Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Wednesday October 6, 2010
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EXLEY Brock Clarke
Algonquin
ISBN 978 1 56512 608 4
303 pages
$24.95
Reviewed by Wendy Smith, a 2010 finalist for the National Book Critic Circle's Excellence in Reviewing Citation and a contributing editor at the American Scholar
Brock Clarke reduced large swaths of the literary landscape to ashes in "An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England," his wickedly funny 2007 novel that skewered everything from book clubs and Harry Potter to falsified memoirs -- especially nervy, that last, since Clarke's text assumed the form of a memoir. Yet for all its wit, "An Arsonist's Guide" was deadly serious in its examination of the stories we tell ourselves about our lives and the awkward disconnect between reality and what we'd like to believe. It seems apt, then, that his new novel pays tribute (if you can call it that) to the real-life American novelist Frederick Exley and his 1968 "fictional memoir" called "A Fan's Notes."
At the beginning of "Exley," 10-year-old Miller Le Ray tells us that "A Fan's Notes" is his father's favorite book. Indeed, it was the only book Miller ever saw him reading, and his father moved to Watertown, N.Y., because it was Exley's hometown. So when Miller learns "on Sunday, the eleventh of November" (a date that resonates with the opening sentence of "A Fan's Notes") that dad is back from Iraq and in a coma at the local VA hospital, he decides to go in search of Frederick Exley. If he can bring the author to meet his father, then somehow everything will be OK.
There are a few difficulties with this scenario. Exley died in 1992, for starters. And it's not entirely certain where Miller's dad went eight months earlier when he left his wife crying in the driveway. "His mother believes strongly that his father left them, but not to join the army and not to go to Iraq," writes a therapist whose notes alternate with the boy's narrative. This first entry appears in the novel's epigraph, underneath a quote from "A Fan's Notes" that gives fair warning there will be no sure facts in the tale that follows.
Clarke pulls off a nice trick here, playing postmodern games while delivering a cleverly plotted story complete with a surprise twist embedded in Miller's partial understanding of his parents' tension-riddled relationship. The payoff is a long time coming, however, and by no means alleviates the unease aroused by the preceding chapters, as Miller hunts for Exley and finds, first, a decrepit janitor at the New Parrot motel; next, a drunken customer at a bar called the Crystal; and last, a shotgun-wielding old man at the end of Oak Street. These locations will be familiar to those who know "A Fan's Notes," as will grotesquely comic developments that recall "An Arsonist's Guide." But black humor that was edgily appropriate in novels with adult protagonists is much more unsettling when employed to depict the misadventures of a young boy.
Granted, Miller doesn't sound like any boy you've ever met, not even one who's in eighth grade and has recently read "Waiting for Godot." That's a problem; some of Clarke's stinging social observations suffer from being implausibly placed in Miller's mouth. The author is more skillful in crafting the words of Miller's therapist, an insecure man whose pompous description of himself as "a mental health professional" becomes a running joke, while his crush on his patient's beautiful mother evolves from creepy to oddly touching. She's a lawyer prosecuting cases of domestic abuse in the military at nearby Fort Drum, and fallout from the Iraq war swirls as an undercurrent to the story's main drift.
The action gets increasingly bizarre. The therapist visits Miller, pretending to be Exley. Washington Post critic Jonathan Yardley makes a cameo appearance, reciting passages from "Misfit," his 1997 biography of Exley. All three head for Watertown's Brookside Cemetery, where Exley is buried. Or is he? Clarke keeps us guessing, rolling out a series of discoveries that indicate Miller has imagined the whole thing, including his father's presence at the VA hospital, then taking an abrupt turn to suggest that the boy may have got it right after all.
What is clear, and what gives the novel its emotional weight, is that Miller feels a painful kinship with Exley and his errant father, discontented dreamers whose inability to deal with the real world is the despair of sensible women like his mother. She wants to tell her son the truth about his father and their marriage, but Miller desperately doesn't want to hear it because her truth is "full of everything I couldn't stand to see." Clarke swiftly rings down the curtain on their confrontation, leaving us to decide whether it's better to grow up and face facts, or to cling steadfastly to the illusions that make life bearable.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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BEFORE YOU SUFFOCATE YOUR OWN FOOL SELF
Danielle Evans
Riverhead
ISBN 978 1 59448 769 9
232 pages
$25.95
Reviewed by Ron Charles, the fiction editor for The Washington Post. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/roncharles.
I hope Danielle Evans is a very nice person because that might be her only defense against other writers' seething envy. At 26, this D.C.-area author has already graduated from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, earned praise from Salman Rushdie and Richard Russo, and appeared in two (two!) volumes of "Best American Short Stories." Now comes the publication of her first collection, "Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self," eight quietly devastating stories that validate the hype. No, she's not the America's Next Top Model of the same name -- that would just be too much -- but she's captivating in a far more profound way.
Lorrie Moore, one of the country's finest short story writers, recently said that she considered the form inherently melancholy, and that's an apt appraisal of Evans' work, though her stories are flecked with humor, too. As an African-American who grew up in Baileys Crossroads, she writes about black teenagers and college students -- sometimes older, occasionally male -- who live in a country still largely determined by race but tired of talking about it. The tensions of interracial dating are private now, and blacks work confidently as lawyers and professors, even as they search out black landlords who won't hassle them. The civil rights protests of their grandparents' era have settled into wry jokes and sarcastic realism.
That attitude energizes a rueful story called "Harvest" about a group of Columbia University students. These young black women see ads in the campus newspaper offering up to $15,000 for human eggs, but they know well-heeled couples don't want their genetic material, no matter how high their SATs or how healthy their bodies. "Columbia credentials be damned," says the narrator. "If they had wanted brown babies who so obviously didn't belong to them, they would have just adopted." Even as the story appears to glide along with no more direction than the flow of dorm-room gossip, it quickly develops into an unsettling reflection on the calculus of race, sex and commerce before arriving at a moment of compromise that's as intimate as it is disturbing.
That technique, the surprising dodge of moral responsibility that casts a character into deep regret and re-evaluation, works well in almost all these stories. The first one, "Virgins," is a deceptively casual tale of sexual initiation told by a 15-year-old girl in 1996. Evans, who teaches creative writing at American University, brings us right into the overconfident patter of these bored, anxious teens, kids who know sunscreen lotion is a white conspiracy, who know they deserve vastly more exciting lives, who know they can handle even the most dangerous situations. The narrator, Erica, resembles many of the people in this collection: She's smart but confused by the rules of teen life; eager to fit in, but conscious that she doesn't. Seeing a slutty girl at a bar, Erica says, "I wondered how you got to be a girl like that. Did you care too much what other people thought, or did you stop caring?" By the end of this powerful story, she gets a disturbing sense of just how far adrift she really is.
English teachers still assigning John Knowles' "A Separate Peace" -- why? why? -- could enrich their classroom discussion by comparing it to Evans' "Snakes." It's a rich, shocking story about a 9-year-old black girl sent to spend the summer with her wealthy white grandmother in Tallahassee. On the grounds of the estate, the young narrator cavorts with a much-favored cousin under the increasingly displeased eye of their toxic grandmother, who warns the girls of man-eating pythons in the lake. Like Ian McEwan's "Atonement," it's a story about longing and what vengeance a young girl can set in motion. You'll never experience its revelation the same way you did the first time, but it rewards in other ways on repeat readings.
Evans' greatest talent is her ability to create poignant moments of crisis in the lives of transient people who can't seem to connect with those they love. How quietly and easily the barriers between us are reinforced. In "Jellyfish," Eva waits eagerly for her father at a restaurant with the sense "that anyone could just by looking at her see that she did not belong to anyone, anywhere. ... Where once she'd taken her self-sufficiency for granted, somewhere in a dizzying string of morning afters she had started to feel her aloneness was a mark of incompletion, faintly spreading." And yet, when her father arrives, so eager to help her, to embrace her, he feels that "her whole life was an elaborate series of barricades against him."
If there's some tonal and thematic redundancy in this collection, it's counterbalanced by such arresting stories as "Someone Ought to Tell Her There's Nowhere to Go." Set in the Washington area, the story involves an Iraq vet who comes home to discover -- as he expected -- that his girlfriend has moved in with a new guy. Determined to behave kindly and stay in her life any way he can, he volunteers to baby-sit her 5-year-old daughter. And what's the harm if this little one wants to call him "Daddy"? As a story of chronic alienation and post-traumatic stress, it's affecting and sweet, moving toward a tragicomic crisis that leaves this young vet staring into the conundrum of his intractable loneliness.
Again and again, without any histrionics, but with a clear appreciation for the natural drama of our mundane lives, Evans frames such questions in a way that will resonate with any thoughtful reader.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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