The Awful Possibilities

and i will hate you for it forever.

as i mentioned before, i had been looking forward to a particular book for a long time, and then the press made me worried about that book (which i had bought by then), and then i was still going to read it with an open mind anyway, after i finished the savage detectives.

then i read more of the press.

first let me provide a little context for those of you who don’t know how to click a link. the book i was talking about was wells tower’s first collection, everything ravaged, everything burned, which, like i said in the title of this post, is perfectly good, but more on that next time. the press is everybody writing about it, everybody but me.

but saying the press is everybody writing about it would be letting the national newspaper of record off the hook, and when i say the national newspaper of record i mean the new york times, which published three separate pieces on the book (two reviews and a profile), all of which seemed designed to make people never want to read any book, much less this perfectly good one.

i’d absorbed the reviews by the time of my last post about it, but the profile made it more difficult than ever to give the book the benefit of the doubt.  it was about a boy from a hardscrabble backwater called chapel hill, north carolina, whose parents, a professor of economics at duke (a community college, i’m guessing, named after john wayne) and a high school latin teacher (does that mean she teaches mexicans?), were so poor they had to drive beat up cars, which is why their son, who had to attend some (probably third-tier public) university called wesleyan and even work, occasionally for upward of a week, had such a good understanding of salt-of-the-earth types.

after i cried for a little while for wells, i decided that really what i should do was celebrate the fact that he was even literate, and my celebration of literacy led me to keep reading. i read a lot of stuff — an encyclopedia, some blogs, etc — until i stumbled on yet another review of wells tower. this one really hit home because it contained this passage:

I often distrust this kind of highly fictive and almost exhibitionistic imagination. Or at least it’s fictive-seeming; did the author in fact ever put a sea slug into an aquarium, shoot a moose, or marry a one-armed woman?

daniel menaker, it’s almost like you were reading my mind. i can’t tell you how much of my life i’ve spent trying to figure out if cervantes ever spent (even upward of a week) riding a haggard horse around spain in a rusty suit of armor with a basin on his head, or if jane austen actually ended up marrying a socially awkward but incredibly wealthy, handsome and sophisticated man,  or if philip roth is really a black man, or michiko kakutani is actually holden caulfield.

that was sarcasm.

i feel a parable coming on, but the parable’s not by me, it’s by christopher kennedy, from his first book, nietzsche’s horse (which you should buy, or any of his books, really) (also, this post has not been endorsed by christopher kennedy, and i am using his parable in demagogic fashion). it’s about a man who, on getting change from a drugstore cashier, decides that one piece is his lucky dollar. this decision is immediately followed by a series of disasters that effect him directly. it ends with this line:

“I’d hate to think what things would be like without my lucky coin.”

apply that to fiction. apply it specifically to short stories.

the common claim is that nobody reads them. the response is that we should keep putting out the same kind we’ve been putting out. if you need me to explain the relation of the parable to this situation, you probably shouldn’t be reading my site, and you may enjoy having drinks with daniel menaker at some reception thrown by the new york times. and you are oblivious and irrelevant.

but wells tower is neither oblivious or irrelevant. wells tower is extremely talented and also the author of a perfectly good book. but perfectly good is not good enough, and i will address that specifically next time.