When a misguided Rumpus editor first suggested the idea of dueling reviews between myself and Matthew Pitt, I thought it meant we would crucify each other’s new story collections. While I admit that might have been fun, it would have been a real bitch. As it is, reviewing Pitt’s story collection has been difficult enough. Taking the stories piecemeal, it’s easy enough to imagine the kind of writer Pitt is and what he’s up to, but together it’s kind of like being a one-year-old child presented with a Baby’s First Blocks early-development toy. One of the stories is the star-shaped block and fits only through the star-shaped hole, another the square through the square-shaped hole, etc. Surely there is a more sophisticated analogy to discuss Pitt’s excellent work, but I’m sticking with this one. That shit blows your mind when you’re one year old.

—

On the first page of the first story in Attention Please Now, “Golden Retrievers,” the owner of Peticular Bliss, a kennel for dogs of the stars, feeds all sixty of her charges their designated vegetarian, low-cal food with special requests like capers and lemon twists out of their respective Fiesta-style ceramic bowls, then closes up for the night. The AC conks out while she’s gone—during a heat wave in August—and by the time she returns in the morning the dogs are all dead. We are told on this first page that this is “the meltdown of Susie Light’s Hollywood career,” but I barely even noticed this line until later, after the story unfolds as a kind of psychological portrait of Susie, who begins seeing phantom dogs everywhere. Eventually, we burrow deep enough into her psychology to find out that the kennel was Susie’s way of pursuing her dream of becoming a star herself: “Someday she’d groom the right terrier, nurse an ill greyhound back to health, which would lead to a producer or casting agent re-sculpting Susie’s life into the mold of instant fame. They would discover her.”

—

Full disclosure: I met Matthew Pitt at the Sewanee Writer’s Conference a few years ago. We didn’t really talk so much. I had a few beers with him and got the sense that he was a really nice guy. After reading his short story collection I felt like I had to meet him again, to get a hold on what the book was trying to do. We both happened to be at the AWP conference last month, so we met for lunch. Here is what I learned:

Matthew Pitt carries around a plastic coffee mug with photos of his daughter laminated to it.

Once, Matthew Pitt played the roles of both Stanley Kowalski and the virgin newspaper donation collector in two separate but simultaneous productions of A Streetcar Named Desire. Later he won second place in the Stella-Off, the Stella Shouting Contest at the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival.

He won a fellowship through a peace conference to be an observer at the International Criminal Court in the Hague, where he was asked for input on legal documents detailing atrocities committed by Slobodan Milosevic. He told me over a beer and an elk burger that he felt conflicted about that role. The documentation was important, he told me, but here he was moving commas around in sentences about overflowing mass graves. The grammar, the words, the punctuation—it all seemed so insignificant to him compared to the content.

—

Matthew Pitt

In the story “Answers to Frequently Asked Questions,” Q&A’s occasionally interrupt the story. It opens with a Q&A, but the answer comes first. Benny, who takes photos of prospective development zones for Manifest Destiny, a real estate company, returns home from a work trip to find the home disheveled and his wife gone. He convinces himself of the worst, that she left him, but soon she calls and tells him that a family member died and he should join her in Tucson. He immediately boards a flight. The disconnectedness of their relationship and the affair he’s been having occupy his mind. As he leaves the plane for a layover an object falls out of the overhead bin and hits him in the head. Impossibly, it seems to be the same “garish clay duck with a bright-green bill and a tuft of yellow fuzz on the top like a mound of grated cheese” that Mexican customs seized from them as they returned from their honeymoon. A Q&A appears:

Q: Could you just leave Kate by attrition? Take a few bags here and a few there, nothing too visible until the last trip, leaving only furniture and a page-long letter?

A: No. If he’s going to do it he needs to do it now, do it quickly, in just one shot.”

The wife, suspecting that all is not right with her husband’s delay, checks around on the Manifest Destiny website and finds that one of the properties listed there is their own apartment. She confronts him on the phone about this and he confesses that he posted it because he needed a twenty-four-hour connection to her. “I needed souvenirs,” he says. In place of her he needed something, and now, in her moment of need, he is making what he believes to be a necessary break.

—

A: Yes it is possible. Very possible.

Q: While acknowledging that Attention Please Now is a fitting title for this book—stories about characters perking up, being perked up, or perking up others from incontrovertible states of inattention—is it possible that the most pugnacious stories here are those that ride the tension between feeling and doing, an anxiety not unlike Pitt’s anxiety about editing commas in sentences describing atrocity?

—

Hey Jeff: Matt here, eavesdropping on your review. I remember that Sewanee conference, too. I enjoyed your reading (from Ovenman). Figured it was only a matter of time before we had our full, Parker-Pitt powwow. Then I looked up and ten days were gone. Profound loss, indeed. Those pictures you mentioned of my daughter, on my travel coffee mug—I can’t always reconcile the child she is with the baby she was, wrestling with one of those Fisher-Price toys. Shrieking with glee as she figured what went where. Seems like what we do as writers—attempt to structure and express in imagination all that we find sublime and haunting in life. And because we can’t tell those things over an elk burger and a beer to everyone we’d like to, we write our stories and turn them over, hoping they connect to whoever winds up voyaging through them.

—

I’ve read “Au Lieu des Fleurs,” another story in Attention Please Now, about five times, and, while it’s mesmerizing, I’m pretty sure that I’m still not fully getting it. The main character is a bureaucrat who’s lost his wife in a car accident. That same day he’d had budget reports to finish and he’d finished them. He’d never even greeted her parents after her death. He goes to a café where a shipment of food has been waylaid and so old rancid fish soup is served. He eats enough to give him a stomach ache and leaves. He tortures himself over his own actions, imagining himself kissing the walls in his dead wife’s parents’ apartment as some kind of restitution. Then he sees a place across the street advertising specials and he goes in but soon finds out that it is not a café but a funeral parlor having a service for public prankster and anarchist Mouna Aguigui, who himself purportedly found his calling to pranksterhood late in life, while working in a café across the street from a funeral parlor where he “saw my life floating away in bowls of fish soup.” He steals a handkerchief from the body embroidered with the phrase “In Place of Flowers Do Something.” The spectacle and the subsequent acts would seem to be a final (or perhaps yet another) prank on Aguigui’s part, but I think that’s irrelevant. These stories obviously are not in themselves acts, I would insist, but at their best they show us ourselves flailing in the grey area between thought and action with spellbinding results. Even if you can’t fit the shape of one story in the slot designed for another, the shit blows my mind.

—

Q: Isn’t this business with the Fisher-Price’s Baby’s First Blocks a bit much?

A: Yes. Yes, I’m afraid that it is.

Q: Does that mean Matthew Pitt won the duel?

A: He has. He has.

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No. No. I am for it. Maybe consult Jimmy Kennedy? More nervous. No. Yes. Sometimes, I could. Yes, and no. Not really. It’s broke. Not at the moment. Correctly, in a square on periodic identities. On a good day, thirty and change.

The above are my answers to the first paragraph of questions in Padgett Powell’s The Interrogative Mood. The novel contains one hundred and sixty-four pages of questions, with an average of about six per page, making it just under a thousand-question book. A brief sampling:

Wasn’t there a day on earth when not every soul was possessed of his or her own petty political and personal-identity agenda?… Are you a sweater person?… Will you believe me if I tell you that I am a little fragile, psychologically speaking and that there is an eagle over the woods out my window, and every day that I see him gliding around, with his white head and his big white tail, even though I have come to appreciate that he is as much a bird of carrion as a buzzard, or more—will you believe me if I tell you that seeing him gives me a small but palpable lift, and not seeing him a small quickening of depression?… If you find an unopened stick of Juicy Fruit gum on the sidewalk, will you chew it?… If one man suggested to a second that he resembled Ted Kennedy and the second in protest said, “I ain’t got no outside gorilla,” what would his remark mean?

Socrates would be proud.

I propose there are three cardinal approaches to reading this book. The first involves simply enjoying the questions, which are probing and profane and insightful and ornery and pleading and whimsical and serious, and which suggest varying degrees of amateur expertise on the part of the interrogator, such as TV watching and ornithology and auto mechanics and philosophy and fumbling romance, and which also suggest wide vistas of delightful and curmudgeonly ignorance. The second involves formulating answers to the questions—this might be developed into, say, a co-ed drinking game or, if one inclines to that sort of thing, kept on a more cerebral level of Oulipian textual experiment. The novel moves pretty fluidly along the continuum from highbrow to lowbrow.

The more controversial approach would seem to be the third, something Powell acknowledges by designating the book a “novel?” I’m not particularly interested in testing any particular definitions of the novel (we would never agree on one, anyway), but here are a couple which fit:

“Take a supportable idea and carry it out for one hundred and fifty pages or so.” –Padgett Powell

“A novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.” –Randall Jarrell

Padgett Powell

And there is a narrative here. There is a character: the interrogator. There is an I. We know things about him. He does some of the things we expect a character to do in a novel. He changes. He wonders why he is asking all these questions. He is not completely unlike the narrator of David Markson’s This Is Not a Novel, but his conceit is a different conceit: where Markson’s narrator is trying to write something, Powell’s narrator is trying to get to something—though what it is we’re not sure. Both narrators doubt their project in general, and their attempts in particular, sufficiently to engender a reader’s sympathy.

All of Powell’s work is moved along by language: No one else talks to you this way. No one else asks you questions like this. But more brilliant than the sentences are the novel’s variations in rhythm. The questions accelerate and then coast, oscillating from profound to pedestrian:

Page ten: “Is survival enhanced by man’s looking more and more like an elephant as he nears his grave? What is your mother tongue? Do you like to party?”

Page ninety-six: “Do you know the location of Albemarle Sound? Is ‘Philosophy by Kant, Bag by Vuitton’ funny? Have you ever registered a dog or other animal or otherwise dealt in animal registry? Are any of your teeth loose, or are perhaps all of them loose? Do you use the word befitting?”

Page one hundred and one: “Do you regard yourself as redeemed, redeemable, or irretrievably lost?… Have you done any mountain climbing? Would you eat a monkey? What broke your heart?”

The Interrogative Mood counters these tonal shifts with sustained digressions. There is a several page riff on excrement and art; Powell spins out a lovely little anecdote to discredit the idea that the art-maker is superior to the excrement-maker. The topic of desire also comes in for repeated, sustained riffs that examine its ebbs and flows, its justifications and perversions. Cheerleaders recur at great length: “Is the thing you notice about cheerleaders,” the narrator asks,

that while they do have those tight stomachs—I suppose by fashion one should say tight abs, they have no fat on their bellies—and it is arresting and interesting to see them, and this firmitude leads you right up to the breasts and your speculations thereupon, you notice how cheerleaders always seem to be refreshingly modest in that department, not amped out on silicone (I refer to the college girls, the professional sideline tramps are another matter), and you are on to the painful-looking perpetual smile that cheerleaders must maintain, and she is bouncing or otherwise celebrating the joyous routine, looking finally rather dumb, the whole thing rather dumb, not really her fault, or their fault, though you do fault her male consorts for being cheerleaders and not on the football team, what the fuck is the matter with them, and so there she is all hot and trim and bouncy and pert and full of vim vigor cheer and goodwill for your benefit, and you are supposed to want her a little and more than a little want your team to do well but you are nagged by this fact: you do not want her at all, and that not wanting has abrogated your wanting the team to do what she ostensibly wants you to want the team to do, and there you sit, a lost fan and a lost man? Do you see now what I mean when I say ‘gassated cheerleader’? Can the feeling of not properly wanting a cheerleader be expanded, not unlike a gas as it were, to express your entire purchase in the world, your total stance on desire and life?

There is a potential storyline here even Oprah, if she could forgive all the above, might find moving. There is at least some evidence that the interrogator is overindulging in pain pills because of a tumor, which may or may not prove benign, a possibility which lends some urgency and personal investment to these questions. Our interrogator may be dying. He may have failed in life. He may have failed even in this interrogation.

“Does integrity lie in failure?” he asks. He hopes it does.

He is complicated and manages to capture, in one man’s pose, an entirety of human experience. Isn’t that what makes a novel?

I’ll come back to the great interrogator of Western culture again in saying The Interrogative Mood may be the first 9/11 novel—maybe the first great 9/11 novel—that really nails it: The narrator is a redneck Socrates who has been given the green light through the chain of command to abandon the questions and waterboard. But he has refused. Instead, he will ask the questions and only the questions. It’s the most honest thing to do at times of great, wholesale uncertainty.

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It’s a strange sentiment coming from one of our most cerebral writers. The reader who lives and dies by perfect Chekhovian narrative structure in his endless quest for insight into the human condition wonders what a bloodless experimental technician like Marcus knows about the heart. The connoisseur of Oulipian textual limitation, who long ago confirmed there are no new stories and who has just completed his multi-letter lipogrammatic novel (written without vowels!), is flabbergasted that a demigod and literary genius expects said novel to include anything as clichéd and overwrought as emotion.

Marcus’s remarks echo those of other writers: John Fante once said, “Writing and storytelling, necessary but distinct skills—I fear I only have writing.” Donald Barthelme, who suggested that collage was the central principle of 20^th century art, used to implore students in his graduate writing workshops to “break their hearts.” The late David Foster Wallace, we’ve recently learned, struggled against and was tortured by his own estimation of his early work as too pyrotechnic.

I really like Marcus’s vague-but-supportable foundational poetics for 21^st century fiction. And if you’re with me, Canadian author Pasha Malla is writing some of the best short stories in anglophone literature today. Seeing as we’re experiencing a surge of great story collections—Donald Ray Pollock’s Knockemstiff, Wells Tower’s Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, and Kevin Wilson’s Tunneling to the Center of the Earth—that’s saying something. Malla’s The Withdrawal Method, published in the U.S. by Soft Skull, stands strong with this crew.

Pasha Malla

Malla’s stories are a strange assortment of short and long, which resonate distantly with the concept of withdrawal—not necessarily coitus interruptus, but calculated removals of the self. In one story, a documentary on dads follows its subjects, improbably, from their childhoods to their deaths. In another, Jacques Cousteau gives Pablo Picasso a piece of rare black coral, and hilarity ensues. In another, a guy’s girlfriend tells him to prepare himself for her full-body molt. In “Long Short Short Long,” an insecure music teacher’s rhythm lesson is misinterpreted by a particularly damaged student as a directive to snip the lovely golden locks of his most accomplished tormentor.

The stories innovate—sometimes in their language and sometimes in their form. Sometimes they enter GeorgeSaundersLand, though they manage to do so without joining the legions of Saunders imitators. But primarily these stories are crushers. Even the most heady ones, which you may be reading with Marcus’s poetics in mind and thinking, It might be difficult for me to react with sincere emotion to this particular content—even these blindside you in the end.

The stories in The Withdrawal Method work like this: engage with situational and linguistic comedy, develop in unexpected direction, show that scope of story will be broader than reader initially thought possible, develop in subsequent direction that is again unexpected in the counterintuitive sense that it is expected but the expectation is so perfect it seems undeliverable, confirm that indeed we are heading in that direction, reader is like, “No fucking way,” story goes slightly off the rails for a moment, seems unresolvable, makes reader surprisingly anxious, then: resolve, crush.

For example, in “Pet Therapy,” my favorite piece, a bonobo (a primate similar to a chimpanzee) in an animal therapy center for sick kids behaves strangely one day when he is let outside into the goat pen:

“Right away he started prowling around the pen, knuckles scraping the ground, breath whistling out through his nostrils, big simian head bobbing stealthily with each calculated step. There was something different about his movements, something dubious and predatory, and in that premonitory way in which animals can tell a storm is coming the goats staggered away from the lustful chimp, mewling.”

The bonobo then proceeds to fuck a goat, which sends everyone into a tizzy—the children believe the bonobo to be killing the goat. So the center’s board is convened and a the protagonist is hired to chaperone the bonobo and keep him from fucking any more goats. But the bonobo can’t stand him, and even seems jealous of his relationship with the female director of the center. The man has a past as a childcare worker that haunts him. We learn that in bonobo culture the males are at the mercy of the females, who tend to use sex as a regulatory device. Then a mix up with a delivery service results in the arrival of a gigantic depressed python which won’t eat.

I don’t really know how Malla gets away with what he does in this story, and throughout The Withdrawal Method. But it is astounding to watch him do it. And the comedy is very, very dark. It is also powerful and moving.

The U.S.-Canada border tends to be a one-way literary strainer: American work gets play up north, while Canadian books tend to be ignored down south. With writers like Malla (and his contemporaries Jon-Paul Fiorentino, Sheila Heti, Lee Henderson, John Goldbach, et. al.) breaking out, we should hope that border becomes more porous.

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