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.

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REVIEW: The Adjustment by Scott Phillips

The Adjustment

Scott Phillips

Counterpoint

224 pp / $25

Fans of Scott Phillips’ 2003 novel, The Walkaway, rejoice: Wayne Ogden is back.

Phillips’ newest novel, The Adjustment, serves as a prequel to The Walkaway, offering a portrait of the monster as a young(er) man. Just back from World War II, Wayne Odgen is among those veterans who are having trouble adapting to life back home. After a brief but fulfilling military career as a pimp and black marketer in Rome, Ogden can’t help but feel stifled by Wichita, Kansas. Trapped in America’s heartland, nothing seems to bring Ogden any satisfaction—not his pregnant wife, Sally, and the prospect of domesticity she offers; not the various women that Ogden seduces on the sly and certainly not his PR job at Collins Aircraft— a job which amounts to little more than being an enabler to Everett Collin’s various vices and addictions. Worse yet, Ogden has started receiving a series of barely-literate poison pen letters that promising an eventual reckoning for the crimes that he committed overseas. Driven to ever further extremes in order to preserve the lifestyle he is nonetheless growing steadily ambivalent towards, Ogden begins the metamorphoses from the spiteful misanthrope he is here to the full-blown psychopath on display in The Walkaway.

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REVIEW: Left Glove by Mac Wellman

Left Glove

Mac Wellman

Solid Objects

56 pp / $12

Resolved, that:
It must first be said that reading a Mac Wellman play is a much different experience than watching one. Wellman delights in creating problems and challenges for his fellow artists to surmount and—as with most theater—any competent production of one of his plays has already done some of the hard work for its audience; the actors, designers and director have already collaborated in order to realize Wellman’s dizzying, idiosyncratic form. Producing one of Wellman’s plays is a true act of theater, a band of artists coming together to make sense and order from a dense and complex text. But when reading one of Wellman’s plays, the reader is on one’s own. Where there ought to be collaboration, there is instead a hall of mirrors and echoes. At points it can even become unclear whether one is reading a stage direction or a line of dialogue (forget for a moment the possibility that it could even be a stage direction meant to be read as a line of dialogue.)

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REVIEW: Someday This Will Be Funny by Lynne Tillman

Someday This Will Be Funny

Lynne Tillman

Red Lemonade

176 pp/$14.95

As with most of the things Lynne Tillman creates, even the title of her new collection, Someday This Will Be Funny, sustains (and even encourages) multiple readings. These are, of course, the words we grimly promise to ourselves in the face of embarrassment, loss and despair—feelings that Tillman’s characters have in spades—in the hope that, one day, our pain will be diminished. But underneath this gloss lurks a deeper recognition of the almost farcical state of the American union of the last ten years. For Someday This Will Be Funny is, in a peculiar sense, a testament to the decade we’ve just exited, a collection undeniably infused with the zeitgeist of an America still reeling from the Bush administration. Tillman’s singular voice and mind induces a certain kind of historical vertigo—if not nostalgic claustrophobia—as it palpably resurrects the malaise of the past decade.

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WEST OF HERE by Jonathan Evison

West of Here

Jonathan Evison

Algonquin Books

496 pages/$24.95

Whenever I hear the words “Manifest Destiny,” I instinctively picture John Gast’s American Progress, a late nineteenth-century painting whose image is still seared into my mind courtesy of my junior year American history textbook. In the painting, Columbia leads civilization westward across a generic Western landscape, dropping telegraph wire in her wake as terrified Native American savages flee from her visage. In hindsight, the arrogance, racism and sheer mendacity of this justification for American expansion seems obvious, but the question remains: If not Columbia herself, what force drives this nation forward?  In West of Here, Jonathan Evison becomes the latest author to tackle this peculiar facet of the American psyche.

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The Ecstatic History of Jim Shepard

Master of Miniatures

Jim Shepard

Solid Objects

56 pages / $12.00

As fans of Jim Shepard’s long career know, there is nothing the man loves more than film and atomic bombs. Happily, Shepard’s new novella, Master of Miniatures combines these two preoccupations into a new and refreshing reiteration of his classic thematic concerns. Although Shepard’s tale of Eiji Tsuburaya, the Japanese special-effects wizard responsible for creating Gojira—the kaiju known more commonly to Western audiences as Godzilla— brings to mind much of his other works, particularly Nosferatu, his 2005 novel about famed director F. W. Murnau and “The Zero-Meter Diving Team,” the deeply-felt account of the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster from Shepard’s 2007 collection, Like You’d Understand, Anyway, this novella stands on its own as a thoughtful commentary about fallouts both nuclear and domestic.

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REVIEW: HERE COMES ANOTHER LESSON by Stephen O’Connor

Stephen O’Connor’s Here Comes Another Lesson offers a rare virtue among short story collections: if one story isn’t what you’re looking for, chances are the next one will be. The sheer variety of narratives offered in this collection is virtuosic. O’Connor writes from such a multiplicity of voices and with such a wide spectrum of concerns, running the gamut from a Minotaur awakening to his own angst to an actor playing himself in a movie based on his life to a graduate student struggling to finish her thesis in a disturbingly isolated house, that considering the collection as a whole becomes a rather dizzying task.

The recurring centerpieces of Here Comes Another Lesson are the adventures of Charles, an untenured Professor of Atheism. In each of the five stories devoted to him, Charles is ruthlessly thrown into a theological scenario that implicitly refutes everything Charles’s world view is based upon; the hopeless unbeliever takes a vacation to Eden and is visited by God and angels. Pretty clever gimmick, right? And in lesser hands, that is exactly what these stories would be: a gimmick. But what O’Connor does with the Professor of Atheism stories is much more complex and satisfying, the humor dark and twisted. What Charles eventually learns every time is not that he is wrong, but that, in a way, he is right. If God truly exists in this world, Charles discovers, then we are probably worse off for it. What could have been a series of casually cruel set pieces instead become the trials of a man grappling with an impossible ideal.

This unpredictability is true of most of the collection; O’Connor consistently zigs when you think he’s going to zag. Take “Disappearance and” for example, where an ornithologist learns the exact moment his death is going to occur. From the opening, where a soothsaying cormorant touches down on a plastic tablecloth, you could be forgiven for expecting the story that follows to be clever, to follow some path to self-defeat and irony, to end with the ornithologist’s death as some sort of punch line. Instead, what O’Connor eventually delivers is a quiet, lyrical meditation on a man struggling to be alert to his life during his final moments on earth.

O’Connor’s eventual purpose in these stories somewhere between the realist and the fantastic. At his most imaginative, O’Connor still manages to pull his fantastic creations back into a more recognizable emotional landscape. “I Think I’m Happier,” where a man is followed home by his dead father, is reminiscent of Donald Barthelme in both absurdity and tone, but O’Connor is softer than Barthelme, tender where Barthelme often relied on artifice. The result is both harrowing and touching. And at his most naturalistic, O’Connor can’t help but veer into the horrific, the odd and the unbelievable. “White Fire,” told from the perspective of a soldier fresh from Iraq, skirts around the war for as long as it can, the soldier using “like” and “you know” to avoid actually saying what needs to be said. But the flat, clipped conversational prose only continues to grow in resonance and weight until, hopelessly pulled by memory, the soldier finally reveals the horrors he’s seen. And once it’s been said, you wish it could be unsaid again. Not for your sake, but for his. And in “He Will Not Seeing Me Stopping Here,” a dinner between two old friends borders on a Lynchian nightmare without ever abandoning its realistic conceit. O’Connor seems to take just as much joy in revealing the peculiar quietness in the ordinary as he does in humanizing the strangest realms of his imagination.

Here Comes Another Lesson is a collection of people lost amidst a world stripped of meaning and purpose. Whether that world resembles our own or merely mirrors it, O’Connor manages to find the beauty, the brutality, and the sublime buried within and offers it all to his reader, unflinchingly.

Stephen O’Connor’s Here Comes Another Lesson is out today, Aug. 3rd, on Free Press.

- Stephen Aubrey is a Brooklyn-based writer and performer. You can find him here.

The Ask

Sam Lipsyte is the poet laureate of the American loser. If there was any question about this before, his new novel, The Ask, has settled the matter. Lipsyte is the kind of comic writer who has his finger on the pulse of the most pathetic possible way of living in America at any given time. The Ask does for the recession what The Subject Steve did for the malaise of the late ‘90s and Homeland did for aging loyal Reaganites in a post 9/11 world. It’s narrated by Milo Burke, who is a former development officer at a third-rate university only referred to as Mediocre University. Newly unemployed and unable to support his family, Milo is given one last chance at his old job: charming a potential donor—a major “ask” in development parlance—who happens to be his old college roommate. And if, in the process, Milo becomes an indentured servant tasked with covering up his old friend’s sordid past, then so be it.

Lipsyte has always excelled at a certain kind of first-person protagonist, the self-aware, self-righteous misanthrope who refuses to buy into the system. The kind of failure you can’t help but cheer for. In this sense, Milo Burke is cut from the same cloth as Teabag Miner, Homeland‘s protagonist. In fact, everything that is wonderful about Lipsyte is present in The Ask: the cripplingly hilarious dialogue and observations; the ability to find comedy in the most dismal of circumstances; the male friendships, equal parts homoerotic and homophobic; the sudden rhapsodies of beauty and despair sandwiched between assaults on the mundane and ponderous.

But in The Ask, Lipsyte’s view of America has evolved and become more complex than anything seen in his earlier novels. The rants are less myopic; resentment has turned into anger. For better or worse, Milo is aware of the systems of power that surround him. Lipsyte’s narratives have always ultimately been about class, the anxieties of a lower middle class peering in at the world of privilege that lies frustratingly beyond its reach, but this quality has never been clearer than it is in The Ask as Lipsyte focuses his considerable talent on the broken promise of a liberal arts education and the fallacy of social mobility.

The ultimate lesson of The Ask is that everything is bound to disappoint: your job, your marriage, your friends, your children, your parents, your dreams, your talent. And as the last few chapters of The Ask fail to coalesce, when the climax peters out and fails to delivers on the pay-off you’re expecting, you realize that Sam Lipsyte is bound to disappoint you as well.

But I like to think that Lipsyte meant it that way. Things don’t usually work out for the losers of the world. Satisfying conclusions are rare and hard-fought. It’s a difficult truth, but there’s no one I’d rather hear it from than Sam Lipsyte.

- Stephen Aubrey is a Brooklyn-based writer and performer.

The Ask by Sam Lipsyte, Farrar, Straus and Giroux ($25, 296 pp.)