Category Archives: awards and prizes

Let me in

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“Naked Chinese People” is the first story in the collection California Transit by Diane Lefer, my adviser this semester at Vermont College of Fine Arts. I thought if I was going to be working with her, I should read some of her writing. California Transit won the 2005 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. Its eight stories tell of displaced characters, of characters on journeys, of individuals who are part of families who are part of something larger. These are stories that matter.

The first sentence of “Naked Chinese People” is “We were always finding naked Chinese people in the shower.” A few paragraphs later in this first of thirty-one unmarked sections:

“It’s in and around our weekend cabin in the desert, now equipped with a lock, that the events I’m about to narrate took place. The lock on the door is irrelevant, as are the naked Chinese.”

The Narrator is going to tell us a story, but there’s another story here too, buried under the Narrator’s words and in the seemingly random sections interspersed throughout these 14 pages. “Let me in,” one of the characters says throughout the story. At least nine threads are mixed and mingled to create this wonderfully layered story.

“At the Site Where Vision is Most Perfect” uses a distant omniscient narrator to tell the story of three individuals who make up a family. The camera/narrator follows each of these individuals but the really cool thing is that the sections are unified not by individual or place but by time.

In the opening section, Matt and Courtney are working on a float. Paragraph. “At this moment, his mother is being handcuffed. Two paragraphs. “Matt’s father is walking across campus…”

This powerful story is a perfect example of the way a story teaches you how to read it.

The ending of the last story of the collection, “The Prosperity of Cities and Desert Places,” will take your breath away:

I am walking to Los Angeles. I am speaking only for myself.
I am singing:
These hands are your hands,
These hands are my hands…
I sing and there is no one here to stop me.

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an equal stillness

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An Equal Stillness, the debut novel by Francesca Kay, who grew up in South-east Asia and India and now lives in Oxford, was one of the best books I read in 2009. My review of this book is now online in Contrary Magazine‘s Winter Issue. An Equal Stillness also won the 2009 Orange Award for New Writers.

I imagine that the inspiration for the UK edition’s book cover came from this passage:

“In her great painting of that time, simply called Santiago, the foreground is a block of saffron broken by a line of deepest blue, above which is a band of blue that is even darker, so dark it might be black if it were not for the light contained in it which magically shines through.”

And a big thank you to all my readers: my stories–”Frosting” and “The Empty Armchair“–were both in Contrary Magazine‘s Top Ten Most Read Stories in 2009!

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first the facts

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Here is the first sentence from Richard Russo‘s novel, Empire Falls, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002:

“The Empire Grill was long and low-slung, with windows that ran its entire length, and since the building next door, a Rexall drugstore, had been condemned and razed, it was now possible to sit at the lunch counter and see straight down Empire Avenue all the way to the old textile mill and its adjacent shirt factory.”

Which is why he is often praised for his sense of place.  But in a July 2, 2004 article in the New York Times, he talked about this.  “I’ve never written nearly as much about place as people seem to think I do.  I just write about class.”

In The Bridge of Sighs, published in 2007, he begins in a completely different manner.  Its first sentence is,

“First, the facts.”

Although I enjoyed both books, I like The Bridge of Sighs even better than Empire Falls.

the street ran on

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img_1292One of my favorite things about William Faulkner‘s Light in August is the language.  His use of repetition is soft and alluring and draws the reader in.   

“He stepped from the dark porch, into the moonlight, and with his bloody head and his empty stomach hot, savage, and courageous with whiskey, he entered the street which was to run for fifteen years.”

“The whiskey died away in time and was renewed and died again, but the street ran on.”

The street running on recurs in the novel–in both language and image.

It should have come as no surprise to me when I recently discovered that Faulkner was also a poet. Apparently he referred to himself as a “failed poet.” Read this and see what you think:

“He thought that it was loneliness which he was trying to escape and not himself. But the street ran on: catlike, one place was the same as another to him. But in none of them could he be quiet. But the street ran on in its moods and phases, always empty…”

And if you’re one of those people (I am) who likes to hear the writer’s speaking voice, you can listen to part of Faulkner’s December 1950 Nobel Prize speech online. In the speech, he says that the only subjects worth writing about are “the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself.”

If you’ve never read Faulkner,I recommend starting with Light in August.

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a good story

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img_1095How do you tell a story? 

First sentence:  “The man arrived after morning prayers.” 

The first paragraph goes on to paint the scene of that morning.  “The man waited, and the boys watched…”

The second paragraph drops back to explain:  “Men often came for children.”  There were some more likely to be chosen.  There were others more likely to be passed over.  “Ren was one of them.”

The third paragraph continues:  “He had no memory of a beginning…”

If you want to read a good story, The Good Thief, by Hannah Tinti, is the book for you.  It is a solid, old-fashioned story–as in, something happens and then something else and then something else.  On Monday night, it won the 2008 John Sargent, Sr. First Novel Prize. 

In a New York Times review, The Good Thief was described as “an American Dickensian tale with touches of Harry Potterish whimsy, along with a macabre streak of spooky New England history.”

I couldn’t put it down.

rough red brick

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img_1047The Gathering, by Irish writer Anne Enright, won the 2007 Man Booker Prize.  I read it in April.  In this novel, the narrator describes her family of origin in terms of the labels we acquire, as families and as individuals in a family.

  • “The Hegartys didn’t start kissing until the late eighties and even then we stuck to Christmas.”
  • “There is always one child who is able, not just to look, but also to see.  The quiet one.”
  • “I am the careful one.”

But what I remember most about this book are the different ways Enright uses memory:

This is what I remember, but that can’t be right:

“It must have been the February of 1968.  I was still eight, Liam was nine, and we were going up to ‘say goodbye’ to Charlie.  I think I knew, even at eight, that you can say goodbye all you like, but when someone is dead they’re not going to say anything back….My memory has them all bundled in shawls; Ada’s back ascending in front of us in corseted black taffeta.  But this is 1968: there would have been patterned headscarves and big-buttoned coats that smelt of the rain.”

I don’t remember that so I must not have been there:

“I don’t remember the hospital.  At a guess, Ada did not take us inside.”

I don’t remember that; it’s not what was important:

“I wish I could remember exactly what he said, but conversation doesn’t stick to my memory of Liam.”

Which gives the novel the air of a memoir, of a struggle for the truth.

I’m trying to nail down my first memory.  Every time I bring the hammer up, it seems to slip away.  I think what I remember is green drinks in glasses and rough red brick.

folded

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img_1043If I weren’t reading all of Rachel Cusk‘s books to look at how her writing develops over time, I would not have finished her sixth book, In the Fold, published in 2005.  As one reviewer wrote, “too little happened to too many people.”  Or another, the book was “so lacking in anything to capture my interest that I couldn’t even finish it.”

There are other opinions:  it was long listed for the 2005 Booker Prize. 

In the Fold is narrated by a man and full of dialogue. Perhaps an important step in a writer’s development is to try something different.  It gives you a reference point:  You do that better than this.  And then you can go boldly forth.

My favorite thing about the book is the name of the country home where most of the action takes place.  It’s called Egypt–no explanation given.  My favorite line refers to Egypt:  “This is our home.  It’s the place that matters, not the people in it.”

Another interesting point:  without realizing I had done it, two of the titles of posts on Rachel Cusk involve circles.  In this novel, the narrator’s wife says, “He’ll come around.”  The narrator then explains that she must be talking about the ‘big wheel,’ a theory whose basis is that “existence is not linear but circular and repetitive.” 

Next in the series, Rachel Cusk’s most recent book, Arlington Park–the novel which prompted me to take this journey.

companion

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Just as Home, a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award in Fiction, has been called a companion to Gilead, this post is a companion to yesterday’s.  Prompted by comments, I wanted to add that if you enjoyed Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson‘s first novel, you might enjoy Home, her latest.  In style of writing, Home more closely resembles Housekeeping, rather than the epistolary slowness of Gilead.  And in sensibility, compare these two passages: 

img_10301From Home: “Glory went up to the attic, the limbo of things that had been displaced from current use but were not in the strict sense useless…Other pious families gave away the things they did not need.  Boughtons put them in the attic, as if to make an experiment of doing without them before they undertook some irreparable act of generosity.”

img_1031From Housekeeping:  “Who would think of dusting or sweeping the cobwebs down in a room used for the storage of cans and newspapers–things utterly without value?  Sylvie only kept them, I think, because she considered accumulation to be the essence of housekeeping, and because she considered the hoarding of worthless things to be proof of a particularly scrupulous thrift.”

And notice the covers–and here I admit I often judge a book by its cover–at least for the few seconds before I open it.  See the curtained window on each.  See how Paul is the only Beatle in bare feet.

I wonder if Robinson’s next novel might not take us inside another person’s home in the same place and the same time.  In other words, I wonder how many ways she can tell the same story, which is in fact not the same story.  And with each telling, if she will manage to show how a story we thought complete was in fact not.

home

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For anyone who enjoyed Gilead, Marilynne Robinson‘s second novel, which won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, you will love her new novel, Home.  For she has just crossed town, so to speak, and turned around to tell us the story from a different porch. 

On page 29 of Gilead, narrated by John Ames, he tells us, “I walked over to Boughton’s to see what he was up to…Glory is there doing everything she can think of to make him comfortable…”  It is here at Boughton’s that most of Home takes place. 

Again in Gilead, on page 86, “Glory has come to tell me Jack Boughton is home.” 

Home is written in the third person from Glory’s point of view.  Although each of these novels is complete in and of itself, together they become two halves of a greater world.

Some of my favorite lines in Home:

“Such times you had!” her father said, as if the present slight desolation were confetti and candy wrappers left after the passing of some glorious parade.”

“The joke seemed to be that once they were very young and now they were very old, and that they had been the same day after day and were somehow at the end of it all so utterly changed.”

“There is so much to be grateful for, words are poor things…”

“How to announce the return of comfort and well-being except by cooking something fragrant.  That is what her mother always did.  After every calamity of any significance she would fill the atmosphere of the house with the smell of cinnamon rolls or brownies, or with chicken and dumplings, and it would mean, This house has a soul that loves us all, no matter what.”

“And here is the world, she thought, just as we left it.”

explaining myself to myself

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What often stands out to me in Richard Russo’s writing is the dialogue. Which makes sense as he is also a screenwriter. Here is a short piece of dialogue from The Bridge of Sighs.

“Mom says you’re writing your life story up there.”

“Nothing quite so grand as that,” I tell him, though it’s true I’ve written far more than I expected to, having underestimated the tug of the past, the intoxication of memory, the attraction of explaining myself to, well, myself.”

It’s simple. It pulls you right in. And the little exposition there at the end has such a beautiful rhythm that I just want to read it out loud over and over again.

Last January, Richard Russo was in Columbus to encourage support for the Columbus Public Library.  On Sunday, the 27th, I was the lucky one who got to drive him back to the Atlanta airport. It’s true.  Richard Russo was trapped in my car for an hour and a half. He could not have been more gracious and pleasant. He signed my books.  He encouraged my writing. He talked about his friendship with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.  If I remember correctly, that friendship started when Paul Newman starred in Nobody’s Fool, another Richard Russo novel that was made into a movie in 1994.  Paul would call Rick to ask about specifics.  How exactly would Sully stand? Where would his hands be?

I’m looking forward to reading Straight Man.  It’s waiting in my tower of books.