Lost Treasure Stash

Encountering George Saunders for the first time through his latest short story collection "Tenth of December" was a little like discovering a lost treasure stash somewhere, filled with a variety astonishing pleasures, from fascinating trinkets to serious and valuable works of art.

Once again I am indebted to my fellow PBR Bookclubbers for pointing my gaze in a necessary direction, as I was also introduced to Haruki Murakami through his latest work (master work "1Q84") and to Roberto Bolaño the same way ("2666").

I was hooked at the first story "Victory Lap" by the easygoing stream of experience flow and casual effortless breaking of the language rules while demonstrating a masterful grip on the narrative and dialog from underneath. In this respect, I'm reminded of Brautigan and his making up words and creating sense out of seeming nonsense in works like "In Watermelon Sugar". Then he switches persona viewpoints and the landscape shifts underfoot. Then he does it again. Yep, hooked.

The second story "Sticks" was more or less an interesting little poem for me but then with the third story "Puppy" Saunders had me hook, line and sinker with his Escherian narrative reflexivity built around a dog. Or, a boy. Or, both. A family held up in juxtaposition to another family (a common theme throughout this collection). I put the book down at the end of this story and thought "This guy's a friggin' genius". Later, intrepid fellow clubber Abby told me that in fact Saunders had won a Genius Grant somewhere along the way

Probably the tour de force here is "The Semplica Girl Diaries" as Nog has previously mentioned - it's long enough to really sink into and is subversive, creative and wryly humorous all at once. Well, all of these stories are that way but this has the room to stretch out in and really pound it home on all levels.

"Escape From Spiderhead" packed so many commentaries about society at once that it makes your head spin but made it such a fun ride with the sci-fi overtones and suspiciously adept articulations of mental states under the influences of a variety of neurotransmitter-manipulating high-tech pharmaceutical recipes.

While I literally liked every story included here, I would have to say that other than perhaps Semplica Girl my favorite was probably "Home". It just works on so many levels and demonstrates deep levels of understanding, questioning, compassion, frustration, and love. What could be more central to all of us in the biggest picture than what "home" means to us?

Generally speaking, in addition to the themes and techniques already mentioned above, what really draws me to this author is his ability to weave humor and poignancy into a single mesh in a playful yet calculating way. In the same way a comedian might set up his final punchline with what comes before, Saunders does exceptionally well what many great writers do (including the Coen brothers in their movies) - by feeding us a bit of information at a time, with judicious timing and sequence, he allows our minds at each step to fill in details based on our natural inclinations, assumptions we automatically make, and tropes we are accustomed to and then leverages those to drop the next bit of information in that radically alters our understanding - sometimes in humorous ways, sometimes in horror-inducing ways.

We see this on the larger narrative level in "Victory Lap" where it is amplified by the cycling through character viewpoints, but we see it within short stretches of description and dialog, as well.

I'll end with a bit of the opening to "Home" which captures the kind of understated humor which produces an overstated smile on my face as I consume it. The person telling the story has just arrived home to where his mother lives after being gone for a long time and not only is the place still a trashy mess, he notices new water stains on the ceiling in the kitchen, and so forth. His mother notices him standing outside and tells him to "get in here, you":

"Still ain't no beeping cleaning lady," Ma said.
I looked at her funny.
"'Beeping'" I said.
"Beep you, " she said. "They been on my case at work."
It was true Ma had a pretty good potty mouth. And was working at a church now, so.
We stood there looking at each other.

Hipster Trifecta and Quasi-Irony

Chapter XV of Portland author James Bernard Frost's Hawthorne Books "A Very Minor Prophet" was probably my favorite. There wasn't as much focus on religion or politics (which admittedly were primary elements of the book) but there was one of the locally legendary nicknamed houses with creepy stuff going on in the basement, and there are wonderfully awkward lurches forward with the love story arc.

And I think by this point in the work I'd hit two hard to resist references: a black The Residents t-shirt and Zia of the Dandy Warhols. The trifecta was later complete with a tertiary "Sweat Loaf" quote.

So yes, while it may not be a perfectly realized work - one triggered by the shock and passion of those years following 9-11 but lingering into a detached aftermath by a years-later publication date - it is a loving, not-yet-jaded tour of Portland and in particular the counter-culture scene and it was actually that aspect and the various scenes and settings, as well as the rhythm and pacing of the story that I enjoyed the most.

And for me the most resonant theme by far was the battle between irony and earnestness. This infuses so many layers of our culture, from politics to entertainment, from what it means to be hip versus what it means to be "good people". Get it wrong and you may get your eardrums perforated with a massive gong hit blasted through a steroidal PA system.

So, what would you do if you were naked, injured, and dripping wet and wandering lost through the subterranean corridors of the Bug Cave and kept passing a room with a buzzing sound on the other side of the door?

And did I mention there was a Zia reference in this work?

Me and You and Every Anxiety We Know

Well I guess I was just hardwired to dig Miranda July's writing. I liked both of her feature films - they weren't quite perfect but each of them was fascinating and hard to look away from. Somehow it seems to work for me even better in literature form, though after reading "Nobody Belongs Here More Than You" I would really like to see what she can do if she stretched out into a longer literary form.

I think what I like most about reading these (other than the fact that I feel like she is my long-time top-of-the-favorite-authors-list Richard Brautigan reincarnated as a modern woman) is that she is essentially delivering a stand-up comedy line in a cerebral context and using it to talk about familiar and serious issues in a way that feels like exploring an alien landscape that immediately becomes familiar as the crest of each rise is crested and each draw traversed. Her comedic timing is fantastic and the steady dose of wry observation and knowing cynicism tempers the fluctuating nostalgia-sentimentality-sincerity flow.

She does also enjoy playing with societal boundaries – nothing too brow-raising but she pulls you along to perspectives you probably don’t consider most days of the week.



For some reason the following line leaped out at me and apparently it grabbed Richard as well (what are the chances of a single line out of an entire collection of short stories making such an impression on multiple readers?), though my focus was more on just this couplet:

"I got up and stood alone in the hallway and pressed my face to the wall. It was wood-paneled and smelled like pee, as so many things do.

That sums up much about July that I like: The moments that happen alone (or when feeling alone), the real details tweaked to exploit telling, briefly incongruous associations to paint a complex sense-picture with great economy of words, and again, the comedic timing.

She does indeed seem to return repeatedly to scenes where someone is seemingly stuck in time. In fact, this seems to be a primary element in her more recent movie "The Future" where time is being held up for a seeming indefinite arc of story. Perhaps it is some sort of statement about the modern condition but as I encountered these (in one of them she is poised with one foot in the freshly drawn bathwater, the other out, and she ponders just staying frozen like that until the person that just left the house never to come back returns), they resonated with me more viscerally - I've had such moments before and even when I don't indulge them in the end, there are others that I notice as their potential rises and falls in the stream of consciousness flowing by.

Her obsession with behavioral detail is enjoyable to witness, as in The Shared Patio where she's not sure if the landlord explained to the couple downstairs that in fact their patio really was supposed to be a shared patio for her (the persona, and she writes from a variety of these) to use equally, so she marks on the calendar when they use it so she can match them in terms of patio-sitting time and then goes and sits for a while then crosses out the mark now that both parties are commensurate:

"Sometimes I lag behind and have to sit out there a lot toward the end of the month in order to catch up."