Context, Cadence, Subtext: An Interview With Margo Jefferson, Author Of Negroland

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Margo Jefferson Negroland Cover.w370.h555

Margo Jefferson is most known for her writing on others. Her ability to unpick the nuances of performed art and theater, to empathize with and contextualize near untouchable pop culture icons like Michael Jackson and Beyoncé, and to engage in critical dialogs that account for present context while demonstrating a thorough grasp of the undertows of history, speak to her sharp intelligence, voracious mind, and finely calibrated writing.

In Negroland, she makes what is perhaps the most difficult move for a critic — she turns the pen on herself, to unpack her own life, its identities, its luxuries and deprivations, its nuanced challenges, and the way it has been guided by history, traditions, culture and inner drive. The daring of her experimentation with form, the range of her sources, and the beauty of her writing make for a book that moves from engrossing to heartrending to regenerative.

Jefferson and I talked in August about titles, audience, style, race, and gender, after what she described as the “cataclysmic histories” of this American summer.

Melody Nixon: While reading Negroland in different parts of NYC (midtown cafes, Fort Greene Park, and the A/C line subways) I’ve found its title, visible as I read, has elicited a range of surprised remarks and questions. You have an excellent section at the start of the book outlining why you chose the term “Negroland,” what the term Negro signifies, its power and associations, and — a comment I love — its moment in history as it gives way to new nomenclatures. When choosing this title, what considerations did you make about how it would be received: the prejudices, familiarity, ‘horrors, and glories’ (to paraphrase your own description) that it could conjure?

Margo Jefferson: I thought about it a lot! Tested it on, talked it through with all sorts of people, then (in my head) created a map of their responses. I was definitely worried about the turnoff factor — suspicion that it was meant to signal political conservatism; disapproval of giving the word any here-and-now credibility whatever my intentions; pure “huh? What’s this supposed to mean?” confusion. And I’ve seen faces fall, or go blank!

“Negroland” has been my private word for this particular social/historical world for a long time. The word “land” is crucial. A land is a literal and an imagined space. It’s contested and mythologized, pressured by neighboring spaces, always redefining its dependence and independence, revising its history and its legends. You live in it, but even when you leave, it lives in you. Negroland was part of and apart from both white and black (“Negro” in those days) America. Those simultaneous meanings, (after all, “Negro” means “black” in Spanish and Portuguese), the pressures of nomenclature and place: as a writer I wanted to claim and explore them linguistically, structurally, imaginatively.

Nixon: Kiese Laymon remarked in Vol.1 Brooklyn, “If you changed the listeners, you change the art.” To what extent did considerations of audience come into this book? Are you writing to a new audience?

Jefferson: I like those words a lot. Being a critic, and a black critic and a woman critic, writing for lots of publications, I’ve always been acutely-to-obsessively aware of audience expectations, hopes, reservations and projections — onto the subject I’m writing about, and onto me, as the critic, as the black critic, as the woman critic. It’s sharpened my sense of cultural complexity, which is good. But it’s hampered me too. Wanting to shake free of that consciousness as a writer, to be more daring in form and content — has everything to do with this book. (And when I wrote the Michael Jackson book I was fascinated by how in thrall he was to his multiple audiences & legacies. So desperate to escape, defy, reward and appease them…)

The more interested I’ve become in this form we call “creative nonfiction” the more chances I’ve wanted to take as a writer. I want to get at fresh ways to combine fact, imagination, memory. A new audience of listeners? An audience of people willing to listen in new ways? I want both!

Nixon: At the start of the book you note: “all readers are strangers. Right now I’m overwhelmed by trying to calculate, imagine, what these readers might expect of me.” How about your actual art creation, your writing process — which mixes first person rumination with third person (auto)biography, memory with cultural reportage, and literature review with thoroughly researched history — how was it affected by, and how did it interact with, your desire for a new audience?

And whatever risks you take, whatever mistakes you’re willing to make, that critical authority is still a safety zone.

Jefferson: In criticism, your readers come to know you, want to be with you, because of the relations you create with art and culture. And whatever risks you take, whatever mistakes you’re willing to make, that critical authority is still a safety zone. At the very least a fourth wall. So that admission of mine about being so vulnerable to my readers’ judgments and demands was my way of breaking the fourth wall right away. Getting past my sanctioned persona as a writer would, I hoped, stir readers to question theirs and bring them to the book. I wanted to — what’s the best verb: spur, induce, incite — the audience to find corresponding or oppositional or conflicted spaces in themselves, their worlds. I had to represent it in every way I could, from confession and obsession to history, literature, clothes, voices, gestures. A theater where class, race and gender were like characters. Each with its weapons, its needs, its devices. Which could foreground the reader’s own.

Nixon: One of the ‘chances you take’ with this memoir — among the playing with form and the mixture of styles — is narration in the third person. I was reminded of Salmon Rushdie’s third person autobiography, Joseph Anton: A Memoir, when reading your third person voice. He used that pronoun to recreate the sense of alienation he felt while in hiding, following the fatwa issued against him by Ayatollah Khomeni. What are your reasons for summoning the third person singular?

Jefferson: At first I did it on impulse. Take the shift to third person in the high school section. At first it helped me escape being paralyzed by the shame of those memories. The omniscient narrator voice managed a dialogue with this struggling adolescent self and restrained me, as a writer, from easy contempt or a craven, “Reader, pity me” tone. Then, as I revised, I saw that the third person did other work. It dramatized the performance demands and rituals of Negroland; continuous judgment — the critical eye constantly turned on the performance. You’re so right about the alienation that it recreates… And also the drive to calculate my — the narrator’s — position in the world, to find strategies for behaving and reacting in every situation.

Nixon: The switch back to first person, to “I” from “she,” reinserts your presence as a writer, and reminds the reader you are in control: that this isn’t some confessional splurging, or self-serving catharsis, but rather a very well crafted series of moments showing us exactly what you want us to see. The “I” moments are also the most honest and heartrending. This is your first autobiography. How challenging was it for you to completely utilize this “I”, and reveal your inner self?

There’s no one way to reveal an inner self; context, cadence, subtext mean everything.

Jefferson: At times it felt impossible. Often, in the past, I’d stop myself with a dead-end mantra that went: “I’ve had to live it. Why do I have to write it too?” It was exhilarating to realize I wanted to work against a forthright chronology. I knew it would make me too cautious and decorous. Feeling freer to choose what intrigued or consumed this narrator — me, moving among styles and genres kept me excited. And gave me concrete things to struggle with, like technique! As a critic, I’d always been really careful about when and how to use “I.” (When I first entered journalism, it wasn’t allowed in mainstream publications). To have access to this coveted power pronoun scared the bejesus out of me in the beginning. Then it got pretty thrilling. The critic-me had been taught to honor the uses and the power of other pronouns, so I tried to bring those powers to bear on the new (for me) powers of “I.” Pronoun shifts have so many uses: structural; tonal; rhythmic. There’s no one way to reveal an inner self; context, cadence, subtext mean everything. An autobiographical “I” has to have multiple meanings in a book that’s both a cultural and a personal memoir.

Nixon: The book’s materials include personal correspondences, which show local comings and goings, divorces, engagements, family matters, and pop culture dissections. Was the choice to include these letters a conscious move to foreground the private and domestic, to include gossip — the unique space where women could assert their voices and opinions — as a source of equal weight vis-à-vis the more traditionally male realm of literature reviews and historical documentation?

Women’s lives always foreground how the public and private worlds mesh and collide, don’t they?

Jefferson: Absolutely. I placed that 1944 letter from Irma, my mother to Deborah, her friend near the beginning of the book, right after a section of quite formalized history. So hers is the first voice from Negroland that you hear unmediated. Letters are so palpable — on the page they’re fleshly. And the writer is untouched by our reactions or expectations. So here she is, this spirited young woman, produced by all that history; in her own here and now, enjoying herself and her confident moves from local gossip to movie talk to marriage talk and race talk. There are also the depression missives exchanged by me and friends, the short conversations and declarations passed on from mothers to daughters, and the short “relativity tales” from the ’70s to my present. All of them revolve around women talking; at dinner, at parties, on the phone, in notes and journals. I wanted to show women recording their thoughts and performing, for themselves, each other and the world. I wanted to show pleasure they took in it. Women’s lives always foreground how the public and private worlds mesh and collide, don’t they? And this book is driven by the manners, styles, and legacies of its women.

Nixon: You mentioned “Negroland” elicited confusion when you tested the word out on people. A man on the A Train who saw me reading the book laughed and said, “Negroland! What’s that? What are you doing reading about that?!”. I felt acutely aware of my race in that moment, and my unnecessarily defensive reaction to explain that this book wasn’t mocking or ridiculing. In short, my race (un)consciousness, insecurities, discomfort, and desire to engage, all came to the surface in that moment. We found our way to a good, long conversation. This brought to mind the potential of literature, and even something as seemingly straightforward as a title, to spark conversation and debate. What are your hopes for, and how do you envision, this book being received?

Jefferson: As soon as I read this, Melody, I started imagining what scenarios might unfold if I took the book on the subway. (I haven’t yet). I’m sure whites wouldn’t risk asking me on the subway; I’m thinking about the reactions I’d get from different blacks, how differences between us, race-kinship notwithstanding, would affect our exchange. That I decided to stay with that title says something about my hopes for the book. What? That it stirs a desire for more complexity not less, as we — as multiple I’s — live out (live with, live down) the demands and consequences of race, gender and class in America. And I want gender, class and race to register as visceral and specific, not abstract or dutiful. They take so many forms, they’re as mutable as they are inescapable. They deserve all the scrupulous attention we give individual psyches. And I want readers to feel that in their own lives, not just in mine. I want readers to think and feel not one but many things.

Nixon: What is the role of literature in a time (particularly given such renewed violence, mass shootings, mass denial of racism, and police brutality against Black people) when conversations on race in America are so needed?

But aren’t we writers trying to show what goes unseen in everyday life, and tell what gets suppressed?

Jefferson: What roles can literature best play at times like these? Literature makes worlds from words, and when readers enter those worlds their internal conversations can start changing. Because, for a time, they have to find new words: play an unexpected role in an unfamiliar world. Real literature makes that newness compelling. Even when you resist, it marks you. Talking about the role of literature can make one veer toward too-grand idealism. But aren’t we writers trying to show what goes unseen in everyday life, and tell what gets suppressed? Give it coherence and urgency, and beauty? (One of my favorite Thelonious Monk compositions is “Ugly Beauty”!) We all know that’s no guarantee of the political change we crave. Still, when literature does its aesthetic and ethical work, it makes those changes feel possible, bearable; even desirable and revelatory.

The Enduring Magic: Let Me Tell You by Shirley Jackson

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I came to Shirley Jackson’s Let Me Tell You — 400+ pages of stories and essays collected and edited by the author’s children, Laurence Jackson Hyman and Sarah Hyman Dewitt — with a deep appreciation for Jackson’s endeavors in literary horror. In addition to reading Jackson’s dark domestic “The Lottery,” which garnered more hate mail than any other story at the time in New Yorker history, I had recently finished her most popular novel, The Haunting of Hill House, a ghost story in which terror lurks around every corner, largely unseen.

Due to these and other works by Jackson, her avowal of the otherworldly has largely defined her career. Some might even say an aura of malevolence surrounds the public perception of Jackson, with her work conjuring up images of wicked children and bewitchery.

But this is also the precise beauty of Jackson’s style, and always has been: That it haunts us. After reading The Haunting of Hill House, for example, oleanders trespassed in my thoughts for weeks. These flowers appear to Eleanor, the novel’s protagonist, upon her arrival at Hill House. A subtle symbol of Eleanor’s innocence, oleanders carry another meaning, one that I discovered in my copy of The Illustrated Language of Flowers.

Oleander … … … Beware.

Even though nowhere in the book does Jackson mention oleanders as symbols of warning, the way in which their presence ribbons through the macabre reality of the story delivers a chilling contrast that remains long after the characters have departed.

In Let Me Tell You, Jackson talks about her use of symbolism in one of her several superb lectures on writing, “Garlic in Fiction.” She explains, “Each of these cumulative symbols dovetails with the others, each belongs absolutely to the journey between reality and unreality, and each must carry the weight of Eleanor’s loneliness and longing for a place where she belongs.”

This is all to say that, in approaching the works in Let Me Tell You, and knowing Jackson’s extensive background with mythology and mysticism (“Shirley was raised on the classics and self-educated in the literature of the supernatural”), I was expecting another series of gripping, terrorizing tales filled with horrors just out of sight. To my surprise and eventual delight, this is not the case in Let Me Tell You. As Ruth Franklin notes in the collection’s foreword, “A notable absence from the fiction in this collection is the interest in the supernatural that would characterize so much of her work.”

Instead, throughout the 22 unpublished stories in Let Me Tell You, Jackson’s many literary influences are readily on display. In step with forefathers of domestic realism like Raymond Carver and John Cheever, Jackson shows her ability to manipulate a setting in which little happens, laying bare the depths of her characters with only a few lines of dialogue or description.

In “The Bridge Game,” for instance, two couples simply discuss whether or not to play bridge. Similarly, in “Mrs. Spencer and the Oberons,” a new family who claims to know Mrs. Spencer moves into town. The whole story encircles this bit of knowledge. And yet through just this singular event we become infuriatingly intimate with Mrs. Oberon and her well-meaning, albeit flawed, existence.

No ghosts. No dread-filled oleanders. No terrible unknown waiting just beyond the next page. And yet each of these stories is far from simple. Ripe with imagery all their own, the stories here offer valuable insights on gender and the toll blind conformity can take on personal relationships.

In other stories, Jackson’s signature preoccupation with the uncanny shows itself in new and unexpected ways. Jackson’s “Company for Dinner,” about a man who fails to notice he’s entered the wrong apartment at dinnertime, suspends disbelief to press upon the reader the non-existence that governs unexamined routines. Jackson’s use of magic escalates with “The New Maid.” In this story, an overworked couple in an unhappy marriage hires a new maid whose own brand of magic transforms the couple into children for an entire day.

“In the kitchen, the new maid, her pocket full of candy and her eyes twinkling wickedly at some secret knowledge, listened first to the voices of the children as they drifted down from the open window of their room; when there was silence upstairs, she was forced to listen to the monotony of the argument going on between Mr. and Mrs. Morgan.”

This blending of the mundane and the bizarre is Shirley Jackson at her finest. The stories in which Jackson twists reality ever so slightly — foraying briefly into myth, fairy tale, or science fiction — insist that the reader look again. Look closely, Jackson implores, at the day-to-day actions that corroborate our existence.

While reading Let Me Tell You, I also became deeply aware of Jackson’s range of knowledge and respect for form. In “The Man in the Woods” — a tale whose loveliness and staying power parallels that of “The Lottery” — Jackson reveals her reverence for the intuitive strangeness of fairy-tale logic. When Christopher, a scholar compelled to the forest for reasons he doesn’t understand, visits a cabin in the woods, his hosts recognize a shift in their structural makeup. Jackson foreshadows this shift with a fight between Christopher’s and his host’s cats:

“I’m terribly sorry,” Christopher said, with a fleeting fear that his irrational cat might have deprived them both of a bed. “Shall I go and find Grimalkin outside?”

Mr. Oakes laughed. “He was fairly beaten,” he said, “and has no right to come back.”

“Now,” Phyllis said softly, “now we can call your cat Grimalkin. Now we have a name, Grimalkin, and no cat, so we can give the name to your cat.”

Here, Jackson embeds in the reader the notion that positions within the household can be supplanted — regardless of the wishes of the rest of the family. In a haunting turn of events, Grimalkin’s fate befalls Mr. Oakes, and his only request of Christopher is to remember the roses: “They must be tied up in the spring if they mean to grow at all,” Mr. Oakes says. In signature Jackson style, the contrasting images of the dark and imminent forest and the flamboyant rose bushes create a horrific atmosphere that perfectly compliments Jackson’s examination of masculinity, purpose, and violence in this story.

In another of the essays contained here, “How I Write,” Jackson says the following about her penchant for the uncanny: “What I am trying to say is that with the small addition of the one element of fantasy, or unreality, or imagination, all the things that happen are fun to write about.” However subtly, the supernatural lurks on each page, in all these stories, whether or not magic makes a physical appearance.

More than anything, the vast range of styles contained in Let Me Tell You, not to mention the range of genres, offer the reader an invigorating and unprecedented peek into the multifarious interests and intellect of one of the greatest writers in American literature. The collection also reminds us just how far Jackson’s influence and legacy extends. Remnants can be seen in contemporary authors ranging from Kelly Link (whose story “The Summer People” shares much in common with Jackson’s story of the same name) to Stephen King (Jackson fans have long drawn parallels between The Shining and The Haunting of Hill House) to Suzanne Collins (The Hunger Games relies on the society’s own twisted form of lottery).

Like Mr. Oakes in “The Man in the Woods,” this collection as a whole gently impels us to remember the dark forces that helped love to grow. Remember who planted the roses — symbols of grace and secrecy, love and horror, domestic and wild — which have since overgrown the literary establishment. Remember we have Shirley Jackson to thank for engineering those dark and good-humored seeds.

Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings

by Shirley Jackson

Powells.com

Computer Art and Sex: Another Dispatch from the Kinsey Institute Library

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by Ander Monson

Ander Monson’s interest in libraries extends beyond books to the human ephemera found in archives — evidence of previous readers and researchers and archivists among the actual holdings themselves. In July, he visited the world-renowned Kinsey Institute’s library in Bloomington, IN as a Coffee House Press In The Stacks writer-in-residence, continuing his exploration of the physical relationship between a reader and a book in an archive that includes not only the papers of Dr. Alfred Kinsey, but also books, print materials, film and video, fine art, artifacts, and photography related to human investigations of sexual behavior, gender, and reproduction. You can read an interview between Monson and librarians from the Kinsey Institute Library here. Below is part two of a two part dispatch from his residency.

The First Love Picture 2

anders first love

Untitled, artist unknown, 1968 (Kinsey Institute Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana)

I still can’t seem to leave Bob and Peg and their amateur sex photo album. I mean I won’t. I’ll carry them with me, how, while fucking on camera — with their shoes on no less — they both look back when the timer goes, as if to celebrate the intersection of their sex and the technology they used to capture it. But then I stumble on another piece, a body made of type, a less transparent use of technology. First, obviously she’s nude. I could include a boob for you, a tit for your titillation, but it’s just colons, 8s, and 4s, arranged; I mean it’s strange: letterform and body, computer art and sex, procured on an American base in Vietnam in 1968.

Below the breasts it’s all those :s, 8s, and 4s. An underarm sports an 8, and a couple 6s too. A few more 8s give shape to the other’s hollow. A & and a 2 perforate her chin. In the lip and face and hair the palette opens further: Cs and Is and Rs, a couple Vs, a random G, a £, and a few ;s here almost as a wink, though this is way pre-emoticon. The use of double-strike for shading is excellently done. Composed on a computer, line-printer printed, probably this is one of an edition outputted for the boys on base.

Is it art? Who cares. I’m fascinated. Downstairs in the Kinsey’s galleries two exhibits (“Secret Impressions: the Mass Production of Erotica Prior to the Camera” and “Hold That Pose: Erotic Imagery in 19th Century Photography”) reinforce the point: give us a tech and we will show you sex. It’s art if we say so. Collect all these artifacts to get at a deeper sense of how we humans work. So the library collects it all, or as much as it can: no little heroism. For instance, it holds an Accu-Jack (a 1970s masturbation machine, forerunner of the more recent RoboSuck). It’s listed in the catalog, under “Accu-jac [realia].”

Realia is a term I didn’t know; it describes not media but everyday objects and materials. Of the 628 pieces of realia in the Indiana University’s library catalog, 414, such as “Rubber Dildo Shaped like a Bride,” “Priest Dildo,” “Plaster Penis Castings,” “Penetrex,” “Doily,” “Treading Chickens,” “Anthropomorphic Vulva,” “Dr. Wing Tip Shoo’s X-Rated Fortune Cookies,” “Copulating Donkeys,” “Altered Butter Package” (“Top from a one-pound box of Land O Lakes unsalted (sweet) butter, decorated with a picture of a kneeling Indian girl who holds a box of butter. The butter box has been cut out and replaced with knees from another box top, thus forming breasts”), “Anal Intruder Set,” “Shithead” (“Head of a man with moustache and bowtie. Made from cow manure. Coated with transparent lacquer. Accompanied by humorous guarantee”), are all in the Kinsey’s collection, because who else would catalog it all? This is why the place is great.

I know I’m just showing you some funny bits (also I really can’t seem to stop; listing them brings me such delight), but funny comes from our discomfort with where sex and culture intersect (which is everywhere the more and more deeply you look). Discomfited yet? It’s okay to joke. Step back a bit. Don’t focus on the punctuation marks and suddenly you see a tit.

I love the thought of those GIs staring at this unnamed woman’s creamy colon-thighs, lit up with desire, in spite of themselves: it was a joke at first but now it’s not. They’re trying not to think about how an alphabet can arouse: anyone who’s written a love letter knows how punctuation hinges things, how a life can seem to hang on a question or an interpretation of a point: how a dependent clause introduces an independent clause and asks to meet to make an answer.

I pause here to consider just when and how a letterform can be a pixel, how the sexual axle turns on the shift from point to line. I’m fine, then boom: something turns me on, as we let the electrical metaphor drive the phrase, and we’ve shifted into another, more excited state. I mean look close enough: we’re all made of unsexy stuff: hairy bits and skin, and, further in: cell walls, cytoplasm, mitochondria, not even to get into the hot atomic bits. It’s in the arrangement and abstraction that things get interesting. Even GI is made of something else: though it’s short these days for “government issue” or “general issue” — a phrase, half-joke (and it’s not my joke to make since I didn’t serve, though I’ll let the sentence stand), meant to ironize disposability, replaceability — it first came from “galvanized iron,” as in what made up supplies, entered in inventories. It’s in these leaps that histories — the better mysteries — are made.

My Book Is Not My Baby

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Less than a year after I gave birth to my first child, I sold my first novel.

“You’re sending your baby out into the world!” people said of the book.

“Yes, I am,” I answered, though I suspected we didn’t quite agree.

I’ve spent the time since publication staring down this old cliché: writing is like giving birth, and a book is the author’s baby. The metaphor — which appears in the best and worst writing about writing — always struck me as grandiose, but perhaps also the best approximation for the extraordinary creative and personal investment the writer makes, and the emotional attachment and protective instinct writers have toward their projects.

Pregnancy and childbirth changed my mind. The cliché may say something about creativity, but it says even more about how we view work and how we validate ourselves; it’s another glimpse into our culture’s hybrid of reverence for motherhood and revulsion for women’s bodies.

When men use the metaphor, I can’t help but hear womb envy: “You can create life? I can create life, too!” But this life, his book, is intellectual, spiritual, philosophical — the opposite of the base reality of physical reproduction. When women use it, I hear an attempt, be it conscious or unconscious, to summon social validation for our creative projects. (We so often find ourselves under attack for our choices, especially in the realms of work and family.) When parents use it, I hear that mistake — common to everyone, but especially virulent among parents — of universalizing one’s own experience. The beauty of the process, or the horror of the process; that ferocious love and superhuman selflessness that the child-free “just don’t understand.”

But here I am, perhaps, making that same mistake: interpreting another’s expression through the narrow lens of my own life. When I gave birth, I felt new kinds of vulnerability, pain, and mortality. I also learned new lessons about labor, dignity, and the relationship between the mind and body. Mostly, I experienced physicality like I never had before.

We talk about childbirth using the word “labor,” but as a euphemism. Our discourse strips away the effort of childbearing. Movies cut from pickle cravings to a gush of fluid to a cooing infant, far too clean and plump to be newly born. Abortion arguments emphasize the trauma of termination, but ignore the physical challenges, risks, and consequences of birth. Pregnancy and birth are physical work. They’re also — though they may not seem that way at the time — comparatively brief. And childbearing is public, from the first moment a nosy relative or stranger eyes your belly to the spectacle of birth itself, with its usual audience of medical professionals.

In contrast, I researched, wrote, and edited my novel over four years, and mostly kept my efforts private. Publishing — not so private, of course — took another year, and though it was an incredible amount of work, for me and my publishers, my involvement was mostly carried out at a quiet desk or over email. Click: I approve the text. Click: Cover looks great! Click: The pre-order button has turned into an “order” button! Tweet, post, update, tweet again.

Using writing as a metaphor for birth, or birth as a metaphor for writing, belittles each: the raw, nerve-shattering physical labor of one, and the years of mental labor and fortitude of the other. It also obscures how these different types of labor operate. Writing is highly intentional. In contrast, childbearing resists our efforts at control. I ate carefully and exercised, took the requisite childbirth classes, meditated my way through pain I had never felt before — but a significant piece of all this, from conception to healthy birth, was luck. Good genes, good medical care, etc. I don’t take it for granted; I don’t take credit for it either. (To be fair, publishing also requires a good dose of luck, no matter how talented or hardworking the author.)

Perhaps I’ve grown weary of this metaphor because it’s suggested to me so often; people see a natural connection between being a debut author and a new mother. Or perhaps I’m bristling at cliché itself, applied to two such personal and transformative experiences. Both baby and book began as something internal and precious; they each existed, for a time, inside of me, with no other person impinging on our relationship. And now I have to let them both go.

The book is going to live its own — forgive me — life. It will be loved and it will be hated. It will be read and it will be cast aside. It will be interpreted in ways I never imagined, and judged on terms I never intended. All of that has nothing, ultimately, to do with me, as a person, or even as a writer.

My daughter has her own life to live, too. She will make her own choices, have her own successes and failures. I must not live through her or try to make her live for me. These are not easy imperatives to live by, of course. Together, they may be the ultimate challenge of giving birth. If there’s any parallel between my life as a mother and my life as a writer, it’s this: giving away.

TED WILSON REVIEWS THE WORLD: A FRUIT SALAD

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★★☆☆☆

Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of the world. Today I am reviewing a fruit salad.

Why is it that a pile of fruit is a fruit salad, but a pile of meat isn’t a meat salad? It’s just a pile of meat. I went to culinary school to find out the answer!

Unfortunately, when I arrived, I was told all the classes were full. That’s when I remembered a movie where a man gets into college by pretending to be black. That gave me an idea! What if I went to butcher school instead? After wandering around for several hours hoping to find one, I got tired and stopped for lunch.

I ordered a fruit salad despite the menu offering only a vague description of what the salad included, saying it contained “seasonal fruits.” What kind of meaningless gibberish is that? I can buy any fruit I want at any time of year. Fruits don’t have seasons!

When the salad arrived I learned why they didn’t get into specifics. There was not a single fruit I could identify and I’ll bet neither could the chef. There was a firm, white fruit the waiter told me he thought might be a “pare.” I’ve never heard of such a thing so I didn’t eat it. I never eat anything new if I can help it because you never know what might give you a tummy ache. Or worse: cancer.

The salad wasn’t very filling so I ordered two more. Then I ordered a third because one fell onto the floor and ants took most of it. If the salad had some meat in it to begin with, I never would have needed additional salads, and then those ants would have starved to death. So many problems would have been fixed.

If the ingredients had been a pare with some type of pig-watermelon hybrid animal, it would have made the difference between a fine salad and a spectacular one. Sadly, neither technology nor God has willed such a thing into existence yet.

There was one thing about this salad I really liked, and that was how it smelled like a smoothie. Like a solid, lumpy smoothie. It reminded me of the odor at a smoothie place I went to once looking for a Slurpee. The worker there had a very nice smile. Eating this salad was like tasting that guy’s smile.

BEST FEATURE: So much mystery! I like mystery. It makes me feel like a detective.
WORST FEATURE: I got a seed stuck in my teeth for three weeks and had to use tweezers to get it out.

Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing Christmas Eve, 2001.

Announcing New Fall Lineup of Writing Workshops from Electric Literature and Catapult

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Want to study the craft of writing with some of the most exciting emerging literary authors in NYC? In conjunction with our partner Catapult, Electric Literature is pleased to present a series of writing classes, workshops and craft intensives. We’ve created the kind of classes we wish we could have taken when we were starting out. All classes will be held in New York City, and are open to passionate and engaged writers of fiction looking to finesse their craft and join a community of like-minded peers.

Fiction workshops include “Establishing the Novel” with Kathleen Alcott, “Character — A Story’s Engine” with Angela Flournoy, and “Kraftwerk” with Marie-Helene Bertino.

Nonfiction workshops include “The Stage & the Page” with Tim Manley, “Essay Means to Try” with Chelsea Hodson, and “Writing Great Essays for the Web” with Ashley Ford.

Check out the full list of classes and application process here. Space is limited.

Nations and Storytelling: Ivan Vladislavić’s The Folly and 101 Detectives

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In a handful of years, readers in the United States have been given the opportunity to become very familiar with the work of South Africa’s Ivan Vladislavić. His novels, The Restless Supermarket and Double Negative, have both been released by And Other Stories, the latter of which featured a glowing introduction from Teju Cole, with whom Vladislavić shares a fondness for the incorporation of visual elements into certain narratives. (Both Cole and Vladislavić were also among the winners of the 2015 Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for Fiction.) The novels explored different facets of life in South Africa: in Double Negative, this came via following its central character, a white South African, across several decades, as his views on politics, art, and privilege shift over time. The Restless Supermarket took a more satirical approach; protagonist Aubrey Tearle was reactionary in his politics, straddling the line between the comically curmudgeonly, and acting as a personification of the anxieties and prejudices of a particular group within a larger society. The result has been memorable work that never underplays the unpleasant societal tensions that lie below the surface. This summer brings with it American editions of two more of Vladislavić’s books, one very new, and one that offers a glimpse as to the genesis of much of his fiction. The Folly was Vladislavić’s first novel; 101 Detectives is his most recent book, a collection of short stories showcasing his stylistic range. Taken together, they offer a fuller picture of his skills as a writer.

In a 2012 interview with The White Review, Vladislavić commented, “I’m interested in the layering of memory and place.” That layering is made literal in The Folly, Vladislavić’s first novel, which plays out like a berserk blend of fairy tales, the plays of Samuel Beckett, and the films of Jacques Tati. Initially, this novel reads like a much more grounded satire, a sort of predecessor to what Vladislavić would go on to do in The Restless Supermarket. (When I interviewed Vladislavić last year, he mentioned that work had begun on The Restless Supermarket in 1994.) Two of the novel’s three primary characters the Malgas family, a pair of white South Africans filled with anxiety coinciding with the end of apartheid. And, if this novel had focused solely on them, that would probably be an accurate description for the book as a whole. Instead, the novel rapidly turns into something much more surreal via a third character, Nieuwenhuizen, who shows up on land beside the Malgas home, pitches a tent, and plans to build a house. And, in fact, his name, roughly translated from Afrikaans, seems to be “new house”–a move that’s both literal and almost mythical.

Nieuwenhuizen is a sort of trickster figure: his arrival on the scene, which opens the novel, finds him eyeing his plot of land, and then standing atop an anthill to survey the area. And archetypes abound in the book: the Malgases refer to each other as “Mr.” and “Mrs.”–an endearing touch that one might expect from a couple of a certain generation and age. More striking, perhaps, is Mrs. Malgas’s refusal to use Nieuwenhuizen’s name, referring to him only as “Him.” This in turn imbues him with a sense of divinity; passages like this, devoid of any context, could be taken from a more avant-garde work: “It was clear to Mrs. that He was avoiding Mr.,” for instance. There’s also a reference late in the book to Nieuwenhuizen being a kind of environmental contagion. “It’s not healthy to be near Him, to breathe His emanations,” Mrs. Malgas says–but at this point, the novel has journeyed past the realistic, if it was ever there to begin with.

As tends to happen with books with a triangle of characters at the center, The Folly charts a number of shifts in the power dynamic within that triangle. The terse conflicts and camaraderie that arise from their interactions–Mr. Malgas and Nieuwenhuizen soon bond–are magnified in the reading experience due to the general absence of any other characters. Aside from a taxi driver who drops Nieuwenhuizen off at the start of the book, the trio of central characters are, for all intents and purposes, the only people who exist in the novel’s universe until very late in the book.

As the novel reaches its halfway point and Nieuwenhuizen envelops Mr. Malgas into his plan to build his home, the prose gradually moves from rapid-fire to more languorous. And slowly, Nieuwenhuizen demarcates the boundaries of his house, and Mr. Malgas begins to see it. (Strangely, this kind of infectious dream is also an idea that suffuses Lauren Beukes’s recent Broken Monsters, a hallucinatory crime novel set in present-day Detroit. Other than the fact that Beukes and Vladislavić are both acclaimed South African novelists, there doesn’t seem to be much to connect them–but it’s fascinating to see the radically different ways in which they handle this concept: horrific in one case, nerve-wrackingly comic in the other.) Reality has forsaken at least one member of the Malgas family, and Nieuwenhuizen becomes even more abstract–a passage late in the book finds him surrounded by “a cloud of dust and typography.” Much as Nieuwenhuizen gradually beckons the Malgases into his strange and dreamlike world, Vladislavić ushers the reader into a strange and liminal space, and leaves a number of mysteries unanswered.

Stylistically, many of the stories in the collection 101 Detectives are more grounded. There’s a brief return to the world depicted in Double Negative; there are scenes of corporate satire and linguistic confusion–a character in “Report on a Convention” mishears “Bhuti” and wonders why nearly everyone is being addressed as “Booty,” for instance. After reading a few of these stories, one is left noticing the way in which they’ve been organized: though the stylistic range on display is vast, Vladislavić finds points of connection between this disparate group of works.

Make no mistake, these stories do shift wildly in tone, both from story to story and sometimes within the same story itself. At first, “The Reading” seems like a satirical take on literary culture, as Akello, the author of a memoir about unspeakable trauma is asked to read it in the language in which it was written, which no one else in the room happens to speak. Out of these beginnings, Vladislavić moves on to explore questions of connection, ending on a haunting and moving image even as the more free-associative sections earlier in the same work memorably capture a number of characters’ quirks, obsessions, and distractions. There’s room enough for a knowing image, such as “[f]our of the page-counters estimated that Akello had reached the halfway mark,” without losing the power of the story’s conclusion.

Corporate satire plays a part in several of these stories; for all that Vladislavić can understandably be compared to the likes of Teju Cole and Edward St. Aubyn, stories like “Exit Strategy,” whose main character is referred to as “the corporate storyteller,” and “Industrial Theater” call to mind the likes of Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island and David Foster Wallace’s “Mister Squishy.” Even the title story explores ideas of archetypes and employment, as a detective as a conference attempts to figure out just what sort of detective he happens to be. While the range of work on display in 101 Detectives is impressive, not all of the stories land with the same emotional impact. “The Reading” does a fine job of interrogating the humanity of a broad selection of characters; others don’t resonate quite as much. In The Restless Supermarket, Vladislavić was able to make Aubrey Tearle, a character who might be despicable on paper, more fully-formed. It’s one of Vladislavić’s great skills as a writer: even the sometimes hapless Malgases in The Folly come off as fully human, despite the surreal and satirical world around them. 101 Detectives does feature these moments of humanity, but it also showcases a bleaker side of Vladislavić’s fictional vision.

The Folly

by Ivan Vladislavic

Powells.com

101 Detectives

by Ivan Vladislavic

Powells.com

Our Existence Is Political: An Interview With JJ Bola, Author Of Word

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It would be fair to say that poetry saved JJ Bola. In many ways, he belonged to the London area of Camden Town, where he grew up — one of the most heterogeneous neighbourhoods in the city, and as such, quintessentially London: everyone belongs. But he was also different to all the kids he was growing up around: he had been born in Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and moved to the English capital at the age of 6 with his parents. That made them all refugees. And that encompasses a lot of things: having to constantly renew documents; never having the certainty that you won’t get kicked out of the country you live in; not being fundamentally understood by your peers; or having to give up your life plans.

jj bola word

Bola grew up to become a big basketball promise, whose dreams of going to America were squashed by his refugee condition. Poetry, and writing, became his unlikely allies when that possibility was shattered. We met in a garden and community center in the Dalston neighbourhood, built on a disused train line, in one of London’s far too scarce clear summer evenings. He was relaxed and charismatic, but there was a hectic energy to him, which his poetry also transpires (“This is not just poetry. This is a prayer. This is eyes closed bended knees hands together in the air.”). In his latest poetry collection, Word, he deals with themes of race, feminism, culture, rape, politics, love, depression, suicide. He is one of those people who seem to thrive the more projects they embark on — he is involved in several educational initiatives and continually works in projects to raise awareness about the horrifying human rights situation in his native country, where six million people have been killed in the ongoing genocide, and 1.000 women are estimated to be raped every day as a weapon of war.

Marta Bausells: Your experience is intrinsically linked to your parents coming to the UK as refugees. Can you explain the journey they went through?

JJ Bola: My family are originally from Kinshasa, Congo; I came here when I was 6 years old, but before that we had a pit stop in Romania, because my grandfather used to work in politics, for the Congolese government. So we were at my grandfather’s before we came to London in the early 90s, into the 3rd decade of Mobutu’s dictatorship. And because my grandfather was involved in politics, there was a lot of pressure and insecurity in the family. My father left first to go to my grandfather, and my mum stayed behind with me and my brothers, and I only learned recently that on the day that we all got on the plane, there was a military mutiny in the city. It’s a story that my mum hasn’t really told, I only found that out last year — and I was like: “Mum, this is a huge thing!” I understand that it means something else to them. For me it’s a really exciting story, to them it’s a really traumatic experience that they don’t want to pass on to their children.

They came here not being able to speak the language. My dad speaks Italian, Romanian, French and Ki-Mongo. My mom speaks Lingala, Ki-Ngombe which is another local Congolese language, and French; they were both educated, but they came here not knowing the language and having to learn English and adapt — that takes a skill that refugees don’t get given credit for, and especially in those days, when there was no internet and barely even mobile phones.

MB: What was your childhood like? Did you have an awareness of being different?

JB: I guess when you’re young, you don’t realise how unique your experience is, you just think everyone’s going through the same. If you’re a refugee, you have to go to the Home Office, and they fingerprint you and give you this four-page document that essentially says: you are this person, this is your status in this country, these are the rights that you have as a person of that status, and this is what you’re entitled to. We used to have to go every month. And for me, that was just normal — that was what every child did! And then you grow up a little bit, you start to have conversations with friends in different circumstances, meeting different kids and understanding the politics behind it.

MB: When did books come into play — and how did they help shape your identity?

…you have to also try and fit in, particularly when you grow up in an experience where you’re already so far in the periphery.

JB: What really touched on me was: I remember when I was doing my GCSEs [a British secondary school qualification], we read Animal Farm by George Orwell. And it talks about the politics of oppression, and the liberators becoming the oppressor, and that’s really the politics of what happened in Congo. I almost thought “oh my gosh, this is where I’m from!” And that really inspired me to become more involved in politics, at least internally. It wasn’t something I vocalised, because particularly being from an inner-city London culture, the whole being political, being outspoken, being into books, wasn’t seen as cool. That wasn’t what got you in — and you have to also try and fit in, particularly when you grow up in an experience where you’re already so far in the periphery… Why are you going keep doing things to push yourself away, you know?

MB: Let’s go back to Camden for a moment. How was it to grow up there, in an ever-changing absolute melting pot (excuse the clichés, but you know they are true in this case)?

JB: Camden is such an interesting place. I think Camden is what taught me how to speak to different people and relate to different people. Because it was — and still is — such a mix. I grew up quite near the Roundhouse [an iconic performing arts venue], so even just walking from Chalk Farm to the Camden Town station, and then Mornington Crescent, you can go from like the stereotypical cockney men, drinking at the pub, watching football, cheering on England; to the very posh, middle-class, well-educated, white British, kind of like quintessential English; and then you walk further down and you have ethnic diverse black African, maybe hip-hop and rap culture, which is more the experience that I grew up in; and then you move a bit forward and you have the punks, and the rockers, you know, like spiky hair, tattooed all over, piercings everywhere, rock music, Dr. Martens boots; and you move further and you have the Asian community, really traditional clothing; and so on. And on top of this whole blend of people, Camden has about 10 million tourists a year, so you have people literally from everywhere walking up and down. So growing up I was exposed to people — so I always felt comfortable around people, and being able to them you learn about their experiences… Seeing someone with their whole face tattooed up wasn’t a shock to me, because I was like “oh, he looks like that person in that shop, I speak to him all the time”, you know.

MB: What about school?

And so you try to hide that part of you because you don’t constantly want to be pointed at, you just want to live your own life.

JB: School was interesting, and I’ll be quite frank: I hated school. Absolutely hated it. It was so bizarre, because although I did have that sense of being the other, I was also quite included. It depended on the context — so I found that because I have a London accent, I don’t sound like I grew up abroad or anything, or like my parents might be refugees or I myself may be onel. So when I’m just speaking, expressing a very London culture, then it’s fine! But if I speak in my home language, or if I brought our own traditional food as packed lunch, my friends would be like “oh my god, what’s that?!” And they’re having fish and chips, but I’m like “this food is nice!” Then you start to realise: oh ok, they don’t really understand the culture. And so you try to hide that part of you because you don’t constantly want to be pointed at, you just want to live your own life.

MB: You were quite a big basketball promise in England when you were a teenager…

JB: I started when I was about 13. As I got older, I competed nationally and won a lot of trophies, but because I didn’t have the nationality, I wasn’t able to travel, so I couldn’t represent England or Britain. So I missed out on a lot of things — and then when I was about 18 I was getting a lot of interest from universities in America to play on scholarships, but I didn’t have papers, so I couldn’t really do anything — I really really tried, but it ended up not working out. So I started university here, and I still carried on playing but it wasn’t the same passion, because you know when you’re not where you expect to be. Even though you have the talent to do that, it’s just due to circumstance — and then I guess maybe that also pushed me to become more interested in the politics (you see how politics influences people’s lives, and people often take a very reductionist approach). I finished university, got my nationality, and I was able to then travel and see the world a little bit, and I ended up getting injured. And after that — you know when something happens and you know “yeah, this is it”?

MB: Is that when poetry started?

…writing was a way of expressing myself and lifting the weight off my shoulders.

JB: I just knew, then, I didn’t have the same passion for [basketball]. What I did start, though, was, in my lectures, instead of writing the notes I started just kind of writing short stories, and phrases, little things, and I would turn them into poems. I never saw it as writing poetry — I didn’t attempt to write poetry. For me, I felt like there was this heavy burden — I felt like a responsibility, because something that was supposed to have happened didn’t, and because my parents had worked so hard to get here and to raise us, and that was supposed to be the next stage of what I did. And because that didn’t happen I didn’t really know how to understand that, how to explain it. And so writing was a way of expressing myself and lifting the weight off my shoulders. The more I wrote, it just came naturally to me.

MB: You said, at your recent book launch, that you never thought those words would ever leave the walls of your bedroom. How do you go from that to having published three books?

JB: I had a little red folder that I would write in, and that was it. For about two years, never showed anyone. And then one day I showed it to a friend and he loved it, and I thought: oh my gosh! Because we were educated, schooled in a way to believe that poetry belongs to a certain group — poetry it was stereotyped in the sense you had to be very middle class, very educated, like a very posh … And that wasn’t my experience. People who came from where I came from, or grew up where I grew up, they rapped! And I didn’t like rapping — I liked to listen to rap, and I think the storytelling of rap was beautiful, I loved them, but I didn’t want to be a rapper. So when I had that reaction from my friend and saw how he was able to connect with it, that really inspired me to keep on going, and I just kept on going until where I am now.

MB: You write about anger, racism, exclusion, suicidal thoughts. Do you feel like you’ve found an inner peace through writing?

JB: I think it’s a balance. Human beings are so complex, and we’re essentially creatures of the universe, of the environment, and there’s nothing in the universe that either is one thing or the other. When I am writing is when I’m at my most peace. And I feel like things that I imagine, that I envision, that I am seeing are becoming real. It’s like you have a gift, a touch, you’re creating something — so you know that if your existence ended right now, there’s something that could continue, and from that something else could come. Because my writing comes from someone else’s writing, and that’s what’s inspired me, and I’m adding to that … So when I do write, for me it’s like — like deep breaths, you know, it’s like when you just find that calm, and it’s beautiful; but at the same time, I think there are times when you really need to be challenged, and you need to be moved.

MB: It’s interesting to me that in WORD you had the need to clarify — almost justify — the role of writer, which you qualified it as “audacious and absurd.”

…you take on that task because you truly do believe that you will change the world; that writing, art, essentially poetry, can change the world…

JB: I think it’s probably one of the most ridiculous tasks anyone can do, right? Because why on earth — I can’t even put into words the hours and the mundane boring tasks that this book project has been! Before the first draft, I spent four draft stages making sure all the full stops were in the right place! You have to read the poem as if it’s not your own poem, and that’s not why you write it. It’s a bold task to undertake, and you take on that task because you truly do believe that you will change the world; that writing, art, essentially poetry, can change the world, and to this day I fundamentally believe that it can. Otherwise I wouldn’t write. And the absurd part is — even though you believe it can, you know it can’t.

MB: To what extent do you write to represent or denounce the refugee experience and the experience of displacement?

…when I write about the refugee experience, I’m not writing about war, rape or displacement…

JB: A lot of my poetry touches really difficult issues like conflict, war, or rape — but I guess for me, when I write about the refugee experience, I’m not writing about war, rape or displacement. For me it’s been an expression of humanity, of my own humanity and that of the stories that I’m connected to. On one hand I want people to be able to connect with the human side of that experience, but I also want people to understand the political aspects of that. Our existence is political — the choices that we make, where we decide to eat, where we buy our clothes, what school we go to, what languages we speak and where we speak them, how we speak… Art allows us to understand the political reality of our human experience without it being forced to us, without someone telling us this is what it is, we connect the stories as human beings.

MB: What do you think about the civil rights situation in America?

JB: We’ve been seeing that social media has given a platform for those who are marginalized in America and who otherwise wouldn’t have a voice to express their views. So if you look at the #blacklivesmatter campaign, and other movements — particularly on Twitter, you see how the media portrays black Americans and non-black Americans. And the difference continues to this day to create such a divide in communities. To the point where you had the recent shootings in Charleston, and you’re seeing how the media treats the perpetrator just because of a different ethnicity. So the politics of separation, the politics of division, continues to have such a huge impact in America. I went to America in 2007, and… it was a different time. George W Bush was still in government, everyone was fed up — and then we got Obama: on one hand, we have to take him with a pinch of salt, and one man can’t change; but on the other hand, just do what you said! It’s particularly difficult to be able to tell what direction America is going in, and I’m planning to visit, but I just don’t know. [ed. note — Bola visited the World Fellowship Center in Albany, N.H. in July] I don’t want to be walking in the street, and then see a police officer and then know that my life might be at risk. Gary Young wrote an article recently about leaving, and that’s huge — and it shouldn’t have to be like that.

MB: You’ve just hosted a few events under the title Hype Your Writers Like You Do Your Rappers. Where did that come from?

JB: I love hip hop, I love rap, I listen to a lot of it. This came out of me thinking about the buzz around J Cole and Kendrick Lamar’s album released recently — I was part of the people who were excited! But I thought, what kind of effect would it have if we had the same buzz around writers? I think the best rappers that we have out there, they read. From listening to a certain record, you can always tell who reads and who doesn’t. And a lot of the time, rap came from the tradition of literature. It was just a continuation of it, a different expression of it — but it wasn’t supposed to be separate from it, it was never meant to go in a certain direction and then leave literature behind. Sadly, one of the things that happen with rap is that a rapper will become popular and then they’ll forget about their message, where they came from and their experience. And then their message becomes dissolved and they start making music that doesn’t really reflect the community that they came from. But with writers, you don’t get that!

CELEBRITY BOOK REVIEW: Jim Perdue on “You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine” by Alexandra Kleeman

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Editor’s note: Any resemblances to actual celebrities — alive or dead — are miraculously coincidental. Celebrity voices channeled by Courtney Maum.

you too can have a body like mine

Unlike my father and his father before him, I did not grow up wanting to be a poultry tycoon. In fact, I wanted to be an acquaculturist — I have my PhD in fisheries. An acquaculturist is someone who helps manage freshwater and marine resources for human consumption. It’s not so different, though, me falling into chicken. Our chicken is mostly water, anyhow.

It was my grandfather, actually, who instilled me with a love of books. Quality, Integrity, Trust, Teamwork, and — incongruously — Poetry. That was my value diet, growing up. Lord knows I don’t get a lot of time to read now, but when I do, I like the things that disagree with the image of the hardworking everyman that I project in our commercials. I like my fiction hard and strange and gamey. I’ve never been allowed to say so, but when it comes to poultry, I go in for duck.

You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine by Alexandra Kleeman is my latest read. I had to take off the dust jacket when I was in bed reading it because my wife kept poking me in the place above my boxer band that she calls my “gizzards” and laughing about the title. Well, yes. A lot of middle-aged white men do in fact have a body just like mine. And a face like mine as well. That’s why I was pushed into our company’s commercials. Because people can relate to the memories of my father that I harbor in my face.

Do you remember my father, Frank Perdue? The tough man who made a very tender chicken? Wrinkled forehead, bald headed, a nose like a beak? My face, they say, has authenticity, because it refers to his. Quality, integrity, trust. After a film crew secretly shared images of the conditions some of our birds were living in, the marketing heads told me that if consumers couldn’t trust our chicken anymore, they’d have to trust my mug.

You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine is about such interchangeability. Of faces. Bodies. Lives. In one scene, the protagonist, A, wanders into a supermarket that only sells plastic food. Even the blood under the chicken cutlets is fabricated: pink, gelatinous, plastic poultry goo. A presses it and pokes it while a Wallyhead (the name of the headdress that masks the employees of the Wally chain of supermarkets) blinks and talks at her through a cavernous mesh mouth.

I know about mesh mouths. I have an entire department of them yattering at me daily about our bottom line. In order to keep up with American’s new delusions of health, we’ve had all our packaging reprinted to boast that our products are now 100% hand-trimmed and 99% fat free. Which means…nothing. And by nothing, I mean the kind of nihilistic darkness that loiters behind a Wallyhead’s mouth.

In this, Kleeman’s first novel, A is encouraged to believe that her psychosomatic redemption will be delivered to her only upon the consumption of an inhuman amount of Kandy Kakes: Hostess cake-like concoctions made of “chemicals, flour, aspartame, and some food-grade plastic.” The Kandy Kakes are made of the same spirals of nothing as our promises of protein that is boneless and fat-free.

Look closer behind the commercial in which I am driving with a denim shirt on, my watch and wedding ring in clear focus, a slideshow of nondescript “barns” and “fences” passing by the open window of the truck they rented for the shoot. I haven’t been inside a truck since I was a toddler. I don’t live in a barn. I live in a townhouse in Salisbury, Maryland. I like boardwalks and beach sand. My favorite word is “estuary.” Just like A becomes ensconced in the disassociation that plagues our modern bodies, I, too, show up day after day for a life that isn’t really mine.

In this novel, there’s a game show called “That’s My Partner!” that A’s boyfriend wants them to sign up for. It’s a twisted version of The Dating Game in which a contestant is asked to show how well he knows his partner through an increasingly bizarre series of tests, including one in which he goes into a cave filled with naked people who have been physically prepped to resemble the contestant’s lover. Whomever he drags out of that cave is the person he has to leave the show with. No ifs, ands, or buts. That is pretty much how I got this CEO gig: Daddy pulled me away from my books on marine parasites, said I was third generation Perdue and that, my friends, was that. This company, like the country it tries to stand for, is navel-gazing. Blind. Before I signed the papers accepting the job I couldn’t turn down, I pointed out to my father that in French, “perdue” means lost. Why should an American, he asked me, give a rat’s tail about the French? He wasn’t wrong, entirely. Because of the growth hormones, the French don’t want our chicken, anyhow.

And yet. And yet! Despite the fact that we have a ten, a twenty, and a thirty-year business plan, lost is exactly how I feel when I’m standing in the supermarket looking at container after container of our yellow meat. Lost is how I feel in the morning when I’m buttoning the shirts that have been chosen for me by the public relationship department because of their “down home feel.” And lost is how A feels within the narrow confines of her life.

Of her closest friend and roommate, A says, “B was the sort of person who might be anywhere.” This roommate invests all of her time and most of her money into buying personal care products to make her look even more like A than A herself. At one point, in a cumulative effort at this doppelganging, B cuts her hair off to more resemble A’s, intertwines the fallen tresses and gives A the braid. A, spiraling and starving, stuffs her throat with it.

This novel is about as easy to get through as a chicken covered with feathers, but it is worth finding your way through it to the book’s nutritious heart. Those that persevere will meet a cast of characters who are violently lethargic, living in a world that is soft and overlit. A’s boyfriend, C, is a sometimes graphic designer who lives on canned food, porn, and Shark Week, an insipid and soft person with “hands loose and docile as flowers.” B is an anorexic who subsists on orange popsicles and spends her free time trying to make herself look exactly like her roommate by using the exact same personal care products as A. Like a nightmarish early-twenties version of the Peanuts comic strips, there aren’t any parents in the book. There aren’t any old people anywhere, and the neighbors that used to live across the street from A and B have covered themselves with sheets with holes for eyes and “ghosted” themselves away.

Although the boyfriend C seems to be thriving sexually and intellectually in a world near catatonic with monotony, A is flailing. She wants something more but because she doesn’t know what this more looks or tastes like, she loses hope…and weight.

You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine shows us what it feels like to want what you are told to want, and not be able to keep up the stamina needed to maintain a false desire. It shows us a world in which we gleefully eat affordable food chemicals that make us look more and more like everyone else and less like ourselves. I know, maybe better than anyone, the pleasant effect that such manufactured food can bring to brain and mouth. Pinkish beige and numbly cooling, pushing our anxieties to a place devoid of sound.

Many people will not be able to persevere through the book’s opaqueness, but those who do will perhaps relate, as I did, to its suggestion that homogenization has left us starving for a life packed full of fat, and fruit, and skin, and bones again.

Don DeLillo Recipient of National Book Award for Lifetime Achievement

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At the upcoming National Book Awards ceremony in November, Don DeLillo will receive a National Book Award for Lifetime Achievement. He joins an elite league of previous award winners, including Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, and Norman Mailer.

The National Book Foundation recognizes DeLillo for his “diverse body of work that examines the mores of contemporary modern American culture and brilliantly embeds the rhythms of everyday speech within a beautifully composed, contoured narrative.”

DeLillo’s impressive body of work includes fifteen novels and a novella, including White Noise, Falling Man, Point Omega and Underworld.

The Associated Press praises his “uncanny insights on technology, alienation and terrorism,” and when asked about any younger writers he admires, 78-year-old DeLillo joked that at his age “they’re all younger.”