Glimpses of Personal Secrets, Situations of Real Human Beings: Roxane Gay's Ayiti

Ayiti is the first book I have ever read by an author whose work I discovered on a blog. Roxane Gay is a regular contributor to HTMLGIANT, “the internet literature magazine blog of the future,” which I unearthed (and obsessed over) in my senior year of high school, desperate to become a part of the “indie lit. scene.”

I enjoyed Gay’s posts so much that I began following her personal blog where Gay writes with wit and heart about writing, rejection, teaching, her life — oh, and films, brilliantly, uproariously. (I read her reviews of both Transformers 3 and Breaking Dawn at work and nearly choked trying to suppress my laughter.) To this day the only things online I check more frequently are my email, Facebook, and xkcd.

Gay’s first book, Ayiti, is infused with every one of her blog’s virtues: it’s funny, sad, bristling, kind, and contemplative. The collection comprises stories, poetry, and nonfiction, and the divides between the three are artfully blurred. Its subject is Haiti, its central topic the Haitian diaspora experience, but its themes — among them the strength/fragility of familial bonds and the real cost of human dignity — run far deeper.

It is refreshing, after reading and hearing ad nauseam the same maudlin but feel-good narrative about Haiti, to see its stories told tenderly, straightforwardly. Like most great literature (and unlike much shameful journalism), this collection profoundly respects the complexity and diversity of the situations of real human beings.

Gay’s prose is patient and, better, patiently-revelatory. Ayiti is smart but never erudite. Frequently, the pieces feel like glimpses of personal secrets. The reader plays the role of close confidante, a receiver of souls spilled forth.

The first piece, “Motherfuckers,” begins: “Gérard spends his days thinking about the many reasons he hates America that include but are not limited to the people, the weather, having to drive everywhere, and having to go to school every day. He is fourteen. He hates lots of things.” Gay knows how to express complex truths, evoke specific senses, without asking the reader to meet her halfway.

In November, 2009, in a blog post titled, “Wish I May, Wish I Might,” Gay worried about the fate of Ayiti, then unpublished. Was it too “ethnic” for publication? She wondered, “Are there any independent publishers who don’t mind such intensely thematic writing? When I see what’s being published, I really worry that there just isn’t a place for a collection like this to find a home.” This story ended happily — Gay’s beautiful little book found its home — but the questions behind her worry remain relevant, even essential.

Ayiti is unapologetic in its focus. It is brave enough to concern itself with a million facets of human life, to employ unique lens after lens, without wavering in its decision to be about Haiti and Haitians. This quality is rare in modern American literature. Ayiti, I hope, will be encouragement that collections of its kind are valuable, even necessary. But it is, of course, an outstanding debut before it is a political statement. And more than anything I hope it is a step toward earning Roxane Gay the readership her work has long deserved.

Finding The Right Strange Details: On Stefanie Freele's Surrounded by Water

I had such a good time reading Stefanie Freele’s Surrounded By Water. I knew I would. I’d been looking forward to it with giggly anticipation you might say. Freele is a writer who does the thing I like most in literature, and that is she writes stuff that only she could write. Reading her is a chance to look into a mind very different from your own. And those differences matter. It’s not like looking into a different mind and only seeing blank white walls or flashing lights or oh look aren’t these people awful and weird and aren’t you glad you don’t really know them? No, Freele is a writer who finds the right strange details and makes them matter in an entirely sympathetic and very human way.

I knew there would be lots to open in this new book. I was a kid creeping down the stairs on the it’s-mine-all-mine holiday morning before anyone else is up, squeak slap squeak slap on the stairs with my flip-flopping slippers. It turns out there are 41 stories and each of them is a remarkable package.

Many of the stories are very short, and that got me thinking about very short fiction, and that led me back to Sudden Fiction International (recommended below). I had forgotten that Charles Baxter wrote the Introduction. This book is where I first read Dino Buzzati (also recommended below) who Baxter also discusses recently in Ecotone 13. Sometimes the coincidences of life seem totally scripted like all the world’s a stage or something. Baxter starts that Ecotone essay talking about new writers, and at one point he says, “The result is Unrealism, our new mainstream mode.”

I think that is probably right. We are back to the fantastic as our major mode but in a way that reflects our times. Some of the best stuff is a kind of interior/exterior bleeding and blending, you turn your head inside out, and Stefanie Freele is very good at this. I’m looking to be surprised when I read stories like these. I want to see details, thoughts, and situations I would never have thought of myself. Then it’s just me and this strange new story cheek-to-cheek in the candlelight.

For example, I’m reading her story “A Bunch of Cash Landed My Way” and in the background I’m hearing Barenaked Ladies singing, “If I Had a Million Dollars.” It’s what I bring to the story. The song might be longer than the story. They probably have nothing to do with one another except in my head. If I had a million dollars I’d buy a big statue of a butt and put it in front of a bank, oh wait. . . .

Or consider the story called “Quack” where the narrator is to have dinner with Lydia but has neglected to invite her. It only gets better. Dinner happens. Lydia is both there and not there. Wonderful.

There is a strange and sinister boy in the complex story “While Surrounded by Water.” There is a town and a storm and a flood, and the people who do not flee are isolated both from the outside world and from one another. I thought of Ballard’s The Drowned World. Freele’s atmosphere and intentions are entirely different from that novel, but she succeeds in setting up a fully realized world with people like islands surrounded by water.

You will have your favorite stories in this book. Mine is probably “Us Hungarians.” Freele gives us deeply imagined and richly described details that are both very strange and very human at the same time. There is a woman with a hair disorder and a sloppy but remarkably tight family bond between another woman and her two brothers. There are dump sick wobbly seagulls. And cows. And Romance. And most of the people are Hungarians.

The twist, the thing you do not expect, is the genuine family bond between Allee and her brothers, the “us” part, or part of the “us” part because there is a very tall girl with a hair disorder (her bright red hair grows forty times faster than normal) and her weird father who are also Hungarians if less admirable ones.

Allee has run off to Massachusetts from Wisconsin (apparently the homeland of the Hungarians, who knew?) to go to school, but now she is visiting her brothers in California where they have rented a cottage on the grounds of a dump. The place is always wet and it smells. There are toxin dazed or crazed seagulls everywhere. Eagles are supposed to swoop down and eat them which can’t be good for the seagulls or the eagles.

When Allee arrives she notices her brother Steyr is bigger than ever as expected, since her other brother Kurz told her on the phone, “He’s turning into Elvis.” Don’t you love that? Isn’t it perfect?

The house is in a state you would expect a house inhabited by your older brothers to be in. Messy. The details are all great. Is Allee resentful? No. Is she disgusted? No. Does she try to clean the place up? Well, a little. Everything that happens in this story is surprising but just right.

And there is something about the landlord, Werner Waffin, the father of Haenel, the girl with the ever-growing red hair. “Rule #1,” Steyr tells Allee. “Never ever open the door to Werner Waffin unless we’re here.” It wouldn’t really be a spoiler to tell you why, but it will be more fun for you to find out for yourself. In the end, you will love these people. You will wish you were on such terms with your own relatives. You will all want to be Hungarians, too.

How to Breathe Underwater reminds us that the crises, tragedies, and dramas, no matter how dark and confusing, can be survived

Serendipity ­— as it happens randomly, appears as if it were planted for you before you arrived. A waiter carries a tray of ice water, bumps against a woman. The water tumbles. A relationship is born. A lawyer browses the book store stacks for George Bush’s memoir, and next to it, a misplaced volume of poetry calls out to him, “Pick me, instead.” It changes his life. Increasingly, it is our machines planning the “aha” moments for us. Case in point, Amazon.com’s recommendation system: “you might also like . . . THIS” is how I discovered Julie Orringer. Amazon’s robot overlords saw fit to point me in the direction of her 2003 short story collection, How to Breathe Underwater. I was looking to find a book of contemporary literature that might connect better with my undergraduates, a book without Pink Monkeys or Spark Notes, one that would make my students think about their own connection to memory, imagination, and literature. Then Orringer’s How to Breathe Underwater appeared on screen, as if waiting for its cue.

Orringer, whose first novel The Invisible Bridge was published last year, makes you believe that the project of realistic fiction can still make a difference, if only left in the right hands. How to Breathe Underwater takes the all too often shopworn theme of “coming of age” and invests it with new life and deep relevance. Having taught it for three consecutive semesters, I can attest to the book’s arresting impact on students. They really connect with it. It is the kind of fiction that speaks especially well to young people who don’t have well tuned ears for challenging fiction; they don’t need special hermeneutic qualifications to read this stuff. They “get it” viscerally and see aspects of themselves in Orringer’s finely drawn characters:  kids coping with diseased parents, guilt, shame, jealousy, addiction, immaturity, religious questing, and personal tragedy. “The Isabel Fish,” one of the best in the set, explores guilt, revenge, and reconciliation among siblings in the aftermath of a fatal car accident.  “The Smoothest Way is Full of Stones” plucks a teenage girl from her comfort zone and drops her into an orthodox religious community, where her religious questions run parallel with forbidden sexual initiation. In Orringer’s short story universe, a change in setting is often the engine for a transformative experience.

There is a consistency of quality throughout the set. Orringer keeps her narrative pacing tight; stories move with inexorable momentum. She is reluctant to stretch plots beyond their realistic snapping point, and knows how to leave a story open ended, allowing it to breathe. This makes them quite friendly to classroom or book-group discussion. The stories virtually teach themselves. Her characters evoke our compassion, and in the case of the antagonists, our understanding. Even the ones we disapprove of and can’t forgive are acting for discoverable reasons.

Sometimes such well-honed storytelling is too much of a good thing, like hearing a soprano hit all the right notes, yet something essential is missing. Not the case here. I think Orringer is able to transcend the trap of mere expert craftwork by holding doggedly to her artistic ethic, in this case, a mode of traditional literary realism. Her eye never loses focus, and the imaginative truth springs into view. In each of the “realistic” lives being depicted, easy answers, short cuts or deus ex machina solutions to growing up are not to be found. Children and teenagers must plow through to the other side, somehow. The “somehow” is the stuff of the stories; they offer situations as occasions for growth and maturing. There are no smooth ways across. How to Breathe Underwater reminds us that the crises, tragedies, and dramas, no matter how dark and confusing, can be survived.

I Would Never Want to Spit Them Up: An Open Letter to Brandi Wells

Dear Brandi Wells,

It was night and we were in my room and my mattress was on the floor. A friend was sitting on it, talking about his fractured heart. Another friend was there too, licking her fingers over an empty box of pizza, empty except for the residue of grease. I was leaning up against my desk, which had a stack of books on it. On the top of the stack was yours, Please Don’t Be Upset. I remembered how I had taken it all in in one gulp. I remembered the way your words felt when I read them out loud — to myself — how they had at once made me feel too small and too big.

I wanted to read them again.

I wanted everyone to listen, to know what your stories could do. So I picked up your book and started reciting a story I’ve since nearly memorized, “Seven Things I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You.” I called out the title to the room and my friends got quiet and I started to read what you had written. “I want to put my fingers in your nose,” I said, “so I can feel where the life goes inside you.” I continued: “When I am trying to fall asleep, I think about flattening you with a giant iron and wrapping your carcass around me like a blanket. When the blood turns cold, I will wear you anyway.”

I finished reading and the room stayed quiet.

My friend with the grease on her fingers reached out and took your book like she was defending it, started over like it was the most important thing on earth.

This is what your stories do.

This is what your stories have done.

This story is true.

Brandi Wells, your book is one that transcends genre. The narrators of your stories are so honest, I wonder if they are really you. They are often unsentimental, other times brutal and yet they are tender. I’m thinking of an excerpt of your story “Bald”: “I find myself drawn to balding men . . . those men in process. I think it’s the idea that they have a chance to say goodbye to their hair. It’s a slow parting.”

So really, the book transcends itself, too.

After reading it I could no longer call it a book, but instead knew it as only a part of me, like a new lung, or an extra arm. Did you plan for that to happen? Did you know I would swallow your words whole and never want to spit them up? Are you hearing what I’m trying to tell you? I’m trying to say that I hope you are happy even though your stories are sometimes sad. I hope that before you sleep each night you pause to think about how your book is out in the world, that people are reading it, reading it again. I hope you are somewhere warm, but not too warm, and that you are still writing.

But I was talking about “Bald”:

“I sit by myself in diners and watch them drink their coffee and fiddle with their toast. Balding men are slow eaters. They are awkward. They do not know what to do with a piece of toast. It’s a flirtation. They see the toast, they are getting to know the toast and then the toast is inside them. This is the way with all relationships.”

This, too, is the way of your Please Don’t Be Upset: suddenly inside me, twisting, showing my guts what they’re made of.

Thank you, Brandi Wells.

Always,

David

In and Around The Land of Pain: On Stacey Richter's "The Land of Pain"

When I was about four years old, my father decided to quit his job as a systems analyst and move our family to a tiny town — a hamlet, really — in the Sierra Nevada mountains, where he would become a utility man. He took a huge reduction in pay and prestige, and went from writing computer programs to dumping garbage and cutting grass so he could spend more time with his kids. He wanted to be able to come home for lunch and see us as we ran around town with our friends — a privilege we never would have had in Southern California.

My father was a very healthy man. He was a runner and, when he lived near the ocean, a surfer. And yet, one day, while lifting a garbage can, he ruptured a disc in his spine. The doctors seemed unsure how to treat his condition, so they experimented. They used him as a surgical guinea pig: fused his spine, broke it, put screws in without his permission, removed them, carved his back with scars, inserted a hockey-puck-sized morphine pump just under the skin of his abdomen, and then misplaced a decimal point while recalibrating it, nearly killing him. Over the course of ten years he had about ten surgeries. Pain became part of his daily life, one it seems they will never be able to fully relieve.

I don’t talk about this much, because people don’t seem to understand it. My father looks pretty normal. He gets scowled at when he parks in the handicapped spot, though he has a valid placard; you can’t see his pain most of the time, and when you can it presents itself with a limp and a scowl. He was once yelled at by an old woman who bought the seat behind him at an amphitheater (he’s 6’4” and long-bodied, so his torso might be that of someone four inches taller) who refused to believe he needed the thin cushion he sat on, or that he couldn’t slouch on account of his fused vertebrae. Because he isn’t in a wheelchair or visibly maimed (I sometimes wish he would lift his t-shirt for these doubters and show them the eight-inch scar down his spine) people aren’t sympathetic.

I’d resigned myself to this fact until I read “The Land of Pain” by Stacey Richter, the ninth story in her second collection, Twin Study. I had never thought to look for fiction about chronic pain until I stumbled across a story about it in my stack of prospective thesis books. It felt fated, especially when I discovered the story had originally appeared in the journal, Willow Springs, where I interned, edited by my thesis advisor, and was written in the second person: my favorite point of view to play with. What amazed me most was that the story handles the subject subject glibly, yet it’s so apt:

“You go for a walk and during the walk something happens: you trip, you fall, you dive off a cliff; you crash, you twist, you type for hours, you age. When you get home, you notice that your house looks slightly different than when you left — mushier, if that’s possible, with misaligned corners. You open the door and are surprised to find a foil banner hanging over the mantle.

“It says: Welcome to the Land of Pain.”

Reading this without understanding what chronic pain can do to a person, this might seem light. It might seem silly. And that’s the thing about this story — and nearly all the stories in Twin Study — Stacey Richter chuckles her way through some of the most intimate subjects, adding flash with fast-paced prose and quirky characters. She sends Barbie-loving cavemen through a time tunnel, douses a rock-star mother in champagne and makes her sing, switches the lives of twins, and puts a princess in the emergency room. She grows a mindless clone, teaches her ballet and yoga, and watches her twirl in her favorite tutu, but then her face straightens, and she stops to ask, “How can you say goodbye to your unbroken version, the good version, the one that dances?”

I sent “The Land of Pain” to my mother once, and told her she and dad might find it interesting. She read it, then wrote back: It was so sad. A simple review, and one you might not expect from a second-person piece of pseudo-science-fiction. I tend to forget, between readings, how much Richter toys with my emotions. I flip through the stories and decide to read “The Cavemen in the Hedges,” mostly remembering the cavemen and their penchant for glitter, but by the time I finish reading, I’m devastated. I’ve sat through the drum circle by the Burger King, wallowed in loss. I have to read the next story to get over the last one, and on and on, until I’ve finished the book and want to start over again.

A Small Congregation of Nerdy Younger Kids: A Review of Ben Tanzer's So Different Now

During the final session of my MFA advanced fiction workshop, my classmates and I read our answers to some questions our professor had cribbed from Paris Review interviews. The idea was to take a step back from our work, which we were all probably sick of by that point, and examine it from more neutral ground. The exercise reminded me of that SNL sketch where James Lipton was interviewing himself, but I did the best I could to not sound like an asshole as I read mine aloud.

In response to the question about hidden flaws in my work, my response was that I have a lot of trouble writing from character because I don’t really understand human interaction at all. I mean, I engage in it (with varying degrees of success), but it’s largely out of reflex. My professor told me that the best writers didn’t understand people either, and that great characters come from those questions about how people would act in certain situations or circumstances, or around certain other people. The unspoken second half of this theory, I think, is that being able to decode people interferes with the process of developing characters and telling stories through them.

It’s a gratifying theory to hear, but it flounders before a writer like Ben Tanzer, who really does seem like he understands people. He sets his own parameters on his characters’ interactions and familial circumstances, as we all do, but you never get the sense that his characters are being moved around like chess pieces for some grander literary purpose.

I’ve reviewed Ben’s work over at my own blog before, and I remember saying that Ben makes writing, specifically the process of building a character arc, look way easier than it really is. His new collection of short stories, So Different Now, shows that his already-impressive gifts for astute narrative observation have sharpened. It’s infuriating. And you can’t even hate him for it because he’s so damn nice and helpful.

Anyway, “Stevey,” the third story in the collection, is the best example of what I’m talking about. The story is anchored by the advice doled out by Stevey, the titular character, to a small congregation of nerdy younger kids that includes the narrator. Any credibility Stevey has is due to his hot girlfriend and cool dad, and because the narrator and his friends “didn’t yet know the difference between being confident and being smart.” This should ring true for anyone who looked to their peer group, rather than their parents or siblings, for guidance.

With this story, Tanzer displays a tiered understanding of how young men seek out role models. The shallow reason is because they’re attracted to success, whose definition is relative to their peer group, and another explanation might be that the narrator is “careening from one fuck-up to the next,” so the illusion of control Stevey has might as well be the real thing. Tanzer’s approach gives the narrator much more agency – he is so desperate for some kind of help structuring his entry into adulthood, which he knows is above his head, that he chooses to heed advice like “don’t ever date girls with dirty nails,” even though he identifies it as one of Stevey’s quirks rather than something to be generally assumed.

Even when this relationship unravels, when the narrator sees evidence of domestic abuse in Stevey’s house and laughs at Stevey’s insistence that “sweat is the biggest fucking turn-off you can imagine,” the writing avoids melodrama. The narrator may brush off his own skepticism, but actual evidence that Stevey “wasn’t in control all the time, that he was flawed, and . . . he struggled just like everyone else did” can’t be so easily brushed aside. It’s the moment where the narrator sees his own path emerging, whereas before it was either follow Stevey’s advice or spend adolescence rudderless and adrift.

I don’t think a writer who didn’t get people could drag those last few paragraphs out of me, because that writer couldn’t handle a coming-of-age piece without relying on the same stereotypes and operatic emotions we’ve seen play out for generations. Hell, someone who didn’t get people couldn’t write teenagers at all, I don’t think – they’d read like miniature adults on the page. Tanzer’s work, by contrast, makes statements like “good writers don’t have to ‘get’ people” sound like flailing self-justification.

No Refunds in Case of Inclement Weather: A Review of Patricia Henley's Other Heartbreaks

I once saw a video of a guitar duel between Stevie Ray Vaughn and B.B. King. It was a brilliant exchange between two brilliant guitarists until Vaughn went for broke, tearing away with that manic energy he could summon — wild, loud, and very impressive. B.B. King nodded, kind of tipped his hat, and stood there thinking a second while the band played. When he was ready, he answered with just one note, just one, kept alive with that inimitable hummingbird vibrato. Vaughn immediately conceded defeat, put down his guitar, and left the stage. It’s an old cliché, but true: sometimes excellence means knowing when to shut the hell up.

Henley writes with that same confidence, the mastery of details, and the same knowledge of just what to say and when. Her new story collection, Other Heartbreaks, is at once elegant in its simplicity and masterful in its complexity, rich in its sincerity and even more so in its austerity. While each story deals almost exclusively with the inner lives, with the hearts, of her characters, Henley actually tells us very little about them.

“Meg wore dark glasses on the plane,” she writes in “Sun Damage,” a story about a woman traveling home for her father’s funeral. “She had not cried yet and expected to at any moment. She expected her eyes eventually to be puffy and tender to the touch.” Visiting the brother she barely knows to reign in a mother she doesn’t want to see, Meg floats through the story, strangely apart from everything going on around her, unexplainably so until Henley reveals the loneliness and terror of her childhood. In the end, when Meg and her mother, Hannah, are finally reunited, it becomes apparent how much they each have changed. However, the damage is done and the distances between Meg and everyone around her may be unbridgeable.

“No Refunds in Case of Inclement Weather,” about a lesbian couple and their drifting apart, comes to life through a similar economy. There are no big fights, no major drama, and no real reason their relationship ends, much like real life. Henley doesn’t need to tell us about the heartbreak of realizing that the deliciousness is gone from your relationship, of watching your loved one change in ways neither of you understand. Almost everyone has been there, watching the inevitability of something unfold, knowing you can’t change it.

Other Heartbreaks is a beautiful book, told with the sparse eloquence and soul of a blues master. Patricia Henley covers the same kind of theme in each of the stories in this book, but like B.B. King she manages to make each story a unique, living thing.