Reviews here are snipped from past blog posts and notes, and are occassionally written at the outset with a plan for coherent heft. Pardon the amalgamation of shapes and sizes.

• Last Things, Jenny Offill

(July 2006) I just read Jenny Offill’s Last Things, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 2000.  It’s an addictive little book, which I flew through in two days.  What’s unique about this book is the first-person eight-year-old narrator, Grace.  I think there’s often a stigma against child narrators, as if the child filter will make a narrative less adult.  Well, this is certainly an adult book.  Many of the themes are common, but the uncommon voice puts a new spin on it, a new lens through which readers can see the world.  One word: haunting.

• Airships, Barry Hannah

(July 2006) I didn’t get that much reading done at the beach.  The only book I finished was Barry Hannah’s Airships.  It wasn’t even on my beach reads list–ha.  As I was walking out the door I saw it on the shelf, remembered I had indeed purchased it, and thought to myself that is what I need.  I hadn’t read any of Hannah’s books before (hanging head in shame), and it was great.  Each story was unique and haunting in it’s own way, with some absurdity thrown in for good measure.  Funny stories, even if funny-sad, are hard to find.  Two of my favorites from Airships are “Return to Return” and “Mother Rooney Unscrolls the Hurt.” Now I will have to get my hands on his first novel, Geronimo Rex.

• All This Heavenly Glory, Elizabeth Crane

(August 2006) I’ve been making notes to myself about fiction I’ve been reading this summer, keeping my own writing in mind…sort of a fiction journal.  Here is a bit about Elizabeth Crane’s second book, All This Heavenly Glory:

It’s hard to know what to call this book.  If I wanted to be crass, or mean, or jealous, or role play as a crass, mean, jealous person, I could say this is a mess of a book, obviously pieced together from a bunch of short stories and writing exercises which all happen to be about the same character.  I could say it’s a broken product of academia, a sour result of the workshop form.  Meaning, that it’s in no way a novel, and Crane must not know how to write a novel, so she wrote this. 

But I don’t really believe those things.  (I loved this book—it’s one of those two day reads I found enthralling and addictive!)  Crane’s book is innovative and witty and fresh, not broken.  Maybe it is fragmented and fractured, but that how people’s lives are, and that’s what this is about, life.  What I do mean to point out, though, is that it is definitely not a traditional novel.  It’s essentially a collection of stories, I think.  There are 18 different sections, which are often written in different styles and voices.  But Charlotte Anne Byers is the main character throughout—and that sounds like a novel, right?  A whole book about one person?  The first line on the inside of the book jacket says, “Here are the events that make up a life.”  And that’s true, an entire life should certainly lend enough material and cohesion to a novel.  But this isn’t really a novel, is it?  Maybe it’s a postmodern novel.  Kidding!  Or maybe it is collection of stories. (Why I don’t want to fully admit this, I don’t know.  But I think it has to do with the fact that I’ve heard over and over that collections of stories don’t sell; so, it’s not like I want to enthusiastically slap the label stories on a book I write.  And All This Heavenly Glory doesn’t label itself, at least not on the physical cover.)  The book does doesn’t say Novel, or Stories on it anywhere.  Which maybe is for the better, because that book
Florida, which was a pretty little thing, called itself a Novel, and that just gave everyone something to rail against and bitch about.  So, why put yourself in a box?  Crane hasn’t, I guess.  This is her second book.  The first was When the Messenger is Hot, which is most definitely a collection of stories…Okay, Amazon does call All This Heavenly Glory a “collection of interconnected stories.”  Is it because it spans so much time and leaves so much out that it can’t be a novel?  Or is that there are such differing styles in the sections?  I’ll try and let this question rest.

One thing I love about this book is how it straddles the line between literary fiction and what you might call chick-lit.  Crane’s writing is good and innovative, but it’s also witty, irreverent, often funny.  This book is a fine specimen of innovative prose styles—there’s a lot to examine on the technical level, casual as the voice may seem.  But this book is also fun and sexy enough to be an excellent weekend beach book.  

As a side note, I thought the black and gold cover of the hard back was really pretty, but the publishers must have decided otherwise because the paper back just came out with a bright, shiny photograph of a girl and bubbles.  I thought the subtle image on the front of the black cover (a constellation of a woman) was a fitting image that also mirrored the structure of the book.

• The Thin Place, Kathryn Davis

The magic moment…It is simply a psychological hot spot, a pulsation on an otherwise dead planet, a “real toad in an imaginary garden.” These queer moments, sometimes thrilling, sometimes just strange, momenets of setting off an altered state, a brief sense of escape from ordinary time and space–moments no doubt similar to those sought by religious mystics, or those experienced by people near death–are the soul of art, the reason people pursue it.

John Gardner in On Becoming a Novelist

That’s how it feels to read a good short story–there is something in it like that, that hits you.  And it’s not the same for everyone, which is why readers have different preferences, why editors might disagree.  As a writer, it’s a complex path.  I’ll have written a story, which seems only acceptable.  Then someone will read it, and they’ll fixate on one detail that somehow encompasses the whole damn thing for them.  And I look over it again–yes, that is a very nice detail, and does it resonate? Yes.  Did I plan it? No.  It just happens.  Boom.  That part looks good, keep going, try to do it again.  It’s hard.  It’s hard to believe those moments will happen when you feel you’re writing pages and pages of cathartic dribble.  But they do happen.  And I was thinking of these moments when I started reading Kathryn Davis’ The Thin Place, which I have very high hopes for (after reading an interview at Bookslut), when I came to the beginning of a new section on page 12:

The world was already acting strange millions of years ago. 

Water had its way with rock.  Liquid beat solid.  Ice is supposed to be obdurate, unyielding, but back then it rippled and flowed.  The glacier rode the world, and the world let it change it, like a girl riding her lover and turning his prick to foam.  Exactly the way it is today.

That is f-ing awesome.  That’s all there is to it.  And if you don’t agree with me, go read the actual book, and then if you still don’t see it, whatever–this is her sixth novel, so someone agrees with me.  It’s works on an extreme level.  And that takes confidence.  That takes a writer who believes in herself, who is ambitious, who takes risks.  There are grandios statements and vast brushstrokes, things that could be pinned cathartic dribble, but which actually strike people in their core when they encounter it, and that makes it art. I’m looking forward to reading the rest of The Thin Place.  And I’m glad there is room for this in the world of literary fiction: books which are not strictly realistic, but are maybe as truthful as it can get.

• Magic for Beginners, Kelly Link