Jumping between worlds trailing run-on sentences

Book: The First Thing Smoking

Author: Nelson Eubanks

Published: 2003 (Random House)

Pages: 210

Two heritages, one crazy-ass family, several ways of growing up wrong.

I wouldn’t call these short stories, exactly, because they’re all too much innertwined with the same people and the same areas, just on different jumps in their timelines, but they’re too loose to be a novel. I like how they jump over the line like that, like a kid jumping rope next to a busted fire hydrant on a hot afternoon in Brooklyn. One jump you’re there, feeling the sidewalk slap the thin soles of your cheap shoes and sweating your brains out but outside your cramped apartment trying to avoid responsibility for your crazy-ass family, and the next you’re in the middle of Brazil’s Carnival, watching in slack-jawed wonder at all the bare asses and feathers because even though it’s your heritage, you feel like an alien and that’s good and bad at the same time and you can’t get past it until your mom nudges you to go check on your criminal uncle when he’s home for the holidays and suddenly you’re back to what you call home again.

Eubanks’s run-on sentences start with a simple thought or sensation and gather speed quickly, which works really well for his Brazil interludes because you get a sensory overload just like you’re supposed to, but it can be a little annoying as a tick in his more concrete episodes.

But he flows well and gets dialogue right and the last story is really good at tying together the two worlds through another gathering snowball of words, this one of lies that brings the main character to the unpleased true secret of keeping a relationship together (it’s lies, he says).

I like it. But the library wants it back. 

Winning, and why you shouldn't care but you probably do

Book: The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value

Author: James F. English

Published: 2005 (Harvard)

Pages: 345

This is an interesting subject told in a boring way. And when I say “boring,” I mean dumbed-down academic writing that’s meant to be for a mainstream audience but has still managed to keep its stuffiness.

But the subject truly is interesting enough to be worth the read (mostly). It’s about how cultural awards, like the Booker and the Pulitzer and the Nobel and the architecture prizes I can’t remember the name of but it’s a really big deal, affect the making and presenting and sort of pimping out of our art.

It talks about the history of such awards that go back to the earlier British and French universities, and how the explosion of prizes in the last couple decades has both mimicked and encouraged art’s explosion of diversity while keeping things more and more divided into their own little pockets of the art world, and how mock awards like the Razzies really enforce the industry awards they’re mocking by picking the works the industry ignored for the best as the worst, and how much more expensive/time intensive it is to put out an award than benefactors ever really think about.

Good sociology, but it actually doesn’t go far enough past the ropes of the artistic world for me. It mentions very briefly how the Oscars influences movie-going, but not nearly enough to explain it, and it never really does talk about how other prizes affect the general consuming public, if it makes them care more or less about something they never heard of, and that’s what I most would’ve liked to learn.

I enjoyed what it did offer, though, in spite of its pretentions. I literally spent like ten minutes trying to decide between this and the history of just the Nobel prize that was next to it on the shelf, and I might go back and read the other one to maybe get a better, fuller society view of at least one of these. Back to the library. 

The Moibus strip of life

Book: Schrodinger’s Ball

Author: Adam Felber

Published: 2006 (Random House)

Pages: 241

If a young man accidentally shoots and kills himself while cleaning his dad’s old gun in his grandma’s basement with the door closed and no one else to find him, is he actually dead?

Or does he still go out on the town with his group of friends, feeling and acting even more spacey than usual as they all seize onto his weirdness as an excuse to fend off the unraveling of bonds they all feel between each other?

This book’s title might clue you in on the answer, which is both, and all of the below.

Does the young man only truly die when his grandma opens the basement door a few days later at the exact instance the young man throws himself in front of his friends to prevent them from getting squashed by a giant 18-wheeler? Yes.

Theoretical physics mixes really well with the absurdity of the human condition, especially when it’s applied lightly and with the cynical armor of post-grad oh-god-what-are-we-doing-with-our-lives-and-each-other sarcasm.

The story does not make a hell of a lot of sense, especially the bits where a collective voice talks about how the real (but somehow still dead) Dr. Schrodinger butts into and invades their real life, only to gradually reveal that part as the hallucinations of a single, modern-day science lecturer who’s having a really hard time getting over the loss of his wife. This, and the parts of the philosophizing bag lady’s revisionist history of the world, are revealingly funny, but they only trickle into the main flow and only make it, like, a bigger stream, not a lake or something.

But then, the parts of an atom are a gajillion measuring units apart and look how well they hold everything together. So this was a good read, and I will be giving it back to the library’s bookshelf because guys, I walked through the stacks instead of the staff exit a week or so ago and that gets me every time. 

Let's get it--no. No, let's not.

Book: Getting In
Author: Karen Stabiner
Published: 2010 (Voice New York)

I'm sort of obsessed with stories about high school kids busting their asses to get into the Ivy League, because I never went through any of that. I wanted the state school, the state school wanted me, the end. My senior spring semester of high school was way more worrying about whether I could pass calculus tests.

Anyway, no insight here. It's all high school politics as usual; nobody goes any deeper into why they want to go to Harvard or Stanford. I don't think they even say, like, "Oh, it's got an excellent marine biology program, and I totally want to work with whales," or something. It's all revealed to be pomp and tradition among a bunch of bright, pretty kids whose parents will all find a way to pay for it and a college counselor who makes this way more a business transaction than one should ever do to a job working with teenagers.  

And, you know, really good academics, like in general. But come on, people! More than that, please!

AND NO, I DON'T MEAN TRANSCRIBING AN ENTIRE BLACK-EYED PEAS SONG AS SPONTANEOUSLY PERFORMED BY A RESTLESS HIGH SCHOOL CLASS AT THEIR GRADUATION. That is when I completely lost this thing.

Donating. If I can scrape the "Only $3.97!" sticker off. 

Double the stories, double the fun

Books: The Best American Short Stories, 2006 and 2005
Authors: Various
Editors: Ann Patchett and Geraldine Brooks
Series editors: Katrina Kenison and Heidi Pitlor
Published: 2006 and 2011 (Houghton Mifflin)

Of course these are good books. They do the collective annual work of about $200 worth of lit mag subscriptions each year. Of course these aren't definitive collections of the best American short stories in any given year, but they're a damn good try.

Reading two volumes back-to-back did shine a rather glaring truth on one lit fic cliche, though - some of these stories just don't have endings. It's not even a question of whether there was a plot leading up to the last few pages or not, some of them just chopped off and left my brain early because there wasn't any last hook to hang my memory on.

Nevertheless! No stories in here were actually bad. Here are a list of ones that stuck: 

The Sleep: a town hibernates with unexpected success and consequences.
Housewifely Arts: a single mother travels to a wildlife preserve to hear a parent speak in her mother's voice one last time.
Phantoms: a town experiences phantom beings as part of their everyday life and start to wonder if they're normal or chosen.
Escape from Spiderhead: sci fi where prisoners are controlled by injected chemicals and thrown into moral quandaries to see how they react.
The Dungeon Master: a sociopathic teenager becomes a DD runner to get his revenge.
The Dog: a family goads a wife who can't cook into cooking a huge dinner to stop them from killing a dog.
Grandmother's Nose: a realistic take on Little Red Riding Hood
Mr. Nobody at All: an infamous artist gets eulogized by everyone he invited to his funeral, plus a few he told to stay the hell away.

Bookshelf!

Slow spiral into - what, exactly?

Book: The Other Typist

Author: Suzanne Rindell

Published: May 2013 (Amy Einhorn Books)

Pages: 354

I loved the premise of this story – a good-girl typist at a New York police precinct is excellent at her job and faithful to the truth as she records and transcribes confessions, until prohibition hits and the police station hires another typist to handle the workload. The new typist slowly reveals herself to be a modern gal and newly minted criminal as she even more slowly seduces the good girl over to the wrong side of propriety and law through an obsessive friendship that ends in more than one innocent person getting hurt.

It’s a coming-of-age story where the protagonist has no intention of or idea that she still had desires to change, set in a unique workplace juxtaposed against more familiar New York set pieces that were yet completely new to her (fancy apartment, underground speakeasies, house at the Hamptons) that throws her off kilter so hard she eventually falls off balance and discovers her best friend is not there to pick her up.

OR IS SHE?

I’ve got two major problems with the execution:

•  It’s so overwritten. Oh my god. I understand that the protagonist is an orphan who was educated by nuns and probably overcompensates for what was considered a bare-bones education, but seriously, she talks like a Victorian graduate student. And since this is told in first person with interior monologues and exposition, you can’t get away from it. By about a third of the way through – once I’d gotten past the setup – I’d gotten used to it, and it’s not like it was super unbelievable, but I never really liked it.
•  The ending. I’ve been harping on endings more than usual lately (and that will continue), but this story’s central mystery depends on a strong resolution to the unreliable narrator hints that build up nicely throughout the rest of the book. Well, we don’t get that. It doesn’t go Shutter Island at the end, and apparently there’s ample evidence either way, so without spoiling a book that hasn’t officially come out yet, I’ll just complain that even in the 1920s police could’ve totally and easily patched some of the bigger holes presented here (especially about their own employee).

It was a good read, and I might catch it when it goes mass market in May to see what’s changed from the uncorrected publicity proof. The character details are really good, and this is ultimately intrigue driven directly by character development and discovery, so I will put it back in the library break room from whence it came, but I’ll be reluctant about it.   

Jane Austen on steroids

Book: Vanity Fair

Author: William Makepeace Thackray

Published: 1848 (original; 2004 Penguin this edition)

Pages: 809

Let me preface this review with something you should keep in mind throughout, because I’m going to sound like I’m contradicting this a couple times: I liked this book.

So let’s tear it apart! Well, that might be difficult given the softback-brick size – I bet you could use this edition to test the same sort of strength ripping a phone book in half requires. But I did digest this in chunks with several other books (in other reviews I post with this one) between the adventures of 19^th-century people who like wealth too much to actually keep any of it and pure-hearted soles who by the tragicomic turnings of fate find themselves falling into the same poverty state as the people who got there dishonestly.

It’s basically three or four Jane Austen books together about the same two families. It covers roughly the same-ish time period, same sort of society manners, same sort of inheritance and scandal drama, same sort of scheming and emphasis on society and how that, more than private decisions, determines how a life will play out.

It’s also got the time’s same decorative, winking prose, although Thackeray is more ironic and pointed and fourth-wall-crashing when revealing hypocrisies that are widely known and still taken as givens in society circles. He also brings in more peripheral details that can be wickedly hilarious but don’t have bearings on anything except the general atmosphere. These all make you laugh and gain insight at unexpected points and understand even the characters he writes as completely unrepentant.

But it was a terrible lunchtime read, because it takes like twenty minutes to get back into (especially if you’ve been dealing with other readings that are modern and just as difficult, like legal decisions or software manuals) and then a few pages after I got going at a good clip I had to stop. And then pick it back up after work when I had to remind myself where I was again. 

Plus everyone’s referred to by like three different names, like their Christian name (okay – none of those repeat), their last name (oh…kay, we’ve got like three generation of men in the same family so…is she flirting with the dad or the—oh right, the son!), or their married name (is that a Mrs.? That’s a Mrs. Okay. This is the wifey. Gotcha). Stylistically, it’s not the easiest thing to keep straight.

Jane Austen anti-fans and people who don’t like society-driven plots in general probably won’t enjoy this, but please do believe me when I say I had a good time getting through it, especially since I didn’t pressure myself to push through the difficult bits. Sometimes absence really does make the reader grow fonder. Bookshelf.