May 112014
 

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Running Through Beijing ought to be profoundly depressing. And yet it isn’t. Just the opposite: it’s uplifting, thrilling. It’s a form of meta-text: the fact that you are reading the book at all, the fact that the book was written and published, confounds the darkness of its message. The novel itself, with its sharp, detailed prose and vivid storytelling creates an exhilaration, a giddy hope in the reader that its characters can never share. —Steven Axelrod

Capture

Running Through Beijing
Xu Zechen, translated by Eric Abrahamsen
Two Lines Press, 2014
161 pages, $14,00
ISBN: 978-1-931883-30-8

 

Dystopian novels and films based on them crowd bookstores and multiplexes. These grim fictional futures, and hardy young people who struggle against contaminated environments and corrupt totalitarian governments that define our ruined future have become a favorite brand of escapism in an uncertain world. Things may be bad, these works seem to be saying, but they’re going to get worse. Partly a call to action but mainly an invitation to a cozy fatalistic complacency, novels and movies like The Hunger Games and Divergent want to lull us to sleep.

The novels written about actual dystopian societies, like Xu Zechen’s Running Through Beijing, have a different purpose: to wake us up.

From the moment that Dunhuang, the hero of Xu Zechen’s remarkable picaresque, returns to a Beijing sandstorm after a stint in jail for selling fake IDs, we know we have entered an ominously different world. The streets are buried in yellow dust — Dunhaung casually mentions boiling the tap water (it’s undrinkable otherwise) — and the police are so corrupt that bribes (of money or just cigarettes) are viewed as “fees,” standard as sales tax. As to the larger government, and the social structures of a civilized society, whatever light they shed they doesn’t penetrate the depths of Beijing’s street life as Xu Zechen describes it. These hustlers, prostitutes and con artists scuttle and scheme on the urban sea floor in the dark.

Dunhuang’s goals are simple: to make enough money selling pirated DVDs to bribe his friend Bao Ding out of jail and to find Qibao, Bao Ding’s girlfriend, and take care of her until the couple can be reunited. He knows nothing about Qibao but her name, and he’s only seen her from the back. It was a memorable view but not much to go on while searching through a city of almost twenty million people.

He’s not totally alone though. The first day in the city he meets a girl selling DVDs and buys a few, just to keep the conversation going. One of them happens to be Vittorio De Sica’s masterpiece The Bicycle Thief, the first of many film references that play in subtle counterpoint to the story. Rome stands in for Beijing, and the quest of Lamberto Maggiorani’s character for his stolen bike, essential for the job he needs to feed his family, resonates quietly with Dunhuang’s efforts to free Bao Ding from jail. In the underworld of Italy after World War II, just as in today’s China, the only real value is personal loyalty. Bao Ding let the police catch him so that Dunhaung could escape, and Dunhuang never questions or tries to shirk the obligation Bao Ding’s sacrifice imposes on him.

The DVDs these characters sell are more than an easy illicit commodity. They have expanded into a plastic jewel box philosophy, a code of ethics and aesthetics, illegally downloaded from America along with the movies themselves. Dunhaung echoes Hollywood con men from Paper Moon to The Grifters when he goes to dinner with the DVD girl, Xia Xiaorong, and claims that someone in the restaurant has stolen his money and his cellphone. The apologetic and embarrassed manager covers the meal and insists on buying them a few more rounds of beer. They emerge from the restaurant tipsy and triumphant.

It’s an awkward situation, because Xiaorong has an on-and-off boyfriend called Kuang Shan, who supplies her DVDs from his video store. But Dunhuang fits himself in somehow as part of the team. Hawking movies at the gate of the Agricultural University, Dunhuang recalls his earlier days selling fake IDs, revealing that world’s mundane anarchy and social dislocation:

Students needed fake IDs just like the rest of society. When it came time for the job hunt, in particular, they showed up in droves wanting fake transcripts and certificates of honor, the gutsy ones even asking for fake diplomas or degrees: polytech students wanting to be BAs, BAs wanting to be MAs, MAs wanting to be PhDs. It went the other way, too: older doctoral students wanting undergraduate student IDs for the half-price tickets to public parks.

Duhuang is cast out into that world again when Kuang Shan moves back in with Xia Xiaorong.  No arrangement is stable in this world for very long.  Dunhuang puts his head down and goes back to work. He moves from squatter’s digs in a disused diner to student lodgings near the university to a one room shack that at least offers privacy, building his clientele, dodging the police and occasionally sleeping with Xia Xiaorong, their stolen moments together unfolding “leisurely, like  silent film from the twenties or thirties.”

Even their romantic moments conjure the astringent snap of Hollywood.

Dunhuang says, “What’s wrong with me saying you’re young, beautiful, graceful and refined?” (And Jack Lemmon says, “Did you hear what I said, Miss Kubelik? I absolutely adore you!”)

To which Xia Xiaorong replies, “A whole bowl of noodles can’t shut you up. Do the dishes!” (Like Shirley MacLaine’s four-word rejoinder that memorably ended Billy Wilder’s The Apartment: “Shut up and deal.”)

Eventually Kuang Shan and Dunhuang come to blows over Xia Xiaorong, but they wind up getting  drunk together and wind up at the beginning of a wary friendship.

Xia Xiaorong suggests another familiar movie trope: the corrupt city girl longing to return to the country and a more innocent life. But that’s an expensive proposition. For the moment she’s stuck in the big city, caught between two men. When she gets pregnant, we never know for sure if Dunhuang is the father or not. In any case it’s hard to imagine raising a child in  the chaotic world of Beijing street hustlers.

It feels like “a year of bad omens” to Dunhuang:

…he could see how the streets and the low residential buildings had all turned to the same dirt yellow color overnight, the way winter snows might blanket the earth. But the feeling was completely different; it made the dust covered buildings and streets look like ancient ruins, silent and deathly.

After a particularly nightmarish dust storm, Dunhuang starts scrawling advertisements for his business on the powdered windshields of parked cars. The trick works and he starts to notice other guerrilla advertisements stuck to hoardings and brick walls, mostly for fake ID sellers. Qibao sold fake IDs, or so Bao Ding had told him. Dunhuang makes the connection: all he has to do is call the numbers on these advertising stickers and keep asking for her.

It’s a long tedious process and in the meanwhile he keeps building his customer base. One girl lives so far away he has to buy a (stolen) bicycle, which itself gets stolen, doubling down on De Sica. Dunhuang winds up running everywhere (“They can’t steal my legs”), and soon he’s in marathon shape, which helps when the short-winded police give chase, though one of the scariest cops turns out to be a fake also, with his own counterfeit ID, just looking for an angle like everyone else.

And then, after more than three hundred phone calls, Dunhuang’s strategy for finding Qibao finally pays off. She turns out to be gorgeous from the front, also, a classic “bad girl” who smokes because she’d “die of boredom” if she quit.

“I barely remember what that jerk Bao Ding looks like,” she says.

“He remembers you.”

“Fuck, plenty of men remember me, Wouldn’t you remember me?”

Soon they are making love, mocking and copying the porn films they both sell on the street.

“You’re my girlfriend,” Dunhaung gushes.

“Whooo! Lucky me.”

But ominous events continue to pursue Dunhuang. When he and Qibao run together to the far district where the girl who buys his movies lives, she’s gone. The apartment is sealed and no one in the building has any idea what happened. People just disappear. No one is quite what they seem, even Dunhuang’s landlady, who turns out to be a Communist Party Secretary and threatens to turn him in when she discovers his cache of DVDs. Of course, she settles for raising the rent. “Stingy bitch,” Dunhuang mutters.

“What did you say?”

“I said, I’ll soon be rich.”

That joke is a small grace note of translation; one can’t help wondering how the rhyme worked in Chinese.

Qibao has little interest in her old boyfriend. Getting Bao Ding out of jail would take connections and Dunhuang doesn’t have any. “You’re not going to meet Buddha just by lighting incense,” she says. Instead of trying to buy Bao Ding out of jail, Dunhuang should save up his money and give it to his friend when he’s out of jail. “He’ll need it more then,” she points out, ruthlessly practical as always.

When Dunhuang visits Bao Ding, he agrees with Qibao. “Don’t even think about it, don’t kill yourself on my account, either way it’s cool. Just bring me a carton of smokes from time to time.” Bao Ding’s sense of loyalty is more impulsive – getting arrested so that Dunhuang could escape, or jumping in to defend a friend who was getting beaten up in jail.

Their world isn’t kind to long range plans.

When Dunhuang returns to Beijing he goes directly to Qibao’s house, but she’s not there. He waits outside for her through most of the night and when she finally shows up, startled to see him, he’s furious. She claims to have been out with friends. He knows she’s lying but he doesn’t have the heart to dig for the truth. Instead, he stalks off. She follows him.

They walk for hours, Dunhuang smoking compulsively and flicking the butts into the street, Qibao following him, picking them up. It’s a bizarre interlude, a hieratic ritual of improvised self-abasement: a concubine, serving the emperor. Her gesture simultaneously evokes the formalities of a bygone era and mocks them. Or perhaps she is just mocking herself and Dunhuang and the very possibility of a structured rational society, however oppressive. In any case, the final offering, the handful of spent cigarettes, is enough to defuse Dunhuang’s anger and win him back.

Spring comes to Beijing and fortunes change: Kuang Chan’s video store is closed by the police, and Dunhuang has to find a new supplier. The pal Bao Ding rescued in jail turns out to have political connections. A few phone calls, and Bao Ding is back out on the streets. When Bao Ding goes to a whorehouse, one of the prostitutes turns out of be Qibao. He tells Dunhuang the truth, and after a screaming, slapping match in the street, Dunhuang breaks up with her.

But when Qibao is busted, Dunhuang bails her out. Loyalty comes before every other emotion. They wind up together, as do Xia Xiaorong – now pregnant — and Kuang Shan. But Beijing doesn’t allow for happy endings, and these characters take “ever after” ten minutes at a time.

The last moments of the novel sum up its theme and story in a single heartbreaking image, a visual jueju poem that seems to encapsulate the past and the future of these trapped, doomed children of the street.

The set up is simple and familiar, echoing the events that first landed Bao Ding and Dunhuang in jail. Kuang Shan and Xia Xiaorong are selling DVDs in the street, now reduced to competing with Dunhuang for sales. A police raid explodes and Dunhuang draws the cops away from his friends. We know his running skills by now. He loses the police but when he returns Kuang Shan is gone and Xia Xiaorong is sprawled on the sidewalk in a puddle of blood. In the violence of the raid she has lost the baby, and her DVDs – brightly colored plastic squares showing the life these kids have aspired to and emulated – are scattered across the dirty pavements: gaudy, mendacious trash.

This is how authentic dystopian novels end, from We to A Clockwork Orange to Oryx and Crake: the characters defeated, the revolution a chimera, all hope lost. No warrior princess or cunning hero is going to save the day. The day was lost before it began.

Running Through Beijing ought to be profoundly depressing. And yet it isn’t.  Just the opposite: it’s uplifting, thrilling. It’s a form of meta-text: the fact that you are reading the book at all, the fact that the book was written and published, confounds the darkness of its message. The novel itself, with its sharp, detailed prose and vivid storytelling, creates an exhilaration, a giddy hope in the reader that its characters can never share.

And so does Xu Zechen’s life. Born in 1978, he got a master’s degree in literature, and edits a prominent literary magazine, People’s Literature. He has won prizes and traveled abroad, serving as a writer in residence at Creighton University in Nebraska and distinguishing himself in the  University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. And now Xu Zechen’s tough, unsentimental novel has been translated into numerous languages, including this elegant English version by Eric Abrahamsen.

It might cheer Dunhuang to know, as he moves beyond the last page, picking up Xia Xiaorong’s DVDs and helping her to the hospital, looking out for the ever present, ever-corruptible cops, taking care of himself and his friends as best he can, with no hope for the future beyond the Hollywood vision, the pirated movie playing in his head, that his humble, anonymous story has finally been told, and that the whole world is listening.

They might even make a film out of it someday.

And if they do, you can be sure Dunhuang will be selling pirated copies of it on the street.

— Steven Axelrod

Steven Axelrod
Steven Axelrod holds an MFA in writing from Vermont College of the Fine Arts and remains a member of the Writers Guild of America (west), though he hasn’t worked in Hollywood for several years. Poisoned Pen Press kicked off his Henry Kennis Nantucket mystery series in January, with Nantucket Sawbuck. The second installment, Nantucket Five-Spot, is scheduled for 2015. He’s also publishing his dark noir thriller Heat of the Moment this summer, with Gutter Books. An excerpt from that novel appeared in a recent issue of “BigPulp” magazine, which will feature his post-modern horror satire The Risen in its upcoming “All Zombieissue. Steven’s work can be also be found on line at TheGoodmenProject and Salon.com. A father of two, he lives on Nantucket Island where he writes novels and paints houses, often at the same time, much to the annoyance of his customers. His web site is here.

 

Mar 142014
 

Donna Tartt
This is an ancient brand of literature, reaching back beyond Stevenson and Sir Walter Scott, to Daniel Defoe and the Lais of Marie De France and even further to Murasaki Shikibu, whose Tale of the Genji invented the novel more than a thousand years ago. These are the books Donna Tartt curled up with under the covers, sneaking a final chapter with the aid of a flashlight. Maybe there’s some girl doing the same thing tonight with The Goldfinch. I certainly hope so. —Steven Axelrod

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The Goldfinch
Donna Tartt
Little, Brown & Co.
771 pages, $30.00
ISBN: 978-0-316-05543-7

 

Describing a book you love is like describing a woman you’re in love with. Adoration turns anodyne; genuflection, generic. Of course she’s “beautiful and smart and funny.” Naturally, the book is thrilling and immersive. Words feel puny in the face of experience, tied to reality by a slender filament of connotation.

Better to just introduce the woman to your friends – or put the book into their hands.

For a reviewer it’s a daunting challenge, but an intriguing one: convey the book’s delights without tarnishing them, share the book’s story without squandering its surprises, celebrate its complexities without overwhelming the reader.

One friend of mine finished The Goldfinch and instantly started it again from page one. There was too much to absorb in one reading and she didn’t want the experience to end. One writer friend said simply “I wish I’d written it”; another said, “I feel like I did.”

For my wife it was like all the books she loved in her childhood, rolled into one: Ivanhoe and Hans Christian Andersen, David Copperfield, Nighthawks of Nantucket, Narnia and The Secret Garden and Treasure Island and more.

Donna Tartt has mentioned during interviews that Robert Louis Stevenson was a special favorite of hers, growing up, and that she loved the feeling his books gave her – the rush of story, the thrill of cascading events. The heroine of Tartt’s previous novel The Little Friend (2002) shares these predilections. The inimitable, indefatigable (and occasionally insufferable) Harriet Cleve loves Treasure Island, and maintains its spirit of adventure when she launches into some frightening adventures of her own.

For me, The Goldfinch recapitulates an even larger trove of literary tradition, from Tom Jones to Huckleberry Finn, from Pride and Prejudice to Catcher in the Rye, from Tolstoy to Capote, from Jules Verne to Elmore Leonard. Yes, along with being a Romance and a Picaresque, a novel of manners, an old-fashioned bildungsroman and a classic Hero’s Journey, The Goldfinch by the end, becomes, along with everything else, a surprisingly hard-boiled and suspenseful piece of all-American crime fiction.

For Theodore Decker the journey and the crime begin on a rainy autumn afternoon in Manhattan, when he ducks into the Metropolitan Museum of Art with his mother, taking shelter from a rain storm.

They wander up the grand stairway and through the upper galleries, pausing by Carel Fabritius’s small masterpiece, which lends its title to the novel it haunts, inspires and animates. The 32-year old Delft artist Fabritius was killed, and his studio leveled, by a gunpowder magazine explosion in October of 1654. The Goldfinch was one of the few of his paintings to survive the blast.

It survives another explosion, more than three hundred and fifty years later, a fictional one this time, the result of the terrorist bombing that sets Donna Tartt’s story in motion. Theo’s mother Audrey is killed, having strolled into the gift shop – ground zero for the blast. Theo had lingered behind in the Dutch Masters exhibit tracking a fascinating old man and his companion, a lovely red haired girl with whom Theo sensed an instant wordless connection.

Theo wakes up in the smoking wreckage, the girl and his mother nowhere to be seen. Staggering through the rubble, he comes upon the old man. Delirious and dying, he instructs Theo to rescue the Fabritius painting, which has been blown off the wall, a “tiny yellow bird, faint beneath a veil of white dust.”

The old man, his name is Welty Blackwell, pulls a heavy gold ring with a carved stone off his own hand and thrusts it into Theo’s with the words, “Hobart and Blackwell”  and the instruction, “Ring the green bell.” The old man dies in Theo’s arms. Then Theo takes the painting and the ring and flees through the shattered labyrinth of the museum, and out a side door to the street. He goes home, chased away by the first responders, hoping to find his mother waiting for him. Of course she’s not there and his life as he once knew it is over.

We are drawn into this vacuum by the precise beauty of Tartt’s prose. She has called herself “a minimalist, painting a wall-sized mural with a brush the size of an eyelash.” To understand the power of the book you have study the brush strokes themselves:

According to the clock on the stove, which I could see from where I sat, it was two-forty-five in the morning. Never had I been alone and awake at such an hour. The living room — normally so airy and open, buoyant with my mother’s presence – had shrunk to a paler cold discomfort, like a vacation house in winter: fragile fabrics, scratchy sisal rug, paper lamp shades from Chinatown and the chairs too little and light. All the furniture seemed spindly, poised at a tiptoe nervousness. I could feel my heart beating, hear the click and ticks and hisses of the large elderly building slumbering around me…And what would I do? Part of me was immobile, stunned with despair, like those rats in laboratory experiments that lie down in the maze to starve.

I tried to pull my thoughts together. For a while it had almost seemed that if I sat still enough, and waited, things might straighten themselves out somehow. Objects in the apartment wobbled with my fatigue, halos shimmered around the table lamp; the stripe of the wall seemed to vibrate.

Theo eventually makes his way to Hobart and Blackwell, an antiques store in the West Village. This is the first of many hidden worlds in the book. The store is dark, apparently closed; the green bell marks an unobtrusive side door.

When Mr. Hobart – Hobie – comes to answer the bell, Welty’s ring grants Theo admittance, and a roof over his head another glimpse of the little girl, Pippa, now recuperating from the explosion in Hobie’s townhouse. For Theo their bond is affirmed, even amplified by their joint survival, but Pippa is still too dazed to fully reciprocate his inchoate feelings.

Theo gradually drifts into the center of Hobie’s life, becoming an apprentice in antique furniture restoration.

After school amidst the drowsy tick of the tall-case clocks, he taught me the pore and luster of different woods, their colors, the ripple and gloss of tiger maple and the frothed grain of burled walnut, their weights in my hand and even their different scents – “sometimes, when you’re not sure what you have, it’s easiest just to take a sniff” – spicy mahogany, dusty smelling oak, black cherry with its characteristic tang and the flowery amber-resin smell of rosewood. Saws and counter-sinks, rasps and rifflers, bent blades and spoon blades, braces and mitre blocks. I learned about veneers and gilding, what a mortise and tenon was, the difference between ebonized wood and true ebony, between Newport and Connecticut and and Philadelphia crest rails, how the blocky design and close-cropped top of one Chippendale bureau rendered it inferior to another bracket-foot of the same vintage with its fluted quarter columns and what he liked to call the “exalted” proportions of the drawer ratio.

Downstairs – weak light wood shavings on the floor—there was something of the feel of a stable, great beasts standing patiently in the dim. Hobie made me see the creaturely quality of good furniture, in how he talked of pieces as “he” and “she”, in the muscular, almost animal quality that distinguished great pieces from their stiff, boxy more mannered peers, and in the affectionate way he ran his hand along the dark glowing flanks of his sideboards and lowboys, like pets.

But it can’t last. Soon Theo is taken out of Hobie’s world by the bureaucracy that controls the lives of orphans (Theo’s father has been AWOL for years), and placed in the posh home of his school friend, Andy Barbour. This is another hidden world, a dark grotto of privilege, barricaded behind doormen and a long dark lobbies, gated elevators and heavy oak doors. The life inside the Barbour’s vast, gloomy pre-war apartment evokes Cheever and Chekhov – dwindling money, gin-soaked father, busy socialite mother; and a Salinger-like Glass family of squabbling siblings – the younger kids Kitsey and Toddy, older brother Pratt. It’s tricky at first. “Though nothing was required of me, still the effort to blend into their polished and complicated household was an immense strain. I was desperate to vanish into the background – to slip invisibly among the Chinoiserie patterns like a fish in a coral reef.”

All of this comes to an end when Theo’s father shows up, cheesy girlfriend Xandra in tow, and sweeps Theo away from everything he knows into a very different hidden kingdom: the deserted outer suburbs of Las Vegas, where abandoned McMansions bake in the heat beyond the range of bus lines and even fast food deliveries. Arid and bleak outside, sterile and over-air-conditioned inside, this new life would be lethal if not for the one friendship Theo strikes up at school, with renegade Ukrainian teen-age con artist Boris, who gleefully name-checks himself with every namesake from Yeltsin to Drubetskoy to Badenov.

If Hobie is the Protector in this journey, Boris is the Trickster, whose role is to disrupt, and he does a splendid job of it, right from the start, introducing Theo to pornography, drugs, and petty crime, while regaling him with the tales of his father’s oil wildcatting across Asia and South America, in several different languages.

The only stable thing in Theo’s life remains the Goldfinch, which he has carried with him to Las Vegas, wrapped and taped and now attached to the back of his bed’s headboard. Theo is terrified that Boris or his father might discover it, so he only takes it out on rare occasions when he’s sure he’s alone. But the picture haunts him, as it obviously haunts Donna Tartt and anyone else who has ever seen it. The lovely little bird is held to its perch by a delicate chain that seems to signify all the tragedy of life as well as the essence of life itself, the breath that leaves the body only to be pulled back again, over and over.

At one point Theo reads an Interpol report in the newspaper, detailing the value of the paintings stolen from the museum after the terrorist attack. A Rembrandt worth forty million was taken, but the Fabritius Goldfinch, clumsily hidden in a Las Vegas boy’s bedroom, is “unique in the annals of art and therefore priceless.”

Priceless! He had to get the priceless one. The little boy getting drunk on stolen whiskey in a desert suburb has somehow become an art thief of impossible global proportions, hunted by the FBI and Interpol. His father is a crook, too, though on a much smaller scale: a low-rent gambler heading for trouble. Eventually, Theo’s father encounters an unfixable string of bad luck. Genteel men with baseball bats appear at the front door, and his father dies in a car crash, speeding to escape his lethal creditors. Theo grabs the Goldfinch, some loose cash, and a handful of drugs to sell, and flees the city.

He winds up back in New York with Hobie, and the narrative jumps eight years into the future.

Clearly they were uneventful years: the soft fizzing of a long fuse. A chance encounter draws Theo back into the Barbour’s world, where he learns that Andy and Mr. Barbour have died in a boating accident off the coast of Long Island. He falls into a love affair with Andy’s sister Kitsey, and a trip to Hobie’s storage space in the Brooklyn Navy yards reveals a whole other side of the artisan’s art: a warehouse crammed with fake antiques. Hobie creates them for his own amusement, and he’s been doing it for decades. They are extraordinary pieces, and Theo starts selling them to the very collectors who have had such a difficult time getting into Hobie’s shop to buy the authentic articles. The deception, rather like his father’s gambling, starts out well. Theo sells many hutches and chairs and escritoires, showing a salesman’s skill and verve not unlike that which Welty built the business thirty years before. Soon Hobie’s business is in the black again. Hobie is too otherworldly to ask many questions about this financial miracle. But the truth is closing in on Theo fast.

It arrives in the person of one Lucius Reeve. Reeve’s curiosity was spiked by one of Theo’s fakes; a year of research later he’s tracked all of them down, and threatens to turn his evidence over to the police. But it’s blackmail, not moral outrage that motivates Reeve. He wants something.

“I know about the museum,” he says. “Here’s what I wonder. Why did James Hobart go about repeating that tale to everyone in town? You turning up at his doorstep with his partner’s ring? Because if he’d just kept his mouth shut, no one would have ever made the connection.”

Theo pleads ignorance, but it’s no use. Reeve is relentless. “You want me to spell it out? Right here? All right, I will. You were with Welton Blackwell and his niece, you were all three of you in gallery 32 and you were the only person to walk out of there. And we know what else walked out gallery 32, don’t we?”

The rest of Reeve’s story just sounds crazy – Theo and Hobie working together, using the painting to broker deals and raise money with thieves and terrorists all over the world. Actually, the painting is stowed safely in an East Side storage space with a load of camping equipment. Clearly someone has been hawking a forgery. Reeve offers a million dollars for the picture – against the threat of police prosecution for the furniture fakes. Theo has no idea what Reeve is talking about or what he can do.

Then Boris shows up.

At this point the plot, which has been cracking and creaking like a giant snowfield in an early spring, fissures into an avalanche and it would be unkind to reveal the events that follow in any detail. Suffice it to say that Theo is swept into the criminal world of Europe and winds up after a harrowing journey, cleaning his bloody clothes in an Amsterdam hotel room.

That moment leads us back to the very beginning of the novel, set in that same Dutch hideout. Turning to the front of the book, I wanted to see how exactly Tartt had whisked me fourteen years and thirty six hundred miles back to that rainy afternoon in Manhattan where everything started.

Deconstructing the transition brought back many of my old feelings about the author. When The Secret History came out in 1992 I read it in one frenzied gluttonous sitting, broken only for work and sleep. I loved the book but the author irritated me, as she no doubt irritated many other forty-something struggling writers who couldn’t get arrested with their work unless they happened to be carrying it in a valise when they were stopped for J-walking in Los Angeles. Tartt was 28 when the book came out, but she’d been working on it for years and must have begun it just out of college. How was that possible? Some childish part of me screamed: Me first! I have seniority! The world tilted into a grotesque carnival injustice thinking about all the languages Tartt’s book had been translated into, and all the money she was making. Of course, someone with actual seniority would have taken the whole affair with more aplomb. Well, five and then six and then seven years passed, and no new book came out and I (together with my grubby consort of the petty and bitter – which included quite a few critics and academics) began to feel better about Donna Tartt. The Secret History had been a fluke, a one-off. She was now suffering from epic writer’s block, crushed by the old sophomore slump, paying her dues belatedly but double or triple, with interest. Then, exactly ten years after the first novel, Tartt published The Little Friend. It seemed like an over-heated mixture of Intruder in the Dust, To Kill a Mockingbird and Harriet, the Spy, written not in Tartt’s dry allusive first person but in an purple pastiche third. A failure! This was getting better and better. I was actually starting to like Donna Tartt. I never read beyond the first ten pages of The Little Friend until I finished the new novel … eleven years later. Then, like Theo, I began to realize the exact nature of the situation. A Google search revealed numerous rave reviews for Tartt’s southern gothic, as well as sales figures and translation statistics that proved beyond a doubt the second novel I had dismissed was in fact another massive success. So I read the book and I loved it and resigned myself: This brilliant woman was going to write a book every ten years, and it was going to be a masterpiece and the best I could do about that ineluctable fact was wait and re-read and pre-order.  And, perhaps, write an occasional essay to express my chastised and belated awe.

To begin at the beginning, then: it starts with Theo dreaming about his dead mother, the glamorous Audrey who remade herself in the big city after a Midwestern childhood; the evocation of Holly Golightly, one of so many allusions that tie the novel into our cultural history, could not be an accident. Pippa evokes everyone from Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking to Robert Browning’s Pippa Passes:

Is she wronged?–To the rescue of her honour,/ My heart! /Is she poor?–What costs it to be styled a donor? /Merely an earth to cleave, a sea to part. /But that fortune should have thrust all this upon her!

Hobie evokes echoes of Gepetto and Fagin and Obi-Wan Kenobi; Mrs. Barbour takes on the aspect of Miss Havisham as she ages; and of course Theo is Holden Caulfield, as well as Tom Sawyer and that other Pip, the much put-upon hero of Great Expectations.

And the dream of Theo’s mother opens into the memory of his last day with her, on the hinge of a single sentence: “Things would have turned out better if she had lived.” He describes her briefly and the next crucial sentence slips in page and a half later: “Her death was my fault.” The final stroke happens after a one more short paragraph: “It happened in New York, April 10th, fourteen years ago.”

And we are there, with the Amsterdam hotel where we started lost in the Manhattan rain, a fading dream of the future. So we dismantle the machinery of narrative, but the mystery remains. Tartt identifies this duality when she deploys an art critic to discuss the title painting:

“But Fabritius, he’s making a pun  on the genre … a masterly riposte to the whole idea of trompe l’oeil …  because in other passages of the work – the head? the wing? – not creaturely or literal in the slightest, he takes the image apart very deliberately to show us how he painted it. Daubs and patches, very shaped and hand-worked, the neckline especially, a solid piece of paint, very abstract. Which is what makes him a genius less of his time than our own. There’s a doubleness. You see the mark, you see the paint for the paint, and also the living bird …It’s a joke, the Fabritius. It has a joke at its heart. And that’s what all the greatest masters do. Rembrandt. Velazquez. Late Titian. They make jokes. They amuse themselves. They build up the illusion, the trick – but step closer. It falls apart into brushstrokes. Abstract, unearthly. A different and much deeper sort of beauty altogether. The thing and yet not the thing.”

Goldfinch

And this is Tartt’s joke, too beyond the wry humor of her character’s voice, the sublime prank of all great writing: to take this jumble of twenty-six letters, arrange them into words and sentences and paragraphs, to leave you with memories more vivid than the ones you made yourself from the crude materials of your actual life, peopled with characters more vivid than the acquaintances you see every day. This is an ancient brand of literature, reaching back beyond Stevenson and Sir Walter Scott, to Daniel Defoe and the Lais of Marie De France and even further to Murasaki Shikibu, whose Tale of the Genji invented the novel more than a thousand years ago. These are the books Donna Tartt curled up with under the covers, sneaking a final chapter with the aid of a flashlight. Maybe there’s some girl doing the same thing tonight with The Goldfinch. I certainly hope so.

                                                                                                                                           — Steven Axelrod

Steven Axelrod

Steven Axelrod holds an MFA in writing from Vermont College of the Fine Arts and remains a member of the Writers Guild of America (west), though he hasn’t worked in Hollywood for several years. Poisoned Pen Press will be kicking off his Henry Kennis Nantucket mystery series in January, with Nantucket Sawbuck. The second installment, Nantucket Five-Spot, is scheduled for 2015. He’s also publishing his dark noir thriller Heat of the Moment next year with Gutter Books. Two excerpts from that novel have appeared in the most recent issues of “BigPulp” and “PulpModern” magazines. Steven’s work can be also be found on line at TheGoodmenProject and Salon.com. A father of two, he lives on Nantucket Island where he writes novels and paints houses, often at the same time, much to the annoyance of his customers. His web site is here.

 

Feb 142014
 

I am always trying to push the envelope in regard to author artist/photos. I loathe the refined, posed, airbrushed glamor head-and-shoulders shots publishers seem to prefer. The author as inhuman, noble object of adulation. NC has always had a subversive edge. And I have been thinking for a while of honouring some of our more adventurous and outlandish spirits for their efforts toward having a bit of personality in their images. I don’t know if I have all the best ones here. If you have a favourite that you remember, remind me in the comments.

I cheated a little bit. bill hayward’s photo of Gordon Lish wasn’t taken especially for NC, but bill has invented a brilliant style of artist/author portrait and we did get to show the photo on NC. But check out bill’s wonderful book of images Bad Behavior for inspiration. Also Jonah’s photo wasn’t his author photo; it’s a self-portrait of sorts. Sometimes I tell authors to at least get a child or a dog in the photo. Horses and goats will do…  André Marois went for bees.

dg

ferryiguana_h_0David Ferry

Steven HeightonSteven Heighton

Andre MaroisAndré Marois

IMG_6257Sharon McCartney

sl, bird dog pete and sharptail, MontanaSydney Lea

IMGP2885Phil Hall

Amber HomeniukAmber Homeniuk

Betsy book pics 2013 - 236Betsy Sholl

Julie Bruck3Julie Bruck

DW-Ark_CodexDerek White

BRiannaBrianna Berbenuik

Michael BrysonMichael Bryson

Julie LariosJulie Larios

Steven AxelrodSteven Axelrod

Gordon-LishGordon Lish photographed by bill hayward

The AuthorJonah Glover

Taiaiake-001Taiaiake Alfred & Sons

Alexander MacLeodAlexander MacLeod

Diane Schoemperlen

Diane Schoemperlen

David Jauss and grandson GalenDavid Jauss & Grandson Galen

Nov 032013
 

eggers

circle 2

The Circle
By Dave Eggers
Knopf, 504 pp., $27.95.

Reading Dave Eggers’ new novel The Circle an image slipped into my mind, one not contained in the book but which I’m sure its protagonist would appreciate: a big church wedding with full Catholic ceremony – the priest in his vestments, bathed in the densely colored sunlight from the rose window, holding a massive Bible before a crowd of hundreds of friends and family as the sacred catechism rolls up the nave and echoes from the flying buttresses of the medieval ceiling. “Do you take this woman …” and the man answers “I do.” Then he turns to the bride. “Do you, Emily Johnson, take this man, Brad Halpern, to be your lawfully wedded husband, to have and to hold …” When he’s done, she looks up distracted.

“What?”

She’s been texting.

The only problem Mae Holland, the heroine of The Circle would have with this scenario is that Emily hadn’t “gone clear” – she had no portable camera attached to herself which could document every moment of the ceremony to her 239,456 followers. She wasn’t “zinging” them all (a kind of instant tweet), acknowledging their “smiles” and good wishes as they came in. What was wrong with Emily? Why wasn’t she sharing this beautiful moment? Who made her dress? Where did Brad get his tuxedo? Does the church do charity work? Couldn’t she link to the designer and the haberdashery and the Catholic aid organization? Think how her Conversion Rate (that’s the number of purchases you stimulate with your comments and zings and links) could be sky-rocketing! Not to mention her Retail Raw – that’s “the total gross purchase price of recommended products” people have purchased because of you. What a waste! Doesn’t Emily understand that sharing is caring and secrets are lies and most of all – privacy is theft?

Those are the guiding principles of the Circle, an internet company which Dave Eggers has conceived, with great precision, merciless humor and a healthy dose of authentic alarm, as the ultimate combination of Google and Facebook. The goal of this ever-growing institution is to “close the circle,” to create a world where everyone has access to every aspect of everyone else’s life at all times, in real time, all of it recorded forever in “the cloud” – those very much land-bound cemetery rows of computer servers that are helping to make this nightmare come true, even as we try to dismiss Eggers’ exaggerations.

With all politicians ‘going clear’ for complete transparency in all their discussions and negotiations, with cameras in every house and infrared cameras outside to mark the movements of all the inhabitants, and with a Circle account mandated by law so that all functions of  life can be  organized through one portal, from health care and voting and car registration to job hunting, friendship and even love affairs (how much greater an intimate moment is when it becomes a communion with five million lovelorn comrades across the globe!), the Circle is poised to take over the world.

Unlike the conventional dystopian fantasies, from We to 1984 to the The Hunger Games, this new world order enjoys the approval of its victims. They embrace it. They celebrate it.

I look around my own world and none of this seems particularly far-fetched. There’s a whole generation growing up that has never known a world with real privacy. Their idea of internet oppression is a day when no one comments on their blog, or their twitter feed goes down.

One of the most audacious aspects of Eggers’ book is that the writing sticks rigorously with Mae Holland’s point of view. The narration is as close as “close third person” can get. Why not tell it in first person then? But that’s the whole point: that pesky “first person” is precisely what the Circle is trying to eradicate. Because Mae doesn’t understand what’s happening to her and her world, the reader is forced to make the arguments that she can’t. The novel becomes interactive in a way that no computer program could ever be. You’re literally shouting at the page. When Mae talks about basic principles with Eamon Bailey, one of the three Wise Men who founded the company, she swallows his specious arguments whole.

All secrets are bad because anything private is suspect – why would we hide something we weren’t ashamed of? Mae doesn’t have the presence of mind or the education to point out that most of the great strides forward in human history – including the basic technical work that created the Circle itself – was done in silence and solitude. Human beings need isolation and quiet and uninterrupted thought. Physical health and sanity depend on it. The idea that we only hide what we’re ashamed of is simply false. But Mae doesn’t get it. She loves being part of something bigger than herself, having her tastes and opinions influencing the world, seeing her face in the mirror of a million hard drives.

Bailey goes on, laying out the corollary point: secrets revealed cast light and harm no one. He uses Wikileaks as an example, saying that no one was harmed by the release of those Top Secret diplomatic cables. But most informed people are aware that Julian Assange meticulously redacted every bit of information that might have compromised anyone’s safety. He kept the secrets that needed keeping.

When the crimes and scandals in the family history of Mae’s friend and Circle Mentor Annie Allerton are revealed, through a new historical data-mining program, the revelations stigmatize her among her c0-workers (her ancestors owned slaves), alienate her from  her parents (they watched a homeless man drown without trying to help him) and finally, tip her over into a nervous breakdown. Knowledge can be caustic, and the truth wounds as often as it heals, whether Eamon Bailey admits it or not.

His off-kilter utopian fervor is only one leg of the tripod that holds up this fantastical internet giant. He’s one of the “Three Wise Men” who created the company. The other two are a Sergei Brin/Mark Zuckerberg geek named Tyson Matthew Gospindov and ruthless entrepreneur Tom Stenton. Stenton fills the Eric Schmidt/Steve Ballmer slot.

Together these three archetypes resemble the three chemicals required for execution by lethal injection. Ty, as everyone calls him, enacts the role of the sodium thiopental in this experiment: his brilliant coding and the seductive internet experience putting the prisoner to sleep. Eamon is the pancuronium bromide, paralyzing the body politic with the false dreams of his perfect world. Then Tom Stenton, the Machiavellian master of monetization, acts as the potassium chloride, administering the death blow in a flurry of zings and recommendations and smiles and surveys.

Stenton has captured a deep-ocean shark and brought it up from the Marianas Trench. He delights in the way it devours everything around it, from tuna to sea turtles to the delicate sea horses that shared the deep water environment with the shark when they were left alone in the dark. Placed in this new setting, in brightly lit tanks, watched by the whole world, the shark turns rapacious and no creature is safe. The metaphor may seem heavy handed; in the context of the novel it seems cautious at best.

We can all sense the shark approaching. Even our jokes about it have a nervous edge. The laughter was uneasy at the Washington Correspondents’ Dinner last year, when Conan O’Brien quipped, “Here’s a suggestion for everyone live-tweeting this event – use the hashtag, ‘unable to live in the moment’.”

Like Henry Ford, feeling a twinge of apocalyptic uneasiness, watching the first cars roll down his production line, Ty himself finally realizes that his invention has gotten out of hand. He enlists Mae’s help to dismantle the monster, but it’s too late for both of them.  He should have known better than to trust Mae. The clue to this tragic miscalculation could have been found in the demonstration she put on a few days before. The Circle was unveiling a new program to locate anyone on the globe in less than half an hour. Mae chose to track down her ex-boy friend, Mercer — a determined Luddite (and the primary voice of sanity in the novel) who fled from San Francisco to live off the grid. The good news: It only takes ten minutes to find him. The bad news: The event, complete with armies of phone-cam wielding acolytes and private airborne drones, pushes him to suicide. He drives his pick-up truck off a high bridge.

Eamon Bailey’s response? What a shame the boy wasn’t in a self-driving car. The on-board computers would never have permitted such self-destructive behavior.

But Mercer understands the world in ways that Mae never will, and Eamon refuses to. Earlier in the book, Mercer walks out on Mae during  dinner with her parents, when she is “zinging” pictures of the deer-antler chandeliers he builds to her “friends” all over the world. She’s caught up with the screen of her phone, oblivious while he  talks to her. She follows him out to the street and he says this, in the course of their confrontation:

Here though, there are no oppressors. No one’s forcing you to do this. You willingly tie yourself to these leashes. And you willingly become socially autistic. You no longer pick up on basic human communication clues.  You’re at a table with three humans, all of whom are looking at you and trying to talk to you, and you’re staring at a screen, searching for strangers in Dubai. You know what I think, Mae? I think you think that sitting at your desk frowning and smiling somehow makes you think you’re actually living some exciting life. You comment on things and that substitutes for doing them … Mae, do you realize how boring you’ve become?

About as boring as the bride in my fantasy – or the kid texting as his dog-trainer friend runs his pet German shepherd through a series of perfectly synchronized commands; or the father texting continuously during his daughter’s dance recital. Or the driver texting his way into a fatal car crash. He was pressing send when the light turned red.

It’s the future and no one has seen it more clearly than Dave Eggers.

In the last image of his novel, Mae sits at Annie’s bedside, watching her comatose friend, studying the read-outs that show brain activity, furious that everything going on inside, all those dreams and memories, remains steadfastly secret, private, stolen from the world by the barricade of a woman’s skull. And the book seems to say: be patient, Mae.

It won’t be long now.

                                                                                                                                                                                — Steven Axelrod

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Steven Axelrod

Steven Axelrod holds an MFA in writing from Vermont College of the Fine Arts and remains a member of the WGA despite a long absence from Hollywood. In addition to Numéro Cinq, his work has appeared at Salon.com and various magazines with ‘pulp’ in the title, including PulpModern and BigPulp. A father of two, he lives on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, where he paints houses and writes, often at the same time, much to the annoyance of his customers.
Contact: stevenaxelrod@old.numerocinqmagazine.com

 

Sep 092013
 

The Mehlis Report

First published in Arabic in 2006, The Mehlis Report is the first English translation from prize-winning Arabic author, Rabee Jaber, a love song and an elegy for his beloved home city of Beirut. The book transcends politics to become a tale of loss and memory, touching without an ounce of sentiment, uplifting without a speck of hope. –Steven Axelrod

The Mehlis Report
By Rabee Jaber, Translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid.
New Directions, 2013.
218 pages. $11.98.

Like Joyce Cary’s London and Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles, Beirut is a living presence in The Mehlis Report. The city has died and been reborn many times in the last 60 years, with all its incarnations superimposed on each other, like the acetate overlays in a mid-20th century encyclopedia, in the minds of the people who love the place. This is not a brooding Islamic casbah full of fanatics plotting carnage in the shadow of the minarets, the war-torn hellscape portrayed by western media.

Instead, the novel gives us a vision of Beirut from the inside: a seaside town with a lovely corniche and a human history stored in the images of human memory: the old athletic club where a hotel stands now; the highway that replaced a warren of narrow streets. It’s a city of bars and hotels,  mosques and bakeries, undergoing a construction boom in 2005, when the book takes place.

A man strolling from Monot to Abd-al-Whab street can buy a Mirinda orange soda and a manakish sandwich en route to his girlfriend’s apartment, even if he has to skirt the rubble from a recent car-bombing on the way.

The man in question is Saman Yarid, a local architect obsessed with the city in all its changing forms, unable to leave despite the entreaties of his two sisters. One of them has opened a bakery in Baltimore, Maryland; the other works as a translator for UNESCO in Paris. Neither of them can understand how Saman can stay on in Beirut, where sectarian violence still rages sporadically, fifteen years after the end of the Civil War. His third sister, Josephine, was kidnapped and killed at the height of that conflict, in 1983.

The first half of the book records Saman’s daily life among the specters and shifting landscapes of his beloved city: his various girlfriends, his work at the Yarid Architecture and Design Agency.

“I’m forty now,” Saman reflects. “and I’ve done nothing with my life.” Mostly he keeps track of the prominent citizens killed on the streets of Beirut – Samir Kassir, for instance, a professor of history at St Joseph University whose secondary career as a journalist writing editorials blasting Lebanon’s pro-Syrian regime in the daily newspaper Al-Nahar earned him an assassination by car bomb in front of his home on Furn al-Hayek Street.

The most horrific and newsworthy murder was that of Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, in February of 2005. The massive explosion wiped out his heavily armored car, his entire motorcade, and a good chunk of the street on which they were driving. Saman walks by that street every day. The threat of car bombs plague his thinking. He is certain he saw two men planting a bomb in a car, during one of his long nightly walks. The big Mercedes seems to stare at him with a ghoulish squint of imminent doom after that encounter – silent, temporarily intact, like Monot Street before the Hariri assassination.

The bomb never goes off, if in fact there ever was one. Nevertheless, Saman is so afraid, so certain of the coming explosion, that he feels as if he has already died. Death is everywhere in Saman’s world as he stalks through the night streets and past the new surveillance cameras of a city perpetually dying but never reborn, eternally haunting itself in poisoned nostalgia of its remaining champions.

All of them are waiting for the release of the Mehlis report, the U.N. Security council’s investigation of the Hariri assassination, authored by German judge Detlev Mehlism who has been investigating the attack at the highest levels of the Lebanese and Syrian Governments.

Fittingly enough, ultimately the report changed like the city itself, under the stress of politics and religious strife. The original document, leaked to the press, clearly indicated the involvement of Hezbollah and certain high officials in Syria. But key witnesses recanted their confessions, documents disappeared, and a much less provocative report became the official version of the investigation’s findings.

For Saman Yarid and his friends, waiting in a purgatory of anxiety and doubt for the verdict of the United Nations, none of that matters. Time stands still as they tip-toe through the minefield of daily life.

This fear-tipped banality finds an uncanny echo in the routines of Josephine Yarid, Saman’s sister. She narrates the second half of the book, starting with the moment she wakes up from what should have been a fatal beating at the hands of her kidnappers.

She walks through a strangely deserted “green line” between east and west Beirut, touching dried blood matted in her hair, feeling little but an overwhelming thirst and the memory of pain, rather than pain itself. The full moon above the city convinces her that somehow, against all odds, she’s still alive.

Then she sees an old man who looks strangely familiar, though she can’t place him.

Look at my face, he said, and imagine me with white hair – not black like this but white.

I said I was tired – so tired and thirsty I couldn’t imagine him with white hair. But I’ve seen you before, I said, and I know you.

I wanted him to help me. To pick me up and carry me home. I wanted him to pick me up and carry me in his arms like a child – I wanted him to take me to my family. Why doesn’t he carry me home? I wanted to open my eyes and see myself back on the familiar sofa in my own familiar house again. To open my eyes and see the faces I knew looking back at me. I wanted them to look at me and tell me I’d come back, tell me I’d been saved. Why wasn’t he taking me home right then and there?

I stared at him and noticed that he looked like my brother – he didn’t just look like my father, he looked like Saman as well. But he wasn’t Saman. This man was older than my brother. I’ll try to picture him with white hair, I thought. And then he spoke again.

“Josephine, I’m your grandfather.”

At that moment, I knew I was dead.

Josephine has entered the afterlife and the Beirut of the dead bears a striking resemblance to the stilled and stifled living city her brother still inhabits. She walks it as he does, and watches him on the television, the only visual connection to the land of the living. Also, she reads and writes. In Jaber’s evocation of the afterlife, everyone reads, all the time. It’s the only activity that brings the dead any peace of mind, though they also write. They even have an assignment: to compress their life stories into a single page. It takes many drafts, and you can’t help feeling that the first half of The Mehlis Report might wind up as Saman’s initial effort, when he reaches the other side.

He has a long way to go, and so does his sister.

Meanwhile, they walk, and chart the changes in their worlds, and remember. For Jaber, both life and death are defined by the futile effort to escape the past. The dead have giant rats who will eat the longing for the living world out of their souls; the living receive no such service. Throughout both worlds and ricocheting between them, the images appear and disappear, recur and reassemble themselves: the city, the green line, the lost buildings and sun beaten squares, and most of all the moon. It’s everywhere in this book – the first thing Josephine sees when she wakes into the afterlife, the last thing Saman sees before he goes to sleep, invoking life and hope and the illusions of both. The moon bathes the city in light, but it’s reflected light, borrowed light, the memory of light, pale and insubstantial. And that last sentence with its chanting rhythms and repetitions, mimics the hypnotic, classical Arabic style, Jaber employs, defttly captured by translator Kareem James Abu-Zeid, as in the extraordinary passage where Josephine addresses her unheeding brother from beyond the grave.

For weeks Saman’s cellphone has been ringing,  the caller disconnecting before he can answer, the number on his screen non-existent or incomplete. He senses that these calls are important, and the silence on the other end of the line haunts him. Literally:

Listen, Saman, I call you but you don’t answer. You look at my number and you don’t answer because you don’t know who it is … I call you but you don’t answer. I want to tell you things. I have so many things to tell you. I’m not alone. And neither are you … I call but you don’t answer.  You look at the number and you don’t answer because you don’t know it. Wrong number you think, or the lines must be crossed, and you tell yourself to call the company and ask about this, but you never call and you never ask, because you’ve already forgotten about it and you’re nor really interested. I all you, but you don’t answer. I want to ask you why you’re not interested … I call you and you look at the number, but you don’t answer. It’s as if you don’t care. Why don’t you care? I’m not just talking about the phone. That should be clear by now. I’m talking about a lot of things… You were born in an evil hour. The old aristocratic house, the whole district. It too is passing through dark times. It’s not your fault: time’s the culprit. How can you find a story for your life, how can you write one, when you’re in the city at this hour?

Finally, she describes the Anatolian Fault, which balances the city on the edge of a possible earthquake at every moment, and the tectonic shift in Saman’s life when Hariri was killed: “The motorcade explodes and a black chasm appears on the road, and the city falls into it. The whole country falls into it.”

Saman dies himself before the Mehlis report is made public, before he finds what he’s looking for or resolves his life into any meaningful direction. He sees the people he knew on the other side – his sister, Harir himself, Kahili Gibran, others. He sees a man, a professional writer when he was alive, who “used to write for the sake of prestige. In this world he writes only a single sentence: ‘I write so as not to choke.’”

You feel that Rabee Jaber, winner of the 2012 International prize for Arabic Fiction, writes for the same reason, under the same ambiguous moon, trying to make sense of this world and the next, well aware that his efforts will fail.

In that other world, the departed learn to read each book many times, to dismantle and reassemble it, over and over again, though few books deserve such study.

This novel is surely one of them, well worth searching out among the libraries of the dead.

— Steven Axelrod

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Steven AxelrodSteven Axelrod holds an MFA in writing from Vermont College of the Fine Arts and remains a member of the WGA despite a long absence from Hollywood. In addition to Numéro Cinq, his work has appeared at Salon.com and various magazines with ‘pulp’ in the title, including PulpModern and BigPulp. A father of two, he lives on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, where he paints houses and writes, often at the same time, much to the annoyance of his customers.
Contact: stevenaxelrod@old.numerocinqmagazine.com

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,

Jul 042013
 

Axelrod

{space}

George Axelrod was a great Hollywood screenwriter who defined highbrow comedy and male-female relations for an era. In truth he may not have so much defined male-female relations as reflected them, the last “classy” gasp of the postwar male dominance in a culture that was fast changing. NC Contributor Steven Axelrod offers here a gorgeous addition to our Fathers Series, his loving but frank look at his father’s life and legacy, a monumental essay from the guy who knew because he watched, as only a little boy can, his father bestriding his world like a god, like myth itself, and finally crumbling from the pedestal.

dg

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Phobias

My father,was afraid of everything, and he passed most of his fears down to me. Some of them remain latent, drugged guard dogs stirring in their sleep at a snapping twig or a heavy footfall: moments of agoraphobia checking into a big hotel in a new city. I consider hiding out in the room, I inventory the miniature bottles of booze; then I button myself up to the neck and the feeling passes, like a chill. I hesitate before boarding an airplane, flinch before walking into an elevator and I feel the ghosts of my father’s phobias haunting me, like his voice in the back of my head, that wry half-drunk ongoing commentary: “That was a room-emptier, dear boy.”

Yet he was capable of convulsions of courage. After stalling for weeks, my step-mother Joanie running interference for him with the studio or the producer or the star (“When I say I have sixty pages, it means I’m about to start”), my father would lock himself in a room and work for thirty hours straight until he finished the script, turning it in on time and camera-ready. It might seem like mere mulish persistence, but nothing frightened my father more than a blank page and a deadline.

working dad-1

In high school he sat with the visiting football team’s fans and cheered on the opposition. Then he took a bat from the athletic department, arming himself against the drunken jocks he knew would storm his room, seeking revenge. He never graduated from high school, though he told me his P.E. teacher there gave him the best advice of his life. “You’re useless at sports,” the man said. “You should play with the girls.”

Dad told me: “I’ve been doing that ever since.”

Women never scared him, I have to give him that.

SPACE

A Self-Made Man

cool dad-1

He arrived in New York City before World War II, with no credentials, no real education and a family who disapproved of his ambitions. He walked into radio writer-producer Goodman Ace’s office looking for a job. The interview was a brief one: “Come back tomorrow with ten jokes.”

He worked for several years on “Mr. Ace and Jane” and “Easy Aces” writing the type of malapropisms that would be associated with another cunningly professional air-head, Gracie Allen, years later: “He lives on the poor side of town, in those Old Testament houses,” and “You could have knocked me over with a fender.”

My father always had faith in his own talent. He never had much beyond it to trust. His grandfather was a tyrant, his father was a tyrant’s prey who gave up his own career in show business under the threat of disinheritance. His grandfather, Jacob Axelrod, was the son of a Silesian rabbi, a Tzadic of the Hasidim, and Jacob was next in line. He fled that responsibility and arrived at Ellis island with fifty cents in his pocket. But of course he also had the steel to stand up to the absolute ruler of his fiercely insular religious sect, the arrogance to defy his father and the courage to sail away into the unknown, owning nothing and knowing no one. Fifty years later he was a different kind of king – a real estate maven who had bought and sold dizzying amounts of property in lower Manhattan. No one knows quite how he did it; or why, ten years later, he threw himself off the roof of one of his own buildings.

When my kids were little, my ex-wife took them  to the refurbished Ellis island, where my daughter found old Jacob’s name on an interactive computer list of 19th century immigrants. “That’s Daddy’s ancestor!” she said.

“Yours, too,” her mother reminded her. It was a stunning moment for a twelve year old girl. She asked me about Jacob, but I never found out much myself – how he created his empire, or came to regret it so profoundly. But his son Herman, who attended Columbia University with Oscar Hammerstein and collaborated with the great lyricist on some collegiate Varsity shows, received  an ultimatum from Jacob: if he didn’t abandon show business and join the family real estate firm, he would be disowned and disinherited. So he knuckled under.

Interestingly, Hammerstein’s father was similarly hostile to his son’s career choice. But the old man died  before Oscar graduated. Herman had to wait another thirty years for his own freedom. The day after Jacob’s funeral, Herman quit the real estate business and took up painting and sculpture. His work had been exhibited in a dozen museums by the time he died.

Unfortunately, he never learned the essential lesson about parental tyranny: quarantine it in your own generation. Almost against his will, it sometimes seemed, he passed the paternal cruelty down the line, along with his brown eyes and his creativity.

He sent George to the Hill School which the boy hated; just as George sent my brother to Hotchkiss, which was just as bad. This heartless dictatorial compulsion loomed like a Biblical curse over all of us, and my brother never had children partly because he feared it so much. Would he have sent his own kids to military school and threatened them with exile if they didn’t join the family law firm? We’ll never know. But none of us would have been surprised.

So my father launched himself away into the unknown just as his grandfather had done. Unlike Jacob, he had no gift for intimidation, no uncompromising greed, no lust for power – just a wry sense of humor and a working typewriter. It turned out to be enough.

“Just finish something,” my mother told him. “You’ll sell it.”

 SPACE

The Best Day

So he did, which led to one of the great high points, the days he always rated ‘10’, in his life. This was the best one of all.

My father’s play, The Seven Year Itch, had opened and by the time rehearsals were finished he was sure he had a useless mess on his hands: snappy first act, weak second act, disastrous finish. Emlyn Williams  — best known for writing The Corn is Green — was performing in a play about Charles Dickens a block away and helped trim Itch with something he called  “interlinear cutting”: taking out individual words, clipping the play sentence by sentence without losing any major scenes. It worked. The play improved. It got tighter, and most of all shorte, but it remained flawed. My father was terrified of the reviews, and he stayed away from the traditional Sardi’s vigil of getting quietly drunk and waiting for the New York Times to hit the street. He left the theater after the first act and went home to bed.

He woke up the next morning to find no food in the refrigerator. My mother, two months pregnant with me, was busy with my brother Peter, fussing and colicky at age four. Their bank account was over-drawn, so he pulled on his Burberry raincoat, too thin for the early winter chill, and walked out into the spitting wet snow to beg a small cash advance from the box office.

The date was November 20th, 1952. The time was eight thirty-five in the morning.

He arrived at the theater, shivering, and just stood across the street, staring at the vision of his life from that moment on, absolutely and irrevocably transformed. The line stretched from the box office down 46th street, all the way to Eighth Avenue and around the corner, men and women in their bulky coats, shuffling in the wind-whipped sleet waiting for the box office to open two hours later. The first of them must have arrived before dawn.

itch playbill-1

He stood a watched them for a long time. Then he got his advance and took a cab home to read the reviews.

Six months later he was in Hollywood.

A year later he was divorced.

SPACE

Autobiography

George  Axelrod and Marilyn Monroe

“People often ask me, which is more rewarding – parenthood or writing,” he used to tell me. “It’s funny because you and The Seven Year Itch were born in the same year. Itch is more successful than you, funnier than you, richer than you, more popular than you. It’s held up better than you. I’d say it’s no contest.” I tell people that anecdote and observe with detached amusement the shock on their faces. The remark was only incidentally cruel; much more than that it was simply an irresistible joke, one which he knew I’d get, and more importantly, one aimed more devastatingly at himself than at me.

He was a bad father, I suppose. But I inherited from him a need to be entertained and a delight at being amused that rendered his mundane failings irrelevant. He could always make me laugh.

Almost twenty-five years after Itch’s triumphant opening, he failed in his struggle to get another play, Feeling No Pain, mounted on Broadway. The gimmick of this new musical was that the protagonist had rented the theater for the night of his fiftieth birthday, to review his life in front of an audience of friends and enemies, colleagues and critics, before committing suicide on stage in the dramatic finale.

He wrote the lyrics for the songs, whose titles reveal his state of mind – “Are you Gonna Change” (The answer, emphatically no); “The Ladies Love Me” and the title number.

Jerry Lewis was committed but backed out. Jack Lemmon signed on but begged off when his wife Felicia balked at moving their kids across country for the length of the  run. With no star the project fell apart. I may have the only extant copy of the play, and even that manuscript remains incomplete.

The partial script gives some hints about why his first marriage failed. Richard Bender, the protagonist, imagines the relationship as a serialized radio soap opera. He brings out the performers and the mikes in the stripped-down stage version of a radio station recording studio:

BENDER

Okay, take it. We’re on the air.

(An ORGAN PLAYS a RADIO THEME; in the manner of radio actors, they drop the pages to the floor as they finish them)

 ACTOR

(As the announcer)

Ladies and gentlemen, once again we take you down Fifth Avenue to the corner of West Eleventh Street, up three flights and into apartment D for another heart-warming episode of ‘Our Gal Sarge’, a story which poses the problem: Can an attractive, well born, socially conscious young housewife, mother and ardent worker for the League of Women Voters find romance and happiness married to a handsome but frivolous and dissolute comedy writer so lacking in political awareness, that he would not even work for Henry Wallace?

BENDER

(He puts his hand over the mike and speaks to the audience)

These things were always written from the woman’s point of view.

My mother’s point of view? “I stuck it out for his psychoanalysis, but he wouldn’t stick it out for mine.” In fact, she thought my father’s psychiatrist was the heart of the problem. His solution to the problem of George’s phobias was “Just take a drink, it’ll calm your nerves.”

He took the advice and it almost killed him.

My mother wanted him to write something great; she wanted him to stop drinking and save his money. He wanted to write sex farces, get bombed and when he ran out of money just make more. My mother was a depression baby; my father  just thought she was depressed.

Joan Stanton, the stunning blond he met on a Fire Island beach that summer, saw things his way. When the call came from Billy Wilder, inviting George out to Los Angeles as the Seven Year Itch movie screenwriter, my mother begged him to save his soul and stay in New York.

Joanie at the B&W-1

Joanie booked the plane tickets.

She was always good at handling the details.

SPACE

The Golden Age of Hollywood

They lived quite a life, and I saw brief glimpses of it on school vacations: sitting around the pool with Tony Curtis, planning “Gemini” birthday parties, spending money in style, with houses at the beach and in town,  freezers full of steaks cooked on the built-in electric charcoal grill, the screenings and openings (Though he had to get drunk to attend them); and the movies themselves, on which his reputation still rests – Bus Stop, Breakfast and Tiffany’s, The Manchurian Candidate, How to Murder Your Wife. The banner quote in the Life magazine article about Murder, summed up his attitude in those days. Was Italian newcomer Virni Lisi a star? ”SHE’S A STAR BECAUSE I SAY SHE’S A STAR.”

Murder one sheet-1

The embedded video is from home movies taken by Roddy McDowall at Dad’s Holmby Hills house in the mid sixties. This was his glory time and you can see it in these silent sun dappled moments caught by Roddy’s ever-present 8 mm camera.

Glamor floated in the air like pollen. But it rarely merited more than a sneeze. I remember one afternoon, inspecting the wedding invitation from Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow: a big glamor portrait of them, with the date and the RSVP inside. Mia Farrow’s mother was Maureen O’Sullivan, who played Jane in a series of Johnny Weismuller Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptations. Somehow this detail crystallized the absurdity of the affair for my father. He laughed and said “Me Tarzan, you Frank Sinatra’s mother-in-law.”

It was an immensely attractive world, a privileged realm of celebrity, warm winters and ripe orange, a sunlit David Hockney world of pale blue swimming pools and cool Mexican tile. An Architectural Digest world of dinners on the patio with views of the city lights, brilliant nights of conversation with the startlingly life-sized people most people would never meet, cashmere against the desert chill; palm trees swaying and bougainvillea blooming red among the faint smells of cut grass and eucalyptus. “One of the great pleasures of success in the movie business,” my father said to me on one of those evenings, “Is that the people you most want to meet want to meet you just as much.”

It was paradise. But it couldn’t last.

murder cartoon-1

My father started directing his own scripts, resulting in a brutal pair of flops. First came the quirky masterpiece Lord Love A Duck (“An act of pure aggression”), which “went from failure to classic, without ever passing through success,” as he liked to put it.

Roddy McDowall played Tuesday Weld’s  high school fairy godfather in that odd dark film, guiding her with faultless cynicism through the obstacle course of teen-age life, even organizing the death of her odious step-father. Ruth Gordon played the batty mother-in-law whose tart “In our family we don’t divorce our men, we bury them” summed up her caustic point of view. Ultimately Mollymauk, as Roddy’s character calls himself (“A bird thought to be extinct, but isn’t”) engineers his protégé’s rise to movie stardom, in the appropriately titled “Bikini Widow”.

The scene where Mollymauk teaches Tuesday Weld’s character to manipulate her father into buying her a load of cashmere sweaters is worth the price of admission all by itself. There’s a simple equation to remember, he explains: father + divorce x guilt2= sweaters to the 12th power.

Then came The Secret Life of an American Wife. My father judged movies by their titles as he judged champagne by how hard it was to get the cork out, with equal success. Even he knew that the film’s clumsy name boded ill. He preferred The Connecticut Look but studio marketing people worried that foreigners wouldn’t understand it. , (“What do you think she’s talking about when she refers to her ‘rapidly spreading Connecticut behind?” I remember him shouting at some studio bean-counter)

Except for a lovely one act chamber piece between Anne Jackson and Walter Matthau buried in the middle of the picture, it deserved the ignominious fate that spiteful critics and an indifferent audience forced upon it.

With the drinking getting worse and the failures piling up behind him, even Joanie, who was so good at manipulating people and bullying them, couldn’t get my father’s career back on track. She used his friends and colleagues to build her own decorating business, and would gladly tell anyone who asked (and some who didn’t) that she’d been the real breadwinner in the family for decades. She owned a shop in Beverly Hills called The Staircase, which featured the circular staircase from The Seven Year Itch as its main decorative motif. She sold Porthault sheets there and expanded her business exponentially with a Who’s Who of Hollywood celebrities. She had the glow of a pregnant woman when she was in the middle of some massive Bel Air renovation; my father used to say “She’s lovely when she’s with house.”

SPACE

“What Have You Written Lately?”

And so, after raising two children (one from Joanie previous marriage, and a daughter of their own), after flipping twelve houses (including one on Carbon beach they sold because Joanie couldn’t stand the sound of the ocean), after their opposite career trajectories, hers to the top of what you might call celebrity interior design, and his to the bottom of a world he had owned in another era, she handled his induction to the Bette Ford Centre, and paid the bill for his rehab.

They’d been separated for a while before that, and Dad had been living a different version of the high life, a mockery of his earlier glory, paying a spectacular Las Vegas hooker full time wages to act the part of his girlfriend, and later, moving back to London, almost killing himself in a savage bender after a battle with the Grosvenor Estates over the matter of a bicycle left in common hallway.

He returned from his ordeal in Palm Springs hurt and humbled, beaten but not broken, determined to stay sober for as long as he could. And I couldn’t help thinking of Neil Simon, with whom he’d toiled in writers’ rooms in the late forties, with whom he had clashed over Dad’s miscasting of Simon’s weakest play, during the winter of 1966. Walter Kerr memorably began his review of The Star Spangled Girl this way: “Neil Simon didn’t have an idea for a play this year, but he wrote one anyway.”

As alcohol scuttled my father’s career in the seventies and eighties, Neil Simon steamed along imperturbable and majestic, like some Cunard luxury liner of comedy. Even his wife’s tragic death and his private struggle to start living again generated a hit play.

Maybe his shrink said “Man up” instead of “Hit the bottle.”

It was a peculiar sad time, those decades of ruminant sobriety between Dad’s stay at Bette Ford and his reversion to white wine on his death bed. He was struggling  to start his career again, taking meetings just as I was, doing odd writing jobs for mentally defective, drug-addled producers, just as I was doing. He was a has-been, I was a never-had-been, but nevertheless, we had a lot in common.

One incident in particular sums up that era. It was the spring of 1978. He was called into a studio meeting “with a bunch of twenty year olds” who told him they wanted to do a glamorous World War II period piece thriller, full of romance and intrigue, set on a train. He told them, “It’s been done. The picture is called The Lady Vanishes.” Blank stares. “Directed by Alfred Hitchcock?” Nothing. He told them to screen the 1938 classic and get back to him. Sure enough, they called the next week and set up another meeting. “We loved it,” they told him. “It was awesome. We want you to write it.”

He explained that it had already been written, generally the first step in the film-making process.

“No, no,” the twenty year-old VP development told him. “The movie’s in black and white. We want you to write it in color.”

So he did, carefully annotating the green plush sofas and the red wine.

Dad was flown to the location to coach Cybill Shepherd on her line readings, but his ideas didn’t register and his opinions didn’t prevail. “Let’s see what she brings to it,” the director finally decreed. “As far as I could tell,” Dad told me, “She brought a nice head of hair and a Porsche.”

The near-misses and dead-ends continued: the script he wrote with Joan Rivers that the fine intellects at Universal determined to be ‘too vulgar’ (but wasn’t that the point?); another original that featured an impossibly boring Secretary of Defense (Even when warning the president of imminent threats, he’s so dull that the President nods off, the  red telephone “slipping through his nerveless fingers”). The man happens to be a separated-at-birth triplet. One of his brothers is a brilliant stand-up comedian, the other a drunken, gambling addicted sociopath. When they all get together, hi-jinks ensue. It was called The Importance of Being Irving, and like so much that Dad wrote, it fell apart in the third act. He knew it, and tried to get various writer/stand-ups to help him revise and star. He said he was ‘too proud’ to ask his pal Steve Martin, who would have been perfect for the role and could have helped with the writing also. Too bad: I really wanted to see that one.

 SPACE

Grandpa

Then there was Grandpa. Like so many abortive projects, this could have been the one that turned things around for him. He described the origin of the project in one of his famous one-page letters:

Dad's letter-1

What could go wrong? It started with a few months of radio silence from John Hughes, then a full page ad in Variety clarified the situation. Hughes was making Home Alone 3, and the subtitle was Lost in New York. Hughes had taken what he needed from George’s idea and left him with the unsalable remnants. Or so it seemed to my father. He no longer had the heart to begin again.

In 1988 my step-brother Jonathan organized the re-release of The Manchurian Candidate, and the video below — a round-table discussion with star Frank Sinatra and director John Frankenheimer — gives an invaluable glimpse of my father during this difficult period.

http://youtu.be/gH0duNvNJ8E

SPACE

Twilight of the Gods

George and Joan were back together after his boot camp stint of high-toned rehab in Palm Springs, and  the Sunday lunches remained a pleasure, a luxurious testing ground of excellent food and sophisticated talk. To this day I judge people at least part by how well they would have fit into those long tipsy afternoons overlooking the smog-bound clutter of the city and the blue desert of the Pacific. Would Joanie have said of this girlfriend or that one, “Charming girl, very bright. Wonderful addition to the life.”? Would my father have flirted with her shamelessly, asking her his patented trick questions (“When did you know you knew?”), while Joanie sipped white wine, and watched out of the corner of her eye while she discussed the seating hierarchy at Morton’s? I often think about that question and I always know the answer.

Of course Joanie ruled those gatherings with her perfect social graces and her iron will. But she let George hold court at the table. She ruled him in every way, until the very end, when she gave him an order he couldn’t follow. Dying of cancer just after the 9/11 attacks, she wanted him to take a Krevorkian-style cocktail of drugs and die with her. I know it sounds like something out of a gothic novel or some camp film with over-the-hill movie stars, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, perhaps: a deranged, wild-haired Bette Davis, screeching “we’re going to die TOGETHER!” But if you knew Joanie, nothing could surprise you.  This was a woman who could break the lock of her teen age daughter’s diary, breeze past the pathetic note asking her not to read further, and then not only read it cover to cover, but declaim the dirty parts aloud, to her daughter’s hated boyfriend,  the next night at dinner.

My father managed to refuse her somehow, despite the giant force of her will. She actually was weakening at last, like an exiled dictator or a great writer falling into dementia, and he lived two more years after she died. They were bedridden years,  he needed help with the mortifying basics of life, but he was still able to fly an entourage of medical personnel with him to  Las Vegas for a final gambling blow-out, still able to make me laugh over a good bottle of  Pouilly Fuisee.

Of course I couldn’t help thinking that he was burning through the last of what would have been my inheritance – money saved and still coming in from both his work and Joanie’s, as projects she had initiated – like the new nursery wing in Norman Lear’s Vermont mansion – rolled on without her.

And then he died and I flew out to Los Angeles for  the memorial service.

I knew I was going to speak in front of the gallery of his surviving friends and I flew out a week early. I spent the time writing and memorizing my eulogy. I could feel the ghost of my father’s own nervous panic addressing a crowd, and I fought it down just the way he did in his later years, when he couldn’t get drunk first any more: relentless preparation and unlimited effort in the name of making the excruciating look easy.

The euology isn’t much, really — just a hint of who he was, like the menu posted outside a four star restaurant or a photograph of the Grand Canyon.

This is what I said:

 SPACE

A Brief Farewell

Old dad-1

I’ll make this short, because that’s how Dad liked it. He had a rule at dinner. Everyone wanted to tell the story of the book or comic book they had just read, or the movie or TV show they had just seen. That was fine, as long as they could do it in three sentences. It was great – all you’d hear for minutes at a time was the sound of grinding teeth as various kids tried to boil down a Star Trek episode, or Lawrence of Arabia … or Moby Dick into three sentences. You could almost hear them: “OK – there’s this whale … no. There’s this guy who was chasing the whale … no, wait …”

It was okay. You were better off listening at that table, anyway.

You could learn a lot at dinner; sometimes meals turned into informal writing seminars. My Dad loved verbs, and he hated adjectives. Once he challenged me to describe something we were eating, some little meat pastry. I said it was flaky and savory and delicious.  Three adjectives: no good. He used two nouns and a verb: “calories, lashed together with garlic.” He taught me Logan’s Law: (The theatre director Josh Logan was a great mentor for him and one of his best friends for more than thirty years)  “A hit movie or play is a series of scenes culminating in a final scene through which the hero learns something about himself, always emotionally and always for the better. “ And it’s true – from Breakfast at Tiffany’s to Rocky to The Lord of the Rings. Dad said a great thing about cutting once that always stuck with me. ‘You turn the story upside down and shake it. All the loose stuff falls out.”

He was always proud that he put a phrase into the language with the title of The Seven Year Itch. But he put a lot more phrases than that into my language. To this day I can’t look at a fattening dessert without hearing him saying “..and the best part is … it tears the weight off you.” I can’t sit looking at a blank page without his credo coming to mind: “Will write, if cornered.” I looked at the airline meal on the flight out here, and heard him say “Toy food.”

And as for the word ‘totter’, they should just retire it from the language now that he’s gone, the way they retired Wayne Gretzky’s number when he quit playing hockey.

Dad could be a tough audience. I’ll never forget watching a young comedian trying his act on him one Sunday at lunch. Dad just sat there saying, “Good. That’s funny.” But he never even cracked a smile. Finally the comic got exasperated and said “Don’t you ever just laugh?” Dad shrugged. “No,” he said. “But don’t feel bad. My eyes are twinkling merrily.”

I wrote a suspense novel and asked him to cut it. He took more than a third of it out.  When I complained, he shrugged and said, “I could cut a minute thirty from the Book of Genesis if I really had to.” The edit was a huge job and a lot of work, taken from his own busy schedule. But the gesture was typically generous. My friends and I often heard him ask, “How much money would change your life?” If you thought about it and told him, he’d give it to you. It didn’t always take much. One night when my friend Stephen Salinger was broke and waiting on tables at Ma Maison,  my Dad tipped him a hundred dollars. It did the trick; Stephen never forgot that night. Dad once ordered a bottle of Mouton Rothschild ’59 in the Oak Room at the Plaza, just to show me what great wine tasted like.  When he knew I needed it desperately, he swept me off to London for my senior year of High School … and thirty two years later, it’s  still the best year of my life.  I learned much more from him than I did in school – antiquing on the Portobello road, or at the Turner show at the Tate. He had to drag me out to see the Noel Coward tribute at the British Film Institute. Hey, I was seventeen. It was a great night as well as Coward’s last public appearance ever.

It’s strange, standing in this house without Dad and Joanie here. Not even this house exactly… there have been so many over the years. This is just the most recent one. All of them, from 1018 Benedict Canyon to 301 North Carolwood, from 56 Chester Square to Malibu to Lloydcrest Drive, all had the same spirit. And most of them had the same bar. I got drunk for the first time in my life at that bar. And I don’t think I’m the only one. Anyway … for most my life these houses have been like the world capital of wit and sophistication.  If any of them are haunted, there are going to be some great parties going on, with some very classy ghosts.

Dad was a wonderful host, but he was cripplingly shy.

He was full of contradictions, mostly between the cynical things he said and the big-hearted way he lived. He used to say there was no one as tedious as a reformed drunk. But he was one himself for the better part of two decades with no loss of charm or style. An English magazine once asked him to comment on the phrase  “All the world loves a lover.” He said, “Funny you should ask. Right now my son is in love, my daughter is in love, my cook is in love, my secretary is in love, even the man who picks up my trash is in love. They stand under my window all night long, baying about it.  So in response to your question, I would have to say that all the world does not love a lover.  In fact all the world is bored to tears by a lover.”

This from a man who was married – with a one short break – to the same woman for more than fifty years. He had nothing against love. He just couldn’t take it seriously.

If there is a heaven, and I know he didn’t believe in that stuff, I can picture him at some celestial Ma Maison (The number is still unlisted), St. Peter bringing him  a bottle of white wine to the table instantly. Dad is ordering lunch – that was his specialty just like Patrick O’Neal’s character in Secret Life. There are some old friends around the table. Maybe he’s even pausing between courses, looking down on this gathering today, listening to my little speech. Not laughing, of course.

But perhaps his eyes are twinkling merrily.

Right now, I’d be happy to settle for that.

I tried to side-step any obvious sentimentality. He hated sentimentality. He used to say every Steven Spielberg movie could be titled with the prefix, “How I spent my summer vacation” (As a sharecropper, in a Japanese internment camp, hiding an alien, chasing a shark, saving Jews from the Nazis). He would walk out of a play if the curtain rose to reveal a refrigerator on the stage (he hated ‘kitchen sink’ drama) and once dragged me out of Man of La Mancha in a theater with no center aisle.

My stepbrother was brusque and succinct at the memorial service, my brother and sister read from prepared notes, though Nina’s gesture of chucking her cell phone into the swimming pool felt spontaneous. Our father hated the telephone (“For a dime anyone in this country can ring a bell in my house”) and he especially hated cell-phones.

Everyone seemed to think I spoke extemporaneously. Dad would have liked that. And I killed.

He would have liked that best of all.

 —Steven Axelrod

————————————–

Steven AxelrodSteven Axelrod holds an MFA in writing from Vermont College of the Fine Arts and remains a member of the WGA despite a long absence from Hollywood. In addition to Numéro Cinq, his work has appeared at Salon.com and various magazines, including PulpModern and BigPulp. A father of two, he lives on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, where he paints houses and writes, often at the same time, much to the annoyance of his customers.

Click here for the complete NC Fathers Series.

May 132013
 

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The Burgess Boys
Elizabeth Strout
Random House
320 pages, $26.00

Elizabeth Strout, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for her book of connected short stories Olive Kitteridge, has written an engrossing, strictly realistic, tightly plotted novel replete with family secrets, long-held grudges, and crises of faith and politics. Set in Olive Kitteridge’s home town of Shirley Falls, Maine, the new novel features a diverse cast of meticulously drawn characters who grow and change. The various braided stories in the book resolve with a sense of the past accepted and the future embraced.

In short, it’s everything a doctrinaire Modernist critic might be tempted to dismiss out of hand.

In his book What Ever Happened to Modernism?, Gabriel Josipovici asks the classic novelist,

What gives you the authority to decide that it will be this rather than that? No authority, the classic novelist will reply, but simply the requirements of realism, the requirements of my plot. But do these things have to do with anything other than ensuring your novel is saleable? That of course is a very reasonable requirement, but let us then simply relegate it to the world of consumerism, of fitted kitchens and package holidays.

His point is that the artificial tidiness and contrivance of conventional literary novels create an organized dream where “well-made” stories reach satisfactory conclusions and console us with a sense of ultimate meaning. But the universe is essentially meaningless, and any fiction which disguises this fact trivializes itself and accomplishes little beyond mere escapism.  Life as people really live it moment by moment can only be described and honored by capturing the ongoing rush of consciousness. The attempt to grasp the unknowable, to sing aloud the intricate harmonies playing silently inside your head, is the true purpose of art.

So how does a writer working long after Virginia Woolf and Alain Robbe-Grillet, a writer of best-selling fiction in 2013, reconcile the demands of story-telling with this higher calling, this need to reveal that which stories, by their very nature,  conceal? For Elizabeth Strout, it involves animating the machinery of her plot with moments of pure consciousness from the interior lives of her characters. It’s an uneasy compromise, and it certainly does not address the modernist need to “write against” and comment on the artificial constructions of the novel form. But it works. It lifts her book above the middle-brow pack, and lets the reader take away something surprising and ineffable, beyond the homely satisfactions of a tale well told.

The tale begins when Zachary, the 17-year-old son of Susan Burgess, shocks the town of Shirley Falls, Maine, by rolling a frozen (but thawing) pig’s head down the center aisle of the local mosque. The mosque is the central place of worship for the town’s Somali immigrants and Zachary’s bizarre hate crime casts an unflattering light, not unlike the harsh fluorescent lights in the local department store changing rooms, on the racism and xenophobia of this small northern village.

Both of Susan’s brothers, Bob and Jim, had fled the State of Maine years before to make their careers in New York City. They are both lawyers, Jim considerably more successful than Bob, but Zachary’s arrest brings them, however reluctantly, home.

The abiding narrative between the titular Burgess boys had begun decades before with a moment of horror that left the family splintered and scarred forever.  All three children were left in a car by their father one evening and somehow Bob crawled into the front seat and released the emergency brake. The car rolled downhill, hit their father and killed him. Throughout his childhood Bob carried the guilt of that moment like a backpack bulging with textbooks, and the burden continues to deform him, well into middle age.

As for Jim, he was always the star of the family, football player, class president and eventually nationally prominent defense lawyer, most famous for getting beloved country music star Wall Packer acquitted in a notorious murder trial.

Jim is less successful in his attempts to intervene on Zachary’s behalf. He slights the governor after a rousing speech, and ineptly bullies the prosecutor. Similar errors of judgment contaminate both his personal life and his career. The two overlap disastrously when an affair with one of the paralegals in his office leads to a threatened sexual harassment law suit. Jim gets fired and divorced, humiliated in every way. He winds up using the last of his connections to secure a low-paying teaching job at an upstate college for rich slackers.

Lies have defined his life from the beginning. It turns out that it was in fact Jim who released the emergency brake and killed their father. Even at eight years old he was cunning enough to scramble into the back seat and position Bob up front, behind the wheel, so that his hapless baby brother would take the blame.

This revelation causes a tectonic shift in Bob Burgess’s life. The quake reduces all his assumptions to rubble. The hero and sovereign of his life becomes at a stroke nemesis and grifter, villain and fool, too awful to love, too sad and puny to hate. As for Bob himself, the curse he’s lived with all his life has lifted; he’s free. The liberation extends beyond his immediate family. His first wife Pam, who left him because they couldn’t have children, loses her hold over him as well: “Pam was gone for him. Gone with Jim somehow. The two of them seemed to have fallen into the pocket where the self knows to put dark unpleasant things …”

Pam is a complex interesting character and one of her private moments touches on the struggling modernism of this conventionally structured novel:

So she lay awake at night and at times there was a curious peacefulness to this, the darkness warm as though the deep violet duvet held its color unseen, wrapping around Pam some soothing aspect of her youth, as her  mind wandered over a life that felt puzzlingly long; she experienced a quiet surprise that so many lifetimes could be fit into one. She couldn’t name them so much as feel them, the soccer field of her high school in autumn, her first boyfriend’s thin torso, the innocence unbelievable to her now, and the sexual innocence in some ways being the smallest part of innocence, there was no way to name the slender, true piercing hopes of a young girl in a rural Massachusetts town – then Orono, and the campus and Shirley Falls, and Bob, and Bob, the first infidelity … and then her new marriage and her boys. Her boys. Nothing is what you imagine. Her mind hovered above this simple and alarming thought. The variables were too great, the particularities too distinct, life a flood of translations from the shadow-edged yearnings of the heart to the immutable aspects of the physical world – this violet duvet and her lightly snoring husband.

Finally she arrives at the ultimate modernist conclusion: “Nothing could be told and be accurate.” Elizabeth Strout allows her character this thought, but the only way to ratify its fatalism would be to fall silent and this she refuses to do. She has a story to tell. The story of Bob’s liberation and his budding romance with the local Unitarian minister; the story of Susan Burgess’s struggles as a single mother, dealing with her son’s crime and his flight to Sweden to hide out with his expatriate father, his ultimate return home. And it’s the story of another expatriate, a Somali named Abdikarim Ahmed, separated from his own son, whose compassion for a troubled boy rescues Zachary both from the anger of the Somali community and the machinery of American justice.

Strout shows tremendous compassion for the Somali community and a sharp awareness of the discomfort of the locals as their community is knocked sideways from the comfort of its historically homogenous world into the era of diversity. Susan’s trip to New York City, which she finds almost as alienating as another country, gives her a faint sense of the overwhelming exile the Somali’s endure. But she can’t grasp, and probably wouldn’t want fully understand, the horror from which her new neighbors have fled. Strout allows us a glimpse of that nightmare, through the moments we spend with Abdikarim:

He should have left Mogadishu earlier. He should have put the two worlds of his mind into one. Siad Barre had fled the city and when the resistance group split in two, Abdikarim’s own mind seemed to split in two. When the mind occupies two worlds it cannot see. One world of his mind had said: Abdikarim, send your wife and young daughters away – and he had done that. The other world of his mind had said: I will stay and keep my shop open, with my son.

His son, dark-eyed, looking at his father, terrified and behind him in the street, and the walls becoming upside down, dust and smoke and the boy falling, as though his arms had been pulled one way, he legs another – To shoot was bad enough to last his lifetime and the next, but not bad enough for the depraved men-boys, who had burst through the door, the splintered shelves and tables, who swung their large, American-made guns. For some reason – no reason – one had stayed behind and smashed the end of his gun onto Baashi repeatedly, while Abdikarim crawled to him. In the dream he never reached him.

Ironically, it’s this loss, this raw view of authentic savagery that gives Abdikarim his compassion for Zachary and helps heal his adopted town.

As to Zachary, his motives are never really made clear. The central figure, the instigator of the story, remains a mystery. He mother is at a loss; so are his uncles. It’s doubtful whether even Zachary fully comprehends the impulse that drove him to bowl that pig’s head into a mosque during Ramadan. The feral distrust of the different had something to do with it. Susan expresses it this way: “They don’t want to be here. They’re waiting to go home. They don’t want to become part of our country. They’re just kind of sitting here, but meanwhile they think our way of life is trashy and glitzy and crummy. It hurts my feelings, honestly.”

So Zachary absorbs his mother’s baffled hostility, he feels separate and alienated, judged and invaded, angry and diminished. But at times he insists that it was just a prank, a random moment of perverse mischief, badly timed, horrifically inappropriate, drastically misinterpreted. None of the explanations add up to a coherent motivation, and that may be Strout’s point, the secret kernel of modernist non-meaning at the heart of the book that helps sustain all its tangled narratives.

As Josipovici remarks, discussing mainstream English novelists like Anthony Powell and Iris Murdoch,

They do what they set out to do perfectly and adequately: they help tell a story and create a world and characters to inhabit that world that do not flout the laws of probability. We never doubt what they are telling us … such narratives are easy to read. They are also illustrative in Bacon’s sense: they tell a story, they have no life of their own … the smooth chain of sentences gives us a sense of security, of comfort even, precisely because it denies the openness, the ‘trembling’ of life itself; the very confidence of the narrative gives the lie to our own sense of things being confused, dark, impossible to grasp fully.

And that, finally, is what Elizabeth Strout delivers in this fine novel: the openness, the trembling, of life itself. That she does this in a solid, deftly plotted piece of classical story-telling makes her accomplishment all the greater – and more mysterious.

—Steven Axelrod

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Steven Axelrod

Steven Axelrod holds an MFA in writing from Vermont College of the Fine Arts and remains a member of the WGA despite a long absence from Hollywood. In addition to Numéro Cinq, his work has appeared at Salon.com and various magazines with ‘pulp’ in the title, including PulpModern and BigPulp. A father of two, he lives on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, where he paints houses and writes, often at the same time, much to the annoyance of his customers.

 

 

Mar 042013
 

Yoko OgawaAuthor Photo via trendy.nikkeibp.co.jp

Revenge cover

Revenge, Eleven Dark Stories
Yoko Ogawa
Translated by Stephen Snyder
Picador, ISBN 978-0312674465
162 Pages, $14.00

The original title of Yoko Ogawa’s surreal novel in eleven stories was Kamoku na shigai, midara na tomurai, which might be translated as Unspeaking Corpse, Unsuitable Interment, a much more appropriate, or at any rate a less distracting, title. Active revenge figures only intermittently in Ms. Ogawa’s book, though it often crosses the minds of her characters.  Even a cursory reading indicates that these stories are connected, with characters, incidents, themes, images and even physical objects recurring and reverberating forward and backward through the linked narratives that make up the collection.

Closer study of the book reveals a more cohesive structure. These eleven stories are really a single harrowing tale, told in one voice, though the eleven protagonists represent various ages and both sexes. The shared flat affect of the unnamed narrators at first seems an oddity or a flaw.  In fact their single voice is the key to the book’s form, and a vital clue to decoding its meaning.

Ogawa leads you through a slightly askew world in these stories, all of them set in the same dream landscape that consists of a town square, a zoo, a resort hotel, a disused post office, a crumbling mansion turned museum, a boarding house with a hill of fruit trees and a field of junked appliances. Her characters move through these designated spaces, following each other’s tracks like the little sculptures that emerge from the clock tower in the town square every hour.

Start with “Afternoon at the Bakery.”  The titular store stands in the town square, with its cuckoo-style clock tower and its straggling figurines: a soldier, a chicken, a skeleton and an angel. Inside, the baker, a tiny woman, cries as she talks on the phone in the kitchen. A customer orders a strawberry shortcake in honor of her dead son. It was his favorite treat, before he trapped himself in the family refrigerator and suffocated, at age six. “He had curled up in an ingenious fashion to fit between the shelves and the egg box, with his legs carefully folded and his face tucked between his knees.”

Later the customer goes home and locks herself inside her refrigerator to try and feel what her son felt. This image, of a body curled between the freezer and the egg tray, opens and closes the book. Along the way, reiterations of it illuminate the path through the other eleven stories like the lighted houses strung along the curve of a beach at night.

In the second story, “Fruit Juice,” a young man is invited to lunch with a schoolmate and the father who abandoned her many years ago. Her mother, dying of cancer, has arranged the meeting. The father is a prominent local politician,  and he sends a  limousine to pick them up. The restaurant is expensive, but the meal is formal and pedestrian. They eat strawberry shortcake for dessert. The old man offers his help. But he’s a stranger.

The friend pauses as they walk through the city streets later, “like a wind-up toy that has run down.”  Later, they find themselves in a closed post office at the foot of a hill planted with fruit trees. The big empty chamber inside is filled with piles of ripe kiwis. The young man watches as his friend gorges herself.  Years later, she studies culinary arts and eventually becomes a baker. When the narrator finds out the politician has died he calls his friend at work to tell her. She is crying on the phone when a woman comes into the shop to order a memorial portion of strawberry shortcake.

“Old Mrs. J”  introduces us to the old woman who owns both the fruit trees and the old post office. Death has marked her life, too. She’s a widow and takes in boarders, including the young tenant who narrates this story. Stray cats make their first appearance here, wrecking her garden. The tenant suggests spreading pine needles to keep them away. In the course of their conversation he tells her he’s a writer, a piece of information she finds oddly disturbing. He watches her harvesting the kiwis and carrying them down the hill in boxes. She also grows carrots. Somehow she has cultivated them into the shape of human hands. When her husband is dug up in the orchard by the police, his hands have been amputated.

“The Little Dustman” features a children’s orchestra playing this Brahms piece on a snowbound train. Both the spring snow storm (the flakes look like blossoms) and the music recur as the book goes on. This narrator is on the train going to “Mama’s” funeral. In fact the woman was his step-mother for just two years, when he was a little boy. She left when he was twelve. He recalls a trip to the zoo during a raging snow storm like the one outside the train window. She was a writer, and the trip was research for a novel about the zoo. At the time of her death, Mama hadn’t written anything in ten years, but she carried a manuscript with her wrapped in a scarf, apparently afraid someone was going to steal it. Finally the stepson reads one of her stories, about a woman who grows carrots in the shape of human hands.

“Lab Coats” concerns two secretaries at the local hospital. They are sorting lab coats for the laundry. One of them is in love with a married doctor, a resident in respiratory medicine. When the doctor goes to reveal the affair to his wife, his train gets stuck in a  springtime snowstorm. The angry secretary doesn’t believe it; her friend reminds her: “Freak snowstorms happen.”  Later they are typing color-coded labels for a medical presentation and the secretary uses color #608, instead of #508. She blames her friend, but #508 is her apartment number. She murdered her doctor boyfriend there. Later sorting out lab coats again, they find his bloody white jacket, with his tongue in the pocket.

“Sewing for the Heart” concerns a bag-maker hired to construct a bag to enclose a woman’s heart, which is located outside her body, just above her left breast.  She is a jazz singer,  at a local nightclub. He goes to hear her perform after examining the beating heart at her house. He’s explains: “I simply wanted to see her heart in the outside world.”

The image of a heart beating unprotected and visible arrives at the book’s midpoint, along with a description of the bag as a work of art that could just easily be about the stories, themselves:  “A bag has no intentions of its own, it embraces every object you ask it to hold.”

He has made all kinds of bags, including one for carrying his pet hamster, which dies in the course of the story. He dumps it into the trash at a hamburger joint. He has no further use for the hamster’s bag, and the singer’s intricate heart-bag winds up on the floor as well, “like a dead animal” when the singer agrees to an operation that will insert her heart back into her chest cavity.

 The thought of his masterpiece going to waste drives the bag-maker mad and he winds up attacking the woman in her bed, as the  hospital PA system pages the missing Dr. Y from respiratory medicine.

He cuts out the heart and carries it away in the sealskin satchel he created.

The woman in “Welcome to the Museum of Torture” is linked to the other characters and situations by many threads. A doctor was murdered in apartment #508 in her building; the policeman interviewing her wonders if there’s any connection to the woman whose heart was cut out in a mysterious attack at the hospital the day before. And she describes the embrace of her boyfriend in a way which by now feels downright ominous: “I have the ability to squeeze into any little space he leaves for me. I fold my legs until they take up almost no room at all, and curl in my shoulders until they’re practically dislocated. Like a mummy in a tomb. And when I get like this, I don’t care if I never get out, or maybe that’s what I hope will happen.”

Thinking she is amused by the murder upstairs, her boyfriend breaks up with her and she winds up wandering through the same city dreamscape the other characters inhabit: through the town square, whose cuckoo clock characters are falling apart –even the angel’s wings are detaching themselves. She finds a dead hamster in the trash. Eventually she winds up at the museum of the title, a stone house on the edge of town. An elderly gentleman shows her around, pointing out various gruesome exhibits, including a torso crusher created by a bag-maker. The old man tells her the bag maker invented this horrific corset to use on himself. Love and torture seem a perfect match to the jilted lover.

“Everything my uncle touched seemed to fall apart at the end,” the narrator of the next story, “The Man Who Sold Braces,” tells us. Of course he wasn’t a real uncle, any more than “Mama” of “The Little Dustman” was an actual mother. All family ties in Ogawa’s world are confused and tenuous.

Uncle brought the boy in the story presents, and made him search through his pocket for them.  Once he helped the boy build a model airplane, which promptly fell apart, losing its wings like the clock angel. Uncle and nephew remained close as the child grew up and the older man launched himself onto a baroque series of failed business endeavors, including a brace that was supposed to help short people grow taller. The uncle winds up as the curator of a museum of torture and the caretaker of the Bengal tiger kept by the twin old women who originally owned the house.  How did he tell the two ancient ladies apart? He couldn’t, and there was no need to: in essence they were the same person, as interchangeable, one can’t help thinking, as the narrators of these eleven stories. The brace he designed winds up in the museum – and falls apart, of course.

The narrator finds his uncle dying in his little apartment, under a collapsed shelf, among a hoarder’s mess of random objects. His uncle tells him the tiger died and gives him a fur coat, which he realizes is stitched together from the animal’s pelt.  He leaves, walking out into a bizarre springtime blizzard. Even as he grasps the nature of his coat, it starts to fall apart, molting off him, scattering its pieces on the snow.

The wife of Dr Y, specialist in respiratory medicine, is driving into town to confront his mistress, as “The Last Hour of the Bengal Tiger” begins. This story seems to takes place before the murder; or perhaps she is just as yet unaware of it. She crosses a bridge covered with spilled tomatoes from a farmer’s overturned truck, driving over them greedily, feeling like she’s crushing human organs with her car wheels. She never gets to apartment #508. Instead she winds up in the backyard of the Museum of Torture, where the old curator is comforting a Bengal tiger in its death throes. Driving home across the bridge, she finds the tomatoes are gone.

The penultimate story in the collection, “Tomatoes and the Full Moon,”  opens with a small woman and her big dog sitting on the protagonist’s hotel bed when he checks into his room.  He convinces her to leave, but she crosses his path often in the days that follow. He sees her trying to sell a load of tomatoes she found scattered a bridge to the hotel chef, and she sits with him the next morning while he eats an omelet engorged with tomatoes and a salad stuffed with them.  He’s a writer, staying at the hotel to review it for a travel magazine. The resort features a dolphin-watching cruise, but the dolphins are dead, from some internal parasite that brings to mind the maggots whose swarming movements made the dead hamster seem alive for a moment to the narrator of “Welcome to the Museum of Torture.”

When the old woman sits next to him on a bench, he remarks, “Her tiny body fit right next to mine,” echoing the dead child in the refrigerator, and the girl from the Museum of Torture, molding herself to her boyfriend. It soon becomes clear that this old lady is “Mama” from the “The Little Dustman.” Of course she had died in that story.

So she is a ghost, or something else, the central consciousness that animates all these tales, the reflected and refracting facets of the gem stone, the blood diamond, she keeps turning and turning in her hands.

She re-tells the story of the snow bound trip to the zoo, but fills in the end. She and her son got lost, and almost died in the blizzard. They were rescued by a man driving a car, so much like the lost father’s car in Fruit Juice. The man who saved them looked exactly like the young journalist. He also reminds her of her son. “I seem to have all the parts in your story,” he says. He asks her about the bundle and she tells him it’s her manuscript. She carries it everywhere for fear of having it stolen. She’s not paranoid. It’s happened before. An old woman stole her work once – her novel Afternoon at the Bakery, about a woman buying a birthday cake for her dead son. The plagiarist had the nerve to say of the book, “It was the product of destroying the world she’d built in her previous works.”

The journalist takes photographs of Mama in the hotel library, recalling the photograph of his own lost son and a picture of Mama with old Mrs. J, holding up hand-shaped carrots for a local newspaper. He finds mama’s book in the library. The dust jacket photo shows old Mrs. J, and claims the author disappeared fifteen years before. She’s gone from the hotel the next day, but he finds her bundled manuscript.

The pages are blank.

In the final story, “Poison Plants,” an elderly painter hears a young man singing “The Little Dustman” in a concert, and is so impressed she offers to help him with his career. She secures a tutor and a music scholarship for him in return for a bi-weekly progress report at her house. The boy’s news doesn’t interest her; all she cares about is hearing his voice. He reads to her, a bizarre (but familiar) story of a hill full of kiwi trees, carrots shaped like hands and a dead cat found in an abandoned post office, under a mountain of fruit.

She had a daughter who died at age nineteen. “My past is full of ghosts,” she tells him. She shows him her paintings, he plays piano for her. She tells him a little more about her life. She met her husband when he hired her to paint the poisonous plants in his garden. By this time in the book, that seems like an entirely reasonable courtship. She throws the tarot for him and sees his girlfriend’s death in the cards, though she doesn’t say so. Their brief friendship comes to an end when she insists he visit on his girlfriend’s birthday. He reads to her on that last visit and the story shifts. Is she hearing it, or living it, remembering it or making it up?

 The events are familiar by now. The old woman scrambles up a hill of fruit trees and then down into a forest, finally out into a field of rusting discarded appliances. She opens the door of a refrigerator and sees her own body: “In this gloomy, cramped box I had eaten poison plants and died, hidden away from prying eyes. Crouching down at the door I wept. For my dead self.”

And the book ends there, a dream of grief, a lesson in life’s revenge on us, for the crime of living. All these characters sound the same because they are the same, one soul caught in the Museum of Torture, lost in the snow, strapped into the brace, watching everything fall apart, even the wings of angels. Her manuscript stolen or made up of blank pages, or both, its metaphors nevertheless persist in her mind, poisoning her like toxic fruit, colonizing her like maggots in the dead hamster, or the intestinal disease that killed the hotel dolphins. The images are surreal: the sealskin bag perfectly fitted to a human heart, the human tongue in a dead man’s lab coat pocket. They serve the highest purpose of surrealism, to enlarge and distort the truth so that we can finally recognize it.

Mama’s child is dead. She’s dead, too. Any parent who has lost a child, or suffered the loss in a nightmare, or lived a moment or two of it in a crowded place when a little boy wandered off, knows the feeling. Has Yoko Ogawa suffered in this way? It’s impossible to tell. Though Ogawa has published more than twenty books since 1988, and won numerous Japanese literary awards, including the Akutagawa prize, she lives a life of absolute privacy, out of the public spotlight, as mysterious as the blank pages of her character’s manuscript.

We may know little about the author, but we do know what those empty pages might have contained: the entwined fever dreams of rage and sorrow that make up this small strange masterpiece.

Like the afflicted jazz singer in “Sewing for the Heart,” Yoko Ogawa wears her heart outside her chest — a remarkable, disturbing, beautiful book.

—Steven Axelrod

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Steven AxelrodSteven Axelrod holds an MFA in writing from Vermont College of the Fine Arts and remains a member of the WGA despite a long absence from Hollywood. In addition to Numéro Cinq, where he has been a contributor and contest winner, his work has appeared at Salon.com and The GoodMen Project, as well various magazines with ‘pulp’ in the title, including PulpModern and BigPulp.  A father of two, he lives on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, where he paints houses and writes, often at the same time, much to the annoyance of his customers.

Dec 072012
 

 

Ian Fleming & the first James Bond, Sean Connery

The newest James Bond movie, Skyfall, opened last month while the press and the blogosphere celebrated the 50th anniversary of the film franchise. Cover stories blossomed describing the various James Bond actors, from Sean Connery and Roger Moore to the newest incarnation of Ian Fleming’s hero, Daniel Craig, along with Bond’s girls, from Ursula Andress to Berenice Marlohe, and Bond’s high-tech toys, from exploding briefcases to invisible cars. Nostalgia buffs of a certain age recall the Mad Magazine Man from U.N.C.L.E. parody where Sean Connery showed up at the end to brusquely inform Robert Vaughan (As Napoleon Solo) that he got more girls in one movie than Solo got in a whole season of the knock-off spy drama. We recall our chagrin when George Lazenby took over for an ungrateful Sean Connery (Bond was constricting his talents) and ruined what might have been the best of film of them all, On her Majesty’s Secret Service.

 “This never happened to the other guy” Lazenby remarked with cheeky meta panache after getting beaten up in the opening action sequence.

You said it, fella.

Despite my own fondness for many of the movies  — they were a family Christmas day tradition for most of my childhood and my favorite part may have been the end of each one where a final note in the credits said  “The end … but James Bond will be back …” – someone has to say it: we’re all celebrating the wrong anniversary.

The correct one: April 13th, 1953. Yes, we’re still five months away from the crucial date, the 60th anniversary of the publication of Ian Fleming’s very first James Bond novel, Casino Royale.

Fleming has become the forgotten man as the hoopla about his character’s ongoing life in the cinema ramps up. Most people seem to regard Fleming as a hack with a taste for fine liquor and high tech gimmicks. He liked to drink, no question about it, and the famous “shaken but not stirred” prescription for the perfect martini first appeared in Diamonds are Forever, published in 1956. But the obsession with “Q branch” and elaborate weaponry was entirely the product of Hollywood.

This lovely moment in From Russia with Love makes the point with typical brio. Bond, headed for Belgrade on the old Orient Express, finds himself at the mercy of SMERSH agent Donovan “Red” Grant, played in the film by Robert Shaw. In the book, there is no fancy exploding briefcase or any other gimmick to save Bond. Fleming notes this, with ironic regret: “He puffed away at his cigarette. If only it had been a trick one – magnesium flare, or anything he could throw in the man’s face! If only his service went in for those explosive toys!”

Ian Fleming’s Bond books in general, though fanciful and romantic when compared with the works of John LeCarré or Len Deighton, seem almost mundane next to the continuously escalating madcap extravagance of the films, which lapsed into self-parody for more than a decade in the seventies and early eighties (still ruefully known as “The Roger Moore Years”).

Fleming’s James Bond was grounded and practical, a sybarite but also an ascetic, equally fond of sea-island cotton shirts and cold showers.  And he had an imagination, which no film has ever managed to portray and no film-maker seems to have noticed.

Here, in Diamonds are Forever, Bond witnesses the villain’s death, Jack Spang — Mafioso and international diamond smugggler  — crashing in a disabled helicopter:  “Yes. There he was. Only about a thousand feet up now, engine roaring and the great blades whirring uselessly as the tangle of metal pitched and yawed down the sky in long drunken staggers.”  Fleming captures the scene vividly, through Bond’s merciless camera-eye:

Bond could imagine the narrow cockpit, the big man holding on with one hand and wrenching at the controls with the other as he watched the needle of the altimeter dip down through the hundreds. And there would be the red glare of terror in the eyes, and the hundred thousand pound pocketful of diamonds would be just so much dead weight, and the gun which had been a strong right arm since boyhood would be no comfort.

About the possibility of a similar fate befalling him, Bond allows himself a few typically hard-nosed philosophical musings, in flight over the Caribbean early on in Live and Let Die:

No, when the stresses are too great for the tired metal, when the ground mechanic who checks the de-icing equipment is in love and skimps his job, way back in London, Idlewild, Gander, Montreal; when those or many things happen, then the little warm room with propellers in front falls straight down into the sea or onto the land, heavier than air, fallible, vain. And the forty little heavier-than-air people, fallible within the plane’s fallibility, vain within its larger vanity, fall down with it and make little holes in the land or little splashes in the sea.  Which is anyway their destiny, so why worry? You are linked to the ground mechanic’s careless fingers in Nassau just as you are linked to the weak head of the little man in the family saloon, who mistakes the red light for the green and meets you head-on, for the first and last time, as you are motoring quietly home from some private sin. There’s nothing to do about it. You start to die the moment you are born. The whole of life is cutting through the pack with death.

Fleming was the first writer I encountered, reading for pleasure, who made me realize that the hero in a book could have an inner life, that the book itself could have a vivid sense of place and a unique sensibility. In other words, Fleming was my introduction to literature. I must add, by way of explanation that I was ten years old at the time and my primary reading, outside of Spider Man comic books, consisted of Albert Payson Terhune dog fiction and the Hardy Boys.  Formulaic as those stories were, they led me to Fleming and Fleming led me directly to Chandler and Hammett, and from there to Hemingway and Camus and beyond.  I learned my first lessons in fine writing from the way Fleming He sprinkled his prose with little  grace notes of description —  the sea  ‘lisping’ on the flat sand, the ‘straight white feather’ of a fishing boat’s wake, viewed from above.

Fleming was a world traveler and he made his settings come alive in a way that some more serious authors might envy.  One of the last of the books, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, begins this way:

It was one of those summers when it seemed that the summer would never end.

The five-mile promenade of Royale-les-Eaux , backed by trim lawns emblazoned at intervals with tri-color beds of salvia, alyssum and lobelia, was bright with flags and, on the longest beach in the north of France, the gay bathing tents still marched prettily down to the tide line in big-money making battalions.

And here is the view of Istanbul from a shabby hotel window, soon after Bond arrives in the city, in From Russia with Love:

Bond got out of bed, drew back the heavy red plush curtains and leant on the iron balustrade and looked out over one of the most famous views in the world – on his right the still waters of the Golden Horn, on his left the dancing waves  of the unsheltered waters of the Bosphorous, and, in between, the tumbling roofs, soaring minarets and crouch mosque of Pera. After all, his choice had been good. The view made up for many bedbugs and much discomfort.

In most of these places, Bond encounters men who become his friends — generally the same kind of man: shrewd, tough adrenaline junkies, with firm dry handshakes and few illusions.  From Darko Kerim, the head the Secret Service’s Istanbul Station, a cheerful cynic who treats spying in the Balkans as a teeming family business, to Corsican gangster Marc-Ange Draco, who briefly becomes Bond’s father-in-law, to Jamaica bone-fisherman Quarrel, and sturdy self-effacing CIA agent Felix Leiter, Bond has a knack for finding kindred spirits. But Bond is a dangerous man to know: most of his allies and companions fall by the way-side, shot, stabbed to death or in Leiter’s case, half eaten by carnivorous fish. Fleming had a streak of sadism and a taste for cruelty, tempered by the essential decency of his much battered, imperfect, hero who often bungles every attempt but the final one.

Fleming’s estate in Jamaica & his study

Fleming himself seems like the icon of an extinct brand of personal style, from his mysterious history with MI6  to Goldeneye, the sprawling beach estate in Jamaica where he wrote most of his books, to the ever present cigarette in its long holder, he possessed a level of personal style that modern thriller writers don’t even aspire to. This was a man who claimed to have seen every sunrise in his adult life, who remarked “I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them,”  and dismissed Sean Connery with a tart “I’m looking for Commander James Bond, not an overgrown stunt man.”

The James Bond movies relentlessly update the character and his world with the cold war dissolving into the war on terror, new actors taking over the role, the gadgets and gizmos becoming ever grander, the tech ever higher, the tropes and traps more topical. The villains use parkour and iPads now; the text has replaced the cable. This is necessary in the big-ticket Hollywood that feeds the international film market, where everything must take place in the immediate, indeed the imperative, present tense.

But the charm of Fleming’s novels is the precise reverse of this passion for the up-to-date. Moldering on the used book store shelf, or awkwardly clustered in the cloud-based queue of my Kindle e-reader, they remain unapologetically documents of their own time, endearing period pieces from an era that baby-boomers like myself regard with a fierce wounding nostalgia.

It was our parents’ time, a time of cars with fins, telephones with rotary dials, when America was still the most powerful nation on earth, riding the storm surge of power and wealth from World War II. Yes there were cracks and fractures in that world, but they were easy to ignore. Everyone smoked and nobody cared. Nothing was fading away, nothing was running out, and no listened to Rachel Carson.

Our fathers wore blocked hats parties and drank from flasks of rye at football games; and our mothers gave big cocktail parties and joined the PTA. We protested and demonstrated and smoked weed and ended the war in View Nam and brought down the President.

Heady times.

Who could have guessed that our swaggering parents would get lung cancer from the smoking and cirhossis from the booze, and that we would become the safety first, rules-making, no-kid-rides-a-bike-without-body-armor scared of its own shadow generation, about to drag the world into insolvency with our collective Medicare and Social Security costs?

What did faded movie star Norma Desmond say in Sunset Boulevard ? “I’m still big. It’s the pictures that got small.” Well, it’s the whole world that’s shriveling now. We live in a diminished, attenuated world, one that seems to be running down like a hand cranked sewing machine. There are too many people, and too little of everything else – food, water, oil, education, breathing space. There was a kind of power moving through the world that Ian Fleming inhabited, like the immense pulses of energy that move through the Pacific from the great Aleutian storms, creating the giant waves that break in Hawaii and the Northern coast of California. That energy has drained from the world somehow. We’re all sitting in inflatable rafts in swimming pools, our new world tiny and tame and chlorinated. The power surging through Fleming’s mid- twentieth century made his success and charisma and swagger possible. It might not have created his stature but it gave him a place to stand.

Okay it was all an illusion, but it was a grand illusion and I miss it and I feel the touch of it on my shoulder every time James Bond lights one of those hand- made cigarettes from Morland’s with the three gold rings above the filter.

That time is gone and Fleming is gone, but the books remain, still more substantial and enduring than the movies they inspired, still wildly inventive  and engrossing, still deliciously preposterous, still as quirky and eccentric as the man who wrote them, sixty years on and still counting.

—Steven Axelrod

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Steven Axelrod holds an MFA in writing from Vermont College of the Fine Arts and remains a member of the WGA despite a long absence from Hollywood. In addition to Numéro Cinq, where he has been a contributor and contest winner, his work has appeared at Salon.com and The GoodMen Project, as well various magazines with ‘pulp’ in the title, including PulpModern and BigPulp.  A father of two, he lives on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, where he paints houses and writes, often at the same time, much to the annoyance of his customers.

Jun 062012
 

 

 

1.

I have always been drawn to stories of escape; not just simple escapism but actual escape. At the age of ten, I obsessed over World War II prisoner of war literature. I may have been the only sixth-grader in the audience for The Great Escape, John Sturges’ stirring adaptation of Paul Brickhill’s memoir of the break-out from Stalag Luft Three, who sat squinting critically at the screen making an inventory of trivial inaccuracies: The living conditions were worse than the film portrayed; the ambitions of the escape team, more modest. And the POW camp, intended to gather all the allied escape artists in one place, was actually Colditz Castle, a one-time mental institution in the town of Colditz, near Leipzig.

The claustrophobic tunnel digger was not the heroic Pole played by Charles Bronson but Paul Brickhill himself, and unlike Bronson’s Danny, he was ultimately banned from participating in the escape, which may have saved his life.

I’ve seen The Great Escape many times since that rainy afternoon in 1963, first in revival theaters and when it became possible I purchased it on every known format: Betamax, VHS, RCA video disk, DVD, Blu-ray, and finally, the digital download. I watch it to the end whenever I chance upon it, clicking through the channels on my TV.  I’ve even rented it on Netflix.

The thing that keeps drawing me back is the way the film expands in the final third, from the airless prison stockades and dark tunnels into the open rolling fields, quaint towns and snow-capped mountains of Bavaria.

Richard Attenborough fleeing across the roofs of a sleepy village; Charles Bronson floating down a placid river to the sea on a stolen rowboat; James Coburn following a French Resistance fighter into the sun-dappled foothills of the Pyrenees, heading for Spain; and of course, most of all, best of all, Steve McQueen tearing across an alpine meadow on a hi-jacked Nazi motorcycle, finally attempting to leap a wall of crossed timbers and barbed wire in an exuberant, gloriously futile bid for freedom. Those images captured everything I longed for as a child.

But why should that be? I was a cheerful, cherubic little boy living a pampered life in a great city. I had a loving mother, a glamorous father, my own dog, my own record player, my own room. And yet I loved to imagine that the six-foot, ornate dark wood-framed mirror hanging in that room was in fact a secret door to – where? Someplace more exciting, more mysterious, more free.

I happily followed the Pevensie children through that wardrobe into Narnia and could have jumped directly into the television every Easter when we watched the annual showing of The Wizard of Oz on CBS. It didn’t matter that all we had was a black-and-white TV.

I provided the color.

Looking back, I realize I was frightened most of the time growing up, afraid of looking foolish or clumsy, cowering at the thought of bullies at school and on my block at home, trying to avoid stern teachers and arrogant camp counselors. The city itself made me nervous. I never explored it until I returned as an adult, after college. I never even visited Greenwich Village until tenth grade when I found a friend who happened to live there. I attended one of the best high schools in the Western Hemisphere, but I was too intimidated to take the most interesting classes Dalton offered. I still regret missing Donald Barr’s Shakespeare seminar and the great Jane Bendetson’s “The Bible as Literature” elective.

The Los Angeles side of my own family frankly terrified me but with good reason: drug addled, bizarrely seductive half-sister, sociopathic step-brother (did he really try to drown me in the swimming pool that day? Or was he just ‘fooling around?’), authentically demonic step-mother (“I would gladly see all of you LAYED OUT DEAD if it meant helping your father IN ANY WAY.”) and of course my brilliant, troubled, phobic, mercurial, unknowable father.

Fear itself is corrosive. My father understood that as well as FDR did, and I knew it, too. That’s why I spent so much time in my early adulthood confronting mean people, flying kamikaze seductions at women far out of my league and surfing waves too big for me. I got defeated, dumped and nearly drowned. I won an argument or two, went on some wild dates, caught some extraordinary waves. But none of that changed anything.

I still wanted to escape — to the Yellow Brick Road with a motley crew of impaired friends, to the city of Helium under the hurtling moons of Barsoom with Dejah Thoris; down the Mississippi on a raft with Nigger Jim. Maybe I just wanted to stake my freehold in the unclaimed territories of the imagination. I’ve always felt more comfortable with stories than with real life, anyway – they’re so much better organized.

My adult reading remains tinged with that longing for other lives and alternate worlds, from Mann’s Zauberberg to Hemingway’s Pamplona, From Michael Chabon’s Sitka, Alaska to (perversely, I know) George Orwell’s Airstrip One.

That path led me through the guilty pleasures of crime fiction to the imaginary upstate New York town of Deganawida and the extraordinary half-Seneca Indian ‘guide’, Jane Whitefield. Author Thomas Perry’s seventh novel featuring Jane – Poison Flower – was released in March.

2.

Perry’s first novel, The Butcher’s Boy, came out in 1982 and won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel a year later. He hasn’t made much of a splash since then, partly because his books have never been made into films. He advanced a theory about why this might be during a 2003 exchange with Roger Birnbaum:

TP: In a way I don’t really think about it much anymore. My first book, The Butcher’s Boy, was in option continuously for 18 years. It was never out of option. There are studios that don’t exist anymore that had these things. At some point every working screenwriter in Hollywood has a bad script for one or another of my books. Which is why they all hate me. So, I don’t know.

RB: I’m not seeing the connection. They write bad scripts and they hate you?

TP: These are people who have written good movies. And they are hired to write a script of one of my books and it just doesn’t work out. It’s partly an obvious problem. Most of my main characters spend most of their time alone. And when they are not alone, whatever they say aloud is a lie. So, it’s confusing and very difficult to make a movie out of that. You have to invent some bogus character who is going to be the interlocutor. That’s one thing. And very often you have to soften the protagonist because he is amoral or something. Or has some other minor drawback.

I’m convinced there’s a different explanation.

Perry’s books resist adaptation for the same reason that many books do: their literary quality is simply not translatable to the medium of film. Thomas Perry writes escapist fiction. I’m sure he’d be amused to hear me accuse him of making literature. And yet, in his small and particular way, that is precisely what he does. The one thing that all the books I take seriously have in common is a feeling in the text of the author’s personality and point of view, his unique slant on the events he’s describing his sensibility.

That ought to be the explanation, at least, since the books move through one extraordinary cinematic set-piece after another. The chase across the roofs in The Face Changers, the escape through deep woods in Shadow Woman where Jane uses every trick from her Seneca heritage to hide her trail, not knowing that a pair of dogs are trampling her cunning diversions guided by her scent alone. When she stumbles into a clearing, exhausted and  hopeless, and finds herself face to face with a giant brown bear she turns this final calamity into her salvation. She distracts the huge beast with the last of her food and lets the dogs rush headlong into the bear in an improvised Darwinian ambush that covers her escape. I’d watch that in a movie: relentless pursuit foiled by improvisation and ingenuity.

Of course you know Jane will always win, whether she’s leading a trio of murderous sociopaths through the bowels of a deserted rust-belt factory or ambushing a platoon of killers in a deserted country house in the North Woods. That’s the brown savory crust on the macaroni and cheese of this narrative comfort food, the thing people both love and despise about genre fiction in general: Kenzie and Gennaro, Elvis Cole and Spenser will always figure things out; Bubba Rugowski, Joe Pike and Hawk will always get there in the nick of time.

And somehow, the phrase “nick of time” will always be apposite.

So, yes, Jane will always ferry her charges to safety but this sets her apart from the other heroes and heroines on the thriller shelf. She’s not trying to steal anything or solve anything; she’s just trying to help.

Plus she’s cool. She can run forever and she knows where to get false documents. She can tell you that a second floor apartment is best for fugitives (you can see people coming but still climb down to the street); she can teach you to memorize the escape routes from any town and how to destroy the fingerprints and DNA evidence in a car with a fire extinguisher.

Also, she’s fearless. At one point in the 6th book, Runner, she spins her car 180 degrees and drives straight at her pursuers, running them off the road. “You can’t play chicken like that!” her panicky passenger screams. But her bravado is based on ruthless calculation: They’re running for their lives – the mercenaries in the other car are chasing them for cash, and no one’s going to die for a dollar.

Dance for the Dead, perhaps the best of the books, opens with Jane fighting her way into a Los Angeles Court House with nine-year-old Timothy Phillips so that the boy can prove he’s alive before the sinister financial holding company Hoffen-Bayne can declare him dead and take control of his inherited fortune. After a dramatic scene in the courtroom, the judge asks to see Jane in his chambers. “I hear you’re one of those people who could kill me with a pencil,” he says. Jane answers simply: “If I am, I wouldn’t need a pencil.”

To give a better sense of who Jane is and why I find her so compelling, I’m going to turn over some page space to her and present the revealing final moments of her talk with Judge Kramer.

Wrapping up their post-mortem, Jane says:

“ … I can’t prove any of it. I only saw the police putting handcuffs on four of the men in the courthouse, and there won’t be anything on paper that connects them with Hoffen-Bayne or anybody else. I know I never saw them before, so I can’t have been the one they recognized. They saw Timmy.” She took a step toward the door. “Keep him safe.”

The Judge said, “Then there’s you.” He watched her stop and face him. “Who are you?”

“Jane Whitefield.”

“I mean what’s your interest in this?”

“Dennis Morgan asked me to keep Timmy alive. I did that. We all did that.”

“What are you? A private detective? A bodyguard?”

“I’m a guide.”

“What kind of guide?”

“I show people how to go from places where someone is trying to kill them to other places where nobody is.”

“What sort of pay do you get for that?”

“Sometimes they give me presents. I declare the presents on my income taxes. There’s a line for that.”

“Did somebody give you a present for this job?”

“If you fail, there’s nobody around to be grateful. My clients are dead.” After a second she added, “I don‘t take money from kids, even rich kids.”

“Have you served in your capacity as ‘guide’ for Dennis Morgan before?”

“Never met him until he called. He was a friend of a friend.”

“You – all three of you – went into this knowing that whoever was near that little boy might be murdered.”

She looked at him as though she were trying to decide whether he was intelligent or not. Finally, she said, “An innocent little boy is going to die. You’re either somebody who will help him or somebody who won’t. For the rest of your life you’ll be somebody who did help him or somebody who didn’t.”

So that’s Jane Whitefield: one-woman witness-protection agency. As she concludes about Pete Hatcher, a client on the run from mobsters who own the gambling casino where he works, “The way he would defeat his enemies was to outlast them. While they were staring at computer screens or loitering late at night in airport baggage areas or sitting in cars outside hotels at check-out time studying each male who came out the door, he had to be somewhere, living a normal, reasonably contented life. If he could do that for long enough, they would give up.” (Shadow Woman)

Perry weaves Jane’s Indian heritage into the fabric of every story, as in this moment as she is about to go to the aid of a small orphan boy in mortal danger from criminal financial predators trying to steal his inherited fortune. Jane has just received a ‘present’ from a previous client named Rhonda Eckerly –  Jane never accepts formal payment for her work. The two hundred thousand dollars will come in handy for the task ahead:

As she locked her door and took a last look at her house, she thought about the old days, when Senecas went out regularly to raid the tribes in the south and west in parties as small as three or four warriors. After a fight they would run back along the trail through the great forest, sometimes not stopping for two days and nights.

When they made it back to Nundawaonoga, they would approach their village and give a special shout to the people to tell them what it was they would be celebrating. (Dance for the Dead)

As Perry said in an interview several years ago,

…one of the things that having a Seneca as my heroine does is give me a way to show the area in several dimensions: the modern place we see, the historical place where armies clashed in deep forests, the mythical place, where deities and supernatural creatures live. The roads in that part of the country are simply Iroquois trails paved over, or short-cuts made by the British Army to connect their forts.

Despite her Ivy League education and upper middle class lifestyle, Jane remains a Long House Seneca at heart. But she is caught between two worlds and the binary nature of reality figures prominently in Seneca lore, as well. Two brothers, Hawenneyu the creator and Hanegoategeh the destroyer, struggle over the world, fighting each other at every turn:

Hawenneyu makes a little boy. Hanegoategeh gives him a virus. Hawenneyu strengthens his body to give him immunity, and Hanegoategeh makes the virus mutate and sends the boy off to kill eighty thousand people. Hawenneyu has made sure that one of the eighty thousand is a man who would have started a war and killed eighty million. (Blood Money)

Jane is exigent and unsentimental, ruthlessly clear in her judgments, sharply articulate in expressing them … rather like Perry himself. The astringent perceptions speckle the books and touch you as you read like summer rain on your face. Of a silent woman in a county lock-up he remarks, “She never spoke to anyone, having long ago lost interest in what other people gained from listening, and having gotten used to whatever they expelled by talking.” (Dance for the Dead) Hiding out at the University of Michigan, the 28-year-old guide makes this unflinching assessment of herself: “There were places where she could still pass as a college girl, but college was not one of them.” (Dance for the Dead) Of her own husband, a successful surgeon, she notes, “Carey was very good at constructing fair, logical solutions to other people’s problems.” (The Face Changers)  Of the three urban gang-bangers she entices to help her follow an escaping villain, Jane thinks, “The part about killing seemed to have raised their level of interest considerably. She had forgotten for a moment about seventeen year old boys. There had never been a moment in human history when anybody hadn’t been able to recruit enough of them for a war.” (Dance for the Dead)

3.

In Poison Flower, Jane Whitefield confronts some of the logical consequences of her Quixotic profession: these windmills fight back. Every person she has rescued over the years has someone still hunting for them, and these hunters are ruthless persistent criminals, organized or not. Jane has always known she might be captured by one of them and tortured to reveal a location of the victims she’s rescued. Like the Seneca scouts left behind to assure the escape of a raiding party, she has always been willing to sacrifice herself for her tribe.

Poison Flower puts this determination to the test.

Jane helps a man named named James Shelby escape from jail in Los Angeles. Shelby’s sister had found Jane in Deganawida and convinced her that Shelby had been framed for murder. No one else was willing or able to help.

Jane gets the man out of jail but she is shot and captured in the process. Her captors begin what our government calls “enhanced interrogation” (unless some other government is doing it) but stop hastily when they realize Jane has more to offer than the location of a single runner. A little research identifies her as a valuable commodity, and soon she’s on the auction block, with every abusive husband, sociopath and career criminal she ever defeated bidding for the right to extract her secrets.

She escapes – the thugs are more worried about someone stealing her before the auction and make the blunder of underestimating a slim, unarmed, badly wounded woman.

With no identification, no money and no cell-phone, some stolen clothes, a thug’s gun and a pair of bolt cutters that were meant to be used on her own fingers and toes, Jane steals a van and winds up several hundred miles away, at a battered women’s shelter in Las Vegas. She knows the staff there will help a woman in her condition with no questions, judgments or demands.

It’s typical of Jane that she acquires a runner, even as she is on the run herself, protecting one of the women at the shelter from the abusive husband who has tracked her down. The last thing he expects, when he breaks into the place, is a moment like this:

Jane swung her good leg to the floor, stood up beside the bed and aimed her gun at him with both hands. “I know you can probably scare her into saying something she doesn’t want to. Now I want you to take a long, careful look at me. If you think I haven’t fired a gun into a man before, or that I even have a slight reluctance to do it again right now, then go ahead. Try to get to me.”

He does, and she shoots him. But it’s not a fatal shot, and as Jane flees the shelter, the hunted wife begs to join her. The woman knows that as long as her husband is alive he’ll keep trying to find her. This is not a request Jane is constructed to refuse.

Once she connects with Shelby the next concern is getting his sister to safety. She’s the obvious next victim. They’re almost too late in attempting to rescue her, and Jane is captured again. The auction is on. Once more she escapes, aided in part by the razor blade taped to her instep but mainly by the greedy ruthless violence of the bidders themselves. They all bring cash to the auction and the temptation of those sacks of money proves too great. The civilized Sotheby’s façade soon disintegrates into total warfare and Jane spirits Shelby’s sister away in the firefight.

With her charges safe, the task should be complete, but now a lifetime’s worth of very bad people are hunting her, so Jane takes the initiative and goes to war. Of course the outcome is preordained, predictable as the next Godiva chocolate. One might say, as nutritious as the next Godiva chocolate as well, and this installment — more violent and plot-driven than any of the others –makes you hungry for the steamed fish and arugula salad of a more demanding literature. As such it may be the perfect book to ease yourself out of Jane Whitefield’s world into Jane Austen’s, or Jhumpa Lahiri’s.

Of course, Perry isn’t the equal of those women. But he has something in common with them that his colleagues can’t claim: he makes a particular sound, he owns a particular tone of voice, and you keep the compassionate asperity of that voice with you long after the details of chase and pursuit are forgotten.

4.

So if it’s my own stubborn fears that draw me to Jane Whitefield, the question persists: where do those fears come from? That’s what I’ve been wondering since I finished Poison Flower.

It might be genetic – my father was a quivering mass of phobias: narrow spaces, open spaces, enclosed spaces … space in general terrified him. In his later years he refused to fly because of a toxic Long Island iced tea of debilitating terrors: agoraphobia, claustrophobia, vertigo – too anxious to fly without a stiff drink and too shy to ask for one. That’s the “Nature” side of the debate; on the Nurture side we have the fact of his leaving my mother when I was six months old. Of course I was too young to register his absence, but reliable sources tell me that my mother was a broken-hearted unstable mess for more than a year after his departure. That could throw a good scare into the average toddler. And that’s the main reason I didn’t leave for California when I got the offer of agency representation and a career writing television sitcoms. My son Nick was nine years old and teetering a little at that point. His father lighting out for the territories would have knocked him over decisively.

So I didn’t follow the fantasy and I didn’t escape my life. I stayed home and raised my kids instead. I may have settled the nature-nurture debate, at least within my own family, since both kids are cheerfully indomitable and fearless. Tellingly. Nick has never shown the slightest interest in works of fantasy. He prefers history; he reads Robert A. Caro, not Robert A. Heinlein, and his “Glory Road” was I-95 South. He’s living in Washington D.C. now, working for the World Wildlife Fund.

He loves The Great Escape though, especially that iconic image of Steve McQueen in flight, leaping for freedom, knowing he’s going to land defeated in a tangle of barbed wire and eternally not giving a shit. And perhaps it’s just because of him and his sister Caity, fighting on the barricades of bureaucracy struggling to help the infected and the afflicted in the halfway houses of Boston, that I have found a rare contentment on this tiny island thirty miles off the coast of Massachusetts. I don’t require the skill and ingenuity of a Jane Whitefield, I no longer yearn to vanish, jump the boat and drive off into a new life.

But I still love Jane Whitefield, and I still feel the delinquent thrill when a new book of her adventures comes out. Like many of her old clients, settled in their new lives, far from danger or pursuit, I might not need Jane Whitefield any more. But it’s nice to know she’s there.

—Steven Axelrod

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Steven Axelrod holds an MFA in writing from Vermont College of the Fine Arts and remains a member of the WGA despite a long absence from Hollywood. In addition to Numéro Cinq, where he has been a contributor and contest winner, his work has appeared at Salon.com and The GoodMen Project, as well various magazines with ‘pulp’ in the title, including PulpModern and BigPulp.  He hopes to make it  full sweep, with an article in the Tropicana corporate newsletter. A father of two, he lives on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, where he paints houses and writes novels, often at the same time, much to the annoyance of his customers.

 

Jan 202012
 

 

The Parkinson’s Diaries

By Steven Axelrod

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Leaving the Breakers: Escape from Assisted Living

 

My mother had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease ten years ago. Still ambulatory in her late eighties, she was now living in a retirement community in Long Beach, California, on the fifth floor of a beautifully restored hotel from the golden era of Hollywood called The Breakers. The ceiling of the lobby floated twenty feet above the marble floor, with intricately worked plaster panels that put the tin ceilings of Greenwich Village cafes to shame. The peaked red tile of its roofs and turrets lent it a Mission revival feeling, and the top floor restaurant, the Sky Room, earned its name with a spectacular panorama of the harbor, while retaining  a heady whisper of old time movie glamour. The staff was charming and helpful, the suites themselves were spacious and sunny, sparked with period detail in the moldings and baseboards, with high ceilings and water views. The dining room was spacious and congenial, the other residents friendly and patient. You couldn’t ask for a more pleasant and professional assisted living arrangement.

And I hated it, with every fiber of my being.

I hated the way the impeccably courteous, and hard-working staff treated my mother and the other residents as a separate, feeble race, inferior but privileged like hemophiliac dwarf royalty, simultaneously catered to and patronized, deferred to and dismissed. I hated the smell in the hallways, some tragic perfume of disinfectant and decay – the sense, so much like the sense you get in a hospital, of a world where human volition and dignity have been sacrificed to the mechanisms of medical technology and routine.

I also hated the dining hall food, tasteless and generic as if the management actually calibrated how many of the residents had no working taste-buds left and arranged the meal preparations accordingly. I hated the weak coffee and the fuzzy sausages, and the cardboard pancakes, the sense that the particular texture of life, the look and feel and taste of things, didn’t really matter any more.

Continue reading »

Nov 172011
 

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Book of Raunch

A Review of Nicholson Baker’s House of Holes

By Steven Axelrod

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House of Holes
A Book of Raunch
By Nicholson Baker
262 pages; Simon & Schuster; $25.

House of Holes, Nicholson Baker’s new “Book of Raunch,” as he calls it, is an impish, jaunty circus of sex,  a porn film directed by Jacques Tati, a Broadway extravaganza devised by Kenneth Tynan and Julia Taymor – with puppets!

In a world where sex is either furtive, tracked along the deleted search histories of internet porn,  crudely commodified in the  sterile ardor of  beer commercials, or  simply forbidden and demonized (abstinence education in school), or else lost in the dray horse drudgery of daily life; where even commercials for sex performance drugs show couples in separate bathtubs, or men alone solving other intractable problems (broken sailboats and mud-locked horse trailers), this book has a revolutionary message: sex is fun, sex is funny, sex is the essence of living and we spurn it at our peril.

Slithering through pin holes and the back of industrial washing machines and any other orifice the physical world provides, the characters in Baker’s book travel from the chilly world of dating and day jobs where sex is rarely even discussed to The House of Holes,  a bizarre carnival world where no one talks about anything else. Even the tradesmen are sexual: the ass-infused wooden bowl makers and collectors of wet dream memories

Continue reading »

Jul 112011
 

My First Job

by Steven Axelrod

Salesmen Wanted

It was the summer of 1971 and Manhattan was molten in the summer heat. The air wavered over the softening asphalt and walking the furnace streets I felt like I’d been dipped in grease and dredged in grit. My girlfriend Marian and I were living in my Mom’s apartment on 82nd Street, looking for jobs. I’d been turned down everywhere.

It shouldn’t have been my first job, anyway: a nineteen year old should have some kind of résumé, even if it’s only delivering pizza or babysitting. But my summers had always been devoted to leisure. At least I did my school reading and kept my room clean.  It was my mother’s idea. She figured I’d be working most of my life and wanted me to look back fondly on these sun-dappled, unstressed months between school years, when I had nothing to do but dawdle and dream. I was grateful for that, but those years were emphatically over.

Still, I couldn’t find a job and the newspapers were no help. The New York Times ran plenty of ads for medical technicians and school superintendents,  and ‘systems technicians’, but I couldn’t imagine even faking a résumé for any of them.

So I was ready on a humid Thursday morning, when I saw the ad for “Encyclopedia Salesmen Wanted”. Marian was just as desperate, so we went down to the office together.


Read the rest of this entry

Apr 092011
 

Play video & music while reading the winning entries. Not suitable for readers under the age of 42.

Numéro Cinq is a refuge for anarchists, outsiders, rebels, misfits, petty criminals and layabouts (something like the infamous Hole-in-the-Wall hideout), and getting them to vote properly has been one of the most difficult of dg’s tasks (has he mentioned recently how he loves you all, in spite of your myriad faults?). The People have spoken and the message is as clear as this week’s vote for the State Supreme Court judge in Wisconsin. We have already had one objection to the official vote count. Surely there will be more. This is not dg’s fault. Some of you voted on the wrong post; some voted for two or more different aphorisms; some, instead of writing out the whole aphorism (thus making it easy to count), simply wrote down ONE WORD from the aphorism! As a group, you are the walking definition of the word “obstreperous.” As near as dg can figure, this year’s vote came down to a tie. You can see the votes and count them yourselves here. The official entry list is here. Even if you find voting discrepancies, dg will not change the results. Always look on the bright side…

And the winners are!

Continue reading »

Jan 202011
 

Here is the first in a new series of Numéro Cinq essays called “Childhood.” The idea is for writers to evoke the place, time and ethos of their childhood in words and pictures, not childhood in general but a particular childhood, not their children’s childhood but their own. Steven Axelrod has been writing on and for NC almost from the beginning. He’s a very witty and loquacious participant in NC contests and a fine observer of the world in his own Open Salon.com column. He wrote a lovely “What it’s like living here” piece about Nantucket. I had often heard him talking about his father, and so it seemed appropriate to ask someone like Steve, for whom childhood was so important, to write about his childhood. As a point of entry, it’s helpful to know that Steve’s father was George Axelrod who wrote the play The Seven Year Itch and the screenplays for such movies as Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Manchurian Candidate, and How to Murder your Wife.

dg

Childhood

By Steven Axelrod


 

 

 

Dog Days

For years I wanted a dog desperately. Wandering the stacks of the New York Society Library on 79th street, I discovered the works of Albert Payson Terhune, and with a boyish, single- minded passion, shared his love for a succession of collies and hunting dogs in books like Lad: a Dog, Buff: a Collie and Lochinvar Luck. Terhune is largely forgotten now, possibly because he really didn’t seem to like people very much. His works introduced me to a number of racial epithets which my Mom used as teaching tools, to explore the fascinating world of human bigotry. “’Chink’ is what people call the Chinese, so they can feel superior to them,” she informed me. “It’s fun to feel superior to other people, especially when you’re not.”

She was stubborn on the subject of dogs, though, knowing full well that the bulk of the care and feeding of any pet would fall on her. And of course we lived in an apartment, not the ideal environment for a herding animal; but Central Park was just three blocks away.

 

I actually found my dog in the park during a dreary Sunday softball game with a bunch of kids I didn’t like, a group I didn’t want to be part of, the uncool group at school. But during a long, dreamy session in the outfield (even in this crowd, I played deep left), I struck up a conversation with a lady walking a collie. Someone scored a homerun during our conversation, but the dog was due to have pups in a few months, and the lady took my number. She called me when the litter arrived. Even at age nine, I was much better at chatting up interesting strangers than I was at baseball, where I achieved a rare incompetence trifecta: I couldn’t hit, throw or catch. I could run all right, but I preferred not to.

The images release themselves, out of order, seemingly at random: my collie darting back and forth ecstatic in his first Central Park snowfall, taking a bite from a drift and leaping away, barking loud enough to wake up all of Fifth Avenue; and his snout, pressed to the rear window of the car that took him away two years later, when my allergies made keeping him impossible. And the counselor at camp that summer, who built a splendid impossible tower of tooth-picks and threw it into the final bonfire, the flames torching it all at once, the sudden light blinding, the heat intense, the crackle deafening and the column of smoke rising like a cobra from a basket, its hood dispersing against the high clear stars.

Continue reading »

Nov 302010
 

NC judges are rarely photographed. In this instance, they appeared in disguise in order to conceal their identities. The man second from the right is obviously Gary Garvin.

The judges emerged briefly from their humid, smoke-filled grotto and handed over a smudged and much crossed-out and rewritten list of rondeaus. Across the top of the page, someone had written in pencil the word: FINALITS (sic). They offered a terse no comment to the international cadre of journalists, TV cameramen, and absinthe-sipping literary celebrities gathered for the announcement. Two of the judges escaped into the crowd and have not been seen since. The other three were rounded up by security guards and pushed back into the cave with much weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Herewith, the list of finalists. As one has come to expect, the entries were witty, surprising, affecting and crafty, all at once and all of them. The finalists seemed ever so slightly, to the judges, to fly above the rest. Printed in a group like this, they are a delightful bunch of poems.

(The management wishes to thank all the entrants, especially the ones new to Numéro Cinq, many of whom no doubt wandered here by mistake and entered without realizing the consequences. Someone did write to complain that he thought he was buying a rondelle of Edam cheese on Ebay. His poem was tactfully withdrawn. One finalist, Jodi Paloni, happens to be a newcomer to NC. Go democracy!)

dg

Read the Finalists here!

Oct 272010
 

 

 

ENTRIES ARE OFFICIALLY CLOSED

Entries close midnight Sunday, November 21.

 

The First Annual Numéro Cinq Rondeau Writing Contest opens for entries November 1 (midnight tonight as of this writing). The rondeau is a slightly intricate little form (see preamble and definitions below). You should not attempt to write one under the influence of intoxicants or while using a cell phone (unless you are writing it on your cell phone). Also do not attempt to operate heavy machinery while composing your rondeau. Don’t shy away from trying a rondeau just because you consider yourself a rhyme & rhythm-challenged prose-writer. Fiction and nonfiction writers always need a dash of form in their lives, something to make them sit up straight (or just to jar the gears loose). As with all the NC contests, there is a method behind the madness. Beyond the discipline of form, we discover the freedom of aesthetic space. Every contest is a teaching moment, a formal lesson, and a moment of unleashing (paradoxical as that seems). Also, if you look at our previous contests, you will see that they are fun. Submit entries by typing them into the comment box beneath this post.

Continue reading »

Oct 192010
 

100_0371

Steven Axelrod is a former student, a painter of houses on Nantucket, an inveterate blogger on Open Salon.com. He also won the 2010 Memoir-in-a-Box contest with a gorgeous piece on the demise of a marriage. Herewith another in an infinite series of Numéro Cinq “What it’s like living here” pieces, in this instance, Steve’s elegiac homage to his adoptive hometown.

dg

What it’s like living here

By Steven Axelrod on Nantucket



Closed for the Season

You walk around your island, stunned by the sudden fair weather, the giant wheel shifting the wind from north east to south west, the air like silk against your face,  the town moving into full dress rehearsal mode for the coming summer: painters sprucing up the store fronts, renovations scrambling to completion, pot holes patched, grass cut, hedges trimmed, waiting for the first boats full of Memorial Day tourists, the first surge of Range Rovers and boat trailers as the summer people take their  seats and the curtain goes up.

Ack 2 Go, Whalers!

Your son Tom graduates from high school today, and you feel ambushed by your own emotions. For years it seems you’ve known every possible sentiment ahead of time, shrugging as they trundled towards you: this is going to make you angry, that will be fun; whatever. But this comes at you from too many directions at once. It’s strange and troubling to have a feeling you can’t identify.

You grasp just bits and pieces of it at first. You feel a tug of genuine suspense when your son was crosses the stage to pick up his diploma … as if something might happen to screw it up, as if the diploma itself might be blank. You know other people feel the same way: You make the joke with a few of the parents you know, and see the nervous smile of recognition on their faces. Then comes the relief.

You call your ex-wife and you talk for a while. Later, you say to your Mom, “No one else knows what this feels like.” And she says, “What about me? I’ve been through it, too.” You hug and you find that you’re crying. She says: “For twenty years you’ve been putting yourself last; now you can finally put yourself first. You can finally do what you want. But what is that?” And you really have no idea. But you feel like some huge changes could begin now; as if you had graduated, not your son.

But even that isn’t all. The graduation unplugs you from a whole community that you didn’t even know you cared about. You weren’t really part of it, in any big way: You didn’t volunteer, or chaperone or substitute teach. But you know these kids, and through them their parents and through those families the real life of the island you live on and the town that had somehow, almost against your will, become your home. Now that living connection is gone, too. The next bunch of kids will be strangers to you; the next crazy teacher won’t be your problem. So this rite of passage isolates you. It makes you feel your age. You finished my fiftieth year, your first real novel and your children’s high school careers, all in the same week. That’s a lot of endings.

Continue reading »

Sep 282010
 

Steven Axelrod in repose

The winner of the first Numéro Cinq Memoir-in-a-Box Contest is Steven Axelrod for his divorce memoir Memoir in a Box.

The judges had a very difficult time picking between Axelrod’s entry and John Proctor’s I Was Young When I Left Home which had the ring of brutal truth, blow after blow delivered in a terse, telegraphic style suffused with the ironies of accumulation and juxtaposition. In nine chapters, John created a  total picture of the family situation out of which he dragged himself to Brooklyn, marriage and fatherhood. That’s a great story. But the judges have a weakness for the NC virtues of wit and arrogance and could not resist similes such as “It was like living in Chernobyl as desperate Russians were starting to do again now: ignoring the obvious and waiting for the symptoms to show” and “She went to Grad school and I followed her like a horse clopping after another horse.” And lines like “I wanted to be fully included in my exclusion, in complete control of my helplessness.” Axelrod consistently delivers one linguistic delight after another. His grammar is complex, dramatic and close to impeccable. Every line is a surprise.

This was a beautiful contest. The judges are still haunted by Lené Gary’s narrative of a poisoned (literally) life and they loved Giovanna Marcus’s polyamorous adventures (if you don’t want to be part of the harem, date other people!) and Adam Arvidson’s sad and reluctant (every line seems dragged from the darkness) memoir of his father’s alcoholism and Jennifer Nelson’s poignant death-of-a-marriage narrative (from joy and hope to infidelity in nine chapters). All is change, all is dust.

Who’d have thought a little contest like this would inspire such fierce prose?

————————————————————–

For all the entries, look here. For the finalists, look here. For the People’s Choice winner, look here.

Read the winning memoir!->

Sep 232010
 

The judges are dumbstruck (all right–their usual state) at the daring and profundity of the entries in the first ever Memoir-in-a-Box contest. These memoirs are searing, honest, startling and bold. Amazing work of the sort we did not expect. Honour to all the entries. If, as the psychologist James Pennebaker says, there is healing in writing the trauma down, the judges hope you have all found solace in putting these words on the page (in the box). (We were disappointed that no one felt boxed in, but perhaps it was better to avoid the obvious.) But then it’s also true that if you’re not willing to put it out there, then you’re better off writing fiction. This year’s entries all passed the test of nerve and honesty. They all have a great subject–themselves and the drama of life.

Read the finalists below.

Continue reading »

Sep 232010
 

The People have chosen.

The winners of the First Annual Numéro Cinq Novel-in-a-Box Contest, by a tie vote, are Rich Farrell for Wondering Where The Lions Are and Shelagh Shapiro for Infinity Falling.

The winner of the First Annual Numéro Cinq Memoir-in-a-Box Contest, after a fierce fight, is Steve Axelrod for his Memoir in a Box.

And the winner of the special Off The Page Peoples’ Choice Award is our own Anna Maria Johnson for her Cat-in-the-Box novel-in-a-box.

The winning entries appear below.

Continue reading »

Aug 242010
 

Jacob, the contrarian, during the EPE (Photo by Jonah Glover)

 

Inspiration

 

[Augusto] Monterroso is perhaps most famous for his short story “The Dinosaur,” which is said to be literature’s shortest story. It reads in full:

When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there.

In an 1996 interview with Ilan Stavans for the Massachusetts Review, Monterroso recalled some early reviews of “The Dinosaur”: “I still have the very first reviews of the book: critics hated it. Since that point on I began hearing complaints to the effect that it isn’t a short-story. My answer is: true, it isn’t a short story, it’s actually a novel.”

Brevity was, to say the least, an important concept for Monterroso. His essay “Fecundity” is included in The Oxford Book of Latin American Essays. It reads in full:

Today I feel well, like a Balzac; I am finishing this line.

—from Tom McCartan’s Crib notes on “What Bolaño Read”

The Contest


Okay, the long-awaited next Numéro Cinq literary contest, The First Annual Numéro Cinq Novel-in-a-Box/Memoir-in-a-Box Contest. The rules are pretty simple this time. You have to write an entire (don’t cut corners) novel or a memoir (personal narrative) consisting of 9 (a mystic number) chapters and each chapter can be no more than 5 lines long. (By lines, I mean the number of lines that appear on the comment box on the blog.) Fewer lines if you can. Try to remember what a novel is like: at least a couple of characters or more (usually), a conflict, development through a series of dramatic actions, etc. Alternatively, try to remember what a memoir looks like: a first person narrator (and a couple of other people or more), a thematically continuous narrative line often based on a conflict and or theme, development through a series of dramatic moments or incidents, etc. Indicate on your entry whether it is fiction or non-fiction (there will be separate prizes). (Note that in the Monterroso story quoted above there ARE two characters, the guy and the dinosaur.)

The contest is open to any living, sentient being in the universe. It is not limited to people who are already on the blog or VCFA students or former students. Everyone is welcome, and also welcome to join in other conversations or suggest topics.

Entries will be accepted between September 1 and September 15, 2010 (midnight), and should be written in English (Gary) and attached as comments to this post (the usual practice at NC).

Remember the values we hold dear here at Numéro Cinq: WIT & ARROGANCE. Remember Gordon Lish’s phrase ATTACK SENTENCES!

P.S. Anyone who mentions the insidious phrase “flash fiction” will have his or her comment deleted from the blog. I mean this! Delete it from your minds. This is not a flash fiction contest.

dg

Jun 102010
 

FIRST EVER NUMÉRO CINQ TRANSLATION CONTEST

Submissions June 12-30, 2010.

Enter by translating the sample passage below and submitting it as a comment on this post.

The competition is open to anyone. Just sign onto WordPress.com for free and contribute your translation.

Rule #1: Do not submit an entry if you actually speak the language in the sample below. It doesn’t help if you can read the sample and render an accurate translation because the judge can’t read the sample himself. (It goes without saying that you shouldn’t bother using a translation dictionary either.)

That’s the only rule.

Rule #2: Translations must be submitted in English. (Gary Garvin already submitted an entry in Chinese characters via email. This will not fly with the judge.)

Rule #3: Given the confusions we had during the last contest, the judge wishes to specify that there will be an open, ageless category (the Numéro Cinq Shark Class) and an under-16 category (the Numéro Cinq Barracuda Class).

Rule #4: Birth certificate and two pieces of photo ID required to qualify for the Barracuda Class competition (last time certain adult members of the Numéro Cinq community—a disreputable, rebellious, disaffected, and outlaw crowd of ne’er-do-wells and agitators—attempted to have their entries switched to the under-16 category).

Let go of your bourgeois yearning after sense and meaning. Forget certainty. (The judge is returning to his Sufi roots.) Think only of the sound of the words, their rhythms, and what you can invent from them.

As usual with Numéro Cinq contests, wit and arrogance will be appreciated. In fact, wit and arrogance are the only qualities the judge cares about.

Contest open to everyone including employees of Numéro Cinq, their significant others, children, and small pets (mammals only, up to 50 lbs).

First Prize — Instant Worldwide (e)Publication w/ commentary.

Plus honours & laurels.

A single malt Scotch at 9 Maple Avenue with dg or a hot chocolate at Virgil’s with Jonah if you’re in the under-16 Barracuda Class. (You have to get to Saratoga Springs on your own and dg will not put you up.)

Each entry must purport to be a translation of the following passage. Feel free to submit more than one translation.

Ja, er dreigde iets. En hij bleef daar zitten, ziek van angst, làf, zonder geestkracht, zonder moed…. Er dreigde iets en hij voelde het naderen, hem overvallen, met hem strijden op leven en dood, in eene overspanning van wanhoop: hij voelde zich wankelen, nederzinken, hij voelde zich gerukt worden uit de fluweelen zachtheid van zijn leven, neergesmakt worden op straat, zonder dak, zonder iets … Wat behoorde hem toe! Het linnen aan zijn lichaam, de schoenen aan zijne voeten, de ring aan zijn vinger, het was van Frank. Het souper daarginds, zijn bed boven, het was van Frank. Zoo was het geweest een vol jaar lang en als hij ooit weg zoû moeten gaan met alleen het zijne, dan zou hij moeten gaan … naakt, in den winter. En hij kón niet meer zijn, als hij geweest was in Amerika, dienstbaar scharrelend van den eenen dag op den anderen. Zijn lijf en zijne ziel waren beide als geweekt in een bad van lauwe weelde; hij was geworden als eene kasplant, die, gewend aan de vochte warmte der serres, vreest in de open lucht te worden gezet. Want het dreigde, gruwzaam, onbarmhartig: geen seconde was die bedreiging van hem af, en, in de lafheid zijner verweeking, wrong hij er zachtjes zijne witte handen om, en drupten er twee tranen langs zijn strak masker van wanhoop.

Apr 242010
 

ENTRIES ARE OFFICIALLY CLOSED. COMMENTS STILL WELCOME.

Herewith the first ever (annual) Numéro Cinq villanelle writing contest. I am announcing it early so that you can work on your entries. Entries will be accepted between May 1 and May 15. Entries, as with the aphorism contest, should be posted as comments on this page. Entries are open to anyone in the world, but only if they are written in  English, French, Latin, or classical Greek (the only languages anyone can speak in this house). As with the aphorism contest, I encourage you to familiarize yourselves with the form. See the craft and technique page for help. Roughly speaking, we’re talking about a 19-line poem written in tercets (except for the last stanza which has four lines). The first and last line of the first stanza become the last lines of the following stanzas and also turn into a couplet at the end of the last stanza. These are fun to write and can actually turn out surprisingly well if you arm yourselves with strong refrain lines (think: panache, drama, obsession, schizophrenia). You need not be a poet to enter. And it’s always a good thing for prose writers to extend themselves; it makes their prose more interesting. One lesson to be drawn from writing a poem like this is the way form drives content instead of the other way around.

Continue reading »

Apr 122010
 




The following is an email sent to dg from the anonymous contest judge who is in hiding, with his entire family and pets, somewhere in Argentina.

This was a tough go over the weekend for an indecisive judge. All the finalists were extremely good, very witty. In fact, the whole contest was a pleasant surprise–for the commentary as well as the entries. I loved Nina’s very short aphorism “A mapped world is always small” for its terseness; when you unpack it, the idea is huge–the unknown is always greater than the known. Steven Axelrod is a very witty man playing on glass houses, green houses and the greenhouse effect. (If there had been a prize for most prolific, he would have won; had their been a prize for the under-21 age group, Madeleine would have won.) C. M. Mayo’s entry grew and grew on me. I think I didn’t take it seriously at first because she was clearly just having fun with the contest, but she did an amazing little thing turning the idea of procrastination upside down (making it a pleasure instead of something to inspire guilt) with the egg and yolk idea. Gwen Mullins three-word line may not even be an aphorism precisely, but I liked the verbal play: fuck to effing to the letter f to the word “ineffable.” Natasha Sarkissian’s face entry was also a sleeper. It just kept staying in the mix as I found reasons to cut others out. It’s very clever: losing face, saving face, face lift, plastic surgery. Kit Hathaway is the old pro, the ringer. His aphorism worked as a rhyming couplet, but it also worked as a complex idea starting with the leap of putting Zoloft next to Nietzsche and coming up with the idea that they have a lot in common; Zoloft evens out the emotional peaks and valleys while Nietzsche delivered us from guilt and judgment (“neither bad nor good” plays off the title of Nietzsche’s book Beyond Good and Evil).

So I tried various criteria. Everyone was about equal on wit and verbal play. But when I asked myself about the profundity of the ideas behind the aphorisms, then Nina and Kit came out in front. Not that aphorisms have to be profound, but I was looking for some reason to separate the entries. Then I also tried to factor in syntactic and semantic complexity. I thought Kit had a slight edge there. But when it came to arrogance, Kit had a definite edge.

So by incremental calculations of relative value–even more Byzantine than hinted at here–I came to the conclusion that the winner is William Hathaway for his aphorism:

Zoloft does more than Nietzsche could
to make you feel neither bad nor good.

This is a preliminary announcement only. Press releases have gone out to major media. The winner was notified this morning by telephone and pronounced himself  “over the moon.” The actual award, along with a considerable financial emolument, will be presented in Stockholm to coincide with the lesser known, yet no doubt estimable in its own right, Nobel Prize for Literature.

The judge will remain anonymous. Any attempt to contact him will be reported to the police. The cat in the earlier post is not the judge’s cat; it was a professional model posing as the judge’s cat. Contractual arrangements outlined in the entry form protect the magazine, dg, his family and staff from civil actions pertaining to the contest. Entry fees were clearly stated to be non-refundable.

dg

Apr 102010
 

The judge's cat, clearly suffering from intense Aphorism Contest anxiety

Yes, the death threats, the bribes, and blackmail have begun. The pressure on the judge is incredible at this point. How do you decide between one great entry and another? The judge is drinking vodka neat morning til night; he’s taken up smoking; he’s found a bottle of painkillers from his knee surgery (or possibly they are antibiotics for the dog). Nothing helps. He is thinking of just taking all the entry fees and prize money and flying to Mexico til this blows over.

I should add that the People’s Choice contest is a complete mess at this point with a three-way tie. Could someone please go to the post and break the tie?

dg

The Finalists



A loss of face requires more than plastic surgery to fix.
Natalia Sarkissian
——————
Zoloft does more than Nietzsche could
to make you feel neither bad nor good.
William Hathaway
—————–
In the egg of procrastination, there is the yolk of fun.
C.M. Mayo
————-
People who live in glass houses understand the greenhouse effect.
Steven Axelrod
——————-
A mapped world is always small.
Nina Alvarez
—————-
Fuck the ineffable.
Gwen Mullins


Mar 152010
 

THE FIRST EVER NUMÉRO CINQ APHORISM CONTEST

Submissions March 15-31, 2010

Submit by commenting on this post

Submissions must be no more than 150 words in length

Do not enter a submission unless you have figured out what an aphorism is first

Wit and arrogance appreciated

Contest open to everyone including employees of Numéro Cinq, their significant others, children, and small pets

First Prize — Instant Worldwide (e)Publication w/ commentary

Plus honours & laurels