To Denis Johnson, from One of the Weirdos

Posted on by 007595

Last week, while traveling in Hong Kong, I was taken by surprise to hear that Denis Johnson had passed away, a surreal bit of news made stranger by the way that so little at home ever feels fully real while I’m abroad. I stood up from the table in the middle of lunch with four of my graduate students, all of us on a global fellowship program during which we’d arranged for them to meet and study with local writers in Hong Kong and Singapore, and when I came back I brought with me the awful news that Johnson had passed. I kept the news to myself, because I didn’t want to interrupt the good cheer my students were sharing, even if I could no longer quite join in. As soon as lunch was over, I excused myself from the group and went back to my hotel room to download Jesus’ Son to my phone, the fastest way I could think of to get to Johnson’s fiction. I sat on my bed and started reading, turning immediately to “Work,” perhaps my favorite of Johnson’s stories, and when I read my favorite sentence in it, the one I’ve known by heart for almost twenty years — “Usually we felt guilty and frightened, because there was something wrong with us, and we didn’t know what it was; but today we had the feeling of men who had worked” — it was all I could do to hold back tears.

Denis Johnson Has Passed Away at 67

Denis Johnson is gone at 67, and a few days later I still feel in shock at the news. Other than the forthcoming collection, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, and the possibility of a posthumous publication or two, there will be no new novels, no new stories, no new plays or poems. Thankfully, we have such a powerful body of work that it might last us all a long time. I have been reading his books over and over for almost half my life, and I am not nearly done with them yet.

Every time I open one of Denis Johnson’s books there is some new thrill of language, some new revelation of what it means to be truly alive.

Even better, they seem not nearly done with me either, because every time I open one of Denis Johnson’s books there is some new thrill of language, some new revelation of what it means to be truly alive, some further mystery of the human experience I hadn’t seen before. Very few books offer this kind of continually deepening relationship to the reader. Almost all of Johnson’s do, at least to me.

Denis Johnson was not my teacher or mentor. We did not have any correspondence; I was never introduced to him by our few mutual friends, and even though he was my favorite writer I never dared to ask for a blurb or any other kind of help. (For me, it would have been like asking God for a blurb: a purely fantastical notion.) I met Johnson only once in person, a brief interaction that was extraordinarily embarrassing for me and probably twice as unbearable for him. (This outcome was my fault, not his. I’m sure he would have been generous, had I given him the chance. I did not give him the chance.)

The relationship I had with Johnson was not a personal one, and yet from my end it was intimate, characterized by the great affection and appreciation we feel toward the writers of the books that mean the most to us. No one’s books have meant more to me than Johnson’s, whose novels and poems I credit with having saved my life when I was twenty years old or so, a perhaps moderately hyperbolic statement that nevertheless feels largely true.

Before 1999 or 2000, I hadn’t read much contemporary literary fiction at all, but the summer before I’d read Kurt Vonnegut’s catalog more or less end to end, and around that same time I saw the movie Fight Club, which led me to Chuck Palahniuk’s novels. It was Palahniuk who indirectly introduced me to Johnson: I was voraciously hungry for better suggestions of what to read, slowly waking up to what contemporary writers were doing, instead of the late dead greats I’d been taught in school.

One trick I’d discovered was reading interviews with writers I liked, who would inevitably mention other writers, who I would then read. Working that tactic, I found an interview with Palahniuk in an issue of Poets & Writers I picked up in the Saginaw, Michigan Barnes & Noble where I then bought so many of my books, and in his interview he said that his three favorite writers were Raymond Carver, Amy Hempel, and Denis Johnson, all of whom I headed to the stacks to buy.

The day you simultaneously discover Raymond Carver, Amy Hempel, and Denis Johnson? That’s a pretty memorable day.

The day you simultaneously discover Raymond Carver, Amy Hempel, and Denis Johnson? That’s a pretty memorable day. I can see exactly where the magazine section the Poets and Writers issue was, I can see the photo of Palahniuk on the cover still, and I remember it was also where I first heard of Colson Whitehead, who I also read soon thereafter. If I remember right, Palahniuk singled out Jesus’ Son as the book of Johnson’s to read, but my Barnes & Noble only had Already Dead, so I bought that novel and asked the cashier to order Jesus’ Son for me. By the time I got the call that my copy had come in, I was finished with Already Dead but only just beginning with Johnson: that afternoon, I immediately read Jesus’ Son cover to cover, and the next day I read it again.

Then I went back and ordered Angels. And while I waited for it to come, I read Jesus’ Son some more.

I had liked Already Dead fine, but Jesus’ Son was life-changing. At twenty, I’d never read anything like it. At thirty-seven, that’s less true, but it’s still not false: there are a lot of books that at first glance look like Jesus’ Son, but it still feels surprisingly singular to me.

Everything I discovered in his books seemed mine, even as I started pushing his books on friends, on my siblings, on anyone else who would listen.

Because I wasn’t immersed in any literary community, I didn’t have anyone else who I could talk to about Jesus’ Son (and then Angels and The Name of the World and Fiskadoro and so on). It seemed like Johnson was mine alone, and as I reread his books there was no one there to tell me how to read him, what the stories meant, what I should be feeling. Everything I discovered in his books seemed mine, even as I started pushing his books on friends, on my siblings, on anyone else who would listen. It would be maybe eight more years before I met anyone else who’d read Johnson without my urging, when I finally made it through undergrad at twenty-six and then on to grad school two years later.

When I first read Johnson, I was, as one of his own characters might have observed, “completely and openly a mess,” absolutely at my most lost, caught in the midst of a period of making terrible mistakes and just barely escaping having to really pay for them, over and over. I’d recently dropped out of college and simultaneously lost my first real job, I was bartending in a chain Mexican restaurant, struggling and sometimes failing to pay my bills, plus I was drinking too much and not doing much of everything except what other people had once told me where the “right things” to do. These many failures of my own making had left me hurting and feeling very alone, and so the first thing Johnson did for me, with Jesus’ Son and Angels especially, was in his fiction name what was wrong with me, by giving me characters who felt the same way I believed I did:

“We all believed we were tragic… We had that helpless, destined feeling. We would die with handcuffs on… And yet we were always being found innocent for ridiculous reasons.”

That wasn’t exactly my story, but it was close enough, a plausible story I could believe in it. And that’s what I needed then, more than anything: a new story.

Then, even more mercifully, Johnson showed me that it was possible to live with what was wrong with me too. I didn’t have to die of my grief or my sadness or my mistakes. I might never get rid of all the cruel and stupid parts of me, but surely there was beauty in me too, and whatever else happened, I would probably live, and if I lived, I might get better. Not today, maybe, and not tomorrow either. But someday. And even if I was always fucked up and weird, that still didn’t mean I was the only fucked up weirdo out there.

Johnson showed me that it was possible to live with what was wrong with me too.

It was enough. That’s what so remarkable: all I needed, right then, was a simple connection with another person who understood how I felt.

I was that alone.

When I was twenty years old, it was enough to hope for nothing more than the thin happiness of the ending Fuckhead finally earns in “Beverly Home”:

“All these weirdos, and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them. I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us.”

Almost twenty years later, I still hold out hope for this, more often than I would like to admit: to get a little better every day, in the midst of all my fellow weirdos. And as for the “place for people like us”? I’ve found that too, sometimes in the physical world, sure, but also in Johnson’s fictional worlds, where all too often both the best and worst parts of me feel right at home.

For a long time, I thought what I loved about Jesus’ Son and Angels and the rest of Johnson’s books were the fuckups and the lost people, because I was a lost fuckup when I first read him too. But that wasn’t all of it. When I first read Johnson, I was unhappy but I was also newly hungry: hungry for bigger experiences, hungry for real wonder, hungry for proof that the world I could see could not possibly be the only world there could be. In truth, I was starving with want, every day consumed with a kind of awful gnawing I hope never to feel so acutely again. And Fuckhead in Jesus’ Son and Bill Houston and Jamie Mays of Angels are hungry too: They go out looking for drugs or alcohol or sex, which they find in excess, but often the rewards of those quests are not merely oblivion or escape but a temporary access to the sublime and the divine, a feeling as fleeting as the hard grace that Flannery O’Connor’s characters famously find for the briefest of moments.

When I first read Johnson, I was unhappy but I was also newly hungry: hungry for bigger experiences, hungry for real wonder, hungry for proof that the world I could see could not possibly be the only world there could be.

When Fuckhead and Georgie stumble into the abandoned drive-in theater during the snowstorm in “Emergency,” Fuckhead believes they’ve come across a cemetery filled with a heavenly host. In that moment, he says, “the sky was torn away and the angels were descending out of a brilliant blue summer, their huge faces streaked with light and full of pity. The sight of them cut through my heart and down the knuckles of my spine, and if there’d been anything in my bowels I would have messed my pants from fear.” For a moment, those angels were there, not a hallucination but a biblical visitation, Fuckhead’s reaction as visceral and physical as that of the shepherds visited by the angels on the birth of Christ, which the King James Version tells us made those shepherds “sore afraid,” as fine a depiction of the physical trauma of encountering the sublime as any I’ve ever read. For Fuckhead, the moment doesn’t last, and the dialogue that follows is tragically hilarious — once George breaks the spell by pointing out that they’ve wandered into a deserted drive-in, Fuckhead flatly remarks, “I see. I thought it was something else.”

9 Stories About Exploring Extremes

Similarly, in “Work,” Fuckhead and Wayne see a woman paragliding naked through the sky, a vision who turns out to be Wayne’s wife — and there is nothing in the story to give this vision any ambiguity except the reader’s own doubts, except the possibility that all this is a dream “Wayne is having about his wife” that somehow Fuckhead has wandered into, itself a kind of impossible vision — and then later Fuckhead relates a memory of another “one of those moments,” spent in bed with his own first wife: “Our naked bodies started glowing, and the air turned such a strange color I thought my life must be leaving me, and with every young fiber and cell I wanted to hold on to it for another breath. A clattering sound was tearing up my head as I staggered upright and opened the door on a vision I will never see again: Where are my women now, with their sweet wet words and ways, and the miraculous balls of hail popping in a green translucence in the yards? We put on our clothes, she and I, and walked out into a town flooded ankle-deep with white, buoyant stones. Birth should have been like that.”

And not just birth: Life should be like that, Johnson implies, and also invites us to ask: Why isn’t it? Why is the sublime and the beautiful and the spiritual so hard to access?

I know now that I might have killed myself with alcohol and drugs or something else if I hadn’t read this book, if I hadn’t seen myself reflected in the cost of Fuckhead’s inability to get what he really wanted for more than a moment at a time.

Throughout Jesus’s Son, Fuckhead wants to get high, but more than that he wants to transcend. Me too, I must have thought, reading Jesus’ Son for the first time. And while I didn’t have the language to articulate all this then — like Fuckhead, I mostly live on a lower and more base plane of existence, even if I pretend otherwise — and I know now that I might have killed myself with alcohol and drugs or something else if I hadn’t read this book, if I hadn’t seen myself reflected in the cost of Fuckhead’s inability to get what he really wanted for more than a moment at a time. If I hadn’t understood that I was becoming a person just like him, limited in similar ways, someone capable of both of cruelty and kindness, someone who craved the sublime but knew only the cheaper and quicker ways of accessing its grandeur.

Johnson once told an interviewer that what he writes about “is really the dilemma of living in a fallen world, and asking: ‘Why is it like this if there’s supposed to be a God?’” In my own work as a writer, I’m animated by something similar to what Johnson describes, although I’d no longer articulate it as religiously as he did. The worst years of my life began all at once for a variety of reasons, but a loss of faith was tied up in all of what happened to me next: that year, I’d suffered a deep and surprisingly traumatic loss of belief in the Catholic faith which up until then had been an important part of my life. More than anything else, losing my faith emptied the world: I had grown up among people who believed in the physicality of God and the angels, who believed that miracles and the intercessions of the saints were real, not metaphorical. When I stopped believing in those things, I lost access to the world everyone where everyone I knew lived — and for a time I also lost some of my ability to even hope for certain kinds of grand experiences and greater beauties, for a world better than this world that made the miseries of this one worth bearing.

Despite my worldview being rearranged, I still sensed there was kind of sublime that doesn’t require the presence of God, but I didn’t know how to get there yet. Fuckhead tries to arrive by drugs and alcohol. So did I. But literature is another way too, and in Johnson’s work there exists a literary depiction of the fleeting liminality of the sublime that I find nearly peerless, especially among contemporary American writers. Nearly everyone who has ever tried to rip off the style of Jesus’ Son — including me, since my first published stories were essentially Denis Johnson fan fiction — fails at this part of it.

In another interview, Johnson once said, “The stories of the fallen world, they excite us. That’s the interesting stuff.” But depicting alcoholics and addicts and criminals and people otherwise down on their luck isn’t that hard: all you have to be willing to do is make your characters suffer. Showing those same characters reach the sublime from within their fallen state — in other words, without insisting on redemption preceding reward — is seemingly much more difficult. Almost no other contemporary writer does that as well as Johnson. Almost no one even tries.

That whatever better world might exist behind our world is for the fallen too, not just the righteous: that’s a radical idea. (Radical enough that by one reading its probably Jesus’ idea too, distilled to its purest form: that we are already in the kingdom of heaven, if only we have eyes to see.) Even if I couldn’t have articulated it then, that’s certainly part of what I responded in my first readings of Johnson. “I went looking for that feeling everywhere,” Fuckhead says in “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” after his own earliest revelatory moment with the grieving woman shrieking with the shriek of an eagle, and like Fuckhead chasing that scream I chased the feeling I got from Johnson’s work everywhere I could but especially in Johnson’s own books.

Transcendence — real transcendence, in the world — usually doesn’t last. The sublime is too difficult to reach, too fleeting to grasp for long. But in Johnson’s books, we can at will touch the hem of the heavens, that better world his characters glimpsed but rarely reached and never got to stay.

We won’t get to stay either. No one ever does. At the end of “Emergency,” Johnson’s Fuckhead says, “That world! These days it’s all been erased and they’ve rolled it up like a scroll and put it away somewhere. Yes, I can touch it with my fingers. But where is it?” It’s a gorgeous moment in one of my favorite stories ever, and Johnson undercuts it by finishing the story with a joke, as if even Fuckhead knows it’s a bit too earnest. But that passage was among the first things I thought of when I heard Johnson had passed: I thought, Jesus, there will never be another Denis Johnson story.

All those worlds, all erased!

Maybe. Maybe! But at least he left us his scrolls. And I hope more than anything that we won’t ever be so foolish as to put them away.

As I said earlier, I met Denis Johnson just once, when I was living in Ann Arbor, finishing my MFA at Bowling Green State an hour away, commuting back and forth. Johnson was in Ann Arbor to speak at the University of Michigan’s Hopwood Awards Ceremony, where he read his Playboy story “The Starlight on Idaho” and gave some brief remarks. I was, as I expected to be, in awe from my seat in the second row of the auditorium’s stadium seating, right above where it turned out he would sit when brought into the room, and where he later tried to calmly return to after his reading. Little did Johnson know that I’d been waiting for my chance to say hello, to say thank you, to say anything that might approximate what his books meant to me — and as he approached I felt something glitch in my brain and the next thing I knew I was leaned over the first row of seats, babbling incoherently from above him — and I had also managed, somehow, to grab him by his shirt, as if afraid he might escape.

By then, he was definitely trying to escape.

I was mortified, he looked very displeased, and throughout our short interaction I kept holding on to him, my mouth moving faster than my brain as I violently tried to tell him what he meant to me, until finally he put the palm of one hand on top of my fist clenched around his shirt buttons and calmly and wordlessly pushed my hand off him.

And that was that. My one chance to speak to my hero, wasted. Johnson turned around and walked away, I shrank back in horror, and when a friend of mine in Michigan’s program suggested “I come to the reception and meet Denis” I instead fled across the street and got drunk with another friend, both of us stunned by what I’d just done.

I truly hope this essay isn’t just more of the same mistake.

Maybe I just wish I could have told him that I loved him because I loved his books, and because I felt loved by his books, because by the way he wrote his characters he showed me that it was capable for a person like him to love someone like me.

I hope what I’ve written here isn’t just one more way of clutching at Denis Johnson’s shirt buttons, refusing to let go, but maybe it is. Maybe that’s all this ever really could be, given how strongly I feel: more than anything, maybe I desperately wish I could have told Denis Johnson how much I loved him, even though we’ve never really met. Maybe I just wish I could have told him that I loved him because I loved his books, and because I felt loved by his books, because by the way he wrote his characters he showed me that it was capable for a person like him to love someone like me.

That’s really what I wished I’d said that day. Just that: Thank you, Mr. Johnson, for being a writer capable of loving someone like Fuckhead or Bill or Jamie or any of the other unforgettable characters you invented. Your love for them on the page, a mix of empathy and honesty and your rendering of them in perfect prose — which the writer in me sees now might have been a way of learning to love someone like yourself, flawed but hopeful — it was a gift to me too, at the time I so desperately needed it, back when I was just another of the many lowercase fuckheads of the worse, just another weirdo without his place.

Without any place except for your books, I should have said, those beautiful books where for many years I went to learn how to live.

9 Stories About Exploring Extremes

Posted on by 007595

With summer comes the promise of adventures and the allure of exploring. It’s often said that fiction is transportive, but wandering through the Recommended Reading archives, that feels like an understatement. In the treasure trove of 260+ stories, we can visit Mary Gaitskill’s childlike and visceral hell, and Joe Kowalski’s unsettling apocalyptic future; we can search the secretive rooms in Mario Levrero’s abandoned house, and poke around Sara Majka’s time-resistant island. After a whirlwind trip and two romances in San Francisco with Jensen Beach’s story, Swati Pandey takes us to India for a journey from boyhood to marriage. In short, we can explore the ends of our world and the extremes of great minds. It’s hard to say which kind of expedition is the more courageous. But fortunately, the writers of these 9 specially unlocked stories have been brave for you, and you can enjoy their work from the safety of your couch.

For just $5 a month, members of Electric Literature get access to the complete Recommended Reading archives of over 260 stories — and year-round open submissions. Membership is tax-deductible, helps us pay writers, and keeps all of our new content free. So if you like what you’ve read, please join today!

The Devil’s Treasure

by Mary Gaitskill, recommended by Electric Literature

Often it takes a child’s perspective to remind us of the true terror of something — or somewhere — we accept as a given in adulthood. “What the hell!” cries seven-year-old Ginger’s father when something is funny. Or, “This is hell!” he might say, when something is not. So Ginger ventures into hell — it is accessible through a trapdoor in very own backyard — to discover its secrets and steal the devil’s treasure. If hoarding the belongings of the devil seems unwise, than perhaps so is a father’s insistence on bringing hell into the human world.

The Adventure of the Space Traveler

by Seth Fried, recommended by Electric Literature

As an astronaut, Arnold Barington is an exceptionally brave man, but as an accident-prone lover of bad jokes, he’s just like the rest of us. After accidentally blowing himself into the ether of outer space, he finds himself floating through the universe, hoping for rescue before his suit can no longer sustain him (so, before 5.6 years). His only company is rumbling space rock, and his only indulgences are the waste-recycled crackers he munches. Yet as he rolls through space — fearing embarrassment when he finds his crew, and still hoping for love back on Earth — Arnold’s journey feels surprisingly familiar.

Not a Bad Bunch

by Anu Jindal, recommended by Electric Literature

To most of us, the idea of voyaging the high seas sounds like the wildest of adventures. But the crew on this whaling ship are plagued by a boredom deep enough to test the difference between amusement and madness. “To relieve ourselves from the taxations of life, we had ways of peaceably passing the time,” the narrator and doctor tell us. But these “taxations” give way to things more insidious than pastimes, and more violent than practical jokes.

The Abandoned House

by Mario Levrero, recommended by Asymptote | Translated by Frances Riddle

A home lacking inhabitants has the capacity to hold just about anything else: magic and memories, spirits and rot, or simply, a disturbing skeleton of decrepitude. Few of us, perhaps, would explore a creepy, empty house with the same archaeological interest and adventurer’s fearlessness as the crew in Levrero’s story. From the “little men” jumping out of old pipes, to five-layer deep wallpaper, and of course, to hidden treasure, the house harbors the enchantments and mysteries that entice the brave and keep the cowardly out.

Spooky Action at a Distance

by Bryan Hurt, recommended by Starcherone Books

There’s a strong argument for time travel as the most perilous of expeditions: One wrong step, and you alter the course of human history. But then again, would such an alteration be a bad thing? “I told her that every time Dr. Hu and I returned to our time everything was pretty much as we’d left it except for a little bit better,” the narrator of Bryan Hurt’s story tells his wife. With time travelers like these, there’s no bad decision that can’t be undone.

On the Power and Prison of Gender: 11 Stories and 1 Poem

Saint Andrews Hotel

by Sara Majka, recommended by A Public Space

They say that every time we call forth a memory, it becomes slightly altered, corrupted, and yet we have to keep recalling memories in order to have them. In Sara Majka’s story, the natural blurriness of memory blends with an other-realm kind of magic. Peter, young and suicidal, is committed to a hospital on the mainland by his islander parents. Time passes and his mother can’t quite understand—or remember—what she’s lost. As Brigid Hughes writes in the introduction, this is a story that captures “a feeling of being nowhere, or in someone else’s life, or between lives.”

Our Meat

by Joe Kowalski, recommended by Electric Literature

It’s a question that’s produced hundreds of stories and fewer happy endings: How far would you go to save the one you love? The narrator in Joe Kowalski’s story answers that question in all its literality, venturing through miles of a post-apocalyptic terrain for a means of rescue he doesn’t know if he can trust. The story, writes Halimah Marcus, resounds with one of the greatest adventure tales — the Inferno, of course—and “offers the chance to see beyond the end — beyond death — into a kind of after life.”

Youth by Swati Pandey

Original fiction, recommended by Electric Literature

A trip doesn’t have to be long to be a journey. In the first installment of this two-part story (find part II here), a young groom in India traverses a risky bridge to meet his bride for the first time, and be married that same afternoon. In another writer’s hands, this story would sink under the weight of metaphor, but with Pandey’s deft touch, the episode is honest and clear even as it is meditative.

In the Night of the Day Before

by Jensen Beach, recommended by Graywolf Press

There is something to be said for exploring the self in secret, for plunging into the freedom of anonymity if only to see who we become there. In Beach’s story, a man named Martin hears the Eagles’s classic “Hotel California” and recalls a visit to San Francisco — and, perhaps more importantly, the stop he made en route. In San Luis Obispo, he met a young man, Cesar, at a bar and brought him back to his motel. Martin goes on to meet a woman in San Francisco, but it is Cesar — and the man Martin was when he was with him — that lingers in his mind when he returns to his normal life.

Is Slow Communication the Future?

Posted on by 007595

I held out as long as I possibly could against the iPhone. My beloved Blackberry Bold was seemingly indestructible: neither toilet water nor city pavement could hamper its beetle-like resilience, and it was resolutely incapable of maintaining anything but a fleeting connection to the Internet. Its built-in camera produced images that looked like they were taken from the inside of a steam room, and its GPS receiver only found its starting point once your destination had been reached.

That Blackberry was my happy place, the telecommunications equivalent of an isolation tank. Useful only for the most basic of purposes, it allowed me to communicate without ever being tempted to over-share. Such sharing simply wasn’t possible. It literally took two and a half hours for Facebook to load.

I am woman enough to admit that I cried when my Blackberry finally croaked. It was 2014 and I was only months away from the publication of my first novel. The good people at my publishing house were all but tearing their hair out that I wasn’t “accessible”: in this brave new world where authors are expected to video call into a book club at the drop of a bespoke hat, my publishing team regarded me as someone who didn’t even have a cell phone because at that point, anything but the iPhone simply didn’t count.

When the bemused technician at Verizon told me it would take five hundred bucks to fix my Blackberry, if he could fix it at all, the decision felt like it had been made by forces greater than myself. I would get an iPhone. I would join the modern world.

It has been ten years since a turtle-necked Steve Jobs first held up a now ubiquitous white object exclaiming that it was a music player, a cell phone, and an internet communicator all in one. Charmingly — and uncharacteristically — shortsighted about his hopes for the device, Jobs was most effusive about how easily the iPhone would allow people to talk to one another.

Flash forward to the present, 2017. When people say they’ve talked to someone, they rarely mean in person. And they almost never mean on the phone. An anecdote derived from having “spoken” with somebody is usually accompanied by a fluttering of fingers to indicate that the conversation was carried out over text. Or Facebook messenger. Or Instagram. Or Snapchat. When is the last time you saw someone extend their pinky toward their chin and their thumb to the right eardrum in the ancient sign for “phone?”

We can’t get much more cell-phone addicted than we are now. With few exceptions, we use our cell phones to tell us what to eat, whether or not our bodies need more sleep or exercise (yes, both), how to get where we are going…we even trust the secret guru buried inside of our SMS cards to tell us who to date. And with the progress being made in virtual reality, we can use our phones to have sex.

The tenth anniversary of the iPhone’s unveiling came flanked with frantic articles about what could possibly come next — what could be around the corner when our smartphones already accomplish so damn much? Google Glass was superfluous and smartwatches a bit desperate, and as for everyone signing up for nanobot implants to be permanently connected to the Internet, thankfully, we’re not there yet.

In a new book I have coming out, called Touch, a noted trend forecaster is tasked with answering just this question for a major tech company: what’s up next, in tech? Her answer is a disappointing one in respect to her employer’s bottom line. She’s convinced the world is on the threshold of a resurgence in face-to-face interactions that don’t require any technology at all.

This premise is one that’s near and dear to my Luddite heart, but it’s also one that the former trend forecaster in me firmly believes. You see, when I was in my twenties and thirties, I worked as a consultant for boutique trend forecasting agencies, most of them in France. In an industry that prizes intuition, no one sits you down and tells you how to spot trends, but it only takes scrutinizing the past year’s “Best-Of” listicles to learn that trend forecasting, on a basic level, is a game of opposites and apexes. Take literature, for example: If 2015 was big in bleak dystopians, you can probably count on seeing the return of epic family sagas that pack a lot of hope. If the seven figure advances were going to the doorstoppers last year, next year, they’ll go to the novels that end at forty-thousand words.

This see-saw pattern can hold true in tech, too. The key is to look for peaks and saturation points. Sophisticated entertainment systems and MP3 players paved the way for the return of the vinyl record. The seeming futility of smartphones (which were so instrumental in electing Obama) to prevent a nation from needling toward The Orange One led many of the disillusioned to leave the echo chambers of social media for the brick and mortar streets.

It would seem we’ve reached an apex in mobile phones as well, which is an exciting place to be. 2016 was the first time that Apple’s sales for cell phones waned. The iPhone 7 Plus doesn’t have much more to offer, in terms of versioning, than the iPhone 7, or, for that matter, the 6S or the SE. Plus, in the wake of an unforeseen election helmed by a hatemonger who’s physically incapable of putting down his phone, it’s really not that cool to be addicted to your cell. So yes. Indeed, the question begs. What in the world is next?

I haven’t donned my trend forecaster fascinator in years now — its feathers are ragged, the beads have fallen off. A mother to a three year-old, I mostly use my intuition to divine whether or not my toddler is going to pee her pants. But I haven’t been out of the game so long that I can’t spot something around the corner: I think we’re about to see the rise of slow communication, heralded by the return of the dumb phone.

I think we’re about to see the rise of slow communication, heralded by the return of the dumb phone.

Because, let’s face it — sure, maybe the aesthete literary critic who roasts his own espresso beans has the time and willpower to flat out cancel his cell phone contract, but most of us do not have such bravura. What many of us do have, however, is the desire to maintain a healthier balance with our cell phones, which, weirdly, I think is going to be accomplished by the trend setters purchasing a secondary phone — a dumb phone — that only calls or texts.

Just as smokers sometimes suck on straws or alcoholics survive cocktail parties with a death-grip on their seltzer, cell phone addicts need a replacement habit, too. But in order to top the fathomless bright connectivity of our touch-screens, it’s gonna have to be something super cool. And as hipsters on one-speeds the world over have proven, what’s cooler than something kind of ugly that doesn’t really work?

Sure, Jasper Morrison has had a very sleek and overpriced dumb phone on the market, sitting stagnantly, for years, but I’m nevertheless convinced that secondary cell phones are about to trend. New-to-the-market The Light Phone is out to make the telecommunications downgrade easier with slim-as-hotel-card companion phones that let you keep your own phone number. Light Phones necessitate that their early-adopters go cold turkey on digital communication. At the time of writing, they can take calls, but they can’t text. The idea of changing our communication patterns so drastically is both overwhelming, and immensely appealing. With it becoming all too easy to know what others are thinking and doing at all times, (and eating, and wearing, and even evacuating in the case of certain over-sharers), it could become the height of sophistication to be unfindable again. Aspirational, even, to literally get lost because your dumb phone doesn’t have a GPS.

It will also be a status symbol, a way to instantly communicate to others that you’re digitally detoxing. Likewise, secondary dumb phones can be used to accord a certain hierarchy to relationships: imagine what it signals to a potential partner if you show up with a dumb phone on a first date. Leaving your smartphone behind tells the people you’re engaging with that they’re worth being fully present for.

In his farewell address (what is the international emoticon for: please come back!!?), President Obama invited citizens who were “tired of fighting with strangers on the Internet” to get out and interact with people in real life. Now, any writer I know worth their #savetheNEA hashtag is happy to do whatever Obama tells them, but regardless of his IRL-lifestyle endorsement, the data shows we’re simply due for a little throwback in our tech. If the US election outcome proves anything, it’s that we’re at an apex of instant communication, but clearly, we’ve never been communicating as poorly as right now. Black, white, brown, empowered, deported, terrified, or feared, you’d be hard placed to find an American who doesn’t feel unheard. Miscommunicated with. Misunderstood.

Black, white, brown, empowered, deported, terrified, or feared, you’d be hard placed to find an American who doesn’t feel unheard. Miscommunicated with. Misunderstood.

Secondary dumb phones could be the gateway drug to a whole inventory of retro telecommunication tools: prepare yourself for handwriting classes, body language clinics, and a surge in pen palship, I say. This is fantastic news for writers, who, in addition to being some of the last professionals on the planet who purchase things like pencils, notebooks, and actual diaries, writers also (in theory) have people to whom they can write. Another great thing about the rise of slow communication is that it will be cool for writers to play the long game again. Maybe people will realize that every single incident doesn’t need an op-ed. That opinions can be formed, and still exist, even if they aren’t digitally shared. Maybe it will empower writers to realize that the fact that they can mull over plot points and character development while waiting in a shopping line, or going for a walk, is something to celebrate. Maybe, just maybe, we will be able to find our way back to that impossible state of early childhood when we didn’t have the pulsing world beneath our fingers, and experienced the exquisite pleasure of being bored.

Keep your head up for the slow communicators and the signs by which they announce their arrival. Lifestyle magazines will start accessorizing their photo shoots with pugnacious rotary phones and chunky, spiraling cords. Houseware catalogues will show off their new wineglass collections with willowy millennials sipping something new world and talking on the phone. The hardcore slow communicators will clip pagers to their pants. In a couple months from now, when you get an actual phone call from a friend of yours, it won’t be due to the human error known as the “butt dial,” it will be because they called.

The downside of the return to slow communication is that you might very well find yourself having to write legibly, or receive (and send!) a fax. The upside is that the late Jobs might find his initial dream for the iPhone realized — humans might actually start talking to other humans again.

7 Novels that Explore the Complexity of Modern France

About the Author

Courtney Maum is the author of “Touch” and “I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You.” A former columnist for Electric Literature, she’s also a shade and product namer for MAC Cosmetics and the founder of the multidisciplinary creative retreat, #thecabins.

Denis Johnson Has Passed Away at 67

Posted on by 007595

It’s a great heartbreak that Denis Johnson, author of the beloved story collection Jesus’ Son has died at 67. Jonathan Galassi, president and publisher of FSG, disclosed that Johnson died on Wednesday, but didn’t give further details at this time.

Johnson’s sparse yet lyric prose were the ideal vessel for his hallucinatory, often violent, tales of heroin addicts roaming around rural Iowa. Among his ten novels, five poetry collections, and three plays, he also won a National Book Award for his Vietnam War epic Tree of Smoke and earned a Pulitzer nomination for the novella Train Dreams.

Whether imagining a post-nuclear dystopia (Fiskadoro), tracing the life of a turn of the century day laborer in the American West (Train Dreams), or crafting a sprawling poem set in a rundown apartment complex (“The Incognito Lounge”), Johnson’s writing was attuned to both place and people. He captured weirdos longing to get out of their little part of the world and loners who’d been passed by in changing times.

Many writers claim Jesus’ Son as indispensable, a bold artful linked collection following a protagonist named Fuckhead and his equally messed up friends, hoarding mistakes and connection throughout Iowa City. Johnson was known to claim that these stories were nothing but bar ramblings written down on napkins, cobbled together to make an advance. But Jesus’ Son is transcendent, poetic, and alive, one of the most enduring collections of contemporary literature. Symphony Space recently held an event honoring the 25th anniversary the collection, where the room was full of reverence as Billy Crudup and Chris Bauer gave readings, and Chuck Palahniuk, Victor LaValle, Michael Cunningham, and Jenny Offil discussed its inestimable influence.

On Twitter, many writers shared their favorite Denis Johnson quotes and memories.

We’ll leave you with the last lines of Jesus’ Son.

“All these weirdos, and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them. I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us.”

You can read The New York Times obituary here.

Ted Wilson Reviews the World: Cotton Candy

Posted on by 007595

★★★★★ (5 out of 5)

Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of the world. Today I am reviewing cotton candy.

Scientists and religious zealots agree — cotton candy is the greatest of the candies. It’s delicious, texturally superior, fun to watch being made, and can be worn as a wig. At most, a chocolate bar can be worn as a mustache only after warming it up and smearing it above your lip.

You probably remember the first time you had cotton candy: A man you would not normally choose to associate with was spinning the candy into existence, spinning and spinning, leaving you almost hypnotized.

You wanted the cotton candy so deeply that you were willing to risk slightly brushing against the skin of this man’s hand as he passed the cotton candy to you. And the moment the pink, soft, sweet candy touched your tongue, you forgot that man had ever existed.

According to a pamphlet I found on the ground at the carnival, cotton candy was invented by Eli Whitney right after he finished inventing the cotton gin. Local townspeople thought he was a witch when they saw what he had done, and were ready to burn him at the stake. But when they tasted the results of his witchery, they relented.

It’s not easy to fill up on cotton candy. I once ate over two dozen servings at the carnival and still had room for a steak dinner afterwards. And then when I spotted the cotton candy vendor dining alone across from me, we went out to the parking lot and he made me more cotton candy out of the trunk of his car.

He said he could see the passion in my tongue and offered to sell me his cotton candy machine right there on the spot. In honor of Eli Whitney, and because this man said the cash could help him get away from things for a while, I ran to the ATM.

My kitchen was too small to accommodate a cotton candy machine, so I installed it next to my bed, allowing me to start and end my day with a delicious treat. Now sometimes I’ll even spin a 3 AM snack just because I can. I don’t need to wait around for a carnival to come through town.

BEST FEATURE: It’s super easy to break off a piece and feed to a bird.
WORST FEATURE: It’s even harder to get than Girl Scout cookies.

Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing a bloody knife.

TED WILSON REVIEWS THE WORLD: VAPING

11 of the Most Disastrous Vacations in Literature

Posted on by 007595

We pour our hopes, dreams, and ludicrously high expectations into vacations, in part because we get to enjoy them so rarely (thanks, America) and in part because when a longed-for holiday is good, it’s sublime. By the same token, when vacations go bad — in one of the countless, cruel ways from tropical storms to familial implosions— they’re terrible.

The only people who get any kind of pleasure out of seeing people suffer through bad vacations must be liquor store owners and writers. For writers, sending characters on vacations is a neat trick, a way to ramp of the stakes. Why see a marriage erode under the weight of infidelity in some house in the burbs when you can have it play out in a villa in Mallorca? How better to show a murderer’s chilling lack of regret then by having him off his friend in a row-boat in the Ligurian Sea, his bloodied hands clean in time for appertivo hour?

So in time for Memorial Day and the kick-off to the vacation season, here are 11 of the most disastrous vacations in literature.

1. Death in Venice by Thomas Mann

Plague. Inappropriate fascination with a young boy. Sudden death. Mann’s claustrophobic novella about a writer named Gustav von Aschenbach who takes a holiday on the Lido island in Venice and becomes creepily obsessed with a boy before succumbing to cholera is a nightmare from its beginning to the untimely end.

2. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

Going on vacation with Raoul Duke and his attorney, Dr. Gonzo, is not for the faint of heart. Though they theoretically head to Vegas to cover a motorcycle race for an unnamed magazine, the duo spend most of their time on a combination of LSD, cocaine, cannabis, alcohol, ether, and mescaline. Their drug-fueled trip is a hallucinatory, violent, psychotic roller-coaster and it’s enough to keep you away from drugs forever.

3. Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

Baldwin’s breathtaking novel opens with the protagonist, David, drunk and alone in a rental house in the South of France, a vacation he was supposed to be enjoying with his fiancé. David recounts the devastating story which brought him to this point, of falling in love with a man named Giovanni, his own refusal to accept his sexuality, and now Giovanni’s imminent execution.

4. The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

Tom Ripley is a con man who sweet talks himself into the prime job of traveling to Italy to convince the rich playboy Dickie Greenleaf to come home to his family business. Tom becomes obsessed with Dickie and his jet-set lifestyle, and just as Dickie begins to tire of him, they take a vacation within their extended vacation to the beach town of Sanremo. Against the beautiful blue of the Ligurian sea, Tom bludgeons Dickie in a rowboat, dumps his body overboard, and assumes his identity.

11 Novels That Take Place During One Summer

5. The Past by Tessa Hadley

If your family didn’t like each other back in the day, it’s never a good idea to gather together for a forced vacation as adults — the same gripes, manipulations, and subtle yet searing psychological tortures are bound to be brought out alongside the old Scrabble set. Tessa Hadley mines all the awkwardness and pent-up emotions of this scenario by bringing together the adult Crane siblings for three fraught weeks as they decide what to do with their crumbling family property.

6. The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe

In this existential novel, a schoolteacher named Jumpei Niki visits a fishing village for a little vacation to pursue his hobby: collecting insects. Things quickly go off the rails when he misses his bus home and the villagers offer him a house in the dunes to stay the night. Niki wakes up to find that the villagers have taken away the house’s rope ladder, trapping him alongside a young woman with whom he’s forced to shovel out the encroaching sand dunes that threaten to bury them.

7. The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante

In the second novel in the Neapolitan trilogy, Elena and Lila are only teenagers, yet Lila is already in an unhappy marriage and carrying a child. When her abusive husband Stefano sends Lila to the island of Ischia for the summer to rest while she’s expecting, Elena joins her, but the supposedly recuperative beach vacation takes turns that mark both girls forever. Lila starts an affair with Nino, the boy that Elena has always loved, and in her despair Elena loses her virginity to Nino’s creepy old father. The trip ends as it began, with the girls’ unhappiness and Stefano’s violent fists.

8. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway captures that feeling, familiar to many Spring Breakers, when a fun drunken vacation tips into a grossly intoxicated mess. A group of American and British expatriates, led by Hemingway stand-in Jake Barnes, take a trip to see the bullfights at Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona. Many, many jugs of wine later, and hearts and noses are broken, and one lucky woman got to bed a matador.

9. The Vacationers by Emma Straub

Straub chose one of the most beautiful settings in the world, the Spanish island of Mallorca, to stage her disastrous vacation. A New York family comes to the island to celebrate the head couple’s 35th wedding anniversary, but things get awkward as it turns out that everyone (literally, everyone) there is dealing with some kind of infidelity.

10. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald also chose a glamorous Mediterranean beach town to set his tale of infidelity, though he adds murder to the mix. Rosemary Hoyt is a young American actress who gets swept up in the dysfunctional, hard-partying circle of Dick and Nicole Diver. Her vacation takes a particularly bad turn after one of the Diver’s parties, when a man is murdered and ends up in her bed.

11. The Beach by Alex Garland

Even vacations can go on too long, as Garland shows in his 1996 novel about Richard, a British backpacker who discovers a secret community on an idyllic island in Thailand. On the surface, the community is a dream hippie commune living an extended vacation away from society, but after a few weeks Richard realizes that the scene is actually closer to Lord of the Flies than Utopia, and things turn just as violent.

Researchers Find Two Previously Unseen Sylvia Plath Poems

Posted on by 007595

And more literary news from around the web…

Get ready for your round-up… Sylvia Plath is resurrected with a pair of newfound poems, data gets democratized, Jack White makes a children’s book just in time for his early 2000’s teen fans to start having kids, and Trump and Pope Francis contend for the most awkward book trade of all time.

Two Sylvia Plath Poems Are Unearthed

It’s easy to succumb to the notion that in the canon of heavily researched and studied authors, there’s simply not much left to discover, save for maybe new, thoughtful interpretations of their work or, in the case of Marcel Proust, some pretty entertaining film footage. For Sylvia Plath, who has attracted devout attention from readers and academics alike, what more could there be? Hell, they’ve even published the unabridged version of her journals for public consumption. Just when it seemed like there wasn’t much more to dig up, Gail Crowther and Peter K Steinberg have announced a new finding: two of Plath’s poems written on a sheet of carbon paper, titled “To a Refractory Santa Claus” and “Megrims.” According to The Guardian, the pieces had been tucked away in the back of an old notebook, and in the roughly fifty years that researchers poured over her archives, nobody noticed them. With the help of Photoshop, Steinberg was able to decipher the faded ink. He says, “the poems definitely can be classed as early [because] no other copy appears to exist it might be surmised that they aren’t very good.”

Nevertheless, it’s fascinating to see firsthand the development of one of American literature’s most celebrated voices.

[Danuta Kean, The Guardian]

Free Data, Ya’ll (No, Not for Your Phone Plan, But Still Good News!)

Lately, there hasn’t been much to celebrate in terms of our government (that is unless of course you are on the Death Eaters’ side, in which case, congratulations). Politics aside, there’s some news we can all celebrate: The Library of Congress has made 25 million records from its catalog free to download! The public will be able to access the content, here. This is definitely a step in the right direction towards democratized access to information.

[Dan Colman, Open Culture]

Jack White Is Bringing Suzy Lee to the Page

Along with the artist Elinor Blake, Jack White is transforming one of The White Stripes most famous hits, “We’re Going to be Friends,” into the narrative of a children’s book. The original audio from the song, as well as newly performed versions by April March (Blake’s musical alter ego) and The Woodstation Elementary School Singers, will be included in the purchase for digital download. The book will be released in November, shortly after The White Stripes celebrate their 20th anniversary as a band.

[Alex Young, Consequence of Sound]

Photo Credit: Evan Vucci/AP

Award for Most Awkward Book Exchange Goes To Trump & Pope Francis

My mother and I previously won this award when she gifted me Girl Stuff: an early 2000’s guide to puberty and sex, and then forced me to publicly read it while we were vacationing at the beach. I’m quite happy to pass along the trophy to our President and Pope, who engaged in a tenuous, politically charged book swap during Trump’s tour of the Vatican this week. As is customary, the two leaders exchanged gifts; Trump gave the Pope a first edition set of the Martin Luther King’s writings (what’s the over/under on whether or not he’s read them himself?), and Francis gave Trump a copy of his encyclical on climate change, along with a medallion featuring an olive tree, emblematic of his hope for peace.

[Emma Green, The Atlantic]

Artificial Intelligence & Climate Change…in a Race to the End of the World

Job Opportunity: We’re Looking for an Editor

Posted on by 007595

JOB DESCRIPTION

The Editor-in-Chief of electricliterature.com drives the editorial vision of the website and is responsible for all content on electricliterature.com, excluding verticals (e.g. Recommended Reading and Okey-Panky). The EIC reports directly to the Executive Director, and will work with the ED to ensure that every piece published on electricliterature.com contributes to Electric Literature’s mission: to expand the influence of literature in popular culture by fostering lively and innovative literary conversations and making extraordinary writing accessible to new audiences.

The EIC is responsible for maintaining levels of journalistic professionalism, content quality, and site performance established by the ED. This includes but is not limited to scheduling, budgeting, presentation (visual and editorial), content development, and promotions. The EIC is the direct supervisor of the site’s contributing editors and will ensure contributing editors fulfill their responsibilities and follow best practices established by the EIC and the ED.

This is a salaried, full-time position with benefits, based in New York City. To apply, please send a cover letter, resume, and published writing sample to editors@electricliterature.com by midnight on Thursday, June 8th, with the subject: EIC APPLICATION — Your Name.

QUALIFICATIONS

  • At least three years of online editorial experience, including experience recruiting freelancers, managing a publication schedule, and maintaining an editorial calendar and budget
  • At least two years of management experience and demonstrated leadership ability
  • Immersed in the literary scene and regular readers of work by contemporary authors, as well as literary magazines, journals, publications, and literary news
  • Published your own non-fiction and cultural criticism in reputable online publications
  • In-depth knowledge of electricliterature.com and the content we publish
  • Educational background in literature, media studies, or journalism is prefered but not required
  • Non-profit and grant writing experience is also a plus

CHARACTERISTICS

  • Avid reader
  • Skilled writer and editor
  • Challenges oneself and continues to set high standards
  • Believes in EL’s mission and has a vision for how the site should best achieve it
  • Organized and motivated

SKILLS

  • Experience using social media in a professional capacity (Twitter, Facebook)
  • Familiarity with Reddit, Tumblr, and Medium
  • Skilled at writing informative, enticing headlines
  • A keen visual eye and a knack for selecting compelling images
  • Knowledge of Google Analytics, SEO, Google AMP, and Google Play
  • Familiarity with Adobe Design Suite

RESPONSIBILITIES

EDITORIAL

  • Maintain an editorial calendar and distribute posts evenly through the week
  • Ensure contributing editors are updating calendar and discuss scheduling with them on a weekly basis
  • Discuss short-, mid-, and long-term editorial plans with contributing editors and provide feedback on the topic, content, and angle of proposed articles
  • Commission and edit work by freelancers, and review freelancer pitches
  • Review all articles prior to publication and check for formatting errors and errors in grammar and spelling
  • Approve all headlines and images
  • Rewrite headline and select new images when necessary
  • Develop and regularly update best practices for all content, including but not limited to images, tags, headlines, formatting, house style, and correction policy
  • Maintain a centralized document outline of those best practices and policies, and communicate them to and enforce them with contributing editors
  • Regularly recruit new writers for the site
  • Hold regular (at least bi-weekly) editorial meetings to brainstorm new content ideas, strategies for improvement, review best practices, and note problem areas

WRITING

  • Contribute regularly to the site, at least one post per week. This can be a mix of short form and long form pieces, with at least one longform piece per month

FIDUCIARY

  • Allocate funds to freelancers on a monthly basis according to a budget set by the ED
  • Maintain a detailed freelance budget
  • Track surplus and deficit and evaluate allocations of funds to be most efficient and effective

PROMOTIONAL

  • Coordinate with social media editor on social media promotion for all posts
  • Use editorial calendar to identify newsworthy or marquee posts for additional promotion attention, and develop additional promotional strategies for those posts
  • Evaluate social media performance and discuss paths to improvement with Social Media Editor

AUDIENCE BUILDING

Develop new audience building strategies, including, but not limited to:

  • New content strategies
  • Improvements to the newsletter
  • Leveraging Medium to reach new readers
  • New social media strategies
  • Identifying new editorial spaces to cultivate
  • New promotional strategies

ANALYTICS AND REPORTING

  • Closely track site analytics on Medium, Google Analytics, AMP, and any other platforms EL uses
  • Closely track social media analytics for Twitter and Facebook
  • Conduct A/B testing for article framing
  • Discuss site performance with Executive Director on a monthly basis
  • File in-depth quarterly traffic reports to the Executive Director
  • Make biannual presentations to the Board of Directors

SUPERVISION

  • Act as the direct supervisor to contributing editors
  • Schedule regular check-ins with contributing editors to share feedback, discuss new ideas, and communicate policy changes
  • Act as a liaison between contributing editors and the ED
  • Assist in supervision of interns with Senior Editor and ED

FUNDRAISING, EVENTS, AND SPECIAL PROJECTS

  • Work with ED and contributing editors to brainstorm for project-based funding opportunities
  • Provide information and language for grant applications that concern electricliterature.com projects
  • Along with the rest of the staff, help to plan and promote fundraising and other major events.
  • Contribute to other special projects as needed. This may include project management on a case by case basis

To apply, please send a cover letter, resume, and published writing sample to editors@electricliterature.com by midnight on Thursday, June 8th, with the subject: EIC APPLICATION — Your Name.

Boys Will (Not) be Boys

Posted on by 007595

Everyone loses something in war. Sometimes, the lucky ones — the winners — are able to recover pieces of those things they lost. The others might search their entire lives, finding nothing of comfort from the past. That’s the cruel nature of war; it’s relentlessly unforgiving.

Daniel Magariel’s sublimely affecting debut One of the Boys opens at the end of a “war,” the name the unnamed father uses to describe the custody battle following his tumultuous divorce, with the father taking his two sons from their mother in Kansas to their new home in New Mexico. The unnamed 12-year-old narrator and his (also unnamed) older brother feel victorious, basking in their new light as being “one of the boys.”

The new family begins playfully, with the father appearing child-like, joking and frequently citing the newfound happiness he feels while being around his sons. The lightness continues even after glimpses of darkness begin to appear. When the sons find their father using marijuana, the father’s response is casual:

“We are all entitled to one bad habit, aren’t we? Aren’t we? You guys have bad habits too.”

Soon after this initial glimpse into his father’s drug usage, the narrator describes a more concerning moment: “He stared blankly into the frying pan, stirring the eggs, waiting for them to cook. He still had not realized the burner was off. Before, he’d been at the countertop buttering bread until the centers gave out. He was trying to act normal, make his kids breakfast before school. His scruff was long, hair matted. The capillaries in his eyes were exposed wires. He had not slept for days. He was still in last week’s clothes. At the table my brother and I ate cereal, watched him, exchanged smirks.” The perfect, new family isn’t so perfect anymore. And the boys realize this truth.

Magariel’s slim novel (under 180 pages) somehow, miraculously, manages to evolve slowly, building a haunting and tender experience that novels double One of the Boys’ size struggle to achieve.

The Lingering Ghosts of an Author’s Oeuvre

The way Magariel pulls off this feat has to be accredited to the meticulous development of the young narrator. The boy’s initial naivety gives the father’s vileness time — and room — to grow. The father pleads to the narrator to trust him — to believe him and him alone. He says, ““You were my decision,” and he continues, “Did you know that? Your brother was an accident. He wasn’t planned like you. To be honest I didn’t even want him.” The father even crafts an elaborate lie, while trying to win his youngest son’s loyalty: “That time I took you fishing. I didn’t take your brother, did I? Know why? You’re special, that’s why. Your first cast you dropped the lure right on the fish’s head. I knew then, I mean I really knew, like really knew that you had magic in you, son. The same magic I have. You got it from me.” The boy falls into the father’s hands, but, as the narrator matures and begins to see the truth surrounding him, the boy’s kind spirit and loving heart works to overcome the father’s cruel “method of control,” especially after physical abuse, fully realized with knives and ropes, enters the picture. The narrator comes of age before our eyes.

While One of the Boys explores a number of themes, including deceit, the bonds of family, and and youthful naivety, masculinity is the issue Magariel seems most focused on dissecting. Magariel shows how toxic being “one of the boys” can be. To fit in, the narrator does terrible things. He hurts the ones he loves. He betrays his brother. He lets down his father. He turns his back on his mother. He fails everyone because he’s too focused on fitting into a mold of expectation. It’s when the narrator steps back and examines himself that he experiences his realization of truth: he’s becoming his own man, one that he’ll have to develop and shape.

The compactness and fragile familial bonds on display here will undoubtedly cause readers to compare Magariel’s debut to Justin Torres’ We the Animals. The two novels do certainly share a common terrain; however, Junot Diaz is the writer who I couldn’t help but think of as the closest kin to Magariel as I closed One of the Boys. There’s an unsparing feeling here that reminds me of Drown. There’s a call for perseverance that makes me think of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. There’s also an exploration of weakness and timidity that brings This is How You Lose Her back to my mind.

Regardless of comparisons, Daniel Magariel is a name to remember because what he’s delivered with his debut is an accomplished work of dazzling, lyrical prose combined with riveting storytelling. The result is explosive and powerful. Magariel demands our attention. He’s more than earned it with One of the Boys.