Hempel’s stories reflect a discontent with the traditional view of narrative: a product (the story), produced by one person (the writer), for consumption by another (the reader). This dynamic is too one-sided for Hempel. Language itself is a kind of a lie, Hempel argues, an abstraction of reality. And she’s trying to show us something real about ourselves. The author can only do that by transcending language, and involving us in the story.

And so logic is turned on its head. Phrases are turned inside out, love is turned into loss, and the reader is turned into a kind of voyeuristic co-author. Here is Hempel addressing us directly, in the final paragraphs of her short story “The Harvest”: “The man of a week, whose motorcycle it was, was not a married man. But when you thought he had a wife, wasn’t I liable to do anything? And didn’t I have it coming?”

This metafictional gambit is either annoying or genius, depending on your point of view. If the former, maybe you get angry and stop reading Amy Hempel. If the latter, maybe you go back and examine whether your assumptions about the narrator were tinged by her loose morals. But in both cases it accomplishes the author’s purpose, which is to reach past the veil of the narrative and force you into a relationship with the “you” from five minutes ago.

This interplay between the psyche and the body is a recurrent theme in Hempel’s stories. We are fragile beings trapped inside strange and wonderful bodies. And while the body might recover from trauma or injury relatively quickly, the mind keeps circling back to it. We are always adding footnotes to past experience, reshaping memories, tricked by our selves into making sense out of nonsense. “Nothing is a long time ago”, Hempel argues in her story “The Afterlife”.

And if our brains are tricksters, then love is a cruel kind of joke, an illusion which the author is slow to embrace. Hempel’s narrators are often voyeuristic third wheels, cracking one-liners from the sidelines as a relationship slides slowly off the rails. Or writing letters to someone who will never respond. Or recounting steamy stories to self-involved lovers who care only about the words, and not about the person doing the telling. Darkly funny stories about love losing itself, Hempel knows, are more revealing than the other kind, the make-believe stories we tell one another about true love.

“There is an almost unbridgeable gulf between what an artist sees and what an artist paints,” Hempel writes in “Offertory”. We graft our experience onto reality, and in so doing make fiction out of life. Art is an extreme example of this phenomenon. But it’s happening all the time, and once you’re aware of it, watching the process at work can be either horrifying, or gratifying, or both. Much like these stories.

“Offertory” is the final story in this collection, written more recently than the others. In it, Hempel comes to terms with the idea that affection – and our experience – is a metafictional construct. The narrator here is in a somewhat sad relationship with a man – an artist – who can only get excited when she talks about the threesome she had with a married couple, years ago:

Hempel could almost be describing her relationship with the reader here. Doomed and distant accomplices, trying to discover something new about the world, and themselves. Can love be trusted? Is it “true”? Probably not, says the author. But sometimes proximity can approximate passion, and in the end Hempel seems to choose the comfort of a stranger over solitude:

Keep talking, Amy.

(This review was originally published at Zouch Magazine)

This review is one in a series for what I’m calling the The DIY MFA in Creative Writing.

Click here for the comprehensive listing of titles, and check back often for updates on other selections from the list.

Gilead is told in two distinct sections. The action unfolds in Gilead, Iowa in 1957. In the first half of the novel, we learn that John Ames’ had a wife and daughter who both died in childbirth. Decades later, Ames falls in love with Lila, an uneducated and much younger woman. Like his father and grandfather before him, John Ames is a preacher. He baptizes Lila, they are married, and at the age of sixty-nine Ames has a son with his new bride.

Ames sketches the town’s early days as a haven for abolitionists in the late nineteenth century. Grandfather Ames was a follower and protector of John Brown, and lost an eye in the bloody skirmishes leading up to the Civil War, leaving him half-blind. But the elder Ames’ militant actions and fiery sermons ended in violence and death for many in his congregation, causing a generational rift in the Ames family. This idea of inherited, original sin becomes the bedrock upon which Robinson constructs the gripping psychological drama that will unfold in the novel’s second half.

Ames initially presents himself as the perfect father figure: calm, reasonable, tender, forgiving. His wife and son are idealized in his thoughts and prayers. With a philosopher’s powers of perception, Ames is trying to show his young son the light that has guided him for so many years:

Ames loves his infant son unconditionally. Or so it seems. But the preacher’s equanimity feels less than honest. He’s holding something back. We soon discover that another man carries John Ames’ name – the young John Ames “Jack” Boughton. Jack is the son of Ames’ best friend, the ailing Presbyterian minister Reverend Robert Boughton. And Jack’s back in town to visit his own dying father.

Jack is the proverbial prodigal son, a recovering alcoholic with a mean streak who seems to ruin everything he touches. In his youth, Jack Boughton had an illegitimate young daughter who died from neglect – a sin our narrator refuses to forgive. Even the mention of Jack’s name is enough to send Reverend Ames into paroxysms of doubt and anger.

Within a few pages of meeting Jack Boughton we understand that John Ames is facing the most important struggle of his life. The love Ames professes for his own son can only be truly unconditional if the preacher can find a way to love, and forgive, young Jack Boughton for his youthful transgressions.

If the first portion of the reverend’s diary gives us a glimpse at the light of his steady and simple faith, the next is a complicated exploration of his doubts and misgivings. It is not a journey our narrator accepts willingly. The preacher often tries – and fails – to communicate with young Jack, cowed by his failing health and lifelong animus toward the young man. But time is running short, and a failure to be honest with himself, with his son, and with the reader will have repercussions for Ames’ very soul:

It is not enough to embrace the light, Robinson argues. This is only part of the picture. Those who never use that light to illuminate the shadows are walking through life like Ames’ grandfather, half-blind. Even the darkest hearts are beautiful, and worthy of God’s unconditional love. If we are up to the truly heroic task of looking past our own shortsighted selves, the author argues, we will be rewarded with the gift of real sight.

(This review was originally published at Zouch Magazine)

This review is one in a series for what I’m calling the The DIY MFA in Creative Writing.

Click here for the comprehensive listing of titles, and check back often for updates on other selections from the list.

“Round two,” the waitress said. She delivered three perspiring mugs of beer and a basket of chicken wings. “Just how old are you kids, anyway?”

The boy opened his mouth to answer.

“They’re twins,” the man said. “Going back to college soon.”

The waitress eyed them all sideways.

“It’s fine,” the man said. “They’re mine.”

The waitress disappeared.

“You said back.”

The man ignored this. He raised his glass. “Drink up.”

The girl pulled a face. “It tastes like hairspray.”

“You get used to it.”

The boy belched. His sister laughed.

“I’m hungry,” the boy said. He reached for the food.

“Drink first,” the man said. “Then eat. That’s how it’s done.”

The three of them drank.

“Don’t ever have more than two of these,” said the man. “You could find yourself in trouble real quick.”

“What kind of trouble?” the girl said.

“You’ve heard of the buddy system?” said the man. “Never go into a place like this alone.”

“My face is tingling,” the boy said.

“What kind of trouble?” the girl said again.

The man fell silent.

“Men aren’t worth a damn,” the man finally said.

“I am,” the boy said.

The boy downed his beer. He tore into a chicken wing. His father looked at him.

“Not a one of us,” said the man.

“Is he telling the truth?” the girl asked her brother.

The boy chewed his food.

“Drink up,” the man said to his daughter.

“I don’t want to,” the girl said.

“You need to understand how this feels,” said the man. He tried flagging the cocktail waitress down.

The girl crossed her arms. “What happens if we do get into trouble?”

“Call me,” said the man.

“You’ll be three counties away.”

“I’ll come anyway.”

“And if this buddy system of yours doesn’t work?”

“It will,” said the man.

“If it doesn’t?” the girl said.

The man considered this.

The girl pushed her chair away from the table. “I’m ready to leave.”

The man didn’t answer. He offered the girl his wallet.

“Pay up,” said the man. “I’ll drive you both back to my place.”

The girl stood. She didn’t take the wallet. She looked at her brother.

“It’s the truth,” said the boy. “What he said. More or less.”

“Which is it?” the girl said.

The boy didn’t answer.

The girl walked away.

The man watched her go.

(This story was originally published in Zouch Magazine)

The recently published Library of America collection of Carver’s work, Collected Stories, gathers multiple drafts of the authors’ more memorable stories together, including the full manuscripts of Beginners and WWTA. In his early days, Carver’s work was dark, depressing, even murderous at times. Babies are killed by squabbling parents, men murder their wives and sisters, alcoholism runs rampant, and infidelity offers more intimacy than the brutality of the marriages described here. Carver was a practicing alcoholic in the late 1960s and 1970s, and the tales he wrote during this time reflect the hopelessness and despair which drove him to drink.

Lish saw in Carver’s stories “a particular bleakness”, took the emerging author under his wing, and championed his work with the New York literary establishment. Lish edited and published Carver’s initial short story collection, Will You Please Be Quiet Please, in 1976. Then in 1977 Carver went on the wagon. He divorced his first wife, moved in with the woman who would become his second wife, and started a daily regimen of writing that would continue until his death, in 1988, of lung cancer.

In Beginners we see a man and an author struggling to come to terms with his past. Where his earlier stories were barebones set pieces highlighting the more disturbing aspects of suburban, working-class life, the stories Carver wrote after 1977 are more nuanced. The characters in Beginners still struggle with death and guilt and divorce and depression. They wonder where things might have gone wrong. But many of Carver’s initial drafts also describe people attempting to rebuild their lives, seeking some sort of meaning in a savage universe.

In May of 1980 Carver delivered what he considered to be the final manuscript of Beginners to Lish in New York City. Several of the stories had been published before. Indeed, Lish had previously edited many of them. Lish read the manuscript, reached out to Carver, and asked if he could tighten the collection as a whole. Carver told him “not to worry about taking a pencil to the stories if you can make them better.”

Five weeks later Lish mailed Carver the revised manuscript, freshly edited and renamed What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Carver did not read the manuscript, and the book was put on “the fast track” for publication. Lish continued editing, assuming from Carver’s vague reply that everything was moving ahead as planned.

The editor continued to work. He cut Carver’s total word count by 55%, removing what he saw as “false sentimentality” to “foreground the bleakness”. Lish removed entire pages of text, saving a word here, a phrase there. One story was cut by a whopping 78%. Lish added hard-hitting and insightful lines of dialogue, characterization and setting. He changed the names of characters. He wrote new (and now famous) lines. He changed titles, tone, effect, endings. He changed everything.

When Raymond Carver finally got around to reading the manuscript, he was understandably floored. He wrote Lish a frantic, heartfelt letter asking to be released from his book contract. The letter is reproduced in the Library of America collection, and in it Carver says:

There is and will continue to be a longstanding debate over Lish’s role in Carver’s career. On one side of the fence, there are those who believe that Lish’s editorial license was a toxic sort of power grab. Stephen King called it “baleful”, and said of Lish’s work on the story “The Bath” (which was originally titled “A Small Good Thing”) that it had been “a cheat.” On the other side, there are those who say that the differences reveal in Gordon Lish a particular kind of brilliance. The New York Review of Books said: “The publication of ‘Beginners’ has not done Carver any favors. Rather, it has inadvertently pointed up the editorial genius of Gordon Lish.”

Having now read them all, I believe Gordon Lish took good stories, then transformed them into brilliant and haunting works of art. Carver was just beginning his recovery from a desperate life. He was reinventing himself as a man and author. But the sentiments he was exploring had yet to be fully realized. He seemed to be writing in order to heal his own tortured soul. But Carver was just starting to heal, just beginning. Whereas the horror and despair were still evident, waiting like a cancer for someone to come along, cut them out, and hold them up to the light.

After WWTA secured Carver’s fame and fortune, he asserted new control over his relationship with Lish. Lish eventually broke off their relationship, and Carver went on to explore his newfound sobriety in one heartfelt story after the next. “Cathedral”, about a blind man who teaches an insensitive husband the concept of empathy, is such a story. Carver had finally matured – as a man, a husband, and author – and “Cathedral” might be his finest tale in the collection.

Artists create for many reasons. Editors revise for many more. But in the end, readers don’t really care about the reasons. Readers want to be entertained, titillated, shocked. They want stories that stick with them for days and months and years later.

Carver’s sparse stories, as edited by Lish, do just that.

(This review was originally published at Zouch Magazine)

This review is one in a series for what I’m calling the The DIY MFA in Creative Writing.

Click here for the comprehensive listing of titles, and check back often for updates on other selections from the list.

I’ve just turned 40 years old. It was a tougher birthday than most, and I want to be alone. So I’m headed for a sports bar called Humperdinks to watch Manny Pacquiao go toe-to-toe with Manuel Márquez for the WBO Welterweight Championship of the World …

You can read the rest of this essay at The Morning News.

O’Brien’s tales play fast and loose with the facts. At times he uses real names, assuring the reader he has received permission from his old war buddies. At other times the plots can veer freakishly off into the realm of horror or genre fiction. And just when we think we’ve gotten our bearings, O’Brien tells us he’s been messing with our heads all along: “In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it’s safe to say that in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true.”

What is true is that, as a young man, Tim O’Brien was drafted into the Vietnam War. He considered fleeing to Canada, but found that his sense of shame wouldn’t let him go through with it. And so the author went to war because he was ashamed not to. He became close friends with the soldiers in his unit. He fought. He cowered. He saw people die. He might have killed someone. And when he came back, Tim O’Brien began to write, trying to wrap his mind around the paradox that was Vietnam. “War is hell,” O’Brien writes, “but that’s not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.”

In the title story, “The Things They Carried”, the author inventories the belongings of every soldier in his unit, mementos and photographs and toothbrushes and weapons and “pounds of ammunition, plus the flak jacket and helmet and rations and water and toilet paper and tranquilizers and all the rest, plus the unweighed fear.” The inventory moves quickly from a listing of physical objects to the awful weight of the war, the guilt and shame and depression and rage that these soldiers will carry for the rest of their lives, assuming they make it back home.

Once home, O’Brien writes stories as a kind of talk therapy. In a combat zone, the author argues, imagination can get you killed. The soldier needs to be present, aware, on constant alert. Stateside, though, imagination can bring the dead back to life, heal psychic wounds, and begin to spin a more resonant emotional truth from the chaos. Below is the entire text of one of the stories in this collection, entitled “Good Form”:

A recurring theme in this collection is the big fish story. Soldiers in war tell whoppers: ghost stories, battle stories, stories about getting laid, stories about what it will be like to get home, stories about dreams and nightmares they’ve had. They tell the stories in order to bond with one another, in order to calm themselves down, in order to capture the horrible essence of their predicament in the combat zone. As the author continued to rely upon this frame tale technique, I was reminded of Scheherazade, the storyteller in “One Thousand and One Nights”, stringing her executioner along with one imaginative tale after the next. Like Scheherazade, Tim O’Brien guides the reader through an increasingly enchanting dreamscape with each successive story in this collection. It’s a place where long-gone friends come back from the dead. It’s a place “where miracles can happen.” It’s a place where the weak have a voice, and where wrongs can be made right.

O’Brien writes here as if his life depended upon it. And in the end, it does: “I’m young and happy. I’ll never die. I’m skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy’s life with a story.”

(This review was originally published at Zouch Magazine)

This review is one in a series for what I’m calling the The DIY MFA in Creative Writing.

Click here for the comprehensive listing of titles, and check back often for updates on other selections from the list.

In her Pulitzer Prize-winning treatise on nature, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, author Annie Dillard manages to see something equally breathtaking, nearly every day of the week. The essays here are, as Eudora Welty writes on the blurb, “a form of meditation, written with headlong urgency, about seeing.”

When I came upon the burning bush in my own creekbed, I did not understand at the time that I was witnessing the annual migration south of the Monarch butterfly. It was only later, in biology class, that I connected the teacher’s lesson plan to the vision I’d witnessed, and finally knew what I had seen. Dillard does much the same thing in her book, stationing herself in a stream or a field, hoping to capture some mystical image on the photoplate of her mind’s eye. Then she rushes home to her cabin on Tinker Creek, in Virginia’s Blue Ridge mountains, and hits the books, doing her level best to understand the science behind, history of, and meaning implied by these fleeting spectacles, “the live water and light that bears from undisclosed sources the freshest news, renewed and renewing, world without end.”

Dillard is trying to open the reader’s own eyes to the divinity implied by the intricacy of this natural world. The author presents her argument in two distinct parts, told over the course of a single calendar year. We begin with winter, and a building amazement at the joy that is creation. We learn seemingly trivial details: how Eskimos bury a knife slathered in frozen seal blubber, then lie in wait for a wolf to “lick it compulsively with numbed tongue, until he sliced his tongue to ribbons, and bled to death”; how some clouds can be seen reflected in water, but are invisible in the sky, because “polarized light from the sky is very much weakened by reflection, but the light in clouds isn’t polarized”; how “the sense impression of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain,” which gives birth to an interesting philosophical conundrum, “since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.”

But these aren’t trivial facts. One of Dillard’s key points is that, unless you understand what it is you’ve seen, you haven’t seen it. “You get what you see,” is her mission statement, and she wants us to see it all. With humor, compassion, and grace, she impresses upon the reader the importance of faith … in God, Buddha, Muhammad, Yahweh. Whatever you want to call it, it’s out there, she argues, ready and waiting to change your life, if you’ll let it.

After spending the first half of her book acting as a kind of ecstatic safari guide, building up the reader’s amazement at the interconnectedness of all things, the author shifts into a more introspective gear. In the afterward to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition, Dillard says of the book’s two-part structure:

Every argument has two sides, and like any good philosopher or scientist, Dillard examines the flip side to awe. In part two, the author begins to deconstruct the sense of joy she’s built up, and investigates the complex interweavings between life and death, joy and sorrow, beauty and pain. We learn of parasites and snakes, injury and deformation, sickness, plague, and death. Dillard reveals an absurd irony: evolution, which enables and sustains life, depends upon death as a kind of macabre fuel to ensure that future versions of us can keep kicking, and wondering why we’re here:

Annie Dillard is trying to wrap her mind around an essential paradox of what it means to be human, and alive. If before you were blind, and suddenly you see – now you have a responsibility to make meaning out of the color patches floating in front of your eyes. But making meaning means getting dirty, in the thick of it, where the answers don’t come easily. This book is a challenge to the reader, a call to adventure. She almost dares us to come along for the ride:

(This review was originally published at Zouch Magazine)

This review is one in a series for what I’m calling the The DIY MFA in Creative Writing.

Click here for the comprehensive listing of titles, and check back often for updates on other selections from the list.

But Suttree’s hopeless neighbors are funny, and it’s a welcome departure for readers familiar with McCarthy’s work. Suttree plays the straight man to an assortment of drunks, criminals, witches, transvestites, goat herders, fortune-tellers, scam-artists and delinquents, people subsisting at the very fringes of society. The characters here rely on a homespun brand of black humor to cope with their dire circumstances along the dying Tennessee River, where the homeless frequently freeze to death in the cold winter months, or fall prey to the ravages of alcoholism or violence or poverty or racism.

In particular there is Gene Harrogate, whom Suttree meets in the workhouse after the boy is imprisoned for sexually assaulting a field of watermelons (the guards call Harrogate “the moonlight melon mounter”). Harrogate is a deviant, unfit for society. But Suttree quickly strikes up a friendship with this misfit, becoming a sort of father figure to the boy because “he’d never heard the city rat tell anything but the naked truth.” Camping in a warren of caves beneath the viaduct downriver from Suttree’s houseboat, Harrogate draws Suttee into several comic get-rich-quick schemes, one hilarious scene involving a slingshot, strychnine, and hundreds of dead bats.

The sparse banter between Suttree and Harrogate provides comic relief to the darker indulgences of the author and his mind-bending style. McCarthy writes English as if it were German, fusing words together to generate some wholly new noun or verb or adjective: “bullbats” are “bandywinged”, “stainedglass” is “particolored”, “shorelight” is “sundabbled”, and “teethfillings” are “toothblack”. McCarthy relies on language that evokes the power of myth, Latinate words and elaborate, complicated sentences that can’t help but curl themselves into the gloomier regions of the heart. When Suttree isn’t making us laugh, he is contemplating the afterlife, his many sins and failings and limitations. The effect is of a soul fallen from grace, of someone who remembers what it must have been like to be a happy, moral, responsible person … but whose pride or addiction or depression now prevents him from climbing out of the Hell his life has become.

At times, reading Suttree, you’re reminded of Mark Twain and his elegies for life on the river. McCarthy’s novel is a sobering mirror to Twain’s more optimistic vision. These characters, like Twain’s, are stoic and curious individualists. Before settling into boring, cookie-cutter lives they want to experience adventure, become one with nature, live life to its fullest. But where Twain explored the vibrant life on the river, McCarthy delves into the subterranean depths beneath it, sending Harrogate on a fool’s errand in the sewer tunnels under Knoxville in search of riches. “He had not known how hollow the city was,” writes McCarthy, before Harrogate nearly meets his end in a river of sewage.

Here is Suttree and an old, fatherly ragpicker, discussing life and death on the river:

Suttree moves with a steady, concentrated gaze through the dying world around him. It’s a world where the simple act of perception – which is so often taken for granted in this age of technological distractions – becomes, in and of itself, a heroic undertaking. A place where every leaf and twig and shadow is imbibed with double meaning, with portents of things to come:

The tension driving Suttree is the disconnect between the title character’s kind-hearted and intelligent personality and the dumb fate he has somehow embraced. “I was drunk,” is Suttree’s defense whenever confronted with the stupidity of his past actions. Early on in the story, McCarthy describes what must be the most painful hangover in the history of literature. But the reader doesn’t buy Suttree’s halfhearted excuses, and fortunately for us McCarthy gives us a glimmer of hope near the novel’s conclusion, as Suttree decides to leave Knoxville and travel out into the wider world, take responsibility for his future and grow, finally, into a man.

Having a mind and then allowing it to rot seems to be McCarthy’s definition of the abyss. Fortunately for us, this author is still bending his own exceptional mind to the task of writing one infernal, well-spun tale after the next.

(This review was originally published at Zouch Magazine)

This review is one in a series for what I’m calling the The DIY MFA in Creative Writing.

Click here for the comprehensive listing of titles, and check back often for updates on other selections from the list.

“The geese are winging in from the north. First a hairline thread in the muted horizon, then a cross-stitch in the sky over Portaferry, in County Down, Northern Ireland. Soon a dark and honking seam gliding in against the ebbing tidal narrows, breaking rank at last to alight in ungainly spray atop the waters of Strangford Lough …”

This is the opening to a recently published short story of mine, “The Ornithologist’s Last Wish”. The fine folks over at Phantom Drift have included it in their inaugural literary journal of “new fabulism”.

So get on over there and buy yourself a copy.

Reading this collection cover to cover, we watch as Boyle imitates, reacts to, and interacts with major literary and philosophical movements, mastering the written word along the way. Boyle doesn’t just read the great works, he incorporates them into his own stories, often updating the characters and situations with some post-modern twist. Whether he’s commenting on the beat writers (“Beat”), the Cold War politicians (“Ike and Nina”), the Dadaists (“Dada”), Gogol (“The Overcoat II”), or Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (“Mexico”), Boyle isn’t afraid to topple heroes from their pedestals, imagining them as regular old folk: proud, inconsistent, often hypocritical … but also vulnerable, tender and (usually) likeable.

From the first story, “Modern Love” (a courting couple is so frightened of becoming infected with some virus or bacterium that their dates involve a battery of blood tests, finally the awkward protection of a full-body condom), to the last, “Filthy With Things” (a pair of compulsive hoarders seek intervention from a diabolic lifestyle coach, hoping to end their addiction to shopping), Boyle’s stories are drunk on language, with a refreshingly experimental approach to style, theme and point of view. This stylistic and thematic variation notwithstanding, many of Boyle’s stories are concerned with the raw power of nature. Boyle’s characters are always seeking either thrills or shelter from the creeping, crawling, oozing, implacable forces of nature – in doomed relationships, in downed airplanes, upon isolated mountaintop watchtowers, or behind the walls of concrete bunkers designed to withstand societal collapse.

But nature always seems to triumph in the end, mostly due to our all-too-human vanity, which lets us feel separate from the environment, somehow above it all. Here’s an excerpt from the hilarious “Descent of Man”, where a man competes for his girlfriend’s attentions with an unusually evolved primate:

And later, when our hero’s girlfriend brings this same chimpanzee home for dinner:

In perhaps the most absurd and touching of these stories, the high-concept “Sinking House”, an aging widow allows her faucets, garden hoses, and sprinkler system to run non-stop for weeks. The woman’s next-door neighbor – a young housewife addicted to Pilates – begins to notice water seeping up through her own foundation, and discovers the sinking house next door. The neighbor confronts the seemingly oblivious widow (“Water?” she said. “What water?”), and we begin to understand that this woman has survived fifty years of domestic abuse. The police are summoned, and the widow is institutionalized. It is only after she is gone that the young housewife ventures next door, recognizing the similarities between her own fate and the widow’s:

“All my humor is based on destruction and despair,” the comedian Lenny Bruce once said. “If the whole world were tranquil, without disease and violence, I’d be standing on the breadline.” T.C. Boyle is mining the same vein as Lenny, conjuring worlds that defy categorization: at once absurd, dangerous, scary, gross, farcical and – above all – funny. Like the woman in “Sinking House”, Boyle writes in order to empathize with his neighbors. He tries on styles, explores absurd situations, toys with literary conventions … all “just to see what it felt like”. This trial and error approach delivers the reader, in the end, to a more perfect understanding of the universe and our place within it.

“We’re all gonna die!” Bruce is rumored to have wailed into the microphone.

To which Boyle replies: Might as well die laughing.

(This review was originally published at Zouch Magazine)

This review is one in a series for what I’m calling the The DIY MFA in Creative Writing.

Click here for the comprehensive listing of titles, and check back often for updates on other selections from the list.