one of the things about me is i have to finish the books i read. with novels that means straight through in a reasonable amount of time, even if sometimes i break in to read a story or some poems or even a shorter novel in the middle of it. with collections it’s actually a little trickier. i’ve mentioned before that i’ll try to drag out a collection i’m enjoying by an author i trust (for example, i still have one story to go in george saunders’s in persuasion nation), but with authors i’m unfamiliar with, i usually read collections quickly, for one of two reasons:
- the book is rocking me, or at least compelling me to read on, or
- the book is terrible but, like i said, i have a compulsion to finish the books i start
also, i read stories consecutively because i assume there’s a reason they’re in the order they’re in. think of it as the old album versus itunes argument. itunes serves its purpose (like publishing one-offs in journals and online does), but listening to a whole album, if it’s a good album, is a more powerful experience. i know i sound like an old man, a very wise old man with impeccable taste.
my brother and i used to make lists of every hip hop album that was excellent all the way through. these lists were always very short, but the best of them were greater than the sum of their parts. think gza’s liquid swords. i don’t know if any individual song on it would make my list of the top-ten rap singles of all time, but the album is far and away the best ever in hip hop and probably the best of its decade in any genre.
to apply this logic to short story collections, think brian evenson. a lot of his stuff, particularly his earlier stuff, can be so shocking as to seem almost splatter porn. as i worked my way through altmann’s tongue, i often questioned whether there was any redeeming value to certain of the stories, beyond the undeniable fact of evenson’s virtuosity (which would have justified the reading, but wouldn’t have placed him among the best writers of his generation), but by the end, it was clear to me that there was more than just beautiful descriptions of violence, that evenson was using them as means to, if not a moralistic, at least a philosophic, in an exploratory sense, end.
what was i getting at, anyway?
i’m thinking about these things a lot because me and the featherproof fellas are in the process of setting the awful possibilities in their final order.
go back and read that little list at the top.
i’ve read one of each type recently.
i don’t want to talk about the book of the latter type except to say these rules:
killer instinct
- quit making every story sound and be exactly the same. you’re not developing a fictional voice, you’re just fucking boring, and worse, demonstrating competence. one time this editor asked me to write a story and i wrote the story and then he edited the hell out of it. his edits were good. he edited it into a good story, a “competent” story. the thing is, i didn’t want it to be a good story, i wanted it to sound like what the narrator of the story would write. it was about a white high school kid in iowa who’s planning a school shooting because his brother is indoctrinating him with black nationalist ideology in an attempt to start a revolution. that kid’s voice should not sound like the voice in a “well-made story.”
- twenty-somethings can not be world-weary. okay, there are probably a handful of world-weary twenty-somethings, but here’s what i think — i think you went to grad school and studied under somebody who went to grad school and studied under somebody who went to grad school and studied under somebody middle-aged or older, who was maybe world-weary and maybe even had a reason to be, and who wrote about characters who were world-weary and had a reason to be. i’m making up a new insult. i’m gonna call writers who do shit like this “A students.” i was describing this phenomenon to a friend at the coffee shop today and he said a sentence fragment, which was “second divorce.” exactly. you know what’s sillier than a story about a world-weary twenty-something getting a second divorce with an air of stoic despair? a whole collection of them.
- do not have a thing. at college, there was this girl who had purple hair and wore purple every day. also there was a guy who wrote in marker on his t-shirts. each had a thing. do you really want to be compared to t-shirt boy and purple girl? i understand that this one can be tougher because part of getting books out there is marketing. when i was doing interviews for we go liquid, everybody wanted to talk to me about how the internet was affecting our lives. you just have to answer the questions. but that’s a lot different than randomly putting something in each story and pretending it gives your collection a theme.
this would be a good time to end the rules and move on to an example of the former kind of collection, the kind that rocks me or compels me to read on.
i was rocked and compelled to read on by lydia millet’s love in infant monkeys, which is funny, because you could argue that the collection breaks that last rule, that it has a “thing.” here’s the thing of it — each story (except for the last, which is a very pretty fable) pairs at least one animal with at least one public figure. take this title for example: “chomsky with rodents.”
this is a thing that’s been done a few times lately, and i think it’s interesting but potentially problematic. like john haskell’s i am not jackson pollock (and this is interesting because there’s even a topical overlap between a story in this collection and millet’s) or shelley jackson’s the melancholy of anatomy. both have very good — even brilliant — stories in them, but they also have at least as many stories in them that seem to have been written to pad the collection, to make a whole collection with the same theme.
this is a problem that millet does not have. every story is at least very good. in this sense, she transcends having a thing to have a theme, an accomplishment in itself, since it’s the first time i’ve seen it work.
there are, of course, fluctuations in quality. i was a little nervous after reading the first story, “sexing the pheasant” (which is about madonna on a pheasant hunt), that millet was playing for cheap laughs, but i decided that placing the story first must have been her way of easing the reader into the collection.
i decided this because it was followed by a really beautiful story called “girl and giraffe.” it’s about george adamson, one of the subjects of his wife’s book born free. born free is about the adamson’s and their lion. girl and giraffe is also about a lion, a lion named girl. the story tells about a hunting trip adamson (george, i mean) takes girl on where, before killing a giraffe foal, girl lies down and lets it play for a while. after girl kills the giraffe, we get this:
Later, he said, he almost believed he had dreamed the episode. But he came to believe, over the years, that a call and answer had passed between Girl and the giraffe: the foal had asked for, and been granted, reprieve. Girl had given him a whole afternoon in which to feel the thorny branches and leaves in his mouth, the sun and shade cross his neck, his heavy lashes blink in the air.
It was a free afternoon, because all afternoon the foal had been free of the past and free of the future. Completely free.
here are the things i like about this passage:
first, obviously, the teleological notion of freedom here. it describes the only scenario i can imagine in which complete freedom is not the terrifying thing (instead, impending death is the potentially terrifying thing that gives freedom its beauty). that’s what jumped out at me when i read it.
but then if you look at the prose, it’s really interesting, even if it doesn’t announce itself that way. i like repetition. i mean, i really like it. but i didn’t notice at first that the word free was used four times in one sentence and a fragment. it seems somehow economical, like in this case repetition is the best way to get the point across succinctly.
also the use of the words “cross” and “blink” in the lyrical sentence that ends that first paragraph. the first verb in the descriptive series is “feel,” so rather than make gerunds of the following verbs, which i think most writers would have done, millet uses parallel forms throughout the sentence. it’s not flashy, but it’s distinct.
i need to figure out more about lydia millet. i suspect she might be a major (as in ability and accomplishment, not reputation) writer, but the bookstores around here only have a slim novel with the same title as a will self book i didn’t much like (though i often like will self), so i’ll keep looking around.
“Do not have a thing” is some of the best writing (and life) advice I’ve ever heard. It’s right up there with “Don’t be that guy.”