Brian Evenson’s five short-fiction collections and four novels are wonderfully difficult to categorize. Recognizable as literary fiction, but with strong undertows of horror and mystery, his style is all the more intriguing for defying classification. The stories in Fugue State will not disappoint, for Evenson extends his obsession with the uncanny and the unhinged that has won him a small but loyal following.
Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s masterful first novel, The Informers, published five years ago in Spanish and now available in a lyric translation by Anne McLean, comprises a dozen narrative strands—some laced, some tangled—that describe the same forgotten tragedy. Between 1941 and 1945, the Colombian government, under pressure from American leaders, interned and economically “blacklisted” hundreds of emigrant Germans suspected of having ties to the Axis cause. At the time, Nazi sympathizers lived throughout Colombia and elsewhere in South America, but many Jews and German nationals had fled persecution in their own country, and they, too, were trampled underfoot.
In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf ponders Coleridge’s claim that a “great mind must be androgynous”: “He meant, perhaps, that the androgynous mind is resonant and porous; that it transmits emotion without impediment; that it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided.” The life and work of Clarice Lispector are marked by a yearning for such undividedness, a grasping after universals. “Facts and particulars annoy me,” she once remarked, and in the novel Água viva (1973), she wrote, “There is much I cannot tell you. I am not going to be autobiographical. I want to be ‘bio.’” As Benjamin
For most readers (perhaps users would be a better word) of Chronic City, there will come a moment when they’re forced to admit that what they have in their hands is a stoner book, with all that implies, good and bad. On the most basic level, the title gives it away. Lethem’s New York is a sick city, suffering from physical disintegration and advanced dope psychosis. Everything seems connected to everything else, each wacky allusion, each comically dense situation, weaving baroque tangles of interrelation, until reader, writer, and characters all realize they’re trapped in a forest of signs and will
William Trevor, former sculptor and advertising copywriter, didn’t begin to publish fiction until he was thirty. Now eighty-one, he’s made up for lost time. Love and Summer is his nineteenth work in that form, one of forty-four volumes of fiction, nonfiction, and drama.
Would it be far-fetched to imagine that Christine Montalbetti was musing on the interior monologue of a certain cowboy president while writing her novel Western, a deconstruction of the classic American myth? In this postmodern pastiche—published in France in 2005, now ably translated by Betsy Wing—the narrator, named Christine Montalbetti, writes a novel titled Western, starring a generic cowboy hero, unnamed until the end. Given the associative spirit and self-referential nature of the text, perhaps such speculation is appropriate.
Although science fiction is known as a “literature of ideas,” many recent novels in the genre have been stuck in a rut of fun but safe geek technophilia or retro “boy’s adventure” stories. In a way, then, Mark von Schlegell’s Mercury Station feels both fresh and dated, because it ignores most of the current scene. Instead, the novel harks back to the heyday of such New Wave giants as J. G. Ballard, as well as such glorious eccentrics as Ursula K. Le Guin, John Calvin Batchelor, and Philip K. Dick, while shooting off stylistic fireworks reminiscent of Vladimir Nabokov.
“Mordancy: there was something that could not really be taught. But it could be borrowed. It could be rubbed up against. It could scrape you like bark.” The words belong to Tassie Keltjin, the narrator of Lorrie Moore’s third novel, A Gate at the Stairs, and in their incisiveness they maybe tell us a bit too much about both the character and her creator. Tassie is twenty, a student in the midwestern college town of “Troy”; Moore herself teaches at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. And mordancy is for Tassie the kind of grown-up sass she associates with a
Patrick Oxtoby, the narrator of This Is How, M. J. Hyland’s third novel, does not appear to have a hopeful future. Although his life started out well—he fulfilled his mother’s ambition by being the first in the family to attend college—he reveals himself within the first few pages to be unfit for society.
Yes, it’s true. Padgett Powell’s new “novel” is a highly allusive prose work composed entirely of questions. Many reviewers of this book, I suspect, will attempt to admonish the questioner with further questions, wondering at the gumption of the thing. But it might be useful instead to answer some of the questions posed. In this regard I have chosen questions at random, at intervals of about twenty pages, in the hopes of giving the flavor of the whole, while, at the same time, attempting some context for this offhanded, witty, original, and altogether unique book.
An international student is pleased that her professor doesn’t consider himself religious. “Good,” the young woman responds. “I’m nothing, either. I’m a Maghreb Algerian Kabyle Catholic Atheist French Canadian on a student visa.”
The intergenre artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha made her reputation with the experimental novel Dictée, published in 1982, a few days after she was murdered by a stranger in New York. A speculative history of Korea as it intersects with the life of Cha’s mother, Dictée intercuts oneiric prose with family photographs and political documents. English, French, and Korean shape the book’s voices.
A Lebanese pharmacist concocts a mysterious green potion that makes him sexually irresistible to his female customers. An architect dreams all day of emigration while playing a computer game simulating the demolition of downtown Beirut. A son rescues his father’s favorite prostitute, a woman who ruined his childhood but also made him a man, from a brothel that is about to be bombed. He looks after her for the rest of her life. An eccentric old man in the port city of Tripoli claims to be the last living descendant of the Frankish invaders who led the Crusades. He applies
For some time I’ve wondered how Michel Houellebecq’s Submission would play when it arrived here in the States, nearly a year removed from its tumultuous publication in France. In that country, of course, it appeared the same morning that terrorists slaughtered much of the editorial staff of Charlie Hebdo, including one of Houellebecq’s closest friends. The book had already enjoyed—if that is the right word, and with Houellebecq it probably is—a prepublication patina of infamy. The novel dominated the evening-TV pundit fests, sparking debates about multiculturalism, Islamophobia, and the politics of provocation and responsibility. Fleur Pellerin, the embattled minister of
“The feuilleton,” Joseph Roth once declared to his editor at the Frankfurter Zeitung, “is just as important to the paper as its politics. . . . I don’t write ‘witty glosses.’ I paint the portrait of the age. That ought to be the job of the great newspaper.” Michael Hofmann, who has, over the past two decades, translated most of Roth’s major fiction, including his great novel The Radetzky March (1932), concurs with this boast. “Roth’s masterpieces,” he writes, “were not his novels but his feuilletons.”
The plot of Clancy Martin’s new novel, Bad Sex, is rickety; it makes the narrative sway. Brett, a writer, is married to Paul, a hotelier with kids. The couple live in Mexico City. When a storm hits Cancún, Brett goes to check on a property there. By chance, her husband’s banker, Eduard, is also in town; by luck, he looks like Benicio Del Toro, if only because Benicio Del Toro is the one hot and famous Latino of whom Martin—or Martin’s reader—has heard. Some months later, Paul discovers her and Eduard’s affair by way of, what else, her phone bills,
No novel has taken the task of defining a generation more literally than Generation X, Douglas Coupland’s first-person narrative of post-Reagan, post-college drift, with its long lexicon of neologisms for the 1990s: Cryptotechnophobia, Conspicuous Minimalism, Lessness, McJob, Mid-Twenties Breakdown. Published without hype in the spring of 1991, Generation X was a word-of-mouth best seller by fall. “I don’t want to be a ‘spokesperson,’” Coupland told a newspaper that winter. “I just want to show society what people born after 1960 think about things. We’re sick of stupid labels, we’re sick of being marginalized in lousy jobs, and we’re tired of
Along with its consumers, American popular culture in the 1950s became both besotted with the abundant possibilities set loose by the Second World War and discomfited by the looming prospect that this bounty, along with all of humanity, could at any moment become devastated by nuclear oblivion. The postwar mood swings of “Oh, wow!” and “Uh-oh!” were absorbed, often with cheeky abandon and heedless ingenuity, by movies, television series, and paperbacks using otherworldly scenarios to probe for malignancies beneath the chrome-plated dreams of Better Tomorrows. The state of dreaming—mostly while sleeping, but also the wide-awake kind—preoccupied one of the era’s
Madness is often said to feed creativity, but the reverse might also be true—that creativity is the fuel that brings madness to fruition. The emotional intensity of that reciprocal relationship is the subject of Adam Haslett’s latest novel, Imagine Me Gone. The ghostly title is given its context a few dozen pages in, when the book’s patriarch, John, takes the two youngest of his three children, Celia and Alec, out on a boat near their family’s borrowed cabin on the coast of Maine. It is Celia who narrates this episode; we will later meet Celia and her brothers as adults,
Sarah Schulman was already working on her third novel when, in the late 1980s, customers at Leroy’s coffee shop in Tribeca, where she was waitressing, told her she needed to get an MFA. She joined Grace Paley’s CCNY class and, as she later wrote, read “a scene from my novel-in-progress After Delores, in which the lesbian narrator meets a little go-go dancer named Punkette, who takes her back to her tenement apartment and tells her about the woman she loves.” The other students didn’t get it: They assumed that the narrator was a man. Paley gave Schulman a sharp look
