|
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||
|
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|
|
Also this issue: Take This Job and Shove It Rebel May Care Follow My Lead Middle East Memoirs |
|
|
|
|
 |
|||||||||
June 26-July 2, 2003
cover story
By Edward Stone Cohen Akashic, 200 pp., $13.95
What do you do with a writer able to pen a sentence like, "The pull from her nipples was so strong now that she could feel the skin on her forehead begin to tighten"?
If you're tiny Akashic Books, and if you're looking to launch a "rural surreal" line, you publish him. Unfortunately, Edward Stone Cohen's howler is no isolated occurrence. More unfortunately, it's not meant as hyperbole -- one suspects that for its author it's a legitimate description of desire.The blame does not belong entirely to Cohen, though. Firewater is his only published novel, and Akashic has published it posthumously (they have apparently taken a pass on his earlier Fellatio, the Boy Scout, in which he set out to "expose the Boy Scouts before they expose themselves"). There are usually reasons posthumous works don't see the light of day, sometimes personal or political -- take E.M. Forster's Maurice -- but more often because of their unfinished or unfit state.
Firewater seems unfinished, and certainly remains unfit -- clumsy in language, juvenile in humor and incoherent and rambling in plot. Ostensibly the story of heroic Native American presidential candidate Chief Shelldrake, Firewater wants to think of itself as comic, apocalyptic and suspenseful. The (intentional) comedy revolves largely around bodily functions; more than one character, for instance, lovingly describes the experience of vomiting "a real steamer" out the window of a moving car. The apocalypse is environmental, but blends real (if dated) references to Bhopal and marine pollution with near-future oddness, like marauding mutant dwarves and regular golf-ball hail. The suspense gets lost completely; there are feints at conspiracy theories, but they disappear in the general incoherence of the book.
Cohen's sincerity as an environmentalist comes through clearly, which makes Firewater all the more regrettable. His publishers want to bill the novel as environmental suspense, but it lacks the tautness of Neal Stephenson's Zodiac or the clear-eyed commitment of Edward Abbey's Monkey Wrench Gang. Instead, the values Cohen clearly sees as heroic come off flaky and mixed up, like month-old granola. –Justin Bauer
By Stuart David Turtle Point Press, 152 pp., $14.95
Nalda Said, the debut novel by Stuart David -- best known as the onetime bassist for Belle and Sebastian -- was published in England in 1999 and reputedly written before David met the members of the band. But it's the Belle and Sebastian connection that has created a large, enthusiastic readership for David's book, a success that most likely will not be repeated in the U.S.
Situated in a timeless, placeless void, Nalda Said is a curious blend of allegory and bildungsroman. The painfully shy, childlike narrator was raised by his Aunt Nalda in a cloistered caravan, and the stories she told him were so vivid that, years later, he is unsure what is real and what is fiction. What he is sure of is that he carries a prized diamond inside him, and he is so afraid that someone will learn his secret that he shuns human interaction. But when he takes a job as a hospital gardener, he becomes attached to his co-workers for the first time, and the threat of that intimacy causes him to confront his fear.
David applies the same approach to storytelling as he does to the spoken-word tales in his current band, Looper: a matter-of-fact realism that is also oddly cartoonish. The narrator's naive imaginings are the kind of primal fantasies in which wolves eat grandmothers, and as Nalda Said quietly meditates on secrecy and trust, it surreptitiously turns into a brutal fairy tale for the paranoid. –Elisa Ludwig
By lê thi diem thúy Knopf, 160 pp., $18
This evocatively titled first novel brings to life a family that escapes Vietnam and comes to America in 1978. As the book begins, they've "washed ashore" in San Diego. At its conclusion, they stand on the California shore, looking at beached silver fish as they flop and gasp for air. It's a telling metaphor, as The Gangster We Are All Looking For is a story about adaptation and the pain of watching one's loved ones fail to adapt. Told from the perspective of an unnamed girl, the tale plays her growing sense of comfort in this new world off her father's increasing alienation and melancholy.
It'd be easy to make such material maudlin, but lê -- who also left Vietnam in 1978 with her family -- demonstrates a soft touch throughout. With its elliptical plotting and evocative set pieces, Gangster gives the reader a powerful sense of how its narrator evolved through her father, Ba, a soldier and a gangster in Vietnam, where he sold black-market cigarettes and chased girls. In America, however, Ba changed; he became softer, and darker. At night he goes out drinking and then comes home to fight enemies only he can see.
Toward the end of the book the narrator has become disillusioned as well. "I grew up studying my father so closely as to suggest I was certain I saw my future in him," she says, continuing the reverie: "I would build and break things with my hands." Finishing her tale, we learn the narrator -- like the author herself -- went east for school and began writing stories. She escaped, in a sense, her imagined fate, but not her destiny. In Gangster she may build a beautiful story with her hands, but it does little to break the power of the past. –John Freeman
By Mark Merlis Fourth Estate/HarperCollins, 360 pp., $24.95
Joel Lingeman has let himself go. Not that the poor slob who sleepwalks through Man About Town, Mark Merlis' third novel, ever had much of a grip on himself. Merlis, who now lives in New Hope, uses his experience as a Capitol Hill health policy consultant to draw out this overlong tale of one wonk's slow awakening.
A dating dud in the anything-goes '70s, Joel may as well have fallen into a coma during his 15-year relationship with Sam. After Sam trades their longtime companionship for a fling with a guy half his age, Joel grows to loathe the dull, out-of-touch sot he's become. Rather than take his bar pals' advice to shape up, he hunts for the man who appeared in the swimsuit ad that first made him tingle 30 years earlier. Evenings filled with fruitless cruising and moping leave Joel with plenty of time for exposition in subplots about a nasty Medicare bill and tax breaks for pharmaceutical companies. Merlis hits the mark with the "Personal Responsibility Act of 19__," but his senators are over the top, referring to "the gays" who get "the AIDS" by "doing stuff." Even Rick Santorum is a little too savvy to talk like that.
Joel fares better in the dialogue department; he doesn't have much to live for, but the (prematurely) old fart gets the best lines. ("You're taking coverage away from sick people so you can cover kids," he tells a bureaucrat. In another scene, he justifies a deception: "Most of civilization consists of lies about the dead.") Merlis' timing is just right; such bons mots are common enough for the reader to plow through in search of the next one, rare enough to make them stand out.
Joel's general discomfort is one reason the story drags; he pities everyone, but saves most of his scorn for those few whose lives are so empty that they care about his. What contempt he must have for anyone who would read 360 pages about his sorry ass. But Merlis turns this unease into something deeper when Joel wonders what his younger black lover sees in him. These scenes are the book's most candid and complicated, hinting at possibilities beyond Man About Town's (and Joel's) narrow focus. –M.J. FineBy Jill Nelson Agate, 318 pp., $23.95
In Sexual Healing, Jill Nelson's first novel, sisters are doing it for themselves because their men sure aren't. Lydia's soon-to-be ex is suing her for alimony, while Acey's fat fellow was so-so in the sack even before his heart attack. What are two 40-ish buppies to do? They hire a few dozen hot guys and open a brothel in Nevada. 
Just because A Sister's Spa is legal doesn't mean it's easy. Our heroines get help from a handsome stranger who sleeps with both of them hours apart, the ghost of Acey's dead husband, a know-it-all bank receptionist and a conservative radio host. With friends like these, they don't need enemies. Lydia and Acey get them anyway: religious hypocrites, a gossip columnist, white feminists who want equal access. Even popularity is a problem when the brothel is booked solid and erection problems arise. It's enough to make the entrepreneurs want to forget their problems by engaging a few good men to relieve their tensions. So they do.
Sexual Healing makes good on the promise of its title. The ban on male bonding is a bummer, but two ladies getting lucky with triplets makes up for it. Nelson would benefit from a less gynecological approach to writing sex scenes. Maybe that's just her nonfiction roots showing -- she wrote Volunteer Slavery and Straight, No Chaser -- but for someone with newspaper experience, she often has a tin ear for dialogue. She hits the right notes with the rhyming preacher who decides to wage a war for morality while in bed with his mistress, but what should be give-and-take conversations come off as interrupted monologues.
Beyond the "good parts," Sexual Healing makes strong points about pleasure, race and hypocrisy without preaching. If you can get past the heavy-handed foreshadowing, you can choose whether to read with one hand or two. –M.J.F.
-- Respond to this article in our Forums -- click to jump there
