Some of my favorite 2012 reads

Throughout the year I've read and reviewed a few books (certainly not as many as I bought). Some of my reading time gets devoured by the college lit courses I teach, so I've re-re-read a number of great titles this year (Passing by Nella Larsen, The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, Medea by Euripides, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, and various short fiction by Flannery O'Connor).

But I'd like to share some of my favorite reads and reviews from this year. One thing I realized as I gathered these links: all but 1 of these books has a great (i.e., perfectly fitting) cover. (Sorry Billy Lynn, while your cover isn't particularly BAD it's not as striking as the rest of these.)

Boy21 by Matthew Quick -- If you don't know who Matthew Quick is yet, you will. Aside from the mammoth critical success of the film adaptation of his debut novel, his 2013 release, Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock, will be in the running for major awards. Before all that, though, there's Boy21, a fantastic exploration of two boys who become friends thanks to basketball, the music of Sun Ra, and a shared disconnection from the world.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain -- ended up on tons of Best of 2012 lists (even lists that were otherwise dull). Worth the recognition and something you should check out if you want a good satire about the Bush years and domestic perspective of Iraq War part deux.

Little Velázquez by Kathryn Kopple -- I blurbed this book. But even if I hadn't blurbed it and didn't become friends with Kopple back in 2008 at the Breadloaf Writer's Conference, I would love this book. A historical fiction about a little known dwarf living in the court of Isabel and Ferdinand, this book blew me away from start to finish. Great sentences, great use of history that never overwhelms, great analysis of women with power, and women without power.

The Disenchantments by Nina LaCour -- A book that haunted me, although that might suggest a more serious subject matter (such as LaCour's debut . The complexity of this road trip novel is never weighed down by the prose and offers some amazing scenes. 

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness -- A short review back when I read it because it's the kind of book that elicits a strong response and begs to be experienced purely. Sad, profound, funny, and beautifully illustrated. The kind of book you want in hardcover since the story and the pictures work together.

Echolocation by Myfanwy Collins -- The second book on this list that offers beautiful, crushing, complex presentation of women in crisis. Moves between perspectives with deft and has me looking forward to her collection of fiction, due out in January.

Me, Earl, and the Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews -- a funny and honest presentation of a teenager's views of death and friendship. Walks a fine line and, in my opinion, succeeds. One of two books I read in about 1 sitting, pretty much against my will (Boy21 was the other.) 

(Note: all of my reviews are on Goodreads, though some of these links will send you to my blog instead. The content is the same regardless of which site it appears. I just didn't figure out how to get the Goodreads posts to appear on my blog until a few months back.)

Review: Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock

Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock by Matthew Quick

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



(disclaimer: Matthew Quick and I are good friends. But that's not why I love this book.)

Put simply, this is an intense, gripping portrayal of a teenage boy who decides to kill his former best friend. Fans of Quick's previous work will sense, immediately, that this is something of a tonal shift, though all of Quick's narrators find themselves in emotionally challenging, often dark, places. In this case, though, we're introduced to Leonard Peacock -- a boy who's in a darker place than we've ever seen in prior books by the author. Amber, of SORTA LIKE A ROCK STAR, certainly has her depression midway through her novel. But Leonard is an all encompassing, authentically sad and angry character.

He has reason to be.

I can't review the bulk of this book without spoiling plot elements. If the setup doesn't grip you, then know that the other hallmark's of Quick's work -- a unique, engaging voice; earned emotional moments; visual descriptions that linger long after the story's done -- are present. This is not a departure, a change, a reinvention of Quick's path as an author. This is the best exploration of a teenager's angry despair that you may ever read.



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Review: BUTTER

Lange's debut novel works with a profound mixture of crucial topics: obesity, bullying, the power of the internet, parenting woes, and the power of music. If you suspect this book is a mess because it attempts to work all of these ingredients together, you suspect wrong. (Also, that's my only food related metaphor for this review. I promise. Oh wait, Promise is a non-dairy spread. argh!)

Back on target.

Butter, the protagonist, walks a fine line of being sympathetic and unsympathetic. He's obese and relatively okay with it, though plenty of things in his life cause him to question his lifestyle. It's not difficult to see why he's complacent, since his mother obsesses over his eating habits but seems incapable of controlling his diet in a meaningful way (aside from cutting out sugar at one point). I could see a version of this book wherein Butter drives readers away, but there's something about him that's vulnerable without being forced. Butter doesn't begin to change his behavior until he finds an online forum featuring comments from his friends at school, who vote him Most Likely to Die of a Heart Attack. He's forced to see himself through the eyes of his peers -- and the internet certainly can make that feeling sharp and profound. He doesn't like what he sees (and reads). So he decides to give up.

Now, it's never completely clear whether Butter truly meant to kill himself live on New Year's Eve or if he meant to just create another buffer around himself by showing people he knew what they said/thought about him. Butter goes back and forth, which means I go back and forth as well. In the end, it doesn't matter what his INITIAL intention is, just what he ultimately chooses to do. I think the book succeeds because of Butter's ambivalence to his own decision. The threat to kill himself, though, needs to feel possible, and Butter gathers information that suggests he is planning his suicide, though, he's more than willing to back off when something positive happens in his life (weight loss, cute girl is nice to him, etc).

In many ways, the specter of death is one of the most crucial aspects of life's meaning. Without death, life carries on endlessly. Death forces us to ponder meaning, purpose, morality, and more, simply because we know we'll run out of time eventually. (Anyone who's read any Modernist literature knows the importance of death to literary characters. It's the fuel for much philosophizing.)

Here, Butter decides to eat himself over the edge and it causes him to change his behavior. He gains popularity, gains access to the girl he's had a crush on from afar (and a relationship over the internet), he gains a sense of worth. All because he decided his life had no worth.

As the plot progresses, Lange rightly focuses on Butter and his struggle as opposed to the various social issues the novel threads together. I found his complexity and hypocrisy very satisfying more so because Lange does not obsess on certain aspects of the story -- the power of the internet, as well as parenting woes. In lesser hands, a certain amount of moralizing and demonizing would occur to be sure the reader understood that the internet is bad or that parents are just "doing their best." While I can't answer for other readers, I never felt Butter's parents were simply good or bad, just frustrated (and, for me, frustrating in their believable behaviors). Nor did I find Butter's experience on the internet to be a judgment of the internet itself, (though it plays a huge role in Butter's self-esteem issues, Lange is clear that the internet both enhances and harms his self-worth).

I think Butter is a fantastic addition to books about suicide and bullying because it doesn't pander and it allows its characters to be real, especially towards the climax when Butter and Anna have a few key conversations. While the ending might feel a little too happy, I believe Lange earns the feelings because she wasn't afraid to let Butter be real in the rest of the novel.

On Mental Health

I've got a post over at The Crowe's Nest (my agent's blog) about the connection between reading and mental health. As a college adjunct who teaches literature, I see the way reading gives students a chance to talk about mental health -- both as a part of stories and as part of their own lives -- in a productive way.

Please check it out and comment! Thanks!

A Book from Another Era or Stuck

Back in 2002 I was working for a self-publisher that I'll call One Horse (because that's the name of the Menomena song that's playing now). It was a life-altering, bizarre, stressful, hilarious workplace. Know this: in a parallel universe, I accepted the offer to live in the Philippines for 7-8 months a year and oversee a book production department. (I would "live like a king" on my salary. I would gain "invaluable experience." I would be a "valued asset, even twelve time zones away.")
In this, preferable reality, I declined and moved on from that place. I earned a couple of graduate degrees, adopted a dog, started a family, played my guitar and some video games.
But during my time at this self-publishing juggernaut , I decided on a much-needed ass-kicking project: write a short story collection. I had a story from college that won an award. I had ideas that involved using that story as a hub of sorts and telling other stories about characters from that central piece. Why not find a way to finish a project? Something that couldn't be brushed aside! Something with a structure, so it wasn't just a bunch of ideas that I had no reason to finish.
Outlines and legal pads full of rough drafts began to take cover my apartment floor. My collection, titled Stuck, would take a cue from James Joyce collection Dubliners. The structure would follow, roughly, an arc with each successive character somewhat older than the main character of the prior story. The opening story follows an 8 year old girl and ends with an 80 year old woman.

"This is a book written by a depressed person." -- paraphrase of my therapist back in 2002

My final year of college, when many of the ideas for Stuck began to appear in the muck of my brain, I lived in an apartment complex near Rowan University with two friends. It was not college housing, so most of our neighbors were regular people, some significantly older and retired, some younger, some single mothers/fathers, etc. Shaped like a U, ringing around a big grass field with a lone tree (which would get struck by lightening shortly before I moved), the complex felt perfectly suburban and lonely. My upstairs neighbor often sat on his balcony in gym shorts (though he never went to a gym), drinking Bud from a brown bottle. He drove a large, white-and-aqua Ford Bronco and demanded that he get a particular parking space. He pounded on our door one Friday night to ask who dared park in his space.
The collection eventually came together as I worked for Philladlephia-based self-publsiher, a job that taught me more than I can ever say (both good and bad). It taught me little about traditional publishing, sadly, but a lot about marketing, cubical jobs, personality disorders, conflict resolution, and more. (Plus, I met my wife there.) I eventually completed my book, designing it during my free time and constructing the cover with the help of my sister.
The end product was not just a book, but my book. Something that I had made as a writer but also as a designer. The cover photo was a photo I had taken. I wrote the copy, picked the fonts, designed the interior.
Literally, Stuck is my book cover-to-cover.
This is not to discount my love for my forthcoming debut novel, Dr. Bird's Advice for Sad Poets. That book is wonderful and fun, but profoundly different. I was a different writer when I wrote it. I was a different person. I was writing for different reasons.
Stuck will always represent another time for me. My post-college listlessness was made worse by living alone and wrestling with serious, longstanding (and undiagnosed) mental health issues.
I was diagnosed with clinical depression and social anxiety disorder (that tepid, commercially neutered term).
Stuck, as my therapist at the time said after reading it, was written by a clinically depressed person. She asked me how I felt about that. I don't remember my answer, just her statement. I don't even remember whether I wanted her to like the book or not. I was ok that she read it, of course, but I didn't know what to expect.
Stuck, unlike Dr. Bird, is not a young adult book. It's not that teenagers can't relate to depression or loneliness or characters that are beyond their teens. But Stuck is steeped in depression and anxiety. The very purpose of the book is to soak the reader in those feelings and find as many ways to describe those feelings as poetically possible (or so I believed then).
Stuck's stories are like paintings of loneliness, pacing, alienation, sorrow. (There is a moment of uplift, but really only one and when it arrives, who knows if a reader will be able to see it as genuinely uplifting or just cynicism.)
The characters are all reflections of feelings that possessed me. The title story is about a girl who isn't invited to a sleepover; she packs a suitcase and decides to go anyway. Another follows the apartment complex handyman, who steals things from apartments to distract from the guilt he feels about his alcoholic father. The entire second half of the collection involves stories about various characters who all interact on a day when an unhappy, obese woman appears at the communal swimming pool and causes the other residents to gossip.
My therapist read this collection and asked me something very important. "Evan, are you afraid that you will not be able to write if you start managing your depression?"
Was I afraid of discovering that my writing was fueled by my emotional turmoil and that my creativity would sputter out if I began to seriously manage my newly diagnosed clinical depression?
Um....
I told her no. I didn't want to be depressed all the time, so if I did lose something, I would at least be better off losing the need or urge to write if all I was writing for was to battle depression.
Honestly, I did fear losing something. I feared losing myself, being numb. I didn't believe I would stop writing, though. Not then.
Still, my writing process, my very writerly life, didn't ignite totally for another five or six years after that -- with almost eleven years between my self-published personal project and my first novel. But I managed to get through. I manage my depression and anxiety. I am not numb or perfect. But I write and have many things that help me feel happy.
And thank goodness that's all true and I didn't lose my will to write. Writing is too much damn fun.

Review: Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk: A Novel

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk: A Novel by Ben Fountain

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



I'm not sure how to review this book without gushing and thus losing the chance to convince people to read this novel. So, know my goal is to encourage people to read this book; I will not summarize plot. I will try to contextualize why I think this book is worth your time.

Perhaps it's just one of those "perfect timing" novels where I found exactly the kind of book I wanted at the right time. Fountain's novel swept me along and I never wanted it to end. The climax is fascinating and surprising and nearly perfect. If you have any interest in novels about 21st century American culture -- teh culture of money and competition and violence and spin, then this book will satisfy you. It is a book about soldiers and war, but not in a warzone. It's a book about friendship and family and the things that give people a reason to keep going.

To keep it simple: BILLY LYNN'S LONG HALFTIME WALK truly does feel like a CATCH-22 for the Iraq War (as one of the blurb proclaims). Now, that's a heavy burden for a book, since CATCH-22 is a classic of war satire (in fact, is it one of the only war satires? LYSISTRATA comes to mind, but I blank on others at the moment).

Let me also say that I am a rabid Tim O'Brien fan. Any fiction I read about war is always read through the filter of THE THINGS THEY CARRIED. Ben Fountain's novel manages to coexist with O'Brien's philosophy on stories about war. Mainly because this is a novel about how America views itself during wartime. Billy Lynn, rather than being an O'Brien-esque story-spinner trying to make sense of his experience is, instead, a semi-sober critic of American culture. He spends the bulk of the novel trying to reconcile what he's fighting for with what he sees during the course of a 2 week 'victory tour' with the rest of his unit. Yes he struggles with the purpose of the war, but he also quickly realizes what O'Brien's short story collection contends: a soldier cannot explain the war experience to civilians. (Hemingway's IN OUR TIME argues this as well).

So, while he does spend some time pondering his life, his future, and his family in a particularly effective chapter, Billy Lynn can spend more time wondering how the Americans flooding Texas Stadium for the Thanksgiving Day game can be so happy and dumb. As Lynn points out: "Somewhere along the way America became a giant mall with a country attached." It's one of his many great DeLillo-esque observations that might seem "out of character" for a 19 year old from a small town in Texas, except that Shroom -- one of the casualties of the battle in Iraq that made Billy & his unit famous -- certainly pointed him towards deeper thinking.

A fantastic book. One I'll make time to read again.





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Negative Reviews (reprise)

This originally appeared over at Alice Ozma's blog in a slightly different form and with more pictures.

I have history posting with my real name on the internet. Blame my age and how I, like millions of people born before reality TV, who didn't know that the internet was supposed to be anonymous. Students have happily asked me about embarrassing posts from the late 1990s that I made on Radiohead websites using my real name. Those posts were full of frothy, college-aged-Evan music-rage, aimed at people who acted like Radiohead lyrics were talking about their life experiences and not Thom Yorke’s. (Seriously, how is “Fake Plastic Trees” about some teenage breakup?) But they were not posts I expected students to see years later.

<image of Thom Yorke removed, imagine him being sad> 

Thom Yorke has enough of his own pain.

Fast-forward to the Amazon.com age: I joined thousands of self-appointed experts, reviewing music, books, and movies to reveal to anyone with an internet connection my very important opinions regarding John Steinbeck’s novels, Godfather III, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor albums. I was saving people time and money and emotional frustration by writing about bad things and somehow increasing audiences by writing about good ones.
It didn’t help that I went to graduate school from 2003-2008 to get a Masters degree in Literature and then an MFA in Creative Writing. Graduate school trained me to believe I was good at judging literature, so that by the time I decided to become a writer I already had set ideas about writing based on the handful of books and writers that academics had deemed good. It’s not that academics are often wrong about what books are good. It’s just that our opinions are often dated. Put another way: the quality and importance of books published now cannot be determined now. I did not understand that books celebrated now might be forgotten in 100 years; and lots of the books that are celebrated 100 years after their publication were initially ignored (see: Herman Melville and Zora Neale Hurtson.)
So, while I learned much about literature during my period as a graduate student, I did not learn how to critique contemporary fiction (or movies, music, laundry detergent, etc). Five years in academia plus a predisposition to snobbery resulted in a number of harshly negative reviews for books on sites like Amazon and Goodreads. Not the greatest tragedy of my life, but certainly a character flaw.
I eventually went too far.
Back in 2008 I posted a review for a book on Goodreads; the review actually got the attention of the book’s author. I said some unnecessarily rough things, spurred by my belief that I knew a good book because I was a double-expert! I had an MA in Literature and I was getting an MFA. Why shouldn’t I post a review questioning the awards given to this novel and its author? Why shouldn’t I question this author’s skills? Chances were high that millions of people were considering whether or not to read that very book! I had to warn them!
The author emailed me and, in a very polite way, suggested I was being unnecessarily harsh. (He was happy to see that I actually liked his second book a bit, joking that at least he was improving — the kind of self-deprecating humor I normally would appreciate).
At the time I joked with fellow MFAers about how sad it was for an author to write a reader. I thought it was desperate and weird for him to go out of the way to contact me. Others agreed; no one seemed to think I was wrong for ripping the guy and his book on the internet. Ripping things on the internet is my right; that’s the very purpose of the internet. Right?
As you can probably sense, this was a terrible way to live. Fortunately, a couple of published authors said some key things about reviews and being a writer that helped shake up my persona both online and in the real world. A weekly coffeeshop conversation with author Matthew Quick, which stretched over many months, helped me shed some (though certainly not all) of my natural and acquired snobbiness. It’s not that Quick would show up and lament the nature of internet reviews. Nor did he chastise me for my own transgressions (yes, I did tell him about my harsh review and the resultant email). But he did push me to consider reviews from the other perspective. The irony is that I used similar thinking when teaching literature. Books force us to consider other perspectives! I said this in class to students but failed to consider it when writing reviews.
In an email, author Rick Moody once told me that he “wouldn’t object to a ‘negative’ review if that review were substantive, and about a resistance to the material based on concrete ideas about how it might be improved” but that negative reviews without substance “are bad for everyone.” I agree with him, even though I have yet to feel the barb of a negative review (my first novel having yet to see the light of publication).
Consider: readers can be talked out of a novel by the opinion of one person who may or may not share that reader’s sensibilities. How are you supposed to know if a reviewer shares your perspective without reading the same books? Who wants to read only the books that a reviewer reads? That doesn’t even cover all the reviews found on Goodreads and Amazon — how can a reader trust the opinions of strangers without knowing the sensibilities of those strangers? My students tell me that they will often pay more attention to how many good or bad reviews something gets online in their effort to decide what to buy. If I followed this rule, I wouldn’t read Don DeLillo’s Underworld because it “only” has a 3.5 star rating on Amazon. (Underworld is one of my favorite novels. So is Moody’s The Four Fingers of Death; also a 3.5 star Amazon rating)
Negative reviews hurt authors, of course. We already endure the criticisms of our own ego both before and after dealing with the many rejections on the road to publication — and those rejections don’t to stop for authors who have successfully released multiple books. I’m not saying only positive reviews should get published, but Moody’s quote puts the importance on the depth and substance of the review. Valid negative responses can lead to interesting conversations for readers (mostly for readers who have read the novel in question).
 In our email conversation about online reviews, Moody went on to assert that “The bilious, cantankerous reviews are posturing and narcissism. I don’t read them, and I feel sorry for the people who write them.” I’m sure we’ve all seen reviews for books or movies that seem to explode from the very gall bladders of the reviewer. I cringe when I see “worst books of the decade” or “most overrated authors” lists because they reek of basic internet jackassary: get people to click on an article by flailing one’s arms and speaking in tongues. Plus, when people who claim to love books and claim to lament the decline of reading write negative things about their very own industry, what hope do any of us have?
What these two authors in particular taught me is crucial: writers are nourished by tiny morsels of praise and nearly choke on the torrent of negativity online. It’s the struggle of being a writer in the 21st century. Self-promotion requires an internet presence; readers require an outlet. The internet, as everyone knows, puts authors in direct contact with readers. Of course, readers have a direct line to the authors — a megaphone five feet from their face. When one person reaches out to thousands it’s considered a huge advance in direct marketing; when thousands can shout in the face of one person — even if they shout praise or say nothing at all — it’s akin to that scene in A Clockwork Orange where Alex DeLarge is reprogrammed by having his eyes kept open.
Most readers would probably suggest an easy solution: all writers should avoid reading negative reviews, especially the ones written with the goal of ruining the author’s week. I’m not sure it’s that easy. Is it possible to avoid reading blogs and tweets and Facebook statuses and reviews on Amazon or Goodreads? Hell no! Writers, as part of our profession, need to self-promote, and the internet is the main way that happens. Promoting yourself while also ignoring what others are writing about you on the same sites? It’s not reasonably possible. Plus, some reviews will find their way to your inbox or into conversations even if you manage to ignore them.

Friend: “I saw you got a few bad reviews on Amazon. How’s that feel?”
Writer: “Thanks for letting me know of their existence.” 

I didn’t relinquish my stance about reviews and my opinions overnight. But I eventually got to a point where I wrote to the author I'd trashed and apologized. I explained not only why I had written the review but also why I eventually took it down. I told him that I didn’t expect him to accept my apology. And I told him I hoped he was still writing. None of that should be read as a noble thing on my part. I should’ve never written the bad review in the first place. There was no need. So, to get to the point, I have stopped writing negative reviews. I've taken down my Goodreads reviews below 4 stars. If I don’t like a book or movie, I don’t post comments about it. As a writer, I need to spend time writing new stories and books. And if someone wants to trash them online, I’ll be sure to debate with myself whether it’s worth sending an email to the critic, ignoring them, or just getting better.