The Mark and the Void

The Mark and the Void is Paul Murray’s third novel, arriving last fall and four years after his widely praised and largely successful work “Skippy Dies.” Expectations have been high for his return. If Murray’s talent is sustainable, reflecting the easy wit and intelligent humor of the voices in his stories, there shouldn’t be much to worry about. With him you can kind of feel another hit coming.

Mark was promoted primarily as a comedy and an incisive spoof of the modern financial industry. Bordering this timeliness can add urgency to the reading, though some impact is diluted due to terrorism overtaking the spotlight of the western world’s dread. To some the financial calamities of 2008 may seem at least arguably a past era. Still, stocks are falling in China and the uncertainty reigns in the world’s economies so the Mark’s setting is believable.

Claude is a French ex-pat and investment banker living and working in Dublin. We are introduced to his life and history in the early pages of the book by a removed dialogue from an unnamed narrator. Claude’s own voice quickly steps in and settles the story, or at least gives it direction. After a solid investment in pages this direction is revealed as a spiral one, looping backward and over itself in circular self-awareness that a reader could find entertaining or equally head shaking. There is a real fear early on that Murray may be performing stunts to get his story across.

The author dangerously self-identifies in the novel when Claude meets Paul, a floundering writer who appears as a potential, though doubtful, spirit guide. The author as character attempts, amongst other increasingly desperate plots, to make Claude’s life story worthy and deserving of interest from the outside world. Claude delivers his side of these deals as he clings desperately to his new author friend’s promise for the definition of meaning in his life. Such meta-literary territory is usually reserved for first time writers, but Murray illustrates Paul with enough humor and exaggerated failure to keep himself clear of solipsism. Paul is just too pathetic to be real, one hopes anyway.

Another voice would be more in your face and even obnoxious but Murray’s easygoing, almost warm tone is preserved from Skippy and works again here. There are deep layers and heavier philosophy than a first time reading can make apparent, but Murray’s humor makes him the fun friend, the welcome party guest that does not take his barbs into the realm of self-display. He makes the right joke at the right time, smiles and steps away.

Getting to the existential value of the Mark proves to be the challenge of it’s reading. It takes a serious amount of faith in Murray’s skill or promise to deliver a hook to arrive at the near center of the novel where the existential value comes through.

A detached philosophic diatribe starts the later portion of the story. This free-floating chapter, a monologue really, presents plainly the book’s most interesting bits of philosophy. That’s not to say Murray depends on the speech to make his work magnetic. Ideas and concepts do move the story and but Murray is not clever, instead truly bright enough to plant the philosophy and burn it as fuel. The mid-story departure is Murray’s promise that yes; this is going to be as deep as we are hoping.

Still, beguiling intelligence and well-placed humor aside, it takes Murray a while to show where he is going. Claude’s naiveté and Paul’s self preservation clearly set them up as mark and void but there are a lot of chapters, hallmark Murray fringe characters and their shaky lives to get through before the plot finally flips completely over on itself.

The Mark cannot be called brilliant by standards of timelessness or universality but it is intricate, and impressive, and woven through with more threads than a critic should try to identify for fear of missing one and sounding stupid. The research achieved to speak accurately through any of the characters voices is stunning really, unless Murray spent time in the financial industry that his biography does not mention.

Explanations of economic processes are not spoon fed or cleverly injected; they are presented seamlessly into the narrative. Descriptions of the world’s banks failings are unobtrusive. This could have taken an incredible amount of research by Murray though it’s not the breadth of knowledge that impresses but the way it works into the story.

His fellow writers quoted on the Mark’s jacket compliment Murray in the wrong direction. The book is not about the financial industry, not solely anyway, and it is not a spoof of this world or a critique. Mark is an examination of reality, what this term means to us, through the lens of the simultaneously most influential and unreal of all societies institutions, its banks. The banks are a plot device and not the subject.

I have to think that if you took the banks away and replaced them with a steel mill, or a coal mine, or even a force of nature like a river or any other massive, unpredictable, largely ungovernable force that a group of people both try to control and depend on for their realities, you could make this story. But it might not be as funny. And this book was funny fairly often, probably more than I would like to admit.

A spiraling, self-aware story like Murray’s asks to be debated. Even the characters argue the value of their own stories, which make up the one we read, which turns back again into another story they create. Ask yourself if that sounds clever or frustrating. I could not decide until the end and I suppose in that the novel succeeded.

What the Mark does, though not as spectacularly as Skippy Dies, is gracefully present both the bitter and sweet of life in unison. It’s not that there are sad parts and happy parts in parallel, instead the characters are in real pain throughout most of the story but the world they live in is nearly ridiculous. They don’t laugh much, but we do, and not at them but at life around them.

Claude’s coworker, Ish, is his only counterpart with a visible, suffering soul. Her attempts to do the unimaginable and show concern for something outside of herself and the industry her and Claude dwell in go repeatedly ignored. After her latest effort to show real empathy is crushed before her she says, “At least someone will let me care about them.” Her plea and her pain go unnoticed by the other characters. No one says anything to her. The story rolls quickly on. This placement of truth inside swirling comedy illustrates the subtlety Murray can work with at times, and the heart. The wit, like the banks and the schemes and the plots, only carry us to his skill.

City on Fire

City on Fire had been in my sights for a long time. Rumors floating around the book put their hooks in me nearly a year prior to its release. 900 plus pages, a setting in late seventies New York, connections to the Bowery punk scene, I’d buy into a whisper of any one of those alone. And of course, the hype. Oh the sweet, indulgent hype. Sugary and colorful and determined to pull me in. Not a few newspapers and magazines reported Garth Risk Hallberg’s debut novel had snagged him a multi-million dollar advance before it was finished. I first read an article about the book in mid 2014 and from then on waited patiently. Hell, I pre-ordered the thing in hardcover.

Weight of expectation like this can only set you up for disappointment, right? I won’t make you wait like I did; this one was a let down. City on Fire is a safe story. The end is lightly triumphant for the characters but largely tepid. The plot is a formulaic even as it tries a few stunts and turns. So, am I really going to bash a guy and a book for a thousand words? There has to be a reason I crawled through nearly a thousand pages. I’ve set down other books that I’ve found disappointing or even offensive but I stuck through City. Why?

1977 starts (or 76 ends) with a crime that we expect to drive the story and surprise us in its resolution, only of course, much later. For a while I did want to know who was guilty. But, the narrative departed from the mystery too often and at too great a distance to keep me curious. The question of the book’s length has to come into play here. I’ve never shied from a heavy page count, the best ones go by faster than anything half their size, but I needed to be reminded in later chapters just who the victim was and why I should care about them. By the time I got near the end, my empathy faded.

Perspective does shift through the lives and viewpoints of its characters quickly enough to produce some momentum. We have the young punk rock grrl and victim of the crime, two children of the New York elite, their lovers in various states of abandonment, two villains fighting for the stage both in the reader’s eyes and with each other, and more than a few stray characters that each get a fairly random magnifying glass held over them at points in the story. An inability to fully commit to one of these lives leaves a lack of depth to them all. When the particularly shallow ones arrive the pace grinds down with them.

The plot swirls back and forth through decades but keeps as its flashpoints the crime on New Years Eve and the blackout of 77. Through such a swirl connections should be made and revealed, bells should ring and revelations had but really, they aren’t. If they were, I misjudged their weight. Everyone is connected and these links pop up often but they seem to be calling for recognition of their cleverness, not meaning.

When the ends of storylines appear frayed at best or completely unfinished I start to doubt myself. I’m sure I missed something, the author is too smart for that and I just wasn’t paying the right amount of attention. A reference must have been lost by some skipped required reading of my childhood. But in City I could trace the flaws through devices the author even flat out mentions. A gun goes off in the story. Another doesn’t. One is identified right out as Chekovian and the other ignored as such. But for however many times Chekov’s famous rule shows itself it is thusly broken. Or at least bent. Guns go off, just maybe at the wrong time. There are other unclear moments I can’t shake. One character may have died or may not have. I missed it. I guess that’s on me but still, how can that be blurry?

Before City’s release it’s weight and breadth drew comparisons to Don Delillo’s Underworld. City is not pure historical fiction and neither is Delillo’s masterpiece though the predecessor here runs its dueling plots along fragments of real events, tracing the motion of history. Hallberg uses events as fence posts to keep his story penned in.

Amongst the myriad things Delillo got right but City misses was the jumping timeline, the shift between decades not past to present or back again but a seemingly random but in fact orchestrated leap between epochs. Hallberg’s leaps land on shaky legs. He doesn’t tell his story in order, which is fine, but he gets the disorder wrong too. I don’t understand why he jumps from the 70’s to the 60’s to the later 70s and even the 80s and back again. Delillo moves to a particular decade because something that happened at that time represented to him the America he was trying to understand. Hallberg jumps to events his characters experienced in their earlier and later lives. When we don’t care about the characters, the foundation slips.

Even though the lights did go out in New York in 77, City is pure fiction set in the past. Underworld needed the times it took place in to achieve Delillo’s goal of understanding cold war America. Hallberg could set his story in nearly any generation and maintain the same plot lines. For his story 1970’s (and 60’s and 80's) New York is pure backdrop.

The book jacket promised explorations of the power of youthful discovery and rock n roll. This could have been what kept me going for over a month. But you better deliver if you’re claiming that hallowed mythology, Bro. Enter Charlie Weisbarger, far from the center of our story but maybe the most broken spoke on the wheel. His is a believable life of teenage confusion and anger drawn forth by his tutelage in the underground punk scene. We can believe in him. Charlie is an honest portrayal of a lost kid and I wanted something special for him separate from the other characters. He runs from the suburbs to the city following punk rock, and a girl, and finds himself twisted into evil undeserving of his blatant if not expected innocence. You kind of want him to be ok. In the end Hallberg portrays him honestly, not as a saint or a hero or even a victim, but realistically as an annoying and broken down kid. I nodded both to Charlie’s spirit quest and it’s ending. His counterparts in the story call him the Prophet and it could be said he grew into just this after his wounded and largely forgotten finish. Charlie was good. He should have made a bigger splash. He cried a lot and that was okay.

Charlie’s journeys through the East Village and Bowery are probably what kept me going. I wanted to see the neighborhood and learn something about it. I wanted to see a movement, a time, a generation, explained or symbolized by the art it created and I needed this done through a good story. A very, very tall order.

I hung on for the knockout Patti Smith reference. There were a few nods, and I’ll admit they weren’t terrible, but the story as a whole falls far short of a revealing picture of life in those times. Looking back to well over a year ago, I can’t recall now any of the hype promising the boiling inspiration that made Patty or the Ramones or Talking Heads take a stage. In the end I’ll have to take the blame for unrealized expectations.

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.

A Brief History of Seven Killings

Historical Fiction is not a genre I ever really expected to get into. The idea of history, even if possibly semi-accurate, reminded me of school and felt dusty. I’m pretty sure Don Delillo’s books broke me out of this mindset. His major work Underworld is big on my list. It didn’t hurt that his books based in history that I did read were set in the 60’s, the decade I was meant to be alive in. I’ve read some others, including heavyweight E.L. Doctorow and even pushed on to some actual Non-Fiction (I love Havana Nocturne, by T.J. English) but these have been phases or quick runs and have not remained steady choices. So what’s your problem Bro? The thought of wiping a thin film off some tome from the attic was stuck in my head. Something felt like assigned reading. Couldn’t do it, even in detention.

This concept was crushed by A Brief History of Seven Killings. Not solely because the history it deals with is fairly recent but more that the subject of the story has been something I’ve at least thought I’ve known about since I was a kid, the attempted assassination of Bob Marley.

Can I safely guess we all had a Bob phase as kids? And that most days we would rather be reliving that phase instead of waking up for work? We do mainline nostalgia here at the Bro sometimes, but lets take it a little farther. Can it be possible to grab that past fondness and pull it into today and, oh man repeat metaphors, dust it off and see it new? Ok, slow down Bro, but this is what Seven Killings did for me.

Understand, this is not the story of Bob Marley for grown ups. He is not the main character, only the point the different narratives revolve around for a large part of the story. He is referred to only as the Singer and exists as a shadow. Facets of his life that are less than CD booklet friendly are woven in, they really pop up and fade as a subtext, maybe a soundtrack. If you were ever a Bob junkie they will be familiar at first and then a little unsettling. The documentary Marley that came out a few years ago did this too, we now know Bob was kind of a dick sometimes, but Killings makes the rumors alive, they crawl and show themselves and hide again. There are surprising or maybe shocking moments but then the story rolls on. Things I knew were affirmed and new things surprised me. But this is historical fiction, not a documentary, so we have to let these pieces remain suggestion, even mystery.

Actual events and the real horrors of Jamaican ghettos in the 70s were not as familiar to me as details of the Singer’s life. Killings doesn’t go over them like a text book, though after a while the horrors are so frequent they do feel like a list and this does get a little tiring. The book is endlessly brutal. But the voices keep it moving.

A lesser writer could have tried to stretch each narrative into a complete novel. Gang lords, CIA Agents, Groupies, Hippie Writers, a Ghost and more I may have forgotten each get their chapters. The story is long but its complexity through these different points of view pull it more towards a spy novel or some massive generation-spanning thriller than straightforward historical fiction. Not every piece is nail biting or suspenseful and at these times the small facts about the Singer or other pop culture fragments of the times carry things along, but you feel something building, and the lives of the characters matter.

That being said, please let me indulge and introduce the best new bad guy of modern literature. Here he is, Mr. Josey Wales. He’s a murdering thug on his way to kingpin status positioned directly opposite the Singer. Their lives are driven together, they circle each other then bounce off into different violent directions. We question the Singer the most through Josey's eyes. If we give his voice its fair moment, we can question a lot more. Despite being the most prolific killer of the book, his words are also the most pragmatic. His philosophies are cruel and realistic and if we believe their stance in opposition to the Singer’s words a vortex is created that pulls us down even below the story into the depths of the book that may be hard to come out of.

Easy, Bro. I’m just saying he’s my favorite part. He’s better than Scarface, if you’re asking me. He might even compare to the Judge, for those of you with a little Cormac going on. There, I said it. Decide for yourself, then lets talk about that whole vortex thing.

Let’s get back to work. The book is big and takes some time. It will be up for awards next year for sure. The author, Marlon James, has a few other works that I am not familiar with but I can guarantee his name will be heard again and frequently. There’s one character that doesn’t seem to have a solid place other than to jump the story from Jamaica to New York but if that what it takes, so be it.

I can’t be sure how James learned all of things he did that make up the book. Even if he interviewed people who were alive and present at the time or were near the real people or foundations for characters he couldn’t have found everything in straightforward sources. There are no textbooks or liner notes that contain the pieces of this story the way he tells them. The Singer’s lyrics might be a solid link to the events. They stand out on the page, even if you aren’t familiar with them all.

The words to Natural Mystic appear in the book more than once. I hope that doesn’t ruin anything for you. It was the most gratifying part of reading for me so I have to mention it. I can’t explain why the song is such an important piece of my personal mythology, I’ve tried, but I do see it as the only Marley song dark enough to represent this story.

Maybe the darkness of the song is why it matters to me. Seven Killings may have dragged that back from old times. I’ll have to go on figuring the rest out. Though I know its impossible, to go living through the past.

Oh man, swear I didn’t do that on purpose. The headphones were on, I couldn’t help it.

Preparation for the Next Life

There haven’t been any Bro posts in a while. Time has passed. I’ve missed a few lit events and some new books have made debuts. Sorry about that. But I have been reading, count on it. So let’s get back into things.

I’ve never been up on new music. That’s not to say I don’t like bands that just came out and I only sit in my room while dusty vinyl spins, though that is close to true, but I am usually the guy that catches a band about two years after they break. Have you guys heard In Utero? It’s better than I expected.

With literature things are a little different. I haven’t meant for them to be but I do try to keep up on what’s new. When I heard about Preparation for the Next Life by Atticus Lish, and damn it if I remember where or how, I was ready. I knew the November 11 release date about a month out. I worked my library queue to make sure only a few new requests would be coming in at the same time. I rushed through the last book I had in hand the week before. Then, on a Sunday, I checked out the schedule at KGB Bar and found out the author, Atticus Lish, was reading from his book that night. Maybe I could get an advanced copy of the book, I could even meet the guy, damn was I on top of things.

You may be able to pick up on my recent lean toward stories from the War in the Middle East. I don’t see this stopping any time soon, though I probably should lay off the gas a bit. Theme burn out is a real thing that I regularly run straight into. I missed the National Book awards this week because I was out of town for work but Redeployment, a book of short stories based around the War, won for Fiction. So the streak is likely to continue. I don’t know if I think short stories should win for fiction, maybe they should have their own category and frankly I don’t prefer the format but regardless, I’m likely to pick the book up soon.

So, Atticus Lish. I checked my fantasy football scores one last time (sup, BRO) and dimmed my phone as he stepped to the podium. He read a brief scene from his book in which the romantic protagonists meet. Yes, it’s a love story. The male main character is a traumatized Iraq Vet floundering in New York City. The female half is an illegal Chinese immigrant. This idea is as modern as I can imagine. This is even before Siamese Dream. I am the guy who found Gish. I’ve begun to believe my second reason for seeking new fiction is to find works that reflect how things really are today, that are about either what isn’t on the news yet or is behind whatever is condensed as news. The first, well that’s the perfect story, and we will keep on talking about that forever. But, a torn up Veteran and an illegal immigrant girl falling in love is about a dozen years too current for television. I grabbed my just ten dollar copy of the yet to be released book, shook hands with the author, suggested he pick up Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and left as pumped as when I came in.

You kind of know Preparation for the Next Life isn’t going to end well. No plot reveal there. Romeo and Juliet it is not and I don’t have a ton of experience with romantic plots but everything in the story is set to collide. Skinner, the soldier, is shaken to his core and descending fast, Zou-lei is illegal, barely employed and waiting for Homeland Security to catch her, and a villain steps in about halfway through whose actions are stomach souring. I just hung on and hoped for some great scenes before the inevitable explosion or collapse at the end.

Memorable scenes did arrive. Others dragged on a little. There seemed to be two authors at work on the pages. The New York described in the book is one most transplants, legal, middle and upper class ones anyway, have never seen. Lish paints these with authority but sometimes for too long. In the other direction, some chapters end abruptly. Where other authors may try to pause on a poetic note, which is dangerous and when it fails it crashes hard, Lish does something else. You get the feeling he was on the same streets the characters were, working his own thoughts through, and packaged them in the story of Skinner and Zou-lei. And since he was still working through them, they are left incomplete.

There is enough dread to keep the story moving even when sections end on characters staring at the horizon. The characters push the reader as well. I started out seeing Skinner as a tall, tough as nails crew cut with a monologue but this was wrong. Nor was Zou-lei a petite, innocent fetish. Their physicality was something I had to make myself accept, dropping my own archetypes, and when I did the realness of the story came through.

Once the bad guy showed how wretched he could really be, I didn’t want to go on. I was scared to get to the end of the book. I had to get myself in the right mood each time I started reading. Eventually I made it through. The worst was on the way and it came, and then again it didn’t. The story ended both better and worse than I guessed. There’s your teaser right there.

Now the hard part. How do I criticize a guy I met and shook hands with? Who was extremely gracious and friendly and signed my copy of his own work thanking me for reading? Didn’t I say the Bro was going to be all positive? And how do I stick to my life long motto of never mess with a guy with cauliflower ear? I don’t know. But I have to be fair and write what I think so here it goes. This was Lish’s first novel and you can tell. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. There are many parts that seem disjointed, there are rough edges, but every piece is written with honesty and emotion. The man means what he writes, even if there is some meandering. He never poses. There are no advertised philosophies. As a kid I read about how the Velvet Underground were imperfect and admired for it and this was how they inspired an endless number of bands in every decade after them. They made you believe you could make music too. I don’t know, they always seemed flawless to me. With Lish, accepting the fractures in his prose could add to his appeal. For me it was a little distracting.

I got to see the author read from his book in a dark attic of an NYC bar. I finally caught something at its early, awkward start. I’m in on the secret. But lets forget my CD collection. The story is what matters. Lish puts the lives of the characters above his words and for that, Preparation is a win. He wrote about terror and love without bullshitting. Maybe truth doesn’t have time to put you in a good mood. He was fair and hopefully I was too.