to tell us which two books had made the strongest impact on them
over the past 12 months. Their recommendations,
which range from short stories and a crime thriller
to road essays and slam poetry, were, as we expected,
surprising and inviting.
Edward Schwarzschild:
Eat the Document
Dana Spiotta (Scribner, 2006)
The Woman in the Woods
Ann Joslin Williams (Eastern Washington University Press, 2007)
These two books are compelling, insightful, and original from start to finish; they’re beautifully written, thought-provoking page-turners. As a writer and a reader, I was particularly enthralled and inspired by the ways in which Williams and Spiotta structured their books. Neither book is built like a traditional novel. Eat the Document is divided into almost 40 sections, and the sections can be anywhere from 20 pages to a single sentence long. The Woman in the Woods is a collection of 12 linked stories that revolve around one central, terrible accident. In both cases, the structural decisions, original as they are, make perfect and immediate sense, strengthening the stunning storytelling and creating the cumulative, symphonic sensation we expect from novels of the highest order.
I was also deeply moved by the stories themselves. Eat the Document shifts between the 1970s and the late 1990s, offering a fascinating look at how two individuals live on after a political protest goes tragically wrong. Spiotta lets us see not only the immediate aftermath of a horrible mistake, but also how lives are affected for decades, into the next generation. The Woman in the Woods also has a tragedy at its center—a car is washed off a bridge during a flood—and the book shows us how that loss haunts the driver’s wife and children throughout their lives.
We often hear that there are only so many stories in the world. That might be true in a general sense, but not when we get down to specifics. Here are two new and powerful stories, and provocative, inspiring examples of how to tell stories.
Edward Schwarzschild’s most recent novel is The Family Diamond (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2007).
Hollis Seamon:
A Spot of Bother
Mark Haddon (Doubleday, 2006)
What happens to George Hall could happen to anyone: A lesion appears on his hip and he believes that he is dying. Sixty-one, quiet, a faithful husband and loving grandfather, George begins to lose his grip, and his family loses it right along with him. His wife has an affair; his gay son dumps his lover; his daughter insists on marrying a man who seems not quite right. A classic comedy of manners, the novel culminates in a madcap wedding scene that is both hilarious and heartbreaking. As in his earlier novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Haddon’s characters are wonderfully complex. The Hall family is refreshing and endearing, each member flawed, funny, and fully human.
The Testament of Gideon Mack
James Robertson (Viking, 2007)
The Devil, a sharp dresser and as sexy as we’ve always imagined, inhabits a cavern outside a small Scottish town. His cave is hidden beneath the Black Jaws, a deep ravine slashed by a wild river. In this odd and powerful novel, Gideon Mack, a Presbyterian minister who does not believe in God, meets the Devil, who saves Gideon’s life, heals his wounds, and steals his boots. The encounter upends Gideon’s atheism. He is profoundly changed; his parishioners think he’s gone mad. Perhaps so: The reader is left to judge the sanity and/or sanctity of this “man that was drowned and that the waters gave back, the mad minister who met with the Devil and lived to tell the tale.”
Hollis Seamon is the author of the mystery novel Flesh (Avocet Press, 2005).
Naton Leslie:
March
Geraldine Brooks (Penguin, 2006)
This latter-day spinoff of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women follows the riveting—and often gruesome—Civil War experiences of March, the absent father from Alcott’s book. With a main character modeled after both the fictional Reverend March and Alcott’s own father, Bronson Alcott, the book is both war novel and moral tale. March, ever mindful of the rightness of abolitionism and the Union cause, is thrown into circumstances that force him to question his own actions and moral integrity. The book begins with a harrowing battle scene, setting the pace for a breathless, often heartrending series of adventures, as March is plunged deeper into his own sense of responsibility for the lives of others.
At Speed: Traveling the Long Road
between Two Points
W. Scott Olsen (University of Nebraska Press, 2006)
Writing in the great tradition of American road books, Olsen’s essays hurtle forward on sheer momentum. They describe his questlike drives across North America in a plucky but less-than-accommodating Jeep, and from the first mile to the last, Olsen takes the reader to extremes: in Death Valley; into South Dakota in the dead of winter; and on a transcontinental trek from Key West to Alaska. Yet the book goes beyond a travel chronicle. At Speed is about the road, about moving, about getting up to speed and chewing up miles. While others might find a long-distance, solo drive with only a radio for company tedious, Olsen shows it can be amusing, meditative, and thrilling by turns.
Naton Leslie’s latest book of poems is Emma Saves Her Life (Turning Point Books, 2007).
Daniel Nester:
The New Year of Yellow
Matthew Lippman (Sarabande Books, 2007)
Initially, Matthew Lippman’s debut poetry collection looks like loopy-lyrical-riffs on quotidiana: jazz, getting fat, blondes. It works. His generous humor makes it a good book. What makes it a great book is the way his hooks transport us to places unexpected, strange, sacred: “Everyone Wants a Monkey” could lounge in Friends sitcom territory; instead, the speaker morphs into a primate, “scratching my head with two fingers, / hanging on my tree with the other three.” Other poems are brave enough to move us, connect. “Apple Psalm” begins “What Mike had to say, / that God was a delicious apple in November, / is what his other side said, / that you must eat yourself.” In 16 lines, we voyage from Broadway to Columbia County, from ecstasy to elegy. Lippman, a New Yorker turned Claveracker, makes his New Year a prayer book all its own.
Teahouse of the Almighty
Patricia Smith (Coffee House Press, 2006)
“Poetry,” W.H. Auden famously wrote, “makes nothing happen.” Patricia Smith, perhaps the greatest slam poet ever, should disagree with pug-faced Wystan. She’s got poems to back her up. Her fourth collection, Teahouse of the Almighty, makes everything happen: ass-kicking monologues of blessed witness, wet bodies, and bawdy wit. Alongside stage-to-page faves “Map Rappin’ ” and “Building Nicole’s Mama,” Teahouse introduces other strands of Smith’s audaciousness: While “Psyche!” ruminates on disappearing AIDS vaccines, she wills each word to do its work, with typographical tricks (“cock/tail”) and lines that are poems themselves (“this whole heart in an African hand”). “My job is to draw the pictures no one can voice,” Smith prophetically writes in “Stop the Presses.” Where are the other prophetic poets? Keep reading Teahouse till they arrive.
Daniel Nester is author of the poetry collection The History of My World Tonight (BlazeVOX Books, 2006).
Barbara Ungar:
What Feeds Us
Diane Lockward (Wind Publications, 2006)
A delectable collection from a witty and inventive poet who deserves to be better known. Using food as her controlling metaphor, she forays into other areas of nourishment, chiefly love and gardening. Her touch remains deft, even when describing her abusive late father or abandonment by her mother. Read “Metamorphoses,” three linked sonnets about her days as an English teacher who played Cupid for her high school students by reading them love poetry, or “Pyromania,” in which we learn that “silicone in the breasts / must be excised before cremation / or it blows up / liquefying to a dangerous substance, / destroying the crematorium. / I’d like to have breasts like that,” and see what pyrotechnics this poet can accomplish.
The Maytrees
Annie Dillard (HarperCollins, 2007)
Reading a novel by Annie Dillard is like watching Michael Jordan play baseball: You recognize the moves of a master, but not in her best form. Still, her evocation of postwar bohemian Provincetown makes you want to quit your job and light out to a shack, just like the painter heroine and her poet husband. The plot is slight, with a denouement along the lines of a breezier Ethan Frome, but the ongoing meditations on love, aging, and the good life, in quintessential Dillard style, challenge you to reconsider your own life. In the end, she achieves a profound overview of entwined lives. As one character observes, “I scarcely knew how pleasantly the moments were falling, until now, when looking them over through the telescope of years.”
Barbara Ungar’s most recent poetry collection is The Origin of the Milky Way (Gival Press, 2007).
William Patrick:
The Tin Roof Blowdown
James Lee Burke (Simon & Schuster, 2007)
The Road
Cormac McCarthy (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006)
Like many writers, I read what I’m currently trying to write: a thriller set in post-Katrina New Orleans. So I’ve spent the last year reading what I often shun—genre novels and fiction bestsellers—and remembering how shortsighted it is to avoid some books simply because they’re popular. That said, I did have to pick through a lot of junk to find these treasures.
The Tin Roof Blowdown is the 16th installment in James Lee Burke’s series of Louisiana novels featuring Cajun detective Dave Robicheaux, an on-and-off alcoholic Vietnam vet who works for the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department and is married to a feisty ex-nun. Tin Roof is one of Burke’s best, weaving its intricate story through the apocalyptic devastation of Katrina and affording an insider’s perspective on that tragedy. This isn’t a beignet-and-coffee-with-chicory-at-the-Café-du-Monde kind of book—wear your riot gear and expect transcendent flashes. Burke knows how to ramp up the action and transport you with his evocative language better than any thriller writer I know.
Speaking of transportation, I couldn’t turn away from The Road, McCarthy’s unforgettable post-apocalyptic story of a father and son trying to survive on their own in a cannibalistic future. As grim as his Outer Dark, and as differently well written as his tour de force Blood Meridian, this cautionary tale has language so startling in its starkness that I couldn’t get the invoked-yet-soul-deadening taste of ash out of my mouth for days after I finished it.
As Dave Robicheaux often says, “I thought I understood the nature of evil. I didn’t.”
William Patrick is the author of Saving Troy: A Year with Firefighters and Paramedics in a Battered City (Hudson Whitman, 2005).
This article appears in December 2007.
