Opening story ‘Wagner in the Desert’, with its detailed and mocking attack on the privileged “modern hustler[s]” like filmmakers and writers, doubles up as an introduction to the type of ‘special’ person Greg Jackson is targeting. These are people “conscious enough of [their] materialism to mock it,” those who listen to acts like U2 and Morrissey and Kylie Minogue “post-ironically, which is not to say exactly, sincerely.” They drive hybrids, donate to charities, sit on boards of non-profits. “We were not bad people, we thought,” says Jackson’s narrator. “Not the best, a bit spoiled, maybe, but pleasant, insouciantly decent. We paid a tax on the lives we lived in order to say in public, I have sacrificed, tithed, given back. A system of pre-Lutheran indulgences. Of carbon offsets. A green-washing of our sins. We were affiliated. We had access.”

The narrator’s simultaneous ambition and guilt shows the great success of collection, its ability to go beyond easy mocking and give the characters and situations a human depth. Greg Jackson is a satirist for sure, but not a peddler of cartoons, and in his nuance opens up a far murkier picture of the elite life—where narcissism is balanced by an equal and opposite force, the ever-pressing, near-spiritual need to justify and validate one’s existence to others. They are not special, and they are all too aware of the fact. If the hedonism of Bret Easton Ellis’s work is a thin, flat surface, then Jackson’s is that same superficial lifestyle stretched taut around a dark void, a lack that is mapped by what surrounds it.

Philosophical attempts to address this void are central to Prodigals, though the (often drug-fueled) epiphanies reached by its characters rarely seem to last—Fool’s Revelations, synaptic firings mistaken for metaphysical meaning. High on something like meth, the protagonists of ‘Metanarrative Breakdown’ discuss “the prime fabric of meaning” with addled conviction, while ‘Epithalamium’ finds a cynical, vain woman come to see her self-image unravel in her loneliness (““The terrifying possibility […] that you were not at all the composite of your past, but merely the confused nerves of the present, ever-supplanting moment”). The narrator of ‘Dynamics in the Storm’ could be said to mistake sexual tension for spiritual significance, driving out of New York with his therapist to escape a superstorm that is descending upon the city. For Jackson’s prodigals, self-obsession is both a curse and posited cure—the lie of exceptionalism gnawing a great hole in the centre of their souls, but also suggesting that they might, just might, be special enough to transcend the human condition.

Prodigals is out now via Granta (UK) and Picador (US).

The post Greg Jackson – Prodigals 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.

Stretching over 600 pages, the novel includes a semi-mythic colonel, his psy-op serving nephew, Vietnamese double agents, humanitarian nurses, too-young-soliders-turned-crazed-lurps and disgraced navy sailors struggling to readjust to life back in Arizona (the latter being Bill Houston, who will eventually grow/descend into the antihero of Johnson’s debut novel, Angels). By the closing stages, the various narrative strands have twisted and tangled to the degree that confusion arises, the reader in effect joining the characters in the bush and hacking through a literary jungle of their own. How do we piece together these small scraps of experience into something coherent and important? And is it enough to explain and justify the war, or human nature itself?

“It’s got to be about something bigger than dying, or we’d all turn deserter. I think we need to be much more conscious of that.”

Johnson passed away in May, though not before being made aware that he was to receive the Library of Congress’ Prize for American Fiction. Tree of Smoke is out now on Picador and Farrar, Straus and Giroux and is available at all good book shops. Those unfamiliar with his work would be well advised to check out his novels (Angels), novellas (Train Dreams) and short story collections (Jesus’ Son), as well as his essay collection, Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond.

P.S. If you like strange, sprawling books about Vietnam and conspiracies, then you’ll be into David Means’ Hystopia.

The post Reading Notes: Denis Johnson – Tree of Smoke appeared first on Various Small Flames.