What it is:

One of the world’s first political thrillers, The Secret Agent (1907) is about a man named Verloc who owns something like a smut shop in London and who has been working for the Russian Embassy. The Russians want him to commit some kind of act of terrorism, and he bungles an explosion at the Greenwich observatory, and the police are on his trail.

Why it’s interesting:

I think Conrad maybe got the short end of the stick when the literary canon was set up. Everyone reads Heart of Darkness, but I’m discovering he has this wealth of literary gems that no one talks about in English classes. The Secret Agent does some interesting things with time to create suspense. After we’re introduced to Verloc, and we see his meeting with the Russians and then some revolutionaries, the time skips forward to the day of the bombing. We get about 100 pages set on that day, in which we’re not sure what exactly happened, or who did what. Then the narrative skips back a few weeks and shows Verloc’s point of view and returns to the bombing and the investigative aftermath. It’s startling how contemporary this novel reads. There are a few anachronisms that would prevent it from being set in 2009, but I could easily see it being written in the 1970s. The style is smooth and suspenseful, and the philosophical questions it raises about terrorism aren’t ones I’ve ever read about in a book earlier than The Quiet American in the 1950s, another book that feels prophetic for the late-20th century concerns it seems to foreshadow. And here is Conrad, writing about terrorism in the beginning of the century, and all we associate with him is how we had to struggle through Heart of Darkness in high school.

Further Reading:

Graham Green, The Quiet American (for terrorism). Robert Stone, Dog Soldiers (for secret plots). Don Delillo, Players and Mao II (for domestic terrorism). It would also pair well with Crime and Punishment, because of the detective fiction aspect of the plot. Finally, Jack London’s The Iron Heel, which isn’t about terrorism, exactly, but it does concern itself with class revolution, which is one element of The Secret Agent.

What it is:

I read this novel last year and just reread it. It holds up a second time. In fact, I think it gets better the second time. A woman takes her two small children and leaves her husband, gets on a bus from Oakland to Pennsylvania, where her sister is. She meets a man (Bill Houston, who is in Tree of Smoke) and the two of them travel around looking for a big time. Booze, drugs, criminal activities and the seedy underbelly the world all drive this narrative – Oakland to Pittsburgh to Chicago to Phoenix, American to the core. DeLillo said of this novel, “These lonely spaces and stunned lives have a hair-trigger fascination that is American to the core.” That’s exactly what I want to read right now, and what I’d like to write.

Why it’s interesting:

Johnson gives you these dazzling lines: “She let them do everything with a ceaseless nausea that could scarcely scratch its name on the barbiturate serenity she inhabited.” A heroin junky gets drunk, “bathing his electrified bones in whiskey to quiet them.” He shoots up: “As the heroin reached him, he could feel the sinuses at the back of his nose opening up.” I’m not sure I want to know how Johnson came up with that last line. What really interests me about this book, from a craft perspective, is what he does with point of view. I guess the perspective is a roving third-limited, in that he stays in one character’s head at a time, but there is an all-seeing omniscience that occasionally pops up. It’s really more of a distorted objective POV, though. While we get the thoughts of the POV character, the prose is spare and removed like the objective, fly-on-the-wall perspective. It’s like if you took the fly on the wall, and made it view the world through the lens of one character’s consciousness (but it’s still just a fly on the wall, removed from the character), that’s what Johnson gives us. Maybe that’s what literary expressionism is? Here’s an example: At one point, the woman Jamie is introduced to a man named Ned, who says his name is Higher-and-Higher. Jamie thinks of Ned as “Ned Higher-and-Higher,” as in, “Ned Higher-and-Higher did this and that.” By referring to the character as Ned Higher-and-Higher, Johnson is rooted in Jamie’s consciousness, but all of the actions are described objectively, as if from the fly on the wall. So rather than give us Jamie’s thoughts, the only access we have is that she thinks of the man as Ned Higher-and-Higher, which really tells us all we need to know about her. (She’s naive and uneducated, she gets drunk and stoned, and the man takes advantage of her.)

Further Reading:

Other than Denis Johnson, I can’t think of anyone off the top of my head who uses this same POV technique. Robert Stone slides into it on occasion, but it’s not as tight. If the POV for literary expressionism is a tightrope, the rope is tight in Johnson’s novel, and he walks it with grace. With Stone, there’s some wiggle room. William Gay’s stories dip into this kind of POV (a spare, omniscient voice that shows rather than tells). Who else does this? And is expressionism the right word for it?

What it is:

This novel is about violence in a small Georgia town. A fourteen-year-old illiterate black girl gets kicked out of her house after getting bitten by a potentially rabid fox, and the woman who takes her in has a troublesome son. The son buys a car from Paris Trout, wrecks it, then refuses to pay Trout. Trout shows up to collect his money from the family, and winds up shooting the teenage girl. The novel is then about his trial and Trout’s reaction to the event.

Why it’s interesting:

I couldn’t finish this novel right now. I wanted to like it (I so wanted to like it). The above synopsis sounds great, and the story seems to have everything I’d want: violence, an unapologetic bad guy, the small-town south. My wife liked the novel, and she usually doesn’t like this kind of story. What’s going on? I’m still trying to figure out if there is something lacking in Paris Trout, or if the flaw lies with the reader. I’m starting to get tired of some of the same old narratives. A friend recently said he was rereading some Faulkner and realized his standards had dropped, that a lot of books just seem silly compared to Faulkner. What I like about Faulkner is not only his subjects and themes and what have you, but his language, that rich prose-poetry. It’s what I also like about Cormac McCarthy and William Gay and Ron Rash. The language of Paris Trout, like a lot of novels from the eighties, is pretty plain, unadorned if you will. Another southern great – Larry Brown – has fairly plain language as well, and I can’t read enough of his stuff. Yet even at Brown’s most naturalistic (Joe), he’s got a big heart. He loves his characters, even when they do bad things, and that heart speaks louder than any language could. I didn’t feel much heart in Paris Trout. Maybe I didn’t read far enough, but I don’t get the impression Dexter loves his characters the way Brown loved his. I might be in the minority here, and I might be committing blasphemy as a southern writer, but Paris Trout just isn’t doing it for me right now.

Further Reading:

I might check out Dexter’s Deadwood, which I’m wondering if might be the inspiration for the HBO series. Part of my gripe with Paris Trout might not be the heart or the language, but just simply that I’m tired of reading about race for right now. Maybe Dexter’s voice and themes would work for me if they were set in the wild west.

Now available. Check out my friend Patrick Nevins’ story “Humility”, as well as these answers to the question, What is your favorite fruit-flavored soda?

What it is:

This novel is about JFK, beginning with his inauguration and continuing to the assassination. Mercurio foregrounds Kennedy’s sexual exploits and illnesses (Addison’s disease, chronic back pain, stomach illnesses), so the novel is one liaison after another – the interns he thinks of as fiddle and faddle, Marilyn Monroe, this or that aide or prostitute, interspersed with evenings with Jackie – followed by him lying in bed with a back brace, being injected with cortisone, taking pain pills and amphetamines and antibiotics, a fitness regimen and shots of painkillers so he can walk well enough to meet with this or that leader. In the background is the promise of the moon landing, the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban missile crisis, Frank Sinatra, J. Edgar Hoover and others.

Why it’s interesting:

Two things about this book are interesting. First, it’s a real foray into the private life of a famous American. The tone is highly clinical: Mercurio always refers to Kennedy as “the subject,” and everything is described objectively, without judgment from the author. My colleague who loaned me the book called it almost pornographic, not because the book dwells on the particulars of sex, but because, like pornography, we feel like we’re witnessing something taboo with this invasion of privacy, yet we can’t help but to read on. Secondly, the book is interesting because it spits in the face of anyone who questions the morality of inhabiting the private consciousness of a real person. In Key West, I watched a panel in which two novelists and a historian discussed this question. To the historian’s dismay, Russell Banks was totally unapologetic about revising history to suit his story in Cloudsplitter. The question of that morality might be in the subtext of Mercurio’s novel – Kennedy often ruminates that what a person does in his private life is no one’s business but his own – but Mercurio dismisses any inhibitions he has and lays Kennedy’s soul out for us. One can’t help but think how our world has changed since JFK’s presidency, for now, post-Lewinsky, the minutia of a politician’s personal life is arguably as important as his policies, or at least we seem to drag a man’s private life through the mud as a metaphor for dismissing his policies. Mercurio seems not to be phased by Kennedy’s liaisons. The novel supports Kennedy’s moral authority as a leader, and the rest is history.

Further Reading:

I’m told Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife is very similar, in that it covers Laura Bush in the same way Mercurio’s novel follows Kennedy. Joyce Carol Oates’ Blonde follows Marilyn Monroe with the same kind of clinical perspective (Monroe has affairs with The President, The Playwright and The Baseball Player).

What it is:

Pynchon’s new one is a hard-boiled private investigator comic noir set in California in the early 1970s (or maybe the late 1960s). The protagonist, Doc Sportello, smokes a lot of pot and gets wrapped up in a plot involving a missing land developer, his mistress, a mysterious organization called the Golden Fang, a police officer named Bigfoot, a couple of hookers (Jade and Bambi), and some other loose ends. Funny and fast-paced, the novel is like Raymond Chandler meets Half Baked.

Why it’s interesting:

I’m not sure whether I read this somewhere, or it just occurred to me, but the novel is zany and interesting and pointless in the same way as The Big Lebowski. It’s fun, and maybe I’ll reread it someday. Characters have names like Ensenada Slim, Jason Velveeta, and Japonica Fenway. As literature, though, I had trouble keeping all these characters straight, and I’m not sure we’re meant to. It’s the kind of novel you can dip into and read a chapter and and enjoy without really knowing anything about the larger plot. Quite honestly, I skimmed the last half looking for sex scenes, which have their own poetic sensibility: “Whatever he was going to say would’ve been drowned out in another deafening approach, and anyway what Luz wanted now was to fuck, which is what they did, and after a while they lit up a joint and she was talking about Sloane.” They have a conversation, and then Doc leaves: “So he was a little late getting back to the office, and for days he would be making up explanations for all the visible hickeys and claw marks and so on.” Juvenile, yes, but it’s a good way to spend a few hours on Saturday morning.

Further Reading:

Pairs well with Denis Johnson’s Nobody Move. Same kind of paranoid plot as The Crying of Lot 49. For a good collection of hard-boiled detective stories, check out The Best American Mysteries of the Century, edited by Tony Hillerman, which includes the great Raymond Chandler story “Red Wind.”

Here’s a link to reading Roberto Bolaño. I still haven’t read any of his work (yet). What is really interesting to me about this article is the idea that one of an author’s books can prepare you for the next:

If I could read just one book by Author X, which would it be? This may be the hardest question we can ask a fellow reader, insofar as it assumes that we can teleport straight to the heart of aesthetic experience, rather than journeying there over weeks or years. In fact, we often come to the books we love – and learn to love them – by way of other books: Dubliners primes us for Portrait, which shapes our expectations for Ulysses, which earns our indulgence for Finnegans Wake.

In this way, the justified hype surrounding the English publication last year of late Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 (If you read only one book this year…) may have done some readers a disservice. Like Joyce’s, Bolaño’s is a sensibility that demands immersion, and for the kind of person who prefers to adjust to the swimming pool by inches rather than jumping straight into the deep end, the massive 2666 may have felt a lot like drowning.