The Power of the Alien Cohort: On Helen Phillips's The Beautiful Bureaucrat

What I found perhaps most impressive about The Beautiful Bureaucrat is the way in which Helen Phillips navigates the difficult business of making a surreal reality feel realistic and credible in a real-ish world. In this briskly plotted and thrilling novel, Josephine and Joseph Newbury are a pair of newlyweds who have recently moved from the “hinterlands” (“hinterland, hint of land, the term they used to dismiss their birthplaces, that endless suburban non-ness”) to a city reminiscent of Brooklyn, although it is never called that. After months of unemployment, Josephine has finally landed a job. But right from the very beginning things are not as they should be. For one thing, Josephine’s boss has no face. (“The person who interviewed her had no face” is the first line of the book.) And what’s more, this person (of indeterminate gender) has the worst breath Josephine has ever smelled. Hitherto, he/she is referred to simply as The Person With Bad Breath. Following a series of uncomfortable and inappropriate questions (“Does it bother you that your husband has such a commonplace name?” “You wish to procreate?”) Josephine is led to a small box of an office, with “pinkish clawed walls,” where she enters a jumble of indecipherable names and dates into a mysterious system known as the Database. It is a mind-numbing task that Josephine is neither encouraged to understand nor question.

Helen Phillips writes with a wonderful accuracy about the doldrums of office life. “It was wise to put bureaucrats in windowless offices,” she observes. “Had there been a window, September might have taunted her with its high and mighty goldenness. As it was… she spent the rest of the workday blasting through files, devoid of curiosity, dying to get the hell home and just be a person with Joseph.” The mysterious agency where Josephine works is located in a “vast, windowless” complex that stretches endlessly down a block; the concrete halls, punctuated at regular intervals by closed doors, drone with buzzing typewriters, an anxious noise that reminds Josephine of scurrying cockroaches. “So, what do you do for work,” a person asks Josephine at one point. “Such an uncouth, painful question,” Phillips writes. For anyone who has ever worked at a soul-crushing office job, these observations ring horribly (and hilariously) true.

On nearly every page, I found myself marveling at the deft touch and careful craftsmanship with which Phillips omits and reveals, elaborates and elides. Such is the case with Trishiffany, whose very name (“My parents couldn’t pick between Trisha and Tiffany”) is an example of what I mean. Aside from the Person with Bad Breath, Trishiffany is the only one of Josephine’s “busy lookalike bureaucrats” to have a significant role in the book. She looks like a Barbie, wears “bubble-gum” pink suits, and always seems to appear out of nowhere. She also seems to know more about Josephine than Josephine reveals. The first time they meet, for instance, Trishiffany asks, “Mind if I call you Jojo? I’ve always wanted to call someone that. Such a cute nickname for Josephine!” It is only later that Josephine realizes “she hadn’t told Trishiffany her name.”

There are literally dozens of instances like this throughout the novel, which skips from one strange incident to the next, such as when Josephine enters her boss’s office to find The Person with Bad Breath sitting at a desk “covered with a white tablecloth and set for an elaborate luncheon for two.” “The table is set for you, Ms. Newbury,” The Person with Bad Breath says. “I have been awaiting you.” As the luncheon unfolds, The Person with Bad Breath behaves in an increasingly bizarre fashion, monologuing about cats, devouring Josephine’s pumpkin pie, swallowing shakers of salt and pepper, licking “pats of butter off their foil wrappers,” drinking the “remainder of the cream straight from the pitcher.” It is remarkable that Phillips is able to get away with this. But she does, time and again, by telling the reader just enough to make things plausible before wisely moving on, with a sort of dream logic or fairytale momentum, as though the bewildering were the most normal thing in the world. She plays a straight-faced game, and for that reason the surreal-within-the-real works absolutely.

In addition to the strangeness and corporate satire, The Beautiful Bureaucrat abounds with allusions and symbols. A neighbor’s three-headed dog snarls and barks in one of the many hellish sublets the Newburys rent, reminding us of Cerberus. Is there really a three-headed dog, or are Josephine’s tired eyes simply imagining things? Phillips never clarifies. But this strange detail, along with so many others, entices and unnerves, lingers and haunts. Phillips knows this, and she uses the ambiguity to create a mounting sense of unease. Pomegranates play a key role, recalling the Myth of Persephone. And there is plenty of religious symbology: Virgin Mary candles, everything in sixes, sevens, and threes. It can’t be a coincidence that Joseph wants a baby.

Beyond the allegory and satire, however, there is a beating heart, and Phillips is at her best and most sincere when portraying the Newburys’ fledgling marriage, the mundane intimacies and small heartbreaks of which will be recognizable to anyone who has ever been in a meaningful relationship. In one passage, Josephine returns home from work, and Joseph says, “You look like you need a hug.” “She felt like an alien,” Phillips writes. “As though she had never before been exposed to the ways things are done on Earth: that you can return home to someone who cares for you, that a few overused words can hurt your heart with their appropriateness, that your muscles can soften into the muscles of another human being… She wanted to cry out when he pulled away from her.” This was the most winning aspect of the novel for me. As I read, I found myself desiring my other, as Josephine, in her loneliness, desires Joseph; and in the end, I was left with a heightened awareness of the power and importance of having a partner—an “alien cohort”—in this strange and often bewildering world.

Berit Ellingsen's Not Dark Yet Is The Story of How Global Crisis Becomes Personal

Somewhere in a northern land, a man decides to leave his life and love in the city and sequester himself in a mountain cabin. The time is probably the not-so-distant future; but, as with so many aspects of Berit Ellingsen’s sci-fi novel Not Dark Yet, we’re asked to make up our own minds about that. The story is both a personal as well as a global one. In fact, Not Dark Yet is the story of how global crisis becomes personal.

The central character in this meticulously detailed narrative is Brandon Minamoto, a man in crisis—of identity, belonging, and loyalty. Although we know so much about him—his sexual orientation (gay), his job (photographer), and his ethnic heritage (Japanese if his name is an accurate indication of this); we also know he’s an athlete, an altruist and a dreamer—Ellingsen goes to great lengths to make this story about none of these things specifically.

There is one aspect of the character’s life that is central and telling: he has epilepsy. And while he has only a couple of seizures in the novel, they do give the reader an indication of what’s really going on in this character’s head. Not Dark Yet is about humanity’s quest for enlightenment. Of course it’s also about one man’s quest for enlightenment, but Ellingsen’s narrative technique of defamiliarizing the concepts of gender, language and place has the effect of universalizing this quest. But before I get to that, let’s talk about epilepsy and self-mummification.

There’s a brilliantly direct relationship between the Buddhist tradition of self-mummification and the central character’s decision to leave society for the mountain cabin. His epileptic seizures are described as euphoric glimpses of enlightenment—a brightness—more so than a malady. The Buddhist monk appears in a flashback, a scene with the central character’s brother. It’s one brief chapter, but it’s also a sort of key to the book. The description of the monk’s last stages of self-mummification are remarkably similar to the description of the main character’s seizures:

The monk:

“Yet, in the spring he dis­covered a brightness, a glow inside himself, that was beautiful and terrible at the same time. He had no words for it and did not try to explain it, but remained inside it when he could, and simply watched it when he couldn’t.”

Brandon Minamoto:

“During the previous spring the brightness became impossible to ignore, but he had gradually grown used to it. After the initial blast it usually faded to a glow behind his thoughts, but now, in the solitude of the cabin with nothing to distract him, the brightness over­took him.”

One can hardly ignore this consonance. And of course these are not the only similarities: the monk and the main character also share a strict diet, strenuous physical exercise, and the compulsion to leave this earth. This is, we shouldn’t forget, science fiction.

Being a hermit in the mountains isn’t enough for the central character. He’s also applied to the space program for a chance to fulfill his boyhood dream of going to Mars. And this is sadly all I can say about this part of the novel without giving away the end.

One important choice in Ellingsen’s narrative is how she defamiliarizes gender, language, and place. Other than somewhere in a northern country, we are not offered any place names. The city—as is often the case in Ellingsen’s shorter fiction—is described simply as, well, the city. The author has also reduced the continents to the points on a compass. She does something similar with the languages in the story. Instead of, say, Japanese, she uses the term “the language of their birthplace”. Though the story is transcribed in English, the reader occasionally has the feeling that the characters could be speaking any language. When the central character goes to a coastal town to get his medical exam for the space program, he has the following exchange in a shop:

‘He nodded at the man behind the counter, who addressed him in an eastern language he didn’t understand.

“Sorry,” he said in the language of the coastal country they were in. “Are you still serving lunch?”

“Lunch, dinner, whatever you need,” the man said, in their common language.’

In removing the names of the languages—and the names of the continents and cities—Ellingsen universalizes the themes in the story. This book is about enlightenment: global enlightenment during a time when humanity is just starting to feel the devastating effects of global warming, when global warming is starting to ruin personal dreams and impede individual quests for enlightenment. The title of the book may be a warning, or it may be a message of hope. It’s not dark yet.

How Much We Compromise: An Interview with Vanessa Blakeslee

RACHEL KOLMAN: Before Juventud, you’ve been known primarily as a short story writer. How was the process of writing and putting together this book different than your collection, Train Shots?

VANESSA BLAKESLEE: I don’t find one form particularly more challenging than the other—just different challenges, and I enjoy both. I found constructing the novel with the compactness of a short story to forever be a challenge—I’m an over-writer, certainly in the long form, and so I have to cut and cut and cut. Even when I think a scene or passage is tight, chances are I have to cut. Hopefully I’ve learned something about this when I sit down to draft the next novel, about focus and concision. On the other hand maybe that’s just my process, and those tangents shed light on other characters or as-yet-unforeseen places where the story needs to go. Occasionally you can repurpose what you cut, although not most of the time.

I see the main challenge between the two forms residing within the impulse at inception—asking myself what container the conflict is calling for, and what kind of meaningful satisfaction am I chasing? For the satisfaction of writing a short story is entirely different than that of a novel. I love both, I can see myself working in both for the rest of my life because I’m a dedicated reader of both forms. And yet there is nothing quite as gratifying as an epic story well told. As humans we are awed by sublime creation on a grand scale; it’s embedded within us. Or so Longinus pointed out centuries ago. I tend to agree, although that just may be my mood of late—a longing to lose myself in a bigger world, an epic story.

RK: This novel is heavily rooted in history and the Catholic Church, and is remarkably researched. Can you tell me about the research that went into this novel? How much of the story was formed before research, and how did the story evolve through the process of research?

VB: When the premise for Juventud took root in my imagination and I knew the story largely took place in Colombia, I had two main concerns: 1) how to set high dramatic stakes (life or death) and 2) how to keep my own interest in the material for the months or years it takes to write a novel. Many Americans have a cursory, if erroneous, understanding of the conflict in Colombia, gleaned from sound bites they’ve picked up about the drug war, cartels, perhaps the FARC, but little else. The more I researched the history of the guerilla movement and the formation of the cartels and the key incidents on the timeline, both on the Internet and in fairly dense scholarly works, the more riveted I became in telling a story that more truly captures the sociopolitical landscape of Colombia—one that shines a light on the atrocities of the paramilitaries as much as the guerillas, and includes the millions of displaced alongside the wealthy. The depictions we’re so used to seeing from the movies play up the “sexy danger” of Latin America: armored cars, bodyguards, lavish estates, gorgeous women. Those exist in Juventud, too, but in a way that I hope is much more balanced, lyrical, and revelatory.

Not surprisingly, the more facts I unearthed in my research fed the shaping of the characters: their wants, actions, and the eventual themes. I studied everything from YouTube videos of Colombian peace rallies from the time, to AP releases on hostage crises, to interviews with paramilitary leaders. I also reached out to Latin American Studies experts for the most recent, reliable, and often dense, texts on the subject. The brutality of the guerilla and paramilitary atrocities’ in the lives of peasants is unbelievably horrifying, and propelled me onward—the book became much more than a love story I wanted to tell, but about the voices of so many in Latin America who scrape by day-to-day in terror, and are silenced. I wrote a lot that didn’t end up making it into the final manuscript, but I hope that those who are moved by the novel will seek to uncover more about that part of the world on their own.

Characters are literally born from whatever fictional earth your story takes place. And in that sense, I felt it was inevitable that Diego have been a cradle-Catholic who came into manhood at the height of the cartels, lost his faith, and when ego brought him down, struggled to reclaim it. And when I came across the event in spring, 1999, of the ELN kidnapping the congregation of La Maria Church in the wealthy Ciudad Jardin district of Cali, I knew this had to affect my characters in some way, and La Maria Juventud was born. I had been wondering what kind of occupation—or preoccupation—to give the young man who was to become Mercedes’ lover, that her father wouldn’t like but would make him sympathetic to the reader, and this was it—that Manuel and his brothers would head up a youth movement for peace, and Manuel would reveal himself to be a natural leader. Through this lens, I found I could also explore other facets of Catholicism in a natural way—that the sexual awakenings between teenagers would clash with the Church’s doctrines on birth control, marriage, and the like. Mercedes is an atheist at the book’s beginning which allows her to observe her Catholic friends (and father) neutrally, although I see her as more of an agnostic by the end.

From early on in my research and drafting, I understood that to not include the Church would be impossible, if I was to be true to the story and the setting. Colombia is an overwhelmingly Catholic country; the very philosophy behind the guerilla movements in South America is that of Marxist liberation theology, which interprets the Christian faith from the perspective of the poor, and in the early days of the guerilla movements, the 1950s and 60s, adopted Marxist teachings in their advocacy for social justice. I was also in the midst of shifting away from the fervent Catholicism I’d been practicing in my mid-twenties because I couldn’t reconcile my personal stance on women’s and gay rights with the Church’s doctrine, but found myself reluctant when it came to Catholicism’s stance on social justice—a cornerstone that I believe Christianity, but especially Catholicism, very much gets right. I’m a huge proponent of “faith in action,” in that respect—the only way spiritual principles make sense to me is if they are lived out in practice. Otherwise, what’s the point?

The Catholicism also prompted me to bring in the Jewish thread to the book—I’m always looking how to complicate threads further to create more contrast and meaning. Wouldn’t it be interesting, I thought, if her mother is not only American but Jewish, and if her mother is on an identity-quest of her own, and if Mercedes eventually goes to visit her in Israel? And then we have the contrast between another decades-long conflict, that of Israel and Palestine, and the Colombian civil war. So in the latter half the book expands outward to reflect not just the issues of social justice and violence in South America, but the global conflicts still raging today. The common ground between Judaism and Christianity is unearthed, but also the divide between the religious and secular. Not to mention the resonance of what Mercedes has escaped from, after she learns the history of her maternal Jewish family prior to World War II.

RK: Tell me more about Mercedes, our narrator. Spending so much time in her voice, I imagine you grew very close to her. How did you develop her character? How was it to write her as fifteen, young and in love in Colombia, and then again as an adult?

VB: From the beginning the voice posed many challenges, not in the least that I didn’t know the ending to the story—the adult section—for quite a while. When the why? behind the story eludes you, the answer lies in probing the dramatic question more fully. Because the dramatic question focuses on how the events of her youth, and most crucially, how she sees them, impact her life long-term, the story belongs to Mercedes. Once I got there, I felt more certain that the book speaks solidly to a mature audience, not excluding the sophisticated younger reader. I suppose I could have structured the narrative differently—say, three third-person narratives, one following Mercedes, the others following Manuel and Diego—but I was more interested in Mercedes as an embodiment of the global citizen of today, the highly-educated Millennial who inhabits several different identities and cultures, and how she navigates the paths available to her. Education and access to birth control are enabling women around the world to make strides and command their destinies for the first time in human history; I found myself more invested in giving a female protagonist full rein, seeing how her roots in a conflicted country leave their imprint on her emotionally as she otherwise achieves success. I wasn’t so much interested in following Diego or Manuel as closely; their inner struggles wouldn’t have touched so much on the identity issues I was intrigued by in Mercedes. Structurally, I felt it should be fully Mercedes’ story in that it is presented as a memoir she’s writing—there’s a self-consciousness about the narrative, then, which hopefully allows the book to transcend the themes of love and career and illuminate her relationship with herself.

By following her out of Colombia and into adulthood, we also get the parallels and contrasts between the developing world of South America and the U.S., the violence Mercedes grew up with in 1990s Cali and that of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict when she takes her birthright trip to Israel. Much can be learned, I think, from studying how some countries long ravaged by war, corruption, and atrocities eventually do arrive at a lasting peace—even though this hardly means that the inequalities, prejudices, and the like have been solved. Far from it, but if this novel illuminates how no one escapes unscathed, by no means the elite, then I’ve done my job.

RK: There’s a great theme in this novel about the power of the truth and the idea of using lies to protect the ones we love. Was this a concept you meant to explore, or did it sort of fall into place? To you, how important is the idea of finding “the truth?”

VB: I love mind-bending novels where you find out, at the end, the way things happened turns out to be very different from what it seemed: The Blind Assassin, Atonement, Never Let Me Go, The Secret in Their Eyes, to name a few. In such stories perspective is key. So I wanted to explore those limitations, but didn’t exactly know how, nor if I could pull it off. I do believe that sometimes, it’s necessary to have reservations about what we divulge to those we care about. As a fiction writer, I’m always fascinated by the grey zone of moral ambiguity and how we navigate that as humans.

There are different types of truth: the kind we perceive, which is shaped by our own perceptions and flawed by our limitations, the truth that resides in facts and evidence, and the emotional truth. The diligent research required of the project only emboldened my interest and commitment to the book, for the more facts I uncovered, the more harrowing and urgent and true I found the themes. Juventud translates to “youth” in Spanish, and speaks to not only the singular world of the novel at a certain place and time, but the ongoing humanitarian crises in South and Central America—tens of thousands of children illegally crossing the US border, the continuation of horrific cartel violence in Mexico and other nations. Eventually Mercedes flees Colombia for the U.S. and her mother’s family, fully embraces her American identity, works first for the State Department and then becomes a journalist. I can’t think of another major work of literary fiction that so vividly illustrates the outcome of neoliberal economic policies in South America, their impact on the guerilla and paramilitary violence of late 1990s Colombia entangled with drug cartel operations, and how through these characters, the crises facing Latin America today are precisely and poignantly illuminated. In Juventud, landowners and upper class such as Mercedes’s father, Diego, Uncle Charlie, Ana’s parents and others wield a firm grasp on their wealth by secretly funding paramilitary armies who violently “cleanse” the countryside of uncooperative peasants or those they believe sympathetic to the guerillas’ (FARC and ELN) cause. Through the artifice of fiction, the novel stirs up disturbing and necessary questions about the decades-long crisis in Colombia, and the very “grey” role played by the United States in the implementation of solutions.

My hope is that readers of Juventud will gain a sharper understanding of what it means to live in Colombia and to greater extent, Central and South America, where the disparity between the “haves” and the “have-nots” is much greater than in the US—although the gap is widening here, quickly— and how violence and bloodshed arise from such disparity to negatively affect everyone, rich, poor, and in-between. This is also a story of how our perceptions very much shape our desires and decisions, not always to our own best interest. Inevitably we are molded and driven by what happens to us in our youth and how we perceive those events, a perspective which is limited and therefore flawed, yet unbeknownst to us at the time, and often for many years afterward. Through Mercedes, the novel reveals how we grapple to make sense of these formative individual experiences – and how as adults, we have the opportunity and means to gain clarity, responsibility, and forgiveness, and ultimately understand and transcend our past even if it will always remain part of us.

RK: The novel also explores some great feminist issues: there are times that even the 15-year-old Mercedes can see how she is being controlled and stifled. How does feminism inform your writing? Do you feel it’s important as a woman writer to contribute to the feminist conversation?

VB: First, I’m so glad to hear Mercedes’ cognizance of how she’s being manipulated at times by the men around her came through; getting her burgeoning awareness to hit the right notes took numerous drafts. I am a feminist, and I am a writer. Your questions remind me of the quote by Flannery O’Connor, from her wonderful collected writings, Mystery and Manners: “Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.” Because I believe in a woman’s right to have control over her own body, no matter what, in access to safe and affordable birth control, that as soon as any state power gains the ability to control a body, it has then seized control of the individual, male or female—these beliefs naturally trickle up through my imagination and into my fiction. Was I to consciously impose them upon the work, the whole experiment would turn brittle and fall apart, because the rules of art won’t allow for it.

Prostitution remains much more peripheral in the novel than the contraceptive subplot, but no less important. The openness and prevalence of prostitution in Latin America is perhaps what shocked me most during my travels. Colombia has laws similar to Costa Rica regarding prostitution, meaning that it’s legalized and regulated to certain zones, bars, brothels, etc. This, along with mandatory STD testing, serves to protect women (and society at large) as well as eliminate pimping. I hesitate to say “empower” because I find the practice of selling sex hardly healthy or empowering; if you’ve ventured into any of these “whore bars,” the mood is unmistakably sad. Mercedes’s brief brushes with putasare crucial to contrasting the different social classes: paths available to women, and lack thereof. This, I hope, illustrates the privilege of Mercedes and her circle—there are only so many jobs with airlines, hotel chains, or zip-lining tourists through the jungle, and far more women who must fare for themselves and provide for children, with far more limited options. I hope these subtle, more tertiary notes shed greater light on Mercedes, her dreams and fears. At one point when her plans to flee to Medellín with Manuel are taking shape, she mentions her fears of ending up in a barrio among prostitutes and the displaced. How quickly may any of us fall, without a safety net? Again, in this context, her fixation on a flight attendant career path ought to make more sense. I hope astute readers will see some of the broader social justice issues that the storyline barely scratches.

I also wanted to explore the assertiveness in Mercedes’s character through her sexual coming-of-age—to show a young woman who is comfortable enough in her body and her relationship to be proactive about losing her virginity in a healthy way, and up front about experiencing and deserving her own pleasure. She and Manuel “wait” a respectable amount of time before having intercourse, so they get to know each other’s character; I saw them as trusted friends by that point, and hope readers will, too. There are too few instances, in books and on the screen, that tastefully depict young men pleasuring young women, which prompted the bedroom scene with Manuel and Mercedes on the night of her birthday party. I’m not aware of cunnilingus concluding a chapter elsewhere in literature. Please enlighten me if such a scene exists!

RK: The second half of the book shows Mercedes in her twenties, with many of her decisions informed by the way she views her past in Colombia. I love the idea of how our misconceptions distort our worldview. Can you talk more about that idea and how it played into the novel?

VB: As we grow older and gain experience, we witness our ideals smacking up against practicalities that compel us to bend, to compromise if we want to keep after our missions at all, versus throw in the towel. When we’re young we usually can’t see the other factors at play, or if we’re aware of them we can’t yet understand the gravity nor nuanced entanglements that come along with the territory, and so it’s easy to profess a cut-and-dry approach. I suspect this reflects the gulf in generational thinking and subsequent behavior across the globe, cultural differences aside. The younger generations organize protests and take grassroots action; the elders legislate and hold summits. The youth cry, “Do something now!”; the elders say, “Let’s step back and discuss first.” To act wisely requires making decisions from somewhere in the middle—from the head and heart, so to speak.

How much we compromise, now that is the stickler, isn’t it? For I believe young people’s ardent convictions are a crucial reminder to older generations of the human spirit not standing for what is unjust, absurd, against liberty and basic human decency, and to press forward to behave better. So the trick as we age is to learn how to bend and accept realities that we can’t change, those that are relatively benign, and still work feverishly with the end goal in mind, without growing jaded and bitter.

Moreover, the overarching lesson in Juventud is a warning about what happens when emotions are running high, and we jump to conclusions and react impulsively. Nothing can change the past, and Mercedes has got to reap what she—and La Maria Juventud–have sown. But I think it’s also important to see the events through the cultural milieu, and consider that in a nation rife with corruption and vigilantism, “innocent until proven guilty in a court of law” is not necessarily in the citizens’ mindset—and likely wouldn’t have been in Mercedes’, until she came to the U.S. True to her upbringing as the daughter of Diego Martinez, in ultimate crisis teenage Mercedes learns to “take matters into her own hands” and unfortunately pays the price.  But I think it’s very possible for her to forgive herself and heal the rift within her family.

RK: Some of my favorite parts to read were the moments of gorgeous imagery: walking the streets of Colombia, lying in Manuel’s bed with the fan whirring above, the image of her father in his bandana. Do you have a favorite moment or scene in the novel, or something that is of particular significance to you?

VB: The scene where Mercedes is on her way to Ana’s engagement party, and her driver stops on the valley road for her to talk to Papi as the sugarcane burns ranks among my favorites for imagery and lyricism, but also emotion. Still, whenever I read that passage, the poignancy of the moment between father and daughter moves me almost to tears.

RK: What were you reading while writing this novel? What works inspired you?

VB: Caucasia by Danzy Senna helped me hone the voice in later drafts, as Senna’s is very much a novel about identity and estranged parents, and how the narrator perceives her reality as a child vs. how she later comes to view those events as a young adult. Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood, also about memory although structurally different and rendered in present tense; I often turn to Atwood for her astounding imagery, and smart, fresh, often funny turns-of-phrase. I suppose The Lover was an influence, for the lyrical way Duras depicts a fifteen-year-old’s discovery of forbidden sex in the tropics. The Kite Runner, for plot and story; even though it centers on a friendship and not a love affair, the novel still deals with the subject of the now-Americanized global citizen returning to a homeland long ravaged by war, confronting individuals from the past, and navigating family dynamics. And many more of course: Julia Alvarez, Ben Fountain, the Greek playwrights, all at some point influenced Juventud.

Zachary Thomas Dodson's Bats of the Republic Invites Us Into Its World Even As It Enters Our Own

Bats of the Republic is a book that straddles the line between artist book and trade publication. Part epistolary novel, part political drama, part naturalist guide to creatures both real and fantastical, it contains a novel-within-a-novel, pamphlet guides ranging from zip line use to minefield navigation, numerous maps, family trees and technical diagrams. It is as much a collection of objects as it is a single one and in this Bats of The Republic is a story that pushes the boundaries of what narrative can do.

Traditional narrative makes up only a small part of the book’s contents. These passages follow Zeke Thomas as he navigates a political drama set in the year 2143. We also follow the story of Zeke’s relative Zadok in 1843 through letters he writes to his love, Elswyth as he travels a reimagined American West. Elswyth’s own story is described through a novel written some time later and based on her life, being read by a character in the future to try and piece together the past and understand how it shaped the present. Complimenting these three primary narratives are a host of letters, drawings and pieces of ephemera from within the story. The Police State that Zeke inhabits in the future transcribes his telephone conversations and we have access to those transcripts. The narrative on Bats is not so much told by Dodson as it is presented. It’s an experience more than a vision and I was drawn through its mystery not by cliffhanger chapter breaks or Dodson’s concealment of information, but instead by a genuine curiosity brought on by each new piece of information discovered.

I found that I often came to understand new evidence in tandem with the book’s characters. Zadock’s drawings grow increasingly fantastical as his journey through Texas progresses and as they did I wondered if the animals inhabiting this fictional past really were so strange or if they were the products of Zadock’s imagination. Just a few pages later, in a letter Zeke’s would-be father-in-law writes, “There is evidence of insanity in these late letters. Zadock becomes more liberal with the attributes he gifts his fantastical animals.” Much of the narrative is carried out in this way, with me wondering if a piece of information meant what I thought it did, and the characters then making their own interpretations and assertions.

The effect is a story you can never quite trust. It is somehow more true and less clear that a typical narrative. The conclusions proposed aren’t the conclusion Dodson necessarily believes, but are instead the interpretations of characters imbedded within the story. They, like the reader, uncover the mystery of the past in pieces and try to put together a story that makes sense based on what they find. But in the end there is no final authority, no definitive answer, no clean conclusion. There might be one, but it is inaccessible, ever obscured by the rich, contradictory, half-remembered way in which the past makes itself available to us. With the available evidence, we are able to construct a picture of what the fictional past was like, and how it laid the road to the dystopic present, but we will only ever have our belief, never a firm knowledge of cause and effect. Bats of the Republic is a narrative that must be excavated, rather than merely found and there is a pleasure in this. It’s a true mystery, a puzzle, something to mull over and think about in an age of increasing ease of consumption. It’s a long read, though filled with pictures and diagrams, because a simple cover-to-cover examination isn’t enough. I had to go back, re-read, confirm, examine, explore in a way that books rarely demand. Bats of the Republic is a book that requires close attention and it’s well crafted enough to warrant the time.

Not only this, but the book is fun. It’s deeply engaging, complex, and experimental, but in the end it’s simply an enjoyable object to engage with. When I was a kid I typed out letters in gothic typefaces, dyed the paper in tea and burned the edges with my parents’ help. I drew maps and made objects for the players of my Dungeons and Dragons games. I wrote histories from within the settings of my imaginary worlds. I have always had a deep love for fiction that enters the real world, that can be drawn out as much as it draws you in. I have a geeky affection for the artifacts of fictional worlds. Bats of The Republic is this kind of object. It’s a case file, a documentary reader, a collector’s archive. It invites us into its world even as it enters our own.

People and How They Live and How They Struggle: On René Steinke's Friendswood

René Steinke’s latest novel Friendswood will have its paperback release on May 26th. Steinke, a National Book Award finalist for Holy Skirts, offers the beautiful story of a small Texas town that has survived a tragedy, but never fully recovered. A number of families living in the same development lost loved ones to the suspicious emergence of rare cancers. The novel’s prelude offers a look at their idyllic life on the verge of disaster:

It was an evening that would melt into the summer, calm, humid, and expansive. The air did not yet smell of dead lemons. The red and blue sores hadn’t yet appeared on anyone’s neck. The black snakes hadn’t wriggled up from the ground. And she had no idea that this world was not without an end.

After being displaced from their homes, the controversy dies down and the town tries to move on. When bad things happen in Friendswood, Texas the town does its best to keep such things quiet. However, not all of the community’s members can abide the culture of silence and acceptance. Years after the tragedy, difficult ecological, religious, cultural, and economic issues percolate to the surface forcing the town’s residence to face what they would prefer to ignore. It is a silence that comes from many places, fear of course, but also the desire to hold onto the town as it once was; a wish from the community to forever live in a time when life was simple and pure.

This is a big book that deals with big issues, but it does not do so on a global plain. Instead, Friendswood is deeply personal, at times completely isolating. The novel’s depictions of struggle, sadness, perseverance, and loss register on a level only the individual can know. Each character’s failures and success happen on a synaptic level, rather than a town hall stage. Steinke calls on four different perspectives to tell the story: Lee is the reluctant activist looking to stop the devastation she experienced from being visited upon anyone else, Willa and Dex are two teens involved with an unreported assault that is quietly dividing the town, and Hal is a deeply religious real estate broker who wants to bring business back to Friendswood. The narrative breath of this braided novel gives the reader a pluralistic view of unilateral thinking. The differing points of view allow for a greater and more complex story. The different ideologies and hard held beliefs challenge the reader to see with another’s eyes. The result is extremely enlightening and very satisfying.

While each character’s perspective is essential to the whole, Lee’s story is the true north. She has lost her daughter to cancer. The diagnosis coincided with the emergence of strange, snake-like, oily protuberances from the ground. The neighborhood, where Lee’s family lived, has been laid low by the toxic soil from an oil refinery with shoddy disposal practices. Although the plant itself has since closed, it was never proven responsible for the cancer cluster. Lee finds herself struggling against the gentry, but is unwilling to let her daughter’s death remain unexplained. She endeavors to restart her quest for proof and justice.

She dug for another hour. She pitched the shovel into the ground…and threw it behind her. She didn’t’ even worry anymore about what the toxic shit might do to her…when the hole was the size of a small bathtub, she heard Jess’s voice in the sound of digging, Mom, Mom, Mom.

Hal on the behalf of other citizens in Friendswood moves forward with plans to build new homes on the site that is responsible for the cancer causing pollution. Seemingly setting up the good guy and bad guy, the novel has all the trappings of a thriller. Instead a much more powerful exploration of human struggle is revealed. It is one that largely plays out in the mind. These interior struggles, like carcinogens, are largely invisible to the casual observer and just as dangerous. “Hal sat down and just breathed for two minutes. He felt the ache in his heart for whiskey, and said a tired prayer. Help. He checked his voicemail…”

The writing held in Friendswood is astonishing; seeming effortless, in that way that only the most thoroughly practiced and equipped writer can pull off. It is style without its pretense; that rare book that is both literary and accessible. Beyond the gorgeous writing, the character work is exceptional. Steinke alternates from teenage voices and adult voices without losing any gravitas, accessibility, or realism. The novel uses a classic protagonist and antagonist dynamic that feels familiar and comfortable at first, but slowly digs into new and significantly richer material as the fight is clearly being fought within each character. This archetypal struggle revealed in the internal conflicts of the characters brings depth and nuance to each point of view. The complexity and richness of the internal lives makes them empathic and accessible. Even through this pluralistic lens, where an individual’s actions can be taken as either deplorable or laudable, their motivations are never left unexplored or misunderstood. When mapping the dramatic landscape of Friendswood the conflicts between people with differing agendas would be cartography, and what Steinke is doing here is spelunking — getting deep below the surface and to the core of things. “Dex knew he had an inside self that was still unfamiliar to him, a shadowy thing he glimpsed while driving straight on the highway.”

Yet, it somehow deals with these larger than life issues that can make heroes or cowards of anyone of us. In its most reductive state, this novel deals with the environment verses commerce, religion verse secularism, and the individual verse the society. However, its main preoccupation is people and how they live and how they struggle and how, every day, they are faced with the choice to move forward through life or be swallowed whole.

Discovery: A Repetitive Process

Leonora Carrington first appeared to me by way of a painting entitled, “Eluhim” or ‘gods’ in Hebrew, on a visit to the Tate Modern in London about a year ago. Her art is strange, not like Dali or Picasso, strange in a slightly fairytale yet disturbing way, a hard to pin it down way. The painting I saw there used muted colors, lots of taupe and gray possibly a way to express neutrality and a matter of fact-ness about the subject matter. Something haunted me about this strange piece of art. I vowed to learn more about her when I got back to the states. I arrived back home ten days later, but I had already moved on to other things, unpacking, finishing an Anne Enright book, with a very steamy opening chapter.

Six months later I found myself traveling to Evanston, IL with my boyfriend to visit his family. I had moved on to another book, one that I won’t name because I couldn’t finish reading it. Chicago, or “the city” as Evanstonians say, was just minutes away. One afternoon we made our way to the Chicago Art Institute where I ran into Carrington again. Her work entitled Juan Soriano De Lacandón also used a neutral color palette and unsettled me in much the same way as the piece I saw in England. This time my curiosity grew and again I vowed not to forget about her.

This time when I got back to Oregon I had not forgotten about Carrington. I Googled her. First, I looked at the images tab in the search. Lots of photos of her artwork showed up, but also a couple images of a very serious woman looking at the camera in a way that made you wonder what she had seen in her life to make her look this way. A very different reality from what many of her paintings depict, but also unsettling just like her artwork. Then I found a web page and read –“A British-born Mexican artist, a surrealist painter and a novelist.”  I read about how she was an outcast in the Catholic school she attended, but that she decided to go on and become an artist and later a writer. A writer. This, I had to check out.

Leonora Carrington’s book, The Hearing Trumpet, like her artwork, is strange in an oddly beautiful way: “Houses are really bodies. We connect ourselves with walls, roofs, and objects just as we hang onto our livers, skeletons, flesh and bloodstream.” Sentences like this make me want to read this book forever. I feel connected to the words as if I’m living inside of them and they are living inside of me.

The Hearing Trumpet is the story of a 92 year old woman, Marian Leatherby who receives a hearing trumpet as a present from her friend, Carmella, a woman who is her conspirator, a trusted council, and ultimately her rescuer.  It’s a story about the power of friendship and a story of their irreverence in the best way possible.  The friendship in this novel is one of the most heartwarming aspects of the book and one of the reasons that I wish I owned it.  It was inspired by Leonora Carrington’s close friendship with fellow painter Remedios Varo.  I wish I had known Carrington or at least had gotten to see her read, but she passed away in her 90’s in 2011.

One of the best things about the book was that it was about an age group that I don’t see a lot in the novels I read. They were all spunky elderly women who had been pushed out of their children’s homes because they needed a bit more looking after once they began to age. Of this age group she says, “People under seventy and over seven are very unreliable if they are not cats.” Phrases like this make the book come alive. The book starts to delve into a more fairytale realm in the latter half and then things get wild, in a good way. I went along for the ride and I’m glad I did.

An Interview with Mark Gluth

It’s not uncommon to put down one of Mark Gluth’s novels and feel physically exhausted. His stripped-bare sentences come at you like a relentless barrage of fists, jabs and blows that break a bone at a time until you, the reader, are rendered breathless, spent and broken. Works that are built like tragic dynamos, intentionally fraught machines which whir themselves to pieces before your eyes. And yet it is within these terrifying worlds that Gluth is able to reach heights of beauty and pathos that are totally unique and elsewhere seldom seen.

His first novel The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis was released on Dennis Cooper’s brilliant and demented imprint Little House on the Bowery in 2010. Now, four years later, Gluth has released a new work through Sator press, a slim and powerful volume called No Other.

I had the chance to speak with Mark about his new book.

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The influence of music on No Other

Mark Gluth: Well, early on, Black Metal became a big influence on the book. What’s great and special about really good Black Metal is it captures, or more specifically embodies, this sense of despondency, failure, forsakenness etc. . . . That was something I was going for specifically in the book. So I drew inspiration from the music and my writing probably colored my listening of the music, highlighting the aforementioned elements. I mean, one of the first thoughts I had about No Other was that it would be broken, structurally, that it would be a failure, a lesser version of what it could otherwise be and, so far as I’m concerned, no human created culture product has this ‘lesserness’ the way Black Metal does. Great Black Metal just feels so fucked, down to the soul and cell by cell. My prototypical Black Metal track in this mold is Prison of Mirrors by Xasthur. Along with that longer form music, Drone, Ambient etc. . . . became something I got really into. I really wanted the paragraphs to be longer in No Other (compared to The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis) and I kinda half assed my way through looking at the machinery that operates in a piece such as  dlp 1.1 or dlp 5 by William Basinski or stuff by Stars In The Lid. The truly amazing composer / musician Kyle Bobby Dunn turned me on to Spem In Alium by Thomas Tallis. I remember the moment I heard it so clearly. Little in my life has released as much dopamine in my brain as the first time I heard it. Anyway, that piece became a kinda theoretical cement as I finished the book. Oh, and the My Bloody Valentine album that came out last year. I listened to that on repeat a ton towards the end of the writing process. I couldn’t tell you what effect it had but it’s a good celebratory record. It’s inspiring.

On the differences in process between ‘The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis’ and ‘No Other’ 

MG: Well, it basically didn’t differ significantly. I started writing it in December of 2007. I’d finished TLWOMK and Dennis hadn’t picked it up yet. I’d no idea if TLWOMK would ever get published so I just focused on moving forward. There were big interruptions in the writing process, doing readings and press for TLWOMK, then doing some music journalism. Also I ended up going back to TLWOMK and expanding some stuff. These are all things that took me away from No Other. And then two of our dogs died suddenly within 4 months which was a horrible nightmare. I also  had all these self created issues. When I started No Other I was very happy with how it was coming, but then when TLWOMK was well received I started to doubt what I was doing with No Other. Just by way of the difference. I was sick of all the story in story stuff, the meta fiction in TLWOMK, and I intended for No Other to be a ‘straight’ story but by 2011 or so I just doubted my abilities to bring off something without all the textual effects of the 1st book. The last  2 sections radically changed from my initial conception so I spent a long time experimenting with how that would work. It really felt like I was writing a separate book from the 1st 2 sections. So that took forever. I write by hand in notebooks, then type those up, then edit on the typed sheets, then type that up . . . it’s a circuitous process that probably doesn’t make me any more efficient. So I would say it was a different version of the same process as for TLWOMK, except that I forced myself to write in cursive for about a year, to see if I could still do it, and that I had a father when I started the book, but I didn’t when I was done because he died suddenly several months before I finished.

On how his novels function

MG: I wanted TLWOMK to have a cohesion that I feel is provided by the emotional undercurrent that runs through it. No Other, like I’ve said, is designed to be broken. So yeah, the narrative, such as it is, is logically impossible but hopefully that’s beside the point. Hopefully the failure of the text renders the idea of a reader looking for logic in the text kind of ridiculous. To put it this way, TLWOMK is a tidy package, whereas No Other is, at least to me, just a mess that’s falling apart. Having said that I don’t like to think about how my books function so I could be totally wrong.

On the epigraphs of No Other

MG: Well somewhere through the writing of the book, early on in fact, I decided I was going to name the chapters after songs. It kind of freed me of having to think of titles or whatever, and allowed me to pay homage to music that inspired the book and tie specific moods, from external sources into the text. Like, for example, one of the first big influences on the book was the album Red State by the band Gowns. So much of the feeling surrounding the family came from that. So that’s why I named a chapter after one of the songs on the album. The first chapter is named after a Black Metal song that, while it’s kind of good, I really just loved the title. So I guess it’s complex.  Each of the quotes . . . in each case those were lines that blew my mind with regards to how they unlocked a piece of the book for me, when I first read them. Especially the Gibson quote.

On certain sentences in No Other that seem like very basic truisms

MG: I’m glad you caught the tautology. That was something that was intentional from the get go. Obviously not every sentence, but yeah . . . it just felt right to build these sentences that operated as if beneath some burden, or against some self-inflicted restriction. I guess maybe one thought is I wanted this failed and deflated language and the awkward sentence structures, the duplicating of words, the duplicating of sounds . . . they all played into that. For example, my favorite sentence in the book, and my favorite sentence I’ve written is the dissonant mess: “Flooded floodplains were glassy planes.” I liked the idea that the sentences were over built, top heavy, all façade. I have no idea if I accomplished that, and I have no idea why I wanted to really but that’s what I was going for.

On the role of alcohol and alcoholism in No Other

MG: You know I’ve never experienced alcoholism or addiction of any sort in my family or anything. I have no knowledge of it. I barely drink, don’t do drugs or anything. The fact that one of the characters is an alcoholic and one is dependent on alcohol, that just really served to support the role those characters played in the overall narrative. For the narrative I envisioned to work, I needed characters that were desperate and grasping (in the Buddhist sense). For example I see Tuesday being deeply depressed about her brother, as just as ‘grasping’ as being dependent on alcohol.

On whether he lacks empathy for his character

MG: For me the main character of the book is the shape of the narrative, the overall form of the story. So the individual characters exist as cogs within that machine. I care really deeply about their experience coming off as and seeming authentic, emotionally, but only in so much as that serves to highlight the strengths of the narrative. So bearing that in mind, no I don’t hate them. I do view their lives as tragic, though I’m not sure what I get from that aside from the fact that the overall narrative contains tragedy. Like, if I was building a house and I had to cut a board as part of building a wall, is that tragic? So is it tragic that I have character die to shore up a narrative strand? Hopefully I don’t come off as sarcastic because I don’t mean to. I probably have as much attachment to my characters as someone playing a video game has to the character they are playing as. I want my books to seem real, or even hyper real, but I’m well aware they are not real.

On eschewing description in the novel

MG: Really I just work on my sentences until they work for me, I guess what works for me doesn’t include that much description. I really tried for this book to have more robust language, compared to my first. I wanted to have longer paragraphs and stuff, and I think there is more descriptive language than my first but you are probably right in that there really isn’t that much. I’m always trying to show, not tell.

On closing off his character’s inner states

MG: There are probably multiple reasons for this. The main one again is about showing, not telling. Also, I wanted the book to have this kinda muffled vibe to it. In musical terms I envisioned there being a thick low frequency filter running over the book, so that very little detail emerges from a general textual murk. I wanted there to be these moments where stuff does bubble up, but for that to be rarer than not. Also, although this book is 3rd person, each chapter strongly identifies with one character, so hopefully on some level you end up sharing some headspace with them and if that is the case then describing what’s in their heads is moot. Also, at least in this book, I was aiming to portray how, at a core level it’s so difficult to identify a specific thought or emotion separated out from all the other emotions and thoughts . . . specifically for the characters in this book, who aren’t particularly self-confident or self-aware.

On the influence of film on No Other

MG: As part of my goal for No Other, right from the get go, I wanted to figure out how to write a book that had a realistic portrayal of a character’s life, but in a way that was compelling to me. The Exploding Girl is an American film that captured an authenticity I’d not seen before, in film. It felt emotionally true, though so much happened off camera, or below the surface. So much went unsaid, which I loved and which allowed me to gain some sort of confidence about what I was trying to do. Another film, a French one, ‘35 Shots of Rum’ did kind of the same thing for me, but perhaps at a more narrative level. Again, coming off having written TLWOMK it was nice to see these ‘straight stories’ play out in a way that, though without structural embellishments, managed to create something really compelling.