Language Arts/Stephanie Kallos: Reflections

I took a single novel with me to Hilton Head Island—the third novel by Seattle-based Stephanie Kallos, who brought us TODAY Book Club selection Broken for You as well as Sing Them Home, which was named by Entertainment Weekly as one Ten Best Novels of the year.

I was expecting very, very good, for I'd read those books and I know a little about Stephanie. I know how hard she has worked over the past four years toward this story she's called Language Arts. I know that she has broken it apart so that she might stitch it back together. That fortitude was required. And faith.

I'll enjoy this, I thought, as I packed my tiny red roller bag.

I had no idea what I was in for and here's the reason: I had no idea that a book like this was possible.

I spent nearly two hours on the plane this afternoon trying to summarize this book. I cannot. Yes, it's about a high school English teacher with a severely challenged (and now institutionalized) son. It's about the teacher's past, his regrets, a best friendship he once betrayed, the wife who left him, the daughter he loves. A family story, a deeply involving family story. It is absolutely that.

But it is also about the Palmer Method of handwriting, a brutalized Italian nun, Janet Leigh, Life magazine, thalidomide babies, and a young student who wears a camera for a necklace and has some ideas about art. Absolutely none of that is decoration, distraction, or tangent; it all counts. How and why it counts is a great part of the genius of this book.

And why you have to read it.

Structurally significant, philosophically whole, unbelievably well written, and please forgive me, Stephanie's best book yet. I could deconstruct this book for days. I could hang the sections by clothespins to a line and lie beneath the fluttering pages, pondering, but I would never be able to figure out just how this book got made. How Stephanie summoned the patience. How she held its many parts together in her head, then put them down for us.

Talk about fluid.

Talk about transporting.

Talk about clever in places and deeply sad in others.

Talk about a stab in the heart, and then a healing.

Language Arts is blurbed by Maria Semple, and anyone who loves Maria Semple (Where'd You Go, Bernadette?) will love this book. It is edited by the very great Lauren Wein of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and anyone who loves Lauren's books (I love Lauren's books) will love this book.

For the rest of you, if there are any rest of you, I give you one small passage about language from Language Arts.

Language left him gradually, a bit at a time. One would expect words to depart predictably, in reverse order—the way a row of knitting disappears, stitch by stitch, when the strand of working yarn is tugged off by the needle—but that was not the case.

Look for it next June.

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The Patron Saint of Ugly/Marie Manilla (prose of the day)

Sometimes life intervenes. Frankly, life ALWAYS intervenes. Which is to say I simply cannot read as thoroughly, as completely, as everlastingly as I would like to do.

Case in point: The Patron Saint of Ugly, a forthcoming novel by Marie Manilla, is so rocking, so unusual, so full of 'tude and flair ... but I haven't had the time to finish reading it yet, and I don't wish to rush through. At the same time I want you to know now about this writer, sooner being better than later, and so my methodology, on this Monday morning, as other pressures press, is to advertise, then to excerpt.

So first, the set up, from the flap copy: Born in Sweetwater, West Virginia, with a mop of flaming red hair and a map of the world rendered in port-wine stains on every surface of her body, Garnet Ferrari is used to being an outcast. With her sharp tongue, she knows how to defend herself against bullies and aggressors, but she finds she is less adept at fending off the pilgrims camped outside her hilltop home, convinced that she is Saint Garnet, healer of skin ailments and maker of miracles. Determined to debunk this "gift" rooted in her past, Garnet reaches back into her family's tangled history, unspooling a tale of love triangles on the shores of the Strait of Messina; a sad, beautiful maiden's gilded-cage childhood in blueblood Virginia; and the angelic, doomed boy Garnet could not protect.

Now an excerpt, to prove my assertion that Marie Manilla writes jangling, animated, original prose, that she ceaselessly surprises, that she is hilarious, that she sings a song to the wild, flame-hued tunes in her head.

Garnet, our storyteller, is addressing the Archbishop:

It's a stormy day in our smudge on the map. I'm impressed you visited, since getting here involves a series of ever-smaller planes—jets, turboprops, hamster-powered Cessnas—topped off with a spiraling drive up to my door. Even you commented on West Virginia's low status, its reputation maligned thanks in part to industrialists, Johnny Carson, and Virginians—our Siamese twins still fuming over that nervy Civil War split.

I can't wait to finish this book. You shouldn't wait to order it. It's due out on June 17th from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Editor: the one and only Lauren Wein.

Congratulations, Marie Manilla.

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Wonderland/Stacey D'Erasmo: Reflections

Stacey D'Erasmo: She did me in. She wrote A Seahorse Year, and I loved it. She wrote a new novel called Wonderland that I've been aching to read ever since Stacey and I talked—privately and then publicly—in Decatur, GA. I was already a huge fan, as readers of this blog know. I became a forever fan in Decatur. There are just some people who know more, see deeper, write better. Stacey, who teaches at Columbia, is one of them, and she brings no arrogance to the aura of her appreciable talent.

But Wonderland—oh, what a book this is, a book richly steeped in the twin geographies of movable time and malleable possibility. It's the story of a rock star of sorts—of a singer named Anna who had once made it quasi big, whose second album bombed, whose chance at doing it all again is now or never. She chooses now. She chooses life on the road, strangers in her bed, the elusive high of a song sung right, an audience discovered. She is the idiosyncratically trained daughter of a sculptor of some renown, and she has been married and she has loved and she has lost, and she's only getting older; she will be forty-five when we see her last. She dyes her red hair now. She loses lines. She sleeps with the wrong guys, or maybe they are the right guys—it can be hard for her to tell. She remembers what she was, others remember who she became, but also, always (beautifully, tragically), she imagines what and who she might have been had she made different choices. When we meet her in Wonderland, she is running out of choices.

I read this book in exile from a storm that had darkened my corner of the world. I read it rivered through with that joy I feel when I've encountered art—real and actual. D'Erasmo doesn't just write gorgeous sentence after gorgeous sentence. She takes an enormous number of structural risks—forges a novel out of wildly imagined fragments without ever losing an ounce of coherency (do you know how hard that is?). Readers of this book get not just a vivid character, Anna, but a full-fledged story and a brilliant meditation on second chances, second-tier careers, secondary love affairs, and fame (borrowed, tenuous, earned?):

And why was I famous, anyway? Fact: I wasn't famous to everyone. I was famous only among certain people. The smart people, the people who pride themselves on being smart. Part of it—let's be honest—was the glamour of my pedigree, and the history to which that pedigree alluded. Everyone knew who my father was. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that everyone who loved my music also loved who my father was. You can't separate the dancer from the dance, and anyway, I never tried. 

The other day, in class, I showed two portraits to my students, asked them to write a single sentence about each that told me what they saw. Capturing the physicality of another is hard stuff; we'd already determined that. Going beyond the obvious, tripping away from cliches, digging in. We want language to be equally alerting and clear. Wonderland is so alerting, so original, so improbable, so spring-water clear. I envy the readers who look forward to reading the novel for the first time. I envy the writers who will study it to shake loose new truths about structure, sentence, form.

And my students? I'm excerpting this, below, for them. Look at how physicality gets done. Look at how much room there still is, if we are patient enough, to render another fully see-able.

Ezra, chatting, laughs his famously peculiar laugh, a kind of Aussie Woody Woodpecker sound. I can't see the stroke on him, the overdose. He looks to me so unmarked, or, more accurately, he is already so marked that I doubt I could tell the recent marks from the older ones. He is not a handsome man, never has been. His face, in the half-light, has an ursine, lumpy quality. What can be seen of his hairline plunges, Ben Franklin style, nearly to his ears; his fringe of hair is wispy, of indeterminate color, and coarse. His face is pitted with acne scars. His eyes are small, tend toward the red. His magic emanates in part from that, from his unregenerate ugliness. He looks like a creature of the night who can hold his own with creatures of the night.

Stacey D'Erasmo, congratulations. This image, taken in Berlin of a young metal-working artist, is for you.

Wonderland will be released from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on May 6. I received this galley at the ALA Midwinter event. Begged for it, basically.

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The Answer to the Riddle is Me: A Memoir of Amnesia/David Stuart MacLean: Reflections

It will all begin again at Penn tomorrow. English 135. A crowd of new faces in a small, elegant room. A shared discovery of the power and pitfalls of memoir and narrative nonfiction. I've taught this class several times now, but it's never nearly the same. I look over old notes. I change my mind. I ask new questions. I read new memoirs hungrily, looking for a new angle on treacherous themes.

This weekend, I read David Stuart MacLean's The Answer to the Riddle is Me: A Memoir of Amnesia (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), which had been sent to me not long ago by the wonderful editor Lauren Wein. The story of one young man's terrifying descent into not-knowing, hallucinations, and loss, it is also the story of reconstruction—of how one reassembles the fractured and vague-edged self, especially when every discovered hint of the past does not suggest, perhaps, an ideal person.

MacLean is a writer on a Fulbright grant in India when he startles into sudden wakefulness at a train station. He does not know who he is, where he is, what he is doing, and there is nothing in his pockets—not a ticket, not a passport—that offers clues. He was, he writes, "alone, alone with no idea how far I was from anyone who knew me. I was alone and empty and terrified. I wiped my face with both palms. I blacked out."

It will only grow worse. He will (so much luck in this) be led toward help by a tourist police officer. He will be put into one hospital and then another. Friends will be sent his way, or facsimile of friends. His parents will arrive, beleaguered, from Ohio. He will be taken home and he will be helped to understand what can barely be understood: he has had an allergic reaction to a common anti-malaria prescription medication. He has severe amnesia, he is subject to terrible nightmares, he cannot, at times, distinguish between reality and his hallucinations. He may never be the same.

The same, however, as what? As who? Studying photo albums in his parents' house, stroking the head of a dog who recognizes him, spending time with the girl he purportedly loved, he orbits the wreckage of a former life that does not always seem entirely enviable. This MacLean to whom David is trying to return wasn't always the nicest guy and was such a loud goof that many of those who are told about his medical condition assume that it is just another stunt, just David being David—again. Navigating with only pieces of a self, with fought-for moments of lucidity, with breaks of anger and breaks of despair, MacLean struggles to find a purpose. He smokes way too much, drinks even more. He alienates some of those who love him.

It's a brutal story, and MacLean does not hold back—on himself, on the condition. He does not write to be a hero, does not write for sympathy; he writes to make a number of important things clear. He elucidates mosquitoes, malaria, this prescription drug. He issues cautions. He suggests that we might have empathy for those who took the drug and returned radically changed—for those countless military personnel, for example, who were exposed to the drug's dire consequences. He asks us to consider what the self is, and how much control we have over our own behaviors, over the lines we leave behind, over the heartbreaks we generate, over the who we can be.

And on every page he writes brilliantly, scouringly, viscerally. We see it all. We feel it.

Like this:

My mom sat on the edge of my bed and smoothed my hair as the doctor talked quietly with my dad. She pushed her thumb into the space between my eyebrows, and I recognized that gesture, too. It was something she'd done my whole life, wordlessly telling me not to worry so much. I still didn't have my memory, but now I had an outline of myself, like a tin form waiting for batter.

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Asunder/Chloe Aridjis: Reflections (and a celebration of Lauren Wein)

Long-time readers of this blog may well remember the day I found and fell in love with Chloe Aridjis's first novel, Book of Clouds. It was a penetrable strange. It vibed mystique. It was Berlin wrapped in the gauze of supernatural weather and smoldering Hitler fumes.

Book of Clouds served as a reminder that novels don't need a category—or easy flap copy—to succeed. It also introduced me to the book's editor, Lauren Wein, whose books have consistently thrilled me and whose friendship is one those things I treasure most in my writing life. I profiled Lauren here, in Publishing Perspectives. She has a remarkable vision and a portfolio of edited books that is essentially unrivaled in the adult publishing world. She chooses, edits, fights for, and nurtures the unobvious—the sort of stories that many a mainstream editor overlooks, the sort of titles that go on to win prizes. (Book of Clouds won the Prix du Premier Roman Etranger in France.) Lauren's titles are written by authors who take their time, who fold in and across multiple themes, who have something to say. Novels as saturations. Novels as spills of the imagination.

Last week, Lauren sent me two of her newest titles, one of which was Asunder, Aridjis's second book. Already released in the United Kingdom, boxed with a star from Publishers Weekly ("stunningly good novel," they called it, also "brilliant"), Asunder is even better than Clouds—more self assured, more seductively strange, more cohering. I read it in a day, my breath held, my thoughts streaming: Can she pull this off, she is pulling this off, she has pulled this off, until I closed the book and pumped my fist, victory style. Chloe Aridjis wields enormous intelligence and knowing in this story about an art museum guard named Marie. She folds history in—a 1914 attack on a Velazquez painting by an angry suffragette. She teaches craquelure—the slow decomposition of paintings over time. She studies the art one might make and hold and the art one must never touch. She creates distance and broaches it. She yields men and women together, and apart. She writes magnificently, like this:

After we'd made ourselves a quick cup of tea from a little tray, we set out. By then dusk had turned into an empty-handed magician who kept a few paces ahead of us, snuffing out the streets seconds before we reached them, robbing us of the sights we'd come to see. One by one, the lights in shop windows were switched off, cafe tables and chairs brought in, postcard racks folded up. 

Look, I loved this book. What more can I say?

Asunder is due out in September from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

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Panorama City/Antoine Wilson: Reflections

I encountered Antoine Wilson at the BEA, where I had gone to find out which adult titles had all the buzz, and why, on behalf of Publishing Perspectives.  Quick on his feet, witty, Antoine was, nonetheless, the author of a book about a "slow absorber"—a 28 year old named Oppen Porter who is recording every millimeter of minutiae about his life and thoughts for the benefit of his unborn son, whom Oppen doesn't expect to meet, stuck as Oppen is, in a hospital, and perhaps dying.  I would need to add a few more commas to that last sentence, a smattering of additional half-steps, not to mention some unexpected profundities, they would have to be funny profundities, but also true, in the way that funny is also true, except that I am personally incapable of conjuring either the profound or the funny, in order to foreshadow the nature of the novel itself, which I have just finished reading, in order to give you a sense for the whole. Or one small sentence of the whole.

I would have to be Antoine Wilson, but I am not.  I would have to be a literary ventriloquist with an obsession with the question, What is a man of the world?, but this is Wilson's terrain.  His Oppen is a Forrest Gump of sorts (minus the super-hero powers and the awesome historic coincidences)—optimistic, well-meaning, highly observant but also stuck in his observing, capable of seeing a lot of the picture, but perhaps not the same picture that so many of us see (because we are rushing, because we have conformed, because we have ceded something of the raw and unschooled in ourselves).  The novel is a monologue, a man talking into a tape recorder while his baby sits coiled within his gold- and white-toothed mom.  It is a circle, and while riding the circle, one meets fast-food workers, big thinkers, exasperated aunts (all right, just one single exasperated aunt), religious zealots, and a talking-cure shrink who cures nothing. 

I'm going to share here three sentences of Oppen's world.  Oppen is tall, you see, and his sleeping arrangements are unfortunate.  He's finding himself slightly fatigued:

I'm not a complainer, I wouldn't have said anything, except that I was concerned I wasn't going to be getting enough rest, that over the course of several nights the lack of rest would add up to a general fatigue, it had happened to me before, it had happened to me in Madera, when I had broken my arm, or rather my arm had gotten broken while playing Smear the Queer with the Alvarez brothers, I had fallen in an awkward way, and because of the cast and the way it was situated I could not roll over freely in my sleep, and as a result I suffered from what your grandfather called general fatigue, which he said was quite noticeable with me, what happened was that in addition to having less energy I was less interested in everything and less friendly, too, I wasn't myself.  At the time I did not know the root cause of the general fatigue but I have since come to realize that without sleep the head gets clogged with other people's words.  The head needs sleep to make everyone else's words into our own words again, it is a conversion process.

One final thing.  Panorama City is a Lauren Wein (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) book.  Lauren, whom I am proud to say is a friend, continues to produce some of the most interesting books around.  Read Shards, if you can.  Read Book of Clouds.  Read Say Her Name.  Read Kamchatka.  And read this interview with Lauren herself, who keeps daring to do different in literature, and who keeps proving that different works.

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See Buzz Bissinger Talk about Fatherhood and the Art of the Rave, and support the Spells Writing Lab in the process

Readers of this blog know just how much I adored Buzz Bissinger's forthcoming memoir Father's Day.  I wrote about it here not once, but twice.  I read passages out loud to my students.  I told a seatmate on a train.  I just kinda—well, did my thing.

There goes Miss Crazy Effusive again.

Philadelphia-area readers and thinkers and hearts (that's all of us, right?) now have a chance not just to meet Buzz and hear him talk about the making of the memoir, the glories and heartbreak of fatherhood, and the art of the rave (don't you want to hear Buzz talk about the art of the rave?), but to support a really important cause—the Spells Writing Lab, a literacy-focused organization that offers after-school tutoring, weekend writing workshops, in-school assistance with student publications, and professional development opportunities for teachers.  If that's not enough to persuade you, consider the composition of its advisory board, which is rocked by Stephen Fried, Elizabeth Gilbert, Carol Saline, Lisa Scottoline, Lori Tharps, and Caroline Tiger, among others.

The event is taking place at the Loews Hotel on 1200 Market Street, Philadelphia, on May 10, 2012. It begins at 6:15, and Anyone Who is Anyone will be there.  (I hope to make it, too.)  More information can be found right here.

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Father's Day/Buzz Bissinger: reflections on a most remarkable book

Every morning, minus the nights I never went to sleep in the first place, I do the same thing, robotic and dull:  Open the door to my office (the temperature there the same as the temperature outside), slump toward my desk, fold into my chair, ping the computer, shiver or sweat (according to the season), and await my email.  It's the wearisome habit of the perennially self-employed.  I take care of my clients first.  And then, if there's room left over, I make room for the day.

I didn't do that this Sunday morning.  The thought (and this, I swear, is historic) never occurred.  Because I had gone to sleep reading Buzz Bissinger's Father's Day, and, on waking, I was so wild in my want to finish the book that habit had no power over me.  Subtitled A Journey Into the Mind & Heart of My Extraordinary Son, Buzz's book is a memoir about fatherhood and about a trip he took with his adult son, a second-born twin named Zach.  Read the flap copy and you'll know why the story—about not wanting and getting, about bewilderment and exhilaration, about doing wrong and being wronged and loving hard and forever—should be important.  Read the book to find out why it (absolutely, you-can't-deny-me-this) is. 

"What is most irreducibly true about you?" I asked my memoir class at Penn last Tuesday.  Memoirs fail, I told the kids, emphatic, when they lack compassion for both the subject and the self.  Take risks, I told them.  Be original; it's your one life. Care about language, go raw and interesting, don't be afraid to get it wrong, because if you do, you have a crack at getting it right. Be unafraid and perhaps, I meant to say if I didn't say, you'll write the true impossible mess of life.

I should have had Buzz's book in hand while I gave my talk.  I would have read my beautiful students every word of this most moving, most meaningful, most wrenching, most clear, most important memoir, Father's Day.  I am proudly Buzz's friend, and I know he struggled with this book, but on every page is proof of how an honest struggle, a desperate wrestling down, can at times yield a book that will be read for ages by all ages—not just for the story and for the wisdoms (which are many, accruing, and right), not just for the language (which is gorgeous as it both lances and limns), not just for the perfectly constructed asides that teach us the history of premature babies and savants, but also, if you want to get technical about it, for the structure. Father's Day is a perfectly structured book.  And it's funny and it's sad and it moves you and it's honest.  Maybe Buzz thinks the world is going to remember him for Friday Night Lights, and of course the world will.  But Buzz Bissinger, I have news for you:  You have just written your most transcendent book.  You had all the words you ever needed.  They were always waiting for you.

Buzz isn't the easiest guy in the world.  Hell.  He knows that.  Indeed, Buzz uses his own trenchant bitterness, his temper, his neediness, his incompleteness to explore his relationship to his son Zach, who is a map-obsessed, calendaring-gifted, birthday-remembering, tender-hearted man who is loved by many but stymied in the land of The Normals, as Buzz puts it, by a low IQ thanks to a difficult, oxygen-deprived birth. Time and time again as Buzz and Zach weave their way across the country remembering the past together, Buzz is wrong and Zach is right.  And Buzz is the kind of father who, after nursing his wounds, relishes that fact.  Buzz is a bestselling Pulitzer Prize winner; sure he is.  But what we love about Buzz after reading Father's Day, is who he is as a dad. Fallible, funny, trying, hurt, and loving the hell out of his sons.

I want to quote the entire book.  I can't.  I want to choose a single passage.  I find, for the first time ever on this blog, that I can't do that either.  If I choose Buzz writing landscape, then I ignore Buzz flailing in a motel room.  If I choose Buzz at an amusement park with Zach, then I lose the scene in Las Vegas.  If I quote Zach, then I don't get to quote Gerry, the twin who was born three minutes ahead and who is, Buzz writes, Buzz's very soul.

I can't choose, and so I won't.  Buy the book when it comes out in May.

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Father's Day: The Buzz Bissinger Memoir

My friend Buzz Bissinger has been at work on an important book for a long time.  It's a memoir called Father's Day: A Journey Into the Mind & Heart of My Extraordinary Son.  It will appear in mid-May from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and for Buzz—the Pulitzer Prize winner, the New York Times bestseller, the Friday Night Lights guy, the Vanity Fair contributing editor, the man so often in the spotlight—it's more than a book.  It's a reckoning.

My galley copy just arrived.  I'm eager to settle in.  Between now and the time I report back to you, I share this flap copy with you. 

This story, I think, argues to be read.

Buzz Bissinger's twin sons were born three and a half months premature in 1983. Gerry weighed one pound and fourteen ounces, Zachary one pound and eleven ounces. They were the youngest male twins ever to survive at that time at Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia, the nation's oldest. They were a medical miracle, but there are no medical miracles without eternal scars.

They entered life three minutes--and a world--apart. Gerry, the older one, is a graduate student at Penn, preparing to become a teacher. His brother Zach has spent his life attending special schools and self-contained classrooms. He is able to work menial jobs such as stocking supplies. But he'll never drive a car, or kiss a girl, or live by himself. He is a savant, challenged by serious intellectual deficits but also blessed with rare talents: an astonishing memory, a dazzling knack for navigation, and a reflexive honesty which can make him both socially awkward and surprisingly wise.

One summer night, Buzz and Zach hit the road to revisit all the places they have lived together during Zach's 24 years. Zach revels in his memories, and Buzz hopes this journey into their shared past will bring them closer and reveal to him the mysterious workings of his son's mind and heart. He also hopes it will help him to better come to grips with the radical differences in his beloved twin boys, inverted mirrors of one another when defined by the usual barometers of what we think it means to be successful.

As father and son follow a pinball's path from Philadelphia to LA, they see the best and worst of America and each other. Ultimately, their trip bestows a new and uplifting wisdom on Buzz, as he comes to realize that Zach's worldview, as exotic as it is, has a sturdy logic of its own, a logic that deserves the greatest respect. And with the help of Zach's twin, Gerry, Buzz learns an even more vital lesson about Zach: character transcends intellect. We come to see Zach as he truly is—patient, fearless, perceptive, kind, a sixth sense for sincerity. It takes 3,500 miles, but Buzz learns the most valuable lesson he has ever learned.

His son Zach is not a man-child as he so often thought, but the man he admires most in his life.

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"Success is when the world returns your faith": my conversation with editor Lauren Wein

When I started this blog more than four years ago, I could not imagine what it might become or where it would take me.  I vaguely remember the early blogging months, those fragile missives I put out into the world.  Was anybody listening?

But we do, eventually, find each other out here, and one of the very special people blogging has brought into my life is Lauren Wein, an editor of impeccable taste, huge heart, and graceful fortitude in an era in which so much about publishing is being recalibrated.  It was my blog review of Book of Clouds that began our conversation, but I have had the privilege since then of reading and loving the enormously interesting and original Lauren list; just yesterday, I ordered her newest book, Shards. Lauren is smart and thoughtful; I trust her sensibilities.  When she agreed to a conversation with me about her new role as senior editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and her continuing interest in global stories, I counted myself lucky.

Here, then, featured on the front page of the fabulous on-line magazine, Publishing Perspectives, is Lauren Wein.  For those who are interested in learning even more about Lauren, I highly recommend this powerful essay about the making of Francisco Goldman's novel, Say Her Name.

My first story for Publishing Perspectives, on the making of the international bestseller Between Shades of Gray (Tamra Tuller, Philomel), can be found here.

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We the Animals/Justin Torres: Reflections

I'm not quite sure what it was that made me decide (spur of the moment, really) to buy We the Animals, the slender debut novel by the widely acclaimed writer Justin Torres.  I'd heard some humming about the book.  I'd seen the ad.  I'd read what Marilynne Robinson had to say: "Brilliant, poised and pure." I'd read the words of Paul Harding:  "It is an indelible and essential work of art."  It was an impulse purchase, a little easy finger work, and there it was, on my iPad, waiting to be read.

From start to finish, without once leaving the couch, I just read.

We the Animals is the third book that I've encountered in the space of a little more than a week that builds through plurals. There was the rhythmic they, they, they of Colleen Mondor's remarkable debut memoir, The Map of My Dead Pilots.  There was the haunting, concentrating we of Julie Otsuka's The Buddha in the Attic.

And now here comes Torres with his story about brothers growing up within the chaotic fist of a poor, troubled family.  "We wanted more," this book begins.  "We knocked the butt ends of our forks against the table, tapped our spoons against our empty bowls; we were hungry.  We wanted more volume, more riots.  We turned up the knob on the TV until our ears ached with the shouts of angry men."

Truly, I am tempted to just keep on quoting.  Because look at that.  Listen to it.  Justin Torres is carving out the sound of a song.

These boys are wild.  Their mom was a teen when all three were born.  Their father is a big, muscular, knotted man—a charmer and a rogue, a man who can purple up his wife with his fists and, just as powerfully, bathe a son. The kids are bound to each other and they're plastering each other—with hands, with words, with wants.  Each scene is a distillation, a moment.  Time moves warily forward.  The boys are in for hurt, and they do some hurting themselves, and sometimes it all grows so unbearably tense that I had to close my eyes and summon my psychic strength to keep on reading.

Readers can never change the fate of the characters they meet.  They can only hope for them.  They can only fear for them.  In reading We the Animals, I did both.  I succumbed to Torres's tale.  I honor his literary powers.   

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Prove the Publishing Houses Wrong. Please?

In today's New York Times, Motoko Rich continues the less-than-pretty news stream regarding the future of publishing. Less-than-pretty? No. Let's just call it what it is: Wholly distressing. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has announced that, "with rare exceptions," editors won't be acquiring anything new. Indefinitely, that is. Indefinitely. All those stories authors have been working and reworking for years, all that hope, all that passion, all that possibility will have to find another home, a door that will open when it is knocked upon. And good luck, too, if that book is quiet, or literary, a work of art as opposed to a commercial venture, for, as Rich reports:

Once upon a time, some publishers suggested, they could cultivate under-the-radar authors and slowly build an audience for them over several books. Now, with few exceptions, books tend to come out of the gate at the top of the best-seller list or be deemed failures.

“It is seriously going to be a time for known commodities,” said Esther Newberg, a literary agent who represents blockbuster authors like the thriller writers Patricia Cornwell and Linda Fairstein and Thomas L. Friedman, a columnist for The Times. “I would hate to be starting out in the business.”

There is, of course, only one fix to this, and that's us consumers proving the publishing houses wrong. Proving that we are a civilization that needs more than vampire stories and thrillers and beach books to survive. That expects more from books than made-for-movie plots. We have just elected a tremendously literary president—a man who both reads and writes. He's calling for programs designed not just to fix a broken economy but to redress a spoiled, mucked-over planet. We have before us a new generation of young people who care so much about their country that they campaigned for change in force.

There's got to be more for them to read than books a publishing house declares a blockbuster.

There has to be more for all of us.

Keep books alive by buying them. Keep culture breathing in, breathing out.

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