Mary Miller Has a Few Questions

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When I was accepted into the MFA program at the Michener Center — what seemed to me then and now a clerical error they were too kind to correct — one of the many happy-making trains of thought that kept returning was, That’s where Mary Miller goes. I had come across Miller’s first collection, Big World, the year before, and it quickly became one of the collections to which I pointed when I thought that is what I want to do. I think of Mary’s stories — in Big World, in her chapbook Less Shiny, and in her new collection, Always Happy Hour, out from Liveright (W.W. Norton) — as apertures through which we, her readers, are given the opportunity to witness, however briefly, a life in the process of being lived. Perhaps this sounds somewhat reductive, or not on the face of it an altogether captivating characterization, but at a time when it seems so much of contemporary short fiction is interested in massive world-building, in grandiosity, in purportedly clever conceits that ultimately obscure a reader’s ability to engage with a character, I find Miller’s stories so generously, beautifully fortifying. She is not interested in dazzling you with a twisting-and-turning plot; she’s happy to have that dazzle take place on the level of the sentence, her kingdom and her greatest gift. (The collection is abundant with sentences one comes across and is instantly furious that one hasn’t written.) What I love most about Miller’s stories, then, is how disinterested they are in presenting a reader with the sense that something has been solved, or is even solvable. I love that Mary Miller has created a space in short fiction wherein the goal is nothing more and nothing less than, to borrow a phrase from Maggie Nelson, “to let things hang out.”

It was the best way to end a terrible year, talking with Miller over e-mail about Always Happy Hour.

Vincent Scarpa: I wanted to begin, if it’s all right with you, with language, with your sentences. Though I identify as something of a syntax-junkie, I find that it’s something extremely difficult to talk about: the way a sentence sounds, and why I find a certain sentence — or, as in your work, so many sentences — to sound, lacking a more clarifying phrase, beautifully correct. Reading the stories in Always Happy Hour and revisiting your previous work — the novel The Last Days of California, the collections Big World and Less Shiny — I always come away feeling most strongly and most delighted by the sentences themselves above all else: their often untidy construction, their occasional disobedience of “proper” grammar, their hiccuping flow and rhythm, and the way these things come together to constitute your singular style. An example, just one of many, from the story, “At One Time This Was the Longest Covered Walkway in the World”: “I want to ask my boyfriend what color his ex-wife’s eyes are because if they’re blue then the boy isn’t his and we could be spending our nights alone.” I wonder: do you read your sentences aloud as you write? Do you find that you labor at the level of the line as much, if not more, than on the level of the story as a whole? Furthermore, I’d love to know which writers you turn to for good sentences, perhaps even feel instructed by. (Frankly, I’d love to know what are some of your favorite sentences.)

Mary Miller: Oh, how I love the sentence. Above all else. Above everything. I never read aloud, though, unless I’m timing myself for a reading. When I’m alone, it feels weird to hear my own voice.

I think my sentences have gotten tidier over the years; the most important thing is rhythm, how the words sound and feel. When I first started writing I didn’t have an amazing grasp of things like modifiers, and published stories with sentences like this: “We carried backpacks and sat around a table in tennis shoes.” Someone wrote to me and said, “The table doesn’t wear tennis shoes!” and I responded with something like, “Don’t be obtuse [I’m not a complete idiot]! You know what I’m saying!” But all the same, I would never write a sentence like that today. I rather like picturing a table with tennis shoes, though.

(I can’t believe this story is still online, but it is, and that sentence is in the first paragraph.)

The sentences I like best are the ones I wish I’d written because they reflect my own thoughts and feelings. I love my Kindle because I can highlight everything in one document instead of messing up my books with dog-ears. I highlight constantly:

— “Every living thing had mysteriously died the second we turned the camera on.” — Miranda July

— “‘I’ve got a retirement plan. It’s called a bullet,’ said Boris.” — Jack Pendarvis

— “We fall out of love only to fall in love with a duplicate of what we’ve left, never understanding that we love what we love and that it doesn’t change.” — Sara Majka

— “A psychiatrist friend of yours once told you that a telltale sign of a mentally unstable person is she’s never dressed appropriately for the weather.” — Vendela Vida

These sentences resonate with me for one reason or another. For example, I remember going over to my grandparents’ house one Sunday afternoon in the winter, how my grandmother asked why I was wearing shorts and kind of blocked me from entering her home until I answered. And then I wondered myself; it was too cold to be wearing gym shorts and yet there I was with my legs all chicken-skinned. It hadn’t even occurred to me to wear something halfway decent, something appropriate for the weather, and my own family said nothing to me, ever, for fear of offending me because I was so sensitive. No matter what anyone said to me, I was always trying to interpret the subtext, and I always felt the subtext was: you’re wrong; what’s the matter with you; why are you the way you are and how can I change it?

VS: You turned me on to that Sara Majka collection, Cities I’ve Never Lived In, when I came to see you in Gulfport, and I’ve probably thought of certain sentences, certain moments, in that collection at least once every few days since I read it in June. So, thank you.

As I think about some of my favorite sentence-makers — Mary Robison, who can marvel with a line “I would always be late, too, if at the parking garage I hadn’t grasped the mechanical-gate concept, that at the very fucking second the fucking stick rises, is when you go,” from One D.O.A., One on the Way, or Flannery O’Connor, who does breathless, breathtaking work in a sentence like “The black sky was underpinned with long silver streaks that looked like scaffolding and depth on depth behind it were thousands of stars that all seemed to be moving very slowly as if they were about some vast construction work that involved the whole order of the universe and would take all time to complete,” from Wise Blood, or William Gay, in Little Sister Death, of his protagonist: “He was seized with longing so intense it ached in his chest, he wanted it always to keep, to drag out secretly and study it like a yellowed photograph, and he thought I am home, this is me, this is where I have been rambling down to all these years” — I wonder, despite thinking that schooling or geographying or really any endeavor to group writers to be mostly futile and almost always exclusionary, if there isn’t something to be said about Southern writers, syntax, and sentences. It might be something as simple as an ear tuned to a different variety of speech pattern, or perhaps something more difficult to pin down, like what it is that might drive a person to talk quickly, ramble, rush out language with no space for pause or comma. Is any of this resonating with you? If so, I’d love to hear you talk about it, designated, as you are, as a “Southern writer.”

MM: Robison is so good! I arrived too late at the University of Southern Mississippi to be her student. All I got were the stories of how things were so much better before I’d gotten there, which of course is how it always is. You missed it, people want to tell you; it was so much better before…

I’m a Southern writer because I’ve always lived in the South. I don’t even know what it means, really, or how it’s “different,” because I’ve always lived here. When I moved to Austin for graduate school, I lost my accent for a few years but that was about it. (I’ve been told that it has returned in full force since my return to Mississippi.) Southerners value storytelling, humor, and rhythm, though I imagine that’s pretty universal. And I come from a family of musicians, so music is very important to us. Over Christmas, my siblings plugged their guitars into their amps and we sang along to Bonnie Raitt’s “Papa Come Quick” and The Band’s “The Weight,” songs that are more like novels set to music.

I’m a Southern writer because I’ve always lived in the South. I don’t even know what it means, really, or how it’s “different,” because I’ve always lived here.

We also kept making my sister’s boyfriend tell the same story every time someone new showed up. Each time he added new details and each time I thought I wouldn’t be entertained, but I was. Perhaps Southerners talk to each other more? Tell more stories? There’s still a front-porch culture; it’s hot nearly year-round (it’s currently 73 degrees) so you sit outside and drink beer or iced tea and just talk about where you’ve been and the things you’ve seen. Or, if you never go anywhere, you gossip about your neighbors.

VS: Many of the narrators and protagonists in the stories here are more or less self-aware, but that self-awareness by my no means indicates that they are going to change, or that they’re even capable of change. Perhaps this is best embodied in a remark made by the narrator of “The House on Main Street,” who says, “It is seven-thirty and already painfully bright outside. I need curtains but this seems completely beyond the realm of possibility — where would I get them and would they be long enough? I’d probably have to have them made.” In which case self-awareness signals an acknowledgement of one’s intractability, one’s tendency not to move toward action. Then there’s the narrator of “Proper Order,” a story which ends with her saying, “Don’t mess it up, I want to tell him. Don’t fuck things up because once you start fucking up it’s so hard to stop and there comes a point at which you simply don’t know how to do anything else anymore.” In which case self-awareness seems to also be a kind of resignation. What about that interior space interests you, or seems ripe for pulling and creating characters from? You capture it exceptionally well.

MM: At the Michener Center, I was a fiction writer who was also writing plays because, as you know, we had to have a secondary genre. I wrote a few plays over those three years but they never interested me much. I wanted to have my narrator think — what was she thinking? How was she feeling? And so I was always writing terrible stage directions, but even those didn’t do it. You can show your character pacing or frowning or crying but WHAT IS SHE THINKING? Action and dialogue and situation — for me everything is secondary to the thoughts in a character’s head.

I’m reading Chelsea Martin’s Mickey right now and dog-eared this last night:

“I felt incredibly close to Mickey in that moment. I felt like he could intuitively understand the trajectory of my mind, or was connected to me in some transcendent way, breaking down one of the many barriers that made us two separate people instead of one whole.

But I could never know what Mickey thought or felt, despite occasional reassurances. It felt the same as the way I couldn’t know if, when I held his hand for comfort while we fell asleep, he felt comforted, too, or was merely patiently attending to my embarrassing emotional needs.”

This is why I read, and why I write. Because you can never know what’s going on in someone else’s head. Because you can never really know the people with whom you are the closest.

VS: When we spoke in 2014 about your novel The Last Days of California, you said, “I think I came to terms long ago with the fact that not a whole lot of people are going to like my work in general.” I think I said something about how the masses have never been arbiters of the sublime, but I didn’t not see what you were getting at, either. Your work, as you said then, isn’t always plot-driven, and doesn’t always give people the ending they might desire. But reading the stories in Always Happy Hour, I think it’s precisely the choices which might alienate some that, on the contrary, convince me of your mastery over the short story form. In no small part because I think you follow and trust the language and make it do such beautiful work, but I think there’s also something of equal importance to be said about that which your stories don’t do. They don’t have an interest in presenting characters who are easily understandable or reducible, or whose actions and motives are always reasonable and unambiguous — because who, really, is? Nor do they engage in ribbon-tying endings, providing a false sense of closure just because the story itself is closing. Which is to say that I think the most rewarding part of reading these stories is the experience of feeling frustrated or worried or puzzled or disenchanted, not about the work itself, but by virtue of the work being so precise and so illuminating that we really do inhabit the world and the lives of these characters; characters who probably resemble us more than we’d like to believe. This is all a long, circuitous way, I suppose, of asking a rather lofty question: what do you feel a short story ought to do? Or, if this is even a different question, what is it you seek to do in your stories?

MM: In any kind of workshop environment (and outside of them, too), you’re asked: “what makes this day different from all of the other days?” and “how does the narrator change throughout the course of the story?”

I never cared much about these things. The day that everything changes isn’t as interesting to me as what led up to that day. And people do change — I’m not one of those people who believe we’re incapable of it — but I also don’t see it happen very often, not in my own life, nor in the lives of the people I know. So a narrator changing over the course of a story and/or coming to some great realization that alters everything — I don’t buy into all that.

The day that everything changes isn’t as interesting to me as what led up to that day.

I like to read about how people live, what someone’s life is like on a particular day. Not, of course, the most boring day of their life while they’re watching TV and semi-catatonic, but that could be a story, too. I’m a thinker, a ruminator, and while it’s not the best way to live, it can be interesting to read about. Who do they miss? Who do they love? How do they get through a day, an evening, a night? What do they want? What led them to this place and time in their life? All of these things interest me.

I walk my dog around our apartment complex and peer into the windows and I’m so incredibly curious. Who are these people? Why don’t I know them? I want to know them. Are they like me? Do they want to be friends? All indications are that they are not like me and do not want to be friends. Right now I’m living in a place with a very transient population because it’s casino/military/trashy, which makes it hard to talk to people. No one is putting down roots; they’re all just waiting to move on. I spoke to a neighbor not long ago and she was very friendly because she had questions for me: did I know why the cops had been called? Had I seen or heard anything? I talk to the homeless guy at the beach where I walk my dog and berate myself for never having any dollar bills to give him as he insists on cleaning my windshield, as he tells me his story about needing bus money to get back to New Orleans and I let him give it to me. I want to interrupt him and tell him I don’t need his tale, it’s not necessary. Of course I want to know everything and and write it down because most people don’t think about their lives as being interesting, or important.

Alas, I’m not that friendly, either, and so we will all be strangers here.

VS: The stories in Always Happy Hour alternate from first-person, second-person, and third-person narration. I’d be interested to hear you talk about the process of deciding from which point of view any given story should be told. Do you always know, going in, that a story is going to be, say, in first-person, or are there times in revision where something that essential can change? Do you have a sense, when writing, that the chosen modality has enforced upon the future of the story certain narrative limits or possibilities? Perhaps because I’ve now heard Antonya Nelson give the same “Against the Use of First Person” lecture twice, I’m even more interested in troubling or complicating the notion that there are things, lacking a better phrase, that you can get away with in one mode that you can’t in another. You seem to have such a keen instinct for not only choosing the right vantage point, but also for playing with perceptions of what these modes can and can not do, so I’d be curious to hear whatever your thoughts about this might be.

MM: I don’t like third person that much, and I hate it when a story begins with a character’s full name, like, “Jack Bishop was waiting for the train when he saw his ex-wife…” It feels like somebody’s making stuff up. And while I love fiction, I want to believe that what I am reading is real.

I learned pretty early that first person was for novices, or this is the line they give you — beginners use first person, and particularly first person present tense — but it often feels like the most authentic point of view to me. And I write in past tense, as well, but my most natural writing mode is first person, present. It’s personal and immediate, like you’re inhabiting the life of a person right now.

When I start writing in second person, I can’t stop, so I don’t do it much anymore. There was something too affected about it, and “you” becomes an authorial intrusion.

VS: My final question is a two-parter. Part one: I’d love to know which books you’ve found recently that you’ve enjoyed, and who we should not fail to be reading. Part two: what are you working on next?

MM: I loved Cities I’ve Never Lived In by Sara Majka. I think I’ve read it three times? And I’m currently finishing up Mickey by Chelsea Martin; what she’s done in this slim book is nothing short of amazing. I think people see a book like this as a bunch of vignettes that are separate and random and therefore easy to cobble together, but it seems harder to me than writing a novel where somebody’s always waking up and beginning a new day, where one thing leads to another. And she has a lot of intelligent stuff to say about art and the fallout that can take place within families, sometimes for no discernible reason. The ways it’s marketed — “a girl coming to terms with her breakup” — the way so many things are marketed — doesn’t do it justice. And I understand the whole marketing thing, it just seems like more often than not the people that are doing the marketing get it wrong.

Rachel Yoder’s forthcoming collection, Infinite Things All at Once, is so good. It’ll be out from Curbside Splendor this year.

As for the other part, I’m working on a novel. I don’t even want to call it that until I have a draft, though. Until then it’s just a very long story that seems to be flailing.

All of this reminds me of the boyfriend who was going to “sit down over a long weekend with a bottle of whiskey” and write the great American novel (loosely based, of course, on his life, with himself as the deeply-flawed but lovable anti-hero).

I guess the other thing about writing is that people think it’s easy. It’s tedious as shit. And you also have to know what a misplaced modifier is so you don’t have your tables wearing tennis shoes.

Writing Teens, in All Their Complex Glory

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Lindsey Lee Johnson’s debut novel, The Most Dangerous Place On Earth (Random House), interlaces the lives of affluent high school students in Marin County, California, where she grew up. When popular girl Calista leaks the love note Tristan penned to her in middle school to their classmates — the archetypal pretty boy, striver, scam artist, dancer, and dime — she sets off a chain of events with tragic consequences. Calista and the others carry the blame for the middle school tragedy to high school, and not even new, bright-eyed teacher Molly can break the spell Tristan has cast over these Valley High students to save them from themselves.

I met Johnson ten years ago in Sandra Tsing Loh’s playwriting class in the Master of Professional Writing program at the University of Southern California. The years that Johnson and I attended produced several successful writers, many of whom would’ve named Johnson the “most likely to succeed” at graduation. Back then, we were in a writing group together, and Johnson was already producing stories about teen angst. In person she is soft-spoken and reserved, but on the page she’s commanding, intense, even fierce. After MPW, she worked as a writing tutor in her hometown and currently lives in Los Angeles.

While sipping elixirs called Illuminated (hers) and Immortal (mine) at Café Gratitude in Venice, I had the opportunity to ask Johnson about growing up in Marin County, tutoring teenagers, scoring Jonathan Franzen’s agent, and The Most Dangerous Place On Earth.

Andrea Arnold: Since we met, you have been writing about teenagers. Most of us like to forget those years. What was it about that time that compels you to return to it in your writing?

Lindsey Lee Johnson: I actually enjoyed my teenage years! I know that’s strange. But I liked high school. I had a good group of friends and was very involved in activities. I had a much harder time in my twenties. As an adult, all my day jobs have been in teaching or tutoring. I’ve spent a lot of time with teenagers, and I just think they’re fascinating.

AA: What was it about growing up in Marin County that made it an ideal setting for a high school novel about bullying? Were any of these storylines taken from something that happened in your high school or how did you come to the story?

LLJ: First, Mill Valley was an ideal setting for my novel because I know it better than anywhere in the world. When you’re writing a novel, one of the goals is to build a world that feels authentic, so knowing all the details of the place, like the fact that there’s a redwood tree in the 7-Eleven parking lot, helped.

More generally, Marin County is an interesting place because it’s a very wealthy, privileged, mostly white community that exists in a kind of bubble. San Francisco is about fifteen minutes away, but kids who live there don’t spend a lot of time in San Francisco, unless they’re going thrift store shopping on Haight Street, like I did, or because their parents are taking them to the ballet or something. Marin teenagers are in a very cosmopolitan region but isolated in a little town. Also, it’s an interesting place because, despite its wealth and relative lack of diversity, it thinks of itself as being very progressive, which it is. When I was growing up there, I was very privileged, everyone I knew was very privileged to one degree or another, but we were constantly being reminded that we were privileged and that we should be aware of the fact that there were people out there that were less privileged. For example, instead of freshman history class we took a class called Contemporary Social Issues, where we learned about racism, sexism, LGBTQ rights, economic inequality, everything. The community has these hippie roots, it is very progressive and socially aware, and yet everyone drives a BMW and shops at Nordstrom. It’s an interesting conundrum of a place.

The book came from my desire to write about teenagers as I knew them to be, not as I saw them being portrayed in media and pop culture. I remember growing up watching all those teen movies — Can’t Buy Me Love, Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead, Saved by the Bell and Beverly Hills 90210 on TV, and then came Gossip Girl. These are all aspirational fantasy shows, but they do color the way we look at teenage life, I think. The actors on those shows are twenty-five year old supermodels! I think they make us forget that teenagers are actually kids. In recent years, I started noticing a lot of news stories coming out about teenagers — bullying, partying, and posting videos on YouTube, et cetera. I just thought there was a one-sided view of teenagers out there. Like there were “good kids” and “bad kids.” I just don’t agree that you can look at teenagers in this one-dimensional kind of way.

The point is, I was captain of the cheerleading squad, but I was also a huge nerd. I was an editor of the school newspaper and dated another newspaper editor. This idea that there is such a thing as a high school cheerleader as we see her portrayed in the media, that there is one archetype that defines such a girl, really bothers me. The notion that you can see a group of high school cheerleaders walk by and think you know anything about who they really are comes from our distorted memories of our own high school years or from media representations. It’s not real! Teenagers are multi-dimensional, they are complex. They are people.

It’s not real! Teenagers are multi-dimensional, they are complex. They are people.

AA: New teacher Molly Nicoll has a lot of compassion for her students. You wrote: “…as a teenager she’d felt alien and alone with her Bob Dylan T-shirts and her Doc Martens rip-offs and the claustrophobic rage that she could not explain to anyone.” Who is Molly?

LLJ: Molly is a very idealistic, sheltered, twenty-three-year-old, brand new teacher. She’s from Fresno and has recently graduated with her credential. She just wants to get out and escape her life. She goes to Mill Valley, and she is very impressed by it. She thinks she’s going to save these kids with books, which is every English major’s dream. Like maybe I’ll hand a copy of Jane Eyre to the impressionable thirteen-year-old girl, and then she’ll become a confident, successful woman! [Laughs] Which is a fantasy that I’ve had and I think a lot of teachers have had. Molly finds out that teaching is not going to be what she thought it would be. Eventually, she is lured into this world she doesn’t understand, and gets herself into a bit of trouble.

AA: Nick is a liar and a cheater, but you love him because he’s clever and brilliant and gets away with it. I loved the way you incorporated San Francisco’s subcultures into his narrative — it’s full of surprises. What makes SF teens like Nick different?

LLJ: Thank you! I think Nick could exist in many different places. Sometimes you look at a kid who seems average, but when you interact with him a little, you see a nugget of brilliance that’s in there that can’t really be taught. A lot of times, a teenage boy will do a lot of work to not let you see that it’s there because he’s trying to be cool, protect himself, keep up his façade. All of my early readers have liked Nick the most. He’s kind of a jerk, but he’s also very curious and clever, and he sees through bullshit. I think that’s his appeal.

AA: Poor Damon. He ruins his whole life. I thought you did the best job with him. I saw him so clearly — his weight, his style, his anger and where it came from. I didn’t expect someone like him at Valley High. From where did his character germinate?

LLJ: He’s not based on anyone that I know, but I encountered a lot of kids his age who are very angry. They don’t know exactly why they are so angry. And their whole world is telling them to be quiet, sit in your chair, and stop tapping that pencil, don’t swear and pull your pants up! The world, especially a very polished world like Mill Valley, kind of just wants those kids to go away. I see Damon as the boy who has developed a harder and harder set of armor because he just doesn’t feel accepted. He’s vulnerable. I mean, I see him as a very tender character. He’s also incompetent at being a juvenile delinquent. Going back to this idea of good kids and bad kids — Nick and Ryan basically do the same crimes as Damon, but they don’t get caught. Damon isn’t clever. He has no guile. He doesn’t know how to cover things up. I’ve seen that kind of thing a lot. I think it’s hard as adults to see that kids are more complicated than you think. You might see a kid like Damon and assume he’s all bad, while you might see a kid like Abigail and assume she has everything together.

10 Great Teens In Contemporary Fiction: A Reading List

AA: You mentioned Abigail. What’s her story?

LLJ: Abigail is the girl you look at and think, Okay, Hillary Clinton, Junior! You are going to rule the world someday! She doesn’t belong in high school. High school, to her, is just a checklist. A thing to get done. She reminds me of you a little bit! [Laughs] Because you just take care of things. Abigail would’ve come in this restaurant and said, “Give me that table.” She handles her life. But the reason she does is that she has to. Her parents are basically absent. She’s never been treated like a child. She doesn’t think of herself as a child. She doesn’t act like a child. But when she gets into an illicit relationship, it becomes apparent, I hope, that she is a child.

AA: The novel begins and ends with Calista. Her character arc, from popular girl to hippie recluse, carries us through the narrative. What would you say to a young Calista if you could offer words of advice about growing up and getting through her teenage years?

LLJ: That’s a good question. I think the hardest thing about interacting with teenagers, as an adult, is that you can give them whatever advice you want to give them, but they are going to do what they are going to do. Calista has to figure things out for herself. No adult can swoop in and make her get over what she’s done. She has to work through it.

I guess I would tell her: You’re smart, and you have a passion for literature and poetry — hold on to that. Also, get out of that car! [Laughs]

AA: Who is your favorite character and why? Who was the most challenging/easiest to write?

LLJ: My favorite is David Chu. David is the sweetest character in the book. He is all heart. He’s average in every way. His looks are average. He has average intelligence. Average athletic skill. He’s just really nice, and all he wants is a simple, happy life. He wants to have a little house and a good job. He doesn’t really care what it is. He’d like to have a girlfriend to go to the movies with. And that’s enough for him, but it’s not enough for his parents who see him as their great hope. To them, he is supposed to be a successful, straight-A student and headed for Berkeley to become a doctor. It’s not who he is, but he’s desperate to please them. Dave was also the easiest to write. He came to me fully formed, and his chapter had hardly any edits. I felt like him so often when I was a teenager. I just wanted to be happy, but Mill Valley is a place where you’re supposed to be exceptional.

The hardest character to write was Emma. Technically, her chapter was hard to write because she’s just lying in bed for most of it. I won’t say why. Also, Emma is nothing like me. She’s a party girl. She’s spontaneous. She’s impulsive. She’s not very reflective. It was hard for me to get in her headspace.

AA: When we were at Tin House Writer’s Workshop together in 2012, I believe you said that you were writing a linked collection. What led to the structure of the novel?

LLJ: I’m a novelist through and through. I always thought of it as a novel. But it’s a novel in linked stories that has become more of a novel as I’ve worked on it. The stories became more knotted together as I edited and worked on them. The Molly teacher story came in after I finished all of the teenager stories, and her story is woven through the whole book, which I think helps tie them together better.

The book came from a list of teenage archetypes like in The Breakfast Club. I wanted to lay out the stereotypes and then undermine them. I wanted to use each chapter to reveal the complicated, three-dimensional human being underneath each teenage archetype. I wanted to knit the stories together to show a community of teenagers, and how small actions can have far-reaching consequences. While writing, I thought of the kids’ stories as a game of dominos — one story knocked the next story into action and on and on throughout the book.

AA: The Most Dangerous Place on Earth is your debut novel. What was the publishing process like for you?

LLJ: What is it like when you work your whole life for something from the age of seven, and then it happens to you? Oh, do you want the nitty gritty? [Laughs] I always had writing groups. I wrote the book and workshopped it with my group. Finally I felt it was in a place where I could send it out. I wanted to query agents, so I did that game everyone talks about where you look on your bookshelf and open your favorite books to see who represents them. Of course, my favorite writers are Jennifer Egan, Jeffrey Eugenides, Joan Didion, and Virginia Woolf! [Laughs] So I had to look beyond my favorites. I found some newer books that I really enjoyed and looked at who represented them. I ended up with a list of maybe twenty agents. Susan Golomb, who is an incredible agent, picked me out of the slush pile. She represented a book called The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman, and that was a big influence on me when I was writing my book. I didn’t know that she was Jonathan Franzen’s agent at the time. Susan understood the book immediately. She did a great job selling it. There were five houses interested in buying the book. As soon as I talked to Random House, I knew they were right for it. They were all about the writing. They told me they were going to do a lot of editing. I wanted that. They signed the book, and we worked on it for about two years. We did four or five full drafts. A lot of that was adding new material and just refining what was there. They gave me very in-depth, very helpful edits to get my book to the best possible place.

AA: Do you have any specific advice for emerging writers?

LLJ: In terms of going into the marketplace, know what your book is at your core. Hold onto that. You have to be certain — not that yours is the greatest book in the world, but of what it is you are trying to do. I knew that I wanted to write a literary novel about teenagers for adult readers. That was a weird concept for the marketplace to grasp. There were other agents that said that I should sell it as YA and that I should change it like this and that. The publishing world will tell you a lot about what your book should or shouldn’t be or what it is or isn’t. A lot of opinions are going to start coming at you really fast. You have to be sure.

The publishing world will tell you a lot about what your book should or shouldn’t be or what it is or isn’t. A lot of opinions are going to start coming at you really fast. You have to be sure.

AA: You have an MFA-like degree. We call it “an MFA equivalent.” I know because I was in a class with you. What was your experience at MPW? Were there any teachers there you emulated? Who were your writing mentors?

LLJ: My most important writing mentor is actually not from MPW. I took a class with him at UCLA Extension before I went to grad school. His name is Seth Greenland. I think he’d read four other books that I’d written before this one. He read drafts. We’d meet for lunch and he’d tell me, “God, you’re really talented, but this isn’t a story!” [Laughs] “You need to write a story!” It was years of this. Like a decade of this. Seth just kind of hung in there and was there for me when I needed support. He believed that I could do it. I don’t know why.

From USC, well, Janet Fitch is like a force of nature. She just embodies being a writer. She’s a true artist. Her whole life is about it. And she was so serious about it. I was frustrated when I was a kid in English classes because teachers were too sweet and talked about writing as creativity time for expressing feelings, implying that creative writing couldn’t be graded or judged. Janet judged it! She made people cry! She wrote on one of my stories: “Time to knuckle down, Lindsey!” I thought that was the best thing that anybody had ever said to me. Her message was, “This is work and this is serious.” Also, she taught me what a scene was, which I never understood before her class. When she taught me that, I understood structure for the first time in my life, even after having written four other books.

AA: We were lucky enough not to grow up with cellphones and social media. I taught high school. I advised parents to limit their kids’ Facebook time. What do you say to teachers or parents of teenagers struggling with teens and today’s cyber environment?

LLJ: I have to preface this. I recognize that I’m not a parent, so I don’t know how it feels to be in that position. But I have been very involved in teenagers’ lives and have had their parents ask me what they should do about their kid [Laughs]. I have two thoughts about it. One thing is if you concentrate on raising your kid with a set of core values about who they are and how they should comport themselves in the world, then I’m not as worried about them. However, all kids need to be told very explicitly how fast social media spreads and that it’s public. Today’s teenagers don’t see Instagram as public. It’s just part of their world. My other thought is — Parents, you own the cellphone! You own the TV! You own the computer! You can take them away!

AA: What are you working on next?

LLJ: It is another story also about growing up and coming of age in the era of social media. It’s also about image-making, the culture of celebrity, and the dangers that come with that.

New Amazon Bookstore Coming to Manhattan in Spring

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The online retailing giant is now moving offline

Amazon long ago conquered the online bookselling world, but now it is tackling the offline world too. This year, Amazon will be opening a bookstore in the Time Warner Center in Columbus Circle in Manhattan. The shop will be the fourth of its kind as the online retailer is already running successful locations in Seattle, Portland, and San Diego. Amazon also has also started bookstore projects in Chicago and Dedham, Massachusetts, to be completed in the coming months.

The New York Times commented that the already existing Amazon bookstores are pretty standard, but “the company stocks far fewer titles than typical bookstores, using online data to determine which ones to carry.” So, it’s highly unlikely that this emerging chain will be able to compete with the charm and personality of New York favorites like McNally Jackson or The Strand. What they do have on their side is cutting edge technology, which is permeating their other ventures, too. Last month, Business Insider reported on Amazon’s futuristic grocery stores, named Amazon Go because an app automatically tracks and charges your purchases, letting you leave without having to wait in line or interact with a cashier.

The irony of Amazon building physical stores is not lost on publications like The Verge, which notes how “Amazon will expand its book-selling empire with the very thing that it once helped to destroy: bookstores.” I guess we’ll see come spring whether or not their reinvention of the wheel gets traction in NYC.

Language, History, and the Memory of Violence

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Is there one word to describe Ramon Saizarbitoria’s massive novel Martutene? “Slow-burning” might do the trick. On paper, this book’s plot seems easy to describe, albeit fairly static: it follows the lives of two middle-aged couples — Martin and Julia, Abaitua and Pilar — as they go about their daily lives and begin to question the bonds between them. This is somewhat accelerated by the arrival of Lynn, an American, whose life intersects with both couples in interesting ways. So far, that seems familiar: the stresses of time on a marriage, the presence of a younger outsider; readers may well think that they know how this will play out.

Thankfully, there’s more going on here than the relatively tired dissection of relatively affluent lives in a prosperous city. Start with the title: Martutene is a neighborhood in the city of Donostia in the Basque Autonomous Region, not far from the border with France. A reference early on to a writer declaring “that he wasn’t going to use the murderers’ language any more” helps establish the mood. For all that the overall shape of this novel might look familiar, the fact that the struggle for Basque independence looms in many of these characters’ histories contorts the narrative in unexpected ways.

Structurally, events unfold at a moderate pace. Saizarbitoria alternates between the two couples from chapter to chapter, and doesn’t provide a lot of exposition up front, instead revealing information gradually–to the extent that, for instance, the reader doesn’t learn how Abaitua and Pilar met until over two hundred pages into the novel. The chapters focusing on them take on a more visceral quality, as befits their work–both are doctors. Martin and Julia, meanwhile, have more literary occupations: he writes and she translates. This, then, opens the door for plenty of literary references to be made, including one that recurs throughout the novel.

That frequently-referenced work would be Max Frisch’s novel Montauk. (Which, serendipitously, was released in a new edition by Tin House in late 2016.) Nods to it abound throughout Martutene: Frisch’s book is a recurring topic of conversation, the novel’s structure seems to be an homage to what Frisch used in Montauk, and young women named Lynn play a significant role in each. It’s an interesting choice, especially given that Saizarbitoria’s novel is nearly four times the length of Frisch’s–this is a book that could devour its predecessor several times over.

More broadly, it adds to the air of Martutene as a work in which books exist as tactile objects. One early reference to Montauk delves into the specifics of that particular edition’s design.

On the beach there are only two empty deckchairs and their shadows. It looks like a Hopper. The title’s printed at the top, MontauK, with the first M and the final K set bigger than the other letters and stretching down below the line the others are on, and in that lower space between them is the writer’s name, Max Frisch.

And this is a novel that’s littered with books. For all that a sense of history is never too far out of reach for these characters, neither is a sense of culture. Action and contemplation frequently take center stage, but actions read about, imagined, or remembered also play a significant part in moving the novel’s plot forward. Add in the fact that Martin’s fiction is periodically referenced, and the end result is a dense web of allusions, a heady yet stately approach to storytelling.

At one point halfway through the novel, Martin describes a recurring nightmare about a room that he doesn’t want to enter, but is forced to. There, he encounters a sinister couple. The passage describing the detail perfectly encapsulates the blend of realism and ambiguity that can occur in dreams–and the way that memories of them seem to bear even more information than might have transpired in the actual dream.

He says that he’s aware of some things even though they aren’t made clear in the nightmare. For instance, the woman is young and beautiful. He said he doesn’t see her face, or the man’s. But he does see some other things in great detail. For example, the woman’s negligée is made of satin, it’s salmon pink, and it has bows on its edges; she has long nails that are painted bright red.

It’s also indicative of the sometimes languorous, always deliberate pacing of this book–which can, at times, be frustrating. There are 800-page novels propelled by extensive plotting and 800-page novels propelled by mood and nuance; this is very much in the latter category. That isn’t to say that the book succumbs to inertia; quite the opposite, in fact. Eventually, the novel’s plotlines begin to converge; eventually, one of its primary characters will turn out to be harboring a horrifying secret.

Martutene is an intellectual novel, a meticulous work, and an object lesson in how different aesthetic and historical strands can memorably converge. It’s very much on its own wavelength, and it takes its own time in establishing its own rhythms; this is not a novel for the impatient. But its headiness and its depth make for a satisfying reading experience. It’s a deep immersion in the lives of its characters, with all of the discomfort and revelation that that can bring.

Jedi

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Jedi had a decision to make. In the next thirty minutes or less she had to decide how she wanted to die. She did not want to do it in the house. She had the habit of sleeping til late. She woke up in the afternoon and took a long bath. Her mother always told her to eat less before long journeys because she often couldn’t hold on to the wriggling food inside her stomach and would throw up. This was to be the longest journey of her life, so she ate only a watermelon, the sole reason she loved summers.

Jedi, born of a Sindhi father and a Bengali mother, grew up to be like neither. She was born with a different name that was used in her academic certificates and passport. Jedi was a name given by her grandfather. In Bengali, it simply means ‘stubborn’; in George Lucas’ universe, Jedi were the guardians of peace and justice in their galaxy. He took Jedi to see the 1999 movie The Phantom Menace, to introduce her to the franchise; she was only eight then.

She would have liked to watch it again today, before slitting her wrist open or plunging herself from a high-rise. She remembered Nemo had put it on her computer a few days ago. Nemo — the boy she had known for the past sixteen years and the man she had been in love with for the past three. They had gone around town as a couple, attending parties and meeting friends for those three years, but a week ago they broke up.

It was his child Jedi was carrying in her womb.

Jedi had always been fascinated with the world of the supernatural. As long as she could remember she had always wanted to acknowledge the presence of spirits, mythical and magical creatures, even demons. Collecting newspaper articles about people’s death was her hobby; she had a small scrapbook in which there were numerous such pieces on suicide, murder, homicide, police encounters, serial killings, and many more.

In one such article that came out a few years ago, she had read about a haunted compartment on the last metro of the day. Passengers disappeared mysteriously during this particular hour of the night. Every few months there would be an incident, but soon it became a common thing and people were not interested in reading about it anymore. But the urban legend remained and grew, that traveling in Coach Number 6 in the 23:05 PM metro was an invitation to death.

She decided to take the last metro that night. Alone.

Jedi had also thought of cycling to the harbor and jumping into the bay. She did not know how to swim and the current there was strong. But it was a place where cargo was more valued than human beings. And she didn’t want to breathe her last in such a place. So she decided against it. Besides, she had another person growing inside her; and if there was anything after death, then she didn’t want her only child’s soul to be trapped in a trading ground forever.

It was a journey of nine stations from her home to the last one. The station was comparatively empty at that time, the trains mostly carrying a convoy of scattered, lonely souls stuck between going and returning. Coach 6 usually was the emptiest, thanks to the legend. Jedi was sitting at one end of the compartment, with only a middle-aged man, wearing a long black coat that had aged beyond repair, as her companion. He had a violin case kept carefully by his side. To her left was a line of empty coaches; only at a distance she could see the silhouette of an old woman holding the hand of a little girl, waiting for their station.

The train passed through the bright lights of the glazing metropolis, brimming with accomplishments and affluence, to the more middle-class residential societies housing families and government employees, and finally descending underground into the abyss of filth, gutters, and into the stench of urbanization in yards where the homeless slept every night in oblivion.

By the fourth station, the old woman with the kid had gotten off. The man with the violin case was buttoning his coat, probably getting ready for his station; December was dry and cold outside, Jedi felt glad the coat would protect him from the howling winds. She was herself dressed in a hooded navy-blue sweatshirt that had a photograph of The Doors imprinted on it, and a pair of denims.

Once he left, Jedi was the only one left inside the train; or at least as far as her eyes could see, she was. Then it was just the rumbling of the coaches, the sound of metal meeting metal, and the chugging of the hand-holds running horizontally along the ceiling.

It was then that she finally felt alone.

Will her Mom miss her more, or her Dad, she thought. She pictured a scale in her head, with her parents’ affections laden on each side, the scale balanced perfectly. But between her and her parents it had always been an imbalanced relationship; they never agreed with her ways and she never abided by their terms. They did not approve of Nemo either. When Jedi started seeing Nemo, their neighbor’s son, her parents thought she had chosen him over them.

She turned her head, trying to ward off thoughts about her life that might make her task more difficult. And there he was, standing not more than fifty feet from her. He was dressed in black from head to toe, almost like the man with the violin case. For an instant she thought it could be him, but it wasn’t. Jedi couldn’t see his face, but this being was definitely much taller, and he walked with a limp. And he was coming towards her. His eyes had a glint, like gold dust sprinkled over a seashell, glistening with power, fury, and perhaps a strange sense of sadness.

The first thing she did when she saw him was bring one of her hands closer to her stomach, like she was cocooning something. This took her by surprise; every time she had thought about this moment, she had tried to imagine the various possibilities. In some she was panting, gasping for breath but running, as fast as she could, away from the shadows that engulfed her; in others she sat silently inside the compartment and no one appeared. But this feeling was new, this unknown sensation of acting as a shield to something that doesn’t even exist.

Or perhaps it had already started existing, breathing in air from her body, feeding on fluids she drank and the food she ate. It had been just three months, but who can tell about these things. She wasn’t a mother, wasn’t ready to be one. But she felt pain at the thought of losing it forever, the kind of pain one feels while amputating a limb.

And suddenly she had another decision to make, preferably in the next thirty seconds or less. Except it was too late, because the tall figure was already standing right in front of her. She had never seen a legend become real in her own life; it was like watching a shooting star crash into the night sky, forever caught between illusion and truth. And then he bent down and placed his face close to her ear, like he was about to share a secret.

The last thing she remembered seeing was like a flash from a lightsaber.

When she woke up, she felt dizzy, nauseous, and sickly. She couldn’t figure out if she was at her home or at a hospital. The curtains her mother chose were often as dull and lifeless as the ones they put up in the hospitals, as if to keep the sick patients sick. It was then she remembered the tall man again.

She remembered looking into his face and seeing her own in it. When she asked him if he was there to kill her, he said: “That is up to you; I am only a reflection. I am only here to push you. Whether you land on the platform or on the tracks will depend on which side you are facing.”

And that is all she could remember from that night.

On Being and Becoming

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Fanny Howe’s books do not come easily categorized. Often noted for her several books of poetry and — that encompassing term — “prose,” Howe’s new book, The Needle’s Eye, is classified as “essays/poetry.” Typical to Howe, the latest book upends these loose categories, featuring short nonfiction, lyric essay, prose poem, and narrative.

The Needle’s Eye is simultaneously cerebral and lyrical, and, often, individual pieces display both sides, combining a lyric rhythm and well-drawn images with factual analysis. “Kristeva and Me,” a seemingly traditional nonfiction essay that weaves more and more lyricism in as it goes on, becomes a study on philosopher-psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva and on the adolescent psyche — something Howe pieces together throughout the book. “Kristeva and Me” takes this to the next level, with the inclusion of Boston marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, whom Howe seems to be trying to understand in some way — not his actions, but his youth.

Throughout this book, adolescence is almost scientifically studied (made initially clear by its subtitle, “Passing through Youth”). Howe explores young people in prisons, and even St. Francis of Assisi in his rebellious youth in the piece “In Prism.” In it, Howe writes, “Francis was an idealistic teenager, an iconic candidate for today’s teenage gangs and jihadis.”

Howe’s well-considered work looks at the world’s handling of teenagers — boys, especially — but not only their incarceration. “The Nymphs without Names” begins, “In ancient Greece young boys…were gods of the wild mountainside… The Greeks understood that some boys were like hurricanes frenziedly dancing and destroying.” Rather than explaining away encouraged violence, Howe probes it, glancing through various cultures. She refuses to look away. The piece ends, “For now, they are ordinary boys.”

In “Absence” she explores the Children’s Crusade, questioning whether it was much different than other crusades — in goals, in action. “The righteousness of childhood was theirs to act upon,” Howe writes. “They knew they could do way better than the grown-ups in creating a safe and verdant land.” Perhaps she’s right. Most of us say this about children. But — “They fell into the sea or society and disappeared,” Howe writes, some equation of the sea and society that may be less metaphor than it appears.

The collection’s title, The Needle’s Eye, is suggested in the piece “Like Grown-Ups” as a “view of the world as seen by a single individual.” Howe writes, perfectly, “Remember how you lift the silver needle to the light to see all the way through the eye and out the other side. The eye is shaped like an eye.” It’s almost as though this book is shaped like an eye, some vessel out of which a partial understanding comes, while acknowledging its own failures to really understand, to really see.

But that title also comes from the book’s epigraph, from W.B. Yeats:

“All the stream that’s roaring by / Came out of a needle’s eye; / Things unborn, things that are gone, / From needle’s eye still goad it on.”

This initially seems the opposite of Howe’s claim that the needle’s eye is simply an individual view of the world, part of a whole. But she asks here: What can we see of that? What does that tell us about the whole?

The Needle’s Eye is perfectly contained — everything as viewed through the tiniest opening. But it calls itself a small opening. It keeps asking. It replies with more questions. It goes back to its own beginnings.

Electric Literature Is Alive and Well and (Still) Living on Medium

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On Wednesday, Medium’s CEO Ev Williams announced that, in addition to laying off 50 employees and closing its East Coast offices, the company has abandoned its ad revenue model which recruited publishers like us, The Awl, and The Ringer to move to Medium last year.

Many have been asking what that means for Electric Literature, and basically, things will stay the same. We’ll be publishing the same writing you enjoy here on Medium for the foreseeable future.

There have been many benefits from Electric Literature’s relaunch last summer. The website looks damn good, for one thing, it’s easier to use, and the community of readers we’ve found has been supportive and engaged. We were also fortunate to work with talented, inspired individuals at Medium, most of whom have been sadly let go.

Admittedly, the potential for higher ad revenue played a significant role in our decision to migrate, and we are disappointed by Medium’s swift retreat from the publisher-centric model.

But unlike larger publishers that will surely be more affected by this change, Electric Literature is a non-profit that relies on reader support and grants as well as earned income. In fact, proceeds from our newly launched Membership program will soon equal what we once made in monthly ad revenue. Electric Literature receives 100% of your Membership dues after credit card processing fees, and contributions are tax-deductible. So, if you’re worried about the state of publishing, please consider supporting the writing you believe in by joining today.

In his post, Williams said that Medium plans to shift “resources and attention to defining a new model for writers and creators to be rewarded, based on the value they’re creating for people.” We’re not sure what that will look like yet, but in the meantime, we are going to keep our heads down and continue to do the work of promoting vibrant literature, supporting writers, and broadening the audience for literary fiction in the digital age.

Ted Wilson Reviews the World: My Potato Sack

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★★★★☆ (4 out of 5)

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

With the exception of potato farmers, these days almost no one wants a potato sack. And it’s exactly that lack of demand which has driven the price of potato sacks so far down that it’s economically irresponsible to not purchase one to wear as a shirt.

Admittedly, when I ordered my potato sack from the back of a magazine I thought I was ordering a potato snack. When it arrived I was pretty disappointed that I couldn’t eat it, but when I discovered that it was the perfect shape for disguising my lumpy torso, I was thrilled. To look at me in it, you wouldn’t know that I have small male breasts.

All my polo shirts literally went out the window. Then I had to go pick them up because they’d blown across into my neighbor’s yard and she was pretty angry about it. I suggested she might feel better if she wore my potato sack for a little while but she wasn’t interested. Now my polo shirts are in a bag in the front hall closet.

I don’t know a better sack than the potato sack. Not only has my potato sack been an awesome shirt, it’s also been an awesome pillow case. You’d think the rough, scratchy texture wouldn’t be very nice to lay your face against, and you’d be right. The potato sack as pillow case keeps me up all night, but it also prevents me from oversleeping. I haven’t missed a single episode of Good Morning America.

There’s one thing I could have done without regarding my potato sack, and that was all the bugs living in its fibers. I don’t know what kind of bugs they were. Are scabies a bug? They were everywhere, all over me. I’d be talking to Frank at the corner store and then he’d say, “There are bugs all over your face.” Then I’d start swiping at them in a panic and Frank would ask me to please leave. It was embarrassing.

Despite the bugs, my potato sack has brought me a lot of unexpected joy, and I think that’s what life is really about. In a way, my potato sack is why we all exist. Except we each have our own personal potato sack.

BEST FEATURE: It smells of potatoes no matter how many times I wash it.
WORST FEATURE: Everyone kept asking me questions about it and all the interest worried me someone might steal it in the middle of the night.

Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing a wallaby burger.

Mein Kampf Makes an Insidious Return to Germany’s Best Sellers List

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Could the new annotated edition prove to have historical value in our troubled times?

Spanish philosopher George Santayana is credited with the powerful proverb: “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.” That’s the optimistic way to look at the successful run of “Hitler, Mein Kampf, A Critical Edition,” spending 35 weeks on German publisher, Der Spiegel’s, best-seller list in 2016. According to the New York Times, the publication of the annotated text follows a 70-year ban in Germany. Its release has been met with plenty of controversy. Andreas Wirsching, the Director of the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich, believes that the project’s historical value has proved worthwhile. He argues that “the discussions about Hitler’s worldview and dealing with his propaganda [has] presented an opportunity — at a time when authoritarian political beliefs and far-right slogans are again gaining in popularity — to re-examine the ominous roots and results of such totalitarian ideologies.”

Since the sales are processed by the booksellers, the Institute is able to keep tabs on who exactly is buying the book and they claim “by and large it appears to be customers who are generally interested in politics and history, as well as people who are active in political education, such as teachers.” Apparently, the fear that the primary readers of the 2,000 page text would be alt-right, xenophobic bigots has yet to come to fruition.

Nevertheless, there’s something profoundly sad about having Hitler’s abhorrent worldview proliferated once again through his dangerous manifesto. One can only hope that his hateful words serve as a lesson of what can happen when we allow demagogues into power and ignore how words are often the precursor to catastrophic action.

The Writing Life as Its Cracked Up to Be

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Joyce Carol Oates begins her latest book — a four hundred-page nonfiction collection — with a trio of combative, idiosyncratic essays about inspiration, both as an abstract writerly concept and the process by which Oates completed a string of history-inspired stories. Combative, here, because Oates is not above picking fights with writers of stature: Socrates “dares to say” (says Oates) that writerly inspiration is divinely gifted, not humanly crafted; and Plato’s concurring opinion (says Oates) is “churlish.”

If Oates insists that writerly inspiration does not come from above, there might yet be hope for the rest of us not-nearly-as-productive souls. The collection, which borrows its title from an Emily Dickinson poem, is (so says its cover) a set of essays ostensibly about “Inspiration” and “the Writing Life,” though the essays and reviews between these covers seem collected less out of thematic connection and more out of a time for harvest. It’s time to check in on what Oates has been reading, and why, this collection implicitly announces to the reader, and we follow.

The first essay in the book, “Is the Uninspired Life Worth Living?,” discusses the struggles her predecessors have faced while searching for inspiration and, later, creative survival, focusing on daunting characters like Mary Shelley and Herman Melville. (In discussing the latter’s early detractors, Oates characterized critical reviewers of Moby Dick as “human-sized harpooners surrounding a mighty Leviathan.”) In a subsequent essay, Oates discusses her own inspiration for the stories in Wild Nights!: Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway, all of which, as she describes in Soul at the White Heat, are rooted in a love for the authors-in-question and an impulse to jiggle their language and mission, lovingly. “I take for granted the fact of Hemingway’s genius,” Oates writes here, “[and] this is true for all of the subjects in Wild Nights!”

“[Joyce Carol Oates challenges the idea that] writerly inspiration is divinely gifted, not humanly crafted.”

The rest of Soul at the White Heat collects a number of Oates’ recent book reviews and critical essays, best read as a wealth of new recommendations from a bright person with very great taste — new recommendations, that is, for readers like me who do not religiously read or adequately remember who reviews what in The New York Review of Books, where most of these pieces originally appeared.

This puts me, Oates’s reviewer, in the unenviable position of reviewing a review — or, a series of reviews — which is only so fair to Oates and her subjects and to my own readers here.

But it is fair to say that, even in her book reviews, Oates reveals dizzying mastery. Her review of Claire Tomalin’s biography of Charles Dickens begins with analytical summary of the strengths and weaknesses across Dickens’s entire body of work — written as though the language breezed effortlessly from Oates’s fingers, as does much of Oates’s best writing (“One might say that [Dickens’s] subject is his unique rendering of his subject, in the echo of Mark Rothko’s statement, ‘The subject of the painting is the painting’”). Her authoritative prose suggests that, rather than restating information from the book she is reviewing, Oates is the expert here.

“Even in her book reviews, Oates reveals dizzying mastery.”

Add these reviews to Oates’s Wild Night!-esque historical canon. Oates’s essays on Dickens, Lovecraft, and Georgia O’Keefe (whose lives Oates views through the lenses of their published biographies) are fitting companions to her famous fictions about Robert Frost, Marilyn Monroe, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Ted Kennedy, to name but a fraction of the contemporary historical figures Oates has memorialized, intelligently, in print. The strongest of her essays here concerns Mike Tyson, and though it’s most technically a review of Tyson’s memoir, Oates draws heavily on her longstanding admiration and knowledge of boxing, and drifts — as in a story — into lyric analytical modes, stating, for example, “A classic long fight divides into acts, or scenes, as in a play.”

The more conventionally structured book reviews in the collection (labeled “Contemporaries” in the Table of Contents), are, truth be told, less exciting than Oates’s bio-essays discussed above, but this is to a noble and respectful end: here, Oates allows her wizardry to take a backseat to description and discussion of her fellow writers’ work, never overloading her analysis with scene-stealing prose that would deflect attention from still-living writers (J. M. Coetzee, Lorrie Moore, Louise Erdrich, and Paul Auster, et cetera, et cetera). Oates’ contemporary reviews are less interesting when read in succession than they would have been in their original, newspaper form, but they contain all the pleasures of a loving, thoughtful recommendation and summary.

Soul at the White Heat will be no one’s favorite book. Due to the specificity of its subjects, it will not join the canon of great craft books from twentieth-century masters. Think of the book more as a worthy bonus volume of literary contribution from one of our best and most prolific geniuses. At times flashily essayistic, at times conventionally literary reportage, Soul at the White Heat is if nothing else a window into a strange and blessed writerly mind — a mind to which we’re granted lucky access. Think of the book as (as Oates writes of Doris Lessing) “a gift that cannot be analyzed; it must only be honored.”