Looking ahead

I realized that today, being the last day of August, means that the year is now officially two-thirds over.  Or, to put it another way, there are only four months of reading left in 2009.  I’m getting a little panicy that the year is almost done, and I haven’t gotten into all of the books that I want to read – not to mention that I may be missing out entirely on all of the great books that haven’t even made it onto my radar. So I put it to our readers, what are the best books that you’ve read in 2009 so far? What are the books that you hope to read in the months ahead?

Here are the titles sitting on my desk right now that are must reads:

• It Feels So Good When I Stop by Joe Pernice (and I need to get the accompanying CD “novel soundtrack”, naturally)
• This Wicked World by Richard Lange
• Andromeda Klein by Frank Portman (will there be a novel soundtrack?)
• The Magicians by Lev Grossman

Two of these novels are written by musicians.  What does that mean?  And Nick Cave has a new novel that comes out tomorrow…

Remainders

And now, another commercial free 90 minute rock block, after these links:

Georgia Shakespeare will be presenting “MacHomer” tonight at Oglethorpe University.  MacHomer is the Shakespearean play Macbeth performed in the voices of characters from The Simpsons.

To avoid any confusion, please review this handy flow chart for the Bonnie Tyler song Total Eclipse of the Heart.

Hey!  Those guys at Green Apple Books in San Francisco have completed their The Book vs. The Kindle video competition:

• Round 7: Storytime
• Round 8: Staff Favorites
• Round 9: Oops
• Round 10: Unfortunate Event

Well, this is just embarrassing.

Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

I’m very late to the party on this one, but I picked up The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo at my favorite vacation bookstore for a holiday read and was thoroughly pleased with my purchase.

Tim covered this one pretty well in his review, but he didn’t marvel at what for me is the main salient insight I gained into Swedish culture by reading this book: If Stieg Larsson’s depiction of his countrymen is even close to accurate, the average Swede drinks enough coffee in a week to reanimate the corpse of Dag Hammarskjold.

I also enjoyed the fact that Larsson, who was a middle-aged lefty magazine reporter in real life, created a protagonist who is a lefty magazine reporter.  The fictional (or not-so-fictional?) investigative reporter, Mickael Blomkvist, drinks a cup of coffee every eight minutes, routinely solves mystery capers, and has sex at least nine times a week–with all kinds of different women, including the titular heroine, a computer hacker with Asperger’s Syndrome.

I liked the book a lot for what it was: it had memorable characters, an original, fast-moving plot, and what I thought was a very strong sense of place (though I’ve never been to Sweden, so I can’t compare this to reality).  I look forward to reading the next installment in the series, but it will have to wait for next year’s vacation.

The Longshot

First of all, how bad ass is that cover?  Would it surprise you to learn that the author of a book about a mixed martial arts fighter with such a badass cover is a woman?  No?  Would you be surprised then to learn that Katie Kitamura is a former ballet dancer and that she graduated from Princeton and got her PhD from the University of London? No? Really?  I was intrigued by all of the above and decided to take The Longshot for a test drive to see what other surprises the author had in store.

The Longshot is the story of Cal, an MMA fighter, and his coach, Riley.  The story picks up with the two men traveling together to Tijuana for a big fight, a re-match between Cal and the champion of the weight class, Rivera.  Cal is a natural fighter, quiet, and intense.  It has been a few years since Cal has fought at the highest levels – when he was beaten by Rivera – years that he has spent working his way back up the ranks.  Cal finds himself surprised that the pair have found themselves suddenly back in the mix:

Cal looked around.  He looked at the people.  It was funny to think it had to do with him. Watching it like this it didn’t seem to have anything to do with him, but already it had made the fight more real.  He could feel it getting more real as he stood there.  He swallowed and rolled out his neck and turned to look for Riley.

Riley discovered the kid and used to liken driving the slumbering fighter between fights to traveling with “sleeping dynamite.” The rematch with Rivera is a second chance for both of them to get back in the game.  Because Cal is insular and solitary, Riley handles their dealings with the outside world:

Riley did the talking,  Riley always did the talking. He could work a room in no time flat if he needed to.  He could check in with every guy he needed to check in with, he could say hey where he needed to say hey,and he could walk out leaving every guy he talked to feeling special.  Years in the game and he had it down to a science.

Despite the tension of the upcoming fight casting a tense shadow over the novel, the book is ultimately about the relationship between a fighter and his coach.  Each has a responsibility to the other, neither wants to let the other down, and each play a central role in the continued livelihood of the other.  That’s a lot of commitment to one another for two men to carry around in a extremely macho world that is as fragile as it is volatile.

A quote that I came across about the author in her press material boldly declares, “Hemingway has returned to life–and this time she’s a woman.”  That’s a heap of expectation to lay on a first-time author. There’s something to it though as you can see from the tightly wound prose in the quotes above.  Kitamura explores an über-manly world with grace and style, and she makes that world utterly and completely real.  No small feat.  And she is a woman.

Let’s make one thing clear, I’m not a fan of mixed martial art fighting. That said, it really doesn’t matter.  The Longshot is a novel full of gritty reality, crackling narrative tension, and humanity.

Bonus: The cover is not a photoshop job.  Those are the real arms of the author’s brother, a tattoo artist.  Read more about Kitamura in this Daily Beast feature: How to Fight Lke A Girl.  You can read the first chapter of The Longshot here.

Fun with the Public Domain

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the Jane Austen…  I came across the Pride and Prejudice comics series last week at Criminal.  The covers of the five volume series re-imagine the story of Pride and Prejudice as Regency Era ladies magazines.  The inside pretty much sticks to the traditional story.  No zombies.  You’ll just have to wait for the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies graphic novel.  Really.

100% Of My Love

I’ve found myself immersed in New York author David Browne’s new-to-paperback biography of Sonic Youth, Goodbye 20th Century. Originally I picked it up in preparation for a book event I’m working on with WORD bookstore in Brooklyn on Sept 24 involving Browne, David Comfort, Greg Milner and Theo Kogan, but I’ve become absorbed in the super-conversational tone Browne uses to recount the earliest, haphazard way in which SY came together and their methodical crawl into the temple of noise.

Honestly, my first Sonic Youth album was Sonic Nurse. I know, I know, I know, I’m losing instant credibility here (the first time I ever heard my favorite SY song, “Mote”? Yeah, it was the Faint covering it live), but that one record-specifically its first song, the propulsive Kim Gordon vehicle “Pattern Recognition”-immediately caused me to start buying up as much of their back catalog as I could, and I’ve kept up with them since then.

Their newer stuff interests me less and less (Rather Ripped was slow-burning but soft (ironically, given the title) and The Eternal is a bit rote but may still yield some undiscovered classic), and, when I saw them live for the first time touring Sonic Nurse , it was the raging, blistered classic from their vaults “Brother James”, a song I had obviously been entirely unfamiliar with until that very moment Kim Gordon dropped to her knees on stage, bellowing, literally bellowing, the line “take my hand you might as well/we’re going STRAIGHT TO HELL”, that most floored me.

Forget the “dancing about architecture” stuff-I love reading about music. In some cases, like with James Brown or Animal Collective, I love reading about some music more than listening to the music itself. With the latter example, I scour fan forums, poring over accounts of Animal Collective fans having near-transcendent experiences with the band, and find the music to fall totally flat (kinda like if Dave Matthews discovered a sampler). But with SY and Goodbye 20th Century, I’m finding myself, oddly, falling in love with this band’s history through Browne’s fly-on-the-wall, hard-and-fast accounts of the way the band fell together, Thurston and Kim’s whirlwind marriage, their near-comical and Spinal Tap-esque inability to retain a drummer, etc-and, more importantly, falling in love with the old, old, old Sonic Youth stuff.

When “The Burning Spear”‘s described in Goodbye 20th Century as the closest thing to a dance hit SY could have ever had, I had to seek it out. Noise+dance=win, to me.

“The Burning Spear” is absolutely amazing, and a song I’d never have hunted down if not for Goodbye, 20th Century, which I think is a greater literary testament to the band than, say, Dave Eggers writing 100 words on “Tuff Gnarl” for Starbucks. I also wrote a little about one of my other major Goodbye 20th Century revelations, SY’s “Ciccone Youth” project, over at Resonator. Sonic Youth’s history is a treasure trove of revelations for me (not the least of which is: Kim Gordon? Hot/amazing right now, used to be EVEN MORE OF A BABE), and I’ll always owe Goodbye 20th Century for the guided tour.

Rock Your Books Off

If you’ve missed it so far (and we’re nothing if not timely here), August is Rock Your Books Off month at the always excellent Jacket Copy blog helmed by Carolyn Kellog.  My favorites so far (but check ‘em all out):

• Thomas Pynchon’s playlist
• The Sorry State of Music Criticism featuring Atlanta’s own “grandpa grumpy pants” – Henry Owings
• Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket) on cerebral bliss versus dancing around in your underwear
• Robert Christgau on Leonard Cohen
• Young Adult books that rock – is King Dork on the list? Yes, it is.
• David Sedaris is Aretha Franklin
• Iceland’s Bragi Ólafsson, former Sugar Cubes bassist, turns to literature with a new novel The Pets
• Rock and literature meet at the Guggenheim (next month features BGB fav Rivka Galchen with that dude from Interpol!)
• Teaching the rock and roll novel

I hate to quibble, but I’ll go ahead and question the choice of August as Rock Your Books Off month, what with Zeptember, Rocktober, and the little known Aldo Nova-mber right around the corner.

Still Can’t Handle It

It’ s old news at this point, but I promised to keep up with this trend.  To get caught up on the litblog buzz from two weeks ago, please read BGB contributor Russ Marshalek’s essay in Creative Loafing’s Culture Surfing.  I’ll summarize by quoting Russ on the controversy surrounding the publication of Justine Larbalestier’s upcoming  novel Liar:

Almost immediately upon cracking that book’s spine, though, what you’ll find is that Micah, the teenage girl narrator, is, as the author describes her, “black with nappy hair which she wears natural and short.”

Naturally, the publisher in its wisdom chose this cover to represent Micah on the advanced reading copies -

This choice rightly seemed to annoy many people, the Australian author among them.  After much hullabaloo on the blogosphere, the publishers decided to change the cover and go with this one instead:

This would all be very surprising, only it isn’t.  In July of 2008, I posted about similar shenanigans for three award-winning novels.

A friend of mine has written a book about the Tuskegee Airmen that will be published in the spring. I am officially urging him to not use the picture below for the cover. We can handle it.

Home Game

Michael Lewis is one of a handful of authors whose work I seem to natter on about incessantly.  It should be little wonder then that I picked up his latest, Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood.  As you may gather from the title, this is a book that may be of limited interest, mostly to the dad and expectant dad reader cohort (I am in both camps).  And maybe some moms that overhear the dads/expectant dads belly laughing throughout.

Let’s start here: If you’re looking for an actual “guide” on how to be a dad, this i snot the place to start.  Home Game is mostly a collection of anecdotes about his experiences of being a father that Lewis has previously published in Slate and other venues.  The value in these stories comes from Lewis’s natural storytelling abilities and his journalistic ability to relate fatherhood as it is – not in the gee-whiz terms of the glossy parenting books/magazines/web sites of the parenting-industrial complex.

In the introduction, Lewis notes that the dad business as practiced in the US is going through a difficult transition. We are moving away from the way our father’s did things, away from the guy who came home from work and watched the news with a beer and had to be left alone, preferably in silence until dinner time – towards some new, as yet undefined “ideal model”:

Within a few miles of my house I can find perfectly sane men and women who regard me as a Neanderthal who should do more to help my poor wife with the kids, and just shut up about it.  But I can also find other perfectly sane men and women who view me as a Truly Modern Man and marvel aloud at my ability to be both a breadwinner and domestic dervish–doer of an approximately 31.5 percent of all parenting.  The absence of standards is the social equivalent of the absence of an acknowledged fair price for a good in a marketplace.  At best it leads to haggling; at worst, to market failure.

Lewis’s stories are often hilarious and have the ring of truth wrought from hard won experience.  Women will surely have little sympathy for the  ”dad trying to find his way in the world” aspects of some of these stories. There are definitely some laugh out loud bits that anyone with a sense of humor will enjoy, like the tale of his young daughter’s profanity-laden outburst at a hotel pool.  The chapters on Lewis’s trip to get a vasectomy and its aftermath are both cringe-inducing and hilarious.  The book also has deadly serious moments that drive home the precarious business that parenting really is at its heart.

If there is a message in this “guide”, it comes in the form of Lewis’s realization that to do the job right, you’ve got to put in the work.  This message is repeated at several key points, and it certainly deserves underscoring.  Dads, take note.

I first attempted to buy this book on the day after Father’s Day (completely by coincidence).  Bad move.  The bookstore had sold out of all copies.  ”It was the centerpiece of our Father’s Day display. Moron,” said the helpful clerk. Well, the “moron” was implied. But still. Home Game is a good read and a perfect gift for dad’s and those about to set out into those uncharted waters.

The Wild Rumpus Continues

One day this blog may stop reporting in almost daily increments on the latest Dave Eggers news.  This is not that day.  We realize that may leave us open to criticism from some quarters.   However, it needs to be noted:  an excerpt from the novelization of the upcoming Where the Wild Things Are movie can be found in the New Yorker.   If the excerpt is any indication, both the Eggers novel and the movie promise to be excellent.

In other news of the Egg-man, as we like to call him, Zeitoun gets an excellent review and is featured on the cover of The New York Times’ Book Review:

Eggers, the boy wonder of good intentions, has given us 21st- century Dickensian storytelling — which is to say, a character -driven potboiler with a point…50 years from now, when people want to know what happened to this once-great city during a shameful episode of our history, they will still be talking about a family named Zeitoun.

But back to the Wild Things for a sec, The Onion uses an excellent throwaway gag in an unrelated story, Maurice Sendak is the new court reporter:

(from Omnivoracious)

Lastly, we’ve been so fixated on the Wild Things movie that we needed our Swedish friends at Bokhora to point out that another exciting movie development is almost upon us.  Sit down for this one. Wes Anderson (!) is directing an animated version of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox starring George Clooney, Meryl Streep, and the usual Anderson lineup.  If the movie is half as awesome as this trailer, we’re in for a treat:

Tomorrow, we will not mention Dave Eggers even once. I promise.

Notes From The Dog

A couple of times this summer I took a break from my usual teenage weirdo fantasy books and tried out some regular teenage/younger adult books.  The sweetest one (and the one that made me cry the most) was Gary Paulsen’s new book, Notes From The Dog.

The only other Paulsen book I’ve read is Hatchet, an amazing adventure tale about a boy who survives a plane crash and is stuck alone in the Canadian woods with nothing but a hatchet.  So I was surprised to see that a) this guy has written about a million books, and b) Notes is not an adventure book at all.  It’s more of a coming-of-age/believe-in-yourself/take-a-chance-on-friends/open-your-heart-to-new-things sort of book that you can read in an afternoon.

Paulsen’s writing is so easy that I think every one of his stories would be a joy to read.  This one hooked me completely on the second page when Finn, the 14 year old hibernating hero of the book, describes the differences between his friends.  Not by who they are in general, but by who they are to him.   He has a best friend, an oldest friend, and a funnest friend, but he has only one true friend.

It’s because he’s the only person I know who doesn’t make me feel like he’s drifted off in his head when I’m talking.  Anyone who listens to everything you have to say, even the bad stuff and the boring things that don’t interest them, is a true friend.  He’s always been the only person who’s easy for me to talk to.

Finn has big plans to spend his summer avoiding people by hiding in his house reading books.  He actually has a quota of how many people he will speak to over the next two months.  Finn can’t seem to figure real people out anyway, as they just make him uncomfortable.  His theory is that “it’s a good idea to avoid discussing anything in social situations.  A better idea is to avoid social situations in general.”

All goes according to plan until he meets Johanna, a mid-twenties college student going through chemotherapy, who moves in next door.  Before the summer ends, Johanna weaves Finn, his dog, his friend Matthew, his grandpa, and his all-but-absent father into her family and social web to such a degree that Finn can no longer imagine how he lived a life without her.  Or why he would have ever had an “under a dozen people communications quota” to begin with.

I’ve just re-read the end of this book and I’m as teary eyed as when I read it the first time.  It’s pretty obvious that Finn no longer has Johanna as part of his life, but there are plenty of life changing things that were left with him.  Not the least are 5 of the best written personal little notes that were mysteriously delivered to Finn over the summer by his dog.

Never Grow Up

Like just about every one in my age bracket/socioeconomic group, I’ve been mourning the loss of film-maker/screenwriter John Hughes this week.  I thought the Molly Ringwold essay in the New York Times was pretty cool. I can’t tell you how saddened I was to learn that Ferris Bueller grew up to be a Republican toady/lawyer whose claims to hi-jinks now lean toward sneaking Ken Starr out the back door of court houses.  Awesome! I am so bummed out.

And then I saw the new trailer for the upcoming Where the Wild Things Are movie, and all was right in the world.

The Unknown Knowns

Jeffery Rotter’s The Unknown Knowns sounds promising right out of the gate.  It’s title takes it’s name from a Donald Rumsfeld quote that sounds like something out of Catch-22.  It’ s a political satire, and the jacket references both Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Pynchon.  The author’s bio says that he got his MFA from Hunter College where he studied with Peter Carey, Colson Whitehead, and Andrew Sean Greer.  OK, sign me up.

The story presents an inevitable conflict between a delusional loser, Jim Rath, and a delusional Homeland Security Agent, Les Diaz.  Jim is a sad sack comics enthusiast who works constructing dioramas for museums (or what his wife calls playing with models). Jim has felt like a loser all of his life:

…whenever I cried Mom took me to the Kress for a candy bar…Which may explain my rapid weight gain in elementary school…and the names they called me.  In playground terminology I was a textbook “crybaby” and also a “fatty.” Or, when facing the most ruthless foes, a “fatty crybaby fatty-fatty.” Later I was just a “fag.”

Jim begins hanging out submerged in pools, breathing through a snorkel, to escape the stresses of life.  He zones out and imagines a lost undersea civilization, no not that one, a different one called Nautica.  He develops a theory that the Nauticons evolved from sea apes (Tangent: Sounds crazy, right?  This lady presented a similar theory at the TED Conference.)

Given his erratic behavior and overall strangeness, it is almost inevitable that Jim crosses paths with Les Diaz. Through his own demons, Agent Diaz has delusions of his own importance on the public water spaces detail in Homeland Security:

Most swimming pool areas, and even your waterslide facilities, you understand, still operate on the old Cold War model, with an architecture open to threats.  But this ain’t Harry Truman’s water park anymore, Congressman.

The cat and mouse between these two is humorous and heartbreaking and it makes for excellent social commentary.  I was loving every minute of this book, until…

Well, there are three chapters in the book that deal with the myth of the Nauticons.  And I get that maybe their story may be the delusional imaginings of Jim Rath, but they are so over the top that I found the third chapter of their tale almost unreadable.  There are references to the “Great Estrodus” of the matrilineal society, a place called the Vulvorum, a Princess Labiaxa, a hymn of the Spermata…it just took me right out of the larger and better story of Jim and Agent Diaz.

I’m conflicted about this book.  Most of it is just outstanding, and other parts…not so much.  I’d almost recommend that you check it out and skip the mythology of the Nauticons chapters altogether.  But then, maybe I just didn’t get it.  You might.

Near the end of the book, Jim is trying to make sense of what is happening to him and he comes up with the following:

The lesson is it’s okay to live in a fantasy world of your own making, but you never, ever want to live in someone else’s. Especially if they have guns.

I didn’t want to live in the fantasy world of the Nauticons, and I was glad that they didn’t have guns.  As always, your mileage may vary.

I am a hipster d-bag

I guess self-awareness is the first step to recovery. I came upon this troubling conclusion after Russ pointed the way to Esquire’s Maxim’s “The Hipster Douchebag Soundboard.” As the web page says, “Hipsters are pretty annoying. And they say a lot of stupid stuff.”  Yeah, totally.  Stupid hipsters.  Apparently one of the stupid things that hipsters say is, “Have you read the new Eggars (sic).”   Well, now.

If you can’t spell the man’s name correctly, I have my doubts about your authority in this regard.  So, I’ll ask it loud and ask it proud, “Have you read the new Eggers?”   Do yourself a favor, and read it already.  Those unbearable hipsters at NPR interviewed Eggers and the titular Zeitoun recently, check it out.

Note: In yesterday’s interview, it was established that neither BGB nor its contributors are on the Eggers payroll.

2 Dudes Talking About Books

Last week’s Solar Anus Reading Series (a Georges Bataille reference it turns out)  was very cool.  Colin Kelley followed some poems with a nice reading from his new novel, Conquering Venus.  Chicago author Ben Tanzer read some short pieces that will appear in an upcoming collection.  His “quasi-nonfictional” story about Ira Glass was hilarious.  The host, author Jamie Iredell, says the series runs monthly-ish, so be sure to check it out sometime.

After the reading and over a couple beers, Ben Tanzer interviewed me for a podcast that he’s posted over at This Blog Will Change Your Life. I’ve never been on the receiving end of interview questions before, so you’ll hear some mumbling, long pauses, and the occasional “uh…” on my end of the conversation.  I’ve helpfully annotated our discussion with some handy links.

You’ll need to go here to listen.

Helpful links for some of the items discussed:

• Manuel’s Tavern
• the Poncey-Highland neighborhood
• Radiant Days by Michael Fitzgerald
• Dave Eggers
• Zeitoun and
• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
• The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall
• The Secret History by Donna Tartt
• A Prayer for Owen Meany and
• The Cider House Rules by John Irving
• Black Flies by Shannon Burke
• Safelight by Shannon Burke
• R.E.M. vs U2 (I’m right.  For the record.)
• Poutine
• Ira Glass

Many thanks to the always happening Ben Tanzer for the fine excuse to be out and about on a school night.

Sag Harbor

It might not seem that I have anything in common with the protagonist of Sag Harbor, a 15 year old black kid from NYC who is spending his summer out on the Hamptons, but this book literally made me feel like I was reading a story about my teenage summer. Why the similarity? Because this book is set in 1985 and Benji, the protagonist, is a teenager who loves New Wave music, bad 80′s sitcoms, and uses all the queer catch phrases that were heard around my school that same year when I happened to be 15 years old.

Sag Harbor is Colson Whitehead’s fourth book (a previous book, John Henry Days, was a Pulitzer and NBCC finalist) and is autobiographical. The story relives the joys of teenage summers, especially one spent in a family beach house in a town where all your friends come back year after year. Sag Harbor is apparently a (or I should say the only) beach town in the Hamptons whose summer population is upper-middle class black families. Benji and his family own their summer home and have been vacationing in Sag Harbor his entire life.

The story begins right after Memorial Day when Benji and all his summer friends regroup after spending the school year apart. Benji attends an exclusive, mostly white NYC prep school.  It is up to his more urban, hip summer friends to school him in the latest rap music and handshakes. Benji spends the summer working at the local ice-cream store, thinking about girls incessantly, hanging with his home-boys, sneaking beers on the beach, and blasting music on his boom-box. One of the funnier scenes in the book is when Lisa Lisa comes to town and Benji and his friends try to get into the local club to see them play. Music is featured prominently throughout the book and Colson Whitehead even put together an exclusive playlist of nine essential tracks found here which is truly a blast from the past.

Sag Harbor is the perfect, summer vacation read; a hilarious, hip coming-of-age story which made me realize that the time period in which you grew up creates as much of a bond as your race, financial, or social status. The pop-culture of the mid 80′s defined my teenage years and those shared memories brought a big smile to my face.

Friday Flicks

Here’s the trailer for the upcoming film of Michael Lewis’s non-fiction The Blind Side.

And be sure to check out the trailer for the upcoming novel mash-up, Sense and Sensibility and Seamonsters:

Books vs. Kindle

David (Green Apple Books in San Francisco) takes on Goliath with a hilarious video series “The Book vs. The Kindle” decathlon.

• Round 1: The Buy Counter
• Round 2: Buying a Book
• Round 3: Sharing
• Round 4: Nap Time!
• Round 5: The Icebreaker
• Round 6: Finding the Right Read

With four rounds to go, the Kindle has already been mathematically eliminated from competition.

Dubiously titled reading tonight

Atlanta author Jamie Iredell hosts his regular “Solar Anus Reading Series” tonight with featured authors Collin Kelley and Ben Tanzer.  Kelley has a new novel, Conquering Venus,coming out soon that he may read from according to the Facebook. Chicago’s Ben Tanzer is the author of the very hip Most Likely You Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine.  All of the cool kids will be there.

Details:

Thursday, August 6, 2009

7:00pm

Beep Beep Gallery

Lowboy

Author John Wray impressed me before I read a word of his work.   As a publicity stunt for his previous novel, Canaan’s Tongue, Wray set off down the Mississippi River in a homemade raft.  Huckleberry Finn-style.  I thought, “that’s my kind of guy.”  That was in 2005.

In 2007, Wray appeared in Granta’s Best Young American Novelists issue.  The story that appeared in the issue was an excerpt of what would become the opening scene for his novel Lowboy.  Once again, it seemed that Wray was my kind of guy.  So, in 2009, I finally sat down with a John Wray novel. It turns out that he is, in fact, my kind of guy.

Lowboy begins with the titular character entering a subway car in New York City:

Everyone in the car would later agree that the boy seemed in very high spirits. He was late for something, by the look of him, but he carried himself with authority and calm.  He was making an effort to appear older than he was … They watched him for a while, glancing at him whenever his back was turned, the way people look at one another on the subway.  What’s a boy like that doing, a few of them wondered, dressed in such hideous clothes?

Eventually, Lowboy manages to weird out almost everyone on the car, which is no small feat for frequenters of mass transportation.  Lowboy is mostly oblivious to his effect on the other passengers as he tries various tricks to keep his head together.  It is soon revealed that Lowboy has left a mental hospital, and he is accordingly off of his necessary medication.  Lowboy’s disappearance from the hospital is sufficiently worrisome to the authorities that the police quickly become involved in locating him.

A veteran NYPD detective has been assigned to find Lowboy, and he begins by interviewing the boy’s mother at the station.  The detective starts off a little brusque and ill-natured, but slowly a sort of understanding, if not friendship begins to form between the mother and policeman.  As the pair travel the city trying to locate Lowboy before something bad happens, it becomes apparent that the mother is hiding something.  As the history of Lowboy and his family is slowly revealed, the suspense in the novel builds.

The novel’s tension comes from the changing expectations of Lowboy as we learn more about the boy and his past. What is he capable of exactly?  Is he really a threat to others (or himself) or is he an essentially harmless teen?  Trying to divine the motives and future actions of someone with a mental illness can be fruitless, and I think that’s the point.  Lowboy finds himself in some truly awful circumstances, places we would never want to find our own children, yet the readers sympathies are always with Lowboy. The novel goes where its protagonist takes it, which is usually wildly unpredictable. Check it out if well written and compelling fiction are your thing.

Bonus: Lucky Dog Audio Post has created a Lowboy streaming mixed tape that incorporates the old school jazz tunes referenced in the novel.  Check it out. The author also gave a reading of Lowboy on a New York subway.  Very cool. Check it out on the Youtube.