The Daily Sabbatical

Somewhat ironically The Daily Sabbatical has all but disappeared during my semester long sabbatical in NYC, but I haven’t stopped reading, and I’ve just finished a book that more people should know about. It’s a collection of three novellas, by Josh Weil, grouped under the title The New Valley. Weil recently was named on of the “top five under thirty-five” by the National Book Foundation, and if any of the other four have written books nearly as good, American Letters is in good hands.

Each of Weil’s three stories, which run from 83 to 150 pages, is a well crafted study of a character playing out, in all imperfection, the cards dealt to him in a small valley of rural Virginia. In the first, and shortest tale, “Ridge Weather,” we move with Osby through the days after his father’s suicide as he uneasily discovers that the silent rails set down by his relationship with his father begin to disappear. In some ways, this is a difficult introduction to the collection, as it takes a while before the quiet and awkward Osby begins to take real shape. But in retrospect, it is an important initiation into to the collection because it introduces us so thoroughly to the land and the concerns that seem to grow organically out of the valley itself. This pays huge dividends in the second and third novellas, which occupy neighboring landscapes, as the characters begin to come to the fore more powerfully with the reader having a taste and implicit understanding of the world around them.

The second tale, Stillman Wing, shows the writer beginning to flex his muscles a bit. Stillman Wing, whose name sounds like it could itself designate a brand of farm equipment, is finding his retirement years embodied by the slow, patient reconstruction of a Deutz tractor. The days and years slide by as the concern of his machine is matched only by his concern for his own aging body, while the more human relationships—such as that with his willful obese daughter—fail to yeild to the deliberative tinkering that rebuild the Deutz.

In my opinion, the third novella, “Sarverville Remains” is the book’s masterpiece. Here Weil leaves the sort of stoic, spare description of characters from the outside, and moves into the first-person voice of Geoffrey, who is a man-child of limited intellect but with increasing emotional sophistication. The novella is in the form of an extended letter or diary, written by Geoffrey to the man who has been imprisoned for savagely beating him to near death. As the diary continues, the events slowly filter through Geoffrey’s perceptions until the unsavory circumstances behind the beating are revealed.

All in all, The New Valley is an exceptional book. The novella has trouble finding an audience, nowadays, being too long for The New Yorker and too short for single bound release. It is an art form, every bit as valid as the short story, that for reasons of economy seems to be at risk of extinction. More power, then, to Josh Weil who makes his debut with this collection, earning him comparisons in my mind to Jim Harrison and John Casey, as well as to that champion of the hopeless, George Saunders.

A lot has been said about this book and this writer: it was runner up for the NBA, and he’s received a MacArthur grant and has been compared to Nabokov more times than Nabokov.  So, I’m sorta just adding my voice to the choir: this is a really good novel.  It combines an adventure story, a buddy novel, a historical fiction, and a potent reflection on immigration to the land of the allegedly free.

The book flows from the project and ambition of it’s narrator, Vladimir Brik: a Bosnian/American transplant who wants to write a novel based on a true (in the fiction) story about a Jewish immigrant named Lazarus who in the early 20th century escapes the Russian pogroms only to be shot by a Chicago chief of police.  In pursuit of the facts, our narrator travels to Eastern Europe with his childhood friend Rora, who is, in my humble, the real star of the novel.  Rora’s anecdotes, jokes, and suspiciously elegant personality keep alive a novel that is involved, at least ostensibly, with the past.  The Lazarus Project switches from telling the story of the protagonist of Brik’s novel, to telling the story of Brik and Rora’s trip, to telling the story of Rora’s involvement in the intricate cloaking and daggering of war ravaged Sarajevo.  As a result, it keeps the reader’s interest hooked–I read it in a few sittings–but at the same time has much to say about the role of stories and fictions in helping us process our tragedies, the fragility and the questionable genuineness of the “American Promise”, and the evanescent quality of cultural identity.  Quite a feat.

Despite my admiration for the book and for Hemon, I have to get something off my chest: the comparisons to Nabokov are ridiculous.  I’ve read almost everything the master wrote, much of it more than once, and I just don’t see the comparison.  I hate to contradict James Wood, who sounds on the cover as if he prefers Hemon to Nabokov, but one of these guys is a good story-teller with an insightful, reflective bent, the other is a literary magician.  More apt is the frequent comparison to W.G. Sebold.  It’s an easy comparison in some ways, since LP and most of Sebolds books share the trick of having pictures interjected into the text to lend a sense of authenticity and character, but there is more to it.  Both Sebold and Hemon are interested in roots and journeys to sniff out the origins of culture and person.  Still, there’s something crystalline about Sebold’s prose that is lacking in Hemon.  Hemon learned English, growing up a Ukranian transplanted to Bosnia, only relatively recently, and while it is unfair to say it shows–he’s a splendid writer and outpaces most native english writers easily–it kinda does now and again.  Words are every once in a while made to do work they don’t easily do but that the OED might well suggest they are capable of.  Sentences haven’t yet gotten the rhythm that they have, say, in Joshua Ferris’ work.  Nevertheless, the guy is a top hand and will only get better.

Angela Carter is one of the lesser known literary wonders.  She’s a sort of British, feminist Thomas Pynchon with a handy dab of Robert Coover mixed in.  I’ve read a few of her short stories, but not until Nights at the Circus has her genius been so apparent to me.  I’m now committed to reading everything she’s written.

Carter’s “Nights” is a sort of hallucinogenic fairy-tale that takes us from London, through Petersburgh, and into the snowy depths of Siberia, all in the warm, oversized company of a winged aerialiste named Fevvers.  Fevvers, along with her protecting witch Liz, guides us through bizarre brothels and the three ringed wonder of Colonal Kearney’s travelling circus–with its prophetic pigs, autodidactic apes, and chaotic clowns–for love of fame, money, and in the end, love itself.  Our proxy is an American Journalist by the name of Walser, who falls for Fevver’s charms, gets blown up in Siberia, and becomes a Shaman constantly tripping on hallucinogenic urine before his love is requited.  Oh, the things we’ll do for the embrace of a winged woman!

Carter is, no doubt, the mother of those young writers who seem to be everywhere these days writing a female inflected sort of fairy-tale.  She has clear kin in Kathyrn Davis, Kelly Link, Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, Laura Groff, Karen Russell, and many other excellent writers, all of them worth reading, but perhaps none quite so fluent in the medium as the original.  Carter performs verbal acrobatics while telling her tale , and is unashamed of where she lands.  Her death at 52, in the early nineties was a great loss.  She was only gaining steam.  Her legacy is something to savor.

Cormac McCarthy has been awarded the PEN lifetime achievement award, very deservedly.  If you haven’t read much CM, my favorites are Blood Meridian, Suttree, and The Road, but really you can’t go wrong.  This guys one of the best american authors, if not the very best.

Thanks to The Yellow Stereo for sharing this.

I used to think that people who wore earplugs at shows should just stay home. Not anymore. I should have known when earplugs were being handed out at the door of the My Bloody Valentine show last night that they were meant to be used. I have never, never been to a louder show (and that includes an ear-blistering Dinasaur Jr. show in the early 90s). MBV ripped into about a 15 minute sonic rush at the end of their set, during which people close to the stage reported heat coming from the speakers (which were massive) and I could literally feel air blowing through my hair like the Memorex man. It was an amazing show, I have no regrets, but my ears are ringing with no signs of stopping.

Hot New Video Game Consists Solely Of Shooting People Point-Blank In The Face

I admit it. I check in on Amazon every now and again to see if A Dialogue on Consciousness ever rises above the 500,000th best selling book. Usually I enter “Alter Howell” as the search, but just to see, I entered Howell, and found that I appear far behind Hannah Howell who seems to be selling a lot more books.  I wonder, is it the cover?