REVIEW: Randy Bradley by Jake Bohstedt Morrill

Randy Bradley
Jake Bohstedt Morrill
Solid Objects
40 pp / $14

It would be easy to dismiss Jake Bohstedt Morrill’s Randy Bradley. A 40-page epistolary novella, Randy Bradley can be read in a single sitting, the reader arriving at the last page before even realizing it. Presented as a letter from a well-meaning but deranged woman named Lucy to her brother-in-law Richard, the text alternates between inspired mania and misguided vulnerability. It would seem that after years of strange behavior on her annual summer visits, Lucy has been summarily banned from her sister Miriam’s home. What follows in Lucy’s letter to Richard are a series of charmingly alarming evasions and justifications for what has truly been happening during stays as a houseguest. Seeing Lucy fall down this rabbit hole of her own making, the reader could be forgiven for mistaking this piece for a rambling character study. But underestimating either Lucy or Jake Bohstedt Morrill would be a grave error—Lucy’s cheerful dementia is merely the facade for the much larger questions that Morrill means to pose. As slight as it may seem on its surface, dig a little deeper and Randy Bradley reveals itself to be a philosophical treatise packaged so sweetly and deftly that one hardly notices when it slyly shifts towards becoming a case study in Wittgenstein’s private language argument. In the end, Lucy resembles no one so much as Charles Kinbote, part of that unique category of the mentally ill whose methods surpass their madness.

Read the rest of this entry »

REVIEW: Train Dreams by Denis Johnson


Train Dreams
Denis Johnson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
128 pp / $18

According to the jacket copy of my edition of Train Dreams, Denis Johnson’s book “captures the disappearance of a distinctly American way of life.”  That’s true, but the lost era this novella mourns isn’t the frontier life of our hero, Robert Grainier, in the early twentieth century. It’s 2006, or maybe 1998 or 1981, when we still believed in cowboys (and even called one President).

Train Dreams is a gorgeous, rich book about the classic American myth, but written for a country that’s lost faith in its own mythology. It’s a portrait of the West when we were rich, cocky, and our destiny had manifested, but told through the eyes of Grainier, who is humble, ungreedy, and unsure of himself. The first time he kisses any woman is the day he proposes to his wife. When he becomes a capitalist, it’s the result of an act of charity.  He’s not John Wayne or even John Grady Cole; while capable, he’s not the kind of goal-oriented man we’re used to seeing out West.

He isn’t even a cowboy; he’s a train worker, and a conflicted one at that. Here he is, watching the first trip of a train crossing a 60-foot-deep gorge on a bridge he’s helped build:

Read the rest of this entry »

INTERVIEW: Justin Torres, author of “We the Animals”

Justin Torres, the author of We the Animals, is 31, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a Wallace Stegner Fellow, a former dog walker, and a former employee of Manhattan’s much-loved indie bookstore, McNally Jackson. Basically, the man was bred for literary royalty.

In Torres’ novella-length debut, a family of five—Ma, a white woman from Brooklyn, Paps, a Puerto Rican, also from Brooklyn, and their trio of sons—scamper and wrestle through life digging trenches, barking at strangers, playing merciless games, testing one another ruthlessly, while loving each other relentlessly. We the Animals is a herculean-powerful story about a family. It’s a coming-of-age story, it’s a chaotic story, it’s a loving story, and it’s a story that continues to haunt me. If the book were a montage, it would intro frame on skinny, caramel feet dangling from chairs, cut to an aerial shot of mambo dancing in a suburban kitchen, jump to an intimate shower scene, fade to a lonesome pre-adolescent son dancing in a movie theater, flashback to a family in a big-dick truck, zoom in on empty beer bottles, and frame-freeze on the youngest, pack-oriented brother.

It would have been lovely to write an all-praising review for this book, as many others will do, but I would have failed. The problem would have been accuracy. Especially after I enjoyed it so much and have considered it, I’ll admit, way more than I should. Instead I wrote Torres, clumsily. It went something along the lines of: “I continue to read your novel out loud to anybody who will listen—friends, you know who you are—and retell, retell, retell the unforgettable descriptions from the book. Could I, maybe, possibly, interview you?”

He agreed.

Read the rest of this entry »

DIGITISE THIS by Adam Lowe

Language is changing. Literature is also changing. It’s about time we threw aside slavish devotion to tradition and embraced the changes that can work for us as writers and readers.

When putting together my novella,  Troglodyte Rose, I used a number of different techniques. Originally the project was going to be an ‘illustronovella’, which is a fusion of sequential art (as in comics) and straightforward prose. This reinvigorated the writing process: flitting between prose and script. It certainly made writing easier and more enjoyable, because those scenes that would be written as a script didn’t require the vigorous technical detail that goes into a traditional novel. I also found the prose sections came out in almost poetic slivers. As Douglas Thompson later said of the book:

I have long harboured the hope that film might have changed writing in much the same way as photography changed painting, and that we are therefore in a bold new era where novels don’t rely on the sequential any longer, but are a series of paragraphs each as good as a poem.

Of course, I have to confess to also being a poet, so perhaps this is natural. But during the writing of this book I did reach an economy of language not present in my earlier attempts of fiction. And the paragraph really is the basic unit of meaning in my writing now. Take for example:

We are inside Hell. How can I describe it any other way? I can feel the fires of the glassworks. I can smell the sulphurous breath of our chthonic gods. I live in squalid darkness and breathe filthy air. My name is Rose and I’ve never seen the sky.

I also managed to alternate slower, more introspective prose sections with fast-paced, rampaging script for art sequences. Unfortunately due to the artists’ commitment to  providing a serial for Tor.com, the overall project had to evolve.

In the end I opted to adapt the Japanese  light novel as a basis for the book. Those scripted sections I’d written, which were all about action and dialogue by necessity, were converted to prose that captured the same pace and energy sequential art would have. Consider:

PAGE 1.
Underground. Outside a pharmaceutical store called Sindar’s Pharmacy.
Light comes from mirrors fixed to the vaulted cave walls and spindly,
Victorian-looking lampposts. We’re in the market district, surrounded by closed
shops, boarded up or with windows smashed. Graffiti covers the walls.
Only a couple of shops are in business, their neon signs half broken
so only some of the letters light. Two figures in the foreground,
perhaps silhouettes or perhaps only half in frame. This frame takes up
the width of the page, but perhaps only a third of its height.

CAP: THE WARRENS. A NATION UNDERGROUND.
CAP: THE ROCKY RIBCAGE OF THE PLANET ASP.

This became:

Underground. Outside Sindar’s Pharmacy. Light pours from the spindly iron lampposts and dies again mere feet away. We’re in the market district, surrounded by closed shops—buildings boarded up or with windows smashed. Graffiti covers the walls. Only a couple of places are still in business, their neon signs half broken so only some of the letters light up in half-understood promises. Our shadows are silhouetted against the door like crooked fangs, hungry for what’s inside.

As you can see, the latter is more fleshed out, but borrows directly from the script to maintain the visual aspect and keep things flowing quick and ready.

Next in the development of the novella was the website. We took the artwork, gave it to my best friend and Creative Director of  Dog Horn Publishing (Michael Dark), and he created an interactive Flash-based website. This is basically a teaser which readers can explore, providing snippets and info about the book, but only enough to tantalise.

Troglodyte Rose comprises three levels: the prose, the art and the website. Together these build a multimedia text which, I hope, lends itself to a digital age with fragmented audiences, shorter attention spans and a need for stimulus. As a result, the limited edition pretty much sold out on the launch day (there are a handful of copies I kept aside just for online sales, but that’s it). It then got nominated for two Lambda Awards and made it to the finals in the Transgender category for its intersex/hermaphrodite character, Flid. Now it has been reworked, again, as a novel, which should make the Trog Rose text accessible to another (perhaps more mainstream) kind of reader.

These kinds of interstices have been explored in other areas of my work, too. Take for example my recent post as writer in residence at the local  I Love West Leeds Arts Festival. Visitors to Armley Mills, where the festival was centred, were sent SMS poetry I’d written in response to my research into West Leeds and the Mills. People could keep these texts or forward them onto friends, and many of them perhaps wouldn’t have read the poetry otherwise.

Poetry and short stories are now being presented as podcasts by websites such as Poetry Jukebox and  PoetCasting.co.uk. There are engaging events like  Literary Death Match and  Polari, and we’re witnessing the rise of the ebook. I think it’s only a matter of time before we’re having cybersex with Mr D’Arcy and exploring the worlds of H. G. Wells in virtual reality.

–Adam Lowe is a writer, journalist and publisher from Leeds, UK. He has been nominated for four Lambda Awards and three British Fantasy Awards. Kurt Huggins & Zelda Devon’s illustration for his story ‘Singer’ was awarded the Silver Editorial Award at the Sepctrum Fantastic Art Awards in 2008.

Troglodyte Rose was published in 2009 by Cadaverine Publications. Illustrations by Kurt Huggina & Zelda Devon. The novel-length version of the book is currently in the contract negotiation stage of publication and a release date will be announced in future.

REVIEW: The Murderess By Alexandros Papadiamantis

Editor’s Note: This is the next installment in Wythe Marschall’s novella project. See his thoughts on the project here.

The Murderess
By Alexandros Papadiamantis
Translated by Peter Levi
New York Review of Books Classics, 2010


The Murderess does not look like a novella.  Its central character—an old woman named Hadoula—is portrayed realistically; its structure is familiar—short, action-filled chapters; and it has an ending, which falls into place inexorably after several characters’ deaths.

The typical question (“what happened?”) seems either not to apply—too obvious; Hadoula is the titular killer—or to apply multivalently.  From the first murder onward, many lines of flight unfold out of many centers of action.

But our character is a stock “lonely old woman.”  All she does is wash clothes and complain and pray.  Her son-in-law drinks at dawn each day; her sons have taken jobs on ships and will never return to Greece.  In her stock-ness, Hadoula serves as an efficient means for the reader to experience the book’s dreamlike action, all of which unfolds from the single putting-into-effect of Hadoula’s ancient, nihilistic, mirror-glass version of Christianity:

Because “nothing is exactly what it seems… grief is joy and death is life and resurrection,” Hadoula kills a young girl, only a few weeks old—her own granddaughter.

This “what happened” leads to the killings of more girls, all young, none suspecting that Hadoula has made a final break with the ethics of her society.

The Murderess is at once difficult and easy to read.  Its prose is lyrical and languid: Greece’s tiny islands come alive, and an impoverished, moral sense of community suffuses the lonely seaside cliffs and montane goat-runs where Hadoula wanders and—eventually, as her work is revealed for murder and not a series of grotesque accidents—where she hides.  (Where “she carried her wound with her.”)

We all feel Hadoula’s inborn, human pain of self-blame, of looking-in-any-incident-for-a-story, looking-for-a-moral.

(Is this the pain of the novella?)

But The Murderess is hard to read when intellectualized:

As Bad Nature is a meditation on the hunt, set in a wonderfully absurd pocket-world within Mexico City that is created by the alchemical combination of Elvis and his sphere of handlers and his translator’s moral mistranslations;—as No Tomorrow is a meditation on desire, set in a pocket-world created by outright lies and an Epicurean commitment to play, to following an adventure through, enjoying a ramble into the unconscious, by both narrator and reader;—

—so is The Murderess a meditation on murder, on the compassionate act of release from the misogynistic brutality of coastal-urban life in Greece in the first years of the century of Hitler and Stalin.

This meditation is set in a real-feeling world that is continually elided in favor of mountain peaks so olive-lush, so remote, so dotted over with the cells of eremites that, in them, it seems not only immoral but impossible that Hadoula’s brazenness—pushing girls down a well only a few yards from the house where their dying mother lies asleep, dreaming of them; strangling the child of a goatherd who helps her avoid the “regulars,” the police sent to question her after a girl falls into a well—seems an affront both narrative and ontological.

…In the forest that crowned all the western slopes… there it was said that a sea-eagle had nested for three human generations… In its abandoned nest was found an entire museum of monstrous bones of sea-snakes, seals, dogfish and other marine monsters, which the huge, powerful bird, with its blue hooked beak and is vast cinder-coloured wings, had picked out of the seas…

With language such as this, we must flatten the olive trees onto the same painting as the murders. But Hadoula is the real link.  We become complicit in her nihilism, and—because this is a novella—we never finally reach a resolution, even when Hadoula is forced into the reach of the law.   She is finally not a character at all, but the narrative shadow of her actions—the gravity of murder, rolling through the idyllic island, distorting it, deepening a brutal, unseen dimension to which we cannot deny existence:

Would it not really be right, if only humans were not so blind, to assist the scourge that fluttered in the angels’ wings…?  But look, the little angels take no sides and make no favours.  They take away boys and girls alike into Paradise.  In fact all the more boys.  So many precious only sons who died utterly…  Girls have seven lives, the old woman reflected.

The world is righteously hard for little girls, certainly in the Greece of the first years of the twentieth century.  Here Papadiamantis’s book resembles a grim Realist version of A Modest Proposal.  The Swiftian gag is Surreal (“more than real”), however, because Hadoula’s logic is not satire, and her invocations of deadly angels dredge up our own maltheism, or at least our Malthusianism.

Papadiamantis (1851-1911, “The greatest Modern Greek prose writer,” Milan Kundera) forces us to question and to affirm what is absolutely essential about life, and he does this cunningly, by forcing us into the consciousness of a woman for whom maltheism has become absolute, rigid.

But was she genuinely second-sighted?  She whose dreams… had often foretold something… or left some strange impression.  Even her lies when she told them became the truth against her will.

Lies, moral lies.  We may want to test our moral positions by announcing or even acting on our convictions before we feel them.  Perhaps the ultimate fear is that we will do so as does Hadoula.

-Wythe Marschall can be found here.

REVIEW: No Tomorrow (Point de lendemain) by Vivant Denon

Note on Column:

What makes a novella a novella, as opposed to a long short story or a short novel? Why does the novella seduce us, even though relatively few are published or taught? (You never hear, for example, “Mommy, I want to grow up to be a famous novella-ist!”) Deleuze and Guattari offer a few hypnotic thoughts on the subject, but even they abandon the question after only—and perhaps appropriately—half-contemplating it.

Towards a literary–psychological theory of the novella, writer and compulsive short-text reader Wythe Marschall offers a biweekly review of classic and contemporary works that may or may not fit your definition of the term.

By focusing on their playful relationship with theme—a constant seesaw between story and meditation, narrative-packed-into-a single moment and timeless “whoa” of profound human experience—Wythe hopes to pin down just what the novella does to its reader’s brain: Can we situate “the novella effect” somewhere between the constrained, heightened consciousness of the short story and the taxonomizing–exhausting consciousness of the novel? Tune in every other week to find out—

Or, at least, to discover several novellas worth reading.

Thanks to Electric Literature, New Directions, NYRB Classics, and Melville House.

No Tomorrow (Point de lendemain)
By Vivant Denon
Translated by Lydia Davis
New York Review of Books Classics, 2009

The novella must look like one thing and be another, always. It cannot succumb to plot—then it is a story. It cannot unfold too spaciously—then your brain organizes it into a novel. No, a novella must remain wild…

In his introduction to No Tomorrow, Peter Brooks writes:

The whole art here is to stage a scene… without naming names, or parts, or detailing the acts taking place. Yet it is all perfectly lucid, even precise.

He could just as well be writing of the novella in general as of Dominique Vivant Denon’s slim opus—a classic “long short story,” as far from the “very short novel” type of novella as you can get.

Still, something holds this story, as well as Marías’s Bad Nature, and a short novel such as Papadiamantis’s The Murderess, in the same abstract gaze. Something makes No Tomorrow (translated by the maniacally precise Lydia Davis) a novella—lucid and compelling but without a breakneck plot; familiar without a deep character.

Part of that “something” of the novella—the mysterium in-betweenium—is the way it gives your unconscious more than enough material to create a meaningful experience without giving you too much.

When Picasso paints the fractured face of a woman—noses, eyes, and mouth-halves all more or less there and relatively proportional, but also wrong—he is not painting “a woman,” but using the trope of “painting a woman” to paint something else entirely, or rather several things:

  • the impression that seeing this woman makes on you;
  • the way that you yourself make meaning out of color and line to form “a woman” in your mind’s eye;
  • the way you take on something of the woman you make, the other—your own “becoming-woman,” as Deleuze & Guattari might’ve said.

This process of forcing the consumer-of-art’s unconscious to carry the heavy part of the creative load is at play always in the novella.

Here’s Denon, forcing you to become the narrator even as, in this same pithy sentence, he turns the plot over on you:

I felt that a blindfold had just been lifted from my eyes, and I didn’t even see the new one with which it was replaced.

We still don’t know the guy’s name, but now we coolly know that he knows that his new love affair with Mme de —— isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

The Mme is the best friend of the Comtesse de ——, with whom the narrator is unrequitedly in love, and this Mme has just informed the poor lad that his object of affection is a pathological liar at best and an inconstant succubus on her off days. The narrator thinks he’s traded glass for sapphire, when all he’s done, to employ Denon’s optical metaphor, is change one broken jeweler’s lens for another.
Desire carries him forward. Denon, inviting philosophy to intervene within melodrama:

Kisses are like confidences: they attract each other, they accelerate each other, they excite each other.

Soon the narrator’s post-Romantic/pre-scientistic impressions of sex and our own conflate, and we share an intimate threesome with the nameless dandy and the skilled, in-command Mme. Her husband is asleep in the other room, and her real lover, the Marquis—who has invited the Mme to take a false secret lover for the evening, if she’s going to stay at her cuckolded husband’s place—is still yet to arrive. All is quiet. (Denon: “Our sighs replaced language.”)

In the morning, we still don’t know our surrogate rake’s name. We continue liking the narrator because, in his way, he wins. He’s playing with house money, and he breaks even, plus maybe enough for an onion soup at the bar on the way home…

So what happened? Is the Rashomon-style, single-moment fulcrum of the “classically libertine” No Tomorrow its narrator’s first kiss with the Mme? Their first (and only) coitus—stranger with stranger, seducer with rake? Brooks:

One would be hard-pressed to find the meaning of No Tomorrow. Yet it has endured as a classic.

Why?

Denon was not a writer, principally, but an artist, one of Napoleon’s lieutenants. According to Denon, when the Little Colonel’s conquering army came upon the ancient city of Thebes in Egypt, it broke out into spontaneous applause.

The French were struck by what happened on a level entirely removed from war, from France, from wanting-to-be-struck. Their campaign was a colonial diversion, and they would end up fighting in Europe.

But what happened that day in Thebes was real beyond the bounds of experiential genre. In some ways, the novella invites this same break with expectation. What happened? A part of you that even you cannot always access will be the judge. Read on.

-Wythe Marschall can be found here.

A launch for Wythe’s first book (in a series), “Lecture, Live Human Dissection and Book Launch”, will happen Friday, July 16th at 8:00 PM at Observatory.