This review originally appeared in Full Stop.

Whatever judgment might be made about the merits of particular stories in Edie Meidav’s collection Kingdom of the Young, a judgment about the book as a whole has to begin in the observation that it does not serve very well as an introduction to Meidav’s work as represented by her preceding three novels, The Far Field (2001), Crawl Space (2005), and Lola, California (2011). Those novels are intricately constructed, expansive works that immerse the reader in their episodic details and unhurried, sauntering prose. Kingdom of the Young is not only a much slimmer volume, which of course is not unusual for story collections that assemble a writer’s ongoing work, but in effect the stories seem conceptually thinner as well, more concerned with tone and atmospheric effect — although this simply may represent a novelist’s attempt to adjust to the differing demands of the short story.

But if the stories in Kingdom of the Young are working in a different mode than Meidav’s novels, the most conspicuous manifestation of this difference can be felt in the absence in many of the stories (not all) of the sort of vivid detail offered in the novels. These details are not necessarily conveyed by flourishes of description, but are built up through a layering effect created via shifts in time and perspective, used by Meidav as the structural foundation of the novels. Thus many of the stories seem abstract and quasi-allegorical where the novels are concrete and immediate. Crawl Space could be described as an account of evil in the world, but its story of an elderly Frenchman accused of war crimes during the Nazi era creates moral ambiguity in its comprehensive first-person narrative of its protagonist’s controversial life. The story “I Never Had Any Problems with You” might also be called a story about the presence of evil, but its highly compressed form — a letter of sorts from a father to a daughter — acts more as a mystery story in which the reader must read between the lines for the apparent truth the father has devoted himself to hiding than an inquiry into the commission of evil itself. The daughter does not fully emerge from the story as a character at all, merely the means to ultimately revealing the father’s complicity in the terrible acts carried out by the government for which he serves as a functionary.

Similarly, Meidav’s most recent novel, Lola, California, could be read as a meditation on male hubris and its effects on those closest to the novel’s central male figure, although this reading would unnecessarily restrict the full scope of the novel’s concerns, explicit and implicit. In Kingdom of the Young, “The Golden Rule, or I Am Only Trying to do the Right Thing” could as well be taken as almost a kind of parable about the sovereignty of male prerogatives. The novel and the story even share the underlying structural trope evoking the male figure in his final decrepitude, awaiting death, a device through which the rest of the character’s life and its influence are related, but again what emerges from the portrayal of Vic Mahler in the novel is its complexity, a complexity that in turn conditions the experiences of all of the other characters in the novel, through the depth of their response to Vic Mahler’s overwhelming presence in their lives. The principal male character in “The Golden Rule” (referred to by the nurses taking care of him as “the Groper”) too exerts unavoidable influence on the women around him, especially his wife. Even more than the narrator of “I Never Had a Problem With You,” the Groper is — as a character — mostly a cipher, emptied by his infirmity of all personality except that which is summed up by his new moniker and important to the story for the emblematic role he plays as a husband who disappoints.

Of course, it is an entirely sound strategy to approach the short story in a way that most effectively exploits its differing formal possibilities. Short stories cannot create the complexity of character or achieve the kind of narrative amplitude possible in the novel, so attempting to achieve tonal consistency or emphasize stylistic invention (in general, to cultivate more “poetic” effects) are certainly worthy and legitimate ambitions. However, while Meidav is by no means a minimalist or “plain” stylist, her prose often features lengthy, relatively complex sentences, and doesn’t really work through obvious poetic devices but rather through accretion: they accumulate largely expository clauses and phrases, as if the sentences, separately and sequentially, are endeavoring to pack themselves full of as much annotative information as possible:

Nothing is not useful. They drive poorly to a eucalyptus clearing where they lie on their backs wearing cardboard-tipped swimsuits, letting rain drum the flat of their bellies, their viewers not just each other but the imaginary, slightly shocked audience they always tote around to cheer them on. They have come to this clearing as if rain-spattered beatnik exhilaration had been their mission back at alpha, drugged without drugs, beatitude theirs to find even if their own chivalric code means that the next day they can never talk about the previous day’s hijinks.

Although Meidav’s writing is lucid and subtly evocative (“drugged without drugs”), it really makes no effort to be “lyrical” or “rhapsodic.” Neither is it purely functional: Meidav’s language does not artlessly “disappear” into the narrative “flow” of plot, and requires the reader’s appreciative attention. But her periodic sentences and chains of subordinate clauses work best in creating the kind of densely textured work exemplified in The Far Field, Crawl Space, and Lola, California. In the more compressed space available in the short story, at least as represented by what she has attempted in Kingdom of the Young, Meidav’s prose style works less well, especially in stories that deliberately foreshorten depth of character and plot and thus necessarily emphasize effects of language, such as the title story, the book’s first, which takes the form of a single, multi-page paragraph of sparsely punctuated sentences that presumably is intended to reset the reader’s expectations toward a more formally unorthodox, verbally adventurous approach, an impression reinforced by the following story, “Romance; or, Blind in Granada.” In both cases, however, the predominant effect is not the kind of poetic dynamism such an approach requires as substitute for character development or “world-building,” but a sense of continuous exposition that struggles to maintain its narrative momentum.

Not all of the stories in Kingdom of the Young grapple unsuccessfully with the imperatives of the short story. Perhaps because it is narrated in the first person, giving the story the cogency added by voice, “The King of Bubbles” effectively exploits its reduced scale, relating an essentially plotless story (although with a surprise ending) in which the narrator observes his surroundings while sitting in a health club hot tub. “Dog’s Journey” is the most compelling of the several stories set in Cuba (or some other more generalized Latin American country with a troubled political history), largely as a result of the greater specificity of detail it provides. “The Christian Girl” likewise immerses us in the lives of an Eastern European Jewish family before the war, and it too could be said to have a surprise ending (although in retrospect not so surprising after all). These are rather disparate stories in subject and theme, however much Meidav has attempted to provide the book with some additional unity by grouping the stories under three broad headings (“Believers,” “Knaves,” and “Dreamers”). This miscellaneous quality is only reinforced by the inclusion (as a “Coda”) of two works of creative nonfiction. These essays considered separately are well done and interesting enough, but finally they seem a little too obviously an effort to augment an otherwise slender collection.

Kingdom of the Young ultimately confirms that Edie Meidav’s skills as a writer are indeed better suited to novels — long ones at that — rather than short fiction. At a time when short stories are probably less welcomed by mainstream publishers than ever — and they’ve never been all that welcome — certainly no writers should be discouraged from testing the potential of the form, especially if it allows them to experiment with previously unexplored techniques and strategies. But while novels like Crawl Space and Lola, California are not “experimental” in the sense by which that term has come to designate a specific mode of self-consciously unconventional fiction, nevertheless their essential realism is not of the sort that encourages distracted, superficial reading. Readers unacquainted with Meidav’s work might turn first to these more abundantly devised and engrossing books.

(This review was originally published in Jacket.)

In Barry Alpert’s 1974 interview with him (republished in this issue of Jacket), Gilbert Sorrentino declares that he is “an episodic and synthetic writer. . .I don’t like to take a subject and break it down into parts, I like to take disparate parts and put them all together and see what happens.” Sorrentino’s recent books, works like Little Casino, Lunar Follies, and now A Strange Commonplace, demonstrate that he continues to purse this “synthetic” approach to the writing of fiction, if anything to even more deliberate and concentrated effect. So dedicated are these books to the juxtaposing of “disparate parts,” they seem to have brought Sorrentino to a point where all conventional expectations of continuity and development in character or story are simply irrelevant, vestiges of a prior of conception of fiction that no longer has much force.

Readers whose assumptions about the novel still depend on notions of plot and character development are likely to have trouble identifying A Strange Commonplace as a novel at all. Some might think of it as a collection of sketches and short tales, but even if we were to take the “episodic” nature of the book as far as this, we would, of course, be privileging the “disparate parts” over the effort “to put them all together” and would be missing the aesthetic point altogether. This is a unified work of fiction, however much Sorrentino makes us participate in the act of synthesizing its elements so that, along with the author, we readers can “see what happens.”
The contents page of A Strange Commonplace signals immediately that the reader should be alert to the novel’s structural patterns, to whatever relationships might be revealed through the arrangement of its parts. “Book One” and “Book Two” each consist of twenty-six sections, the titles of which are identical across both books, although presented in a different order. Thus, we can read a pair of “chapters” called “In the Bedroom,” “Success,” “Born Again,” etc., although, as we discover, in the second set of episodes the cast of characters changes and the stories related are different — except insofar as all of the separate tales depict a post-World War II America of faded dreams, dysfunctional families, adultery-ridden marriages, and often wanton cruelty. Inevitably, this device tempts us actively to seek out correspondences between these episodes; perhaps such correspondences can indeed be found, but one suspects that Sorrentino himself would be less interested in leading his readers to the “meaning” that might be gleaned from this approach than in the process — unconventional and unorthodox — by which they are led there.

This process is intensified by Sorrentino’s use of a few recurring names for his characters and recurring images and motifs. Two stories are called “Claire,” but the characters involved are, for all we can tell, not the same Claire, and other characters in other stories also bear the name. The same is true of stories whose characters are named “Warren,” “Ray,” “Janet,” and “Inez.” A pearl gray homburg hat appears in numerous stories, frequently we find ourselves at Rockefeller Center, and Meryl Streep is the subject of several conversations. Surely at least here we might regard the homburg as a symbol of the recognizable sort, the other repeated elements similarly placed to provoke us into reflecting on the deeper meaning to which they point? Experienced readers of Sorrentino’s fiction know that such symbol-hunting leads us down a blind alley, that this approach to reading fiction is relentlessly mocked in many of his books, the very notion of “deeper meaning” made the subject of some of his best jokes.

So what does A Strange Commonplace have to offer the reader willing to allow it its strangeness, its determination to render the commonplace actions of its interchangeable characters in an uncommon way? Partly the same pleasures to be found in all of Sorrentino’s work: mordant humor (although rather less broad in this case), a delight in exploring formal conceits as far as they will go, a prose style that, although entirely free of affectation and ornamental flourishes, is both energetic and inventive, recognizably Sorrentinoesque. Here in its entirety is the first of the two sections called “Snow”:

The tunnel in the snow leads to a warm kitchen, vinegary salad, ham and baloney and American cheese, white bread from Bohack’s and tomato-rice soup and bottles of ketchup and Worcestershire sauce, coffee. It leads to heaven. Who is the strange and beautiful man at the far end of the tunnel he has just dug from the black Packard sedan to the white door of the little frame house? And who is the woman, who smells of winter and wool and perfume, of spearmint and whiskey and love? He gets out of the car and the woman holds his arm as he starts down the thrilling tunnel, through the snow banked above him on both sides, to the man in the navy blue overcoat and pearl gray homburg who waits, down on one knee, his arms held out to him. This will never happen again, nothing like it will ever happen again. The child begins to laugh joyously in the crepuscular gray light of the magical tunnel, laughing in the middle of the knifing cold of the January day, laughing since he does not know, nor do his mother and father, in their youth and beauty and strength, that this will never happen again, and that the family is almost finished and done. His father wears a white silk scarf with blue polka dots.

Even this brief passage exhibits some of Sorrentino’s signature stylistic traits: the first sentence with its list, the exposition-through-questions, the mock lyricism, in this instance leading us to the sudden reckoning with reality — “. . .the family is almost finished and done with. His father wears a white silk scarf with blue polka dots.”

As playful, even extravagant, as Sorrentino’s fiction can sometimes seem, his best work always represents a reckoning with reality. Books like Crystal Vision and Red the Fiend perhaps address hard-bitten realities somewhat more directly (but only somewhat) than books like Mulligan Stew and Blue Pastoral, but ultimately all of his books are aesthetically provocative efforts to get at the prevailing features of postwar American life, at what the title of one of his best books calls the “imaginative qualities of actual things.” A Strange Commonplace indeed. This new book will probably strike readers less familiar with Sorrentino’s work (for whom it would make a perfectly good introduction) as especially concerned with depicting these prevailing features, most of them disturbing if not actively repugnant, as well as the ways in which its characters attempt to cope with their circumstances. If the novel seems unfamiliar in its method of portraying these characters, their mostly unsuccessful strategies will undoubtedly seem very familiar, the kaleidoscopic picture of ourselves that emerges all too recognizable.

This review originally appeared in Bookforum.

Most attentive readers of contemporary American fiction are probably aware of Stephen Dixon and his voluminous body of work, his plain-spoken expository style complete with serial run-on sentences and with paragraphs that might take up pages, his apparent use of his own autobiographical circumstances to slice off a seemingly inexhaustible supply of real-life episodes. They may even have read one or more of his myriad short stories (collected in at least a dozen volumes) or tried one of the novels—themselves frequently constructed out of what seem separate and self-sufficient stories—perhaps Frog (1991) or Interstate (1995), probably the two most well-publicized of Dixon’s books.

Such readers may have felt somewhat at a loss. How exactly to approach a writer whose prose is so clearly distinctive yet finally almost not prose at all, so free does it seem of obvious signs of craft, of any recognizable evidence of being composed at all? What to make of a narrative strategy that seems to revel in discontinuity and to defy good order, that features long stretches of snowballing exposition and undifferentiated dialogue? Is this Dixon’s own kind of obsessive realism, or, given their frequent focus on writer protagonists and discussions of writing, are these stories and novels really a version of metafiction, and thus essentially to be considered postmodern‖?

Unfortunately, curious readers won’t find much guidance from the reviews Dixon’s books have received, since they have often been equivocal, even contradictory, in answering many of these very questions. Moreover, except for Frog and the next few books following on its publication, Dixon—whose first book appeared in 1976—hasn’t really been reviewed much at all, intermittently at best. Even academic critics have been almost entirely neglectful.

Happily, the reader who picks the short novel Old Friends will have the opportunity to sample Dixon at his sharpest and distilled best. Old Friends provides a more or less straightforward account of the friendship between two writers. It manages, in fact, to depict this thirty-year friendship in a fully satisfying way over the course of 220 pages, relating its history in a series of salient episodes that evoke the relationship between these writers, Irv and Leonard, quite convincingly, if not through entirely orthodox means. Much of the  action in Old Friends occurs in the form of telephone calls between the two, later between Irv and Leonard’s second and much younger wife (and former student) when Leonard begins to suffer from species of dementia induced by Lyme disease. Along the way, Irv listens to Leonard describe the various irresponsible behaviors that lead to the dissolution of his first marriage, and in its wake he helps Leonard find the teaching job he needs to support himself.

Both writers come off as prickly sorts, opinionated and not infrequently self-absorbed, which if anything makes the fact of their sustained friendship even more unlikely. Although the novel ultimately focuses on Irv’s attempt to deal with Leonard’s irreversible mental decline, Irv himself has his own problems: His wife is an invalid who requires his help to perform the most rudimentary daily activities. (This situation is common to many previous Dixon characters as well, suggesting it is a reflection of the author’s own circumstances, although it recurs so often one simply accepts it as an established feature of Dixon’s fictional world.) Their conversations suggest that Irv is a somewhat more successful writer than Leonard, but Irv also struggles with the various forces buffeting those who would take up the mostly thankless duties of the serious writer in America.

Ultimately, however, Dixon’s fidelity to what seems a kind of unstudied immediacy in the portrayal of character—unstudied, but surely not artless—serves him well indeed by the time we get to the novel’s final encounter between Irv and Leonard in the mental hospital to which Leonard’s wife, Tessie, has been forced to confine him. The man once possessed of nothing if not a clear sense of his own personality (flaws and all), the writer concerned most of all with the marshaling of language, can now summon up only a stream of unmoored words:

“Leonard,” Irv says, going up to him after first approaching another patient in a chair he thought was Leonard, both of them pale and gaunt from not going out and just being sick, and that same loss of head hair, “how you doing?” and Leonard looks up, without seeming to recognize him, and then gives him a big smile and says “Hey, how are you, how’s it going, good to see you,” and sticks out his hand and Irv shakes it. “Thanks for coming, but you didn’t have to, you know. I’ll be out of here before you leave yourself.” “Very good; your humor, it never flags,” and Leonard says “Oh, I’m a funny guy, all right. People always liked my jokes when I cracked them. They also liked to crack my nuts, but that’s a story we won’t go into. You’re a funny guy too, always funny, always cracking me up. But tell me, because I don’t want to be disrespectful to you or a fake, but what’s your name again?”

These final few pages of Old Friends are emotionally powerful in a way that is both well-earned and aesthetically convincing. The novel is a compelling and skillful, if idiosyncratic, work that should convince readers Dixon is a splendid literary artist. His deceptively transparent prose style and ingenuous manner ultimately reveal a writer examining the profound issues we all confront at some time in our own unavoidably prosaic lives.

In a very good essay about the Russian writer Isaac Babel, Gary Saul Morson also provides a useful mini-lesson on the perils of translation:

Babel’s prose depends on his silences, on what he does not say. Like his contemporaries the Russian Formalists, he wanted to shock readers out of cliché and routine perceptions, and so he cultivated a style demanding interpretations he did not provide. When convention or common sense suggests one word, he provides another, slightly but significantly different. The test of a good translator is whether she preserves the strangeness. When Babel writes “invisible voices,” does the translator supply (as Walter Morison does) “mysterious voices”? Without realizing it, most translators betray Babel’s style by interpreting his words.

The new translations. . .provide a readable text that captures much of what makes Babel’s stories great, but they often explain—that is, explain away—Babel’s oddities. In the story “Pan Apolek,” Babel begins a sentence: “V Novograd-Volynske, v naspekh smyatom gorode, sredi skruchennykh razvalin,” which, as literally as possible, means: “In Novograd-Volynsk, in the hastily crumpled city, amid the crooked ruins….” Vinokur gives us “In Novograd-Volynsk, among the twisted ruins of that swiftly crushed town,” while Dralyuk offers “In Novograd-Volynsk, among the gnarled ruins of that hastily crushed city.” And Morison: “In Novograd-Volynsk, among the ruins of a town swiftly brought to confusion….”

These are all interpretations, almost paraphrases. Babel describes the city as “crumpled” (smyatyi), the way one crumples a piece of paper before throwing it away. The ruins are not twisted or gnarled or brought to confusion, but crooked: the word skruchennyi, as my colleague Nina Gourianova reminds me, is the one used in Samuil Marshak’s famous translation of the English nursery rhyme about a crooked man in a crooked house. Babel’s strange lexicon, and the peculiar image of a town resembling a crumpled letter, disappear. And the translators omit the double use of the word “in” (“In Novograd-Volynsk, in the hastily crumpled city”), so the sentence’s rhythm changes.

[Boris] Dralyuk makes a principle of explaining. His introduction offers as an example of his method a passage where Babel describes old letters as istlevshikh (rotten, decaying). Dralyuk alters this to “letters worn thin”: “If one takes a moment to imagine what Babel’s narrator imagines…one can conjure the fragile letters before one’s eyes, feel their texture; they have been ‘worn thin’ by friction and sweat.” But Babel does not describe them as worn thin, and the Red Cavalry stories constantly offer images of rot, decay, and moldering.

All translations are always, unavoidably, interpretations. This is a fact we have to accept, since otherwise we would have no access at all to some of the world's greatest writing. In this case, Babel's style hasn't truly been "betrayed," or it has only if you are fluent in Russian and know what Babel really wrote. Most of us, alas, are not in a position to know this, and must settle for the interpretation (although certainly some interpretations might be better than others). We should acknowledge–and this is true for reviewers of translated books especially–that we are reading a necessary (and essential) substitute for the work the author in fact created, not the "thing itself," which abides as itself only in the language its author actually used. 

Laurie Stone's My Life as an Animal is a particularly interesting "in-between" book in at least two ways: it straddles the line between novel and short story collection more adroitly than most such books, and it provocatively blurs distinctions between the fictional and the autobiographical, not allowing us simply to appeal to the latter as the final source of meaning, the book's interpretive authority.

The book's cover labels its contents as "stories," but while we reflexively identify such a marker with fiction, there of course is nothing that would necessarily prevent the term from applying to nonfiction, where stories, especially in "creative nonfiction," certainly serve as the coin of the literary realm. The stories as a whole provide a depiction of character, event, and milieu of sufficiently expanded scope that we could certainly regard  it as a novel-in-stories, although again nothing would preclude a memoir from being structured as a series of self-contained episodes that contribute to an overarching narrative. If the book has a formal pattern or continuity, however, it is in its prevailing fragmentation–the individual stories are themselves highly fragmented, freely shifting in time and place, and the book overall provides a discontinuous portrayal of the narrator and her circumstances, although there are motifs and repeated images that serve to unite the stories both thematically and formally. In a book that at first glance might seem formless, this concern with the configuration of experience, its subordination to form, is the most telling affirmation of the book's status as a work of fiction, to be judged and interpreted accordingly.

The stories in My Life as an Animal are narrated by "Laurie," who, as far as can be determined, shares all the characteristics of her depicted life with the life–personal and professional– of the author. Although the book mostly concentrates on the narrator's current status as a 60-something woman, she also frequently recalls episodes from her past–often prompted by events in the present–but they are presented not so much to give a fuller account of the narrator's life-story (although they do indeed have that secondary effect) but to illustrate and extend the narrator's contemporaneous preoccupations. This formal quality is no doubt an effect rising from Stone's method of composition: "In building stories, I work at the level of the sentence. The first sentence is a provocation setting in motion the next sentence, and so on. I layer the narrator’s reaction to an earlier moment with what the narrator makes of it now—at the time of the telling—whether the lookback is five minutes ago or twenty years in the past" (Necessary Fiction). Stone's stylistic approach, which implies that the finished story is indeed a product of artifice, that the writing itself largely determines the "content" rather than acting merely as the means of registering that content (documenting the writer's experiences), thus seems to further confirm we are to take her book as a work of the imagination, the realization of an aesthetically ordered language.

While My Life as an Animal ostensibly belongs to an increasingly familiar literary form that attempts to unite fruitful qualities of already existing forms of fiction, then, this book doesn't exactly unite the more compressed effects of the short story and the more expansive story "arc" of the novel but subtly questions prevailing notions of what is to expected of these forms–why can't a story seem to be a "jumble of impressions," as Laurie's partner puts it in the very first story, rather than a dramatically integrated narrative; must a novel have discernible "development," or might it instead be deceptively static, proceeding through a kind of amplification, gradually enlarged as if through concentric circles? Similarly, it is a book that doesn't so much leave us wondering whether the characters and actions portrayed are autobiographically "true" or they are invented, but should convince us that, in a work of fiction, this distinction doesn't matter. Considering as well that it presents us with a perspective–an unmarried woman in her 60s, sometimes torn between independence and attachment–that is generally underrepresented in American fiction, My Life as an Animal in its unostentatious way provides a consistently engaging and enlivening reading experience.

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(This is the first of a series of shorter reviews I plan to start posting on The Reading Experience. I hope they will allow me to cover more new (or relatively recent) and noteworthy books and increase the frequency of the posts on this blog.)

 

In her review of Nell Zink's The Wallcreeper, Lionel Shriver judges that the novel exists in a kind of narrative void so that "when all is said and done, you’re pretty much left with a strong voice and snappy one-liners. There’s an arbitrary quality. . .a sense that one thing could happen or something else altogether and it wouldn’t matter." Despite Zink's stylistic skills, the narrative lacks "a story that really rolls."

There is certainly a great deal of drift in the account of her life given by the novel's protagonist, Tiffany, even to the point that episodes follow each other almost randomly, but I am inclined to agree with Daniel Davis Wood, who interprets Tiffany's continual recourse to the "snappy one-liners" as "a strange sort of stylistic coping strategy" in the face of the essentially traumatic experiences she recounts. This perspective on the plotlessness of The Wallcreeper helps us to perceive a certain kind of compensating unity in the novel–a unity of voice and style–but Shriver's complaint that it meanders sufficiently to at times verge on the aimless does identify a quality of the novel that often threatens to induce lethargy even in readers otherwise willing to acknowledge the narrator's stylistic charms.

Ultimately, however, it is not really plot or story that this novel lacks, but an attention to form, the creation of an aesthetic order that engages the reader's interest as a substitute for conventionally developed plot. Even in mainstream literary fiction (perhaps especially in mainstream literary fiction), "form" is too often conceived as identical to plot, but in the most interesting fiction, the former transcends the latter, converging with voice and style to provide a work with its aesthetic identity, to fashion the "art" of the art of fiction. In The Wallcreeper, it is as if Zink gave all of her effort to creating a distinctive voice (at which she succeeds), one that leans heavily on witticisms and arresting expressions, while leaving form to take care of itself–which unfortunately it ultimately fails to do. If Tiffany's narration is intended as a kind of experiment with formlessness, the actual effect is paradoxically to put even more emphasis on character and, if not story of the well-made variety, on what happens.

This is not an auspicious context for an appreciation of The Wallcreeper. Aside from Tiffany, none of the characters in the novel are very interesting (although perhaps it is Tiffany's egocentric account that prevents her husband, Stephen, from becoming an interesting character, since finally we know so little about him it is difficult to apprehend him fully), and Tiffany herself through most of the novel is surely not a very likeable character. This finally does not prevent her from being a compelling character in her own way (compelling perhaps in her determination not to be a likeable character), but eventually her exasperating behavior palls from repetition, and the "snappy one-liners" are not enough to sustain any consistent concern for what she does. She spends a good deal of time relating her adulterous affairs, but again their sameness eventually becomes wearisome rather than salacious.

Eventually Tiffany becomes involved in a quasi-radical kind of environmentalism (quasi because it is related in such an affectless way, just something else she's gotten involved in), but most of these episodes seem designed principally to provide us with "information" about European environmental issues and EU bureaucracy. They are the most tedious parts of the book, but in their gratuitous way help to highlight for us the novel's more serious flaw. Without a sense of how these interludes contribute to the realization of the novel's formal ambitions–largely because it doesn't seem to have any such ambitions–the reader must conclude they have been included for no particular reason at all. 

I am sympathetic to most of what Joanna Walsh says about unconventional fiction in her recent Irish Times article, "The N Word: Against the Novel." Her question, "why not many novels, not all of which suit everyone; instead of novels that strive to create a world, why not novels that highlight their own artificiality, stretching the seams at which language is stitched to meaning, shuffling experience as it is shuffled in memory?" is entirely apropos, and her general call for works of fiction that break whatever rules they wish, that alter or invert any of the currently established practices of "literary fiction," is one I profoundly hope other writers hear.

Additionally, she is completely justified in asking why "so many contemporary novels continue to be encumbered by the realist demands of plot, character, place. . less able to make less room. . .for the truly 'novel' varieties of language" the novelist might employ. However, I think her answer to her own question is mistaken, or at least incomplete: "what many a novel most closely resembles is… another novel," she asserts.

It is indeed quite puzzling that, in American fiction at least, post-modernism and post-postmodernism, so many novels (and short stories) adhere to the familiar conventions of plot, character, and setting. Judging from the books that are most prominently reviewed and that win most of the prestigious awards, and from the kind of fiction published in most literary magazines (especially in print), it is almost as if Woolf, Joyce, and Faulkner, Beckett, Borges, and Barth never existed, the primary line of influence bypassing them and their alternative strategies in favor of the narrative conventions associated with "the great tradition" inaugurated in the 19th century. (There are exceptions of course. However, that they are usually explicitly noted by reviewers and readers as exceptional, out of the mainstream of establishment-authorized fiction, only reinforces the impression that the alternative tradition of literary experiment has largely been forgotten–to the extent it ever became familiar.)

But I don't think that the cause of such reflexive, and regressive, fealty to the old narrative verities is the kind of insular preoccupation with other novels that Walsh describes. I believe that the greatest influence on these kinds of novels is not fiction at all, but movies, which have never stopped favoring the 19th century narrative conventions. Writers both appropriate these conventions as borrowed by the more popular form and write stories they think could be adapted to film. (I do not include here such books as John Domini's Movieola or Robert Coover's A Night at the Movies, which parody, contort, and transform the plot conventions of movies to create an altered form of fiction.) This is the only conclusion I can come to when so many of the literary novels I try to read seem so obviously trying to be a movie in words, not so much the script for a movie, but a facsimile of one with words only, absent the equipment necessary to make an actual movie. I love movies, but in reading or choosing fiction I'm not really interested in a film simulacrum in place of an attempt to fashion a distinctive work of verbal art.

The  novel is a "self-referential and self-affirming form" only in that novels always have some relation to the literary history that has made them identifiable as novels in the first place. Something so idiosyncratic or "new" that it doesn't apparently have a connection to that history would no longer be a novel but literally a new form. There's nothing wrong with that, but if this new form proves compelling enough, others will want to try it out as well, and a new kind of history begins to unfold, to which new works in the form will become unavoidably "self-referential." If it isn't compelling, it may eventually be considered just a curiosity.

In a riposte to Jessa Crispin's recent complaint that  a besieged literary culture has been too quick to "close ranks," leading some review editors to prefer only positive reviews, Bethanne Patrick wants to remind us that "Positive reviews, well-written and carefully thought out, certainly are part of criticism." This is, of course, correct, and Patrick does not suggest that, conversely, negative reviews are somehow not part of criticism. Indeed, she confesses to engaging in excessive "boosterism" in her own efforts as editor and book reviewer, ultimately declining the role of "book cheerleader," an inclination to which does indeed characterize a great deal of what is called "literary journalism," and the performance of which too often substitutes for actual literary criticism in both print and online publications.

A positive review does not have to be merely an instance of book cheerleading, however. I would argue that a genuinely "carefully thought out" positive review can be harder to do well than a negative review, since writing a review of a book one finds disappointing, or even actively dislikes, focuses a critic's attention in a way that can be more difficult when trying to account for what one likes in a good book. Those qualities that contribute to a work's failure of interest are likely to make themselves felt distinctly over the duration of the reading experience, leaving the critic with a fairly acute perception of what went wrong in the work. A successful book, a book that consistently engages attention and fulfills its aesthetic ambitions, can challenge the critic to go beyond generic praise and empty accolades, to summon a critical language that doesn't simply repeat, in different variations, "This is a good book."

The most common type of positive review, to be found across the spectrum of available critical opinion, from personal blogs to front page reviews in the New York Times Book Review, employs the rhetoric of extravagant, hyperbolic acclamation, usually leaning heavily on a few all-purpose terms of fulsome praise: "astonishing;" "incandescent;" "rapturous;" "stunning." Most of these terms are more or less interchangeable, and are used so frequently in so many different contexts that they have essentially become meaningless. Unfortunately, most reviews that use such language rely on it as their primary mode of appraisal, at most adding further plot summary, as if reminding us of the story or summing up characters will suffice as illustration of the pertinence of these hopelessly nebulous adjectives as applied to the book at hand.

This sort of review implicitly accepts the conception of reviews as consumer guides, advice to the reader about whether a book is worth his/her time and money. It affirms the evaluative function of criticism (as, of course, does the negative review as well) at the expense of the descriptive function, at least if "description" means more than highlighting and recapitulating narrative content. If newspaper book reviews–to the extent they survive–are not likely to ever abandon this model, reviews in cultural magazines, literary journals, and online generally have no particular reason to embrace it, and thus we could expect reviews from these sources to more often incorporate the descriptive function of criticism, to more fully convey to the reader an impression of the critic's own experience of reading. In this context, a positive review doesn't just commend a book to its potential readers or offer praise and approval to the author (although it could do both of these things), but tries to make manifest the "imaginative qualities" the critic has fathomed in that actual thing–the literary work–readers now and in the future might more fruitfully appreciate.

This means the most valuable skill the critic can bring to the consideration of books, specifically poetry or fiction, is the ability to pay close but also receptive attention–receptive especially to goals and strategies that might seem unfamiliar or unorthodox. Simply calling such a strategy "incandescent" without explaining how it works (or why it prompts a metaphor that invokes giving off light rather than, say, an auditory metaphor) doesn't really help us assimilate its intention or effect. Similarly, a negative review that dismisses an unfamiliar strategy simply because it is unfamiliar does no service either to the book in question or to the efficacy of literary criticism. This sort of reflexively dismissive negative review is arguably even more useless as criticism than the cheerleading panegyric. An enthusiastic but opaque positive review can be correct in its judgment if inadequate in its justification; an uncomprehending negative review provides no reason to take it seriously to begin with.

A well-executed positive review performs an entirely legitimate function of literary criticism. It offers a sort of baseline affirmative analysis that other reviews or critical essays might need to challenge, although not necessarily in an explicit way. To the extent that an intelligent contemporaneous review of a novel that continues to attract readers and critical attention into the future forms a part of the lasting critical discourse about that novel, criticism later readers might consider, a "carefully thought out" positive review would play its part in the study, formal or informal, of the work. Less tangibly, a convincing positive review partly determines the tenor of the conversation about a new book, in some cases no doubt directly affecting the consensus of opinion about it. Negative reviews do this as well, of course, but this is most likely with a prominent "takedown" kind of review. Since positive reviews of fiction usually outnumber negative reviews, a good one needs to be especially good to stand out.

Though the recent attention given to such writers as Roberto Bolaño and Clarice Lispector has helped to broaden our perspective on the important contribution of Latin American fiction to postwar world literature, it’s likely that most readers continue to associate that contribution with the writers of the so-called “Boom”: Garcia Marquez, Cortázar, Vargas Llosa, etc. One could imagine this legacy might seem to younger Latin American writers both a blessing and a curse, as it continues to give writers from this region a more receptive audience than they might otherwise have, but also leads to expectations these writers don’t necessarily want to fulfill. It is tempting to think we could approach an anthology of “new” fiction from such writers by putting aside expectations based on our previous experiences reading “Latin American fiction” as published in the United States, that we could immediately begin to appreciate this fiction on its own merits without further reflection. It is a temptation better resisted.

In an early review of The Future Is Not Ours: New Latin American Fiction, John Freeman advises to “skip over the anthology’s churlish introduction” by editor Diego Trelles Paz. This would be a mistake, however. Not only does this introduction actually avoid being “churlish,” but it provides the stories collected in the anthology with important context we need to fully account for some of the stories’ formal features as well as their subjects. Because the stories are presented in simple alphabetical order by author’s nationality, the guidance offered by Paz in his “Prologue” helps the reader assimilate them more fully than would be possible without it.

Most immediately, Paz informs us of the origins of this anthology in an online project (from which this book offers a selection) initiated by writers “who use electronic means . . . to fight the internal editorial isolation in which the region is submerged.” As Paz puts it, the original anthology “was made by writers in search of readers.” He describes a situation that has long prevailed in Latin America, in which writers (and readers) from one part of the region have trouble getting access to books from other parts, so that “Latin American” writers are to an extent left unaware of each other. Yet for a long time now new fiction from Latin American has been marketed, especially in the United States, as if this fiction was all of a piece, “a bastardized version of magical realism that combines magic, folklore, and miraculous cooking to go.” This version of Latin American fiction is “exoticism on-demand for foreign consumers and American and European Spanish departments.” Perhaps this sounds “churlish” to readers who have blithely accepted such bastardized magical realism as somehow the essence of Latin American fiction, but Paz’s insistence that the writers included in The Future Is Not Ours be distinguished both from the “Boom” writers and from each other is important for readers to keep in mind as they sample the stories in this book.

Paz thus mostly avoids making broad generalizations about the styles or the assumptions that might link the writers in The Future Is Not Ours, except for the shared presumption of futility reflected in the title. The future is bleak, and for reasons that aren’t confined to Latin America, as we all now inhabit “a time catastrophic in terms of equality and social justice, sinister with respect to human rights, apocalyptic for the ecological health of the planet, cynical toward those least favored by the neoliberal fundamentalism of a marked currently in free fall.” However much these conditions might be even more destructive in Latin America, where social injustice and more widespread poverty make it even more susceptible to the depredations of oligarchy and global capital, these intimations of a dystopian future would resonate fully enough with American and European readers facing their own version of such a future. In this way, Paz proposes, most stories in the book address concerns beyond “national boundaries” without succumbing to the lazy realism that contents itself with depicting the ubiquitous influence of American culture on all countries.

While Paz does want to insist that “one of our greatest strengths as a group is that, above all, our fractures are internal,” he nevertheless also provides a taxonomy of the “core motives and concerns” to be found in The Future Is Not Ours. In some ways this guide to the shared thematic and formal concerns of the included writers offers a better way to organize a reading of the book than the fairly arbitrary arrangement of the table of contents. Paz suggests three categories: First is the treatment of “differing manifestations of violence.” In Fifteen Flowers,” by Argentine Federico Falco, the violence emerges from personal conflicts, although the story portrays these conflicts among characters growing up in an environment in which they clearly have little to look forward to. Daniel Alarcon’s “Lima, Peru, July 28, 1979” shifts the focus to violence as an explicitly social and political phenomenon, as it portrays the beginnings of a revolutionary group (probably the Shining Path guerillas) and the casual brutality implicit in its mission. (The group’s first “revolutionary act” as described by the narrator: “We strung up dogs from all the street lamps, covered them with terse and angry slogans, Die, Capitalist Dogs and such; leaving the beasts there for the people to see how fanatical we could be.”) Guatemalan writer Ronald Flores’s “Any Old Story” focuses not on the explicit violence that arises from conditions of deprivation and despair, but on the spiritual violence those conditions visit on ordinary people, in a story of a young girl defeated in her attempt to “improve herself” by migrating from the provinces to “the capital.” Similarly, Alejandro Zambra’s “34” addresses the dehumanizing political violence in Pinochet’s Chile, but obliquely, in a story about students at the National Institute, “the most prestigious secondary school in Chile,” who are known only by their assigned numbers. The final line is especially chilling as a portent of what awaits these students, as the narrator (number 45) tells us about number 34: “Little by little, we lost track of him.”

Most of these stories are subtle, engaging the theme of violence without belaboring their social and political ramifications (and therefore making them all the more powerful as we come to fully recognize the implications). Puerto Rican writer Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro’s “Pillage” relates its narrator’s horrific experience witnessing two men rape and murder a ten year-old girl, although it also seems to link this violent act to ongoing political circumstances, but again obliquely, through the narrator’s sudden awareness of the girl’s screams beneath the sounds of the “rallying at the campaign closings of the usual politicians” and in his confession he had secured his job through a connection with the ruling party, a connection “that didn’t seem likely to be renewed.” Even more obliquely, he informs us that “no one else would hire me with my record, knowing my secret.” The narrator watches the girl being brutally beaten without intervening, and we are left to wonder what resonance this scene might have, if any, with the political context so elliptically introduced.

Other stories in the book, Paz points out, focus on “eroticism,” although, as “Pillage” illustrates, sex “isn’t far removed from the matrix of violence.” One of the most disturbing stories, “Sun-Woo” by Argentine Oliverio Coelho (also the first story in the book) follows a Latin American writer who finds himself in South Korea (immediately demonstrating that these writers are indeed willing to extend themselves beyond “national boundaries”) and involved sexually with the title character, whose sexual appetite proves dangerous, to say the least. Chilean Lina Meruane’s “Razor Blades” is a simultaneously creepy and buoyant story about a group of schoolgirls whose sexual awakening is manifested in a frenzy of depilation. Beginning with the armpits, soon enough they are “running the razor blade down our arms and up our calves and thighs.” The story culminates in the forced shaving of a new girl, Pilar. After reaching her “black, swollen pubis,” the narrator tells us, “we threw our razor blades onto the floor and kissed that mouth and then each other with our tongues, crazed by the ecstasy of our discovery.” The most disturbing story in the book may be by another Chilean, Andrea Jeftanovic’s “Family Tree,” in which a father is seduced by his daughter into an incestuous relationship. The daughter, who has been abandoned by her mother, is clearly attempting to ensure her father doesn’t also leave her (she spies on him when he is entertaining women in the wake of his wife’s departure), although he is apparently unable to see this. At the end of the story the daughter is pregnant and the two are preparing to “settle down”—unless the story is actually the unfolding fantasy of the father/narrator (which might just make the story even more disturbing.)

The third category Paz describes does not unite the stories thematically but instead directs us to see the “aesthetic diversity” in the collection. Unfortunately, these are generally among the weaker stories in The Future Is Not Ours. Some, such as Ena Lucia Portela’s “Hurricane,” are conventionally realistic, if more extended, narratives with political overtones, while others, such as Santiago Nazarian’s “Fish Spine” or Carlos Wynter Melo’s “Boxer,” are briefer but still realistic sketches that evoke pathos in a way that borders on sentimentality. Samanta Schweblin’s “On the Steppe” is a surrealist work that creates an enigmatic situation (an odd outbreak of infertility, it would seem) that never really becomes anything other than enigmatic, its effect depending on the withholding of information that if provided would likely make the story a fairly tepid entry in the postapocalyptic genre. “Wolf to Man,” by Ines Bortegaray, and “Love Belongs to Another Part,” by Slavko Zupcic, are the most “postmodern” stories in the book, each of them focused metafictionally on writers and writing: the former depicts a journalism student preparing a report on a former revolutionary who is on his deathbed; the latter shows a novelist working on a storyincorporating letters written by his presumptive father, whom he has never met. The postmodernism of both stories doesn’t really go much beyond such perfunctory self-reflexivity, although “Wolf to Man” does also include annotations a la David Foster Wallace. Moreover, the underlying narratives framed by these metafictional devices are finally not very interesting.

If there is disappointment in reading The Future Is Not Ours, it is disappointment in its relative lack of aesthetic diversity. On the one hand, it is gratifying to see Latin American writers moving on from magical realism (without necessarily dismissing its achievement), but there is more departure from the “magical” side of this once provocative pairing than from “realism.” Stories such as “Lima, Peru” and “Pillage” use the methods of realism very skillfully (in these cases, something like the “slice-of-life” strategy), but there is little suggestion from this book that the way forward from magical realism might involve formal innovation, or at least some re-appraisal of the role of storytelling in fiction. Paz does point out the greater willingness of these writers to include elements of genre fiction, but while this might make Latin American fiction potentially more attractive to a wider international audience, it doesn’t really encourage fresh approaches to narrative practice, since if anything genre fiction tends to rely even more reflexively on conventional modes of storytelling than mainstream literary fiction.

Arguably this aesthetic conservatism is an unavoidable function of the shared worldview evinced in the book’s title. Writers of formally or stylistically adventurous fiction implicitly think there is a future—at least for literature—and it belongs to them and to all other writers attempting to replenish the resources of literature with freshly conceived strategies, techniques, tropes. One would not begrudge the writers in The Future Is Not Ours their pessimism, of course, which provides an underlying perspective that makes many of the stories here so emotionally bracing. Even readers reluctant to share in that pessimism will surely find the book (or at least parts of it) compelling in this way, but if it does present a broader overview of this generation of Latin American writers—as it does, inevitably—it is one that shows them somewhat in retreat from the more audacious practices and commodious vision of Borges, Cortázar, and Garcia Marquez, the writers who first brought Latin American fiction widespread attention beyond the borders of Central and South America. These stories are still well worth reading, and perhaps, given current circumstances in Latin America, they represent precisely the kind of fiction we should expect to encounter, but one might still hope that writers from this part of the world conclude that the future is theirs after all, and that they begin to discover new or surprising ways to extend the future of fiction without attenuating their engagement with the realities of life as it is lived there.