BOOKS: FEBRUARY

BOOKS WE LOVE: In which we editors gush about some recent books that have knocked our respective socks off.

THE UNKNOWN KNOWNS
by Jeffrey Rotter
(Scribner, 2009)

In the novel THE UNKNOWN KNOWNS, the narrator, Jim Rath, a thirty-eight-year-old comic-book enthusiast, failed-marriage veteran, and frequent visitor at the Colorado Springs Hilton pool, has discovered Nautika, a lost underwater civilization. Then there’s Agent Les Diaz, a member of the Water Terror Emergency Readiness Team of Homeland Security. Jim’s fixation with swimming pools makes it almost inevitable that he crosses paths with the water-obsessed oddball Les Diaz. Diaz scours water parks and pools for possible terrorist infiltration and security vulnerabilities. Both men end up pursuing each other, which is the thrust of the novel’s plot. Along the way we learn the full history and origin of the mythical Nautika species; and we get to listen in on the testimony of Agent Les Diaz, who has been called to testify before a “special hearing for a special reason.”

The title is a reference to Donald Rumsfeld’s famous “unknown knowns” statement, and Jeffrey Rotter runs with it, weaving an allegory for the concerted paranoia that dominated Rumsfeld’s tenure. However, Rotter’s comic prose is the headlining feature of the novel: It never relents. The comedy is dry, absurd, and exact. And it’s a convivial book, which is refreshing, since most literary fiction doesn’t seem to know how to have fun.

Lines we liked: “Diaz: I mourn these girls’ deaths along with the rest of America, but the bottom line is, if that incident hadn’t transpired on the Oaken Bucket, you and I wouldn’t be sitting here today having this conversation. Loss of American life is always an unfortunate outcome, but we’ve also got to acknowledge the positives. We’ve finally got a public dialogue going about water terrorism. And any way you julienne it, that’s constructive.

Rep Frost: Of course you know those girls didn’t actually die. Nobody died.

Diaz: Yes. I know that.”

—MB

MEETING JIMMIE RODGERS
by Barry Mazor
(Oxford University Press, 2009)

In MEETING JIMMIE RODGERS, Barry Mazor not only reintroduces the All-American musical icon commonly known as The Blue Yodeler but explores his musical influence through the twentieth century. Mazor shows how Rodgers—a young, tubercular, one-time hobo with an all-too-short career—had a lasting and widespread impact on American music.

Jimmie Rodgers, from Meridian, Mississippi, was a musical phenomenon who can only be compared to, and may have been responsible for, Elvis and the rock & roll revolution. By blending musical traditions both black and white, Rodgers helped found country music and shaped the sounds of Western swing, bluegrass, Cajun, jazz, folk, and rock & roll. Mazor traces his legacy to musicians as wide-ranging as Cajun accordionist Iry Lejeune and psychedelic-funk-rocker Sly Stone.

Mazor challenges the rigid distinctions between folk and popular music, debunking scholarly claims of folk music’s aesthetic purity. Rodgers performed country blues as well as vaudeville pop standards; he sang solo as well as with a Dixieland jazz band. He refused to be pigeonholed as a hillbilly artist, which in part explains his enduring relevance. Mazor agrees with Steve Earle, who claimed that “calling Jimmie Rodgers the ‘father of country music’ is almost doing him an injustice.”

Lines we liked: “Perhaps it is relevant here to recall how Jimmie Rodgers’s sensibility embodies qualities of the great silent screen clowns—Chaplin’s chosen outsiderhood, Lloyd’s energy, Keaton’s seemingly nonresistant entanglement with nature’s puzzles—because taken all together, these tendencies add up to something very much like the great critic Albert Murray’s famous description of the blues sensibility: ‘elegantly playful, and heroic in its nonchalance.’”

—BS

EVERYTHING HERE IS THE BEST THING EVER
by Justin Taylor
(Harper Perennial, February 2010)
 
In his first book of short stories, Taylor hones a dark-humored and character-themed collection in the tradition of Mary Gaitskill’s BAD BEHAVIOR or Denis Johnson’s JESUS’ SON. After a series of male-driven pieces, Taylor introduces a refreshingly original female narrator in “Weekend Away,” an unconventional story of muddled sexual encounters. Beware: The nontraditional sexual relationship is a theme in Taylor’s work and deliciously unusual conflicts appear in tales like “A House in Our Arms” and the Bataille-homage piece “Jewels Flashing in the Night of Time.” Occasionally, Taylor’s ambitious formal experiments detract from his hypnotic plots and sloppily charming characters. Even so, stories like “Jewels” illuminate terrors both political and personal.

Lines we liked: “When he heard the opening chords—certainly, at the latest, by the bridge—knowledge would rise up inside like water seeping into a basement or an unfurling rose—or better yet, it would arrive in his mind fully formed, ex nihilo, like how when somebody calls you with the bad news your first thought is always ‘I already knew that, I have always known.’”

—NE

ALIENS IN THE PRIME OF THEIR LIVES
by Brad Watson
(forthcoming from Norton, March 2010)

To put it mildly, the characters in Brad Watson’s latest collection do not have happy home lives. They are lonely; they struggle with issues of domestic unrest ranging from incest to divorce; and their inner turmoil often manifests itself in physical injuries and deformities—a splintered diving board severs a toe, aliens inhabit the bodies of unsuspecting mental patients, and a man gets so angry during a fight with his wife that he literally shoots himself in the foot. Most of the stories in ALIENS IN THE PRIME OF THEIR LIVES take place in Alabama or in the author’s native Mississippi. Watson is an expert at probing the minds of his characters—be they men, women, children, or even animals—describing universal, irresistible urges to make the wrong choices. He also has a knack for inserting uncanny, even supernatural details into otherwise mundane worlds with utterly believable results. Moments of comic relief arrive courtesy of the author’s grotesque sense of humor—look out for the zombie annoyed by a permanent erection. For all of their darkness, these stories are hard to turn away from.

Lines we liked: “I thought I heard a woman sneaking up on me in the grass. This is the predatory season for women, when men lie pale and naked in their yards like dazed birds. I let my head drop casually over the side of the lawn chair, open one eye, look. No woman. It could have been the birds.” (From “Are You Mr. Lonelee?”)

—SCA

LETTERS TO MY FATHER
by William Styron
edited by James L. W. West III
(LSU Press, 2009)

Dear Pop, please send some dough asap. Most of William Styron’s letters to his father—from 1942, when he entered Davidson College, to the publication of his first novel, LIE DOWN IN DARKNESS, almost a decade later—express brazen filial need: emotional, financial, even artistic. An only child, Styron lost his mother when he was fourteen. His father tirelessly encouraged Styron’s early literary efforts, providing funds and positive reinforcement as needed. When you read a letter that is not addressed to you, what exactly is your motivation? Perhaps you are fascinated with the sender, hoping to unlock a mystery. If so, Styron’s revelatory memoir, DARKNESS VISIBLE, details (with artful nuance) the intimate landscape of his tortured psyche. In comparison, these letters are guarded—informative rather than soul-baring—and, by turns, defensive (he earns mediocre grades), self-congratulatory, and almost painfully glib. And yet they engage, because this young man, who freely admits that his “chief fault...is laziness,” keeps slogging away: “It’s a tedious and agonizing process,” he confesses, “and I loathe writing with almost a panic hatred.” After college, Styron moves to New York, where he wrangles a short-lived job at a publishing house (he gets fired) and rents a pad in Brooklyn, where he channels his father’s funds into the writing of a terrific first novel. LETTERS TO MY FATHER also includes some material (a few letters and an essay on his son) by Styron, Sr., a warm and generous spirit, without whom, this book makes clear, the career of William Styron would not have existed.

Lines we liked: “This is not ‘sour grapes’ when I say that I’m glad I’ve left Whittlesey House, and that my joy at leaving the publishing business, even after so short a time, is genuine. Because, after observation, I’ve concluded that most publishing people are really frustrated writers and, beyond this, that it is practically impossible to combine a writing and a publishing career. There is actually very little glamour in publishing and my job at Whittlesey House...would have become, I see now, very dull—perhaps not as dull as bank clerking or accounting, but dull nonetheless.”

—CAF

PHOTOGRAPHS BY SOUTHERN GIRL.