Laila Lalami

Writers on the Air
Donna Seaman
Paul Dry Books
467pp

The best thing about an interview collection like Donna Seaman’s Writers on the Air is the eclecticism of the offering. In one book you can find authors as varied as Wade Davis, Margaret Atwood, Peter Carey, Diane Ackerman, Terry Tempest Williams and Ward Just. The one thing they have in common is that all of them have been guests on Seaman’s Chicago-based radio show, Open Books.

I will admit that I am a big fan of interview collections, but I’ve read enough of them to know that unless the interviewer takes the time to know their subject, the result can be dull at best. Seaman clearly does voluminous research before going on air, as she states in her introduction, “I write out pages of notes and questions in preparation for each interview, hoping to structure a narrative arc so that each discussion has a story line and builds toward some sort of resolution.” This determination to have a point to her interviews, a “focused give-and-take” prevents the sort of inane questions that are certain killers and deadly dull to listeners (or readers).

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Three Generations
Yom Sang-seop
Archipelago Books
476pp.

When people speak of “East Asian literature,” it’s not surprising that the conversation is limited to Japanese and Chinese writers. Almost none of Korea’s writers (with the exception of Yi Munyol) have been translated or widely distributed within the United States. But one hopes that Yom Sang-seop’s Three Generations (Archipelago Books, 2005) will bring Korean literature to a wider, English speaking audience.

Originally published as a serial in the early 1930s and as a book in 1948, Three Generations chronicles the life of Deok-gi, the youngest adult of the wealthy Jo clan. Beloved by his grandfather, the formidable patriarch of the clan, and estranged from Sang-hun, his father, college-aged Deok-gi navigates the strictures of the Korean social system, aided by his socialist friend, Byeong-hwa, the other focal point of the novel.

Immediately, Yom gets up the family conflicts: the grandfather dislikes Sang-hun for becoming a Christian minister, while Deok-gi finds his father hypocritical for fathering a child with a young girl, then abandoning them. But the inter-generational squabbling is not the whole of the novel; indeed, though the recipient of the grandfather’s inheritance drives the first half of the novel, the suspense picks up considerably in the second half when Byeong-hwa’s socialist activities cause trouble.

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And the Word Was
Bruce Bauman
Other Press
350 pp.

In Greek mythology, Castor, son of Zeus and the mortal Leda, was a soldier and champion athlete who was killed in a battle that was not his. In Bruce Bauman’s And the Word Was, Castor is a precocious New York City teenager killed in a Columbine-like school-shooting rampage. Names are important in this book, although the conjured associations are left incomplete. Mythology’s Castor had a twin brother, Pollux, granted immortality by Zeus in compensation for Castor’s death. Here, Castor has no siblings, let alone an immortal twin. In Hindu mythology, Holika, sister of a maniacal king, could not be harmed by fire but still burned to death when the king tried to use her to murder his disloyal son. Here, Holika is a fiery Indian heiress who also finds herself at the center of a palace controversy, but escapes unhurt the fire that incapacitates her corrupt, power-crazed brother.

Neil Downs (the name is a silly pun, given the character’s atheism) is an emergency room physician in New York City. His wife, Sarah, is a modestly successful artist. After their son’s murder (by disaffected students shouting ethnic slurs), and the revelation that Sarah was with another man at the time, Downs runs as far away as he can, and finds that he feels at home in chaotic Delhi, a “city on the verge of collapse.” The U.S. ambassador to India, Charlie Bedrosian, happens to be an acquaintance who feels beholden to Downs for saving the life of his only son, and appears to favor Downs by introducing him to Holika, the niece of a prominent industrialist. But Holika eventually helps Downs see Charlie’s venal motives and the truth about his ties with both her uncle and the CEO of a palm-greasing American conglomerate.

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Natives & Exotics
Jane Alison
Harcourt
238 pp.

Jane Alison’s Natives and Exotics is a fascinating look into the way in which people interact with the natural world. From the very beginning, with a prologue that includes Sir Joseph Banks and Alexander Humboldt, Alison defines herself as an author uniquely in touch with natural history and its impact on modern man. She makes it clear that while this is not a book with a direct political message in the obvious sense, it does demand that the politics of man and nature be considered. As Banks marks his map and plots where exotic plants will be relocated, at his direction, anywhere in the world, he remains blissfully and willfully unaware that, by spreading his vision of progress, he is endangering the lives of native creatures. You can forgive Banks for his empire building vision as he was a man of the 18th century, but Alison’s book stretches forward to the 1970s and could very well have continued into the present. My local paper is full of the controversy over large ships dumping ballast water from foreign locales and transporting thousands of exotics species to the Pacific Northwest from Asia. We live in the world that Alison historically explores in her book and the questions asked by her characters are the same ones we should be posting today.

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Ideas of Heaven
Joan Silber
250 pp.
Norton

Joan Silber’s “Ring of Stories” weaves six distinctive voices together with stunning dexterity. From a young poet in 1500′s Venice, to an aging homosexual dancer in modern day New York, the characters seem like people we know. This is due to Silber’s beautifully nuanced, understated style which allows us to examine the lives of the characters in their own words and pulls us into each compelling and unique world.

Silber obviously did a considerable amount of research into time and place to succeed so well in convincing us we were reading fiction. Four of the selections, “My Shape,” “Ideas of Heaven,” “Gaspara Stampa,” and “The High Road,” felt particularly autobiographical. The protagonists told their stories simply, revealing themselves by their actions and attitudes. Although not all of the main characters were sympathetic, it was easy to fall under the spell of their personalities and feel an intimate involvement in the joys and sorrows of their lives.

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The Lives of Rain
By Nathalie Handal
Interlink Books
Paperback, 67 pp.

“The Doors of Exile,” the prologue-poem of Nathalie Handal’s accomplished and affecting debut collection, presents the bleak and disorienting nature of the Palestinian diaspora: “The shadows close the door / this is loneliness: / every time we enter a room we enter a new room / the hours of morning growing deep into our exile / prayers stuck in between two doors / waiting to leave to enter / waiting for memory to escape / the breath of cities.” For those in exile, there is no arriving, no here or there, only loneliness and a hope that memory-of something unspoken and unspeakable-will fade. And exile produces a multifaceted loss; it has more than one door. This poem sets the tone and theme for the collection.

Handal divides her book into three untitled sections. The first set of poems focuses on the nature and consequences of Palestinian displacement. In “Gaza City,” the narrator laments: “My hands and my cheek against / the cold wall, I hide like a slut, ashamed…. / Every house is a prison, / every room a dog cage.” This is the nature of being made unwelcome in one’s own home: the victim feels guilt, like a “slut,” nothing more than a “dog.”

With remarkable and brutal clarity, Handal shows us the longing created by war when she focuses on an individual’s suffering. “It’s been a long time-,” begins the narrator in “The Combatant and I,” remembering her absent lover, “where have you been, where are you?” She recounts her loss: “I miss your frowns, / the dark shadow of your oval chin. / I can’t breathe at night, can’t feel my legs. / Dreamed I stopped seeing. / Are you lost?” And she imagines his response: “I suppose you would say, / I should be happy that I can still love.”

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Bitter Milk
John McManus
Picador
208 pp.

John McManus’ startling debut novel Bitter Milk tells the emotional coming-of-age story of nine-year-old Loren Garland. Loren is an awkward, overweight, fatherless child growing up haphazardly in the mountains of Tennessee with a mother who is acutely unhappy in her female skin.

Loren’s story comes to us through the voice of Luther, a young boy who is by turns presented as Loren’s imaginary friend, his evil alter ego, and even a twin who died at birth but retains a sort of omniscient dominion over his surviving sibling. Luther-as-narrator speaks directly to the reader, as well as maintaining the ability to speak freely with both Loren and Loren’s mother. This is a tricky position for a narrator to hold and at times the various relationships become confusing as we are fed bits of insight through Luther’s quixotic (and quotationless) first-person narrative:

That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard, I said. I never thanked anyone for creating me.

You say everything’s the dumbest thing you’ve ever heard.

That’s because everything you say gets dumber each time. Anyway, I didn’t ask her to bring me into the world.

She didn’t bring you into the world.

Yes she did.

No she didn’t.

Yes she did.

And that was the last thing I said to him, because I was too bound by the terms of the wager, and it was time to abide, and wait. Loren went to bed and lay awake most of the night. When he awoke the next morning, Mother was gone.

The “wager” between Mother and Luther remains largely unexplained (as does the means by which imaginary Luther can speak to Mother as well as Loren), although we do find out that the wager has something to do with Loren choosing between Mother and Luther and thereby growing up.

Mother’s reason for leaving, by contrast, remains a mystery only to Loren, as the reader learns on page one that Opal Avery Garland is not happy as a woman, wears overalls, blue jeans, and a chest binder, and goes by Avery, rather than Opal. In fact, the whole extended family (as well as the entire town) seems to know exactly what the mysterious “hospital visit” will do for Loren’s troubled mother. However, even when Loren finds a letter in the mailbox of Mother’s girlfriend, addressed to Mr. Garland and outlining fees for a double mastectomy, he remains puzzled as to the meaning of her disappearance.

Since Loren is otherwise a smart, perceptive child, this contrived confusion becomes Bitter Milk‘s main failing. (Further exacerbated by the scenes with Mr. Ownby, the principal, who we are led to believe is Loren’s real father, although Loren never suspects, despite the many clues.) Time and again, the reader, the narrator, and the writer all seem to be having a joke at Loren’s expense. We all get it. He still doesn’t. Poor, pitiful Loren.

Far more satisfying would have been the chance to see Loren struggle openly with gender and identity issues, instead of adopting a forced naivet

Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson
Jonathan Coe
Continuum
477 pages

All teaching must be simplification,
and to simplify is to falsify:
how to teach the landscape of the complex heart
to those who have no wish to learn: and why?

This final stanza from B.S. Johnson’s poem “Basic Landscape” written in 1964, could stand as a metaphor for the life-and death-of this troubled and innovative writer. Jonathan Coe, an award-winning novelist in his own right, has tackled a daunting subject, not just because Johnson was a complicated man and sometimes impenetrable writer, but because Coe finds himself exploring the nature of the novel, and the nature of the writer of novels, through Johnson’s eyes. The perspective of a man who found writing to be an inadequate bulwark against the system often provides an uncomfortable viewpoint.

Bryan Stanley William Johnson was born in 1933. He wrote seven novels, two volumes of poetry, and many plays and scripts as well as articles and what can only be called polemics. He committed suicide in November 1973 after a series of literary and emotional disappointments apparently overwhelmed him. But the bare bones of fact cannot begin to clothe the astonishing reality of B.S. Johnson: a larger than life man in both the literal and the literary sense.

One of the many strands that Jonathan Coe brings to his complex delineation of Johnson is the fatefulness of coincidence. When Coe was a boy his family watched a documentary featuring Johnson because he was talking about a part of Wales they visited on holidays. They found it so odd and distasteful it was switched off, but Coe had been exposed to the man whom he would later spend eight years and five hundred pages exploring.

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The Apple’s Bruise
Lisa Glatt
Simon & Schuster, 2005
194 pages

The title of this collection, taken from an incident in its lead story “Dirty Hannah Gets Hit by a Car” hints at the Genesis story of the fall from innocence and the acquisition of the knowledge of good and evil. In Glatt’s story a bully steals hungry Hannah’s sandwich, just as Hannah is about to bite into it. She is left with only a bruised apple “and chewed and chewed, pretending she loved it, pretending that brown spot was the very thing she was hungry for, the very thing she craved.” In Hannah’s act of pride and deception are the seeds of empowerment, seeds which take root by the story’s end. Thus Glatt’s protagonists cross lines, extend their established moral boundaries, resulting in personal consequences comprising a refreshingly realistic amalgam of remorse, defiance, and inevitability. The stories are honest without being brutal, sensitive and subtle without sentimentality.

Fans of Glatt’s striking debut novel A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That, about a young female professor, her terminally ill mother, a female student of the professor, and a social work client of that student, will find these stories equally compelling. While Comma‘s biggest (and perhaps only) drawback is a somewhat stitched together quality that imperfectly unites its various threads, The Apple’s Bruise, conversely, combines unity and diversity to the best possible effect, making it a great introduction to Glatt’s sensibility for readers new to it.

In many of these stories, Glatt’s emotional landscape evokes that of Mary Gaitskill: girls and women get drawn into shame-infused encounters that leave them emotionally devastated, bereft, empowered, and wise in varying combinations and proportions. In the aforementioned “Dirty Hannah Gets Hit by a Car,” abuse and damage transform (as Nietzsche long told us) into strength and pride. “Body Shop” presents a wife understandably compelled to investigate her husband’s inexplicable act of disloyalty; this “research” inevitably leads her into her own. In “Eggs,” a series of pressures drives a somewhat judgmental professor to acts once off limits and beyond her recent comprehension. The young widow in “Soup,” drawn to her son’s hoodlum friend, must confront the darkness in herself, and, far more distressing, in her son.

The lines where proximity becomes collusion and where collusion becomes culpability are most closely examined in the two stories with male narrator-protagonists. In “What Milton Heard,” a man endures police questioning about his serial killer neighbor and is called out on his stalker-ish obsession with the wife of the new neighbor. The narrator of “Animals,” the head veterinarian of a zoo where animals are dying at an inexplicable rate, must navigate his complicated relationship with both his wife and his wife’s seductive teenage sister who is living with them.

In several stories, a quality of abjectness startlingly similar to that exemplified by minimalist icon Raymond Carver fairly shimmers up from Glatt’s lucid prose. Glatt’s story “Waste,” while covering quintessential Gaitskill S&M territory ends: “…I am leaving him. I will leave him. It’s sure as anything” strikingly reminiscent of the close of Carver’s story “Fat.” Two other stories demonstrate the frequent minimalist technique of projection. In “Bad Girl on the Curb,” a couple, estranged as a result of the wife’s recent mastectomy, contemplate earthquakes and speculate on the precise culpability of the accident victim outside their window, a subtle Rorschach test for their views on the intersection of fate and will in their own lives. Similarly, in “Tag,” the morning after their one night stand a couple witnesses a childhood game as it devolves into violence. As Carver often juxtaposed the mundane with the psychologically agonizing, so Glatt does in her harrowing “Grip,” where a couple coldly and without explanation abandon their three year old daughter amid domestic arguments about coffee-making and conciliatory discussions of auto maintenance. The story is made emotionally bearable by its shifts in perspective from the man to the girl and finally to the girl’s fireman rescuer who is named, perhaps significantly, “Adam.”

Many stories use humor to good effect, and at least one, “Ludlow,” is unabashedly comic, complementing its poignancy.

But Darlene Tate is persistent…I shot up from the couch and went to the kitchen, where I opened a drawer and pulled out a pad of paper and a pen. “Make a list for me…I’m all about self-improvement. Darlene wants to better herself,” I told him.
The first thing he wrote down: It bugs me when you talk about yourself in the third person.

The last story in the collection, this is one of many that ends in a gesture of reconciliation as Jimmy says “No music…let’s just talk. I want to hear everything you have to say, Dar. You’re my wife.”

As readers we might hope to have better luck than these characters in extremis, may hope to escape from having to make similar choices. But, deep down, we suspect there is no escape, and that when our time comes we might well not exercise any better judgment than they do, either. The consolation of this insight is that it connects us to our flawed culture, our flawed humanity, just as it binds Glatt’s characters to one another. In all of these stories, there’s a strong element of comfort, even cheer, in the attitude that it’s never to late to ‘come of age.’ The chance to embrace the wisdom that is gained as innocence is lost can happen to any of us, at any moment, and any time of life, whenever we choose to wake up, bite, and savor the apple’s bruise.

Julie Benesh’s fiction has appeared in Tin House and Bestial Noise: A Tin House Fiction Reader, and many other magazines. She is completing an MFA in Fiction from Warren Wilson College and teaches creative writing at the Newberry Library in Chicago.

Under the Persimmon Tree
Suzanne Fisher Staples
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005
270 pages

Under the Persimmon Tree has an irresistible premise for readers curious about Afghanis struggling to have a “normal” life under the Taliban. It tells the story of Najmah and her search for her family on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border in the months after 9/11. The twist is provided by the dual plotline, that of an American woman, Nusrat, who teaches refugee children in Peshawar while she awaits news of her Afghani husband who has crossed the border to work in a field hospital. A desperate Najmah ultimately ends up in Nusrat’s classroom, “under the persimmon tree” and the two find comfort in each other’s company as they wait for word on their loved ones and cope with the dangers and uncertainties of war.

One of the most striking things about Under the Persimmon Tree is the way in which Najmah’s world is easily and effectively destroyed within only a few pages. Author Suzanne Fisher Staple was a UPI correspondent for ten years and lived in both Afghanistan and Pakistan; clearly the Afghanistan Civil War is a subject she knows about. By approaching this story from the perspective of a young girl she gives readers a chance to view their own childhoods in a completely different way. What would it be like for any of us if we came home one day to see our father and brother dragged away, if we lost our mother in an instant, if we had no one to trust? What would we do if finding our family bordered on the impossible, and ever reclaiming our home again seemed like a dream? If you were Najmah what would you want for the rest of your life and what would you hope for your future?

Because the author is American the answers to Najmah’s questions might seem obvious, but Staple has a lot of surprises in this book. The character of Nusrat in particular is a revelation, an American who has chosen Islam for its beauty and complexity, and explains her choice in a manner that makes it both understandable and compelling. There is no glorification of one religion over another in this book, simply questions of math and science and faith that help one woman decide where her place should be in the world. For the girl Najmah there is the definition of home, and what it means to her even if the people she loves are no longer part of that familiar landscape. In many ways Under the Persimmon Tree is about who you are and where you belong, and what you will do to discover the answers to those questions.

The thing I loved best about this book, though, the part that still resonates with me, is Najmah’s response to Nusrat’s offer to return with her to New York City and pursue a new life there. Nusrat knows that Najmah has better chances to obtain an education in New York; that in many ways her future would be without limits in the U.S. She thinks this would be the best thing for the young girl. Najmah’s immediate response is heartfelt and deeply honest:

For hundreds of years my people have lived a good and simple life in hills that are more beautiful than anywhere on Earth,” I say at last, for this is the truth. “I think always of the wind on my face and the smell of grass, the gentle sounds of the animals. I cannot imagine living anywhere else.

When tomorrow’s casualty numbers blink across my television screen, it is these words, from a fictional Afghani girl, that I will think of. What if she does live in the most beautiful place on earth? Shouldn’t we be doing something to save that beauty? Reading about Afghanistan is the smallest thing we can do, the first thing. Learning about the land that lives under the same sky and stars as America is a beginning, no matter what age of reader; it is a place to begin.