Murder. Explosions. A city draped in rain and shadows.

Murder. Explosions. Red herrings, interrogations, car chases, Hells’  Angels, a city draped in rain and shadows. These are the things that make Detective Inspector Huss the epitome of a modern detective novel.

Christmas shopping. Judo. A gourmet chef husband. An angst-ridden tween daughter who shaves her head to be in a skinhead band at school. Swedish politics. Inter-office gender politics. Angst about an approaching fortieth birthday. These are the things that set Detective Inspector Huss apart from the modern detective novel.

Originally published in Sweden in 1998 as as Den krossade Tanghästen (The Smashed Tang Horse, an infinitely better title, in my opinion), Helene Tursten’s story of the police investigation into the murder of Richard von Knecht, one of Götenborg’s richest citizens, is by turns both a noirish police procedural, and a down-to-earth family portrait. The author deftly balances the scenes of Detective Inspector Irene Huss and her colleagues from the Violent Crimes Unit as they face danger, confusing evidence, and a veritable Gordian Knot of politics, drugs, drunkenness, and heaps of money in their murder investigation with the more domestic, but equally important scenes of Irene’s home life, detailing the arrangements that need to be made when she has to work late, the eternal patience of her supportive husband, the trials of her daughter’s first boyfriend, and the other things that make her a complete person and not just the cynical, bitter cop hardened by the years of violence and death she’s seen on the job.

Speaking of bitter and cynical, when I agreed to review this book, I decided to go back and reread The Long Goodbye, a true masterpiece of the noir genre by Raymond Chandler, who helped to create the image of the hard-nosed, tough-as-nails, sarcastic and cynical private eye. And don’t get me wrong, he did so wonderfully; I absolutely love Chandler’s work. But it is a product of the time it was written. Things have changed. Phillip Marlowe would not be able to operate the way he did in the ‘40s anymore. Tursten’s novel reflects these changes.

Huss is hardly the hard-boiled, cynical private eye that Marlowe was. But she doesn’t need to be. Where Marlowe is a loner, Irene has the entire Göteborg police force and a loving family at home to support her. The surrounding cast of characters help to flesh out the detective inspector as a character and as a fully formed, modern human being. She struggles to maintain the division of her time between an often demanding and demoralizing job and the duties of a wife and mother (of twin teenage girls no less). Where Marlowe will occasionally remind the reader that he is aging, and can no longer handle a punk the way he used to, Huss is feeling insecure about the steady approach of her fortieth birthday, and can’t help comparing herself to the other women she interacts with, feeling self-conscious around those younger or richer than she is.

This is not to say that the novel is all sentimental and soft, either. Tursten knows how to turn a phrase (on the assumption that the translator has done a halfway decent job of sticking to her original text). There are passages that feel like they could have leapt cleanly out of one of Chandler’s novels: “Nobody saw him fall through the dense November darkness. With a dull, heavy thud he hit the rain-wet pavement.” The entire novel is bursting with Atmosphere, creating scenes that are at turns terrifying, tragic, tender, and other words that start with T.

As a lover of a good mystery story, I can appreciate the way that Tursten is able to drop clues in places that seem insignificant, like the fact that the sheets had been recently washed when von Knecht was murdered. Is this an important detail that will ultimately lead Irene to the killer, or just another red herring? From reading similar stories, my brain has become attuned to these details: I was always able to identify when these clues were dropped, and make a mental note to remember them, but was never able to tell whether they were actually worth remembering or not. This is, for me, the mark of an excellent mystery as well as a sense of realism. Actual criminal investigations, from what I understand, are usually full of completely meaningless evidence that needs to be analyzed and considered because it might mean something. Unlike, say, an Agatha Christie novel, where the entire solution hinges on a single line the butler said back on page twenty-five, and everything else is just misdirection, Tursten makes every aspect of the investigation important, and the frustration and tension mounts for the reader just as it does for the police investigating the case. As Tursten puts it in chapter fourteen, “Check and double-check all the witness statements. And check again if you don’t find anything new. A routine job. But that’s the way you solve crimes.”

More Than Ephemeral Flashes of Light On A Screen: An Interview with B.J. Best

B.J. Best, seven-time Pushcart Prize nominee and author of previous poetry collections State Sonnets and Birds of Wisconsin, takes a step into the risky literary unknown with his new collection of prose poetry, But Our Princess is in Another Castle. Drawing heavily from the kaleidoscope imagery of videogame worlds, But Our Princess is in Another Castle explores not games themselves, but the real lives of their human players. Journeying from “Beginning World” to “Heart World,” “Do World,” “Mind World,” and many others, Best’s collection traverses romantic relationships, childhood friendships, fear, death, and love – all the best things about our truly strange real world.In this interview, we discuss not just the craft of writing itself, but also the difficulties of producing serious literature around the pop-culture theme of videogames.

ELS: Your website says that But Our Princess is in Another Castle is “a book of prose poems inspired by videogames.” Did you go into it knowing that it would be centered on videogames, or did a pattern in your writing give you the idea to write about them?

BJB: I did go in thinking that’s what I wanted to do. I took a long writing retreat weekend and I wrote ten of them (something like that) up there as a means to explore and see if it would actually hold together. I liked the process and the ideas enough that I thought maybe it could work. You know, of those first ten, maybe two made that final cut into the actual book. In fact maybe it was only one. So obviously my writing changed a lot. I thought a lot about what it should actually be. I actually prefer working that way, because it helps eliminate some of the choices you need to make early on. If you told me to sit down right now and write a poem, I would be terrified by that because I would have no idea where to go. But if you said “Okay, well, write another videogame poem,” I would have at least some sort of grounding to base what I’m thinking about, and it would give me a much clearer direction to get that poem, especially in that poem-a-day kind of thing, as opposed to “Well, now I just have to sit around and think about something completely unrelated to anything else and see what it turns into.”

ELS: How and when did you get that idea to write a poetry book about videogames?

BJB: Those first poems were written in November of 2004. I don’t know where the original idea came from. They’re all prose poems, and they started life as prose poems, too. I think part of it was just that I wanted to explore that form because I hadn’t written many of them up until that point. My main thought (if I can even recollect what it was) was that it was something worth writing about (and at the time not a lot of people were writing about it) and there might be some possibilities for turning something that’s mass produced and very pop-culture-y into a different art form. I saw the opportunities there so I thought that would be a cool area to explore because I didn’t see it happening. When I started in 2004 I think I could point to two books that I had that were using videogames in a literary sense. There have been more since then, but that was the main genesis of the project.

ELS: It seems like a risky move to publish a serious work that openly admits to being about videogames. Were you afraid that the literary community (especially) would ignore your book?

BJB: Definitely. There were several times during the process where I just threw up my hands and asked myself, “What on earth am I doing?” The idea that it may very well be 100% frivolous was never lost on me. But the poems are serious; they’re not intended to be frivolous, so one of my goals with the book was to show that videogames can be treated seriously and to show how they can move into other aspects of people’s lives. So I knew I had that much to stand on, because it wasn’t about how much I love Pac Man or Tetris. But I knew it wasn’t a typical, serious university press kind of book, so my gut said I needed to approach more indie publishers with it. That’s where I wound up going because I didn’t figure I would win a contest judged by some other eminent poet, but I figured there would be enough people out there who would find it to be an interesting approach. The small press thing seemed like a more logical place to make that happen.

ELS: You mentioned a couple of times in your blog that it was important to you to make the book accessible to people who don’t play videogames or didn’t have experience with them. Don’t you think they lose some of the richness of the references, or was that not the point?

BJB: I’m not entirely sure, and it’s hard for me to answer because I know exactly what I’m talking about in all of those poems, but really my goal was that to not get any of the references wouldn’t matter, and it would still be a good poem that would hold up on its own. I definitely think you could argue that it’s just like any other ekphrastic work: If it’s about a work of art, it’s useful to be looking at the painting, photograph, or whatever. All of a sudden the connections start to make a little more sense. So there is an advantage to knowing the games themselves, but the actual details are pretty small – they’re in the poems, but they don’t necessarily influence the poems very much. So someone who knows the particular games could go through and say “Oh, I know where that’s from, and I know where that’s from,” but I’m not sure (with the exception of a very very few cases) that actually knowing the game inherently enhances the understanding of the poem, because one of my goals with the poems was to take them to places other than where the games happened to lead.

ELS: Why was that one of your goals?

BJB: I didn’t want to write a book gratifying for people who know all this arcana about classic video games. I did want it to appeal to as large of an audience as possible. There’s already a lot of writing out there on the web about the games: what they are, what they do… There’s enough commentary on the games as they currently exist, and to me that operates more in the review world, which is perfectly fine, but it doesn’t really transform the material into anything new.

ELS: What was your writing process with But Our Princess is in Another Castle? Was it different or similar as for your previous works?

BJB: Well, I mean, this was different because it was ekphrastic. Basically, I made several lists of fifty so videogames I would conceivably want to write about. Halfway through the project I made another list, and I have a feeling I maybe even made a third one. And then it was just brainstorming to settle on one that maybe seemed interesting, and literally I would go and play the game. It’s weird to think about playing video games for research, but actually that’s exactly what I did.

Most of the games in the book are small, especially compared to modern games, so it didn’t take long to do it. It’s not like I played any of them through to beat them. I played them long enough to get a sense of details that interested me. I would literally keep my eyes open and try to pay attention to things that simply seemed weird about the game, or unusual, or things that even though I’d played this game a million times, I’d never noticed before. Those were the details that were impressed on me, and those are often the ones that wind up showing up in the particular poems. Because ultimately, videogames are weird. If you sit back and objectively look at them, the things they ask you to do, and the worlds they create are just strange. I really like that, I think that’s really interesting. Compared to other books I wrote, I had to sit down and get the videogame in my head enough so I knew I could pull from that wealth of images that the game happened to have, while also limiting myself by not playing it over and over again, because I usually find if I know something too well it actually makes it more difficult to write about. You lose the sense of wonder and the idea of what makes it interesting and important versus “Well, here’s my encyclopedia of knowledge about something.”

ELS: Had you played all of the games before, or did you try some new ones also?

BJB: Most of them I had played before, from what I remember. I think there were some that I had never played before or some that I had always wanted to play that seemed interesting that I had never gotten around to, but no, they’re not inherently my favorite games, or anything like that. I cast a pretty wide net in thinking about what was valuable and what was intriguing. And there were also plenty of games that I wanted to write about, but just didn’t work for whatever reason. I wish Sonic the Hedgehog was in the book, but I tried three different times to write a Sonic the Hedgehog poem and they all blew up in my face, so I’m like “well I guess that’s the way it goes.”

ELS: You published a Sonic the Hedgehog poem on your WordPress blog that I really liked, and I was actually wondering why you didn’t include that one in But Our Princess is in Another Castle…

BJB: I published three: that one, “Minesweeper,” and “Mappy.” What I realized about those three particular poems is that they just seemed a little stranger, and that they didn’t quite seem to hit the same notes as far as the overall tenor of the book. You always have to draw lines. Those three were just on the edge and fell.

ELS: That’s unfortunate for Sonic.

BJB: Yeah, that’s right!

ELS: Did you have a problem poem when you were writing But Our Princess is in Another Castle? One particular poem that gave you more trouble, or something that you worked on longer, or edited a million times…?

BJB: Many of the ones that I did have problems with wound up not being included in the book to begin with. There were a couple that flat-out got rewritten because the first time they made it through, they did not work very well. The first one’s in the first section of the book. It’s called “Gauntlet” and it was actually one of the first ten. What I remember about that poem is that it was mostly an exercise of seeing how often I could alliterate words that began with the letter Q. I distinctly remember that because Gauntlet is this game in which you die very frequently, so if you’re playing this at an arcade you just keep pumping quarters into the machine. I don’t think that version of the poem even made it to the very first draft of the book.

ELS: Not sure you could have gotten too far with Qs.

BJB: Yeah, exactly. Once you’ve got a version of a poem, it’s difficult to go back and say “I’m going to write about this game again” and do it completely differently, so the version of “Gauntlet” in the book was written in 2010-2011. I tried again once enough time had passed that I honestly could forget about what that first poem was about.

ELS: Do you keep copies of your first drafts?

BJB: Oh, I’ve got them somewhere. I’m not quite sure what draft of the book finally got published, but I’ve got a feeling it was draft number twenty or something like that. Just out of curiosity one day, while I was going through the final edits, I pulled up draft #1 and it was fascinating to see how completely different the book was compared to what was finally there. My first draft was written in 2005 and I thought there was a book there, but it’s very clear there was not.

ELS: Did you include any favorite childhood games?

BJB: A lot of them were favorites. My first videogame system (that I remember) was the Nintendo. I played Super Mario Brothers until all hours of the night. I was so proud when I finally beat Super Marios that I took a picture of the screen with my mom’s camera (this was just before digital cameras), and I went up to tell her that I’d just beaten Super Mario Brothers. At this point I’m eleven or twelve. She just looks at me, and all she says is “Go to bed,” which in retrospect was a completely reasonable suggestion at the time…

So the system I’m fondest of, because it was my first, is probably the Nintendo. There’s Mario in there, and Legend of Zelda in there, and Kid Icarus in there… I tend to have more nostalgic memories with those particular games, but I tried not to let that influence what I chose for the book.

ELS: What was the editorial process like?

BJB: The book was accepted in 2011 and actually I was still writing some new poems at that point. I had sent off a copy of the manuscript even though I had some new poems I was working on, and they accepted the manuscript, so the first thing for me do was figure out which, if any, of those new poems were going to belong. I went through about nineteen drafts on my own – when I say “on my own,” I mean me and a couple of trusted readers that I give virtually anything tobecause they give me all sorts of good feedback. But then we went through three rounds of edits with the editors. Very detailed, very thorough, and very much appreciated. We worked back and forth up until the last draft. In the final draft I actually cut four poems out of the manuscript, “Mappy” being one of them, just because I didn’t think at the time that they quite fit. Even up until then we were still making major changes to it to make it as strong as possible.

ELS: Poor “Mappy”! Almost made it.

BJB: Exactly.

ELS: What kind of edits did the publishing house make – mostly stylistic, or…?

BJB: It was everything and anything. Sometimes it was making sure things were spelled correctly, sometimes it was suggesting cutting poems, sometimes they recommended a new ending, definitely a lot of trimming of language, which I almost always agreed with, like extra adjectives, adverbs, some details that didn’t seem like they went anywhere or were needless at that point.

ELS: You had two “Heart Worlds”; was there a reason for that?

BJB: Yeah. The first one is not a very positive “Heart World,” and in fact talks mostly about a relationship breaking up, all negative falling apart, whereas the second one is more a positive, developing, lasting relationship and in many ways autobiographically based on me and my wife. I like the idea of two “Heart Worlds” because it’s mnemonic of videogames in a certain way. Videogames (either because they were lazily designed or cleverly designed, one of the two) often have you go back to a place where you’ve already been and make you do something else with it. But the goal was for each poem to stand on its own, even though together they’re thematic. I tried to be pretty clear about the themes, by virtue of the different worlds that each poem winds up in, like “Heart World” or “Map World.” The goal was to keep them apart and not try to necessarily rely on narrative, or for one to rely on another one, because that becomes one rickety house of cards pretty quickly.

ELS: Is there a specific line or image that you’re particularly proud of in this book?

BJB: Oh jeez, that’s a tough question.

ELS: I figured it might be.

BJB: What I like – and it almost becomes my own little cliché during the book – is poems that close strongly. I have so many poems that end with basically a single-sentence paragraph at the very end. For example, the end of “Mega Man”: “Being an electrician is different than being a doctor of light.” It even includes a reference to the game, because you’re fighting on behalf of the character Dr. Light in there. Another one that I really like is the end of “Legend of Zelda”: “We become the stories we tell ourselves.” That carries throughout the book too, and it’s also true about videogames. You’re the one enacting the story, so you become the story as you go through it. That strategy particularly does it for me. I don’t know if it winds up irritating other people because it happens so often, but I feel that they’re like daggers at the end.

ELS: Did you pick the title at the end or did you have it in mind from the beginning?

BJB: No, I had that from the beginning. The old manuscript in 2005 had that as the title. It just seemed to me like it was a pretty famous videogame phrase and that no one at the time was using it for anything, and honestly since I’ve been doing this and talking about the book, I’ve had several people either tell me or it gets back to me that they think it’s a great title. But I was terrified that between then and now someone else would come out with something called precisely that and I would have to change as a result. There is a “Mountain Goats” song called “Thank you Mario, But Our Princess is in Another Castle,” but I figured I was just far enough away from that that it would still hold up. I chose it because it’s a videogame phrase and I like the idea that it suggests, what so many videogames suggest: that you need to keep trying, you need to keep searching, you need to keep working, because you’re not quite done yet, and I think thematically that addresses a variety of the poems in the book, too.

ELS: The phrase has become a pretty popular meme; not sure if was back in 2005.

BJB: Memes didn’t really exist in 2005. It was one of those things that was sufficiently familiar that I hoped it would pull people in. It definitely has become meme-ified.

ELS: Do you still play videogames, or was this a thing of the past that you revisited for this project?

BJB: It’s weird. I began this project in 2004, almost ten years ago. I had no kids then, so I had time to play games and do what I wished. Now I’ve got a son – he was born in 2010 so he’s three and a half. Honestly, playing videogames is one of the things in my life that has fallen by the wayside. I still enjoy doing it, but I have a hard time justifying it, especially since so many modern games take up so much of your time if you actually play them. So I don’t spend much time playing games anymore, and I’m actually fairly comfortable with that idea. I balance that out by saying that I actually teach a videogame course at Carroll University in Wisconsin, so I get my fix that way. I assign all sorts of games: some classics, some contemporaries, and a bunch that the students have never heard of. So I’m still playing and thinking about them, just in a more academic context these days. When it comes down to it, my free time is fairly small, so when it gets to 9:30 at night, I would rather read or do something else than spend half an hour playing a videogame.

ELS: Does your videogame course focus on literature, mechanics, design, or…?

BJB: It’s called a “Cultural Seminar” – that’s the big touchstone for many of the general education courses. We want our students to learn about culture through different lenses, so mine is videogames, and believe it or not there is actually a textbook about how to study videogames. We talk about the academic theory of videogames, how they reveal culture by what they reveal within the games themselves, and how they impact the larger culture. We look at why Pac Man was so popular, why Tetris was so popular, and we also deal with the question of “Do violentgames cause violence?” We look at how the games are situated within American culture as well to see what their impacts are.

ELS: Do you think some of that came through in your book?

BJB: I don’t really think so. It wasn’t something I was necessarily thinking much about during the writing. So many of the poems are not inherently autobiographical but they’re autobiographically based, so I was writing more from personal perspective than from a broader perspective. It’s definitely more of a lyric voice in this particular book as opposed to trying to teach– because the poems are ultimately about experiences other than the game themselves and the comment is the game itself.

ELS: So you don’t think you had any messages about video games in mind for your readers when you wrote?

BJB: Other than that they’re worth serious inquiry. And I think that’s important. That they can be treated seriously, that they’re more than ephemeral flashes of light on a screen, that they do have meaning and can have artistic meaning either through transforming them or even in and of themselves. The question I’ve been asked a couple of times is “Are videogames art?” People wrestle with it, so it’s something I’ve tried to comment on. My answer is very clearly yes. More specifically, it’s my goal to show that videogames can be a generative source for other artistic endeavors.

The Night It Happens the Moon Is Murderously Bright

It’s a slim collection of just six stories (two of flash length), but Claudia Smith’s new book, Quarry Light, from Magic Helicopter Press, is dense and deep and brilliantly written. It is a book to read slowly, to let sink in to one’s heart and mind, and to ponder long after reading.

I’ve been a fan of Smith’s work for many years, having workshopped with her in Kim Chinquee’s Hot Pants group and having read her chapbooks, The Sky is a Well and Other Shorts (Rose Metal Press, 2007) and Put Your Head in My Lap (Future Tense Books, 2009).

The stories in Quarry Light display Smith’s lovely prose and use of specific detail as well as her gift for keenly portraying the lives of young girls and women. Particularly in her evocation of childhood, one feels as if these memories and details remain as clear and tangible and compelling to Smith as the present day. This serves the stories and the reader both.

The opening story, “Catgirl,” is one that Smith notes in her acknowledgements as “taking [her] writing into a new direction.” Written for the anthology Lone Star Noir, the story is indeed deeper and darker than anything I’d previously read of hers. Yet, it opens with the sort of winsome image familiar to fans of her stories:

The girls are waiting for the ferry, dangling their legs out the side of the van, popsicle juice dripping down their chins. Four girls: Trina, Tricia, Grace, and Allie.

From there, Smith builds her story, brick by brick, detail by detail, going deeper into the lives of the girls, taking the reader along on this weekend trip to the beach with Tricia and Trina’s divorced mother. The story is juxtaposed with a children’s rhyme/song the girls sing throughout, Miss Mary Mack. As the story takes a darker turn, so do the stanzas of the song.

On display here and in all the stories of this collection is Smith’s masterful storytelling, her ability to build tension, set a tone of foreboding, to draw the reader ever forward, to make the heart beat a little faster. Things grow increasingly off-kilter as Smith introduces a new character here, an ominous detail there, weaving past and present and even the future with subtlety and control.

The reader begins to know the girls are not safe even if they are unaware of any danger and at one point, they laugh and sing:

She cannot cry, cry, cry

That’s why she begs begs begs

She begs to die, die, die.

The story takes its inevitable turn and Smith punctuates it with one perfect sentence:

The night it happens the moon is murderously bright.

The imagery of the last two paragraphs of this story is among the most haunting and devastating I’ve ever read.

Always in Smith’s stories we see how deeply she understands, and uses, the past as an illumination of the present. Stories can sometimes get bogged down in this way but Smith makes both past and present so alive, so compelling, that the shifts in time feel seamless and right.

In the story, “As If Someone Had Polished the Air” an intelligent and imaginative child befriends first a rat, then small girl she discovers living in her closet. Her father is rarely around and her mother is troubled, alcoholic. Smith makes the child’s fear and loneliness palpable:

That night Agatha felt sick. Her mother had been dead drunk; she wouldn’t remember what she’d said or done. Her mother, she now know, was kind of a loon. In the dark, the flowers on her walls were scary. They looked as though they might grow right into the room and strangle the dolls, the furniture, her.

In “Lucy,” the longest story in the collection, a young woman returns from her grandmother’s funeral to find a dog left in her yard, a dog she takes in and cares for. Throughout, the prose is clean, precise, and evocative, always hitting the mark, as here where the woman recalls a chance encounter on a bus trip:

New Mexico in darkness was bare mountains looming outside the bus window like a giant’s bones, giving their conversation a solemnity and proportion she appreciated. She was weepy without being drunk.

“Lucy” is another story where past events, heartaches, and losses impinge on the present. In this way, Smith draws us in to her characters and makes them unforgettable.

There is a gothic feel to Quarry Light, inhabited as it is by ghosts and rats, imperiled and abused children and dysfunctional mothers. Gothic, with a strong, beating heart. Claudia Smith mines the depths of sadness and loss and human frailty with bravery and compassion. These stories will leave their mark.

At Times, I Felt Like I Didn’t Even Recognize Myself: On Sophie Kinsella's Remember Me?

I was fourteen years old when I first read Remember Me?. The large iconic sunflower on the book’s front cover caught my eye one summer afternoon as I strolled through the books aisle of a wholesale warehouse while my mother shopped for vegetables and juice. I didn’t know it then, but I was looking right at the book that I would later consider one of my absolute favorites. Several years later, I still can’t pinpoint the precise reason why I felt so drawn to Kinsella’s novel. I can say, however, that the two very words of the title spoke so clearly to my desires at the time.

Growing up, friends and peers moved in and out of my life constantly. It started in the fall of the third grade when my best childhood friend moved away, and would continue up until high school. I attended a middle school none of my elementary school friends attended, and I was bracing myself to attend a high school none of my middle school friends would attend. Time after time, I had to rebuild my social ground, and being on the introverted side, I found it quite wearing and disorienting. I felt undeniably lonely, yet secretly frustrated at my peers for never remaining constant in my life, even though I knew they weren’t to blame. I was tired of not recognizing anybody, and in turn, nobody recognizing me. At times, I felt like I didn’t even recognize myself.

I’ll admit that I had this absurd recurring fantasy in which one day, when we were all older and I was successful and living abroad, I would visit my hometown, walk down the street and eye a group of my old peers laughing and joking to each other about their mundane lives and kids and jobs, then they would see me, too, and halt in their tracks. I’d strut up to them, jut my chin up high and say, “Remember me?” Then they would freak out and remember neglecting me and sob about their regret and swear never to ignore me again and then ask sheepishly if maybe they could work for me for the rest of their sorry little lives. I realize now that this rather vicious daydream of mine is foolish, cocky, and totally impractical, but back then, it was my driving force to be “better” than other people, to accomplish more and higher than anybody I’d ever known. I was The Little Engine that Wanted to Could, and I wanted it bad. So did, as it turned out, Lexi Smart, the protagonist of Remember Me?.

Glancing over the front cover of Remember Me?, I felt a heated medley of all these inner resentments churn and bubble within my heart. I just had to read it. I asked my mom if she was willing to buy it for me, and she did, since she was always happy for me to read on my own. I sat down on my bed that evening and cracked open my paperback copy, and thus marked my first step into the world of twenty-eight year old Lexi Smart, and boy, did I enjoy the ride. I enjoyed the ride so immensely that I would read it through another seven times over the following three years. I remember staying up late many summer nights just so I could relive Lexi’s tale of when she woke up one evening in a London hospital to a big surprise: herself.

Upon regaining consciousness, Lexi discovers that she has straight teeth, a toned body, amazing nails, and a business card that reads “Director” of the company for which she used to be a junior assistant manager. She lives in a trendy new loft with her handsome, multimillionaire husband, and has her own personal assistant. The doctor tells Lexi that she survived a car crash in which she lost memory of the past three years, so she has no idea how her life could change so dramatically. Her most recent memory was the night she ranked a “minus six…on a scale of one to ten”, when she was still twenty-five years old. She was just a week shy of a yearly bonus at her new job, was stood up by her boyfriend, and was preparing to attend her father’s funeral the following morning. She remembers lamenting desperately for her life to improve, and it seems that it has finally happened; as if by magic, she’s living her dream life.

Lexi tries to hold onto this glamorous image of her new life, but the more she learns, the more her life turns out to be not quite what she originally thought it to be. Her sweet, innocuous twelve year old sister is now a rebellious, swindling teenager; her lifelong friends insist that she is a “bitch boss from hell”; and her husband is in love only with Lexi’s businesslike façade. And on top of all that, she is apparently having an affair with her husband’s architect, Jon, who later confronts her about it. As Lexi slowly pieces together the past three years of her life, she comes to discover how and why these drastic changes in her life came to be. Once the bigger picture of her life materializes, Lexi must ultimately decide whether she wants to keep her present life or find the strength within her to change it to suit her own accord.

What really struck me about Remember Me?, even after my first time reading it, was that twenty-eight year old Lexi from before the car crash was secretly unhappy with this glamorous lifestyle, and it was an idea my then fourteen year old brain had trouble grasping. I didn’t understand fully why until I reread the novel years later. Yes, she was stinking rich, but she was unloved. Nobody really understood her. When she was being simply herself at twenty-five, she was dreadfully unhappy with current prospects of her life. She was fed up with always drawing the shortest straw, so she decided to undertake the most extreme of makeovers. She fostered an austere businesslike persona she thought all successful people had and used it to climb out of the hole she was in. She knew it wasn’t really her, but if that attitude was her ride to the top, she would hop in and floor it. She let it overtake her, and that was the mask her husband fell in love with. Reaching the summit was all she could think about, for reasons explained towards the end of the book, but in doing so, she lost perspective of other more important areas of her life. She had gone too far in her blind pursuits and ended up where she knew she didn’t belong, not deep down inside. It’s no wonder she sparked an affair with the architect. She was lonely.

Perhaps what struck me even more was that this memory loss what just what Lexi needed; perhaps the past, more genuine Lexi could offer a fresh perspective on her current lifestyle, a solution to her problem. Talk about a blessing in disguise.

All in all, Remember Me? is a fun and light read. It is definitely no literary classic, but it made me laugh to myself many times, and once it was over, it made me think about what kind of future I wanted to create for myself. I empathized greatly with Lexi, and eventually, I realized that I had a Lexi Smart within me as well, one who dreams of a better tomorrow, but may not quite know where to start.

At one point in the novel, Lexi explains, “I feel like I’ve been plonked in the middle of a map, with one of those big arrows pointing to me. ‘You Are Here.’ And what I want to know is, how did I get here?” This lost, confuzzled feeling is one I have felt many times, and this is always how it starts when we begin to question our own direction and motives. Remember Me? is about being and becoming, about taking time to reflect on the trajectory of our very lives. Do we see a beautiful future on the horizon, or are we sailing in the wrong direction? Only we can decide for ourselves what we truly want, and Lexi struggles through the process of leaving marks on her own life that, upon looking back, she can be happy with.

So, did the book I saw one summer afternoon I strolled through the books aisle of a wholesale warehouse while my mother shopped for vegetables and juice satisfy me? Yes it did, but more than that. It taught me the right way to learn about myself; just like Lexi questioned herself, I learned the importance of questioning my own goals and choices so that I can be who I truly desire to be while remaining honest with myself. That truly is a valuable lesson.

The real gold of this book lies in the protagonist, Lexi, and tagging along with her as she interacts with others and tries to piece herself together. What she learns may surprise you. Sit back and listen as Lexi introduces her brand new life not only to you, but to herself as well; Sophie Kinsella’s Remember Me? is a peep of sunshine that will surely try its best to brighten your day.

He’s cutting our cake. He’s hugging your mom.

I have been trying to write a book review of this X Marks the Dress: A Registry for months. I’ve been nervous about writing this book review. This is a complicated book, intentionally and fruitfully complicated, but rewarding. It’s an incredible mash-up of voices, perspectives, forms.

Kristina Marie Darling and Carol Guess have written a book and written a book and written a book. What I mean is, they are getting at the problematic idea of marriage in a variety of ways. The poems are written from varying perspectives, and later include footnotes and then erasures that serve to render the former poems skewed and different. All of this accumulates into what feels like more than one book. Though compact it is certainly a multitude of voices. Marriage isn’t one thing. It isn’t just that.

In Appendix C an earlier poem is almost entirely erased to leave the remaining words:

I can’t decide between/ a candy bride/ a glass cabinet

And neither can the reader. I don’t want to decide. I want to hold all of this book in my  head at once, but I can’t. I want all the contradictions and restatements. I want to understand it all as a truth, because the truth is varied and layered.

Reading this book felt like a kind of game. I flipped between the poems and their erasures to see what actually got erased. What were these words’ original contexts? On page eighty-one, the only words left behind are “I was stolen.” From what, I wondered? I flipped to page seventeen to find its original context. “On Wednesdays she says I was stolen, not birthed. On Thursday, no talking. Weekends are for orphans. I’m so many men in the back of a cab. Husband or lover? Plastic or paper? Sometimes I’m a woman, too…” But if I flip back to the near empty page containing only the words “I was stolen,” I find a different narrative is created. The words lead right into the next page, which reads, “stashed between/my mother/clawing.” I spent a lot of time flipping back and forth between the sections, thinking about the words on their own and in the different contexts this book creates for them.

This book made me think about marriage, about how easily I have accepted its conventions. I’m not married, but it looms as this standard that I haven’t often questioned. It simply is. It is an absolute. It possesses authority. Marriage is and no one can stop it. But that’s not true. I think Darling and Guess are doing important work to look at marriage, what it is, how it’s perceived, what’s wrong with it, what it’s doing to everyone, and the dangers inherent in these assumptions.

We get a lot of information from the footnoted sections, which are footnotes to blank pages. I imagine them as instructions for reading this book. A section of footnote five reads, “The autobiographical novel depicts a heroine’s pursuit of an alternative to marriage, particularly the social conventions governing the ceremony itself.” This points at the book, points at marriage and the idea of a marriage as the standard.

Marriage feels like a kind of intrusion, a thing forcing itself into the picture. My favorite poem in the book is Pizza:

How odd, I said, that a stranger ended up in so many of our photos. He’s even in the photos we took at home. Look, I said, he’s petting our dog. He’s cutting our cake. He’s hugging your mom.

Look. Here’s marriage. It’s in the home. It’s in my head. I didn’t even notice it before. This complicated book with its erasures and footnotes to blank pages and quickly changing perspectives demands a close read and a good deal of thought. As a reader, we are forced to involve ourselves in the work of the text. We’re doing more than simply reading and are therein implicated, held responsible. This isn’t a book to read and put on the shelf and never think of again. This is a book to be read carefully again and again, to be talked about and then leant to friends.

*

Carol Guess is an American novelist and poet. Her books Femme’s Dictionary and Gaslight were nominated for Lambda Literary Awards. Switch was a finalist for the American Library Association’s Stonewall Book Award.

Declared by the French Government as a “Habitual Criminal”

“Nobody knows anybody . . . not that well,” Tom Regan (played brilliantly by Gabriel Byrne) declares in the Coen Brothers’ gangster noir “Miller’s Crossing.” And before I’d read Jean-Paul Sartre’s expansive, exhaustive (in a good way) biography of one of our most complex authors, Jean Genet, I agreed with tough guy Tom. But after trudging my way for nearly two years through this unbelievable work of art cum psychoanalysis, I beg to differ. For if anyone knows the inside and out of the highly compartmentalized Genet, it is most definitely Jean-Paul Sartre.

In the 2012 University of Minnesota Press re-release of “Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr,” Sartre has completely turned his compatriot, existential philosopher/playwright/actor/thief/all around man of letters Jean Genet, into his own private existential-living hero. It has taken me 19 months to digest this incredible book not because I’m a slow reader or because it clocks in at 650 pages (considerably fewer than Edmund White’s 1994, 800-page offering), but because in his psychoanalysis of Genet, Sartre manages to turn the tables around on the reader himself (at least this one), making him pause for tremendous chunks of time to thoroughly examine the ghastly, horrific tendencies that lie beneath and inside a human being, secretly tucked away from “proper, virtuous” society. As a writer and a semi-reformed thief/liar, I found myself stopping often and for sometimes weeks at a time to mull over and attempt to reconcile the ideas on the page aimed at deciphering Genet with my own similar reasons or justification for my petty crimes.

Sartre divides Saint Genet into four sections. The first, “The Metamorphosis,” presents us with the young orphan Genet and the complications surrounding his relationship with his various adoptive parents and their restrictive lifestyles.

Genet’s hyper awareness of social institutions and the ways in which they function transform the young boy into a willing societal tool. This little bastard child, this “ward of the French State” becomes, then, an incorrigible truant, eventually declared by the French government as a “habitual criminal.”

The administrative machine with its various gears grinding down on Genet becomes a constant, menacing entity throughout Genet’s early life, eventually metamorphosizing from foe to friend. Sartre captures this: “He is obscurely aware that he belongs legally to administrative bodies and laboratories, and so there is nothing surprising in the fact that he will later feel elective affinities with reformatories and prisons.” In Sartre’s analysis of Genet’s psyche there is an empathetic understanding of the emotional isolation and torture experienced by Genet at the hands of French society, with the knowledge that it would eventually be channeled into something extraordinary.

The second section, “First Conversion: Evil,” plays fully into Sartre’s wheelhouse, as it highlights the philosophical and theoretical complexities of evil. It is by far the most complex section of the book, and unsurprisingly, the longest. Genet’s spirit still hovers, but the form morphs from biography to philosophy as Sartre explores predicament after predicament regarding morality, crime, passion, and a host of other compelling topics. “What does this will to be evil mean to Genet himself, what is its intentional structure?” This is the type of philosophical inquiry (and subsequent exploration) that governs “First Conversion: Evil.”

In the third section, “Second Metamorphosis: The Aesthete,” the Genet of popular imagination, the Legend itself, begins to surface. To his fans, Genet was, at various times in his life: a beggar, thief, homosexual, prostitute, deserter, and escapee from both reform schools and prisons.

Genet proceeded to continue to live out the life of what he had accepted as his defined role in society, as a vagabond, deadbeat, homosexual, and criminal. Even later in life, after he had become both a famous and a wealthy writer, he traveled, continued thieving, defended revolutionary causes, and never quite stopped giving the middle finger to the society that had previously rejected him. But to this list he could now also add the legitimate title of genius writer.

(When it was discovered that he was not just a writer, but an extraordinarily good one, Sartre and other members of the French Literati requested and got him pardoned from an automatically earned life sentence.)

Yet, it is precisely in this willingness to adhere to a life of crime that Genet emerges in Sartre’s eyes as the ultimate existential hero. Sartre maintains that, only “by [actually] doing evil, could [Genet] discover the evil that [French society] had told him, he possessed.” In Sartre’s eyes, Genet, born into a meaningless and hostile world, filled with guilt, fear, evil, and vacillation could only be free by eventually learning to rebel against the society that had so carefully categorized him and then so profoundly rejected him.

Sartre declares him a Saint because the morality he carves out for himself is based on a kind of pristine innocence and truth that will not admit to “bad faith.” Genet sees morality as a local bipolar tool to create psychological stability, if not some sense of self-defined equanimity. If one is honest enough (and Genet is), one can forge a black and white morality out of any kind of debris — even that leftover from a hostile society — and use it to drive one’s own stake into even alien moral ground. That is why for Genet, there is no contradiction between being a committed bible-reading altar boy and a skillful full time thief.

As The New York Times put it so elegantly at the time of the book’s original release in 1952: “Of all the forbidden literary fruits, Jean Genet was always the darkest and most dangerous.”

It is in this third part of the biography that Sartre posits: “Genet drifts from the Ethics of Evil to a black aestheticism. The metamorphosis takes place at first without his realizing it: he thinks that he is still living beneath the sun of Satan when a new sun rises: Beauty.”

Unlike Sartre’s previously engagement with Genet’s relationship to evil, this particular section, brief by the book’s standards, formulates Genet’s budding relationship with art and the establishment of aesthetic criteria, and serves as a connecting bridge to Sartre’s fullest consideration of Genet’s writing in the final section, “Third Metamorphosis: The Writer.”

Sartre begins the final, fourth section with a pledge: “I shall explain why Genet’s works are false novels written in false prose. But prose, whether false or not, springs from the intention to communicate.” There it is, then. Sartre sees Genet’s body of work as having something extremely muscular to transmit and the forms it has taken, as a means to an end. In fact, Sartre goes so far to say that “Genet treats his readers as means. He uses them all to talk to himself about himself, and this peculiarity may alienate readers.” This could very well be a possibility, if readers had weak enough constitutions to feel self-conscious of their exploitation; however, they would lose out on Genet’s writing genius if they were to pass him up in favor of this easy dismissal.

Of Sartre, Genet himself said in a 1964 Playboy interview that “in a world where everyone is trying to be a respectful prostitute, it’s nice to meet someone who knows he’s a bit whorish but doesn’t want to be respectable.” About this biography, in that same interview, he said that “It filled me with a kind of disgust, because I saw myself stripped naked by someone other than myself. When I strip myself I manage not to get too damaged as I disguise myself with words, with attitudes, with certain choices, by means of certain magic. My first impulse was to burn the book. I was almost unable to continue writing. Sartre’s book created a kind of void which made for [me] a kind of psychological deterioration.”

In this last section, Sartre asks a simple, stirring question: “Have I been fair enough to Genet?” The answer is not surprisingly multi-layered and complex. Each reader will have his or her own powerful, different opinion.

Despite often being misunderstood, Genet has been called a genius, and he ultimately became a rich man. He remained, until his death from cancer in 1983, a man of simple counter-cultural taste. Until the bitter end, he mocked the society that had rejected him.

Sartre, quite powerfully, ends this long, intense journey with a unique obligation: “Genet holds the mirror up to us: we must look at it and see ourselves.” If you’re like me, you won’t like what you see, but neither will you be able to look away.

His Stumbling, Almost Dream-like Existence: On Cody James's The Dead Beat

The Dead Beat is a coming of age story for the slacker generation — surely, this being what some might label as Slacker Fiction—those who find themselves between great swathes of adulthood (school and careers, namely), unstuck in time with nothing but (little) money to burn and carnal instincts to explore. It sheds light on a particular foursome of dysfunctional twenty-somethings, childhood friends—not just meth addicts, but addicts of alcohol, of themselves . . . addicts to wasting away — and The High, not only from drugs, but from various facets of life, the relationships they take for granted (as we all do) and reform (again, as we all do) and others we cultivate from chance meetings. From living on the fringe, from not being a sellout and doing your own thing.

There aren’t many likable characters here, which isn’t necessarily a novel approach towards an empathetic audience (see, for instance, every character in Ellis’ Rules of Attraction, various Updike novels featuring Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, Leopold Bloom from Joyce’s Ulysses), but somehow you find yourself smiling at the antics of it all. Even though these people may be a far cry from you, there are parts of them you recognize in yourself and in your generation. These friends — lead by the affable-yet-burned-out one-time writer Adam, our guide into this world of debauchery and apathy — are addicts, users, and the story follows them, through their ramblings, through their few ups and many downs, seeing their friends suffer but doing nothing, standing idly by as the world, the lives they had once planned out, pass them by.

There are moments of clarity in the book where Adam “wakes up” from his stumbling, almost dream-like existence, and as much as we want him to kick his habits and grow up, he doesn’t. You realize this is real life, not any sort of make-believe, and there are people out there, in every city, in every town, just like this. It’s not easy to kick habits so engrained in you—and it’s the lifestyle in general, not the specificities of the lifestyle. Their daily regimens, what they have grown to expect out of life, has molded onto them like some second skin and can’t so easily be picked off. Only in the last few paragraphs do we see a change in a few of them after a heinous event transpires, one that, potentially, could rocket them all on the path to righteousness once and for all.

But then the book ends.  It’s gone. And we don’t know what actually does happen at this pivotal turning point: Do they see the error of their ways, the irreparable damage they’ve caused their bodies and their minds and move on, or do they go right back to their old ways, those familiar ways?  We don’t ever find out, and that’s the point, really, that it’s not up to us, that people in this position, they have to help themselves, so the book ends, taking it out of our hands entirely, letting these characters’ lives live on in obscurity.

James’ writing is concise, not flashy, and rarely deviates from its set course — it lays out for us, almost diorama-like, the sets and characters, and doesn’t need this glitz and glamour that many young writers feel is necessary but, more often than not, isn’t. In fact, her terse style — which readily avoids fluttering up in the clouds with long, drawn out idioms and unnecessary dialog — strengthens the story: It’s these maddening, heart-wrenching characters, the snippets of human we see in them from time to time and their interactions, and the experiences they fall backwards into, that define the book, and with such color already present, anything more would take away and lessen the impact.

The Dead Beat truly offers a worm’s-eye-view of the world, through one deadbeat after another, and while there are plenty out there who have written or will continue to write about the dredge of society — those oft-overlooked “slackers” that represent, on a much larger scale, all of us in general (but, who are too afraid to let go, some might argue, as the dredge find so easy to do) — but James does it with such wit and style, with such a tight narrative that opens up just enough to let us in and poke around without overdoing it and creating pointless caricatures, one wonders how any could ever top her.