Author: David Hebblethwaite

Sunday Story Society: “Black Box”

22nd July 2012 / / 27 Comments

To keep up to date with the Sunday Story Society: view our schedule; follow @SundayStorySoc on Twitter; or like us on Facebook.

So, it’s time for our first discussion. The story – Jennifer Egan’s “Black Box” – is available to read here at the New Yorker website, if you haven’t yet seen it. For the rest of this post, I’m going to round up some of the comment there’s already been on the story. There has been rather a lot, so I won’t pretend to have captured it all here.

Perhaps inevitably, a good number of the responses focus on Egan’s story in its Twitter form. Dan Holmes found that the Twitter form influenced his reading: “Many of the sentences have an aphoristic power that can be appreciated when taken alone, independent of the larger text.” (Holmes goes on to explore how the tweeting of Egan’s story could be seen as performance art).

Bruce Stone’s essay at Numéro Cinq (well worth reading in full) reflects on literature in digital media, and finds “Black Box” pertinent to that subject:

Egan’s work speaks most powerfully and palpably to…the vexed core of the media wars: tensions between the old and new; the technological and the organic; the self and the other; the word, the body and the data processor…the tale’s cool, lyrical irony reveals a deep skepticism for the very technological apparatus that it presumes to embrace and exploit.

Joe Winkler reviewed “Black Box” in sentences of 140 characters or fewer:

Ultimately, the story itself embraces the idea of attention, of what to think about, what to view, what to choose, and how to perceive life.

In many ways, Egan’s story is less about a nebulous women spying on a nebulous man that it is about general musings on perception, projection, persona and controlling the images we make, create and intake.

Show, don’t tell.

Sara Walker’s response was more negative:

Women are not disposable, and I’m not enamoured with a world where they would be treated as such. I’m sure this was a choice to add social commentary to the science fiction, but it devalued the story for me. Likewise the theme that beauty and brains are mutually exclusive.

For Martin Ott, the story brought to mind instructional poetry. Trevor from The Mookse and the Gripes found “Black Box” stronger in print form. Further positive write-ups come from Paul Debraski; Rosabel Tan; Aaron Riccio; J Chance; and Catie Disabato.

A couple of this blog’s regular readers have also posted their thoughts. Alan Bowden liked the story very much:

The narrative drive Egan attains in each sentence, often by allusion alone, is wonderful and is combined with unexpectedly poetic moments, all of which are deployed in the instrumental manner of the training manual.

Maureen Kincaid Speller (in another extended response, again recommended in its entirety) was less complimentary:

The brevity of the format naturally eschews detailed explanation of setting and motivation, although Egan seems able to include it when she feels like it. However, this leaves the reader having to try to figure out what is going on while providing an escape clause for the author if things don’t quite make sense. There is a difference between the narrator not making sense and the story not making sense; my own feeling here is that the story in and of itself somehow lacks clarity, in part because Egan is too taken up with the format and transmission of the story to fully consider its implications.

I’ll also point out a New Yorker interview with Egan about the story (to which Maureen refers).

With that, it’s over to you. What did you make of “Black Box”?

Book notes: Toby Litt and Stuart Evers

21st July 2012 / / 1 Comment

Toby Litt, Ghost Story (2004)

Toby Litt is an author I’ve intended to read for ages; his work is so varied that it’s hard to know where to start, so I just went for something from the middle of his career to date. I may not know Litt’s work that well, but I know enough to be wary of a novel that so blatantly declares its (ostensible) genre. And, indeed, Ghost Story is not a ghost story as you might imagine; its ‘ghosts’ are not the supernatural kind.

When first we meet Agatha and Paddy, she’s expecting, and they’re about to leave London for a new home on the south coast. After they’ve moved in, Agatha has given birth to Max, but miscarried his twin, which has affected her deeply (as it has Paddy, but Agatha is the novel’s main focus), and she becomes withdrawn. Effectively, Agatha comes to haunt (and is haunted by) her own house. Litt tells this story in a way that highlights its fictionality: long descriptive passages which create a sense of lassitude, dialogue which feels theatrical rather than naturalistic – and there’s a tension between this and the book’s emotions, which ring so true.

It seems to me that key to understanding Ghost Story is its fifty-page preface, in which Litt describes how he and his partner were themselves affected by three miscarriages. This memoir also includes a couple of fantastical sections; the sense here is that fiction can tell certain kinds of truth which non-fiction cannot. The story of Agatha and Paddy strikes me as a portrait of loss which lies beneath the surface of what’s told, and is perhaps all the more powerful for it.

Elsewhere
Toby Litt’s website
Some other reviews of Ghost Story: Reading Matters; Joanna Briscoe for The Guardian.

Stuart Evers, If This Is Home (2012)

The author of last year’s excellent Ten Stories About Smoking returns with his first novel, which continues to explore how life may fall short of one’s dreams. Evers’ protagonist is Mark Wilkinson, who escaped his life in Cheshire and made it in America as ‘Joe Novak’; when we meet him in the early 2000s, he’s in Las Vegas , selling apartments at the ultra-high-end Valhalla complex. Alternate chapters chronicle a day in 1990 when Mark’s teenage girlfriend Bethany Wilder became a reluctant beauty queen at a parade, shortly before she and Mark were planning to leave for New York. But Bethany is nowhere to be seen in Mark’s present life – what happened becomes clear about halfway through the novel, when an incident moves Mark to return to the UK and catch up with the people and places of his own life.

There are some striking and well-handled shifts of tone in If This Is Home. In the opening chapters, the Valhalla complex seems almost to belong in a more heightened reality, which contrasts sharply with the down-to-earth nature of the Cheshire-set sequences. Later on, the novel starts to turn on Mark’s character and, balances reality with a slight unreality in a different way – yet If This Is Home always feels a cohesive whole. Evers examines the difficulties of fitting in, leaving and returning; and shows how an individual can simultaneously have no options and all the choice in the world.

Elsewhere

Stuart Evers’ website
Evers interviewed on Nikesh Shukla’s Subaltern podcast.
Some other reviews of If This Is Home: Julie Fisher for Bookmunch; Dog Ear Discs; David Whelan for Litro.

Sunday Story Society Reminder: Black Box

19th July 2012 / / 0 Comments

The time for our first Sunday Story Society discussion is nearly here; our subject will be Jennifer Egan’s “Black Box”. Egan is author of the Pulitzer-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) and three other novels, as well as a short story collection, Emerald City (1993).

“Black Box” (2012) was published in The New Yorker‘s recent ‘science fiction issue’, and also via the medium of Twitter. It’s now available to read on the New Yorker website. Join us here on Sunday to talk about it.

Book notes: debuts by Kerry Hudson and Katy Darby

18th July 2012 / / 7 Comments

Kerry Hudson, Tony Hogan Bought Me an Ice Cream Float Before He Stole My Ma (2012)

Boasting one of the best (and longest) titles I’ve come across in ages, Kerry Hudson’s debut chronicles the childhood of one Janie Ryan. Born to a single mother in Aberdeen (her American father having long since disappeared from their lives), Janie is a battler from the start (‘fishwives to the marrow, [the Ryan Women] were always ready to fight and knew the places that would cut deepest,’ p. 1). Janie’s childhood is spent in a succession of B&Bs and run-down council properties; and her mother goes through a number of violent and destructive relationships – but Janie comes through it all.

Hudson has a great eye for detail, and this is what really makes the places and characters in her book live and breathe. She’s unflinching in depicting the harshness of Janie’s and her mother Iris’s lives; but there’s humour in there too – both in comic scenes such as that when the young Janie tries to warm up Iris’s coffee in the toaster; and in wryer undercurrents, as when Janie misunderstands what the ‘wee bags of flour’ are that her mother weighs out for other people.Hudsoncaptures the ups and downs of life through this skilful control of tone.

I had an exchange with Naomi Frisby on Twitter recently about whether Tony Hogan was a grim book; she found it ‘unrelentingly’ so, but I said that it didn’t feel that way to me. On reflection, with everything that Janie goes through, it seems somewhat naïve not to call the book grim. I think what I really meant was that I didn’t find it bleak; that’s not just down to the good humour, but also Janie’s determination to move beyond her circumstances – and the narrative voice which acts as a constant reminder that she will eventually succeed. The road for Janie is rocky, and there’s nothing that can suddenly stop it from being so; but the story of how she travels it is engaging and compelling.

Elsewhere
Kerry Hudson’s website
Foyles interview with Hudson
Review of Tony Hogan at Read Between the Lines
Start of Tony Hogan blog tour at Valerie O’Riordan’s blog

Katy Darby, The Whores’ Asylum (2012)

NB. The Whores’ Asylum is published in paperback as The Unpierced Heart.

Katy Darby’s first novel is a proper page-turner. I don’t care how overused that description may be; it applies to this book. The Whores’ Asylum is presented as a series of manuscripts from the late 19th century, beginning with one Edward Fraser’s memoir of his years studying theology at Oxford, where he befriended a medical student named Stephen Chapman. With expertise in obstetrics and gynaecology, Chapman began to volunteer at a refuge for fallen women, managed by an acquaintance of his named Diana Pelham. On later meeting her, Fraser realised that he had encountered ‘Diana Pelham’ years before, under a different name – and tragedy resulted for another friend of his.

The subsequent parts of Darby’s novel delve back into that past, and give Chapman and Diana their own turns as narrator. This enables a wonderfully gradual unfurling of the truth, as we come to see all three protagonists in a different light. Darby’s prose evokes period style without coming across as pastiche; this and a gleeful streak of melodrama help keep the pages turning. But Darby also finds time to reflect on love, and explore attitudes towards prostitutes (and women more generally) in Victorian society.

To put it more succinctly: read this book.

Elsewhere
Katy Darby’s website
Foyles interview with Darby
Some other reviews of The Whores’ Asylum: What Sarah Reads; For Books’ Sake; Desperate Reader.

Teaser Tuesday: Ghost Story

17th July 2012 / / 1 Comment

Time for the weekly meme hosted by Should Be Reading, where we open the book we’re reading at a random page, and quote two sentences (without spoilers). My quote this week is from Ghost Story by Toby Litt:

The only drama came from the juddercrash of the pilot light catching, or the yawp of the central heating waking up and that was long past, now. Agatha enjoyed listening – doing nothing but listening; she took possession of the house first of all through her ears. (p. 31)

It’s difficult to give a true flavour of Ghost Story just by pulling out a couple of sentences – this is a book that works through long, immersive stretches of prose – but I think these lines give a sense of how the main character, Agatha, becomes preoccupied with the small details of her environment; and so starts to haunt (or be haunted by) her own house.

David Logan,Half-Sick of Shadows (2012): The Zone review

16th July 2012 / / 2 Comments

The Zone are now carrying my review of David Logan‘s first novel, Half-Sick of Shadows. The book was one of the joint winners of the inaugural Terry Pratchett Anywhere But Here, Anywhen But Now First Novel Award. The curious thing about it is that, for a work of the fantastic, Half-Sick of Shadows is at its best in realist mode: Logan’s portrait of childhood in a remote part of Ireland is excellent; but, when time travel elements kick in properly at about halfway through, the novel starts to falter.

Click here to read what I thought about Half-Sick of Shadows in full.

Announcing the Sunday Story Society

14th July 2012 / / 6 Comments

After the expressions of interest, we’re going ahead! Here’s how it works: each fortnight, we’ll discuss a particular short story (which will all be available to read for free online, either in HTML for as a PDF). I’ll post a reminder on the Thursday beforehand, and the main post on the Sunday will round up commentary on the story that I could find online (feel free to post your thoughts on your own blog in advance if you wish) – then the floor (or comment thread) will be open to you.

We’ll start off with six stories, and see how it goes. I’d love to make this a regular feature if there’s enough demand. Here are the first selections, with dates and links to the stories:

22 July: “Black Box” by Jennifer Egan [discussion]

5 Aug: “Bombay’s Republic” by Rotimi Babatunde [PDF]

19 Aug: “Atlantic City” by Kevin Barry [PDF]

02 Sept: “The Merchant of Shadows” by Angela Carter

16 Sept: “Two Ways of Leaving” by Alois Hotschnig

30 Sept: “Drifting House” by Krys Lee

Please note, although there’s usually a fortnight between discussions, I’ve scheduled the first one for next week (this is to avoid a clash of dates later on). The Society has its own index on the blog (above), as well as a dedicated Twitter account and Facebook page.

So there we go.What do you reckon to the first selections?

Your thoughts, please: short story discussion

12th July 2012 / / 15 Comments

EDIT, 13 July: I think there’s enough interest to make this worth doing. Look out for more news in the next couple of days.

So I’ve been mulling over the idea of starting a short story discussion feature on the blog. Once a week, or maybe once every two weeks, I’d host a discussion (in post comments) on a short story. I’d aim to make the selection of stories diverse, but sticking to pieces available to read online for free. I’d anticipate starting with six to see how it goes. (EDIT: The model I’m looking at is what Torque Control did a few years ago, but with multiple genres.)

What I want to do first is find out what sort of interest there may be for the idea. So I have a couple of questions: in general, do you like the sound of this? And if so, would you prefer it to be weekly or fortnightly? (EDIT: I’ve thought of a third option, which would be to run it weekly, but in blocks of six stories with a gap between – let me know how that sounds as well.)

War Stories: Hassan Blasim and Ben Fountain

11th July 2012 / / 8 Comments

Hassan Blasim, The Madman of Freedom Square (2009)
Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (2012)

One thing I feel I ought to do more often as a reader and reviewer is engage with the issues; I tend to think more about how novels and stories work as pieces of fiction, and park the issues they deal with to one side. I probably shouldn’t do that, and certainly couldn’t do that with the stories in the Iraqi writer Hassan Blasim’s collection, The Madman of Freedom Square (translated by Jonathan Wright), because they’re all about how stories shape people’s experiences of war and its consequences.

The opening piece, ‘The Reality and the Record’, illustrates what I mean. After a scene-setting introduction – which explains that refugees arriving at reception centres have the stories they tell to gain asylum, and the stories they keep to themselves, the ones about what really happened to them – we launch into the main body of the story, an account given to a Swedish immigration official by an Iraqi refugee. Our narrator tells how he was kidnapped from his work as an ambulance driver, and forced to appear in a video claiming to be a member of the Iraqi army. He describes how, over the subsequent months and years, he was kept in captivity, sold from group to group, and placed in front of a camera innumerable times, to play all manner of roles.

Stories upon stories upon stories – not just all these fake videos, but the refugee’s account itself, because who would believe such an outlandish tale? Generally speaking, I’d read something like ‘The Reality and the Record’ and praise its aesthetics in using story, the way it resists a definitive interpretation… I can still do these things, but I can’t ignore the emotional impact of Blasim’s portrayal of war as a maze of realities in which a person can so easily become lost. The narrator of the tale’s frame comments at the end that ‘the ambulance driver summed up his real story in four words: “I want to sleep,”’ p.11); those four words say so much.

Elsewhere in The Madman of Freedom Square, we see more characters being damaged and destroyed by war, stories, or both. The narrator of the title story refused to believe tales of two young blond men who left good fortune in their wake, until he was wounded in an explosion and apparently rescued by them; Blasim shows how blurred the line between sanity and delusion may be, and the final sentences are especially chilling. ‘The Truck to Berlin’ is another tale which layers hearsay upon anecdote in depicting what happens to a group of Iraqi men who pay to be smuggled out of the country; in the darkness of the truck, they don’t know what’s happening, or even if they’re actually heading to Berlin as promised – the conclusion is both brutal and powerful.

Dedicated ‘to the Dead of the Iran-Iraq War’, ‘An Army Newspaper’ revolves around a fairly straightforward – but nonetheless effective – metaphor. The now-deceased editor of an army newspaper’s cultural page narrates how he received anonymously-authored exercise books containing the stories of soldiers, and published them – to great acclaim – under his own name. But the books kept coming, until he was besieged. At the story’s close, the editor cries out to the writer who has temporarily brought him back to life, ‘why do you need an incinerator for your characters?’ (p.20). That’s just one example of how Blasim brings home the stark realities of war. Not all the stories in The Madman of Freedom Square are as successful, but the best pieces alone make the book worth buying. I’m very grateful to M. Lynx Qualey of the ArabLit blog for bringing Blasim’s work to my attention.

***

A new novel of the Iraq war comes from US author Ben Fountain, a debut novelist in his fifties. Nineteen-year-old Billy Lynn is the star of ‘Bravo squad’, who became the toast of America after an embedded Fox News crew filmed them winning a firefight against Iraqi insurgents, and the video went viral. Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is set on the final day of the soldiers’ ‘Victory Tour’ organised by the government, when they will be guests of honour at a Thanksgiving Day football game in Texas, before returning to Iraq.

Fountain’s main subject could be summed up, I think, as the gap between the reality of the soldiers’ experiences at war, and perceptions of them at home – it’s all about stories again. The people he meets on the Victory Tour treat Billy like a hero:

They want autographs. They want cell phone snaps. They say thank you over and over and with growing fervor, they know they’re being good when they thank the troops and their eyes shimmer with love for themselves and this tangible proof of their goodness (pp. 39-40).

But for Billy, what he did on that day in Iraq was – well, just something he had to do:

Billy did not seek the heroic deed, no. The deed came for him, and what he dreads like a cancer in his brain is that the deed will seek him out again (p. 40).

Already, new realities are being woven around those three minutes in the life of Bravo squad. Technically, even the name ‘Bravo squad’ is incorrect, but that’s what they’ve been dubbed by the media, and so that is who they now are. Movie rights are being negotiated: Hilary Swank is interested in playing Billy, and the fact she’s a woman is irrelevant in the face of a possible film deal. So, the boys of Bravo are losing control of their destiny, but they’re used to it: ‘manipulation is their air and element, for what is a soldier’s job but to be the pawn of higher?’ (p. 28)

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is one of those books which I had to keep stopping reading to make note of something interesting; I don’t find myself doing that as often as I’d like. I’m still left with a nagging sense, though, that the plot of Billy Lynn is not quite enough to support a novel of this length – but there is a nicely-done sub-plot in which Billy falls for a cheerleader at the stadium, which has the uncertainty and awkwardness of a teenage crush that begins suddenly but may not have the chance to last.

But it’s Fountain’s prose to which I keep returning. One of my favourite sections in the novel comes when Bravo squad are introduced to the footballers and Billy sees behind the scenes: there’s a clear contrast drawn between these enormous men with all facilities on hand, and the soldiers of Bravo squad. As his Victory Tour comes to an end, Billy reflects on the implications of the discrepancy between the image and reality of war:

For the past two weeks he’s been feeling so superior and smart because of all the things he knows from the war, but forget it, they are the ones in charge, these saps, these innocents, their homeland dream is the dominant force…Their reality dominates, except for this: It can’t save you. It won’t stop any bombs or bullets (p. 306).

Whether in Fountain’s novel or Blasim’s collection, the stories win – and, so often, it’s the characters who lose.

Links

The Madman of Freedom Square
Hassan Blasim’s website
The publisher, Comma Press.
Interview with Blasim at The Short Review.
Some other reviews: A Year of Reading the World; Mithran Somasundrum for The Short Review; M. Lynx Qualey for The Quarterly Conversation; Alan Whelan for Lancashire Writing Hub.

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
Interview with Ben Fountain in The Scotsman.
The publisher, Canongate Books.
Some other reviews: Naomi Frisby for Bookmunch; Bite the Book; Boston Bibliophile; Curiosity Killed the Bookworm.

Teaser Tuesday: Pure

10th July 2012 / / 6 Comments

I’ve found this weekly meme over at the Should Be Reading blog: open the book you’re reading at a random page, and quote two sentences (without spoilers). Sounds fun. Today I am reading Pure, Andrew Miller’s Costa-winning novel set in pre-Revolutionary Paris:

When the assault took place, when precisely, no one could ever say with any certainty. Somewhere between very late and very early, some deep, velvet-lined pocket of a winter’s night. (p. 189)

I haven’t actually reached that page yet; I’m intrigued.

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