Rhythm and Books

Summer is Officially Over

With the awardance of our Short Story Summer prize package to Greenwood native David Hicks, whose entry was drawn blindly from a hat last week by our guest author Dan Chaon, summer has officially ended. 

At the event last Wednesday, Mr. Hicks' victory was met with both applause and raised eyebrows.  Many locals remembered him as "the voice of Turnrow" in a television commercial produced and aired last year, and his win suggested a possible conflict of interest.  However, Mr. Chaon, who arrived from out of town in a rented Camaro, vouched for the contest's impartiality and quelled the crowd with a dramatic reading from his work before an angry division occurred.

Rather than favoritism, we feel certain it was Mr. Hicks' literary karma that earned him the coveted prize package — a bundle of reputable short story collections, including works by Raymond Carver, Barry Hannah, Flannery O'Connor and nearly a dozen more.  A regular customer at Turnrow since our opening three years ago, Mr. Hicks reads on the cutting edge and is noted for taking chances on both unknown writers and intimidating classics alike.  (He once called us from a Miami resort swimming pool, where he was reading Crime and Punishment as dance hall electronica throbbed in the background.)

Mr. Hicks became eligible for our summer reading contest by purchasing a copy of Richard Ford's collection Rock Springs, but he is no stranger to short fiction.  His interest in the short form developed a few years ago after reading The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books.  He noticed repeated references to the stories of Anton Chekhov and Flannery O'Connor, so he bought and sampled respective collections, including, coincidentally, a collection of Chekhov stories edited by Richard Ford, a cosmic decision that may have sealed his fate as our summer prize-winner. 

The form suits his leisure reading, Mr. Hicks admits, whether he's lounging by the pool or waiting for the missus to finish her shopping.  Among his favorite recent collections, purchased on our recommendation, is Wells Tower's Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, a book that has repaid him many times over in laughter and insights into the peculiar nature of humanity.

Stop in Turnrow some time and you'll be lucky to find David browsing the tables, or perhaps on our backporch, in his favorite rocker (pictured above), escaping his worries and expanding his mind.  You'd do well to sit and hear his stories, which are also some of our favorites.

The Last Good Summer Buzz Kill

You may derive your literary frights from the likes of Stephen King, a creepy gothic horror novel, or any book in the new wave of paranormal wolfman/vampire horror romance.  Or, if you're like us, you take perverse delight in scaring yourself with a book about any of the litany of modern terrors that threaten to destroy us all, be it flu pandemic, tainted food, terrorism, political corruption, environmental breakdown, or the Mayan-prophesied 2012 apocalypse that will kill us in so many different ways we won't even worry you to mention them.

Our friend Jeff Cope, a book rep for Macmillan, understands our penchant for doomsday lit, and thus sent us a copy of Rowan Jacobsen's Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honey Bee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis, just out in paperback.  In his accompanying note, Jeff said that after reading this, he felt like putting a hive in the backyard, and that he may never buy industrial honey again.

If you're still reading this, you've probably heard about Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), a term which describes the mysterious death and disappearance of honey bees.  CCD has ravaged colonies worldwide over the past three years and is a major concern in that a third of the food we eat is derived from plants that rely on bee pollination.  Early explanations for the disorder, which began turning up in 2006, ranged from the common (pesticides) to the unlikely (cell phone disturbance) to the absurd (alien abduction), and the fact that scientists have been so perplexed by the issue only creates more unease. 

Before reading Fruitless Fall, CCD was no more than a nagging worry, swarming alongside a thousand other futile fears in the back of our mind.  If you're curious and harbor similar fears, Jacobsen's book will enlighten and may allay (or exacerbate) fears, depending on your faith in mankind's ability to curb this epidemic.  The author does an excellent job covering the issue — explaining how hives operate ("the impression is not of thousands of individuals but of one fluid intelligence"), what occurred in the wake of hive collapse (food prices rose 37 percent), how scientists documented the research, as well as the myriad and conflicting theories put forth by various interests. 

After reading how commercial beekeeping and industrialized food production, with its impossible schedules and synergy of poisons, work hand-in-hand, you begin to understand that CCD is most likely not some mystery disease but further evidence of a system out of balance.  "Trucked to new (pollination) sites every few weeks, jacked up on high-fructose corn syrup, dosed with pesticides and antibiotics, invaded by parasites, and exposed to exotic pathogens, (bee colonies) are worn thinner and thinner," Jacobsen writes.  Most frightening is the implication that bees may be the canary in the coal mine — a harbinger for other, more evolved species.

As if CCD weren't bad enough, there's the usual bad news from the commercial front.  American honey is being undercut by cheaper Chinese imports, which seem to be either laden with illegal antibiotics or comprised of over half filler to dodge U.S. tariffs.  We're not only hurting our domestic market, we're substituting one of the healthiest substances on earth with potentially harmful imitations.  So remember that when you're eating your next cut-rate honey baked ham or honey-coated nuts, cereals and pre-packaged delights.  (We also threw out our frozen Chinese-raised fish after reading this.)

Like Michael Pollan, Jacobsen is a journalist with philosophical interests, and he finds some of his most fascinating material — and greatest hope — from beekeepers and scientists on the fringes, who take a holistic approach to the problem.  And alongside the vast, thought-provoking themes with repercussions for all society, there is the usual trove of great nerdy trivia on bees and pollination in general.  (We'll never eat a fig again without wondering if there is a host of huge-penised baby wasps clustered inside.)  Despite all the disastrous examples we've shown, Jacobsen has worked hard to make this a very upbeat and readable book, complete with goofy analogies and a conversational tone.

The lesson here, once again, seems to be that when we rush to douse our fields and forests with chemicals, whether to help it along or inhibit it, all in the interest of quicker and bigger pay-offs, we so often undermine the delicate natural balance with its ingenious system of growth, cooperation and protection.  Until our food producers embrace sustainability over the market (which always seems to fail them in the end anyway), we are faced with the potential for a looming agricultural crisis.  "There are good reasons why we shouldn't measure farms with the same yardstick we use for other businesses," Jacobsen writes, "but how do we do that in a culture where the economy has become the default measure of value?"

And so with this book, appropriately, we wind up our summer reading and look toward a bountiful fall.

Strange in all the Right Ways

Dan Chaon's new novel, Await Your Reply, opens in three stages.  The individual storylines could be the beginnings of separate novels, but for the fact that each character — a young man racing through the night toward a hospital to reattach his severed hand, a high school graduate fleeing her small hometown with her high school history professor, and an obsessed man who has traveled to the Arctic Circle to reunite with his long-lost twin — seems to be either running toward or away from something that we don't yet fully understand. 

The mysterious scenes unfold in short blocks of prose, and their lack of explanation might confound were they not such perfect little vignettes by themselves.  Gradually, deftly, in alternating chapters, Chaon reveals his characters — their complicated, troubled pasts; their uncertain and, we fear, ill-fated quests — jumping backwards and forwards in time.  More similarities are revealed:  they have traded, or had stolen, their identities and must contend with starting new lives.  The more that is revealed, the stranger the novel becomes.  And then, about three-fourths of the way through the book, it becomes obvious that these are not distinct, parallel storylines, but three lives edging incrementally toward each other into a tight braid.  It's one of the most fascinating narratives we've read in ages.

We've long been admirers of Chaon's use of character and humor in his unique depiction of domestic woe.  He's managed to marry this gift with the art of an illusionist storyteller.  Await Your Reply is another major work from one of the most consistently interesting American writers around.

We're eager to welcome Dan Chaon to Turnrow, where he'll sign and read from the new book, which is receiving loads of great reviews, from New York to L.A.  Prior to his visit, he submitted to a few questions about his craft....

Turnrow Book Co.: We've spent the summer trying to convince people that short stories are the perfect literary form for time-crunched Americans.  Why, outside of classrooms and literary circles, do you think short stories are such a tough sell?  Who are some of your favorite contemporary practitioners of the form?

Dan Chaon:  My younger brother is a truck driver, and he reads a lot — usually audiobooks — when he's on the road.  His favorite writers are Zane Grey and Larry McMurtry, but he'll read about anything he can get his hands on, from the epic fantasy novels of Robert Jordan to classics like Slaughterhouse Five.  But he doesn't much like short stories.  When I gave him my first book, a collection of short stories called Fitting Ends, he read it but had to admit that he didn't much like it.  "I wish you would give me an appendix and tell me what happens to the characters after the story is over," he said.  "They just sort of stop.  Did you call it Fitting Ends as a joke?"

In other words, he likes Plot.  And I think a lot of contemporary short stories — mine included — tend to be elusive and mysterious when it comes to endings.  That's something I like, personally.  But it doesn't satisfy the same itch as novels do, for many readers.  They may be shorter, but a lot of times short stories require a lot more of the reader's attention — and participation —than a more straightforward novel does.  I think that short stories are popular in the classroom and in literary circles because they often do require the reader to answer some of the unanswered questions themselves, with their own imagination and intuition.  I love that, but not everybody does.

Still, my brother liked my second collection, Among the Missing, a little better.  There's a story in there about a foul-mouthed parrot that he was particularly taken by.  And subsequently — maybe he's getting older, maybe he's humoring me — I've been able to get him to take a look at some short story collections.  Last October, I gave him the anthology Poe's Children,  edited by Peter Straub, and he was pretty enthusiastic about a lot of those stories.

One contemporary short story writers I particularly admire is Joyce Carol Oates, who I think is one of the great masters of the form. Other contemporary practitioners I recommend:  Jean Thompson, whose new book, Do Not Deny Me, is one of my favorites of this year;  Aleksandar Hemon, who has an excellent new collection called Love & Obstacles;  the strange and wonderful Kelly Link, whose collection Pretty Monsters I like to give as a gift for young adult readers.  I have a lot of favorites, because I read a lot of short story collections every year, but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Wells Tower, whose first book is Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned a short story collection that knocked my socks off.

TBC:  We read that you wrote Await Your Reply in a kind of piecemeal fashion, with bits of inspiration and ideas cobbled together.  And yet it seems like a completely realized idea that is told in a bit of patchwork style, jumping around in time and subject.  How did you construct it, and did you know that the three storylines would eventually weave together?  Also, how do you approach writing a short story versus a novel?

Chaon:  The process is not that different for me between short stories and novels.  In both, I usually tend to start with images.  The descriptions that were at the core of Await Your Reply were there early on:  a severed hand in an ice bucket;  a lighthouse on the edge of a dried-up lake;  a man who hasn't slept for days, driving down an empty highway, an air-freshener hanging from the rear-view mirror, turning in the breeze of the defroster;  snow falling on an Egyptian pyramid.

I had the intuition that all of these odd images fit together somehow — the early working title for the book was Sleepwalk, which I guess helped me to put a finger on the mood.  (In my mind, that old Santo & Johnny song "Sleepwalk" from the 1960s was playing as these scenes scrolled by.)

My first step was attaching individual characters to these images and the accompanying soundtrack, figuring out who they were and what they were doing and why.  Eventually, I began to see how the various sets of characters were connected, but that actually took a long time and a lot of thought.

I think that some people imagine that a book is written like a blueprint for a house, that everything is laid out beforehand and you just add the lumber and drywall of prose.  But for me, at least, the process of writing has to involve discovery and surprise.  I have to get to know the characters before I know the plot, and I have to have these images — scenes, moods, iconic objects — before I can get to know the characters.  At least in the early stages, writing is like forcing myself to have a waking dream.

Ultimately, I do think that I bring a short story writer's sensibility to my novels, in that I tend to work in small pieces — with the chapter as my main unit of construction — so the patchwork quality comes to me naturally. 

TBC:  You've said that you read a lot of mysteries and fantastical fiction when you were young and impressionable.  You can really see that influence in the new novel, more than anything else we've read of yours.  Creating suspense, whether it's subtle, character-driven suspense or plot formulas, seems essential to successful fiction.  Do you approach a story with the aim of creating suspense or is it something natural that arises from your story and/or characters?

Chaon:  There's an old bit of advice — I think it might be from Hemingway?— that says you should always stop writing for the day at a place that leaves the situation or scene unfinished, in a state of anticipation.  This is something that is very effective for me as a writer, and as I was working on this book it was particularly useful, because there are three different threads, three stories told round-robin style, so I could leave off of one character in a state of suspense, and then go on to the next one, and it would give me some time to stew about what was going to happen to the previous character.  Because I generally don't know what's going to happen as I'm writing, suspense is built into the process.  The trick is creating situations which don't lead you to rambling dead ends.

Of course, there were a lot of mis-steps along the way as I was writing, a lot of chapters and subplots and so forth that had to be scrapped or totally re-written. Aren't you glad books don't have deleted scenes like DVDs do these days?

But anyway the plotting was also a little easier with this book because the characters start out in dire situations, so the anxiety was built in from the beginning.

TBC:  Your fiction has a distinctive sense of humor.  We described it as "cheerful melancholy."  It's funny but always just covering up something much darker and uncomfortable.  What sort of humor are you drawn to?

Chaon:  Bless you for finding the books funny.  My books are meant to have some humor in them, but occasionally I'll get a reviewer who will not really see any humor, and I've been accused of being relentlessly bleak.  Which I hope I'm not.

I guess I do have a dark sense of humor a lot of the time.  I like stuff that has some kind of edge, where the humor can also be a ward against sadness (as in the work of Lorrie Moore) or it can act as a protest against the stupidities and injustices of the world (as in, for example, the work of George Saunders or Flannery O'Connor or Kafka, all of whom can be breathtakingly bleak and completely hilarious at the same time.)  Word for word, David Sedaris is one of the funniest writers in America, but I don't think anyone would call him light-hearted.

TBC:  We notice you're on Twitter and Facebook.  Is it a diversion or do you see any artistic potential in these new media?  What about electronic books — any concerns?

Chaon:  Oh, lots of concerns, but none that are strong enough to get my nose away from that dang computer screen.

I like Facebook because it keeps me in touch with people I might not otherwise talk to as frequently.  It's a little like creating your own small town, and you can follow peoples' doings and their daily lives even though they are far away.

I use twitter mostly to keep up with literary news and that sort of thing.  Most of the people I follow are booksellers, or book bloggers, or in the business in some way.  I don't do a lot of socializing on there.  I use it more as a news aggregator — there's nothing better than following a lot of smart people who point you in good directions in this big sea of endless information.

As far as e-books, I can see the advantage of being able to carry a lot of books in a single compact space.  It's one of the things that sold me on the iPod.  But I still have a strong attachment to the book as an object.  I like to hold them and turn the pages, and I like the fact that they still work without having to be charged up.  How amazing and magic is that?  Entertainment you don't have to plug in!

TBC:  Read any good books this summer?

Chaon:  Besides the story collections I mentioned above, I've enjoyed a bunch of new novels, including, most recently, Victor LaValle's Big Machine and Peter Rock's My Abandonment.  Right now, I'm reading Total Oblivion, More or Less by Alan DeNiro, which is due out in November, and I'm loving it.

A book that came out earlier this year which continues to be on my mind a lot is Lies Will Take You Somewhere, by my late wife, Sheila Schwartz, and not just because we were married, either.  I learned nearly everything I know about writing from her, and it's a flat-out brilliant book:  dark, funny, and strange in all the right ways.

* We hope to see you at Turnrow on Wednesday, August 26, at 5:30 p.m.  If you can't make it, reserve your signed first edition of Await Your Reply.

Missing Summer

Where has summer gone?  Already, the kids are off to school, and any good pupil can tell you, once school opens, summer will crawl off and die.  Of course, here in Mississippi we still have two miserable months of heat and mosquitoes.  So to honor any summer hold-outs, last-minute vacationers, and balmy backyard weekend sunbathers, we'll dole out a few more summer reading recommendations.

This week we go back to the summer of July 2001.  Our nation was celebrating its 225th birthday.  It was an innocent time, the world still unaware of the major shift just ahead.  Moviegoers were lining up to watch Shrek and Jurassic Park III.  Tunes by Usher and Nelly — and how could we forget "Bootylicious" by Destiny's Child? — were spewing out of car radios like muffler stink.  And in books, underdog newcomer Dan Chaon released his short story collection Among the Missing, which would find a modest readership and would become a finalist for the National Book Award.

We discovered the book early and were caught off guard by its power.  Born from the Raymond Carver school of modern American realism, these stories were of a more distinct and genuine talent than most of the MFA-harvested fiction of the time.  Chaon does domestic drama as well as anyone, which seemed likely then and has been affirmed by two subsequent novels, including his latest, Await Your Reply, which he'll sign and read from at Turnrow later this month.

The stories in Among the Missing are quiet, peculiar portraits of families in various stages of dissolution.  There are tragic accidents, deaths in the family, strained relationships, and personal turmoil, yet Chaon manages to prop up these heavy emotions and show us something unique and hopeful, even comical, under the pain.   You're lured in by the simple precision of his language, the authentic and humorous gestures of his characters, and before long you've become deeply immersed in the story, the jabbing emotional truths almost always finding their target.  There is a distinctive tone, a kind of cheerful melancholy, at play in these stories, a reconciliation that great art brings.  It remains, all these years later, a resounding and major work of fiction.

Try these stories.  Read them one at a time, one a day.  They may touch you strangely, softly;  crack you up, or break you in two.  You may find yourself paying more consideration to passing strangers or even stumble upon some insight to yourself, so be warned. 

However it goes, don't miss Dan Chaon's reading here at Turnrow on Wednesday, August 26.  We'll ring out summer with his visit and ask him to draw the winning entry in our short story summer contest.  You'll still be eligible to win a bundle of short story collections by reserving a signed copy.

Stormy Summer

It rained all last week and then some.  Bad for the tomatoes but good for reading.  As the real storm season approaches, we found ourselves engaged in two new books set in Louisiana before, during and after Hurricane Katrina four years ago.

In keeping with our summer of the short story, the first book was The Southern Cross, a prize-winning debut collection by Skip Horack.  These 16 short stories are grouped by season, set during the arrival and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.  While the hurricane is omnipresent within these stories, it is Horack's authentic characters who dominate this haunting fictional world.

Readers are introduced to a little girl who warns her neighbor that God and Jesus are planning to punish the people of New Orleans.  An exotic dancer hitches a ride with a fanatical preacher.  A father comes to terms with his divorce and separation from his son.  In "The Redfish," readers meet Luther, a murderer, wrongly convicted for the murder of someone he didn't kill, who in a comical, Cashian way ends up duct-taped alongside his ex-girlfriend's mother in a trailer about to be consumed by Katrina. 

It is difficult to choose the most moving story in the collection, but we were partial to "Borderlands," the story of a high school student who, while hunting, discovers the murdered corpse of one of his classmates, or "The Final Conner," the story of Ellis, who travels to Europe to rescue the remains of his grandfather, killed in the War, only to discover his family's past may be darker than the black German soil encapsulating his grandfather's remains.

After reading this collection it is difficult not to compare Horack's stories to another of the South's most powerful writers, Larry Brown.  In time, these stories may be the introduction to the work of Horack in the same way Facing the Music became an introduction to the work of Brown.  

Our next storm book was Zeitoun by Dave Eggers.  Honestly, we weren't anxious to read another grave, non-fictional account of Katrina-era New Orleans, but we knew if anyone could give the subject a fresh spin, it was Eggers.  The author found this story through his Voices of Witness book series, which collected and published oral histories from Katrina by Gulf Coast survivors.  Among the most compelling stories of the hurricane came from Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian American who ran a successful painting business in New Orleans.

Eggers spends the first half of the book introducing us to Zeitoun, his wife Kathy, and a close family network that extends from Arizona to Spain to Syria.  Tracking the events that lead up to the hurricane, we witness through the eyes of Abdulrahman and Kathy their parting — Kathy and the children's flight to Baton Rouge, then Arizona, and Zeitoun's dogged mission to stay and protect his home and work sites.  The book was a bit slow-going at first, since the build-up is naturally devoid of suspense (we know what's going to happen when Katrina lands) and Eggers strips his prose of its arch humor and style for a more succinct, journalistic approach.  We were afraid this would turn out to be a rather mundane account of one man's struggle — albeit dignified — in a tragedy with plenty of tremendous stories.

Then halfway through the book, everything changes for Zeitoun.  Whereas he'd spent his days after the storm rescuing neighbors and delivering supplies in his second-hand canoe, now he found himself in the most unfortunate, and unforeseen, of circumstances.  The book kicks into overdrive, and you won't be able to put it down.  Zeitoun's ordeal, missed by the media during the Katrina frenzy, sheds a harsh new light on the New Orleans-Katrina experience.  It is a story that will astonish, frighten and infuriate.  Most likely, it will forever color how you view the Hurricane Katrina disaster, especially when considering the government debacle that furthered the tragedy.  And for anyone who still believes the government was not culpable in this event, Zeitoun should be required reading.  Perhaps it should be required anyway.  The book is remarkable for the ugliness it reveals, yet equally important for the strength and endurance it depicts in the character of Zeitoun.