The Cloven by R. Muir

As it is October, I decided to find something dark in the slush pile. The Cloven fits the bill.

It is 1987. Malcolm Poole, an unpublished writer (self-publishing in this time means going down to Kinko's), answers a personal ad (as there is no World Wide Web, there are no online dating sites) from someone seeking a writer and asks that he describe his "heart's ideal." The 666 P.O. Box is a dead giveaway to the reader but not Poole. I'm not giving anything away by telling you that the Devil itself (for Muir's Satan is a hermaphrodite) has set this trap. But unlike most, if not all, sold-your-soul-to-the-Devil stories, Satan is in the foreground of the story instead of being relegated to a walk on role. You see, Satan has its reasons for picking Poole.

Poole is in the midst of writing what he feels will be the novel that finally lands him a publishing contract. A good deal of The Cloven is this manuscript: a story about a UC Berkeley professor named Mortimer who teaches an ethics class. The use of torture factors pretty heavily in his lectures. Willis Rutherford, a grad student auditing his class, is distraught as his girlfriend, Tamara, is missing. Willis has a vague empathic ability which proves to be both blessing and curse. While he suspects Mortimer knows something about Tamara's disappearance, he isn't certain that he isn't the one who's to blame.

Beaten down with repeated failure to get any sort of attention from the publishing industry, Poole's confidence is a mask which Muir tears away to reveal a troubled and yet possibly disturbed man. The reader doesn't know whether to pity or revile him. To further complicate things, Muir calls into question how much of Poole is in Professor Mortimer. Poole reflects on his unhappy childhood and gender confusion while Mortimer does the same. While the two characters' circumstances are different, there are enough similarities that Muir keeps you guessing until the very end.

Muir's Satan is no misunderstood dark prince. It is an angry Beast with nothing but anger for God and contempt for the human race. Muir provides visceral details whenever it is in the room with Poole. Its rant against God is well thought out and demonstrates a clear unblinking arrogance of ego.

At times, Muir resorts to unconventional writing styles: poetry, paragraph long sentences and screenplay-like setting of scenes. While these might be dismissed as errors by an inexperienced writer, it isn't the case here. Muir deliberately experiments with writing conventions as someone who still sees literature as an art form and not mere entertainment. At times, I found the paragraph long sentences tiring, but Muir's heart is in the right place and should be given credit for being brave enough to wander outside the norm.

The Cloven defies the "sell your soul" mold and provides an unconventional and unflinching look at the darkness within humanity. Strong characterization drives this unsettling psychological analysis of its protagonist. Muir doesn't shy away from the graphic, whether it be sex, torture or death though it isn't done for shock value. Instead, how characters respond to it determines how readers will respond to them.

March 2011 Smashwords Conveyor Belt

I picked out these pieces in the first week of March and only now am able to review them, not only due to being involved in a move but also due to the sweetness of some of the candies coming down the belt. I think the caliber of Smashwords submissions is improving.

Here Today by Simon Groth is a novel about a woman doing a short-term gig as an occupational therapist in a palliative ward. It takes place in Australia. The protagonist, Astrid, is bunking with a friend, Leith, who herself has become paralyzed from the waist down, and who deals with it by dressing and behaving like Lindsay Lohan. Astrid has self-esteem issues, but does some good work with the mostly elderly clientele, and with a famous writer who has suddenly become locked in by a stroke. The theme of the book is communication; sometimes this is expressed with slightly heavy-handed metaphors, as when Astrid bites her tongue seriously enough to require medical attention, but overall the interplay between her, her patients, and her friend is handled very well. The narrative explores the lies we tell to ourselves and to others, and the struggle to communicate truthfully that some never win. It was an enjoyable book overall.

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The Empress Rose by Chris Eastvedt held my attention for many pages, until the constant info-dump of material about the superiority of hydroponic farming wore me down. At my new digs, a front and back yard with scruffy grass are challenging me to revitalize them organically, but I doubt you want to hear much about the three-bin method of composting or the pros and cons of corn gluten meal. But Rose doesn't stop. At a farmers' market, after she has explained to other farmers in excruciating detail how her methods are superior, she starts all over again preaching to a restaurateur. I have been accused of doing the same thing over topics I am passionate about; I have learned that it is a quick way to bore people conversationally, and it sure is a good way to bore the reader if one is not careful.

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Siding the House by Michael Jasper is a short vignette about a poor African-American family living down South who try to preserve a little joie de vivre in the face of threatening monotony and casual racism. The story is narrated by turns by Kanita, the little daughter, all brightness and speed; her depressed mother; her toothless grandmother, who tries to keep up morale by constantly making candy (an imaginative example of self-defeating behavior); and Bobby Ray, the developmentally delayed brother. Their house is being covered with siding by two young white men who seem to illustrate the downside of attempts at upward mobility in a racist system. Kanita disowns the siding, calling it “ugly,” and manages to hold onto her self-esteem. Beautifully written.

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Tim the Tale Teller by Timothy Conerson: "By 2010 President Obama was constantly looking for terrorist in every corner of the globe. While cities and towns in the United States crumbled, Chinese computer programmers began to create a virus that paralyzed the weapon systems in the U.S. All combat took place hand to hand, gun to gun. The people of the United States were not particularly patriotic during that time so it was easy for the Chinese military to occupy the U.S."

This is from “The Peoples [sic] Republic,” the first of several short stories. I think he means “terrorists.” This would have worked so much better if set in the distant future, with names changed (and text edited; there are many typos and grammatical errors). The year 2010 has come and gone, and I see no dearth of people who consider themselves patriotic, from the Tea Partiers to the strikers in Wisconsin. The author really liked his own book; he gave it five stars on Amazon.

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Chewing on Pen Caps by Cloud Buchholz. I think this is. A type of experimental fiction. Because when the narrative is. In the POV of. Or about the protagonist. Lemon Anderson. The structure reverts. To sentence fragments. But it's difficult to read. And no substitute for character development. Which may happen eventually. But not soon enough for me.

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If you find explicit sexual content unpleasant, read no further.

This is Butte. You Have Ten Minutes by Craig Lancaster and Gunshot Stigmata by Scott C. Rogers, if I had them in paperback, would probably smell of stale cigarette smoke and dried beer, with covers splotched with dried secretions whose origin I might not want to know. The Lancaster book looks at the trajectories of the lives of several people in Montana, down on their luck, and in one case, in prison. There is a lot of riding of Greyhound buses, furtive and fast screwing in a bus station restroom, and the exchange of a blow job for a lift with a trucker. The prose is intense but smooth, like good black coffee. The characters are honed by experience, mostly bad. Any residual loyalty or vulnerability is tested or betrayed. The whole narrative is bathed in yellowish sodium streetlight.

Rogers' book is different, in that its unreliable narrator is usually stoned and always insane. A damaged product of the foster care system, he plays guitar until his incapacity to bear life leads him to shoot himself in the hand, hence the title. He does try to find love; an uninhibited male view of sex runs rampant here and is refreshing. Rogers writes about sex and the ever-present undertone of aggression, like Charles Bukowski on steroids: “The mole that hid just on the inside of her right thigh. Whenever I ate her out I always kissed it goodbye afterwards, pulling up with a chin wet like a lion fresh from a kill.” The novella is in many short, disjointed chapters that jump around like the disordered thoughts of a severely shattered soul. Very well done.

The Reader

The Reader
Bernhard Schlink
224 pages
Vintage (1999)

Michael Berg, 15, is on his way home from school in post-World War II Germany when he falls ill and is befriended by the 36-year-old Hanna who takes him home. When he recovers many weeks later, he dutifully brings her flowers in appreciation, and the two become lovers. The relationship, at first purely physical, deepens when Hanna takes an interest in Michael’s education, insisting that he study hard and attend classes. Soon, their meetings take on a more meaningful routine in which after lovemaking Michael reads aloud from the classics. There are hints of Hanna's darker side: one inexplicable moment of violence over a minor misunderstanding, and the fact that Michael knows nothing of her life other than that she collects tickets on the streetcar. Hanna leaves the city abruptly and mysteriously, and Michael does not see her again until years later, as a law student, he sits in on her case when she is being tried as a Nazi criminal.

The Reader explores Germany's guilt-ridden relationship with its own past by objectifying it in the sexual and emotional coupling of a 15-year-old boy and a 36-year-old woman. On the face of it, that doesn't sound like the premise for one of the most engaging pieces of Holocaust fiction available, but it is. Far from eroticizing Nazism or trivializing the Holocaust, using the metaphor of a human relationship makes them both more accessible. Schlink provides a way into the unique postwar experience of the German people by relating it to things we have all experienced: guilt and romantic love. Issues and events which usually repel or dismay us with their enormity are taken out of the zones of History and Philosophy and reconfigured on a human, interpersonal scale - the scale on which they actually happened, and on which they must be confronted if we are ever to understand them fully.

I was surprised and moved to find a novel that treats the Holocaust in this way; a novel that risks being misunderstood in order to foster understanding. The erotic aspect of the novel is, in the end, a minor one and hardly the point: it's about so much more than that. Through careful characterization and plot development, Schlink manages not only to make plain the ease with which German civilians were drawn into unspeakable roles, but also to explore the difference between a legal conviction and real justice, between retribution and recompense, and, most importantly, the almost insoluble situation in which Germans born postwar find themselves - laden with guilt for things they did not do and for which they cannot possibly atone.

Interestingly, Schlink's book also becomes a sustained yet subtle commentary on the function of literature and literacy as ways of recording and recovering the past. Those interested in this subtext might like to read next W. G. Sebald's On The Natural History of Destruction which explores the historical unwillingness, and therefore the contemporary inability, of German literature to deal with the terrorist victimization of German civilians at the hands of the Allies, e.g. the bombing of Dresden. Anyone unfamiliar with W. G. Sebald’s work should read all of it. Immediately.

For all its high intent, and equally high achievement, The Reader is almost an easy read. Schlink's language (or Carol Brown Janeway's translation, at least) is smooth, spare and precise. Schlink's subject is dignified by such straightforwardness.

IM by Rick R. Reed (B)

A serial killer targeting gay men is on the loose in Rick R. Reed's thriller titled IM. The killer, as the title suggests, picks his victims through instant messages in gay online chat rooms. I think that this setup would have been interesting a decade ago, when the chat room scene was a novelty, but today it seems a bit quaint. Nevertheless, the writing is very strong, and the plot is handled well enough to be interesting, providing genuine twists and turns, managing to rescue the limping concept.

The first twist comes shortly after Ed Comparetto, the detective pursuing the case, gets himself fired because of a witness who apparently does not exist. Ed heads to a gay bar to take some time off to relax. A beer arrives, courtesy of a secret admirer, who turns out to be the non-existent witness. This is good plotting, and it’s a bit of a surprise to find it in a POD novel. As a result, things spin out of control, and a genuine question results—who is this witness, and why the game of hide and seek?

The heart of great plotting is the ability on the writer’s part to create suspense and tension. Reversals of expectation and surprises are at the center of this approach. IM has some interesting reversals, as when Ed calls the number of the witness, expecting to finally talk to this mysterious figure, only to get someone he does not expect, this reversal further increasing the suspense of the story. These reversals are, for the most part, interesting and genuinely add to the story suspense. At some point, however, Ed and the killer seem at a standstill, neither doing much to complicate the plans and goals of the other.

Besides the relatively good plot, the book gives us a glimpse into the gay culture: the online games, the obsessions, the loneliness, and the desperate search for love that never seems to work out. There is some gay sexual content here, so the book may not appeal all readers.