Mystery Girl by David Gordon

Gordon has written two novels that I know about. In each the main character is a failed or failing novelist with characteristics that range from gullible to gleefully, monstrously domineering. What am I supposed to think? About halfway through this second novel, [stomping about in rubber boots] deep in descriptions of satanic porn films, I get the distinct impression I am in some kind of weird therapy session—but not for me.

”In A Difficulty in The Path of Psycho-Analysis (1917). Freud introduces the concept of the Third Wound to describe the repeated assaults that scientific knowledge had inflicted on human conceit: first, Copernicus discovered that the sun does not revolve around the earth and that man is not in fact the true center of the universe. The second blow was delivered by Darwin: man is not set apart from the animals, not formed by a creator in His image, but is in fact a creature among others, a variation on a theme, and no longer the center of life on earth either. The final, vanquishing blow, was of course Freud’s own: his discovery of the unconscious—that immense internal sea, full of fears and wishes, memories and fantasies, whose depths remain largely unsounded—revealed the truth, that our inner world is as alien as the universe without.”

Amen to that.

Gordon could probably write anything he wanted but he decided to write a mystery novel centered on a beautiful, sexy, and mysterious mixed-race woman who, after copulating with our narrator, disappears. I am not kidding. I am not going to tell you what to think about that, but he does spend much of the book alternately dreaming about her and looking for her. Along the way we get deep in [his subconscious] Black Arts films and murders and arson.

And oh, by the way, his wife is also beautiful, sexy, mysterious, and mixed race, and she has disappeared also. And no wonder. Our failed novelist, whose taste in literature has devolved to the “funny, violent, dirty, and fast…[of] crime novels, newspaper, fashion magazines, comics and porn” serves only as breeding material but not as provider or protector. It seems he doesn’t have the goods to hold onto a wench of her proportions.

“Why can’t you write normal stories, that people want to read?” queries one of the several mixed-race babes that our unpublished novelist fantasizes about: “Why not write regular realistic stories?” Ah, but life is not realistic, our novelist argues. “Does your life have a plot?” Does time shift and “does the past erupt into the present?” Good point.

But the argument continues, this time from another character: “Let’s face it. No one was ever going to read [your novels.] People need hope and comfort. Real stories that give them a sense of meaning. Boring books like yours just upset and confuse people…” The novelist concedes this character critic has a point, but concludes that one has “to do something to fill one’s time on this planet,” and since he would not do well doing anything else, some “suicidal car salesman or lonely oncologist…would come across something I wrote in a dusty, bankrupt used bookshop, and recognize the message I left just for them…”

Well, maybe not just for me, but I get the gist. And I like it. I like him. I like this writing. He’s crazy, and funny, and has some very strange tastes in movies, but sitting in on a therapy session with him, just me and the page, is a little like watching a peep show of the human heart…its weird desires and fears. We have here a man, a novelist, at his most vulnerable. He is published but not yet “successful” in the commercial sense. And he insists on telling us how it feels. It sounds pretty realistic to me.

Keep your eyes on David Gordon. He is sui generis.


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The Serialist by David Gordon

Here’s something I haven’t done before: read two books by the same author one after another. I’d never heard of David Gordon until I came across a very funny essay by him in the NY Times Magazine one Sunday this January. In the essay he explains that his debut novel was mostly ignored in the U.S. but was widely admired in Japan, where he won three literary prizes and sold the film rights. Gordon, bewildered and mute in a country where he didn't speak the language, was hosted in Tokyo when the film came out and ushered about by adoring fans.

Gordon’s main character, Harry Bloch, is the quintessential hack writer: he did his research into what kind of fiction is selling at the bookstore chains and decided to incorporate those elements in the writing he did for different publications. Vampires and werewolves. Serial Killers. True Crime. Mystery. Urban. Soft Porn. Whatever. He’s got it all going, with ideas to spare. He even created new names and faces (!) for each authorial persona.

Harry Bloch is contacted by a serial killer, Darian, to be the ghost writer of his story before Darian is executed. Bloch acquires a teenaged “agent” and, after meeting some of the relatives of the murdered victims of his serial killer, acquires a friend and lover called Dani.

Interspersed throughout this story of the process of ghost-writing are examples of some of the work Bloch had been doing to keep food on the table. It is here we encounter vampires and soft-porn, keeping readers laughing and awake to the author’s next move. Bloch also addresses the reader directly, making them complicit in his writing: He suggests that he is trying to “establish the intimacy of first-person voice, so you’ll follow me anywhere,” and “I don’t know about you, but I hate coming to the end of a mystery.” Throughout the novel he prods us: we readers “should have figured it out by now” because he “gave us enough clues.”

Well, Gordon’s novel succeeded in this: the clues, the shifting identities, and incredibly detailed knowledge of the murders led to me suspect David Gordon/Harry Bloch, our erstwhile first-person narrator, is a serial killer while he claims to be ghostwriting for someone else.

Gordon/Bloch shows us his versatility, his charade, his cover and then led us with these asides, quite willingly, to a most grisly final couple of chapters about the reality of crime and its depravity. He wipes the smile off our mugs. I almost can’t forgive him for that. It seems unfair, somehow. We give our attention and faith to a novelist, not expecting that they will blindside us with the gruesome possibility of truth.

In the final pages, Gordon/Bloch gives us some of his philosophy about writing and life, which is: it’s not the beginning or the end of a novel (or life) that is most difficult. It is the middle. And I guess that flies in the face of most author interviews I have read, but it may be true in the case of real life. We’ll see.

Gordon reminds me a little of Jess Walter, endlessly inventive, determined to appeal, and laughing with (at?) us the same time. And he is really funny. But Gordon has an edge that bleeds.

I had to read Gordon’s second novel, Mystery Girl to see if Gordon betrays my confidence as he did in The Serialist, and if his sense of humor still keeps me rapt. Review here.


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The Hot Country by Robert Olen Butler

Olen Butler tries something unique with this wartime spy novel set in Veracruz, Mexico in 1914. World War I was beginning in Europe, Mexico was in the midst of the Mexican Revolution, the United States occupied Veracruz after a diplomatic dispute, and Germans used money and influence to encourage the Mexican government to respond militarily to the U.S. Reporting on all this was “Kit” Christopher Marlowe, newspaper journalist and son of an aging Hollywood actress.

Using a style made famous by Humphrey Bogart in ”Treasure of Sierra Madre” and Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, this noir novel follows Kit as he digs for stories in the German connection. He ends up meeting Pancho Villa and falling for a beautiful and talented muchacha but the story only seems to be getting going when this episode ends. With so much political intrigue in Mexico in the early twentieth century, it’s ripe for novelistic exploitation. This series could live a long life.

I listened to the HighBridge audio of this book, read by Ray Chase. Chase does a wonderful job of speaking Chandler-ese with a Bogart swagger, and accelerating with the action so that some chapters of fighting and tension raced. The Kit character is a likeable one, but in the beginning his journalistic seen-it-all irony and sarcasm made it difficult for me to sympathize and identify with him. The story itself was intriguing enough to pull us along until we could see Kit’s other talents.

Kit’s other skills involve the other meaning of “Marlowe,” which would be a reference to the Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe. He can fight and he can act, all of which he needs before the end of the novel. There is character development to spare here, which is why I imagine it to the first of a series. Olen Butler has chosen his area well, as it is underserved in the literary mystery series market and there is as much intrigue as in any major port during wartime.


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At the Shores by Thomas Rogers

The northern state border of Indiana doesn’t nestle in the arms of Lake Michigan but kisses its bottom curve. And what a kiss it is. “High dune, grass covered, tree crowned” shoreline stretches for miles along the wave-torn lake and it is here that the story of Jerry Engels, adolescent, unfolds.

This coming-of-age story was first published by Simon & Schuster in 1980, but a few years ago it was revived by Other Press and now has just been re-released by Open Road Media in ebook format. Thomas Rogers died at age 79 in 2007.

It is 1950s Midwest. Jerry Engels is White, Protestant, and the son of a Standard Oil executive. His girlfriend, Rosalind, is an heiress and outclasses him a little. Since his early days Jerry enjoyed the company and caresses of his sister, his mother, and his classmates and always felt girls were more interesting and intriguing than boys. An unreflective young man, he has many friends, and his body and urges develop faster than his restraint.

I always felt there was a class of men who operated primarily on orders from their genitals and this book gives us a good example. The time, style, and world created here are reminiscent of John Updike—when White men ruled the world and their desires were the most important thing in it.

Rogers captures something fast in this novel, in both senses of the word. There is something edgy, forward, illicit in the dreams and actions of young Jerry, as well as something lasting and built into our culture: the unconscious privilege of a White man well born. I will not deny a certain impatience with the circuitous, faulty, and deafening logic of a young man ruled by his hormones. But it is as clear a picture of teenaged confusion and angst as we may find without the further complications wiser eyes may bring to a summer idyll. My parents would have said Jerry wasn’t busy enough.

Any joy I felt came from Rogers’ pitch-perfect description of the lake and its beauty, back when summer vacations were just that. Rogers is at his most eloquent when describing the Lake Michigan shoreline—the clarity of the water, the softness and heat of the sand, the nature of the waves, the intensity of the changing skies.

”Pale blue in the calm mornings, cloud darkened in the afternoons, wind roughened and white-capped during storms, the lake was always awaiting him…the sandbars below developed unexpected pockets…through the clear water…against the fine sand on the [sunlit] bottom…[where] only minnows and silver perch and a turtle [could be seen].

This might just be the perfect summer read. Imagine discovering this on the shelves of some summer house cooling in the dark shade of fragrant pines. It might cause one to break out the watercolors.


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The Roving Party by Rohan Wilson

This remarkably assured debut novel by Tasmanian author Rohan Wilson is a grim but evocative retelling of the clearing of Van Diemen’s Land for white settlers. Darkly imagined and unblinkingly told, the story features Black Bill, a black man raised white, as a key figure in the 'roving party' that travels the countryside seeking to capture or kill aborigines in the area that came to be called Tasmania. Black Bill is also called The Vandemonian. 'Vandemonian' is a term white settlers of Van Dieman’s Land called themselves.

Leading the roving party is John Batman, a well-known historical figure born in Sydney of British parents and who settled in Tasmania’s northeast. Batman led roving parties over a period of years during the ‘Black Wars’ (1828-1832) that is the subject of this novel. The roving party has two more black scouts, both from Parramatta near Sydney, who join for payment. Much of the rest of the group are poor damned men, recently released white convicts who seek government pardons or land grants for their efforts. There is a young boy, too, who follows, watches, and learns.

Wilson balances on a knife’s edge in re-creating the real life that fills this story, rounding out his two main characters by instilling in them a steely-eyed savagery, an ability to coldly reason and plot their advantages, and a blessed and unexpected charity. Rich language and complex characterizations make this tragedy the marvel it is, and Wilson is positively Shakespearean in adding comic relief with the occasional buffoonery of some of the rovers.

The raid depicted in this novel is a recorded event that took place in September 1829. Batman led an attack on a large group of Plindermairhemener clan aborigines who were headed by the witch Manalargena.

"Foremost among that singular horde was Manalargena who carried across his shoulder a waddy shaped from blackwood and stained with the filth of war…his wife had ochred his hair into long ringlets as precise as woven rope…the beard on his chin was matted, and the lank twists as red as a rooster’s wattle jiggled as he walked about…"

On this raid, Batman takes hostage a young mother and her child. He sends the mother off to the penal colony down south while he keeping the child in his own household. But it is Black Bill we watch with such terrible intensity throughout the novel, praying that his motivation becomes, if not acceptable, at least understandable. He knows Manalargena, and hosted his band at his home.

Riveting though the story may be, it is the clear and gorgeous prose and rich imagining that held me. Wilson captured the sense and sound and feel of the men as they trekked through snow and rain, trailing the aborigines as they fled the bloodthirst.

"The men had their ears bent listening to Bill's tale and when he paused to take a sip of his tea they also raised their mugs and drank. The Vandemonian flicked a finger at the billycan in the fire for another serving and the boy obliged by lifting it away with a stick and pouring using his sleeve tugged over his fingers against the burning handle. With a fresh steaming mug in his hands Bill went on and the men listened now like he was giving scripture."

There is no apology in this work: we feel transported to a different time. Whatever dislocation non-Australians might feel with the language, the weapons, the plants and animals unique to the continent ‘down under’, one knows in one’s heart and gut the bald truth of the white man’s sense of ‘manifest destiny’: What’s yours is mine and what’s mine is mine. That each of our continents experienced it makes this terrible tale no less potent.

Originally published by Allen & Unwin in Australia in 2011, this book won the Vogel Literary Award there in that year. It has also won the 2013 Tasmania Literary Award Margaret Scott Prize, and the 2012 New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award. It was shortlisted for the numerous other awards. It deserves all this attention for as a debut this is an extraordinary achievement. For more history of the time and place recorded in this fiction, see this Wikipedia entry for Ben Lomond Mountain in northeast Tasmania.

It turns out that Black Bill was real, too. His name was William Ponsonby. Rohan Wilson shares with us the experience of writing his first novel and winning the Vogel Prize. His writing schedule and methods are revealed here in an interview.

This book is being released in the United States in February 2014 by Soho Publishing and is available for pre-order. I was given a copy in exchange for an honest review.


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Lawrence in Arabia by Scott Anderson

This book would be a perfect semester-long study for young bucks with an interest in foreign affairs and a willingness to test themselves with knotty problems and harsh realities. Coming into the information with clear eyes and no prior understanding of the histories we have undergone in the past one hundred years, youths that imagine patterning themselves on the legendary stoic T.E. Lawrence will have an education.

Anderson had much primary material at his disposal to create this dense wartime history of The Middle East full of schemes and counter-schemes, spies and double agents, treachery unbound and heroism unheralded. There might be just too much information for me here: I am Swift’s Gulliver, on my back, securely bound with threads of information, staring unblinkingly at the sky and wondering still about Lawrence. The subtitle of the book is perhaps a truer picture of the contents than the title, and the two could be reversed.

Anderson does a masterly job of marshaling the material and propelling the narrative with quotes from the players themselves. One becomes familiar with the skill and treachery of many men besides that of the enigmatic Lawrence. Lawrence is a device: a way into the material and circumscribing it fore and aft. Lawrence had been used before for such ends and at one time he would have been interested to read this many-faceted story of the times in which he lived and how it played out.

Anderson writes: “Since late 1916, Lawrence had waged a quiet war against his own government, and now he had lost. What would soon become clear, however, was that he intended to continue that fight off the battlefield, in the conference halls and meeting rooms of peacetime Paris. He may have asked to leave Damascus out of exhaustion, but it was also to prepare for the next round in the struggle for Arab independence.”

If Lawrence had been given more credence at the Paris Peace Conference instead of stripped of his credentials, things may have been different in the present-day Middle East, though perhaps not much better. Lawrence worked out an agreement for the administration of an Arab-Jewish state in Palestine with then Prince Faisal ibn-Hussein of Syria and British Zionist Chaim Weizmann but the plan was scuttled by the British and French, who had earlier agreed to split the Middle East between them. “…Great Britain and France had taken the discredited Sykes-Picot Agreement and fashioned something even worse; how much worse was evidenced by the myriad fires that had spread across the region almost immediately.”

An alternative history with Lawrence’s involvement after the war, had he not suffered from PTSD, changed his name (twice), retreated to a lonely Indian outpost as a low-ranking British army private, and then died from a motorcycle accident in 1935, would be most interesting. But the Lawrence of the First World War had died shortly after that war, though the man himself lived another seventeen years:

Anderson: ”In Arabia, Lawrence had exerted life-and-death control over thousands, and had cobbled together a cause and an army as he went along. All the while, he had been tormented by a sense of his own fraudulence, the awareness that the men who fought and died at his side were almost certain to be betrayed in the end. As he would suggest in Seven Pillars, and state quote explicitly in letters to friends, after Arabia he never wanted to be in a position of responsibility again: ’The Arabs are like a page I have turned over, and sequels are rotten things.’

The 1962 David Lean/Peter O’Toole movie is surprisingly thorough and captured many key events featuring Lawrence recounted here, though emphases and characterizations were tailored to the screen and the sensibilities of the time. With Anderson’s help, we understand the larger context of competing national interests and how the shaping of the Middle East had less to do with T.E. Lawrence, Curt Prüfer, Aaron Aaronsohn, Chaim Weizmann, and William Yale than with Mark Sykes, François Georges-Picot, David Lloyd George, and Georges Clemenceau. The whole globe was watching the unfolding events in the Middle East and everyone had different desires. The event-makers, in the end, did not have the effect of those who watched.


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Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward

I wonder now if I will ever see the title of a new book by Jesmyn Ward that does not thrill me at the same time it fills me with trepidation. Ward’s talent is such that we read what she writes even when we do not want to. Her despair and distress cuts like a blade. She wants it to hurt. So that we know. And we do, now. Has there ever been anyone who could tell this story in this way?

”I never knew Demond when he was younger. I came to know him as an adult, when he was old enough to have sharp smile lines and the thin skin at his temples was threaded through with veins. The skull beneath looked hard…'You should write about my life,' Demond said…I heard this often at home. Most of the men in my life thought their stories, whether they were drug dealers or straight-laced, were worthy of being written about…Now, as I write these stories, I see the truth in their claims...'I don’t write real-life stuff,' I said.”

That was then. Ward writes real-life stuff, in such a way that we come away changed, knowing.

”This is where the past and the future meet…This is the summer of the year 2000. This is the last summer I will spend with my brother, [Josh]. This is the heart. This is. Every day, this is.”

But even she admits it is hard to know, really know people. But she may come closer than anyone else has. Closer than anyone else has bothered to.

“I know that sense of despair. I know that when [Roland] looked down at his copper hands and in the mirror, at his dark eyes and his freckles and his even mouth, that he thought it would be better if he were dead, because then all of it, every bit of it, would stop. The endless struggle with his girlfriend, the drugs that lit his darkness, the degradations that come from a life of poverty exacerbated by maleness and Blackness and fatherlessness in the South—being stopped and searched by the police, going to a high school where no one really cared if he graduated and went to college, the dashed dreams of being a pilot or a doctor or whatever it was he wanted, realizing the promises that had been made to him at All God’s Creatures day camp were empty and he didn’t have a world and a heaven of options—all of these things would cease.”

Five deaths in five years. Young black men with a life expectancy of 23 years. Families with a shifting sense of belonging, sometimes including the community, sometimes losing members, fathers and brothers especially, to other families. The lowering heat of a muggy, buggy Mississippi night with dampness on the window crank and seats of an eighties-model gray-blue Cutlass. Drug selling as last-ditch income production. Casual racism, "I don’t believe in the mixing of the races”, thrown out with lacerating results.

“How could I know then that this would be my life: yearning to leave the South and doing so again and again, but perpetually called back to home by a love so thick it choked me?”

Ah. So she is like us after all. Just like us. I expect she knows now that despair and loneliness knows not race nor income level. None of us is spared that at least. But the other, well...I'm glad she told us. I believe it makes a difference.

I came away with a vivid sense of the terrible burden of anger, frustration, and loneliness that Ward carried. I hope she does not carry it still, but only picks it up again now and again to try it on and to see it does not fit her anymore.

You may find that, having bared all, Ward intrigues more than ever. Here she talks about the writing of her memoir. Jesmimi is her blog which she doesn’t update very often, or perhaps only when she’s stuck.


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