I should not have enjoyed Shane Jones’s novel Light Boxes.

Usually I just don’t like fiction that exists on a magical plain.  That’s not a criticism of the fundamental nature of such work.  It just doesn’t do it for me.  For whatever reason, I prefer my fiction to be grounded in the laws of physics.

I’ve paid a social price for this attitude of mine.  People assume I’m a snob for not being able to tolerate all of those Harry Potter things.  They secretly theorize that I shun The Lord of the Rings because my ears are, shall we say, Hobbit-like.  I don’t dig on García Márquez either (shocking!).  Or Rushdie.  I tried.  Can’t do it.  Maybe I’ll try again some day when I’ve finished reading everything else.  Maybe not.

I once had a potential love interest stop speaking to me mid-meal (as in, not speaking one single additional word) after I stated that I don’t like fantasy.  Awkward, but ultimately most fortunate.

Soon after passing by its beautifully designed cover, it becomes quite clear that Light Boxes takes place in a world created by Shane Jones.  It’s a cold, dreary place where the month of February lasts forever, where dead children live in tunnels under the ground and where February is also a person, or a person-like being, who is responsible for inflicting this seemingly eternal winter on a town of people strangely obsessed with flying hot air balloons.

My gut did initially react negatively, but I kept reading anyway.  Why?  Certainly Jones’s deceptively simple and highly effective prose was a large part of the reason.  But if this book had been 300 or 400 or 1,000 pages, I might simply have moved on to another book in the stack.  Light Boxes is 168 pages long, and they’re small pages.  It’s rare for any one of its sections to last for more than two pages, and most are much shorter than that.  Each section is tightly written and could probably stand all on its own (even if the meaning might not be entirely clear if it were taken out of context).  I have no idea whether Jones structured his novel this way intentionally, but the fact is that this book is ideally suited for reading quickly and for reading until the end.

That’s not why I liked this book.  It’s why I kept reading it.  Those very manageable short sections allowed me to get to the point where I could get past my hang-ups and really enjoy passages like this:

They held hands.  They formed dozens of circles around their deflated smoldering balloons.  Balloons silken globes the colors magenta grass green and sky blue were mud strewn wet with holy water and burned black through the stitching.

Bianca said, I don’t understand.

Thaddeus said, I don’t either.

Is this February’s doing, she said.

Maybe, said Thaddeus who looked up at the sky.

A scroll of parchment was nailed to an oak tree, calling for the end of all things that could fly…

I don’t want to make too much of our famously shortened attention spans or how the internet has made us all want to read “modules” instead of lengthy stretches of text.  There may be something to all that, but that’s not my point here.

The fact is simply that it’s hard enough to get a person to read a book, particularly a book on the more literary end of the spectrum.  If a writer has the discipline necessary to write in this way, and if such a structure suits the work, then I think it does greatly increase the book’s chances of being read.  Of course, of course, of course, it still has to be good.  But there are many good books that are rarely read.

No, I don’t think every novel now needs to be short or that literature must be comprised of bite-sized chunks.  I would not want that.  I’m quite content reading long chapters and books.

Light Boxes, I suspect, would also be ideally suited to reading in an electronic format.  Just sayin’.

By the time I arrived at page 168, if there had been more, I would have kept reading.  What can I say?  Might just have to read it again.

Light Boxes is available directly from Publishing Genius Press and at a good bookstore near you.

For a normal review of Light Boxes, try this one or this one or this one (includes a good interview with Shane Jones).

An unnamed woman works as a public address announcer in Paris’s Gare du Nord.  The job suits her.  No need for opinion or initiative.  She just has to say what she is told to say.  That’s it.  She communicates with thousands of people every day, yet not one of them communicates back.  She is invisible and she prefers it that way.

The woman at the center of Céline Curiol’s Voice Over leads a disturbingly solitary urban existence, yet she is almost continually affected by the people surrounding her.  A stranger’s glance in her direction, a shop girl’s dutiful inquiry, the way a waiter sets down a glass of water–they all register with her.  In particular, she is affected by the man with whom she has become obsessed.  Anyone who has been alone in a large city understands how the mind, without proper care, could easily slip out of control.  This is a story of what happens when it does.

The woman seems to have no close friends of any sort.  People pass through her life, but she just doesn’t know how to hold on to them.  In fact, she hardly cares.  She does allow herself to fall into strange, spontaneous interactions with a cross-dressing cabaret singer, an African man who picks her up on the street, an actress who happens to have the exact same name as she, a man who mistakenly believes she is a prostitute.  She drifts into these seemingly random, temporary relationships, and then just as quickly the people are out of her life forever.  Even if she bumps into them again, they don’t recognize her.

There is only one person she really cares about, and her desire for him is the focus of the novel.  Problem: he is in a live-in relationship with a woman named Ange.  Ange is beautiful, intelligent, perfect.  She knows she is inferior to Ange, but she won’t let that stop her.  She doesn’t need him all to herself.  She just needs him in her life.

So why might this woman be the way she is?  There was a childhood incident.  Her “right of passage,” she calls it.  You probably get the idea.  Is this backstory essential to understanding the character and what moves her?  I don’t think so.  It’s easy enough to accept the existence of a troubled person without getting into the textbook psychological roots.  We all know that story already.

One potential problem from the reader’s perspective:  many of this woman’s problems could easily be solved by the use of a mobile phone, but mobile phones do not seem to exist in this fictitious world.  The woman sees news of the 2003 blackout in New York City, and other events place the story in that year.  This story is happening in the age of mobile phones, yet the issue is never addressed.  It may have been believable that this woman would choose not to have one, so uncomfortable is she with human contact (though she is most definitely attached to her land line), but the issue is never addressed.  This may seem petty, but in this otherwise realistic work of fiction, it becomes impossible to ignore.

There is a well-known tendency in French literature and film to use subconscious self-destruction as a plot device.  Voice Over continues this madcap tradition.  What is it with these people?  Are they really this crazy, or do they just have a greater appreciation for crazy?  I’m content to let the French be French, but the melodramatic closing of the novel does nudge it a bit over the edge.  Again, not necessary.

So perhaps the novel is imperfect, but it hardly matters.  The writing is fantastic, and this fact outweighs everything else.  Curiol is highly skilled at weaving thought, emotion, dialogue and action together into an almost seamless flow of text, as if everything were being narrated by an objective, articulate bystander within the main character’s mind.  Credit must also be given to translator Sam Richard-I mourn my own inability to read this work in the original French, but Richard’s language helps mitigate the pain.  As Paul Auster writes in the translation’s Foreword, “The reader is both inside and outside at the same time, immersed in the inner life of the central character and yet vividly aware of the world that surrounds her as she floats through an all-too-real present-day Paris.”  What a pleasure it is to find a novel that is experimental in its use of language but still very readable.

At a dinner party hosted by her obsession and Ange, the other guests ask her what she does for a living.  With her hosts out of the room, she decides to lie and tell the others that she’s a prostitute.

She said it so well, with a mixture of professional pride and personal regret, that the others believed her-she sensed it at once.  There is a brief freeze-frame.  The man with the stoop feels a bit of a jerk now that he has his answer.  He manages a polite rejoinder, all the same:  And have you been in the business long?  Maybe he’s not quite so lacking in imagination, after all.  Quick as a flash, her voice steady.  Ten years, I started young.  Even the virulent husband is taken aback; a few more details, and he could almost feel sorry for her.  She knows that none of the four men will dare ask her how much she charges.  Besides, they have ceased to look upon her with kindness:  she is no longer innocent.  Only the two women continue to regard her with curiosity.  And then, all at once, a heart-felt cry from the wearer of Iranian veils:  life can’t be easy for you.  It isn’t sarcasm or disdain, but sincerity, and it plunges all present into what, from the outside, appears to be intense introspection.  At which point he returns with a strawberry tart, Ange, and nine dessert plates.

If this scenario and this passage appeal to you, read this book.  You won’t be disappointed.

Hey squares, ever wonder what life is like for those filthy Williamsburg hipsters you see on the L Train?  Want to take a journey into their drug-fueled, sex-crazed world without getting your hands dirty or bringing home any bed bugs?  Well, let Cristy C. Road’s Bad Habits be your ticket on this sinful safari into the life and mind of a Cuban-American, bisexual, cokehead punk who just wants a little bit o’ love in her life.

Car is damaged goods.  But she’s trying.  She’s really trying.  Having been burned by love in the past, she moves to Brooklyn, settles into a basement room of a dingy hipster flophouse under the BQE and contents herself with scoring a lot of ass.  Both boy ass and girl ass are enjoyed, but only after having she pickles her brain with booze and fills her skull with rail after rail of coke.  It’s easier that way.  As Car says, “You have to accept any chemically altered state of mind as a legitimate human feeling.”  Indeed.

Try as she might to keep her heart on ice, sometimes, despite herself, some other soul starts to thaw that baby out.  But is the promise of love just a tease?  Probably.  But Car hasn’t given up yet.

Car, drunk, walking in the rain, her nipple bleeding from the bite of a German woman who’d picked her up in a bar:

Do the unhappy endings of affairs prove the puritan theories behind the anti-pleasure agenda?  Or maybe they prove we are imperfect humans with imperfect affairs that resort to puritanical theories for self-protection?  Damn.  Are imperfections finally making me stronger?

Bonus:  this novel is illustrated by Road herself.  Double-bonus:  the text supports itself–Road can write and does so with a very distinct but naturalistic voice, so the many illustrations are an enhancement rather something the book really needs.  Triple-bonus:  the illustrations are fantastic, often hilarious and a lot of fun.  Hell, I admit it:  I bought the book because of the cover.  Why not?  There are many other literally exposed hearts (and brains) within, along with plenty of snorting, smoking, huffing, dancing, blowing, licking, sucking, puking…and Coney Island!  Really, what more could you hope for in a set of illustrations?

I dare you not to fall in love with the illustration of Tatiana, Car’s former lover and perhaps the only person she knows with the potential to bring true love and happiness into her life.  Though still a friend, Tatiana just doesn’t want to have a sexual relationship anymore.  Yeah, life sucks that way.

True story:  I was reading Bad Habits on the subway when I heard a little whispering behind me and sensed someone looking over my shoulder.  “Damn!” said one voice.  “That’s a good book!” said another.  It was a couple of teenage gangsta-types who’d been having a rather noisy conversation up until that point.  They offered several more compliments of the illustrations (it was the page with the nipple-biting scene), and I showed them the cover and told them it was a novel and that they should get it.  Finally, I said, “Have to turn the page now…sorry!”  Boisterous laughter ensued.

Books:  bringing people together across cultural and generational boundaries.  Beautiful.

Gratuitous rant:  okay, so Road is a talented illustrator and a talented writer.  This thing feels more than a little autobiographical, so let me ask a simple question:  honey, what you feeling so bad about?  Who needs love when you’ve got talent?

This is a fast read and only took a few subway trips to get through, but I always found myself looking forward to getting back to it.  The work takes place during a particularly rough patch in the narrator’s life, with all the (mostly) self-inflicted insanity that such periods entail.  By the end, there’s no bullshit happy ending or artificial resolution, but Car is a little bit stronger, and her life has settled down.  For now, at least.

John Fante’s books are kept behind the customer service desk at St. Marks Books, along with Bukowski, Burroughs and all the other oft-shoplifted authors.  That should tell you something.

Wait Until Spring, Bandini, published in 1938, was his first novel and the kick-off of the four-novel “Saga of Arturo Bandini.”  Although lacking the focus and narrative skill of his next novel, Ask the Dust, usually considered his greatest (and considered by many to be one of the finest American novels), Fante’s debut demonstrates the same naturalistic voice and brutal honesty that would come to define his body of work.

Wait Until Spring, Bandini tells the story of a first-generation Italian-American family living in poverty in the depths of a miserable, cold winter in Depression-era Colorado.  The focus is on Svevo Bandini, an under-employed bricklayer and father of the Bandini clan, and his oldest son Arturo, Fante’s surrogate who would become the main character of Ask the Dust.  Svevo stumbles into an extramarital affair when he does some work for Mrs. Hildegarde, the richest woman in town.  She gives him sex but not a trace of love or genuine respect.  Arturo longs for his classmate Rosa.  When she’s not ignoring him entirely, she gives him little else but contempt.  Only Maria Bandini, wife and mother, loves them both passionately, but her love is only reciprocated fitfully.

There’s something very American about this novel and about Fante’s style of writing.  His characters might not be the brightest bulbs in the shed, but they know what they know, and they know they know it.  They’re frustrated but always longing for and expecting something better.  They dream big, fall hard and occasionally manage to squeeze a modicum of satisfaction out of the lives they’ve made for themselves.

The novel reads so quickly and easily that its complexity becomes apparent only in retrospect.  How can a boy love his mother but still cheer his father’s extramarital conquest?  Why would a man frustrated by his inability to support his family make matters worse by abandoning them?  And why would he then be so anxious to come crawling back while finally experiencing a life of material luxury?  Fante knew how closely love and hate are intertwined and how logic rarely guides human emotion.

Yet Fante’s novels were out of print for much of his life.  The man’s literary endeavors (he was also a screenwriter) did not find much respect until Charles Bukowski, his literary descendent, championed his work and helped to bring his books back into print in the early 1980’s.  Fiction about working class Italians, especially work with a Catholic sensibility, probably didn’t stand much of a chance throughout much of the 20th Century.  Passages like this, describing the thoughts of the pubescent Arturo, might not have resonated with the literary establishment at the time:

After his twelfth year the only things in life that mattered were baseball and girls, only he called them women.  He said it over and over because it was a secret sensation.  Even at Mass, when there were fifty or a hundred of them around him, he reveled in the secrecy of his delights.

And it was all a sin–the whole thing had the sticky sensation of evil.  Even the sound of some words was a sin.  Ripple.  Supple.  Nipple.  All sins.  Carnal.  The flesh.  Scarlet.  Lips.  All sins.  When he said the Hail Mary.  Hail Mary full of grace, the Lord is with thee and blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.  The word shook him like thunder.  Fruit of thy womb.  Another sin was born.

Right on.

Wait Until Spring, Bandini probably isn’t quite big enough to support and fully explore its two primary characters, but it gives enough.  It gives more than most.  It’s no Ask the Dust, but you can see where Fante going.  The story might not seem original, the voice and treatment certainly are.  If you’ve never read John Fante, read Ask the Dust.  If you liked Ask the Dust, read Wait Until Spring, Bandini.  If you didn’t like Ask the Dust, get yourself tested for heartlessness.

My imagining Lydia Davis writing about retirement and the deficiencies of the 401(k) plan last week was no accident–I was reading her excellent 2007 collection of stories, Varieties of Disturbance.

I had not read much of Davis’s work since the late 1990’s, when I was unhappily working in lower Manhattan at my first-ever corporate job.  As a temporary escape from the humiliation, I would read throughout every allotted minute of my lunch break, in Battery Park during good weather and in whatever office worker eating establishment I could tolerate when the weather was cold or wet.  In particular, I remember reading Almost No Memory in a dark but quiet corner in one of those disgusting buffet style pay-by-pound-of-bacteria delis.  It was the middle of winter, and I was sick with some cold or lingering flu symptoms, as I so often was in those days.  Amidst all that misery, discovering a writer of such originality and intelligence gave me hope that life just might have something better to offer.  It made me realize that literature was the one thing in the world that might deliver me from hell that I had made of my life.

With the exception of The End of the Story, her one novel, Davis’s books have never disappointed me.  The form she has mastered is the short story, in particular the short short story.  Her writing style might be described as experimental, but it is not meaningless or willfully complex (or unpleasant), attributes many associate with experimental fiction.  Her subject matter is typically mundane:  a misunderstanding between lovers, a brief interaction with an animal, a phone call (or lack thereof), taking a walk.  But each situation is thoroughly dissected and explored.  Davis finds the story within the very common situations that human beings frequently experience.

Perhaps the shortest story in the collection is entitled “Insomnia” (reproduced here in its entirety…fair use!):

My body aches so–

It must be this heavy bed pressing up against me.

In “The Caterpillar,” a two page story written in the first-person, the narrator describes finding a caterpillar in her bedroom and accidentally dropping it on the stairs when attempting do carry it outside to the garden.  Once dropped, she can’t find the caterpillar again.  She knows she did her best and should just move on with her life and forget about the caterpillar.  But she can’t.  The anxiety this situation inspires lasts throughout her day until finally…

The next time I think of him, I see that I have forgotten him for several hours.  I think of him only when I go up or down the stairs.  After all, he is really there somewhere, trying to find his way to a green leaf, or dying.  But already I don’t care as much.  Soon, I’m sure, I will forget him entirely.

Later there is an unpleasant animal smell lingering about the stairwell, but it can’t be him.  He is too small to have any smell.  He has probably died by now.  He is simply too small, really, for me to go on thinking about him.

There the story ends, though certainly not the woman’s disturbance.  Although anyone with an ounce of empathy might occasionally have a similar experience, this is not a situation normally explored in prose.

Perhaps the best longer story in the collection is “Helen and Vi:  A Study in Health and Vitality.”  Written in the cold, objective voice of a scientific paper, the story describes the lives of two elderly women.  We learn a about their personal habits throughout the course of their lives and their conversational manner.  We’re presented with a detailed description of each woman’s physical appearance.  We’re told of their attitudes toward animals and their work with their local religious organizations.   This goes on for forty pages and it is absolutely fascinating.  There’s no story in the traditional sense to carry the reader along, so why is this fictitious study of two very common-seeming people so captivating?  As with so much of her work, Davis shows us here that to be human is to be endlessly complex.

That is not to say every story in the collection is a winner, of course.  “We Miss You:  A Study of Get-Well Letters from a Class of Fourth-Graders” is similar in style to “Helen and Vi.”  Although amusing at first, it begins to feel pointlessly repetitious as it studies the get-well letters of a group of children to their hospitalized classmate.  The heavily footnoted “Southward Bound, Reads Worstward Ho” was something I just didn’t want to deal with.  Overall, though, this collection is a treasure-trove just waiting to be claimed by the reader with a taste for something different.

As an added bonus, the black fly on the cover design provides endless subway amusement as other passengers surreptitiously attempt to determine whether the fly is really real.

This is for people who prefer their journalism in the form of a novel.

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga was on my list of to-be-read books before it won the Booker Prize simply because of my interest in the subject matter.  The novel is about a lower caste servant in contemporary India who murders his boss, steals his money and uses it as seed money for a start-up in Bangalore.  After having spent a bit of time working in India and developing an interest in the changes that are happening in the country, this novel sounded like something that would be right up my alley.  The awarding of the Booker, one of the few literary prizes that more often than not goes to authors whose work I actually like, certainly raised my expectations.

Judging by my own experience and by other accounts of contemporary India that I’ve read, the novel does succeed as a work of journalism of sorts.  The brutal relationships between servants and masters, as well as the brutal relationships among servants, are well-drawn.  Sometimes it seems as if every human relationship in the country is a power struggle, and this fiction certainly does not sanitize the culture as so many others have done.  It is no surprise that Adiga is in fact a journalist (or was, prior to this literary success) and that most of his work has been for Western periodicals.  This is a work of fiction written not for Indians but rather for a Western audience, who of course will greatly appreciate having the curtain pulled back by a “real Indian” who will reveal for them that crazy country’s true nature.

Yes, Adiga is Indian, but he is certainly not from the class of workers to which the novel’s narrator belongs.  Although raised mostly in India, he and his family also lived in Australia.  He holds dual Indian and Australian citizenship.  More telling, Adiga attended Columbia University and then Oxford University.  Sorry, but such opportunities are only possible for members of the upper crust of Indian society.  The White Tiger has been compared to Native Son by many reviewers and blurb writers, and the author himself has spoken of Richard Wright as an influence (along with Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin).  Okay, maybe that’s true, but this just strikes me as a conscious attempt by the author (or his publicist) to spin this first-novel as the “Native Son of India.”  But this is Native Son written by the (sympathetic) white oppressor, not by one who has lived the experience himself.  Adiga may be Indian but he is not from the same India as his narrator.

For more on this, read Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s refreshingly critical piece in the London Review of Books.  The White Tiger, of course, was written in English.  But the narrator himself does not speak English, and Subrahmanyam is particularly devastating when criticizing of the narrator’s language.

Despite the odd namaste, daal, paan and ghat, his vocabulary is not sprinkled with North Indian vernacular terms. His sentences are mostly short and crudely constructed, apparently a reflection of the fact that we’re dealing with a member of the ‘subaltern’ classes. He doesn’t engage in Rushdian word-play. But he does use a series of expressions that simply don’t add up. He describes his office as a ‘hole in the wall’. He refers to ‘kissing some god’s arse’, an idiomatic expression that doesn’t exist in any North Indian language. ‘Half-formed ideas bugger one another, and make more half-formed ideas’ and the Chinese prime minister is advised never to ‘let that blasphemous idea into your yellow skull’. On another matter, he sneers: ‘They’re so yesterday.’ A clever little phrase appears: ‘A statutory warning - as they say on cigarette packs - before we begin.’ Dogs are referred to as ‘mutts’. Yet whose vocabulary and whose expressions are these? On page after page, one is brought up short by the jangling dissonance of the language and the falsity of the expressions. This is a posh English-educated voice trying to talk dirty, without being able to pull it off. This is not Salinger speaking as Holden Caulfield, or Joyce speaking as Molly Bloom. It is certainly not Ralph Ellison or James Baldwin, whom Adiga has claimed as his models in speaking for the underdog. What we are dealing with is someone with no sense of the texture of Indian vernaculars, yet claiming to have produced a realistic text.

Alright, then what if we forget reality and just treat the novel as an self-contained work of fiction?  If this novel took place in some fictitious land and not in the new India that everyone finds so fascinating these days, I think we’d never have heard of it.  From the hero’s rise through the ranks of servitude to the murder of his boss to the rapid success of his start-up, the novel’s twists and turns are too unrealistic to be interesting.  Everything moves as quickly as in a children’s book.  The murder and escape are over in just over two pages.  Perhaps ten pages later, the hero has gone from from servant-murderer a successful business owner.  Most of the novel up until that point is simply a catalog of the many injustices that the narrator is forced to endure.  Yes, we’ve seen this story before.  It’s the same old paradigm.  But now it’s India’s turn.

The characters?  Apart from the narrator, they’re all dosa thin, each serving as a representative of an archetype of contemporary Indian culture:  the entrepreneur, the abused lower caste servant, the Muslim, the money-hungry family matriarch, the corrupt government official, the self-righteous upper class business man with his bottle of Johnny Walker Black (the weapon that will be used to murder him…one detail I’ll admit that I loved) , the spoiled American-born woman with her crazy western ideas.  There are more one-dimensional cartoons than fully drawn characters here.

Yes, the narrator himself is of some interest and has a good sense of humor.  But I never really believed that this character exists.  He was more of an authorial device than a seemingly real human being.  It did not help that each chapter is supposed to be a letter to a Chinese premier who is soon to visit Bangalore.  This gimmick serves no purpose whatsoever but has the effect of continually reminding the reader that she is reading a work of fiction.

So if you want to learn a little bit about contemporary India by means of a fast-moving novel rather than by visiting the place or reading a work of journalism or non-fiction, then The White Tiger may have something to offer you.  If you’re craving an interesting work of literature, go elsewhere.

In a word:  accurate.

In three words:  dirty, dirty, dirty!

But accurately so, and very well done.

I’m not very good at keeping up with quality non-famous fiction writers.  I have my small stock of quality non-famous fiction writers whose new work I will read.  And occasionally someone will recommend a quality non-famous fiction writer, and maybe I’ll give it a shot.  I should make more of a disciplined effort to broaden my horizons, but it’s such a big, scary world.  Sometimes I wonder if it’s even possible to keep up with what’s really good since there’s so much mediocre stuff to wade through to find it.

But I’m trying.  I placed myself in St. Mark’s Bookshop.  I told myself I was going to purchase a work of fiction published by an independent publisher.  Before my eyes was a novel published by an independent publisher (do university presses count as “independent”?) with a naked lady on the cover.  I like naked ladies.  Done.

The beautifully named Micheline Aharonian Marcom has won significant awards and fellowships and has been praised by significant publications, but I had never read her work or heard of her before.  My failing.  My loss.  (But will you look at the size of the author’s last name in relation to the novel’s title?  Is Marcom pulling a Lars von Trier there?)

The Mirror in the Well goes a little somethin’ like this: a sex-starved middle-aged wife and mother begins an affair with a married man she does not find attractive, experiences a transformative sexual awakening and is miserable.  We never learn their names and we learn little of their lives outside of their sexual relationship.  Why does she do it?  Forget the cliche-riddled psychological rationales for female infidelity:  simply put, this woman has a hungry c*nt (Marcom uses the word roughly 183 times throughout the course of he novel).  Her sex life is her real life.  Everything else is peripheral, the way time is filled until she is once again eagerly spreading her legs on the floor of her lover’s workshop.  “Pleasure is the reason to live.”  Her actions are simultaneously self-liberating and self-destructive.  By normal middle-class standards, she has ruined her life and she wouldn’t want it any other way.

Porn?  No.  There’s plenty of graphic sex, but the novel is more focused on the raw emotions that lead to and result from all that sex.

The novel is self-referential at times (”135 pages ago, the lover will remove her clothes and she will lie back on the motel bed on L Street and spread her legs and breathe live for this interlude”).  If there was some original significance to the novel’s self-awareness, something other than pointing out the obvious fact that the reader is reading a work of fiction, the significance escaped me.  But this monkey business was not terribly prevalent or intrusive, so there’s not much to complain about.

The male lover is often addressed in the second-person by the narrator, though not always, creating an interesting effect (though I wonder how this effect might work on a female reader).  The language in general is playful enough to be interesting but not so much as to render it meaningless.

Did I eagerly anticipate my next subway ride so that I might return to this woman’s sexual world?  No, not really.  There’s not a story here to call you back, though the reading experience is a fulfilling one.

Did I feel that reading this novel was worth my time?  Yes.  Here is a writer bravely attempting to use language to capture a narrow slice of reality and succeeding.  That is a rare feat, and I am grateful for it.

What a strange little book.

The Man Within, published in 1929, was Graham Greene’s first novel.  You don’t hear much about this one, and it does offer only a small taste of what’s to come in the author’s later work.  Although not without its defects, overall it is a successful effort, largely because of the sometimes slow-moving but very well executed first third of the novel.

Taking place on the south coast of England, the story is centered upon Andrews, a smuggler who has betrayed his cohorts to the authorities and is now running for his life from the three men who were not captured.  He ends up hiding in the home of a young but strong-willed farm girl named Elizabeth, who is about to bury the older man who was her guardian of sorts.  She eventually convinces the smitten Andrews to go testify against his former comrades, and he ends up doing so more by accident than as a result of a desire for justice or even loyalty to Elizabeth.  But the party of smugglers is found innocent.  Andrews returns to Elizabeth to protect her from the vengeful gang, and the two proclaim their love for one another.  Then, tragedy.

Probably the most closely related later novel of Greene’s is The Power and the Glory, the story of a “whiskey priest” in Mexico, alone in the world and on the run from government authorities in a state where the Catholic Church has been outlawed.  Both characters are filled with self-loathing and both inspire the contempt of most people they encounter.  Within each of them, however, is a latent desire to do what is right.  They eventually do so, but not without enduring prolonged fits of self-doubt and despair.

The first third of The Man Within, when Andrews and Elizabeth are in the initial stages of the mating dance that will lead to their short-lived romance, is a perfectly executed study of a blossoming relationship.  It’s a stripped down romance taking place entirely in a small stone cottage, and the lack of extraneous detail makes it all the more intriguing.  Greene, the infamous seducer of women, obviously understood this game well, even at this early stage of his life.

Less successfully executed is Andrews’s relationship with his gang-leader/father-figure Carlyon.  Portrayed in almost erotic terms, the friendship is based equally upon fear and loyalty.  It is rather original and refreshing in its own way, but their dynamic doesn’t really make sense in the context of the novel.  There’s just not enough background information or actual interaction between the characters to make this relationship comprehensible.

The courtroom drama is competent though not so interesting in light of all the other courtroom dramas we’ve all experienced at this point.  The legal proceedings are almost painfully corrupt and unfair, and the reader just knows that it won’t end well.  By the novel’s final act, a sympathetic reader will be invested enough in these characters to care about what happens.  The actions of the primary characters are difficult to comprehend, however, and so the deadly climax just doesn’t ring true.  The novel at that stage feels more like a Shakespearean tragedy than a modern novel.  Perhaps a second read would reveal the rest of the novel to be more Shakespearean than novelistic, too (alas, I must move on).

Despite its imperfections, The Man Within, like most of Graham Greene’s work, is worth every penny spent acquiring it ($6 off a street bookseller’s table for me) and every minute spent reading it.

How much do you know about Bulgaria?  In particular, how much do you know about life in Bulgaria during the most interesting period in its recent history, in the 1990’s, after the Communists had fallen and the power-vacuum had been filled by Mafia thugs?

Way back yonder in 2002, first-time novelist Annie Ward wrote a novel called The Making of June, which takes place (mostly) in Sofia during this period.  It’s about a young married couple from sunny southern California, Ethan and June, who end up in the grim, corrupt country that is the focus of Ethan’s doctoral work.  After June confesses to having committed a single act of infidelity months before with a male friend in LA, Ethan, with a kind of bratty indignation, throws himself into a love affair with a 22 year-old Bulgarian maid.  June, almost inexplicably, finds herself pulled into a dangerous relationship with one of the city’s most powerful Mafia bosses.  All this is set against the backdrop of a period of political upheaval, when the country’s corruption, poverty and bread lines finally drive the populace to rise up and demand a change in the power structure.

I stumbled upon the book accidentally, and more than anything else it was the opportunity to learn a thing or two about Bulgaria that inspired me to make it my subway companion for a week.  It did not disappoint.  The story moved along nicely, the characters were effective and intriguing, and I was indeed successfully transported to a  place I’ll probably never have reason to visit.

Ward is not afraid to make her her two main American characters somewhat unlikable in a very American way.  They’re real, and therefore imperfect, and they’re products of the land of their birth.  June’s relationship with Mafia man Chavdar is a bit hard to swallow, though.  She’s guilt-stricken enough to confess a one-time infidelity to her husband, but hardly resists becoming the moll of a man who would think nothing about ordering the death of an innocent?  This book exists very much in the real world.  I know women do CRAZZZZY THINGS, but this amoral submission to the temptations of wealth, charm and power just didn’t feel quite right.

The Bulgarian characters, while interesting and very human, do seem to be occupying cultural roles.  The charming but deadly Mafia boss.  The older alcoholic woman with little strength left after a dreary life under Communism and a poverty-stricken life under the new regime.  The young, virtuous, hard-working maid of Muslim descent who had been gang-raped as a child by the same soldiers who murdered her parents.  Her sister, a stripper who makes her living grinding on fat Germans.

Maybe I’m wrong about that last paragraph, but it really doesn’t matter.  The characters, just like the setting, are unusual enough that I was still happy to get back to their lives after swiping the ol’ Metro Card.

The ending does suffer from a frustrating, Three’s Company-like misunderstanding.  Ultimately everything seems to get sorted out, and the story ends in a somewhat happy-ish way.  In the book’s Acknowledgements, the author does thank somebody named Russ who “gave the story a happy end.”  Hmmm.  I can’t help but wonder whether I would have been happier with the original ending, whatever it was.  I guess I’ll never know.

This was just just what I needed after Tree of Smoke:  a single main character taking me along on her journey from Point A to Point B.  Actually, this book is not nearly that simple, though the reading experience feels relatively effortless.

Falling Under, by first-time novelist Danielle Younge-Ullman, is the story of a Toronto artist trying to deal with the traumatic repercussions of her f-ed up upbringing and an even more f-ed up event that is not revealed until the novel is almost complete.  Mara’s got issues.  Love issues mostly, but life issues, too.  She don’t need no stinking therapy.  Keeping herself as far from the outside world as she’s able, she doesn’t seem to need much at all, with the exception of the occasional loveless but emotionally intense pounding from the equally withdrawn Erik.  Apparently this woman has never had a sexual experience that was anything but mind-blowing, proving once again that there are benefits to psychological trauma.  It’s better than being bored, right?

Normally, I’m annoyed by any story that works under the formula that THIS CHARACTER ACTS THIS WAY NOW BECAUSE OF THIS THING THAT HAPPENED BACK THEN.  It always strikes me as a first-year psychology student’s oversimplification of the complexities of the human experience and human motivation.  There’s some of that here, and there were a few times I just wanted to slap Mara across the face and tell her to stop being so goddamn weak.  Move on, woman!  Repress and move on!

But the story is strong enough that it takes to another level.  Is it all the sex?  No, it’s more than that.  It’s a basic but not all that common thing that has been accomplished here: Younge-Ullman has managed to create a character you want to follow.  That’s it.  And that’s good enough for me.

Past and present are covered in (usually) alternating sections.  Again, nothing fancy, but highly effective.  It’s difficult to move a reader around in time without losing a story’s continuum, but it all feels seamless here.

Mara does flirt with the opportunity to have something akin to a healthy relationship with the painfully saintly Hugo.  The poor sucker doesn’t stand a chance (or does he?).  Of course, after reading a line of dialog like this…

“I’ll love you the best I can,” he says, and there are tears in his eyes.  “That I can promise.”

…I was eagerly anticipating the nimrod’s humiliation.

Mara is the kind of brooding and solitary character to whom I’m often drawn.  She reminds me of the all-growed-up version of Asia in The Day Is Here.  Most of us have a bit of Mara somewhere inside of us, and if you don’t then I probably won’t like you very much.

Perhaps the story does end a bit too optimistically (what would Mara think?).  Personally, I’d prefer to see a character who didn’t quite have the artistic talent and connections to catch a break.  What if she did have to get a job at Starbucks?  Could she possibly deal with her emotional problems under such circumstances?  Of course, that’s just my taste.  I’m not the one trying to sell books.  Wait…yes, I am.

Falling Under = Good Read = Buy It

I finally managed to read Denis Johnson’s National Book Award winner Tree of Smoke.  Though I’ve long been an admirer of Jesus’ Son, really a collection of related short stories, I’ve never found the same power in any of his novels (I believe I’ve read them all except for Angels).  I like them fine, actually, but none really hit me in the gut the way Jesus’ Son did.  So all the hub-bub and awards really raised my expectations for Tree of Smoke.  I’m sorry to say after lugging the brick-like 600+ page British paperback edition of the novel around for over a week, this one didn’t quite do the job either.

It has been a long time since I’ve read any work of fiction where I had a hard time distinguishing among the characters.  There are many here, and a number of them here just kind of melded together for me.  There was no cohesive plot to carry me through those 600 pages (that’s fine, but there wasn’t much else carrying me either).  And as true as they might be, there were also just too many Vietnam cliches here (the whores, the crazy Colonel, the rogue soldier going native, the self-destructive vet…you get the idea).

Some positives:

Kathy, a somewhat imbalanced Canadian nurse, is probably the best female character Johnson has ever written.  They’ve been a weakness of his, but this one really works for me and is my favorite character in the book.  It takes a while, but she really grows into a very original and very real figure.

Then there are just those fragments of truly inspired writing.  There aren’t as many as there should be but there were enough to get me to the end.  My favorite was the last sentence of this section:

He worried about his mother.  She didn’t make much money at the ranch.  She exhausted herself.  She’d grown thinner, knobbier.  She spent the first half of every Sunday at the Faith Tabernacle, and every Saturday afternoon she drove a hundred miles to the prison in Florence to see her common-law-husband…Whenever he mentioned enlisting in the service, she seemed willing to sign the papers, but if he left her now, how would it all turn out for her?  She had nothing in this world but her two hands and her crazy love for Jesus, who seemed, for his part, never to have heard of her.

Johnson is always at his best in down-and-out America.  As for Nam Lit, I think I’m pretty much satiated by Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato and Graham Greene’s The Quiet American.  Roger that.