The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40″ short story issue has generated lots of comment, much of it in the why-wasn’t-so-and-so included? category, some of it in the why-wasn’t-I included? category, the best of it in the (sorta) latter category and self-deprecating in a satiric way. And, of course, there was some that made no sense at all.

While we loved and marveled at most of the stories — okay, we saw Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Here We Aren’t, So Quickly” as a gimmick built on two pronouns and  misleading in its intent to impart double meaning (and we love Foer’s novels) — we couldn’t help notice that none of them addressed the day’s biggest issue: the economic downturn and its effect on the lives of everyday, let alone well-off Americans. Sure, Salvatore Scibona’s “The Kid” gives us an American soldier who orphans his foreign-born  child after an ill-advised marriage. And ZZ Packer’s “Dayward”  uses Reconstruction-era black children to suggest modern-day lessons. There’s certainly poverty and displacement there. But where are the stories of a struggling middle-class? Where are the stories of homes lost, incomes destroyed, the frustrations of futile job searching, the loss of love and respect and the psychology of imposed failure? Where are this generation’s Steinbecks, Orwells, Algrens, Zolas, Lewises, Faulkners? Are we so afraid of class distinction in this country, of making someone who’s still comfortably positioned uncomfortable, that we can’t even acknowledge what’s going on right before our very eyes?

Almost all of these tales are about difficulties in relationships. Nothing is more damaging to relationship stability than economic failure and displacement. Can the most common story of our time also be the most ignored?

It’s true that this New Yorker issue included only eight of the 20 stories. We’ll be looking closely through the others for a contemporary realism that deals with more than the frustrations of party anxiety among the Hollywood wannabe set or the professional-class’ social climbing and the Porsche mechanics they left behind. Great literature, literature that changes culture and political direction, has always portrayed the struggles of common people in difficult times. The characters –and subjects — in the contemporary stories here may be what we’ve come to accept as common people. But there is no sense of what the greatest recession since the depression  is doing –specifically and in detail — to their lives. Certainly there are writers out there adressing these subjects (and no, I’m not one of them…shame). Where are the publishers with the guts to get them in print?–Cabbage Rabbit

Rereading Douglas Coupland’s  Generation X: Tales For An Accelerated Culture reminded this baby boomer how important and, in its way, groundbreaking the book was when published in 1991. Not that it received much attention, despite its title,  at release. No major reviews in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker or The Los Angeles Times (somebody please prove me wrong about this). Only culture critic Robin Abcarian of the LA Times seemed to catch on and then, months behind the book’s release, only in light of his second novel.

The book was different even in its design. It’s use of margin slogans and illustrations separated it from the previous generation of literature. Also in the margins were the defining terms of the times, such as  “MCJOB: A low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future job in the service sector. Frequently considered a satisfying career choice by people who never held one.” And “NUTRITIONAL SLUMMING: Food whose enjoyment stems not from flavor but from a complex mixture of class connotations, nostalgia signals, and packaging semiotics.” Even its off-beat size (8″x9″) made it stand out.

But writers, particularly those interested in marketing, were quick to catch on to the idea of Generation X that prior to the novel had been the province of punk rock and those unable to find a suitable label for any generation of teens that came after (and sometimes including) the boomers.

Coupland defines the subject generation  not quite a third of the way into the book when Andrew tells the story of his working at a “teenybopper magazine” in Japan and seeing the alienation of its same-age generation, those for whom the prevailing culture, as one of his Japanese colleagues puts it, “murder my ambition.”

“…shin jin rui – that’s what the Japanese newspapers call people like those kids in their twenties at the office –  new human beings. It’s hard to explain. We have the same group over here and it’s just as large, but it doesn’t have a name — an X generation — purposefully hiding itself. There’s more space over here [in the U.S.] to hide in — to get lost in — to use as camouflage. You’re not allowed to disappear in Japan.”

This disappearing act is less related to generation than to class (see “McJobs” and “Nutritional Slumming” above). Near the end of the book, Andrew sees this invisibility being shared by his entire family. He’s lit hundreds (”maybe thousands”) of candles in the family living room for the holiday celebration. The effect is revelatory, “the normally dreary living room covered with a molten living cake-icing of white fire, all surfaces devoured in flame — a dazzling fleeting empire of ideal light.” But once the candles are snuffed, life reverts to normal. And that’s when the true revelation rises.

“But I get this feeling –

“It is a feeling that our emotions, while wonderful, are transpiring in a vacuum, and I think it boils down to the fact that we’re middle class.

“You see, when you’re middle class, you have to live with the fact that history will ignore you. You have to live with the fact that history can never champion your causes and that history will never feel sorry for you. It is the price that is paid for day-to-day comfort and silence. And because of this price, all happiness es are sterile; all sadnesses go unpitied.”

While Coupland is credited with painting the alienation of a certain generation, he’s also defined it for all contemporary generations, a definition that speaks to class struggle and middle-class envy leading to unfullfillment. Some of this class consciousness exists in  Generation A but its alienation is a separation more from nature and emotional experience caused by a dependence on technology, much of it pharmacological. Telling stories is central to both books but there’s a difference. The stories in A are all about plot. In X, they’re all about character. In X, Coupland explains story-telling in terms of “the letter inside us,” an idea he credits to Rilke, and that “only if we are true to ourselves, may we be allowed to read it before we die.” He also uses Rilke to define the separation from reality felt by the alienated, a theme that pervades both books.

Coupland’s excellent first novel, badly misunderstood when it first came out (by this dumb bunny,  too)  spawned a curse of generational considerations, mostly on the negative side of opportunity and abundance, that we can’t seem to escape. Film critic A.O. Scott bemoaned (enough whining!) this curse in a piece that references Sam Lipsyte’s timely book The Ask. Scott suggests that Generation X –those slackers — are having a mid-life crisis.  But what they’re going through — what most of us are going through — is more like Coupland’s middle-class invisibility. How can you be someone, at any age,  when no one can see you? Generation A is not only less of a novel for its failure to make the label stick (”Generation A” comes from an address given by Kurt Vonnegut at Syracuse University in 1994) but also for making its five central characters circumstantial celebrities, something that will never happen to X’s Andy, Claire and Dag, midlife crisis or not.   –Cabbage Rabbit

Storytelling has mysterious, unmeasurable power and storytellers have expended a lot of that power trying to explain it to us. Let me try. Hearing a story is a way of organizing the brain and stimulating thought. Formulating a story is an exercise in ordering thought, making associations and generally “thinking through” scenarios and intellectual questions. You want to understand or explain something? Make a story of it.

There’s a fear that this power may be lost, like an animal gone extinct, in the age of texts, tweets and abbreviated cursing (WTF?). Or maybe, as Douglas Coupland suggests in his latest novel Generation A, the rediscovery of storytelling by a generation that’s been cheated of it will give it a badly needed refreshing.

Coupland saddled himself with generational themes back in 1991 when he gave us Generation X: Tales For An Accelerated Culture, the story of  three, post-baby boomers trying to make sense of their lives and the culture at large through storytelling (”Either our lives become stories , or there’s just no way to get through them,” declares its female lead). In ten novels since (and we admit to reading only two of the others), he’s wrestled with the monster he created — generational lit — and the particular generation which he’s credited with naming (his own). If anything, his characters, including Tyler Johnson from Shampoo Nation, are seeking escape from generational labeling; that attached to their own and that which has been inflicted on them by their baby-boomer, ’60s indulgent forebears. Generation A is also about escaping the times but in more peculiar circumstances.

A’s times are the near future when bees, those pesky little pollinators that give us everything from fruit and honey to opium, have mysteriously gone extinct. Or so the story goes. It’s also a time where the world is relatively happy, thanks to a drug known as Solon, which seems to negate the measurement of time. The result is that prisoners don’t seem to mind prison, depressives don’t mind depression and the merely disgruntled can get through life without the grunting. Doing the drug is akin to reading Finnegan’s Wake. Shades of Soma! The whole world is hooked.

Then, on one momentous day, five people roughly the same age and in different parts of the world are stung. The five are commandeered by quasi-governmental-corporate authorities and held in captivity where they are fed Jell-O. Upon release, they seek each other, gathering on an island off the Newfounland coast, aided by a mysterious, seemingly sympathetic benefactor. Let the stories begin.

Our bee-stung heroes discover their importance as the stories unwind. Once they  get going its easy to see where they will head, minus a surprising capper. Cue the Jell-O.

Other reviewers have denigrated the stories told in the novel’s telling (they’re all offset by smaller typeface, titles and authors though that’s apparent from the narrative). But this bunny thinks that the stories aren’t that bad, even entertaining at the times they take sudden spins and plunges.  We think Coupland intended to give us a view to the current state of the short-story and novelist’s craft: this one’s Yann Martel, this one T.C. Boyle, here’s  Carver and Murakami, even Alice Munro.  Coupland’s reason for this — neither parody nor praise  — seems unclear (and may disprove our tidy little theory). But Coupland makes clear the magic and importance of storytelling even as he warns against its loss. Nothing could be more generational.

The book, divided into narratives about and from the five stingees,  is of two speeds, the downhill all in the first half, the slow crawl up to conclusion all in the second when the stories are told. Most of Coupland’s themes — alienation, corporate greed, loss of the natural world — are revealed and dissected early which makes the resolution somewhat anti-climatic. But the framing of the whole, done so cleverly and without malice towards even the malicious, is a mark for inventive and engaging storytelling. Coupland is a master of bringing the now and new to his stories — as one writer has said, his work is so current it seems slightly ahead of the present — but he also astute enough to tie in the relevant past. Referring to the group of five as “Wonka” children sets them both of their generation and apart. This kind of cultural pollination makes his story flower.–Cabbage Rabbit

In the failed-males-sabotaging-their-own-lives genre of storytelling,  sub-genres abound. The latest variation takes its cues from our on-going economic conditions; guys lose their jobs and go into free fall as does Matthew in Jess Walter’s The Financial Lives of the Poets.

Sam Lipsyte’s take on this theme finds Milo Burke (this is a book with a number of strangely-named characters, for effect we assume) laid off from his job as a development officer at an obscure private college in New York, otherwise known as Mediocre University. The usual complication ensue: he can’t pay his bills, his wife may be fooling around and his kid begins to treat him with distrust. How his life unravels and how it loosely ties back up into a new knot, square to half-hitch, makes Lipsyte’s tale stand out from the kind of story we’ve heard too many times. Statistically, happy endings may be on the increase. But they’re still in the minority. Frustration, as it is in The Ask, seems the theme of the day.

Frustration is the source of much of the book’s humor as well as its dividing line. Readers who feel only frustration with Milo’s situation, his inability to (mostly) take things seriously, his appetite for porn, doughnuts and turkey wraps, and, especially, his desire to be more a naughty boy than he is, will find the book frustrating. Those who enjoy Lipsyte’s satiric take on fund raising, his celebration of self-loathing and the digs at the egoism of the rich, powerful  and unfaithful will find joy in those  same frustrations.

That this is a book about America’s descent into meaninglessness  is apparent from the first page. Horace, the forever-office temp who turns capre diem into a slacker anthem, defines our country as “a run-down and demented pimp” whose “whoremaster days are through.” What’s left? “Now our nation slumped in the corner of the pool hall, some gummy coot with a pint of Mad Dog and soggy yellow eyes, just another mark for the juvenile wolves. ” “‘We’re the bitches of the First World,’” Horace declares.

Of course, our hero must take issue. “That’s a pretty sexist way to frame a discussion of America’s decline, don’t you think? Not to mention racist,” Milo counters, apropos  to nothing. Lipsyte, in classic satiric form, has defined the current state of discussion in the U.S.: real questions hounded by cliched, knee-jerk reactions, be they claims of  discrimination, outcries of deficit spending or paens to free enterprise.  You want to discuss details? Climb over this first.

It’s no coincidence that the metaphoric complaints come from a guy named  Horace, that our doofus hero is named Milo or that the woman who holds power over them both is a big-bosomed, crack-whore’s daughter named Vargina (the “r” inserted after naming, Lipsyte tells us, by a sympathetic nurse). Side twists in this satiric corkscrew include  four-year-old son Bernie’s day care center, Happy Salamander, run by some  “young people with fancy education degrees and a tin of Tinker Toys” who operate under a “dense, pedagogical manifesto.” Then there’s a deck carpenter’s pitch for a Food Channel-styled program about death-row inmates’ last meal entitled “Dead Man Dining.” And don’t forget Milo’s weird parents, living and dead. There’s a lot here that’s funny in a sort of sad way.

The plot is simple enough. After losing his job for offending the art student daughter of a deep-pockets donor (”You made his daughter doubt herself, artistically. He had to buy her an apartment in Copenhagen so she could heal”), Milo is asked back to help secure a donation from a former college buddy named Purdy. Irony here is that Purdy asked Milo to join his fist-over-hand money-making ventures right out of school. Milo chose to pursue his art instead. Purdy has a troubled, disabled Iraq War-veteran son. Purdy has chosen Milo to be a sort of go-between, shuttling bribe money and generally keeping an eye on the son. The son, of course, stays anything but quiet.

The reward in all this? Possibly a huge endowment for the university which would mean Milo gets his job back. With money, the family stays together. Happy ending.

As Lydia Millet points out in her review of the book in The New York Times, true satire is rare in today’s literature, but pervasive in such vehicles as The Colbert Report and The Onion. Maybe that’s because literature demands more than just funny. And Lipsyte, plenty funny, provides it, not just making fun of certain character types and closely-held beliefs (meritocracy) bur raising real ethical, existential questions.

So what’s the larger target here? It’s certainly not men like Milo. Much of what happens to him is out of his control –  almost as much as is under his control — and we can’t help feel sympathetic for the sap. Yet Milo is more than some Gulliver, a vehicle to lampoon everything else. Maybe the real target of Lipsyte’s satiric skills is the men-sabotaging-their-own-lives genre itself. True or not, Lipsyte has given the form new life, all because he didn’t take it that seriously.–Cabbage Rabbit

Short story writers are most like magicians, plying their craft with illusion and misdirection. Both want their audiences to believe what they present, to think it as real. They don’t want them to notice or even think about what goes on to make the magic.

Which makes Thomas Lynch a magical story writer. The poet and essayist’s first book of fiction is deep and convincing, full of mystery and wonder. Even when writing from a female point of view, Lynch makes us see what he wants us to see and, more importantly, feel what he wants us to feel. If there’s a trick to what he does it’s to make us think  that writing is no trick at all.

The characters here–a man taking his father’s ashes in a Thermos to be dispersed,  another man who befriends a young girl after her father’s death only to see her murdered, a casket salesman remembering his three wives, a widow attracted to a younger woman–spend their time in the present considering their past. It’s as if they haunt their own lives. The central figure in the novella “Apparition,” a former minister who, after divorce, writes a self-help best seller entitled Good Riddance, comes to an anti-realization after considering all the realizations he’s experienced.  The divorce gave him new life. It came as a kind of death.

A somber air, like that of a funeral home, resides over everything here. This is a book of cancers, hemorrhages and shot-gun blasts. Lynch’s day-job, if you can call being a mortician a day job, gives him insight into a certain trade–remember that casket salesman?–as well as a hard view of life’s mysteries. If his characters seem like ghosts it’s because so many spirits move through their lives. Sadness is so widely held that it becomes something matter-of-fact.

Fishing and hunting, with a nod to Hemingway, become symbols of mens’ understanding and relationship to each other as well as a metaphor of death. The story “Catch and Release” is a snap shot of high-end outdoors men escaping their lives in the woods and streams. The woods and streams are full of such men, all looking to take something. Its narrator recalls catching his first fish and the awful choice it presents: “Kill it, eat it, show his mother. Let it go.” The release of his father’s ashes, in an unexpected way, only extends the metaphor (for an excellent father-son-fishing relationship memoir see John McPhee’s “The Patch” in the February 8, 2010 edition of The New Yorker).

The only story in which in which the smoke and mirrors don’t completely hide Lynch’s masterful sleight-of-hand is the one that most closely mirrors Lynch’s experience. “Bloodsport” goes into great detail of the pathologist’s and mortician’s art, so much so that it feels as if Lynch is manipulating us. “Stuffing the open cranium with cotton, fitting the skullcap back in place and easing the scalp back over the skull…” It’s all part of the process of embalming, laying out the dead, the funeral and all part of “the larger concept of a death in the family,” making it more of a “manageable prospect.” It’s as if Lynch has pulled back the wizard’s curtain and revealed a corpse.

“Matinee de Septembre” also exposes  Lynch’s craft but in another way. He writes in the person of a 40-year-old woman, the widow of a respected older poet, and his character is a male fantasy of what a 40-year-old woman should be: “she had the bosom of a woman half her age. She looked in good in no bra or a Wonderbra, pantsuits or little black dresses, vintage lingerie or plaid pajamas.” Of course, she finds something more attractive, younger, and this person, also a woman, becomes an object of imagination and fixation, another step toward an end.

The longer Lynch’s stories, the better.  The novella “Apparition” takes its time and the telling is done so well we want it to go on. Lynch makes his character’s evolution so believable that we agree with it every step of the way, even at end when he concludes that all those former conclusions may have been misguided. This is true throughout the book. Lynch’s experience as a poet gives his writing musical tones and he exploits the sound of language unabashedly. “Primrose, Maple, hemlock, Helen…” the casket salesman thinks as he walks. The narrator of “Apparition” considers how far he’s come: “the little clapboard manse on Cory Street behind the church to this three-story palace with its towers and turrents, bay windows and balconies, its dozen cut-brick chimneys…” Lynch also has a good ear for the topical and trendy thinking. “Some divorces, like some marriages,  are made in heaven,” writes the lead in “Apparition” in one of his self-help books. The wealthy widow of “Matinee” thinks the first-class section of her flight hold “Bigger seats for bigger asses….big, fat balding asses whose wives only traveled with them for the shopping ops, the change of scenery and the chance of meeting someone really interesting.” It’s moments like these, when Lych’s characters see the illusions that they themselves accept as reality, that makes reading him a magical experience.–Cabbage Rabbit

In his New York Times review of Justin Taylor’s Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever, Todd Pruzan explains how Raymond Carver “advanced a literary genre with ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.’  The movement wasn’t dirty realism or minimalism, but ‘vaguely titled fiction’: stories concealing their intensity and anxiety behind titles full of pronouns and ennui, signifying nothing much about their narratives.”  As examples, he cites Miranda July’s No One Belongs Here More Than You, Lorrie Moore’s People Like That Are the Only People Here and Maile Meloy’s Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It.

Meloy actually goes Pruzan and Carver one (or two or three) better.  She not only borrows Carver’s technique (or was it Gordon Lish’s?) for titling her book  (the story titles are more to the point),  she mirrors his simple narratives and working class  protagonists. At times, her stories reminded me of  Annie Proulx, Richard Ford (who wrote a blurb for her book) , even Joyce Carol Oates.

Indeed, the book’s first tale of a gimpy, modern- day cowboy who falls in love with a young, traveling  attorney seemed like something Proulx might have done and done better. It immediately set me to thinking. Do MFA programs –Meloy took hers at UCIrvine, a school which produced Michael Chabon, Alice Sebold and, back somewhat, Richard Ford–teach imitation disguised as learning by example? There’s nothing wrong with learning from other writers. But how do you avoid sounding like them?

The second story, an abrupt coming of age for a 15-year-old girl triggered by an aggressive older man and her father’s compliance, all with the added tension (and metaphor) of firearms, was artfully disturbing but still came across as an Oates-meets-Ford story. At that point we put the book down.

That was a mistake. Picking it up again, we found Meloy master of her own voice in the remaining nine stories. They’re simply told and suggest all the complications and moral questions that salt even the blandest lives. Nor, as we feared, was she exclusively a Montana regional author (she was born and raised in Helena but now lives in L.A.). Her stories take us to working class  Connecticut in the 1970s and upper class Argentina.  There’s intrigue in the strange mystery of  intercom pranks in “Lovely Rita” and wise, generational contrasts of romance and reality between a grade school student  and her mother in “Nine.”

Meloy’s craft comes from her matter-of-fact voice, as easy and gentle as a soft rain, even if a storm is lurking in the distance. Disease and death pay quick and lasting visits, fidelity is challenged and even children aren’t quite sure what to make of their lives even as they seem routine. She infrequently spices dialogue with terrible insight, masked as down-home homily: “the whole soul mates idea,” explains one woman, ” is really most useful when you’re stealing someone’s husband. It’s not so good when someone might be stealing yours.”

What Meloy does best is inject a benign tension into her stories, tension that starts passively enough and builds into a sort of personal horror. In the last story, “O Tannenbaum,” which does take place in Montana, the fears and resentment between two couples, one traveling home with their daughter after cutting a Christmas tree, the other stranded in the snow, grows as Meloy reveals their reflected and assumed histories.As she does in many of the stories, the author employs a child, not only to show what is at risk, but to heighten the fearful and innocent qualities of action.

One other Carver comparison: Meloy seems so comfortable telling her stories from a working class perspective, one has to wonder if the details come from experience or research. If it’s the later, she’s done a great job (she’s reportedly now working on a novel set in post-war London). As author Dagoberto Gilb pointed out, Carver wrote about working class anti-heroes from his experience as a hard-scrabble graduate student, then applied the principles of struggle to the working class characters. Maybe we should be wondering what Meloy’s student days were like?–Cabbage Rabbit

Note: Why is it that in their book jacket blurbs, author’s are so reticent to note their education? Maybe they don’t want their craft to be thought of as manufactured? We discovered Meloy’s MFA school in a Wikipedia article, not necessarily a source the Rabbit likes to quote unconfirmed. We could not confirm it anywhere on her web site  and, as noted, it’s missing from her bio on the book’s jacket.  More Google searching to follow…

Which is better?  Minimalist and working-class author Raymond Carver’s original manuscripts? Or the stories published after Gordon Lish’s edits? Some 20 years after Carver’s death, the answer has supporters on both sides. It’s the question on which Carol Sklenicka’s big and sometimes frustrating biography of the famous minimalist, working-class writer finds its focus.  The work’s frustrations come from the fact the that Sklenica doesn’t seem to take sides, on this or other questions in Carver’s short life.

The editorial arguments are familiar to those who’ve followed  them since The New Yorker published Carver’s pre-edit story “Beginners” that under Lish’s hand became “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” (as well as an edition that detailed the edits). A companion essay was subtitled “The cutting of Raymond Carver.” The publication last year of The Library of America’s Raymond Carver: Collected Stories, with Carver’s manuscript version of the stories eventually collected as What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, gave readers the chance to make their own comparisons. What we found was good and bad; that Carver may not have been the absolute minimalist that defines his style (and influence) and that he may have been more descriptive, less ambiguous and deeper in his insight than the first-published stories let on. We also wonder how much collaborative effort went into his poetry, much of it written after he began his is relationship with poet Tess Gallagher.

The understory here is how Carver so quickly and initially without argument took Lish’s edits and rewrites. Maybe the uncertainty and lack of integrity imparted by alcohol made him doubt his own voice. Later, after he went sober, he dismissed Lish even as Lish was claiming Carver as his invention.

Lish did more than just change a word here and there. He rewrote whole sections, changed endings and turned intended meaning into something more ambigious. When Sklenicka compares the stories in Carver’s later collection Cathedral with the Lish-edited stories in What We Talk About,  she finds Cathedral to have “richer perspective” and “more complex humor” than the earlier work.  She also says that the stories lack “the raw pain,” “meanness” and “nihilism” of the earlier efforts. Which she prefers–humor or raw pain–isn’t said.

What Sklenicka does make clear is Carver’s selfishness–both during and post-alcoholism–and his willingness to exploit his wife. Stephen King’s review in The New York Times proclaims Maryanne Carver, the author’s first wife, as the heroine but not the benefactor of his success. Maryanne unselfishly  supported her husband’s writing through a variety of odd jobs while suffering his abuse. (Sklenicka also makes clear that Maryanne was  a bad drunk.)  Sklenicka’s matter-of-fact treatment of  Carver’s disregard and occasional meanness towards his wife upsets King, and should. He wants Sklenicka to call Carver what he was: a self-absorbed, serial spouse abuser. It’s no great revelation that Carver wasn’t much of a father. He often blamed his inability to work on the that he had two children.

Readers may have been aware of Carver’s drinking problems but not their extent. Sklenicka, through anecdotes from John Cheever, William Kittredge and others, paints a picture of a man always with a bottle in one hand and a cigarette in another. Even after quitting drink for good, Carver was an insatiable pot smoker.

The biography’s biggest challenge to the Carver mystique is mentioned only in passing. Author Dagoberto Gilb, who met the short-story writer when he was teaching at the University of Texas at El Paso, questions the very source of Carver’s inspiration.  Sklenicka quotes Gilb claiming that Carver’s stories weren’t really about working class people. “I could see where he came from the working class, but he wasn’t it. His stories were about graduate students’ lives, but he smartly made his characters vacuum cleaner sale-men or whatever.” That Carver went out after his first big pay-day and, after driving clunkers all his life, bought a brand new Mercedes speaks for itself.

This challenge to Carver’s working-class credentials  may take from his personal reputation but shouldn’t lessen the impact of his stories. Carver spent a lot of time at menial jobs to make ends meet (his most fruitful employment was with the Reading Laboratory Series of Palo Alto’s  Science Research Associates which gave him writing and editing experience).  While the “he-she” incidents of his stories may have been derived from a life inside graduate student programs, his framing of them in working-class circumstances heightened their emotional squalor and gritty impact. In this, he did what most writers do: frame personal experience in the most meaningful circumstances.

Indeed, Sklenicka is at her best when she details the personal experiences that inspired Carver’s work. In doing so, she proves Gilb right.  Often, it was his father’s or  Maryanne’s working life that he used to frame his work. “Fat” and “They’re Not Your Husband”  comes from Maryanne’s waitressing experience. Exceptions include “Nobody Says Anything,” a story that exploits his parents’ hard scrabble life and the alienation Carver felt in his early teens. The tale is  “about silent, uneasy accommodations to bad situations.”  The parallels Sklenicka draws between life in the Carver household and the story define the way Carver would approach all his work. Linking his real-life experiences to one of his great themes–”the divided child and divided self”–Sklenicka reveals as much about the writer than any comparison between edited and unedited work.

Sklenicka’s biography makes clears that publishing, like so much in our meritocracy,  has to do with who you know. Carver’s story is full of attachments and recommendations from fellow authors, much of them cultivated in university programs. Carver was hyper-aware of this. Central to this is his meeting Lish through the pages of Best American Short Stories.  Cultivating this relationship had great rewards for Carver. But it also had its drawbacks.  Lish changed Carver’s captivating title “Are These Actual Miles?” to the mundane “What Is It?” and Carver, anxious to have his story published in Esquire, agreed. At that,  Maryanne calls him “a whore” who sold out to the establishment. Now we know to what extent that was true.–Cabbage Rabbit

UPDATED (at end): Since the death of J.D. Salinger, there’s been scads of comment declaring his books as life-changers (or not) and plenty of speculation on what waits in his safe to be published or what might be made into a movie and even some of that personal, David Copperfield kind of crap. But there’s been precious little about why Salinger’s great achievement, The Catcher In the Rye, had the impact it had. How is it that the story of a post-World War II, New York prep-school kid spoke across class and generational divides to six decades of teens as well as adults? What is it that continues to speak to readers, not only in the competitive world of New York private schools, but to kids in Nebraska, California and Montana as well (this may be changing) ? Why do those of us who read it more years back than we’d like to remember and, picking it up again, still find plenty of laughs, poignancy  and situations to identify with?

Salinger’s Holden Caulfield does what all adolescents do:  struggle to define identity (see Erik Erikson, Identity: Youth and Crisis).  Holden’s struggle overwhelms him. What teenager can’t empathize with his alienation? The book is full of things that teenagers still hear:  “frequent warnings to start applying myself”  (”applying?”…what does that mean?), and “life being a game” ( “Game, my ass. Some game. If you get on the side where all the hot-shots are, then it’s a game all right–I’ll admit that. But if you get on the other side….”). Sexual identity adds confusion, lots of confusion: “Sex is something I just don’t understand. I swear to God I don’t” and, “In my mind, I’m probably the biggest sex maniac you ever saw.” Holden’s sensitivity leads him to find the importance attached to the innocuous discouraging. “If somebody, some girl in an awful looking hat, for instance, comes all the way to New York — from Seattle, Washington for God’s sake–and ends up getting up early to see the goddamn first show at Radio City Music Hall, it makes me so depressed I can’t stand it.” Then there’s hypocrisy. Remember Ossenburger, the Pencey graduate who made “a pot of dough in the undertaking business”? How in his address to the students,  “He said he talked to Jesus all the time. Even when he was driving his car. That killed me I can just see the big phony bastard shifting into first gear and asking Jesus to send him a few more stiffs”?

Phonies. They’re the bane of Holden’s existence. And who’s the biggest phony? “I’m the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life,” Holden says.  Remember him on the train home feeding manure to Ernie Morrow’s mother about how great her son was? (”Her son was doubtless the biggest bastard that ever went to Pencey, in the whole crumby history of the school.”) Somehow, we know we aren’t really who we think we are (Holden: “I’m quite illiterate, but I read alot.”), a realization that puts us in Caulfield-like crisis.   This is the “fidelity” stage of Erikson’s   personality theory. Society’s push to make us conform puts Holden in a quandary. Where do the ducks in Central Park go when the pond is frozen? Why does Holden wear his red hunting cap with his pajamas?

That the story is told with humor and a certain spoken rhythm adds to its authenticity. Salinger pioneered the irreverent, scatological humor so prevalent in movie comedies of the last several decades (”The only good part of the speech was right in the middle of it….all of a sudden this guy sitting in the row in front of me, Edgar Marsalla, laid this terrific fart. It was a very crude thing to do, in chapel and all…”). The swearing–still the bane of high school librarians everywhere–not only adds realism but a sense of the phoniness directed towards teens.  “I toleja about that. I don’t like that type of language,” says the woman that Holden dances with in his hotel’s lounge.  Holden’s relationship to adults–his parents, cab drivers, waiters,  elevator operator and prostitute–contrasted with that to his 10-year-old sister Phoebe seems too idealistic, as if children could never be mean or  phony. But it stands as a symbol of innocence and genuineness, a  nostalgic cry for our lost childhood.

The book’s central image, the catcher in the rye keeping children from going over the edge, speaks to this nostalgia. In my case, it led to a life dedicated to working with children, a result that was a slight misinterpretation of what Salinger probably intended. But right reading of the image or wrong, my life was changed. Salinger’s other books didn’t affect me as deeply, though I loved them well. The Nine Stories, Raise High the Roof Beam ,Carpenters and Seymour: an Introduction were lessons on the sometimes radical actions that come of identity confusion and the use of those actions as symbol for larger meaning. Franny and Zooey introduced us to a type of specific yet undefinable spirituality that has since been embraced by writers ranging from Isabelle Allende to Jim Harrison. As good as these books are, they seem footnotes in Salinger’s career. But Holden Caulfield? He’s our  guru.–Cabbage Rabbit

UPDATE: Adam Gopnik’s sparkling Salinger “Postscript” in the February 8th issue of The New Yorker sums up Salinger’s writing better than anything else we’ve read. He writes of Salinger’s ear for American dialogue, his “essential gift for joy” and, how “that amid the malice and falseness of social life, redemption rises from clear speech, and childlike enchantment, from all the forms of unselfconscious innocence that still surround us,” statements that explain Salinger’s fascination with children and his reluctance to paint them or their experience as perfect. “writing, real writing,” he says, ” is done not from some seat of fussy moral judgment but with the eye and ear and heart; no American writer will ever have a more alert ear, a more attentive eye, or a more ardent heart than his.”  Note to writers (including self): Forget that MFA, “high-hearted” moral posturing and all the other (to borrow Holden’s word ) crap and start paying closer attention to what you hear from those around you as well as your own heart.

What is it that’s “invisible” in Paul Auster’s latest novel? It’s not the truth. The truth is there… somewhere … though choosing it from all the various claims and denials batted around by three different narrators and one or two other characters might be an impossible task. Or maybe it’s not. Let’s settle on this: the truth is not apparently visible.

What’s invisible is Auster himself. In the past, Auster has inserted himself to various degrees in his writing (remember the detective Paul Auster in City of Glass?). And his work has often focused on identity; how it’s established and how it’s held. In Invisible, Auster explores how our identity is developed and perceived, by ourselves and others, through the stories we tell.  Here the stories are of  trust, love, murder and incest, made-up and otherwise. Just when we think we know one of the characters, and through his/her telling, the others, the point-of view changes and the new narrator destroys what we believed about them all. As we take more and more interest in the entwining tales, the author of them all goes transparent.

It’s 1967 and Adam Walker,  a student at Columbia and aspiring poet (as was Auster) is befriended by an excitable, mysterious older Frenchman, Rudolf Born, and his younger woman friend Margot. The two become entangled in Walker’s’ already tangled life. Born proposes generously funding a literary journal that Adam will edit. In Born’s absence, Margot and Adam begin sleeping together, apparently with Born’s blessing. All seems hope and promise until Adam and Born are accosted walking on Riverside Drive and Born reacts with surprising brutality. Or does he?

This first of four sections seems to fall into a literary model of the type represented by John Fowles’ The Magus. A young man, full of aspiration and desire, falls in with an unpredictable, Svengali-like mentor who, through sinister manipulation, seems intent on teaching his young protege  the cruel and trustless realities of life. But in part II we’re propelled forward some 30 years and given a new narrator, Adam’s Columbia-era friend Jim, who hasn’t heard from him all this time.  Adam is dying from leukemia and entrusts the story–so it was only a story?–of his relationship with Born and Margot to his old friend. Their correpsondence reveals much more of Adam’s story, including his deep, incestuous relationship with his sister. After the Riverside Drive incident, Adam breaks with Born and questions his own involvement. He travels to Paris where he again takes up with Margot. Then he runs into Born, who has become a cipher that marks the point Adam’s life lost all innocence (or was it that incestuous experience with his year-older sister when he was fourteen?).  The affair with Margot becomes less serious even as it’s announced that Born will marry an old acquaintance with a strangely desirable daughter. Adam, anxious to expose Born’s murderous behavior, hatches his own magus plot, one that can only end in emotional–and dangerous– disaster. The daughter, years later, tells her own story.  As Auster writes, “Compelling as those twists and turns might be, they amount to just one story among an infinity of stories, one film among a multitude of films…”

Auster has discussed the power of the stories we tell ourselves previously, notably in 2008’s Man In the Dark. Here, the theme isn’t as much about creating reality as defining it. Identity creates truth, circumstance defines identity and truth, real or perceived, influences circumstance.  Adam and his sister are drawn together by the death of their younger brother. That leads them to intimacy. Born, something of a double agent, defines himself as he sees fit, leaving others to their suspicions. In his pursuit of revenge, Adam seeks a new identity but becomes something entirely unexpected, by him and the reader.

Invisible cements Auster’s reputation as a mystery writer, one who pursues the various clues of meaning towards an ever-elusive answer. In this sense, his writing is as captivating as any detective fiction while vastly superior in psychic and existential puzzles. This writer-as-detective is a stand-in for all of us who have ever wondered who or what to believe. Believing ourselves could be a mistake. Fashioning our lives as stories may or may not help make sense of it all.–Cabbage Rabbit

Like much of Nick Hornby’s work, Juliet, Naked is not a book about love in the traditional sense. It’s a book for those of us who are obsessively in love with music, so much in love that it defines us when so little else does. We identify with someone’s art, and them as well, without any defining, creative acts of our own. Our identification with them tells us who we are.  Part of the reason we love some music so much is that it talks about love. There’s no real love in Hornby’s characters, just attachments of convenience, stops against loneliness, occasionally sexual attraction. Okay,  hardly any sexual attraction. Sad, really.

Sad like a lot of Juliet, Naked. Hornby revisits familiar territory here-who can forget High Fidelity?–and again music stands in for the emotions that seemingly can’t be generated any other way.  The people here aren’t falling in love, even with music, as much as they are falling out of love. Maybe there’s no such thing as love after all. Even for music.

The book falls into three sections, roughly divided as its three main characters rotate their third-person narration duties. On its first page, Duncan from the washed-up-town of Goolness, England is in a Minneapolis bar taking a picture of a urinal with help from his live-in of 15 years, Annie. They have come to America on a pilgrimage, as obsessed fans will, to view the landmarks in the career of mostly-forgotten rocker Tucker Crowe. The urinal, as legend has it, is the place where Crowe in 1986 decided to chuck his career. Duncan later sneaks into the Berkley home of one of Crowe’s many women, the one who inspired Crowe’s “sixth and… last studio album” (according to a fictional Wikipedia entry) Juliet. Singer-songwriter-Crowe has been (mostly) invisible since that year but it doesn’t stop his consumed-with-him fans from speculating on the meaning of Tucker’s music and that important epiphany, if there was an epiphany, at a Minneapolis urinal.

This first part of the book, focused on Duncan’s captivation and how it defines his life, is the most interesting. Then, Duncan receives an advanced copy  of  Juliet, Naked, Crowe’s masterpiece “unadorned,” before it was mastered, shorn of strings and percussion. Annie, who is at home to receive the package, listens before Duncan has the chance, and Duncan’s reaction to that not-so-innocent act opens flood-gates in their relationship.

When it’s Annie’s turn to take center stage, we learn of her disappointment, or more specifically, puzzlement at not having children during her long relationship with Duncan, years that span Tucker’s public absence. Then, after Tucker sends Annie an e-mail about her blog-post reaction to Juliet, Naked (she doesn’t like it, further alienating Duncan), the two strike up an unlikely relationship. Crowe, it turns out, is incapable of love as well, though he’s gone through numerous relationships and fathered a few children. Suddenly, the story loses momentum.  Better, as novelist Julie Meyerson’s review in The Guardian suggests, that Tucker remain an unseen presence.

But he does turn up, crowding Duncan and Annie aside. Though his presence isn’t required to do it, he provides contrast to Duncan. Here is someone who has actually accomplished something before disappearing, who psychologically abused several women not just one. It’s as if we know much of what will happen in this middle section–short of a heart attack–before it does.

The end of the book turns back to Annie, the only character we have real sympathy for. In tying up the plot, Hornby goes for the maudlin: “The two biggest parts of a man’s life were his family and his work…” Do we need to be told at end that it’s too late for Tucker or Duncan to do anything about them?

Still, there’s joy and insight to be had in the getting there. There are nuggets like this: “Loving art…involved a lot more ill will than one might have suspected.”  As he does with that phony Wikipedia entry and the Annie-Tucker e-mail exchange, Hornby is a master of making meaning out of the contemporary, of relating technology, old school or new, to human experience:

“The first time Duncan had watched his computer fill in the track names of the CD he’d put into it, he simply didn’t believe it.  It was as if he were watching a magician who actually possessed magic powers…Shortly after that, people from the message board started sending him songs attached to e-mails, and that was every bit as mysterious, because it meant that recorded music wasn’t, as he’d previously always understood, a thing at all–a CD, a piece of plastic, a spool of tape. You could reduce it to its essence, and its essence was literally intangible. This made music better, more beautiful, more mysterious, as far as he was concerned. People who knew of his relationship with Tucker expected him to be a vinyl nostalgic, but the new technology had made his passions more romantic, not less.”

It’s for passages like this that we read Hornby, even when his storytelling isn’t at best. Juliet, Naked has too much dressing. Still, it’s worth a listen.–Cabbage Rabbit