We usually eat up memoirs of public figures, past or present, loved or loathed, because their lives, quite simply, are more interesting than ours.  Take George W. Bush’s Decision Points, for example (presently loathed): the 43^rd president argues that all the decisions he made in the White House, though largely unpopular with the general public, were all “correct.”  Let’s not go there.  But even the staunchest liberal reader must concede that they’re interesting decisions regardless.

Occasionally, however, memoirs are indeed written by “regular” people.  Richard Seaver, for example, isn’t George W. Bush – he was never even president.  But like Bush, Seaver made decisions that affected, and will affect, millions of people.  Like his decision to publish Beckett’s short works in Merlin, Seaver’s upstart French avant-garde literary journal, which catapulted the Irishman to the top of the world literature heap.  And his decision to push Naked Lunch, Story of O, and Last Exit to Brooklyn, among others, through the ignorant hands of the censors ultimately diminished their sway.  And, finally, his decision to record his life in vivid detail (which his wife Jeanette posthumously compiled into The Tender Hour of Twilight Seaver’s vast and intimate memoir), will lead to new insights and new appreciation for the literature that captivated Seaver so very much.

Born in Watertown, Connecticut, Seaver graduated from the University of North Carolina before moving to France in his twenties.  In Part 1 of his memoir, entitled “Paris, 1950s,” his adventures and accomplishments as a Parisian abound: starting a quarterly literary journal (the aforementioned Merlin), noted for publishing seminal modern/postmodern authors (Ionesco, Sartre, the list goes on and on…); writing a lengthy dissertation on Joyce’s Ulysses at the Sorbonne as a Fulbright scholar; fending off the drunken impositions of Brendan Behan, eventual esteemed playwright; and, most importantly, falling in love and marrying Jeanette, his steadfast wife and posthumous editor.  Not bad for a guy with such unassuming origins in suburban America.

Professionally, Seaver mostly operated behind-the-scenes as editor, translator, and eventual publisher of literary figures once considered crass but now occupying the esteemed halls of academia.  In Part 2, entitled “New York, 1960s,” Seaver and company take up court battle after court battle with a quiet, assured glee.  Seaver’s perspective is fascinating because he is both aesthete and businessman.  Were he not convinced that Tropic of Cancer, for example, was anything less than brilliant, he may not have been able to endure the lengthy court exercise in ensuring its publication.  If The Tender Hour of Twilight has one overriding message, it’s that good art often needs to be fought for, and we should thank our lucky stars that people like Seaver are dedicated to the task.  It’s a lovely book written by a book lover for book lovers.

Despite publishing such controversial and monumental literature, Seaver is incredibly grounded and writes in a clear yet erudite style that expertly balances conversation, pure wit, and genuine insight.  His earnest voice stems from a wealth of varied life experiences; in addition to his “gentlemanly” endeavors in literature, Seaver spent two years as a United States Navy Seal.  He was even a high school Greco-Roman wrestling coach!  Seaver never comes off as an elitist, though he certainly could have, considering the authors he knew personally.  He humanizes these ethereal figures through quirky, humorous anecdotes, including the Mets doubleheader he attended with Beckett, as well as the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago he attended with Genet and Burroughs.  These anecdotes work so well because Seaver wasn’t just under their employ – he was their friend.

The Tender Hour of Twilight is ultimately such a success because Seaver comes off as a friend to the reader as well.  The long-term success of a memoir is usually predicated on the author’s persona, despite the particulars of his life.  Not having read Bush’s memoir, the persona would have to be pretty damn endearing to the staunch liberal reader, its thematic statement on decision-making notwithstanding.  The Tender Hour of Twilight gets both right – interesting narrative and genuine voice – despite it being written by a “regular” guy.  If you’re a fan of modern/postmodern literature, are interested in the fields of editing and publishing, are trying to figure out if that Master’s thesis on teleology in Beckett is really worth writing, or are trying to make the next great literary statement, make the right decision and pick up this book.

The Tender Hour of Twilight: Paris in the ’50s, New York in the ’60s: A Memoir of Publishing’s Golden Age
by Richard Seaver

***
– Stephen Spencer lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He has an M.A. in English Literature from Brooklyn College and is currently teaching composition there. He writes creatively in his spare time.

In Monty Python and the Holy Grail – a touchstone for any contemporary retelling of the Arthurian legends – knightly valor and violence are reduced (or enhanced, depending on your sense of humor) to Arthur’s encounter with the Black Knight.  “’Tis but a scratch,” the Black Knight says after one arm is lopped off.  “It’s just a flesh wound,” he again protests as blood begins spraying from both shoulder sockets.  There is no better modern example of the impossibility of chivalry in a time marked by violence and certain death.

Peter Ackroyd calls his The Death of Arthur a “retelling” of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur.  Here, Ackroyd seeks to rewrite Malory’s tale for current audiences, aiming to render Malory’s version in modern English with greater conciseness and clarity.  Besides simply translating Malory’s late Middle English, Ackroyd does a great deal to reconcile the inconsistencies in Malory’s rambling original.  The “Tristan and Isolde” section, for example, is markedly, and thankfully, shorter.  Ackroyd also adds subheadings to the chapters: “Read of a contest for love” (in “Tristan and Isolde”) and “See a great slaughter” (in “The Adventure of the Holy Grail”). The origins of “see” and “read” seem dubious, but the subtitles do serve to orient the reader when the narrative jumps, as it often does.

Malory’s original work was composed in the 15^th century, probably while its author was in prison.  His sources were a diverse collection of tales and folklore from French prose romances that were popular at the time, many of which featured the courtly love theme.  His task, when you think about it, was quite impossible: Malory sought to reconcile and condense the various legends, which were floating around in disparate forms.  The result is repetitive, hard to read, and lacks the familiar narrative structures like setting and characterization.  Thomas Caxton published Malory’s completed work in 1485, and, as Ackroyd points out in the introduction, it has been in continuous print ever since.

The language of Malory’s original, though, recalls a special, intangible quality of the Arthurian legends.  Compare, for example the following from Malory’s version:

Than the kynge dremed a mervaylous dreme whereof he was sore adrad…hym thought there was com into hys londe gryffens and serpentes.

The following is Ackroyd’s retelling:

[King Arthur] was disturbed by a dreadful dream.  He dreamed that dragons and serpents had invaded his land. 

Just the appearance of Malory’s Middle English, the placement of “hym thought there was com” versus “invaded,” gives the reader a different picture of King Arthur.

Malory’s English is more similar to Modern English than Chaucer’s Middle English, and most current editions simply change the pronouns and spellings.  Ackroyd says that he hoped to draw the characters more “convincingly,” perhaps because Malory’s version isn’t as rich in what we would call character development and narrative consistency.  Knights appear and disappear in disparate segments; time moves forwards and backwards in uncertain leaps.  In this way, the work tends to resemble bits of gossip shared between close friends.  Yet, most of what we now associate with Guinevere, Lancelot, and King Arthur are products of Malory’s retelling, even though the origins are much earlier.  His very language seems infused with the feel of Arthurian times, the strange combination of betrayal, violence, and idealized love.  (Malory likely served under the army of Henry V, who was, not surprisingly, compared to King Arthur.)

Ackroyd’s other nonfiction works include a retelling of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales as well as works focusing on Dickens, Shakespeare, and London: The Biography.  A reader might assume that he seeks to recreate the canon of medieval British history so that the works aren’t lost because high schools students are no longer required to learn Middle English. Perhaps there are other lessons readers can still take from the tales.  At the end of Ackroyd’s version King Arthur is overthrown by his bastard son, and sadly discovers that public opinion is easily swayed against him: “Here was the sovereign who had most loved the fellowship of his warriors of the Round Table.  Yet the lords of our country were disloyal to him and lacking in reverence.  What was the reason?  The English are forever unstable and untrue, seeking novelty in new guises.  Nothing satisfies us for long.”

But, on the other hand, does culture actually risk losing these books?  The Arthurian legends are so fully integrated into Western consciousness, it seems that Malory’s work is constantly being retold.  George R.R. Martin’s series Game of Thrones has distinct overtones of Malory’s 15^th century England – knights ride horses, the king rules from a vaguely British-looking medieval castle (at least on HBO), and family ties are constantly questioned.  Like Greek tragedy, Arthurian legends reveal the tenuousness of familial bonds – just because Mordred is blood doesn’t mean King Arthur won’t try to kill him (or that Mordred won’t oust his father).  Half sisters and other men’s wives are fair game for sexual intercourse.  The bonds that some would like to assume have been inviolate since the beginning of time are proven to be treacherous, flimsy, and dangerous.  Consider King Arthur’s origins story: he is taken away from his parent’s home, treated as an adopted son, and has trouble convincing people that he is the heir.  These were not romantic times.

Arthurian legends also reveal the glory of legend, and the sheer number of adaptations speaks to the power of these basic tales.  A great deal of the allure is, in fact, the paradox of chivalry and betrayal, rape and courtly love.  Most retellings rely on this duality. Ackroyd attempts to keep the spirit of Malory’s King Arthur while making it more accessible for the modern reader, a challenging task given how influential these stories are even today.

The Death of King Arthur: The Immortal Legend
by Thomas Malory

***
– Jessica Pishko is a current MFA candidate in fiction at Columbia University. She also has a J.D. from Harvard Law School. You can follow her on Twitter @jesspish.

I first encountered Leigh Stein in a Classics course at Brooklyn College in the spring of 2010.  She sat adjacent to me, and as the professor recounted the Iliad’s instances of aristia, Leigh would write furiously in her notebook any words, phrases, or descriptions pertaining to the text.  I found this technique captivating because, already having knowledge of Leigh’s accomplishments as a poet and fiction writer, I imagined her entries as alternative versions to Homer’s epic, wherein Helen of Troy develops a chronic case of acne after promising to be bestowed to Paris, or Achilles becomes fatally dizzy after chasing Hector around Troy’s walls.

Similar to this fashion, Leigh Stein’s delightful and hilarious debut novel, The Fallback Plan, is a vertiginous rewriting of what do after college when even one’s fallback plan is hardly a sustainable option.  Stein’s narrator, Esther Kohler, accepts this fate as social common sense, i.e., is externally apathetic to moving back in with her parents or watching her capricious boy interest, Jack, fumble with his prettier girlfriend.  She is reservedly jealous of her friend Tierney who writes her letters from Rome, and bemused by her friend Pickle, whose preoccupation with weed and video games starts to rub off on her.  So what does one do when job searching becomes a laughable prospect and one’s Wellbutrin recreation runs dry?  Take a babysitting job, of course, set up by none other than Esther’s assiduously proud mother.

In an otherwise straightforward plot, Stein meticulously draws out Esther’s postponed career as a babysitter for the Browns’ daughter May.  Esther, the self-effacing “Jewess”, becomes the first-hand spectator of Amy Brown’s reclusive ways and her husband Nate’s equivocal motives towards Esther as well as his family.  Esther reveals to us that the Brown’s first child had died six months earlier, and as we watch the Browns try to move away from the past, we see Esther growing closer to May just as May’s parents secretly try to work out their own problems through Esther. This appears morally comforting, but Stein won’t let us get off that easily. The implication of the Brown’s tragedy combined with Esther’s droll approach to most everything unwinds slowly, and when it wants to seriously impact, Stein cleverly weaves the narrative with vignettes of Esther’s rendition of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe starring a panda. Esther’s half-serious fallback plan as a screenwriter for this concept is amusing, but we can also be sure that this “plan” is no less arbitrary than any other.

Stein’s poetic trademark is all over this novel, as Esther writes herself so effortlessly into pop culture and literature, making a farce out of the now accepted recourse of going home after college.  And similar to Stein’s poems, the confessional style submits itself to the confident self-assurance of the self-conscious, as if it were mere clockwork.  Stein’s original and practiced technique allows Esther to move through the scenes so unguided we take her unbridled thoughts and opinions as true wisdom.  And this characteristic makes The Fallback Plan one of the most honest purveyors of the allure of lacking practical objective after college.

The Fallback Plan
by Leigh Stein

***

—Matthew Daddona is a poetry and fiction writer based in New York. His work has appeared in Slice, Anderbo, InDigest, Barely South Review, Assisi, and Mad Swirl. He works in the publishing industry.

Don DeLillo has been a powerful presence on the American literary scene for the past four decades, and his latest short-fiction anthology, The Angel Esmeralda, encapsulates some of his lasting concerns and themes. In it, the readers will find the familiar landscape of psychological alienation, sardonic treatment of mass media and western consumerism that absorbs and savages any meager attempts at transcendence.

DeLillo has the rare gift for capturing the linguistic verve of advertizing (he had worked as a copy writer), while simultaneously sabotaging it. He achieves the muscular rhythm of his prose by often using punch lines and refrains, with sentences whose content sometimes sounds so truistic that it has led some critics to accuse him of hollow existentialism. His technique can perhaps be likened to that of the American post-pop artists, who appropriate the objects and the language of mass culture, to manipulate them.

His use of postmodern/new-agey zeitgeist can be seen in the story “The Starveling.” The narrator comments on his drifting apart from his wife:

It had something to do with Flory’s worldview. She dropped out of the neighborhood association, the local acting company, the volunteers for the homeless. Then she stopped voting, stopped eating meat and stopped being married. She devoted more time to her stabilization exercises, training herself to maintain difficult body positions, draped over a chair, rolled into a dense mass on the floor, a bolus, motionless for long periods, seemingly unaware of anything beyond her abdominal muscles, her vertebrae. To Leo she seemed nearly swallowed by her surroundings, on the verge of melting out of sight, dematerializing.

If this passage is funny, it is savagely so: a relentless snapshot of a personality and a marriage unraveling, and an acerbic commentary on a society in which we are more and more often willing to form “relationships” with fantasies (including whatever new self-help ideology is in fashion), or things (video games, gym, TV). The collection is full of stalkers—two university boys follow an old man and invent his life story in “Midnight in Dostoevsky;” an older divorced man trails a young woman he spotted alone in a movie theater (weaving a made-up tale of her life along the way) in “The Starveling.” More than an addiction to voyeurism, or to daydreaming, the characters convey a sense of muted despair—a frightful, almost unspeakable knowledge that our usual forms of communication, e.g. language, sensation, have somehow broken down. Sometimes, humans are replaced altogether—in “Human Moments in World War III,” an astronaut stalking unmanned satellites in outer space would rather communicate with the soulless universe than with his colleague (“his human insights make me nervous”). The “human moment” is reduced to interacting with objects: hammocks, earplugs, broccoli. It is a bleak vision, as if language’s failure has forced us to retreat to our most rudimentary foundations.

A distancing tendency permeates DeLillo’s fiction. Sometimes in a more innocuous way—in “Midnight,” the fictional narrative that the boys invent feels so real it becomes an end in itself (what postmodern theorists call “hyper-reality”). Luckily for readers who favor character-driven fiction, in this particular instance, DeLillo is more interested in depicting a human affair with language than in theories—his characters are seduced by words, by their power to dictate and change how we view life, ourselves. It is a beautiful allegory of both imagination and evolution in general—of how we come to acquire a “world.” In “Hammer and Sickle,” a story about white-collar criminals in a low-security prison, the narrator confesses that just hearing the word “phantom” made him want to be “phantasmal.” But language deceives as much as it seduces. The convict adds, “here I am, a floaty fever dream, but where’s the rest of it?” In the most moving stories, the instant gratification of language is offset by the writer’s skepticism.

In some of the more transparent passages, on the other hand, human beings feel more like thinly veiled manifestations of phenomena. In “The Starveling,” the male narrator reflects on why he has stopped taking movie notes:

He stopped, he said, because the notebooks had become the reason for what he was doing. What he was doing was going to the movie. The notebooks were beginning to replace the movies. The movies didn’t need the movie notes. They only needed him to be there.

The passage fails to convince as an explanation of the character’s psychological motivation. In another instant, in “Hammer and Sickle,” the narrator’s two little girls appear on children’s television to deliver a stock-market report. While hilarious, the girls’ presence, or the convicts’ fascination with them, feels contrived, leading too quickly to musings on the demise of global markets and the cancer of capitalism.

The inclusion in the collection of the eponymous “The Angel Esmeralda” may seem surprising, at first—the old nun Edgar’s story appears in DeLillo’s masterpiece, Underworld. So much here echoes the passage in the novel, the pleasure lies not in novelty but in revisiting what may be some of the very finest contemporary American writing. In a single story, DeLillo encompasses both the malaise of a postmodern cosmopolis—littered with debris, ridden with drugs, crime, and ad-hoc capitalist enterprises raised in the ruins of an impoverished community—and the apocalyptic, mythic vision, encapsulated in a young runaway turned saintly apparition. That the apparition turns out to be a bust—a reflection, made by the lights of a passing train, against a sprawling ad for orange juice—hardly takes away from its power. The Angel Esmeralda is a simulation par excellence, and it would make Jean Baudrillard proud: once the angel becomes a media event, drawing in crowds (and tacky commerce) and bringing the onlookers to a near catharsis, who’s to say that the fakery (or the non-existence) of the ghost matters? The event and its afterglow, processed by the media and perpetuated by the converted, creates a new kind of reality. What makes all this possible, DeLillo suggests, is our human need to create myths (urban legends), and to become part of something greater than ourselves—as is the case of Edgar, who feels “nameless for a moment, lost to the details of personal history,” and for whom the angel is “the vision you crave because you need a sign to stand against your doubt.”

The literary critic Harold Bloom has questioned whether Don DeLillo is in fact postmodern. Bloom may be right: in the most engaging stories, like “The Angel Esmeralda,” the writer’s brilliance seems to lie not so much in channeling the ills of our age, but in juxtaposing the old systems of belief with the new. It is a cry for what has been lost, as much as a pastiche, in the Jamesonian sense, of our age’s questionable gains, and the resulting mix is full of tension and inventively surprising.

The Angel Esmeralda Signed 1st Edition
by Don Delillo

***
—Ela Bittencourt has an M.F.A. in writing and an M.A. in arts administration from Columbia University. She is currently based in New York, where she writes book and art reviews, as well as fiction.

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.

Randy Bradley is, to my mind, the most entertaining demonstration of what Wittgenstein meant in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus when he wrote that, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” (Or, at least what the most entertaining demonstration of what I think Wittgenstein meant by that. Articulating Wittgenstein’s thought is notoriously like trying to nail jelly to a wall.) As it turns out, the story (and Lucy’s behavior) hinges on an ingenious word-game of Lucy’s own making, one deviously complex in its simplicity. To reveal the rules or the purpose of the game would be to give too much away, but imagine, as Lucy urges Richard and the reader, placing a jar over an insect in order to prevent conflict between the insect and a human antagonist. Now suppose what it would mean if the jar could be placed so deftly that the insect can be contained (and protected) without ever realizing that its world has been restricted. This “embalming effect” is—in a very roundabout way—what Lucy has been doing all along.

But lest this sound too much like an undergraduate bull session, it’s important to empathize that Morrill is not strictly writing about philosophy, his true aim is more in exploring the real-life consequences of these ideas. While Lucy may seem eccentric or harmless, her intentions turn out to be deathly serious. (At least to her.) The game Lucy is playing isn’t simply a game; it is a deception, a labyrinth in which to trap a Minotaur that must not be spoken of. Lucy teeters on the edge of meaning and discovery, the semiotics of her private universe in perpetual danger of being revealed. And were her methods ever to be known—should Lucy’s reluctant co-players, Miriam and Richard, ever uncover the secret of Lucy’s games and speak the name “Randy Bradley”—the fallout would, to Lucy’s fragile yet agile mind, plunge all three of them into a domestic crisis that could undo the fabric of her sister’s marriage. And so, Lucy must be misunderstood. No one can ever know that Lucy is playing a game with discernible rules and goals. And that is the true tragedy here: this necessary misunderstanding—perpetuated for the sake of domestic tranquility—inevitably leaves Lucy isolated and alone, a pariah to her own sister.

In one sense, Jake Bohstedt Morrill is working within the vanguard of an increasingly vogue school of fiction intensely focused on the architecture and sound of the sentence. Randy Bradley offers small, concise lessons in the craftsmanship of sentences: each of Lucy’s declarations is painstakingly formed and her word-game focuses the reader’s attentions upon the smallest subtleties of how words are formed. But at the same time, Randy Bradley feels like a commentary on that type of prose as well. It highlights not only the malleability of language, but also its potential malfunctions. As this gymnastic minimalism continues to gain steam (and esteem), Randy Bradley demonstrates the pitfalls of such writing. This hyper-sensitivity to words and sounds, syllables and vowels, promises new vistas, but it also has the power to alienate and confuse. Language may be the medium, but it’s also the message; we play with it at our own peril.

***
–Stephen Aubrey is a writer and dramaturg. He can be found here.

In the Late Victorian era, an age of sexual repression and widespread, often fatal sexual diseases, it was the vampire and the werewolf. In the Fifties , when our  two biggest fears were nuclear annihilation and Communist takeover there were body snatchers and a series of monsters created by atomic radiation. In the late Sixties and early Seventies, at a time when it seemed like our society was abandoning traditional religion and losing its moral compass, it was the devil (Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, The Omen).

In the new millennium, teenagers may be vampire-crazy, but the monster of choice seems to be the zombie. In the last ten years, we have had remakes of Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, 28 Days Later and its sequel, 28 Weeks Later, zombie comedies like Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland, even erotic zombie movies. The biggest hit on cable is The Walking Dead. And now Colson Whitehead, the author of rarefied novels like The Intuitionist and John Henry Days, tries his hand at the genre with the novel Zone One.

Zombies? Not exactly the most exciting monsters around, are they? They lack the glamour and philosophical bent of vampires, the exotic charm of aliens, even the athleticism of werewolves. Clumsy and slow-moving, they are interchangeable creatures of pure appetite.

Yet this very ordinariness could be the source of their contemporary appeal: the zombie may represent our fear of our fellow man in the aggregate. Look at the post-millennial world: resources and elbow room getting scarcer, globalization turning the whole planet into a level playing field in which survival is guaranteed for nothing and no one. In this scary landscape, our fellow man looks less like a brother and more like a depersonalized enemy.

Zombie stories are also appealing because they are stories of scarcity and survival; in the genre, the emergence of zombies is usually simultaneous with large-scale ecological catastrophe. In Zone One, an indeterminate catastrophe called Last Night has created a race of zombies and changed the world from a recognizable contemporary terrain to a post-apocalyptic one in which only shards of civilized society remain.

But in this mordantly funny novel, some habits never change.  For example, as a man runs for his life from a mob of zombies, he ‘narrates his progress’ into a dead Bluetooth. The infrastructure may be in tatters, but the military’s mission to restore order, christened American Phoenix (sounds like Desert Storm or Operation Iraqi Freedom, doesn’t it?), has still managed to attract a few corporate sponsors.

The best parts of Whitehead’s previous novels have always been trenchant, detachable passages of observational humor. Zone One‘s protagonist, Mark Spitz, a ‘sweeper’ who clears urban areas of zombies after the Marines have done their initial search-and-destroy, is remarkable chiefly in his averageness:

His most appropriate designation [in high school] would have been Most Likely Not to Be Named the Most Likely Anything, and this was not a category. His aptitude lay in the well-executed muddle, never shining, never flunking, but gathering himself for what it took to progress past life’s next random obstacle.

The sweepers in the story are charged with de-zombifying Zone One, which is the post-apocalyptic name for the island formerly known as Manhattan. The typical wartime camaraderie evolves among the sweepers, who share the same black humor and exchange the usual wistful, pained before-the-war stories.  There ‘s the inevitable scary recon scene in a mutant-infested subway tunnel. There are enough of the conventions of the zombie story in Zone One, including copious amounts of gore, which it could pass to reach a broad audience.

Yet Whitehead, who has an ear for absurdist jargon second only to Don DeLillo’s, is true to his tongue-in-cheek vision. The survivors suffer from something called PASD, which turns out, after some pages of teasing, to stand for ‘Post Apocalyptic Stress Disorder. This is, after all, the writer who published a helpful guide to writing contemporary fiction, including genres like the Southern Novel of Black Misery (“I’ll Love You Till the Gravy Runs Out and Then I’m Gonna Lick Out the Skillet”) and the Novel based on a Little-Known Historical Fact (“People like to be educated about tragedies that they’ve never shaken their heads sadly over before. Getting them to say “I didn’t know about that” is a surprisingly effective marketing tool”).

Whitehead is one of the writers who reserve their tenderness chiefly for inanimate objects, and who has imagined destruction so he can gaze lovingly at the ruins. In the novel’s most poignant passage, Mark Spitz reflects on a city storefront:

These stores had opened every morning to serve a clientele extinct even before the plague’s rampage, displaying objects of zero utility on felt behind smudged glass, dangling them on steel hooks where dust clung and colonized. Discontinued products, exterminated desires. The city protected them…The typewriter-repair shop, the shoe-repair joint with its antiquated neon calligraphy and palpable incompetence that warned away the curious, the family deli with its germ-herding griddle: They stuck to the block with their faded signage and ninety-nine-year leases, murmuring among themselves in a dying vernacular of nostalgia.

As the faceless Mark Spitz sifts through his generic, buzzword-laden, pre-apocalypse memories and marches passively towards his fate, the suspicion grows that, in Whitehead’s world, the human and the undead might just be two different classes of zombies.

Zone One
by Colson Whitehead

***

—John Broening is a chef and writer based in Denver, Colorado. His work has appeared in the Baltimore Sun, the Baltimore City Paper, Gastronomica, Edible Front Range, and the Denver Post, for whom he writes a weekly column about food.

A question for the gentlemen – what would you do if your wife was cheating on you?  Would you confront her, raising a domestic scene worthy of COPS? Or, would you keep quiet, letting the betrayal turn into a lifetime of passive aggression?  If your name is Hal Lindley, and you’re the protagonist of Lydia Millet’s new novel Ghost Lights, your reaction would fall somewhere in between: a drunken offer to rescue your unfaithful partner’s obnoxious boss from a tropical jungle.

Let’s take a few steps back.  Hal works for the IRS and has settled into a complacent suburban life with Susan, his ex-hippie of a wife.  She works for Thomas Stern, or “T.” as he prefers to be called, who vanished during a trip to Belize.  Since T.’s disappearance, things start to fall apart for Hal, particularly after he catches Susan sleeping with the young sexy paralegal at her office.  Later, Hal gets a little too libation-happy at his daughter’s dinner party, and as the conversation moves to the subject of T., he blurts out that he will fly to Belize in search of the mercurial businessman.

So begins Millet’s seventh novel.  Having been in the game for about 15 years now, Millet has received much praise for her dark comedies, and with Ghost Lights, she continues the tradition.  Hers is a psychological humor, evinced through Hal’s petty yet plausible motivations.  This is sort of what his thought process is like, in brief:

Why should I look for T.?  I hate him, that such a new-age phony!  Because Susan adores him!  But I’m mad at her!  True, but what better way to stick it to her than rescuing her hero?

If this sounds confusing or downright silly, then steer clear.  If it strikes a chord, then you’ll find a fiendish glee in Ghost Lights.    

The quirky premise is reminiscent of Vonnegut, particularly Cat’s Cradle, as well as Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.  Like Vonnegut, Millet is interested in absurdity set against an exotic locale, and like Conrad, Hal’s physical journey corresponds to an inner journey.  If Marlow is Conrad’s Everyman, then Hal is something slightly less, a “surplus human,” as he calls himself.  Similarly, if Kurtz is the Everyman gone insane, then T. is the Everyman gone a bit cuckoo, but with a less loquacious philosophy (how can he compete?).  In the end, these are two guys suffering from quarter and mid-life crises; fortunately for us, they reacted radically.

But how far does Hal’s inner journey extend?  Can he change amidst his new surroundings?  From the moment he adopts T.’s three-legged dog to the moment he reaches his Kurtz deep in the jungle primeval, we are made a party to Hal’s every thought and opinion, which range from the quick quip to the querulous tirade.  Millet forces us confront our feelings for Hal, whether we root for his growth or his undoing.  Personally, as I felt the novel’s encroaching end, I wasn’t sure what I wanted for him.  It made for a surprisingly tense last few chapters.

Other characters serve mostly as another “setting” on which we impute Hal’s mind.  Casey, his daughter, is a paraplegic that humanizes him, an ironic amalgam of the deformed and the beautiful.  Hans and Gretel, Germans he meets in Belize, are almost fabulistic symbols (Hansel and Gretel, anyone?) that force Hal to confront his mind’s tendency to form obdurate stereotypes.  Though they are interesting in their own right, this is ultimately the Hal show.  We understand him on a psychological level, something we don’t get from any other character.  When it’s all said and done, Millet favors the inner to the physical journey.  Other characters are but signposts.

The question is not whether Hal is likable or unlikable; the question is if he’s interesting.  In a phrase, he’s not: dull job for “the man,” stale marriage, predictable life.  But, is his being uninteresting, in fact, interesting?  This will vary from reader to reader; some will find his witticisms witty, and some will find them obnoxious.  You can love or hate Hal and still find this book intriguing.

From her character study, Millet touches on some pretty deep themes with Ghost Lights: rampant conformity, the inherent pain of child rearing, and the possibility of changing one’s worldview.  Perhaps the most moving is escaping fate.  Hal’s future in suburban California was set in the stars, and those stars were rather dim.  At least in Belize the stars are unpredictable, showing themselves to be what they truly are – suns, universes, chaotic balls of change.

Ghost Lights
by Lydia Millet

***
– Stephen Spencer lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He has an M.A. in English Literature from Brooklyn College and is currently teaching composition there. He writes creatively in his spare time.

About once a year, you find a book that you can unimpeachably recommend to everyone, like Cloud Atlas or Beat the Reaper. This year, and just in time for holiday gifts and small talk, John Jeremiah Sullivan has given us that book in Pulphead.

A collection of essays and long-form journalism published, over the years, in GQ, The Paris Review, Oxford American, Ecotone, and Harper’s, the book touches on topics as diverse as these publications: Axl Rose’s best dance, the unexplained giant ocean noise known as the Bloop, a tragedy in Sullivan’s family, the Tea Party, and the quintessential Real World bro, among others.

But there’s a common thread connecting the touching personal essays for The Paris Review with the sexy, weed-soaked assignments for GQ: Each is a lesson in generosity.

To be a great magazine journalist, you have to be likeable, both in person and in print. The former because you have to convince strangers to spend long hours with you and share their stories. And you’re starting out at a deficit—everyone knows journalists have a knack for making decent people look stupid. Some journalists overcome this by stealth, like Joan Didion; Sullivan does it by being a good guy.

A lot of the sources Sullivan befriends have been hounded for years, but he wins people over, again and again; reading through, you start to think he must be a super-charming person. He spends time with the notoriously reclusive Bunny Wailer (of Bob Marley and the Wailers). As a fact-checker working under Greil Marcus, he has an all-night phone conversation with John Fahey, another reclusive musician who’s willing to just hang out with Sullivan and rap. Even Mike “the Miz” Mizanin, a Real World alum who makes his living by partying with strangers, seems to reach a new kind of comfortable with Sullivan. But this might just be a feature of Sullivan’s likeability in print; reading each of these essays, you feel like you’re just hanging out, too.

Generously, Sullivan honors each of these people’s trust in the written piece. The book is LOL funny, but he never once makes a joke at one of his sources’ expense. He’s fully aware that most journalists do this; as he says of the Real World alumni:

“I wish—for your sakes—that the Miz, Coral, and Melissa had turned out to be more fucked-up, as people. I have a vague sense of owing the reader that.”

But he won’t do it. He’s a total fanboy—he knows more Road Rules trivia than the cast members themselves do—and his goal, in these pieces, is not to tear things down but to share his love for everything he reports on. He reminds you how great a singer Axl Rose is. He makes you like a character from One Tree Hill. Even when he’s writing about a conspiracy theorist—one who believes that a league of evolving animals are coordinating, under the command of the dolphins, to launch a war on humankind—the only person Sullivan really makes fun of is himself, for buying so hard into the evidence.

I’ll resist the urge to go on and on, because I’m sure I’ll spend the next two months doing so to all of my friends and acquaintances.¹ Instead, I’ll just recommend it to you as your next recommendable book.

Does your brother need a birthday present? Give him Pulphead. Does your boss want you to recommend a going-away gift for the intern? Pulphead. Are you making small-talk with your high school boyfriend’s girlfriend at your hometown bar on Christmas Eve? You know where to safely steer the conversation.

Pulphead: Essays
by John Jeremiah Sullivan

¹Did you know that you can reshape a warped vinyl record by placing it between two panes of glass and leaving it in the sun? So you’ll learn in “Unknown Bards.” Did you know that, six weeks after Steve Irwin was killed by the first ever sting-ray attack, a man in Florida was killed in the exact same, deliberate way? It’s in “Violence of the Lambs.” Seriously, you’re going to love this book.

***
— K. Reed Petty is a writer from maryland. You can follow her on twitter @pettykate.

A common narrative of this recession is the “unlikely criminal:” A middle-class person, usually white, turns to crime to survive hard times. Most of these stories are on cable: Weeds, Hung, Breaking Bad. But Mule, a compulsively-readable new novel from Tony D’Souza, takes the genre down to the nitty-gritty: How do you actually go about building a criminal empire?

Mule is Scarface for readers of The New Yorker: It plots all the emotional points on a man’s rise and downfall, while explaining everything you need to know to avoid getting caught while driving $50,000 worth of marijuana from California to Tennessee.

D’Souza’s book is the most satisfying in answering the details that cable skims over. Our hero, James, is an out-of-work freelance journalist with a new family and no safety net. When he gets an opportunity to make some quick cash, he researches the business of driving drugs like a long-form journalist: How do you convince a bank teller to hand over your $7,000 savings account in hundreds? What are your rights if a cop pulls you over in Texas versus Nevada? And, as James asks of a buyer he meets on his first run: “How much does an ounce weigh?”

That joke is genius, a perfect execution of a necessary beat in the unlikely criminal genre: the criminal ingénue doesn’t know what he’s doing. And, admirably, it’s one of the few genre clichés D’Souza leans on.

Many of these genre stories indulge in a little celebration of privilege. There’s always the beat, early on, where a character realizes he’s getting away with murder because he’s white, middle-aged, and drives an SUV. He’s blundering, but the people around him are blind.

It happens in the first season of Breaking Bad: Walt, the chemistry-teacher-turned-meth-cook, gets a visit from a DEA agent investigating chemistry class equipment stolen by a meth cook. (Walt stole it). Walt takes a phone call from a dealer in front of the DEA agent, then laughs along as the agent jokes about Walt being the culprit.¹ That genre moment is there in these stories to remind us that the protagonist, hard times or not, is still a middle-class person with the privilege it affords.

In Mule, James doesn’t have that luxury. The trappings of middle-class security are stripped from him quickly and thoroughly, and while his choice to break the law is never totally forced, his options are limited. Once he gets started, he’s painfully visible; cops watch him on the road, noticing his rental car and two-day stubble.

By forcing this middle-class person (James is a freelance journalist with the New Yorker on his resume, for crying out loud) into this situation, D’Souza gives Mule the accurate weight of the recession on middle America. Even when James and his young family are in fat city, the woes of Florida are vividly all around them.

Compared to the fantasy of cable, this book is a “For Dummies” primer on surviving the recession without getting arrested — for those considering crime, at least. Those considering #OccupyWallStreet will have to rely on tips and tricks from the cops.

¹ I apologize for the very long digression about Breaking Bad. I love Breaking Bad.

***
— K. Reed Petty is a writer from maryland. You can follow her on twitter @pettykate.

Taking after the old pulp tradition, badbadbad starts off on a sharp note: A man has been left by his wife, taking their son along with her. The prose is as razor sharp as you’d expect in old hardboiled paperbacks, with the same juxtaposition of opposites creating the same tension we’ve come to love from the genre, and the cover is designed with the same campy grittiness in mind. badbadbad, however, isn’t a pulp novel, but a taut psychological examination, a blueprint into madness, all wrapped up in a nice pulp package. This is an important distinction to note because the novel is shot through with this sentiment, this idea of covertness, of hidden layers, of people masquerading as things they’re not.

The Artifice of Media

Jesus Angel Garcia, the narrator, has just been left by his wife, who took their son with her. Looking for money in order to hire a divorce lawyer, he’s hired by the Reverend Puck to be webmaster for the First Church Before Church, helping build their online presence. The community grows so large that he’s picked up by other area churches. Around this time, he meets Cyrus, the ex-communicated son of Rev Puck. Cyrus and JAG bond over music on almost a molecular level. They are fluent in punk, jazz, soul and communicate through in the innate language of aesthetes. He also introduces JAG to fallenangels, a website forum created as a safe haven for fetishists. It’s this site that triggers a revelation for Jesus, that it is his calling to be a sexual messiah for these broken women, fulfilling their needs.

The institutions of church and chatboards—assuming the interwebs can be labeled an institution by this point—are ripe for exploitation, especially if crosscut. In the hands of an overwrought undergrad, this could quickly become tired and the motives transparent. Garcia—the author, Garcia—has a steady, old-fashioned storyteller hand, though, and makes even small elements like the First Church’s name feel more organic, clever maybe, instead of twee. The storylines of each venue are beautifully thrown against each other, informing the next while never outright commenting on either, rather letting the reader draw their own conclusions. At First Church, the Reverend’s passionate sermons—with the help of JAG’s photography and podcasting—begin to attract an increasingly large amount of parishioners to the website, where they discuss sermons, Christian living and local politics. This conversation, though, is monitored and even stoked by JAG himself under a variety of names. When conversation veers to the unchristian, the posts are deleted; when discussion lags, an incarnation of JAG starts talking, sometimes even conversing with himself. During his evenings, he trolls through fallenagels, chatting with numerous women, recreating himself to fit within their pleasure’s parameters in order to satisfy them. At points, he has so many different names and women—each with their own screenname and Christian name—that it nearly requires notes. Keeping all of these straight in his head is a feat unto itself, much less devoting himself, morphing into whatever it is that they need.

All of the varied media address one of the major themes in the book: communication and intimacy in the digital age. Namely, is communication—real communication—possible with all our social networks, and if so, how does this impact our ability to connect and be intimate? Digging further into the novel, peeling back more layers of Jesus Angel Garcia, we start to see his thoughts on this materialize.

The Artifice of Man

All of these personalities and facets dictated by the various media begin to wear on Jesus. He becomes increasingly distressed by the inability to connect with people, despite overextending himself to meet their needs. This is where I began to wonder about the book, reevaluating my understanding of it and starting to consider that I was slowly wandering into unreliable narrator territory. The prospect of this was especially interesting as Garcia’s voice is so confident I hadn’t had any cause to question him.

Structurally, badbadbad is an epistolary novel, told to JAG’s younger brother. Recounting events, particularly ones as intense as these, is already subject to revisionist tendencies. It’s a nice corollary, too, that the veracity of the events mirrors Jesus’s constantly changing identity. This kind of revision is apparent any Friday night at a bar, where we put forth only the best of ourselves. He takes it a step further, though, even streaking his hair with grey dye and using colored contacts for women with specific needs. Regarding his sexual God complex, I understand that he believes it’s his purpose to satisfy women’s urges, to be a martyr of the mattress, but at points it began to feel like he was actually thriving on these missed emotional connections. He seems to constantly point out these superficial interactions, but they all occur in a venue that is impersonal itself. It was almost like he was trying to atone for something in his past by offering himself as a sacrifice, to heal the sexual wounds of these women in order to heal himself. The naivety with which he approaches many of these interactions calls into question his actual intentions as well.

At various points, JAG dips into asides to his brother, hinting at an abusive household that he fled, leaving his brother behind to fend for himself. This could be the wound he’s trying to heal, but it also made me wonder from where he’s narrating the story. To try to avoid (more) spoilers, I won’t go into it, but again it made me question JAG as a narrator, which then led me to look into the son storyline. The issue of the ex and missing son, though being pretty much the inciting incident of the story, plays a surprisingly small role in the overall story. The lack of focus—bordering ‘tacked on’—on an element so large in a novel that is so well told sent alarm bells clanging inside my head. This possibility of unreliability casts some of his other trysts in a very different light after the book is finished.

badbadbad is one of those novels that requires more than one reading, the kind that forces you to consider and reconsider its implications for weeks after reading. It’s a constantly morphing novel, with prose that is (could be?) deceiving in the best possible way. It’s a beautiful debut by Jesus Angel Garcia, and sets the bar high for his next.

***

– Nik Korpon is the author of Stay God, Old Ghosts and By the Nails of the Warpriest. He is an Associate Editor with Dirty Noir and Rotten Leaves magazines. He lives in Baltimore. Give him some danger, little stranger, at nikkorpon.com