A Glass of Water

by Jimmy Santiago Baca

Grove Press; First Edition edition (October 1, 2009)

240 pages

Review by Benjamin Whitmer

I’ll admit that it’s more than likely impossible for me to give an objective review of Jimmy Santiago Baca’s debut novel, A Glass of Water.  I have been a devoted fan of his poetry for almost a decade, ever since I first read Immigrants in Our Own Land on the recommendation of a family member.  Baca’s poems are both refreshingly direct and grimly lyrical, constructed of the kind of startling concrete images which you can, as a poet friend of mine once put it, almost walk on.  Recently, while reading Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, I kept thinking of Baca’s work as an example of the “visceral realist” poetic movement which The Savage Detectives chronicles but never provides examples of – something which, I’m pretty sure, is fair to neither Bolaño nor Baca.

Nearly as remarkable as Baca’s poetry are the conditions under which his career was launched.  It was in prison, where he served six and a half years in his twenties, a portion of that on death row, that Baca began his literary career, trading poems to fellow inmates for cigarettes.  A Glass of Water reflects Baca’s rough origins, at least in his choice of subject matter.  There is not even a pretense of interest in middle-class life to be found in the novel.  Instead, A Glass of Water is the story of two Chicano brothers living and working in New Mexico.  Lorenzo works the same farm his father did, and sells marijuana smuggled across the border, enough of it to substantially better the lives of the migrant workers he works with; Vito is exiled to the city after beating up the white farm owner’s son, and begins a boxing career that looks as promising as his brother’s future in drug-dealing.  Between them is Carmine, a college student who arrives at the farm to study migrant workers, and ends up falling in love with Lorenzo – and who is also the inspiration for Vito’s thrashing of the farm owner’s son.  Their father, Casamiro, still lives on the farm, but no longer works, having been struck down by a stroke, while their mother, Nopal, was murdered while they were still children.

There are times when the narrative seems rushed, when that which would be perhaps better rendered dramatically is summarized.  Likewise, there are times the multitude of voices can work to dilute the force of the slender narrative.  Still, it would be nearly impossible to determine which of these narrators should be cut, especially when given the dazzling and unique contributions of each, such as in the following passage, where Nopal laments from beyond the grave the failure of America to equal her husband’s dreams:

Ah, my man Casimiro, all those people you loved as a boy and had faith in that they could deliver you from poverty.  They told you keep your spirits high and described the wonders of America and how life could be if you worked hard and trusted in the American dream.  It will never let you down, they said, and you rose early and went to bed knowing the words were true as the ten commandments and that you had a life waiting for you beyond the border.

All you had to do was cross miles of desert, hide from Blackwater assassins and Blackwater mercenaries and keep moving north along sandy ravines, burying yourself in dirt to sleep, because you believed what they said.

But over the years you became a man without hope, without a single wish that came true, and that hurts more than anything in the world and it can never be erased because that was all you talked about, the promised land under stars.  Believing what they told you opened your heart and you would have done anything for them and you did, you gave it all up to follow them, and the lies broke you.  It was not as they said, you were no longer who you were.  Despair and darkness poured out of your eyes and there was nothing you could do about it.  You were completely powerless to even whisper a complaint and you carried this dark need to avenge the betrayal, to devour people and destroy, to make people pay for what they had said, make them suffer, and that was what you hated most, because you are a good man, and became not much of anything.

Though such passages may not move the plot in ways that would best satisfy James Patterson’s readers, it’s pretty hard to argue with the resulting prose.  A Glass of Water may not be seamless, and may not be as polished as your average assembly-line thriller, but it is as powerful, tough, and beautiful as anything that has been written about immigrants in America, and given the lineage of that genre, that’s a mouthful.

The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier, 1607-1814

John Grenier

Cambridge University Press

246 pages

No book has had more influence on American military history than Russell F. Weigley ‘s The American Way of War.   Written during the worst of the American war in Vietnam and focusing on traditional military campaigns, Weigley’s book has fairly owned the field of American military history for the 35-odd years since its publication.  A growing number of historians are beginning to take note of the cracks in Weigley’s seminal work, however.  The American Way of War posits a uniquely American way of war – specifically the use of overwhelming force with the goal of completely crushing the enemy’s military – but includes only a cursory treatment of early American warfare, beginning in earnest with the American Civil War and focusing primarily on the Twentieth Century.  The hundreds of American campaigns waged against American Indians for the purpose of establishing the United States’ territorial boundaries are treated almost dismissively, given less than twenty pages in the near six-hundred page tome.

John Grenier is one of those historians working to correct the record, and his The First Way of War begins, appropriately enough for any overview of American military history, with the wars waged by the first English colonies in North America in 1607, and runs all the way through the Creek War of 1813-1814.  Most of the wars during that time period were frontier wars, waged by irregular troops against Indian peoples with the direct aim of dispossessing them of their land, and unsurprisingly Grenier’s conclusions are far less complimentary than Weigley’s vis-à-vis America’s contribution to world military history.  In Grenier’s words: “early Americans created a military tradition that accepted, legitimized, and encouraged attacks upon and the destruction of nonocombatants, villages, and agricultural resources.” The term he uses to describe this type of warfare – if it can even be justified as such – is “extirpative,” as nifty a euphemism for genocide as has been employed in recent memory.

The First Way of War is nothing if not comprehensive in its detailing of the first two-hundred years of Anglo-American military history.  Depressingly so.  The litany of campaigns waged against American Indian civilians is not only staggering in its sheer size, it also begs the question as to why it is almost completely absent from public memory – Weigley’s book being an excellent example of this prevailing memory hole.  Outside of American History graduate programs and the occasional sentimental Hollywood flick, the hundreds of years of hundreds of campaigns against American Indians have simply vanished from American’s national discourse.  One suspects that the answer has something to do with a collective desire to misremember our national origins in the interest of preserving what we like to consider our national identity.  As Grenier puts it:

We recoil at the news reports of the killing of innocent men, women, and children in Central Africa and Bosnia.  We look with repugnance on the Serbians who drove the ethnic Albanians from their homes in Kosovo and pillaged their land.  We judge these as genocidal acts that fall far outside the norm of American behavior.  When we look into our military past and see events like the My Lai Massacre, we can rationalize it as anomaly or the result of an overzealous and deranged junior officer like Lieutenant William Calley, not as a grim waypoint in the evolution of the American way of war.

The First Way of War is an important corrective to prevailing assumptions about American military history, but it is also an immensely readable detailing of an early American history that remains largely unacknowledged, written by a scholar whom no one could label as the kind of leftist historian we are forever being warned about by David Horowitz and Bill O’Reilly.  John Grenier is an Air Force officer and Air Force Academy History Professor, in a position like few others to write the book he has.  And to give us pause as we move into another period of continual warfare, particularly one which the likes of Robert Kaplan is referring all-too-sanguinely as the new “Indian wars.”
Benjamin Whitmer is a Denver area author.

Tree of Smoke

by Denis Johnson

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

624 pages

Take everything you know about the American war in Vietnam. Take the two decades of cop shows where the protagonist was invariably a veteran haunted by the war, the echoes of America’s genocidal campaigns against its indigenous peoples, the thousands of songs written in opposition and support, the rumors of American POWs being held for slave labor that culminated in a failed incursion into Laos organized by Bo Gritz, William Shatner, Clint Eastwood, and President Ronald Reagan. Take all of that and add in the drugs, the fraggings, the bizarre PSYOP campaigns, and, lest we forget, the millions of dead Vietnamese – not to mention an entire country decimated by chemical defoliant, napalm, and more than a decade of high-intensity bombing campaigns. Then roll in Graham Green’s The Quiet American, Eugene Burdick and William Lederer’s The Ugly American, Michael Herr’s Dispatches, and H.Bruce’s Franklin’s Vietnam and Other American Fantasies.

If you can keep all that in mind, and if you can spare the brainpower for a study of the world’s inexhaustible capacity for mystery and suffering, and you can manage to read at the same time, you’ll be just about perfectly primed for Denis Johnson’s astounding novel, Tree of Smoke. It’s a hulking masterpiece, as unwieldy, contradictory, and, at times, blindingly nonsensical as the war itself. It is also, if you’re able to hang on for the ride, easily one of the finest novels of the twenty-first century.

Summarizing the plot seems about as useful as trying to herd cats, and the characters are almost too numerous to mention. The protagonist is one Skip Sands, a slightly intellectual and mildly naïve CIA operative, pulled into the Agency by his hard-drinking legend of an uncle, Colonel Sands. It’s pretty much Skip’s book, in that a good portion of it tracks his descent from idealistic spook to thoroughly disillusioned specter. But it’s Kathy Jones’ book, too. She’s a Canadian missionary and aid worker in Vietnam, and Skip Sands’ sometimes lover, who provides witness to the ramifications of the CIA’s chicanery. And we can’t forget Hao, the Vietnamese collaborator working for Colonel Sands. Nor his cousin, Trung, an NVA double-agent. And then there’s Bill Houston, who appears courtesy of Denis Johnson’s first novel, Angels, where he was the protagonist. And his little brother James, who goes from a green new recruit to a hardened acid-dropping LRRP over the course of the novel. And, then there’s my personal favorite, Jimmy Storm, a madman PSYOP dream-maker whom I won’t even try to summarize, instead offering this bit of dialogue:

While Storm tried to eat, Skip quizzed him in the Agency’s sweat-room style: let your man have a cigarette but ask him question so fast he can’t smoke it.

“Where are you from, Jimmy?”

“Carlyle County, Kentucky. Never going back.”

“Your name is B.S. Storm?”

“Correct. Billem Stafford Storm.”

“Billem?”

“B-I-L-L-E-M. It was my grandfather’s nickname. My mother’s father, William John Stafford. It doesn’t really solve the puzzle, man, it just puts in a crazy piece that doesn’t fit. You start out confused and end up mystified.”

“And they don’t call you Bill.”

“Nope.”

“Or Stormy.”

“Jimmy’s good. Jimmy gets you a response.”

Skip said, “Are you army Intelligence?”

“Psy Ops. Just like you. We want to turn those tunnels into a zone of psychological mental torture.”

“The tunnels?”

“The VC tunnels all over Cu Chin. I’m thinking: odorless, psychoactive substance. Scopolamine. LSD, man. Let it seep through the system. Those bastards would come swarming out of those holes with their brains revved way past the redline.”

“Gee.”

“Psy Ops is all about unusual thinking, man. We want ideas blown up right to where they’re gonna pop. We’re on the cutting edge of reality itself. Right where it turns into a dream.”

The novel whole novel reads like that, like a titanic pastiche of all its sources, but with rhythm all its own, illuminating not only the war, but also the incredible mythmaking surrounding it. One of the major subplots revolves around a paper proposal being developed by Colonel Sands about the dangers of cross-contamination in the intelligence world and the ways it can lead to insane policy decisions. It provides a wonderful critique of our latest foreign policy disasters, of course, but also, and more importantly to the novel, it gives us the task of trying to create a coherent narrative out of the disparate and dream-like sources that make up the story we tell ourselves about the Vietnam War. As does another of Colonel Sands’ pet projects: a number of boxes of index note cards on which he’s written something like the sum total of the all intelligence he’s gathered in his life, and which Skip Sands can find no way to organize to make them make sense.

All in all, one of the most impressive things about this colossal novel is that it seems to include not only everything that’s ever been said about the war, but everything that could be. And given all that seems to be at stake to America’s national mythology in the Vietnam War, it’s a breathtaking feat.

Ben Whitmer teaches at University of Colorado, Boulder.

There are few stories as foundational to American identity as the epic revenge tale. From the genocidal Indian haters of early American frontier novels, to the sidewalk vigilantes regurgitated by Hollywood every month or so, nothing seems to bring in the public like righteous vengeance.

The stories are all reasonably similar. A quiet everyman — and this genre has traditionally been the bailiwick of men — is going about living a quiet life, when he returns home one day to find that some portion of his family has been butchered and the women viciously raped by Indians, urban malcontents or some other assortment of bad guys. Much frothing at the mouth ensues, followed by a monomaniacal pursuit of vengeance, ending in the righteous extermination of said bad guys, usually attended by some buckets of blood.

It’s a narrative that recurs with such frequency in American letters that one is, at times, a little afraid for the sanity of American culture, particularly given that the bad guys are almost exclusively dark-skinned, while the good guys are almost always, well, not. In fact, the tale originates with the likes of Robert Montgomery Bird and Judge James Hall as a way of framing an argument for the wholesale extermination of American Indians and has been used as similar justification throughout America’s long history of racial warfare.

Emma Pérez’s award-winning historical novel Forgetting the Alamo, Or, Blood Memory falls within the tradition of this kind of revenge story, but only in the way that, say, Pynchon’s Inherent Vice falls within the tradition of detective fiction. It’s a delightfully playful deconstruction of the narratives used by Anglo-Americans to justify colonization, a deadly serious rumination on the consequences of that colonization, and, not least by anyone’s standards, an explosive adventure tale.

It takes place in the early half of the 19th century and follows the exploits and revenge attempts of a Tejana lesbian cowgirl who is dispossessed of her family’s ranch by a murderous, rapacious gang of marauders — otherwise known as Texas’ founding fathers — during the Anglo-American colonization of Texas.

The narrator, Micaela Campos, is as vivid as a character gets. She’s a drunken, foul-mouthed drifter tormented by the massacres she’s been witness to, and Perez’s prose leads us through her stark and violent world with the kind of deadpan humor and high style that her narrator deserves. Take, for instance, this description of the consequences visited upon an unfortunate gambler who makes the mistake of trying to force himself on Micaela’s lover, Clara:

At first I was polite. I stood and inched to the center table and locked his neck with my arm and choked the unfortunate slug until he spit. Then I knocked his head over and over against the table and blood poured out of his nose and he spit saliva mixed with blood onto the other boys, who got up and scattered. I didn’t care if they defended him or not. I was lunatic enough for the lot of them and I think they saw that I was crazy and that my lunacy came out of nowhere and none of them cared to test its sincerity. I shoved him on the floor and kick from his head to his groin and I kicked over and over and couldn’t stop and I have to say I was not inclined to stop.

Forgetting the Alamo deliberately evokes the 19th century world of Cormac McCarthy’s scalp-hunting epic, Blood Meridian, even stopping by a scalp-bounty massacre, but is no kind of McCarthy derivative. Blood Meridian is a modern masterpiece but not one that’s particularly interested in the nuances of individual character; Forgetting the Alamo, on the other hand, is as devoted to its protagonist as it is to its flawed minor characters, like Jed Jedediah, Micaela’s rakish, cowardly, and ultimately worthy cousin. If anything, Forgetting the Alamo is something of a cousin to Blood Meridian, with both sharing an ancestor in William Faulkner, and before him, Herman Melville. It’s a book that’s worthy of that lineage: a proud, raucous and wonderful novel, tearing like cannon shot through the far less proud history of America’s colonization of Texas.

Emma Pérez is a Colorado author. She teaches at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She published her first novel, Gulf Dreams, in 1996.

Shimmer

by Eric Barnes

Unbridled Books

288 pages

hardcover

White collar criminals have gotten rather a short shrift in recent literature. With the exception of Don Delillo’s Cosmopolis and William Gibson’s recent work, few serious novelists have bothered delving into the lives of those new economy billionaires who make the new global economy hum – and who seem more than willing to gleefully destroy said economy in the name of their own insatiable greed. It’s almost as if these technology billionaires inhabit the cultural space heretofore reserved for philosophers and artistic geniuses, as if they’re not quite human, their internal lives so alien from those of us normal folk that authors are intimidated by the prospect of trying to capture them in literature. Luckily for readers, Eric Barnes is completely fearless. His debut novel, Shimmer, is an insightful and incisive rendering of the kind of high-tech confidence man that it’s impossible not to recognize from the 24-hour news cycle.

Shimmer’s protagonist, Robbie Case, is the CEO and founder of Core Communications, a twenty billion dollar company built on a visionary new technology that allows the transfer of data at unparalleled speed. The only problem being that the technology doesn’t work. Instead, the product at the heart of Case’s impossible transfer speeds, the Blue Box, relies on a massive shadow network of servers to provide the promised performance, with the result that each Blue Box sold loses Core a huge amount of money. The entire corporation is a gargantuan Ponzi scheme, relying on quick sales and skyrocketing stock prices to survive.

Only three entities in the company are aware of the true nature of Core’s flagship product. There is Robbie Case, who lives in constant terror of discovery by his own people, particularly his director of security, Whitley. Then there is Case’s step-brother and cofounder, the deftly amoral head of sales, Trevor. Finally, there’s the software application that coordinates the shadow network, Shimmer, which consumes Case’s nights:

And so, late at night, I stared at Shimmer, Shimmer representing all the information in full motion, data transformed into images and color, curling shapes and ever-turning lines. Shimmer was omniscient, the infinitely powerful reflection of the secrets it tracked. And, of course, this was yet another reason I was the only person who had access to Shimmer. Because Shimmer simplified everything it controlled. With Shimmer, the shadow network could be displayed in the simplest of images, made clear to every manager in the company, to every analyst on the outside, and to Whitley and her SWAT team.

As the passage suggests, Barnes easily conveys an elaborate and convincing technological world without bogging down in details. In fact, as with the aforementioned Delillo and Gibson, the technology, though high concept, is not the main subject of Barnes’ interest, except in the ways it transforms the characters. In Core’s teeming subterranean shadow network, as well as in the superstructure of Shimmer that controls it, ever working to both hide and coordinate the movement of data, it’s easy to find parallels to Case’s own internal world. Especially as Case’s guilt deepens, and he becomes more and more alienated from his co-workers and even himself, going months without stepping outside of the building, and finding himself only able to experience human contact as delivered by high-priced call girls.

Shimmer manages to work on as many levels as its namesake. It is a painstakingly-plotted and fast-paced thriller, but it is also a remarkable character study, unflinchingly probing the psyche of its flawed but compelling protagonist. The choices that lead to Robbie Case’s fall never seem quite laudable, but they do seem understandable. And, well, human.

The protagonist of the title story of Charles Yu’s brilliant high-concept short story collection, Third Class Superhero, is a sad case. Known as Moisture Man, he is able to pull up to 2 gallons of water out of the atmosphere and shoot it at bad guys in a stream, a gentle mist or a ball. It’s not very impressive as superpowers go, but he’s tried to make the best of it. Now and then, those of his friends with higher classes of superpowers even allow him to tag along on adventures, but he mostly sits on the sidelines while those with real powers battle it out. He has his good-guy card, true, but because he’s rated third-class, he has neither a regular paycheck nor health insurance. He’s even petitioned for a more illustrious moniker in hopes that might increase his rating:

For a few months last year, I tried to get people to call me Atmosphero. A few people did it to be nice, but it didn’t stick — I think the problem was too many syllables. Shortening it to Atmos doesn’t work either, because there’s a physicist up in Seattle named Atmos who solves science crimes with a group that calls itself the Nucleus. The registrar says if I use too similar a name I could be sued for infringement. She suggested the name ‘Sphero,’ but that’s just plain wrong. Makes me sound like a force-field guy, and, anyway, -o endings are usually for villains.

Nothing works to promote his career, however. He finds himself blocked at every turn by a combination of circumstance, bureaucratic congestion and, of course, his own mediocrity. Advancement seems impossible, at least until he receives an offer by a recruiter for the bad guys: switch sides and sell out his superbetters in exchange for the power of flight, a power that will, he hopes, at least garner him steady work.

I won’t give away Moisture Man’s choice, especially since it’s fairly irrelevant. In Yu’s stories, the characters’ choices are, for the most part, useless. There is hardly any action of any consequence, just the neurotic grasping for a cohesive identity and the always/already failed attempt at making meaningful connection with other people. Yu’s characters can’t make choices, at least in any meaningful or transformative way.

Each of Yu’s meticulously crafted stories is an experiment in form, expanding in different ways on the themes of fragmented identity and alienation. Problems for Self-Study unfolds as a math problem involving a train moving at a constant speed and a lonely character named A who is departing town to find someone who shares his love of mathematical theory. In My Last Days as Me the actor playing Me in the television show “Me and My Mother” finds his role as Me uncomfortably altered by the recasting of his mother. Autobiographical Raw Material Unsuitable for the Mining of Fiction is the story of a man’s failed attempt to construct a coherent biography for his mother. Then there is the first sentence of The Man Who Became Himself, the sublime: “He was turning into something unspeakable.”

The above can make Yu’s stories sound a little more academic than does him justice. The stories are experimental in form, but their attention to character is what propels them. And the characters are unfailingly convincing, and, even when nameless and faceless, they are sympathetic, often very funny, and usually all too familiar. There’s not one of the stories that isn’t more than a little uncomfortable in its microscopic dissection of the problems inherent to modern identity. But there also isn’t one of them that isn’t just as moving as it is disturbing.

In the Light of You

by Nathan Singer

Bleak House Books

238 pages

While reading Nathan Singer’s raw and beautiful novel, In the Light of You, I kept being reminded of a key quote from another of my favorite books about Nazis, Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night. In Vonnegut’s novel, the protagonist, Howard W. Campbell, is an American double-agent, broadcasting secret information to the Allies in a Nazi radio show which he produces. The only problem being, as Campbell comes to understand, is that his value as a propagandist to the Nazis is far greater than the information he’s been broadcasting. As he realizes, “we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

Nathan Singer’s Nazis are a different breed than Vonnegut’s. His protagonist, Mikal Fanon, is a poor white Kentucky boy who is, as a teenager, moved by his burn-out parents to a poor black neighborhood in an unnamed Ohio city. After years of being “beaten, threatened, robbed, ridiculed, and run down as a matter of habit,” Mikal joins up with the Fifth Reich under the leadership of a charismatic neo-Nazi by the name of Richard. It’s a world where race may not be exactly everything, but class most certainly is, and though these Nazis are a very different sort than Vonnegut’s, Vonnegut’s lesson holds. Mikal becomes a Nazi not so much because he has any great interest in the advancement of the white race, but because it offers protection and a sense of identity in a brutal, dehumanizing environment. Not that this makes any of his ensuing atrocities any more palatable. As Christopher R. Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland reminds us, some of the worst atrocities of the European Holocaust were committed because they were, for one reason or another, simply convenient to the men committing them.

Very much to his credit, Singer takes his subjects seriously. He provides round characters, not caricatures. They’re poor white kids, floundering, grasping about for anything to pretend to be in a world that’s pretty much foreclosed on all available options. They drink too much beer, don’t have much in the way of a future, economic or otherwise, and are more often than not bored stupid. Like most other young men, they listen to loud music, fall in love far too easily, and have a predilection towards casual and senseless cruelty. Mikal describes the life as follows:

I’m often asked how True Aryan Warriors spend their time day in and day out. Let me tell you, there is a lot of Tetris involved. And the importance of Sonic the Hedgehog to the struggle for total ethnic supremacy simply cannot be overstated. Speaking just for my chapter, we also spent an inordinate number of afternoons at vinyl record swap meets, Richard being the most dedicated vinyl fetishist I’d ever met before or since.

It’s this kind of wry commentary that sells Mikal to us, even when we don’t particularly want to be sold, even when we know a racist beatdown is just on the next page. The world Singer creates is seamlessly authentic, and Mikal is the kind of complicated, flawed, and completely compelling character that very few writers could pull off. Singer’s prose is as stark and brutal as the world he describes, but it’s also riveting. And when Mikal stops pretending to be a “True Aryan Warrior” and becomes the character we’ve seen glimpses of throughout the book, it carries the kind of redemptive power that reminds us why we read novels in the first place.

THE DEATH OF BUNNY MUNRO

Nick Cave

Faber & Faber

288 pages

There are few antiheros as loathsome as Bunny Munro, the protagonist of Nick Cave’s second novel, The Death of Bunny Munro. A monstrously pathetic (and unaccountable successful) cosmetic salesman, Bunny Munro seems to have spent his life careening from date rape to date rape, fueled by Scotch, cigarettes, and cocaine. The novel opens with Bunny’s wife’s suicide – due to Bunny’s more unsavory foibles, it’s worth mentioning – and even this doesn’t calm him down. If anything, it lends his debauches a certain hellish urgency as he packs up his nine-year-old son, Bunny Jr., and takes off on a sales trip in his bright yellow Punto.

Nick Cave provides Bunny’s string of nauseating conquests in riotously funny detail. The prose is deliciously funny and artfully profane. Take, for instance, this description of one of Bunny’s wife’s friends, whom he spots at his wife’s funeral:

Patsy “Bad Vibes” Parker throws Bunny incriminatory looks every so often, but Bunny expects nothing less. Patsy Parker has never liked Bunny and at every opportunity she can find alerts him to the fact. Patsy is short, with an overdeveloped backside, and to compensate for her low stature wears high heels much of the time on her tiny undersize feet. When she would come to visit Libby, she would walk down the gangway in an obscene and purposeful trot, reminding Bunny of one of the three little pigs, probably the one who made its house out of bricks. This is particularly pertinent, as she had once, in a fit of pique over some porny comment she had overheard him make about the walking f-fest Sonia Barnes from No. 12, called Bunny a wolf. Bunny assumed she meant the cartoon wolf, all drooling tongue and bulging eyeballs, and had actually taken this remark as a compliment. Each time he’d see her he would do his “I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down” routine. Bunny considers rolling out his tongue and bugging his eyeballs at her but realizes with a certain satisfaction that he can’t be f—.

It’s a scene that provides a pretty good glimpse into the whole of the novel. It’s cartoonish, brutal, sordid, and degenerate, sure, but it’s also tremendously funny.

Of course, anyone who is even remotely familiar with Nick Cave already has a pretty good idea as to the thematic bent of the novel. Whether writing screenplays, novels, or songs, sex and death – the grislier the better – form Cave’s raison d’être. And there is, as always, a religious aspect. The devil stalks the pages, brought to life as a minor character and providing Bunny one of his more, shall we say, uncomfortable moments in this protracted death of a ladies’ man.

That said, the novel can hardly be called predictable. Cave’s imagination, though often preying (praying?) on the same set of core themes, is endlessly fertile. As is his sense of empathy. He is ironically among the most compassionate of artists, finding worth and even occasional redemption in the worst miscreants, criminals, and misogynists the world has to offer. He never seeks to excuse Bunny Munro, but his presentation is unnervingly affectionate. Yes, Bunny is vile, and yes, he has to die – I don’t think I’m giving away anything there – but he is also a member of our common humanity, as disturbing as that may be.

And then there is Bunny Jr., who, after his mother’s suicide, attends Bunny on the majority of his debauches. Bunny Jr., in the words of Cave, “loves his dad with all his heart and he wouldn’t in a million years swap him for another one. Who would? Like when he is funny, he is an absolute scream – look at him now with all the busted refrigerators and bathtubs and junk, with his trousers around his ankles. Tell me a dad who’d do that?” Bunny Jr. is the heart of the novel, and it is exactly for that reason that Bunny must die, to free the boy from the hell of his father. A hell which, as we come to understand when we meet Bunny’s own father, Bunny Sr., has been passed down father-to-son for generations. This does not, perhaps, make for the most endearing of father/son novels ever written. But in the human wreckage Cave describes, it is perfectly appropriate.

Moreover, as Bunny’s character unwinds, slipping and further and further into his complete breakdown, it’s nearly impossible not to be impressed by Cave’s feat, managing to pull off a character as terrible and ridiculous as Bunny, and to portray his implosion as convincingly as he does. And by the end of the novel, when Bunny dies — and again, I don’t think this is a spoiler — the reader’s sigh of relief is not entirely unsympathetic. Which may be the greatest feat of all.

Benjamin Whitmer is a Denver area author.

In one essay, “Faking It,” Chabon even calls the entire ballgame, defining manhood as a “great radiant arc of bullshit” by which those of us with that aforementioned pair of testicles – and a certain number of years – attempt to present an illusion of flawless control over our surroundings.

Not all of the essays are quite so flip in the questioning of manly motives, however. “The Cut” focuses on Chabon’s decision to have his sons circumcised, even with the knowledge that to do so is genital mutilation and that he possesses no clear reason for doing so, except that perhaps it’s “never too soon for them to start learning what a liar you are.” Then there’s “The Memory Hole,” an essay about one decision all parents must make: what of their child’s art to keep, and what to throw away:

It’s not only her artwork that I’m busy throwing away. Almost every hour that I spend with my children is disposed of just as surely, tossed aside, burned through like money by a man on a spree. The sum total of my clear memories of them—of their unintended aphorisms, gnomic jokes, and the sad plain truths they have expressed about the world; of incidents of precociousness, Gothic madness, sleepwalking, mythomania, and vomiting; of the way light has struck their hair or eyelashes on vanished afternoons; of the stupefying tedium of games we have played on rainy Sundays; of highlights and horrors from their encyclopedic history of odorousness; of the 297,000 minor kvetchings and heartfelt pleas I have responded to over the past eleven years with fury, tenderness, utter lack of interest, or a heartless and automatic compassion—those memories, when combined with the sum total of the photographs that we have managed to take, probably add up, for all four of my children to under 1 percent of everything that we have undergone, lived through, and taken pleasure in together.

It’s a wonderful riff on the old saw about not knowing where the years went. And, it’s as artful and poignant as anything Chabon has every written, fictional or otherwise.

If there is one fault with Manhood for Amateurs, it is that it sometimes reads like the product of a fairly narrow, very upper-middle-class swathe of the population. (The sort of people who might read Details magazine, not coincidentally.) In “The Wilderness of Childhood” Chabon laments the lack of freedom we grant our children – a theme that he revisits throughout the book – but he seems unaware that parental overprotection, although not exclusively a problem of the upper classes, is certainly less prevalent among those parents who aren’t so well-to-do. Parents, that is, without the resources available to bestselling authors. Children of single working parents often still come home to all the freedom they can handle. As do many rural, inner city, and reservation children. For better or worse, there are still plenty of kids who spend most of their childhood outdoors, banging around with their friends, and know all about wilderness. Perhaps even a little more than is entirely healthy.

I suspect the narrowness of vision in Manhood for Amateurs is intentional, however. Chabon doesn’t seem to be trying to give us the whole of parental experience, just a little bit of his own. And it’s nearly impossible to fault the result. Especially towards the end of the collection, when the reader comes to realize that Manhood for Amateurs isn’t so much about manhood at all. Instead, it’s about the second part of that title, amateur, which Chabon defines as “a lover; a devotee; a person driven by passion and obsession to do it—to explore the imaginary world—oneself.” In his penultimate essay, “The Amateur Family”, Michael Chabon writes that maybe “all families are a kind of fandom, an endlessly elaborate, endlessly disputed, endlessly reconfigured set of commentaries, extrapolations, and variations generated by passionate amateurs.” It’s an evocative and ingenious definition of family, and it provides as delightful a surprise ending as to be found in any of Michael Chabon’s fiction.

The Trouble with Being Born

Jeffrey DeShell

Fiction Collective 2

208 pages

Colorado author Jeffrey DeShell’s previous work did little to prepare me for the fiercely personal The Trouble with Being Born. His previous novel, Peter, was an experimental revisiting of one of the most spectacular literary implosions of all time, Herman Melville’s Pierre: or, The Ambiguities, a book which so enraged contemporary critics that one reviewer dismissed the book as “muddy, foul, and corrupt” and another titled his review, “Herman Melville Crazy”. And then there was the novel before that, S&M, which was investigated by the Committee on Education and the Workforce of the House of Representatives on morals charges.

The Trouble with Being Born, on the other hand, is the story of DeShell’s parents told in their alternating voices. A premise that, at first blush, doesn’t seem like it would be entirely ill-at-ease among Oprah’s latest picks. It doesn’t take long for DeShell to alleviate any misgivings that we might have about his roving into conventional familial biography, however. Only a few pages into the book we get one of the most viscerally disturbing scenes in modern literature, with DeShell’s mother, in the grip of dementia, hallucinating four young redheaded boys standing in her room, begging to see her underwear.

“Please Frances, we want to see your underwear. If you don’t show us your underwear, we’ll tell you things. We’ll tell you what Jeff has really been up to. Do you want to know what Jeff has been up to? Frances? Okay. He’s been doing bad things. Lots of bad things. He doesn’t have a job and he doesn’t want one. All he wants to do is smoke marijuana and screw girls. You know how he keeps moving around. That’s because he keeps getting fired from those colleges for screwing all the girls. He doesn’t tell you that does he? He doesn’t tell you how many girls he screws and how he loves marijuana cigarettes. Sometimes he likes to puff on a marijuana cigarette while he screws a girl. That’s why he doesn’t have kids. Sometimes he even screws Mexican girls. Or black girls. He likes those the best.”

The scene keeps intensifying until one of the redheaded boys begins to demonstrate to Frances exactly what Jeff – the author – does to those girls while puffing on his marijuana cigarettes. By the time it ends, the reader becomes aware of the sensation of their skin slowly creeping off their body, and there is no longer even the slightest fear of sentimentalism.

Likewise, the novel is meticulously structured in ways that belie, and even oppose, everyday biography, cannily foregrounding the tension between Frances and DeShell’s father, Joe. Frances’ passages begin in a nursing home and are presented in reverse chronological order, with Alzheimer’s having already taken over her life; Joe’s begin with his own troubled childhood and advance chronologically. Their narratives intersect, often in startling ways, but never intertwine, and this seems very much part of the point.

The Trouble with Being Born takes its title from a book by French-Romanian philosopher, Emil Cioran, which consists of meditations on exactly what the title indicates. In Cioran’s own words, “I long to be free — desperately free. Free as the stillborn are free.” This sentiment seems remarkably apt as the voices of DeShell’s parents suffocate everything not integral to their own personal narratives. Their disillusionment with their misspent lives appears again and again in their disappointment with each other, and none of the pitiful horror of their stifled existence is mitigated even a little by the reader’s understanding that this is the tragedy of all lives, that we only get the one, and that every life, like every novel, forecloses on all other possibilities. All lives are misspent and misunderstood, and this is powerfully rendered in Francis and Joe’s (particularly Joe’s) shabby sexual jealousies and petty marital resentments.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about The Trouble with Being Born is DeShell’s treatment of his parents. Instead of condemning them by assuming some historically superior vantage point to them, or, worse, treating them with ahistorical patronage, the novel constructs a kind of pledge of solidarity with them against those troubles that come with birth. One so carefully crafted and well written, that it’s almost possible to overlook how touching it is.