| anna
godbersen
The Paris Review Book of People With Problems.
Picador Press. 384pp. $15.00
House of Thieves. Kaui Hart Hemmings.
The Penguin Press. 237pp. $22.95
Envy. Katherine Harrison. Random House.
320pp. $24.95
Natural Novel. Georgi Gospodinov. Dalkey
Archive Press. 136pp. $12.95
The Paris Review Book of People with Problems is a book
whose price of admission would be justified by its straight-forward
and brilliant title alone. Problems are, of course—in
the Fiction Writing 101 sense—the motors of stories,
what allows them to be more than just worlds rendered in miniature
or jots of lovely writing. But this title also appeals to
that lowest and most compulsive of readerly instincts: The
desire to peer into other people’s houses and see what
messes they live by. And what gems of messes are contained
within these pages. The stories in this collection were published
in The Paris Review between 1974 and 2004; they are a wry
bunch, accomplished and unshowy, amused by their own shiftlessness,
humiliation, wanting and loss. There is a profusion of absent
women—wives, girlfriends, daughters, although mostly
wives. We have, for instance, Bob Munroe of Wells Tower’s
“The Brown Coast,” who wakes up saltine-encrusted,
out of a job, in a “cinderblock cottage with a badly
flaking pink paint job,” in a place far away from his
Vicky. He is a man foolish enough to have “tried to
blunt oncoming feelings of hopelessness by trysting with a
lonely woman he’d met in traffic school”; he is
a man foolish enough to have become emotionally attached to
fish. We also have the nearly divorced Jack of Charlie Smith’s
“Crystal River,” a man whose every step is haunted
by Frieda the estranged wife, a man who still exchanges unmentioned
blowjobs with his best friend Harold, with whom he is on a
Florida canoeing trip, a trip turned snowy and wild of a sudden.
And then there is K of Joanna Scott’s “A Borderline
Case,” the aristocratic, Punjabi psychoanalyst whose
problem—or more accurately, his raison d’etre—is
other people’s problems. Scott tells the story of K’s
sexually charged first session with B, a pederast with “a
high-ranking post at an embassy in London,” a man K
will turn into his own writing project—his case study.
Through this carefully dissected first of many interactions
between K and B, we understand that this is how K builds himself
up; we understand what a perverse thrill he derives from holding
the interpretive key to another man’s problems.
Following such nuanced
and confidently written tales, House of Thieves,
Kaui Hart Hemmings’s suite of debut stories, feels a
tad weak, like a series of promises half met. But still it
beckons, with a Come on in, the writing is lovely, the world
is fascinatingly dark and littered with palm trees. As its
title suggests, House of Thieves aims to portray its idyll
of a setting—Hawaii—in a way that is, while not
exactly new, still complex and sharply observed. Like the
problem-plagued heroes stalking The Paris Review,
Hemmings’s characters are hung-up on missing persons
and fragmented families; in the background, we catch a glimpse
of a land with a legacy of violence, an excess of natural
beauty unfairly divvied up. There are the girls of House
of Thieves's namesake story (ages 12-13) who help Wendy’s
older brother (currently estranged from the family and living
the down and out surfer life) steal the silver, the jewelry,
the Maker’s Mark, the white marble fireplace, from their
parents’ house and drive the loot back to his seaside
shack. There is Pete of “Island Cowboys,” whose
pregnant girlfriend won’t validate him with marriage,
a man routinely humiliated not only by the financial world,
but also by the natural world in the form of a belligerent
goat. And there is Brooke the real estate agent selling parcels
of the Gold Coast, fated to spend time with a bratty teenager
named Letta because she is having an affair with Letta’s
married father. Hemmings does occasionally misstep, most notably
with “Begin with an Outline,” which is sectioned
up under headings like “Setting,” “Choosing
a Subject,” and so on. It is a prank of a story that
does not so much interrogate the short fiction form as bring
to mind an image of the author photocopying her latest pages
for the creative writing workshop that will begin in fifteen
minutes. On the whole, though, Hemmings achieves a sandy and
subtle melancholy; Paradise, she seems to be saying, is always
overrun with snakes. Or, to borrow from the first line of
her first story, “The sun is shining, mynah birds are
hopping, palm trees are swaying, so what.”
Kathryn Harrison’s
Envy is, by contrast, a novel without a strand of
hair out of place. Harrison is the author of several books,
but she is probably most known for The Kiss, a lovely and
tragic memoir that recalls her sexual relationship with her
father, a man almost entirely absent from her childhood. Envy
is not a book concerned with loveliness—it is a lean
and neatly structured affair—but it does pick up on
some of the same themes. Mild-mannered psychoanalyst Will
Moreland is a man who, despite all the comforts of upper middle-class
life in New York City (long lunches, sophisticated sex) is
haunted by questions of masculinity and absence. He is estranged
from his identical twin, Mitch, a swimmer who has become world-famous
for his daring athleticism. His retired father has recently
taken a lover in Manhattan—with the permission of Will’s
mother. Most harrowingly, Will is indirectly responsible for
the death by drowning of his twelve year old son. Meanwhile,
Will’s wife Carole, already a calm and remote sort of
woman, has become sexually and emotionally distant. And then,
just to underscore all these lurking issues, Will discovers
that his college girlfriend (not a nice lady, all around)
was pregnant when she left him to marry the supposed father
of her twenty-four year old daughter. Will makes a futile
demand, to the old girlfriend’s great irritation, that
a paternity test be performed to determine if he is in fact
the father. With all this as back-story, Will is soon a man
obsessed by sex, and not just the “more or less constant
nano-porn that buzzes through his male brain without overcoming
or disrupting the sequence of his thoughts.” No, this
is far darker—after all, “even the most civilized
gentleman have their brutal fantasies. Especially the most
civilized.” Before long, Will is on the verge of breaking
every taboo upholding his normal, and largely happy, family
life. And while Envy is the kind of novel that the
literal-minded might accuse of being melodramatic, or (the
horror!) unrealistic, it is thoroughly engrossing, and not
only for its scandals and revelations. Will’s profession,
however convenient to the plot, allows for a hyper-interpreted
series of events, and every gesture and habit is analyzed
for its deeper meaning. Thus does Harrison conjure a richly
intelligent and loaded portrait of contemporary family that
reads with all the speed of a genre novel.
And then along comes a
book which, for all its story similarities, is radically different
in form. The narrator of Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov’s
Natural Novel—whose name, of course, is Georgi
Gospodinov—is also haunted by masculinity and paternity.
He is obsessed by the scatological, the banal (“only
here do we get a glimpse of the tragic and the sublime. The
mediocrity of everyday life”), by the rocking chair
he paid a great sum for when he had very little money, by
fragmentation (narrative and otherwise) and by beginnings,
especially new beginnings, since he left his wife when she
became pregnant by another man. (Or, as Gopsodinov puts it,
when he found he “wasn’t the author of her pregnancy.”)
This is not a novel that hides its hand, you see, but it is
no less engrossing a book for having revealed the divorce,
and the reason for the divorce, so early on. Gospodinov entertains
by recording a series of conversations on the topic of public
toilets and their graffiti (apparently held over a meal) and
with his idea for a novel of beginnings. (Such a novel, “will
only give the initial impetus and will subtly move into the
shadow of the next opening, leaving the characters to connect
as they may.”) He, too, is preoccupied by a Vicky or
a Carole (or, in this case, an Emma), but he is also playing
at the postmodern game of breaking down a fiction to its parts
and origins, doing away with anything as familiar as a plot.
And yet, Natural Novel never feels schematic or plodding.
It is a cool, brainy work that asks its readers to consider
how meaning is made from language, and in the process suggests
how much is absent from life.
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