Man Alive

My San Francisco New Year’s trip a few from 2014 into 15 had to include a stop at City Lights bookstore. I found the store has a publishing arm so decided part of my mission while in town was to sample what was currently being promoted. I spent a while looking back at forth over the shelves reserved for the store’s own books until I could narrow my choices to two.

I held “Man Alive” and another book in my hands. I looked at their covers, read the descriptions on the backs and flipped them over. I put them back on the shelves and took them off again. I can’t name the other book now, so something about Thomas Page McBee’s work must have hooked me.

The other, now unremembered title, talked about violence, homelessness and a man’s journey. Standards for the bro-edged story. McBee’s said something similar but with more force, and did it right there on the cover, so I looked inside. I do this often, stealing a quick look at a single sentence from a random page in the meat of a book in order to finally make up my mind. The sentence I found in McBee’s was not only violent, it mentioned my hometown. Did I need another sign?

What I didn’t catch right away was how literal McBee’s journey to manhood was. “Man Alive” is the story of the author’s transformation from female at birth to the man he is today. Okay, maybe I was a little put off by the subject. I wasn’t curious about what such a change in life would be like. I didn’t care. I don’t care. Now that’s a posture waiting to be tested. Still, I needed something from City Lights and why go on with the same thing I’m always finding? This is still the story of a man on a journey, only with a sharp angle. The dare was made and I accepted.

The author faces violence, navigates a meaningful but fragile relationship, contemplates his past and future, and confronts what may or may not have made him the man he is and will be. Every angle of his life is considered. We see his childhood in Western Pennsylvania, late youth in San Francisco and his search for answers in the South, where his family’s roots lie. There is a bit of a road trip narrative embedded in the story that keeps it moving. Flashback scenes are revealing but not overly shocking.

We meet the men in his life. In short, they are muggers and molesters. You kind of see them coming. They are bad from the start and don’t really get much better or worse. They show themselves, are examined and pass through the author’s eyes. None deliver the unshakable answers he is looking for.

The author’s mother is the character who proves to be the shifting, unsteady and enigmatic force throughout. She is the influence who is revealed as more than her initial presence. Her actions and the role she played in the author’s life are dragged out and exposed and we, along with him, are forced to decide and judge just who this person is and what she means. When doubt is undeniably cast and the focus of its shadow is someone’s mother, shown in all her imperfection and humanity, well that’s a rare kind of conflict and its intensity can be disturbing, even repellant. McBee does not shy away. He paints the stubbing of cigarettes, chewed skin on fingertips, sour exhalations after long drinks, and confessions across kitchen tables with precision and restraint. Did I get flowery there? Sorry, this is his story not mine, and McBee does his job well enough.

The book is not short; it’s compact. The pages are thinner than what is between them. The thing for me that I loved and will steal was on the front cover the whole time. I missed it even though I stared for so long. The narrator forgives unconditionally. Through all of his consideration and introspection, we are shown without doubt that the sinners and offenders in the story will be given a pass. They are held up and examined as are their actions but they are just as soon set down and released into history. He walks with a constantly turned cheek. He forgives at every turn. I couldn’t let this go. If the story is true, and there is little doubt that it is, I can’t help but be stunned by the lack of anger the voice in the pages carries. It’s humbling. It transcends the subject matter. He seeks no revenge, only the causes of his pain and whether he finds them or not can only be inferred, not proven.

I personally don’t think he finds the truths he seeks. I think some of the pace of the story is compromised by an effort to make the truth fit, or to mold or end a pattern where there may be none. This doesn’t kill anything but it does lead to an increase in dramatic closing sentiments in paragraphs and chapters. These attempts at sweeping philosophy increase toward the end of the book.

Take this book off the shelf if you are looking for a meaningful yet light read. The page count is minimal. There is nothing to read over again to catch the meaning. I appreciated the sparse but present meaningful statements. Some descriptions overreach but McBee keeps his philosophy limited, at least at the beginning. He does not preach. As the story goes on, the heavy statements increase but they don’t smother. Nothing is cryptic in the story, though the narrator moves between a constant state of reflection and deciphering.

There may be an excess of effort made to bind a true life lived to a story arch, but the narrator doesn’t expect the reader to be as amazed or frustrated as he. Facts are stated; we follow along. We are invited but we don’t have to stress out if we don’t want. Maybe there could be a little more harshness or a swing could be taken at the reader’s comfortable seat, but why? This wasn’t what the narrator was looking for. There was enough violence thrust upon him in reality, so why do the same to the imagination of someone listening? Maybe this is the emblem of someone wiser, a true teacher: to experience and pass on the wisdom and not the pain. I won’t try to say this is the mark of a man. I have far too many books left to read and stories to hear to make that decision.

The Sportswriter

Richard Ford was familiar in some distant way before I read one of his books last month. Actually last year into last month. It took me a while. I knew Ford was highly regarded in modern lit and I had passed his name on library shelves before. I may have mixed him up with some other names as well. When it comes down to today, looking back at his book now finished for a couple of weeks, I don’t recall what finally made me pick it up. Oh yes I do, I saw a guy on the PATH train on the way to Newark airport, a real nervous, lit enthusiast type, short on hair combing and ironed clothes but likely to be up on books, reading a Richard Ford hardcover. I asked him if it was any good. He was twitchy and a little too serious but assured me it was great and Ford’s others were too. I decided to go with the one that was oldest, the Sportswriter. If I liked it, there would be time for the others.

Before starting the book I placed Ford in the miserable older man writer category kept in my head. Phillip Roth and John Updike echoed through early pages of the Sportswriter. That’s not to say those famous names are a guaranteed unhappy time, but their protagonists seem that way to me. Guys roaming around the suburbs, maybe traveling into the city for work, getting older.

I’ve seen this trope before. I’m not into it. I don’t know anyone who is. Well maybe one guy but regardless I have little interest in these types of stories. I’m not drawn by a curiosity toward their authors’ legendary statuses, as one might think. No, its still me, absorbed in the study of the self, thinking one of these stories has some lesson inside, some warning of an inevitable future. A revelation? Oh yeah, give me one of those. Give me all you got.

Narrator Frank Bascombe is a divorcee with a deceased young son and job as a sportswriter he is only marginally committed to. He hates New York where he works but his love for his quaint New Jersey suburban home borders on an obsession. Later we find him to be a bit of a ladies man and just a little self destructive maybe even completely morbid. But at the start we are really just sitting alongside the narrator as he speaks and observes.

Frank gives casual speeches about life and his unshakable view of its various facets. The book appears slow and Frank needs to be tolerated more than understood. Then, finally, as the quote on the back cover promised and yes, I read those and worry how much they plant in my head, the Ford pushes dialogue to the forefront. And the words in here are truly great. The outer characters speak to the narrator in more than common voices. We are given hyper-real snapshots of conversations. In these exchanges a spiral begins. The hook that pulls through Ford’s story is set. Frank is slowly revealed as a fraud, well, a gently unraveling one, and instead of tolerating his voice you wait again for it to be exposed by one of the lives that glance off his own.

Frank goes on giving speeches, to himself, justifying his ways. His reminiscences dig up raw material for the walls he builds up around himself. The fortress is clearly crumbling. His descent is slow, there are no real disasters along the way, yet we keep on waiting for that big one, for something to hit Frank and wake him up or knock him down. We trudge along listening to him talk. We tour the suburbs at his side, to awkward Easter dinners, to roadside psychics and strip malls and through strained visits with his ex-wife. When tragedy finally arrives Frank, true to himself, does not admit how ugly things really are. This truth of character may be the real accomplishment of the book.

I’m not going to say Ford transcends the other writers I put him in league with. I haven’t changed my feeling about that made up category. I cannot think of another time when pure frustration pulled me through a novel and I was happy with it doing so. Like I said, it took me a while to get through and though there were times when I felt that energy of being carried by the prose, each time I set it down I had to work back into it again.

Two or three page clips on the subway couldn’t keep me moving. I had to read in double digit stretches to get my mental pace synced with the story. I was mad at times. I never shook my head in agreement with anything.

The reader has to wait, and focus, until their eyes burn a little to find any revelation through Frank’s life. There is none for him. Raw humanity surrounds him but the exposure of it is so thin you cant come close to nodding or smiling or sighing or really feeling anything, you can only go on wishing Frank eventually would. Or that somehow a final payment for his ways comes due.

I’m looking at the next book in the Frank Bascombe series that sits on my desk. I know I’m going to read it. Independence Day came out in 1995, ten years after the Sportswriter and it won the Pulitzer. I can’t think of a sequel in any form that surpassed its original that way. And the most recent book in the series, Let Me Be Frank With You, just came out last year. So there’s my project and challenge.

Since I caught the series late I don’t have to wait in decade long stretches to find the next piece. This can be a real experiment. Will Frank keep frustrating me? Will Ford’s style change over thirty years? Let’s find out. I’m not starting on the next one right away, I need to clear my head of Frank for a while, and his voice is quite tangled in there, but I will get to it. Stick with me. Maybe we will find that revelation somewhere. We are only guaranteed to find more Frank, and the same goes for him.

The Hollywood Trilogy

California is a big piece of my personal mythology. I always thought I would go there, maybe even live there, mostly as a kid, but here I am in New York and things are fine. Still, California will always be somewhere in my mind so even when living East, I can sometimes feel a pull to the West. Last fall I saw “The Hollywood Trilogy” as a big yellow and orange paperback in a Brooklyn store window and couldn’t help picking it up. I had a feeling it wasn’t a new book and in a sense it wasn’t, it wasn’t even a single book as it is a collection of novellas, so it did not reach a high place on the planned list at the Bro. I read the first two stories, put the book down, and came back to the third. Even though I read other things last fall and into this year, this collection was hanging around in the background.

I’ve read other California based books recently, some good (American Dream Machine, Matthew Specktor) some not so (This Book Will Save Your Life, A.M. Homes) and I am still on the look out for something surf /skate based (Think Lords of Dogtown in Lit, suggestions? Anybody?). I would say Hollywood is the best of the bunch. But really it stands alone and separate from the others. The three stories, A Couple of Comedians, the True Life Story of Jody McKeegan and Turnaround were written from 1975 to 1981 but the collection was rereleased last year. The author Don Carpenter died years ago. From the start I was feeling a connection to the old greats, Bukowski of course, but then on to Thompson and hell even Morrsion because this is California we’re talking about here, right? This was L.A. history, that hazy golden dream from my youth. I was meant to read this book just like I was meant to go out there. At least I hoped so.

The stories are accessible, they aren’t avant garde or artsy but still Don Carpenter is a writer’s writer, if such a thing exists, and his lengthy prose matches up more with poets and heavier “lit” writers than the average thriller. That’s not to say things don’t happen to the characters, and you care about them a lot, I found, but don’t expect explosions and twists. Their endings, which I will of course leave out, are not predictable and really are the main separation between Carpenter’s tales and something by the Beats or a Kesey. There is plenty of Hollywood sleaze in each but it’s all a footnote or background noise. The characters have heart and great, magnetic voices. You can read each book on their own for sure but all three together are worth the time.

Carpenter uses aging actors, movie producers and writers to frame his world, not so much starlets or superstars. The Hollywood he describes is one from the past so it’s easy to see a kind of classic, day buzzed glow around the stories. There is little if no tragic youth or crushed idealism in his golden West, but much more of the struggle of regular people putting in a lot of work to get by. They just happen to work in the movies and have an excess of sex and drugs available. Carpenter is separate once again from the poets in his lack of existential leanings but the drawn out toils of his characters are endearing. This connection to common life can be as deep as any gaze off into the sunset.

There is an exceptional amount of physical and emotional detail in each story so if you love words, you’ll be set. If you need something to blow up you might want to move on. If you grew up with Bukowski and Fante and all the other boys of drinking, screwing and the occasional poem fame but have put them down recently, Hollywood might be a nice way to keep in touch.

I’m not sure if I like one of the stories over the others. The last one, Turnaround, wove three characters with very different roots in and around each other’s lives and was done seamlessly so I liked that. The first, Comedians, had a great first person voice. And the middle story, Jody McKeegan, won’t be found on a screen anywhere. Naturally, I wanted to find something of myself in the pages. Specifically some tie to that idea I had of California. When I put the book down finally, or even when I picked it up again to start a new story, I was satisfied, comforted even by Carpenter’s sparing of few words, but I won’t say pulled back to imagining beaches and a Doors soundtrack and destiny and oh, ok I’ll stop there. I made a visit to an old dream but that’s all.

Two tasks came my way after finishing Hollywood, a quick study of Don Carpenter’s life story and a trip out West. No, not to L.A., but to San Francisco with some friends for New years.

The trip came first. I had never been to San Fran and found I loved it. I followed up on as much sixties culture that was dear to me as I could and left too soon. I didn’t think too much of my old L.A. ideas and tried not to compare the two. But, I found passages from the Hollywood Trilogy sticking around in my mind. I kept thinking damn, what a good book and got ready to kick the idea of a recap up to the Bro. Then I got home and read up on Carpenter. Despite acclaim from fellow writers he did not achieve major fame and his time in Los Angeles was spent screenwriting to pay the bills. He committed suicide in 1995. His last unfinished novel, also set in Hollywood, Fridays at Enrico’s, was completed by Johnathan Lethem and rereleased in 2014. So, that respect from other writers carries on.

Then after a few quick articles I found out that he first gained the admiration of his fellows in North Beach, the neighborhood I stayed in and loved in San Fran. He was a friend and contemporary of most of the greats his words brought back to my mind. Don Carpenter, the writer’s writer of North Beach. Dream alive. See you after the next one.