The stories in Bruce Machart’s debut collection, Men in the Making, fit together with the logic of a good mix tape. Granted, it’s the mix tape you’d give your buddy who a) still has a cassette player in his truck, and b) after a long night of drinking plans to drive across the country to confront an ex-lover. While the stories share a focus on men in distress in contemporary Texas and neighbors-it-thinks-lesser—Oklahoma and Arkansas, for example—their prose styles vary dramatically, especially in cadence.

The first story, “Where You Begin,” starts the collection with the attention-catching fervor of a symphony’s allegro. Its narrator dictates in an often breathless direct address that quickly slips into that false second person contemporary poets are so fond of. Take the second paragraph for example, which is one long semicoloned sentence:

But if you’re like I used be, when your fiancée of five months gets home from a day of slaving for that lawyer downtown, the guy who cuts her a check twice a month for the privilege of telling her what to do and watching her cleavage go red with splotches the way it does sometimes when she’s flustered; when she makes it through the door and finds you scribbling your latest on a legal pad, still in your boxers with the newspaper untouched on the porch in its plastic wrap, the classified still tucked inside without a single job listing circled; and when a few minutes later she comes half naked and frowning into the hallway as red-faced and eager for her evening shower as would be a farm wife after bleeding a hog, you know you’re history.

The first clause, at seven words, is relatively calm. The second, at seventeen, begins to pick up steam. The third, doubling again, comes in a whopping thirty-five words. Between the semicolons are three balanced clauses all in the fifteen words range. The first two use alliteration to emphasize their conclusions (latest/legal and porch/plastic); the third simply runs into the semicolon. Finally, in the sentence’s third part, we encounter another whopper, a thirty-three-word clause that leads up to three simple iambs with which the reader is finally released.

For all of its speed, brevity, and tone, the story’s structure is surprisingly elegant and sophisticated. The story is set at the end of several cycles: the narrator’s compulsive falling in love, serial writing of not quite good enough stories, and long nights driving Houston’s loop while drinking beer. Apparently the 610 is exactly long enough for one person to drink a six pack of Lone Star. (If I do have a petty annoyance with the book it’s that it feels like Machart might be on Lone Star’s payroll.) Most of the story’s action takes place on this literal loop, which is brilliant both as an organizational strategy for the narrative and as a metaphor for all the other cycles the action seeks to interrupt.

If “The Way You Begin” is in allegro, the collection’s second story, “The Last One in Arkansas,” is an adagio. Twice as long as the first story and told in short, clipped, nearly stumbling, first-person clauses, it narrates the lonely reflections of a man who lost his family when his son died while the narrator helps bury, years later, another young man.

Bruce Machert

The first two stories give the tenor of the collection’s content and a sense of the mastery Machart brings both to their stylistic composition and the collection’s overall arrangement. That arrangement allows him to build towards the collection’s two final stories, both of which feel considerably more mature, more in keeping with his novel, The Wake of Forgiveness. The language in the first of these two, “Among the Living Amidst the Trees,” particularly impressed me. There’s a remarkable control and precision in its prosody. Listen, for example, to the first sentence:

Half past quitting time on Friday, a day we began by liquefying a family of possums in the debarker, and Garrett and me are driving the drive we drive five times a week.

Its stacked alliteration, assonance, and repetition give its action a sense of inevitability, an inevitability reinforced by the conjunction that gives the introductory clauses equal weight with the independent clause to which they should be subordinate. The story is set in Jasper in the wake of James Byrd Jr.’s dragging murder. The narrator’s wife has become obsessed with the murder in a way that renders her inaccessible. The sentences in which the narrator contemplates his lost access, sentences complicated and cascading, present a tremendous capacity for deep interiority while pining for access to that very thing. This sort of move is Machart at his best:

Instead I want her to laugh, to wink at me while stepping out of her skirt, to turn off the lights and shut the bedroom door and pull me with her beneath three or four quilts so that I can have her all to myself, so I can duck my head beneath the covers before we make love and see her skin glowing there in the darkness, calling to me in some shiny new language only I can understand, lighting my way while I reach out and hold her and keep her from crying and answer her in the voice of the man I’ve somehow managed to become.

Later, when they sneak into the crime scene at night and observe the red paint circles marking the bits of Byrd Jr.’s body:

And there, by God, they are: dozens of them, some big enough to outline a trash can lid, other so small you could cover them with a coffee cup, and no pattern or order to them whatsoever. We walk up the road and Glenda bounces the light around from red circle to red circle, and the moon stays back behind the clouds, and the forest seems rightfully alive and loud. And they just go on forever. I’m thinking you could pull me apart however you pleased, and no matter how you tried you’d never end up with enough pieces to fill these rings. I’m thinking there’s a lesson in that, a lesson I might could stand to learn, something about how there’s always more to you than what you might think, but then Glenda bends down and trace a finger around one of the red circles and it’s all I can do to stand there and watch her.

The collection is worth reading for this story alone, which is not to say that the rest of it isn’t anything other than good reading. Those who’ve read The Wake of Forgiveness may find these stories a considerable shift from that novel. Indeed, many of these stories likely predate the novel, but the range and prose are truly a marvel and make the collection a must-read.

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Bruce Machart’s brilliant debut novel, The Wake of Forgiveness, is remarkable for many reasons, not least of which is its tight, tight narrative control. Machart maintains this control while managing difficult prose through multiple time frames, all while aspiring to the myth-making sensibility of the southern gothic.

Despite its genre predilections, what struck me most is that The Wake of Forgiveness is about women. Granted, it’s about women as perceived by the men of Lavaca County, Texas, a piece of ranchland settled by Czech farmers and fictionalized to enhance the grotesque in a fashion that might please Cormac McCarthy or Carson McCullers. The novel explicitly tracks the six women with whom its protagonist, Karel, has direct relationships—three of them are his lovers; the other three are his mothers. But it also considers the women of Lavaca County in the abstract, as if its real ambition were to somehow break through the limitations of its narrative viewpoint and grasp what it is to be those women.

The nuts and bolts: The Wake of Forgiveness tells the story of Karel Skala, the youngest of Vaclav Skala’s four sons. The book opens with Karel’s birth, a depth-of-night affair that begins with his mother, Klara’s, bleeding, and ends with him nursing on her corpse. This all takes place in 1895, one of the book’s three time periods. The other two periods, 1910 and 1924, document the destruction of the Skala family and the birth of Karel’s own son, respectively. The 1895 narrative is the frame: Its very limited action—Karel’s movement from dead mother’s breast to his (live) nursemaid’s, as mediated by the midwife, also a mother figure—is told in brief sections that bookend the novel.

Bruce Machart

The 1910 section begins with Karel’s dirty win of a neighbor’s land in a horse race. Karel’s father has redirected the affection he once felt for his wife into a brutal obsession with horseracing. Enter Villasenor, a wealthy Mexican aficionado of racehorses and father of three daughters, who offers to race one of the daughters, Graciela, against Karel for the right to marry all three of them to Vaclav’s eldest sons. The lead-up to the race is highly sexualized: Graciela makes midnight visits to the Skala stables; Karel, alone among his brothers, wakes to find her, night after night. His ensuing fantasy, the fantasy of a fifteen-year-old farm boy for a rich, thick-braided, sexy, horse-riding, foreign girl, lies at the heart of the book.

The 1924 narrative introduces two more important women: Karel’s wife, Sophie, and his mistress, Elizka. Though the narrative initially suggests that it is occasioned by Sophie’s labor, and Karel’s sex with Elizka during, its actual plot is driven by twin fifteen-year-old brothers—yes, the same age as Karel in the middle narrative—whom Karel hires to watch his farm and bootlegging business while he stays in Praha with his wife and newborn (and mistress). The twins, it turns out, are the sons of Hildi, Karel’s nursemaid, which gives them a claim to being Karel’s brothers—a claim, they’re eager to point out, that they’re willing to make whereas Karel’s actual brothers are not. The twins get into trouble with the rival bootlegging business run by Karel’s brothers on behalf of Villasenor. What happens as a result is a symbolic outcome for Hildi, and for Karel’s claims of a separate dynasty; in this way, the twins serve as the novel’s metaphoric and thematic center.

Machart creates the novel’s sense of mythic grandiosity by repeating images. He repeatedly describes Vaclav grinding tobacco between his back teeth and Karel grinding out cigarettes with the toe of his boot. He introduces more than one scene with the description of a bird in flight. But he does this work on a far grander level in the novel’s sex scenes. Karel’s sex with Elizka takes, essentially, the same form as with Graciela—same location, same position—making the scene with Graciela, when it arrives, read like something we’ve always known. Machart’s language grows more spare here, bringing the action into sharper focus and reinforcing the scene’s otherness, until it seems larger than life. Machart’s success with this scene, and it is breathtakingly successful, is ultimately the success of the novel as a whole, as it depends on the careful patterning of everything else in the narrative.

There are many other things to admire in The Wake of Forgiveness, not least its focus on the relationships between fathers and their offspring, between siblings, between neighbors. All of are well rendered, all of them are compelling. But the scene with Graciela truly stands out, and could single-handedly serve as the reason to read this excellent debut.

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Well, that’s a lie. I should say that it’s the great book I dabble in, here and there, in frantic, frenetic moments, moments that invariably make me turn the music up loud and run around the house, wishing there was a reasonable way to tattoo the star of David and moon of Islam on my respective fists. Truth is, the book’s a tome, and unless you’re a scholar of Hebrew Poetry or Moorish Spain, or simply a much better man than I am, you’re unlikely to read this thing from cover to cover. But you should. I picked the book up after hearing Cole read a few years ago at the University of Utah’s guest writers reading series. At the time, I was polishing a novel that featured a heretical translation of the Tehillim (psalms, for those of you who’ve lacked the good fortune of an ultra-orthodox Jewish education). In the course of writing that book – or perhaps this is why I wrote that book – I’d worked on my own translation of the Tehillim. Because Hebrew relies on a system of shoreshes, three-letter roots, for its words, words carry traces of other words (must have made Derrida so damn happy). These traces allow for an infinite and maniacal system of puns and double-entendres. This problem only gets worse when one realizes that whole sentences in the Tehillim are lifted out of Ugarist poems worshipping the gods of sky and water. Honestly, I do think that the Tehillim are a heretical work recuperated by the King James and some real fear of Hebrew poetry, but I digress. Peter Cole had unearthed five centuries of Jewish poetry, written in Spain, in Hebrew, between the end of the tenth century and 1492 (yes, the year Columbus sailed the ocean blue). At his reading, he read some of the Hebrew before his translations. It was stunning. His translations were stunning, too, but I did suffer a moment’s disappointment when the book arrived in the mail – turns out my local independent bookstore does not stock this one – and realized that the book only included the English.

That disappointment was short-lived. The translations are excellent, and the introductions to each poet contain the kinds of fantastical biographies that were the stuff of my pre-adolescent daydreams. You know the kind: the ones in which you and an unusually apt tree branch re-imagined as a scimitar, and the space behind your backyard-grapefruit tree, allow you to command wild and bloody battles.

Take, for example, Shmuel HaNagid. Here’s a dude who flees a Berber revolt and ends up young, impoverished, and on his own. He opens a spice shop, and begins working as a scribe. His handwriting is pretty enough to impress the Malagan Vizier, who takes him into his court. From there he has a helter-skelter decade of ascension that leads him to Granada. Another decade goes by and he’s promoted to chief vizier of the Andalusian Caliphate. For those of you less versed in Moorish political positions, the chief vizier sits between the ruler and his subjects. Think of him as prime minister for a king who has actual power. All this from fancy handwriting! But that’s not all. When Shmuel is promoted to chief vizier, he’s also made head of the Spanish Muslim military. And he’s no Donald Rumsfeld behind a desk in the Pentagon plying his pretty letters abstractly to matters of life and death. He rides at the head of the army when it goes into battle for sixteen of the next eighteen years! How about that? A Jewish scholar who leads a Muslim army into battle! Cole writes that when Shmuel died at sixty-three, he’d just returned from another military campaign. Do I wish that there’d been a detailed accounting of those battles replete with hacked off limbs, and dramatic acts of daring-do? Of course. But I don’t need it, because I have Shmuel’s exquisite poetry. I have “Jasmine:”

Look at the jasmine, whose branches are green
as topaz, and its stems and leaves –
while its blossoms are white as bdellium.
With canelian red in its shoot
it looks like a pallid boy who’s shedding
the blood of innocent men with his hand. (45)

Even better, I have a poem in which Shmuel and his brother discuss their outrage at those who head the academies of Talmud study – mind you, this from a man who was not only the head of the Jews in Andalusia – Nagid is his title for that role – but an impressive Talmud scholar in his own right. In the poem he attacks the stuffiness of the old fools reciting their prayers. The poem culminates in the following verses:

And the teacher expounded at length,
preying on every sound they made,
and I sat there enraged at the sight,
and my soul grew sad…
I asked the good teacher after his health,
but he answered as a man of strife –
and he started reciting the hundred blessings
in a course voice, like an army or horde,
and he thanked the Lord
who had made him a man and not a woman.
And I told him: “You flaunt your phallic soul,
but the Lord will prove you hollow.” (48)

Shmuel seems to point at a different mode of practice, a spiritual rightness in action, an advocacy for engaging the material world. The final three lines could be read as Shmuel’s rejection the “good teacher’s” manliness, and thus chauvinistic, but I like to think he’s also making a statement about the emptiness of thanking God for having a cock. I like that in an eleventh century poem.

I recently visited Granada and toured the Alhambra. My first instinct was that Europeans had deeply influenced the Moors, and that the Moors had adopted Christian-Europe’s palace-building style: long, pooled courtyards ringed with orange trees and columned, vaulted walkways, impossibly high-ceilinged rooms with secret crannies in which one might imagine a mad Hamlet sequestering a desperate Ophelia, elaborate gardens, towers, dungeons, garrisons. I was wrong. The Alhambra, it turns out, was the blueprint for the Europe. It was where medieval Europe went to learn science, architecture and culture. I imagine Shmuel at the beginning of this compound’s magnificent development, his nights spent in its tight garrisons cramped amongst his soldiers, his days in the elaborate halls of powers.

But this is but a fraction of the book. Spanish Jews invented the Qabbala. And, like any kooky revolutionary religious movement, Qabbalism wasn’t developed in isolation anymore than was its recent celebrity cult following. Would-be mystical messiahs ran rampant through late-Moorish Spain. Who can blame them? The caliphates were losing strength, and infusions of power from North Africa inevitably brought with them fundamentalist restrictiveness. The Christians’ intents were never in question. Dependent upon a repressive failing state for sanctuary from an encroaching, genocidal army, Spain’s Jews quite reasonably hoped for an end-of-days way out. Fortunately, despair and mysticism are potent poetry-inducers.

Take the Qabbalist Yosef Giqatilla, who, granted, lived quite some time before the Reconquista’s success.  He found his way to prison, where he continued to write. This is from his prison poems. Goths eat your hearts out:

1. As Love Lives

As love lives, fly – O birds – to lovers
with greetings from suffering men, held in the ground,
and tell the world, I beg you, they’re hungry and thirsty,
though bread of their tears and blood of their hearts abound.
They’re cast like unwanted births, deep in dungeons,
where lice and fleas and mosquitoes feast on their flesh,
and tiny creatures that have not names yet jostle
against one another, like lovers in frenzies of lust.
Flies buzz at the bees, the rodents gnaw,
their teeth attacking body and soul exposed –
and jailers and soldiers harry the prisoners, as ordered.
and no one brings them a morsel, not even the crows. (263)

His other prison poems range from threats based in God’s avenging power to despair at God’s abandonment.

Of course this is but a tiny sampling from a 540-page book. I love this book because it makes me want to live in Moorish Spain. It makes me wish – I think justifiably – that the Reconquista had failed. When I read it, I want to be Shmuel HaNagid

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