au currant

Review of Grammar Lessons by Michele Morano

                                    

My review of Grammar Lessons by Michele Morano is alive and well on KGB Lit. Please go and view it!

Review of Lullabies for Little Criminals

                                      

Lullabies for Little Criminals by Heather O'Neill is a hilarious and heartrending look at the life of a teenager navigating the critical transition between child and adulthood. The story follows thirteen-year-old Baby on the rough streets of Montreal, as she psychologically morphs from an immature 9-year-old to a dissolute seventeen in the space of a year.

The novel spends a lot of time on Baby's father, Jules, who is both lovable and despicable. At first, Jules is a loving junkie dad who shares playful rituals with Baby, like kissing her seven times for good luck before parting. Reading about Baby's father describing his childhood is like listening to your favorite drunk babble: "We had fried snowballs for dessert. I had one toy. It was a chair. My mother put a wig on it and told me to pretend it was a horse. I'd take my chair outside and ride it." But the book descends into a social worker's nightmare when Jules is sent to rehab after being charged with heroin possession, returning sober and terribly mean.

O'Neill introduces remarkably vivid characters: there's an unforgettably cool Linus Lucas, destructive but big-hearted Trevor, nerdy Xavier, and the handsome but violent pimp Alphonse. Although O'Neill depicts these characters carefully, they are vignettes without permanence, carefully rendered and then ripped out. No one seems to last in Baby's hyper-developing life.

In Lullabies, O'Neill unleashes her talent for painting visceral experiences with simple words. Her descriptions of heroin-induced hallucinations are fascinating: a marble found on the ground contains a tiny horse, pigeons converse in flawless French, a cricket is "nothing but a safety pin that believed in God." The descriptions are so engaging they take the readers into a trip of their own. But the frivolity and fun of Lullabies turns decidedly gloomy as the adulteration of Baby accelerates, and the effect seems heavy-handed. O'Neill's strength lies in absurdist comedy and levity, not piteous accounts of destitution. She's at her best when writing plainly, because the circumstances she describes are so powerful and quietly sad. For instance, when Baby receives a note full of death threats, she is so starved for attention that she carries it "around like a poem" in her pocket. Baby's self-reflection towards the end of the novel is heartbreaking. "Some people even smiled at me as I walked by. They didn't know. How would they know I was a messed-up, ragged, dirty, nasty thing?"

The most impressive part of Lullabies is the way O'Neill captures the magic and joy a child's imagination can conjure even in the bleakest situations. She depicts squalor with humor, panache , and pride. O'Neill carefully renders the very palpable personality of a too-young thirteen-year-old -- over-confident, under-ripe, and vulnerable, fluttering precariously towards adulthood.

This review needs a title

                                          

                                  

Sneak Preview: This review will appear on KGB Lit Magazine next week. I finally finished writing it, much to my editor's relief . I would be grateful if you could help me think of a title.

             At times brilliant, at times tactical and plain, Shari Goldhagen's "Family and Other Accidents" has moments of wisdom, wistfulness and elegiac beauty as it describes relationships atrophied by miscommunication and elapsed time. The novel recounts the accidental lives of the orphaned Reed brothers over two decades. Jack, ten years older than Connor, returns to Cleveland to be his guardian when their parents unexpectedly pass away. While Jack copes with the sudden responsibility and authority of being a parent, Connor yearns for a closer relationship with him, seeking both mother and father in him.

Over the years, their dysfunctional family of two expands to include more complications – patient Mona for Jack and devoted Laine for Connor. Jack and Connor play out their lives unawares, profoundly affected by accident and circumstance. What follows are reactionary lives led by chance, rather than choice. It is noteworthy that both Mona and Laine are dedicated and patient - and always waiting for the men to make some decision, some choice that will liberate them from the heavy sense of inherited fate. Though these are modern superwomen, ambitious, focused, and capable of taking care of themselves, they are far more emotionally dependent on their men, than the women from Jane Austen’s world.

    

I appreciate Goldhagen’s depiction of how things dissipate, how elusive things that cause you pain are not necessarily what makes you happy when they are attained. How great things become middling and unwanted; how plain and petty we all are at the end. And that there are consequences for lost time. This is well exemplified when Jack asks Mona for a divorce, "it had been the saddest moment of her life because she realized he had no desire to hurt her, he simply wanted to leave.”

            Another touching point that Goldhagen makes is that the vast majority of actions we take are based on guilt and on things that have nothing to do with desire. She excels at describing the heaviness of the real – the emotional squalor that has nothing to do with poverty – such as in ‘As Good As It Gets’ where Helen Hunt’s character’s evening out is curt short when her date rejects her, commenting on her sick child’s vomit on her dress – “it’s too much reality for a Saturday night.”

Goldhagen is indeed talented and knows how to turn a sentence, especially in describing Connor's cancer stricken body as seen by Jack; “he noticed the question mark curve of his brother's bald head.” In another moment, Connor is depicted as disease ridden saint – emaciated, suffering, shitting and vomiting at same time. Yet there are also mediocre moments in which Golhagen submits herself to using easy gimmicks such as having consistent multiple year gaps between chapters.

At times touching, at times rote – Goldhagen's writing is disjointed and inconsistent. It is as though she tired of diligent writing. There's a lot of "answers with more sincerity than he has ever had about anything" and just too many 'ever' statements. These statements are more ‘tell’ than ‘show’ and are hurried attempts of lending an air of gravitas to her writing. This is particularly evident in the interactions between Jack and Conner. Almost every moment they spend is "ever had about anything" which at first is touching, then rote, then grating.

Though “Family and Other Accidents” has moments of clarity in which deep emotions are elucidated, on the whole, it falls short of great. Goldhagen is clearly a keen observer and reporter of human interactions. However, she is not yet a long-distance runner – her novice style reveals itself when she relies too heavily on literary devices and similar phrases to pull the story through where the connections fail. The reliance on multi-year breaks between chapters betrays that she is more familiar and comfortable with shorter runs – at times, the chapters work better as short stories, rather than as components of a complete work. I look forward to her second novel.

Review of 'The Thin Place' by Kathryn Davis

                                    

This review originally appeared in June, in the launch issue of KGB Bar Lit Magazine, where I am a contributing writer and editor. Please visit the magazine for contemporary fiction, poetry, reviews, and cool happenings in the literary world.

In The Thin Place, Davis creates another world, a semblance similar to the one we inhabit, yet composed of different primordial ether than our own. Davis details the events of one season in a conjured New England town. And conjured, it is, for seemingly ordinary Varennes is a surreal landscape in which the worlds of mortals and immortals intertwine. Nothing is what it seems – tragedies seem to repeat themselves as if ghosts were enacting rituals. Twelve year old girls are petty, stubby, sexual, precocious priestesses, men are resurrected, insane women sing mellifluously in the church choir and aging women in the Crockett’s home converse with wisps. An archaeologist’s wife is continuously unfaithful but he doesn’t mind since it affords him the liberty of living alone in his tent in the Arctic. Cats, dogs and insects love and introspect. There are no heroes or heroines – it is as if every character is given equal significance.

The inspiration for her sixth novel, Davis notes, came from her visit to a convent outside of Peekskill, overlooking the Hudson River. As one of the sisters, gravely ill, lay dying, the bells of church poised to ring in ritual, she miraculously recovered. When Davis enquired how such a thing was possible, another sister told her that this a thin place, where the membrane between this world and the spirit world was very thin – anything could happen.[1]

In Varennes, time ceases to exist in sequential form - time treads so heavily that is leaves impressions in this thin place. The story lacks progression – if one were to revisit Varennes – the same spirits would roam and exude their thoughts, as if in purgatory. There is no buildup – and when the inevitable climax occurs, one is caught aware and unaware simultaneously. Temporal things do not seem to matter – there are timeless spiritual battles to be had. The book is unconcerned with plot or with actions, but with what thoughts and what feelings had a hand in commanding muscle to move and wreak action.

Stylistically, The Thin Place, is reminiscent of descriptions present in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. In introspections, Davis uses repeating monosyllabic words to signify important moods and obsessions in the stream of consciousness narrative. Like Mrs. Dalloway, the book rapidly shifts from one character’s perspective to another. Yet what it is most similar to is not so much a book, but a work of mixed media assemblage art.

The Thin Place is composed of juxtapositions of police reports, diary entries, church service programs, horoscopes, private thoughts of humans, animals, insects, God, nature – consciousness streams unbounded. (All this leads to a sense of privilege but also to a sense of confusion which blends the characters, especially that of Helen and Billie, Piet Ziebrugge’s mother and love interest.) Their lives and thoughts are so intertwined that people seem indistinct, their membranes so permeable and their thoughts filling the environment as if they were skinless, boundless beings; strangely amoebic as if they were auras of thought rather than humans.

Given the profuseness of thoughts, it is unexpected that Davis’s treatment of the characters is so entirely unsentimental that it is nearly pitiless. Not only does she stay entirely unbiased towards good and evil – it is as if everyone is given equal standing, despite what the reader may perceive as inherent emphasis. No one is entirely likable nor lovable. Even the few characters for whom she has distaste, mother and daughter Kathryn and Sunny Crockett, are given a chance to express their thoughts, albeit limited airtime. To Davis, Kathy and Sunny Crockett represent the true evil in this world – the world that seeks to benefit itself at the expense of others and nature; the world that is soulless and spiritless and does not desire redemption. Characters that we come to care about are reduced to lesser fates and non-existences, and unapologetically so – as a statement of fact. Perhaps Davis’ view of the natural world is that it is indifferent and cruelly nonchalant. It is then unsurprising that the biggest role is played by Davis- she is a resolutely unsentimental prophet for her Varennes.

I could not help but wonder if all of these characters were representations of the author herself – because more than a work of fiction, I found the book to be philosophical text, a powerful introspection of the author’s mind, reminiscent of Agnes Varda's 'Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse,' (The Gleaners and I) where the subject matter is supposedly about gleaners of all varieties in France, but it actually provides the backdrop on which Varda casts her anxieties, observations, sense of goodness and evil.

Davis is a demanding author who assumes a certain sapience from her readers. She refers to Julian of Norwich[2] with nary a description, numerous references to the bible, and books that must have been read. More demanding than whether or not one is well and widely read, Davis forces one to retreat and retrace one’s thoughts. The Thin Place is a self-conscious (self-aware) read, deserves a careful reading, in a quiet place where one can introspect.

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[1] Hogan, Ron. “Kathryn Davis on Thin Places.” January 3, 2006,  http://www.beatrice.com/archives/001877.html 

[2] Julian or Juliana of Norwich (c. 1342 – 1416) – considered the greatest of the English mystics. Her ‘Revelations of Divine Love’ explores the great love of God for men and the detestable character of human sin.