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.

“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.

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.

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.

Cheever’s genius is in his ability to create rich and (mostly) sympathetic characters, show us how circumstances or social norms have built around each one a kind of psychological solitary confinement, and then explore how they might try to escape from, rise above or (more often) simply endure this private, existential prison. In the early stories, Cheever is writing as a realist, inviting us along to posh summer vacations by the sea, where upper crust families entertain themselves with passive-aggressive mind games fueled by gin and familial discontent. Readers of F. Scott Fitzgerald will recognize in Cheever’s characters the yearning that arises in those who rub shoulders with the wealthy – dreamy losers trying (and often failing) to gain access to the glamour just beyond their grasp.

The women in this collection typically fall into one of two categories – there is the bitter, acid-tongued harpy who abandons her family to pursue another passion (like an education, say, or a job); and the virginal baroness or princess, perfect in every way, impossible for the mere mortal to obtain, way up there on her gilded pedestal. Marriage is not just a prison sentence, it is a murderous evolution of the mind-games played by the sea … a fight to the death between the sexes, where fathers and mothers “put the burden of order onto their children and filled their days with specious rites and ceremonies.” Here is a Cheever character in “The Ocean,” wondering if he should eat what might be a poisonous dinner, cooked for him by his wife:

Cheever’s characters are often at war with themselves, wondering how to reconcile their natural impulses with the requirements of social convention, not wanting to “offend the order of things”. When the author lets his imagination off the leash, abandoning realism for a kind of Kafkaesque commentary on suburban life and its discontents, the stories become magical, almost mythical, in their effect. In “The Death of Justina,” for example, a man has to battle an absurd zoning restriction after his mother-in-law dies, an entirely natural condition which has apparently been outlawed by the zoning committee:

In what might be the most famous Cheever story (“The Swimmer”), Neddy Merrill awakens one summer’s day from an alcoholic stupor beside a friend’s pool. In a flash of insight Neddy realizes “that by taking a dogleg to the southwest he could reach his home by water”, and decides to leap the fences of his neighbors and swim home via a succession of backyard pools. Along the way, Neddy interrupts quiet Sunday afternoon barbecues and cocktail parties, apologizing to his open-mouthed neighbors as he invades their privacy and dives into their waters. Time and memory seem to contract as Neddy swims his way home. Entire seasons pass – summer changes into fall and finally into winter. Neddy grows tired, but persists in his absurd journey homeward, even after sensing that a tragic epiphany awaits him there. Returning home after an absence of what has seemed like years, Neddy finds a crumbling house, long since abandoned. “He had done what he wanted, he had swum the county, but he was so stupefied with exhaustion that his triumph seemed vague.”

“The Swimmer” shows us a protagonist at sea, trying desperately to maintain his public composure while feeling wholly divorced from the society in which he moves. In Cheever’s works, water represents a whole host of things – at times memory, baptism, opportunity, life, sex, and death. Water, rivers, the sea – these are chaotic, ever-changing elements. Cheever’s characters turn to them in order to sustain themselves, to find the courage required to endure yet another day in the prisons around them. The sad and beautiful thing about “The Swimmer” is the sense that, unless we address the larger problem of the prison and the way it makes us feel, the restorative swim in the water eventually loses its power to heal. Self-knowledge is required to break down those walls, and since so few of Cheever’s characters attain enlightenment, few of them come away from their dip in the chaotic, turbulent sea feeling truly refreshed.

“Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos (no less) and we can accomplish this only by the most vigilant exercise of choice, but in a world that changes more swiftly than we can perceive there is always the danger that our powers of selection will be mistaken and that the vision we serve will come to nothing,” Cheever writes. “Our knowledge of ourselves and of one another, in a historical moment of mercurial change, is groping. To hedge our observation, curiosity, and reflection with indifference would be sheer recklessness.”

Or, to put it more simply, from his story “Artemis, The Honest Well Digger”:

(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.

Johnson’s protagonist, known only as FH (shorthand for the more obscene nickname given to him by one of his stoner friends), fumbles his way through eleven linked vignettes that, taken together, sketch a more poignant, modern, and truly felt portrait of addiction than Malcolm Lowry’s infernal Under the Volcano. FH lives in a self-constructed sort of alternate reality, his conscious perceptions sprinkled with the dreamlike afterimages bubbling up from the ether of his daydreams and nightmares.

With these stories, Johnson pulls off an impressive feat – he adds to the literature of addiction without relying on its well-established tropes: the exhilarating “first taste”, promising a glimpse at an alternate means of perception, the voyeuristic descent to “rock bottom”, the inevitable brush with crime, the twelve-step road back to recovery. Instead, FH drifts through the “great pity” of his life seemingly untouched, bouncing between scenes of mayhem, violence, and loss with the thoughtless grace of a child: “As nearly as I could tell, I’d wandered into some sort of dream.” FH truly doesn’t understand who he is, where he is going, or why he is on this planet, other than to wonder that he might be “the victim of a joke.”

And these stories are funny. In 1999 Jack Black and Billy Crudup starred in a film adaptation (view the Jesus’ Son movie trailer here), which pretty effectively captures the quirky, fun, and yet heartbreaking nature of Johnson’s collection. Rather than dwell on the fear and loathing that a sober mind might encounter in the big, wide, scary world beyond our eyelids, FH runs from it all. He avoids any responsibility for his actions and his fate by escaping into a kind of eternal, stoned, present – the world measured in hazy micro-moments, free from his guilty past or the anxiety that his future might contain.

And some of those micro-moments are beautiful (if you can’t find this collection in the fiction stacks at the library, be sure to check the poetry shelves, too). “I knew every raindrop by its name,” FH says. “I sensed everything before it happened.”

But numbed-out on narcotics and driving drunk from “the bombed-out squalor” of one dive bar to the next, FH can merely watch, witness, and transcribe his adventures … without really investing himself in the outcome. Insulated from the inner joy or sorrow that his misadventures might entail, FH is free to transcribe horrifying events with humorous, often insightful glee. The great tragedy is that for the majority of these stories, FH is looking for (but unable to experience) true emotional connection with the world around him.

Johnson leaves it up to us, as his readers, to summon the feelings FH might be going through … and the experience can sometimes feel strangely voyeuristic, as if we shouldn’t be privy to such private, shameful, and intimate thoughts. FH, too, is a voyeur, spying on “normal” life in an attempt to remember what it might have been like. In a story called Beverly Home, FH crouches in the bushes to watch a Mennonite couple in their bedroom. He “wanted to watch them fucking”, but instead witnesses an argument. The Mennonite wife, crying, walks to the window and draws back the curtains:

The husband ends the argument by eating his angry words and washing his wife’s feet in a basin. This scene seems to imply that self-reflection is something FH covets. It will mean taking a closer look at himself, but it might also mean abandoning his special powers of perception … he will be blinded to the micro-moments of grace sometimes offered by his drugs. Exhilarated by the depth of the feelings he has glimpsed, FH eventually does make it back from the wasteland of addiction, learns to live sober, and deals with the confusing aftermath of his half-remembered actions.

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.

Take the opening line from Dennis Lehane’s noirish Until Gwen:

Mandy’s frustrated urge to create appears frequently in this collection: there’s the novelist who spends a decade writing his story, only to realize during the editing process that the entire thing can be distilled down to a single haiku (J. Robert Lennon’s brilliant Eight Pieces for the Left Hand); the stay-at-home mom who moves into a spooky McMansion in the suburbs of upstate New York, painting and repainting room after room, pining for the days when she still contemplated finishing her now-abandoned novel (Kelly Link’s haunting Stone Animals); the pudgy photojournalist trudging through the blasted sands of Afghanistan, in search of a MacGuffin-like cure for his dying friend (Tom Bissell’s Death Defier); the young piano student who grows disillusioned with his studies, after a creepy encounter with a pedophile teacher (Alix Ohlin’s Simple Exercises for the Beginning Student).

Chabon and the authors seem to be commenting on the dilemma faced by the artist in our increasingly connected modern age: when the real world streaming past on the evening news is more gripping than most make-believe ones, how does the author or the painter or the photographer or the pianist survive … much less innovate?

By embracing pulp and bending genres, that’s how.

Chabon is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which tracks the rise and fall of two comic book magnates in the Golden Age of comics during the second World War. He understands that the limitations imposed by what seem like the most elemental of forms (the comic book, the detective story, the hardcore sci-fi saga) can force the author to dig deeper. The result can be characters iconic in their simplicity, yet complex in the depth of their emotional experience.

Kelly Link’s pitch perfect ghost story Stone Animals moved me the most. On the surface, not much happens: a family moves to the suburbs hoping for a better life, finds their expectations unmet, then fragment into four warring individuals. Hoping to bridge the widening gulf between them, the husband and wife resort to fiction: Catherine lies about sleeping with a coworker (she didn’t), hoping that jealousy will rekindle the flame with her husband Henry; Henry tries to persuade Catherine that he loves and needs her more than the job he has in the city (he doesn’t).

The title of the story comes from the pair of stone rabbits planted like gargoyles on the front steps of the McMansion Henry buys in the suburbs of upstate New York. As Henry and a very pregnant Catherine unpack their things, they begin to notice a rapidly growing warren of rabbits plaguing their yard. And their things are haunted: soap smells weird, the TV seems too big, the coffee pot freaks everyone out, Henry’s office looms like a tomb, Catherine complains that her left breast is haunted. And soon their son Henry is seemingly possessed.

Link recycles and revisits a compelling series of symbolic images throughout the story, shifting points of view and reworking perspectives to throw the reader off balance. Catherine buys a gas mask from a door-to-door solicitor and paints (and repaints, and repaints) the rooms of their new house in colors named after famous novels: “Madame Bovary, Forever Amber, Fahrenheit 451, The Tin Drum, A Curtain of Green, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea“.

Henry’s dream of working from home in his pajamas is subverted by his manipulative boss, a woman he calls the Crocodile because of her “reptilian, watery gaze” which she wields like “a tactical advantage, the way it spooked people”. He leaves the house at four or five in the morning, returning days later to sleepwalking children and a lawn plagued by more rabbits, now tunneling through the earth beneath the house’s foundation. The children – Tilly and Carleton – divvy up the unhaunted toys and squabble over which side of the yard is theirs.

Henry originally planned to work from home; now he finds himself commuting at insane hours, talking to the kids on the phone, working even harder. Here’s Tilly, the young daughter, commenting on the dissociative effects of those conversations:

Having finally achieved their dream of a big house in the country, the entire family now consists of four individuals who couldn’t feel more alone. And the technology which was supposed to enable this idyllic state only seems to make the isolation more poignant.

As the story gets weirder and weirder (think David Lynch on LSD), it becomes apparent that the fictions these characters tell one another are all intended to gloss over some deeper, scarier truth, which nobody can bear to address. Though these white lies are told with the best intentions, seemingly the only hope this flawed family has of pulling together during the strangeness of their move into the unforgiving suburbs, Link makes it clear things are just getting worse.

In a final, surreal scene, Henry is transformed into a tiny warrior, leading a small army mounted upon the backs of the hundreds of rabbits in his front yard in an assault on his formerly idyllic existence:

This family, like so many of us, expects too much: from life, from each other, from their jobs, their children. And so they make believe, telling stories in the hopes of painting over the imperfections … which only grow deeper and more malevolent as the story progresses. Link seems to be commenting on the way that the American Dream can be perverted by desire, and the redemption that the creative impulse might offer to fill the resulting void. Henry and his family are an imitation family, just playing the part, like the stone animals on their porch heralding their eventual downward spiral.

Sometimes it takes a science fiction story like this to hammer home the most poignant observations about the American Condition.

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.

So I’ve resolved to complete a “DIY MFA in Creative Writing,” utilizing free (or near-free) resources, including: the local library, local Dallas-Ft. Worth writing critique groups, a small network of alpha and beta readers, selective use of freelance editors, and the web. I’ll be trying to complete the first draft of my novel over the course of two years, taking occasional breaks to finish a collection of short stories (6 or 7 of which are complete).

The reading list for this stay-at-home-dad’s MFA is listed below, and reflects my tastes more than anything else. These are the stories I enjoy reading, and will hopefully influence the novel I eventually produce. I’ve read a few of these already, but most will be new. I’ve also sprinkled in some “just for fun” books such as Susanna Clarke’s “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell”.

And so here, in no particular order, is my reading list for the next two years. I’ll get started in early June, and will update you infrequently on my progress and thoughts about each novel:

1. Rabbit, Run (John Updike)
2. The Right Stuff (Tom Wolfe)
3. Underworld (Don DeLillo)
4. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Annie Dillard)
5. 2666 (Roberto Bolaño)
6. Oryx & Crake (Margaret Atwood)
7. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle (David Wroblewski)
8. Jesus’ Son (Denis Johnson)
9. Suttree (Cormac McCarthy)
10. The Brothers K (David James Duncan)
11. Collected Stories (Raymond Carver)
12. American Tabloid (James Ellroy)
13. The Cold Six Thousand (James Ellroy)
14. Matterhorn (Karl Marlantes)
15. Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison)
16. Under the Volcano (Malcolm Lowry)
17. Drop City (TC Boyle)
18. The Sweet Hereafter (Russell Banks)
19. Middlemarch (George Eliot)
20. Libra (Don DeLillo)
21. Stories (TC Boyle)
22. The Stories of John Cheever (John Cheever)
23. Collected Stories (Amy Hempel)
24. The Sportswriter (Richard Ford)
25. Independence Day (Richard Ford)
26. The Intuitionist (Colson Whitehead)
27. American Pastoral (Philip Roth)
28. Shadow Country (Peter Matthiessen)
29. Blindness (Jose Saramago)
30. Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)
31. Gilead (Marilynne Robinson)
32. Disgrace (JM Coetzee)
33. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (Susanna Clarke)
34. Tree of Smoke (Denis Johnson)
35. Chronic City (Jonathan Lethem)
36. The Unconsoled (Kazuo Ishiguro)
37. The Sheltering Sky (Paul Bowles)
38. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (Michael Chabon)
39. The Art of Racing in The Rain (Garth Stein)
40. Await Your Reply (Dan Chaon)
41. Geronimo Rex (Barry Hannah)
42. Airships (Barry Hannah)
43. Best American Short Stories 2005 (edited by Michael Chabon)
44. Slaughterhouse Five (Kurt Vonnegut)
45. The Things They Carried (Tim O’Brien)
46. Empire Falls (Richard Russo)
47. Escapes (Joy Williams)
48. The Complete Stories (Flannery O’Connor)
49. Too Much Happiness (Alice Munro)
50. Our Story Begins (Tobias Wolff)
51. The Elegance of the Hedgehog (Muriel Barbery)
52. Gravity’s Rainbow (Thomas Pynchon)

There are a few things that jump out as I begin thinking about what to say.

1. One of them is the concept of Community: the hero leaves home, is engaged in an incredibly exciting adventure, gains magical powers or insight … and is then expected to return to the hum-drum routines of everyday life in order to share his magical powers with the local Community.
   • Joseph Campbell, the author of Hero With A Thousand Faces and the incredibly sharp guy who documented this mythological construct after reading and comparing thousands of texts, believes that a hero who refuses to share his mystical knowledge with the Community (a responsibility which can come at great personal expense to the hero), has failed to complete his heroic journey.
   • After all, what kind of a hero helps … himself? Imagine a Superman who only cared about winning the heart of Lois Lane. Or a Michael Clayton who took the bribe rather than expose the corruption in U-North.
2. The second concept also has to do with refusal: Refusal of the Call. The hero simply says “why bother?” and continues playing Guitar Hero while the world falls apart out his window.
   • Campbell writes: “Refusal of the summons converts the adventure into its negative. Walled in boredom, hard work, or ‘culture,’ the subject loses the power of significant affirmative action and becomes a victim to be saved. His flowering world becomes a wasteland of dry stones and his life feels meaningless – even though, like King Minos, he may through titanic effort succeed in building an empire or renown. Whatever house he builds, it will be a house of death: a labyrinth of cyclopean walls to hide from him his minotaur. All he can do is create new problems for himself and await the gradual approach of his disintegration.”
   • That’s a pretty dire prognosis. Refusal of the call results in the “future” hero never realizing his full potential, doomed to a life of failure and regret.

Campbell’s system tells us that the home is the center of the hero’s world: it’s where he spent his formative years, it’s why he fights and strives against supernatural forces, and it’s the place he desperately needs to return to complete the story. A healthy, fulfilling home life has more power over our hero – whether it be Superman, Michael Clayton, or Bilbo Baggins – than the evil forces against which he strives.

The kids in this 8th grade class attend a well-respected Dallas private school focusing on an international perspective to education. Every one of them can speak three languages or more (French, English and Spanish), and each will have more opportunities than many of their peers in the Dallas public school system. But only if they decide to accept a highly personal and challenging call to adventure, work hard to achieve it, and give something back to their friends, family or local community.