BOOKS: JULY

BOOKS WE LOVE: In which we (editors and interns) gush about the books—new or old—that have knocked our respective socks off.

Plenty Enough Suck to Go Around: A Memoir of Floods, Fires, Parades, and Plywood
by Cheryl Wagner
(Citadel Press, 2009)

Maybe it is not surprising that when a disaster of epic proportions strikes a creative hub like New Orleans, the result is a flowering of artistic expression. Many fine books have emerged from the flood zone, but four years after, you might think the topic has been exhausted. Think again: Cheryl Wagner's plucky memoir offers a fresh—and dare I say, entertaining—perspective on what it's like to rebuild a ruined home in a ruined neighborhood with your boyfriend, some gas masks, two basset hounds, and a shotgun. When (honest) electricians are scarce, trusty Google will teach you how to rewire a house from scratch. When Road Home (Louisiana's housing recovery program, aka "the final circle of hell") assesses your damage and offers you, uh, zero compensation, you either unload the wreck or fix it yourself. When FEMA keeps "accidentally" bumping you off the list for trailers, you hunker down upstairs and hope the mold spores won't cause permanent damage. This is a heroic tale humbly told—imagine This Old House meets The Omega Man—and its greatest charm is the author's sense of (gallows) humor. In surviving "disasterville," Wagner learns, and shares, many handy tricks: diminish your expectations; accept that "everything is booby-trapped" (and it may take five hours to get one ridiculously over-priced hammer); don't get bogged down in comparing your sucky life with other people's less-sucky lives ("suck was too hard to quantify"); put a hatchet in your attic; get life preservers for your dogs; "minimize contact with the government wherever possible"; and once in a while, maybe around the eighth or ninth flat tire, remember to laugh.

Lines we liked: "I didn't know you could leave your house one person and return another. That the planets could shift to suddenly make you four or five people all at once, none slightly resembling who you thought you were before. I did not start this summer as a haphazard victim, rescuer, roofer, or adventurer. I hated swashbucklers."

—CAF

Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription: Notes & Asides From National Review
by William F. Buckley, Jr.
(Basic Books, 2007; paperback, 2009)

One of the enticements deployed to hoodwink people into reading the always readable National Review during the late William F. Buckley, Jr.'s reign was the "Notes & Asides" department, which offered the publication of arguments written directly to Buckley (vs. the magazine itself), and Buckley's own devilish ripostes. The man was funny. Too bad a plethora of working Talking Heads lack that charm. (Hard to imagine, say, Sean Hannity cracking wise, even with a script.) Then there was the formidable Buckley brain, able to penetrate shrill surface confusion to the calmer, more conclusive evidence below. The formidable Buckley ego would then joyfully broadcast his findings. These exchanges were not for the soft-hearted. Complaints even focused on Buckley's posture and appearance on his TV debate-show, The Firing Line.

Lines we liked: A reader writes: "You are, shall we say, unhandsome. This misfortune does not confer the right to appear disheveled.... Toward that end, I enclose a pocket comb."

Buckley responds: "I have combed my hair. What do I do now?"

Or his elite vocabulary: A reader named Grimes writes: "Buckley states that he 'cohabits comfortably with [H.L.] Mencken.' Thus by his own confession he is both a homosexual and a necrophile."

After proving, with citation, that the word "cohabits" conveys a distinctive sense of "sharing a philosophical bent," Buckley says: "Grimes, baby, I'd hate to see your Rorschach test."

Or his politics. A reader writes: "I would trust a snake before I would trust you or anybody you support."

Buckley responds: "What would you do if I supported the snake?"

Or his magazine: The acclaimed historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., writes: "[T]he reason one confuses The National Enquirer and the National Review is because they have comparable standards of wit, taste, intelligence and reliability."

Buckley responds: "It is obvious to me that only someone who had difficulty in distinguishing between The National Enquirer and National Review could have written such works of history as you have written."

Our conclusion: Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription is a romp. And besides the trenchant wit, there is much else to ponder in the book—and life.

—MAS

A Horse of Her Own
by Annie Wedekind
(Feiwel and Friends/MacMillan, 2008)

Why on earth is a middle-aged dude reading a young adult novel ("Ages: 10 to 14") about girls and horses? We can explain! Wedekind was once Managing Editor of this magazine and we've long admired (and published) her "adult" prose. From way back, we knew she loved horses and, come to think of it, she once also gushed about the Harry Potter series. The heroine of AHOHO is Jane, the poorest girl (her parents are academics) at a summer camp. Unlike the spoiled kids around her, she doesn't own her own horse and therefore forms a close bond with a camp horse, Beau. When Beau is sold off, Jane must dare to ride the most fearsome horse in camp. One lovely thing about AHOHO—besides the crisp writing—is how it doesn't condescend. By using horse jargon and riding nuances matter-of-factly, Wedekind forces the reader to engage his or her brain (or dictionary) to keep up; in this way, she echoes Patrick O'Brian's use of Georgian-era naval arcana with his readers. Two new horse books by Wedekind, Wild Blue: The Story of a Mustang Appaloosa and Little Prince: The Story of a Shetland Pony (which the author describes as a comedy), have just been published. We look forward to quizzing Wedekind in this space in the near future.

Lines we liked: "Some arrived at camp starry-eyed at the prospect of riding a real horse, only to be terrified by the enormous, dirty, hoofed creatures that confronted them, so different from their toys with purple manes and silvery eyelashes.... Then there were the awestruck girls, who might be nervous, might even be scared, but to whom fear was nothing compared with the bliss of being astride a horse."

—MAS

I Am Not Sidney Poitier
by Percival Everett
(Graywolf, 2009)

"I was, in life, to be a gambler, a risk taker, a swashbuckler, a knight. I accepted, then and there, my place in this world. I was a fighter of windmills. I was a chaser of whales. I was Not Sidney Poitier." So begins the quest of Not Sidney Poitier—and what else but absurdity could ensue for the oddly named young orphan, a spitting image of the famous actor, with scads of inherited money and a rented room in Ted Turner's mansion?
 
Percival Everett's latest novel—or experiment, as his work tends to be—finds its hero ambling through the American South and navigating molestation-by-attractive-schoolteacher and almost-continual bigotry (and seduction), and surviving attempted murder.

All the while, Not Sidney struggles with and shatters expectations for race, class, and wealth (not to mention his enigma of a name). The novel unravels into madness at times, but somehow, while probing the darker depths of these issues with poison-tipped satire and chilling dreamscapes, it remains hilarious. It's weird.

Lines we liked: "An extremely tall, extremely thin, extremely washed-out, and extremely white man walked out of the darkness beside the building and into the white glow of my headlights. He bent at the waist and peered through the driver's-side window and said the scariest thing I could imagine.
    He said, 'Boy you must be lost.'
    'I must be,' I said. 'Can you fix my car?'
    'Can but won't.'
    'May I use your garage to try to fix it myself?'
    'You may not.'
    'Are you Rabbit Toe?'
    'That's what they call me.'"

—JTM

The Good Thief
by Hannah Tinti
(Dial, 2008; paperback forthcoming August 2009)

Hannah Tinti's debut novel has sparked comparisons to the picaresque tales of Dickens, Stevenson, and Twain. In fact, the author succeeds in creating a landscape all her own, where professional mousetrappers, winemakers, and phrenologists mix and mingle. Tinti's prose is elegant yet never obtuse, vividly depicting the fictionalized New England landscape through the eyes of Ren, the young orphan-cum-bandit protagonist.

Lines we liked: "These possibilities fanned out before Ren like cards on a table, then closed back together, until there was only one option left. He was never going to study science; he was never going to be respectable."
 
—CMG

Going Away Shoes: Stories
by Jill McCorkle
(forthcoming from Algonquin, September 2009)

This morning, I was late to work because I could not make myself stop reading OA contributor Jill McCorkle's Going Away Shoes. This is not to say that these stories are the most upbeat or optimistic start to the day—a lonely school nurse finds solace in the "happy accidents" of PBS painter Bob Ross; a wife reluctantly confronts her husband's alcoholism decades after he saved her from her own demons; a divorcée pens an angry letter to her couples' therapist. Still, with her knack for blending humor and pain with remarkably believable results, McCorkle delivers eleven crystal-clear snapshots of middle age, middle class, and marriage gone wrong.

Lines we liked: "A life without any surprise is safe in its own way. You know if you stay within the lines and don't glom too much paint on your brush, your paint-by-number picture of a seagull squatting on a rugged post will turn out okay. Do you want to look at it for the rest of your life? Does it make you happy? Now those are different questions altogether."

—SCA

Linthead Stomp: The Creation of Country Music in the Piedmont South
by Patrick Huber
(UNC Press, 2008)

Are the primal echoes—those ancestors to modern country music—cackling from our Smithsonian anthologies the rustic moans of the ancient American hillbilly bellowing in some pre-modern mountain hollow? Or do we hear in these syncopations the beating spindles of modern industry, the musical experiments of working-class bohemians, and the lyrical protests of a disenchanted industrial workforce who toiled in the Southern cotton mills from World War I through the Depression, and whose hands barely remembered the agrarian efforts of plowing and reaping but knew well the monotony of carding, spinning, warping, and weaving? Patrick Huber's Linthead Stomp compellingly argues the latter.

Lines we liked: "Today the term 'hillbilly' connotes all that is rural, unsophisticated, backward, and disadvantaged; it is seldom used as a compliment. But, at least within Piedmont textile villages in the decades prior to World War II, hillbilly music was urban, modern, and, in its way, tremendously sophisticated."

—RJBF

A Gate at the Stairs
by Lorrie Moore
(forthcoming from Knopf, September 2009)

Here, Lorrie Moore offers us a new kind of cynicism, one that's still developing beneath a shroud of hope and "adorable" youth, and believes love—so much like life—is, quite frankly, absurd, but not yet to be abandoned: "How like the end of love," Tassie muses soon after her brother dies in Iraq, "to leave a beautiful corpse." This coming-of-age story quietly resists with wit, with unsentimental awe, and with stark self-awareness, the mistakes—or is it inculcation?—of generations past and encourages you, whom once, too, were just as "adorable" in youth as Tassie, to remember the person you used to be, just before you became the person you are now. It's funny, no?

Lines we liked: "Tragedies...were a luxury. They were constructions of an affluent society, full of sorrow and truth but without moral function.... For understanding and for perspective, suffering required a butcher's weighing. And to ease the suffering of the listener, things had better be funny. Though they weren't always. And this is how, sometimes, stories failed us: Not that funny. Or worse, not funny in the least."

—JME

The Southern Cross
by Skip Horack
(forthcoming from Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, August 2009)

Anyone who crafts characters as vital, funny, and heartbreakingly human as Skip Horack does in The Southern Cross deserves a "Hot Damn!" slap and a "Roll Tide!" whoop. (It will be noted by this Alabaman reviewer that Horack is Louisianan, but several of the stories in this collection take place in Alabama.) His voice morphs seamlessly as he inhabits the lives of: a grad student aimlessly chasing sturgeon and love, a stripper toying with a not-so-saintly evangelical preacher, an ex-con thrust into the heart of a hurricane, a lonely rabbit breeder forced to kill his plague-infested animals, and a disillusioned poet in search of lost ancestors (to name a few), all scattered about the Gulf Coast in 2005—before, during, and after Katrina. Horack's prose illuminates the shadows around us: One character, tentatively descending into a mud cave deep in a Baton Rouge swamp, realizes that "though it is dark at first, a few steps more and he can't believe what he is seeing, what he has been missing this whole time, these worlds within worlds."

Lines we liked: "Outside, a giant Pentecostal screams at deer hunters from the shoulder of the highway. He looks close to seven feet tall but is built like a rake. He calls me a whore. 'You're gonna burn in hell,' he says.
    My ride home is back inside swinging on a pole so I holler right back at the skinny Bible beater. 'Give me a lift,' I tell him. 'Be a good Christian.'"

—MGS

All the Living
by C.E. Morgan
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009)

Read this novel slowly so as to appreciate the author's luxuriant phrasing and near-biblical cadences. A young woman and a young man, both orphans, both college-age but not college-bound, attempt to cohabitate on a hardscrabble Kentucky tobacco farm. The woman, a gifted pianist, craves escape from the desolate setting, where the mountains that encage her are "the one place in the world she want[s] to leave behind her, where nothing work[s], where every last thing waste[s] flesh into bone," but she also wants to cleave her life with the man she loves. The mighty challenge of being a good partner and being true to yourself burns within these restrained-on-the-surface pages. This solemn book doesn't provide easy answers to questions of love and sacrifice, but it does pay tribute to people who work the land with meager rewards and to an environment that is both malevolent and majestic.

Lines we liked: "She never lived in a house and now, seeing the thing, she was no longer sure she wanted to." (And that's just the first sentence!)

—CAF

Valeria's Last Stand
by Marc Fitten
(Bloomsbury, 2009)

The unlikely hero of Marc Fitten's bawdy and playful debut novel is a crotchety, sixty-eight-year-old Hungarian woman. The author, currently a Ph.D. student in Georgia, grew up in the Bronx, and spent a few years abroad (mostly in Hungary), and his prose is both Old World and Global World—Valeria, the elderly spinster, falls in love with a widowed potter (when she spots him eating a banana in the local market) and her lustful pheromones pervade the village like toxic (or intoxicating) gas: "The stray dogs began to rut in the street. Children threw stones to stop them. Pigs rubbed their rumps against posts. The village was awake. Hot and awake." In a tiny town, everyone knows your dirty little secrets, but in this Eastern European setting, they also welcome and treasure them. The story includes a nasty chimney sweep, an "abrupt and smelly little man," who would "curse, whistle, break wind—do anything he could to show his contempt. The wives couldn't get enough"; a beloved barkeep named Ibolya, fifty-eight, with "a heaving bosom, a heavy hand when dispensing cheap wine, and a generous line of credit"; and a whistling mayor who is trying to launch his remote village into the modern era (by building a train station and bringing in Korean "investors"). Fitten's warm and spirited approach to characters and social constructs is like that of Milan Kundera (who provides the novel's epigraph) and Bohumil Hrabal. First and foremost, you get individuals—gloriously goofy, opinionated, madcap, conniving, quick-tempered personalities—who evoke broader conflicts (Communism vs. Capitalism, aggression vs. submission, the old vs. the new) not usually explored in contemporary American lit and certainly not with Fitten's surprising open-mindedness.

Lines we liked: "If the potter thought it would be easy to continue avoiding either woman, he was wrong. He saw them both all too often. It was a small village, after all. There wasn't enough space for anyone to avoid anybody else. Sadly, there was no getting away from things. Everybody had to be faced, and the happiest of citizens were those who faced their turmoils right away."

—CAF

All photographs by John McElwee and Cassandra Gambill.