A disappointment and a surprise

I had been looking forward to reading Yiyun Li's story in BASS, because I'd been following all the hype about her, and so many respected authors had praised her so highly. I suppose I was really being set up to be disappointed; it's hard to live up to media-generated hype. But I was expecting something a little more breathtaking than what I got in "After a Life."

The prose was skilled, but not magical; the characters strong, but not overly sympathetic. In fact, I didn't really care about the plight of Mrs. Su or the confusion of Mr. Fong. I did like the ending, but so much of the middlejust sort of sat there placidly that as a whole, the story was less than impressive. It was kind of like eating a good roast chicken. It fills you up, and can be very contenting, but you will not still be tasting it at random moments of the day a week later.

By contrast, Aleksandar Hemon's story, "The Conductor," completely blew me away. I love the way he uses words; perhaps it is the mark of someone for whom English is a second language, that they can cherish words the way a native speaker cannot. His story completely sucked me into its world, refusing to release me conveniently at the end. After finishing the story, I simply wanted to read it over again. And then I went to Hemon's website and read all about him and his other works, and I have every intention of reading his novels.

I particularly liked the way "The Conductor" was able to weave 9/11 into the fabric of its narrative, without making it a focal point or even an important moment, but simply letting it hang there in the background, lending undertones to the story the way a framed picture can change the atmosphere of a room. This paragraph is the only one in which he talks about the attacks:

... As it was on the cloudless morning of September 11, 2001, when I was on a plane to D.C. The flight attendant was virginally blond. The man sitting next to me ad a ring of biblical proportions on his pinkie. The woman on my right was immensely pregnant, squeezed into a tight red dress. I, of course, had no idea what was going on - the plane simply landed in Detroit and we disembarked. The Twin Towers were going down simultaneously on every screen at the unreal airport; maintenance personnel wept, leaning on their brooms; teenaged girls screamed into their cell phones; forlorn pilots sat at closed gates. I wandered around the airport, recalling one of Dedo's poems: "I will be alive, when everybody's dead. / But there will be no joy in that, for all those undone / by death need to pass through me, to get to hell."

I don't think there's much that needs to be said about that, except that I love it.

Why I dislike Alice Munro but wish I were Jack Livings

The nice thing about a short story is that it's possible to know from literally the first page whether or not you are going to fall in love with it or not. I wouldn't say this is true of all writing - I can definitely think of a few novels whose first pages aren't a representative enough taste of what's to come. But I always know with short stories. Which makes reading them either a great experience or an extremely frustrating experience ... if I know I'm going to dislike the story after reading just the first page, what's the point of continuing to read it? And yet I read on anyway, fueled by that literary guilt that forces me to compulsively read each word of even the least deserving pieces of writing, just to avoid that horrible feeling of betrayal and abandonment that comes with setting aside an unfinished work.

When I started reading Alice Munro's story in BASS, I knew immediately that it wasn't the kind of thing I'd like. I don't like the third-person present tense narration, the characters, the purposefully removed tone (I-am-displaying-a-moment-in-someone's-life,-please-watch-and-admire). And of course, it's just my luck that this is one of those 30-page excursions rather than a nice little 10-page jaunt. So I struggled my way through all of "The View From Castle Rock," reading about the monotonous experiences of Andrew and Agnes and Old James and Young James and poor little sick coughing girl going to America, only to find that there's not even a rewarding ending. Worse was when I read Munro's little blurb in the back of the book and discovered that it was a purely self-indulgent exercise - a story based on the lives of some ancestors that she'd been doing some research on and wanted to imagine. Well, that's very nice for you to work out on your own, but must you really submit this to major publications and force it down other people's throats? I was really very annoyed by the whole thing, and decided rashly that personal meditation on real events does not a valid short story make.

Then I got to Jack Livings' story, "The Dog," and I was forced to change my tune. This, too, was based on a real event (a story that a Chinese woman in his English course presented as part of the class), but Livings lent it a weight, a heaviness, a purpose - a reason to exist beyond a mere hypothetical historical hole-filling that I didn't find in Munro's work.

Comparing the last paragraphs of each story is telling. Munro's story ends on a very factual, too-ponderous explanation of Young James' fate:

Young James was dead within a month of the family's landing at Quebec. His name is here, but surely he cannot be. They had not yet taken up their land when he died; they had not even seen this place. He may have been buried somewhere along the way from Montreal to York or in that hectic new town itself. Perhaps in a raw temporary burying ground now paved over, perhaps without a stone in a churchyard, where other bodies would someday be laid on top of his. Dead of some mishap in the busy streets, or of a fever, or dysentery, or any of the ailments, the accidents, that were the common destroyers of little children in his time.

Livings' story, on the other hand, ends with a delicately enigmatic transition from plot to purpose:

It was obvious to everyone that Chen Wei meant to extract a measure of revenge from his wife. Sweat rolled over his brow and his jaw was working furiously at something. Everyone waited for him to make a move, and he stood in the yard for an embarrassingly long time, the plates clacking wetly against his chest while the dog arched its back playfully, just out of reach. Finally, Chen Wei turned to his wife and shouted, "You've cooked for a pack of dogs, so let the head of the family have the first bite." And with that, he hurled the plates at the dog. As the dog tore at the bounty before it, Li Yan tightened her grip on her stack of plates and turned to face her husband's family, as if to issue a challenge. But after a moment nothing had come to her. As she looked across the valley at the dark hills and the immense black sky, she had the strange feeling that she had made a great discovery, that she had entered uncharted waters. But she didn't know yet what to do with this knowledge, so for the time being she stood quietly, the plates clutched to her chest, as if she expected someone to wrest them from her.

When I read these paragraphs, there is just something so quietly revealing about Livings' work, and something so off-puttingly blatant about Munro's.

Because sometimes a novel is just too much of a commitment.

After slogging my way through the Hell - oh yes, capital "H" definitely needed - that was my students' papers on The Great Gatsby (favorite line: "Time is passing by so it Daisy"), I find myself unable to read with concentration anything much more intense than the back of the cereal box. Actually, revise that down to the back of a toothpaste box. We're talking seriously interrupted brain function. Since starting a new novel would have failed miserably, I decided to start working my way through Best American Short Stories 2006. I do always feel like I've sold out to The Man a little bit when I read this series. But, let's face it, I'm not conscientious or wealthy enough to actually subscribe to all the literary journals that I'd really like to read, and since it's hard to take a gamble on an entire volume of short stories by someone you've never heard of, BASS it is.

So far, I've read the first five short stories, two of which have entranced me, two of which have bored me, and one of which I'm still on the fence about. Since it's mean to bash authors who probably just bored me out of some freakish alignment of the stars, especially since I haven't read enough else by them to fairly assess my response, I won't talk about the boring ones (ahem, Tobias Wolff and Maxine Swann). But I absolutely fell in love with the story by Paul Yoon ("Once the Shore") and the story by Mark Slouka ("Dominion"). According to the nice little bio in the back of the book, "Once the Shore" was Paul Yoon's first published story. See, why did you have to go and make me jealous like that, Paul? Here I am, ready to extol the virtues of your lyrical little dewdrop of a story, and instead you have to rub it in my face that even if I do eventually get something of mine published, it probably won't be as good as the first short story YOU published. Oh, the tragedy. Anyway, I loved it. If you can find it anywhere (it was originally published in One Story), you should read it.

"Dominion" was also one of those stories that sucks you in deep and refuses to relinquish its hold on you even after you've put the book down ... I was also pleasantly surprised to be reading about an elderly character that I could actually identify with. So much of the time, authors portray the eldery as either childlike or wise or senile, and it's rare to find a portrait of a man nearing death written with such relevance to all generations.

I'm hoping to read a little more tonight - perhaps I'll update again soon.

Finished!

Well, I finally got through the last 25 pages of Under the Volcano last night. I had been putting them off, as I often do with good books that also happen to be depressing; it's hard enough to say goodbye to a book you've actually enjoyed reading, let alone one that you know is also going to make you want to hurl things into the existential void, cursing it for not being a god of some sort. But I forced it down last night, and it was decidedly worth it.

The book was not only beautiful and compelling, it was also curiosity-inducing. The kind where, when you finish, you actually WANT to go back and read the introduction. The kind where you spend some time searching around on Wikipedia et al. for mentions of Maximilian & Carlota, mescal, vultures, William Blackstone, and Popocatepetl. The kind that spurs compulsive literary critic wannabes (yes, I do fall into this category) to begin drafting thesis ideas.

So, thanks, Malcolm. Sorry it took depression and fatal substance abuse problems, but you did indeed manage to produce a work of near-genius. (I tend to keep "genius" open for Shakespeare and Dali ... but Lowry is on deck to be considered, along with Faulkner.)

Next on my list to read? Well, 110 high school essays about The Great Gatsby, at the moment. What a way to ruin a perfect book. After that, who knows? Will update after the grammar-ignorant masses enlighten me on what the green light REALLY stands for.

Back from vacation, nearly through Volcano

After a harrowing few days in Orlando and several frustrating days in airports, I'm back home, drinking coffee and savoring the last few chapters of Under the Volcano. A beautiful tragedy of a book. The writing seems to me some kind of surreal combination of Faulkner and Fitzgerald - it has the depth and complexity and dreamlike ponderous quality of Faulkner combined with the surprising clarity Fitzgerald lends to human interactions. I am absolutely loving it. It is the type of book I feel I am going to need to read again - too many references and mythic/mystical/Mexican allusions to take in on one reading.

I wonder if it is possible to write a book like this anymore - or if I am doomed to impersonal and tongue-in-cheek postmodernism. I certainly hope not.