagonist which drives this story, because the unbraiding plot powerfully captures the spirit of the people—their flaws and evils being integral parts of who they are.  Modernity is not the enemy here, it is rather a vehicle of change.

Days pass slowly, the heat grows, and the people caravan to Harran, the new industrialized city for work and for trade.  But it isn’t the same as the same as the Wadi, and the people know it. There are two parts to Harran, American Harran and Arab Harran, each constructed with its own problems. The story takes flight there and catalogues the series of misfires and abuses on both sides of Harran, until the sandstorm rises, and the tempest arrives.

Conflict rises and falls, people rise and fall—no clear rising action gives way to climax — yet, there is a feeling of inevitability in the tempest. All that remains is the sand of the desert and the crystalline structures of cities, fashioned of salt.

Abdelrahman Munif was of Saudi Arabian heritage, and spent the majority of his professional career within the but his Saudi citizenship was revoked for political reasons — brought to a front in his writing as it critiques the way in which modernity came to the region. Hypnotically, I became the little kid listening to this story unfold from the narrator’s lips, waiting to see how it ended. What is certain is that the changing world of globalization and multicultural exchange confirms that the vistas of a thousand Arabian nights had to meet modernity at some point, but Munif’s novel carefully analyzes how they may have met under different circumstances with different ends.

A Violently Hypnotic Story Covered in a Lipstick of Decay

Sadler Truman is dying in Craig Wallwork’s To Die Upon a Kiss, a stylish noir wracked from beginning to end by beautiful prose and multifaceted characters. Multifaceted, as in at war with themselves, both desperately morbid and exultant. Truman is convinced his death is imminent because no one in his family has survived past the age of thirty, victim to Sudden Arrhythmia Death Syndrome. To help him come to terms with his mortality, his girlfriend, Prudence, suggests they undertake a series of murders.

This book is not for the squeamish and gets descriptively bloody in the deaths. Details abound, as in the two making up fake identities to help detach themselves from the victims, or the meticulous methodology they apply in executing the killings. The ritual takes on a disturbing skew when Prudence gets aroused by the killing. Both the killer and the victim “struggle for equal breaths, eyelids trembling in unison, both whispering similar noises, poles apart in life and death, yet both so alike at the moment it’s hard to differentiate between those caught on the threshold of death, and those getting off.”

Wallwork claws his scenes to life and the mundane is rendered in throbbingly visceral discomfort. Take his job as a censor at a photography laboratory for which he is given no guidelines or regulations. After he lets pass a set of photos he shouldn’t have, his boss flails him with the instructions:

Flaccid cocks only. And a woman’s vagina can’t be parted. Tits and closed piss flaps are fine. Understand?”

Sexuality gets a shade of the macabre and sensuality gets no censor, particularly as Truman is just as obsessed with pleasure as he is with his fear of dying from overly-exciting his heart. Literally and physically, he has to restrain his lust:

If only to inoculate the infection of love before it renders me sick.

His gnawing obsession with death shreds itself on an altar of tattered memories connected to his mother, Verity. Verity is a bad mother and she even puts it out in the open when Prudence visits with Truman: “I’m sure my son has made it clear how terrible a mother I’ve been. How I lied about his daddy, and the poor unfortunate situation he’s now in because of it.” As Verity continues to taunt him, he is consumed by a paroxysm of rage and when he reacts violently towards her, it’s clear Truman’s corruption has gone past the physical, festering beyond an attempt at empathy with the dying. The situation with his mother intensifies as Prudence prods him with questions he can neither deflect nor deny. Even his reflection scares him:

A ghostly apparition in a cabinet mirror grips my throat. At best, I look five days away from having every orifice in my body filled with cotton wadding. Put me in a surgical gown while asleep, and I would awake with veins pierced with plastic tubes; bags of embalming fluid feeding each. Foundation cream would do shit for my complexion right now.

Similar to Othello, from which the title gets its name, misunderstandings abound and spiral into a canvas of bloody murder. Like Shakespeare’s play, the characters may not necessarily be likable, but they are scarily authentic, even while astray, social vagabonds wading in anger at their wasted lives. Truman’s bitterness permeates the pages, but so does a longing for affirmation, for purpose in the meaninglessness. It’s a fine balance that Wallwork deftly juggles and though Truman tries to find an anchor in Prudence, she is just as adrift, a hurricane swarming in another stratosphere. In that sense, To Die Upon a Kiss is as much about living as it is about dying.

. . . for those I sit beside, waiting and watching for the last glimmer of life to abandon each eye, the prospect of a long life is more depressing than living it. If only we could exchange bodies. If only for a few extra years, I would happily endure the noisy neighbors and feeling of loss.

A pile of corpses lie in his wake. Truths are splintered. Even as Truman dispels misconceptions he’d held onto, the melting blur of fear and hate siphon off one another into a titular kiss. Craig Wallwork weaves a violently hypnotic story covered in a lipstick of decay, presaging a conjunction doused in strange love.

The Destruction and Violence of Identity and Identification

It’s probably not true that I met Jordaan Mason by Google image searching “two headed boy.” But that’s how I remember it. This was back when I was in high school, for shivermouth’s sake. Jordaan was pretty much my age and he was doing a record label called Oh! Map. They put out haunting twitches, hopeful folk, scream cream. Then I remember driving up California foothill Black Bart madrone and straw-colored highways to Nevada City to see Jordaan and his friends play music in a theatre that smelled like silver dollars. Jordaan and his friends hugged each other and knew how to play the saw. It was maybe the first time I ever wore my favorite cowboy shirt in public.

Years later, in October of 2007, I made a to-do list that included “clip your toenails” and “buy chips and shit for Jordaan’s show.” Jordaan showed up in an essay I wrote for Nervebut they cut most of him out, even though he made the essay sadder and more nuanced and less huckstery. He is always doing that kind of shit to the world. Like one time he told me he wrote a novel, and I was like, “Oh? Can I read it?” And lo and behold: The Skin Team is that novel, here with us now maybe three years after I first read it, and it is as good at itself as Jordaan is good at every room I’ve ever known him to sing his way through.

The Skin Team concerns the interloopings and intercouplings and mind habits and drastic measures of three people. Two boys, one girl, all young. Plus there’s a Power Company, but that catches on fire. The Skin Team is one of the most honest books about sex I’ve ever read. There are horses and maps and light-bulb vomit and tag teams. This is a thick book rioting all over itself with skin and shaking its head at science and stomping/sobbing pretty much every time the world tells it to shush. What I’ve been telling people is that it’s like if Dennis Cooper rewrote The Virgin Suicides. What Dennis Cooper says is that “it’s about as beautiful as fiction can ever be” and “you would never suspect how difficult it is to write even fairly about such things, much less with Jordaan Mason’s radiant emotional grace and super-deft detailing and flawless style.”

This isn’t just a novel I published because I’ve known Jordaan for like ten years; it’s more like the only reason I’ve been friends with some random dude in Canada for ten years is because he has one of the truest throats. Jordaan is double-talented, what a jerk. Playing his high school songs on my high school radio show or adult-putting his adult book out in the world are two things I’ve done because of the same feeling. Which is this feeling: Jordaan Mason is hollering so much real-talk through this all around fucknut dark that he makes our crooked faces feel not so apart.

Here’s some talking I did with him:

Mike Young: You’ve been working on The Skin Team for a long time. This book has traveled with you through a lot of crazy singing-saw time on the road as a musician and now into your homey plaid domestic life as a filmmaker/student/husband. Can you completely ignore my oversimplification of your life and tell us about The Skin Team‘s genesis and process?

Jordaan Mason: I started writing what is now The Skin Team around the time that I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. I was in my first year of university, but I was traveling a lot, playing music, and my ability to focus on school was diminishing. During that time I went through a series of medications until I found the right balance or whatever. One of the medications I was taking early on made me feel really detached from everything and that detachment was a big part of where the text originated from: trying to describe this complete separation of my body from everything around it and from itself. And trying to figure out how or even if this had any effect on my sense of identity, how does having this illness inform it, how do we get named and categorized through these intangible things through medical discourse. This detachment from my sense of self turned into these three characters who then stuck around in my head even after I sorted the medication stuff out. I kept picking at them, gradually, wondering why they had taken up residence in me. I wrote as a way of trying to figure them out even if they refused to be figured out, even if they didn’t want to be categorized.

I dropped out of university before entering my third year. I wasn’t in the right head space for academic thinking and was much more interested in traveling and playing music, in losing myself in creating things for a while, and so I did. I devoted a lot of my time when I wasn’t traveling to this text until it grew into what seemed to be something like a novel. It took about two years of writing until that’s what I realized I had been writing. But just as it was starting to really come together, I lost the majority of the book in a thunderstorm computer crash. I was left with a document of hieroglyphics and symbols and sentence fragments. I also had a very early draft on paper that was about twenty pages long. I had to start over (and also learn to back things up).

During this time I was living at a house/art space called The Oxford Hotel and I was working on a record called Divorce Lawyers I Shaved My Head with my then-band, The Horse Museum. When it was nearly finished, I took a break from touring to save up some money so we could release the album and worked a shitty telemarketing job. I rewrote most of the book during my time there. In between phone calls, I would write. I would then come home and work with what I’d been able to jot down between calls, expand it. After two months or so, I was back to a working draft of the book’s narrative. I spent the next year editing and working on structure until it became essentially what it is now. And then I went back to school.

MY: The Skin Team has three main characters and a lot of heft placed on the idea of threedom. Even the cover image was sewn in three parts: the cover fabric, the spine fabric, and the back fabric, which—hey, look at that—has three boxes on it. These three fabrics overlap and shove together in interesting and even somewhat violent ways, just like your three main characters. Can you introduce those three main characters to us?

JM: Since the novel is largely about the destruction and violence of identity and identification, the characters in the book are generally nameless and devoid of physical description. Their identities are fluid and bleed into one another but they still stand alone as separate entities through the structure of the book. The characters are:

1. A boy who has a series of physical ailments which doctors cannot detect, including but not limited to the feeling that he is swallowing fire in his sleep and that he is being magnetically drawn to True North. He begins to believe that his illness is caused by the distribution of energy through electric wires which spread throughout his town and, in turn, through him, and the genesis of that energy is the Power Company Building. He has varying sexual experiences with both of the other characters. His sections are called “The Power is Out, Sing.”

2. A girl who is called Sarah (despite the fact that this is not really her name). After the death of her mother, she spends most of her time with horses in the stables and sneaks out of the house at night to be with boys at the Power Company Building. She still believes in singing but does not want to admit it. Her section is called “Of Moving Water, Erosion, and Other Alterations.”

3. Another boy who is slightly older, who spends most nights wandering the woods, who builds up conspiracies in his head, who thinks often of fire and destruction. He acts as a kind of guide to the others; the voice of unreason. His section is called “Of Thermal Energy, Continuous Operation, and the Efficient Use of Land.”

MY: This is the portion of the interview where I pretend to be really dumb and use the word “stuff” a lot. For example: I began falling in love with this book after meeting my way around the three characters we just talked about, but what really drove my heart into my knees was what I’m going to call “all the science stuff.” So what’s the deal with all the science stuff (Continuous Operation, Thermal Energy, True North) in the book?

JM: Science is the realm of naming, so I had to wrestle with that in this text. I wanted to destroy the logic of science, to unname things and start over. So while I was writing I started reading science textbooks instead of poetry and discovered that they aren’t that really that different somehow. I tried to write science textbooks but it sort of came out backwards. I ended up writing the kind of science textbooks that make sense to people like me who think that science textbooks don’t really make any sense. Science is the kind of the thing where if you explain it to me that this is the reason why the earth is tilted on an axis it’s like, yes, rationally I understand that, but also really why is the earth tilted on an axis? It’s like when you’re a kid and you ask adults questions and they give you the answer but you keep asking why. The characters in this book keep asking why.

So all this science stuff really started to infect the world of the book. Fragments of language and concepts from the textbooks I was reading turned into characters. They grew bodies and they spoke out and took up space on the page. They interacted with these three people I had been trying to figure out. And the science stuff kind of makes it feel like sometimes the book is really grounded in a kind of real-logic of the real-world but then it refutes itself, it asks why again, and it does so from its own mouth, with its own language. I basically almost failed all my science classes in high school, so there you have it.

MY: Where/who does the “map is not the territory” stuff come from and what does that stuff have to do with anything?

JM: My partner and now-husband Jason introduced me to the work of Alfred Korzybski, who wrote the dictum “the map is not the territory.” It came up because I was trying to explain my book to him, all this stuff about Map North versus True North versus the body versus our identities etc. etc., and he was like, “You should read about structural differential.” He had taken this class that his professor jokingly called Science and Unsanity and he gave me all of his notes. I read them and got really lost in those ideas. They were basically the theory-version of everything I had been writing, this denial of identity, this distantiation between spoken or written language and what we really mean. It was basically the only science-related stuff that I read during the writing process that actually made sense to me and it became really integral to the project.

MY: Poker and the game of tag going on in the woods with color-named teams and horse racing—what’s the deal with games and stuff in this book?

JM: Games are a big part of the language of children, and I wanted to puncture the text with reminders that these characters aren’t actually adults yet. I’m particularly drawn to how games all have their own language, their own structure of rules. And they’re so ingrained that we forget that the fun we are having is actually being regimented and controlled, that we’ve been out in the woods playing tag for hours even though it wouldn’t really matter if we got caught. I’m also just a big games person.

MY: You and I both have a lot of affinity for Leonard Cohen’s novel Beautiful Losers, which he has called more of a sunstroke than a novel. I feel a little Beautiful Losers in your book too, and I don’t just mean Leonard Cohen via the “the room just filled up with mosquitos / they heard that my body was free” allusion. What are your feelings about Beautiful Losers a) as a writer, b) as a lilac tree, and c) as a Canadian?

JM: a) I think in terms of writing articulately/inarticulately about the body, Beautiful Losers is the book that really has stuck with me most. It’s scattered occasionally but I admire how much he tries to pack in. It’s insanely ambitious and really gets my gut. I knew pretty immediately that I was in the wrong creative writing program when I brought in Beautiful Losers to read aloud in class as an example of “good prose” and everyone else brought in very straight-forward realist stuff. My professor later called me out on trying to provoke the class by reading something so “shocking.” This should reveal a little bit more about why I dropped out of university the first time around.

b) Beautiful Losers is a book that’s told in fragments that all come together even when it doesn’t feel like they are going to. It works so well on both the small-scale sentence level and as a larger project. I feel like I’m still returning to this book and still learning so much from it. It grows larger in my heart with each re-read; I pluck it from the shelf often.

c) My super-anglo-basic-French-skills have helped me to understand all of the untranslated French portions of the book, which is a very Canadian thing, I guess. There’s a lot of Canada in that book even though he wrote in Greece and even though he doesn’t really write about Canada in the way that most Canadian writers generally write about Canada. My book doesn’t mention Canada once by name but I’m sure it’s in there somewhere.

MY: I know you’re someone who invests a ton of energy and love toward your friends and collaboration with them. You helped run The Oxford Hotel, a now legendary old house show spot in Toronto. And, in fact, I met you at an awesome theatre in Nevada City, CA in 2003 where you were playing music with a whole menagerie of friends. Plus I think America wouldn’t let you bring your accordion over the border because we’re dumbs. What does collaboration mean for/to you?

JM: Collaboration has always been important to me but it has become even more-so with time. I played music alone for a number of years but it was always within a community so it never felt like I was doing it alone-alone. Touring and meeting people and sharing spaces and opening The Oxford Hotel eventually led to The Horse Museum, a band that I was in from 2007-2010. Even though I technically wrote those songs they were completely transformed when my friends started to play them with me. That was really a community project, a lot of people were involved in bringing that together. We all really inspired one another and it was during that time that I was also writing the book. Everyone was going through a lot of heavy shit and we were all there for one another through it. I had to talk out these ideas and I had a lot of support and time and energy from my peers. Writing a novel is a pretty solitary thing I guess, but again, it didn’t feel like I was doing it alone-alone. Those years were tough, too. I wouldn’t have made it through without those people.

The Art of Remembering: On Zakes Mda's Cion

Award-winning author Zakes Mda first introduced us to Toloki, the sad-eyed professional mourner paid to wail at funerals, in his novel Ways of Dying. Now in Mda’s Cion, Toloki finds his South African practice in a rut. Hoping to revitalize his art and “discover new ways of mourning,” he travels to America, a place where death is glorified to an extent unimagined — and where a chance encounter diverts him from his task and draws him deeper into the land of the living.

Cast in a surreal light, the territory Mda explores is at once familiar and strange. The politics of race, the clash between the old ways and the new, the search for the self through lineage: such themes emerge naturally out of grittily realized, emotionally entangled lives.

In the tiny town of Kivert, Ohio, Toloki is taken in by the Quigleys, a tri-racial family of four. Relentlessly, Ruth harps on politics and her grown children’s idle ways. Feeling it’s not his place to argue, Toloki initially keeps quiet. But when he falls for Ruth’s daughter, the sitar-playing Orpah, and learns that her mother is destroying her art — quilt designs that tell Orpah’s story rather than following time-honored customs — Toloki intervenes and risks losing his new family and life.

As the Quigleys’ past unfolds, so does the history of the quilts. Like Toloki’s art, the quilts keep both past and future alive.  Stories were told on them; dreams and hopes nourished by them. Ruth explains their significance thus: “people were made on them . . . people born on them, people got sick on them, people died on them, cycles of loves and losses were enacted on the quilts.”

Skillfully, the novel shuttles between Toloki’s contemporary tale and another set in 1830s Virginia. Through her stories and ingeniously coded quilts, a stud-farm slave known as “The Abyssinian Queen” teaches her sons to value freedom. One winter the two boys escape, following their quilts’ instructions as they slowly tack their way north. Eventually, one of them finds refuge among the Indians in southeast Ohio¾in a town where he meets an Irish fugitive, Niall Quigley, and past and present join in the intersection of three different cultures.

To my mind, Cion succeeds wonderfully at what fiction does best. It aligns our thoughts, our aspirations, with those of others; it de-exoticizes the foreign so we’re plunged in experience as it’s lived; and it brings the past in close so we feel its active presence. It’s the past more than anything that gives breadth to Mda’s vision. He, like the Quigleys and their ancestors, can hear ghost trees breathe out stories, can read the signs on a worn, tattered quilt.

If You Take the 'e' Out of Dead, You Get Dad: A Review of Michael Kimball's Big Ray

In some ways, Michael Kimball’s Big Ray felt like I was reading from a dirge, a long melancholy hymn fractured into broken pieces, unified by Kimball’s troubled melody. There were too many parallels I identified with, too many details I understood too well to read this without a conflicted sense of empathy. Kimball bares all through his narrator, Daniel Todd Carrier, who recounts the life of his father, the eponymous Big Ray.

The book starts with the death of his father and while outwardly, it’s a biography revealing strips from Big Ray’s life, it evolves into an autopsy of their relationship, a dissection of sundered identity. Anecdotes, vignettes, and observations give us glimpses of who Big Ray is, though it reads less like a novel and more like a candid conversation with a good friend over drinks. In fact, the prose is so natural and free-flowing, it almost vanishes into the backdrop. Physical traits become character sketches as in the case of his father who is “morbidly obese” and suffers sleep apnea.

The snoring it caused was turbulent, violent, and full of animal sounds. The snoring was also part of why my mother divorced my father. She couldn’t get any good sleep either. Plus, my father took up most of the bed. There was just enough room for my mother to lie there and not move.

That paralysis his mother suffers becomes emblematic of their relationship that eventually leads to its fissure.

Daniel tries to find a map to navigate his father’s life, but contradictions abound, from his early military career that was mostly non-existent, to the quirky, almost accidental way his parents met (yelling at each other on the street). His father gambles, argues with his mom about everything, and scoops up all the leftover food at the dinner table. I was always waiting for a moral climax, the moment where the son would gain some insight into his father that would help the two bond. It was refreshingly authentic, then, that so much was left unresolved. The dysfunctional family never finds itself and there’s a morbid beauty in their disastrous interactions which is part of the allure of Big Ray.

The narrative jumps from the present to the past, but the transitions aren’t jarring and are handled as branching conversations that segue into different areas including a whole lot of fat jokes. Like most people, Big Ray is full of dichotomies that the narrator struggles with. Daniel seeks answers, not just for the sake of resolution, but his curiosity too. For example, his father has an argument with his mother because she sets out slices of bread rather than dinner rolls. It seems extremely petty until we’re told:

For my father, good bread was an important distinction between the poor farm family he grew up in and the middle-class family he expected us to be. That is why we had family dinners on Sunday. That is why we ate so many pot roasts.

The grossest memory of his father was when he’d make breakfast and he’d “stand over a frying pan wearing nothing but tight, stretchy, red bikini briefs. His underwear was always too small for him, so the crack of his butt stuck out above the waistband. . . He liked his eggs greasy and over easy. He fried his bacon until it was burnt. . . Even today, the smell of greasy eggs still makes me feel queasy.” The father makes for a ridiculous figure in the tight briefs, but he’s intent on cooking his bacon to crisp because that happens to be the way he likes it. The son endures the oily mornings because he has no choice, although he resists his father’s will by leaving before finishing the breakfast. Scenes like this form a thematic link throughout illustrating their conflict and hint at the bigger issues rotting their connection.

I went through a stage where I would walk into whatever room my father was in and turn the lights off. I never told anybody why, but I was trying to make him disappear.

Daniel is still turning off the lights paragraph by paragraph. Part of his anger comes from the abuse, both physical and mental, that is inflicted by his father on both him and his sister. It’s uncomfortable to read and there’s a final revelation near the end that left me feeling both depressed and ill. To the book’s credit, the scene is handled with brutal honesty but never feels like exploitation or a pity-seeking confessional.

It’s a gutsy truth to share with strangers (us the readers) and I know it’s a delicate balance to render this painful experience without coming across as sensational. I felt like Daniel was performing a mental baptism to exorcise that past trauma through this recounting and the loose structure of the book becomes more poignant as we realize it’s his attempt at finding answers in the nuances and details that comprise the jumbled mass of his memories.

In the end, there’s an interesting cycle revolving around weight that weaves an organic analogy for the cycle of the book. When Big Ray was born, he was six pounds. He ballooned up to 500 pounds, which “is also the size of the largest kind of lion, a full-grown male.” But as Daniel notes after his father is cremated, “My dad’s ashes weighed just over six pounds, which means he lost around 500 pounds after he died.” His dad went right back to where he started, and there’s an ambivalence and yearning that haunts the book from beginning to end originating from that lack of resolution. “If you take the e out of dead, you get dad.” Likewise, strip out the ‘Big’ from Big Ray, and all you have left is Ray.

An Interview with Deborah Crombie

A Texas woman with a British soul, Deb Crombie, deftly weaves wonderfully tangled webs of mystery around Duncan Kincaid and Gemma James. Both are employed by the London Police and find themselves solving one complex crime after another while becoming hopelessly personally involved. In The Sound Of Broken Glass, Gemma is challenged by the salacious death of a respected London barrister in a seedy hotel in Crystal Palace. An unsavory accident or murder?

* * *

MaryAnne Kolton: When you were little, what did you dream of being when you grew up?

Deborah Crombie: Such fun to think about this, MaryAnne.

I think the very first thing I wanted to be was a cowgirl. I have photos (somewhere—the childhood album is missing . . .) of me at six in my cowgirl outfit, complete with six-shooter. Then a horse trainer and breeder—I was horse mad. King of the Wind, the Black Stallion books—loved them!

And then came the “ologists.” My grandmother, who lived with us, was a retired schoolteacher. She had a subscription to National Geographic and we read every issue together, cover to cover. I had a rock collection and wanted to be a geologist, then an archeologist, a paleontologist, a marine biologist, a zoologist, a botanist . . . you get the picture. I think “world explorer” figured in there somewhere. And I wanted to climb Mount Everest.

Later, I started college as a history major, finished with a degree in biology. The one thing I never imagined I would do was write novels.

(And Charles Darwin is still my hero.)

MAK: Do you see these childhood dreams resonating in your writing in some way?

DC: Obviously, I liked learning new things, and that’s certainly carried over into the books. Not only do I tend to research new geographical areas, but most books throw me into new subjects, such as rowing in No Mark Upon Her and rock guitar in The Sound Of Broken Glass. You could say that writing satisfies my magpie instincts.

But even more than that, I see the thread of curiosity, and I think that curiosity—about people and places and life in general—must be the driving force of the novelist. We are, most of us, the elephant’s children. We always want to know WHY.

MAK: You’ve said you have felt that the UK is your “real” home for most of your life. So many Americans are Anglophiles to some degree. How did this feeling you have come about?

DC: This is hardest question to answer, and I’m not sure I’ve become any better at it over the years. I no longer trust what is actual memory and what I’ve spliced in, trying to find some logic in my own life. . . . Did it really start with A.A. Milne? I still have my treasured first editions, so perhaps that is true. I’m sure there were other children’s books, and then there were Tolkien and CS Lewis, T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, and on to Sayers and Christie, Mary Stewart and Josephine Tey, Dick Francis and James Herriott. But it was more than stories—there was always landscape, even in my dreams as a child.

I’ve said this often, but it remains a lodestone in my perception of my life: I didn’t actually visit England until I graduated from college (my parents took me as a graduation gift.) And on that first bus ride between Gatwick Airport and London, I looked out at the rolling hills and fields and red rooftops of Surrey, and felt I had come home. That feeling was profound, heart-deep, and has never gone away.

MAK: There is such a sense of interiority about your characterizations. It tends to give the reader permission to care a great deal about Gemma and Duncan. How do you do that?

DC: Some of it is instinctive, I think. I heard Duncan’s voice in my head so clearly before I ever began to write him, and that’s how many scenes and characters begin for me — with a line of thought or a line of dialogue.

Then there is that perpetual writer’s curiosity. Even as a child I looked in the windows of houses in the evenings, wondering about the families that lived there — What were their names? Did they have pets? What did they eat for dinner? What did they talk about? So I think this fascination with detail carried over into — or perhaps spurred — my writing. And these details do tell the reader things about the characters.

And the third thing—I’m viewpoint obsessive. I never, never write omniscient viewpoint. I never shift viewpoint within a scene. And I always try to make it very clear at the beginning of a scene whose head we are inhabiting. I think this gives the readers a very strong sense of identification with the characters—and of course we are in Duncan’s and Gemma’s viewpoints most often.

MAK: Are you more like Duncan or Gemma and in what ways?

In the beginning I would easily have said Duncan. I understood how he thought and how he reacted to things. And although I very deliberately made Gemma’s personal situation one that I understood very well—a young woman trying to meet her responsibilities as a mother AND get ahead in a job that she cares passionately about—I saw her as much more assertive than me, and perhaps more emotionally open.

DC: But the characters have grown into themselves, sometimes in ways that surprised me. Duncan turned out to be the more willing to take emotional risks, while it was Gemma who was reluctant to make a commitment. It’s a journey of discovery these days. And interestingly, the character that I identify with most strongly might be Kit.

MAK: It might be helpful here to give a brief background summary of the story of Gemma and Duncan. Then tell a bit about why you identify so strongly with Kit?

DC: Duncan and Gemma began the series as professional partners. I set out with the idea that I wanted to write characters that experience growth and change, whose lives evolve. Even so, I think it was as much a surprise to me as it was to them when Duncan and Gemma’s
relationship moved into the realm of the personal. That’s a very dry way of saying they fell in love . . . but that’s what happened, as it does in real life, no matter how inconvenient.

Kit, who came to Duncan when he was eleven, is now fourteen, and he is so like me when I was that age. (I should say here that I was never a very “girly” girl.) Kit wants to be a biologist. He loves animals. He likes to collect bits and pieces of things, rocks and plants and insects, as did I. Kit is a noticer, very aware of atmosphere and other people’s emotions. He also has a tendency to feel responsible for other people’s safety and emotional well-being, which can be a dangerous trait. And Kit is a dreamer. He sees stories in things, and in people. Who knows—he might even grow up to be a writer…

(Gemma) “Did you ever see any indication that Mr. Arnott was into anything . . . kinky?”

“Vincent?” Kershaw looked astonished. “Kinky? I’d say you couldn’t have found anyone more sexually straight ahead than Vincent.” . . . Kershaw went on, thoughtfully, “I never thought he liked women.”

You mean he liked men?” asked Gemma, wondering if they’d got the whole scenario wrong.

No. I mean he didn’t like women. . . . I learned years ago that he would never make a real effort to defend a woman. It was as if he made an automatic assumption of guilt.

—from The Sound Of Broken Glass

MAK: Your fans are quite anxious to read your newest book, The Sound Of Broken Glass, if their Internet posts are any indication of their loyalty to you and love of Gemma and Duncan. I don’t want to talk too much about the book itself so as not to give away any tense-making plot maneuvers. But I am wondering how far ahead you are plotting when you are writing the book you are working on? One book, two?

DC: I’m usually thinking at least two books ahead with Duncan, Gemma, and their family’s continuing story arc. And with the particulars stories for each novel, sometimes farther back than that. I introduced Andy Monahan, the character who is the focus of The Sound Of Broken Glass, three books ago, in WHERE MEMORIES LIE. He had a walk-on part as a witness to a murder, and I found I couldn’t get his voice out of my head. I gave him very brief cameos in the next two books, and a personal connection to Duncan and Gemma, knowing I wanted to devote a
book to his story.

MAK: Melody is another character that seems to have found a place in your heart and is gaining more page space.

DC: Ah, Melody. One of the most fun things about writing a long-running series is the evolution of characters. When Gemma took that promotion to detective inspector and could no long work with Duncan, I knew they would both need new partners. Melody showed up in the first few books as a bit of an eager-beaver, always bringing Gemma coffee. She still likes to bring Gemma coffee, but she’s a detective sergeant now, and she’s turned out to be a very complex and interesting character with an unexpected background (no spoilers!) She’s a mass of contradictions, very sure of herself in some ways and lacking confidence in others.

Melody’s rather prickly friendship with Doug Cullen, Duncan’s sergeant, is now one of the driving story arcs of the series for me. Neither of them is quite sure who they are, but in trying to build a relationship they learn things about themselves as well as each other.

MAK: In addition to your excellent characterizations, which make the reader want to check in with Gemma and Duncan on a regular basis, the novels also contain a splendid sense of place. How much time do you actually spend in the UK gathering details?

DC: I usually go to England (most often London) a couple of times a year, for about three weeks at a time. That’s about as long as I can manage to be away from home without complete domestic chaos!

I usually stay in a flat in London, most often in Notting Hill. That’s the best way to really get the flow and rhythm of my characters’ lives, and I especially love being on Duncan and Gemma’s “patch.”

MAK: What are your feelings about touring and all the promotional work that’s required in today’s very competitive world of selling books?

DC: It’s a necessity except for the very top of the list authors — and perhaps even for them. In a way, it’s nothing new. Authors have always had to sell themselves. I organized my own book tours with other writer friends in the early days. But the social networking certainly takes up more time than anything we did in the past. On the downside, that’s time that could be spent writing. On the upside, it keeps you connected with readers and the reading community in a way never before possible. And it’s fun. You can’t do everything and I think each author has to find the niche that suits them. I’m better at Facebook than Twitter, for instance.

As for touring, I love it. It’s such fun to meet and visit with readers. And the best thing about touring — making connections with the booksellers, hasn’t changed.

An Interview with Rachel B. Glaser

For this series I’m asking writers I love to recommend a book. If I haven’t read it, I read it. Then we talk about it.

In this installment, I’m talking with Rachel B. Glaser (author of Pee on Water and MOODS) about I Am Elijah Thrush by James Purdy.

Colin Winnette: Some books we love and would recommend to anyone because we just deep down believe that everyone should read them(!), other times our recommendations are tailored to suit the individual receiving the recommendation . . . but then there are books we love in a selfish way, that we hesitate to recommend to anyone, as if they need our protection. Where on that spectrum does I Am Elijah Thrush fall for you? Is there, in your mind, an ideal reader for this book?

Rachel B. Glaser:  I know what you mean about “protecting” the books we love. I think I Am Elijah Thrush should be reprinted and read again by many, but I did enjoy the way the book made its way to me, as if by mistake.  It feels great to “uncover” a book.  There is an idea that it’s rare to come upon a great book that you haven’t heard recommended many times before, but it keeps happening, which is encouraging to me, though it means that there are great books out there, lonely from not being read!  Though I felt precious about this book, I did the opposite of keeping it to myself, and have been regularly buying it online (bookstores never have it, though they all have tons of Purdy!) and distributing it.  In terms of an ideal reader for this book—someone who enjoys the absurd?  I feel that Jane Bowles has a lot in common with Purdy, so anyone who appreciates her writing should seek out I Am Elijah Thrush.

CW: It’s true. It’s a little depressing to think about how many great books are out there, going unread. Without your recommendation, I never would have heard of this one. In fact, it was sort of a difficult title to get my hands on. But I’m thrilled to have had this opportunity to read I am Elijah Thrush, because it’s a fantastic book, wild and funny and moving and super strange. What brought you to this particular book originally? And, if you can remember, what were some of your initial reactions?

RBG:  I’m so glad you enjoyed it!  My boyfriend, John Maradik, picked this book up off the shelf while at Grey Matter Books (in Hadley, MA) with the poet/our friend Christopher Cheney.  John read it and loved it and then Cheney read it immediately after, and they were both so enamored and entertained with it that I felt there was no way I could feel the same, but when it was my turn I was just as surprised and delighted.

From the first line you can tell it’s going to be good:

Millicent De Frayne, who was young in 1913, the sole possessor
of an immense oil fortune, languished of an incurable ailment, 
her willful, hopeless love for Elijah Thrush, “the mime, poet, 
painter of art nouveau,” who, after ruining the lives of countless 
men and women, was finally himself in love, “incorrectly, if not 
indecently,” with his great-grandson.

That first line is like a book in itself!  Each word is so forceful in creating a story and defining the characters.  When I read Purdy, especially this book, I am consistently deeply surprised.  In some ways, a first line like this could deflate surprise.  For instance, we already know Elijah Thrush is in love with his grandson.  It is not revealed in some suspenseful way.  The surprises happen on a smaller level, in the sentences and the moments of the book.  So, my initial reaction was disbelief and joy.  Since I knew that Purdy had written many books, reading and loving IAET felt like the beginning of a long life with Purdy.

CW: That opening line really is something. It’s almost as if, for Purdy, love and obsession are givens. It’s how those states are expressed that occupies him most. We learn that the narrator is “in love with a bird” long before his “habit” is revealed, and with far less ceremony. Purdy presents the object of the narrator’s affection as if there is nothing potentially strange about it. It’s the ‘habit,’ the form that the narrator’s love takes, that interests Purdy. What do you make of the way these characters love?

RBG:  I think their love drives this whole plot home.  “Make your characters want something” is the well-worn phrase in fiction classes, and I’ve never agreed with it as much as when I read Elijah Thrush.  I used to think of characters wanting in a more traditional way, like character A just wants to become a famous musician.  Character B is really hungry and hasn’t eaten in days.  Purdy creates love triangles among two elderly white enemies, a black man hired as a spy, a child who speaks in kissing sounds, and an animal that lives locked in a room.  Love is written about in a great, new way.  It feels good to watch these loves like an outsider, to not immediately relate.  I also enjoy how all these loves are hopeless.  No character in love falls out of love.  All the loves have barriers keeping them complicated.

CW: That’s a good point. These are all perpetually frustrated loves. It’s all messy and there’s no way out of the mess. It’s a tragic kind of farce. A huge part of the joy of the book for me was watching these characters navigate those “barriers” you mention. So, rather than just making his characters want something, Purdy keeps his characters wanting, and in a major way.

RBG: Yes, I think you’re right. The characters in this book are in an almost constant state of wanting. They have much anxiety, pain, and sorrow over their love. Love is a cruel torture in this book. Moments of joy, surprise, and friendship, ease the mood, but do not erase the pain. So much of Purdy’s work feels exaggerated, but he’s just exposing the ridiculous, unrelenting, human parts of ourselves.

CW: Let’s talk about the weirdness here, and how Purdy manages to maintain an unpredictably bizarre world with emotional consequences that are acutely experienced by the reader. The various frustrated loves and emotional sacrifices all have recognizable and sympathetic emotional content, but are presented in somewhat alien packages. Again, I think of the example of the narrator’s “habit”. It is simultaneously horrific and bizarrely tender. It presents an emotional state I relate to, though the physical reality is like nothing I have ever seen or experienced before. Could you talk a little about Purdy’s tactics in this regard? Did you have a similar reaction?

RBG: While trying to find other people writing about Purdy online, I once came upon a review (I think on Amazon) where someone referred to Purdy’s writing as “Social Fantasy.”  I had never seen this genre referred to, (and have not since), but it accurately described Purdy’s work to create unexpected, heightened (often absurd) interactions between characters that create a tension of possibility and show human existence to be inane, dramatic, and incongruous.  The characters of Jane Bowles and James Purdy are capable of anything, nothing is “out of character” for them.  Ascertains are reversed, logic is dismantled.  This is how I’ve come to think of the term “social fantasy,” which has been a continual reference point when working on my own work.  I think this feeling might be what you are getting at too.  The way Purdy writes human emotion so beautifully and true, even in the most (especially in the most) unfamiliar relationships.

CW: “Tension of possibility,” that’s perfect. (The book is always one or two steps beyond believability, which is not to say we don’t feel for the characters, but their lives are, as you say, pointedly absurd. So while it begins to feel that nearly anything could happen, there are still identifiable consequences to the absurdity, and we feel for the characters, so we’re invested in that “anything”.) I also think “social fantasy” is a great way of talking about your and Purdy’s work. I’m always curious when I hear a writer talk about personal points of reference in their own work. Could you list specific examples of how you’ve applied that reference point in your writing? Is it a conscious thing applied during drafting/editing or a just useful way of talking/thinking about your work in general?

RBG:  Twice in my life I have stumbled upon an author that I feel has pre-inspired me. The first time it was with Barthelme, the second with Jane Bowles. Both times it felt I had been channeling them before I’d ever read them. Barthelme gave me extra confidence to let my narrative voice go wild, and allow my characters to talk in an unrealistic manner. Bowles and Purdy encourage me to write characters that act and want unusually. Sometimes I am writing a story that is very strange, and no matter how typical the characters act or talk, the story is still going to have a weird, intriguing undercurrent. Other times, as with the novel I am working on, the situations are familiar to me, and I need to picture Bowles and Purdy and find the inspiration to make it “bristle with impossibility” (as Purdy once said).

CW: Are you far enough along in the new book to talk about it? If so, would you tell us a little bit about it?

RBG:  Sure, Colin!  It’s my first novel and currently called “Paulina & Fran” (or alternately “Careers in the Visual Arts”).  It’s about the complicated relationships between girls, the culture of art school, artist/career disappointments, and the power of nostalgia.  It’s a love triangle at art school in the early 2000’s, but I’m hoping to transcend some of the conventions of the kind of book I just described!  I’ve got some crazy sentences in there, but recently I realized my female characters are not insane enough.  I was somehow reading a summary of what had taken place on a reality tv show I have never seen (Real Housewives of Somewhere) and I saw that the ladies on this show were acting far more ridiculous than I had arranged for my characters to act.  So I am I taking this as a challenge.  Here is one of my favorite sentences from the story:

“Libraries!” Paulina cried, “What a trap for youth!”  One did not 
become realistic in libraries.  One filled their head with mold 
and ideas, and left their sexuality in a coil near the stacks, 
where it turned to nothing and joined the dust on the floor, 
swept by losers. 

CW: Could you talk a little about your attraction to absurdity? I know you’re a die-hard Bowles fan, and we’ve talked about Gaeton Soucy in the past, but who are some others and what draws you to them?

RBG:  In Junior High I was reading Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, and the plays of Christopher Durang.  I went to public school in New Jersey, and I think I was partially attracted to absurdity because I was surrounded by a lot of conventions.  Art seemed like an escape out of the ordinary.

CW: You’ve also got a new book of poems forthcoming on Factory Hollow Press. Is your poetry equally influenced by the writers you mention? How does your approach to poetry differ from your approach to writing fiction, if it does at all?

RBG:  The influence of Purdy and Bowles might be even stronger in my poetry, though I wrote most of the poems in MOODS before I’d read either author.  I love making bold declarations and those occur in a higher density in my poems.  When I’m writing a poem, I feel like I’m prancing alone on a stage.  When I’m writing fiction, it feels like I am organizing my closet, bidding on things at a massive auction, or strategically planning a war.  These sensations are partially a reaction to the number of words on the page, but not entirely.  A poem distills things.  I think I am more accepting of my poetry.  I write it with immediacy and don’t mess with it, bemoan it, and cart it around the way I do with fiction.

CW: Any final thoughts on I am Elijah Thrush by James Purdy? Anything you want to make sure gets said before we say goodbye?

RBG: I want to comment on the bravery and nerve of Purdy. People who read this book often assume that Purdy was African American, because few white writers write so boldly about African Americans. The racism against Albert is a constant force and pain in the book. I think what I find so complex, interesting, and troubling, is the way the characters Millicent and Elijah are racist and loving at the same time to Albert — both in the same sentence and in the same feeling. In many books, racism is implied or alluded to, but in Purdy’s book it is bared and explored. Purdy’s narration as Albert is so thoughtful, bizarre, and intimate. It is important to see from Albert’s point of view, to experience his pain and his love, and there is so much of both.

Thank you, Colin, for your great questions!  I feel I understand Purdy on an entirely new level!