He Makes us Laugh and Grieve Simultaneously: A Review of Joseph Bates's Tomorrowland

Literature — like all forms of art — is most successful when it entertains us andenlightens us. Sure, there’s a certain merit to a superficial tale whose only purpose is to help us pass the time, just as there’s a justification for relentlessly aggressive music or the shamelessly voyeuristic fad of “torture porn” (a genre which speaks volumes about our sadistically desensitized culture, of course). But to be truly worthwhile, a story should mirror our own fears, hopes, secrets, experiences, and hypocrisies with ingenious subtly and plenty of imagination.

That’s exactly with Joseph Bates does in his latest collection, Tomorrowland. In fact, he does it ten times.

A resident of Oxford, Ohio (where he teaches creative writing at Miami University), Bates established himself as a visceral voice in the lit community long before the emergence of Tomorrowland. His debut work, The Nighttime Novelist, was published in 2010, and his fiction has appeared in several places, including InDigest Magazine and The Rumpus. As for Tomorrowland, its opening pages are covered with positive feedback, which isn’t very surprising given the way these pieces almost always amount to a fine duality between humor and heartache; his characters often find themselves in ridiculous situations that serve to demonstrate commentary on the human condition. In this way, he makes us laugh and grieve simultaneously.

Take opener “Mirrorverse” for example. A bittersweet sci-fi saga, it’s one of two selections that feel like lost Doctor Who episodes. Told in the first person, it actually begins as a jab at product reviewing (which makes writing this a bit ironic, I suppose). The speaker’s editor tells him to review a new invention (“The Belton Multiverse Spectrometer”) over the weekend. Essentially, the device projects alternate realities on televisions. From there we’re told that the editor wants a positive review, as is shown by this exchange:

I don’t know if I mentioned it, but they’re paying us for a decent review. So there’s that.

So it’s an advertisement,” I say.

It’s a reviewvertisement,” he says.

Anyone who’s ever written reviews can definitely relate to this dilemma.  Once the story gets moving, Bates explores the all-too-familiar idea of trying to recapture lost love, as the protagonist uses the machine to explore untapped possibilities in which he and his ex-wife (who’s since remarried) indulge in the full potential of their “innocent” movie nights. Like everything in Tomorrowland, it results in a funny twist with moving undertones.

Bates also messes with form in two stories: “Gas Head Tells All” and “Survey of My Exes.” The former is a serious of questions and answers between an interviewer and the protagonist, whose head is literally a ball of flame. It’s a very detailed exchange overall, with plenty of unique details and honest reactions that make Gas Head feel as real as any other character in the book.

As for the latter, well, it’s absolutely brilliant; in fact, it’s easily the best of the bunch. A man sends the same series of questions (including “Do you know I never meant to cause you pain?” and “Did you know that I’m finally better?”) to all of his exes, ranging from Samantha (4th grade) to Shelly P (grad school). We’re told that the man suffered from depression in his thirties, and thus we get the impression that he’s trying to make amends to these women. These conversations reveal a plethora of refined yet monumental sentiments, and their implications are devastating (because this could happen to any of us).

The theme of unfulfilled potential also looms heavy over a few stories, including “Boardwalk Elvis” and “Yankees Burn Atlanta,” in which two middle aged men face embarrassment and self-loathing in the wake of trying to achieve their unique ambitions. These men are sorrowful yet charming (especially Elvis), and as a guy in his mid-twenties, I can envision myself in a similar situation in a few decades (reflecting on my lost goals, not dressing up Elvis or Sid Bream, just to be clear).

Perhaps the most important commentary in Tomorrowland is related to the increasingly narrow barrier between politics and religion, extremism and tolerance, and between authority and manipulation. “How We Made a Difference” is a humorous account of a bizarre Halloween night in which neighborhood children supplement the “trick or treat?” cliché for the mindless conservative rhetoric of [we assume] their parents and the media. For example, the first kids say:

You can’t trust Bob Jamney. . . . He’s a tax and spend Liberal. Can I have a Snickers?

and

Did you know that Embryonic Stem Cell Research takes developing embryos from the still-growing wombs of unwed teen black mothers impregnated by Phil . . . by Phil Clinton?

At first, it just seems silly, but when one considers the real life basis for cases like this (such as the Westboro Baptist Church), the story becomes a thinly veiled (and wildly intriguing) cautionary tale.

Likewise, closing chapter “Bearing a Cross” tells of a town that elects an egotistical Christian zealot as its new mayor. Naturally, the man (Wayne Butts, ha-ha) starts out with modest legislation and only slightly spiritual speeches, but soon his need for absolute power drives him to turn the city into a prison for anyone who doesn’t obey the rules. Eventually, sinners literally bare a cross for their misdoings. As imaginative and ludicrous as it seems on the surface, Bates is also striking up a very relevant and biting conversation about the possible outcome for America if we continue down this path. In other words, Wayne Butts serves as a stand-in for any one of the countless Bible Thumpers plaguing our society.

In the end, Tomorrowland does just what its title suggests—it expresses several potential worlds (both internally and externally) for our future. These pieces are filled with creative surprises, empathetic characters, and simple yet rich emotional consequences, which exemplifies how well Bates balances his own humility and confidence. There’s a level of originality and boldness here that is rarely seen, and these tales will stay with you long after tomorrow ends.

1 Shovel Load = 1 Gram of Bread: A Review of Herta Müller's The Hunger Angel

When I first started reading The Hunger Angel by Herta Müller, I found myself thinking of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. I think most could agree that there are certainly similarities. Both detail life in a Russian labor camp. Of course, there are quite a few differences as well.

To begin with, Ivan was sentenced to his labor camp for supposedly being a spy because he’d been captured by the Germans during WWII. Müller’s Leo, however, was guilty of nothing more than being a German living in Romania when Russia demanded slave labor as war reparations. Leo had done nothing. He just seems randomly picked at endure atrocities while his family, and others, stay at home.

Regardless of that, though, I don’t think anyone could argue that Solzhenitsyn could find any fault with Müller’s vision of the labor camps. She may not have experienced such camps firsthand the way that Solzhenitsyn did, but she wonderfully uses Leo’s eyes to capture the gritty bareness of that kind of daily horror and deprivation, life reduced down to only the notes concerned with immediate survival:

The first decision of the day was: Am I steadfast enough to not eat my entire portion at breakfast with my cabbage soup. Can I, in all my hunger, save a little piece for the evening. At midday there was nothing to decide, since we were at work and there was no meal. In the evening after work, assuming I’d been steadfast in the morning, came the second decision: Am I steadfast enough just to check that my saved bread is still under my pillow, only look and nothing more. Can I hold off eating it until I’m in the mess hall, after evening roll call, which could take another two hours, or even longer.

If I hadn’t been steadfast in the morning, I had no leftover bread in the evening and no decision to make. Then I would fill my spoon just halfway and slurp deeply. I had learned to eat slowly, to swallow a little spit after every spoonful of soup…[s]pit makes the soup longer, and going to bed early makes the hunger shorter.

I went to bed early but woke up constantly, because my throat was swollen and pulsing. Whether I kept my eyes open or closed, whether I tossed around or stared at the lightbulb, whether someone was snoring as if he were downing, whether the rubber worm from the cuckoo clock was rattling or not–the night was boundlessly vast, and in the night Fenya’s bread cloths were endlessly large, and beneath them lay the abundant, unreachable bread.

However, one of the aspects that struck me as most different from works such as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is how this is only part of Leo’s view. Though so much is muted for him to only immediate concerns by his hunger, his mind takes amazing flights. He fights against hunger with thoughts of food and imagines the lives of the camp inmates as controlled and manipulated by the Hunger Angel:

One thing is certain, I thought: the hunger angel knows who his accomplices are. He pampers them and then drops them. Then they shatter. And he with them. He’s made of the same flesh that he’s deceiving. This is consistent with his lever principle.

And what am I to say to that now…And it seems to me that if someone is inclined to talk about it later, there’s nothing that can’t be included: the hunger angel thinks straight, he’s never absent, he doesn’t go away but comes back, he knows his direction and he knows my boundaries, he knows where I come from and what he does to me, he walks to one side with open eyes, he never denies his own existence, he’s disgustingly personal, his sleep is transparent, he’s an expert in orach, sugar, and salt, lice and homesickness, he has water in his belly and in his legs.

All you can do is list.

If you don’t let go, things will only be half as bad, you think. To this day, the hunger angel speaks out of your mouth. But no matter what he says, this remains utterly clear:

1 shovel load = 1 gram bread.

This alternation between the grittily real and the darkly symbolic is utterly different from Solzhenitsyn. For me, it’s where the real beauty of The Hunger Angel comes . . . and its most touching humanity. I’ve certainly never endured something like this, but wouldn’t the human mind be unable to decide between bare survival and escape into fancy? Perhaps endlessly oscillating between the two since there is nowhere else to go? I can only imagine. Regardless, this makes for some amazing prose and a novel you won’t want to miss.

An Invisible Threshold that Can Ignite an Otherwise Unforeseen Epidemic: On Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point

My whole life, I’ve had this kind of crazy intuition that I was meant to change the world for the better somehow. It would happen much farther into the future, but not so far that I would already be dead. To this day, I still can’t quite explain the nature of this conviction myself, other than that I’ve felt it deeply within me for as long as I can remember.

Let me clarify. What I mean is that, yes, I really do want to change the world around me, and I’ve always wanted to. In my perfect world, everyone would be kind to each other, everybody would follow the rules, everybody would care just a bit more about each other’s well being. No one would be prejudiced, no one would suffer at another’s hands, no one would talk about another behind his or her back. Also, the general population would stop littering. That includes anything to do with cigarettes. Everyone would just behave and then get a little gold star for it at the end of the day. Or another color, if gold isn’t your thing.

My friends tell me that I am idealistic, and I don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing. I’ve heard stories of people who have done terrible things in the name of who they love or what they stand for, and with all my heart, I always just pray that I do not end up one of them. All I am saying is that as captivating as our world is, there is room for so much more improvement. Am I naïve for thinking that such a future is possible?

When I picked up a copy of The Tipping Point, I was given hope that perhaps I am not. The Tipping Point was actually a book my little sister was assigned to read over the summer for her upcoming Language and Composition class. I was interested when she began sharing these statistics and facts with me from this very book: “Hey, Sam, did you know that 80% of nearly all group work is done by only 20% of the group?” or “Wow, Sam, read this passage on conversational body language!” I was definitely interested. Once it was finally my turn to read it through, I was ready to learn just what this “Tipping Point” business was all about.

The “Tipping Point”, as it turns out, is an invisible threshold that, when broken, can ignite an otherwise unforeseen epidemic of immense magnitude that spreads almost instantaneously. Gladwell writes about this phenomenon:

We are all, at heart, gradualists, our expectations set by the steady passage of time. But the world of The Tipping Point is a place where the unexpected becomes expected, where radical change is more than possibility. It is – contrary to all our expectations – a certainty.

Doesn’t that sound fascinating?

Gladwell argues in The Tipping Point that it is not the mass-scale actions that set the fiercest or most rampant trends into motion, but the small. “We need to prepare ourselves for the possibility that sometimes big changes follow from small events,” Gladwell writes, “and that sometimes these changes can happen very quickly.” The Tipping Point leads us through numerous real-world examples of the phenomenon and then dismantles completely the inner workings of how and why a certain social epidemics came to be. His argument appears paradoxical on the surface, but his prose makes understanding his argument relatively easy. Gladwell’s writing remains transparent and polished all throughout, and manages to craft an argument that is consistently convincing and conceivable. Furthermore, Gladwell supports his claims with numerous astounding facts and statistics from the most compelling and surprising of studies; it is evident that he is an experienced and nuanced researcher. Take, for example, this passage detailing the results of Zimbardo’s prison experiment:

In the early 1970s, a group of social scientists at Stanford University, led by Philip Zimbardo, decided to create a mock prison in the basement of the university’s psychology building…Zimbardo and his colleagues picked the 21 who appeared the most normal and healthy on psychological tests. Half of the group were chosen, at random, to be guards…The other half were told that they were to be prisoners…The purpose of the experiment was to try to find out why prisons are such nasty places.

So what became of the experiment?

What Zimbardo found out shocked him. The guards, some of whom had previously identified themselves as pacifists, fell quickly into the role of hard-bitten disciplinarians. The first night they woke up the prisoners at two in the morning and made them do pushups, line up against the wall, and perform other arbitrary tasks. On the morning of the second day, the prisoners rebelled. They ripped off their numbers and barricaded themselves in their cells. The guards responded by stripping them, spraying them with fire extinguishers, and throwing the leader of the rebellion into solitary confinement.

From this revolutionary experiment on the dynamics of people’s immediate environment, Zimbardo was able to conclude that “there are specific situations so powerful that they can overwhelm our inherent predispositions.” Thus, it is not fair to claim that prison is as horrible as it is primarily because of the people in it; the situation wields at least just as much significance.

Gladwell discusses this famous experiment to ultimately explain the sharp decline of a viciously rampant New York City crime epidemic in the late 1980s, which Gladwell attributes to one principle of the Tipping Point, the Power of Context, which states that humans are highly sensitive to their surroundings and will act in accordance with what their specific surroundings allow and encourage. The Power of Context is actually one of three major concepts that determine whether an epidemic will spark; the other two are the Law of the Few, which states that trends can begin in the hands of only several key types of people, and the Stickiness Factor, which asserts that the content and presentation of a message or product are critical, as well.

In addition, Gladwell explains plenty of other perplexing Tipping Point phenomena that have occurred throughout history. He explains, for example, what certain production values allowed the popular children’s shows Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues to become so successful, what particular traits of Paul Revere himself made his message so memorable on his “midnight ride” to Lexington, and what happens when a group’s population expands past 150. Particularly meaningful to me were his case study on why teenage smoking is so prevalent in Western society and his quest for the “unsticky” cigarette. Gladwell explores the impact of the really small factors that no one would suspect actually play a monumental role. Turns out, it’s a science.

Gladwell’s exploration of why big trends happen really did change my view of the world. I hadn’t thought of this before, but there are trends everywhere, from the latest political craze to the new hip iProduct. Why, exactly, are these messages or ideas or products so popular now? What do these obsessions hint about our intrinsic values? What do they say about us as humans?

Gladwell, as it turns out, had a second purpose for writing this book. Gladwell believes that if we can investigate specifically why social epidemics happen, surely we can harness the potential to ignite benevolent epidemics of our own. On one hand, the world of the Tipping Point is mysterious and unpredictable and very real, yet on the other, it has massive potential to do great good. Think about it. What if somebody, careful and intelligent in his or her actions, managed to start a major movement for health awareness or education reform, for example? The idea that such change is possible in the world gives me so much hope that my heart aches from it. Very few non-fiction works have made me feel this way.

Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point is such a magnificent read. I recommend that all my fellow idealists give this bad boy a swing. It lent me such a different perspective on how the world works, contrary to almost everything I have believed before. I am a strong believer that what goes in must equal what comes out, that what goes around is sure to equal what comes around, but The Tipping Point has revealed to me that such does not have to be a case. In fact, Gladwell has convinced me that the only way to cultivate these major changes is to make the small moves. He writes, “That’s why social change is so volatile and so often inexplicable, because it is the nature of all of us to be volatile and inexplicable.”

Don’t be ashamed to think that the world can be a better place. It can, and The Tipping Point will prove that transforming your vision into a reality is indeed possible. With just one small, smart move, everything can change drastically in a matter of days, hours, minutes, seconds. It will be beautiful, bigger than anything you could ever imagine. The world is in your hands. But there’s just one question.

Are you ready for it?