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.

Water and History Everywhere!

There have been exactly two books I’ve read in my life that have made me decide to stop writing for good, knowing full well I could never achieve the mastery of their respective novelists. Before you go and ostracize me for indolence or lack of perseverance, know that the feeling of discomfiture is always temporary. In fact, on both occasions after a few hours wallowing in my self-pity and doubt, I was determined to get back on the warhorse and ride that Equus ferus into the combat that is writing.

The first novel that elicited defeat within me was Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground. I was eighteen when I first came across the little book, so you could possibly blame youth on my resolve to give up. But the second time I felt the sense of vanquishment was no longer than a few months ago, when I finished Graham Swift’s brilliant novel, Waterland.

Set in the bleak, drab, musty, and aqueous Fen land of East Anglia, Waterland is the profound story of a family marked by tragedy, incest, madness, torment, 240 years of ale-making, and generations of excruciating, pumping manual labor of land reclamation. It’s a big, beautiful endeavor and Swift delivers brilliantly.

This novel screams with energy, fertility, violence, madness, and a profound knowledge of history and drama. Graham Swift slowly unravels the plot of this masterful work much in the vein of Thomas Hardy, but with a wonderful, contemporary verbal felicity and ardor.

There are unbearable scenes in this book — unendurable both for their honest, horrific imagery, but also for the complete mastery with which they’re unfurled for us readers by Swift — little bits at a time, not too slowly, not too quickly. But oh so goddamn eloquently! In particular, there is a long scene dealing with an illegal home abortion performed on one of the characters, which will leave you breathless for the consummate language with which it’s written. The intensity and dynamic of this particular scene is reminiscent of the tableau Hemingway gives us in For Whom the Bell Tolls, in which Fascists and fascist sympathizers are being run through a gauntlet of armed Republicans, and thrown over a cliff. To say it’s acute and agonizing would be watering down the tension. I found myself reading Swift’s passage with jaw fully clenched, at times grinding my teeth. Yeah, this book will make you get that much into it.

If you’re a writer, you’ll think about giving up your craft after reading Swift’s Waterland. But only briefly. This kind of book will ultimately energize you, and fill you with the hunger to continue weaving your own stories. If you’re a reader, a lover of history, humanity, and getting lost in earthy, realistic narratives, you’ll not want to finish this book. You’ll want to dole it out to yourself in increments, maybe daily . . . maybe weekly.

Graham Swift went on to win the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1996 for his novel Last Orders. It is a wonderful book, worthy of the prize indeed, and a great little film as well with Michael Caine, Helen Mirren, and Bob Hoskins among others. It’s recommended at the bottom of this page. But Swift’s career-defining work (at least so far) is his stellar Waterland. Please read this amazing novel and rejoice at the beauty of storytelling; and at the beauty of our language.

Something About A Keeper—Peter Markus’s We Make Mud

When I was a kid, my dad and his brother and his brother’s sons and I would go fishing for trout a lot. We’d go out to a lake in Eastern Washington. We’d catch a lot, throw back a lot. Keep a few to barbecue. We used a lot of charcoal. My dad and his brother would send us cousins and brothers out for paper plates and the small kind of grills they sell for twenty bucks at the bait shop.

I don’t remember learning how to gut a fish but I remember the gutting. I remember having a dream once out there at the lake, about being gutted myself, a knife running me up from asshole to mouth, some giant thumb the size of a knee cleaning me out and running me under an enormous hose. I remember telling my dad and cousin-brothers and uncle about it. One of them said, Yeah, I’ve had that dream.

This, for me, was some way of defining family.

Reading Peter Markus’ most recent book, We Make Mud, I felt myself again and again reeled back to those fishing trips, and I’ve been trying to figure the why. It’s a marvelous thing, this book, one that makes good on the promise of the shorter, previous story books Good, Brother and The Singing Fish. And like those, in We Make Mud makes much music out of a deliberate, repetitive river-language of fish and brothers. From the title story:

“Us brothers, we kept reaching down, with our hands, down into the mud. We kept on with our hands reaching down, into the mud, and when we did, us brothers, we kept on pulling up mud. But then once, when we reached with our hands down into the mud, us brothers, we pulled up Girl. We pulled Girl up, out of the mud, until Girl became a tree. Us brothers, up this girl tree, up, us brothers, we climbed.”

But like a muddy river, you can’t step into the same Peter Markus sentence twice. The continually torquing and repeating language wraps you up, disorientingly, more like lahar than river, until all you see is the river and the fish and mud. And perhaps this is what it is that reels me back to childhood. From “The Singing Fish”:

“Look here: there was a dirty river in our dirty river town. There were dirty river fish in this here dirty river that us brothers liked to catch. There was a house, just up from this river, with a back-of-the-yard part where, us brothers, we liked to take the fish that we’d catch out of this dirty river and, us brothers, we liked to chop off the heads off these fish.”

It’s childlike, this simplicity, in which a world forms slowly, and out of repetition. As kids we do the same thing every day. We wake. We play. We eat. We play. We sleep. We wake. We play. One day we’re playing and Boy appears. One day we’re playing and Girl appears. It seems as if by magic. Like the first time we tossed dirt into water and made mud.

Three Ways of the Saw: Matt Mullins’s Walk on the Wild Side

It’s not hard to imagine the seamier side of life: it is, after all, shoved in our faces day after day in the papers, on cable news networks, and in late-night dramas aired at such an hour when all good children have supposedly gone to bed. Drugs, hookers, bikers, gangs — all seem to have their mysterious attraction as if we, the viewers, secretly wish to experience the thrill of it all without risking the danger of its very stark reality.

Growing up in the sixties in New York City, these realities were a daily part of everyday life, at least for some of us. Want to cop an ounce? Head to Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village where you’ll either score what you came for or, more than likely, get ripped off. Sex and the city? In those days, the phrase referred to a lot more than just the name of a Hollywood movie. Peep shows, prostitutes and pimps ruled the streets off of 8th Avenue which was lined with hardcore bookstores and triple X theaters.

Fast forward to Los Angeles in the eighties and life became even grittier. Punk rock ruled. Bands with names like The Germs, Black Flag, and The Circle Jerks rankled the airwaves with their music while films like The Decline of Western Civilization documented their often squalid lives. East Hollywood, in those days, was grungy and hip, another nod to middle class kids who wanted to experience the seedier side of life. Mosh pits were the rage, elimination dancing was hot and rowdy, and dark, smoke-filled nightclubs were the norm.

Perhaps the best book to capture the grit and grunge of the underground is William S. Burroughs 1959 classic Naked Lunch. This gut-wrenching book does more than just describe the sordid side of life. Unlike CSI: Miami and the like, it forces the reader to experience it almost first hand, so that, by the time you have finished with it, you have come as close as possible to the underworld of sex and drugs. In the end, you are left so sick and numb that it is as if you have directly encountered the reality-bend of hallucinatory life.

Three Ways of the Saw, by Matt Mullins, is, in some ways, similar though you will not come out of it with the same raw feeling that Burroughs leaves you with. The stories are often gritty and in-your-face, mustering up Midwestern street life in Detroit and its suburbs. There are the inevitable manifestations of sex, drugs and rock and roll and the not so inevitable Catholic school girls whose religious upbringing seems to push them to the opposite of what was intended by those good priests and nuns.

Yet, unlike Burroughs, these stories are page turners, creating tension in the reader which can only be mitigated by reading on. And, unlike Burroughs, there is redemption: characters whose lives have often been formed by a staid upbringing (Catholic school, solid middle class parents, etc.) who, unwillingly or not, fall between the cracks only to discover their own vulnerabilities and, in the end, are reduced to the common thread that binds us all: a humanity struggling with the reality of what it means to be alive in modern-day America.

There is guilt here as well — Catholic guilt stoked by Irish irascibility — a lot of soul-searching and, in the end, a confrontation with self which sometimes, but not always, leads to deliverance.

The book is divided into three sections, each containing longer stories as well as shorter, experimental pieces. Curiously, this format lends structure to a landscape of setting and character which often does not seem structured at all. And, like the Winnebago in “No Prints. No Negatives,” we meander through towns and deserts, through cemeteries and cities, through the lives of those who populate this landscape in a Travels with Charley-like journey that takes us through the wilderness and delivers us in tact back to our comfortable lives.

Readers will find Three Ways a bumpy ride, as it jolts them out of tranquility and takes them through the ups and downs of its characters’ lives. From the nameless guard in “The Way I See It,” who exhibits empathy towards a hooker while he comes to terms with his own guilt and failure, to Danny in “Dead Falls” who is forced to confront his sexuality and his self-doubt through a friendship that straddles staid suburban life and urban grit, readers will find themselves in unknown territory that smacks of familiarity: a familiarity that we are all, in the end, capable of the worst and the best that life has to offer.

Foursquare, Delicate, and Lovely: A Review of Kent Haruf's Plainsong

When one examines wood for purposes of construction, one looks at the direction of the grain, its flow through the sanded plank. A grain’s pattern offers indications of a plank’s strength. Grain that wavers like a sine graph yields a weaker structure than a grain pattern more oriented and point-to-point. Woven throughout Plainsong is a deep-rooted sense of goodness and grace that almost seems hokey and antiquated in today’s world. But goodness in this book is not bumpkin in the way that sophisticated city-dwellers often sneer. No, Plainsong is brave. It’s also a slow book in the way that a mist only begins to saturate you with time. It takes hours or days perhaps to realize the strength of this book and allow it work upon you. One fingers the pages and comes in stages to know Tom Guthrie, his boys Ike and Bobby, the troubled but sweet girl Victoria Roubideaux, and the work-rough hands and wind-blistered faces of the McPheron brothers. It’s the McPherons, two brothers who live alone on a farm outside of town, that buoy this novel of human cruelty with an unyielding air of decency. What’s so compelling about the McPheron’s good nature is that they are decent and the veracity of their decency is never challenged. That decency is a fact weighty and undeniable as a boulder. I imagine that if one could slice the McPheron brothers apart the way a tree’s trunk becomes wood plank, one would see the grain of good in them run arrow straight. Normally I admire characters that skirt the terminator line between right and wrong. That teetering often makes the characters feel real, but that wobble between shades doesn’t exist with Raymond and Harold McPheron. They are good people, simply that, and it’s incredibly pleasing to encounter them, to be reminded that we can create such light and people that embody those characteristics might exist in the world.

There’s a blurb on the front cover of this book by the New York Times that sums up the feeling I get from reading Plainsong: “A novel so foursquare, so delicate and lovely, that it has the power to exalt the reader.” Exalt the reader. How often do you encounter those words in the description of a novel? Often novels entertain, stun, confuse, surprise or excite us. But exalt? What a weighty word exalt is. It means to praise, to esteem, to revere, venerate, worship, lionize and ennoble. Ennoble. It seems like we often lose sight of what being noble means. It’s not a large part of our reality tv lexicon. Nobility is a smaller facet of our modern character because to be noble means also we have to believe in something greater than ourselves. I think this capacity is shrinking in the human animal, especially the Internet-connected human animal. We have to be noble for something larger than our own concern. That can be God, Nation, or Community even. One can be noble for another person, one’s daughter, son, mother, or even a stranger, but being noble is never an aggrandizing of self or self-image. To be noble is to not be solipsistic or surface-oriented. Many modern texts are concerned with their own aims and goals only. Such texts engineer ways to make their voice heard in the modern din of literary work by confusion, manipulation, or straight-out, unqualified weirdness. Often we laud the strange as being something new when in fact the strange is really nothing more than a weakness of communication, a grain run awry through the wood. There’s a marked difference between having no meaning at all as opposed to merely being sly about meaning. But the sorts of inward-oriented texts I’m talking about here fulfill many needs still. They can surprise, flabbergast, stun, or entertain us, but such works cannot exalt a reader. Only a text concerned with reaching out can connect enough to exalt a reader.

In Plainsong, it’s that exaltation that does me in, every time. See, I’m a huge fan of Cormac McCarthy, his tortured, wonderful sentences, and the grim, nihilistic characters that inhabit his landscape. It’s easy to consider the world in McCarthy’s terms. Such an ill-hearted determinism often feels right when we face what we face in the world. In a book like Blood Meridian, one marvels at the intensity with which McCarthy stares into blackness, never wavering. He’s showing us the true heart of the human! At one point, I thought it brave to do such a thing. Many consider Blood Meridian his best work, and a work like The Road to be inferior, but I tend to think of it differently now. While The Road is brutal and forlorn, there is a moment slowly built up to where the book offers a gesture, when the boy reaches out to take the stranger’s hand, and that textual gesture is also the book itself reaching out to the reader. With that motion, the book elevates itself. Sometimes it behooves us to deny reality, because in that turning away, we have a chance to change things, to reimagine our world in different terms. Each denial is also the spore of recreation, or can be. The Road does not exalt the way Plainsong does, however, because the focus is different. Plainsong‘s focus has what John Gardner may have called a moral intent, or if that word is too bold, then perhaps one might proclaim the aim of Plainsong to be an effort to not tear down and lay waste, but instead to lift.

Some may consider these types of gestures to be remnants of the magical thinking that has plagued our species since its inception. And perhaps that is so. To be wedded to feeling or emotional states often presents a poor invention in the face of bald facts and many consider that moment at the finish of The Road to be McCarthy growing soft. I don’t think so. It takes guts to reach out like that. It takes balls to write about hope, especially when cataclysm gathers the large crowd.

That’s why Haruf’s Plainsong, to me, is such a brave tome. It’s not fanciful. It’s constructed of straight lines and forward glances. The morality in Plainsong is gray, however, never unilateral, and its variations are wide as the sky in Holt, Colorado. Tom Guthrie takes questionable actions against one of his students, but he’s also fierce in his defense of his children. There are no reasons, no explanations. The same sorts of things we get in McCarthy, we can find in Haruf (and one hears as well tones of Cormac in Kent’s measured prose), but what we find in Plainsong that’s not in Blood Meridian is a willingness to entertain that good does exist in the world, that good is not imaginary, nor foolhardy, nor magical, nor is good delivered from God or portioned out by spirits otherwise incorporeal and unseen. Instead, goodness is realized, or better yet, created in the world by how we act, how we treat others, and how we protect those that we love from the small-hearted. Because what is exaltation other than a recognition and transcendence of faults? What makes me weep when I read Plainsong is seeing how easy it is to be a good person and then wondering why, for me, it’s always so hard.

Sink Review, Issue 9

“Everyone spit on it. Did it in Switzerland,
Did it suspended upside-down. Leaned over
The difference between leaning and falling
Wondering where the conversation went.”

-Jared White from “Painting”

Issue 9 of Sink Review recently went live and I thought it might be a good time to talk about it, but first it seems necessary to go backwards before forwards, as I was not always involved with the journal, which was first hatched as an idea by Doug Hahn, Dan Magers, and Rich Scheiwe while they were undergrads at Loyola University (Chicago). This was back in fall 2002; however, the first issue did not come out until December 2006.

Since that time Rich has become an editor-at-large for Sink Review allowing him to focus his attention on The Aviary. I came on as an editor for issue 6 back in 2010. Doug is now in role of web editor (& remains the rock & reason the issues look as good as they do!), and for this issue we brought on Stephanie Willis.

Sink Review comes out twice a year. Dan and I set the goal to have issue 9 out prior to AWP, but knew we’d be tight on time. Dan was in the midst of finishing edits on his first book Partyknife (Birds, LLC) and I had agreed to guest-edit the next chapbook for Dan’s chapbook press, Immaculate Disciples Press.  To make things even trickier, I fell in love with two collaborative manuscripts from Julia Cohen and Mathias Svalina, which naturally led to the idea of publishing a double-chapbook! In addition to editing and making the chapbooks, I’m also chairing a panel at AWP. Stephanie was able to step right in and read through all the submissions, as well as keep both Dan and me on track. In addition to this, we both feel Stephanie will help keep Sink Review fresh in terms of our aesthetics and growth.

Issue 9 started with a list of solicitations from Dan and me. For some time I curated a reading series, Stain of Poetry, with Christie Ann Reynolds and Erika Moya. For one of the readings we had Heather Christle and Jared White. When they read I swooned and knew I wanted both of them in the upcoming issue. When everything was said and done, the issue wound up being pretty large in terms of poetry content and also contains three substantial reviews (one of them written by me — yet another thing I had been working on).

For this issue, we tried to balance out the amount of authors who publish a lot with those who haven’t published as much. We do this through both solicitations and what is sent in during our reading period. We consider ourselves lucky to get submissions from people like Brandon Shimoda (who has three books!) and someone like B.C. Edwards(issue 7) who, at the time, hadn’t published much poetry. Now Edwards has two forthcoming books — one fiction and one poetry, plus a brand new chapbook — which means everyone else is just finding out what we knew years ago.

We hope to always be current, a little ahead of times (see Paige Taggart’s Michaux translation in issue 9), and also rooted in the respect of a poetic tradition that Dan, Doug, Stephanie and I are just happy to be in conversation with. Many of the poets in issue 9 will be at AWP so go see them read, buy their books, chapbooks, and ephemera. Dan & I will also be sitting in Table Y section J2. Come say hi.

It is in the combinational weaving of both the insinuating and the blatant that make this book’s singing so unsettling.

J. A. Tyler’s A Shiny Unused Heart (Black Coffee Press, 2011) is, to me, a radical ballad of grief. Sometimes people think of grief in the context of loss or lack, but the grief of which this book sings is very rich — is its own indelible surplus. This is not the grief of any singular moment but the grief of moments that eventually lead to more moments of grieving.

This succession of moments is heavy with excesses of sensation that are insinuated (“he wants to paint her out”) but there is also a lot of blatant statement of the sensation (“he has a hole in his gut”) (“pathetic and lonely and fucked up and sad”). It is in the combinational weaving of both the insinuating and the blatant that make this book’s singing so unsettling.

I think that to be unsettled is to be beautiful. This is one of the reasons that this book is so stimulating to me. It feels like being held under a sort of gelatinous liquid that I may or may not someday teach myself to breathe in. I practice the possibilities of that breathing or drowning or? throughout the duration of the experience of the book.

I also appreciate that the book is not very accommodating to readers in the context of keeping them above that liquid quality. There is too much active practice of the fracture of light below! We are capable of being in the below with the characters, slough-ly: “Him, lying on the bed in half-wet clothes [. . .] “uncalm, uncollected.”

With us set below the gelatinous (by author) we can keep ourselves there (as way to honor the book — to stay with it) as we try to deal with the realities of this unforeseen offspring that changes everything. Yes, in A Shiny Unused Heart it is the arrival of offspring (which brings joy to so many) that is the demise of the lovers. Breaking or shattering how he “[once] leap[t] into her body. . . . How they ate the bodies of one another.”

It is true. I want my body to be eaten by the characters and presences in this book. I let that happen to me while I am here, consumed by the husband, the wife, the phantom offspring, the offspring in person, the “non-linear revelation” — all of these. I also eventually find myself wanting to be ravaged even by the grief itself, which through the coiling process of the book’s unfolding becomes a sort of autonomous presence driven by sound and thrum. I know that I want to be intaken by the autonomous grief, because I have somehow become it. Because through the experience of the book I have become part of its archives of grief.