Mariner Books

“Through its peculiar blend of horror, sci-fi and satire, Friday Black presents America as caught in a funhouse mirror—fear and fury and fully-righteous greed brought into relief and magnified into hideous detail. Still, no matter how exaggerated and distorted the reflection, its eyes are always staring back, as cold and star-spangled as ever. Adjei-Brenyah is undeterred, staring right back with an unflinching gaze, all the while grasping for anything that might represent a human heart that still exists within the monster ahead of him” [Read full review].

Jen Beagin – Pretend I’m Dead

OneWorld (UK) / Simon & Schuster (US)

“A fuller version of Mona soon emerges, one apathetic and emotionally-distant not through some hip disaffection but rather the chaos and distrust of her past. The metaphor of cleaning takes on a whole new slant, a constant movement toward purity that is doomed to perpetual action, just as Mona’s attempts to reconnect with herself and others allows long swept memories to surface.

Unlike [A.M.] Homes’s Novak [from This Book Will Save Your Life], Jen Beagin’s Mona cannot free herself from cynicism long enough to embrace any potential cure, though there is a similarity in how proximity to bizarre beliefs and lifestyles encourage the development of one’s own. Maybe a full embrace of one’s position and life, contrary to any outside expectation or criticism, is a noble and valuable pursuit. Which is to say, for Mona, perhaps cleaning could have a spiritual function? No book, no psychic seeing, no pyjama-clad, lotus-positioned observance of the setting sun can be sure of saving one’s life. But perhaps the idea can trigger something more practical. Something better than pretending to be dead” [Read full review].

Sam Byers – Perfidious Albion

Faber & Faber (UK)

“Far from nebulous abstractions, for Byers, ideas and opinions have effects and consequences. Thoughts, spread widely enough, can change the world. And now, thanks to the internet, they are spread with greater reach and immediacy than ever before. Context is stripped, as is intonation and intention. Irony is mistaken for sincerity and vice versa. The reader decides how to take any given information, and their interpretation can never be incorrect. Their interpretation is the information. Additionally, as communication is gamified into a competition of numbers, the feedback loop is closed. You simply give the readers what they want.

[…]

Byers suggests that if the dualism between on and offline has collapsed, so too has the dualism between true and false. Fake News and Alternative Facts may be presented as an invention of the Trump administration, but mass media is the true pioneer. And, in the same way, the solution is far deeper and more knotty than merely ignoring misinformation from nefarious governments in favour of the truth. Rather, fact and fiction blur, our world now a hyperreality where such distinctions have lost their meaning. In the closing scene, Jess and Deepa listen to an ASMR recording of rainfall, and the soundtrack merges with the sound of actual rain hitting the roof outside. The digital and physical have merged, the fictional and ‘real’ enmeshed as one. But then, such is life in the hysterical present” [Read full review (for 3AM Magazine)].

Elaine Castillo – America is Not the Heart

Atlantic Books (UK) / Viking (US)

“Elaine Castillo’s true triumph is that America Is Not the Heart cannot be faithfully categorized purely as an immigrant saga or LGBT romance. This, aside from being a testament to her writing, serves as a scathing critique of just what those labels entail, and what it says about the white gatekeepers who control them. Hero’s story does not conform to the ideal Western immigrant story of foreigner done well. She is not a plucky underdog making a home against homesickness and long odds, her history not present only to be beaten smooth of its sharp edges. Ultimately, she does not exist to follow the fanciful arc us straight white people like to imagine an immigrant or queer person traversing—the palatable, enriching passage from alienation to total acceptance, and thus, of course, a more realised state of being.

Because America Is Not the Heart is a novel about human experience, about loving and being loved, where every detail—the Filipinx-American setting, historical context, bisexual relationships, class hierarchies, family dramas—is used not to build the characters but the world around them, Great American conditions that must be navigated in order to live” [Read full review].

Evan Dara – Provisional Biography of Mose Eakins

Aurora

One of our favourite novelists returns with what he describes as “a play in progress,” which isn’t that great a leap seeing as Evan Dara’s work has always been entirely dialogue. Available only in electronic formats, Provisional Biography of Mose Eakins tells the story of the titular character’s struggle with a novel medical condition which renders every word that leaves his mouth meaningless. That is, unless he asks to buy something. Dara takes aim at Late capitalism, capturing the crushing confusion and alienation of existence in a world in which even human connection has been commodified.

Sergio De La Pava – Lost Empress

MacLehose Press (UK) / Pantheon Books (US)

Detailing indoor football teams, expert EMTs and Dali paintings on Rikers island, while the tone veers between Pynchonian slapstick and philosophical musings, Lost Empress has an almost improvisational quality that refuses to slow or settle into any one groove. In what is becoming the author’s signature, the book rebels against concision and efficiency in favour of proliferation, the interconnectedness never reaching a neat conclusion but feeling all the more salient as a result. Like A Naked Singluarity before it, the novel situates Sergio De La Pava as a lead figure in the contemporary fight for challenging, ambitious fiction—and proves that the battle is not as hopeless as many would have you believe.

Nick Drnaso – Sabrina

Granta (UK) / Drawn & Quarterly (USA)

Ignore the people that said Sabrina was overhyped, a token placement on prize lists. Nick Drnaso’s graphic novel is a wonderful piece of literature, and one of 2018’s best attempts to get at the fear, paranoia and pervading sadness of the contemporary western world. Although the narrative centres on unspeakable tragedy, the real triumph is how Drnaso’s simple muted illustrations capture quiet loneliness and isolation. Yes, there’s desperation and grief, but equally powerful is the sorrow ingrained in clipped conversations and the walls of empty rooms.

William Gay – The Lost Country

Faber & Faber (UK) / Dzanc Books (US)

A lost William Gay novel, what more do we have to say? One of the masters of Southern Gothic delivers another story full of colourfully downtrodden characters, McCarthy-esque prose and whip-poor-wills. Billy Edgewater hitchhikes home after being discharged from the Navy, and navigates a whole shapeless community of the damned and depraved, drunks, swindlers and evil killers gathering in a tragicomic hellscape of decay and destitution.

Lauren Groff – Florida

William Heinemann (UK) / Riverhead (US)

“The Florida of [Groff]’s world is a canary in the coal mine, a ground zero for the approaching catastrophe. Her anxiety is not concerned with the likelihood of disaster, but rather the scale. Degrees of ruin sorted into a hierarchy—individual, familial, local, regional, national, global—and the question becomes whether a personal calamity will get to the characters before the climate slides into a planetary one. Will they get picked off one by one by a monstrous feline before the sea engulfs the peninsula? Will their house collapse into a sinkhole, killing them before the real trouble begins? Because, while the titular state might be uniquely dangerous, with its cottonheads and gators and mythic black panthers, the real looming threat is more ubiquitous and inescapable. “She had always thought this would be the place to be during the climate wars that she sees looming in the future,” Groff writes, her protagonist finding Paris hotter than she had imagined. “But maybe there is no place to be; maybe all places on a hotter planet will be equally bad, desert and hunger everywhere.”

In the opening story ‘Ghosts and Empties’ we find her wandering the streets after dark, afraid to be in the house because of a propensity to yell, leaving the parenting duties to her husband, who does not yell. However, far from appearing unhinged, the narrator comes across the sane one […] Who wouldn’t yell, knowing what we know, living how we do?” [Read full review].

Denis Johnson – The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

Jonathan Cape (UK) / Random House (US)

To view The Largesse of the Sea Maiden as the parting words of a genius is a fair perspective, though to assume the collection’s primary interest exists in Johnson’s death is to disrespect the stories as valuable additions to his oeuvre. With an epistolary story where the protagonist writes to people as part of his AA program (“Dear Old Dad and Dear Grandma…,” “Dear Pope John Paul…,” “Dear Satan…,” “Dear Rolling Stone and TV Guide…,”), the return of some old faces (or, more accurately, old Heads) and devastating, semi-autobiographical tales of subtle grief, the work might be the last from a master, but it is by no means an end.

Rachel Kushner – The Mars Room

Jonathan Cape (UK) / Scribner (US)

“In The Mars Room, characters are not separated into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ prisoners. Stoicism and sacrifice mean nothing not because a yawning nihilistic meaninglessness consumes all within the cell walls, but rather because meaning persists in all. Even the disobedient have significance, the most troubled and violent. Which goes some way in explaining the cast of characters within Stanville. Spouse killers, baby killers, killers of any witnesses. White supremacists and death row fantasists and women now specialists in playing lonely men over the phone. All are treated with an even gaze, with no hierarchy of morality or self-worth.

In this way, Kushner is following something of a Dostoyevskian theme, her characters capable of committing terrible violence and maintaining some semblance of innocence too. As Jennifer Wilson wrote in a recent article for The New York Times, “Dostoyevsky implored [that] it is not only our task to support the innocent or wrongly convicted but also to recognize the humanity of the guilty and the shared sense of responsibility that we have for one another.” As Romy insists at the end of the novel, “the opposite of nothing is not something. It is everything.” For Rachel Kushner, being human no matter what means just that. No matter what” [Read full review].

Ottessa Moshfegh – My Year of Rest and Relaxation

Jonathan Cape (UK) / Penguin (US)

“In his 2013 book 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, Jonathan Crary argues that, from the perspective of twenty-first century capitalism, sleep is a useless, even deleterious phenomena. After all, we cannot buy anything while unconscious, nor can we work. Our productivity is nil. ‘The stunning, inconceivable reality [of sleep],’ Crary writes, ‘is that nothing of value can be extracted from it.’

[…]

If capitalism denatures our existence into an unbearable state, then the obvious reaction is to rebel against capitalism. Only, Moshfegh’s narrator finds a dead end down that path, with art, protest and even complete withdrawal already co-opted and commodified to become just another version of neoliberal life. The second option, then, is to abstain from life altogether. If the parasite can’t be killed, then what about killing the host? Which means locking your doors, abandoning your friends, doing everything you can to minimise your existence. In this way, Moshfegh offers her own counter-intuitive cure—narcissistic solipsism as the antidote to a culture of narcissistic solipsism. Capitalism will still try to draw from you in this state, yes, but does it matter if one has no memory of its fangs? Perhaps the stunning, inconceivable reality of sleep is not that nothing can be extracted from it, but rather that nothing can get inside” [Read full review (for the Cardiff Review)].

 Sayaka Murata – Convenience Store Woman

Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori

Portobello Books

“[Keiko’s sister is] far happier thinking [Keiko] is normal, even if she has a lot of problems, than she is having an abnormal sister for whom everything is fine. For her, normality—however messy—is far more comprehensible.” So sums up the position of Sayaka Murata’s Keiko, a woman who finds solace and purpose working in a convenience store, though faces unceasing criticism for her disinterest in ‘proper’ jobs or marriage. Her family and friends, projecting loneliness and depression onto her situation, want her to be ‘cured’, to be normal. But for Keiko, the only source of loneliness and depression is this concern from others. The result is cutting, fearless exploration of what it means to be different in a society that, for all of its talk of diversity, seems hellbent on the total homogenisation of what it means to be human.

Tommy Orange – There There

Harvill Secker (UK) / Knopf (US)

“Orange complicates things by delving into the idea of performance and invented identity. Yes, Orvil finds healing magic within powwow music, but then his brother finds the same within Chance the Rapper and Earl Sweatshirt, and the other in the arrangements of Beethoven. And, when Orvil films himself dancing in traditional clothing, the act is a half-satisfying tug-of-war between holy and phony, an attempt at realisation rather than realisation itself. Still, Orvil perseveres, determined to dance at the upcoming Powwow where the novel’s characters converge, and finds value within his quest. Because a Native search for meaning is much like any other, a process of belief and faith that depends not on some sacred arrangement of sounds and rituals but rather the commitment to the cause. Identity need not be a binary presence or absence, but something to be discovered, nurtured, or dropped.

Gertrude Stein’s passage containing the “there there” quote continues along such lines. “It is a funny thing about addresses where you live.” she writes. “When you live there you know it so well that it is like an identity […] then years after you do not know what the address was and when you say it is not a name anymore but something you cannot remember. That is what makes your identity not a thing that exists but something you do or do not remember.” Which is to say, Indianness is not something inherent and inviolable at the core of all things, nor is it something that can be eradicated forever. Rather, it is the product of what is remembered, and what is not. There can be a there there, Tommy Orange seems to say, and one defined not by white fantasy, but the Natives themselves. It is just a case of remembering” [Read full review].

Chris Power – Mothers

Faber & Faber (UK) / Farrar, Straus and Giroux (US)

“Strong stories will always instigate some sort of reaction or change, but to assume that this alteration will always be good, or to map them on any kind of good-bad binary at all, is to underestimate the power of fiction. Yes, the characters of Chris Power attempt to use stories as an antidote to loneliness, but that’s not to say every effort is redemptive or magically healing. Indeed, sometimes it is actively counterproductive, the stories growing into new, deeper sources of loneliness that grip a soul and refuse to let go. Fiction, it turns out, is not some therapeutic balm. Rather, it is something that can help and hinder, soothe and scorch, and in doing so, be as nuanced and complicated as life itself” [Read full review].

Richard Powers – Overstory

William Heinemann (UK) / W.W. Norton & Company (US)

“Speaking about the environment makes you either a naive idealist or unhinged polemic, and neither belong in the circles of the truly ‘intelligent’ […] Thus, to speak about the environment is to silence yourself.

But Powers refuses to be silenced, which translates to a lot of (intentionally) heavy-handed dendrological metaphors, a lot of (non-ironic) talk of rediscovering the beauty of nature and much (sincere) discussion of how humans are terrible and short-sighted and doomed in the way of a Greek tragedy. Essentially, a lot of trees. However, the fact that such a premise feels tiring, and the metaphors ham-fisted, and the views unsophisticated only confirms Powers’ point. There’s nothing hip or trendy about this message. There is no cultural capital to be earned, no badges of honour to wear, no quick redemption to cash in at the next available opportunity. There’s a slow, grinding process of unpicking ourselves from the prevailing attitudes and expectations, a version of life less comfortable and entertaining and cool. A willingness to appear naive in the short term in the hope of defeating the wider foolishness, a committed attempt to confront what surely lies before us. The Overstory represents a bravery test not only for Richard Powers, but for us all” [Read full review].

Nico Walker – Cherry

Jonathan Cape (UK, forthcoming 2019) / Knopf (US)

Cherry a blistering and breathless novel that confronts post 9/11 America through the lens of just one young man. It’s raw and brutal and hilarious, sad and terrifying and oftentimes intensely uncomfortable. Nico Walker has written a contender for the best Iraq novel and the best opioid epidemic novel in one.

The post Favourite Books of 2018 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Taking the title from Stein’s quote, Tommy Orange’s debut novel There, There applies a similar sentiment to the Native American experience in contemporary America. Told from a multitude of perspectives, the work is a tapestry of voices that forms a picture of indigenous life in Oakland, California. This structure can be tied to the role of Dene Oxendene, one of the book’s characters who is granted funding to collect the stories of American Indian people around the city. Each chapter begins with the name of the person focused on there, allowing the novel to read like a carefully arranged archive, specific and highly personal stories curated to tell a loose, community-based narrative.

Though maybe community is the wrong word, or at least could be taken as such. Because the stereotypical impression of an Indian community is as condescending as it is reductive, flattening the people into permanent mourners or warriors who band together through some profound sense of belonging, a group sage and wise and vaguely mystic, as though permanently tapped into the very essence of history and nature itself. Through a chorus of voices that spans several generations, Orange fights homogeneity and cultivates humanity, breathing air into the flat representation of indigenous people, inflating them into their full, 3D shape once more.

With this in mind, the relevance of Stein’s quote is brought into relief. Which is to say, Orange’s title is a lamentation of sorts, though not quite of the manner one might expect. The cliched perspective would like to imagine it as a plaintive evocation of a land now lost, a desire to return to the spiritual harmony of bygone eras where man and beast and earth itself lived in sympathetic peace. A sensation born of some spirit in the bloodline, something that persevered throughout the persecution and war and disease and famine, a sense of history and belonging burned within the soul of a people now and forever. Indeed, for whatever reason, it seems almost necessary from a white perspective to imagine such a thing. Perhaps it is easier to live with violence if you know the victims possess the character to endure it? Or maybe we need to project a transcendental form of identity to compensate for some fundamental lack within our own history, like some quaint, far off proof that higher meaning is possible, and we are not alone.

But the characters here have not lost their land, because their land is urban Oakland. People who “came to know the downtown Oakland skyline better than we did any sacred mountain range, the redwoods in the Oakland hills better than any other deep wild forest.” Rather, it is the spirit that is being lost. The sense of identity and belonging that we like to ascribe. Indeed, Tommy Orange could be said to have flipped the white expectation, the “no there there” referring to personal and communal Indianness, and not the stage upon which this can be enacted. There, There is map of reactions to this, ranging from the apoplectic to apathetic—a web of characters trying to figure out how to square their own view of their heritage with that of those around them, as well as the world at large.

Some, such as janitor Thomas Frank and young Orvil Red Feather, find a drumbeat within their hearts, pounding out a longing to more fully immerse themselves within their ancestral culture. However, Orange complicates things by delving into the idea of performance and invented identity. Yes, Orvil finds healing magic within powwow music, but then his brother finds the same within Chance the Rapper and Earl Sweatshirt, and the other in the arrangements of Beethoven. And, when Orvil films himself dancing in traditional clothing, the act is a half-satisfying tug-of-war between holy and phony, an attempt at realisation rather than realisation itself. Still, Orvil perseveres, determined to dance at the upcoming Powwow where the novel’s characters converge, and finds value within his quest. Because a Native search for meaning is much like any other, a process of belief and faith that depends not on some sacred arrangement of sounds and rituals but rather the commitment to the cause. Identity need not be a binary presence or absence, but something to be discovered, nurtured, or dropped.

Gertrude Stein’s passage containing the “there there” quote continues along such lines. “It is a funny thing about addresses where you live.” she writes. “When you live there you know it so well that it is like an identity […] then years after you do not know what the address was and when you say it is not a name anymore but something you cannot remember. That is what makes your identity not a thing that exists but something you do or do not remember.” Which is to say, Indianness is not something inherent and inviolable at the core of all things, nor is it something that can be eradicated forever. Rather, it is the product of what is remembered, and what is not. There can be a there there, Tommy Orange seems to say, and one defined not by white fantasy, but the Natives themselves. It is just a case of remembering.

There, There is out now via Harvill Secker (UK) and Knopf (US).

The post Tommy Orange – There, There appeared first on Various Small Flames.

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.

— Omar El Akkad

Canadian-Egyptian journalist Omar El Akkad has experience of human conflict. In his ten years writing for The Globe and Mail, El Akkad covered a diverse range of politically and socially-charged events, from the Arab Spring in Egypt and the US War in Afghanistan, to military trials at Guantanamo Bay and the Black Lives Matter movement in Ferguson. However, there must have been a sense of familiarity by the second and third events, each an example of ordinary people rising against injustices by systems with guns and armour. People made angry, and acting like angry people will.

His debut novel, American War, feels rooted in such understanding. A dystopic imagining of the Second American Civil War, the book takes place in the last quarter of the twenty-first century, each chapter followed by an excerpt from various sources of (fictional) non-fiction that provide the necessary exposition without drowning the narrative. And boy is such exposition needed. El Akkad’s America is one ravaged by climate change, great portions of the country too hot to inhabit or else underwater, while the entire Middle East is now the Bouazizi Empire, a prosperous and stable democracy. The United States are no longer united, north and south split into Blue and Red, a battle of brutal force and insidious insurgency amplified by new technology—cheap guns and IEDs joined by bio-warfare plagues and unmanned, solar-power drones gone haywire, dropping fire indiscriminately.

Perhaps understandably, much of the critical reception has focused on the novel’s link to the current political and cultural situation in the United States. With visible, bare-faced white supremacism joining the already copious amounts of insidious racism across the country, and the bipartisan split between right and left seemingly growing more conspicuous and developed by the day, the term ‘civil war’ has been bandied semi-seriously. The bottom line is that America represents different things to different people, so ‘being American’ has various conflicting and often incompatible definitions that makes any sort of peaceful middle ground seem not just fanciful but downright impossible. In a novel where rebel states in the South secede from the Union in order to continue the extraction of fossil fuels, and both sides are entrenched in the ideological righteousness of their position, parallels are always going to be drawn.

However, the real focus of the novel is not the ‘America’ of the title but the ‘War’—a fact made clear by the quote from El Akkad himself on the front cover (see the epigraph to the article). 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. The American setting is just the method of grounding this facet of the human condition, marking it not as some geographical, cultural or religious trait but rather the product of suffering and trauma.

American War is out in the UK via Picador and the US through Knopf.

The post Omar El Akkad – American War appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Whether Garth Risk Hallberg lived up to the hype is up for debate. I’d suggest there is a certain ‘hype threshold’ past which people will ensure you get a fair share of criticism regardless of what’s between the covers. What is not up for discussion is the beauty of the writing on show, nor is the sheer scope of the world it brings to life. Here we find a network of characters linked by blood or love or sheer chance which grows through schizophrenic POV changes and creative interludes. To give you some idea: There’s Mercer, a man struggling with being gay and black in 1970s New York and his relationship with punk musician/artist William, heir to the Hamilton-Sweeney fortune who’s music with the now-defunct Ex Post Facto “seemed to promise complete freedom, on the condition of complete surrender”. Then there’s William’s estranged sister Regan and her troubled relationship with husband Keith, who are themselves caught up in the Hamilton-Sweeney machine, plus loser-loner Charlie and his friendship with punk cool-kid Sam, and their link to the Post-Humanist Phalanx. That’s not to mention the police detective, the art dealer, the shock jock radio presenter. The investigative journalist, the firework-setter, the transvestite keyboard player. The anarchistic, arsonist cult leader.

So… yeah, it’s all too detailed to review properly, though the key plot is strangely simple. Packed with the sort of suspense/drama you might expect from a film or television show, the book is not as challenging (difficult, ‘literary’) as you might expect. What Hallberg does achieve is to conjure New York at a specific time. The web of characters produce a panoramic snapshot of a generation, palpable nostalgia and a good sprinkling of well-used topics (troubled artists, drug addicts, traumatised and/or damaged lovers) creating a view of the seventies perhaps as we’d like to remember them. The spirit of the book is captured nicely near the beginning, when the clock strikes midnight on New Year’s Day :

“For a second the city seemed to lean forward and make contact with a future self: ruined, de-peopled, and nearly still. In a sealed hanger, forensic economists move around numbered lots with scales and callipers. Believing themselves to have evolved beyond delusion and loneliness, beyond illness and longing and sex, they hum distractedly and wonder what it all meant”

As books go, City on Fire is pretty easy to soundtrack, so this playlist could have been a hundred songs. But anyway, here are twenty songs which go some way to capturing the time/place/mood Hallberg created. I’ve included a mix of classics and newer stuff to keep things interesting, and the order isn’t important.

Tracklisting:

1. Blank Generation – Richard Hell and the Voidoids
2. Art is Hard – Cursive
3. To Hell With Good Intentions – Japandroids
4. Kimberly – Patti Smith
5. Chinese Rocks – The Heartbreakers
6. Roar of Nothingness – Sun Organ
7. Docking Guard – Northern Primitive
8. Today, More Than Any Other Day – Ought
9. Aloha Steve and Danno – Radio Birdman
10. The Kids – Lou Reed
11. Orphans – Teenage Jesus and the Jerks
12. Stevie Nix – The Hold Steady
13. Who Do You Belong To? – The Spirit of The Beehive
14. You Can’t Hold The Hand of a Rock and Roll Man – Okkervil River
15. Our Lives Would Make a Sad, Boring Movie – The Hotel Year
16. Using – Sorority Noise
17. Fireworks – Radiator Hospital
18. Your Own Place To Ruin – Rivulets
19. New York Hardcore – Talons’
20. This Heart’s on Fire – Wolf Parade

City on Fire is out now via Knopf Doubleday (US) and Jonathan Cape and is available from all good book shops. Quiet, Constant Friends is available digitally and on cassette via the Wake The Deaf Bandcamp page.

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