Love Is the Greatest Threat: A Review of Jane Shapiro's The Dangerous Husband

The Dangerous Husband by Jane Shapiro is the predecessor of Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, a marital thriller that amuses itself with unexpected turns of phrase and wiles away the hours by punishing the reader’s loyalty.

“Help me,” he said in greeting. “I’m in a mess.”

“I’m not the one to save you!” I snapped, and we laughed like maniacs.

This conversation, the book’s meet cute, takes place in a surreal landscape that uncomfortably echoes our own, where love is the greatest threat to future happiness. An unnamed woman marries a hunky oaf named Dennis who turns out to be a terminal klutz, causing her to fear for her cat, him, her frog and her own life. The woman hires a hit man and vacillates on whether someone so prone to unhealthy mistakes with permanent consequences should be permitted to blunder about in the world.

A funny book about a serious subject that delights in its unreliable narrator and her oddly believable husband. Is the abuse accidental? Are you privy to the marital secrets on the pages or are they not secrets at all? How familiar is all of it and how does that correlate to its level of funniness? Is accidental abuse still abuse? Does original intent alter the crime? Is it no longer a crime, now relegated to a mere mistake, no matter how painful?

The best part of the book is Shapiro’s bland descriptions of the way disenchantment tends to creeps up on a person, even as complacency takes over and mildly boring routine becomes the new order. What was once disarming has decayed into the unforgivable, what was once irksome now intolerable, and what was once possible to overlook is now all that can be seen.

Despite its indulgently pretentious tone The Dangerous Husband is imminently readable. It is a darkly comic, self-aware, postfeminist portrayal of a marriage falling apart. And staying together. And getting hurt. And falling apart again. So we greet and snap and laugh like maniacs because what else is there to do?

On Delmore Schwartz’s The Ego is Always at the Wheel

A century after his birth, and nearly fifty years since he died, alone, in a midtown Manhattan hotel, Delmore Schwartz, briefly considered the great American poet, remains relatively unknown. Hailed by the likes of Nabokov, Eliot, Bellow and Trilling, Schwartz remains relatively absent from the Elysian Fields of the Forgotten Author: The syllabus. Not even New Directions’ 2012 reissue of his story collection, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, revived Schwartz. Perhaps admirers were misguided in their attempted revivals. For it’s no longer the stories readers want, but the stories about the creators of stories, the interviews, origin tales, and advice to the novices. But in The Ego is Always at the Wheel—Schwartz’s undeservedly neglected personal essay collection—we find just that. Here he mythologizes, criticizes, sketches, and yarns to create a lucid and neurotic account of the role of the Artist.

Schwartz was a tormented genius. A literary Icarus; as much reputation as writer. That he wrote feels both fundamental and incidental to his biography. He made his name through his writing, but now it’s the torment interests us—posterity loves splitting authors into their work and their torment. But The Ego is a synthesis. It’s an account of Schwartz rendered by Schwartz: a deft construction distinct from the triangulation of journal, biography, and fictional alter egos. This is the public persona. Not the medicated melancholic who cataloged his drinks in his journal. Not the man who stole his wife’s typewriter because his work was more important than hers. Not the pill-popper who lay unclaimed at the morgue for three days. Here is the witty and humorous Delmore who left friends breathless with laughter. The man whose company “meant not only breathing with one’s lungs but with one’s mind.” The man whose death stopped clocks.

The collection’s longest piece, “Memoirs of a Metropolitan Child, Memoirs of a Giants Fan,” is a sort of bildungsroman squeezed into 22 pages. As a young man, Schwartz intended to split his adult as a New York Giants short stop and a poet—that is until he reads The Decline of the West. The book devastates him. “By New Year’s Day the Spenglerian sky . . . made the new year seem as hopeless and bleak as my own present and future.” He feels as if he were “born too late in a world too old.” If the West is in decline, he reasons, why do anything? Why be a poet? For the fame? Schwartz does, after all, publish poems in his high school literary journal—only to learn that nobody reads them. In the essay, Schwartz confronts the insecurity and fatalism of a young poet—the belief that he will never be good enough—as it clashes with the fantasy that poet need only work hard to succeed. Newspaper “reports of boy wonders and child prodigies”depress Schwartz. Talent is linked to genetics: “Was your father a poet? Was your grandfather a poet?” an uncle asks. They weren’t. So how can Delmore become one? The irony is thick. Reading the essay, we know that Schwartz, the son of no poets, became a great a poet. This provides a veneer of comfort (We really can become anything with enough work!) that Schwartz masterfully undercuts when he concludes “Experience has taught me nothing.” If he has learned nothing from experience, what can we learn from reading this essay? The essay isn’t advice for how a writer should be, but merely what happened.

The intersection of literature and personal life found in “Memoirs” reappears throughout the collection, notably in its literary criticism. In, “Hamlet, or There is Something Wrong with Everyone,” Schwartz begins by summarizing the play with the arrogance of a tenth-grader: “Ophelia was very much in love with Hamlet, and when Hamlet went to Germany to study metaphysics and lager beer, she thought about him all the time.” He dismisses a variety of scholarly readings—Hamlet was a woman, he was homosexual, everyone was blasted drunk—and concludes that Hamlet was manic-depressive. “No one knows the real causes of the manic-depressive disease . . . and that is why no one understands Hamlet,” he writes, with an urgency belying personal struggles with bipolar disorder. “You can have this gift or that disease, and no one understands why, no one is responsible . . . and yet no one can stop thinking that someone is to blame.” Like the disappointments of youth in “Memoirs,” Hamlet is used to confront a larger question: Can we, and should we, relate to great literature? Schwartz studies the play in order to understand Hamlet, with whom he has an affinity, but Hamlet cannot be understood. Associating with Hamlet means being misunderstood. It means having a gift and feeling like someone’s to blame. There are dangers, the essay suggests, in relating to art.

Yet his personal life is inextricable from literature. Where Schwartz, in his journals, might find despair in this fact, the author of The Ego plays it for comedy. In one essay, his nine-year-old brother-in-law advises him to give up writing and become a golf caddy—a comparably lucrative option he briefly considers. Asked by a reporter why he became a poet, Schwartz answers, “as an infant in the cradle I had cried loudly and received immediate attention . . . I tried crying out loudly in public and in blank verse, and the results had on the whole been most gratifying.” Attempting to define existentialism, Schwartz evades the facile definition that we are all alone and must die alone, to conclude that existentialism quite simply means “no one else can take a bath for you.” And in “Dostoyevsky and the Bell Telephone Company,” Schwartz teaches The Brothers Karamozov to Bell Telephone executives. Invited out for drinks after class, he surprises his students by accepting. “There seems to be some misunderstanding about those who read books having no time for guzzling,” he writes, “no class of people are more abundantly provided with time for drinking than readers of books.” Amen.

And we find Schwartz at his best when he writes directly about the relation between poet and audience. In “Poetry is Its Own Reward,” he reflects:

Every modern poet would like to be direct, lucid, and immediately intelligible, at least most of the time. In fact, one of the most fantastic misconceptions of modern literature and modern art in general is the widespread delusion that the modern artist does not want and would not like a vast popular audience. . . . The lack of popularity does not arise from any poet’s desire to punish himself of these glorious prizes and delectable rewards. The basic cause is a consciousness of the powers and possibilities of language, a consciousness of which cannot be discarded with any more ease than one can regain one’s innocence.

The desire for fame tormented Schwartz throughout his career—he began his career “passionate
with reveries of glory and power.” But as his notoriety waned, he took greater solace in the act of writing, seeing the work, rather than public attention, as poetry’s primary reward. Was this a rationalization, coming from a writer who so dearly craved adulation? Mastery is, after all, the final refuge for the unread author.

Throughout these essays Schwartz tries to understand, quite simply, how a should writer be in the world. This remains a problem today—recognizable not only in the myriad craft books pawning the trade, but in the brilliant work of Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, or Karl Ove Knausgaard. The ubiquity of writing advice and interviews from authors of varying talents puts writers in contact and conflict with an ideal Author. Writer and Author endanger one another, like a yin and a yang vying for space on the circle. Facing this same problem, Schwartz asks a friend if he would rather write great poems or be a poet? Is it best to be a writer, he asks, or a celebrity? And when, we might ask ourselves now, do we cease being the former and became the latter? Do we even notice?

Although it’s hard to tell what Delmore would say about the state of American letters, with its domesticated fabulists, its MFA industry, and its click-bait existential crises, the essays in The Ego come close providing an answer. The collection is reminiscent of Roberto Bolaño’s Between Parentheses, with its lucid digressiveness, casual tone, and glib pronouncements. And the book shares many qualities with David Lipsky’s Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, where we see Dave Wallace playing the part of David Foster Wallace. The Ego is Always at the Wheel is a fascinating, funny, and sly self-portrait of an artist due for a renaissance.

We Are Conditioned, We Are Conditional: On Cassandra Troyan's Blacken Me Blacken Me Growled

‘If we’d only stop flailing
we’d realize we float.’

I first read Blacken Me Blacken Me Growled in pdf form while at my desk at work under the glare of one thousand fluorescent lights, Cassandra’s words fantastically magnified on the computer monitor. I felt odd and more than a little disoriented. Where did the poems start? Where did they end? And were the black pages poems too, or titles, or something else, some other, unnameable art form altogether? I scrolled and read, the poems blurring together into an kind of melancholic state. After “Shells,” part three of four (following “Carriages” and “Chambers,” and preceding “Hides”), I needed a break. Plus, my shift had ended at 11 pm and I was the only living person still sitting in the office.

My fiancé had been writing in a Burger King down the street, and on our way home he asked me about Cassandra’s book. Was I enjoying it? How did the poems compare to Cassandra’s poetry circa 2011 (an energetic and exciting time for me in the internet writing scene, during which I devoured anything and everything Cassandra Troyan had published online and wildly and more often than not drunkenly asserted to anyone who would listen that she was one of THE BEST poets I knew)? Responding to these questions was difficult. They were different, I said. I didn’t know, I said. What did these poems make me feel? I couldn’t say. Was I different now? Was Cassandra? Maybe we had both changed in ways that disconnected us as ideal writer / reader. I felt sad.

First thing the next morning, I sat in bed and read “Hides” on my laptop, and everything changed. Here it was, for me. I found purchase in these poems, was immediately drawn to the space they took up on the page, their breadth and their intensity. Cassandra begins:

Now I would like to play the role of provider / inviter
of supreme romance supreme terror

Yes, I thought. Yes, yes, yes, I continued to think as I binge-read the last 50 pages of Blacken Me Blacken Me Growled. What was so different about “Hides”? Or, what was so different about my reading of “Hides”?

1. I felt more comfortable while reading “Hides.” Sitting in my bed, my house enveloped by rain clouds (I live at the top of a hill overlooking the city), reading off my laptop in natural lighting gave me sense of control over my environment I hadn’t had in my office.

2. “Hides” begins with an epigraph from Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs that made me feel ‘same’:

The juddering of climax, as involuntary as a death rattle, I took to be a statement of hopeless attachment. Why, I don’t know. I didn’t think of myself as sentimental, I thought of myself as spiritually alert.

3. The sexuality and brutality in this section felt like a huge throwback to Cassandra’s poetry circa 2011, which I had felt connected to then in a very intense way (I had ‘taken a lover’ who was mentally and physically exhausting me, in unequal parts dangerous and wonderful. Cassandra’s writing made me feel like I was part of some kind of club of poets writing about sex and sexuality in an empowering way.)

4. Everything fell into place, aesthetically. The black pages felt less like title cards here and more like poster poems, like,

I WANT EVERYTHING TO HURT MORE THAN IT NEEDS TO AND SOMETIMES YOU JUST GOTTA BEAT THAT PUSSY UP

stands alone, I think, but also acts as a kind of conversation starter for the poem that follows, which begins:

“What does that mean in terms of / sexual gratification / exchanges of diversions / distracted tongue”

5. There is so much scary beauty here.

Hides made me feel nostalgic and excited. It also made me want to immediately reread Blacken Me Blacken Me Growled, which I did, which felt like an entirely different experience than it had when I read the first three sections.

People change. But the thing is, we don’t just change over long swaths of time (which is what three years can feel like to a 26-year-old human with a heightened sense of her own impermanence), we change from setting to setting, from day to day, from condition to condition, and these conditions can drastically change something as simple or as difficult as reading a pdf of an old friend’s new book. These conditions can change our connections to the world and our home and ourselves. Find your right conditions and Blacken Me Blacken Me Growled will meet you there.

Discovery: A Repetitive Process

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Interview with Mark Gluth

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

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

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

*

The influence of music on No Other

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

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

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

On how his novels function

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

On the epigraphs of No Other

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

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

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

On the role of alcohol and alcoholism in No Other

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

On whether he lacks empathy for his character

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

On eschewing description in the novel

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

On closing off his character’s inner states

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

On the influence of film on No Other

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

Trigger Warnings: A Review of Alana Noel Voth's Dog Men

How real do we want our stories to be? These days, readers go in with their eyes open. We know how the writer plays the reader, how we by turn relax our guard, suspend our disbelief, pull back, check and recheck. We know we’re being taken for a ride — fuck it, if we bought a book, we’ve paid to be taken for a ride. But how far can we trust the author?

Reading Dog Men felt like walking on a melting ice sheet, everything slippery underfoot, liable to crack apart. Voth plays with images and snatches of song, with cultural scraps and genre tropes, like she’s making a jaggy, unpredictable landscape — cityscape, in fact — these stories are nothing if not man-made. Violence erupts instead of happy endings. References are scattered through the trailer parks and litter-blown streets — Georges Bataille, David Bowie, Pulp Fiction.

Plots occasionally break apart, or break down to reveal the tender longing of the heart. Just when I thought I’d fixed the writer’s motivations, they’d shift. Voth seems aware of every potential resonance within her work. Stories like “Reservoir Bitch,” with a protagonist that bleeds (literally), sweats and struggles, and an ending subtly and strongly underplayed, really got under my skin. By the end of the book, I was ready to believe in the fallen saint of Black Tina — a whore who “carries a knife in her bag.”

At times, these stories are hard to read. Voth is not afraid to make us confront the dark, weeping underbelly of the worlds we live in. These stories linger in your guts — I caught echoes of them every time I watched the news, read about rape or persecution, the powerful subjugating the vulnerable.

Willing to write gritty, hard-edged reality and swirl it with supernatural flair, Voth’s writing is supple and relentless. She doesn’t let the reader off the hook easily. She’ll show you the submerged, unarticulated desires of the collective unconscious — however trashy and shallow — and force you to confront your complicity as a reader, and as a human being.

The action here is deep and meaningful — characters make difficult choices, and endure the consequences. Not many writers would have you feel genuine, wrenching pity for the plight of a brain-eating zombie, or the most beautiful man in the world, or a loser who works in a porn shop. But there’s nothing straightforward here — nobody is exempt from the hard pinch of life. “Everyone was a piece of meat in this world.”

The stories are sex-soaked — hustlers, porn shops, trysts that are messy and hot and explicit. People risk everything for sex (“love was holy”) — their reputations, their bodies, their lives. And the sex is not straightforward. This is as about as far from vanilla as I can imagine. Sex with an edge. Failed sex, masochistic sex, salty, painful, difficult and real.

Dog Men disturbed me. Darker than Tarantino, bleaker than fairy tales, Voth’s characters are united in suffering. In here are souls who have slipped through the cracks of contemporary America: people who suffer for who they love, how they look, what they want.

Some of them learn to transcend — flying zombies, a loving hustler, a suicidal beauty. But these are not easy stories. They compel, they demand from the reader. The rewards are: fragments of beauty, scattered through the book; moments of underplayed humour; a faint, warm glow underlying the darkness, that you might recognise as hope of redemption.

"A Fascinating Study Into the Mindsets of a Few Fans": A Review of The Wes Letters

In the world of contemporary filmmaking, visionary auteur Wes Anderson is in a class all his own. The man behind several remarkable works of art, including The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic, Moonrise Kingdom, and this year’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, his films exude a wholly idiosyncratic and damn near inimitable blend of storytelling, characterization, direction, design, and dialogue, capturing the subtleties of the human condition via dry humor and colorful imagery. It’s fair to say that no one makes movies quite like him, and like most complex artists, he has gathered a significant following over the years. Naturally, his supporters would love nothing more than to engage in revealing conversations with him, which is exactly what The Wes Letters looks at in depth—or, at least that’s what the three authors of the collection think they’re doing. Really, it’s a fascinating study into the mindsets of a few fans whose obsession, delusion, and unwavering affection for their idol blur the line between charming admiration and narcissistic, sociopathic devotion.

As the book’s description states, The Wes Letters is “an epistolary novel written from three friends to the elusive Wes Anderson. . . . it’s about personal memory, it’s about gossip and philosophy, and it’s about pop culture and late capitalism. It’s (not) about Wes Anderson.” This synopsis is surprisingly accurate, as the compilation’s three authors (Feliz Lucia Molina, Ben Segal, and Brett Zehner, whose interpersonal relationships are as mysterious as anything else they discuss) use their subject as merely a catalyst for their own subtly vulnerable confessions and wildly eccentric, nonsensical musings. Through the guise of a “connection” to Wes Anderson, they explore a plethora of secrets, ambitions, and imaginative non sequiturs that infer a lack of mental and emotional stability. As is usual with celebrity fixations, these “protagonists” project their own neuroses onto him, using their “bond” as a platform through which they can expel, rationalize, and dismiss what affects them most. In this way, Wes Anderson himself doesn’t really matter in the context of the device; the trio just needs someone to latch onto.

Interestingly, this narrative structure feels akin to an Anderson-esque plot. Essentially, it tracks the individual paths of the group as they try to understand the challenges and opportunities of their lives, which include haphazard romances, bizarre encounters, and plenty of traveling. They often comment on each other’s motivations and thoughts, instructing Anderson to disregard, sympathize, or simply try to understand what the other person meant with his or her letters. Sometimes they even mention letters they meant to write but wound up discarding, which is odd yet strangely revealing about their psyche.

This perceived attachment is evident even from the opening letter, in which Feliz recounts how Brett [apparently] met Anderson on a train. She writes:

Dear Wes Anderson

I heard you took the train from Chicago to southern California. I thought it was kind of cute to hear you don’t like airplanes. They scare me too. . . . I showed [Brett] ‘I Love Dick’ by Chris Kraus. . . . Why am I telling you this? It just feels like a place to begin, in this letter. . . . So let me start over. When do you think those high-speed rail trains are going to happen in California? Anyways, I should probably get the day moving. My rabbit is out of hay and water. Ben is out being a graduate student. . . . If I close my eyes and imagine what you’re doing now all I see is darkness. I can’t imagine you, just that image of you and Brett on the train eating dinner and him sincerely not recognizing you at all. So when he told us the story it felt like we were there too.

Although there’s nothing overtly threatening or illogical about this first message, it does reveal how Feliz is already acting somewhat delusional and narcissistic, as she speaks to Anderson with unjustified familiarity. This passage also demonstrates how unfocused these writers are at times; they jump from topic to topic without warning or need, all the while acting as if Anderson is totally on board for the ride.

For the most part, The Wes Letters continues in this style, and just about every letter could be analyzed for its [lack of] relevancy to Anderson, which in turn demonstrates more and more about the writers’ troubles, priorities, and pent up issues. While we’re never quite sure how serious they are with their requests, responses, and reactions, they border on being stalkers far too often. For instance, a bit further into the pseudo-story, Ben alludes to a closeness that is definitely not there:

Dear Wes Anderson,

We were wondering if you might want us to watch your house for you some time when you’re away. . . . the point is that we’d be really good at this job. . . . we can get you references. Plus you know we’re trustworthy since we basically tell you everything. Also, I promise I won’t steal your toothbrushes. I know I asked you about what if I did, but that was just a hypothetical. I might hide little notes to you in the drop-ceiling if you have one, or in other places you aren’t likely to go. They wouldn’t be bad notes, though. They’d be jokes probably. . . .

Another set of letters starts off with the following confessions:

Dear Wes,

I have no desire to write to you. You don’t have to tolerate me not wanting to write to you, but it feels like you’ve already locked me into this trap. I have this urge to paint the whole apartment. I wish you could come over and help.

Dear Wes,

Just real quick I wanted to say I miss you. . . . I might start imagining things more, like your head covered in birds, your lawn as a field of tentacles, me and you in the backyard scene from ‘Honey I Shrunk the Kids.’

Dear Wes,

I’m sorry I don’t want to make love to you. Things would be so much easier if I did. I’m pretty sure none of us want to be with you in that way, at least not publically or enough to even admit it to each other. And we’re all pretty close, so we’d probably admit it. What I’m saying is that these aren’t those kinds of crazed-slash-obsessive fan letters.

Again, this entire anthology is one sided; Anderson never responds to them, so it’s fascinating to see the meta ramifications of their self-referential commentary. They acknowledge their own compulsive, creepy behavior, yet they continue with it. In a way, that tendency makes their deepest psychological issues more unnerving.

Furthermore, their paths eventually draw closer as the novel comes to a conclusion, so it makes sense that their final entry is a joint letter, during which they discuss possibilities for Anderson’s next film. In fact, the beginning contains Ellis-esque levels of existential crisis:

Dear Wes,

You’ve disappeared. We disappeared too. We wanted to tie back into you, but we’re not finding ourselves up to it.

Believe me, I’ve barely scratched the surface of what this book entails. The Wes Letters is a captivating—if purposefully confusing at times—venture into the minds of three personalities who seem to invest their entire selves into a relationship with a man they’ve never met. It’s never overtly sinister or preposterous; rather, each exchange contains subtly substantial details about what makes these writers tick, as well as how quickly fandom can escalate from mere esteem to pitiful fantasy. While I admit that my interpretation could be wrong, I stand by it, and thus I find The Wes Letters to be an extremely involving, profound, and generally brilliant character study.