Reviewed by Roger Barrett

Purchase at Nightbird Books.

Jonathan Lethem is a writer of mixtapes. The Ecstasy of Influence is a perplexing, oddball, and illuminating set of liner  notes to the novels, and life of Jonathan Lethem, from his early days as a bookstore clerk, through his early career as a science fiction writer, Philip K. Dick scholar, cultural critic, music fan, and MacArthur Award “Genius”. Throughout The Ecstasy of Influence, Lethem uncovers new truths about himself, his characters (Dylan Ebdus, Perkus Tooth, etc…), his love of superheroes, Bob Dylan, Roberto Bolano, JG Ballard, and etc… Lethem shows you what you missed, and explains what you could not have known, about his influences and writing.

Everywhere the ecstasy is apparent. In the essay The Ecstasy of Influence – a plagiarism, Lethem explains the role his influences have shaped his own writing, and describes the gift economy of ideas that great writers have given us. The essay is a plagiarism, with source material highlighted and explained. Crazy Friend is an ode to Philip K. Dick, Lethem is an editor of The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick. Other essays discuss critical reaction to The Fortress of Solitude, the music of James Brown, Bolano’s 2666, Thomas Berger, Norman Mailer, book tours, Otis Redding, dancing, and etc.

The Ecstasy of Influence works on many levels and throws around ideas and insight at random, showcasing the range of Lethem, and further detailing the pop culture plethoras of Chronic City, and The Fortress of Solitude. Highly recommended for Lethem readers, and sure to convert casual readers into fans. Roberto Bolano, and JG Ballard get high praise in essays that make you want to read and rediscover, the same praise Lethem gave Edward Dahlberg in The Disappointment Artist, explosive praise that makes you want to spend all day in used bookstores, and sit in libraries hoping to find another gift.

Jonathan Lethem’s essays are contagious. The Ecstasy of Influence details his own gift economy and asks you to share. The words fly at you with fanzine-like zeal. Sure to add to your to-read list, and google-search your new favorite author.

Purchase at Nightbird Books

By Roger Barrett

In Stone Arabia, Dana Spiotta once again shows us, with painful detail, characters coming to terms with the realignment of their pasts and presents. Spiotta’s award-winning Eat The Document focused on 70′s radicalism morphing into 90′s era stagnation, and with Stone Arabia, we witness nostalgic and cliche desires colliding with memory to become fantasy. “It’s make believe, don’t you get it? You just have to make me believe.”

Stone Arabia tells the story of Nik and Denise Kranis, siblings who enable and delude each other. At the age of 10, Nik gets a guitar as a birthday present, teaches himself to play, and write, and his life is forever changed. Nik Kranis is always in a band, and always writing songs. Nik’s young bands The Demonics, and The Fakes play live and open up for better bands. He records everything as Nik Worth and self releases his music for his sister, his girlfriend of the moment, and later Denise’s daughter, Ada. But Nik is his only audience, his self referential world only known by his family, critical alter-egos, imaginary fans, and extensively chronicled for the future. How can Nik’s musical “career” be disproved if no one remembers, and he is it’s curator? Nik is leaving his Chronicles (a nod to Bob Dylan), for Denise. The Chronicles consist of his early band recordings, fake bootlegs, home recordings from the 70′s into 2000′s, and a 20 LP collection The Ontology of Worth, and including reviews, interviews, letters, and fan notes written under the “self curate or perish” mantra. Nik’s fantasy world is what allows his real world to exist, and continue, as an unknown musician, aging has-been, negligent brother, and dive- bartender.

Denise and Nik’s mother is losing her memory, compelling Nik to disappear into his Chronicles and Denise to disappear into the incessant tragedy of cable news, a distant relationship, and poor parenting. Denise has always loved Nik’s music, she lends him money for hospital visits and rent, and her fascination with Nik rubs off on her daughter Ada, who wants to film a documentary about his life and music. Ada enthusiastically blogs about the songs of her eccentric Uncle Nik. We learn about Nik through Denise, and Denise through Nik, exposing the secrets, and inner lives that only a sibling could know. Nik and Denise Kranis live vicariously through Nik Worth.

In a counter-chronicle, Denise writes:

My Disclaimer: You can go back forever to grab a context for a brother and sister. And even then the backward glance is distorted by the lens of the present. The further back, the greater the distortion. It is not just that emotions distort memory. It is that memory distorts memory, if that makes any kind of sense.

and later:

This is the thing, the shame: my memory is dominated by events external to my actual life. These events, for whatever reason, stick in my mind and become secondhand memories. Although I did not experience the events, watching them and reading about them and my reaction to them was a kind of experience nevertheless.

Like Don DeLillo,  Dana Spiotta accurately lets us feel black hair turn to gray. Stone Arabia is an intimate portrait of rock and roll, sibling camaraderie, misplaced desires, and the need to fit into the world by leaving yourself behind. True hindsight is impossible when the present is in retrospect, and the past is fabricated. Stone Arabia is highly recommended for readers of DeLillo, Bret Easton Ellis, and Jonathan Lethem.

Purchase at Nightbird Books

Reviewed by Roger Barrett

In The Leftovers, Tom Perrotta dispenses with the rapture before you know it. Perrotta, who Time Magazine dubbed “The Steinbeck of Suburbia”, wisely, and effectively, has his characters (the leftovers) recollect  October 14, The Sudden Departure, as a matter of fact. Without explanation, millions of people across the world disappear at random. How do the left behind recreate their lives? The novel begins 3 years later, with the survivors stuck in suspended animation, criss-crossing the stages of grief and unable to reconcile the past.

Once again, Perrotta shines a laser light near the middle, focusing on one family in Mapleton, New Jersey.  Kevin’s wife Laurie has left him for The Guilty Remnant, whose business cards read:

We are Members of  The Guilty Remnant. We have taken a vow of Silence. We stand before you as living reminders of God’s awesome power. His judgment is upon us.

Kevin’s son Tom has left to follow Holy Wayne, a new messiah-figure,  and Kevin’s daughter Jill has begun making bad choices and forgetting about future commitments. In this family limbo, Kevin, the town mayor,  spends most nights at the neighborhood bar, Carpe Diem, attempting to move on, or at least forget.

The members of The Guilty Remnant dress in all white and watch select people in public, to remind them that the rapture is still upon us, and could happen again. They always appear with lighted cigarettes in their mouth, as another reminder that talking is a waste of breath. Their volatile relationship with the town is threatened when a member is found dead.

What the survivors can’t get over is the randomness of The Sudden Departure. If The Rapture is an act of God, then why were nonbelievers taken? Remaining believers spend their days discrediting the goodness of the disappeared, succumbing to gossip. The Leftovers want to belong, to the Guilty Remnant, the Barefoot People, The Hopeful Party, The Healing Hug Movement, or their own family. Everywhere they are reminded of being left behind.

Tom Perrotta fills in the mundane aspects of survivors guilt in The Leftovers. Moving on may mean passing through false leads, and forgiveness might be impossible. People need answers and are willing to accept the close-enough. Luckily for us, Perrotta takes his characters to far away places before bringing them back to intersect and change.  Perrotta shows us the dark side of belief, and colors in the holes inside his characters. We turn the pages because we are these people in a tragedy. With The Leftovers, Perrotta may be the Ray Bradbury of Suburbia, and this may be a Harold Camping satire, or a post 9/11 remark on current affairs, or it may just be a compelling novel.

These short recommendations do not begin to compare with the thoughtful reviews written elsewhere in this blog, but I hoped they might still be of interest.

W W Norton purchase at Nightbird Books

Reviewed by Roger Barrett

In his short life as a poet, Arthur Rimbaud created a new poetry by abandoning poetry. Camus hailed Rimbaud “a poet of revolt, and the greatest”, and in John Ashbery’s new translation, we finally get the greatest, complete version of Illuminations. In Illuminations, Rimbaud bests Baudelaire, plants the seeds of surrealism, inspires symbolism, originates free verse in French, describes impossible, and takes us on a metaphorical and autobiographical walk into the future.

Ashbery’s translation is a love letter to Rimbaud, and French culture. Here Ashbery is faithful to the original text, presents the clearest ordering of the poems, and leaves out the cloudy, unnecessary biography that has dominated past translations. Ashbery has been compared to Rimbaud since his first collection was published in 1956, his changes to the original are minimal and highlight Rimbaud’s own vivid imagery. Ashbery and Rimbaud embrace abstraction, without compromise, and seek “absolute modernity”, which for Rimbaud was “acknowledging the simultaneity of all of life, the condition that nourishes poetry at every second”.

Rimbaud wanted his prose to express a rational derangement of the senses, what Ashbery calls a “crystalline jumble”. Illuminations begins where A Season In Hell left off, with Rimbaud abandoning poetry and describing the aftermath. The beginning (for Ashbery, since there is no known order) is After The Flood, a re-imagining of A Season In Hell’s precious stones. Near the end of After The Flood, Rimbaud tells us “…For since they subsided,-oh the precious stones shoveled under, and the full-blown flowers!-so boring! and the Queen, the Witch who lights her coals in the clay pot, will never want to tell us what she knows, and which we do not know”. One can imagine the Queen and Witch in the same body, as poetry itself, or the modern city Rimbaud loved and reviled. After this Rimbaud’s prose becomes a hallucinatory, shape-shifting tale of his fractured life, which is the tale of the death of life under industrialization, and our own lives.

Rimbaud, before 21, wrote in Childhood, “let someone finally rent me this tomb, whited with quicklime”, and “the lamp illuminates these newspapers that I’m a fool for rereading, these books of no interest”, lines that express a contempt for poetry, and a desire to become absolutely modern. Deeper into Illuminations in To A Reason, Rimbaud addresses the world with “Change our fates, shoot down the plagues, beginning with time-the children sing to you, build wherever you can the substance of our fortunes and our wishes-they beg you”. The last line of To A Reason is “arriving from always, you’ll go away everywhere”, a possible explanation of Rimbaud’s exit from poetry.

“What are the Illuminations?”, Ashbery asks in his introduction, and answers with, among other unknowable things, “a disordered collection of magic lantern slides”.  With Illuminations, Rimbaud hoped to save the world from “all resonant and surging suffering in more intense music”, but also predicted “the clear song of new misfortunes”, and these contradictory statements sum up Illuminations: beautiful and ugly, hopeful and tragic. In all of his poetry, Rimbaud tried to explain color to the blind, and was all at once, real and surreal, direct and abstract.

Philip Roth, one-time “bad boy of Jewish-American literature”, is now 78-years-old with nearly 30 novels under his belt. While he has gotten plenty of acclaim from critics- Harold Bloom calls him the greatest living American novelist- and has a core of devoted readers, many people are hesitant to delve into the world of Roth, often because: a) they feel compelled to tackle the whole Zuckerman series (not necessary) b) they read one Roth book they didn’t like (he’s written a few duds) or c) they found Portnoy’s Complaint too salacious for their tastes (he doesn’t always write about sex). This guide provides a brief rundown of some of Roth’s best work, with the aim of inspiring the neophyte to pick up a book by this American master.

American Pastoral  Vintage (1997): Perhaps the best representation Roth’s later work, Pastoral follows Swede Levov, attractive, well-liked family man, as his world begins to unravel around him. Narrated by longtime Roth protagonist Nathan Zuckerman, who is trying to piece together the Levov story from fragments recounted to him by Swede and others, the book raises questions of memory and authorship as well as family life and the American dream. Delicate and moving, readers who only know the author through Portnoy’s Complaint will be surprised to see this side of Philip Roth.    Purchase at Nightbird Books

Sabbath’s Theater  Vintage (1995): This is the Roth book for the brave. Far more scabrous than even Portnoy, Sabbath’s Theater follows the aging, sex-obsessed puppeteer Mickey Sabbath as he tries to cope with the death of his longtime mistress Drenka Dragic. Sabbath’s sexual deviancy knows no bounds, and the book is comprised largely of sexual episodes. It is to sex what Blood Meridian is to violence- the sexual motif manifests its significance through almost unbearable repetition. This strange and powerful book is not for the faint of heart, but may be Roth’s best.    Purchase at Nightbird Books

Nemesis Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (2010): The final book in Roth’s “quartet on aging” that also includes Everyman, Indignation, and The Humbling, Nemesis is the best of the four. This short work focuses on the polio epidemic that was taking a heavy toll on America’s children in the 1940’s, while the war was taking its own toll on our adults. Our protagonist, Bucky Cantor, is a good-hearted young Jewish man who has been exempted from the war due to bad eyesight. He takes a summer job as a camp counselor in the Poconos, where he comes face to face with a force as terrible as any he might have seen on the Western Front. While not as ambitious as the other books on this list, Nemesis is a deeply moving work.    Purchase at Nightbird Books

Operation Shylock: a Confession  Vintage (1993): Roth shows readers his postmodern side in Shylock. In this work, Philip Roth takes a trip to Israel, meets a man who calls himself Philip Roth, and later writes a book called Operation Shylock. This may sound like the sort of metafictional schlock a first-year MFA would hash out, but it is not. Shylock delves deeply into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the relationship between the two Roths (and the questions of identity it raises) mirrors that of these troubled nations. Operation Shylock is a great introductory Roth novel for anyone interested in the Middle East and fans of postmodern lit.    Purchase at Nightbird Books

Reviewed by Alex Tripodi

Read enough reviews of contemporary Southern writers and a Groundhog Day sort of feeling sets in. Obligatory comparisons to Faulkner, O’Connor, McCullers, and Capote, along with phrases like ‘Southern Gothic’ and ‘grotesque’ seem to appear in any review or blurb for a book written south of the Mason-Dixon. Whether due to lack of creativity on the part of reviewers or too much hero-worship among Southerners, one could almost believe that one person wrote all Southern fiction under several pen names.

Then there’s Clyde Edgerton, a man whose name has likely never appeared in the same sentence as the phrase ‘Southern gothic’ (well, until now). His work owes little to William Faulkner; is written in far plainer language and concerned with more mundane themes. More sociologist than philosopher, Edgerton uses his characters not so much to convey an idea but rather to help us understand life as he sees it in his beloved North Carolina. His poor country folk are not in need of radical redemption, as in Flannery O’Connor’s world, nor stoically doomed, as in Faulkner’s. Rather, they are mostly good- perhaps a little naïve at worst- and hardship is more the result of happenstance than malice.

For example, Edgerton sees goodness in, and devotes much attention to, Southern holy-rolling Protestantism, a phenomenon disparaged or ignored by most writers. Church scenes pervade his books, as do hymn readings (he even penned his own hymn in Walking Across Egypt) and meditations on Bible verses. The disparity between white and black spirituality, and between Southerners’ piety and their propensity for hell raising- that “duality of the Southern thing” in the Drive-By Trucker’s phrase- are defining elements of Southern culture for this writer. These contradictory impulses have created an ultimately comic culture in the South. Edgerton’s new work, The Night Train, corrals these elements into a very funny, and peculiar, little book.

The setting is Starke, North Carolina, 1963. The town is bisected by train tracks (among other factors), with white families living mostly to the East and black families mostly to the West of them. Racial antagonism is present, but comparatively mild. One could say The Night Train is a book about race relations in the South, but this calls to mind scenes of lynchings and church bombings, or of the Shakespearean bombast of Absalom, Absalom! . This is North Carolina though, and, as our narrator reminds us, the sixties weren’t as strained here as they were in Alabama or Mississippi. Tension brews but never bubbles, and life is unjust but not tragic.

All this is to say that very little happens in Starke, North Carolina, and consequently, very little happens in The Night Train. Readers who demand a hard-driving plot will find the book tedious, but those who make it through the book will come to better understand the political and cultural changes that were beginning to surface in the early sixties.

The Night Train follows Larry Lime Beacon of Time Reckoning Breathe on Me Nolan (named, like all the Nolans, by his eccentric Aunt Marzie, and called Larry Lime for short), a black teenager and aspiring jazz pianist, and his friend and coworker Dwayne Hallston, a white kid who wants to be James Brown (“Night Train” is his favorite song by the Godfather of Soul). As the two obsess over and hone their craft, music comes to symbolize much of what is unique and unfair about this time and place. Larry Lime, who reveres Thelonious Monk, is the better musician, but Dwayne is more successful. Dwayne likes ‘black music’ (rock and R&B) better than white (country), but finds it alien and somewhat frightening at the same time. This ‘black’ music is informed by the African-American gospel tradition, but is attacked on religious grounds. And parents on both sides of the tracks can’t quite make sense of this new music their kids are listening to, though families in Starke are otherwise very tight-knit.

Dwayne’s band, the Amazing Rumblers, want nothing more than to appear on The Brother Bobby Lee Reese Country Music Jamboree, a local variety show that showcases amateur acts and is watched religiously by all of Starke, white and black. Reese’s show is, in one sense, a low-rent, early version of Hee Haw (Reese eating dog food is the shows major motif). But the role it plays in the life of Starkevillians is profound: Bobby Lee’s “…apparent naïve generosity and his ability to talk to black people under the white radar,” make him an unintended source of unity between black and white. Bobby Lee’s naiveté is only apparent, however: he is in fact a degreed historian (and Yankee) who has fallen in love with this region and its history and gotten the TV hosting job almost by accident. He has studied Starkes’ people, black and white, and learned to emulate their storytelling, accent, and folksy demeanor. Scattered throughout The Night Train’s twenty-nine chapters are interviews of Bobby Lee, conducted sometime past 1963, by Rumblers’ drummer Donnie Howell (who ends up an academic himself). These interviews allow the books most surreptitiously articulate character to express what he, as a somewhat remote observer, is able to sense about the changing political climate in this sleepy region. And when the light humor and ‘white’ music expected by the Jamboree’s producer come head-to-head with the ‘black’ music influencing upcoming acts like the Rumblers, you can expect Bobby Lee to have some interesting things to say about it.

The Night Train is a thoughtful and interesting book, if not an exciting one. There are, of course, moments of outright hilarity, as any fan of Edgerton would expect (“What they wanted was a leisure class that could paint pictures and read books…What would you learn in a leisure class?”), but mostly there is the rote day-to-day of poor whites and poor blacks working with and against each other, trying to figure out their place in the burgeoning Civil Rights era. Though not a must-read, Night Train will be enjoyed by serious Southern Lit buffs, Edgerton fans, and those who see (or want to see) the world as a somewhat lighter place than novelists typically imagine.

Reviewed by Alex Tripodi

“It’s like, no matter where you are or what you’re doing, you have to try like hell to keep from getting bored to death,” Joseph, a potato gun-obsessed Iraq veteran tells Buster Fang at the beginning of Kevin Wilson’s The Family Fang. Buster is a novelist whose second book has been ill-received. Unable to conjure the nerve to begin a third, he has taken an offer from a men’s magazine to report on Joseph and his spud gun club in Nebraska. Joseph goes on to alleviate his boredom by attempting to William Tell a beer can off of Buster’s head with one of his pneumatic tuber-tossers, with predictably disastrous results.

Buster, along with his older sister Annie, is used to being looked upon to alleviate others’ boredom, and is used to disastrous results. As the children of Guggenheim-winning performance artists Caleb and Camille Fang, they grew up as “Child A” and “Child B”, co-stars in their parents’ “choreographed spontaneity”. These performances, usually staged in malls, consisted of the Fang tribe engaging in some act of borderline criminality to rile shoppers out of their middle-class, consumerist complacency. Picaresque recounts of these performance pieces are sprinkled throughout the book. In one, Buster is dressed in drag and made to enter a girl’s beauty pageant (which he wins, to everyone’s surprise). In another, Camille steals jellybeans and makes a scene until she is detained by mall security. As Annie explains it, “They make something crazy happen and then they watch you try to deal with it.”

Buster has dealt with it mostly by writing in solitude. He has no friends to speak of and “…could count on one hand the number of times he’d had sex and still have enough fingers left over to make complicated shadow puppets.” Annie, for her part, has become a not-quite A-list actress, prone to alcoholism, and woefully inept at public relations. After one particularly bad meltdown, which ends with her breasts being plastered all over the internet, she goes back to her parents’ house in Tennessee to recuperate, where she rejoins Buster and his potato-damaged face. Naturally, the elder Fangs have plans to get the kids back into the family trade.

Everyone, starting with their parents and on down to film producers, magazine editors, and ex-lovers, seem out to manipulate the Fang siblings- to force them, without their knowledge, to do something outlandish and thereby make the world a little less boring. This conspiratorial air is strongly reminiscent of Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49. Unlike Pynchon’s book, however, nothing about the Fangs’ situation seems implausible, and the reader is never led to suspect that Fangs are simply paranoid. Nor is a Trystero-like dues ex machina posited to explain the world’s strange obsession with the siblings. They are simply seen as entertainers and, as such, objects. In Kevin Wilson’s world, boredom, not wickedness, is the major catalyst for profound human indifference. The Iraq War? “It was boring as hell…until it wasn’t, and then it was fucking terrifying.”

Disturbing, hilarious, and thoroughly enjoyable, Kevin Wilson’s second novel is a humane portrait of dysfunction that will appeal to fans of everyone from Pynchon to Southern yarn-spinners James Wilcox and Clyde Edgerton.