However, there came a time, in the closing minutes of almost every episode, where Ross took stock of the landscape before him and picked up the ol’ Filbert brush. “This is going to be your bravery test,” he would say, loading the bristles with the darkest paint before dropping a huge tree trunk in the foreground of his painting. Often, this tree would obscure fine details behind, pushing ahead of waterfalls and snow-capped peaks to draw all eyes to its bold, brash branches. Whether intended as such or not, the effect was one of plants fighting back, refusing to be shaped into the picaresque vista, as if to remind us that nature is not a pleasant background but rather the entirety of our home, and something of which we are only a small part.

The latest novel from Richard Powers, The Overstory is a novel operating according to such aims. Powers has carved a long and successful career marrying scientific detail and character study, using subjects such as artificial intelligence (Galatea 2.2), virtual reality (Plowing the Dark), and DNA and music (The Gold Bug Variations, Orfeo) as novel-wide allegories to explore the lives of his characters. The Overstory could be said to represent something of an inversion of this pattern. Instead of the science being used to illuminate the lives of his characters, here the primary function of the protagonists is to illuminate the critical importance of the environment. Or, more specifically, trees.

So, while the cast of characters is varied, each individual has an overt aboreal connection. Artist Nicholas Hoel is the last in a line of men dedicated to photographing the same chestnut tree each month, watching it grow from sapling to landmark. Mimi Ma is the daughter of a Chinese immigrant depressed by his dying mulberry. Neelay Mehta a computer whizz bound to a wheelchair after falling from a tree, and Douglas Pavlicek a Vietnam vet only alive after an even higher fall was broken by a miraculously placed banyan. Both Patricia Weatherford and Adam Appich grow up obsessed by nature and become successful scientists, though the former is tortured by the constant scepticism of his field, and the latter made a pariah for her pioneering view that trees could communicate with one another. Party animal Olivia Vandergriff grows convinced trees are communicating with her after a near death experience, and even Dorothy and Ray Brinkman, “two people for whom trees mean almost nothing,” find their lives shaped by a far quieter manifestation of nature’s power.

As you would expect from Powers, each individual is drawn with nuance and depth, and every separate narrative carries a sense of emotion and family history worthy of a novel in its own right. But, like the ecosystem Patricia hypothesises, all of these characters are connected on one level or another, be they sharing plots of land or impacting one another in a more diffuse way, like plants sending seeds or pollen through the air, or chemicals on the wind. The narrative threads push out like roots, and when two happen to converge, they fuse and strengthen one another, forging out in a new direction as one.

However, as hinted previously, the tree motif is not merely some device to portray the interconnected nature of contemporary life. Because, as much as Powers is interested in the existential questions of communication and isolation that mark the human condition, he has identified something more pressing, and indeed more existential. The systems of capitalism and consumerism have created an eschatological irony, where the constant push for efficient productivity is unravelling the systems that make life possible. A zealous commitment to growth that is destroying us. Furthermore, while all but the most dishonest now recognise that something about the current system is untenable, the overwhelming majority have done nothing of any consequence to reverse the trend. When the measures of success and happiness are almost entirely capitalistic, then why would we expect otherwise?

“Imminent, at the speed of people, is too late. The law must judge imminent at the speed of trees.”

Powers understands this, and takes it upon himself to fight against the tide with every ounce of his energy, no matter how it might be received or make him look. Which brings us back to Bob Ross. The Overstory feels like Richard Powers’ bravery test. Unless you’re a white teen with dreadlocks or live in a commune, there’s nothing cool about preaching green. That dismissive tree-hugging jokes are so easy and universal is a testament to that. So, when Powers’ intricate details are lost beneath his bullhorned message, and the moving character studies are drowned in facts about trees, the more ‘sophisticated’ reader might find themselves breaking out in a rash. When characters climb trees and paint trees, eat and sleep in trees, chain themselves to trees, the well-tested alarm bells in the ‘rationalist’ mind start ringing. Because, be it through self-harm or vague sinister forces, the image of the environmentalist has been seized and re-purposed as something of a joke—the stereotypical New Age crazy living off water and goodwill—thus undercutting any form of viable protest. Speaking about the environment makes you either a naive idealist or unhinged polemic, and neither belong in the circles of the truly ‘intelligent’ (“Righteousness makes Mimi nuts,” Powers writes on page 240. “She has always been allergic to people with conviction.”) 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.

“Adam fights down his hatred of virtuous singing […] Maybe it’s okay. Maybe mass extinction justifies a little fuzziness. Maybe earnestness can help his hurt species as much as anything. Who is he to say?”

The Overstory is out now via William Heinemann (UK) and W.W. Norton & Company (US). You can find out more about Richard Powers on his website.

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It was a surprise, then, to hear that Egan’s latest novel, Manhattan Beach, was a historical work without much in the way of genre-bending style. Pitched somewhere between crime-noir and domestic novel, the book follows the life of Anna Kerrigan, a girl growing up out of Depression-era New York into a war-time city where women are employed in the naval yard. This novel situation, coupled with Anna’s relationship with her disabled sister, worn-out mother and, most importantly, mysteriously absent and potentially mob-involved father, drives a narrative capable of straddling interior life with more genre-based features, with detective elements of urban thrillers and the rich research of historical fictional. However, while Anna finds herself spread across a range of scenes—family homes, docklands, nightclubs, crime dens—all are tied together by various forms of deceit and deception.

The opening scene finds a pre-teen Anna in the early 1930s, travelling with her father Eddie on one of his ‘work’ business trips, which appear to cast him as a kind of bagman for organised crime. From there, the narrative jumps to the 40s, to a Kerrigan household abandoned by Eddie with no explanation, and Anna working toward the war effort. Slowly, we learn that almost every character has secrets, with Anna more than most. Indeed, it is almost as though she has been conditioned by her father to lie, to occupy a slippery space whenever questions are asked, as though to mislead others is a vital part of self-preservation, a habit done often enough to become instinctive.

To say anymore risks spoiling the book, be it one based on clues and red herrings and mistaken identity. However, it bears saying that fans of Goon Squad and Look At Me, that is, readers expecting something more than glorified pulp noir from a writer such as Egan, should not be so quick to judge. The so-called ‘standard’ narrative not only contains enough signals—implicit communications, miscommunications, passive aggressions—to warrant deep investigative reading, but Egan uses both the character and setting to explore wider themes of American identity. The many-headed monster of organised crime proves a useful vehicle for such examinations, with the characters who find themselves roped into criminal systems not only justifying their involvement, but partaking in various means to obscure the fact, to conceal the truth of their crimes (from others and themselves) to the degree that their actions become abstract and ethically vague. This is just another example of the key theme of deception. Characters lying to shape their identity and gain some degree of agency. Some semblance of freedom. Be it from poverty, or preconceptions and reputation—essentially the forces of the prevailing system.

Jennifer Egan has long detailed an America heading toward some sort of saturation point, where consumerist culture and image-obsessed ideology would soon reach a critical, apocalyptic mass. While the closing segments of Goon Squad suggest a runaway escalation of technology, the tone and timing of Look At Me make 9/11 a kind of extra-narrative denouement. The American Dream, Egan seems to say, is collapsing into clouds of dust—America attacked and wounded, New York City at war—as though some falsehood has been revealed at its no longer impenetrable core. While it would be naive to say that Manhattan Beach traces back to the origin of this Dream, the novel portrays an America ready to inflate it, to display it to the wider world as an opportunity or promise more seductive than any other.

“I see the rise of this country to a height no country has occupied, ever […] Because our dominance won’t arise from subjugating peoples. We’ll emerge from this war victorious and unscathed, and become bankers to the world. We’ll export our dreams, our language, our culture, our way of life. And it will prove irresistible.”

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 texts book-ending an American fantasy which opened and closed in war.

Manhattan Beach is out now via Corsair (UK) and Scribner (US).

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— Joseph Scapellato, ‘Cowboy Good Stuff’s Four True Lovers’

Through a careful give and take between familiar imagery and surrealist flourishes, Joseph Scapellato’s debut collection Big Lonesome is a subversive love letter to The Wild West, skewing archetypes just enough to subvert the myths and tropes of the genre. Split into three sections– ‘Old West’, ‘New West’ and ‘Post-West’– the book stretches the notion of The West into the present and beyond, resulting in twenty-five stories of considerable variation that nonetheless hang upon the All-American themes of individualism, identity and history.

Unsurprisingly, ‘Old West’ is the most traditional of the segments, though this is not to say Scapellato plays it straight. ‘Big Lonesome Beginnings’ sets the tone, a story centred on a saunter of cowboys, one armed with a guitar in place of an absent Her, the others forcing themselves to stay awake so as not to miss what the music has them feeling. “He knew his music would never be a body,” Scapellato writes, “but he played it nonetheless.” From here we are introduced to cowboys of all shapes and sizes, from the eponymous centaurian hero of ‘Horseman Cowboy’ to the puny cowboy of ‘Mutt-Face’ who attempts (unsuccessfully) to drink himself big, each character representing some spin on the masculine mystique of Western mythology. One standout is ‘Thataway’, where a hard-luck cowboy lives in fear of a ‘rile’ which rises within him and (worse) the ‘weepies’ which sometimes follow. Sitting in a laundromat, he meets an odd old man who speaks of the ‘brown boy’ who climbs down throats and hugs hearts but ultimately abandons you. The story grows increasingly hallucinatory, the old man growing more strange and the brown boy manifesting physically. The cowboy comes to learn that beneath his fear of his emotions lies a deeper dread, a dark dead absence that grins behind the early promise of narcotic relief.

“Most nothings showed up where a something used to be, and the gone something was what you used to measure the nothing. This nothing had come from where there had never been anything. There was no telling how much of him it would require, and for how long, and to what end. It was much worse than the weepies” (23).

The jewel at the centre of ‘Old West’ is ‘Cowboy Good Stuff’s Four True Loves’, a piece split into subheadings detailing either a true love (“His First”, “His Second”, etc.) or other notable and metaphorically-ripe events from the cowboy’s life. His first three loves are women—a singing whore, a blushing teacher, a star-crossed senorita—but the fourth is a radio. Finding the cowboy in his old age and sharing wistful wisdom with a local kid (“Music don’t make the world smaller. Just makes you bigger.”), this final section paints loneliness in its true light, comprehensive and all-consuming yet also surprisingly feeble, a force that feels like the default state right up until it is no longer. The result is a Saunders-like sense of compassion and empathy, love appearing at irregular intervals to slap Good Stuff in the face and help him see clearly for however long it lasts.

“The way he saw it, love had always come to him like a thing remembered. Known and new. And now the radio! It received what it was given, and what it received it gave. It gave to those who gathered round. What was far was now” (36).

‘New West’ drags us forward into something like the present day, where the cowboys are still cowboys, yet ones reared on the Western myth. As such, it’s impossible to tell whether this West is one big performance or something intrinsic in the American spirit, loneliness and self-destruction made halfway gratifying by the knowledge of those already lost to the curse, by a nostalgia for something that was never quite yours. Again, the stories range from the mundane to the fantastic, the latter typified by ‘Cowgirl’, where a human female born of a cow traverses life in strange detachment, thoughts and feelings arriving and dissipating without warning, her mind clouded (or not) by a bovine thoughtlessness. ‘A Mother Buries a Gun in the Desert Again’ is a pretty literal expansion of the title, charting the slow sadness of ageing and steady surrender to liquid distractions, while ‘Small Boy’ serves as a direct challenge of the whole Heroic Western trope, asking a variety of people a simple question with the forthright innocence only found in young children. “Why did we kill all the Indians?”

Closing story ‘Snake Canyon’ has a Jon Raymond/Kelly Reinhardt vibe, finding two friends retreating to the wilderness as a salve against day-to-day life. “The air was clean and dry, but flush with the feeling they’d come for,” Scapellato writes. “An emptying out: an emptying in. A reminder that they were made out of their bodies” (95). Disaster strikes, as one of the men gets so badly injured the other must to carry him down the mountain, and the heart of the New West experience is revealed. Having a weird out-of-body experience, the man sees himself saving his friend’s life. At first, he is filled with pride at the vision, though doubts soon creep in as he wishes he was stronger and more confident in his life-saving ability. Finally, he turns to anger, furious at an imagined audience judging his every action, seeing his act of heroism in its less-than-glorious detail, recognising him not as a Western hero but a fallible human. The idea that the truth of the Old West was equally human/cowardly lurks at the back of the story, a vague awareness of some self-imposed amnesia, a blurring of the truth.

“By intentionally or unintentionally overlooking history, American communities could choose to shape and be shaped by imagined futures that, at least initially, appeared untouched by American mistakes, by American embarrassments. Freedom in forgetting” (96-7)

If ‘New West’ is a contemporary West, then ‘Post-West’ is a contemporary Midwest, representing another step away from American history toward the imagined futures referenced above. Still, the characters here seem just as lost, either dizzied by their new-found freedom or else confused by some looming strangeness, as though history lurks just out of view, a gigantic body disrupting the normal forces of life. ‘It Meant There Would Be More’ is one such example, a story examining a couple and their life within an apartment complex where communication feels subtly impossible, every interaction a thin skin atop of a deep recess of fear and feeling.

I took her hand, the one with the keys. I talked about what we were and what we could be.
She took back her hand. “When you talk about us you don’t mean what you say.
“I mean it now.”
“Exactly. That’s it, that’s all” (122).

Focusing on a man who takes his fiance’s dog to a bar, ‘Dead Dogs’ follows a similar vein, the canine triggering a series of patrons to approach with tales of the own, long deceased pets. One-sided and almost entirely for their own benefit, their stories are more like soliloquies, Evan Dara-like monologues whose natural cadences mask a broader sadness. Again the sense is one of stilted communication, people with this urgent need to share what’s inside their heads yet either too embarrassed to do so or else finding words and phrases insufficient, the message degraded upon contact with air. ‘Company’ confronts this head on, with a person trying to get another to talk, or at least know they can should they feel so inclined. The story progresses to a suicide attempt, the sense of danger sharpening the narrator’s plea:

“You’re no addict brother, you’re not insane, you haven’t been beaten or abused or abandoned. You’re okay! You’re okay, so what is it, what is it always, and why have we only ever talked around it?” (174)

What’s striking about ‘Company’, and indeed the majority of the collection, is the push and pull of the past. “I can’t stop plunging my head into the past,” the narrator says, “even though it’s hard to breathe in” (170). 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.

Big Lonesome is out now via Mariner Books, and you can head to the Joseph Scapellato website for more info on the author.

The lure of making a companion mixtape for this one proved just too much. Just like the collection, we’ve broken the playlist into three distinct sections.

Tracklisting:

“Old West”

1) The Rev. J.M. Gates – Death’s Black Train is Coming
2) Ken Maynard – The Lone Star Trail
3) Bascom Lamar Lunsford – Dry Bones
4) Uncle Dave Macon – Walking in the Sunlight
5) Blind Lemon Jefferson – See That My Grave is Kept Clean
6) Harry Jackson – Some Cowboy Brag Talk

“New West”

7) Andrew Weathers Ensemble – You Are Powerful We Are Taking Over
8) Fog Lake – I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry
9) Sawtooth – Dead Dog Eyes
10) Jordan O’Jordan – A Lonely Road
11) The Dead Tongues – Stained Glass Eyes
12) Ben Seretan – Cottonwood Tree

“Post West”

13) Frederick Squire – Old Times Past New Times
14) Dear Nora – The Lonesome Border, Pt. 1
15) Phosphorescent – A New Anhedonia (Live On KEXP)
16) YOWL – Saturday Drag
17) Advance Base – Nephew in the Wild
18) Talons’ – Change

Photo From the Joseph Scapelatto Website / Cover (re)design by Liam Doyle

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The central conceit is that the Underground Railroad is a literal thing, a subterranean train line which transports escapees across state borders. While its running is unreliable, its boxcars bumpy, its conductors terrified, the track provides a tangible symbol of hope for those fleeing captivity, especially, as is Cora’s case, for those pursued by slave catchers plucked straight from a Cormac McCarthy novel. Unfortunately, the journey is not a complete line to the apparent safety of the North, rather a patchy hop state to state, each new locale representing a different face of America, the flickering light of safety always at the end of a dark tunnel, no matter how far they travel.

Hence the balance between hope and reality becomes as much a part of the narrative as it is Whitehead’s writing. Cora faces a trade off between feeling and surviving, never giving up on knowing and being known, on loving, yet always ready to pitch up and leave, alone. For his part, Whitehead is committed to courage in both directions, possessing the bravery to see the human and the inhuman no matter how extreme the end, and thus preserving belief and reality. The semi-magical railroad for Cora is the semi-magical human spirit for Whitehead, small, important things beneath the surface which persevere in spite of the violence and suffering above.

There’s a scene in the novel where, presuming she’ll be undertaking some sort of behind-the-scenes manual labour, Cora takes a job at a museum, only to find that she’s actually a strange actor/object on display. Splitting her time between three sets – “Scenes from Darkest Africa”, “Life on the Slave Ship” and “Typical Day on the Plantation” – she must pose in costume for the public, who often bang on the glass and make inaudible comments. Of course, the museum scenes are nothing but banal and ignorant simulacra, though small details (birds hung from the ceiling that bring to mind carrion-feeders, wax dummies painted in disturbing hues) hint at the overwhelming horror behind the facade.

This voyeurism signifies a second assault by whites, a disinformation dressed as intellectual curiosity which slowly reworks black history to their own telling, a kind of semi-conscious attempt to attenuate their crimes even while such abuses were (or are) ongoing. Some reviews have touched upon the allegorical links between Whitehead’s writing and contemporary society, though the book is not so much fable of our times but rather the genesis story, the giant, ever-present thing that looms over everything that’s playing out today. As one character puts it in a particularly scathing and relevant piece:

“America, too, is a delusion, the grandest one of all. The white race believes – believes with all its heart – that it is their right to take the land. To kill Indians. Make war. Enslave their brothers. This nation shouldn’t exist, if there is any justice in the world, for its foundations are murder, theft and cruelty.”

Cora’s life almost plays like the museum displays in which she worked, a simplified journey through a decidedly unsimple array of evils and atrocities. She moves from scene to scene with little choice or reason – (Genuine) Typical Day on the Plantation, Run in with Bounty Hunters, Tuskegee-Style Medical Testing, Anne Frank-esque Attic Existence, White Supremacist Lynching – a tale at once unimaginably violent yet fundamentally inauthentic, institutions and systems reduced to recognisable heroes and villains so that they might become a little more fathomable. The result is a kind of game, the author daring us to imagine beyond the fabulism, us readers staring through the glass in a mixture of morbid curiosity and blank horror, plagued by the unshiftable unease unique to guilt.

The Underground Railroad is out now via Fleet (UK) and Doubleday (North America). Colson Whitehead’s Goodreads page is a good place to find out more about his previous work.

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A book within a book, Hystopia is actually the novel left behind by Eugene Allen, a Vietnam vet from a slightly-alternate version of the 60s where John F. Kennedy survived Oswald’s assassination attempt and is serving his third term in office. Opened and closed by various notes and testimonies from friends and family members, Allen’s work makes up the majority of the novel, a narrative imagining characters from his time in Vietnam once they return home. The kicker, though, is that while they are back in the States, they never really ‘get home’, with the war following them back to a dystopian (but far from unrecognisable) America ravaged by biker gangs and forest fires.

In an attempt to solve the crisis of PTSD and violence, the government turn to an experimental psychiatric method called ‘enfolding’, where veterans reenact traumatic scenes while dosed up on a tranquilliser, Tripizoid. While even the doctors working on the project believe the technique to be without substance, it proves paradoxically effective for many subjects and blanks memories of combat. “Confusion is undoubtedly an element of the curative process,” writes Means. “In most cases the patient does forget about it, becoming fully immersed in the reenacted trauma’s nullification of the real trauma”.

Which isn’t to say it’s a silver bullet. Indeed the novel opens with a “failed enfold,” Rake, a man filled with the sort of all-consuming rage and propensity for violence unique to men forced into the sacrifices of war only to end up on the losing side. We find him with Allen’s sister, Meg (whom he has almost certainly kidnapped, and has undergone some degree of enfolding too), as they drive across Michigan on an anarchistic rampage of murder, drugs and destruction. Eventually, they reach the home of Hank, Rake’s former sidekick who has developed a love of trees since enfolding, a man who tries to protect Meg and figure out a way in which they can save themselves from Rake.

The second strand of the story deals with another enfold Singleton and his colleague Wendy, government officials breaking protocol to meet up and fall in love, who somehow end up on the trail of Rake, as though their rule bending was in fact a conspiracy on the part of their superiors to engineer the operation. Again though, confusion reigns, with Singleton’s boss admitting that a key part of being a commander is having the “gumption to go back and revise history”, talking of writing operation plans after the operation in order to ensure they are correct.

This sense of counter-history runs throughout the novel, from Singleton and Wendy’s quest and Hank’s transformation into peaceful nature-lover, right down to Eugene Allen’s re-telling (re-imagining?) of his sister’s story. What becomes important for these troubled people is not discerning the capital-T Truth but rather finding a variation they can believe in. More often than not, this involves a sense of mission, the victim’s need for order in the face of chaos, the desire for purpose or meaning in “an age when everything else seemed to be spinning deeper and deeper into despair,” anything which enables them to form a narrative of the world in a way they would like it to exist.

“It was crazy, he admitted, but it kept him going and like all good delusions it was fuelled by genuine hope and dedication to the truth”

And that’s what sets apart David Means’ Vietnam from that of the postmodern cannon. Yes, it is full of claims and counter-claims and impenetrable paranoia, but rather than using these to trace a descent into bewilderment, Hystopia utilises them to chart a way out. In a world where confusion and conflict constitute the resting face of the planet, maybe disinformation is needed not to obscure the truth but rather create it?

Here’s a playlist of songs that are suitable or relevant in one way or another, or maybe just capture the mood of certain characters and scenes.

Tracklisting:

1) Search and Destroy – The Stooges
2) IN EVIL HOUR – Battle Ave.
3) High & Wild – Angel Olsen
4) My War – Black Flag
5) Everything Falls Apart – Hüsker Dü
6) Saigon Shrunken Panorama – The Mountain Goats
7) Rugged Country – Japanese Breakfast
8) Meg – Hovvdy
9) Love, Come Save Me – Right Away, Great Captain!
10) I Need You To Tell Me Who I Am – John Moreland
11) Drugs To Make You Sober – Jeremiah Nelson
12) Are We Failing? – Hallelujah The Hills
13) Flaming Home – Mount Eerie with Julie Doiron and Frederick Squire
14) Lovers as Mirrors – Paper Bee
15) Forgetting is Believing – Nathaniel Rateliff
16) Redemption:1 (An Army Man And His Self-Discovery) – Justin Vernon

Hystopia is out now via Faber & Faber (UK) and Farrar, Straus and Giroux (US) and you can get it from most good bookshops. Check out the other works by David Means on his Goodreads page.

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But somehow, amidst the drugs and fighting and perversion, Pollock managed to create characters interesting beyond black curiosity, taking up the mantle of Southern greats such as William Gay and Flannery O’Connor in his ability to induce sympathy or at least complicate the antipathy his characters will garner. This style was developed (and potentially mastered) with Devil All The Time, his debut novel which cast the reader into world in which the membrane between reality and nightmare is leaky at best, with blood sacrifice and serial killer couples complicating an already bleak coming-of-age tale.

While Donald Ray Pollock’s latest novel, The Heavenly Table, takes us back to the 1917, it’s still rooted in the area of America he is making his own. The narrative is snappy and unsettled, the short chapters jumping between various locations and points of view, slowly drawing inwards in an inescapable ring which corrals the characters into the inevitable finale at the town of Meade. We have Ellsworth Fiddler, a swindled farmer trying to save face, Jasper Cone, a painfully afflicted sanitation inspector, Lieutenant Bovard, a jilted husband turned homoerotic (would be) war hero, and finally the luckless Jewett brothers, Cane, Cob and Chimney, who grow tired of the poor life and turn to robbing banks as a path to salvation.

With the graphic violence, crude sex and odd scatological humour, this appears to be more or less Pollock’s odd twist on the standard Western fare. Where things get interesting is that the Jewetts are inspired by a cheap dime novel, The Life and Times of Bloody Bill Bucket. Every cliche can therefore be read as a secondhand gesture, the Jewetts wearing Bloody Bill’s persona like a tacky fancy dress costume, hoping some of his magic (ie. his fictional bravado, success, imperiousness to pain/failure/death) might rub off on them. Furthermore, as their ‘spree’ gains traction so does the media’s reaction, with stories of ‘Jewett’ crimes emanating from newspapers in other areas and states, despite the brothers never having been there.

So not only are the boys distorting fiction into reality, but their reality is distorting into fiction, leaving them having to live up to the magnificent/terrifying tales on both ends. And while it’s apparent the trio are not well-equipped for such pressures, they sure give it their (quite literal) best shot, working on the logic of faking it ’til you make it:

‘Leaning over the horn of his saddle, Chimney spat and then said, “Well, I don’t know who those ol’ boys are back there, but I don’t figure they can shoot any better than we can.”

“Maybe, but there must be fifteen of them in that pack.”

“So?” Chimney said. “That many don’t even amount to one box of shells.”‘

Here are some dust-strewn, blood-spattered songs to listen to as you read.

Tracklisting:

1) Devil Town – Bright Eyes
2) Blood Red Sentimental Blues – Cotton Jones
3) Bury Me in the Garden – Tyler Butler and his Handsome Friends
4) Tom Justice, The Choir Boy Robber, Apprehended at Ace Hardware in Libertyville, IL – Casiotone For The Painfully Alone
5) Murderous Joy – Carter Tanton
6) Christ Jesus – Deer Tick
7) You Should’ve Seen the Other Guy – Nathaniel Rateliff
8) Buriedfed – Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson
9) Fire & Fast Bullets – Blitzen Trapper
10) Brother’s Blood – Kevin Devine
11) I Dreamt of My Brother Dying – Oscar Lush
12) Drunk and On a Star – Kevin Morby
13) Weather of a Killing Kind – The Tallest Man on Earth
14) Whore – Low
15) Liars – Gregory Alan Isakov and the Colorado Symphony
16) Closer to Heaven – Pink Mountaintops
17) Killer – Samantha Crain

The Heavenly Table is out now via Harvill Secker and Doubleday. You can read about Donald Ray Pollock’s other works on the Knopf Doubleday website.

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“Sean is 3-dimensional/real/alive because he is at once remarkably kind and empathetic and capable of destroying lives. In some ways he is ignorant beyond hope and in others understanding beyond all expectation”

Well the good news is that John Darnielle is back with a new novel. Universal Harvester apparently hits a “sad/frightening axis”, which supposedly means a blend of straight up B-movie terror and horrors more human in nature, things like loneliness and sorrow and grief. The preview on the FSG website gives a few more details, claiming that the work is a” significant literary leap” in terms of scope and craft, describing the general plot like something between Infinite Jest, The Ring and a grown up sequel to Eerie, Indiana.

Twentysomething Jeremy works at a late 90s Video Hut in small-town Iowa that’s just about to be transformed/finished by the dawn of DVDs and the internet, though he seems “blissfully unaware” of such forces. The twist is that customers keep returning tapes that are apparently damaged or tampered with, like She’s All That‘s four minute interruption of “grainy, homemade, black-and-white footage that is distinctly creepy-as-hell—there’s a darkness there, an overwhelming sadness”. Jeremy, like all good video store clerks/literary protagonists, explores just what is going on with the strange stock, though we’re going to have to wait and see just what path Darnielle sends him down.

Universal Harvester is set for release on the 7th February, 2017 on Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and you can pre-order it now from most good book shops.

Book design by Rodrigo Corral and Alex Merto

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Today we are delighted to share a piece by Shana Hartzel, one half of the excellent, Philly-based music blog Swell Tone. If you are unfamiliar with the site, Hartzel and her partner in crime Victoria surf the high seas of new music and write about the best of it, with well-written reviews, cool sessions, innovative (and often pizza-based) guest appearances and regular mixtapes full of unearthed gems. Basically, it offers everything a music blog should.

As if that wasn’t enough, Shana also writes for The Wild Honey Pie, and is the assistant director of Philadelphia’s Y-Not Radio, and hosts the show ‘Aussie Unlocked’ on 2nd Fridays, 9-10pm (or you can find them on-demand via Mixcloud).

Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park
by Shana Hartzel

Though I’ve never been the most dedicated reader, my adoration for Jane Austen hasn’t waned since my first required reading of Pride and Prejudice. The English novelist’s romantic yet satirical fiction is an ideal match for my constantly shifting mental stream of humor and enchantment. It is a rare literary love that, at its peak, led to a full day of my life being dedicated to baking scones and lemon tarts, wearing frilly dresses, and plowing through the film adaptations of her three biggest novels in the company of a large pot of tea and my equally nerdy best friend.

There is something especially intriguing about Mansfield Park. Austen’s third novel is arguably her strongest exploration into the cloudy dichotomies of the British middle class and her most controversial work. Amongst an examination of the period’s morals and privileges and a slew of amorous entanglements, the story centers around the life of Fanny Price. Fanny is relocated at age ten from her markedly poor family to live with her wealthy relatives at Mansfield Park where she becomes a tiresome burden to everyone but her cousin Edmund.

Thanks to Edmund’s kindness, Fanny survives through an upbringing of monetary privilege and emotional abuse to become the most morally centered resident of the estate. As a character, Fanny isn’t nearly as agreeable or as openly charming as Austen’s other protagonists. Her emotional fragility appropriately reflects her constant treatment as an inferior. Yet, she always manages to imperfectly persevere through matters of affairs, slavery, debauchery, and consanguineous relationships. Seemingly unaffected by normal rules of decorum, her free will and clarity of thinking are always her best defense against the surrounding negativity. In the many ways it both defines and guides her, Fanny’s sincere approach to life is what has always drawn me back to this story in particular.

While the book itself portrays music as a skill that elevates character or a means by which affections are exchanged through dance, I have aimed to take a more modern musical approach to the grandeur and societal confines of Mansfield Park. Below, you’ll find an assortment of songs that challenge structural and melodic conventions in the way that Austen’s characters grapple with the expectations of their environment and upbringing. The sonic mix paints the spirit of the novel’s colorfully quaint world in stokes of humble grace, fearsome defiance, and (of course) irrevocable declarations of love.

Tracklisting

1. 1914 – Florist
2. Looking Out for You – Joy Again
3. For You – Free Cake For Every Creature
4. Super Rat – Honeyblood
5. The Garden – Flinter
6. Don’t Feel So Alive – Gabriella Cohen
7. p r e s c r i p t i o n – Good Try
8. Hey – The Twoks
9. Your Best American Girl – Mitski
10. Don’t Go – CBMC
11. Jogalong – Rozi Plain
12. Girl! – Terror Pigeon
13. Right Now – Amber Arcades
14. Tame One – Your Friend
15. All Day and All Night – And The Kids
16. No Room For Doubt – Lianne La Havas Ft. Willy Mason
17. Running with the Wolves – Aurora
18. You and I – Margaret Glaspy
19. Geranimo – Aphra
20. The Sun – BATTLE AVE.

You should most definitely add Swell Tone to your ‘blogs to check regularly’ list, and you can also find them on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Soundcloud and Playmoss. The Quiet, Constant Friends compilation is still available on our Bandcamp page, including a rather nice limited edition tape and art print bundle. All profits go to Worldreader so why not treat yourself?

The post Lit Links: Shana Hartzel 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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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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