Reading this Saturday!

Open Letters Monthly is throwing a one-year anniversary party in Cambridge this Saturday and celebrating with a reading featuring three of the finest young writers in America.

Joshua Harmon, Sommer Browning, and Adam Golaski will read selections from their work at the Lily Pad Gallery in Inman Square on Saturday, March 1st at 7:30pm. We’ll have refreshments, information about the magazine, and readings from some of the best poetry, fiction, and translation we’ve seen.

Joshua Harmon will read from his debut novel Quinnehtukqut. This from our November issue: “Harmon is a brave writer, and one of the novel’s great strengths is its daring mix of narrative styles: from a straight third-person which easily shuttles back and forth through time, to haunting impressionistic monologues, to jagged, folkloric nuggets and parallel narratives that creep alongside one another on the page.”

Open Letters Monthly publishes just one poem a month, and Sommer Browning remains the only poet we’ve published twice. First in April, and then July.

Rounding the bill will be Adam Golaski, whose innovative new translation, Green, miraculously contemporizes the buzz and thwack of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, seamlessly easing the poem into the locus of everyday speech and so making it still more strange.

come join us!

Saturday March 1st, 2008

Open Letters Monthly 1st Anniversary Party & Reading
Joshua Harmon, Sommer Browning, Adam Golaski
Lily Pad Gallery, 1353 Cambridge Street (Inman Square), Cambridge

7:30pm or thereabouts

Russell Banks’ “The Reserve”

The Reserve
By Russell Banks
HarperCollins, 2008

Near the end of Russell Banks’ newest novel The Reserve, the hero Jordan Groves, finding himself in a spot of trouble, tries to take on the following mind frame:

He thought of Ernest Hemingway’s stories and James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity. That was the style he needed, and he felt that if he could keep on affecting it, he could become it….

The style is not only an affectation of Jordan’s. Banks has set his novel in the Adirondack Mountains in 1936, the latter edge of the interwar period during which time, as World War I veteran Ford Madox Ford declared, “there were strong men” writing novels. The Reserve is Banks’ love note to that era, at least as he romantically conceives of it; it’s a Lost Generation fairy tale.

The plot follows Jordan Groves’ complicated liaison with a gorgeous, mentally unbalanced socialite named Vanessa Cole. Jordan is a famous painter modeled off the book illustrator Rockwell Kent, and Vanessa is the seductive “rich bitch” modeled off so many women in novels from the 1930s—she seems very consciously to be a hybrid of Hemingway’s promiscuous Brett Ashley and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s dangerously unstable Nicole Diver. Vanessa’s feelings about Jordan most palpably evoke Banks’ yearning for a manlier age:

He was strong and lean and hardhanded. Many of the men whom she had successfully seduced were cut from the same cloth as he—rich men; cosmopolitan men; even a few famous writers and artists…. She was rumored to have had affairs with Ernest Hemingway and Max Ernst and Baron von Blixen. But none of them had hands like his. Their bodies had been hardened by sport and exercise, not by physical work.

Banks is a skilled writer with a fluent, lucid prose style, and The Reserve is occasionally enlivened by a fight, an exposed infidelity, and even an accidental death, but the reader is never really able to figure out what the novel is about beyond an adoring pastiche of an era that probably never existed in the first place. The characters are mostly unhappy, but their disenchantment is treated romantically, as though broken, adulterous people are rather glamorous, so long as they have lovely pale throats or hard hands. Maybe they can be made glamorous, but only through a Vaseline-smeared lens of nostalgia.

–Sam Sacks

The Fiction Class

The Fiction Class
by Susan Breen
Plume, 2008

When a fiction writer writes a novel about writing fiction, he stumbles naked into a hall of funhouse mirrors. The results are virtually never pretty, sensible, or helpful – only grisly. Novelist can write with marvelous effect about other arts – one thinks of Frank Conroy’s beautiful evocation of piano-playing in Body & Soul – but when they turn their eye on their own craft, they are forced to lie, or worse, to tell the truth.

All of which makes Susan Breen’s accomplishment in her new novel The Fiction Class all the more remarkable: she has written a book not only about fiction-writing but the teaching of fiction-writing, and she has entirely avoided the funhouse mirrors. This slim novel is a gem not to be missed.

Breen’s central character in this engrossing story (told in the present tense) is Arabella Hicks, mid-thirties and single, teaching an adult education class in writing to a diverse group of eleven students every Wednesday. After each class, she drives to a nursing home to visit her shrewd, imperious mother, Vera, who has Parkinson’s and is dying. Mother and daughter have an affectionate but barbed relationship, mainly because Vera is so uncompromisingly strong-willed:

Her mother shakes here head. “You have an answer for everything. All that psychoanalysis has turned you into a wimp. There’s a reason they call them shrinks, you know. They make people smaller.

The story unfolds swiftly but surely: Arabella’s classes begin to work on her students (and she finds possible romance with Chuck, the oldest and laziest of her students, a wonderfully allusive portrait by Breen), and Arabella herself is surprised to learn that her mother is writing a story of her own. The novel is openly suffused throughout with the love of writing and of books:

The library [of the nursing home] is surprisingly lovely. In the midst of so much pastel neutrality, the bright colors of the book jackets are a welcome explosion of color. Here is life; even a nursing home cannot deaden the joy of a book.

Joy indeed: this moving, unflinchingly honest book is Breen’s first novel. We must hope for many more.

                                                                                                                                     –Steve Donoghue

Junot Diaz in the TLS!

The 1 February issue of the TLS at last makes mention of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, that author’s first novel and much-ballyhooed return to publication after a long hiatus. In a review of scarcely 200 words, Bill Broun devotes half his space to plot summary, but the few evaluative comments he does make, though maddeningly vaporous, tend toward the positive. He concludes his piece with this paragraph:
 

Junot Diaz’s much-acclaimed 1996 story collection, Drown, established him as one of the most interesting writers of his time, and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was a critical sensation when it was published in the United States last autumn. One theme in the American reviews was how this book was “worth the wait:. The underlying idea seemed to be that thet years Diaz spent writing it were linked to an increase in quality, as though writers toiled at a constant rate, ever burnishing their masterpieces. But Diaz demonstrates here that novels not only need to be built, they must also be carefully grown. The book’s great virtue lies in its accretions of poetic coincidence in imagery, language and narrative. The notion of “watching”, for instance, and the different words for it, plays out on many levels - linguistic, narrative, political, personal - so that we are left as readers admiring the way a work of art can imitate, if not reproduce, the wonder of a single small life in New Jersey.

What the reader will notice first about this (apart from how much of it is twaddle of the first water) is how vague it all is. What, for instance, can be the difference between the ‘narrative’ and the ‘personal’ level in a novel told in the first person by an honest narrator? And how does what follows that central ‘but’ refute what precedes it? First Broun tells us what all those uncouth American reviewers said about the book - that it was worth the wait - and then he tells us, vaguely, allusively, what he thinks about it - that it was worth the wait.
 
And what readers of the whole review will notice immediately is how short it is. If, as Broun correctly points out, Diaz is one of the most interesting writers of his time, what can possibly be the justification for granting a mere 200 words to his debut novel? It smacks of some kind of insult - not only to Diaz but to readers in general.
 
For an entirely more worthy review of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, click over to our September 2007 issue and read Sam Sacks’ longer, more thoughtful essay about the book, which insults nobody but useless old people. And a word of warning: be sure to don hip-waders before venturing into the seething psychotic sludge-pool of the piece’s comments field. 

Richard Price and A.J. Jacobs!

Looks like all those video gamers and Sudoku addicts can come in from the cold - reading is now cool again. At least, that’s the consensus arrived at by Esquire and Men’s Journal, both of whom this month trip over themselves to thank Richard Price for saving literature from itself. John H. Richardson, writing in Esquire, at least attempts some poise: 

Price has been around for what seems like forever, but there’s a reason we still read him. Because every sentence is a pleasure. Because he never puts a foot wrong, and he never lingers. He takes just enough time to make you care.

Over in Men’s Journal, Jonathan Miles has thrown all such caution to the wind: 

Price surveys the psychological skids of the witnesses, the mourners, and perps with a precision that is, frankly, unmatched by any other writer working today. He’s as cool as they come.

Our own Sam Sacks has just reviewed the new Price novel, Lush Life, in our February issue. Once you’re done hyperventilating with the boys over in the Lad Mags, you might want to treat yourself to his infinitely more measured take on Price’s literary estate.

In that same issue of Esquire, genial idiot A. J. Jacobs sings the praises of self-delusion: 

Self-delusion is not a defense mechanism or a coping technique. It’s the most human thing we have. It’s faith, existential courage, essential to mixing a decent drink, loving our spouse, writing a sentence. It’s what separates us from the animals and the boring.

To which our own Steve Donoghue might mutter, “that explains a lot.” To revisit the details of his rancor, click over to “Vain Offerings” in our October 2007 issue and spectate at a good old-fashioned mauling.

Proust Was a Neuroscientist

Our friends at the Internet Review of Books have now come out with their fourth issue, which features a long list of writing on a growing variety of subjects.  Among the reviews is Steve George’s look at Jonah Lehrer’s recent popular science release Proust Was a Neuroscientist.  George describes Lehrer’s motives by writing 

What he means is that those he celebrates have managed to reveal details of actual brain anatomy and physiology. But isn’t it neuroscientists, not artists and writers, who make discoveries about brain structure and function? That artists and novelists are even implicitly engaged in the same work as neuroscientists is a controversial idea, and only a partly convincing one. Still, Jonah Lehrer has developed the idea into a book that is well worth reading.

For an even more fleshed out—and somewhat less lenient—analysis of young super-hottie Lehrer’s book, go here for Lianne Habinek’s review in Open Letters‘ January issue.