Literary fiction: August's best-written recent releases II
Read the openings of our picks below ^ Plus Mary Tabor's discussion of prose style
Photo by Sander Copier
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In today’s issue:
— ‘Everyone, it seems, is more desperate than they were before’: our next pick from the recent releases in literary fiction. In our last post we picked Joy Williams’ Concerning the Future of Souls and Mary Tabor’s Who by Fire.
— ‘A de-generation—a degeneration of ideals, yes. What the fuck, we might imagine a future historian throwing their hands in the air and asking—were we to sincerely fathom such a thing as a future, much less come to dwell in one’: our next literary fiction pick, and also the next from our subscribers’ submissions. We’ll soon be publishing the writer’s detailed discussion of prose style.
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— ‘if Cormac McCarthy were publishing today, not one of what some call the big three houses would take him’: Mary Tabor on prose style.
You can also browse our author masterclasses on prose style, picks from the best-written recent releases, from prize shortlists, the best-written books of the century, and extracts from many of these.
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BOOKS CONSIDERED
Bonding Mariel Franklin
Rosarita Anita Desai
Little Rot Akwaeke Emezi
The Unwilding Marina Kemp
The Echoes Evie Wyld
Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good Eley Williams
Concerning the Future of Souls Joy Williams
The Cliffs J. Courtney Sullivan
The Caricaturist Norman Lock
Atta Boy Cally T Fiedorek
Settlers Landing Travis Jeppesen
Quickly, While They Still Have Horses Jan Carson
The History of Sound Ben Shattuck
The Anthropologists Ayşegül Savaş
Long Island Compromise Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Come to the Window Howard Norman
State of Paradise Laura van den Berg
Head Fake Scott Gordon
Banal Nightmare Halle Butler
Evenings and Weekends Oisín McKenna
The Most Jessica Anthony
The Horse Willy Vlautin
Off the Books Soma Mei Sheng Frazier
Who by Fire Mary Tabor
Our next pick from these is
Knives
In Florida, my husband runs. Ten miles a day, seventy miles a week, a physical feat that is astonishing to me. He started running after he got stuck on a book he is trying to write, a historical account of pilgrimages in medieval Europe. Back then it was not unusual for pilgrims to traverse hundreds of miles on foot: 248 miles from Bologna to the catacombs in Rome; 500 from Mannheim to Our Lady of Walsingham. My husband is a trained historian and fascinated by journeys. He wants to understand what has become of the pilgrimage in our broken modern world. In the meantime, he observes a lot on his daily voyages. For example, there has been an increase in carrion birds down by the lake. Cobalt crows circling overhead, bloodstains on the sidewalk, awaiting the erasure of afternoon rain. He returns so sweat-wet it looks like he’s been swimming. He returns overflowing with story. When a story is told to another person it takes on a life of its own; it spreads, contagion-like. The more times a story is shared the more powerful it becomes. This morning my husband witnessed a man—a neighborhood regular who gets around on a bike, a white dog with caramel ears trotting along beside him—ride up to a truck parked by the lake. An unsheltered community sleeps in cars and campers in this area; in the aftermath of the pandemic, the population tripled, with blue tents pitched in the park. My husband has seen the owner of this particular truck, a man with a white beard, drinking morning beers on his tailgate and looking askance at the world. Today the bike man rested one foot on the ground, looked left and then right. He pulled a knife from his pants pocket and jammed the blade into the truck’s back tire. The truck man was asleep inside (my husband could see him slumped against the window, the swirl of white hair, the bleached denim jacket sleeve) and did not stir. The dog sat perfectly still as the tire hissed and withered. As the bike man withdrew the blade, he looked up at my husband jogging in place. He tipped the blade, like a cowboy in an old western, and then he tucked the knife back into his pants pocket and rode on. Now my husband thinks he and the bike man have entered into some kind of pact—a vow of silence. That evening, we take our dog for a walk and pass the bike man and his white dog resting on the shaded steps of a blue brick church. I think about the knife hidden somewhere on the bike man’s body, sharp enough to tear through a tire. I wonder what the truck man did to deserve the knifing. Maybe nothing. Everyone, it seems, is more desperate than they were before. I wonder where the bike man and his dog sleep at night. On the church steps? In the park? We have been in Florida, land of my childhood, since the start of the year, living in my mother’s house. Now we stand on the threshold of summer’s sweltering cave. During the pandemic I got sick but recovered after a week of rolling around in a wet fever. Ever since, I’ve had the strangest dreams. Is it possible for a fever to turn a body so hot that molecules are rearranged? Is our life just on pause or is this pause now our life? The white dog barks. Our dog barks back. Twice for good measure. I wonder what they are saying to each other, in their animal language. All the people wave.
Named a Most Anticipated Summer Book by TIME, Esquire, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, and Lit Hub.
It’s another summer in a small Florida town. After an illness that vanishes as mysteriously as it arrived, everything appears to be getting back to normal: soul-crushing heat, torrential downpours, sinkholes swallowing the earth, ominous cats, a world-bending virtual reality device being handed out by a company called ELECTRA, and an increasing number of posters dotting the streets with the faces of missing citizens. Living in her mother’s home, a ghostwriter for a famous thriller author tracks the eerie changes. On top of everything else, she’s contending with family secrets, spotty memories of her troubled youth, a burgeoning cult in the living room, and the alarming expansion of her own belly button.
Then, during a violent rainstorm, her sister goes missing. She returns a few days later, sprawled on their mother’s lawn and speaking of another dimension. Now the ghostwriter must investigate not only what happened to her sister and the other missing people but also the uncanny connections between ELECTRA, the famous author she works for, and reality itself.
A sticky, rain-soaked reckoning with the elusive nature of selfhood and storytelling, Laura van den Berg’s State of Paradise is an intricate and page-turning whirlwind. With inimitable control and thrilling style, van den Berg reaches deep into the void and returns with a story far stranger than either reality or fiction.
CHAPTER ONE
CONFUSION
1.
WELL, LET’S JUST say there was a confusion of ideals. No one could quite determine the exact tenor of the era, though that did not prevent the many from their efforts at articulation, damned though they might be. A whole new phraseology was required—the old language just wouldn’t do. Everything was simplified into neo-this, alt-that; post- seemed much too complex and worrisome a prefix. The world was posh and impoverished—somehow both at once. Violence so tightly woven into the fabric of the daily, hardly anyone noticed real instances of mass murder anymore. Far too frequent, they had become the norm. Stains on the carpeting. Drops of blood running down. The news, anyhoo, was left to be categorized as real or fake. What to believe? The real: what’s that? We couldn’t quite figure it out; perhaps we didn’t genuinely want to. So comfortable in this state of confusion had we ultimately settled, been settled. Buying things helped. Certainly made us feel better. The algebra of want and need had become so variegated, so sophisticated in its molding by internal forces, so as to resemble a sort of arcane calculus. Suddenly we felt the acute bodily need for things that hadn’t even existed five years prior, attachments and extensions to our being, without which, we might very well fail to endure. More than anything, you could say, the thing we needed was for all that pain to disappear. Why did the chicken cross the road? To reach the other side of the void. People began doing heroin—and not even rock stars. Hicks and suburbanites. High school kids. Housewives. The emptiness was vast, enswathing an entire generation. A de-generation—a degeneration of ideals, yes. What the fuck, we might imagine a future historian throwing their hands in the air and asking—were we to sincerely fathom such a thing as a future, much less come to dwell in one. The headlines were no longer epigrammatic and inferential, deferential to the readers’ presumed intelligence, in the seductive way of years long past, but written in blunt declarative and often instructive sentences, rife with skepticism about its intended audience’s literacy level and attention span—and for good reason, in all likelihood.
It’s not about fun. It’s about survival.
Or:
Here’s the real reason X did Y.
Or:
Reading this will make you…
…laugh? Cry? Moan? Squeal? Puke? Yes, they also had a whiny undertone, so as to appeal to that anxious malaise everyone was pressed into absorbing by the mediated noise machine surrounding. No room for subtle metaphor or poetic evocation here. Just the cold cruel bitter bluntness that might stand some chance of rippling the synapses of the overly medicated.
To live in a state of perpetual anxiety was to be engaged. Just look at Harold Hull over there, tweaking out in front of his MacBook at Belle Encoding, ensconced (encoded?) in the drab windowless confines of one decrepit office tower in the middle of one island, the “island of many hills,” according to one etymological investigatory work that pinpoints its name as a derogation of the Lenape-language word Mannahatta. One of countless such humble, near nameless enterprises on this fine island of many more near-spirits cloaked in human bodies than actual hills, and Harold has been incentivized into its shadows and beyond, his talents rewarded of late with the bestowal of Motherfucker of the Month—a title with which he has been enshrined, some might say burdened, for no less than three months and five days, which was the last time a meager representative from the home office deigned to stick their toe in the door.
What exactly Harold does in front of the dim glow of his screen for nine, ten, twelve hours each day—well, it’s a bit complicated in many senses. Technically, spiritually, legally… I myself don’t pretend to understand half of it. Oh, encoding, for sure, as the name of the business would imply. But what, exactly, does that entail? What does it mean? It’s a question I thought to ask Mrdok on many occasions. But it’s also the type of question best not to ask Mrdok. For it is sure to yield a most unpalatable response. And so I never did. Ah, the complexities of our era!
NO MAN IS AN ISLAND—WITH ONE EXCEPTION
In Travis Jeppesen's Settlers Landing, a wholly fantastic yet nightmarishly real excavation of the Trumpian malaise, Mrdok is a self-made billionaire who has everything he wants and needs, and quite often, too much of it. What he does not yet have is his own private island. So when he discovers Sagosia, a former pirate colony in the lost Pseudotropical region known as the Brown Sea, he takes it over the only way he knows how—roughly, and under the guise of “philanthropy.” But merely possessing his own slice of offshore land isn’t enough; together with his algorithmically selected band of .01% elites, he elects to declare sovereignty and launch his very own country. It will be the deal of the century. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, a lot, it turns out—especially when you throw in an infinite-release opioid manufactured by North Koreans, a CIA-funded civil war being fought by veterans afflicted with untreated PTSD, a poet laureate suffering from aphasia, and a dog that speaks in rhyme—to name just a few of the tributaries in this relentlessly inventive narrative, a brutal and pyrotechnic satire of a very awkward Zeitgeist that mercilessly fracks the dreams of colonial conquest haunting our history, literature, and consciousness.
MARY TABOR ON PROSE STYLE
What were the first books you read where you realised you were enjoying the quality of the prose?
I’ve been reading since age 4 or 5. So the first book that bewitched was Little Witch and then, older, I discovered D.H. Lawrence, read all his novels and poetry. This early line from Sons and Lovers lay highlighted in my copy: “Sleep is still the most perfect, in spite of hygienists, when it is shared with a beloved. The warmth, the security and peace of soul, the utter comfort from the touch of the other, knit the sleep, so that it takes the body and soul completely in the healing.” The way Lawrence used the word “knit” caught me in his web, metaphoric and literal meaning. My mother was never without her knitting—and I was hooked like her crochet hook to the written word.
Without being prompted to copy the style, could AI ever write as well as this?
Simple answer: No. Better answer? Will AI ever understand the depth and breadth of metaphor? Maybe Melville had the answer: In Moby Dick—what does that unforgettable whale stand for? I’m still trying to figure that out—his narrator Ishmael says: “It is not down in any map. True places never are.”
What stylistic issues were most important to the writing of Who by Fire?
The biggest risk I take in the novel is that my character is inventing a story he couldn’t possibly be present for. This ended up being a style issue because it involves a dangerous high-wire prose act. I had to keep my balance for the reader on the real time, what I call the “now” or the present action of the story. He lives in real time and interacts with other characters in real time even as he imagines what happened in the past—a balance act to control the time and, thus, the style of the sections shifts from the past versus the present: More abrupt prose in the present. More languorous in the past—with sharp-tongued interruptions by the present-action narrator.
How important is style to your characterisation? And to the reader’s immersion in your writing?
Voice for me is key to my style. I work hard to a give a sense of reality, heightened and tightened, more narrowly focused through concrete but troubling details. All that ties to voice. The term “voice” encompasses elements of point of view, tone, diction and rhythm. It’s the sound of the speaker in the broadest sense. I work to catch the reader with my narrative voice. I have to discover and recreate the sounds, the cadences, the rhythms that are mine and the characters’.
You know you’ve found a distinctive narrative “voice” when you read Saul Bellow, William Faulkner, Henry James, Cynthia Ozick, Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, Hemingway. You know who you’re reading in one or two sentences. Colm Tóibín in today’s world of authors has this gift in spades. I discovered this quality in Annie Dillard’s Holy the Firm that literally has a cult following, then later in her life she wrote The Maytrees and once again that unforgettable totally recognizable voice that is Annie is on the page.
Books not picked for Auraist tend to lack appealing rhythms, and musicality more generally. Do you have to work on this in your own sentences or does it come naturally?
Comes naturally, and often to my detriment. I’ve read all of Shakespeare and had an early tendency to write prose in iambic rhythm that in editing with a cool eye, I had to fix, refix and make less lyrical with poetic dactyls and spondees to fit meaning. Poetry in prose is no easy task but there lies the goal I shoot for.
Do you read your work out loud, and if so, how important is this to your style?
I do, must do, to hear if the prose is working with the meaning and that the sound of the sentences reflects not only my own voice, but the changes needed for the meaning, for each character. Short and abrupt for hurry, languid and lyrical to express longing. I can hear those variations. I fix the voice as I go along, reading sentences and passages out loud. When finished, I recorded the book in a studio and knew I’d done something right when I realized I was discovering it as if for the first time.
George Saunders proposed on his substack that it’s in the editing process that literary voice emerges -- the more a writer edits the more they’ll make choices different to other writers, resulting in a voice and style unique to them. Do you agree with this?
Yes. But I tell myself that editing is my secondary task. I don’t mean I don’t need to do it. I mean I need to let the invention happen before I analyze it—and editing involves analysis.
I allow the invention to come first. That place is where my voice, my so-called “inspiration” comes from. That’s mysterious stuff. I don’t want to mess with that before I edit. But edit I will, indeed, and a lot of it.
The critic in me is like the evil stepmother from Cinderella. The critic never lets the princess go to the ball. So, I go to the ball first, let the invention happen, get some sleep and then I edit.
How close have you come to headbutting your keyboard in frustration at the miniscule nature of the prose issues you were working on, and what were those issues?
The simple task to figure out that just right opening sentence. I told a poet friend once that I couldn’t find that one sentence that’s so key to everything that follows. What to do? He told me to go to sleep. He was right.
I’m not sure how miniscule this next is, but the blank page scares the hell out of me.
Which publishers put out the most stylish writing?
I love Tinkers by Paul Harding, published by Bellevue Literary Press that comes out of a medical school with doctors as editors. Tinkers later won the Pulitzer. Paul Harding talked with Margaret Brown who created, before she died, Shelf Unbound, an indie review magazine. Paul Harding told her in an interview that his book would have never found a publisher if Erika Goldman at Bellevue hadn’t come across the manuscript. He called his book “quiet, meditative,” as if that wouldn’t sell. It’s also a gorgeous read with an unmistakable voice.
Authors Equity is new and it’s competing with the conglomerates: Authors don’t get advances and share in the profits.
The publishing world has changed so much. As we all know, chances for a new voice to get chosen by one of the few big houses has gotten harder than ever. Fewer editors, less focus on what we might call “literary” fiction. Some in-the-know folks have said that if Cormac McCarthy were publishing today, not one of what some call the big three houses would take him.
Sounds unbelievable. “The times they are a-changin'”. We have to adapt.
"Mary L. Tabor's WHO BY FIRE is a lovely, innovative, deeply engaging novel about how it is that human beings make their way through the mysteries of existence."—Robert Olen Butler
Great questions for Mary
Fantastic interview. So many nuances. Makes me want to re-read HOLY THE FIRM specifically for voice. Never mind McCarthy, Tabor's WHO BY FIRE is beyond riveting!