Thank You

Thanks to everyone who tuned in to hear me on the radio this week! What an experience! I can't wait to do more of the same.

It wouldn't have been nearly as fun if I didn't know I had fans out there in the world listening.

Will Be Reading on 91.9 FM

Thursday, October 28th 10:00pm

http://www.streamingthe.net/KSDB-The-Wildcat-91.9-FM-Manhattan-KS/p/8496&player=1

The Financial Lives of the Poets

Jess Walter. Harper. 2009. 304 pp.

(originally published 10/10/10 in the Manhattan Mercury)

In the great Modern tradition, Jess Walter presents at the heart of his novel not a hero but an anti-hero, a J. Alfred Prufrock character – middleaged, educated to the point of pretension, pigeon-holed and indecisive – a protagonist who is his own antagonist. However, like with Prufrock, these flaws do not make us dislike Matthew Prior. On the contrary, they fill us with a great affection, perhaps even a great pity for Matt. The plot of the novel, excepting the ending, which I won’t get into here, is essentially a story

of entropy. Walter introduces Matt not on the day he leaves the local newspaper to start an illconceived website specializing in free-verse poetry about the stock market, poetfolio.com, nor when that particular venture fails, when he crawls back to the paper, nor when he is finally fired; the novel doesn’t even open on a small but symbolic moment: discovering his wife Lisa’s infidelity on Facebook, perhaps, or opening the foreclosure notice. No, we meet Matt in an unlikely place: 7/11 at 2 a.m., contemplating the original cost of his car versus how much he still owes on it (two commensurate figures) and getting stoned with two twentysomethings he’s just met, Jamie and Skeet. So in medias res we being, not at the outset of conflict but in the thick of it. "This is what it means to come apart," our narrator tells us. "Not gently unraveling, but blowing out, a tire on the freeway."

One of the most remarkable aspects of this book is that literally every part of the protagonist's life is marching seemingly in tandem toward complete dissolution, and yet clarity of situation is never compromised. With Skeet and Jamie, he stands in a fetid apartment littered with pizza crusts; at home he doesn't sleep because he simply can't bring himself to share a bed with his unfaithful wife; when he should be working, he's reminded again and again that there's nothing in this world for him to do: "Four years earlier we had complained about too many ads in the paper (less room for our brilliance) and competed for designer beats (cultural trends reporter); now we sighed with relief when the slender paper had any ads at all and eagerly accepted pay cuts and broad, hyphenated jobs created by the loss of our colleges (courtscops-schools...)."

More tragic than this fiscal crisis is the crisis in Matt's marriage, a crisis that weighs on him at practically all points in the story. His unemployment would not be nearly as devastating if her new beau, Chuck, didn't own his own lumber business or if she didn't love the house (he's about to lose) so much. "After each bad decision, after each failure we quietly logged our blame, our petty resentments; we constructed a case against the other that we never prosecuted,” Matt explains, and our only hope is that they truly never prosecute it.

The weight of these conflicts, internal and external, are bearable because Walter writes them with such a keen sense of humor, such an eye for absurdity. From the lawyer/drug dealer – “A prospectus? What kind of drug dealers have a prospectus?” – to the industrious squirrel who’s also struggling, “doing a little last gathering for his chestnut 401K,” Walter keeps us laughing and the true gravity of these failures he keeps at bay.

If I had to summarize “The Financial Lives of the Poets” in one word, it would be “convergence," because this is the essential nature of the characters here, characters who are constantly conflating incompatible elements (poetry and stock tips, drug dealing and legal contracts, their son Franklin's actions both diffident and at times violent) for the absurd aims of money, protection, love. In this respect, at the character-level if not the plot, Walter is an utter realist, refusing the flat character at every turn, and because these conflicts are character-driven we buy their synchronization and flip the pages still faster.

Darkly Comedic, Family Dysfunction with a Twist: a review of "The Girl Who Ate Kalamazoo," by Darrin Doyle

(published in The Manhattan Mercury 1/24/2010)

          If it's true that literature is an on-going conversation – a conceit too often repeated to be attributed to anyone – then before discussing a work of fiction, one should first consider a work that preceded its creation. This is actually much less contrived than it sounds, for when hearing of a new novel, say one that takes place in a single day, who of us doesn't think, “Ah, Woolf,” or “Ah, Joyce,” and then begin making comparisons?

          I wasn't 10 pages into Darrin Doyle's new novel, when I thought to myself, “Ah, Donald Barthelme.” In particular, I was reminded of his story, “I Bought a Little City” (Ain't it Pretty), in which a wealthy man purchases Galveston, Texas. This isn't, in reality, a thing one can do, but that doesn't stop the protagonist from telling, in plainest detail, what he did with his new acquisition:
“I went out on the streets then and shot six thousand dogs. This gave me great satisfaction and you have no idea how wonderfully it improved the city for the better...Then I went down to the Galveston News, the morning paper, and wrote an editorial denouncing myself as the vilest creature the good God had ever placed on earth.”

           We accept the circumstance, that he purchased Galveston, because it's immediately presented, and also because the story is interesting, well-written, and engaging. This is how Doyle's narrative works as well.

          In the fictitious “Note From the Editor,” we are informed that from 1997 to 1999, the beautiful and famous eatist Audrey Mapes ate the city of Kalamazoo, Mich. The text of the book is supposedly a compilation of hand-written notes jotted down by her sister McKenna, notes purchased by D. M. Doyle. “There was no cohesion to the random jottings. No story,” the editor explains. “So Mr. Doyle sculpted it, trimmed it, molded it; like Dr. Frankenstein, he stitched together the necrotic segments in order to breath life into the rantings of this decidedly melancholy and plain woman.

          The narrative then follows. Each chapter is short, easily digestible, if you will, and resembles a cleaned up note, one given both a thematic and narrative arc. They don't follow chronologically, but instead jump around, spending time with each member of the Mapes family: Grandma Pencil with her religious judgment of Audrey's obsession; Audrey's brother, Toby, whose own excessive eating aims at bulking up, at achieving the perfect body; her mother, Misty, listless but loving; her father Murray, a factory worker by day and inventor by night (his patents include, “the Clock Hat, the Squeezable Survival Kit...the Collapsible Ukulele with Hairbrush”); and of course Audrey herself, stunningly beautiful despite her birth defects – an iron stomach and two stumps instead of feet.

          The finale is known from the beginning – “she was the gentlest earthquake, the softest tsunami” – therefore, Doyle shows us the path as opposed to constantly pushing us toward the destination.

          As a metaphor, the possibilities are endless. A girl who can't sate her appetite for nonfood could be a stand in for obesity, alcoholism, sex and/or drug addiction, the lifelong search for love, faith, family. The story of Kalamazoo, its rise and fall, growth then total destruction, could parallel the fate of any number of Michigan cities. To investigate these any further, however, would be purely academic. We are concerned with the simple question, “Is it worth reading?”

          I answer a resounding, “Yes!” Not because it is profoundly meaningful – it is – but because the story is sensational, worth telling, and executed with a concision and clarity that brings us into the fold of the narrative. Perhaps even better than the descriptions of her eating, are the reactions of the townspeople:

          “All they could do was stare. It was shocking, deeply unreal. Physically numbing. Narcotic...and at the same time it seemed, for lack of a better word, expected. Comforting.

          “Of course, their mind-blown minds said. Of course there is a shapely woman with the face of an angel standing in my living room, gorging herself on my coffee table. Why wouldn't there be?”

In a climate of literary plots that tell of “The time nothing didn't happen,” Doyle is audacious enough to write about “The time something did happen!” I believe this is a positive trend taking place in American fiction, and I applaud him.

          As this is a time for predictions, I would like to lay down one of my own: The Girl Who Ate Kalamazoo will win the Pulitzer Prize this year. If it doesn't, this will simply be because the committee either didn't read it, or because they understood and enjoyed it too well.

          Buy, borrow or steal this book; you won't be sorry.

Brain Science

"It's not like it's rocket surgery," Walker says, and I laugh at this butchering of an idiom I know so well, even though he's misremembering it on purpose just to make me laugh. I'm letting him make me laugh.

Read the rest at Hobo Pancakes: http://www.hobopancakes.com/2011/03/03/graph-garden-2/