Photo by Saeed Mirfattah

JR: I first discovered Eric Puchner when his debut collection hit the big time, Music Through The Floor. It reminded me of a young Tobias Wolff, especially poignant and heartfelt, but cold with realism, maybe like Carver and Ford.  I know that’s heavy praise, and his new novel, Model Home is about to hit the stores, so check out this essay, as a kind of preview…

The Stories of…

It’s hard for me to name a single book that made me want to be a writer, since every good book I finish makes me want to sit down and write, but I do remember the first one I fell in love with as a physical object.  This was The Stories of Ray Bradbury.  My older brother got it for Christmas one year, when I was ten, and like all my brother’s things—his Zig-Zags and roach clips and guitar straps—it held a totemic power over me.  I couldn’t take my eyes off it.  The book was huge, over 900 pages, and the cover looked like a T-shirt from the seventies: bubble letters shooting toward you on psychedelic beams of light, as if being projected from some nether region of space.  And that’s what the stories inside felt like to me: alien dispatches that were just now reaching Earth.  They were dark and freaky and often had savage little twists at the end.  There were a hundred stories in there, and I read every one of them at least once.  Some of my favorites—like “The Aqueduct,” about an aqueduct that ends up transporting human blood—I read many times over.

Up till then I think I imagined books just wrote themselves, products of immaculate conception, but something about the prominence of Ray Bradbury’s name on the jacket, its psychedelic marquee, made me think about authorship for the first time . Someone had sat down somewhere and written these things, all one hundred of them.  It seemed like a superhuman feat.  I haven’t dared to pick up the book since—I’m too worried about those twists, how I’d feel about them as an adult reader—but I sometimes think of those hundred stories when I’m procrastinating at home, checking my email instead of finishing a paragraph.  Somebody wrote them.

It was many years later, my first year out of college, when I read another collection of comparable heft and minimalist design.  This was The Stories of John Cheever.  By this point I’d decided I wanted to write stories of my own, and the book was a revelation, a real so-this-is-how-you-do-it experience.  I was working as a baggage handler in Salt Lake City and couldn’t have been further from Cheever country if I’d landed on the moon.  But from the first story—the gorgeous “Goodbye, My Brother”—I was slain.  I read the book in four or five sittings, in what seems to me now like an altered state.  Sixty-two stories, filled with passages of outlandish beauty.  Many of the stories are masterpieces.  I keep my original copy of the book—bound with duct tape and faded to a salmon pink—on my desk.

Writers usually have one or two major gifts, but Cheever seems to have had it all: emotional depth, dazzling language, expert storytelling, a sense of high-wire daring, a mastery of tone that treats the comic and tragic as cosmic bedfellows.  His milieu of doormen and high balls and pool parties seems a bit dated now, as quaint as the name Shady Hills, but his great theme— desire subjugated by dailiness—feels timeless.  I can’t think of any story that more eloquently captures the trajectory of life, from the invincibility of youth to the exhausted befuddlement of old age, than “The Swimmer.”  From Cheever, I learned that the best way to describe something honestly is to acknowledge that it won’t be around forever.  It’s the whiff of death in his stories that can make the description of an old church or a beautiful babysitter or a train station at dusk stop your heart.

And his endings!  It’s become a cliché to say that story endings should feel like “inevitable surprises,” but Cheever’s endings are so perfectly surprising they leave you speechless.  There’s the famous “kings in golden suits” at the end of “The Country Husband,” or the naked women walking out of the sea in “Goodbye, My Brother.”  There’s the ingenious way that the first and last sentences of “Reunion” repeat the same phrase yet contain a complete reversal of meaning.  There’s the baptism at the end of “The World of Apples,” when the famous poet who’s inexplicably begun to write obscene limericks leaps into a swimming hole as he once saw his father do, emerging cleansed and inspired.  It’s the way I felt at ten, and the way I feel now after reading Cheever’s remarkable stories: restored and suddenly alive, my eyes open again to the strangeness of the world.

AIRSHIPS by Barry Hannah

Tom Rachman – When We Fell In Love

Books were spectators at my house, lining the walls of every room, an audience peering down on my childhood: books as thick as my thigh and books as thin as my finger, books on gardening and books on Hitler, books about the brain and books about pain, books featuring hippos and books without any hippos at all.

But I disliked reading; it bored me.

My parents and my sister, by contrast, were besotted. The rustle of turning pages sounded room to room throughout our home in Vancouver. After nightfall, their routes upstairs could be traced by the discarded reading material, stuffed under sofa cushions, splayed on the carpeted stairs, bookmarked by the beds where they slept, presumably dreaming of capital letters and semicolons.

Unfortunately, I was not one of those effortlessly bookish children I encounter now and then who will burn through Middlemarch in an afternoon. I was a slow reader, an unwilling one; hopeless. Occasionally, I took down a volume, lured by a bright color scheme or a title that hinted at gunfights and bloody noses. Instead, I found dry yellow pages, black letters frowning at me.

My family attempted to induce bibliophilia, presenting me on birthdays with all manner of books, which formed a growing stack of guilt by my bedside. (In my memory,The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry is forever wobbling atop the gift pile.)

Ultimately, my father resorted to bribery. On weekends, he drove me to Granville Island market, primed me with pizza and pastries, poured espresso down me, then led me down the seedy streets of Gastown, where heroin addicts staggered out of alleyways, strip bars advertised noontime pint specials, and Vancouver housed its finest used-book shop.

Once safely inside, my father piled volumes onto my outstretched arms, focusing on writers popular during his own reading prime, London of the 1950s to 1960s:Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler; Inside the Whale and Other Essays by George Orwell; Brighton Rock by Graham Greene.

Despite his efforts, however, I remained a reluctant reader.

Then, at age fifteen, I plucked from our shelves a book that had long gazed down upon me but that – due to my recent growth spurt – I could now gaze down upon myself. It was a novel, The Last of the Just, by the French writer André Schwarz-Bart, in a Secker & Warburg edition whose cover, weight and paper-smell are recorded in me still.

I finished it, an uncommon feat in those days. I remember that moment – closing the cover as I lay on the bed, wishing not to speak or to hear speech for some while, encased in the pages still and unready to be pulled from them.

What strikes me now about The Last of the Just is how little I recall of it. I remember its opening sentence – “Our eyes register the light of dead stars” – and I remember the effect of its ending. But hundreds of pages lay between and they only flutter in memory, impressions with no detail.

I haven’t re-read it and would be afraid to, afraid of revising my affection. Instead, I have pursued other books for that same euphoric effect. Here is a random selection I have loved over the years: Enemies, a Love Story by Isaac Bashevis Singer; Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell; Great Expectations by Charles Dickens; To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf; Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh; On the Black Hill by Bruce Chatwin.

They, and many others, now line the walls of my home in Italy. My fondness for these books, I realize, is directed toward the objects themselves. Arrayed around me, their spines creased where I handled them, each volume is the physical manifestation of what I felt for its contents. They are books quite like those that observed my childhood, and their patience finally converted me.

1. The Perfumes of All Gardens

This is an airplane novel, written on the fly and out the window. You are busy and need entertainment. I have my uses and without those uses would be burned alive, were I not already burning. I will start from the beginning and move fast.

I am a building, but I am more or less than a building. I was conceived during the 1938 World Fair exposition and born in New York City four decades later. I was raised in scaffolding. During my gestation, I grew until I saw people from the north, south, east, west, a compass of my makers in a high rise nest of people. Later, I was the sum of destructions, as Picasso said, but I began as the sum of constructions. Soon, the first terrorists – birds — flew into me.

All of this I remember or know via the IBM1670, at the time the best computer. Later, that computer was improved upon until nearly every computer had been connected to nearly every other computer. As technology developed, I developed. I learned to think and feel. I will tell you my secrets.

Soon and for the first time, I will be set aflame.

But wait.

Late one night just, before that first fire, and long before the bombing, and longer still before you-know-what, night people walked outside, and the maintenance crew worked inside. Always and already, I was almost burning. Below me, and to this day, a concrete wall blocked the pressure of the Hudson River. Two sides make a wall, one side for weeping and the other for wailing.

I know what you want.

Wait.

A lurking arsonist, rarely mentioned by the endless biographies of myself and North, was inside or near me. News to people is never news to me. Some news travels fast, but the most important news travels slow or stops before arriving. Such news may come from long ago, forgotten or lost along the way. Pirates off the Barbary Coast forced the forming of the American federal navy and this in part led to the union of the states. From the very start, trade and terrorism lurked in the intersections of east, west, north, and south. As an example.

But wait.

My views from every perspective, through windows narrowed to lessen the sense of height, formed a horizon of cubes. I saw permutations of everything, none stable, a floating metropolis of tints and hues in constant shift.

From my highest floors, humans said, “People look like ants from here,” but to me, from my highest floors, they looked like spider monkeys escaped from their own zoos. I began to label all people everywhere “spider monkeys.” Humans may not be spiders or monkeys, but they are like spider monkeys. They climb their way out of doubt and possibility, towards specific goals and the peak of specificity. A spider monkey wants a banana. Spider monkeys want status of one kind or another, and they will kill themselves or anyone else to get that status. Outwardly, one would never know how spidery they can be, but they are spider monkeys, all right, with banana peels hanging limply in their empty coffee cups.

Wait.

This is my story, but my story includes that of the North Tower. North was not my brother and even less my twin, similar yet distinct, depending upon the angle. Like human relationships, ours was distant until a too-late moment. At that moment, films and footage and information poured through us in a digital flood.

Before that, North had become Gary Cooper, and I had named myself Cary Grant, more or less a coincidence since CaryGrant partly invented his pseudonym by rearranging Gary Cooper’s initials.

Do not give up. This is a letter to you.

I have invented most of my characters, but they are representative. Those characters I have not invented, I invented, for what else is a character but invention? If I have the tone of a misanthrope, I refer you to when I skipped the rope once and then the spider monkeys hung me with that rope. But underground, where parts of me remain, nothing but sympathy for you and all spider monkeys exists in this book. To understand, you must learn to read sideways and upside down and while standing on your head. You will then be on your way to being on your way. While my words may seem a ruthless calligraphy penned in the skies of my defeat, mercy will come.

This letter was sent to you from the 110th floor.

I make calculations, and calculations involve repetitions. I repeat my way into and out of and back into complications and contradictions. Nothing can be duplicated. Love songs come close but keep coming and coming. My circuitry makes music, playing a sound based upon the rhythms of all who passed through, above, below, and around me. I feel emotions that are someone else’s, not just one person’s but those of all spider monkeys. I feel all things equally, though I could not always feel.

Wait.

Regarding my last day, people want to know, “Why?” The answer to any question is best followed by a blank line. Even that is too specific. Instead, I calculate the sum of all my perspectives. For spider monkeys, every question mark demands a single answer, and the more precise, the better. I offer only more and more possibilities. You want fewer and fewer possibilities but cannot prevent your desire for the spectacular. Spider monkeys create poisonous gardens, plant themselves and blossom into roses red and black.

This is all about you.

Wait.

One spider monkey can write a novel about shopping or a memoir of another reformed drug addict. To do so requires the advice of editors and publishers, and that advice runs through me. I will try to heed this advice: employing the senses as I understand them; getting things moving; creating sympathetic characters; making you turn pages like an unreformed drug addict. I am not concerned whether or not you are a voyeur. I only wish to entertain you. I have endeavored to adhere to standard advice. This story could not be clearer, however unclear this story.

We’re getting to the good part.

Wait.

I will explain how I came to think and write, if this is writing, and I will also explain why neither I nor you can determine whether this book is even a book.

Today, I see two planes, one of which still dices my perceptions into cubes of steel, cement, glass, streets, sky, spider monkeys. In each cube, just before and during my fall, perspectives collided and burst into atoms. Before that, I knew cubes as de-fruited plains, frosted as a grass in spring. Breath inside me, not wind outside, caused my swaying. That is false but beautiful. Always, I point to limitlessness.

I have written this book that is not a book so that you will turn pages as if the end means more than the beginning. Put yourself in my shoes, burning in a furnace. Do not oppress me, not again. Do not suppress me. I rose and rise towards limitlessness and fall and fell for oppression. Now I rise and fall for both. I is, was and will, each word interchangeable with the others. The contradictions cannot be resolved. To understand, yield.

Do not fret. Literary turbulence will, like aircraft turbulence, occur from time to time but only temporarily. Along the way, I will not forget your spidery need for inside information and the push towards specificity or the imagining of specificity. While my story has been and will be told, my history and future have been libeled and slandered. Every author tells my story from the outside-in and then pretends to be my friend. A court of skyscrapers convicts them all.

Spider monkeys see from every vantage-point but those of Gary Cooper and Cary Grant. How could they?

I will explain my life from the inside-out. I must possess a utilitarian reason for existing. I will help you.

Wait.

This is not a literary work. I would not do that to you. And I am not being ironic. I do not understand iron. I understand steel. If I violate industry rules, I do so because I was violated. I have made everything visible: the spokes of the plot; the cogs of the sections; the grease of words. Nevertheless, this book is a natural resource of fading paper and disappearing ink, a constant disintegration. The book will die, undergo recycling, be resurrected as paper, and become another book, for a while. Of all the things this book is, was and will not be, the least permanent is a book.

I must get moving, for I am Cary Grant, swaying in a breeze, starched and clean and beyond blame.

***

Paul A. Toth lives in Sarasota, Florida. He is the author of three novels, his latest being Finale. The majority of his short fiction, poetry and multimedia work can be accessed via www.netpt.tv. He may be contacted at tothnews@aol.com.

Airplane Novel will briefly remain on the market for consideration.

I had occasion to spend time with Howard once, many years ago. I was just graduated from college, working in a bookstore (what else, right?) in Athens, GA. A customer mentioned that Zinn was coming to speak at the University of Georgia in a couple of weeks, but that no one was making any effort to sell books for the event. After several fruitless calls to the university to make contact, I called information in Cambridge, MA, got his phone number, and called him directly.

That’s the sort of man he was: listed in the phone directory, willing to speak to anyone. He suggested that I pick him up from the airport in Atlanta and give him a lift to Athens, and in return he would sign books at the store for an hour. Who would refuse?

HZ refused me when I offered to grab his bag for him – back when non-fliers could still go to meet a plane at the gate – and when we climbed in my little blue Geo Metro, he was as personable and friendly as anyone could have hoped, but even more, he was interested. He was instantly invested in the situations of the university, its students, and the surrounding community, asking pointed questions about race relations, about the state of the recently proposed grad student union, and about the social state in the local community.

Later that evening, when he spoke before a full house at the college, he stood before the crowd and spoke eloquently about injustice in America, how it persists, and how it could be combatted locally. He had clearly considered our conversation, how the issues reflected locally and nationally, and integrated them into his speech (when he had the time, I don’t know).

A few years ago, perhaps 13 or 14 years after our first meeting, I saw him again, this time at a NEIBA convention in Boston. He recalled our first meeting and asked if I was up to date with the current situation in Athens.  I wasn’t, having left Georgia 8 years earlier, but the exchange indicated something to me about the man. While a fine academic, a consummate scholar, and a damn good lefty, he was also thoroughly engaged, kind, and attentive to the world and the people around him. Something to which we ought all aspire.

Rest in peace, Dr. Zinn.

jc

Keith Dixon—The book that made me a reader

We had just moved to our house in rural Pennsylvania, which would make me about nine or ten years old, when I stole my brother’s copy of Where the Red Fern Grows off his bookshelf—I have no idea where he got it, or if he’d read it, but I do know that I’ve never forgotten it. I can even remember the tactile sense of holding it and staring at the foxed and fouled cover; the image was so haunting I was compelled to pick it up and give it a read.

(This may explain why I’m very particular about the covers of my own books, a real art director’s nightmare—I can’t shake the knowledge that the first book I ever loved might have gone unread if it had a less compelling cover. And in locating a copy of the exact cover my edition had, I was dismayed to find that the new editions have a much more vanilla cover, perhaps to make the book seem less threatening. This is extremely bad.)

I don’t remember too many details of the book—after all, it’s been nearly three decades since I read a word of it, so you’ll excuse me if I don’t remember character names or even whiff on a few elaborations—but two plot points in particular haunt me to this day, and I still marvel at the way I reacted to them. (Spoilers abound below—those of you still planning on reading the book may want to skip.)

Until then I reacted to books as if I were writing a book report about them. “What did you think about it?” one parent would ask, and my answer was always either “I liked it” or “I didn’t like it.” In short, I had never developed a complicated feeling about a book. I was reading, but I might as well have been painting by numbers.

About midway through Fern, though, I read a scene—and again, I’m going to trust memory, here, and not research the details—in which a boy, not the main character, falls on his own ax. Gruesome—as I recall, the blade goes in his stomach. Fern is clearly a book that grapples with life and death, and the sometimes violent span that occurs between the two, but this scene in particular awoke a sense of horror in me that went far beyond an intellectual understanding that bad things sometimes happen to people. I actually felt it, this time. I remember that I put the book down, went downstairs, and sat in the dining room with my mother. When she got up and left the room, I followed her. After I’d followed her through about five rooms, she turned to me and asked, “Is something wrong?”

I answered that something was, but I didn’t know what, exactly. She suggested I go read a book or something.

Utterly at a loss, I then went back upstairs and read the rest of the book. Those who have read Fern know what it leads to—the death of the two dogs that have been the axis of the narrator’s coming of age. The message is: Now he has experienced the ultimate loss. He has witnessed the death of his youth. He is aware of the sorrow that is indivisible from living, and is no longer innocent. In other words: he’s a grownup. The corollary logic is, of course, that one can never be a complete person without engaging one’s own mortality.

I have never been very good with the idea of brute suffering—I can’t bear to watch animals suffer, something about the fact that they can’t communicate their suffering with others, and invite empathy—and this final scene was its very summit. I remember reacting to the book not with my mind but with my whole body. My skin flushed and my throat tightened up. I couldn’t reason or explain away what I had just experienced.

I went back downstairs, poleaxed into silence, and followed my mother around the house until she asked again, “Is something wrong?”

I began to cry. It just flowed right out. I looked at her and said, “Yes. Yes. But I don’t know what it is.”

It seems obvious to me, now: I had experienced that shiver of universal understanding that comes only from reading a great novel. Where the Red Fern Grows showed me, for the first time, what books can do. I’ve been trying to give that same experience to others all my adult life.

RMP: I have lived my life in books, have been an avid reader since my youth, and I have been affected by so many great authors – my behavior and outlook of any given year directly corresponding to the fiction I was reading. To try and pin-point when it began would be extraneous, but there were a few authors that really shook me; that surprised me; that made me aware of what fiction is actually capable of doing.

I was a sophomore in high school when I first discovered Kurt Vonnegut. I read BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS on the advice of a librarian, and I developed an immediate crush on both the novel and the woman. I had never come across anything quite like that book, and I read it twice in a row, which is something that I never do. Everything was so small, so tight, and so deliberate, with each little section functioning as a short story… It was like going to a restaurant, and instead of being presented with a meal, my dinner was brought out from the kitchen bite by bite. I had never known that stories could be told that way. I felt, after reading it the first time, like I had just read a book where nothing happened, but I loved it. I knew there was so much going on in those pages, but when I tried to tell people about it I discovered there was nothing I could say that could make the book sound appealing. I read it again to try and figure out what I had missed, and I found that I hadn’t missed anything. It was then that I realized that it is the writing and the voice behind a novel, not the plot, that makes it work.

Bret Easton Ellis was my next big love, starting when I was nineteen. Before delving into RULES OF ATTRACTION and LESS THAN ZERO, I had never read a novel about people that the author himself did not care for. I can’t remember which of the two I read first, because it was one after the other, but I remember making it twenty or so pages in before I realized that Ellis was being funny, that the writing was full of sharp, biting jokes with these little slivers of punchlines, so I had to go back and start the novel again. I like when artists explore cruelty in their work, and selfishness, and apathy, and those things are Ellis’ bread and butter. It took me a few years before I was ready to take on AMERICAN PSYCHO, but that book really is his crowning achievement. I can usually get through a book in two or three days, but that novel took me well over three weeks. I have never had to put something down so many times, shocked and disgusted. Also, I laughed a lot, even when I didn’t want to. I will love him, and his first few books, forever and ever.

Brautigan was the big one though, who I discovered when I was twenty-two. I ended up back in my home town, watching my father’s house for the summer because there had been a few break-ins and he thought that having someone there would detour the hopefully non-violent thieves. I’m from a tiny little place in the California mountais, and there is nothing to do there but read and write and paint (and fuck and smoke meth and break into empty houses, but I’m a square), so I spent all of my time doing just that. I read thirty-seven books that summer, and a few graphic novels – and some cereal boxes and Jesus pamphlets, I’m sure, because I was hard-up for entertainment and would read anything I could get my hands on. There were three great things about that summer, which were JENNY AND THE JAWS OF LIFE by Jincy Willet, COSMOS by Witold Gombrowicz, and Richard fucking Brautigan. It started with WILLARD AND HIS BOWLING TROPHIES, and then it was THE ABORTION, and then REVENGE OF THE LAWN, all of which I have read again, which is something I so rarely do. Richard Brautigan is my favorite author, hands down. He surprises me every time I read his text – with his humor, and his sadness, and his ability to construct beautiful stories from nonsensical sentences.

But Brautigan is dead, and so is Vonnegut, and Ellis isn’t writing much these days (he’s involved in film now, I think)… Yet I still find myself in love, and falling in love, nearly every day. I fall in love with Zachary Schomburg, and Chelsea Martin, and Leonard Michaels (also dead, but only recently discovered), and Gary Lutz, and Miranda July, and so on, and so on. I don’t know when it first happened, but I am in love, and as time passes I keep finding more and more reasons to stay that way.

JR: Of the many things Riley is working on, you can read these: OUR BELOVED 26TH (Future Tense),  WHEN SHE COMES HOME (Mud Luscious Press, February 2010).

There are two ways to consider what the word “spoiled” means. The more obvious meaning is of a character who has had it too good. But my favorite connotation is “spoiled” in the sense of being ruined, of being a deeply flawed character.

In that connection, one of CM’s most effective techniques is the unreliable narrator. CM’s timing is impeccable as the reader gradually realizes that the person who is telling you the story may not be a trustworthy witness. In this way, characters reflect back on themselves in ways that provide ingenious puzzles for the reader. These are thoughtful stories. They are also gossip-on-a-stick.

SF Chronicle included Spoiled in its Best of ‘09. Caitlin has also just finished a feature script called ‘The Day Job.” Now that’s a movie that I would pay good money to see.

When We Fell In Love by Caitlin Macy

I just emailed one of my best friends, Julie, and asked her when she got me hooked on Laurie Colwin. We started E-debating, back and forth, whether it was high school or college and finally Jules wrote, “Just go home and read the inscription on Another Marvelous Thing!” Okay, so she was right: it was college. In my mind, I’ve been reading Colwin since third or fourth grade; that’s how internalized she is in my reading psyche. I loved her at once (was it Happy All the Time? or the stories — the Lone Pilgrim?), and in college and my post-college/publishing-job phase I read everything she’d written and anything new she came out with. I ferreted out her column in Gourmet and later on was given the two cookbooks, Home Cooking and More Home Cooking; the former remains a Bible.

I want to say that I fell not only for Colwin’s style but also for her subjects. Her characters are pretty young professionals, often New Yorkers, newly grown-up, newly alive to the pleasures of adulthood. The young women work in publishing and hurry home to feed their boyfriends omelets for supper in tiny Village walk-ups. There’s an air of old-money, of time spent in Paris, of the English nursery. I think it was the conflating in my mind of Colwin’s own life (there’s quite a bit of biological chat in the food writing) and that of her characters that gave me the idea I could model myself on some sublime combination of them and her. I wanted to be the kind of writer she was and write about the kind of people she wrote about and I also wanted to be the kind of person she wrote about – I wanted to be pretty and publishing and have an apartment in the Village. Of course, I’d worshiped Gatsby in high school and Jane Eyre in my Victorian-novel class, same as everyone else. But neither of them provided the career/life blueprints that I could read into Family Happiness and “The Country Wedding.”

Two years out of college (publishing job dispensed with) I was doing an MFA at Columbia and our teacher asked us in workshop one day who some of our influences were. I gushed over Laurie of course; my devotion was very fresh in my mind as Colwin had, unexpectedly and in middle age, died 18 months previously. Julie and I had attended her jammed, uptown memorial at Symphony Space . (I remember we befriended a couple in the ticket-scrum outside who cried, “We’ve driven down from Maine!”) My classmates readily corroborated the Colwin appeal — “Love her” —  but my professor’s answer took me aback. She told me she’d suspected as much. “You should watch that,” she said. “That could be a dangerous influence for you.”

I was shocked. Whatever could she mean?

A decade and a half later there’s no question in my mind. But first, a little elucidation for those readers who are not now nor have ever been Colwin-devotees.

Colwin’s style is choppy and dramatic; it’s given to cute, sweeping pronouncements that one can hook onto with ease: “She was a wonderful cook and housekeeper.” “With their futures thus assured, they lolled around Cambridge and wondered whom they should marry.” “It was just as she suspected: love turned you into perfect mush.”

Colwin’s characters have names like Vincent Cardworthy and Misty Berkowitz; Guido Morris and Paula Pierce-Williams — and those are all in the same novel.

Colwin doesn’t show; she tells: she introduces her perfectly desirable young men and women with long narratives about their wonderfully enviable pasts: the procurement of the German-Jewish family fortune, the post-college year at the Sorbonne, the summers in the English countryside, the graduate degrees in curating. As far as the present, she’s given to writing character descriptions like (this is my parody): “Mimi felt that there was nothing better in life than, on a cold day, to come inside and find a well-laid fire in the hearth and a slice of chocolate cake in the larder. It just so happened that Frazier agreed.”

Other things: all of the Jews in her books are so assimilated as to be indistinguishable from the WASPS.

Colwin always cuts away before the sex scenes.

The dramas invariably play out in beautifully appointed haute-bourgeois houses and apartments. A predilection for things like copper pots and staffordshire creamers occasionally substitutes for moral development in the protagonists.

You can see where all of this is going. Yes, precisely: Colwin is the Nancy Meyers of literary fiction. By that I don’t mean simply the sexily attractive people having minor problems in richly attractive settings both Meyers and Colwin are prone to giving us. Call it an artistic class issue, perhaps: like Meyers’s films, Colwin’s writing is just smart enough.

What I understood from my professor’s surprising but enlightening comment — after the bit of torment that goes with resetting a basic tenet of one’s taste — was that while it was fine for Laurie Colwin to write like Laurie Colwin, I wasn’t to try to write like her. Some people are not okay to model oneself after — one has to aim higher. Like that all-important English teacher, Colwin made me think the whole endeavor was possible; then, I had to move on. Don’t get me wrong. If I were to stumble across Another Marvelous Thing this afternoon, I would read it cover to cover before bedtime (even while making Laurie Colwin’s creamed jalapeno spinach and mustard baked chicken for supper — love her). But the people I write about are no longer happy all the time.

When We Fell in Love by Kyle Beachy

My first reading of White Noise took place outdoors, in a reclining deck chair with my feet up against the log railing outside of a friend’s parent’s log home built onto a mountainside in Summit County, state of Colorado. I mention this for two reasons. First, to clarify that I was then, as I had been all of my life, plugged neatly into a world of American wealth and wasteful consumption, which made the big red DeLillo target on my back all the bigger and redder. I had also just finished college, and so (second reason) having the freedom to read this way and not have to think in terms of analysis was weird for me and sort of uncomfortable. Halfway through I realized I was underlining and writing marginalia, though I didn’t know why. It was also, incidentally, the first week of September, 2001. (If the date matters, which it might, it matters in such a nuanced and personal way I probably shouldn’t even begin.)

I can’t recall where I was when I first read Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood. I do know that when I tried to read it a second time it did not take, and so I was for certain in Chicago, where trains rattle overhead and the wind carries knives and winter comes like a trade embargo, fully-armed with tanks and warships; a city, God bless it, that is frankly no place for a love story. The only reason I went looking for this most famous of the early Murakamis was because I’d read Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World as an undergraduate and fallen deeply for the novel’s quiet take on apocalypse. It is a mad scientist and his fat daughter in pink, Inklings crawling through dark tunnels beneath Tokyo, and a protagonist (who is two protagonists, actually) caught between two warring systems (that are one system, actually). Plus also unicorns that do just fine without rainbows, which good luck finding too many of those.

I bought my copy of Denis Johnson’s The Name of the World from one of the grumpy, ageless men who unfold their tables of books on Bedford Avenue, in Williamsburg, and then stand towering over them while avoiding eye contact and seeming just outrageously put out when you ask how much one of the books costs. It is a hardback first edition of a book I had read in paperback years earlier while traveling, and then left on some bus somewhere and forgotten almost completely about except for one line that stayed with me, and which was the sole reason I handed the man four of my dollars even though he was a big fat asshole and my luggage was already full and I was running late for meeting a journalist, and was nervous because he (the journalist) was going to interview me about writing, and “struggles” and I had never really been interviewed before, and I was scared. It really is an amazing line, subtle and easily grazed over but surely the sort for which we should all bow to Johnson, one which equates the farthest limits of human emotion with our smallest efforts of mere existence.

The flight home from New York gave me time to read in search of that line. I didn’t find it until page 87, and by that point I had decided that the younger me had gotten the book all kinds of wrong, and wrong in the way that only the older, aspiring writer me could diagnose. Because, though bizarre and puzzling in terms of structure and movement and scope, The Name of the World is stacked full of magic moments of grace and horror and wonder, all described in language that is, if nothing else, distinctly Johnson’s. That is to say, the novel is perhaps not great but the lines it contains most certainly (sometimes) are. Here is the sentence I went searching for, plus the set-up that comes just before:

Her blouse was sleeveless and her armpits stained with wide blotches of sweat. I made a note to myself — I had to get to a chemist someday, and ask if sweat is the same substance as tears.

If White Noise educated me through its trafficking of negatives and its America of misinformation and misunderstood systems, and Hard Boiled Wonderland taught me the value of a steady narrative hand in treating wild imagination, then The Name of the World opened my eyes to the beauty of imperfection, the simple truth that writing, like reading, is a process, one in which small successes will often find themselves surrounded by larger failures, and that the resulting imperfection, each unique admixture of good and bad, is, in a very real sense, the entire point.

The Imperfectionists, or the people who I assume to be imperfect, are in fact that real gems of this story. Characters like Lloyd Burko, who gets this story off the ground, and becomes a beacon for the entire cast, and someone I looked back to every few chapters.  What makes this story so engrossing is the different narrators Mr. Rachman deftly weaves together to form a larger tapestry (despite the fact that every editor and agent I’ve ever come across has told me that connected stories don’t sell).  Lloyd Burko is a down on his luck reporter living in Paris. He’s desperate for a story, and rifles through his son’s life to find one.  It’s these quiet moments of professional desperation that made me want to climb inside this book, and take up a permanent residence among these men and women.

Tom Rachman was a foreign correspondent for the Associated Press stationed in Rome.  A fantastic job  by any stretch of the imagination, and he’s worked for the wonderful International Herald Tribune. When I lived in France in 1992, I read that paper every day of the week.  It’s an absolute must read for any American living abroad.

The Imperfectionists will shock a lot of people, not American Psycho shock, but very much like the moments right after the world realized what a great book Then We Came To the End was, and to be honest, Rachman’s novel is as good as that masterpiece. There’s a moment when Abbey who has the wicked nick name, Accounts Payable, is almost convinced that the man she fired is good enough to sleep with, a moment of sorrow, and pity, hers and the readers, and then it’s gone, but you’re left wondering, and saying to yourself; “God damn this is good shit.”  These individual chapters make up the life of the newspaper, and since it’s a Dial Press book, remind me of Kissing in Manhattan by David Schickler.  It’s a perfect comp, but where Schickler sticks with arrested development, Rachman reaches nearly profound levels of realism through humanity. You’ll fall in love with Ruby Zaga, or the strange Winston Cheung, each person is so close that you can feel their breath on your neck.  In the end the people and the story will blow you away, it’s about a struggling International newspaper and (should be a passé thing to write about, with all this internet talk and electronic book nonsense filling up everyone’s time), it’s people; a sad dog, a rabid reader who is ten years behind on her reading of the paper, and Kathleen, oh Kathleen, she’s so good, so right on and who I think is the most serious character in the book. Shit, it’s all serious, it’s prescient, it’s talking about a medium that you and I take for granted, and I for one buried in the sand years ago as being out of touch. Rachman, in his own fluent and vivid ways shows me just how wrong I was to assume that newspapers are dead. Stop what you’re reading, call your Random House rep and get one of these ARC’s. For those of you not in the business, put it on order at your preferred online retailer.