Granta Summer 2009: Chicago Edition

Finally, last year's summer Granta is completed by me, reading-wise. So yes, I'm a year late and a dollar short or something. Some sort of flippant & pithy dismissal of my missing the train the first go round, not literally. That's who I am, one who misses metaphorical trains.

I haven't read a lot of Granta outside of last summer's Chicago issue, but as a native Chicagoan (sort of, live very near it in the NW suburbs) I can say definitively that I enjoyed the content this British literary magazine chose to include. Good for the Brits! Cheers and tally-ho, in fact. But on a less colloquially condescending note, I'm impressed with the shear number and variety of good things to be found here. Every piece of writing contains some new insight, new perspective worth reading, even if the work on the whole isn't to your taste. If you have any interest in Chicago at all, at least one of the many pieces to be found in this issue is sure to smack you mightily with its earnest analysis of life and times in the Windy City.

MORE TOO MUCH GOOD STUFF THAN AN AM/PM ClAIMS TO HAVE IN STOCK! (Note: AM/PM convenience stores are relatively new to Chicago (within the last two years or so), and I dunno, I figured alluding to their old tagline "Too much good stuff" was an opportunity not to be missed. I'm beginning to think that isn't the case at all. That I was wrong. That doing so was ill-advised -- but there's no turning back now. No sir. Gotta keep moving on.)

And so . . .

I mean surrhiously, this is a nifty collection of anecdotes, fictions and things not to be despised snidely. It's culled from the keyboards and word processors, or typewriters and typepaper, or stone tablets and chisels, or ectoplasmic residue left in shapes on walls resembling our alphabet by ghosts of Studs Terkel (perhaps?) and transcribed by real life ghostbuster writers, of famous Chicago-area authors mostly still living and one dead (i.e. Nelson Algren with his featured short story, "The Lightless Room"; the only writing appearing here posthumously, I gather).

Dinaw Mengestu for those of you who don't know is one of the New Yorker's Top 20 Under 40. Who'd have thought I'd find a way to sneak a reference to that in? (Anyone who's read one or more posts from the last month is who.) Mengestu is also a Chicago transplant via Peoria via Ethiopia. I'm not sure about him living anywhere else in that interval, but rest assured he's a native born Ethiopian who came to live in Chicago. I learned a great deal about it in his autobiographical essay, "Big Money." It's cool. It's about his work as a courier for his dad's delivery service.

It touches passingly on the way in which someone can be a profoundly well-educated person and still find him or herself doing work in which the presumption by outsiders is that it is work meant only for the downcast and insignificant lower (and in so many ways second) class citizens. He found himself at times desiring to showcase he was more than his low-level job to the haughty lawyers and other white collar professionals he sometimes worked for, but didn't, in part because what could he prove? What would there be about "proving" oneself that would allow you to save face? Perception is sealed already, and anything incongruous would be mitigated by some form of dismissal, more than likely.

Thom Jones, meanwhile, has a piece describing his time working in a General Mills factory, making Bugles right around the time of their debut. It's a Bukowski-esque jaunt of a tale, in part describing another individual who falls outside of our prescriptive norms and classification. Maybe this happens often in Chicago.

Stuart Dybek's essay speaks of a priest swimming far out to the horizon of Lake Michigan. He spots him all the time at this task deep into fall, when most everyone else has given up on the lake until spring. It's a truly charmed and beautifully described anecdote, although that's just par for the course with Dybek.

Alex Kotlowitz rounds out my favorites of this collection. In "Khalid," he describes gang life in Chicago, and focuses in on the nuances of the culture and how it relates to the city's infrastructure (with particular respect to the Chicago Police Department). He then makes it more personal with the story of a Sudanese refugee and her children, one of whom is named Khalid. The story is sure to get a grip on you emotionally, with a profundity I don't think I'll be likely to find elsewhere anytime soon.

The Pugilist Resting Comfortably

If you're like me then one thing you enjoy (and I mean enjoy) is browsing used bookstores, ideally those with piles and stacks of books that aren't in any identifiable order. So "finds" (i.e., books and authors I wouldn't normally read if it were up to me and my browsing on Amazon) are commonplace in used bookstores of this disheveled (in a good way) variety I describe, and that makes me so happy -- possibly happier than is logical but I think I contain my exuberance reasonably well, even if I make off with my "finds" like I somehow pulled a fast one on the old guy (and it's always an old(ish) guy where I'm from) who owns the place and mans the register, and usually "the register" is something like an old cigar box. It should be said I'm frequently absconding with things that are either fairly cheap and I paid for them or entirely free, like my taking the complimentary literary edition of Vice Magazine from an American Apparel a couple weeks ago, imagine the trill in my step when no alarm sounded as I was leaving. It has interviews with Annie Proulx, Jim Shepard and William Gass!

Anyway, one such "find" I unearthed at a used book store recently was Thom Jones' "The Pugilist at Rest." Now, I have to admit I wasn't expecting much from Jones, even with the heavy accolade of a "National Book Award Finalist" badge stamped on his book's cover. National Book Awards (and their runners up) are always quality writing but not always my kind of quality writing. I'll further admit I wasn't super impressed by Jones' first couple stories, and again not because they weren't good but because they were very familiar to me in terms of tone. I was like, "Oh, awesome, I mean we've got another guy, in this case a veteran of the conflict, taking a stab at Vietnam by way of the U.S. soldier's perspective." It wasn't that he couldn't do this well (he did), it was that lots of guys seemed to have beaten him to the punch, with similar protagonists and similar scenes -- the likes of James Crumley and Tim O'Brien came immediately to mind. I still liked what I was getting from Thom Jones, but I couldn't escape from feeling the "more of the same" vibe.

But thankfully that's selling Thom Jones short, which I'm honestly always pleased when I find out I've sold an author short. (I don't like doing it!) Jones' vaguely-based-on-true-events Vietnam stories were only part of a really ballsy collection. I say "ballsy" because in the first place that particular word (slang, if you want to be a picky grammarian) has a Thom Jones sound to it, like the same sort of crass vernacular that's indicative of Jones' style. I say "ballsy" also because some of his stories barely resemble the tough-as-nails-but-with-heart style of his war stories. "I Want to Live!" for example is more like his fellow Illinoisan Richard Powers' novel "Gain" and in which a woman is left to come to terms with her inoperable abdominal cancer. She finds logic.

In another called "Silhouettes" Jones' protagonist is as impotent and sheepish as characters will get, which isn't exactly Jones' writing M.O., either -- or as I say, that's what I thought. But he's largely successful here, as well, with his character, Window, reaching "can't stands no more" catharsis. Even his war stories' protagonists -- all of whom seem more or less to be caricatures of himself, based on what I've read of his personal history -- are flawed and often deeply at the mercy of the system, with resemblance to the motley set of patients inhabiting Ken Kesey's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" (at one point in "As of July 6, I Am Responsible for No Debts Other Than My Own" he references the movie by name, and I think in so doing hints at his awareness of a connection).

Now as said, flawed heroes in stories about Vietnam's G.I.s aren't terribly hard to come by, but I think Jones adds his own take more than he echos this genre's still-ongoing dialogue. His philosophical tack is one that differs from his peers as much as it shares many of the traits that have come to define the Vietnam hero, viz. emotional instability, nihilistic leanings, apathy or extreme rage, pugnaciousness, psychopathy or sociopathy -- in three words, a damaged being. They're also men who measure virility by the amount of physical blows one can endure. In the case of Jones' heroes, they're usually boxers -- but never are they the uncomplicated spitting image of the "Ubermensch." Taken from his own personal experiences with the affliction (according to his wiki entry he suffers from temporal lobe epilepsy), nearly all of his protagonists are epileptics of some degree of severity. Often, he relates his fighters to the actual bronzed sculpture of The Pugilist at Rest -- i.e., in the aftermath of their battles, a kind of Beowulf-in-winter perspective, most of their bodies comprised of visible scars and scar tissue, and the lasting effects of broken bones and brain damage. He doesn't always do this by direct reference but in reading "The Pugilist at Rest," in which story he does make a direct correlation, one gets a sense of how the fighter is always fated to his broken-down end, cannot endure forever, even if the spirit is willing. Jones' unnamed narrator (and likely stand-in for himself) in "The Pugilist at Rest" remarks about the Pugilist sculpture:

How did he come to be at this place in space and time? Would he rather be safely removed to the countryside -- an obscure, stinking peasant shoving a plow behind a mule? Would that be better? Or does he revel in his role? Perhaps he once did, but surely not now.

It's surely a different way of considering the old war horse. Without any battles left to fight, or only the battles that will finally finish you, existence is a labor in itself. Actually, better put it's a battle in itself, the final battle is with the efficacy of your own health and well-being, which is an idea Jones' fiction nicely captures. Maybe that's why he's such an earnest and enthusiastic fan of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.