Mini-book review: Blake Butler's "There Is No Year"

Blake Butler frustrates me. While undeniably a talented young writer, with a knack for creating both disturbing imagery and evocative and atmospheric sentences, I've yet to read one of his books and end up walking away feeling 100% satisfied. I came across his "novel-in-stories" Scorch Atlas during the summer of 2010, while vacationing with my family in Philadelphia, and when I first began it I thought it was one of the most incredible apocalyptic novels I had read in awhile, a stunning and even breathtaking murky glimpse at a world in which all logic had suddenly gone out the window, a world suffering through a number of surrealistic apocalypses, with Butler, like some sort of necromantic magician, conjuring up scene after scene of dazed people numbly trying to cope with a new civilization in which everything was rotting and decaying, a sort of textual recreation of Max Ernst's Europe After the Rain, if you will. At least, that's what I thought about the first 100 pages: the 52 pages that follow seemed to jettison the horror and clarity of what came before them and in their place was just a lot of free form imagery and tired stabs at experimental writing (for example, one page consisted of a few terse sentences interspersed with hundreds of parentheses repeated over and over again). In the end, it just wound up leaving me feeling disappointed, a missed opportunity.

I kind of feel the same way about Butler's newest novel (and major publishing debut), There Is No Year (Harper Perennial, 2011). Like Scorch Atlas, there isn't much in the way of a plot or a story. The novel can best be summed up in this manner: in a world suffused by a sort of vaguely described light, a father, mother and their sickly son move into a haunted house and weird things happen. It's a flimsy set-up that somehow Butler manages to stretch out for 400 pages, whereas I feel it probably would have made a more effective novella or short story (as it is, the whole "house-within-a-house"/"house that's larger on the inside than it is from the outside" feels like it's been done to death before anyway: Borges tackled the same theme in a lot of his short fiction, as did J.G. Ballard in stories such as "The Endless Space" and "Report on an Unidentified Space Station"). I thought the first 230 pages or so were quite good, thinking that maybe this was how a book like Lunar Park should have been written (another novel dealing with a family experiencing weird phenomena in a house that may be haunted, albeit told in a more conventional, less flashy style). But after that tedium started setting in as the book just dragged on and on before "ending" with not much of a bang. While the book certainly looks great, with its gray pages and its blurry photographs, this just seems to serve as a mask to cover up the "been there, done that" nature of Butler's themes. It doesn't help matters that the main characters in question (none of which are named) are such abstract stick figures that it's hard to really give a damn about them and the bizarre things that happen to them, and after awhile all of the unrelenting weirdness starts to become banal and routine, all of it written in Butler's blank style. I'm kind of curious as to how he feels about his own work: there seems, to me, to be a lack of passion or emotion present.

This isn't to say that the book isn't enjoyable, as like in Scorch Atlas there are some effective and disturbing scenes and images, such as a scene where the son plays a video game that finds him trapped in a level that never ends. But as the book goes on these interesting scenes start to become few and far between, and it just doesn't seem to add up or cohere into a successful whole. If one views There Is No Year as an illogical and choppy nightmare set in the form of a novel, one might be tempted to see it as a literary success, but as a friend of mine (Chris Stamm) recently noted in his own review of the book in question, "one man’s bad dream will almost always be the same man’s dull tale, no matter the amount of typesetting tomfoolery."

Mini-book review: Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow"

For many years now, I've desired to read Thomas Pynchon's classic 1973 novel Gravity's Rainbow, which I believe I first purchased maybe in the year 2005. Over the years I've tried to read it a few times, but was never able to make it past the first 100 pages or so (unsurprising, as it's considered by many to be a difficult, almost unreadable book). But recently I finally finished it. It's kind of hard to summarize a novel this large in one mini-review (after all, the book is 760 pages long and features a cast of well over 400 characters, many of whom vanish just as quickly as they appear). But I'll take a stab at it.

The novel takes place over a period from Christmas season 1944 to September of 1945, though there are flashbacks to earlier eras. The action takes place mainly in Europe during the closing days of World War II, and the book is divided into 4 parts (the longest of which is part 3, which is around 336 pages). The book doesn't have all that much of a plot, and what little plot it does have doesn't start to kick in until over 200 pages into the book. The story revolves around a promiscuous (and somewhat paranoid) United States Army lieutenant named Tyrone Slothrop who is stationed in London. Various military organizations (including one dubbed "The White Visitation," which consists of a number of nutty psychics, mediums and occultists), gradually notice that at locations where Slothrop has sex with woman, a V-2 rocket lands at that same spot a few days later. Slothrop begins to fall under surveillance from these aforementioned organizations, and eventually finds himself racing through "The Zone" (Pynchon's name for lawless postwar Europe), trying to avoid a shadowy conspiracy he sees forming all around himself (the people behind this conspiracy usually being classified simply as "They" or "Them") while at the same time trying to unlock the secrets of a mysterious weapon called the "Schwarzgerät" that is to be installed in a rocket with the serial number "00000." As the book progresses, things become increasingly hallucinatory: an octopus named Grigori attacks a female bather, one chapter is written from the perspective of a sentient light bulb named Byron, characters take a trip to what appears to be Hell, and so on.

Like most of Pynchon's novels, the characters have very colorful and inventive names (such as Milton Gloaming, Ernest Pudding, and Miklos Thanatz). Pynchon also employs quite a few evocative words, some of which are probably made up (I especially liked dracunculiasis, glyptic, tulipomania, noctiluca, proscenium, travalency, necropolism, sodomistical, and lycanthropophobia). The mystic in me also liked all of the references to the Tarot, Jewish mysticism, and the Hermetic Qabalah. And even though I'm not crazy about long books I liked the density and impenetrability of this one, the sense that one was literally immersing oneself into a labyrinth of words, and it got to the point where it even began to invade my dreams. Upon completing it, I initially felt a bit confused and dislocated, because I had spent so long prowling the book's WW II territory that it had almost become a sort of alternate reality for me. Granted, the book has some flaws: portions of it kind of meander, it's hard to care all that much about the characters in question, the constant "songs" can get irritating, and I detected a slight homophobic subtext (a constant comparison of homosexuality to Nazism, or anti-life/death in general) that kind of lessened my enjoyment of it a tad. But when all is said and done I'd probably rank it in my top 50 novels, and in terms of experimental/postmodern/post WW II literature it's certainly required reading. And once you finish it, you become part of that elite club that can brag, "I read Gravity's Rainbow," which makes it worth the effort. A difficult book, but in the end a rewarding one. I'm glad I was finally able to read it all the way through.

Mini-book review: Zachary German's "Eat When You Feel Sad"

Zachary German's Eat When You Feel Sad is a slim novel (127 pages) that was published in late 2009 by ultra-trendy Melville House Publishing. Although he isn't referenced by name in the book, the shadow of Bret Easton Ellis looms large over Eat When You Feel Sad. In fact, the book really reminded me a lot of Ellis' debut novel, Less Than Zero, which was published in 1985. Less Than Zero was, at the time, referred to as "Catcher in the Rye for the MTV generation." I guess you could call Eat When You Feel Sad a Less Than Zero for the Twitter generation. Like Zero the book has no plot (or even chapters) and is instead a selection of very brief scenes from the life of Robert, a young vegetarian hipster who (I presume) lives in New York City. And while the book is written in the third person as opposed to Zero's first person, it still resembles Zero's clipped and minimalist style (here's a few sentences from a typical paragraph: "Robert is in his parents' house. He is in the kitchen. He looks at the microwave. The microwave is illuminated. There is a veggy burger patty in the microwave. Robert looks at a plate. There is a bun on the plate. He opens the refrigerator. Robert picks up the ketchup. He looks at a bag of lettuce. He picks up the bag of lettuce. Robert closes the refrigerator"). It almost reads less like a novel and more like a collection of Facebook status updates: indeed, there's a scene where Robert posts a status update on Facebook. Like Zero, the book features a large cast of characters who appear briefly and vanish just as quickly, and these characters are somehow even less fleshed out than the ammoral and hedonistic stick figures who populated Less Than Zero.

There's not a whole lot I have to say about this book because there isn't much in the way of content: just a long parade of scenes featuring Robert watching The Office, checking email on his laptop computer, masturbating to pornography, reading Joy Williams books, playing video games, drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon beer with his aimless friends, shopping at American Apparel, eating at Chinese restaurants, making playlists on his iTunes, feeding his cat, riding his bike, and listening to music (like Ellis, German namechecks a lot of bands, at least close to 100, mainly indie rock bands like Death Cab For Cutie, Xiu Xiu and Broken Social Scene but also lots of hip-hop musicians like Ol' Dirty Bastard, Jay-Z and Lil' Wayne). Although there are a few scenes where Robert seems to realize the emptiness of his aimless life, for the most part it's hard to work up a great deal of sympathy (or even interest) in him or his circle of friends. I like reading these very short and minimalist modern novels because they don't take a whole lot of time to get through (and one doesn't need to exert all that much brain power in the process). But this book lacks the power of a Less Than Zero, a book where, beneath its shallow surface of passionless sex, pop culture references and 80's music, real horror lurked: serial killers and snuff films and anorexia and drug abuse and abortions and prostitution and child rape (whereas in Eat When You Feel Sad, there's practically no darkness at all, other than characters getting drunk, throwing up, and witnessing a minor car accident). German also seems to be trying to channel Dennis Cooper (whose name crops up twice in the book), but Cooper's characters possess real emotional depth, whereas those in Eat When You Feel Sad are pretty much just names on a page. Like a lot of younger writers, German strikes me as being too obsessed with style and not enough with content. This isn't to say I didn't enjoy this novel: I suppose it could function as a snapshot of today's youth, though I've never met anyone possessing the self-conscious vacuity displayed by the characters in this book. I just wish that German had something more profound to say about his generation.

Mini-book review: Lonely Christopher's "The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse"

In 2003, the novelist Dennis Cooper launched his Little House on the Bowery series in connection with Akashic Books. Releasing around two books a year, this line of fiction books focuses mainly on younger North American writers who, according to an introduction for the series written by Dennis himself, "believe that fiction can be as entertaining, challenging, revelatory, and, in a word, important as any other medium. I hope Little House on the Bowery will be a reliable source for readers who want literature to be an adventure on the levels of content and style. I also want it to be an oasis for people who have come to see contemporary literature as a spotty, conservative medium." Over the years Little House on the Bowery has released a number of innovative and captivating books, including 2007's short fiction anthology Userlands (confession: a story of mine appeared in this book so naturally I'm biased) and, more recently, Mark Gluth's sublime novella The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis. Early this year they released their two newest titles, a reissue of Matthew Stokoe's cult transgressive novel Cows and Lonely Christopher's The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse, a collection of nine short stories that I have just recently completed reading and will now briefly review.

This is certainly a most curious collection, and I'm having trouble classifying it. Many of the stories (which end on ambigious notes) feature characters with unusual names, such as Dumb, Vowel Shift, Burning Church, Normal Chapter, and Timmy Victim. And the writing style is very unusual. For example, the first story, "That Which," is narrated by a boy who suffered from a debilitating head injury and is thus written in a very disjointed manner. Equally bizarre is the subject matter: the fourth story, "Milk" (which is also the shortest story in the collection at a mere 4 pages) revolves around the murder of a horse in a kitchen. The better stories, in my opinion, are the longer ones that focus more on characterization, such as "Burning Church," (which deals with a week in the life of a school teacher named Burning Church), and "Game Belly," an atmospheric piece which takes place in an empty city late at night and which revolves around a number of vacuous characters going about their nocturnal activity (though I wonder what exactly a "game belly" is). By far the best story is "Nobody Understands Thorny When," which at 34 pages is the longest story of the book. It's about the relationship between an odd boy (named Thorny When) and his kidnapper (Normal Chapter), and their most strange love affair, and how Thorny's life changes when he's "saved" from his captor after four years.

Not all of the stories worked for me though. I had no idea what "The Pokemon Movie" was supposed to be about (perhaps because I'm not all that familiar with the Pokemon phenomenon in general), though if I had to hazard a guess I'd say it's about the loss of childhood innocence. And the last story, "White Dog," which is about a seven foot tall lesbian who wanders in a dream-like daze through a supermarket, goes on for way too long, with many tedious and rambling paragraphs (the narrator spends 4 pages debating whether to buy mascara or not).

For the most part, however, I found the stories to be well-written, entertaining and humorous. I can only wonder what Christopher's influences are... some of the stories have a sort of David Lynch vibe ("Burning Church" even features a hallway light that flickers constantly). He certainly has an impressive vocabulary: some words that really stood out were "videlicet," "pulchritude," and "contrastively." One thing is certain: it will be interesting to see in what direction he takes his fiction next.

Finally, like many of the other books released by Little House on the Bowery, this one also features a typically awesome cover by Joel Westendorf.

Mini-book review: Robert Aickman's "Cold Hand in Mine"

As both a student and a writer of short fiction that could be classified as "supernatural," "horror," or just plain "weird," I'm constantly seeking out short story collections that fit the above terminology, if only to further refine my own craft. Hence my recent exploration of the work of Robert Aickman (1914-1982), an English conservationist and a writer of fiction (and mostly supernatural fiction at that). He wrote around 50 or so such stories, which were collected in around eight volumes over a period from 1951 to 1985 (many of these volumes are now out of print and very expensive). I first heard of Aickman through the music of Current 93: one of my favorite songs performed by that group, entitled "Niemandswasser," is named after an Aickman story of the same title. Cold Hand in Mine was originally published in England in 1975, but the American version (which I own) was put out by Scribner in 1977, with a dust jacket illustrated by one of my favorite artists, Edward Gorey. This collection of "strange" stories, Aickman's fifth, was, I believe, the first of his books to be published in the United States. It consists of eight short stories, four of which are over 30 pages long: "The Swords," "The Real Road to the Church," "Niemandswasser," "Pages from a Young Girl's Journal," "The Hospice," "The Same Dog," "Meeting Mr Millar," and "The Clock Watcher."

The collection opens with the following quote from Sacheverell Sitwell: "In the end it is the mystery that lasts and not the explanation." This is actually a perfect quote to use as it really does seem to sum up Aickman's stories, at least in this collection. Many of the stories here end in an open-ended or inconclusive manner. It's actually one of the things I find frustrating about Aickman. His (somewhat lenghty) stories have so much build-up and atmosphere, yet so often at the conclusion they just seem to fizzle out or go nowhere exciting. When Aickman is good, he's very good, but when he's not good, he just comes off as somewhat bland. There's a fine line between subtly and just plain perplexing, and Aickman walks it constantly. Some of the stories in this collection I would highly recommend (such as "Niemandswasser," "The Hospice," and "The Clock Watcher") but some of them, such as "Meeting Mr Millar" (the longest story in the collection at 36 pages) are just dull and go nowhere. I can't say that Aickman has the most exciting writing style in the world: while I enjoy the very controlled, elegant and somewhat cold manner of his style, at the same time I would often find myself hoping for a bit of chaos to seep in. For stories that were (I presume) written in the 1960's and 70's, these seem very old-fashioned, like products of the 19th century, what with their lack of profanity and sex that's only hinted at, for the most part (the writer who Aickman reminds me the most of is M.R. James, which might be a lazy generalization). His vocabulary isn't the most thrilling either, though he does drop a few words I don't often encounter in fiction, such as "ichthyologists" and "consecrationary." And there are some good quotes: "We control nothing of importance that happens to us" and "What other thought mattered than that nothing mattered?" or "As we acquire weight in the world, we lose it within ourselves" and (my favorite) "Everything to do with time is hideous." In the end, I think one of my biggest problems with Aickman (as skilled a writer as he is) is that his supernatural tales lack the grand unifying philosophies that make reading H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti (what with their deep-seated cosmic pessimism) such a thrilling intellectual experience.

Mini-book review: Johnny Weir's "Welcome to my World"

Perhaps the biggest shocker of Johnny Weir's new autobiography Welcome to my World (Gallery Books, 2011) isn't Weir's now public confirmation of his homosexuality (which as even he notes doesn't even really need to be mentioned, it's so obvious) but the fact that probably 95% of the book is actually devoted to the topic of figure skating as opposed to, say, fashion or hanging out with celebrities. Although it opens up on a slightly cringe-inducing note, with a prologue full of ass-kissing and celebrity name-dropping that reads like something from a Bret Easton Ellis novel (the scene where he fawns over Sarah Jessica Parker is a bit much), Weir flashes back to his childhood and takes us on a tour of his life, from his early ambition to be a horse rider to his initial forays into the world of ice skating to his sexual awakening (he didn't lose his virginity until he was 20), to the struggles he's had to endure from skating judges who thought his style was too feminine, to his two appearances at the Olympics (the book ends after his performance at the 2010 Winter Olympics, which was when I myself noticed Weir for the first time, and became more interested in figure skating in general). Welcome to my World reveals Weir as a complex, contradictory and multi-faceted individual (he acknowledges that his wild and crazy public life is kind of at odds with his more quiet and shy private life) with interesting and articulate thoughts on topics such as homosexuality. One thing stands out clear: Weir takes figure skating very seriously (he also loves Russia, a country that seems to appreciate his skating style much more than his native America). The book was also fairly humorous (though it didn't have me laughing out loud like Kathy Griffin's autobiography from 2009, Official Book Club Selection), and gives the reader a good introduction into the back scene world of competitive figure skating. I also found it kind of charming how he thanked Lady Gaga (among other divas) in the acknowledgments at the end. The book made me want to go onto Youtube immediately after I finished it and check out some of Weir's past performances.