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.

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.

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?

My recent radio silence has been in part due to the fact that I seem to be incessantly busy with refereeing articles, grading papers, writing letters and evaluating applications of various sorts.  But that is not all.  Many of my previous posts have been inspired by the best of recent indie music, but in the new year I have let that interest lag considerably.  Instead, I have become obsessed with the “classical” tradition in music–to the point that I have taken up piano once again and have been studying music as though I were back in school.  Unfortunately, I’m simply not educated enough to write very informatively about much of this music.

I can, however, sing the praises of a book that has reignited my interest in numerous composers and periods of music history: Jan Swafford’s Vintage Guide to Classical Music.  I can’t say enough good things about this book.  It takes one through a tour of Western Music through the early notes of Perotin and Machaut through the minimalists such as Reich and Glass.  Its principle structure involves a chronological series of composer biographies, with a section recommending “beginning points” for each composer.  Meanwhile, important concepts and trends in the tradition (polyphony, atonality, the sonata form, etc.) are explained in lucid sections running parallel to appropriate composers.  While not entirely uncritical, Swafford almost always leaves the reader excited to hear pieces from each composer with an eye towards their ineluctable place in the grand Western tradition.  It ends with a glossary and a nice list of pieces that should be part of an inclusive historical library.

So, while I’ve been reading other things as well, it is Swafford’s book that has won my heart recently.  Check it out!

A friend of mine once said that England and America are separated by a common language.  While not entirely sure what this means, I’m often surprised at how much the predominant sensibilities of the two countries differ.  We both have our forms of The Office, sure, and who doesn’t love Hogwarts, but it is startling how many things fail to translate even though no actual translation needs to be done.  The works of Penelope Fitzgerald might be an example.  This woman had two books shortlisted for the Booker and won it with a third book.  Even her books that don’t get Bookered are unanimously praised in the British press.  So why don’t we know her better over here?

It was in an attempt to find out that I read Blue Flowers, which was Fitzgerald’s last book which won the American National Book Critics award in 1998, two years before her death at age 88.  I probably chose the wrong book.  The Blue Flower is about the German Romantic poet Friedrich von Hardenberg  and his love for a woman whom everyone but Fritz recognizes to be a silly dunce of a girl.  She dies in the end and that’s very sad.

Before ripping into this book, which isn’t really all that bad, I should voice my prejudice.  It turns out that Fritz (who became famous as the poet Novalis) was a dabbler in idealistic philosophy and was a student of Fichte.  While I think there is some stuff to be learned from Fichte (I actually made a pilgramage to Jena once, myself) like most of those German idealists things lapse into nonsense pretty quickly.  I also hate romantic poetry, and I have little understanding of someone who falls in love with an idiot.  So, because of my own baggage, I hated Fritz and wished he had died alongside his hollow beloved.

Hating a novel’s protagonist is no better reason for hating a novel than hating a lead singer’s voice is for hating a band.  (Both are often sufficient motivators, but I’m not sure they are really good reasons.)  It must be said that Fitzgerald was talented.  She had a very light touch, with a sort of understated humor that almost made me grin once or twice, but in general I found the book somewhat boring.  It has been called a masterpiece by more than one critic, but I couldn’t help being thankful that the chapters were short and the book as a whole was only a couple of hundred pages.  So, I have my doubts about “masterpiece,” but it was good enough to where I will check out another book by Fitzgerald.  After all, surely so many British critics can’t be wrong, can they?

Though I now feel myself to be a southerner by little more than birth, I have to admit a tendency to seek out and relish southern writers with something approximating a search for kinship.  After his last book of short stories landed him on the shortlist for the Pen/Faulkner award and his novel Serena was one of the most lauded books of the year, I thought it time to check out the Appalachian poet and author, Ron Rash.  In the end I wasn’t disappointed so much as underwhelmed.

Serena is the story of the Pembertons and the swath they cut through the forests and communities of Depression-era North Carolina.  Pemberton and Serena, his wife, are logger-barons, ruthlessly indifferent to the toll they are taking on the environment and on human life in their ambitious grasp for power and wealth.  The body count of then novel is high, starting on the second or third page when Pemberton guts the father of a girl pregnant with his child.  In retrospect, this death will seem one of the most reasonable of the novel’s killings, and if the husband seems cold he is a kitten in comparison to his wife, whose singular drive is the engine at the novel’s center.

Rash’s novel is an entertaining read that definitely seems timely given the self-and-other-destructive selfishness that seems to be the rising picture of Wall Street.  Nevertheless, in the end its morality tale is a bit obvious.  Serena is such an extreme character that one is at a loss as to what really beats within her breast, and her husband’s shows of mercy at certain points in the novel do no more than open up cracks that reveal little beyond them.   Rash tempers the seriousness by introducing a sort of chorus of loggers who crack wise and philosophical in the background, but it’s hard to feel that one’s understanding is deepend by those comic moments–funny as they sometimes are.

Serena is not a bad book, by any means.  But it shows its seams a little too clearly for my taste, both in the form and the point of its construction.  At times I felt this was intentional–that Rash was trying to create a faithful homage to Greek tragedy, for example.  At other times, I wasn’t so sure and I ultimately don’t think it matters.  Serena does what it does, and it does it pretty well–but that’s not enough to earn it a home on my top shelf.

I recently read a story by Rick Bass in the 2008 Pushcart Prize anthology, my favorite book almost every year. I’d definitely heard of Bass–he’s in the pantheon of America’s short story writers–but till then I had never read him. It was a story about boys in Texas trying to turn a buck buying cattle, and I almost wept with laughter. I resolved to check this guy out, and though this story was from his new collection, The Lives of Rocks, anal retent that I am I had to start with his first book, The Watch, published in 1989. I was not disappointed.
Though Bass’s stories are often humorous, he is not a humor writer ala David Sedaris. The humour in his stories is a natural outgrowth of the voices of his characters, or their sideways perception of the events around them. (This as opposed to Sedaris, who I always feel is lying to me.) Bass is from Texas, so many of his stories are set here, but he feels more Southern than many Texas writers–more like Barry Hannah, perhaps. His characters are often just hanging on, trying to survive from day to day and to make sense out of the messes around them, but they are rarely desperate.  Rather, they accept the world that is theirs in a factual manner, and the distance between that factual manner and the often absurd situation is what generates a good deal of the humor.

Witness the first paragraph of the first story in the collection, “Mexico”:

“Kirby’s faithful.  He’s loyal: Kirby has fidelity.  He has one wife, Tricia.  The bass’s name is Shack.  The fish is not in an acquarium.  It’s in the swimming pool that Kirby built, out in his and Tricia’s front yard.”

This almost reads as notes for a story, but instead it sets the tempo and tone in a way that completely hooked me, and told me that the world I was entering was skewed, but that this was just to be accepted as part of the situation.

Bass’ grasp of voice is just masterful.  Check the start my favorite story in the collection, “Cats and Students, Bubbles and Abysses:”

“I got a roommate, he’s tally and skiny, when we get into arguments he says “I went to Millsaps,” uses the word like what he thinks a battering ram sounds like.  He’s a real jerk.  I could break both his arms just like that! if I wanted to, I’ve got a degree in English Literature from Jackson State.  I was the only white on campus, I can’t use “I went to Jackson State” like a battering ram, but I can break both his arms.”

Great stuff.  Reminds me a bit of Barthelme the Great and the late, sad David Foster Wallace.

Check this guy out.  It looks like he’s been pretty consistent over the years.  I’ll read everything the dude has written.

This seems to have been an especially strong year in fiction.  It seems as though every book I have read recently has merited enthusiastic jigs.  Perhaps I’ve simply become better at choosing what I read.  Who cares.  The result is that I’m a happy reader.

Atmospheric Disturbances is a wow book.  It is a gift.  I had heard Rivka Galchen’s name, and I had seen the book’s striking cover, but I was not ready for such an excellent work.  I was, in fact, poised to hate this book.  It has an epigram from Gilles Deleuze, one of the great intellectal pretenders, and an epigram drawn from The Journal of Atmospheric Sciences that suggests all sorts of trying metaphors.  The last thing we need is another fiction that flirts with quantum profundities and chaos-theoretical butterflies.  That mess barely worked for Pynchon in Entropy, and it doesn’t need revisiting.

Then Rivka Galchen kicked my ass.

Galchen is apparently smart enough to avoid such intellectual muddling, but she is also clever enough to see that it still has comedic and, surprisingly, dramatic potential.  Her narrator is a psychotherapist who, in the process of treating a patient who believes he has the power and the duty to affect the weather, gets caught up in the delusion. He believes, to begin with, that his wife Rema has been replaced with a doppleganger, and the book follows his quest to find the real Rema.  A sort of post-modern Quixote, Leo finds clues everywhere he looks, particularly in the writings of one Tzvi Gal-Chen, a meteorologist who, incidentally, may or may not be the author’s husband.  Since the reader’s world is filtered through Leo’s confused perceptions, his disorientation is infectious–which fact explains, I believe, the chaos that was my dreamlife last night–but Galchen allows just enough reality to peek around the corners of his consciousness to make the whole adventure a very humorous farce.

I suspect some will compare this book to The Crying of Lot 49, but it doesn’t really read like Pynchon at all.  It reads more like a mix of Barthelme, Borges and Sebald.  That, my friends, is a good mix.

I’ve read some excellent stuff this year, and I don’t feel I can really name a favorite of 2008.  But there is no book I had more fun reading than Atmospheric Disturbances and there is no author I am more excited about than Rivka Galchen.

It’s finally out, and it is a lovely little book if I do say so myself.  And boy, it seems so much cleverer now that it is bound and formatted.  It’s too late for Christmas, but all of your philosophical friends and relatives would no doubt appreciate A Dialogue on Consciousness as a New Year’s present.  Great for birthdays, holidays, and hell, even Fridays.  Amazon has it listed as a pre-order, but it should ship now if you order it.

I know I’m being presumptuous to think anyone reading my blog will order the book, but in any case, I’d advise against buying the hardback.  It doesn’t have the cover art and is bound for libraries only.  The paperback is much prettier.

Salvatore Scibona is an extraordinary writer.  His first book, The End, was nominated this year for The National Book award, and I’d say there is a very good chance he would have won it had the staggeringly good trilogy by Matthiesson not been allowed in the race.  What’s even more impressive, I suspect this author will only get better.  Scibona is a crafter of sentences in the DeLillo tradition–and in fact his dialogue, at times, feels like that of the Don.  His love of language comes through both in form and content, but he’s no pedantic formalist.  His craft is still the telling of tales, and he does it splendidly.

The End is an immigrant tale, of sorts, but like any good book it transcends the moldy stereotypes.  Scibona’s Italian-Americans reside in Cleveland, and though the city isn’t actually identified until later in the book, one is led to feel as if one spent the early part of the century in the neighborhood surrounding Elephant Creek.   As present as the city itself is, however, one reads this book for the people.  One character in particular, Constanza Marini, is so finely wrought that she becomes ones own neighbor.  Costanza, who is an old widow for most of the novel, is a whip-smart pragmatist who provides that axis around which the book’s events revolve.  And without spoiling, the book does have events–it has a sort of mystery at its core that had me combing back through earlier pages looking for clues.

There are not many debut novels that i plan to reread.  The End is one of them.  Before I do, I’m going to search out some of Scibona’s short stories–this is a writer to follow.