Mo' Regrets

Under the Covers with Justin Bauer

by Justin Bauer

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The Rolling Stones' "Can't You Hear Me Knocking" is a long song. Near the end of the first side of Sticky Fingers, it follows the slow stretch of "Wild Horses," anchoring the set. It's long in a way that songs really aren't anymore — no Dirty Projectors suite containing a bunch of ideas or slow-coalescing Animal Collective mirage, just a simple blues that becomes an extended jam, fading out on a series of riffs traded between Mick Taylor's guitar and the session saxophone.

That seven-minute stretch of 1971 gets more than a nostalgic mention in Next (Reagan Arthur, March 9). In the hands of James Hynes, the song takes up more than 10 pages. This is par for the course for the book, which in 320 pages covers just six hours of Kevin Quinn's life. There's very little in Quinn's six hours that goes unexamined, as he makes a rather ordinary trip from Ann Arbor to a job interview in Austin, looking for some kind of escape from the rut he's worn himself into.

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Next, for most of its length, maps the precise dimensions of Quinn's rut. Beginning as his plane touches down in Texas, Quinn engages in a drawn-out tangential reverie, periodically broken into by the real world, that shows the sheer weight of personal history leading him to the present. Hynes, a gifted comic novelist, is after something very serious here; he adopts a near-stream-of-consciousness narrative to tease at it, with Quinn more Dalloway than Bloom as he makes his way across the unfamiliar overheated Texas capital.

Quinn's recollection of that Stones song — or, of a party where it played 30 years ago, where he showed up with one woman to spite another — encapsulates Hynes' unhurried work developing his character's sentimental journey. The fluid back-and-forth between past and present sparks Quinn's realization that he, weakly liberal, professional underachiever, unlucky in love, has sacrificed his present to his regrets about the past.

It's hard to imagine anything nearly as all-encompassing or elegaic coming from the playlists that Zachary German's close-focused main character, Robert, queues up on iTunes during Eat When You Feel Sad (Melville House, Feb. 9). Even though German's book finishes with an 11-page list of all the books and songs and movies and records and artists mentioned in his slim volume, the kind of identification and total absorption Quinn has in his nostalgia seems unimaginably foreign for skinny-jeaned twentysomething Robert.

Instead? "Nancy puts the DVD Gimme Shelter into her DVD player. She turns on her TV. Gimme Shelter is on TV. Robert, Tom and Nancy look at the TV. On TV, The Rolling Stones are in a room. On TV, the song 'Wild Horses' is playing. Robert says 'This is my favorite song ever.'"

German's style lulls and irritates in its flatness. He writes almost exclusively in simple S-V-O sentences, almost entirely in present tense and passive voice, repeating names and proper nouns like he's packing together mantras. He's solely concerned with surfaces; there's no indication, for instance, of any reason Robert likes "Wild Horses," why it is any more special than Pavement or Yo La Tengo or Spiritualized. Emotion amounts to marking when characters "feel sad" and conversation happens in sentences like, "Alison says something."

But, even as mannered and carefully branded as his prose is, German so earnestly tries to get at a certain kind of adolescent isolation that's mirrored in the shallowness of the writing, that the facile stylistic parody that serves as jacket copy seems like sad, self-hating mockery. German's diffidence depends so much on style that co-opting it for marketing copy makes his little book seem even more fragile and pale.

Given this absolute difference between these books — generational, with Quinn old enough to be Robert's father; aesthetic, with Hynes' slow modernist lushness overwhelming German's tinkly flatness — both surprisingly explore similar problems of sadness and regret. But where Robert's problem is one of consumption, figuring out that he's happy as long as he's eating Chinese takeout, Quinn's is the opposite. He can't take in anything new because of the crush of regret.

And likewise, both writers try to break their characters free with abrupt shifts at their volumes' ends. German's sappy last paragraph is jarring, a weirdly sentimental closing for so affectless a book. But Hynes' third act, maybe no more successful, is unexpected and unsettling enough to leave unspoiled; it represents a near-complete break, in tone and also in abandoning the formal nostalgia of modernist reverie almost completely. Hynes breaks both his perspective and Quinn's in order to focus on the future, and in a way that German's eternal present tense can't, this old-fashioned book points toward what might come next.

(j_bauer@citypaper.net)