If You Like That Sort of Thing

SUDDENLY, A KNOCK ON THE DOOR (by Etgar Keret)

Etgar Keret writes in a deceptively casual style, conversational at times, even, and his very short stories can seem airy until suddenly they punch you in the face with a raw emotion, a harsh political statement, or just a sudden revelation. What I love about the style is that all the writerly work is invisible; the craft is so deeply embedded that everything feels so natural, until you realize that there really is a lot going on in terms of construction. He also weaves fantasy elements into his work in such a natural way that it doesn’t seem fantastic at all: the world he’s describing seems entirely real.

For example, one of my favorite pieces in Suddenly, a Knock on the Door is “Unzipping,” in which a girl discovers that her lover has a zipper under his tongue. She opens him up and finds another man inside him, a man very different from her lover: sexier, more dangerous. But “life with Jurgen wasn’t easy” and he eventually leaves her. Later, she finds the “wrapping” which once contained her previous lover and wonders whether it was a mistake to open him up and discard him. Then she also finds that she has a zipper under her tongue, too, and the story leaves us with her wondering whether or not to open it: “It made her very hopeful but also a little worried—mainly about freckled hands and a dry complexion. Maybe she’d have a tattoo, she thought, of a rose. She’d always wanted to have one, but never had the nerve. She’d thought it would hurt a lot.” So what we have is an allegory—the idea that we leave people behind because we’re always looking for something a little bit better, and we change ourselves, too, wondering what life would be like lived another way. She tries to “imagine what she’d be like inside.” The zipper metaphor works so perfectly and seamlessly, eliminating the necessity of certain scenes—a breakup scene with her previous lover, meeting Jurgen for the first time, etc—and compresses the reality of the story, letting the most important elements resonate most strongly. And in “What, Of This Goldfish, Would You Wish?” a guy is making a documentary in which he knocks on doors and asks people what they would wish for if they found a talking goldfish that granted three wishes, and he ends up encountering an old Russian man who actually has such a goldfish. But the whimsical element is quickly replaced with tragedy when the device becomes imbued with its real purpose: to reveal how lonely the old man is, having saved his third wish only because he didn’t want the goldfish to go away.

In the title story (which is also the first story in the collection), a character says, tellingly, to a writer named Etgar Keret: “Don’t you go and dump reality on us like a garbage truck. Use your imagination, man, create, invent, take it all the way.” This can be read as a sort of mantra, a lens through which to investigate the book: “reality” as “too safe,” a failure to “take it all the way.”

            In “Joseph,” Keret’s narrator lies to himself, or hedges on the truth, in ways that point to a general inability to be sure of anything at all. From the opening:

“There are conversations that can change a person’s life. I’m sure of it. I mean, I’d like to believe it. I’m sitting in a café with a producer. He’s not exactly a producer, he never produced anything, but he wants to.”

Twice there we have a declarative sentence undermined by a hedge—“I mean, I’d like to believe it”; and “not exactly a producer”—which does some great work in terms of characterizing the narrator, getting us into his frame of mind. The unreliability of narrators is something pervasive in these stories, too. “Teamwork” begins with a father explaining that his son wants him to kill his grandmother (the narrator’s ex-wife’s mother): “My son wants me to kill her. He’s still young and doesn’t express this perfectly just yet, but I know exactly what he’s after. ‘I want that Daddy should hit her hard,’ he says.” The dialogue is what drives home that the son is actually very young, unaware of the import of his suggestions, and turns the first two sentences back against the narrator—we realize he’s fabricating this murder plot for his own reasons, but justifying them as his son’s wishes. Dialogue is a great way to reveal this unreliability, because then we don’t feel like the narrator’s internal monologue is forced; usually when we can easily see through a character as he lies to himself, it’s hard not to wonder why they can’t see what we see.

Many of the stories have a metafictional element to them, in the sense that they are stories about stories—and sometimes stories about the act of writing. The title story involves a writer being forced to write a story by intruders in his home. “Creative Writing” is a brilliant piece about a husband and wife, told almost entirely in the context of the stories they write in creative writing classes. The stories they write, and the metaphors contained within them, are the way we discover the problems in the story’s central relationship. And in “What Animal Are you?” a writer is asked by a reporter to “write something on the computer because it always makes for great visuals”—she’s filming him for German Public Television. At first he just pretends, but then a story emerges, which feels at first like a recounting of the very real, diegetic events, but becomes a story about the narrator’s troubled relationship with his wife and son—and the lies we tell ourselves and others. I love how Keret is able to write about writing and still be telling a story that has an emotional core, a relevance outside of a conversation about craft.

in which I review THE GREAT GATSBY

From the beginning of my review of The Great Gatsby for Slant Magazine:

From Willy Loman and his diamonds in Death of a Salesman to the Joads and their famous westbound road trip in The Grapes of Wrath, revealing the American myth as a shiny yet futile fantasy is nothing unfamiliar in literature, but doing so while implicating an audience in its own excess is a more complicated project, one handily taken on by Baz Luhrmann in his adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's mostly undisputed masterpiece The Great Gatsby. This is a film which takes classic source material and imbues it on screen with a sense of wonder commensurate to its prior form, perhaps offering an even more visceral impression of the possibilities inherent to this beautiful, tragic world, as Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan) would undoubtedly describe it. Decadent prose is transformed into a decadent filmmaking style that defies modesty in the most brutal sense. Gone are Fitzgerald's incisiveness and subtlety, but they're replaced here by Luhrmann's grandiosity, equal parts Gershwin and Beyoncé and Jay-Z—a larger-than-life worldview that sometimes grates but also frequently charms, despite an uneven script with a penchant for condescension. But these are fireworks that are meant to burn out, and when the exterior of light and color and magic burns away, it's up to the doctor in the room to see if a heartbeat can be detected.

Notes after reading some Tobias Wolff stories:

The magic of “Hunters in the Snow,” one of Tobias Wolff’s most famous stories, is what’s not being said: that the negligence of two men is causing a third man to die. Tub has shot Kenny while on a hunting trip after a miscommunication, and now Tub and his friend Frank have the responsibility of taking Kenny to the hospital before he bleeds to death. The problem is that the truck has no windshield and it’s freezing outside, so they have to keep stopping to warm themselves up, all while dealing with their own personal problems: Kenny’s marriage is falling apart, and he’s fallen in love with a teenager; and Tub has become an over-eater, getting fatter and fatter, and all he wants is to be able to tell someone, for someone to understand him. Meanwhile, Kenny is dying in the back of the truck, and the last line points to the inevitability of this conclusion with a cruel directness.

Another road story is “Powder,” about a father driving his son in very dangerous conditions on a closed road towards home. What’s really just a situation with no ultimate conclusion—two guys in a car going home—becomes an odyssey of a father and son’s relationship over time, the journey that day becoming representative of a whole life lived: “And the best was yet to come—switchbacks and hairpins impossible to describe.” Wolff works this way frequently in his short fiction, revealing surface details—dialogue, exposition, simple straightforward events told in chronological order—while embedding the real story, the real import of what’s happening, in the subtext. “Bullet in the Brain” works very similarly to “Powder,” a small or isolated incident becoming a whole world; in “Powder,” time expands to incorporate the whole of a relationship, while in “Bullet,” time slows down to give a dying man a new perspective just as the titular bullet slices through his brain. And in “Leviathan,” one woman’s slow breakdown and submission to drug addiction is only addressed directly at the very end of the story, when her three friends smile at her as she prepares to snort meth: “Their faces were rosy with candlelight. They were the faces of three well-wishers, carolers, looking in at Helen through a window filling up with snow.” The perspectival gesture—the act of them actually looking at her—mimics our own looking, our own final framing of Helen alone, distinct from these other three who are able to manage their drug habit (and their depression, where it exists) without letting it consume them. The story lives in these small visual cues: who’s looking at who, and why. Wolff manages it perfectly.

“The Other Miller” is a story about a man whose mother dies before he’s able to atone for shutting her out after she married his former teacher against her son’s selfish wishes—a fairly straightforward setup, except that the protagonist thinks this is all a mistake, that another guy with his same name is the actual son of the dead woman, and that the army (where he’s currently serving) has mixed them up. Like in “Hunters in the Snow,” we’re pretty sure we know more than the characters about what’s happened: that it actually is Miller’s mother who has died, and there has been no mix-up. This knowledge on the part of the reader serves to implicate us in the tragedy of the protagonist’s not-knowing. The sadness of what has happened becomes all the more poignant as we cringe while Miller remains convinced that his mother is still alive. The story he tells himself about his past, too, is imbued with this same sense of inevitable dread: we hear how he unfairly shunned his mother, and we also know that she’s (probably) now dead, so the whole story has a “what might have been” feel to it, like watching a video of a car crash knowing already that there were no survivors. When Miller is forced to visit a gypsy fortune-teller, he is understandably wary: “There’s no predicting what a fortune-teller might say, and once it’s said, no way of keeping it from happening. Once you hear what’s out there it isn’t out there anymore; it’s here. You might as well open your door to a murderer as to the future.” Some part of Miller is afraid of knowing the truth, and this is how he lives his life: not wanting to know about the future. And this thematic truth is woven into the structure of the story itself, the form of the narrative. The story elements become greater than the sum of their parts.

I also noticed something consistent and evocative in the construction of many of Wolff’s paragraphs. He’ll often embed atmosphere (particularly, weather, in “Soldier’s Joy,” a story that is densely atmospheric and rooted in the metaphor of rain mirroring the main character’s muddied internal life) in the very center of a paragraph, sandwiched between powerful actions. For example:

Hooper parked the truck halfway up the drive and walked the rest of the distance. The rain was falling harder now, tapping steadily on the shoulders of his poncho. Sweet, thick, almost unbreathable smells rose from the earth. He walked slowly, gravel crunching under his boots. When he reached the gate a voice to his left said, “Shit, man, you took your time.”

And then:

Hooper shook out a cigarette and bent to light it. “Hey, all right,” he said. “One match.” He put the case back in his pocket and cupped the cigarette under the picnic table to keep it dry. The rain was falling lightly now in fine, fitful gusts like spray. Misty gray light was spreading through the sky. Porchoff’s shoulders kept twitching, and his lips were blue and trembling. “Put your poncho on,” Hooper told him.

The form itself embeds a sense of setting and “weather” (in both the literal sense, and in the sense that the weather of a story is the circumstances within which the action takes place) within the action so as to imbue the action with a sense of atmosphere. The construction of the paragraph allows the story to keep moving while also giving the reader a very clear sense of the story’s world, as well as the internal world of the narrator; as Wolff is not a writer who deals much with the interior lives of his characters, he relies instead on outward circumstances to reflect the inward. Here, the rain reflects the narrator’s mental state: “falling harder now, tapping steadily,” and then “falling lightly now in fine, fitful gusts”—updating us on the state of the rain is updating us on the narrator’s development, and his relationship to the story’s action.

New URL

You can now find this page at http://richardscottlarson.com.

Sorry for any dead links or bookmarks!

Writing is "scary and shitty"

From an interview with Claire Vaye Watkins:

RM Right, and you’re working on a novel, is that right? How is that going?

CVW Oh, it’s awful. It’s going awfully. I’ve told friends in the past that if something’s scary or shitty, that’s a good sign because most good things started out as scary and shitty. But I’m starting to think that that was bullshit, what I was telling them, because it doesn’t feel fun or good. But it never really feels good for me. I always kind of dread writing. Sometimes I even get a stomachache before my writing time. Just winding myself up about it.

Thursday elsewheres:

Kevin B. Lee on Room 237.

Pablo Neruda exhumed!

I really love these fan-designed LOTR covers.

A great profile of Laird Barron over at Weird Fiction Review.

William Friedkin, no bullshit.

Rick Yancey's The Fifth Wave sounds interesting...

Dale Bailey on The Bad Place: the importance of setting in horror fiction.

The reemergence of Zelda Fitzgerald. I have a cat named Zelda Fitzgerald, and she emerged almost two years ago. But then again she's very much a trend-setter.

Some random thoughts on Donald Antrim's ELECT MR. ROBINSON FOR A BETTER WORLD

The form of Donald Antrim’s Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World is as hypnotic as the narrative itself. Working without line breaks or chapter breaks, the text forms one cohesive whole, forcing the reader to mediate his or her own experience of the narrative world without ever being told to stop digging deeper, without ever being told to stop for a moment and reflect. The insularity is not arbitrary: the setting of the novel is a strange yet familiar town (“a watery place familiar but not familiar, home but not home”) which has seemingly been cut off from the outside world, its residents left to fend for themselves within increasingly complicated social structures. Antrim tells his story largely in flashback, too—non-chronologically, even—and yet still retains momentum; the structure seems to work like memory does, elliptically, in fits and starts, full of diversions. And, aside from the absence of line breaks, there’s also another lovely technique Antrim uses to further focus our reading experience. In moments of heightened scene, Antrim cuts out dialogue tags, focusing the sentence on the action, almost like a screenplay: “ ‘Okay,’ vanishing, with the refreshing… ” … or here: “ ‘Call me Pete,’ following her into the warm kitchen… ” The effect is fluid, yet powerful, rendering the scene with more immediacy.

Lots of fantasy or absurdist elements flit into the narrative—people turn into animals (in a  beautiful representation of a marriage’s  breakdown, the protagonist and his wife turn into two different animals, one a fish and another a land mammal: they can no longer occupy the same habitat); two families go to war in a public park which is now filled with land mines; and there are many more instances of weirdness—but the novel still feels realist, grounded in the world we know, and that’s due to how meticulously Antrim paints these people and their circumstances, never teetering too far towards any one effect. Rather, the effect is many things at once—humor, horror, and everything in between.

The first sentence itself is a wonder:

See a town stucco-pink, fishbelly-white, done up in wisteria and swaying palms and smelling of rotted fruits broken beneath trees: mango, papaya, delicious tangerine; imagine this town rising from coral shoals bleached and cutting upward through bathwater seas: the sunken world of fish. That’s what my wife, Meredith, calls the ocean.

We have “rotted” and “broken” fruits which are also “delicious,” establishing a binary which follows through the whole novel, this idea that things can possess two opposing qualities at the same time; we have marine signifiers in “fishbelly” and “bathwater seas,” as well as (of course) the final image, the summation of what we’re seeing: “the sunken world of fish” (according to his wife, the ocean itself, marine symbolism—and the idea of drowning, which manifests itself in a variety ways—being inherent to the novel’s language). And we have movement, too, the town “rising” and “cutting upward” through the seas, this idea of a sunken world, rather like Atlantis, or the common trope of the domed city. The sentence unsettles us, revealing that we aren’t on solid ground. The terrain will shift. And we have to pay attention, because the meanings won’t always be obvious.

Antrim also has a way with economically painting pictures through startling word choice. He uses literal colors—“It was a black hour”; “dim light spilling yellowly”; “the sea, faintly, blackly visible”—but also joins words in a way that illustrates the binaries present in the world he’s building, such as in “Barbara looked unhappy and sexy” or “exquisite distres,”; a man who looks “fungal” and who elicits a “menacing, beery chuckle”; things being “wetly alive”; the presence of “anxious chaos”; and also the strangeness of “savage foliage”—the implication being that the world itself, the physical/natural world, has also gone wild. The deliberateness of these word pairings demonstrates Antrim’s control over the world of the novel, the descriptors (the words themselves) being just as startling and unsettling as the events of the story. In this way, the text itself (form) points to the novel’s arching themes (content).

Monday elsewheres:

Jeff VanderMeer offers some more details about his Southern Reach trilogy, and the film adaptation currently being developed.

Hugo Award nominations!

Laura Miller on sneaky author tricks.

A bit more info on the forthcoming Under the Dome TV adaptation.

An interview with Adrian Van Young, whose debut collection sounds awesome (and who also writes interesting stuff about horror movies). A snippet from the interview:

I think that film at large has this intensely versatile index of visual cues and techniques that can’t be overestimated as an asset to writers of fiction. The two mediums have a tremendous amount in common, which you see not only in the contemporary work of someone like Jonathan Lethem, but also in books that were written pre-cinema, like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, for instance. For my money, that scene early in the novel where Victor catches sight of the monster illuminated, briefly, by the lightning encircling the Alps, is one of the most cinematic pre-cinematic scenes in literary history. If it’s even possible to say something like that…

And lastly, the awesome Brian Francis Slattery has won the Philip K. Dick Award for Lost Everything.

Review of THE EXPLORER by James Smythe

My review of The Explorer, the latest novel by James Smythe, was posted today at Strange Horizons. From the beginning of the review:

There’s plenty to love about James Smythe's most recent novel, The Explorer, the story of Cormac Easton, a journalist launched into space as part of a team aiming to go further into the unknown than anyone ever has before. Their journey is to be "a voyage to rival Columbus, to rival the stories of Jules Verne" (p. 88). And indeed, the exploration motif is front and center throughout the novel, a rhetoric which is seemingly a direct response to the recent scaling back of manned space travel. The romance of exploration is perhaps hammered in a bit too hard, buffeted by a few too many flowery paragraphs explaining humanity's history of exploration and the idea that exploration is part of human nature (which sounds especially clumsy in dialogue), but it’s a welcome attempt to literalize a sentiment which often gets lost in all the science. Cormac, who is vocationally a writer rather than a scientist, is the perfect character to take on this role. Cormac's presence on the ship is predicated on his ability to tell the story of the expedition, to package it for the eager audience back home, and the novel itself can be read in that manner, too, much like a captain's ledger in the days of exploration by sea travel: a chronicle of exactly what happened, and exactly what was found.

Some thoughts after reading several Babel stories

Isaac Babel’s stories are deceptively simple. He hides his larger project in the micro, casting small, isolated narratives against a much larger context which makes them burst open with meaning—most famously, perhaps, in “The Story of my Dovecote,” which purports to be a story about a schoolboy and his pursuit of a dovecote (a story which ends tragically) but which is actually a much larger metaphor for the historical context of the Jews living in Russia in the early 20^th century.

We see the narrator struggle to get into school (and succeed, however briefly) against a prejudiced quota system; we see him begin to achieve his dream of possessing a dovecote; and then we see everything crash down around him, his dream literally crushed. This is the point in the story of a great transformation: while the boy lies on the ground, “the innards of the crushed bird trickling down the side of my face,” the narrative slows down to allow a psychological transition inward as we see his worldview shifting, the world becoming, to him, “small and ugly.” The external perceptions—the innards “blinding me”; the earth smelling of “damp depths, of tombs, of flowers”—mirror his internal state. The fact that this paragraph is so focused on the boy’s own sensory experience allows the actual context—the pogrom—to be felt more viscerally, too, by the reader. There’s a whole scene here, as he lies on the ground and then eventually begins to walk “down a foreign street … filled with the crackling, crashing song of shattering wood,” and the effect is one of allowing tiny details to stand in for bigger ideas. The fact that the story begins with the line “As a child I wanted a dovecote very badly” makes this scene all the more tragic, as it shows us the literal destruction of his most coveted prize, a devastating loss which is felt by the reader in a specific way, but also in a way that can be expanded to encompass the greater horrors represented in the scene.

Individuals often stand in for larger groups in Babel’s stories, such as in “Salt,” with the murdered woman standing in for the whole of the citizenry that Lenin’s army is failing to help. “My First Goose” is also a story which presents a micro narrative hiding a larger story, that of a soldier disavowing Judaism in order to gain the favor of his comrades. Babel is all about the details and hiding greater implications in smaller packages. Intellectualism is to be read as Jewish here, so when the commander criticizes the narrator for his higher education accomplishments (and his glasses, another signifier) he’s really calling him out as Jewish. The Cossack soldiers throw the narrator’s belongings (mostly manuscripts, of course) into the street in disdain. Wounded, he then takes his frustrations out on an old woman in the house (also spectacled), killing a goose and forcing her to cook it for him. Violence for violence—and of course this impresses his comrades. Also, the eating of pork, a literal disavowal of his religion. He’s further redeemed when he reads the words of Lenin to his comrades from a newspaper, finally aligning with the Cossacks politically as well as revealing the worth of his education, i.e. how his education can be applied to their mission.

But Babel never actually says anything about these external implications; they’re just there in the text, represented in the details. What he does so well is he packs all the context into the action. I’m going to bring up Lydia Davis again, because she’s been on my mind after reading those interviews. There’s a quote from her in which she says: “As the writer, I may choose to ignore the emotional heart of the matter, and focus on details, and trust that the heart of the matter will be conveyed nonetheless.” And I think this addresses what Babel accomplishes, too: the heart of the matter is off the page, but it’s brought to life by the details, the slow development of action in real time.