Book review: Just Like Dostoyevsky by Barry Rachin

Reviewed for The New Podler Review of Books by Libby Cone.

Having sat down at my computer to sort through the literary fiction on Smashwords, imagine my surprise at finding a winner in my first selection! “Just Like Dostoyevsky” by Barry Rachin is a smart short story about a divorcee, her teenage daughter, and an Irish handyman. Even better, the story is free. Unless, like myself, one has the great good fortune to be married to an engineer who also knows plumbing, certain domestic emergencies arise that call for a handyman. The man in question, Danny O’Rourke, hails from the Emerald Isle and charms mother and daughter with his quiet competence. The dialogue is dead-on. Rachin even manages to fit in flashbacks to a Russian trip the mother had taken the year before. The kid is appropriately flirty, the professor mother reserved. My only complaint was the succession of adjective-comma-adjective-noun phrases, like “curly, brown hair,” “muggy, July warmth,” “leggy, blonde coed.” Nothing that can’t be fixed.

The book is available at Smashwords.

Arguing with Henry by Niall Hunter

Reviewed for The New Podler Review of Books by Libby Cone

Arguing with Henry and Greenberg are both works with 40-year-old narcissistic white male protagonists who drink to assuage their existential angst. Arguing is a book by Niall Hunter; Greenberg is a film by Noah Baumbach. While Ben Stiller's performance in the film is noteworthy, the movie itself drags.

Greenberg is a man of the Eighties. He has fallen off the train of popular culture, except when an opportunity for "hooking up" with a woman he barely knows presents itself; then he is quite up-to-date. I get the symbolism of the dog with autoimmune disease and the distorted animal in the pool; he is self-sabotaging and his goals and desires warped. But so what?

It was quite a surprise to download this book, with its crude cover illustration, and find myself immediately drawn into the story of its parallel protagonist, Henry Flanagan. Married to a woman who finds more and more reasons to be away, having an affair with a younger woman with a need to settle down that is manifested by a wandering eye, Henry drinks and smokes his way through life, enfeebled with narcissism. The book is replete with scenes of drinking, screwing, shitting, and vomiting. Did I mention there is a lot of drinking? Dried secretions and body odors are lovingly described in a way that, if just a little more effusive, would qualify as McCarthyesque.

The prose is deft and hilarious; it limns an Ireland struggling to enter the 21st Century, while obviously looking over its shoulder at the Catholic Church. The baggage of its estimable literary tradition is another burden to anyone with the slightest inclination towards creativity. Henry is on the outs with a columnist manque of his own age, as well as with a younger entertainment tycoon his lover takes a fancy to, one of a handful of twentysomethings he finds himself slyly analyzing; Hunter somehow is able to convey the idea of Henry's genuineness outshining the flash of the phonies.

To the bemused chagrin of us nose-to-the-grindstone types, Henry, like many self-absorbed slobs, is able to function, even excel, in his job. I suppose it stems from his rubbing elbows with what he sees as the lowest cultural common denominator, thus knowing his audience. There is a hidden nugget of genuineness within him that makes his actions believable. Conversely, Roger Greenberg, recently out of a psychiatric facility, protests that "it doesn't define me," all the while making choices and behaving towards women in a way that just screams "crazy."

I would be remiss if I did not mention that this self-published one-dollar book is beautifully edited, with typos I can count on the fingers of one hand, giving lie to the notion that POD means "sloppy." Edit, proofread, and edit some more, my friends!

If you're a huge fan of Ben Stiller, by all means go out and see the movie; he is excellent in it. But if you don't want to see him with a bad brown dye job and you like a little dry humor with your narcissism, skip the film and read Arguing with Henry.

Niall Hunter’s Smashwords page: http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/nhunter

Waiting for Spring * * * *

Waiting For Spring
by R.J. Keller
Available from Amazon

Waiting for Spring opens with an image of a path on which nothing will grow. The earth is just too hard, having been long trodden, to admit new life. Such is the heart of Tess Dyer, the protagonist, who lives in a world marked by emotional abuse and the absence of love. Tess yearns for spring.

The place was hidden from the road by thick, bushy pines and naked maples. The driveway was a little rough but already plowed, which was a good sign. The house itself was white. Two story. Small and very old. Old enough to explain the low rent. Enclosed porch with lots of windows. There was no garage or barn, but there was a decent sized shed beside the house. It was white, too, but looked much newer than the house. And beside that stood a little orchard; five bare, snowy apple trees.

There were no other vehicles in the driveway. I parked facing the orchard, kept the car running. Stared out the window at the trees. The heater was running at full blast. I still shivered. I’d been shivering for five months. No. I’d been shivering longer than that.

My heart was Titanium White. Arctic Wasteland. Hard, trampled soil covered with ice. The frozen orchard seemed to say that it always would be and the tears came. Finally. Stinging and bitter, but quiet like always, and I looked away from the trees, looked down at the dashboard. Oil light flashing, neon red. I stared at it, tried to imagine my engine; tired, hot, low on precious blood. The neon light liquefied, blurred, floated as my eyes filled past the point of choking it all back. I glanced up to let them spill over, hoping I’d be able to dam up what would want to follow. Squinted my eyes against the tears.

And that’s when I saw it.

Bare, icy trees; eerie and still. They almost looked dead, but they were really only sleeping. Waiting for spring. The red light caught in the pool of tears; refracted, projected, and I could see it. I could see what the orchard would look like covered with blossoms. In the spring. Alizarin Crimson, Dusty Pink--starry, superimposed on the wintry scene. Like covering a photo with a clear sheet of plastic then drawing on it with dried out marker; shadowy and transparent. But real. So real.

When her marriage to the small town sports hero ends in a divorce, Tess, an unsuccessful artist making a living as a cleaning lady, moves to a small rural Maine town of New Mills, where the beloved local cleaning lady had been murdered by rampaging teens, to start a new life. Conveniently, her new neighbor, Brian LaChance, happens to be an available attractive male with whom she can start something new. Despite a wound of a broken marriage, Tess finds herself attracted by the small-time charm of the younger man as she tries to fill her life with something. Will she be able to find love or will spring never come? What can break through the hardness of heart?

There are many impressive things about Spring that I want to mention. What impresses me about Waiting for Spring the most is the writing. R.J. Keller is a good writer, as you can tell from the excerpt above, and there are some good lines in the book that are worthy of a good independent film.

But Ashley had a suggestion.
“You can come, Brian. If you want. That way you can keep an eye on her.”
He didn’t even miss a beat. “Nope. We already have plans.”
She looked at me and I gave her an eyebrow.
That’s right, honey. While you’re getting drunk and stoned with your little friends he’ll be in my bed. Fucking me. Stuff that in your training bra.

Another impressive aspect of Spring is the humanity of its characters—Tess and Brian seem human for two reasons. They have personal struggles resulting from understandable yearnings and conflicting emotions. But the two are not the only characters who seem real. All of the characters in the book are trying to make love grow but fail miserably in their attempts, generating only enmity and conflict. All are deeply flawed. Brian's sister, Rachel, struggles with a drug problem that boils over into violence. All are deeply needy, but they are unable to give one another what they need. All have become hardened of heart as a result of being in one another's lives. And all are yearning for rebirth. Perhaps the most awesome moment in terms of character comes at Thanksgiving, when Tess and Cass have a conversation. The contrast between what Tess had been told and what she herself tells Cass reveals how she had evolved as a person in a moving and poignant way. Not only are the characters real, they inhabit a realistically portrayed world populated by secondary characters who seem alive. Someone once said that you should write about that which you know, and R.J. Keller certainly knows the world that she chose to portray in her novel. I think that there are more books to be written about the characters in these two towns.

Waiting for Spring deals with a perennial theme in popular American literature—the yearning for rebirth and the desire for a second chance—in an honest and human way. But there is a way to be too honest, and Spring is not what it could be because it does not stray from reality much. Part of the tragedy of the characters in Spring is their inability or unwillingness to express themselves or to understand others. Tess's tragedy is that she has no actionable goal, and therefore no hope of achieving it. Wanting a new life is not a goal; it is a desire that is dramatically irrelevant until a character particularizes it in terms of a specific goal. She lives a real life, and failures and pain are a part of that life. But we don't want to read about how characters fail or about how life really is. We want to read about the potential for hope expressed through struggle for something that stands for that hope. Characters who hope for something are deliberate in their action. They are always moving toward some goal. Tess isn't acting toward a goal. When Rachel dies, there is nothing she can do to keep Brian in her life. But Tess should have something, some lifeline, that she can use to stay with Brian. She must be able to do something.

Waiting for Spring is a story of lives in the small world of rural Maine, filled with ordinary humanity of flawed men and women as they hope, pray, and suffer their way toward rebirth of spring and new life.

And to Think That He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street by Richard Grayson (A)

Richard Grayson is a prolific writer of over 200 stories, articles, and books. In the 80s, he staged a satiric run for the White House against Ronald Reagan. He has obtained a J.D. degree from University of Florida with honors and is, in addition, a master satirist and a keen observer of the American scene from his own and unique viewpoint. Grayson writes in a deceptively simple style that is, nevertheless, hard to imitate. Using this kind of autobiographical method, bordering on a confessional, Grayson looks through shifting viewpoints (gay and straight; white and black; American and immigrant; young and old) at the people, times, and palaces of a fictional Brooklyn.

In these fictions, Grayson meditates on various topics, mostly race, sexual identity, age, and change by using the device of popular culture, mixing in liberally the icons of pop culture with persons and places from memory to construct a solid literary edifice.

The collection is filled with resonant stories about the lives of ordinary people, and this focus is what makes them interesting and memorable. Somehow, though Grayson's master touch, the ordinary becomes fascinating and highly readable literature. Many of these stories, however, reflect a deep sadness that exists in the heart of the common man and his experience. Nothing seems to happen for the protagonists in these stories, their lives stupefying their subjects. Grayson reminds us with his fiction that our lives are, in the end, rather banal, revolving around the mundane, the ordinary, and the common. At the same time, there seems to be a kind of weird current of apathy that flows beneath the surface of the stories. In the title story, we wonder, for example, whether the narrator is incredibly open-minded about his son's sexuality and the kiss between the boys, or whether he's just too apathetic to care, and we wonder because the title seems to be a kind of subconscious expression of protest by the protagonist. Apathy, or more precisely, a kind of stupefaction, perhaps synergized by the bathos of pop culture, rears its head in "Shirtless Tea-bag Eating White Boys", in which two characters, one stupefied by Haldol, the other just tranquilized by American culture, watch internet videos, which somehow are appropriate for the mentally dysfunctional character and the young elementary school teacher; the first prefers to watch a purple hippo, and the latter prefers to view shirtless tea-bag eating white boy clips.

Some of these stories are biographical, and those are the stories that I like the best. Especially likable are "Branch Libraries of Southeastern Brooklyn", in which Grayson's character reminisces about the libraries that he had known and how they had evolved over the years-this one is probably my favorite story, as I do love libraries, and it seems that Grayson is a true lover of the library as well-and "The Lost Movie Theatres of Southeastern Brooklyn and Rockaway Beach", another story of nostalgia and memory, where we are treated to reminiscences about the various theatres that the author remembers. "1001 Ways to Defeat Green Arrow" deals with change in gay relationships and the longing and emptiness that result. "My Life in The New York Post" is a collection of strange but somehow funny clips from, apparently, the Post regarding a fictional Grayson's plots and schemes.

Other stories that I liked were "In the Sixties", a kaleidoscope-like summary of the Sixties; "Diary of a Brooklyn Cyclones Hot Dog", which deals with the life of a lesbian Uzbek immigrant who is promoted to being the Relish in a Hot Dog Race; and "Mohammad's Therapy Monkey", in which the protagonist, a college student with some issues is assigned a roommate with a pet monkey, which helps him find acceptance and a relationship of his own in a place that he detests.

Grayson chronicles the real through his funny, sometimes sad, but always genuine, if slightly offbeat, fictional world.

Richard Grayson has a website at https://www.richardgrayson.com/
Grayson has been interviewed by Geoffrey Philip.
Grayson's Wikipedia entry is here.

Homefront by Kristen Tsetsi (A)

Homefront deals with the emptiness in Mia’s life after her boyfriend, Jake, is deployed to Iraq. A literary novel, it shies away from lurid plot in favor of the use of language to evoke the protagonist’s inner struggle. Kristen Tsetsi is certainly in great command of language and craft, which should not be surprising—her fiction has been published in Storyglossia and other respectable venues.

Mia’s struggle with herself, manifested in loneliness and confusion, is a common one, affecting many women whose men are deployed abroad. But Mia’s struggle is made harder not by the potential temptations to her fidelity to Jake but by the breadcrumbs left here and there that lead Mia to question just how well she really knows Jake. Consequently, a sense of foreboding weaves through the story, revealing that the relationship between Mia and Jake is troubled, uncertain, and perhaps ultimately fatally flawed. Certainly it seems to be missing in action in the end of the story.

There is a kind of apathy, too, in Mia’s character. She seems to wax and wane, developing a relationship with Donny “Doc” Donaldson, a Vietnam era alcoholic vet, yet this relationship does not go anywhere. Mia seems stuck, unsure of where she stands with Jake, and unwilling to outright betray him.

Like the war front, Homefront is a place of struggle, this one taking place in the hearts and minds of those left behind, and like in real combat, feelings and relationships can become missing in action. This is a thoughtful and elegant book; the writing immersive, evocative, and polished; the structure reflecting the sense of dislocation and of something missing in Mia’s life.

She is one of them, one of the others. The man she cares about is here, safe with her. She can’t understand about dusk, the sun’s evil teasing. The time of evening too far from sleep and an ‘x’ across another day, but too close to darkness and the hollow air of no conversation that amplifies the TV sounds of over-acted dialogue and rehearsed applause. Denise doesn’t know the taunting, subtle fade that cues the lighting of yellow windows, the drawing of curtains to hide people living normal lives, eating dinner, yelling top floor to bottom about who wants milk and where are the scissors. She would have little to say about time spent staring out the window at shapeless clouds and cracked sidewalks and meticulously trimmed shrubs, all of it so cheerful and commonplace while over the rooftops and trees and a plane-ride away, “everyday” is mission-planning and mortar fire and grass is something they might find tucked in the fold of a letter.

Prayer at Rumayla by Charles Sheehan-Miles (A+)

Available at Amazon.com

Profoundly moving, raw, exceptionally well-executed vision into one man's troubled heart as he deals with betrayal and the complexities of life after returning from the 1991 tour in Iraq.

In Prayer at Rumayla you will find an expertly written psychological thriller charting the slowly building resentment and psychological degradation of the protagonist, Private Brown. The story begins with betrayal and disappointment, this theme informing nearly every relationship that the protagonist has: that with his lover, with the Army life in the States, personified by a new and overly harsh sergeant, and finally with his remaining family. Brown is looking for a place of rest, for open arms after being wearied by combat, but finds no safe harbor-everyone, seemingly, is living for themselves, their lives too full to allow Brown even a slightest foothold:

In my room, I get another shock. Everything is gone. My clothes, books, my photo album. Chris, what about my diaries! What the hell did she do with them! I yank open the closet door - empty. The other one down the hall is filled with towels and blankets. I throw it all out on the floor, searching for my things. I don't believe this. Seven years of journals gone - what kind of monster is she? I sink to the floor and put my head in my hands. I wish I could cry.

What happens to such a man—a man who can find no rest in those who should give him peace? Indeed, having been altered by the experiences of war, can Brown ever find peace again? These questions permeate Prayer, with hints of violence presented as dangling causes, bits of dialogue, about killing the sergeant. But the violence is not something that Brown wants, it erupts of its own volition, an ugly monster created by his past, leaving Brown powerless to stop it.

Staring at the road ahead of me, I wonder what will happen. Jesus, I think I really hurt him. I couldn't stop myself; I just got so angry. I don't want to hurt anybody. I don't want to hurt anybody. I don't know what I'm going to do.

Unlike in many novels dealing with violence, violence in Prayer is well earned, evolving from the broken hearts and shattered dreams of the characters, being their desperate cry for help, a last stab back at the world that turns a cold shoulder to them. We understand why Brown is the way he is, and we even, if possible, feel a bit of sympathy with him: Brown is lost; having survived the close knit lifestyle of combat soldier, he returns home to find a void. And he's not himself anymore, but a different man, one that he no longer understands.

Will he be able to find a foothold into a new life or will his life spin out of control and he end up crashing into the ground? Just when you think that Prayer is about to offer a cheap resolution, something by-the-numbers, you find that the ending is much more nuanced and thought out, evolving out of the story and the characters in it.

Prayer is easily one of the most impressive books reviewed in this blog. The writing is spectacular, the kind you'd expect to find in a mainstream novel, and this is somewhat disappointing because it demonstrates that mainstream publishing does not always publish books that deserve to be published.

The Mad Days of Me: Escaping Barcelona by Henry Martin (C)

Cover: interesting.
Available: Amazon.com

The story opens with the arrival of the protagonist in Barcelona. He turns out to be a runaway who has spent some time wandering about Europe. In Barcelona, his life takes a marked turn for the worse when he's attacked, robbed, and raped, leaving him homeless and wandering in the streets. This story has some potential that is not fully realized because of poor plot construction and some editing problems.

The first problem lies with the fact that we don't know who the protagonist is. The story gains nothing by keeping this unclear. Details are the lifeblood of good fiction, and they are a bit hazy in this novel. For example, is the protagonist European or an American? This has some consequence on the plot, as you don't need a passport to travel between EU nations if you are from one of the EU member states. The whole consulate scene, as a result of lack of details, is somewhat unbelievable.

Details are also essential because they evoke mood, tone, and theme; the very first page, the character arriving at the Barcelona train station, should therefore be much more detailed: we should experience this place, but we don't, as there are only hints of the place and the people who go through it. This was a great opportunity for a detailed description since the protagonist is new to this place, and so the author can legitimately insert a bit of exposition and description. There are other detail issues, as when, for instance, the protagonist files a police report despite not being able to speak the language. The lack of details really undermines the suspension of disbelief.

More serious problems, however, involve the plot. The story suggests that the protagonist will be trying to leave Barcelona. Great. Yet where will he go? He has run away from home, so what's his next stop? The destination is unclear, and this lack of clarity makes the plot weak and directionless. In any good story, literary or otherwise, the protagonist must have some goal, some task that he must accomplish in order to get what he wants. The goal and the task must be clearly defined and all action must somehow relate to this goal/task. What is the task here—to get the passport? (But why does he need the passport, if he has no specific destination anyway? I mean, why not just stay in Barcelona?) For the sake of argument, let's say his goal is to get the passport, but then the question becomes—how does he go about it? What's his plan, his strategy, to get the passport back? Without such clarity of tasks, goals and strategies, there is no tension or suspense because complications that come do not threaten any plan, goal, or strategy. Complications only work if they become treats to the achievement of something of vital importance to the protagonist.

Another plot issue is the lack of genuine conflict. For example, the protagonist goes to the police after his ordeal, and… nothing happens. Well, what should happen—something unexpected, something that creates a problem in his quest to get his passport, if that's his goal. In Code to Zero, by Ken Follett, we have a very similar situation, and we can look to that novel to see how obstacles create conflict and action. The protagonist in Follett's book wakes up in a public bathroom, apparently having lost all memory of who he is. His goal, naturally, is to find out who he is. Where does he go? The police. So what will happen? The police will help him out, right? Wrong. This is a story, and in a story complications and problems happen—characters almost never get what they want or expect. Instead of helping him, the police officer beats him up because he's wearing bum's clothes. How's that for a twist? As a result of this, the protagonist goes on a quest to steal suitable clothes before trying to resume his search for his identity.

In Mad Days of Me, the protagonist does not encounter any trouble with the police. It would be more dramatic if he did. It would certainly create conflict. There is no trouble again latter on when a good Samaritan offers some help. But what if this good Samaritan wanted to use the protagonist somehow? Maybe he would make him an offer of some kind—do something dangerous and or illegal and I will give you ten thousand euros, something along those lines. Of course, I realize that the author's intention was to write a more literary novel focused on the psychological aspects of the protagonist's predicament. But I think, and this is only my opinion, that literary writing requires more, not less, attention to plot, character goals, motivations, and other aspects of craft and story construction.

Another problem is that the book is not written in clear scenes. Scenes are dramatic exchanges between characters, each of which wants something out of the other. The scenes in this novel are not very clear, and this creates a very diffuse story. When you look at, for example, House of Sand and Fog, by Andre Dubus, which is a literary thriller, you see, in the very first page, great scene writing: we are in a specific place, the characters doing specific things. Each scene in that book evolves into another, advancing the movement of the plot. Such clear scenes are lacking in this novel. The turning point of the story, the robbery and rape scene, is not written as a scene, so its impact is lessened.

Finally, there is no real character development. The protagonist hangs out with all these homeless characters, but he doesn't develop a relationship with any of them. He doesn’t really change either, and this is because he doesn't develop any relationships. You can argue that a literary novel does not need plot; this is a valid point; what you can't argue for is that a literary novel does not need character development. And, the bottom line is, when you create character development, you find yourself creating plot and suspense and tension, which arise out of the character interactions.