Jennifer Egan – Manhattan Beach

Corsair / Scribner

“Beneath the exciting plot and readable prose, Egan is still examining the modes and consequences of power in the United States. As such, Manhattan Beach is the introduction to the Look At Me‘s conclusion, the two texts book-ending an American fantasy which opened and closed in war.”

REVIEW

Steve Erickson – Shadowbahn

Blue Rider Press

“In Steve Erickson’s Shadowbahn, the Twin Towers return, fully formed, in the middle of the Dakota Badlands. Thousands are drawn to this “American Stonehenge,” and rumours start of a figure on the upper floors. This person, we find out, is Jesse Presley, the stillborn twin of Elvis—a man with no singing voice haunted by the spectre of his brother, and the memory of a parallel America where Elvis was never born. Growing increasingly strange, the dream-like novel charts the movement of several characters through this world, where a second reality impinges on our own, as though the line between two dimensions has grown porous, slowly melding into one.” (Taken from our review of Protomartyr’s Relatives In Descent).

Ottessa Moshfegh – Homesick for Another World

Jonathan Cape

“I don’t know what they teach you in Utah,” warns an elderly gossip column writer in one of the stories from Ottessa Moshfegh’s Homesick for Another World, “but even Jesus would get greedy here.” Similarly black and bleak, the entire collection is built on characters who, in one way or another, are reaching a point of unbearable tension within their current state. From the alcoholic, grade-fudging teacher of opener ‘Bettering Myself’ to the wannabee actor and  of ‘The Weirdos’, the people here are somehow jarred slightly out of reality, lost within the only world they know, or reaching a fatal point of self-destruction—exploding in some great flash of light or disintegrating into dust and shifted high on the wind. Consistently funny and sad and interesting, Homesick cements Moshfegh’s position as one of the best writers plying their trade right now.

Gabe Habash – Stephen Florida

Coffee House Press

Stephen Florida follows the final year of a lonely young wrestler in a North Dakota college, the last chance to achieve his dream of winning the Division IV NCAA Championship. Evoking the likes of DeLillo‘s Logos College and Wallace’s Enfield Tennis Academy, the college is a paradoxical blend of logic and madness, the ascetic athletic routine straining around the neurotic inner lives of the athletes, the competition between the boys blossoming into obsession and violence. Florida himself is either the ultimate unreliable narrator, or the most reliable narrator literature has ever seen, sucking us into his strange life and having us root for him, no matter how futile we both realise the quest to be.

Chavisa Woods – Things To Do When You’re a Goth in the Country

Seven Stories Press

“The stories are a reminder that despite much of the bluster and bravado it presents internationally, America is a dense mosaic of misfits, many of whom are trapped in damaging cycles by powers beyond their control. Whether dealing with war, drugs, queer relationships or, well… being a goth in the country, Chavisa Woods achieves a tone that’s simultaneously streetwise and sympathetic, and is exactly the kind of fiction we’re going to need to get us through currents times.”

REVIEW

Daniel Magariel – One of the Boys

Granta

Short, sharp and striking, Magariel’s debut One of the Boys blends sensitivity and ferocity to explore the relationship between two young boys and their abusive father. Fleeing their mother (inventing stories of maltreatment to gain custody), the volatile dad drives his sons to Albuquerque, promising a tight-knit relationship and a better life. But instead he slowly descends into the nadir of addiction, leaving the brothers to navigate the complexities of adult life alone, learning the importance of the unsaid, the truth behind closed doors.

Joseph Scapellato – Big Lonesome

Mariner Books

“Here, times gone are both something to escape and retreat into, to remember and forget, questions and answers and warnings all rolled into one. They come with lessons we’d do well to learn, expectations we’d do well to ignore. Ultimately, Big Lonesome paints the past as something that can destroy us, and as something that could save our souls.”

REVIEW

Omar El Akkad – American War

Picador / Knopf

“For all of its futuristic flourishes, this war could be any number of places from the past fifty years. The refugee camps, the suicide bombers, the baseless incarceration and torture. The distant foreign concern, the malicious intervention. The self-perpetuating violence. Angry young people killing angry young people, creating more angry young people. So, beneath the YA-style coming-of-age plot and sci-fi dressing, the novel is a study of radicalisation, of finding identity and purpose within chaos through unflinching world views and gestures of loyalty.”

REVIEW

George Saunders – Lincoln in the Bardo

Bloomsbury

“The majority of the action takes place in a state of existence between life and whatever comes next. The space is laid over our own, the spirits that inhabit it able to see the real world and pass across it, but unable to successfully interact with anything tangible, or communicate with anyone living. The result is a frustrating and confusing isolation, where words can be voiced but not heard, gestured made but never quite received. They are, therefore, left as bewildered viewers of the living, incapable of altering their paths and decisions, and wondering when, if ever, something might change.” (Taken from our review of Friendship’s Shock out of Season).

Nathan Hill – The Nix

Picador

“Hill is dedicated to the Wallacean endeavor of sincerity while simultaneously warning of the dangers that arise from a complete suspension of skepticism and irony. The Nix enacts a constantly revolving committal to criticism and skepticism coupled with attempts at understanding and empathy, a perpetual readjustment of the scales so that neither irony nor sincerity can gain detrimental prevalence.” (From a piece for Critique).

 Chanelle Benz – The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead

Ecco

The debut collection of stories by Chanelle Benz, The Man Who Shot Out My Eye is Dead stretches across eras, places and styles to become one of the most diverse and wide-ranging books of the year. From Western bank hold-ups and contemporary wanderers to Middle Eastern subterfuge and a metafictional pastiche/parody of Gothic romance classics, the structure, tone and content veers from piece to piece, leaving it unclear quite where Benz’s true voice will settle, but offering a handful of viable avenues for the future.

The post Favourite Books of 2017 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

It’s up for debate whether Alexandra Kleeman’s début novel You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine is dystopian. I mean, it’s too familiar and life-like to be truly dystopian, although that’s exactly what makes it so terrifying. The world seems to be functioning pretty much as normal, as people go about their days with the aimless sense of duty we are all accustomed to, a far cry from the visions of Orwell or Burgess or Dick. But the definition of dystopia is “a community or society that is undesirable or frightening”, so who’s to say “normal” can’t also be dystopic?

Kleeman’s narrator ‘A’ is blank, mostly faceless with few discernible personality traits. Her job feels temporary and is barely mentioned. Many of her scenes involve her doing very little inside her apartment. Instead she is fleshed out through her exposure to-/interaction with her room-mate (‘B’), boyfriend (‘C’) and the vivid stream of entertainment and advertising (or entertaining advertisement) which seems part of the world’s very fabric. Obvious comparisons are Pynchon and Foster Wallace, plus George Saunders in his being-clever mode (as opposed to his sentimental one), although the focus is very much away from the large-scale political/societal systems in favour of personal, A-centric explorations. All background occurrences (the mystery of disappearing dads, an anti-veal activist who ends up marketing it, even B and C) are filtered through A’s experience.

As the story is told in first person this might seem obvious, but (to me at least) it goes much deeper than that. In most postmodern books the main character is subject to/lost amongst a world of disinformation, whereas in You Too… it’s A herself who feels like the disinformation. The question here isn’t “is the world as the media says it is?” but rather “am I who the media says I am? Who I think I am?” Whether this is an emerging trend in post-postmodern millennial literature, a natural reaction to a world in which identity is unsettled and fluctuating, or just a new, gender-based perspective on things traditionally written about by men is unclear. One thing is for certain, Kleeman is a name to watch among the new generation of writers building upon the work of the aforementioned greats.Here’s a collection of songs that I think are relevant or related to the novel. If you like a particular band, just click the artist name in the tracklisting to be whisked away for more information. Enjoy:

Tracklisting:

1. Too Dark – Frankie Cosmos
2. Sucks Hanging Out With You (It Sucks Even More When You Leave) – Free Cake For Every Creature
3. Slumber Party – Mommy Long Legs
4. What’s Another Lipstick Mark – Adult Mom
5. Unholy Faces – Florist
6. Bedroom – Alanna McArdle
7. TV – Oh, Rose & Sawtooth
8. Death Cult Paradise – Trace Mountains
9. I Saw My Twin – Hop Along
10. Nashville Parthenon – Casiotone For The Painfully Alone
11. Dear Sons and Daughters of Hungry Ghosts – Wolf Parade
12. Oranges – Young Jesus
13. 1994 – PWR BTTM
14. Washing Machine – SPORTS
15. Lookalike / I Lost My Mind – Titus Andronicus

You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine is out now on HarperCollins. Quiet, Constant Friends is still available as a download or on cassette via the Wake The Deaf Bandcamp page. You can read the other Lit Links posts here. If you have a book in mind and fancy a go yourself, just get in touch!

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“This is no chillwave side-project, no 80s-inspired synth revolution, just an extremely talented lyricist doing what he does best”

Instead of a drastic alteration of sound, what had changed was the focus and reach of Ashworth’s writing. There has long been a factoid in circulation that Owen Ashworth is a sad, angry-at-the-world young man who writes sad, angry-at-the-world music, most likely about himself. Of course, the moniker Casiotone For The Painfully Alone didn’t help matters, nor did his choice of theme or style (for those not familiar, CFTPA is a pretty much perfect description). However, the true strength of his writing is how he manages to cast outside of himself to create nuanced, believable characters from different walks of life. While early albums (arguably right up to Etiquette) focused on post-collegiates lost in their twenties, Ashworth has gradually cast his net wider, and Advance Base’s sophomore album Nephew in the Wild finds this evolution still in motion, with the characters slowly radiating from the sad teens in draughty apartments into a wide ensemble of (still mostly sad) misfits, dropouts and unfortunates (read: real human beings) occupying all sorts of lives and unfortunate situations.

The record opens with ‘Trisha Please Come Home’, in which a nameless narrator rues the disappearance of the titular Trisha from their small, blue-collar town. While the scenario might not seem all that original, Ashworth subverts the usual lost-love angst in favour of real-world worry and sincerity – small, poignant details replacing the sweeping melodrama and self-pity familiar to pop and country music. So when they say “You don’t call me ever on the phone / Am I supposed to listen to Thin Lizzy & get high on my own?” it comes off a half-joke, an attempt to make light of a situation that has hurt more than they would ever admit.

As a consequence of this careful writing ability, you always get the sense that the characters in Ashworth’s music are almost real – three-dimensional, complex people who have lives outside of the incidents and accidents detailed in the songs. Take ‘Might of the Moose’ for example, an indie pop vignette where the narrator hits a moose with their car. The tale alone seems odd and dramatic enough to warrant telling, but the song is loaded with greater meaning, subtle details woven in with a master’s precision.

“On my way home from Traverse City
I hit a moose it wasn’t pretty
Walked ’til I found a Citgo payphone down the road
& I called your house it’s the only number that I know”

As is often the case with Ashworth’s work, a simple love story emerges from beneath (or rather within) the primary details, with small references to everyday events and gestures (ie. calling a familiar face for a tow truck after totalling your car) allowing a higher story to blossom. The song brings to mind ‘The Perfect Gerbil’, an essay by George Saunders from his collection The Braindead Megaphone, where he explains the genius of Donald Barthelme’s ‘The School’ and the economy of its language. The story is essentially a recurring pattern of increasing severity: things associated with the school die. It starts with an unsuccessful gardening project and escalates into classroom pets fatalities and eventually human death. The piece is funny and entertaining, with sharp wit and intrigue carrying your attention (ie. “what’s going to die next!?”) but the ending unfurls with a deft turn, allowing the true meaning to dawn on the reader. The teacher is asked by his class to make love to the teaching assistant Helen (“so that we can see how it is done… We know you like Helen”). The teacher refuses, although admits he likes the woman, and Helen just “looked out of the window”. As Saunders explains:

“A few lines ago we didn’t even know Helen existed, but we do now, and so does The Narrator, and the small voice in our mind that has all along been  registering that The Narrator has no personal life… is assuaged: this is now, writ small, a love story. It’s a love story!”

I suppose what I’m trying to say is that I think all of Ashworth’s songs are love stories in one way or another. ‘Christmas in Dearborn’ has an almost lullaby-style opening and a ‘hushed snowfall, fire in the hearth’ kind of vibe. Sad but warmly so, the song charts a holiday season with the people you don’t get along with but love all the same, describing the various guests and dull conversations while hinting at the failed marriage of the narrator. ‘Pamela’ is yet another spin of a love song, telling of a girl born to teenage parents, the father a drug dealer (“Sold acid & mescaline”) and the mother a fast food worker (“She worked at Dairy Queen/and no matter how she cleaned/she still had the smell of death in her hair”). This is a familiar theme in Ashworth’s work, a broken home where the father is absent (or worse) and love or the lack of it shapes both mother and child into forms they would rather not fill.

“You were born into a world of sin
You are the devil’s kin
The sign of the beast on your skin

You have come to fulfill a prophecy
To level humanity
& burn everything that you see”

‘Christmas in Milwaukee’, the second festive song, tells of a person trying to keep their head above water (both figuratively and literally) with a baby in tow. The love here is not the cotton-candy kind but rather one of pacts and promises, a binding force which makes even the most cheerful days unneeded complications (“You want a Christmas in Milwaukee/I’ve got trouble enough”). ‘Summon Satan’ goes a step further, with love conspicuous in its absence. Concerning teenage dabblings in the occult, this is a story of loneliness and isolation and the violent messed-up means a person can resort to abate them. “You had tried to summon Satan” sings Ashworth, “but screwed up the incantation, and left an open portal on your parents’ kitchen wall”, before going on to describe the brutal-yet-detached ‘curse’ in almost tender detail, as if he is looking back at something irreconcilable. Things don’t get any more conventional (or should that be fictional? Romantic?) with ‘My Love For You is Like a Puppy Underfoot’, with Jody Weinmann’s lyrics detailing lots of clever analogies of love.

“My love for you
It’s not an atom bomb
My love for you
It’s not a lightning storm
My love for you
It’s like a puppy underfoot
Better watch my step
You know I could trample it

My love for you
It’s not a movie script
Doesn’t make sense
To my friends when I describe it”

‘The Only Other Girl From Back Home’ plays like an old folk-song updated for the teens of maybe the eighties or nineties, with loneliness and liquor and lookers to fight over, and a good heap of tragedy to wrap things up. The title track is similarly tragic, the ghosts of absent fathers haunting the story of a family torn up by silly mistakes and blind chance (“In hard times kids grow up fast / Please be there for him / your sister would ask”). Again, the song feels from a previous time, not old per se but pre-internet, and indeed all of Nephew in the Wild sits somewhere in this not-so-distant past, The Year of the Painfully Alone, in which things appear simpler yet further apart, stretched wide by a lack of technology, a place where disappearances are easy and final.

So, for all the worries about changes of direction, Nephew in the Wild sees Ashworth following the same path he always has. Any changes are because he’s getting better at what he does, refusing to stand still. The final song, ‘Kitty Winn’, feels like a milestone along this road. The track’s autobiographical air is conspicuously different to the rest of the album, although the storytelling is if anything even more effective. It finds Ashworth older and wiser, accepting his past as something sometimes damaging and instead focussing on his new family and life at home. This too is very much a love song, in fact the most sincere, ardent one on the record.

“We got married in September
The baby came the next December
So I got off the road
It’s the longest I’ve been home
since I remember
I wake up earlier these days
to dress the kid & fix her eggs
Then we’ll walk down to the park
if it’s nice out
There’s a swing set where she plays

I’m not out looking for something
I haven’t found
You won’t see me around
I’ve got a family now”

It’s a wonderful song, and one which is imbued with perhaps the holiest of all emotions: contentment. And I for one hope it truly is autobiographical. I don’t know Owen Ashworth, and maybe I’m completely wrong, but he seems like a kind and empathetic generally nice human being, in the same way the best writers seem like people you could be friends with. Even if none of that is true, I guess it doesn’t matter – what is indisputable is the fact that he’s a damn good writer who tells stories that speak to and help us all. While it’s easy to cast him as the lonely boy in front of a keyboard, the truth, at least in my eyes, is that he’s often hardly there at all, a transparent gateway into the lives of people you’ve never met feeling things you thought you had to suffer through alone.

Nephew in the Wild is out now and you can download it from the Advance Base Bandcamp page or grab a physical copy from the Orindal store/Tomlab.

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