William T. Vollmann – The Rainbow Stories

If the community of contemporary writers is like a school, William Vollmann is the weird kid who sits in the corner drawing dead bodies and aimlessly unbending paper clips over and over again. The Rainbow Stories was Vollmann’s second work, published in 1989, and borrows the structure of the colours of the rainbow to tell a series of unconnected stories concerned with outcasts, victims, freaks, losers, dropouts and those who exist on society’s fringes. “The White Knights” uses Vollmann’s trademark semi-reportage style to tell the reader of a community of neo-Nazi skinheads in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district in the 1980s, and “Ladies and Red Lights” employs the same technique for the prostitutes of the area (Vollmann has spent a lot of time writing about prostitutes in his career, including a book, Whores For Gloria, on the subject). In both cases, what marks out Vollmann’s writing is that it is not what one would expect: compassion. There is no tenderness, no “understanding” of how these people came to be, and little empathy: Vollmann is harder on the reader, less straightforward, and totally non-judgemental (in any direction). These stories are morally blank, direct, honest – what we make of them is up to us. As the book develops his palette expands: “Scintillant Orange” retells the Christian myth of Abednego, Shadrach and Mesach being thrown into the burning flames in ancient Babylon with a curious modern sheen; while “The Yellow Sugar” uses a medieval Muslim myth to prick hypocrisy and violence (no doubt inspired by the time Vollmann spent in Afghanistan as a young man). “The Green Dress” (subtitled “A Pornographic Tale”) is the story of a fetishist who steals a woman’s dress which he sexually worships, while “The Indigo Engineers” is a quasi-futuristic story about dead animals being stuffed with mechanical parts to fight brutally for entertainment – it’s Robot Wars, ten years before Phillippa Forrester and Craig Charles ever heard of it.

Perhaps the most emblematic story, though, is the longest in the collection: “The Blue Yonder”, a tale – inspired, like many here, by real life  - of a mentally disturbed and possibly schizophrenic man, who, in his night-time guise as “The Zombie”, stalks and brutally murders homeless people, stuffing their mouths with cleaning fluid before decapitating them and leaving their heads in dumpsters. As the “day-time” version of the killer, known as “The Other”, starts to become dimly aware of what his alter-ego is doing, their battle of wills takes place amongst a backdrop of the winos, junkies and alcoholics who populate the park benches and underpasses of San Francisco. These are, then, stories of the dispossessed – and here we mean the truly dispossessed, those whose dispossession makes us not uncomfortable but often glad. There are no easy answers, no quickly identifiable “victims” and “oppressors”, often those dispossessed here are bad people, violent, brutal and cruel. They are stories of those who seek to dominate and wield power over others, who themselves victimise and Otherize groups around them. He dares us to empathise with these scenes from nightmares, dares us not to look away (a five-page description of a tramp’s autopsy in “The Blue Yonder” will turn the stomach), challenges our own moral and societal assumptions. If there is a writer who immediately springs to mind reading Vollmann, it is William S. Burroughs, in his nightmarish depictions of violence, brutality and the very fringes of socially acceptable behaviour.

The writing here is frequently grandiloquent and poetic: sometimes to Vollmann’s credit, sometimes to the mere bafflement of the reader, and I’d be lying if I didn’t confess that there were times I wished the narrative onwards and was, well, confused and – at worst – bored by Vollmann’s Pynchonian flights of prosodic fancy. The stories here bear great potential, but next I think I’d like to read something more recent of his work; I hear that Europe Central is a fine novel. In the meantime, to read something original, dark and unsettling, one could do a lot worse than checking out The Rainbow Stories.

J. D. Salinger – For Esmé – With Love & Squalor, And Other Stories

The British edition of this slim collection of short stories is called For Esmé – With Love & Squalor, And Other Stories, but it is more commonly known by the title under which it was published in America, 9 Stories. With most of the stories here having appeared in The New Yorker, the collection itself was published in 1953 to instant acclaim. Salinger is in fine fettle for the majority of these pieces, most of which stretch for perhaps ten or fifteen pages. His concerns remain familiar: the suffocation of modern existence; a quest for some kind of meaningful truth in the face of materialist, cynical, ironic culture;  and the precociousness (and preciousness) of the types of people he writes about: jaded ex-college types, lazily downing highballs and waving a too-clever hand at the vista of civilization before them.

The collection begins with what might be its high point: “A Perfect Day For Bananafish”, in which Salinger once again focusses on the Glass family (as in his superlative Franny & Zooey), in this case the unstable brother Seymour and his wife Muriel, lodged in a coastal hotel. As Muriel fixes buttonholes and chats on the telephone with her mother whilst lacquering her nails, Seymour lounges on the beach until a young girl he knows invites him for a swim. The story is touching, funny, profound and finally shocking, examining a whole culture and how we as humans interact with that culture in one fell swoop. The collection almost (but not quite) tops it with the second story, “Uncle Wiggily In Connecticut”, in which two hip ex-college roommates, Eloise and Mary Jane,  spend a lazy afternoon drinking, discussing their past, their husbands and their children. It is quietly devastating and demonstrates the sheet heart which underlies all Salinger’s writing. Other stories tread similar emotional terrain: “Just Before The War With The Eskimos” is quintessential Salinger, peopled with bored bright young things, disaffected and yet more than those cliches suggest – always truly human and sad. Meanwhile, the titular story is set in wartime and narrates the memories one young soldier has of a girl he knew whilst training in England. While this is the only time war is explicitly framing the narratives, it looms darkly behind a good deal of the action in these stories; hazy, violent, dark, sinister, unspoken war. “Pretty Mouth And Green My Eyes” is a story of betrayal, friendship and forgiveness, and the unusual and striking “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period” details a few months in the life of a precocious young artist, employed to give correspondence advice to budding artists. He becomes peculiarly taken with the work of one nun, writing her elaborate letters of praise and advice which ultimately lead to her being removed from the program (“the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid“, writes Salinger in this story).

Many of the key themes which dominate the collection: a desire for some kind of meaning which transcends the quotidian, boredom, mental illness, precociousness – are focussed in the final story, “Teddy”, the tale of a young prodigy on a luxury cruise with his family. The story is ambiguous and leaves much to the reader, ending the collection on a thoughtful note – perhaps appropriate for a collection which is rich and serious in subject, and a treat for anyone who enjoys Salinger’s work.

Raymond Carver – What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

The American Midwest has long been a source of inspiration for writers wishing to mine the troves of how humdrum daily activity masks a wealth of human emotion, but rarely has it been conjured up with such economy and starkness as by Raymond Carver. Long regarded as one of the great writers of short stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love was his second collection, originally published in 1981. It comprises seventeen stories, some no more than three pages, and the longest – the titular story – clocking in at a mere fifteen pages or so. Carver wasted no words in his stories, pulling away everything until what remains is bare and honest in the manner of Hemingway or Ishiguro, leaving us to do the interpreting. In this manner he resembles Chekhov, one of his great inspirations; rather than the wintry Russian landscape, however, in Carver we witness the emotional backstories of suburban heartland America: the lawns, sunscreens and fishing rods; the gin and the hollow marriages, the concealed frustrations, the long roads, the helplessness. So, “Popular Mechanics” and “Tell The Women We’re Going” depict a disturbing, brutal misogyny manifested from the most banal conditions, stories like “Mr Coffee and Mr Fixit”, “Everything Stuck To Him” and “I Could See The Smallest Things” detail the secret longings and desperations of conventional, often lifeless marriages, and the title story takes us through domestic abuse, casual sexism and the mysteries of lifelong togetherness – all in Carver’s spare, quietly devastating prose.

Not every story is a masterwork: I was uninspired by the tale of jealousy and fishing in “The Third Thing That Killed My Father Off”, and “Viewfinder” – featuring a peripatetic photographer with hooks for hands – was an unusual exercise for Carver, stepping somewhat out of the defiant micro-realism he is dedicated to elsewhere, not entirely successfully. Other stories are superlative: “After the Denim” is a moving and pointed tale of seniority versus adolescence which rends the heart while “Sacks” is a hauntingly ambiguous tale of infidelity and regret. But what is most impressive about Carver is that he knows which blanks he should fill in and which blanks we should fill in, and which blanks will be filled in automatically. This is the art of the short story, an art over which Carver wields confident power.

Alan Bennett – The Uncommon Reader

The trademark Northern wit, the dry melancholia and philosophizing that distinguish Alan Bennett are all present in 2007′s charming novella The Uncommon Reader. Perhaps even “novella” is stretching things: the book is shorter than The Crying of Lot 49 but possibly longer than The Dead. I shall list it under “short fiction” for this reason. This charming story centres around the late blooming of the Queen’s passion for literature – beginning with an accidental trip to the Westminster travelling library, Her Majesty begins to read more and more and more. After the initial disappointment of reading Ivy Compton Burnett, she perseveres and eventually progresses to the likes of Anita Brookner, Henry James, Jane Austen and Marcel Proust. Eventually, the Queen is reading so much, and so enthusiastically, that she begins to neglect her public duties, beginning to question her “properness” and her life spent in duty – her equerries and aides attempting to find a way to stop this deviant behaviour. As well as the inevitable-but-welcome jokes about “old queens” (this is Alan Bennett, after all), there are gentle jibes at the fatuousness of Prince Philip and the cosseting of the monarch – her epic wardrobe, chosen each day with the most fastidious attention to detail – and the fact that the books in Buckingham Palace’s own library are kept on shelves, locked away behind grills – like convicts. Bennett also includes some more thoughtful points; for example, the monarch finds it difficult to understand Jane Austen because the minutiae of social distinctions are lost on a woman for whom all other people are in a class below her. These and other such observations make The Uncommon Reader delightful short reading.

Of course, the story is really a defence and analysis of reading literature; Her Majesty finds hitherto unknown wells of empathy and feeling for fellow people through her reading; she begins to treat her servant more equally and recognise their humanity in a deeper sense; she begins to examine the status of her own life, and to reflect thoughtfully and critically upon it, to the extent where she feels she must begin to write; for after all, “reading only takes one so far”. She also begins to neglect real, lived experiences in favour of settling down with a book, and here Bennett poetically sums up the double-edged sword of a life spent in literature: “Had she been asked if reading her enriched her life she would have had to say yes, undoubtedly, though adding with equal certainty that it had at the same time drained her life of all purpose.”  Literature, Bennett suggests, can change lives, and what changes lives changes history. The story makes its way to an almost inevitable conclusion, bringing satire, charm and wit along the way.

David Foster Wallace – Girl With Curious Hair

“Life, the truth, will be its own commercial. Advertising will finally have arrived at the death that’s been its object all along. And, in Death, it will of course become Life.” – Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way

Girl With Curious Hair was the first collection of short fiction by David Foster Wallace, published in 1989. It displays all of the staggering talent, breathless intelligence and maddening self-indulgence that characterized the body of his literature. The themes and tropes which made up his voice are loudly on display; the numbing bootprint of corporate language, the constant attempt to negiotiate sincerity in a world which ridicules it, the Baudrillardian awareness of simulacra combined with a healthy disgust for the torpor of metafiction and the masturbatory excesses of dry postmodernism.

The stories vary in both length and subject matter; My Appearance charts a TV starlet’s first meeting with late-night sincerity-mortician David Letterman, while Little Expressionless Animals (perhaps the finest story in the collection) follows Julie Smith, a three-year reigning champion on TV show Jeopardy!, eventually unseated by her severely autistic brother. The titular story juxataposes hip punk cynicism with the bland amoral horror of Young Republicanism, while Luckily the Account Representative Knew CPR details the emptiness felt by two victims of corporate mentality (themes Wallace would later return to in his superlative collection Oblivion). The least successful stories here are, in fact, the more experimental ones; Wallace’s toying with narrative voice in stories like John Billy and Say Never don’t ring wholly true, and the final novella-length story, Westward The Course of Empire Takes Its Way, which intersperses the narrative of a group of ex-McDonald’s commercial actors meeting together in the middle of Illinois with commentary on the text itself (and on the ultimate pointlessness of said commentary), drives metafiction – and occasionally, the reader’s patience – to its limits.

Wallace takes the generation of American writers who came before him –  Barthelme, Updike, Roth, Barth, Auster, to some extent Pynchon – and spits them out like the tobacco he was allegedly fond of chewing, as being fundamentally inadequate to deal with the emotional realities of living in the world they themselves helped define. This is Wallace’s greatest legacy as a writer, to be able to articulate not only what the supposed “postmodern” is, but to engage deeply with how it feels to be a 21st century Western human being; the sense of being broken and lost inside in some indefinable way whilst being more than aware of your own privilege, luck and basic understanding that everyone else feels as alone as you do. That postmodern tropes such as advertising proliferation, self-referentiality, simulacra and irony aren’t simply brute facts: they make us feel something, something nameless to which Wallace was acutely attuned. And to do all of this while making you laugh out loud? That’s genius.

P. G. Wodehouse – (Jeeves & Wooster)

This review/commetary is actually borne out of reading several of Wodehouse’s Jeeves books, namely Thank You, Jeeves; The Code of the Woosters; The Inimitable Jeeves; and Carry On, Jeeves. Wodehouse’s Jeeves books are near-innumerable, of course, and this review will merely sketch an overview of their pleasures.

Noted depressive Hugh Laurie (now, sadly, best known as misanthropic medical Sherlock Holmes Dr Gregory House, and who memorably played Bertie Wooster in the definitive TV Wodehouse adaptations alongside erstwhile comedy partner Stephen Fry) once remarked that Wodehouse saved his life at University during bleak spells, and I can understand why. Doctors should prescribe chapters of these books for depressed patients; a story is enough to lift even the dampest of spirits. For those who may not know, the Jeeves stories follow the travails of upper-class fop Bertie Wooster and his ingenious valet Jeeves, as Bertie becomes involved in convoluted engagements and adventures in 1920s London, New York and various stately homes in the Home Counties. Although Wodehouse can be read as a satire on the general cluelessness of the English aristocracy (and these stories, if nothing else, are definitively English), and while, indeed, that theme remains a constant background concern, it is best to read Wodehouse as sheer pleasure. I challenge anybody not to guffaw loudly whilst reading these books. Bertie’s world is one of thieving policemen’s helmets, putting bets on the local village Sports Day, heaving pieces of bread at his equally dim chums at the Drones Club, extricating himself from embarrassing situations aboard yachts, and generally making an ass of himself amongst the dithering high and mighty; all tended to, of course, by the steady hand of Jeeves. His friends, enemies and formidable aunts – with superb names such as Cyril Bassington-Bassington, Bingo Little, Gussy Fink-Nottle, Barmy Fotheringay-Phipps, Honoria Glossop, Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright, J. Washburn Stoker, Roderick Spode, Boko Fittleworth and good old Chuffy –  become involved in absurd love triangles, require the theft of antique cow-creamers and the handing out of prizes at Market Snodsbury Grammar School, with inevitably complex and hilarious consequences (I would wager reasonably decent sums of money that Larry David has read Wodehouse, as the satire of social mores and intricate relationship plotlines bear much in common with Seinfeld).

There are few pleasures more delicious in life than settling down of a summer’s afternoon, Pimms in hand, the thwack of leather on willow sailing over the treetops, and opening up a Jeeves story. Quintessentially English, always a joy and guaranteed to brighten any day.

Anaïs Nin – Delta of Venus

Delta of Venus is a collection of erotic stories, written by Nin for a collector of erotic literature. Although the writing of these stories began as a purely financial necessity, it has become – arguably – Nin’s most enduring literary legacy – her erotica. There is a second volume of erotic stories available, called Little Birds.

What separates a work such as Delta of Venus from common-or-garden smut (which certainly has its place) is that it succeeds on a level far beyond “does it turn you on?” The true power of Nin’s work, in the final analysis, is not that it is erotic, or that it is aesthetically beautiful and superbly  written (although it is undoubtedly all of those things) but that it is transformative. What we experience when we read Anaïs Nin is an account of how to transform human experience into total aesthetic awareness, how to elevate our own lives and synthesise it with art – connecting the prose and the passion, to paraphrase E. M. Forster.

In the Preface to Delta of Venus, Nin describes how she wrote an angry letter to the anonymous recipient of her erotica, who had been requesting “less poetry, less analysis” and more sex. She chastises him for not grasping the uniqueness of every sexual experience and the whole world of emotions, sensations and pleasures that comes from recognising this context. And indeed, she conjures up a cavalcade of sexual encounters in Delta of Venus, whose short stories contain tenderness, romance, brutality, cruelty, voyeurism, exhibitionism, anonymity, love, and whose characters include artists, artisans, models, whores, adventurers and aristocrats.  The grace of Nin’s prose renders even the most callous and base encounters beautiful, and the detail she pays to each and every detail of the characters and their contexts only serves to heighten the eroticism; this is part of Nin’s burgeoning, nascent mission to create a female erotica, to tear the definition of the Erotic out of the hands (and the pens) of men and develop a sense of written female sensuality, a language of the female experience of sex. Every detail – perfume, a man’s hands or smile, the windows in a room, rouge and mascara – and every emotional state form part of this tapestry of sensuality, and contribute to this aesthetic experience. It is in this respect that Nin’s prose is transformative, and this is the most valuable aspect of the superb eroticism of Delta of Venus.