Small Wonders

Under the covers with Justin Bauer

by Justin Bauer

High concept — at least in the movie business — feels like a backhanded compliment. It carries a taint of gimmickry, a slight suspicion that you're about to be tricked. High concept means you're in for a technical display, a virtuoso performance that fits neatly into a two-paragraph blurb. Take David Nicholls' One Day (Vintage, June 15), which follows Emma and Dexter from a night spent together after college graduation through 20 years of their lives. The action takes place on one day per year until our 22-year-olds hit their 40s. Chapters build to charged meetings as dogged Emma painstakingly assembles career, boyfriend and professional success while Dexter squanders his natural charm as a short-term C-list celebrity with a long-term case of arrested development.

If the story is predictable and the structure forces important moments offstage, Nicholls compensates by coloring in Dex and Em's story with nuanced strokes. Nicholls' talents as a writer echo Nick Hornby's, both in the fluidity of his style and the flatly laddish trajectory of Dex's story. What's more, the steady momentum of his chapters amplifies the creep of aging as Dex and Em pile up their days.

Nicholls' facility with a single idea is the polar opposite of the considerably less-disciplined Alasdair Gray. Considered something of a living legend for his debut, Lanark, and something of a crackpot for his painstaking approach to publishing, Gray frames Old Men In Love (Small Beer, June 1) as the found manuscript writings of John Tunnock (a Glaswegian schoolteacher and disappointed novelist), collected and edited by a distant relative, helped by "local writer" Alasdair Gray.

The papers — fragments of three historical novels, sutured together by Tunnock's diaries — are engaging, scattered and uneven. But Gray festoons his pages with marginalia and portraits and illustrations, showing his allegiance doesn't lie with Tunnock, but with his beautiful book.

Gray's commitment to the object underlines the difference between his old-fashioned postmodernism and Nicholls' high concept. Gray's maximalist inability to pass up a digression is worlds away from the constraint that Nicholls' device imposes on him.

While the challenge of a high-concept conceit may draw attention away from plot or character, the restrictions it imposes can magnify a story's details or a writer's performance. Shane Jones' Light Boxes (Penguin, May 25), a slight, dreamlike thing, sketches out balloonist Thaddeus Lowe's war against a godlike, winter-enforcing old man named February. Jones uses an armload of found documents and involved typography to dress up his fable's small stock of words and images: Whispers in small-point typefaces, lists and white space combine to give the chapbook novel a fairy-tale feel. They make Thaddeus' world glow, but Jones' eventual pedestrian explanation of February's behavior falls short of the precious intricacy of the book's design, piercing the lofty atmosphere he's built.

By contrast, Jean-Christophe Valtat's 03 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, June 22) is as self-conscious as Jones is subconscious. The single-paragraph novella freezes an extended stream-of-consciousness reverie, as an isolated suburban teenager stares at his beautiful semi-institutionalized neighbor waiting for her bus across the street. Valtat's narrator, perfect in his self-dramatizing emotional precocity, sidetracks into lurid little fantasies and screeds on Morrissey lyrics. The writing is stunning, but its duration and breadth of reference sap its plausibility, making it clear that Valtat's imagination is the real show.

While it would be easy enough to accuse Alain Mabanckou of the same miscalculation, his Broken Glass (Soft Skull, May 18) uses its simple central device to build up its own indictment. Disgraced Congolese schoolÂteacher Broken Glass is a wine-soaked fixture of Brazzaville bar Credit Gone West; the bar's owner has given his educated regular a note­book to commemorate the tales of his fellow barflies.

The stories he collects share similar elements — unfaithful wives and feckless husbands, ambitions crushed and soaked in alcohol — and stumble wildly through French and African writing and traditions, quoting

Zola and aping Perec and staging a bawdy piss­ing contest that could come from Rabelais.

Mabanckou's writing is dense, witty and utterly singular; he casts his narrative into long, period-free run-on sentences, broken up only by white space here and there, as if his ruined, erudite drunk has you button­holed in a corner. When he hands Broken Glass the notebook, the bar's owner sneers at the oral-tradition cliché that holds "In Africa, when an old person dies, a library burns." "I only trust what's written down," he says. Mabanckou's book is remarkable in the way it marries the two, using a flowing gout of words to push the hot, untrustworthy, wine-soaked breath of Broken Glass along the honest blank page.

(j_bauer@citypaper.net)