Blog Posts

The Invisible Rider, Kirsten McDougall (And Other Favourites)

12/27/2012

This is one of my favourite books of this year. It’s expertly written, moving, and funny. Here are three things that interested me about this clever book.

1.   A complete character. The Invisible Rider has an interesting structure—a discontinuous narrative. But what I love most is the central character, Philip Fetch. He’s completely believable--utterly caught in the adult spiderweb of kids, work, wife, unformed hopes, and a troubled heart. Kirsten has said he was developed in a character workshop run by Elizabeth and Sara Knox. I admire the work that’s been put into building this character—it glued me right into the book.

2.   Small but important. One of my favourite chapters is ‘Laughing Stock’. The prospect of a party at a society friend’s house fills Philip with dread. But he trundles along for his wife’s sake, and bravely attempts conversation with a politician and his self-regarding friends. His key anecdote is a flop, and creeping death ensues. But Philip doesn’t slink off. Instead he calls the politician on his selfishness. ‘And you know what? I and my little office will never vote for you and your self-serving little ideas.’

Philip’s journey is peppered with such moments of small bravery. They are sometimes funny but always important, because they reflect Philip’s pragmatic but sound system of ethics. For example, the wonderful moment when he stands up to an abusive football dad:
[The man] looked away from Philip and did a little snort. ‘Fuck-knuckle.’
Philip held his whistle up. ‘That,’ he said, ‘is not a word.’

3.   All I feel is an urge to die sooner. But the episode I most admire is ‘Love’, in which Philip is asked to facilitate the divorce of the local greengrocer, Dennis, who has gradually lost contact with his desired life. Unlike the unscrupled host of the earlier chapter, Philip refuses to opt for what is expedient. Instead, he determines that the divorce mustn’t go ahead, and encourages the couple to talk to each other: ‘You might just need some time alone together. Children are truly wonderful, but they do make your life complicated. And with running the shop as well …’

Ironically, his perspective just depresses Dennis even more: ‘In the face of your relentless optimism, all I feel is an urge to die sooner.’ Finally Philip closes the door on them, shutting himself out of his own office in order to rescue their marriage.

Perhaps this is what makes Philip so easy to identify with. He seems like so many of the well-meaning, harried people we know from real life—exhausted by kids and work and all the things that get too complex, and by the sense of life escaping him, but still making an effort to do things right, and to make life a small bit better for his family and the people he works with.

And Ten More Favourite Books

And here are ten more favourites that I've read this year, but haven't had time to write about.

1. Crime, Ferdinand Von Shirach (2009)
Precise and incisive tales of crimes motivated, mostly, by twisted-up love. ‘The Ethiopian’ is a story to work a jaded heart. For me, Crime is a lot better than the second book, Guilt.

2. White Fang, Jack London (1906)
I was amazed at how effectively Jack London suggests the experience of a wolf. Interestingly, it’s nowhere near as convincing when the human characters speak.

3. Somebody Loves Us All, Damien Wilkins (2010)
My favourite Wilkins book. To me it seems the most accessible and tender so far, but still it includes some daring bits, like that long narrative detour on bikes in the centre of the book. I admire the risks that Wilkins takes—for example, in the most recent collection of short pieces, To Whom It May Concern, and in the novel about Thomas Hardy that's coming out shortly, excerpted in Sport 40 this year.

4. Their Faces Were Shining, Tim Wilson (2010)
5. The Desolation Angel, Tim Wilson (2011)
His narrative ideas are striking—the Rapture, the creep of kikuyu grass, a home-invading angel of desolation—but what I like most is his ability to convey despair subtly, as a by-product of an engaging narrative.

6. The Road, Cormac McCarthy (2006)
I read the print version twice, then listened to the audio book two and a half times more. Boy is it gripping.

7. The Angel’s Cut, Elizabeth Knox (2009)
Welcome back, Xas. I found the last half of this book particularly magnetic.

8. The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane (1895)
Civil war, adventure, and a deep study of a character under stress. Yay. My kind of book.

9. Soon, Charlotte Grimshaw (2012)
Grimshaw is a real expert. In Soon it’s impressive how she intrigues us in the lives of characters who can be very difficult to like. There’s also the matter of a politically inexpedient murder, which I thought was cleverly managed.

10. Rangatira, Paula Morris (2011)
Funny and gripping. I was surprised at the light touch this managed to bring to a big, unusual story about Paratene Te Manu, a rangatira of Ngāti Wai.

American Youth, Phil LaMarche (2007)

12/1/2012

I read this white-knuckle ride for the second time recently. Here are three things that struck me—and one problem that irked me—about this absorbing book.

1.    The Dubious Goodness of Guns: American Youth has gun trouble at its heart. But mostly it avoids the simplicities of a gun crime debate. On the one hand, Ted's proximity to firearms pitches him into a bloody awful crisis. At the same time, guns are the site of precious memories of outdoor times with his father and uncle. One of the tragedies of his life is that their old hunting grounds are being milled for housing developments. For an equally intense take on guns and male inheritance, watch the film version of LaMarche’s story 'In the Tradition of My Family'.

2.    Good authority, bad love: Ted’s predicament is made worse by his mother’s insistence that he lie about who loaded a certain gun. The problem of his mute and fierce loyalty to both his parents—who piss him off tremendously, nonetheless—is plain to Officer Duncan, a decent local cop. As Ted spirals through arson, bad grades, and self-abuse towards jail time, Duncan takes him out in his car for lunch. ‘Your mother loves you very much,’ he says. ‘Too much, Ted. She’s not seeing this clearly.’ By now the reader is screaming at Ted to fess up. But we’re also aware that, to save himself, he has to betray his mum. LaMarche pitches this perfectly. In David Vann’s terms, Ted now has the problem of the classic divided protagonist—whatever he decides, it’s going to tear him in half.

3.    Torn up and Firebombed: This bind is made worse by the fact that Ted is stuck in a place where he can’t easily communicate. Trapped in a lie, he’s also bound by the painful inarticulacy of teenage boyhood. Plus his father is miles away. Barely realising it, the boy aches for his dad’s restoring presence, without ever voicing it: ‘A great fondness for the man welled up in the boy, but it was quickly followed by a tremendous ache—his father was so, so far from him, standing in the backyard as he was, half stoned and torn up as hell. He stood for a moment and waited for it to pass. ’

It’s the same when Ted is aided and abetted by Terry, his best mate, who protects him when his gangmates turn nasty*. When Ted tries to say thanks, Terry tells him to shut up. Instead, he hands him a Molotov cocktail and firebombs a car in a revenge attack. This is where the book’s minimalist surface is revealed to be rich and deep. It’s not that the men of this book don’t have feelings, it’s just that their communication comes out mute and twisted. Sometimes it’s easy to think that spare, active writing of this sort is reductive and unsubtle, but it’s not. It’s the opposite.

*Small is Big: One thing that irritated me was the decision to anonymise Ted in narration as ‘the boy’. Similarly the pan-American naming of the gang ‘American Youth’, which in turn gives the rather grandiose title to the book. These techniques seemed to be striving for the everyman, anytown effect—universalising a story that works best when it's most precisely focused on Ted's immediate, local experience.

While You Were Sleeping: NZ at the Frankfurt Bookfair

10/27/2012

Inside the New Zealand Pavilion.

The city was buzzing, the programme was intense, and the writers were collegial. Here are just three of my favourite moments from this extraordinary week of book activity in Germany.

1. In Praise of Hondas & Failures

A diverse cluster of poets read brilliantly in the New Zealand Poetry Sampler. They included Harry Ricketts, Anna Jackson, and Robert Sullivan. Among my favourites were Ricketts’ clever celebration of misadventure, ‘On Failure’. Another was Sullivan’s subtle elegy for a beloved car, amongst other things, ‘Honda Waka’: ‘That Honda has seen a high percentage/ of my poetry./ Now I have left it behind.’

The pavilion’s programme of writer talks was full of such rare collisions. In other sessions I was intrigued by such different voices as Justin Paton, Carl Nixon, and Bronwyn Hayward on the arts in Christchurch after the earthquakes, Elizabeth Knox on her coming novel (wow), Nalini Singh on immortality, and CK Stead on the reflection of Katherine Mansfield’s real genius in the letters and journals.

2. The Scroll & The Kumara

For the Transit of Venus event Hinemoana Baker had read some appealing poems involving UFOs. At the handover ceremony she appeared with novelist Milton Hatoum as the weirdly beautiful guest scroll was handed to next year’s guest of honour, Brazil. It was a moment where four different languages and literary voices—German, Māori, English, and Brazilian-Portugese—bounced alongside and into each other. Another high moment was Bill Manhire’s brilliant opening speech, which featured a dig at a visiting Kiwi politician whose educational background included a seldom-celebrated literary degree, Manhire pretending to presume that this reticence stemmed from the Kiwi reluctance to brag about one’s former achievements: ‘Even the political kumara, it seems, does not boast of its own sweetness.’

Hue & Cry Issue 5 at the Weltkulturen Museum.

3. Incredibly Hot Talks at the Weltkulturen

For me the New Zealand Text and Culture Marathon at the Weltkulturen Museum offered something different again, the expanded time-slots and intimate atmosphere allowing conversations to go deeper and reveal more. As chair, Harry Ricketts made new inroads along the ‘borderlines’ of poetry by Jenny Bornholdt and Anna Jackson, and my own fiction.

But my personal highlight of the entire week was an address by Tina Makereti that she’d crafted as one of the museum’s resident artists. Addressing a tauihu that had been brought to Europe many decades before and then separated from its story by the World Wars, she took listeners to a place where its presence in a museum so far from home was not as unsettling or saddening as expected, the taonga not lost or neglected but valued in both places, its presence creating a relationship between distant people. This was a moving literary experience. You can read more about it here.

Others to interact with the collection as resident artists included Hamish Clayton, author of the excellent Wulf, Bryce Galloway, creator of the zine Incredibly Hot Sex with Hideous People, and Heather Galbraith, who with Bryce curated an exhibition of New Zealand zines, including our very own Hue & Cry.

My grateful thanks to the following, who among others helped made this extraordinary experience possible: the International Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University and the Research Office, Victoria University Press, the Publishers Association of New Zealand, Weltkulturen Museum, and the Ministry of Culture and Heritage.

A Man Runs into a Woman, Sarah Jane Barnett

8/4/2012

1. Once, he sung gospel: This is Sarah Jane Barnett’s first book. I‘m glad to see it, because Barnett is a daring poet—her poetry takes exciting formal risks, but it can kick you in the guts, as well.

If you want this double whammy, go to the death row poems, which use the last words of convicts who’ve faced that unspeakable punishment in the land of the free. Their crimes are also explored, along with the equally horrible nexus of violent forces that helped create them: ‘what happened to me/ was in California. I was in their reformatory schools and/ penitentiary,/ but ah they create monsters in there.’

2. Most people get funny when I talk about running: It’s very hard to write about running, but the long poem ‘Marathon Men’ manages to suggest the strange, solitary rhythm of that lifestyle. I found it very moving—the lost-and-found artificial leg, the lonely old men, and the romantic turn of the rubbish-collector who invites the housekeeper out for a dance.

3. Fresh Pressed: A Man Runs Into a Woman is the first book from Hue & Cry Press, the venture that brings you the art and literary journal Hue & Cry. I’m biased, but how brilliant—a new press backing a daring book. Heaps of readers have got in behind this—the funding drive was the fastest-ever PledgeMe campaign. Go this book! Launching on 10 August: http://www.hueandcry.org.nz/

The Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham (1951)

7/15/2012

1. Star Wars over Raumati: I listened twice to the The Day of the Triffids. It was only on the second listen that I connected the sudden blindness of almost the entire population of Triffids with the space weapons that the Cold War powers had put into orbit. While listening to this passage I was walking the dog at night. In a freaky coincidence, a shooting star appeared overhead and plunged down the night-sky towards Wellington. The dog was less impressed. In fact she was bored. She pulled on the leash and whined.

2. Six-fingered fiction: A friend switched me on to Wyndham by recommending The Chrysalids, knowing that I’d like its post-apocalyptic and frontier set-up, and the fact that New Zealand gets a mention.

3. Beware the foliage: another mate pointed out that you’ve got be a real master at story-telling and world-building to generate this amount of tension out of the slow approach of plants.

It Can't Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis (1935)

7/14/2012

1. Those 0dd little fascists: I was led here by HHhH, Laurent Binet’s superb novel about the rise and assassination of a Nazi. Whereas Binet’s SS boss is a cultured and fastidious butcher, this totalitarian is a folksy thug, broadcasting down-home values while his Minute Men bash the liberal softies. But, like Binet, Sinclair uses humour to show how such odd and opportunistic little people end up running our world, time and time again:

'He had been coaxing in supporters ever since the day when, at the age of four, he had captivated a neighbourhood comrade by giving him an ammonia pistol which later he thriftily stole back from the comrade's pocket. Buzz might not have learned, perhaps could not have learned, much from sociologists […] but they could have learned a great deal from Buzz.'

2. 'A downy town': It was the old-school start that grabbed me first, the ‘drowsy’ evocation of Fort Beulah and its clapboard houses. It’s that old and pillowy sort of world-building that invites you to relax into a novel. Of course, this serenity is an illusion—Lewis quickly turns the town into a prison for his liberally minded hero, Doremus Jessup. Having shot his son-in-law, the boss of the local Minute Men raids Jessup’s house and destroys his Dickens collection in an orgy of book-burning. Only months before, this man was Jessup’s domestic help. It’s a complete inversion of Jessup’s world. Brilliant storytelling.

3. You want sauce with your words?: Sinclair wrote It Can’t Happen Here in the 1930s but some of its satire feels very fresh. I particularly loved his way of poking fun at people who moan about ‘the youth of today’:

'the wishy-washy young people today—Going seventy miles an hour but not going anywhere—not enough imagination to want to go anywhere! Getting their music by turning a dial. Getting their phrases from the comic strips instead of from Shakespeare and the Bible'

This lazy rhetoric comes from none other than Doremus Jessup, early in the story—one of this novel's many delightful ironies.

Joyce Carol Oates: Wild Nights!

6/20/2012

In Wild Nights! Joyce Carol Oates riffs on the deaths of Hemingway, Emily Dickinson and others. Her take on the Great Dead Authors speaks powerfully to current debates about the use of real people in fiction.

1. I own you, Emily Dickinson
My favourite character is EDickinsonRepliLuxe, a robotic mannequin ‘animated’ with the soul of the American poet. Oates’ brilliant device for focalising the destructive energies of the fame industry, this mannequin is bought by a couple who hope that Emily Dickinson’s presence will banish the ‘torpor’ of their suburban home. But she and her genius are elusive, and in their rage to own and know her completely—in all senses of that word—the couple freak the poet right out. The wife is over-friendly and the husband so excited by the power of possession that he attempts mannequin-rape:

‘In a rage the husband tore at these [undergarments], he was owed this, he had a right to this, he’d paid for this, under U.S. law this model of EDickinsonRepliLuxe was his possession and he was legally blameless in anything he might do with her […] she was his to dispose of as he wished.’

Other RepliLuxe models for purchase include Freud, van Gogh, and Babe Ruth. Unsurprisingly, most are wrecked by their owners, one way or another, within their first year of purchase ... MORE at Victoria University Press

You Think That's Bad: Stories, Jim Shepard

5/6/2012

1.     I feel sick: the sickening moment when you realise the narrator of 'Classical Scenes of Farewell' is not reliable.

    ‘I’ve felt remorse for all of those children,’ I told him.
    ‘You wrote that [Lord de Rais] had this or that person’s                 throat cut,’ he answered. ‘But you neglected to indicate                 who sometimes did the cutting.’

2.     Tell me a story: For years Michael Chabon has pleaded with writers and readers to rediscover the deep literary joy of gripping narrative, and to break with the contemporary obsession with the ‘quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story’. Shepard opens the batting for Chabon in McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, with a story about an Antarctic search for the Megalodon.

‘He was in a region of astounding stories. And he had always lived for astounding stories.’

3.     I have failed you: Shepard is the master at making a sense of failure the centre of a story—especially failure at being a reliable husband or good brother. My favourite moment from an earlier collection:

I’ve been a problem baby, a lousy son, a distant brother, an off-putting neighbour, a piss-poor student, a worrisome seatmate, an unreliable employee, a bewildering lover, a frustrating confidant, and a crappy husband. Among the things I do pretty well at this point I’d have to list darts, reclosing Stay-Fresh boxes, and staying out of the way.

The Sister’s Brothers, Patrick de Witt

4/29/2012

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1.     Brush your teeth: Eli, the contract killer at the centre of this book, is taken with the new craze for tooth powder and oral hygiene. He shares his tooth brush with his killing-partner and brother, Charlie.

        Handing back the brush and powder he said, ‘There              is a very fine feeling.’
        ‘That is what I’ve been telling you.’
        ‘It is as though my entire head has been cleaned.’
        ‘We might pick you up a brush of your own in San                 Francisco.’
        ‘I think we may have to.’

2.     O my brother: Like Jim Shepard, DeWitt gets at that awful and ineffable complex of regard and regret that one brother can feel for an older, more volatile one. The novel’s great achievement is to enable Eli to rescue his brother, temporarily at least, ‘from all earthly dangers and horrors’.

3.     Frontier of abandon: Speech of the Book goes to a man holding a chicken in San Francisco, who explains for Eli the mad, expensive, destructive energy of the ‘Go West’ enterprise.

        Yesterday I saw a man leap from the roof of the Orient Hotel, laughing all the way to the                                 ground, upon which he fairly exploded. He was drunk they say, but I had seen him sober shortly                 before this. There is a feeling here, which if it gets you, will envenom your very center. It is a                         madness of possibilities.

(For a brilliant exploration of this book, visit Bill Nelson's This Is Writing?)