The Awful Possibilities

levin  reminds me i’m not posting much. thank you, adam.

i haven’t been posting much because i’ve been reading vanity fair, the novel. filling in some gaps because i was more of a continental-type back in the syllabus days. it’s nice but not a life changer. almost done. not gonna write about it.

i read a grip of shorter books in between big chunks of thackeray. one of them was lydia millet’s love in infant monkeys, but i want to think about that one some more and maybe reread some of it before i put my take up. others were crap and i don’t feel like talking about them. but also there was this novella by mario bellatin called beauty salon.

i’m a little jealous of beauty salon, not in the good way (would kill to have written it), but not in a bad way (why did anyone publish this bullshit when i have to bust my ass to get a book out there), either. more like, this is a good little book, beautifully designed, would fit in your pocket except you don’t want to shove it in there because it’s so fancy.

that’s actually a little bit of a problem, because the fanciness is, i assume, part of the reason i had to pay 11 bux for a 64 page book. city lights — didn’t you used to be punk rock? i’d rather have a good read at a good price than uv coating.

anyway, i found out about bellatin from this article in the ny times a couple months back. it did a great job of making it sound like he was some kind of hidden genius of the magnitude of bolano and i was missing out by not reading him and never having heard of him. i was missing out; he is not a genius of the magnitude of bolano.

also, i was distracted by the incredible picture that accompanied the article. apparently the guy is missing a hand and decorates the stump with designer hooks. this comment stands in for a picture.

okay, enough of the flash.

beauty salon is a good book. it’s about a guy who runs a beauty salon and decorates the beauty salon with exotic fish. when not running the beauty salon he and his friends dress up like women and go to the park and turn tricks. then a plague hits the city he lives in and he turns the salon into a hospice for men. it’s told in the first person in the time of the plague, and all of the stuff about hairdressing, fish, and prostitution is reminiscence, except for the fish part — some of the uglier, hardier ones (guppies) manage to hang on throughout.

abstracted this way, the book looks a lot like an allegory for the aids crisis. over the course of its 64 pages it also looks a lot like an allegory for the aids crisis.

“allegory” has become a bad word in recent years, i think. like “fairy tale” without all the whimsy and charm everybody loves.

the strength of beauty salon, i think, is that it is unapologetically allegorical and still very good. part of the reason it’s good is the prose (assuming that kurt hollander’s is a good translation), which is subtle and even blank, but not cold. another part of the reason it’s good is the fact that it has none of that whimsy and charm everybody loves. but the most effective thing about it — what sets it apart from most of the other plague allegories i’ve read — is the perspective. here is a little passage that stuck out, and which i think illustrates what i’m getting at:

In the Terminal they were guaranteed a bed, a bowl of soup, and the company of all the other dying people. If the guest was conscious or, even better, if he was able to move around, he could help out, morally as well as physically. The physical help, truth be told, was very sporadic. That only happened when a guest suffered a sudden, temporary recovery, since I made a point of only accepting those who had almost no life left in them.

the first sentence does a good job of expressing the narrator’s lack of sentimentality (“all of the other dying people” sounds resigned without sounding callous). the “even better” in the second sentence escalates the take, because it isn’t an evaluation of the patient’s quality of life so much as an estimation of his utility to the narrator (and the “morally” is an interesting addition, meant to apply to morale, but signifying uniquely if you do read this as an aids allegory, aids having been one of those diseases that was — and is, i think — treated by some as a moral battleground). (obviously i can’t say whether this pun works en espagnol.) but it’s the phrase “suffered a sudden, temporary recovery” that really clinches for me. sure, it’s another pun (suffer meaning to undergo, but much more commonly to undergo pain, the second meaning being the one that most contemporary readers, i think, would initially take from it) that i can’t be sure was intended by the author (though in this case it would be totally irresponsible of hollander to use it if it wasn’t in the original when so many less loaded terms are available), but it rocked me in english.

so yes, like i said, it’s an allegory, but it’s unsentimental, and that keeps the narrator an enigma. he’s as selfish as he is a “hero,” and the book itself doesn’t judge its teller, which is refreshing.

i would probably be raving about beauty salon if it had cost me between 5 and 7 dollars. i would like to propose that someone start publishing more books like this in a chunky, saddle-stapled chapbook format (similar to that of some philosophy classics i’ve seen). also, city lights, and hell, new directions and everybody else — it’s admirable of you to bring translated works to us rubes, but americans also write books of this length.

hint.

some things i wanted you to know –

good friend david gruber emailed to tell me that astrophil press is holding a poetry contest for a first or second book. the winner will be chosen by awesome poet eleni sikelianos. astrophil press is run by my old labelmate/excellent novelist duncan barlow, and he’s a stand-up fellow who is doing good things with books, so why don’t you go on and send him your best manuscript? details here.

while you’re over there, why don’t you pick up david’s book, sleepers’ republic. trust me, someday the swedes are going to realize the folly of their ways and start awarding the nobel prize to americans again. this will happen sometime around 2033. by then, david will be in contention and your first edition copy of his first book will be very valuable. i guarantee it. (and don’t come at me with your print is dead bullshit. it smells too good to go away. print, not bullshit.)

thanks for noticing.

finally, maybe i should tell you that there is stuff by me in the lamination colony “this is not not a contest” issue? that the stuff by me is a hint of what will be in that collection of short stories i keep mentioning? that there is stuff by bobby alter, mark doten, james chapman, mel bosworth, darby larson, sasha fletcher, drew kalbach, andrew borgstrom, and ben segal, too? and it’s free? all of the above. go see.

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.