Cracking Spines
Dogfight: A Love Story
originally printed in the Star Tribune
Alfredo Batista is maybe the most likable drug dealer in Queens, which probably factors into his being the worst drug dealer in Queens. Business is sparse; his entire life savings (Alfredo is 19) comes to roughly $200, which he keeps in his sock. Despite long hours — he’s routinely on the streets until 4 a.m. — he’s able to unload only the occasional dime bag or Viagra.
It’s because, and surely this is ruinous for any respectable dealer, Alfredo possesses an extremely sensitive conscience. His brain houses its own Department of Regret, with filing cabinets meticulously arranged. There’s a “why-didn’t-I-wear-a-condom” folder, a folder for having impregnated his brother’s ex-girlfriend, and folders for never having learned to throw a knuckleball or drive a car, among presumably infinite others. The day we meet Alfredo Batista in the summer of 2002, he’s about to begin a new folder, the contents of which make up the narrative of “Dogfight, a Love Story,” the exciting and really-tough-to-put-down novel by Matt Burgess.
The following are consolidated into a single plot: drugs, dogs, “Street Fighter 2,” the Mets/Yankees rivalry, the Nas/Jay-Z rivalry, McDonald’s infuriating late-night drive-thru policies, and a gun. The main story is that Alfredo’s brother, Tariq, is being released from prison, and Alfredo must steal a pit bull for Tariq, so that he can participate in a dogfight. The plot is fun, original, addictive and totally negligible. The real draw is Burgess’ prose.
One suspects he could have written a book devoid of story and characters. The landscape Burgess paints (setting: Jackson Heights, Queens) has the alluring exoticism of a Gauguin: “Look around. Shirtless men play netless basketball. A father snaps pictures of his little girl, while a Chinese woman dances to the water-like rhythms of tai chi, while teenagers bum cigarettes off the neighborhood schizo, while bees, drunk with pleasure, swarm the bottoms of trash cans.”
Passages like this — of which “Dogfight” has many — are not merely funny or incisive but also feel true, and intimately so, as if revealing to us hidden parts of a world we already know. McDonald’s, somehow, becomes unusual and interesting.
Will Alfredo steal the pit bull? Will Roger Clemens get beaned? Who will be shot? These questions all have satisfying answers that don’t really matter. There’s something more expansive at play here, as we watch Alfredo grapple with his conscience and fall deeper into an unknown yet eerily familiar world.
Max Ross’s writing has appeared in the Boston Globe and the Harvard Review. A Minnesotan, he currently is a creative writing instructor at New York University.
Ecuador! Chile! Peru!
Published by Slush Pile
We worked together at a Russian-fusion restaurant– Jenna had been there six years, I’d been there four– and both of us wanted to quit. But the tips were good at The Estate, and Jenna liked the small interactions with people, asking how was their food, how was their day. At times our relationship was composed of so many minor exchanges, with nothing much larger infiltrating the conversation. By the time she got pregnant, we’d broken up and gotten back together three times spread over as many years.
Ours was not the type of sex that should have produced infants. Ours was exciting, often vertical or three-quarters vertical, kissless, red-faced, spontaneous, and inebriated. We humped like it was the only way to apologize to each other anymore, and we wanted always to prove how much we meant it.
Jenna had grown up in South Dakota before moving to Minneapolis for college, and there was something endearingly rural about her, the baby fat she still had on her cheeks and under her chin, the way she wore a red-checked apron when she cooked (and sometimes nothing else), the way she pronounced long Os with the hint of an L: Doln’t. That summer she’d decided it was time for us to go on vacation together, and had been researching airline prices and different types of sand. This would be her second abortion, and so I deferred everything to her: the decision, the arrangements. She seemed to know exactly what she was doing. To use the word eager would be unfair, but Jenna was certainly adamant about enacting the plans. She was the sort who, once she made a decision (which was actually a fairly rare occurrence; it could take her hours to determine whether she felt like Thai or Vietnamese for dinner) she applied all her energy and attention toward seeing it through.
All week before the appointment she felt a lot on her own breasts, which had grown slightly larger from pregnancy. And I felt a lot on her breasts, too.
(for the rest, check out slush pile)
originally published by Open Letters
Holding a light bulb in one’s hand produces a set of possibilities, each of them equally plausible: if screwed into a socket and charged with electricity, the light bulb either will work or will not work – the bulb is in equal parts useful and useless. And, in its convoluted way, this seems to be Alberto Manguel’s central belief about any given book. The novel (any novel, if read correctly) is a useful thing – certain texts cast light on our lives in such a way that we might consider ourselves anew, notice beauty in corners previously shadowed; and also it is useless – no book will never stop the spread of HIV or the abuse of political power or even our own dark fears, whatever they may be.
In A Reader on Reading, Manguel carries around his library a diverse array of light bulbs – one is called Don Quixote, one The Divine Comedy, one The Odyssey, and so on – and for three hundred pages he screws and unscrews them into different fixtures – art, politics, religion, sexuality, Alberto Manguel. Though now and again he clumsily blows a fuse or shakes loose a perfectly good filament, he proves himself a master electrician, able to make old and dusty bulbs glow bright. Reader, then, is a weird chandelier – both a functional structure providing light to any reader who wishes to read beneath it, and also a lamp colorful and original enough itself to be considered art.
A Reader on Reading is meticulously arranged; A Reader on Reading is utterly disorganized. Speaking of his library, which holds over 30,000 books, Manguel says, “I have organized it simply according to my own requirements and prejudices. A certain zany logic governs its geography.” The same could be said of Reader. (Indeed, Manguel has a history of letting spontaneity guide him. In the introduction to his book Reading Pictures, he admits that the narrative was organized by “Chance, private attractions, and the suspicion of an interesting story…. I have not attempted to devise or discover a systematic method.”) There are thirty-nine chapters spread among eight sections. The distinctions between each chapter are mostly irrelevant. A two-page parable about the demise of the publishing industry (“The Legend of the Dodos”) follows a ten-page re-imagining of Jonah and the Whale.
Some of its erratic structure, though, probably arises from the fact that A Reader on Reading was not conceived in any linear fashion. Rather, it is an accumulation – a Best Of – of essays that Manguel has published in the last twenty years. Remarkably, though the arguments here span decades and defy conventional definitions of unity, gathered together there is an undeniable coherence to his thoughts.
Manguel gives literature a catholic definition. He makes no attempt to joust with books and defeat them (as Nabokov might be said to do in his Lectures on Literature), nor does he endeavor to compartmentalize books into theoretical categories (the terms modernist, postmodernist, realist, and surrealist have no place here). Rather, Manguel asserts that everything is literature. The Odyssey is literature and The Da Vinci Code is literature and the cover of The Da Vinci Code is literature and the Old Testament and sexual intercourse and a car battery and the childhood of Alberto Manguel. (About the only thing he excludes from his definition – singled out at three separate times in the book – is the work of Bret Easton Ellis.) Manguel follows happily in the footsteps of his fellow countryman Jorge Luis Borges – one of Reader’s sections, “The Lesson of the Master,” is devoted to Borges’s work and influence – and Manguel’s philosophy closely resembles that of the eponymous character from Borges’ story “A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain”: “He believes that ‘great literature’ is the commonest thing in the world, and that there was hardly a conversation in the street that did not attain those ‘heights.’”
In A Reader on Reading, simply everything can be read and interpreted for meaning (“Puns,” he says, “reveal behind their at times doubtful humor the weblike coherence of the cosmos”) and Manguel’s arguments are so seductive that his readers can’t help but to adopt his view: the world is an incredibly meaningful place, even if often cruel and ungraspable:
Alice and her Wonderland shadows play out for us the parts we enact in the real world. Their folly is tragic or amusing, they are themselves exemplary fools or they are eloquent witnesses to the folly of their shadowy brethren, they tell us stories of absurd or mad behavior which mirrors our own so that we may better see and understand it. The difference is that their folly, unlike ours, is framed by the margins of the page, contained by the however-uncertain imagination of their author. Crimes and evil deeds in the real world have sources so deep and consequences so distant that we can never hold them entirely in our understanding, we can merely clip them in a moment, box them in a judicial file, or observe them under the lens of psychoanalysis…. The folly of the world is unintelligible.
What separates Manguel from Roland Barthes and similar-minded poststructuralists that attempted to democratize the definition of literature, though, is that Manguel isn’t trying to overhaul canons or establish new norms. His views aren’t reactions against previous theories. He simply seems to be recording the world as he sees it, the way a carpenter might look at a forest and see rocking chairs and bed frames, without ulterior aspirations of converting readers to his views (the carpenter, to carry out the analogy, has not brought his saw with him).
There is no thesis or central narrative. The first couple chapters might best be described as memoir-ish, as Manguel explains how he first fell in love with books. When the third chapter, “On Being Jewish,” deviates somewhat from this structure – it is less about Manguel’s Judaism than his thoughts on “constructed identity” – I was a little put off. I found myself hoping for a memoir, and was disappointed in Reader for a few pages because it didn’t conform to my expectations. Manguel is an Argentine Jewish homosexual, and he writes about Argentina and Judaism and homosexuality, but rarely delves into how these things have affected him personally. At a certain point, though, I abandoned my own logic and submitted to the author’s – or rather, as I kept reading, my own notions of logic seemed more and more arbitrary.
Though it may not be a memoir, one senses that Reader exposes Manguel’s innermost feelings and thoughts. He’s writing about books, sure, but he’s also writing about AIDS, politics, martyrdom, and Truth. And himself. His brain and chest are turned inside-out, their contents translated into prose. “In the midst of uncertainty and many kinds of fear, threatened by loss, change, and the welling of pain within and without for which one can offer no comfort, readers know that at least there are, here and there, a few safe places, as real as paper and as bracing as ink.”
Ultimately what comes through above all else is Manguel’s love of reading, which he designates the “most human of creative activities”:
What remains invariable is the pleasure of reading, of holding a book in my hands and suddenly feeling that peculiar sense of wonder, recognition, chill, or warmth that for no discernible reason a certain string of words sometimes evokes…. I believe there is an ethic of reading, a responsibility in how we read, a commitment that is both political and private in the act of turning the pages and following the lines. And I believe that sometimes, beyond the author’s intentions and beyond the reader’s hopes, a book can make us better and wiser.
One chapter is an ode to the full stop, one a meditation on page size and paper quality, and another simply an appreciation of words. My harshest criticism, to which I think Manguel might be acutely sensitive, is that the font of Reader is slightly too small.
The book would be a failure, though, if all it did was to appreciate. But Manguel is unafraid to admit to the shortcomings of prose, and does so frequently. He warns against forgetting that the great novels and stories that have come from the Holocaust and Vietnam and Argentina’s Dirty War do little to mitigate the tragedies from which the art has arisen. Without these concessions, Reader would be nothing more than a book-long justification of one man’s solipsistic hobby. It may matter to the world that Don Quixote was written, but it will never matter to the world that Manguel (or I) read it individually. By acknowledging the weaknesses of literature, though, Manguel’s faith in it becomes all the more potent. The implicit question is why, in the face of the possible uselessness of reading, Manguel continues to read. His answer is that reading is a means to asking more questions, and questioning the world is his first step toward illuminating it. “Literature, as we know all too well, does not offer solutions, but poses good conundrums,” he says. “I am tempted to say that perhaps this is all that literature really does.”
Of course this idea isn’t anything new – Manguel offers incisive, surprising readings of The Odyssey and The Divine Comedy, but his larger ideas will likely have flashed previously across the minds of his readers – but his path toward it is self-beaten and worthwhile to follow.
Reading, we come to learn by the end of the book (or, perhaps, just have reaffirmed) is at once pleasurable, powerful, and sorrowful. The paradox of it – sitting alone in one’s room with a book as a way to connect with the world – makes a little more sense, or seems to. And the selfishness of it seems a little more justified. The sun will never shine for any one of us, but we are all, Manguel might say, entitled to our bedside lamps.
___
Max Ross‘s reviews have appeared in The Boston Globe, The Star Tribune, The Harvard Review, and The Rumpus. He lives in New York.
A review of Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light by Jane Brox
originally printed in The Boston Globe
The sun’s pretty neat, but it comes nowhere close to satisfying 24/7 consumer demand. Prometheus, the first human to commoditize fire (and thus elongate waking hours), was certainly an ambitious entrepreneur, but his product quickly suffered from market saturation.
In “Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light,’’ Jane Brox renders a history of humankind’s relationship with flames, lamps, and bulbs, and our ever-increasing dependence on them. It’s an expansive book, covering not only illuminants, but also the race relations, class struggles, and rural flight brought about by the electric grid. With its panoramic scope, though, focus is sometimes lost, as if too many people entered the picture, smiling, just as the photographer set off her flash.
Brox traces artificial light from stone lamps in the Pleistocene era up through whale oil and tallow candles, gaslight, and kerosene, and on through incandescent bulbs and fluorescent and LED lighting, succinctly explaining the discovery and impact of each innovation.
In her narrative, Brox teases out a theme suggesting that illuminants separate not just light from dark, but rich from poor. “The wealthy and powerful have always been the first to acquire new kinds of light and have always had more of it,’’ she says. In the middle of the 15th century, a pound of tallow cost half of a common laborer’s daily wage, and wax was “priceless.’’ As electric service became common in US cities in the 1930s, neighborhoods inhabited by immigrants and African-Americans “remained relentlessly in the dark.’’ Even today, rich and poor countries can be easily distinguished in satellite images from space; the wealthiest countries are the brightest. “The most glaring spots on the map,’’ says Brox, “correspond to flagrancy and prosperity.’’
Brox’s style is concise, free of unnecessary frills, and she makes effective use of primary sources. It’s apparent she has approached her subject as an interested writer — not as an expert — and her enthusiasm (and research) is evident. We’re treated to sparkling information on both micro and macro levels. We learn that early coal miners used phosphorescent fish to light their underground tunnels. We learn that, in the United States, more than $1 billion a year is spent on wasted light.
But Brox too often deviates from her narrative. Large portions of the middle chapters push light aside, focusing instead on electricity in general. She spends less time describing light’s influence on society than the influence of vacuum cleaners and electric irons.
If this were a different book, these digressions might make the material feel more complete. Here, though, the peripheral information overwhelms and undermines the principal subject. The implicit premise of “Brilliant’’ is that light itself is significant enough to warrant undivided attention. As Brox continues to pepper us with minutiae (“In time, harpooning became the favored method for hunting whales’’), the reader can’t help but sense that light’s history isn’t so singularly compelling after all.
Perhaps most disappointing is that she considers light only as an illuminant, neglecting its other potential functions. Integral to artificial light’s progression and its future are its uses beyond the visual. Innovations in linguistics and in medicine (Morse code, light therapy) are myriad and ongoing; fiber optics specialists are currently developing computers powered by light. Brox’s contemplation of the future, meanwhile, is mainly limited to the invention of more efficient bulbs.
We live in an era where information has become a perpetually more valuable commodity. And “Brilliant’’ has loads of exceptionally engaging information, including all the extracurricular stuff. But there may be too much here; the facts sometimes become jumbled and confusing, an amusement park with so many flashing lights it’s difficult to know where to go.
Max Ross teaches creative writing at New York University. He can be reached at maxlyonross@gmail.com. 
originally published in The Harvard Review
Love and Obstacles, Aleksandar Hemon, Riverhead Books, 210 pages, $25.95, #978-1-59448-864-1
In his previous work, Aleksandar Hemon sometimes approached the English language like a classical pianist discovering jazz for the first time – while technically trained, he was getting a taste of improvisational freedom. One character in 2008’s The Lazarus Project, “Would push a pea around his plate ponderously”; “birch branches beyond the bus” slumped, forlorn. With Love and Obstacles, Hemon’s fourth book, he’s settled down a bit. The language, while still vibrant and surprising, is more straightforward. Here Hemon continues to prove that he’s not just a clever wordsmith, but a powerful weaver of themes and metaphors, which is to say, a powerful storyteller.
The tale of how Hemon became an American writer is by now pretty well known: In 1992, when he was visiting Chicago, civil war broke out in his native Sarajevo and it was impossible for him to return home. Hemon set himself a limit of five years to learn English and start writing in it. By 1995, he began publishing his fiction in the United States.
The narrator of the linked short stories in Love and Obstacles has a past that closely resembles the author’s. “My story is boring,” he says in “The Conductor.” “I was not in Sarajevo when the war began; I felt helplessness and guilt as I watched the destruction of my hometown on TV; I lived in America.” In “The Noble Truths of Suffering,” the narrator describes how, “I introduced myself and proceeded to deliver the usual, well-rehearsed story of displacement and writing in English.”
The narrator, who remains nameless, is an immigrant poet living in Chicago and recounting tales of his past. There’s a definite arc, as we witness him becoming more Americanized – more self-conscious, more wasteful, more wasted, more boastful – over the course of the stories.
The collection opens when the narrator is sixteen, and his family is spending a summer in Africa, where his father is a diplomat; the narrator falls in love with a blackjack dealer, but fails to woo her despite her possible affection for him. Then we’re in Sarajevo, as the narrator is sent on a mission across the country to purchase a refrigerator for his family, a large wad of cash in his pocket, a pair of thuggish characters in his train car. The third story begins in a Bosnian poets’ society, but ends in the United States with the poets’ dignity gone and not even worth mourning. From there we’re more or less in Chicago – the narrator lamenting and loving and relating his past – until, in the eighth and final story, we go back to Sarajevo where the narrator returns only to feel like an outsider.
No matter where he is, or how old, or how American, the narrator can’t escape a certain feeling of emptiness. The most prominent theme Hemon tackles might be described as the meaningless meaning of life. This has been a preoccupation of his in earlier writing, too. Jozef Pronek, one of the author’s recurring characters, ponders his existence in Hemon’s first collection, The Question of Bruno:
He realized, schlepping through the goo and yuck of wet April snow, that he was utterly superfluous walking down the Magnificent Mile, that everything would be exactly the same if the space his body occupied at that moment were empty.
In The Lazarus Project, the narrator, a writer, remarks that, “The world would be exactly the same with my book as without it.”
Here the message is equally stark. “Most human lives perish without other people’s ever noticing,” the narrator says. “And I recognized that it could happen to me, too.” The phrasing morphs – one time it’s manifested as a group of birds “atwitter in a paroxysm of meaningless life”; one time it’s Rimbaud’s line, “What will become of the world when you leave? No matter what happens, no trace of now will remain” – but the underlying despair is always present.
Somehow, though, Hemon makes it upbeat, affirming. The suffering is universal, and so there’s solidarity in that. It’s kind of like saying, “Yeah, maybe we don’t matter. But that doesn’t matter, either.”
The idea isn’t simply repeated within these pages, but its meaning and importance develop throughout the book. Every story can stand alone, but the thematic tie-ins make the collection feel like a collection, a cohesive unit that, like a novel, is meant to be and should be ingested whole.
originally published in the collagist
“Reality is the fastest American commodity,” writes Aleksandar Hemon in his 2008 novel, The Lazarus Project. “The incessant perpetuation of collective fantasies makes people crave the truth and nothing but the truth.”
And he’s right, I think. Maybe it’s because there’s not a lot to believe in anymore–our meat is tainted, definitely; our world is warming, definitely–and so we need something on which to pin our faith. But because of the difficulty in discerning capital-T Truths in the world, we settle mostly for facts, the best of which seem immutable and undeniable in the way God used to be.
The Lazarus Project imparts this information with a wink: the book is fiction, and as such the odds of success were stacked against it, at least from a marketing perspective. In the last half-century, the American craving for truth and fact has made the Novel a bench player in entertainment media while simultaneously making memoirs the fastest growing literary commodities in the country.
Memoir: A History, Ben Yagoda’s study of the genre, documents how–and a little bit of why–memoir has become the predominant form. Claiming the fifth-century The Confessions of St. Augustine as the first modern-ish example of the genre, Yagoda traces the history of the memoir–and along with it, the history of its fallibility–up to the present day.
The book begins with a Genesis-like roll call of sub-genres: dog memoirs, dad memoirs, misery memoirs, holocaust memoirs (a specialized subset of misery, to be sure), celebrity memoirs, spiritual memoirs, and so on. By and large, the ten chapters that follow are just extrapolations of what we’re introduced to here, with Yagoda approaching his subject with something like lust, his enthusiasm showing throughout the crisp, wry prose.
There’s no denying that the book achieves exactly what it sets out to do, following the evolution of the genre and marking the traits it develops for survival. But there’s a repetition in the rising and falling of the autobiographical sub-species that’s inherently dull, and—if Yagoda is to be faithful to history—then perhaps this dullness is unavoidable. While there are exciting, revealing tidbits–“The development of glass mirrors at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries has been cited as a key factor in the Renaissance emphasis on the self”–most of the intrigue in these sections comes from excerpted portions of the memoirs in question.
Memoir really gets cooking, though, when Yagoda addresses the topic of Truth. Anyone who pays any attention to the book world or to Oprah likely knows the story of James Frey’s semi-fabricated memoir, A Million Little Pieces, and how it threatened to taint the entire industry. It follows that anyone who picks up Memoir will likely expect a bit of discussion of Frey’s transgression and what it means to autobiographical writing. Instead, we learn of memoirs dating back to the early 1800s whose factual bases were questioned (with the aside that Daniel Defoe’s 1718 Robinson Crusoe suffered “the first recorded instance of an attack on a fake memoir”). Turns out that authenticity of personal narratives has been heatedly and steadily debated for centuries, that authenticity is near-impossible to achieve in the first place, and also that our expectations to read truth are actually kind of ludicrous. Citing studies on the imperfection of memory by psychologists C.R. Barclay, Ulric Neisser, and Sigmund Freud, we’re told (and convinced) that “memory is by nature untrustworthy…It is itself a creative writer.”
Yagoda picks up the argument again in Memoir’s final chapter, “Truth and Consequences.” The real question soon becomes not whether every line of dialogue in a memoir is faithful to words actually spoken in its author’s life, but whether the writer is willfully and knowingly deceiving readers, and to what purpose. Here we get a roll call of award-winning, best-selling, fraudulent memoirs. There are a lot of them. And one finds that, true or not, these are undeniably stories with a lot of power in them. Yet we’re willing to submit to that power only if we believe in a memoir’s factualness. Do we, as readers, have a right to expect the factual truth? Would we be better off if we were able to sever a book from its author, and allow that stories might not be true, but still hold Truth? Probably, but that’s not likely ever to happen. In the end, Memoir leaves us with a somewhat sad, but fundamental, reality: We might like the truth, but really we have no idea what it is.
