Grist

The Journal for Writers

Avuncularly Pynchonian: Joe Ponepinto’s Mr. Neutron | Review by David A. Southard

By

You have heard it before: you are the lead in the running film or the voluminous Proustian saga that is your life. This is what you tell yourself, whether as a result of confidence, privilege, evolutionary machinations, or sheer tyranny of will. It gets you through the day. In all likelihood, however, you, if you are anything, are the background actor moving his or her lips, standing naturally at your mark, engaged in silent conversation with another body as backdrop. You are a minor character, a friend of a friend at a party, a relative, or an ex—discarded in a throw-away line of dialogue. You are much closer to how Gray Davenport sees himself:  “a fraction of an atom, taking up an area of space so insignificant that it [is] no surprise to be regularly ignored,” and, like Gray, you want something different, you have ambition, you desire a function. Mr. Neutron, the new novel by Ponepinto, follows Gray as he transitions from backdrop to accidental lead, from weightless, charge-less neutron into something with presence, someone with a purpose. This novel—satiric, comic, slapstick, surreal—follows this floundering fool as he quests to change himself and the city he has so often failed.

Not only is Gray Davenport a loser, but he also works for one—Bob, mayoral candidate and small time thinker who serves as a perpetual candidate and joke to residents of the dumpy coastal city of Grand River. Gray serves as a “political consultant, but [is] not really political. Not republican, not Democrat, but not independent enough even to be an Independent.” Bob—stuffed with corn nuts and regurgitated phrases on crime and taxes—is just the perfect blank mass to reflect such mediocre indifference. Bob’s second in command is Patsy, a woman rarely, if ever, seen off of her rubber stability ball. Patsy, too, has contented herself to her permanent runner-up position and keeps Bob as hollow and superficial as possible.

Gray begins shedding his indifference, however, when the gigantic, hypnotic, and dimwitted Reason Wilder arrives, announcing his candidacy for mayor. Reason comes from nowhere, an “unknown Pied Piper . . . without a platform or a slogan” who speaks in simplicities and magically transfixes people across (and off) the political spectrum.

Gray, un-hypnotized by the naïve charm of the giant, smells something rotten from Reason, both literally and figuratively, and from there the novel unrolls in plot, characterization, and quirks like something from an avuncular Pynchon (sans elaborate formal stylings): there’s a mad-scientist huckster, conspiratorial underpinnings, a porn star turned political operative, corruption, reanimation, characters with suitable aptonyms, the stink of pollution, and enough losers to fill the leaky hot-tub of a deserted motel at the edge of town. The novel is avuncular in both its friendliness to readers as entertainment and in its comedic stylings, which surround a journey of misery and defeat for our titular neutron.

Do not misunderstand this as your typical hero’s journey, however, though many of the tropes and stages appear as the novel progresses. Heroes eventually heed the call to adventure, reveal strength in their road of trials, and experience clarity in apotheosis. In Mr. Neutron, Gray Davenport moves through his journey in a perpetual state of near capitulation to the permanent mediocrity to which he has been relegated. He remains lost, in fantasy and from success.

Heroes, though flawed, also tend to be more likeable. Gray Davenport is a sad, pessimistic, weak, sex-crazed, occasionally misogynistic, often irritating, but nonetheless engaging enough observer of his little mad world to carry the reader along. This makes him a difficult character in which to ask readers to invest time and emotion. Some readers may give up on Gray, while others will recognize themselves in, or at least respect, his persistence and determination.

Early in the novel Gray, imaging himself as the subatomic particle, thinks “Perhaps neutrons were necessary. Perhaps there was a higher calling for them . . . He just had to deduce what that purpose was.” The purpose finally comes for Gray, when a charge transforms this neutron, and a new(ish) life emerges. The change in the final parts of the novel is as absurd and funny as it is unexpected by both protagonist and reader.

Finally, though this novel is satirical, it is not overtly political. The fun it pokes at politics—corruption, collusion, amorality, idiocy, and gullibility—is universal. This may bother some readers who demand outright resistance or compliance to the current situation of America. Instead the reader gets something fun, something light, a reprieve from the static of screaming heads that fill every page and every screen. Sometimes that is what we need from a book: entertainment.

 

 

 

Mr. Neutron

by Joe Ponepinto

7.13 Books, March 2018

Paperback, 300pp., $15.99

 

***

David A. Southard is a writer, musician, and teacher. His novella K. at Liberation will be published by BOSS Underground Press in the summer of 2018. He creates music under the moniker Building a Building. You can find him @davidsouthard.

Exquisite Desolation: Emily Fridlund’s Catapult | Review by Sarah Appleton

By

Emily Fridlund has had an eventful year: her novel The History of Wolves was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and her short story collection, Catapult, won Sarabande Books’s Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, selected by Ben Marcus. Fridlund’s short stories are riveting; they tantalize in their description and submerge readers in the ominous, off-kilter world of her characters.

Fridlund entrances the reader right from the start of each story. “My wife could take your skin off with one glance, she was that excruciating,” begins the opening story, “Expecting.” This bluntness is characteristic of her narrators and their opening lines, and the underlying threat leaves little room to doubt that darkness will follow. These openings often skirt the plot’s central tension and speak instead to the narrator’s root of or excuse for their present situation, illuminating a quality of the character that tips toward deranged by the end of the story. “It wasn’t my husband that wanted the bear, it was me,” the narrator opens “Lake Arcturus Lodge,” a story about a couple starting a lodge and attempting to start a family too, although they are divided on this. In the titular story, the adolescent narrator says, “That summer I was reading vampire books, so when Noah said no to sex, I let myself pretend that’s what he was. I told myself: inside his mouth is a hallway to death.” Of course, the whole story, then, is about sex and not about sex, about a girl teetering on the cusp of not-quite-womanhood. As these opening lines demonstrate, the lines work to frame the character’s already off-kilter world, which tilts further as the plot progresses.

Perhaps the most unifying characteristic of the collection’s eleven stories are the fraught relationships between characters—husbands and wives, best friends, parents and children, those who are thrown together by circumstance, characters who are often waiting or stalled in a liminal space. In “Expecting,” the narrator thinks of his son’s pregnant girlfriend, “She looks devastated by her body. I tell her she looks nice because I’m afraid for her.” Later, when the baby is born, the characters are discomfited by her aloofness, her decidedly unbaby-like qualities. “She reminds me of my wife,” the narrator thinks, “and I pray that the baby will never learn to talk, never wobble onto her feet so she can walk away…We call her ‘the baby’ to her face to make ourselves feel better.” Before the baby, two females walked out of the narrator’s life, and this sense of isolation and being left behind pervades the collection. It recurs in “Here, Still.” The narrator thinks, “With most people in my life, I come to the end of myself pretty fast. I walk to my borders—where there’s dinner on a dropleaf table, maybe small talk or sex—then wave politely and turn back. [My best friend] made me sorry there wasn’t anywhere better to go.” This narrator, like others, is more than arm’s length from those around her, fundamentally incapable of forging a human connection with those she ought to be closest to, who love her most.

Characters also experience fraught relationships with their selves. “I was still holding out hope that my body could go back to being what it was a year ago, effortless and completely forgettable,” the narrator of the titular story says, “but that was starting to seem less and less likely.” Her thought belies her vulnerability, but smacks of Fridlund’s precise description, too, which enables readers to feel, like the narrator, the “effortless and completely forgettable” body she once had. In “Lake Arcturus Lodge,” a guest visiting the lodge gets drunk and tells the story about leaving his mother to die in an avalanche.  “‘I just wanted to survive,’” he says, “‘but now I can’t do nothing. I’m a napkin. I’m rust.’” The guest’s description of himself moves from something disposable to something already decayed, a description which rings with exceptional eloquence.

Fridlund also stuns readers with the preciseness and concision of her characterization: “Her mother is in her fifties, widowed, loyal to horoscopes. She is afraid of making decisions that work against her fate,” from “Time Difference,” and “I thought of how Tom combed his hair before he came to bed, the way he once wore swimming goggles in a snowstorm,” in “Here, Still.” Fridlund wrenches readers most, however, with her salient descriptions of the human condition and the relationships we cultivate. “Childhood, by then, had been sucked dry by the unremitting soullessness of adolescence,” the newly-teenaged narrator laments in the titular story. In “Time Difference,” the narrator notes, “The problem with living with someone is that your every act can be transformed into another example of their larger theory of you,” a sentence which may well sum up the experiences and relationships of most of the collection’s narrators given their insularity.

One of the most striking pieces of the collection, “Gimme Shelter,” is distinctive because it’s composed of short vignettes that build a life, and ultimately disorient the reader as the narrator, Lynn, becomes increasingly unreliable. The story is anchored by the house she grew up in and the family it once contained. In the second vignette, Lynn recounts a dream in which the house has a 19th century library that her parents have hidden from her and her siblings. She professes to understand “that [her parents] were just a little cruel, to hide the best room in the house from their children.” Although her parents have done no such thing, the sentiment sticks despite the apparent normalcy of her childhood. From this moment, Lynn’s psychological state seems to slowly and subtly deteriorate. In the end, Fridlund circles back to the structure of a house. Lynn, reminiscing with her siblings at her father’s funeral, reflects on the game of their mother’s invention they played as children: “it seemed possible to Lynn for a brief instant that no other reality had in fact ever fully existed for any of them, that there had only ever been that old car on the highway with all of them inside, each locked in their chosen rooms, and she wondered in anguish and awe how many times she would forget and have to remember this again.” Lynn reveals how isolated she’s felt all along, thereby becoming another of Fridlund’s isolated narrators despite their proximity to people who love them.

In short, Fridlund’s collection is a riveting read, and the blow of one last line leads to the scintillating opening sentence of the following story. At times, Fridlund may push her original detail a little too far, distracting readers from the central tensions of a scene rather than enriching them. This, however, is not the norm; on the whole, the collection is so enthralling that it can be read in one go, but its stories are so devastating that one yearns to read them repeatedly. “It’s all too staged, too obvious to talk about,” the frustrated narrator of “Lock Jaw” thinks. Like the narrator’s situation, these stories are conspicuously staged, set against desolate, decrepit backdrops, peopled with isolated, off-kilter characters. And yet, these stories are far from being too obvious to talk about. They are exactly what we should be saying.

 

Catapult: Stories
by Emily Fridlund
Sarabande Books, 2017
 ISBN: 978-1946448057
240 pp. / $15.95

 

 

 

 

***

Sarah Appleton earned her MFA in creative nonfiction at Western Washington University. Her writing projects focus on memory, family, and feminism. She currently teaches at Cranbrook Kingswood School where she lives with  her fiancé and beautiful Australian Shepherd, Zoë. You can find her@sarahkapples on Twitter.

Stars and Bright Signs: Tawnysha Greene’s A House Made of Stars | Review by Justin LaFreniere

By

Tawnysha Greene’s A House Made of Stars opens with danger disguised as play: the young hearing-impaired girl who serves as unnamed narrator hides in the bathtub with her younger deaf sister because “Momma tells us it’s a game.” But the observant narrator knows the truth: hiding in the bathtub behind a locked door is only a temporary refuge from her bipolar, abusive father.

A House Made of Stars ties knots in your gut. It thrives on a constantly palpable tension. The reader, like the family, never knows when the father might erupt in inevitable acts of violence. Greene’s short chapters and the fluidity of narrative create a sometimes indeterminate length of crisis, leaving the reader in the same position as the narrator: unable to guess at the twists in mood or which innocuous action might be the trigger. It’s a choice that shines early in the book as the father, jobless for longer than usual, forces the family to move in with the father’s sister. As her father’s low period continues, his volatility culminates in an assault on his daughters, rendered in strong, horrific prose.

When the narrator’s mother covers for the father after the narrator calls 9-1-1, the message is clear: I will protect you from him, but I will also protect him from you. A House Made of Stars understands and utilizes this environment of enabling, the way real abusers create situations and cycles that allow their rage and behavior to go unchecked. In the novel, the failings of the adults in the family and their choices about whom to protect generate as much tension as the violence itself. And the violence is unpleasantly beautiful, for Greene is at her best when her writing strikes with fervency, such as when the father does his own oral surgery:

Daddy’s in the bathroom with a clothes hanger in his mouth. He pulls on it, and hands are bloody. He makes the sound again. . . . He spins around, pushes past Momma to the kitchen, pulls out the knife drawer, picks the long skinny one we use for meat, and saws with deep strokes, making the sounds again.

Genetics seem to pass on more than biological material within Greene’s novel; the cycle of abuse exists almost as a given, a birthright. The father’s bipolarity is hereditary, as we learn his mother was abusive, burning a scar onto his neck and face. The cycle of abuse continues until eventually the maternal grandmother whisks the girls—narrator, sister, and mother—off to her house where they will be safe.

When the novel makes this shift in the action from the tightly plotted beginning, the reader is given an opportunity to ask some of the questions that might be nagging at the periphery. I found myself considering how the stellar rendering of the narrator seemed so much more complete and dynamic than some of the secondary characters, like the narrator’s maternal grandmother—protective, caring, and encouraging to the creativity and maturation of her granddaughters. How she begot the conservative and enabling mother who disdains what she calls “Jezebels” and won’t listen to a woman speak in church also feels unexplained. When the father and his temper returns, however, the pacing, too, returns to its previous breakneck pace, and the reader quickly forgets the incongruities of these secondary characters and becomes enthralled in the return of danger.

A House Made of Stars may not reinvent the genre of the coming-of-age novel, but its subject matter is fresh and compelling. Greene’s use of dialogue is particularly noteworthy for a modesty that makes it easy to read the characters’ sign language as speech. Still, deafness subsides and resurfaces as Greene reminds us of its presence in artful ways, such as when the narrator reacts to the feel of vibrating speakers or the double meaning when she explains how to sign “Daddy”: “an open hand with the thumb hitting my forehead.” These moments are rendered in the text with an impressive intimacy that bonds reader to character. It is this humanness and honesty that makes us love the narrator and worry for her. We understand the conflict in the family immediately when she says, “I never saw words come from Daddy’s hands.”

Though the family wages minor rebellions against the father, the reader knows that the book’s ultimate confrontation must come from the narrator. And when it does, in the final chapters of the book, I found myself of two minds. At first, the book seemed to end too soon. The father is still an ominous presence pursuing the narrator, but I wanted the tension that Greene so aptly creates to transition to a more stable, traditional resolution—I wanted to know what would happen or to have the strong suggestion of a future. But there’s an undeniable power in Greene ending A House Made of Stars as she does. The danger to the narrator remains real, palpable, and I found myself, in the days after reading, constantly revisited by thoughts of our unnamed narrator, wondering if she would be all right.

A HOUSE MADE OF STARS
By Tawnysha Greene
Burlesque Press, 2015
Paperback, 196 pp. $16.95

—–

Justin Lafreniere earned his MFA in Fiction from George Mason University and is the Prose Editor for Stillhouse Press. His poems, essays, and stories have appeared in The Postgame, Charlotte Viewpoint, and The Western Online, among other publications. He attended the Tin House Writers’ Workshop to study short fiction in 2015 and previously served as the Fiction Editor for So to Speak. He teaches writing and lives in Northern Virginia. He can be found @justinlaf

Quinn Dalton’s Midnight Bowling | Review by Courtney Mullis

By

 

20160127_135217-e1454045981619-225x300Quinn Dalton’s second novel Midnight Bowling is more than just a teenage love story. A skillfully written young adult crossover, Midnight Bowling uses parallel memoirs to recount two romances as well as one coming-of-age story. Middle-aged Leo Florida owns The Galaxy, Sandusky’s timeworn bowling alley where Tess Wycheski’s father teaches her how to bowl a perfect strike. Tess’s father, Joe Wycheski, was once a pro bowling wannabe, and Leo was the coach who abandoned him and skipped town after Joe choked at his first and last major bowling tournament. Leo never explained his reasons for leaving, and Joe never asked. Joe gave up bowling until ultimately deciding he needed to pass his love for the game on to Tess. Like her father, Tess comes to appreciate the art of bowling and to strive relentlessly for perfection in the sport.

Unlike her mother, a devout Christian who “had never once gone bowling,” Tess regarded bowling as her “religion.” Tess and her father share their quasi-religious devotion to bowling with Leo and his nephew, Donny. Through both Tess and Leo’s retrospective accounts of love, despair, and sacrifice, the reader is able to piece together their complicated and intertwined histories. Tess and her father come to share not only a passion for bowling, but also a common view of the world. Both Wycheskis see bowling as an art form to explore and to try to refine, rather than a mere means to victory. Similar to the ways in which Tess comes to mirror her father, Donny turns out to be far more like his uncle than he ever realized. Both Tess and Donny will have to choose if they want to be like the men who have influenced them or if they want to chart their own course; they must decide when individual desire ought to come before loyalty, family, and sentiment. Joe, Leo, Tess and Donny each have to decide if they should let go of their pasts and if they can accept uncertain futures.

In addition to the brilliant dual narration and skillfully developed characters, Dalton interweaves complicated and timeless subplots into the narrative. While the timeframe is not always clear and the reader may not necessarily feel the setting and time, the endurance of Dalton’s themes solidifies the story’s contemporary applicability. One of the ways in which the narrative’s timeframe is clear is in that the legacy and shame of the Vietnam War loom over the Florida family, and presumably over the community as a whole. The community grieves when they believe Leo’s brother, Walt, was killed in Vietnam. According to Leo, the town was so distraught that “You didn’t have a town more ready to get into the jungle.” While skillfully representing America’s cultural and societal response to both past and contemporary wars, Dalton also shows that the realities of life and death haunt each character in the story, whether they acknowledge their pain or delude themselves into forgetting. Dalton’s unquestionably flawed and human characters make the sometimes-unclear setting irrelevant; whether we are in Sandusky in 1980 or somewhere else entirely, the main characters’ stories are universal.

Dalton utilizes the detailed accounts of multiple significant interrelated characters in order to give the reader a look into all of the possibilities that lay ahead of Tess. She can refuse to accept less than perfection like her father, or she can blindly chase an unrealistic kind of perfection like her mother. She can devote herself to the love and family she already has, or she can find her own path to happiness. Tess’s journey runs deeper than the typical path to adulthood; while she does face and rise above pressure to be like her popular best friend, Chelsea, she also stares an uncertain future in the face and learns when to let go. By the end of the novel, the reader is satisfied to know not only what Tess ultimately chooses for her life, but also to catch a glimpse of the multiple other lives she might have lived. Tess’s account of her teen years means she may be a role model to the younger reader, a peer to the young adult reader, or a fond memory of what once was and what could have been for the adult reader. Like Tess, all readers can look back at the way their hometown has “changed and not changed, the way a place that lives inside you does.” Tess and Leo are characters whose stories are relatable enough to elicit an almost nostalgiac feeling in the hearts and minds of any reader.

MIDNIGHT BOWLING
by Quinn Dalton
Carolina Wren Press, March 2016
Paperback, 263pp. $17.95

—–

Courtney Mullis graduated from Coastal Carolina University in 2015, and she is currently an English MA student at Wake Forest University. Her thesis project engages with contemporary American novels that feature Jewish American passing narratives. Her research interests include postwar American literature, American ethnic studies, and critical theory. When she has time to read for fun, Mullis enjoys French existentialism and American modernism.

Rosa Liksom’s Compartment No. 6 | Review by Torrie Jay White

By

 

9781555977474Compartment No. 6 is a tense, terse, dense novel. In less than 200 pages, Rosa Liksom jails the entire, crumbling Soviet Union, and gives it to us to unspool.

This novel, published in early August by Graywolf Press, starts in Moscow. A girl—we never learn her name—boards a train bound for Mongolia. She’s leaving something, that much we know, and craving the silence that a solo cross-continental train ride will afford her, but as the train is leaving, another passenger joins her.

Vadim Nikolayevich—the man, as he’s most often called—is crude, brash, and talkative. He smashes her solitude. Vadim begins to talk. Right away, he is both threatening and appealing. Vulgar and abusive in the way that he describes his relationships with women, emphatic and excited about the Soviet Union, and generous with his food and his money, Vadim paces between friend and foe. She tries to seek reassignment, and tries repeatedly to repel him—turning down his advances and even dumping nail polish remover into his vodka—but she and Vadim remain together. As the girl becomes resigned to him, she warms to him. They become traveling companions, odd, but united. As their train crosses Siberia, Vadim drinks himself stupid, waxes poetic about the Soviet Union, and tells stories about women and work camps and a lifetime of deprivation.

The girl listens, and watches.

We spend the whole novel inside her head, but we only hear her speak once. Like she does here, Liksom pairs physical setting with the girl’s emotional undercurrents: “She rested with her eyes closed. And that’s how they travelled that whole long twilit evening, each of them sleeping and waking in their own time. She was with Mitka in his room. A Jefferson Airplane song wobbled out from the little blue record player.” This fluid structure gives the story an intimate, yet voyeuristic feeling. She watches Vadim drink himself into a stupor, sees the filth of the train’s washrooms, notices snatches of rural life, and witnesses the desolate beauty of Russia. Yet rarely is she ever active—in the train, she listens as Vadim speaks, and in the small towns the train stops at, she observes without engaging the people or scenes she watches. Only in her memories of what she’s leaving and occasionally in the cities that the train stops in do we see the girl act. She spends the novel trapped—clearly escaping something, but paralyzed in her flight.

The novel becomes quiet, its roaring power kept outside the train’s windows. Between the stories that Vadim tells and the countryside that their train moves through, Liksom catalogues the Soviet Union, using her extraordinary prose to gather the details of an entire nation—promise, want, poverty, corruption, brokenness, hopelessness, hopefulness—into dense, lyrical language. Each word is precise, a note on a piano played well, and when strung together, they make the Soviet Union as real and complex as it is. Compartment No. 6 quickly becomes not about what the girl is traveling to—Ulan Bator and ancient petroglyphs—or what she is traveling away from—a boyfriend with mental health issues and a love affair with his mother—but about Russia, the Soviet Union, desperate in its final years.

The train sped east and everyone waited for morning. The girl thought of travelling in the hot train across dreaded Siberia, how someone might look at that train and long for Moscow, someone who wanted to be on that very train, someone who had escaped from a camp without a rifle, without food, with nothing but wet matches in his pocket, traveling on skis stolen from a guard, a rusted knife in his pocket, someone willing to kill, willing to suffer freezing and exhaustion, willing to throw himself at life.

This is the core of the story: Underneath the deteriorating empire, underneath the relentless want, underneath the primal desperation of the escaping person, there is brutal and persistent hope. Even amidst the girl’s passivity, there is the thrum of life and of a fierce and potent energy. Vadim is that prisoner, and as the girl listens to him recount the ways that he, starved, suffered and savage, threw himself at the merciless world, we feel the deep thrum of her passivity breaking. She is preparing, her desire for life overwhelming her weariness.

This novel is extraordinary in its scope. It’s relentless in its mission to bear witness to a complex and now lost nation, but it always, always remains specific. Compelling and repelling, it’s a story that takes you in, and holds you. Liksom drags her readers through the waste and ruin and beauty of Russia, and only when she’s through with you, will she pull back the curtain, and let you see its hope.

COMPARTMENT NO. 6: A NOVEL
by Rosa Liksom, Trans. by Lola Rogers
Graywolf Press, August 2016
Paperback, 192 pp., $16

—–

Torrie Jay White is a writer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She holds a degree in English literature and History, and currently works in museum education. Her work has appeared in most recently in fields and Litro Magazine, and she is currently working on her novel, This Dark Place. She talks writing, books, and personal stories at https://torriejayw.wordpress.com/, and tweets wit and wisdom from @Torriejay.