20 under 40: a roundup

I've been out of town, and work is piling up, and other projects are eating in to blogging time. Despite this, I've put together a round-up of the other six stories in the New Yorker's 20 under 40 collection. Here they are, with my sometimes warty synopsis:


Rivka Galchen: The Entire Northern Side was Covered with Fire
Another quirky break-up story. A pregnant writer's husband dumps her. Apparently he was keeping a blog that was a list of grievances against her. A friend comes over to console her. Their conversation wanders around, eventually coming to the great Tunguska blast of 1908. They ponder mystery and uncertainty. End story.

Gary Shteyngart: Lenny Hearts Eunice
A hilarious, heartbreaking love story set in the near future. Lenny works for a company that provides immortality services to those lucky enough to qualify for the treatments; he himself is 40, and aging quickly, a misfit in his job and life. On a sabbatical to Rome he meeets Eunice, a nice Asian girl, and falls in love. He returns to an America that has been taken over by the American Restoration Authority. He invites Eunice to join him, and after a breakup, she does. Their romance is heartbreaking, if unbelievable, but the world Shtyengart creates around them is a perfect match: rigidly conforming, politically savage, and bitingly real.

ZZ Packer: Dayward
A former slave, 14, escapes from the oppressive South to New Orleans. In the first scene, he is being chased by a dog; to escape he shoves his hand down the dog's throat, choking it but mangling his hand. By starting with the highest point of action, Packer loses all tension except the seeping wound of the boy's hand; her prose is tense but often confusing; the narrative is clipped and loses its own train of thought - Packer has probably done better work than this.

Salvatore Scibona: The Kid
A simply amazing story on themes you'd need nerves of steel to go near.  Probably the best story in the collection. A soldier in Latvia falls in love and has a son with a local girl. Things go bad, they break up. Five years later, she wants him to take the boy to America. Along the way, he gets cold feet. Reading as the man abandons the boy in a Hamburg airport and drifts back to his life in New Mexico, and the boy is held by airport security, is harrowing, riveting, and disturbingly real. There's precious little information about Scibona on the web, but I'm going to look for his novel The End and read it some day.

C.E. Morgan: Twins

A lyrical portrait of 1980's Cincinnati, about a set of twins - one light, one dark, born to a single mother in a working-class neighborhood. I need to take a closer look at this story. Instead of a proper review, I'm putting in her picture and a link to her interview on the New Yorker website. It's interesting that her first novel took 14 days to write, and that she revised it over two semesters in graduate school. My first thought was that she was lucky to have the time to write, that oh, here's another golden-cage writer of privilege. Then I realized that was about the same thing that happened to me, and I never ended up in the New Yorker. I guess we all have our path.





Summary of the collection:
Like any collection striving to present the best voices of a generation (or two?) there's a lot of variety here. Which is another way of saying The New Yorker must have felt there were a lot of critical slots to fill: Campus intellectuals, urban minorities, feminists, immigrants, goofballs and valedictorians. A Breakfast Club of writers. But variety isn't the spice of youth alone. This collection, then, is a perfect cross-section not of young American writers, per se, but of the major themes of contemporary American writing. That they're under 40 is just a nice hook for marketing.

But write on, fellow scribblers and strivers, don't worry that you've crossed the New Yorker's rubicon of fame. Bukowski was 50 when he published his first novel; Raymond Chandler wasn't published till he was 49. Harriet Doerr was in her 70's. It's never too late to become who you were meant to be.

Short Story Review: What you do out here, when you're alone, by Philipp Meyer

This story is next in line in The New Yorker's 20 under 40 special summer fiction issue.  It's apparent now, from these samples, that the authors the New Yorker chose play for different stakes. Jonathan Safran Foer and Joshua Ferris strive for self-reflexive cleverness, trying to shake our assumptions about reality by illuminating the lives of freaks and aestheticians. But there's another class of writer on display with Phillip Meyer, whose relatively quiet voice attempts a more difficult task, to describe how real, normal people live in the relative quiet of their everyday lives.

This story is about a mechanic, an expert with Porsches, whose success has led him to move into a posh southern neighborhood. But the move has led to alienation from his social climbing wife, and to drug troubles for his teenage son. The story takes place in a pause between major events, in the days after his son is arrested for possession, while his wife is away on a day trip with some neighbors who have a free-wheeling reputation.

So Max broods. He starts to mow the lawn, but is overwhelmed by the beauty of the tiny flowers he would destroy, so knowing that the neighbors would hate the shaggy lawn, he puts the mower away. He contemplates an affair with a neighbor, but doesn't follow through. He studiously avoids thinking about his son's condition, an emotional position I understand, but one that turns the structure  of the story into a start-in-the-middle hide-and-seek bit that, as a matter of personal taste, I find annoying. But it's forgivable, a minor quibble in a story that's playing for high stakes, and winning.

A glance at Meyer's website shows reviews that compare his first novel 'American Rust' to Steinbeck, and others that throw around the term 'Great American Novel.' Yikes. But I'd say from the title, and the quiet despair of the main character, that Meyer is working Raymond Carver territory here (if it matters). And while this may not be the great American short story, it is the only one in this collection, so far, that lives and breathes in the classic American tradition mastered by writers like Cheever, Updike, and Roth, a tradition most modern writers are running from in terror.

More Nordeast Feng Shui: NE Barbecue patio

My neighbor grew up in the neighborhood and considers himself a sensei of Nordeast feng shui. His yard is wonderful: a calming collection of building materials, some for projects that have been in the queue for years. There's ornamental sculptures and wire furniture tucked into tiny meditation groves built of semi-native plants run amok. That's it from the outside, there to the left.






He's taken me on several tours of the area, and likes to point out subtleties of the practice. This place, with the blue paint, he likes for some reasons, but not for others. The barbecue pit is perfect, he says. Minimal, functional, and convenient. But the lawn is too short. Lawns need to breath, he says. Nature is paramount in NordEast, and the eco-systems that live in uncut grass are sacred. The retaining wall around the tree is nice, but a bit too formal. Better to use large river-stones, tossed casually, and to let some of the dirt fall through.

Short Story Reviews: New Yorker Summer Fiction Edition

The New Yorker's summer fiction issue highlights 20 writers, all of whom are under 40 years old. These are writers who will be, they think, 'key to their generation.' It's an absurd idea, of course, that the editors will cop to almost immediately, admitting that its best side effect is an industry of second-guessing, with TNY at the white-hot center. Which is why they went ahead with their little game anyway, apologizing and winking along as they take us down the barely shameful promotion of a marginal idea. Such is the state of American fiction.

The lead story, The Pilot, by Joshua Ferris, is perhaps an obvious nod to what old curmudgeonly editors would expect a young writer of this era to write about: Television. It's a satire designed to show off the writer's talent for 1) wacky names like Kate Lotvelt, Eaton Aitken, Gleekman and Mark Pleble, and 2) Ferris's flair for uncomfortable situations.

The lead character is an insecure nervous wreck with a sitcom pilot he wants a famous actress to read. So we get to sit in his head for a few hours as he kvetches and complains, then he goes to a party dressed as a character from another television show, and fails miserably to achieve his goals. He gets stinking drunk, accidentally sets fire to his manuscript, then has a revelation about his own shallowness before drowning (perhaps) in a pool. It's a pretty okay story, even if part of me thinks that hopeless shlubs don't need deathbed revelations to realize they're hopeless shlubs - wallowing in their hopeless shlubbiness is one of the major pre-occupations of shlubs around the world.

The second story is 'Here we aren't, so quickly,' by Jonathan Safran Foer. It's more a prose poem, a show-stopping piece of barely sufferable cleverness. It's not a story so much as a series of statements, often in tortuously negated constructions, about characters named I and You: 'I couldn't explain the cycles of the moon without pen and paper, or with. You didn't know where e-mails were.'

It goes on like that, descending into Alanis Morrisette-style lyricism near the end: 'I'm not disappointed, just quiet. Not willfully unclear, just trying to say it as it wasn't.' I know there are people who love Jonathan Safran Foer, and I think passages of his first novel, Everything is Illuminated, are quite brilliant. And there are those who might see this story as a loving, fractured portrait of a marriage moving through inevitable cycles of love and loss. And it is. But it's also an unintentional horror story, I think, of a mind trapped into exploring itself as a thing which does not have emotions per se, but as a machine dedicated to processing emotion-like things through a tortured syntax machine powered by the owner's delicately uber-sensitive genius. It's a cool trick, but tiring to us mere mortals.

Okay, so. But the whole collection, the idea of 20 under 40, as though younger writers were bugs to be pinned to a wall and examined. Kinda creepy. And then to have the first story be a satire of self-pity and narcissism, and second to be a celebration of the same... It's as though there's this cliche that young writers are self-obsessed and shallow that The New Yorker had to uphold, and that's just not fair. All writers are self-obsessed and shallow.

At the Vintage Motorcycle Show

Last Saturday, in the bleak and sometimes pouring rain, I drove out to the AMCA Viking Chapter’s annual vintage motorcycle show. It was held on the Minnesota State Fairgrounds, in the Progress building, so I was allowed the cheap thrill of driving my car on the grounds where I’d only been before on foot, in August heat, trudging through crowds of energetic fairgoers.

There were a few soggy vendor tents sunk into the lawn on the north side of the building. Men with long-sided mustaches presiding over tables of cycle parts: pipes and pedals and handles and what-not. A junk table of easter eggs awaiting the perfect need to walk by and take notice. There were bikes of dubious heritage standing in the rain, for sale but wet, and more grim-faced vendors, so I ducked my head and went inside.

Short Story Review: Shawntera, by Jeff Parker

Shawntera, Jeff Parker
From American Short Fiction

A story that starts with the main character holding a brick, and coming out of the dentist office thinking about the guy who knocked out his teeth, you think it's going to be a certain kind of story. But Jeff Parker is in a different kind of business, and 'Shawntera' is a story you're not expecting.

Shawntera, the lead character, is a classic slacker slash loser, a literary kinsman to Bukowski or Denis Johnson's Fuckhead character, and this story is a loose bildungsroman of a day in his life. He's been tasked by a friend, Two-face Jud, into escorting his kid around the zoo while Two-face Jud friend sets up an underground strip club in the living room. Meanwhile the guy who knocked out his teeth, Mike Fox, stays on the margins, the source of their conflict a nagging mystery.

Nordeast Feng Shui: Wild Rose

 

curbside wild roses

dandelions gone to seed

in cottonwood snow