Rhythm and Books

Short Summer

The short story is perfectly suited for the bustling American lifestyle.  They can be easily enjoyed before bed, while eating breakfast, commuting to work, or during that lazy afternoon hour when the cubicle walls start closing in.  One staff member keeps a short story collection in the car to fill the inevitable lulls in life, whether stuck in the waiting room or stranded at the drive-thru.

And yet we continue to notice a reluctance among our customers to read short stories.  To confront this obstinance we've started a promotion to urge readers toward this underdog art form.  When you buy a book of short stories at Turnrow this summer, we'll enter you to win a bundle of some of our favorite short story collections.

Our renewed interest in short fiction may be partially in response to Wells Tower's tremendous debut collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, recommended to us by fellow bookseller Joe Nettles, former Square Books all-star, now at Davis-Kidd in Nashville and a legit rocker.  He likened the book to reading "a bad-ass collection from the '70s," the kind of book you enjoy all the more knowing that you're holding white-hot talent. 

We immediately dipped into this collection and found it was very bad-ass '70s indeed.  It brought to mind a comforting blend of two favorite short story masters from that era — Raymond Carver, with his impeccable and unsettling portrayals of deceptively mundane situations, and Barry Hannah, whose wildly creative sentences convey the world in previously unseen shades.  Tower has effectively delivered stories that combine these two genius traits without being derivative or overzealous, a fault you'll find in much overpaid verbiage sprung from university writing classes.

The lives depicted in Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned are not pretty, nor are they morose or saddled with stylized gloom.  The stories are driven by the humor in uncomfortable situations, delivered without judgment or tidy conclusions.  They are sleek, without wasted words and dull ponderance;  they move with welcome tics and surprises of language.  The characters are the sort you'll follow out of morbid curiosity, like an odd stranger spied in public and wondered about in voyeuristic daydreams.  Good stories like these let you follow them home from the safety of the static page.

We could go on heaping praise for Mr. Tower and his auspicious debut.  But let us encourage you instead to take a few minutes and flavor your day with a sample of his colorful fiction.   Check out a selection from the book, "Leopard," available at the New Yorker site.  If you want more, buy the book at Turnrow so we can enter you for a chance to win a nice pile of favored collections.

A Brave Night

Only a few anonymous strangers know what really happened to the former bookseller who was beaten and tossed into the Yazoo River;  but first we should speak of our own modest attempts to read and understand the same book that brought them together that night by the river (see photo), a night which ended so terribly for our friend.  After all, it was that unfortunate and besodden former employee whose clumsy indiscretion revealed to us the time and location of the Secret Book Club's last meeting, from which we'd been banned and which we, harboring resentment, exposed on this very blog, an act which no doubt earned our friend his aforementioned humiliation and for which we humbly beseech his forgiveness.

It all goes back to the week after the last meeting of Greenwood's Secret Book Club (SBC).  We noticed an unusual spike in sales for Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman and guessed that it must be their next selection.  Several of us, still a touch perturbed by our exclusion from the reading club, took it upon ourselves to read the novel.  We'd hoped to crash their discussion and impress the club members with our trenchant reading of the imposing material.  But weeks and months passed without sign of an SBC meeting, so we met ourselves in the desperate, after-hours gloom of the Turnrow cafe and discussed the novel over beer and Hostess cakes.

Certainly the most obscure of the SBC's selections heretofore, The Third Policeman is a posthumously published novel by the Irish trickster Flann O'Brien, one of many pseudonyms used by beloved Dublin columnist Brian O'Nolan, a contemporary of James Joyce.  The novel, published in 1967, is narrated by a young scholar who lives on the farm of his deceased parents with the caretaker of the family business.  In order to get money to publish his exhaustive biography of a maverick philosopher named de Selby — whose bizarre theories are patched into the novel — the young writer hatches a scheme with his roommate to murder a neighbor and steal his bank.  From this promising and relatively normal beginning, a series of bizarre occurrences puts our hero in the local police barracks, where he meets with and engages in stymieing conversation with two officers.  From here the book plummets and bounds through a playful series of ideas and diversions, finding little or no grounding in reality as it threatens to send less patient readers into book-tossing hysterics.

The novel's reputation has increased in recent years due to its well-documented influence on the popular and similarly confounding television series Lost.  That, perhaps, and the high praise paid it by Jack Pendarvis, a popular writer in these parts who has mentioned it at his blog and during recent visits, influenced the SBC's decision ... we can only assume, not being members ourselves, you understand, which is why we formed our own shadow club.

Reviews among our own secret ranks ran the gamut.  One despised The Third Policeman as utter nonsense, while another lofted it into his top-ten books of all time.  Yet another appreciated the idea of it more than the reading experience, and still another found it tough going but appreciated the ending, which brought the whole book together into some closer semblance of meaning.  Half the members vowed to re-read it at some later date, the other half asked that it never be mentioned again.  For those uninitiated readers who are curious about O'Brien, we found valuable profiles and analyses by John Updike and Jim Ruland, available for your free perusal.

Flash forward to this past weekend.  A staff member was gassing up in Winona and caught sight of our man P—, the former staff member who infiltrated the SBC.  Once a genial bookman and part-time college student, he was now dipping chicken sticks at the Pump-N-Huff.  A bit skittish on first glance, P— finally warmed up and admitted that he'd moved away from Greenwood after the ugly incident at the book club meeting for The Third Policeman.

P— recalled the incident painfully while on smoke break.  He'd received an email instructing him to ride his bicycle down to the boat landing on the Yazoo River in Greenwood at a specific hour on a specific night.  Bicycling was requisite, as the policemen in the novel have a peculiar obsession with this mode of transportation.  Not owning a bike, P— showed up in his Buick, squealing tires and Van Halen blaring through the windows.

There he found the club members sitting in a circle on a large blanket, a candle burning in the middle.  He was asked to dump out his cocktail (Jagermeister and Redbull) and quietly join the group, where he then endured insinuations that he'd known we were eavesdropping on their last meeting at the bookstore and had conspired to make fools of them all.  

After an awkward series of accusations and dismissals, the discussion turned to The Third Policeman and all the oddities that arise in the novel's second chapter, continuing until the end when the story's true nature is revealed.  They swapped some mad chatter about bicycles and eternity and the various undiscovered realms of the world, and P— finally spoke up.  "I think y'all are reading too much into this.  This was a fairly straight forward thriller, and I figured it out halfway through the book."

The group rebutted with sighs and groans, and the leader said that the murderer's identity was not in dispute, but the story's inherent mystery was in the consequences.  Only then, after P— replied with his own aimless theories about the book, was it revealed that he had read 3rd Degree by James Patterson.

That did it.  The SBC's discussion leader jumped up and began wailing on P— with his booksack.  Two other members jumped up and approached the crazed leader, to pull him away, P— supposed.  Instead, they joined in the punishment by dragging him to the bank of the river, which was running high that night on account of recent torrential rains.  According to P—, they whipped him with a cane pulled straight up from the banks, then chased him out into the river until he was carried off by the current.  As he drifted away, he heard one of them yell, "You're out of the club, turncoat!"

P— could swim, but the swift current got the better of him.  At one point he feared he would drown, but just in time, a cooler floated by and he managed to grab it and hold on for safety.  He drifted nearly a mile downstream before he could reach the bank.  He came ashore in a cotton field and had to hike back in wet shoes and swarms of mosquitoes.  By the time he got home, his pride and crotch were chafed, and he vowed then and there to never read another book again.

What an odyssey!  It seemed like fiction but clearly it was true.  P— had the mosquito bites and a water-logged copy of Patterson to prove it.  We were nearly ashamed to be book folk after hearing this tale of pagan rituals and irate book discussion, and yet there was something oddly endearing to know that, in our quiet little town in remote Mississippi, such a ruckus had been raised in the name of literature.

Hobo Summer

Anyone who frequents the blog is aware of our penchant for road novels, especially those written by authors with Scandinavian names.  This week's summer reading recommendation, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet by Reif Larsen, fits the bill on both counts.

Cartographer T.S. Spivet has a serious problem. The Smithsonian has just awarded him the Baird Award for his intricate diagram of the Carabidae brachinus, or Bombardier Beetle, which mixes and expels boiling secretions from its abdomen.  Unfortunately for T.S., the Smithsonian doesn't know that he is 12 years old.

T.S. can only see one course of action to solve his dilemma; he will leave his Montana ranch and cross the United States hobo style on a boxcar.  Leaving his ranch means leaving his entomologist mother and his rancher father, neither of whom seem to understand his desire to map everything.  Packing only the most important of his possessions, T.S. heads east to Washington. 

The possessions are the cipher to this story.  They introduce the reader to a secret family history, one filled with inspiration and pain which only enhances the vivid manner in which T.S. views the world, a world in which reality has become a mystery for the 12-year-old genius.  Along his journey, he meets a homicidal preacher, a racist trucker, a sentient Winnebago, discovers a hobo hotline and comes in contact with a lost secret society of geniuses, the Megatherium Club. 

The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet is a special book and a wonderful debut for author Reif Larson.  You have to hold this book to really capture its aesthetic.  Larger than a normal novel, nearly every page is surrounded with illustrations and elaborations which expound on the text.  Each illustration is beautifully drawn and does not distract from the reading experience.  It's the kind of book that exposes the inherent flaws in electronic readers like the ill-fated Kindle, which can be easily dropped and rendered useless in addition to other limitations, too many to list here. 

This book is more than just a series of tricks though.  At its heart, it is a book about family and how T.S. learns to exist within his family.  This book is perfect for readers who enjoy Dave Eggers, Jonathan Safran Foer and John Wray.

Summer Reading Begins

Beginning this week, just in time for the official start of summer, we pledge to post one summer reading pick per week for the duration of the season.  Fine literature is turning up all the time, so it should be no problem.  Just consider our advice and check back regularly.

Your quintessential summer read is a fast-paced, juicy tale you can stop and start, flip into your beach bag, and read with bored children scrambling across your lap or while driving down the interstate as your eyes dart from the page to the road. 

John Hart's new novel, The Last Child, fits the bill, so he's our first summer reading choice.  Hart's personal story is familiar: a lawyer turned young hot-shot novelist with three books under his belt, each subsequent release receiving greater acclaim and readership.  But there's nothing ordinary about his fiction.  Hart's novels are character-driven thrillers with expertly wound tension and family drama, the sort that has won him comparisons to Truman Capote and Harper Lee. 

In The Last Child, Hart boldly casts a 13-year-old boy — last seen fishing by the river, a happy child without a care in the world, in a flash scene from his Edgar Award-winning Down River — as his protagonist.  Young Jimmy Merrimon's life has been turned upside down.  It's been a year since his twin sister was kidnapped.  No leads and no body.  His family has unraveled — his dad wandered off and abandoned the family, while his mother has taken to pills and shacked up with a rich local slimeball.  All of the adults in Johnny's life have failed him, but he still believes his sister is alive.

Concurrently, local detective Clyde Hunt, who admires Johnny's determination and harbors a strong attraction to the boy's distraught mother, has not given up on the case.  When a second child disappears and new clues turn up, Johnny resumes his hunt in earnest, as does Detective Hunt, who begins to believe the culprit is closer than anyone believed.  There is much family dysfunction, inner turmoil at the police department, creepy townsfolk, and meddling news media to confound our pair of heroes.  Add a clever twist and a blind-sided ending, and you have a cracking tale that rises well above the pale of your average thriller.  Hart has literary aspirations and a deft touch with character, all without forsaking momentum.  Like the best summer reading, this book defies you to put it aside, even to refill your drink or get out of the sun.

We were finally able to get John Hart in the store last week, per requests from many customers who are addicted to his books.  He spoke at an author luncheon we hosted in our upstairs cafe.  As readers sipped their carrot ginger soup, munched their shrimp salads, and scarfed down red velvet cupcakes, Hart reported his rise from disgruntled criminal defense attorney to best-selling novelist.  He left the legal profession after being creeped out by one too many clients, stared abject poverty in the eye, and finally wrote a successful debut, The King of Lies, which Pat Conroy described as "a book on fire."

Despite his past, Hart doesn't write legal thrillers.  Grisham and Turow have that territory covered just fine, he said.  You can look forward to a different book each time from him, Hart promises, and likely there will be some family in turmoil, a subject that always provides a deep well of drama.  He confessed to being most proud of The Last Child, which he called "easily my best work ... I may never top it."

Believe us, you'll want to get a signed first edition of this fine potboiler.

A Strange Debt

Who doesn't enjoy a good prison memoir?  We found a great one in Neil White's new book, In the Sanctuary of Outcasts.  We've been eager to read it, having met Neil in Oxford years ago, always wondering how such a nice and decent guy might have once been a jailbird.  He comes clean in the book, revealing how he floated his burgeoning publishing empire by kiting checks.  He was eventually nabbed and sentenced to 18 months in a federal prison. 

It might have been a terrifying ordeal for any other white-collar criminal, handsome over-achiever and devoted family man.  But somehow, reading Neil's account, he seems almost blessed by his debt to society.  He ended up at Carville, a former plantation in the deepest rural wilds of Louisiana which had become home to non-violent federal prisoners.  It also housed the remains of a colony of disfigured leprosy sufferers. 

Carville's leper colony has been chronicled numerous times but rarely this personal.  Neil depicts the colony's routine, its personalities and natural peculiarities with a gentle, honest charm.  His year-long journey is also an education on becoming self-reflective.

Unwilling to face up to his crime, Neil idealizes himself as an investigative journalist and takes copious notes, drawing stories out of his fellow inmates — his roommate, a cynical doctor who bilked millions of Medicaid dollars with his volatile weight-loss pill;  a foul-mouthed thug who admitted to planning his carjackings close to Popeye's chicken restaurants so he'd have a meal with his stolen ride;  a famous mob lawyer, who recounted the Mafia's involvement in the murders of JFK and Jimmy Hoffa — as well as leprosy patients, some of whom become his closest friends.

One patient in particular, Ella Bounds, serves as a soothsayer and spiritual guide to Neil, who begins to shed his egotism and enacts his own rehabilitation.  His perspective is so refreshed by the leprosy patients and fellow inmates that he is truly able to transform.  By the end of his sentence, he sounds downright nostalgic for prison.

It's a different sort of prison book, to be sure.  It lacks much of the grit, violence and humiliation of many modern prison accounts (it's white collar crime, after all) but keeps its humor and edge, along with a generous amount of compassion and insight.  It's broad appeal, lovable characters and uncommon setting will make this a summer favorite with all sorts of readers. 

Neil paid us a visit last night and spoke to a nice-sized crowd (including at least one fellow inmate) and signed a tall stack of books, which can be ordered here.