Pippa Glenning is the youngest member of the Family of Isis, a religious sect in Springfield, Massachusetts. A few years back, Tian, the Family’s leader, saved Pippa from a life of street prostitution, bringing her into the fold to sell spearmint tea out of a downtown storefront and live out his exegesis of Isis, an Egyptian fertility goddess, half-bird, half-woman, “bare breasts and fierce eyes.” Soon Pippa is pregnant with her second child; she spends her days gazing at the mural of Isis painted above the fireplace at the group home. She has also been working through residual guilt: Back home in Georgia, she might have been responsible for a Ku Klux Klan lynching.

But all is not well in the Family. Pippa’s first child froze to death during a winter solstice ceremony, a rite involving nude dancing, pregnancy-worship, an abandoned nature trail, and peyote-spiked wine. Tian is in jail, the Family is in tatters, and Pippa is under house arrest, where she receives weekly visits from a home care nurse, who herself is the daughter of Weathermen-styled revolutionaries.

Ellen Meeropol has bitten off a lot in her debut novel, House Arrest. Dead children, cult ritual, political violence, drugs, prison, the Klan. And that’s not to mention spina bifida, patient privacy, interracial relationships, computer hacking, handlebar mustaches, or the skinheads who show up near the novel’s close. With all this freight, it is to her credit that Meeropol’s book seems, in fits and starts, real and urgent. Unfortunately, the novel never coheres.

You couldn’t find a reader more partial to Meeropol’s ambition. I have a soft spot for novels that tackle potentially melodramatic subject matter, and for books that attempt to depict how social pressures influence the way people act. I treasure John Irving, Robert Stone, Jonathan Franzen, Richard Price. But Meeropol’s novel fails to bring these social issues to life, and the melodrama never really sings. The reasons are several. First, much of the novel is narrated in a voice that wavers between noir and Steve Martin: “I don’t know what I expected to find Monday morning at the Hall of Justice, but it wasn’t an x-ray security scanner with a conveyer belt, a metal-detector gateway, and two armed guards.” Secondly, most of the interesting action takes place before the novel begins. A lynching, the formation of a utopian cult, the bombing of a draft office: all of these are presented in flashbacks that are more persuasive and urgent than what actually happens in the novel’s present. Here is that doomed solstice ritual:

They had all worn white. Silent and almost invisible in the blowing snow, they slipped under the massive bronze arch into the park. They walked single file, even the twins, following the narrow path through skeleton trees. They didn’t need flashlights. All day, fat flakes had melted on the city streets, covered branches and decaying leaves and pin needles. Although the solstice moon was shrouded, the snow crystals absorbed and mirrored its weak light. Pippa’s head barely reached Tian’s shoulder, but she stretched into his footprints, rocking Abby who slept cradled in a blanket heavy across her breasts.

This is some of Meeropol’s best writing. There is tension, drama, a beginning, middle, and end. It feels vital.

Ellen Meeropol

That’s less true of the present action. People say things to each other, go from one room to another, travel home for a funeral, enter the Hall of Justice, but little of what these characters do actually affects the outcome of the story—all the drama comes from the revelation of secrets.

This is not necessarily bad, of course: Oedipus Rex works the same way. Maybe Meeropol’s idea is that our decisions are determined by social or historical pressures. Still, the present action of House Arrest feels hungover, as if the characters are struggling to remember the exact cause of their suffering.

Meeropol seems to be telling us that our ethical dilemmas—and there are plenty in House Arrest—have no greater importance than to help us work through past trauma. A nurse’s dithering over whether to help a patient break house arrest is not, to Meeropol, interesting as a story: instead it is a symbol, or echo, of the nurse’s struggle to forgive her father, and the decision to couch the conflict in a melodrama of family secrets and revolutionary political action has the effect of trivializing it.

House Arrest has the potential to be captivating. There are hints of compelling, even profound stories here. Tian, former gang leader, current cult leader, literally wrote the book of Isis. (Actually, he calls it a manual). After a brutal gang fight in New Jersey, Tian researches various communal religious organizations—he “wanted to avoid the biggest mistakes that other groups have made.” He decides on Isis, and calls in his former rival to co-head the cult. After some vague trouble in Newark, the Family of Isis moves to Massachusetts.

I’m reminded of King Benjamin Purnell, head of the House of David commune, an early-20th-century religious colony known best for their barnstorming baseball team. Based in Michigan, members of the House of David lived in a mansion, wore long hair and beards, operated an amusement park, owned a cruise ship line, dug for limestone, pioneered cold storage, and toured the country’s vaudeville circuit, teaching Purnell’s gospel of equality, celibacy, vegetarianism, and the second coming. The House of David helped southwestern Michigan become a tourist and business Mecca, but a cloud of infamy gathered when several young women accused Purnell of sexual indiscretion, “purifying” them when they were as young as fourteen. Purnell was ousted and died soon after; allegedly he is buried in a glass coffin, location known to only a few faithful followers.

Now that is a story. Technological innovation, charismatic evangelism, communal utopianism, pedophilia, secret burial, baseball: It smacks of something weird and essential about the way that business, sex, and religion are tied up in America. Meeropol could have done something similar in House Arrest. Even the most quotidian of the novel’s situations—the everyday life of the Family of Isis—has the potential to be explosive. Here we have the Family in decline: Without Tian to lead in worship, the Family bickers about what to fix for dinner, about how to educate the children, about who works what shifts at the tea shop, about the inconsistencies in Tian’s teachings. When Tian calls home from prison, he sounds not like a seductive, power-mad oracle but like a middle manager; the leader, too, is lost. The Family is struggling to be, well, a family. There is a fascinating story here, but we don’t get to read it.

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My old boss at a lit mag gave me a single piece of advice before sending me to slosh through the slush pile: “Distrust first impressions.” Here is a case where that advice is warranted. At first glance, Jim Hanas’s new story collection, Why They Cried, published exclusively as an e-book, seems to be a bundle of George Saunders-lite: clever, guarded, self-consciously odd stories that follow cute conceits as if they were geometry proofs. A couple—a working woman and a compliant, helpless man—only speak to each other by assigning dialogue to the dog: “Look,” she said. “He’s going: Really, I hate this thing. I’ve got to bite it. I hate it. Like somebody who gets drunk and talks too loud…” They can’t communicate. Is she seeing someone else? They break up. They reunite. The dog barks. End of story. These types of stories too often play like Rube Goldberg machines. They accomplish a basic task, catharsis, through means that are sometimes fantastic but more often just inane. There is rarely a sense of possibility: characters seem to behave according to a pre-ordained schematic. They aren’t stories so much as devices, and devices require the virtuosity and generosity of a Barthelme or a Borges. But then something strange happened: the second story. “Pangaea” opens onto a vague, strange, sterile office world. Jeanie, the protagonist, gets so tired by lunch that she drives to a motel and sleeps until dawn. She seems to have given up control over her actions, even her thoughts. “Thinking had somehow taken place,” we are told. Her decisions are described as “newly excavated.” Jeanie has an odd sense that some invisible force is doing her job for her (she designs retail displays—simulacra, “Plexiglass representations”). But this feeling of lost control is a delusion:

The work would eventually get done. Not miraculously, as she hoped, but by her. She would do it. A deadline would loom and terror at the prospect of not having done the work would consume her, materializing in her mind as a giant boulder or a fiery asteroid, hurtling swiftly and steadily toward her. This terror would become excruciating in the way that only insubstantial pain can be.

This goes on—Jeanie’s sense of time gets confused, she may or may not sleep with a co-worker—until Jeanie has a stray thought about a pair of contact lenses. She just knows, for no reason at all, that these contacts “would make her look like a cat.” We never see her put on the contacts—we are never told whether she’s decided to put them on or not, and, since she’s given up agency, her actions seem not to matter anymore—and yet, as she looks into the mirror…

Jim Hanas

But I’ll let you read the story for yourself. It’s a surprising, haunting ending, with Yeats’s “click like a closing box,” and it slapped my first impression silly.

The mysterious, beautiful ending of “Pangaea” is the rule, rather than the exception, and it turns out that Why They Cried is, in fact, about something important: how much suffering arises in the gap between our constructed public identities and whatever kernel of self is left inside.

Take “The Cryerer.” An actor is ill. He’s just gone through a break-up. He is known for his expertise at weeping. The Cryerer gets the first call to play sad, because “he had range. From a single rolling tear to a face-wrenching, hyperventilated blubber, there was no cry the Cryerer couldn’t do.” His ability to express grief seems to be a genetic gift, a permanent facial fixture, like that of the scream-faced mother in David Foster Wallace’s “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.” In public “sometimes people asked if he was okay, if he was sad, but even they didn’t know why.” The Cryerer’s sorrowful visage fetches the highest bids at a celebrity date auction: “Women were curious and concerned. They wanted to help.”

So here is a guy who happens to look sad, and he exploits that chance for profit and charity, all of which is fine and interesting—but what makes Hanas’s story work is that the Cryerer is actually sad. The action, in this story and others, develops out of the tension between a character’s inner feeling and the masks he or she puts over that feeling.

Hanas is unnervingly accurate at nailing the feeling of lost control. In “The Arab Bank,” perhaps the best story here, Marco, a French street tough in Cannes, signs his life over to a sinister Algerian in order to live the glamorous existence of a hustler. After a while Marco is told to lay low—he’s been seen mugging a famous American actor. And he doesn’t like laying low. The power comes from Marco’s realization, never stated, that when he promised loyalty to the Algerian, he promised it for life. It’s a story about the unforeseen consequences of giving in.

Hanas has a gift for vivid description. The Cannes Film Festival is “a chaotic scrum with everyone—the players, the press, the locals—jockeying for position.” A packet of birth control is a disk “ringed by plastic teardrops, each teardrop containing a tiny pill.” A going-nowhere slacker “enjoyed letting indecision weigh on him like damp clothing.” A man folds a bird’s “broken wing against its body like a kickstand.” Hanas also displays an effortless talent for straight-ahead yarn-spinning; in stories like stories like “The Audubon Society” and “You Can Touch This!,” you feel you’re in for a ride, but you don’t quite know where you’re going.

Much of the conversation around e-books has revolved the question of invisibility—that is, how easily the device can disappear, leaving just the human reader and the text. Since Hanas writes with a swift clip, deploys images so judiciously and vividly, and demonstrates real insight into the way we live now, I imagine most readers will be able to forget their devices and fall into these stories, either after overcoming a first impression or, more likely, right away.

**

Why They Cried is now available as a Joyland eBook from ECW Press. It can be purchased for Kindle, iBooks, Sony Reader, or as a PDF directly from the publisher. Visit whytheycried.com for these and other download options.

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We’re each the hero of our own story. We walk the sidewalks of Echo Park, which were once dirt paths meandering between tin shacks, as jacaranda blooms “shudder” and fall and we repeat our stories under our breaths. As we tell ourselves about ourselves we unwittingly bump past our mothers, fathers, daughters, grandmothers, the Virgin, the Lord, Madonna, and maybe Morrissey. The invisibility of everyone else’s story—the existence of everyone else’s story: This is what Brando Skyhorse’s stellar new novel, The Madonnas of Echo Park, is about.

The Madonnas are a group of young girls and mothers who gather weekly in front of the Los Angeles mercado featured in Madonna’s “Borderline” video. In that video, “dressed as a classic ‘Low Rider’ chola,” the real Madonna dances with a group of Hispanic kids and “refuse[s] to abandon… her chicas or her ‘hood.” For that reason, Madonna is a hero to the girls of Echo Park. As these fake-Madonnas, the authentic chicas that Madonna pretends to be, pose for a photograph in front of the store, a car slowly approaches, there is a gunshot, and a three-year-old child is killed. At the scene is a young woman named Aurora, who, according to a fictional “Author’s Note,” Brando Skyhorse insulted in the sixth grade; the novel is partly framed as a search for Aurora, but this is no metafictional detective story. Skyhorse’s control and capability as a storyteller make the story clear, compelling, and meaningful. His theme is connection, and how connections are paved over by lust, fear, jobs, divorce, age, resentment, religion, immigration status, gentrification, and taste in pop music. Above all, The Madonnas of Echo Park is about people trying to understand why their world is changing.

There is much to marvel at, beginning with Skyhorse’s excellent writing. Many of the nonchronological chapters open with lyrical prologues in the present tense, where the narrators—who change with each chapter—introduce their landscapes and worldviews:

Before the sun rises on this famished desert, stretching from the fiercest undertow in the Pacific to the steepest flint-tipped crest in the San Gabriel Mountains, the temperature drops to an icy chill, the border disappears, and in a finger snap of a blink of an eye, we are running, carried on the breath of a morning frost into hot kitchens to cook your food, waltzing across miles of tile floor to clean your houses, settling like dew on shaggy front lawns to cut your grass.

Brando Skyhorse

Sometimes the prose suggests that these narrators are speaking to the author; but more often these prologues function like the openings of Richard Ford’s stories in Rock Springs: as demonstrations of voice, wisdom, and insight, a way of setting the stakes before the events of the story really occur. Occasionally the self-consciousness of these prologues can grate, but more often they introduce us to one of the novel’s refreshing tendencies: The narrators believe that actions have consequences, and that their decisions matter.

Which is important. Skyhorse puts his narrators in classic moral dilemmas. Should a day laborer risk exposing his immigration status to turn in his murderous boss? During a fight on a bus in a black neighborhood, who should the Mexican anti-immigrant driver kick off: the Hispanic who started it, who would surely be beat up, or the young black man hustling Skittle packets? Facing a suicidal boss, what should a worker do? These chapters are about serious decisions—and the narrators know they are serious.

The Madonnas is labeled a novel-in-stories, but it is more a novel than discrete stories. Though they tell distinct tales, Skyhorse’s chapters rely, like a novel, on information the reader understands from what has gone before. One exception is the masterful “The Blossoms of Los Feliz,” which has a classic short story structure and uses symbolism—those “shuddering” jacaranda blooms—to illustrate emotions and idea. After the drive-by, Aurora’s mother begins working as a maid. But the house she’s hired to clean is spotless. Why has she been hired? Her search is depicted in clear prose, powerful because of what it doesn’t say:

Three of the five beds were never slept in, but I stripped and remade every one of them. The six bathrooms were the most trouble. Each had dried stalactites of vomit and blood around the rims and on the bases of the toilets. To get these clean you need to scrub and scratch with your fingertips whiles the rest of your body’s crouched in a runner’s starting hunch, motionless above.

She befriends her employer and soon learns of a possible cause for the woman’s suffering—a husband with a predilection for young Hispanic men—all while reflecting on the jacaranda bloom she believed would save her childhood home from gentrification. The end of the chapter explodes with symbolism, surprising yet inevitable, in the tradition of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and O’Connor. “The Blossoms of Los Feliz” could stand alone in any anthology of short fiction.

And yet it gains power in context. Those jacaranda blooms continue to shudder and fall throughout the novel, and Aurora’s mother shows up several more times, reminding us each time of the friendship she made and lost. There’s a pattern here: While most of these narrators couldn’t care less who they bump into on the street, the reader understands that all of these people—even those not afforded chapters of their own—have stories shot through with struggle, beauty, and redemption.

The risk with a book that depends on interlaced stories—Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin is another recent example—is that characters’ relationships can seem contrived or hokey, the story subservient to the theme. Yet The Madonnas is anything but artificial. Its structure, repeated descriptions, interlocked plot elements, even that metafictional “Author’s Note,” all work to do the most important thing fiction can do: create a complex world in which readers can practice empathy.

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There is a poem in Ander Monson’s first collection called “I Have a Theory about This Elegy.” Monson’s new book of nonfiction, Vanishing Point, might be subtitled “I Have a Theory about Memoir.” Vanishing Point is a collage of vignettes, found texts, improvisations, and well-crafted personal essays, as well as a meditation on the meaning—and means—of memoir. Vanishing Point rolls along like the ball in Katamari Damarcy (a video game Monson explicitly refers to), picking up meanings and associations as it goes. And it is Monson’s best use of the book-as-collage to make a meaning greater than any individual piece or sentence can convey.

Though Vanishing Point is subtitled Not a Memoir, it turns out to contain the seeds of one. Just under the surface of this work is the story of Monson’s move from Grand Rapids, Michigan to Tucson, Arizona. This move is not told in the play-by-play scene-and-summary of a conventional memoir, but by the accretion of small details, most notably in the three rhapsodic essays titled “Vanishing Point.” Fans of Monson’s fiction and poems will find much to love here; the “Vanishing Point” essays are told in the first-person plural: “On Godrey St. SW we are increasingly desiring to know everything about the city, to capture its incomprehensibility, its complexity, to reduce it, to keep it, to saturate it with queries.”

With the first-person plural, Monson manages to write about the world through the lens of the self without being overly solipsistic, and about the self through the lens of the world without being totally annoying. This is just one of the author’s attempts to move beyond “the singular authority of ‘I’ in nonfiction, the essayistic ‘I’”—in other words, the conventional narrating I that uses conventional techniques without much consideration for how the forms affect (and effect, as in “bring about”) content. Monson addresses this very problem in the opening essay, “Voir Dire.”

While a man named Michael Jordan is on trial for “uttering and publishing”—forging a check, more or less—Monson spends his time as jury foreman ruminating on witness, recollection, verification, and proof: “We trust consensus, experience, and common sense, as the prosecuting attorney reminds us in voir dire: we can judge what is credible and what is not by the manner in which it is told and the person who tells it.” In a trial, Monson concludes, just as in memoir, truth is reconstructed through storytelling and rhetoric, and that seems, somehow, not quite right.

Ander Monson

We have plenty of excellent, smart memoirs that address this problem, and the best of them embody it or examine it through form. The question of how to narrate experience accurately yet artfully is closely tied to what might be termed Monson’s Second Problem of Memoir, and where the memoir-as-trial falls apart: A trial, unlike almost all books, always has real-world consequences. “How often is something actually at stake in essays, in memoirs, in most of the nonfiction I read (and perhaps write), I wonder? How often is there actual risk involved, invoked?” That “invoked” is exemplary of the prose of Vanishing Point: sentences roil and roll on past their natural ending point, usually including near-synonyms that are also near-homonyms; the effect is somewhat like reading a more mellifluous Henry James—James as slam poet, maybe.

Monson’s answer to the Second Problem is to disclose real-world sins and mistakes, such as a breach of protocol at the trial that could, through its revelation here, create “a crack in the conviction that might be used to appeal it and possibly to stick it to me, legally.” What seems to bother Monson is that storytelling applies artifice to truth, but at the same time is absolutely dependent upon that artifice. Monson, like most of us, wants that artifice: “Telling is performing, even if it seems effortless… given the endless possibilities of the sentence on the page, I expect to see a little fucking craft. I guess I want awareness, a sense that the writer has reckoned with the self, the material, as well what it means to reveal it.” And yet that gloss of craft seems to somehow negate any “possible real-world consequence.”

Monson’s solution is to restate the question, basically, by using many, many narrative techniques to examine what it means to write “I,” to tell all. The final effect is considerable, especially for such a slim book. These techniques—which include “Assembloirs,” short essays made up of quotes from hundreds of memoirs—are attempts at “finding, creating, or uncovering another subject—something else to rely on and parse beyond the self.” This all evokes the recent hubbub over David Shields’ book Reality Hunger, in which Shields argues that memoir’s capacity for overt formal invention is both awesomely large and largely unexplored. Vanishing Point, like any number of recent memoirs, gives the lie to the second part of this thesis; for Monson, invention becomes a way to rip to shreds the notion that narrative can authentically represent reality. And invention then becomes a way to think about what those shreds do represent.

If you flip open Vanishing Point to its more-or-less center, you will find two pages covered in the word “Me.” You couldn’t be faulted for finding this silly. And yet in the context of the book itself—in the context of thinking really, really hard about the problems of memoirs—this repetition becomes thought-provoking, profound, moving, and awesomely large.

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The first best choice that Peter Bognanni makes in The House of Tomorrow is to allow his main characters to bond over track 5 on the skull-faced CD that junior-high kids know as Misfits Collection I. Why is this a good choice? The Misfits are, ah, not excellent. They’re goofballs with dumb haircuts; they aren’t especially funny. They’re clever but clunky. They’re menacing but not tough. Their hardcore songs sound like protracted belches and their basslines are out of tune. And yet Misfits walk among us. Hang around the halls of any junior high and you’ll see a Misfits skull cut from a t-shirt and safety-pinned to a jean jacket every time.

This skillful scene is a sign of Bognanni’s central aesthetic value, and the reason you may want to read his debut novel, The House of Tomorrow: because it’s true. The Misfits are a fact of teen culture and Bognanni should be lauded for revealing “Teenagers From Mars” for what it really is: a tender expression of adolescent yearning. (Keep in mind that the second line of this song is “the insemination of little girls in the middle of wet dreams.”)

Bognanni makes many such excellent choices in The House of Tomorrow. Refreshingly, he is not interested in street cred or the namedropping that can spoil a punk novel—Bognanni is interested in depicting adolescence as it really is. The House of Tomorrow concerns the gradual incorporation of Sebastian, our loquacious narrator, into a new family, the Whitcombs. In glimpses, we are given the hidden sadness of each member of this family: Janice, the mother and youth-group leader; Meredith, the promiscuous older sister; and Jared, the punk-rocking heart transplant recipient. In a series of moving scenes, Sebastian comes to understand the Whitcombs’ secret sorrows—or, rather, the sorrows they think they’ve hidden.

These sudden revelations of adult loneliness are the best element of The House of Tomorrow, and another example of Bognanni’s fidelity to the uncool truths of teenage life. Teenagers are often privy to intimations from their friends’ parents and siblings—a weird confidence gained from rides home and shared meals and run-ins in the bathroom. If, as a teenager, you spent time with a friend’s single mom, say, you may have been subject to an outburst such as this:

“We got married young,” she said. “For one thing. And I think that when you do that, it’s hard to tell if you’re really going to be compatible down the line. Sometimes you are. And sometimes it just takes one big problem to prove that you aren’t.”

She took a deep breath. “It also helps if you don’t marry a giant selfish baby.”

Peter Bognanni

Sebastian’s own sorrows are depicted less convincingly. The reason he lives with the Whitcombs is that his mentally deteriorating grandmother has kicked him out of their home: a geodesic dome that’s become a minor tourist attraction in their small Iowa town. Sebastian’s education is steeped in the philosophy of his grandmother’s former lover, the real-life architect and futurist Buckminster Fuller, and Bognanni begins many chapters by echoing Fuller’s own musings:

Something that is easy to forget about the universe when you live in isolation is just how full of motion it is. It’s in a state of perpetual motion, technically. The whole entire thing: going, going, going. Never stopping. At least that’s the way Fuller described it. He said the universe is always transforming.

These reflective passages are often as disarmingly direct as the above, and yet Sebastian’s (or perhaps Bognanni’s) insistence on connecting them back to Fuller is a literary conceit that gets in the way of the novel’s tight plot and well-drawn characters. Likewise, a subplot that involves transforming the geodesic dome into something called a Geoscope is thematically resonant but dramatically dull.

The concept of creation is all over The House of Tomorrow. Sebastian’s grandmother creates the Geoscope while Sebastian and Jared create the Misfits-covering band, The Rash, and readers are treated to a predictable Fuller = punk rock argument. However, creation shows up in subtler, truer places, especially the conversations between Sebastian and Jared Whitcomb, the transplant recipient:

“I got the beep, Sebastian,” he said. He rested a palm against his chest. “I got to live and have a band. Matthew from Minnesota didn’t get shit. So it’s got to be a good band, okay? And nobody is going to mess it up or stop it before we get there.”

Here is Jared working out the passionate ethics that smolder in the best punk rock; Sebastian, the geodesical intellect to Jared’s mercurial heart, also attempts to work this morality into his detached, Fullerian worldview. This Dionysus-Apollo/Calvin-Hobbes duality yields fine comic moments and embarrassingly earnest speeches. But beyond thematic unity, Bognanni wants to communicate the verbal dexterity and daring of teenagers—that first sense that conversation can be, in and of itself, a pleasurable activity. It’s a difficult thing to approximate, and Bognanni gets it down fairly well, especially once Sebastian starts to trade his awkward locutions and syntax for a more straightforward tone.

The House of Tomorrow isn’t London Calling or Pink Flag—but it is a welcome addition to the recent collection of punk rock bildungsromans such as I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone, Hairstyles of the Damned, and Ovenman. It’s as imperfect and truly pleasurable an achievement as the Misfits’ Collection I.

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