Sole Survivors

Justin Bauer between the covers.

by Justin Bauer

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Published: Nov 3, 2010

Eric Gansworth's novel Extra Indians (Milkweed, Nov. 1) opens with the epigraph "THIS IS A TRUE STORY," which comes from Fargo's opening credits. It's important because Extra Indians starts out by telling the tale of a trucker who picks up a Japanese girl out searching for Fargo's missing treasure. Having taken the movie's fictional disclaimer as fact, she ends the night outside, in the northern Minnesota winter, dead from exposure.

Nuriko Furuta's death is instrumental in warming up the voice of the trucker, Tommy Jack McMorsey. The events of that night, and the repercussions of his tabloid-TV interview about the girl's death, structure Tommy Jack's present, but they mainly frame a couple of older stories that are just as sad. One belongs to Tommy Jack, and concerns his return to West Texas from Vietnam and his courtship of Shirley Mounter; the other belongs to his comrade-in-arms, who leaves his own home for a desperate shot at Hollywood. Both stories get teased out of Tommy Jack when his adopted son and Shirley's daughter come hunting for him after his TV appearance. Saturated in nostalgia and regret, both stories are delivered in Tommy Jack's worn-in cadence.

Both tales fill out the stark outlines of fear drawn by the Japanese girl's death. And when Gansworth, in his author's note, discloses that her story is factual, he underlines the cliché that truth is stranger than fiction. "Google it," he challenges. It's a pointed inversion, with the realism of a literary novel carrying themes that possess more true-to-life tangible strength than verifiable facts. By layering truth and fiction, Gansworth complicates the two, dislocating us along with his characters.

Anne Fortier's Juliet (Ballantine, Aug. 24) glories in similar complications, whipping literary history and historical fiction into macchiato-ready froth. Julie Jacobs, who finds out she's really Giulietta Tolomei, the direct (matrilineal) descendant of the historical source for Shakespeare's Juliet, endures coincidence and misdirection and hidden identities. She winds up unsure of whether she's trapped by the circumstances of her ancestor's story, or whether she's able to rewrite Juliet's fate.

But Julie's author has no such qualms about monkeying with the Bard: She grabs on to the Juliet story's fairy-tale plotting, and starts up multiple versions of it in parallel, full of preposterous flash and high-blown romance. It's a bravura performance by Fortier, who riffs and vamps in the beats between what we know the story does and how she can manipulate it. It's no shock that Julie swaps comedy for tragic fate; the surprise comes with how well Fortier pulls off the often-ridiculous twists of candy-floss plot.

None of her devices are nearly as preposterous as Ed, a nonexistent retconned dog who is sidekick and comic relief in Charles Yu's How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (Pantheon, Sept. 7). Just like Juliet plays on the real-life fiction of Shakespeare in Julie's fictional real life, Yu hijacks the rules of sci-fi for his own purposes. Yu's protagonist (explicitly not a hero, also named Charles Yu) repairs time machines for a living, constantly interjecting highly technical but not-particularly-earnest explanations of the grammatical physics of Minor Universe 31.

Despite all the charmingly geeky care Yu takes to chart the twisting chronologies of time travel, Universe isn't really science fiction. It's maybe meta-science fiction, a Douglas Adams goof; it's mostly metaphor. Because the rules of time travel, in Yu's universe, prohibit tampering with the past, the metafictional literalness of time travel becomes an actual symbol of memory.

The reality of the sci-fi universe, its adventure and gadgetry, allows Yu to explore the very non-science-fictional ideas of loss and dislocation. When his father leaves his home, "where there was enough magic left in the real [world] ... that time travel devices were ... unnecessary," we can recognize his struggle, which rehearses the American conflicts between immigrant first and second generations; Yu's exuberant armature of ray-gun clichés refreshes that familiar story, restores its power and jerks the immigrant's dislocation firmly into the present tense.

(j_bauer@citypaper.net)

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