There’s a reason I avert my eyes from multi-author short story collections, and it’s this: you have favourites among the throng, and nothing can stop you from loving those bright-eyed scamps more than the others. I’m an egalitarian reader, and love to love everything the same. But it’s difficult to shy away in the case of a book like Readings and Writings: Forty Years in Books, a collection no doubt published because independent Melbourne bookshop Readings has a clientele able to discern their Carver from their Chekhov, their Kennedy from their Lahiri. An editorial team headed by Jason Cotter and Michael Williams has brought together the shining lights of the short fiction form in Australia, including Alex Miller, Peter Goldsworthy, Cate Kennedy, Paddy O’Reilly and Tony Birch. The book not only brings good literary will to its readers; in addition, proceeds from the book go to The Readings Foundation, which supports local community and arts projects.

So, a book full of treasures. But the heart is wilful, and it goes where it pleases. Can I say how surprised I was by where it took me, and how grateful I was to discover the final destination? For example, I know who Mark Seymour is – he’s indirectly responsible for the longstanding but one-sided love affair I had with Paul McDermott when I was but an impressionable teen. But I had no idea Seymour was such a master of voice, of getting into a fictional skin. ‘The Scragger’ is a masterpiece showcasing the laconic Australian sporting male. Shawsie is a footballer, the ‘new dog in the kennel’. His anxieties are necessarily more hidden than others’, but his desires are plain for everyone to see. It’s the last game of the season, and he wants a run, badly. But he’s new in from the state league and the opposition players are huge, vicious, scraggin’. Coded in expletives, Shawsie’s verbiage is a wonderful couch for the ‘first run’ dream and the ‘couldn’t give a shit’ attitude expected of the sportsperson:

As if I don’t care about people’s feelings. Course I care. I mean, if I look at your face and you’re upset about something I’m going to notice that, right? And I’ll probably ask you what the matter is. On the other hand, I’m not soft either. I don’t suck up to anybody. I mean, there are bullshitters everywhere, don’t you reckon? Some people really know how to get the sympathy vote. ‘Squeaky wheels’ Dad calls ‘em … Mum too for that matter. ‘Watch out for the squeaky wheels,’ she used to say. That was a long time ago though.

Seymour’s writing is immediate and physical; it feels like it feeds straight into the part of the brain that perceives three-dimensional movement.

Like sentiment and football, youth and small town boredom are uncomfortable bedfellows, and Jenny Sinclair’s ‘Postcards’ is a bang-on sketch of what a kid with an adventurous bent might do: ‘Technically speaking it was a motorbike.’ In four skilful pages, Sinclair wraps the teenaged Owen in well-meaning relatives and benign promises and also the promising dust of the road. It’s a great little piece, with a focus on loving escape.

Now that I look again at Robbie Egan’s ‘Snake’, I’m starting to see a theme in the stories in Readings and Writings that have so enthralled me. ‘Snake’ begins with some kids playing around a river on a day Melburnians won’t need to try too hard to imagine, a day of blazing heat and lazy languor. Fans oscillate and boys smoke while their friends on the riverbank mangle their turn jumping into the water. But every action has its reverse and a single event has the day in tragic rewind.

Plenty of the other stories are great companions. David Cohen’s ‘Woodcutter’ is whimsical and fatalistic in the way of George Saunders, and Alex Miller’s ‘The End’ is a seemingly gentle story that groans terrifically at its end with a brutal kind of respite. In ‘Icarus’, Leanne Hall figures the remembrance of an installation artist in a way that foregrounds the allure of both the work and the strange unknowable person behind tangible flights of fancy. The foreword by Shane Maloney laughingly captures the character of the Readings enterprise, a place where ‘Helen Garner freewheeled past with a gasfitter’s apprentice over her shoulder’ and ‘The proprietor, a ruffian named Rubbo, stood behind an oak-laden counter, idly slitting the pages of uncut hardbacks with a switchblade stiletto.’ Rubbo’s introduction is a great read too, telling the story behind the big blue R.

Such were my bright-eyed scamps. Perhaps yours are different?

So, it’s David Foster Wallace Week here at 3000 BOOKS. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that it’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace Week, but that would be more unwieldy than a 50x real size Rubik’s Cube. Imagine permuting the LL corners on that. I loved Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and there were a few things I wanted to get my head around (or, in some cases, simply put into a list). So, this week there will be multiple posts dealing with various aspects of my reading of this book.

What did you get up to this weekend? How about me, you say? Oh, well, just THIS: righteous bruises.

What do I say about this book? Just be brief: ‘I hated it’? Simply state the facts: ‘This book contains 13 short stories’? Attempt to entertain instead of just being grumpy by exaggerating my response: ‘I was so bored while reading this book that I started to wonder if it would be okay to return it to the person I borrowed it from with “I want those hours of my life back, Vladimir” written in eyeliner on the front cover’? Just ask rhetorical questions instead of actually writing something of substance? Hokay, then.

Trying to formulate a compelling comment about a book I disliked so much feels like being in the chair of a halitosic dentist after having eaten nothing but sweets for seven years. I’ve read Lolita, of course, a long time ago, and remember being enthusiastic in no minor way about it. Nabokov’s faculty for witty and beautiful language is an absolute treat in that book. His familiar/formal tone perfectly made present the strangeness of child-lover Humbert Humbert. Just think upon this little excerpt:

Finally, on a Californian beach, perverse privacy in a kind of cave whence you could hear the separate part of the beach, behind rotting trees; but the fog was like a wet blanket, and the sand was gritty and clammy, and Lo was all gooseflesh and grit, and for the first time in my life I had as little desire for her as for a manatee.

Just look at that sentence structure, all elegant echoes; and the way Humbert seems fussy, while the language itself is not. I picked this sentence out pretty well at random, but it’s a juicy one: clean and balanced and alliterative; a tensile string prettily plucked at its end.

The problem in Nabokov’s Dozen (and who on earth picked that title?) isn’t the language. It’s a collection from which an interested random-excerpter could easily isolate many sweetly flavoured phrases of incomparable virtuosity and verve. I love this, from the end of ‘Signs and Symbols’:

His clumsy moist lips spelled out their eloquent labels: apricot, grape, beech plum, quince. He had got to crab apple, when the telephone rang again.

I mean, you can’t fault this writing. And there is a lot of the real breathtaking, high-wire stuff in here, too: there are model firmaments and teetotums gyrating and things get a bit violaceous. A reader’s attention can be well fed by writing like this for a little while. But there’s only so much this reader could take before she began to feel herself giving less and less of a shit about what happens. Sentences like these are fabulous on their own, but they aren’t put to much use in Nabokov’s Dozen. Instead, they have the brave, panicky sense of having been shoved up against each other like prize pooches at an animal show that’s particularly short on space.

Part of why this book failed to fully charm me can be characterised as a tendency towards over-the-top drama. Two of the stories have similar plosive endings, even though the characters and the situations are quite different. Just use your imagination a little bit, Vlad. However, these two stories were the ones I probably enjoyed the most in the collection, seeing as they actually had some drama in them. One was ‘Spring in Fialta’, a lovely but distant chase through a man’s memories of a woman, Nina, whom he loved but never managed to properly hold on to. The other, ‘The Aurelian’, tells the story of Paul Pilgram, a seller of butterflies, whose life is unexpectedly enlivened by the arrival of a customer with great enthusiasm for Pilgram’s colourful specimens. It’s a gorgeous story that depicts with pathos the inevitable decline of dreams, which is made more cruel by the exotic, unattainable nature of the insects Pilgram loves so much. Bonus points: Nabokov was a real-life butterfly enthusiast.

But there are some stories that lacked drama, or even any narrative drive. The final story, ‘Lance’, is like an overworded version of The Little Prince, with gerbils. I gave up on trying to understand what was happening — and I think only a couple of lines really served the ‘plot’ — and tried not to get a headache from all the florid prose. A couple of the stories are based loosely on people from Nabokov’s past; his childhood French instructor gets a look in (‘Mademoiselle O’) and his first beloved, as well (‘First Love’). Non-climactic and strongly sentimental, these are more like personal essays than stories per se. I don’t know why he bothered to fictionalise them; they might even have been more interesting as actual essays.

So, I don’t think I will be reading this. I might have to re-read Lolita soon, though. I really like stories with strong narrative arcs and finely judged moral or character tension. Good luck finding much of that in Nabokov’s Dozen. The writing’s nice, though.

I love short stories, full stop. Their language needs to be so particular and intense, and when it’s right, it’s humbling and bracing all at the same time. Wells Tower’s Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned ultimately tells readers more through its restraint than other writing can through a surfeit of expression. I can tell that this book is going to be my American short story hobby horse for 2009 the way Miranda July’s No One Belongs Here More than You was in 2007. Both debut collections are powerful and startlingly transformative expeditions into the human condition.

Tower’s protagonists are people who get caught like prickles in the fabric of life, unintentionally repelling and attaching to various trajectories. Just as July’s book could have been subtitled ‘Screwed-up Women on Their Own’, Tower’s trawler has picked up quite a few men stranded by the tides of twenty-first century whatever. In the collection’s first story, ‘The Brown Tower’, Bob Munroe finds himself alone in his uncle Randall’s beach house after having been coerced into doing some repairs. Following a joyless two-week affair with a lonely woman following the death of his father shortly before, Bob’s wife has thrown him out of the house:

Bob Munroe woke up on his face. His jaw hurt and morning birds were yelling and there was real discomfort in his underpants. He’d come in late, his spine throbbing from the bus ride down, and he had stretched out on the floor with a late dinner of two bricks of saltines. Now cracker bits were all over him – under his bare chest, stuck in the sweaty creases of his elbows and his neck, and the biggest and worst of them he could feel lodged deep into his buttock crack like a flint arrowhead somebody had shot in there.

It’s direct, creative writing that stops just short of being cute. With all of this skill at his command, Tower is able to take life’s time-honoured crevices — post-separation chaos, slow descent into dementia, lonely young life in a small town — and portray them through a new vocabulary of images and actions. Vicissitudes we thought we knew so well, whether through others’ writing or our own roiling experience, take on this new, oblique language with a kind of natural surprise, as if grateful for the new lease of life. It’s not tricky or bravura writing — it’s mimetic but angular, like what a camera might capture at the right moment if it followed the right person.

I suppose that marshals the question: right time and place for what? Most of the big-ticket events happen off-page in Everything Ravaged: the divorces are already done, the father has already departed, the teenaged girl is already uglier and more alone than her beautiful cousin, the runaway has already taken a chunk out of his stepfather’s thigh with his teeth. These things pass into the reader’s knowledge in a simple way, and we then take a ride through a middle passage where possible but heightened components of daily life take hold. Bob Munroe, above, of the saltines, takes a walk down to the beach where he spies a gorgeously blue and yellow fish swimming slowly around in a rockpool, where it’s been trapped since high tide. It’s hungry because there’s nothing to eat; to trap it, Munroe bends over and catches its attention with a slow glob of spit. He’s fishing with nothing, with spit that is even less than excrement, but he catches the fish and places it in an aquarium at home, the first in a collection of wondrous marine life. Everything Ravaged contains this and a thousand other emotionless triumphs and ebbs.

All this, though, is like the timely march of the actor towards the stage. From this heightened catalogue of quotidian effects, a kind of acceleration takes place, an impetus for inertia to become centrifugal force; and Tower specialises in a kind of aborted flourish where the protagonist’s bewilderment and instability is revealed in something small, Freudian, or true. I like this kind of ending much better than I like Nabokov’s plosive cadenzas. Tower doesn’t aspire to conjure the closure we never actually get. It’s drama without the release of catharsis; it’s release for greater intake, whether for education or prostration.

None of the previous would seem to admit to any humour, but Everything Ravaged is hilarious, too. Munroe’s neighbour down at the beach is the local vet, Derrick, who considers ‘the tiniest jean shorts Bob had ever seen’ comfortable daywear. You wait the entire collection for the title story ‘Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned’, bristling with the promise of that title’s poetic and patterned cadence, and its marauding Vikings, with their snot-crusted moustaches, potato wine and monk chasing, are therefore almost unwelcome. But these fellows are charming guys the likes of which you could find down at the pub. When Gnut, of the moustache, falls in love with a one-armed seamstress, his friend Harald asks for clarification: ‘This a voluntary thing, or an abduction-type deal?’

My only complaint about this book is the stock it’s printed on: it’s that awful crap that scritches when the pages rub together the wrong way. It makes my teeth want to vomit. See, though, everything else about this book is good.

I have garlanded Tom Cho with that most sought-after of literary prizes: the suburban flower arrangement. Do you know what kind of books get this kind of treatment? Ones that I like.

My predisposition to love this book was cemented in two separate instances. First, I read ‘The Bodyguard’ in Black Inc.’s Best Australian Stories 2007 while I was away over the summer. It was, hands-down, my favourite story in the collection, a breathtakingly aware literary roleplay which begins: ‘Someone is stalking Whitney Houston and I have been hired to be her bodyguard.’ No more explanation than that; an assumption you’re familiar with 90s Hollywood tripe; impassive I-strewn narration: I was fully hooked, bro. Second, hoping Cho would do a reading, I went to the launch of Look Who’s Morphing at Hares and Hyenas about a month ago. Lucky me! He read ‘Aiyo!!! An evil group of ninjas is entering and destroying a call centre!!!’, a story which certainly puts the kibosh on the ‘no more than 40 exclamation marks per page’ rule (don’t try it at home, kids). Gold-star funny piece with, rightly, no hesitation or anxious explication about bringing little-valorised South-East Asian shibboleths to Australian literature.

I hesitate to call the works ‘short stories’ (Cho calls them ‘fictions’), because, as with ‘Aiyo!!!…’ the pieces lend themselves very well to performance, and given Cho’s background in spoken word, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them passed through that medium in their development. From ‘A Counting Rhyme’: ‘One, two, buckle my shoe. Two, one, steamed pork bun.’ Don’t want to annoy myself or you by trying to discuss the ‘traditional’ short story, but most of the pieces are short, and feature a first-person point of view. The pieces are also connected through their performativity of the personal, and the inevitability of play in that performance. Reinforcing this is the cover, with Cho’s eyes, framed by cliff-high quiff and leather jacket, gazing out over a neon-pink bleed on his cheek.

Having sobbed many guilty Asian-Australian tears over The Joy Luck Club when I was ten (okay, and Mulan when I was fifteen), I admit to having developed a hardness of heart towards ‘ethnic’ as a literary flavour: writing in that genre (as with other genres, of course) is often not distinct or sophisticated or complex or interesting, and I’m not as guilelessly interpellated by it as publishers would probably like. But Cho interrupts these cardboard cutout performative accounts of racial identity. His narrators’ identities are perpetually changing and fluid, and questioned by themselves and others. With irreverence, too — ‘Learning English’ begins like a typical migrant story but, madlib-like, veers off that road pretty quickly:

Australia is very different from my homeland. I was born and raised in a town called Rod Stewart. Back in those days, Rod Stewart was a very busy town. The major industries were David Hasselhoff and coal. I think it is hard for a non-migrant to understand just how difficult it is to learn a new language while adapting to life in a new country.

Cho doesn’t limit his inquiry to racial identity, extending it also to gender, sexual and even social identity. In ‘Pinocchio’, the protagonist attempts to justify his long absence to his girlfriend, Tara (Cho’s actual partner’s name) by claiming that he has only just managed to transform back from being one of Jim Henson’s muppets. Sure, it sounds silly, but it’s not too bad a metaphor for the lies we tell each other. This piece is a well-judged reminder that the concerns of morphing aren’t only for those who look or act most differently from the norm, but that everyone is every day prodding at the fabric of themselves.

There’s also a healthy amount of irreverence towards the seriousness with which people address these selves and choices. In ‘The Sound of Music’, erstwhile nun Maria asks Mother Superior: ‘Can who you like to “do” also be bound up in issues of who you are or want to be?’, after which the two women begin sharing their fantasies about the Fonz. You might have noticed that I think this book is hilarious, and in fact spurred me to multiple ‘let me read this to you’ moments. Cho selects a matter-of-fact tone in most of the stories, and it works really well. In particular, there’s a fantastic running joke about Chinese food that made me snicker each time it appeared.

If there is such a thing as classically postmodern, Look Who’s Morphing fits that description. It’s relentlessly intertextual, openly questioning and questing, and takes storytelling to absurdist yet never inhumane extremes. But it’s also inclusive and playful. Cho’s written identities defy the linear narratives of self imposed by technology, product lust, received knowledge and ancestry to emerge as shifting sands: the endless metaphors and similes for the self eventually resolving, not blurring, into the person.

A hypocritical by-the-way: there are lots of reviews about this book already, but try not to read too many of them, because lots of them quote highlights of the book, and the book’s not very long. Read them afterwards.

Verdict: the Fonz says yes.

Though the picture above is so genteel, what with the nice succulent and all, there is going to be some explicit language below because this book is all about sex. I wiggle my eyebrows at you in warning.

I got so excited when I saw Delta of Venus in the Popular Penguins stand that I bought it right away. I remember borrowing this book from the local library, sub rosa of course, when I was fourteen or fifteen. It was a surprising book for the young me, as there’s no Hardian delicacy about female sexuality in Nin’s work, and the things that are typically romantic about the characters (they’re all firm-fleshed, like pumas) are balanced out by, well, oddnesses. In the first story, ‘The Hungarian Adventurer’, the titular adventurer plays a game with two little children of the Spanish ambassador, in which the goal is to ‘catch’ the Hungarian’s erect penis as he waves it around under bedsheets. Those poor girls.

I never finished reading Delta of Venus when I was a teenager. Perhaps I found it weird that the mystery and nobility of sex (how sweet and naive a teenagerly conceit) was here reduced to the paedophilic gamble of a charming but unlikeable man. But I always remembered the passion with which Nin expressed, in the introduction, her endeavour to use ‘a woman’s language’ to describe sexual experience. Even though there are few people who would today subscribe to the view that there is such an absolute, discrete entity as ‘a woman’s language’, the idea that women should be writing about sex was compelling enough for me to want to pick the book up again this year.

Most of the stories take the name of their protagonists: Mathilde, Lilith, Marianne, Pierre, the Basque and Bijou. All have their proclivities and sensitivities — Mathilde is an idealist who rejects unromantic overtures from seemingly suitable aristocratic lovers, and her curiosity leads her to seek out different sexual partners, but the combination of her idealism and curiosity takes her to dangerous ground. Manuel is an exhibitionist who likes to expose himself in public, and searches for a woman who can understand his desires.

Sometimes it’s fun and titillating, sometimes it’s boring and a bit like flipping through a postal order catalogue, but sex is accorded primacy in each story. Delta of Venus‘s characters are all libertines who seem to live and die for sex, artists and aristocrats and prostitutes whose constant openness to sex seems to propose that all human relationships are potentially erotic ones. The extent to which the characters are willing to go past the boundaries set by society and themselves — Bijou progresses from struggle to pleasure in a forced bestiality scene — reveals their slavery to experimentation or sex itself.

But are the characters slaves to sex or to each other? Though Nin was interested in portraying sex from a woman’s point of view, Venus is not necessarily a feminist party. While the characters, bearing only first names like signs of the horoscope, all have their particularities, Nin sometimes writes the sexual act in erotic detail that deidentifies the participants: ‘A hand was opening someone’s buttocks.’ Women in these stories are often humiliated and dominated, as are their male counterparts. One character, Maria, is tricked into having sex by a man pretending to be another woman. Also problematic is Nin’s iteration that emotion, poetry and monogamy are necessarily bound up in her ‘feminine self’, a generalisation which she enthusiastically but somewhat unnecessarily extends to all women.

Some people consider her books as damning an accessory to the owner’s identity as plastic light sabres. But though I am not right behind her in politics, I still admire Nin as a lively, passionate person who couldn’t resist the urge to live and write about sex, which so enthralled her. You can roll your eyes all you like at teenage girls who brandish their copies of her books, but the passion and sensuality she championed is absolutely palpable in Delta of Venus. Just think about that the next time you read a sex scene.

Here’s a really bad one, to take you out. From Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart (which won a Bad Sex Award in 2007)

“You wanna pop me?” she said. This must have been some new-fangled youth term. The verb “to pop.”
“I wanna bust a nut inside you, shorty,” I said. “I wanna make you sweat, boo. Let’s do this thing.”

I have to admit I wanted to read Demonology ever since I saw a picture of Miranda July holding a copy. I guess I wanted to get inside her winsomely whimsical head. Did I get there? No — it’s a book, not the portal from Being John Malkovich. It’s a good book, though. Moody is a virtuosic writer who, when the gods of the written word offered him the paint-by-numbers legend for language, filled the empty spaces with blood, car oil, Fanta, splinters and street signs instead.

Moody deals in baroque prose; he’s a gunslinger of a writer who’s not afraid to use all the ammunition at his disposal. His characters brew ‘creamy distillate’, not beer; and spit out ‘rhinoviral gobs’, not phlegm. In one story, ‘Ineluctable Modality of the Vaginal’, academics engage in wearied lovers’ fusillades with the heightened vocabularies of Lacan and Irigaray. Moody often compounds the effects of his adroitness by constructing long, long sentences, with phrases and clauses signposted by comma after comma — one story, ‘Drawer’, doesn’t have any full stops at all.

It would be a little useless to describe Demonology with reference to the qualities of the stories’ characters. Sure, Andrew, the wedding-corporation employee who narrates ‘The Mansion on the Hill’, is a downtrodden mess. While working for Hot Bird, a chicken-restaurant franchise, wearing a chicken mask, he tells a child that ‘Death comes to all’. But more than this episode, it is his percussive refrain of the word ‘Sis’ throughout the story that admits of Andrew’s imbalance. His repetitive invocation echoes the bleating supplication of someone who has done something wrong. Yet Andrew is a friendly, witty guy — there’s more to this story than the voyeuristic look at a damaged person.

‘Wilkie Fahnstock, The Boxed Set‘ takes the form of liner notes in a series of mixtapes representing the life of one Wilkie Fahnstock, ‘an undistinguished American’. It’s kind of a nineties-postmodernist intertextual piece of fluff, but the fictional Fahnstock has pretty good and zeitgeisty taste in music (Cocteau Twins and Laurie Anderson in the mid-eighties, My Bloody Valentine and The Pixies in the nineties), so it’s okay. More successful as an experiment in form is ‘Surplus Value Books: Catalogue Number 13′, in which useful book descriptions and market-friendly prices are supplanted by the logic of the cataloguer’s personal economy: books that serve as artifacts of an unrequited love are listed for thousands of dollars.

What with all the wordplay and the italics and the disappearing full stops, Demonology‘s not all easy to read. ‘Pan’s Fair Throng’ throws riff after riff on language and fairytale at you until frankly, you’re kind of tired and want to get off the merry-go-round. But if you like a little gristle in your literary digestion, Demonology is the book for you: it catalogues not demons but the parameters of our own energies, emotional protuberances, fortunes and fables.