Story Sundays: “Jane” by McKinley M. Hellenes

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Jane, McKinley M. Hellenes, Story Sunday, This Reading Life

McKinley M. Hellenes

“She is a conventional woman — though she likes to imagine that she hasn’t always been, that once she wasn’t. She was something else, something bolder and guileless. Was she ever guileless? Was she ever bold? She doesn’t remember. Even now, out of the house and slinking her way through the night, she doesn’t feel bold. She feels nothing more than she ever does. She could be anywhere right now, doing anything but what she is actually planning to do.”

A woman goes in search of something one night, after the neatly ordered emblems of her suburban life are tucked away. She takes no one with her. She tells no one where she’s gone. Her purpose is best known to herself, and as she stealthily trawls the city streets for the object of her compulsion and fascination, it seems more than likely that she will encounter it… and encounter it, she does. Once the woman, this unassuming wife and mother, takes the male prostitute to bed, you’d be thinking that the goal of the story has been accomplished, with a few vigorous flesh-tangles and a nostalgic memory stamped into a bored homemaker’s carnal scrapbook. Not so… not when Hellenes is the one holding your attention rapt with each new paragraph, with each sleight of hand prose flourish.

Avid perspicacity in detailing marks every turn of the story’s progression. The writer imbues the most apparently mundane of images, such as the glow from a television screen, with surprising vitality. In so doing, the tv’s glare becomes an “auroral coruscation”, the comforting security of a vehicle is glimpsed as “a chrysalis of steel and tempered glass.” This isn’t verbosity so much as it is prose, given space to consider alternative workday outfits, descriptions that don top hats, similes that barely recognize themselves in their new and unaccustomed lustre. Hellenes polishes language with care, with a steadfast eye and ear for both the visual and auditory occupation of storytelling. When you combine this solicitude with a style that flows both compellingly and naturally, you receive lines like these, detailing the narrator’s steeling of resolve before she approaches the young man.

“She rolls down her window a few inches, like opening a letterbox in a door, and waits. Her heart is beating hard, but in slow-motion, like it is hesitating, deciding whether to keep on going or not each time it floods with a shipment of her blood.”

Duality of perspective can be a tricky navigation in short fiction, if one is aiming for a certain equanimity in voice, and even if one isn’t. If I was nervous about being privy to the prostitute’s train of thought, that concern evaporated within the opening syllables of the window into his consciousness. Indeed, seeing the assignation from his mind as well as hers brought a chorus of musings singing to the surface, not least among them this: that people who conduct sexual transactions, whether money is involved or not, never do so with just each other. There are always any number of spectres, sitting on the edge of the creaking bed, even if they’re never acknowledged (and really, maybe your backstory burns harder in your throat with the effort of having to keep it silent). The precious few words he shares with the woman, compared to the jungle thicket of his thoughts, are testimony to the truth, and usefulness, of some people knowing the deep value of silence, of how much we can hold, how little we ever need to grant.

From the top of the glimmering treasure cache of aspects I love best in this story, the following shines most undeniably: this story will make you investigate your own strongly or loosely held belief systems. I struggle with short fiction that paints a thick swathe of supposedly artful moralizing into its corridors of pseudo-subtext — you know, like a bitterly aching bit about a trip to the abortionist that’s glad-handingly strewn with pro-life sycophancy? Or an oppressive pamphlet piece detailing the cloistered sexploits of two nuns, signalling the erotic dangers of mono-gendered religious life? The problem, it seems to me, is that most writers have already decided, before they’ve written “Once upon a time…”, how they’d prefer you felt about the moral spine of their fiction. Writers like Hellenes merit respect for, well, the respect they confer on their readers. Stories such as “Jane” seem to declare nothing so strongly as: this is life. We live it gracelessly, spontaneously, messily, even when we’re struggling to be cautious. No one is immune to the daily poison or elixir of human interaction. Not everyone gets saved; very few are ever sainted. We can die, and be resurrected, on every stroke of the clock.

Reading “Jane” is a fresh, wrist-grippingly acute reminder of the fact that, though Hellenes undoubtedly is, not every writer of prose is a good writer of short fiction. If you’ve read spellbinding short stories, you’ll know that what’s needed are a different combination of tools from the same craftswoman’s lair — similar instruments, cunningly and piercingly reconfigured. Never trust a novelist who laughs off the challenges of honing a piece for brevity, paring it for tension, lining it with carefully coiled images, mistressing the necessity of each important word, of no trivial elements. It’s the job of the short story writer to ensorcell you in seconds, to ravish your creative nape with a million ink kisses, all bound up in the promise of the opening lines. Hellenes does this. It’s bewitchingly easy enough to think that the author has taken us down these furtive, dimly lit city pavements an entire, stuffed walletful of times. We feel like we’ve already made the journey with our narrator, crouched low in her armoured automotive titan, knuckles gleaming with a brand of audacious trepidation. “Jane” gives us the chance to huddle in the backseat, or to embody the narrator herself, to carefully lay out the crisp offering of hundred dollar bills on the nightstand, to figure out how much of the night we can safely hoard in our post-modern adventuresses’ hearts.

You can read “Jane” by McKinley M. Hellenes here. (This Reading Life)

Story Sundays was created by Fat Books and Thin Women as a way to share appreciation for this undervalued fiction form. All stories discussed are available to read free, online. Here’s Fat Books and Thin Women’s Story Sunday archive, and here’s mine. Want to start up Story Sundays on your blog? Yay! Email story.sundaysATgmail.com for details.

28. Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan

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David Levithan, Dutton Books, Fiction, John Green, Novel, Review, Will Grayson Will Grayson

Published in 2010 by Dutton Books.

When I first saw Will Grayson, Will Grayson, winking at me from the hardcover bookshelves, I don’t know why I thought it would be science fiction. Perhaps it was the prismatic, kaleidoscopic-reminiscent imagery on the front cover that made me imagine interstellar journeys. Even when I read the front jacket cover’s blurb, the description of fate, delivering both Will Graysons to the same surprising crossroads, led me to conjure up non-terrestrial possibilities. As I read on, I realized that the novel was decidedly non-speculative… but not an iota less fantastic.

Will Grayson, probably best known to his fellow high schoolers as loyal friend to the irrepressible, unabashedly gay Tiny Cooper, has curated a couple simple rules for getting through life relatively unscathed. They are: “1. Don’t care too much. 2. Shut up.” Both devoted to his friend and increasingly bemused by him, Will finds himself struggling to make sense of his role in the shadows that Tiny’s larger than life influence casts. His uncertainty only seems to mount as he wrestles with inconvenient feelings for a girl he maybe likes, maybe doesn’t: she of the quiet cleverness, the parallel music-crush on Neutral Milk Hotel, and the ultra-awesome smile, Jane. In another school, another Chicago town, will grayson, anti-capital letter user, anti-everything-ist, makes it through the tedium of his days by way of furtive online conversations with isaac, a guy he’s never met in person, a guy who gets will on every seeming level of importance. will keeps isaac a solemn secret, even from his more-or-less best friend, maura, a goth girl whose dependence on will runs deeper than he can initially suspect. Will Grayson and will grayson are seeking out entirely different things when their paths converge in the unlikeliest, potentially most scandalous of places, and their lives take on unimagined dimensions, expanding to include new allegiances, bewildering affections, heart-singing revelations… and the most bejewelled, glitteringly decked out high school musical of All Time.

This is a laudable book for many reasons, principal among them the ways in which it de-exoticizes the story of the gay high school student. I expect that there’ll be some opposition to this notion. “Who could be a more outlandish character than Tiny Cooper?” one might ask. It’s true; they don’t get much more delightfully camp, more technicoloured-in with non-heteronormative pride than Tiny does. He revels in his romantic and lifestyle choices, and makes no apologies for them… but this, the authors seem to be saying, isn’t even strictly the point. The point resides in the suggestion that Tiny needn’t be an anomaly, that writing about the lives and loves of any number of Tinys should really be par for the course in capturing the richness and diversity of the young adult’s life, gay, straight, bisexual or otherwise inclined. Tiny himself, in a candid conversation with will grayson, puts it best:

“tiny: you know what? i’m totally at peace with being big-boned. and i was gay before i knew what sex was. it’s just who i am, and that’s great. i don’t want to be thin or conventionally beautiful or straight or brilliant. no, what i really want – is to be appreciated.”

It isn’t just Tiny who struggles with the desire to be embraced for who he is, for what he brings to the table – every character of note, including but not limited to the Wills – feels this instinct deeply. In fact, they feel all their feelings deeply, and the authors never shy away from documenting those feelings with grace, humour and irrepressible honesty. Here’s an example of that unflinching candour from will grayson, as he contemplates Tiny’s declaration of a necessary “mental health day”.

“i think the idea of a ‘mental health day is something completely invented by people who have no clue what it’s like to have bad mental health. the idea that your mind can be aired out in twenty-four hours is kind of like saying heart disease can be cured if you eat the right breakfast cereal. mental health days only exist for people who have the luxury of saying ‘i don’t want to deal with things today’ and then can take the whole day off, while the rest of us are stuck fighting the fights we always fight, with no one really caring one way or another, unless we choose to bring a gun to school or ruin the morning announcements with a suicide.”

The truly beautiful thing? So much of the book is this refreshingly forthright, no matter which Will is narrating. I read Will Grayson, Will Grayson like a nostalgic primer on what it felt like to be marginalized, misunderstood, poorly-quoted, confused, sexually uncertain and bursting with a thousand intense ideas, in my teenage years. Green and Levithan don’t, to their credit, ever explicitly state that your life becomes better when you become an adult. They don’t even pretend that the things you cared about when you’re a teenager will evanesce in importance when you’re saddled with a full-time job and greying hairs. They concentrate on the absolute, inviolable sanctity of your God/dess and the Universe-given right to feel the feelings you’re feeling, no excuses, no regrets. There’s no need to sweep those passionate outbursts beneath the rug, no need to objectify your silences, be they awkward or serene: every bit of you, young person, is valid, has meaning, is worth something on this planet.

In a genre of literature stifled with romantic considerations, (many of them poorly worked out and dubiously contextualized) a book like this is a saving grace. There are concerns of the heart in these pages, to be sure – how the heart breaks, how the heart resists love while plummeting towards it, how the heart seeks like-beating hearts out… but the novel’s epicentre isn’t carnally-propelled, and this is a relief. It would be more accurate to say that the writers throw themselves into tides and currents of the whole heart, not just the chamber that pines for a boyfriend or girlfriend. These are affairs of the heart in their baffling, million moods per minute-ness, making this book required reading for young adults, and those who know that being boldly and beautifully sixteen is just a state of mind away.

Story Sundays: “What You Pawn I Will Redeem” by Sherman Alexie

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Sherman Alexie, Story Sunday, The New Yorker, What You Pawn I Will Redeem

Sherman Alexie

If you’ve been keeping tabs on my Story Sunday posts, you’ll know that I’ve been on something of a hiatus. It wasn’t that I didn’t have brilliant, heartbreaking, resurrecting short stories about which to gush; I did, and I do. This story, in fact, has been at the top of that particular list for several months. I fell in love with Sherman Alexie on the basis of this one story, and everything I’ve read by him since has only confirmed my feverish adulation.

You could think of this entire tale as a curious, quirky escapade with the Lost and Found department of life, and you’d not be far off the mark. It centres on the misadventures of Jackson Jackson, a tragicomically titled Spokane Indian who stumbles across his grandmother’s long-lost powwow-dance regalia in the window of a Seattle pawnshop. Woefully bereft of financial resources with which to purchase it from the shopkeeper, Jackson Squared sets out to earn, beg, borrow and/or magick the money (nine hundred and ninety nine dollars, to be precise), in just one day.

Alexie manages with Jackson Squared, in the space of eight pages or so, more than some writers can achieve with their protagonists in three volumes. We’re never quite sure what to make of him, this hilarious, downtrodden, disarmingly pragmatic drifter who, in the story’s opening paragraphs, says of himself:

“I’ve broken a few hearts in my time, but we’ve all done that, so I’m nothing special in that regard. I’m a boring heartbreaker, too. I never dated or married more than one woman at a time. I didn’t break hearts into pieces overnight. I broke them slowly and carefully. And I didn’t set any land-speed records running out the door. Piece by piece, I disappeared. I’ve been disappearing ever since.”

Jackson’s epic, 24-hours-or-less quest reads like an anti-Galahad’s peregrination, his own personal Grail wrapped up in years of deprivation, cultural sidelining, in a certain inured thick-skinnedness that grows from someone understanding his place in the world. Yet for all that potentially suffocating bleakness, this story is more complex, more delicately modulated with grey areas, than to be thought of as a simple indemnification against Caucasian hegemony. It isn’t so clear-cut, Alexie seems to be urging us, as “Down with the paleface!”, though, certainly, if there are threads of that sentiment woven into the narrative, the author doesn’t shy away from them. There are contemplations of the fate/state of the First Nation peoples that are so bitterly steeped in the darkest humour that you’ll wonder whether you’re clever, or cruel, for bursting out in laughter. Here is one such instance, in which Jackson is amicably interrogated by a policeman friend, who finds the former decidedly worse for wear after a night of drunken carousing that’s gone awry.

“He walked around the car and sat in the driver’s seat. “I’m taking you over to detox,” he said.

“No, man, that place is awful,” I said. “It’s full of drunk Indians.” We laughed. He drove away from the docks.

“I don’t know how you guys do it,” he said.

“What guys?” I asked.

“You Indians. How the hell do you laugh so much? I just picked your ass off the railroad tracks, and you’re making jokes. Why the hell do you do that?”

“The two funniest tribes I’ve ever been around are Indians and Jews, so I guess that says something about the inherent humor of genocide.”

We laughed.”

As you’ve likely surmised by now, Jackson Squared is hardly the noblest narrator you’ll encounter. As I did, you might find yourself musing from time to time on how much he deserves to inherit his deceased grandmother’s regalia, after all. You might not admire him, in the final analysis, or want to emulate his series of patchwork-quilted life decisions… but my goodness, how you’ll want to root for him. Keeping faith with Jackson seems like casting your bets for the ultimate, endearing/bemusing underdog.

I’ve read this story more than twenty times now, and with each fresh visitation I find new lines to love, new perspectives to consider, fascinating and aching hypotheticals to mull over. This isn’t the politically correct tale of the noble savage that mainstream media has come to endorse through laziness and misinformation. Shiftily romantic stereotypes found wandering through Alexie’s prose are shot on sight, ribboned with rapier-sharp witticisms, with an unflinching eye that tends towards truth. Alexie’s prose is one of the best compasses for contemporary storytelling that I’ve ever read, and I shall eagerly follow it over the horizon, hoping, like Jackson Squared, that each day brings with it a little more redemption, a little more illuminating grace, a little more food money and fighting chances than the last.

You can read “What You Pawn I Will Redeem” by Sherman Alexie here. (The New Yorker)

Story Sundays was created by Fat Books and Thin Women as a way to share appreciation for this undervalued fiction form. All stories discussed are available to read free, online. Here’s Fat Books and Thin Women’s Story Sunday archive, and here’s mine. Want to start up Story Sundays on your blog? Yay! Email story.sundaysATgmail.com for details.

Talking with Lisa Allen-Agostini about The Allen Prize for Young Writers

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Bocas Lit Fest 2012, Lisa Allen-Agostini, The Allen Prize for Young Writers

Lisa Allen-Agostini. Photo: Richard Acosta

I tell her I’ve been writing since I was 11. A strange thing happens to me when Lisa Allen-Agostini then puts this pointed, precise question to me during our mid-Bocas Festival conversation:

“How did you feel, at 11, as a young writer, beginning to discover your own voice?”

The truth? It was as terrifying as it was liberating. I realized, with the retroactive shock of absolute clarity, of just how isolated I was in my pre-adolescent writing world, of how much I longed, without even articulating it specifically to myself, of someone to let me know: what you’re doing is valid. It isn’t a waste of time. Thankfully, I had my mother’s incredible support in my writing life, as the years went by, but nothing compensates for that 11 year old girl’s absolute uncertainty, her silent, shy worries. I had my mother, and Lisa’s children have her, but we both acknowledge grimly: thousands upon thousands of our nation’s budding writers have had, for so long, no one… and this is the void that The Allen Prize for Young Writers seeks to fill.

“There was no guesswork over my writing ambitions”, Lisa tells me… just as much as there’s been no guesswork about her commitment to furthering the hopes and dreams of young authors and poets. Her love of children’s books has stood her in good stead throughout her life; it didn’t taper off when she became an adult. It’s important to remember the distinction, too, between writing for children, and writing by children, she reminds me. I’ve got to nod in recognition of this, as I know that the latter category often faces severe ordeals in being legitimized, to say nothing of published. This is why initiatives like the well-stocked NGC Bocas Lit Fest’s Children’s Programme bring Lisa joy – because they help mark a clear path forward. The fact that the 16-story collection, Children’s Stories from the Bocas Lit Fest 2011, is available for purchase nationwide: this is significant, too, but how much notice does it receive in our local media? How many good stories do we tell about young people reading and writing, and seeking to script out a future from their passion for literature and storytelling?

Lisa and the winning Allen Prize writers of 2011, at the awards ceremony on the 29th.

The galvanizing moment in Lisa’s writing career came when she won Clico’s annual Put it in Poetry Competition for secondary school students. (Sadly, the prize is no longer active.) The win signalled to her the beginning of infinite possibilities she could imagine for herself and her work. It’s that strength of imagination she hopes to share with The Allen Prize program participants. The foundation is about much more than the bestowing of a cash prize, though that’s one of its highlights. It hosts annual, intensive workshops with established writers in mentorship roles, as well as three seminars yearly, which address multiple aspects of a young writer’s craft, process and everyday concerns. As telling testimony to the practicalities of the program, The Allen Prize also guides and facilitates the potential publication, staging and transmission of participants’ completed works, enabling fresh, promising talent to forge significant relationships that can well last a lifetime.

Lisa and I discuss the worrying dearth of regional young adult fiction, a bemusing irony when one considers the vast popularity of that particular genre in worldwide publishing. We chuckle irreverently over what, to us, seems like the lacklustre presentation (though we use much meaner terms to describe it!) of Caribbean literature in most Trinidadian bookshops (with the notable exception of a special few, such as Joan Dayal’s Paper Based Bookshop at The Normandie). Frankly, Lisa’s tired of Caribbean literature getting the short end of the stick… within the Caribbean, no less, and what gets her hackles up is the underrepresentation paid to young writers in particular. All the better, then, that one of the festival highlights this year celebrated The Allen Prize for Young Writers, rewarding the talent and ambition of our upcoming who’s who in all things local and literary. Held on the last day of full festival activities, the event was a well-attended, inspiring success, and will hopefully serve to draw even more reluctant young writers out from beneath their sequestered stairwells, showing them – look, it’s okay to fully and unapologetically embrace your dreams.

“When I get an idea, an idea worth pursuing, you can be certain that I’ll follow it,” Lisa smiles, and I think I speak for most people when I say that Trinidad and Tobago is the better for Lisa’s unflinching persistence, her fierce dedication which proves that the best stories can be scripted with pencils and crayons just as well as they can with an exclusively adult pen.

For more information on the work that The Allen Prize for Young Writers does, visit their official website, as well as their frequently-updated Facebook page.

Group photo by Rodell Warner, our official 2012 Festival photographer.

Paper Based: 25 Years of Bookselling Excellence

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Bocas Lit Fest 2012, Joan Dayal, Paper Based Bookshop

This year's shortlisted titles (bottom row) on display in the bookshop window!

A few days before the adrenaline high of the 2012 NGC Bocas Lit Fest was launched, I had the opportunity to sit in the lobby of the Hotel Normandie with Joan Dayal, the proprietress of Paper Based Bookshop, which occupies a cozy nook of the hotel foyer. It’s a little disconcerting to me that more Trinbagonians don’t know about Joan and her shop, which is one of the reasons I felt compelled to interview her in the first place. Paper Based shouldn’t be a well-kept secret, as romantic as that notion seems… it is a supportive bastion for all things Caribbean and literary. Really, when one thinks of acquiring the next Earl Lovelace novel, or the upcoming release from a promising, fresh regional talent, Paper Based is the place to turn, first.

The heart of what fuels a business founded in books, Joan tells me, is a love of reading. She’s quick to add that many other pragmatic concerns must run alongside this bibliophilia, otherwise one might find oneself at the helm of a sinking ship. Thankfully, that sort of demise seems never to have been on the cards for Joan, who runs her establishment with generous helpings of acumen, of a keen investment in the literary pulse of the people, of a solid commitment to research in reading trends. She has kept in touch with what readers want to read, with how readers appreciate the feel of a bookshop that’s not mired in profit margins, in a way that I daresay larger conglomerate booksellers tend to miss.

Gorgeous ARC magazines proudly preening!

Joan and Paper Based’s loyalty to the Bocas Lit Fest has its roots in the very reception of the idea of an inclusive literary festival on these shores. She tells me of her early talks with festival director Marina Salandy-Brown, wherein the two lamented the dearth of ground-level, home-brewed celebrations of our islands’ writers, readers and publishers. What distinguishes their conversations from so many that are had, cross-island, about the state of local literary appreciation, is that Salandy-Brown, along with a core collective of supportive individuals (of which Joan is and continues to be a proud member) purposed to actually do something about it. The result is what we’re currently enjoying – four unfettered days and nights of bookish delight, and a festival calendar that extends far beyond this event-crammed long weekend. Joan is visibly proud when she speaks of Paper Based’s role as the festival’s booksellers’ coordinator. I imagine of how difficult it would be to encounter this warm enthusiasm in an impersonal, unapologetically commercial paperback pusher, and, even mid-interview, I’m flooded with gratitude for the very existence of Paper Based – a telling marker that Joan is doing multiple things right, in an age where brick and mortar bookstores are literally crumbling beneath the yoke of financial sustainability, both home and abroad. Times are hard, we both agree… but the people keep reading.

As I’d hoped it would, my talk with Joan really runs the gamut. We muse on the evolving trends in publishing, principal among them the rapid ascent of the e-book’s popularity, of the fact that Kindles, Nooks and Kobos have become as indispensable as mobile phones to so many. We discuss the difficulties inherent in sourcing book orders from foreign countries, and the exorbitant costs of shipping, issues which have been aired at the inaugural meeting of the Caribbean Literature Action Group (CALAG), which convened one day before the festival launch. With bold, necessary initiatives like CALAG and the Bocas Lit Fest on the rise, the future seems bright for the world of Caribbean arts and letters, doesn’t it? In the midst of this, Joan reminds me, it’s important to continue encouraging our vibrantly promising talent, a mission to which Paper Based has dedicated itself over the years.

A certain book blogger poring over Rahul Bhattacharya's novel, The Sly Company of People Who Care.

A bookshop loved equally by both readers and writers, Paper Based held its 25^th anniversary celebrations on March 3^rd, to a deeply appreciative audience. Andre Bagoo, one of this year’s featured festival writers, had his work read by Barbara Jenkins and Jaime Bagoo. Other writers sharing their work included novelists Lawrence Scott (who read from his forthcoming poetry collection), prolific and celebrated author Earl Lovelace, winner of this year’s fiction category prize for Is Just A Movie, and poet-academic Jennifer Rahim. From every description I’ve heard of it, it sounds like it was a fantastic event, and I’m dreadfully sorry to have missed it. I’ve since resolved to make up for it by attending every single future Paper Based event that occurs while I’m present in Trinidad. Having been to a couple in the past, I can attest to the knowledge that they are a rare treat for those who enjoy author-reader interaction and stimulation.

It is quite impossible to wish someone like Joan Dayal anything but all the best, given her quiet generosity, her unflagging devotion to our regional arts, and her personal investment in our nation’s attitudes to reading, and so I wish her the bookish best, repeatedly! Here’s hoping that Joan and I can sit down in another twenty-five years, to chat once more about Paper Based’s rousing, and encouraging, successes.

Many thanks to Joan Dayal for her willingness to be interviewed, for her generosity in response and availability. This interview was originally posted on the Bocas Lit Fest blog. Photos by Keroy J. Chee Chow.

Paper Based Bookshop is located at The Normandie, 10 Nook Avenue, St. Anns, Trinidad. Its opening hours are Mon.-Fri.,10.00 – 18.00, and Sat.,10.00 – 16.00. To get in touch, you can call the shop, at +1 868.625.3197, email at paperbasedbookshop@gmail.com, and visit the well-updated Facebook page.

My 2012 Bocas Lit Fest Diary: Bocas’ Eve

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Bocas Lit Fest 2012

Last year, in April, at least an entire library of my bookish dreams became page-turning realities, when I attended, and blogged for, the 2011 Bocas Lit Fest. One of the best things about this year’s festival is that I have the chance to do it all over again.

Don’t misunderstand; even if I weren’t part of the merrily busy Bocas staff, I would be no less in love with this festival. I’d still be present at as many of the events as I could reasonably stuff into my day. I’d still leave home early in the morning, to return long past the sunset, weary, my mind still turning a thousand gears of creative hyperstimulation. I’d still be sitting on the amphitheatre steps of the Trinidad and Tobago National Library on the festival’s last day, thinking that the next Bocas can’t come too soon.

The fact that we’re celebrating a second Bocas should, I hope, put paid to the notion that an entire festival seeking to highlight the importance of books, reading and publishing is flighty, fanciful, or worse, non-sustainable. So much of what makes us of these islands has its genesis in a singular, inimitable style of storytelling. How can it be claimed that the honouring of Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora stories is unworthy of every effort we can make to keep sharing those tales?

I confess that one of the best curated memories I possess of last year’s Bocas was sitting outside the Old Fire Station, after a New Talent Showcase that featured the readings of an exciting voice in prose fiction, and a Cropper Foundation co-alumni, Alake Pilgrim. While speaking with her about her work, two schoolgirls strolled by, the trail end of their conversation within earshot.

Girl I: What it have going on here? Something was advertising in the papers, ent?

Girl II: I eh know, nah. I think might be some book thing, but I eh know. 

Perhaps it’s reactionary of me to be sad. I know that not everyone likes reading. Not every one thrills to the sight of writers they’ve only up until that point encountered in the pages of their favourite novels, their best-beloved poetry collections, their most fiercely defended non-fiction paperbacks. I’m not saying that the country should grind to a halt to take the Bocas Festival in… but it worries me that a basic awareness is lacking. It worries me that festivals like these, which seek, at their core, to be all-embracing, all-encompassing, generously ecumenical in outreach, instead often appear to be elitist, exclusive and esoteric fora wherein only red wine is sipped, where only Standard English is allowed. People… please, perish the thought.

I believe that, on Bocas’ Eve, if I want to transmit one message over all other messages about this celebration, it is this:

All are invited; all are welcome.

Let’s not be literary exclusivists at the 2012 NGC Bocas Lit Fest. Let’s be lovers of books. A full day of events kicks off bright and early at 9 am tomorrow. I hope to see you there, with your notepads/ novels for signing/ fresh enthusiasm in tow!

To learn more about the Bocas Lit Fest, visit the website, here.
For Thursday 26th April, 2012′s full schedule of events, visit here.
For Friday 27th April, 2012′s full schedule of events, visit here.
For Saturday, 28th April, 2012′s full schedule of events, visit here.
For Sunday, 29th April, 2012′s full schedule of events, visit here. 

Reading Ruminations: January to March 2012

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Reading Ruminations

Dear Novel Nichers,

Welcome to this, the first post of its kind, my introductory entry to a reading journal! I’ve been feeling for some time the desire to incorporate other aspects of book-loving to Novel Niche, to round out the palette of reading fare you can expect to encounter here. (This means that I’ll also be resuming the Charting Children’s Literature and Story Sunday features, soon, and with great enthusiasm.) I love the process of crafting a full-length review, but I reminded myself that there’s more to the bookish connection, and its sustenance, than an uninterrupted stream of those. I plan on sharing these reading retrospective rambles monthly, so since I’ve not done any for January and February, this month you get all three, sandwiched together! Without further ado…

January
Books Read: 5 

Ah, Swamplandia!… Karen Russell’s first novel and Novel Niche’s first full-length review of 2012. What an intriguing title with which to begin my reading year! From it, I was reminded of how much I adore ambitious moxy in storytelling, even when the results aren’t as pristine or polished as the clamouring critical crowd demands. I moved on from the Floridian bayou to the Middle Eastern markets and mosques of Distant View of a Minaret, by Alifa Rifaat, which I borrowed from the Tunapuna branch of my local library. Rifaat’s stories explored the ways in which traditionally devout Muslim women chafed against the yoke of what I recently described as “male hegemonic bastardry.” (Yes, I was a little emotively worked up, at the time.) These are important stories to have read, and I am glad I discovered them when I did. My reaction to them was complex and fragmented, which convinced me that this slim collection warrants a second reading before I review it.

Readers, I have long had the suspicion, ever since reading (and rereading, and rereading some more) “What You Pawn I Will Redeem”, that Sherman Alexie is one of my special literary boyfriends. (Shh, he doesn’t know about it just yet.) His young adult title, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, is one of the most essential reads of this year for me. It was harrowing and hilarious, jarring and jocund. I’m going to review this one, without a doubt. I also bought it, so in keeping with my 2012 bookish giveaway resolution, I’ll also be making a gift of it to someone. This time, it’ll be someone in particular, so stay tuned to find out who! Right on the heels of this read, I got intimately acquainted with the bloody, bruised slew of Fight Club references that have been sailing over my head for several years. This was my first Palahniuk (actually, it was Palahniuk’s first Palahniuk too, heh heh), and it’s only spurred me on to devour more of his work. The book was gritty, gorgeous and entirely too short, but more on that in a future review. I rounded January out with one of my Netgalley reads, the Mark Vonnegut memoir, Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So, bringing the full-length review tally for 2012 up to two, where it has stayed since. I never suspected I’d read a Mark Vonnegut before a Kurt, but that reaffirms my delight in the power of literary trajectories to surprise you.

February
Books Read: 2

This was a brief month for books; only two titles were read. I probably spent a lot more time planning which books I was going to read, and ended up reading… well, significantly less than I’d projected. I began the month with one of the titles my mother gave me for Christmas 2011, I Was Told There’d Be Cake, a collection of essays by smart, caustic-witted Sloane Crosley. A difficult read to place in my affections for a few reasons (which I’ll get into when I review it in full), but I found the book to be a chuckle-inducing stroll through humorous non-fiction, compared to the work of David Sedaris, but not quite at his altitude. The other book of February was the pictorial delight, Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret. It’s one I have returned to several times since reading, to pore over, to marvel at the contagious poetry of Selznick’s story, a story distilled through words and images with equal ebullience. I think of it as indispensable reading for all dreamers, designers, engineers and film enthusiasts, as well as for all those who enjoy the sensation of adventuring through a book, delighting in the journey and all it uncovers.

March
Books Read: 5

March’s figures match January’s, with a total of five books being read. The first of these was the feisty, nigh unputdownable Zoo City by Lauren Beukes, which I also consider to be my first speculative fiction read of 2012. Swamplandia! possesses hints and glimmers of the supernatural here and there, but Zoo City is all-out, unapologetic spec. fic. at its finest—and wow, does it ever work. The second title of March is classified beneath a sub-genre of spec. fic. called “weird fiction”, which, I admit, I’d not encountered before. You know when people describe the book they’re reading with the cautious preface, “Well, um, it isn’t for everyone…”—that description is tailored to books like this, Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. It’s rare for me to encounter a reading experience wherein most of the conclusions appear foregone, where you feel reasonably certain you won’t be surprised, to then brush up against goosebump-prickling passages, every other page. Weird fiction fans, and general admirers of non-orthodox tales, will, I think, agree that Jackson’s book is (literally) frightfully good.

My third read of March 2012 was a Netgalley-provided copy of Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, which in all likelihood will be the next book I review, given its prominence at the forefront of my thoughts. There is so much to say about this book. In my notes taken while reading, I remarked,

“Tron meets The Karate Kid meets a World of Warcraft raid, meets… a LAN Party!”

It will, I promise, make sense in my review, but if you’re even remotely intrigued, and if you were born in and identify with the 80s, and if you are even fractionally a self-avowed nerd… you should really read this book. Now. Yes, right now. The book I read right after Ready Player One was Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers, a melancholic, oft-scatological, searing, bewildering examination of human frailty and decay. What else would one expect from Leonard Cohen, after all? This is a difficult book to love, and it’s hard not to feel singed at the ways it wounds the sensibilities (by setting them on fire)—and wow, is this ever a Not for Everyone sort of book—but if it is for you, you won’t be able to deny it.

The last book of March, Jean Rhys’ Voyage in the Dark, made me think of Beautiful Losers often. I think it’s because of how mercilessly both works interrogate the most vulnerable, achingly secret selves we try to keep veiled, how they investigate the depths of individual excess and the terrible curse of unwished-for loneliness. This is the third book I’ve read by Jean Rhys, the woman who wrote my Everything Novel†. I think the reason that I’ve only read three of her books thus far is because I am saving them, hoarding them against the knowledge that the list of Rhys titles is distressingly finite. There won’t ever be any more. I am making what exists count, as counterintuitive as that seems. Perhaps where your Everything books are concerned, you’re allowed to be at least mildly irrational.

† For my thoughts on the concept of an Everything Book, read my post recommending six Caribbean novels.

Observations

♣ I have a horrifying substantial number of full reviews to draft, edit and post. The more I think about this, the more I realize that, for me, a review is as painstaking and delicate a process as crafting anything else I write. In many ways, it takes less out of me to write certain poems. Sometimes the verses just happen to me, if you take my meaning. Book reviews rarely ever just happen. They require mulling, deliberation, copious tea consumption, and care. I am always sensitive to the truth that when I review, I am handling someone else’s work, too. My review is the space where their work (the text) meets mine (the review). If we, the book blogging community, are ever going to escape the pernicious labelling cast on us  by other, ‘loftier’ literary critics, we need to work well. We need to be able to proudly and, at times, aggressively, defend our body of work against attack—and for that to happen with any conviction, quality (and an assurance in the quality of what we write) has to be present. I’d rather work well and slowly, than hyper-prolifically, with mediocrity.

♣ I’ve purposed to read more literary work from the Caribbean in April, largely in the spirit of celebrating the upcoming Bocas Literary Festival. At present, I’m reading two books side by side: Earl Lovelace’s Is Just A Movie and Michael Anthony’s The Year in San Fernando. Is Just a Movie has already won the fiction category for this year’s OCM Bocas Prize, and… even without having read the other contenders, even without having reached more than a quarter of the way through the book… I cannot be surprised. Lovelace’s prose is phenomenal. It makes the act of reading as immersive and natural as breathing. You forget that you’re holding a book in your hands. You are there, in the village of Cascadu in 1970s Trinidad, in the aftermath of the Black Power rebellion. You are there, listening to men hammer and coax the magic out of a steel pan; you are there, learning how to die excellently in the WhitePeople movies despite the urgings of directors who’ve come to film in foreign, exotic locales. Arundhati Roy (author of another Everything Book, The God of Small Things) said this about the book:

“Is Just a Movie is not just a movie, it’s a poem, too.”

I cannot think but that she is entirely right, even if my estimation is premature. Maybe there are books you get the measure of, from the opening chapters, and if you are wrong about your first, blushing impressions, then the results can, and do, break your heart.

♣ Some questions for my dear Novel Nichers!

•  Do you have a favourite read for the first quarter of 2012?
• Perhaps some of you curate online reading journals—I would love to see them, of any and all descriptions.
• How goes your April for reading, thus far? Are you loving/loathing what’s currently on your bookish bedside table?
• Maybe you’ve read one/some/all of the books on my quarterly list… what are your thoughts on these titles? Do you eagerly agree or vociferously shun my own opinions? I’m hoping for a rousing literary debate in my near future!

Novel Niche Recommends: Six Caribbean Novels

Tags

Cereus Blooms at Night, Fruit of the Lemon, Is Just a Movie, The Book of Night Women, The Ghost of Memory, Wide Sargasso Sea

Dominican writer, Jean Rhys.

As January drew to a close, I found myself in a delightful conversation with two dear intimates (be careful you didn’t read that as inmates), on “best of” book lists. The topic fire-starter was Project Gutenberg’s compilation of the Best Books Ever Listings. I scanned some of the listings, and while they all featured many prominent titles from around the globe, I grew disheartened, as often I do, by the lack of Caribbean literature presented there. Here’s exactly what I said in the conversation thread:

More lists to love! Ah, I wonder how many books from the Caribbean are on these? I am like a broken record, harping on that, but it’s been much on my mind of late. I shall just have to bolster the tradition of making lists of books from the islands, then!

One of my friends had an exceptional suggestion… that I curate a list of six books from these islands for her summer reading. My other friend, who also lives in a climate where “summer” is less a cultural affectation and more of a sweltering reality, eagerly agreed that she’d be up for a Caribbean Book Challenge in the warm, sultry months.

Since I’ve been whinging to myself about reading more regional work, I decided to try a different tack with this list. I’m recommending three books I’ve already read, and adored, as well as three works I’ve not yet approached. (How does one recommend books one hasn’t yet read, you might ask? I’m recommending them on the strength of expectation I attach to them, based on the promise they show, not necessarily (or at all) on the accolades they’ve won.) My friends are both superlative, sensitive, wise readers, and I’m hoping they will come to this list with even a glimmer of the excitement I feel, in composing it.

Three Titles I’ve Not Yet Read

Is Just a Movie by Earl Lovelace (Trinidad)

One of the illustrious three titles on the OCM Bocas Prize shortlist, and the winner of the prize’s fiction category, Is Just a Movie is Earl Lovelace’s sixth novel. Any Caribbean literature devotee worth her… heh, well, worth her Salt (Lovelace’s fifth novel) will have encountered this prolific prose master’s publications. (Yes, compulsory secondary school readings of The Schoolmaster count, but they don’t make you an enthusiast!) I’ve only read two of Lovelace’s novels so far, and I heartily want to make this my third. In fact, this book was one of twelve Caribbean titles I challenged myself to read last year—thus far, I’ve read only three, proving that I’m addicted to making reading challenge lists, but that I need to work on that pesky follow-through. I’ve had the pleasure of hearing the author read from this book before its publication, and I was mesmerized… as was everyone present in the audience that day, if appearances were anything to go by. I look forward to encountering that scene again as I read, and smiling at the memories it evokes. The OCM Bocas judges described Is Just a Movie as “a tapestry of island history . . . steeped in place and full of beautifully realised characters.” I’m eager to explore it!

♦♦♦

The Book of Night Women by Marlon James (Jamaica)

Superficially, a cover and title like these cannot help but catch the eye. James’ second novel caught mine when I first saw it, about two years ago, browsing through the shelves at Paper Based bookstore, one of the best repositories for regional lit. on this island. Kaiama L. Glover, in her review of the novel at The New York Times Sunday Book Review, likened the author’s writing to the work of Toni Morrison and Alice Walker—hefty endorsements, both. As Baker summarizes it, the plot of The Book of Night Women “takes us back to the cruel world of a Jamaican sugar plantation at the turn of the 19th century.” I’m extremely excited to see what James brings to the table of this old, sad discussion, which holds the potential for emotional liberation through harrowing catharsis in its very telling. This particular book has also been much on my mind since my book blogging colleague Amy reviewed it last year, as part of The Real Help reading initiative she co-founded.

♦♦♦

The Ghost of Memory by Wilson Harris (Guyana)

There are writers from these islands whose names I feel I’ve known all my life, whose books have lined the shelves of libraries close to my heart. The writers I’m thinking of specifically are those with whose works I feel I should be more familiar, because I want to be more familiar with them. Their names are, among others: Edgar Mittelholzer; Anthony Winkler; Jamaica Kincaid; Erna Brodber; Michael Anthony; George Lamming… and Wilson Harris is on that list, too. I am personally involved in an ongoing relationship with his mesmerizing, ensorcelling first novel The Palace of the Peacock. The thought of being unmoved by that particular literary journey is terrifying to me—you know, of being someone who “just didn’t get it.” This isn’t to say I hold a grudge against strictly linear readers (though I wonder how much fun they’re having), but suffice it to say that The Ghost of Memory would probably irritate, rather than enchant them. Stephen Howe’s review in The Independent informs me that this, Harris’ twenty-fifth novel, will also be his last. I read his first many years ago; I’ll read his last this year, and spend the rest of my life filling in the spaces of the other twenty-three.

Three Titles I’ve Read

Cereus Blooms at Night by Shani Mootoo (Trinidad)

This is Shani Mootoo’s first novel, and it remains my favourite work of hers. Nothing I’ve read by her hand in the past several years has come close to matching my emotional response to this seductive, sorrowing tale, set on the fictitious island of Lantanacamara, narrated by a gay male nurse, Tyler, as he grows close to his taciturn patient of many secrets, Mala Ramchandin. I don’t want to suggest that Mootoo’s subsequent novels and short fiction pieces (I’ve not yet had the pleasure of reading her poetry collection, The Predicament of Or) have taken a nosedive in quality—far from it. In fact, the unfairness is stacked on my end, since I’ve approached every Mootoo publication hunting down a similar sense of lush magic, of the beautiful urgency wherein lyrical language dances with an unforgettable story. As I remarked to one of the readers for whom I’m making this list, one of the primary reasons I need to reread Cereus Blooms at Night is to gauge how much of my adoration is based in nostalgia. Even if it turns out to be the lion’s share, I cannot think I would love it any less.

♦♦♦

Fruit of the Lemon by Andrea Levy (Jamaica)

To put it simply, this is one of the better Caribbean reads I’ve encountered about finding yourself—about the realization that that process is rarely ever simple, that it comes studded with difficulties and detours one can’t possibly foresee. We might think we’ve got a decent benchmark on how far back the long arm of our history goes, but Levy’s protagonist in Fruit of the Lemon, Faith, learns that you can’t ever truly know until you take the journey. This was one of the three Caribbean titles from last year’s challenge that I did read, and I reviewed it here. Summoning this title to this list reminds me, too, of how much I want to read Small Island, the author’s penultimate novel to date, and one of the books I received in last year’s Yuletide Book Gifting.

♦♦♦

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (Dominica)

There are some books in life about which you will find it impossible to be impartial. When someone asks you how you feel about them, you will hear the word “Everything” fall out of your mouth, and you will, perhaps, be a little bit irritated when people ask you to elucidate. Everyone’s got an Everything book… and Wide Sargasso Sea is mine. In fact, it’s one of only two titles I am extremely reluctant to review on Novel Niche, because I think my thoughts would less resemble coherent reviews than they would desperate love letters scented with my fangirlish glee. I could never make a “reading the Caribbean” list without including this book. It is one of the first titles I read that sought to interrogate and respond to colonial perceptions of island identity. It’s immeasurably poetic while being rapier-sharp in its economy. It’s brutal, bold, visionary, shockingly sad and… well, you know. It’s everything.

Some post-listmaking musings:

♣ Picking six novels wasn’t intentional at first, but I decided to stick with it, so I’ll be making separate lists for my Caribbean picks in short fiction, poetry and non-fiction, too.

♣ It wasn’t intentional, either, that the three unread books are by male authors, and the three read ones are by women. Getting into my thoughts on gender roles in writing would take several posts, but in short, I try not to be reductive on either/in any spectrum of the equation.

♣ Most, if not all, of the writers I’ve referenced here have their points of identification and origin in lands additional to the ones I’ve listed. I have offered in brackets alongside their names, the islands with which they are chiefly aligned, with which they chiefly align themselves by birth, residence, inclination, and any and all such markers of prominence. (Now I want to do a completely separate blog post on the (inter)national naming of writers, of how they carve out their geographical footholds… *files away that thought dutifully*)

♣ If anyone else has got an Everything book they’d like to share, please do! I love knowing about which books fellow readers love (and hate) best.

♣ Do you plan on adding any or all of these six novels to your reading queue? It would be fantastic to hear how you get along with them!

 “The island had given me the world as a writer, had given me the themes that in the second half of the twentieth century had become important.”
— V.S. Naipaul

27. Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So by Mark Vonnegut

Tags

Delacorte Press, Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So, Mark Vonnegut, Memoir, NetGalley, Non-Fiction, Review

Published in 2010 by Delacorte Press.

“I’m getting better again, taking medication, doing my very best to be a good patient, but then out of the blue, the chain-link fence that surrounds the hospital pulls me toward it, wraps around me, and is going to crush me. [...] At some point in there I try to tell my father that I’m feeling better, and he says that he wouldn’t nominate me as Mr. Mental Health quite yet. I want to ask him if he is in the running or just one of the judges.”

I’m fully prepared to be wrong here, but I suspect that high on the lists of why people gravitate towards reading memoir is because they anticipate a certain unflinchingness in articulation. They expect, oft-erroneously, that if a person’s got the testicular/cervical fortitude to put themselves out in the limelight, then, by gad, they’re going to write with moxy, with aplomb, with some brass! I’m pleased to report that Mark Vonnegut’s got all three. Even though I’ve not yet read anything by his famous father, I was hesitant, approaching this title. You know full well how the children of illustrious creatives often balk from the wide circles of fame their parents cast. If they do venture into productive waters of their own, they typically embody one of the following traits:

1. They offer work that is painfully, ludicrously derivative—but this is forgiveable, and less egregious than—
2. the fact that they just as easily feign ignorance of their parents’ existence, shunning the specific styles of their mothers and fathers.

Shunning is all well and good, but shunning for reasons that are petulantly emotive rather than deliberately stylistic—well, that smacks of danger, to me… the danger of potentially good art being obscured by the long, long arm of familial resentment. It’s important to note that Vonnegut doesn’t write with cloying sycophancy or feigned apathy about Kurt, when he writes of him. In this way, I suppose people who turn to Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So to glean more of Vonnegut Senior’s inner workings would be most put out. I respectfully posit that they’re looking in entirely the wrong place. This is Mark’s story, after all. Readers like myself, who’ve not had the benefit of reading his previous book, The Eden Express, will likely be relieved to know that this second offering stands heartily on its own—though, doubtless, if you enjoyed this one, as I did, you’ll want to seek out the first.

A wideness and generosity of range drives the scope of the memoir; it feels like we’re touching base with Vonnegut at various points on his life, that he’s chosen this approach in attempt to round and flesh out the narrative: to show the polyvalency of the paths he’s trod. In addition to sharing the trajectory (if not the specifics, but more on that anon) of his four psychotic breakdowns, the writer presents his childhood days, his memories of Kurt the non-writer (his pre-fame father was, to quote Mark, “the world’s worst car salesman who couldn’t get a job teaching English at Cape Cod Community College.”) We’re also treated to reflections on Mark’s seemingly circuitous path to entering medical school at the age of twenty-eight, glimpses into his family’s mental health (or lack thereof) history, his decision to specialize in paediatrics, humorous anecdotes gleaned from his stint of relief work in Honduras. The overall impression created is less linear than good-humouredly scattered, with the chapters anchored by the author’s own paintings.

What’s particularly illuminating about Vonnegut’s situation is that, as both mental patient and physician, he’s able to speak candidly and forthrightly about either side of the institutional coin. His perspectives on the profession, patient-doctor relationships and medical insurance are wise, modulated by experience rather than any desire of his to sell you something. The insights he proffers on what one might term “behind the scenes” goings-on in the world of health care might not be novel, but it’s refreshing to have them uttered by someone in his specific white coat. Here, he speaks about the nature and classification history of his ailment:

“I was diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia. [...] What I had and have is more consistent with what is now called bipolar disorder, which used to be called manic depression. The name change was an effort to get away from the stigma around the diagnosis of manic depression. Good luck. Until we come up with an unequivocal blood test or the equivalent, we’re all blowing smoke and don’t know if what we call schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are one disorder or a dozen.”

It’s especially gratifying to read Vonnegut’s less than flattering opinion of the corporate concerns that undercut the quality and consistency of aid given. In remarking on the shifting behaviours that govern patient-doctor discussion, he reminisces with gratitude on the open, wide-ranged talks he was able to have with his own psychiatrist when his Thorazine dosage was being reduced. In speculating on what that procedure would entail in a present-day setting, his tone is resolutely bald.

“Today, if I was lucky, I’d see a case supervisor monthly and maybe a psychopharmacology nurse every three months. Clinical guidelines would mandate that I be on antipsychotics for at least five years. The medication I was on would be determined by who paid for lunch and what deal was cut between my health insurer and the pharmaceutical industry.”

I didn’t get the impression that the author was trying to earn a battery of enemies in the medical insurance field. He’s not calling out the insurers, the pharmaceutical manufacturers, the impersonal practitioners, because he’s trying to curry favour with readers for his audacity. One senses that Mark Vonnegut’s just speaking his mind, that having lived through his psychotic episodes (which he refers to as “breaks”) made him less susceptible to tolerating perceived injustices: in short, that those very breaks helped build him into a more genuine, candour-driven self.

An anticlimactic area centres on the issue that there is little visceral untangling of the four psychotic breaks themselves. The writer doesn’t shy away from bringing them up, but we’re never allowed a full and inexorable assessment of those specifics. The autobiography opens with the general delineation of Mark’s symptoms: his inability to eat or sleep; the voices that plagued him; his tendency toward self-harm; his heavy sedation. I kept waiting, with bated breath, to be led further down the rabbit hole of an insider’s vivid description of bipolar disorder… but it felt like Mark kept me solidly, perhaps even safely, at the fringes. Maybe this is as much enlightenment as can be reasonably expected, and maybe this is just the way Mark experienced those breaks, too. Still, it’s difficult not to feel stranded on the shore of apprehension, hoping an illuminating wave of prose will sweep us into the churning emotional seas of a world populated by voices in your head. It never happens. Perhaps I ought to be grateful for that, rather than critical.

What will win readers to this artful autobiographical meandering is, ultimately, its ease of voice. The narrative is laden with quotable illuminations on the role of art in assuaging despair, on the combined weight-inspiration of laying claim to a famous father, on the ways in which interludes of madness can wreak havoc on your life and simultaneously transform it to your best advantage. All of these are shared in the writer’s personable, gently self-deprecating style. Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More is a interior journey you can take with the signposts of a life that’s been, by turns, extraordinary and reassuringly simple. If you think of your autobiographical narrator as a companion and cohort in the reading experience, you’d be hard-pressed to find one more earnest and admirably principled than Mark Vonnegut.

A free electronic copy of this novel was provided by the Random House Publishing Group (Delacorte Press imprint) for review, through NetGalley. The opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own, and are not influenced by their generous gift of gratuitous literature.

26. Swamplandia! by Karen Russell

Tags

Fiction, Karen Russell, Novel, Review, Swamplandia!, Vintage Books

Published in 2011 by Vintage Books.

Longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, 2011.

Ava Bigtree can’t help but feel like she’s floundering, rather than flourishing, in her deceased mother Hilola’s footsteps. Hilola was the feature attraction show-stopper at the Bigtree’s family-owned and operated alligator wrestling theme park, “Swamplandia!”, nestled on an island little more than an adventurer’s spit of a hundred acres, off the Floridian mainland. “Mainland” is a geographical state that the Bigtree children—Ava; her awkwardly academic brother Kiwi; her eerily disengaged sister Osceola—have come to both desire and decry. The swamp, the theatre of routine and spectacle, of sold-out crowds clamouring in the stands, the moods and movements of their alligator brood (each animal named Seth, to avoid ambiguity): this is the life to which they’ve been born. However, when Hilola Bigtree succumbs, mundanely and sadly, to cancer, “Swamplandia!” falls on hard times. First Kiwi, then the Chief (the children’s gruffly well-intentioned father) head to the mainland for reasons both disparate and bonded, leaving the girls, the alligators, and the island to each other.

Much has been made of Swamplandia! since it was published, and it’s easy to see why—the novel is a quirk-factory. The ingredients for a tall-taled yarn are stacked sky-high, lined up for our perusal without even a shred of self-effacement in the prose. Nothing seems tongue in cheek or inversely satirical about the host of Seths, the fantastic Bigtree establishment ensconced within the swamp, the undead visitations of Osceola’s supernatural gentleman callers. To swallow this narrative arc, you won’t need suspension of disbelief so much as an utter willingness to park your reliance of concrete allegories outside. This novel isn’t for the reader who dismisses weirdness; quite the contrary… if you’re not inclined to wade through the inlets that lead to the sound of surreality, then this isn’t the best way to kick off your year in reading. Adherents to the sweet, cerebral cult of oddities, however, will find the book gratifying, akin to a curious girl’s fictional compendium of island-within-island navigation, of gritty, unsentimental survivalism.

I have read few books within recent memory wherein the author so skilfully constructed her setting as integral to the work’s beating heart. In Swamplandia!, the swamp is far more than a mere cardboard backdrop against which a plastic alligator or two is positioned. The landscape is capable of eliciting fear, awe or grudging respect (or all three), depending on which season you confront it. Early on in the story, Ava’s description of persistent bad weather coincides with the theme park’s declining fortunes.

“Our swamp got blown to green bits and reassembled, daily, hourly. The wet season was a series of land-versus-water skirmishes: marl turned to chowder and shunted the baby-green cocoplums into the sea; tides maniacally revised the coastlines. Whole islands caught fire from lightning strikes, and you could sometimes watch deer and marsh rabbits leaping into the sea of saw grass on gasps of smoke.”

When the plot becomes dense with dreadful adventure, much later on, as Ava, in the company of the enigmatic, leather-jacketed Bird Man, embarks on a quest to rescue her sister from the dark maw of the underworld, the descriptions of the islands teeming around our tenacious narrator threaten to steal the show. The nearer Ava draws towards the Stygian wilderness in which she believes Osceola to be trapped with her paranormal beau, Louis Thanksgiving, the more dreadfully fascinating her surroundings become.

“I was seeing new geometries of petals and trees, white saplings that pushed through the peat like fantailing spires of coral, big oaky trunks that went wide-arming into the woods … A large egretlike bird with true fuschia eyes and cirrusy plumage went screeching through the canopy.”

If landscape in Swamplandia! can be considered a pliable, inventive entity, then the tridented, oft-unspoken concord among the Bigtree progeny often feels and reads like a ghost character who haunts the pages, howling with love and angst. Ava’s frankly inquisitive absorption of the secrets and foibles in both her brother and sister’s nature make her a talented voyeuse. The perils into which she dashes, seemingly uncaring of her personal welfare, are prompted by the fiercest of sibling devotions, and yet, very little that is voluminous or fulsome distinguishes the talks that Ava trades with Osceola and Kiwi. Their adoration is made to stretch thinly over mysterious swamp islands, into the cheerless concrete of mainland life. In depicting it, Russell reminds the reader of the craggy heartlands of human communication, of how, even (or especially) among those who love each other best, familial adoration is unerringly represented by a snarling, non-communicative beast, one who skulks in a cave, one whose feelings run too deep to fathom.

It is, however, in the narrative split between Ava and Kiwi that the structure of the novel falters, diminishing a sustained sense of reading pleasure by forcing unsolicited somersaults from one compelling character, to one decidedly less so. This shift is taken up when Kiwi heads to the mainland, his act of teenagerly defiance to his father’s pipe dreamed notions of salvaging the future of “Swamplandia!”. For what he’s worth, Kiwi is not an unsatisfying character. His self-imposed blend of awkwardness and haughtiness, his massive disconnect from mainland life meeting his puppyish desire to ingratiate himself into the best ideas of his full potential: these make for good reading, and hold the bulwark of levity for much of the novel’s narration. Anyone’s who’s felt the weight of being a smart outsider hang heavy on their shoulders will relate to what Kiwi goes through as he endures the undignified employ at the subterranean-themed rival amusement centre, The World of Darkness. Witness, for instance, as poor Kiwi’s inner sufferer-scholar flares up, following the unwarranted opprobrium of a superior.

“Kiwi could feel his intelligence leap like an anchored flame inside him. His whole body ached at the terrible gulf between what he knew himself to be capable of (neuroscience, complicated opthalmological surgeries, air-traffic control) and what he was actually doing.”

Indeed, reading the ‘World’ segments are grimly, wit-stingingly winning: the setting is described as so mock-garish, so ostentatiously macabre, so unaware of its own enormous kitsch, that it prompts comparisons with similar, comically absurd urban designs. A short story featuring Kiwi’s exploits and misadventures at the ‘World’ would go over spectacularly, but even for all his tragicomic fumblings towards manhood, Kiwi’s narration is eclipsed utterly by Ava’s.

Perhaps what I like best about Swamplandia! is its audacious ambition. There is always some distance, in varying increments, of how outstanding a thing wants to be, of how ardent its desire to overwhelm you, compared to the impact, the force of actual resonance it generates. Respectfully, there is more distance between ambition and impact in this kaleidoscopic swamp-romp than, say, the illumination of other, greater first novels. That said, (bearing in mind that even a poor work of art, which this is not, usually requires patience, effort and devotion), Russell’s work here is both charming and challenging, beautiful in a graphic, grounded light. It introduces us to a pragmatic heroine fighting for a happy story, or at least, a safe one, while a wilderness of reconditely-curved fates clutch at her ankles like vine creepers. If there were no other fine hallmark of writing prowess in Swamplandia!, Ava Bigtree on her own would be worth the price of the paperback/hardcover/Kindle copy. She’s the sort of little girl whom grown women ought aspire to de-age themselves towards.