The Paper Man Is More Than a Man Made of Paper

Gallaghar Lawson is a name to remember in the coming years. He's got his finger on the pulse of something and it's led to a wonderful conflation of aspects of modernism and fabulism in the spirit of Franz Kafka but with a smidge of someone more contemporaneous, like Shane Jones or Amelia Gray.

Lawson's novel is entitled The Paper Man and recently released by Unnamed Press (a press to keep an eye on in the future; I just finished reading The Fine Art of Fucking Up by Cate Dicharry, another of their titles in this year's catalog and enjoyed it immensely, as well). The Paper Man, meanwhile, is quite an unassuming titled for a novel so packed with ideas, ambiguities and in general the good "stuff" that perpetuates a narrative.

I mentioned Kafka, Jones and Gray but I'd be remiss if I didn't also say that Lawson's book stands entirely on its own. I don't know if he is a reader and / or admirer of any of those authors, but regardless of any similarities in spirit, his novel has a tone that's unique to himself and the world he's conjured in the The Paper Man.

My philosophy, perhaps without really knowing it and bungling it many times in the past (or maybe I've literally written this before and forgotten), with respect to a works of literature, is to consider those narratives like you would a Rorschach Test. And by that I mean, my interpretation of a novel and its "meaning" will usually say a lot more about me than it will about the book itself. In general, I perceive this to be the case with most literary criticism. So much of what the reader "interprets" is something they either want or don't want from the story they're reading, and, in some weird and quasi-fatalistic way, that was true before they ever even laid eyes on said book.

That's not to entirely let the author off the hook. They have a role in the process, too, and certainly I can say things about myself while perhaps indicating things about a story that might not work for other readers (in their manifold forms), and in certain cases, might represent things the author him or herself also believes are lacking in their story. Broad strokes questioning of a given writer's choices isn't necessarily an indication of something latent in me, as reader, I mean, it can also be something that genuinely adds to the discourse, even if it's not the most chipper thought or comment added to the discourse surrounding a book. Most recent and glaring case in point would be questions of Atticus Finch's racial awareness, i,e, does he need to be the perfect incarnation of all that is good about white people, or as Go Set A Watchman brings to the table, can he be human, too? And does it have to be such a bad thing that he's human? I don't know. I haven't read that book yet, but the most glaring questions already swirling by plenty of people who no doubt have also not yet read it in too many cases at least adds to the discussion.

To that end, I'm a subscriber of Rebecca Solnit's thoughts on criticism, which she articulates succinctly and pointedly in her essay "Woolf's Darkness: Embracing the Inexplicable." She says, "The worst criticism seeks to have the last word and leave the rest of us in silence; the best opens up an exchange that need never end." The latter is the goal to aspire to whenever reflecting upon a work you admire. The Paper Man certainly lends itself to discussion and the kind of conversation that need never end.

And so the following analysis is filled with plenty of light spoilers. Therefore, read it with caution if that's something you're concerned about, spoilers. I hope with it I can open up the discourse, because Lawson's book is certainly one deserving of that treatment and, still more than that, deserving of many readers.

Michael, Lawson's protagonist, has recently left his home in the south for some kind of opportunity in the city. The vagueness of the topography and other elements of setting in the novel are what give it such a Kafkaesque quality. Michael lives in a land that is not entirely devoid of the one we understand as our own, but he also enjoys surrealist elements that are nothing like what you'd find in typical realist fiction. He's a man actually made of paper, which occurs after a train accident that also results his mother's death. His father, an artist, manages to save him, but leaves him trapped in the body of a boy made of paper.

One of the things I liked best about Lawson's description of Michael is that he leaves very little to the imagination. It works somehow. And as odd as it is to hear that Michael has been given a paper penis by his father, one that is as puny and flaccid as a roll of small coins, it seems important information and keenly brings to mind the fragility of this paper man (beyond his being composed of a material that is in itself so apparently feeble), among very many other things.

While questions of aesthetics and what makes for true, honest art are a huge component of the novel, I have to leave that to others, because, as though this were a Rorshach Test and I the one interpreting, those areas of concern didn't move me terribly much -- which says nothing of Lawson's novel and only of my own personal deficits, so take this as one example of what I mean in the preceding part of this review.

Indeed, I'm much more interested in the ways Michael is treated by the other primary characters, those whom I'd classify as Maiko, a young woman who takes him in early on both saving his life and growing to view him as some cross between her ward and romantic partner; the artist David Doppelman, whom he meets when he discovers the man has painted a portrait of the adult-version of a girl he loved in his childhood; and Mischa, that very girl he loved in his childhood who seems to see it as her responsibility to return Michael to reality, no matter the draconian measures required to do so.

The story is in fact separated by a moment in it when Mischa literally tears Michael apart. His old body is then made new by David Doppelman, who gives him an upgrade in every way, which includes his genitalia, one of the many things Mischa had mocked about him, as she both rightly and cruelly turned a mirror to Michael and tried to make him understand that he was not simply a victim but also a person who had to become something less flimsy if he ever wanted to grow into the person he dreamed of being, which included artistic aspirations of his own. In his new body, he gains a literal strength and a figurative confidence he'd never previously enjoyed.

He reunites with Maiko, with whom he'd had a falling out in the earlier part of the story because he'd lied to her about his dealings with Doppelman and his search for Mischa. He gets work in the window of a department store as a living mannequin, more or less, which is one of my favorite, and also arguably one of the most humorous moments in the novel, because he's absurdly expected to model department store clothing and dance and interact with two other non-living mannequins for the public's amusement. They play music and he finds himself increasingly invested in his part, until the day the window literally comes crashing down due to an explosion caused by forces from the north.

And as other reviews I've read have noted and I've already alluded to, there are only the most tenuous comparisons to be found between our world and that of the inhabitants of The Paper Man. The north is the power center, and the south and the city are at its mercy. Still, like our world, and the climatic finish of the novel, there feels constantly the prospect of combustion, one which a man made of paper seems perfectly apt to find himself at risk of being made tinder in.

I highly recommend The Paper Man, and with it all of the titles of Unnamed Press.

Books That I Keep Coming Back To For My Reasons

I reread. I don't reread a lot by the standard of some friends of mine, but I reread. There are certain books whose shear force is too much not to return to over and over again. Certain stories within certain books that I cannot forget about and have to keep reading and thinking about. So with that in mind, I thought, for once I'd like to compile them here, on the old blog, in all their glory. I have some things to say about each one, naturally. Take a gander, if you so choose. (Do take a gander at these books for yourselves, regardless of whether you care to read what I have to say about them.)

For as much as Slaughterhouse-Five and Catch-22 and Mark Twain and dozens of others of the recent or more distant past have had on my perspective about what fiction can do, George Saunders has in so many ways eclipsed them. Perhaps it's because I've had several wonderful encounters with Saunders over the years (not that we're friends by any means, though I can dream, can't I?), but there is such an earnestness to his work and his humor that adds to its potency. The man, himself, in my limited experience, seems to exude these characteristics as well. Though I'm only remarking on two of Saunders' books here, I could just easily include everything he's ever published. It's all very worthy of your time and attention. Rather, I'll let you investigate the entirety of his work yourself. I'll say a few things about the works of his that have resonated most powerfully, and which I return to most frequently. 

Allow me to begin with the one I consider more formative of the two: The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil (Riverhead Trade, 2005). A marvel, truly. Few books have captured the attention of summer school students I've taught like this one has. Humorous, certainly, in all the bombastic and wondrously whimsical ways Saunders tends to be. Students identify with the plight of the Inner-Hornerites, their subjugation at the hands of the Outer-Hornerites and specifically a tyrannical, megalomaniacal jackass named Phil, whose cruelty and justification for his cruelty likewise are salient through the eyes of those he oppresses, and those sympathetic to the oppressed. We learn more about Phil than that, though. He's not merely a villain, to be sure. Phil's sad early life is given its due, is taken into consideration. It's not impossible to imagine that Hitler, too, could evoke our sympathy were we to more closely scrutinize his early life, his abusive father, his intense struggle with failure creatively. But like Hitler and the great many other despots who've come and gone in time, Phil is judged ultimately and quite reasonably by his most significant actions -- which is, indeed, a lesson for us all.  

Of all of my favorite Saunders short stories, and there are many, I think more than half are contained within the pages of CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (Vintage, 1997). In fact, the only ones not included in this collection that I can definitely say I'd immediately miss are, "Sea Oak," "Escape from Spiderhead," and "The Tenth of December." The titular story in CivilWarLand, meanwhile, is really spectacular. I can't lie, I find myself constantly overly influenced by CivilWarLand and "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline," in particular. A lot of things I've written in the past five years got their start merely from wondering WHY can't I write a short story as good as "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline"? I've tried. I'm not George Saunders. Can't be him. Happy with who I am, at last, as a writer. BUT I am thankful there is a George Saunders out there who continues to write disjointed tales in his beautifully idiosyncratic way. The melange of atrophic capitalistic dreams and nightmares fills his pages. Stories rife with the human toll society often takes, as we search hopefully to succeed at the kind of gain this country, at least, suggests is our one monomaniacal purpose on earth. Saunders looks at those who fall between the cracks, live on the margins, don't always get to see the light of day. We care about them because Saunders cares about them, teaches us that they are people, too. And there are more like them. And there's more to them, so much more, than we could possibly have expected at a superficial glance.

Don't Kiss Me (FSG, 2013) is a new classic, which I admit is a strange thing to call it seeing as it was only just released this past July. Lindsay Hunter is a writer you should expect to hear more and more from in the coming years. I was a fan of her work before I ever had the privilege of meeting her, and I was pleased that she's every bit as wonderful and kind and generous as I could hope she'd be. Her stories are amazing. I've heard people compare certain classic writers to her works and writing style, many of the southern tradition, and I would not disagree. Not exactly. BUT, where all that's concerned, I see Lindsay Hunter as a fascinating fusion of Southern and Midwestern traditions. It's no coincidence, I think, that Don't Kiss Me was dedicated to Chicago. She understands certain notions that cross the complexly different and similar sociological patterns of the two cultures. Much as Middle America can look and maybe even feel the same to the outsider, to the East and West Coasters, it really couldn't be more philosophically disparate. And in her fiction, Lindsay Hunter often creates emotional collages of these often contradictory elements. Stories like "After" bring this notion immediately into focus. Certainly, with the ostensible rural dialect of her first-person narrator, you could attribute this story to anyplace outside the urban and suburban sprawl in the post-apocalyptic United States. Anywhere troubles abound, which Lindsay Hunter recognizes seems to be everywhere. It's fun. It's the most fun you'll have in a society of ruin. Lots of gross descriptions loaded with black comedy. Bodies that are literally falling apart. Lindsay Hunter's work tends to walk the tightrope between what could happen and what is surreal. It's a delicate balancing act, but she has a way of making the improbable seem possible and the everyday seem spectacular. It's enviable and I hate her for it. But I get to read her stories, so in the end, I'd say I probably don't actually hate her for it / am happy she's out there, writing. She has a novel in the works. I consider that a very good thing.

As much as I'm thrilled Amelia Gray moved right into prime time with the release of THREATS (FSG, 2012), I'm certain to remain a devotee of Museum of the Weird (Fc2, 2010). With a title like that, how could it not be my favorite of her books? I ask you! And it's truly a museum of the weird. Stories like "Dinner" -- which I've taught to my high school students, and they typically enjoy puzzling over its disgusting dilemma: a woman must decide whether or not to eat a plate of hair. It's perfect for that age, too, because it asks them to reflect upon the possibility of pressure from a peer or more specifically a possible romantic interest and decide how far they'd be willing to go to prove their devotion. (I've yet to meet a student who would eat the hair in that situation, although they have said they'd do it for a lot of money.) There's also the killer who calls himself "God" and removes two ribs from men's rib-cages. 

Amelia Gray has such a gentle style of prose, casual and really pleasant to ease into reading. It is always fun to watch how it reveals her often disturbing or at least irreverent narrative turns. It creates a fantastic amount of tension, too. I suppose I'd liken it to the greats of the past. She brings to mind the matter-of-factness despite its twilight zone subject matter of writers like Shirley Jackson, Roald Dahl and, yes, George Saunders. She's great at picking out minutiae to have her characters obsess over, too, like a bag of frozen tilapia, a human tongue for possible ingestion or the hostage negotiating skills of javelina. Prepare yourself and enjoy. 

Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day (Penguin Books, 2011). I've reread this book a couple times now. It's really a wonder of spare prose and fabulism. Loory is so subtle, so precise with his strangeness. I heard him explain to Brad Listi on the Other People Podcast that he has certain, if I'm not totally bungling this, mathematical methods for determining some of the plot turns and whatnot. That just sounds cool to me. And it works, if that's actually what he does. It works well. His stories are mazes of ambiguity, reminding me of Kafka in some respects but really are something entirely new. Fiction that's all his own. And the darkness that floats through his work is so appealing. Even in stories with "happy endings" we get this sense as readers that the other shoe is soon to drop. Things can be very grim, especially in the world of fiction. It's why we keep reading. We want to see things. Loory wants to tell you things. His characters are meant to experience things. Certainly he develops a sense of who they are, these characters, at their core. But he's more interested in how the nameless will respond in any given situation, at least that's been my takeaway. It's why almost no character in any of the stories, certainly no main character, is referred to as anything other than "the man" or "the woman." You don't need to know. Judge them by their actions, or their paltry little circumstances, as Nietzsche might refer to them.


HONORABLE MENTIONS: Adam Levin's Hot Pink, Mathias Svalina's I Am a Very Productive Entrepreneur, and Patrick Somerville's The Universe in Miniature in Miniature.

Now I Know About Jobs For Women and Girls: the 2nd Bibliographing Challenge

Alissa Nutting is another young author you should take time out to read. She has a macabre view of life, at least as shown through her fiction. I like that. I ENCOURAGE it. Or the plan is that I will dedicate my life to the promotion of such things, ENCOURAGING such things as the hilarious macabre in fiction, for one thing I will do / am doing. (Check out Lindsay Hunter, Amelia Gray, Faith Gardner and Jill Summers if you're looking for more of this kind of good stuff (and yes, I've provided links, but there's more by all four authors athwart the internet and elsewhere, which you should also read).)

Nutting is also the second of two writers I challenged Nicole of bibliographing to read. Nicole, never being one to back down from a reading challenge of any sort, did just that. (Check out Nicole's good thoughts on the subject here, in fact.)

So without further ado, and not much reiteration of my "take that, challenged" etc. refrain of last time, here are my thoughts on Nutting's debut short story collection, "Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls."

The first story in the collection is called "Dinner." It's about a motley assortment of individuals being boiled alive in a kettle. I was reminded of cartoons in which the protagonist is set into similar circumstances, misinterpreting the situation at first as some sort of spa-treatment and, in specific, Jacuzzi, complete with a ravenous antagonist chopping carrots nearby. The inhabitants of the kettle are a little more immediately aware of their plight than, say, Bugs Bunny.

We are given, probably not surprisingly considering the entire collection's title, an offering of this experience through the narrative lens of the only female in the bunch, a bunch of six altogether. There's a weird pragmatism and a fatalistic resignation to her description. She describes the others by the degrees of their attractiveness as men, human beings and, disconcertingly, as meals. "The men do not look so delicious."

"'There are worse ways to die,' I tell myself, 'than being boiled then sliced with a knife.' But it takes me awhile to think of one." This is the sort of black humor that the piece drives on. The story itself is probably too outlandish to take its subject matter as seriously as it might have, i.e. sincere rumination on the cruelty of man feels misplaced when at several points an evil-seeming chef enters their boiling chamber to remove one of their ranks for preparation and consumption. Couple that with the fact that the narrator immediately gets it in her head to dive unthinkingly into faux-love with the nearest, most innocuous seeming of the men who surround her (e.g. she says: "'I love you,' I say. It's coming from a good-pretend place. I just want to pack as much into these last few moments as I can."), and what you have is a really charged story, powered by a comic eye for the absurd and a willingness to poke fun at the human condition, wherever said condition rears its terse, too serious head.

And while generally humorous throughout, there are a great many stories here that do in fact hit dramatic high notes and demonstrate considerable range on the part of their author. One in particular is "She-Man" -- which just by its title starts off by sounding a little callous, yet ultimately proves to be anything but. Human callousness factors into the story heavily, though. Deceit and love are components as well. I've never seen "The Crying Game" but "She-Man" strikes me, based on what I've heard of "The Crying Game," as a more honest appraisal of its outcome (at least a very different appraisal).

The narrator, an unnamed woman, is a complex person, hitherto the time of the story she'd been a transgendered prostitute in the employ of a pimp named "Daddy V." Daddy is as huge an asshole as one would assume a man of that moniker would be. He makes life hard for the protagonist, reentering her life and attempting to blackmail her and extort money from her boyfriend, a professional bowler named Ginno. Ginno is unaware of the fact that she was once a man, which is where Daddy's blackmail enters the equation. But she's unwilling to manipulate Ginno, in every way a lovable loser, into giving her the lion's share of his recent payday after a big tournament win.

Or as she puts it:

He wants the money. All of it, the whole pot of Ginno's winnings. Daddy didn't change the channel until he saw Ginno receive an oversized $30,000 check.

The terrible part is that I know I could invent some story that makes it seem like I really need the money and Ginno would have no problem giving it to me. Somehow that means there is no way that I could ever bring myself to do it. He's the first and only decent man I've ever been with. And that makes me a decent woman.

So she attempts to pay him off herself, which goes not the way she probably wanted. The whole thing turns into a massive nightmare, and despite her best intentions, the narrator is undone by her deception. I'll say no more of that.

"Dancing Rat" is another of the stories that I found particularly enjoyable. It tells the tale of a woman who plays the part of a mouse named Sneezoid on a kid's dance show called Whisker-Bop! It's also about her relationship with her infertile boyfriend and, also, her relationship with her young, opinionated co-star Missy. The interplay between Missy and the narrator, in specific, is peculiar. Missy is as manipulative and bratty as privileged people get. The narrator won't be browbeaten by her, though, if she is at least in general kowtowing and servile to her demands.

Others I really enjoyed and highly recommend "Gardner," "Deliverywoman" and "Bandleader's Girlfriend."

Probably the only story that really missed its mark (and of course we're talking purely opinion here) was "Hellion." I thought it ambitious, and it had a really excellent concept: a hell-bound woman, or "Hellion," who becomes entangled in a romantic relationship with the devil. What could go wrong? Well, for my tastes the story was just sort of blah, nothing much happens. I guess I'm complaining about what I felt could have happened more than I am what did. I suppose that's an irritating position to take, but I've never promised I'm not irritating in a great many ways. Read it and see what you think.

Go, go now and read it!

Amelia Gray's Museum is Weird, Indeed

Misapprehension is a stupid thing. You can, for instance, come across a trifling bit of an author on some literary journal or another and misapprehend its representing their entire body of work. And who wants to misapprehend? Not me, that's for true. So I'm glad that whatever it was that made me skeptical of Amelia Gray was easy enough to get past when I first heard of the content of her recent 2010 short story collection, "Museum of the Weird." It's weird, as advertised. It's like Lorrie Moore if Lorrie Moore decided she wanted to be the prefect fusion of Will Self concepts and Donald Barthelme-style abstraction and pith. It's a read you itch to get back to reading, when reading of it stops and you have to go do other things. Fortunately, the stories are all very short, so at least you get some sense of conclusion whilst you itch for more.

It's a disorienting world come to life, here, I mean. Hysterically funny and hysterically sad and hysterically difficult to pin down. But ever worth reading.

There's a nonchalance to the storytelling, as if to say, yes, this is a humorous, wry and thoughtful narrative, but we needn't get all hot and bothered about these facts. Stay cool yet emotionally plugged in. A tough balancing act but Amelia Gray succeeds pretty completely at it.

Let's break it down a bit; here are some of her stories discretely analyzed:

One of my personal favorites is "The Suitcase." I mean "The Suitcase" is about as perfectly comedic as literary fiction gets, the narrative centering on a woman's dealing with her boyfriend's preference to remain ensconced in a piece of luggage. I like to think of main character Claire's boyfriend, Alex, as emblematic of the current, generally infantalized generation -- he can't sprout like the healthy seed he is, if we're speaking of people in terms of their being like seeds.

You grow to love being kept safe and warm by the many safety nets society constructs to keep you safe, even if simultaneously -- if you're any kind of healthy, functional person -- you can't help but resent your situation. Feeling you need to be stuck in a suitcase is both succoring and stifling and you love/hate it. I think one scene that exemplifies this fairly well is when they're confronted by airport security, subsequently barred from boarding their flight, and brought to the airport chaplain (his name is Ted) for some reason. Their exchange is as follows:

"How does he live?" Ted asked. "How does he feed himself, or use the restroom? Doesn't he develop terrible sores? What of his work towards his spirit?"

The Samsonite hopped a little with rage. "We manage, guy," Alex said from within.

This segment also illustrates Alex's position for the entirety of the story, which is object and never subject (except prior to his enclosure in the suitcase). He always needs to react to the comments, is never referred to directly but only tangentially, and this produces the delightfully amusing impotence that defines his character. It's really something to behold that it's achieved with so few words, more with touch and with feel.

"Diary of a Blockage" reads to me like the study of singular obsession, a narrator ostensibly named Miss Mosely is suffering the feeling of a fleck of regurgitation caught in her throat. Yes, it's funny but why is it funny? It's funny because, geez, it's a horrible idea. Imagine if the blockage is only illusory? What a terrible, morbid thought. But from that thought emerges obsession, and obsession's thriving with the wrong -- i.e. destructive -- focus makes life difficult to live. It culminates with numerous excellent thoughts, but my favorite is in this narration:

. . . it is time for the blockage to finally emerge, the gestation period has concluded, the suffering is nearly through (though it has not been true suffering and we will never know true suffering), that which will most closely resemble joy is prepared to leave my body and move into the world

While I think the last line of that excerpt is interesting -- that the blockage will "most closely resemble joy" -- better still is, "the suffering is nearly through (though it has not been true suffering and we will never know true suffering)." Like the difference in poverty and abject poverty, human suffering can be measured on a relative scale. In another sense, you could argue true suffering is only measurable by your personal experiences, that you can never know another's experiences, not palpably, and so you're left to endure only what is worst to you. There is, however, a discriminating tendency in humans, the awareness of others, that shows itself with empathy and feeling you have experienced something similarly insufferable, so as to better understand what would be worse than that, through the perspective of another's experience. What's interesting is having that clarity of mind WHILE you are enduring something horrible, to know that this is not the worst thing that has ever befallen someone, not even close. But that's just one thing.

"Fish" seems to have been written, if for no other reason, then to illustrate the slippery slope of unusual romances. An oft-heard argument of the current political climate is that if gays are allowed to marry then soon no one will be able to present an argument for why beastiality isn't permissible, because a man or woman's having a romantic (sexual) relationship with an animal is no less logical than two members of the same sex being married. I won't bother with the speciousness of this argument. I don't think I have anything new to add to that. Amelia Gray tackles the issue, even if only indirectly, with her protagonists, Dale and Howard, and their respective marriages to a paring knife and a bag of frozen tilapia. The problem is these objects aren't spouses, can't share in anything of the nature of interpersonal interaction, and are thus rendered crutches -- helping Dale and Howard isolate themselves from other people, giving them cause to say others do not understand. I think this story wraps up particularly well, and it could be my favorite of the bunch, were I forced to pick.

All right, so there are many more stories than just the three above, but perhaps you see, they all beg to be analyzed and, really, just thought about. Because who knows if anything I've said here is true at all? What the hell is truth in that respect? I mean, these are just the things I think, so what do you think? What are the things you think on the subject of books and perhaps "Museum of the Weird," in particular? I await your reply.

Here's a link to a good interview with Amelia Gray on HTML Giant, if you would like to know more!