2005 Pushcart Prize XXIX ed. Bill Henderson

I end up reading most of the Pushcart Anthology every year but some favorite short fiction this year: "Immortality" by Yiyun Li and "Dog Song" by Ann Pancake. The Li story was simply surprising in its subject matter and in the turns that it takes. It blends an old-fashioned storytelling voice with some very contemporary language, as well as blending history with current affairs. Really interesting. And the Pancake story wowed me with its voice. Plus it's about dogs (kind of). I'm a sucker for dogs. I didn't entirely understand what happened in the end, but the language was so good that I (almost) didn't care that I didn't understand. Both stories felt very removed from the majority of stories I see in workshop, in magazines, in books ... they both felt honest-to-goodness imagined.

The Gardens of Kyoto by Kate Walbert

I read this novel when it first came out in 2001 because I liked the short story (which turned out to be the opening section) that was in the Pushcart Anthology. I reread it recently because I wanted to look at how Walbert created the tone, which is mournful and poetic, and which stayed with me for years. The opening section is still my favorite part--the plot itself feels (to me) unsatisfying in the end. But throughout Walbert uses concrete scenes to create a lyric voice. Typically I think of lyricism as coming from more abstract or metaphorical storytelling, but she is able through her sentence structure and her emphasis on certain images--which are literal not metaphoric--to inject lyricism into the characters' interactions. She helps her cause by choosing settings--like a rundown mansion that was a former Underground Railroad stop--that lend themselves to mournful description, but ultimately it's a matter of precise word choice and a very tight voice. The extended metaphor of the book--the heavily symbolic gardens of Kyoto which were saved from Allied bombing during WWII--are also used as concretely as possible--represented through a book The Gardens of Kyoto, that passes amongst several characters, and through the gardens themselves. The extended metaphor is one of the things Walbert did extremely well, allowing her to inject an entire subplot and layer of meaning into her under-plotted, but lovely novel.

Getting Mother's Body by Suzan-Lori Parks

Parks is best known as a playwright, and Getting Mother's Body seems like a logical first novel for a playwright--told in alternating voices in such short sections that they sound like monologues. I'm not a fan of the structure--one beginning novelists seem to love presumably because it makes the whole idea of writing a novel more approachable--because it feels too short-attention-span to me. GMB is about a quest to retrieve some jewels that the primary character, Billy Beede's, mother was supposedly buried with. A number of characters end up going on this trip to "get" the body, each with their own agenda and need to either protect the body or obtain the money for the jewels. This is a great choice by Parks--all the characters feel three-dimensional as a result, however I can't help but feel the novel would have been richer if told from one--or even two or three--narrative voice(s). To me, the voices aren't distinct enough, nor are their points of view so different, for the constant switching to seem necessary. The novel would have to be either alternating first between a few characters or omniscient third because of the secrets that various characters have that the reader is let in on, but either of those would have been preferable to me to the ten or so characters that talk now.

Structurally Parks is smart though, and there is a big pay off scene when everyone has arrived at the burial site (which is in one character's backyard) , and in effect the whole story comes together. (structurally it reminded me of nothing more than the movie It's a Mad, Mad, Mad World, but in tone it is in no way mad-cap). The reader feels satisfied with the journey coming to the physical end that has been anticipated, but without knowing how on earth things will turn out. And Parks takes some truly down-and-out characters and gives them a believable, happy ending, something that is pretty hard to pull off. She manages because her characters while desperate and sometimes cruel or cold in their desperation all have emotional centers that are clear and good. And so when they treat each other well in the end, I buy it, with pleasure.

I'd recommend Parks' play Topdog/Underdog as a stronger model of good writing, however. Her use of sound, with the rhythms of the shell game and the patterns of dialogue within the play can certainly serve as a model for fiction writers.

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

I always give fiction published by MacAdam-Cage a chance, and this is a clever book. It made for an excellent airplane read (am I the only person who worries about choosing books to read on airplanes that don't make me look common --c'mon you know what I mean-- but also don't make me look pompous?). The hook--husband can't help but time travel--naked--at unexpected moments--puts tension into every scene. You never know when he's going to disappear or show up and how he's going to cope with not having any clothes, so there is a physical threat at even the most ordinary moments. I flew through this book wondering what would happen, and yet it's in many ways a conventional romance. The events are basically dates, wedding, difficulty getting pregnant--the author has just found a way to make them fresh. The thing is I read this book only a week ago and I remember almost nothing from it. Essentially it's an engagingly-written, plot-driven read. If Niffenegger had paid a little more attention to character-development, I think it would have been the kind of book I want to reread every few years; as it is, I probably won't keep my copy for long. Good book to learn about tension from, though.

Madeleine is Sleeping by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum

I like the description of this novel more than the novel itself, but it's a worthy experiment. It's structured almost like a book of prose poems, very short, titled sections, clearly meant to be lyric. I like the idea of the mini chapters adding up to a novel, but the language never felt quite good enough to compensate for the lack of character development (these are Capital C Characters, not people). One of my students has been asking about how fiction can work if it's not character-driven, and my belief, at least, is that it then has to operate much more like a poem -- either language-driven or idea-driven, preferably some of both.

Much of the novel is set in dreams, and the big problem there is that dreams are allowed to be random and loaded with meaning, which to a writer is way too convenient. It lets you load up the symbols and strangeness without really earning them. The choice to use present tense also overdid the sense of forced lyricism--as did a number of the one line paragraphs (a tool I like, but only when it's a really worthy line). Actually this felt like a whole book of one line paragraphs.

There were moments I really liked in this book, and I applaud the ambition. The best image is the predominant one--Madeleine, in her bed, sleeping, as all kinds of odd business goes on around her. I also love the cover, but you know what they say about that...

Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee

This novel isn't at all what I thought it would be. I knew it was about a professor accused of sexual harrassment, a topic that's looking fairly tired, but Coetzee merely uses that as his initial premise -- the incident that leads to the incident that leads to the incident which is the novel's center. What interested me is how Coetzee gets away with, and indeed succeeds at, some things I know I would warn against in a workshop. To start off, I'm quite sure if I saw the title Disgrace at the top of a story or novel draft, I'd cross it out and write "too obvious" next to it. And yet ... and yet... attached to this novel, the word has a lyric, mournful sound that makes it an appropriate center for the work. Disgrace is, quite hit over the head with a hammer, what the novel is about, yet because Coetzee actually has interesting things to say about the state of "disgrace" it definitely works.

The events of the novel are very large, very violent, very dramatic. And again Coetzee gets away with what I might caution against in workshop in part because of the larger scope of the novel (South African politics, which are not subtle) and in part because the language is so understated and removed. There is a large psychic distance at work, and that actually suits the sense of a character in shock at what violence has so suddenly entered his life. Increasingly I'm realizing that huge events can work extremely well in novels (perhaps less so in short stories, or perhaps I'm just not convinced yet), but they need room to be explored. The repercussions need to play out fully -- something that isn't going to happen in a twenty-page workshop installment. Which reminds me why it's so important for student writers, in particular, to be reading a lot and discovering for themselves what works in finished books. Interestingly, some of the more "workshoppy" elements of the novel -- especially the return to each element of the beginning of the novel (the harrassment, the dog shelter, the farm) in the novel's end didn't work as well for me. Only then did the fact that the Professor was (symbolically) punished for raping one man's daughter by having his own daughter raped feel forced into the novel rather than of it. Still, in the end, the plot feels real because of the real consequences the characters suffer.

Edinburgh by Alexander Chee

A grad student recommended this first novel to me. The writing is immediately striking -- as I read the first pages I thought, well, of course, this got published. The sentences are incredibly tight and loaded with imagery and precise word choices. The initial subject matter -- twelve choir boys are molested by their choir master -- is dark, but the first person voice of one of the boys --Fee-- makes it dark and beautiful rather than simply crushing. More than halfway through the novel switches to another first person (Fee has grown up and one of his students takes up the narration) which while decently written didn't hold me the way the first half did. When we switch back to Fee's voice it becomes clear that the novel really does belong to him, and the writer basically needed to use the middle section to convey information Fee couldn't give us. It's a trick probably only other writers will be bothered by, but I was bothered by it. It's perhaps a pet peeve since so many student novelists move between first person voices simply as a means to not be overwhelmed by telling a big, extended story. Or maybe it's just a personal objection. It almost always feels like cheating to me when a book switches voices. Though there are exceptions -- Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, for one. Still, this was a good book.