If you read the blog, you know how much I loved this collection. Full disclosure, the author sent me cookies.
(after I reviewed the book)

A video for the upcoming Birds of a Lesser Paradise.
By Megan Mayhew Bergman
on sale March 6th

Praise be, a brilliant debut novel reminiscent of the moral explorations of Iris Murdoch and Zadie Smith but younger in temperament, more directly passionate and theatrical.

I’m excited about The Bellwether Revivals by Benjamin Wood, on sale July 2nd from Viking. I’ve just finished the galley and if you are in the business and can get an ARC, don’t hesitate to get your hands on this one. Wow!

The action takes place in the environs of Cambridge. BW has written a realist novel, drawing on the classic concerns of English fiction since the Victorians to use literature to explore ethics and the contrasting and mixing domains of good and evil. The ingenious Benjamin Wood has introduced a transgressive element dead center: a messianic character who is determined to transcend the realist contours of the plot.

We are presented with Oscar, a 20-something care assistant in a nursing home framed by wisteria that is not far from Cambridge University. Oscar doesn’t have his qualifications certified. That is, he is not what we would call a registered nurse. He’s sort of a nurse’s aid. And Oscar isn’t sure he wants to be qualified. He doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life.

His favorite elderly patient is Doctor Paulsen, in his eighties. Dr. Paulsen is a retired literature professor who keeps a large library in his room at the retirement home. Oscar borrows books from his favorite patient and it’s clear that Oscar is college material.

He’s working class. Wood describes Oscar’s family as always having low expectations for themselves. Basically it’s work and telly, work and telly. At the nursing home, Oscar works 8 or 10 or 12 hour shifts, falls onto his bed in his modest one room flat, and lies unconscious until it’s time to get up and start the cycle again. So Oscar is drifting into the same pattern he learned from his parents.

But one evening (this sounds like a fairy tale or an improbable upsurge of romanticism in the story), Oscar passes Kings College Chapel on the way home from work. There is an open-to-the-public performance of evensong taking place. Entranced by the singing and the extraordinary eloquence of the organ, Oscar goes in to listen. Oscar is an atheist but he is drawn in by the experience.

That fateful decision, walking into the church on impulse, creates the novel. In the church, he starts up a casual conversation with Iris Bellwether, a Cambridge undergrad. It’s her hyper-talented brother, with the extraordinary name of Eden Bellwether, who is playing the organ. Eden is probably the most gifted musicology student that Cambridge has ever seen. The whole Bellwether clan is remarkable for its wealth and over-achieving ethic. The father of the siblings, Theo, is an eminent surgeon, now retired.

Iris and Oscar hit it off. But it’s Eden who places the ultimate seal of approval on Oscar. It’s very important to Iris that her brother likes Oscar. Benjamin Wood has formed the first of several complex triangles that underpin the plot of The Bellwether Revivals. Eden is like…an icon of charisma in his Cambridge social circle. He’s the leader, the coolest of he cool. Even his talented sister Iris is intimated by him. Iris tells Oscar…their whole social set tells Oscar…that they don’t often have the opportunity to meet ordinary people.

There’s a wonderful scene later in the book where Eden in an offhand conversation with Oscar, uses a phrase that he could have only learned on account of something that Oscar said to Iris in bed. This telegraphs to Oscar that Iris is telling her brother everything about the relationship.

On the other hand, Iris appeals to Oscar to help Eden. Iris worries about her brother. Eden thinks that he’s exceptional. Of course, every student at Cambridge is exceptional, part of an elite. But Eden thinks that his comprehension of the true secrets of music have made him into a virtual god. Eden is the transgressive character that I mentioned in my opening paragraphs. Iris is a brilliant weather vane. During the course of the novel, she shifts from worshipping her brother, to seeing him as a victim of his own delusions, to worshipping him all over again when it looks like Eden really does have remarkable powers.

And as Iris shifts in relation to her brother, she shifts. correspondingly, in relation to her boyfriend. Torn between her charismatic brother and her empathic boyfriend, Iris is in a life-and-death struggle to be herself. That’s the most extraordinary triangular relationship in the narrative. BW keeps you guessing about Eden right through to the terrifying conclusion of the book.

Dear readers of this blog, I have to stop now and continue this discussion of The Bellwether Revivals in another post or maybe another two posts. I feel like the borders of the Three Guys blog are bursting under the strain of Benjamin Wood’s brilliance. I liked this book.

Maybe it was a particular incident that caused emotional destruction, incest, rape, a child predator, whatever. In the end, the brother and sister played by Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan in the searing but warmly realistic ‘Shame’, are so clearly ruined that it is hard to imagine a pain they have not endured. But what? I don’t care what it was, to be honest. Perhaps this incident was so horrendous that nothing they ever do, good or bad, will match that moment. Brandon is played by the icy cool Fassbender, almost silently, until suddenly he is not. Like when he’s pushed to engage with his sister Sissy who is played to perfect sadness by Mulligan, or his boss, the wildly underwritten character played by James Badge Dale, but he is just a moment of reality, underwritten for a reason.

Director Steve McQueen hammers this story down to the very essence of vacant emotion (with the help of Abi Morgan). Whether it is Brandon finding sexual satisfaction from a stranger, or a woman in his office, it is purely primal. Sometimes he runs, or walks, stalking the city looking for a place to put his desire. Or is he looking for a feeling to fill this black hole that has surrounded him. Sissy shows up like a smear of lint, literally, and Brandon is instantly enraged by her presence. She is a singer of the lounge type, and suddenly finds her terminally lonely self in arms of Brandon’s boss. From here the story goes deeper than I thought it could. Brandon chooses women randomly, only when they react to him, the girl on the subway, or his office, even a little hello to a stranger on the street. He is looking for something he will never find, and looking enthusiastically. Brandon fucks, then does it again, then again, and is finally repulsed by what he sees. Just not enough to stop. He goes out to find attention, and accepts a beating just so he can feel something. Like the basket case Sissy, they both want to engage, with anything. Preferably bad things, so they can test the depths of their emotions, however sanitized they are.

There are a few scenes where the standard technique of close up is thrown out the window. Especially effective are the very long and painful takes where Brandon and Sissy are talking, and he rages on her. It goes on longer than you think possible. Then goes further. The sections of this film where the characters talk for close to ten minutes, no cuts or close ups, just a master shot, are magic. This movie is wonderfully potent. I wish it was longer, as I wanted to see what would happen next.

Here’s an apocalyptic vision for you: Imagine a world without independent bookstores. Think of all the money consumers would save if they didn’t have an independent literary culture in their neighborhood! What would we be giving up…should we care? The loss of a store space where we could get a decent cup of coffee while we waste our time browsing magazines that we don’t intend to buy? Even that time-waster might be rendered passe as mag reading catches on by electronic tablet. But don’t even count on that. Most of the people I see on the train with hand-helds are playing some sort of dumb game like tic-tack-toe or find-the-rabbit.

I’ll be candid with you, it pissed me off when I got the impression that indie bookstores are confined to the more affluent zip codes. But then I thought that wasn’t the whole story. The presence of large numbers of college students helps. Although I don’t understand why high school students wouldn’t help as much. I figure they are under-serviced.

Kids are brought to indie bookstores by their parents. But do you stop reading when you get to high school and then start up again if you go to college? Hire a high school part-timer and have them start a book club just for teens. When parents hear that their teenager has to be at the local indie for their book club meeting, they will be overjoyed.

And what about the students who are not going on to college? Does that mean they are not allowed to read? Listen up, in our world, you must never stop being a student. So, if you want, you can learn all about a new video game, or you can be absorbed by the latest dumb-ass reality show. Or you could splay yourself down on the open carpet of literature at an indie bookstore. So cheer up if you miss the old school. High school is forever!

How much can you cut yourself off from…until there is nothing left to cut yourself off from. My computer is a great tool. I’m writing on it now. But I’m going to kick myself in my own ass if all I do all day is chores and go online. Downton Abbey (which I watch online) can wait.

If you keep supporting ilife to the detriment of real life then someday you will try to visit real life and it won’t be there.

Discover an indie bookstore you can get to, in a neighborhood you like, and sign up for their email newsletter. Then attend some of their events. It’s the event tie-in that makes you a sophisticated reader.

What we’re up against is Alphaville, the deconstruction of the human which can’t be accomplished unless our everyday literary culture is dismantled first. That’s a world where no one can ask why only because. Where there can be no rebellion and words are systematically banned from the dictionary because they would encourage independent ideas.

Goddard says that sometimes reality is too complex to be expressed except in legend. In that spirit, I’m expressing my concern that the rise of the zombie in your community is a mortal threat to indie bookstores. So if you spot them in the neighborhood of your store or your stories, maybe you should consider some kind of security measure. Of course, Lemmy Caution (in Alphaville) would just plug them.

On the other hand, for the sake of attracting the kids into your store, maybe you should hire one zombie as a part-timer, just for the weekends.

From the forthcoming collection Stay Awake.

Death hangs around Brandon like a necklace. People die, and that’s what defines this story, but it seems to me that this is more about Brandon’s inability to accept death as a part of life. Of course he is moving on, but is he really? His parents have voluntarily departed this mortal coil, and left Brandon and his sister the family house. Brandon lets that drift away, and he finds it particularly hard to enter his parents bedroom where they died.

The title of the story comes from a slice of graffiti that is left on the wall in the men’s room of the supermarket where Brandon works. Chaon imagines where Patrick would be now, and what kind of updates he’d leave on bathroom stalls. Brandon doesn’t seem to care about much, he’s just taking the path of least resistance.

Death comes to this story quickly and makes Brandon feel less responsible with each passing. The people he knows and works with are just people, and it might be best to describe him as a person who breaths, eats, and goes to the bathroom. All the while he fills the narrative with other people that he has no feeling for one way or the other. Maybe the emotional wreckage that follows a death is too much for Brandon, and this story is about avoiding everything. What happens when you are left behind? Because Brandon certainly doesn’t know what to do.

I don’t need to tell anyone who has read it, but Mikhail Bulgakov’s masterwork, The Master and Margarita, is one of the seminal reading experiences of anyone’s life. If you think you know Russian literature…well, you don’t, unless you have read it. And if you think you have a clear idea of how fantasy and surrealism can lie down in bed with realism and produce an incestuous child of a novel, you don’t know that either, unless you have read The Master. I recommend the Vintage or Penguin editions.

At the end of this month, Overlook will release Diaboliad and other Stories by Bulgakov. From my prejudiced POV, this wicked little atom of a collection is the perfect remedy for anyone, like myself, who sometimes suffers from the very stale beer of American realism. That sort of placid realism, which as Lionel Trilling has observed, doesn’t think of our ideas as part of reality…consigning our fantasy lives to some netherworld…banning our interior dreams and nightmares from the sacred precincts of fiction. Caging the beasts and concepts of the mind doesn’t tame the mind. It makes the dark undercurrents of convention, which we try so hard to suppress, grow especially nasty.

D is a 45 page story that takes place in the 1920′s in Moscow. Comrade Korotkov works for a collective with the mind-numbing name of Macentsupmatmat. You can be confident that word didn’t make it past spellcheck. The concern produces matches of such mediocre quality that lighting one could well take your eye out. It’s great that the matches give off pungent fumes of sulphur when ignited, an early sign of the satanic powers that are about to engulf our hero.

Our friend Korotkov is a middle manager at the firm which one fine payday runs out of cash to pay its workers. So it authorizes a payment in kind. That is, it pays its workers with matches. If you’ve ever worked in an office, then you’ll recognize even the pre-cubicle office environment of Macentsupmatmat. Banks of desks with drone-like functionaries typing and filing papers. More fortunate semi-autonomous worker-types like K who have their own offices. And the Director, remote and imperious in his own restricted space. Bulgakov excels at depicting how ordinary are the settings of his horror shows.

Korotkov’s boss is replaced, always a wary time for the average office schnook. The oddity of the new director gives Bulgakov the opportunity to show how we insist on pretending that reality is normative, even when slapped in the face with the most outrageous deformities. The new director’s name is underwarr, lower case, which K misreads as underwear and misrepresents in an interoffice memo. This is one of a string of nonsensical calamities that leads to K’s dismissal.

In Bulgakov, physical deformity is a clear folklorish sign to the reader that we are in the presence of evil. underwarr is so short that he barely comes up to the level of Korotkov’s belt. Amazingly, his head is described as ovoid, like an egg laid on its side with the pointy part facing forwards. he is described as shaved blue in the face. His voice has the dark grating sound of rusty metal. Although he is extremely short, his shoulders are extremely wide. One secretary observes that he’s a weird one. This is such an understatement that it sounds absolutely absurd. Oh…and underwarr is lame in his left foot. Speaking of the old folklore, we know that the devil limps, due to his one cloven foot, I believe. So what you always suspected is true. Your boss is the devil.

One of the most interesting features of Diaboliad is how physical it is. And how it uses the most mundane props of city life to create Bulgakov’s signature style of slapstick comedy combined with horror. It’s as if the manic Three Stooges were agents of darkness. Underneath comedy, especially the older comedy, is a lot of darkness. The Stooges could be quite sadistic but we’re supposed to laugh at them. The Marx brothers were creators of anarchy. So with Bulgakov, at first you laugh and then you are chilled. The devil is The Great Disruptor. At first you think it’s funny. But then you realize it’s not so funny to have your sense of reality systematically destroyed. That’s what were afraid of, isn’t it? That reality won’t hold up under pressure?

One of my favorite bits is underwarr in an elevator with glass doors. Bulgakov employs glass doors and walls a lot, as a play to show what you desire or fear right before your eyes but unreachable nonetheless. So as underwarr descends in the elevator, he disappears in sections, first his feet, then his midsection and finally his head, though he’s still talking. He only seems to descend in elevators, never to rise in them. It’s the Ascension of Christianity in reverse, like holding the cross upside down. Christ ascends, underwarr, in contrast, sinks.

As Korothov chases after underwarr, trying to get his dismissal reversed, the story tilts off the axis of reality. It would be nearly impossible to describe what happens in this increasingly manic story, in which the worst horror is that other people become increasingly unreal. The devil doesn’t, perhaps can’t, do anything to Korothov. K has to do that to himself. Should I feel guilty that I found Diaboliad so funny? It’s hilariously funny and I don’t feel guilty. But the ending, where the meaning of such basic concepts as up and down are reversed, is as black as the ink on this page.

Matt Norman is the author of the amazing, Domestic Violets, just out from Harper Perennial. I am happy to provide you with our most recent conversation:

MN:  An afternoon?  Are you kidding?  Freaking thing took me an entire week.

Actually…all told, it was about two years. I had a completed first draft in about a year. Then the next year was spent fiddling and obsessing. Somewhere along the way, I blew the whole thing up and set it at the beginning of the financial crisis. Of course, it shouldn’t have taken as long as it did, but wives and children and dogs and friends and jobs and television and alcohol and Netflix and televised sports really get in the way of writing.

MN: I think it’s probably a pretty low number, like one or two. I think writing a first draft is the most emotionally agonizing thing you can do to yourself. The “giving birth to a cactus” comparison is dead on. But once I have a beginning, middle, and end, I revel in the process of destroying my own work. I believe that every sentence, particularly if it’s written by me, can be made way, way better.

MN:  For the sake of not rambling on and on like a fool, I’ll just talk about Achtung Baby. When it came out, I was a teenager, and I loved it like a kid loves a great album…because it was  just so goddamn cool.  Along with the music, I really responded to how the band transformed themselves visually and stylistically to fully embody the new material.  I’d never really seen a band do that before. They became full-blown rock stars.  Over the last twenty years, though, I’ve gained a deeper appreciation for how difficult that album was for them to make.  They’d gotten very rich and famous making a very particular kind of music (see The Joshua Tree). But they had the guts and the vision to tear all of that down and give people something that theydidn’t even know they wanted.

I dare you to listen to One in a dimly lit room by yourself and feel nothing.  I dare you! (Why am I yelling?)

JR: American Psycho and Domestic Violets were both trade paper originals. I believe the comparison ends there. BUT, do you think a writer’s career is started in trade paper? Less expectations? (this is the serious question of the interview).

MN: Wow, yeah, that officially marks the first American Psycho comparison. Richard Russo’s first novel was a paperback original, too, I believe. Those two guys have done OK, I guess.

When I first sold the book, my agent presented the paperback deal to me as a very positive thing—as a way of making it more accessible to people. That makes sense.  You’re asking a lot of readers when you’re asking them to buy your first novel. They have no idea who in the hell you are, and they’re standing there in a bookstore surrounded by authors they already know. So, offering your book in an easier, slightly cheaper form can’t hurt.

And, as you mentioned, from the publisher’s standpoint, I think a paperback original is blessed with more modest expectations, which is good. I’ve found that I’m at my best when people don’t expect a lot from me.  My wife can attest to that.

MN: I’d say I shoplift about 75% of the books I read.  I can run surprisingly fast for a tall person. But, when I actually do buy a book, I try to hit The Ivy Bookstore—which, for those who don’t know, is a great indie bookstore in Baltimore. My two-year old single-handedly destroys their children’s book department every time she’s there.

I know virtually nothing about business, but my guess is that indie bookstores are going to be OK, particularly in urban areas. The big chains do their thing, and they always will.  But indie bookstores are the only places left in the world that are really all about the books—and not just the big sellers either, thank God.  So, as long as there are book nerds like us to wander into them, the indies will survive in some form. (He says, hopefully.)

MN: I’m about 50 pages into a new novel now, and, yeah, it has been kind of a bitch. It’s finally going well though, which I’m happy about.

I think the difficulty comes from being reminded, as I said earlier, of how horrible and agonizing first drafts are. By the time your first novel comes out, it exists in your mind as this completed, fully polished thing, and so you fool yourself into thinking that the next one should come out like that, too. Artistic amnesia somehow makes you forget that before your first novel was sitting on the NEW FICTION shelf at a bookstore, it was an aimless train wreck of a Microsoft Word document that kept you up at night wishing you’d gotten a degree in accounting.

Seriously, for book #3, I’m just going to have my team of personal assistants and stylists write it.  Seems like that’d be a lot easier.

MN: I wish I was interesting enough to say something totally obscure that no one has ever heard of, but I think The Great Gatsby is it for me. It’s just this absolutely perfect thing. And telling that story through Nick Carraway’s perspective adds a wonderful layer of meaning and commentary.  I think about the first line of the book a lot, particularly as it applies to today’s political scene. I’m not going to type it out, though. I don’t want you to get sued by Fitzgerald’s estate…but people should Google it.

As for the worst book…I try to avoid being a hater, at least in public, but I’ll make an exception here. I tend to resist the books that EVERYONE is reading because usually EVERYONE can’t be trusted. But a few years ago I decided to try The Da Vinci Code, just to see what the big deal was. It literally made me angry at society. Well…you know…more angry than usual.

Jane Gardam says somewhere in Crusoe’s Daughter that a writer’s discovery of a great character is a divine accident. Perhaps in Polly Flint, the lead character in CD, Gardam imagined someone as intelligent and resourceful as herself but fictionally stranger.

Polly Flint is borne out of the head of Robinson Crusoe. JG imagines a young girl who worships Daniel Defoe’s masterwork as if it were her Bible. Polly Flint is a transposed Crusoe, living in the North Yorkshire moors (where Gardam was born incidentally) from early in the 20th to 1986.

Crusoe’s Daughter is a novel about the emotional survival of Polly, who loses her sole parent, her seafaring father, very early in the book and goes to live in the yellow house called Oversands, a Victorian pile on a hill, surrounded by moors, the sea, and industrial waste. Towards the end of the novel, Polly needs to take her first trip to London and it’s as if there’s been an earthquake in the story.

This novel is as drenched in Englishness as it is in rain. This might put off some American readers who need to have their own country’s social references at hand in order to enjoy a story. But it should be literary caviar to the Anglophiles who practically trample over each other to get a good seat for Downton Abbey.

I’m stunned at the concrete density of Jane Gardam’s realism. It might be worth it to read this novel just to be impressed by how a great writer can knock you out with description. But Crusoe’s Daughter is the most purely character-driven novel that I’ve read in years. Jane Gardam gives herself as a writer…like…nothing to work with in Polly Flint. She sets the bar impossibly high, and then she soars over it.

After Polly loses her only parent, she goes to live with Aunts Frances and Mary in that house on the moors. Also in the house is Mrs. Woods, no relation to anybody, but she’s there because she has no place to go. Mrs. Woods has no resources either so she’s not paying anything into the household. She does occasionally supply coffee. There’s also the housekeeper, Charlotte. Charlotte tragically loses her beloved nephew, Stanley, to illness; a boy who probably would have survived if his family had the resources for better medical treatment.

Charlotte shuts down. She sits in her kitchen chair, a statue of grief. Gardam notes that a pin falls from her hair into her lap. Immobile, she doesn’t retrieve it. The Aunts and Mrs. Woods want her to get up and make the fire so that they all can get back to their lives. Charlotte is counselled that, as a good Christian, her duty is to offer praise and thanksgiving, to get over it. Charlotte’s response is to walk out the kitchen door.

There’s also that look between Charlotte and Stanley when he was alive, so subtle you could miss it if you skipped a sentence. A look of microscopic tenderness such as 40-year-old women should maybe not be giving to boys. Charlotte’s never seen again. Great scene, minor in the story, but you know great writers from the small touches, like that pin.

Polly, in addition to her survival-gospel Crusoe, has read 283 novels from the great Oversands library: Scott, Dickens, Hardy, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Disraeli are mentioned. These are complete sets. DH Lawrence and Fanny Hill don’t rear their provocative heads until late in the story. So Polly has polished off hundreds of classic English stories. And it’s sad that Polly never gets to university, even though the Camelot-like vision of Cambridge is dangled briefly before her eyes.

In the height of its wonderful weirdness, Crusoe’s Daughter visits the hard scrabble farmhouse of a family that has lost a son in the Great War. Polly was a friend, and an ambivalent friend at that, as perhaps we all truly are. But Polly stays over at the working class homestead knowing that her friend’s mother thinks of Polly as the daughter-in-law to-be. This is a false relation, the friend was in all likelihood gay, but at no point during the visit does Polly contradict the family who all assume that a marriage was in the offing.

It’s brilliant sleight-of-hand by Gardam who keeps her fictional cake while eating it. She has a character who’s a social misfit, impractical for all her vaunted practicality and self-reliance, but still makes her a daughter-in-law via role-playing. And it’s not unkind, it’s one of the many surreal but touching scenes in the book. It seems to scream, man, this is weird, only no one says it is, which is ideal.

Polly does lay with Theo, in a wonderful set-piece in a great country house that’s about to be demolished. Theo is heir to an industrial empire owned by his German Jewish emigrant family. As native Germans, the Zeits (wonderful name) are persecuted in England during World War I, so they make the amazing decision to return to Germany.

As for Polly, she inherits Oversands, grows more unkempt, puts on weight, translates Crusoe into German and French and takes to drinking whiskey on the stair landing. Sometimes she doesn’t leave the house for days, padding around in her odd assortment of what she’s calls clothing. It’s like Gardam’s character is dying as a personality in a way that makes actual death no more than a formality.

Early in the book, JG goes all anti-Freudian on us: The deep stamp of past years and even dreams can be eradicated… If you’re a writer, you have to believe that characters can change. Will Crusoe’s daughter abandon Crusoe? Will she leave the island?

JR once said to me that not everybody finds love. And maybe that’s true of our ingenious Polly. But Jane Gardam has set herself an unusual task as a writer: to riff off a character from a most unlikely classic source. To create a woman who lives as if she’s on a deserted island in the midst of society. To create as Jane Gardam says writers must: a novel novel. Originality in fiction being something that you should not quite notice or it isn’t really originality. Jane Gardam makes the reader love Crusoe’s Daughter, dating from 1985. It will be reissued by Europa Editions on April 24th, 2012 in trade paperback.

One think-tank book that has been under the radar is The Lights in the Tunnel by Martin Ford. You come across the ideas in smart journals of opinion; I think that will increasingly be true; but in most commercial media, the deep sources of creative thought are usually obscured to give more legitimacy to the middlemen. MF is a deep source.

Ford’s guiding idea is that technological acceleration is an understated cause of unemployment. The stereotype, which looks to be wrong, is that increases in productivity due to increasing automation will always spin off innovative new jobs eventually. And that those jobs will be better for the unemployed population then the jobs we have now.

We hear a lot about all those green energy jobs to come. But how many people, realistically, are going to be needed to polish up all those solar collectors? And how many people are needed to run Facebook? 12? Okay, more than 12, but there are not 500K plus of jobs in the smartest companies on earth, like Facebook.

I’m being a smart ass, but Ford’s idea is that if the curve of tech innovation is steep enough, then it proves the Luddites right. There won’t be enough work for everybody. The great Steve Jobs was, deservedly, a one-percenter. But even the great SJ didn’t need to personally own 500K of cell phones. So who’s going to buy the iPhones of a mass technological culture if those masses don’t have a job?

Henry Ford saw to it that his workers made enough money to buy the cars that they were producing. But if Ford’s factories are increasingly automated, you eventually reach the point where there are not enough workers employed in the plant, or any other plant, to buy the cars.

That’s the drift of The Lights in the Tunnel. We are those lights, as economically solvent beings, a few of which may burn brighter, like the one-percenters, while the other lights fade out, disrupting the model.

So I wondered if when robots can scan literature better than you can, if you will still want to read. Why would you want to? That’s when I stumbled across The Great Vegetative Library. It’s found in Two Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion by David Hume, one of our 18th century friends.

Imagine that forming a home library was a kind of horticulture. Imagine books without writers. Here’s how it might work: You lay out for yourself a fine selection of bookshelves in a sunny room. You water the shelves appropriately and then leave time for the books to germinate and start to grow on their own! If you had a fine basement library like my good friend JC, then you could grow books like mushrooms, direct from the fungus!

Be sure to lay in some colorful, narrow shelving for the mass markets to pollinate. Mysteries quite naturally prefer dark shelves. If you like science fiction, I think steel shelving allows for more rigorous growth. But if you want massive library sets or an encyclopedia, I recommend built-in shelving to accommodate these larger plants. Please feel free to imagine a vegetative library of your own! What would you want it to contain? There are no writers! What would you like to have in your organic library that is more like a landscape than a reading room?

When I awoke from this fever dream of pod-people literature, I swung in the opposite direction. What if forming an association with the writer was the most important thing in reading? It’s just a thought experiment. I’m imagining that the reason I would want to read Pride and Prejudice is that I want to relate to Jane Austen’s mind. This is a social media kind of attitude and reinforces my impulse to always want to go to the source: To think that the active brain that writes the book is more exciting than the book. It happens to me anyway when I know the writer well. When I read Jonathan Evison, I swear I hear his voice speaking the words. I feel as if he is present and imagining his book before my eyes.

I think that every writer is two persons. The writer creates a second identity for themselves when they create novels. It’s an after-image or shadow identity, the writerly self, that exists behind the book you are reading. It’s that creative self, spinning out a yarn in its own signature style, that I want to get to know. And I want to write back.

That’s my antidote for the robot reader. The robot reader doesn’t need to have a writer. Readers and writers need each other. They need to share the creative force that is the act of writing. Writing is an act. The next time that you read Pride and Prejudice try to imagine that Jane Austen is still writing it.

From I Am an Executioner: Stories by Rajesh Parameswaran
Knopf, 2012

Gopi isn’t what he wants to be, and life has done nothing to help him. But Gopi has always tried to be someone else, impersonating is a way into the life of someone he wants to be, even if it’s pretend. Gopi has been fired from his lousy job at CompUSA. Instead of collecting unemployment he tells his wife he has a sales job, and disappears each day. It is a standard trick of the painfully unemployed. Lie. Tell everyone you have something, when you don’t. It’s easier to lie. Who isn’t going to believe you?

Gopi checks out some books from the library and decides that he is going to be a doctor that specializes in women’s troubles. It’s hilariously ambitious, and can only lead to catastrophe. Gopi easily fools his wife, and she thinks the books he is reading are his solution to their inability to have children. Gopi is fooling people without trying. He occupies a small office that was once housed veterinarian’s office. The place still smells of piss, but Gopi manages to get it cleaned up. I was surprised by what he could get through the mail to help outfit his fledgling office, but persistence is the key to life, and Gopi is ready to practice medicine.

The world knows nothing of Gopi’s trick, and I had no idea how far Parameswaran would push the nuts and bolts of this story. By the time Gopi has performed his first surgery, I was looking at this story with my hands over my eyes. The results are harrowing. I ask you this; where did Rajesh Parameswaran come from?   Regardless of the provenance, this writer has is a serious threat. I am bursting at the seams about this collection, and have held back some of the most delicious details from this story. Believe me, when you read this, you will be telling everyone you know about this book.