i’ve been surprised by books a few times this year. that makes it a good year. usually, you’re lucky if you get one good surprise in a year of reading. that doesn’t mean you’re lucky if you read one good book — if you only read one good book in a year, you’re unlucky — it means you’re lucky if you get surprised.
one of the surprises doesn’t really count because it was ben lerner’s angle of yaw, and i’d been hearing people rave about it for a couple of years already and also i’d read his first book the lichtenberg figures before, so i realized he had the potential to write a book as good as angle of yaw, so i shouldn’t have been surprised. still, i read it straight through three times this summer. i don’t want to write about it because what’s there to say?
i say you’re lucky to get one surprise a year, but that’s an old guy talking, because there’s a time when you get more than one surprise a year, which is when you first discover books, good ones i mean, and hopefully when this happens you’re an adolescent, because when you first discover books you get surprised all the time and can proclaim your revelations without shame — dostoevsky is amazing. vonnegut is my spirit animal. me and my girlfriend are going to dig up kerouac’s grave and remove what’s left of his liver, place it next to the radiator in my dorm room and incubate our love child on it.
then you learn shame and learn to like grown up shit and disavow those writers because it seems like they’re for kids until you realize, later, that they’re as good as you remembered, if maybe for different reasons.
samuel ligon’s drift and swerve was another surprise i got this year.
i get the sense that ligon either never went through that shame phase (to his credit) or got over it a lot faster than i and my friends did, because the stories in drift and swerve synthesize this incredibly wide range of influences in an only slightly-less-wide range of styles, all the while being unified by a clear authorial sensibility.
so influences. the way i found out about sam was a reading i did with him a couple weeks ago. before the reading, somebody told me he was like a gritty padgett powell. that was a high compliment and he deserved it. there are also elements of hannah, carver, salinger, and flannery o’connor in there, yet like i said, he makes it his. what i particularly like about this is the number of southern influences — there is a degree to which he seems to have taken the southern gothic and infused it with a (usually) northern setting and sensibility. the title story, for example, could be an alternate take on o’connor’s “a good man is hard to find” if the family in the latter never got out of the car.
one of the reasons i rambled on about adolescents and books above is because there’s a kind of palpable nostalgia in this book, and it matches up in many ways with my own nostalgia. for one, there’s a series of stories revolving around a single character — nikki — set in the early 90s, and these stories contain well-integrated references to the indie music and culture of that era, as well as a heavy emphasis on travel narrative (like kerouac updated, with all the energy but without the overindulgence that made me write off the beats for so long) and disaffected youth (a la salinger, without the priveleged whininess of holden and the glass family) (i’m fine with their priveleged whininess in the context of salinger, by the way).
when i was seventeen thirteen
i tend not to give into nostalgia very much, though, and i tend to fault writers who do. maybe nostalgia is the wrong word. maybe i should call this particular story cycle historical fiction, just that it’s about a period in history i lived through.
in any case, while the nikki stories are good, and they seem to be the focus of much of the writing i’ve found about drift and swerve, i don’t think they’re the strongest or most surprising stories in the collection.
for me, those would actually be what i would call the “relationship stories.”
my friends know that i’m no great fan of carver, but i would guess sam ligon is. while i like carver’s prose style (at least in the lish volumes), i think the events (or complete lack of events) in his stories smother the form. ligon transcends (for me) this problem by starting from similar premises — a man in a stagnant marriage becomes obsessed with the kids who are vandalizing his front yard; three couples have an uncomfortable dinner party — but brings them to engaging conclusions (i won’t totally spoil them, but one leads to accidental death and another to revelation of a possible rape).
stylewise, what i like about this collection is that ligon is daring, but not flashy. the writing is strong throughout, and each story varies in tone, perspective, etc, which is really refreshing giving that most collections read like the same story over and over again. but what i really like is the kind of skewed angle ligon approaches his subjects from. here is a passage from the story “germans” in which the character henry, adjusting to his family’s move to michigan, thinks about his stillborn brother:
Now that he was almost nine Henry knew that the baby was dead, but he still thought of him wandering around New Jersey, lost. Maybe under the big beer bottle in Newark, as tall as a smokestack, that they passed on the way to his grandmother’s house in Connecticut. And each move seemed to make it less likely that the baby would ever be found. Like if he’d somehow made it to Baltimore, crawling along the beltway, there was no way he’d find them here.
first it’s an interesting take, worthy of both a good author (ligon) and a nine year old boy (henry — i particularly like how it’s not cutesy). but then there are also subtle perspective shifts in the paragraph. the use of the passive voice in the penultimate sentence i quoted is totally justified and a sophisticated way of negotiating the close third person.
so like i said i was surprised. i can’t believe no one had told me about this book before. now i’m telling you. go be surprised.
what i said was that the title story was like if padgett powell was way more fucked up.
that’s what i said.
yr piece on the colony is great.
i want to hug you.
ok. sorry if i misunderstood that, then. still i think we agree. anyway, hugs back.
no we totally agree.
i just wanted the record to be straight.
just like my sexual orientation.
bam.