In 1932, eleven years after Trotsky crushed the rebellion at Kronstadt, and a few years before the purge, a smart young Soviet writer called Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky sent out a collection of stories for publication. A well-known figure in Russian literary circles, Krzhizhanovsky had not, until that point, had much success. In the land of “dialectical materialism,” Krzhizhanovsky was known, not without reason, as a Kantian, which is a bit like being a socialist in Texas. Nevertheless, on the strength of his reputation, the manuscript managed to scale the gray heights of cultural bureaucracy—passed, one assumes, in triplicate, from functionary to functionary—until it landed in the soft hands of that most disheartening functionary of them all, Mr. Maxim Gorky.

Gorky was not impressed. Like the “notes” given by the simple-minded fuck-wits who always seem to govern major cultural institutions—I’m looking at you, network TV—Gorky’s reply reminds us why Official Culture is so often a contradiction in terms. As he put it, the stories were, “more suited to the nineteenth century” and thus, in Caryl Emerson’s paraphrase, “unnecessary to the tasks of the working class.” Although Krzhizhanovsky would keep writing, this casual judgment essentially ended his career.

And get this: the silly bastard didn’t even quit. With no market, and no access to the party’s printers, Krzhizhanovsky kept plugging away, finishing over 150 experimental prose works, a dozen plays, and a whole mess of criticism, nearly all of which went unpublished, unperformed, and untranslated. Even during the war, with the Nazis at the gates, he stayed in Moscow, working; and it was only in 1945 that he decided to quit, feeling, as his longtime companion puts it in Caryl Emerson’s fantastic introduction, “a played out player, a loser.” By the time of his death in 1950, Krzhizhanovsky had published nine stories.

There is no happy ending; like so many stories of Soviet life, the biography of Krzhizhanovsky is an unqualified bummer. But for us, there is good news: sixty years after his death, the New York Review of Books has published a translation of The Letter Killers Club, one of Krzhizhanovsky’s many experimental novellas, and it is very, very good. While there are many reasons to read this book, let me give you just one: we have, in these glorious pages, final, unequivocal proof that Maxim Gorky was an idiot.

The Letter Killers Club begins with a strange but successful writer who has decided to quit publishing. Confused by this decision, our narrator, a kind of literary everyman, comes to the reclusive writer’s residence, where he learns the truth. The writer, waxing nostalgic, returns to the poverty of his pre-literary days, where, “Besides the desk that served as a cemetery for my fictions, my room contained: a bed, a chair, and bookshelves… the stove was usually without wood, and I without food.” One day, he receives a telegram telling him that his mother is dead, and to make the funeral, 700 miles distant, he is forced to sell his library. When he returns, there is nothing for this isolated bachelor to do but remember the stories he has lost.

Through some strange psychic alchemy, the act of re-imagining these lost classics allows our writer, as Hilary Clinton might put it, to “find his voice.” Soon, his stories are being accepted by major magazines; his books are published, to acclaim; and he becomes what newspapers call a literary icon. Like other literary icons, our writer quickly becomes “drunk from the ink.” He plunders the canon, wildly throwing his “concepts” into print, emptying his pockets of words—until, tragically, he finds himself bereft. As he somewhat oddly concludes, the juice of his works was squeezed from old masters; as he runs out of classics to plunder, he runs out of words.

Like some literary scrooge, his solution is to hoard. “Sometimes,” he tells us, “out of long habit, I was drawn to paper, and a few words would steal out from under my pencil: but I killed those freaks…” He dreams of concepts which might “grow and bloom for themselves,” without the barbaric limitations of print. Fleeing the bloody inkwell, our writer founds a club, for writers who do not wish to write. One by one, the members—taking nonsense names like Tyd, Zez, Das, and Hig—give an unwritten story. It is these stories that form the bulk of The Letter Killers Club.

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

The first ex-writer tells the story of two actors, Guilden and Stern, who compete for the love of a woman (Phelia) and a role (Hamlet). Struggling to meet the challenges of playing Hamlet, Stern encounters Role, who takes him to “Hamletburg,” a spiritual home for old Shakespearean actors. Greedily surveying the lines of old greats, Stern comes across Burbage. Oddness ensues. At one point, our narrator, Rar, is caught rustling papers in his coat pocket. The others are outraged. Zez jumps up, and accuses Rar of being an accursed ink-man: “Did you smuggle letters in here?”

The story, like The Letter Killers Club as a whole, dramatizes, more than anything else, a person’s capacity to dwell in mind-fucking metaphysics. Our narrator leaves the club disturbed: “The evening seemed like a black wedge driven into my life.” The next story gives us the Feast of the Ass, when the Christians of a local shire march on their church to enact an “inverse Mass” of ecstasy, sacrilege, and profound ass-cruelty. On this day, Francoise, a well-loved peasant, and Goliard, a “strapping lad,” plan to marry. In the church, as they announce their vows, the wild mob cries out: “And me!” “And me!” The story ends with Francoise rising from her marriage bed, to wander alone in the night, plagued by a mass of spectral bridegrooms.

Each of the stories in The Letter Killers Club has either the perfume or stink of German metaphysics; this is, for better or worse, where Krzhizhanovsky finds his home. In the next story, we follow Tutus, an engineer, who helps to invent a device called the “exes,” an “ethical machine”of social control. With a casual “blast of ether wind,” this machine “drives the ‘I’ out, into the world,” where it can be remotely and rationally re-configured. Tutus, captured by the sad modernist dream of a completely rational and efficient society, aims to “rebuild all of human reality: from top to bottom”:

We must socialize psyches; if a blast of air can blow the hat off my head and drive it before me, then why not blow the entire psychic contents hiding inside people’s heads out from under their craniums with a controlled stream of ether; why not turn every in, damn it, into an ex.

Things, of course, do not go well. An “international government” buys the device, and uses it to put the insane to work. The initial phases of the project are spoiled by “unaccountable scrawls of will” and “highly complex and elusive fauna of the brain.” People revolt; armies of “ex-persons” patrol the streets; the streets themselves are rebuilt “as straight as bowling alleys.” As the ranks of ex-people grows, Tutus begins to realize his dream of “a reality that was read off meters, correctly dosed and distributed.”

This is great science fiction; and our narrator, like us ink-addicted readers, is frustrated to see this slim bit of brilliance wedged between oddities and obfuscation. Though not as egregiously experimental as comparable modernists, Krzhizhanovsky often has us wishing, like that sad reactionary Gorky, that he would put down his well-thumbed editions of Kant’s Critiques and Tell the Fucking Story. Rar, the most sympathetic of our letter killers, puts this another way: “A conception without a line of text, I argued, is like a needle without thread: it pricks, but does not sew.”

After these relatively minor mind-fucks—the thinking about thinking and stories about stories—you return, as always, to the sentences. And in my opinion there is, quite simply, something rather nice about Nig blowing “the downy clocks off dandelions.” Though he was never quite professional, Krzhizhanovsky is always a pro, and this short book is littered with damn fine throwaways. There is the passer-by, “who left nothing to posterity but odd pages from untitled drafts.” There is the clown, who sees “the loneliness and homelessness of laughter, seraphically pure, sewn from dazzling scraps.” There is the “narrow black street” which stretches ahead “like a thread that had slipped the needle.” For Gorky, tasked with the onward march of History, this wasn’t enough. For us, raised in the general pigsty of monopoly culture, The Letter Killers Club is wonderful reminder of what a great writer can do, “a holiday lost among weekdays.”

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After finishing Monster Party, Lizzy Acker’s debut collection of stories, the temptation is to make grand, specious diagnoses about this or that “generation.” The fault is not Acker’s: stories about young people hanging out, risking their bodies, drinking, fucking, crying and the like generally attract the old critical reflex to make grand pronouncements about Kids Today. They are, the familiar argument runs, isolated, rootless, apolitical, sarcastic, and cynical. As usual, these claims are as much about “kids today,” as they are about our deeply felt concerns about the future of community.

Acker, thank god, is not nearly as pretentious as this. Her collection of stories depicts the lives of adults who see themselves apart from history. In so doing, she gives us a clear view of history’s sad effects. Her young people muddle along in the usual way, at a time when the usual trajectories of American middle class life have begun to disappear. While Acker’s stories are firmly American, her characters appear as so many migrants from suburbia: unattached, rootless, and free-floating. In the fifties and sixties, this might have been the attractive, rebellious choice, the old romantic escape from the stupefying routines of office work and the deadening banalities of suburbia. For the characters of Monster Party, such detachment hardly seems like a choice at all. Here, rebellion blurs into exclusion, and the old celebration of dropping out becomes the new horizon of scarce and precarious jobs.

Monster Party begins with a story of four-year-old Lizzy. In “The Basement,” we follow Lizzy as she escapes the gaze of her mother and descends into a college basement, where she is told by a slightly older boy to take off her pants. He can, he says, put them in Playboy, “this book with pictures of girls with no clothes.” This childish world of partial knowledge and serious play sets up her other stories, in which the drunken parties of adults suggest frustrated lives. In “There’s a Drunk Lady Selling Jewelry on QVC,” friends Lizzy and Joe talk shit to the television and decide to cut each other, to break their boredom. “I want to try things,” Joe says. “I think the world needs us to try this.” And so they make each other bleed—the teenager’s search for an empty thrill again spilling over into adulthood.

Lizzy Acker

On the one hand, these characters are kids; on the other hand, we fear that kids are all they can ever be. In “Dave is Looking for the Devil and He Wants to be Friends,” Acker shows the friendship of a student with her former professor. The clichéd scenario—the messy, regretted ingestion of forbidden fruit, the tawdry encounter of a young woman with an flabby, too-hairy fifty-something—is obviously present, as Dave and the woman, like so many other Acker characters, drink and joke. When he employs her to clean his house, the narrator begins to realize the truth: the problem with Dave, the real reason that she shouldn’t sleep with him, is not that they are of a different age, or that he was once her teacher, but that he is of a different class. He has a “real professor’s house.” “It was,” she tells us, “three stories and the grass in the lawn was green. The porch was deep and had furniture and stretched along the full side of the house.” As she walks around the house, thinking about where to begin, it becomes clear that “it was a fully clothed house that wanted finger paintings and A+ spelling tests posted with magnets on the fridge.” The story ends with the narrator ringing a boy and heading to a bar. Here, as elsewhere, her characters do not have plans; nor do they particularly care.

In the title story, the most effecting and ambitious, the narrator reunites with her old friend Joe. Both in their mid-twenties, they visit a skatepark, eat steak and salmon, buy a lap-dance, and sit together, naked, in a hot tub. This loose series of events is typical for Acker: within an unexceptional life, there is no ambition, no grand claims to self-transformation and improvement. The narrator tells Joe that his girlfriend is sleeping around. Joe, a real-estate agent, stands, “like some sort of massive toddler getting out of the bathtub, hit in the stomach by a brick when no one was looking, panting, not knowing he should scream.”

When all of America’s prudes are thrice married and affairs are as common as precarious work, the dramas of Monster Party are not particularly shocking. Nor are they meant to be: the debauchery is generally strained or ironic, more listless than rebellious. The stories themselves read like sketches towards a lost novel: smaller scenes and scenarios of something larger, something looming off the page. This “something” may be nothing more than the common opportunities and limits of a generation. In the title story, we follow these adults slowly shedding their cuteness and realizing their horizon of sadness and pain. But mostly, these adults identify as kids: in “True Love,” our narrator jokes to Mike that Jared, another friend, has been hitting her. Even as a joke, this appearance of a real adult problem sends Jared into a tantrum. “Our relationship is canceled,” he announces, as he throws her out of his house.

In Monster Party, Acker makes scattered comic references to the apocalypse. This sort of thinking—that we are inexorably heading into collective oblivion—once again marks the incapacity of her characters to see themselves in history. They are fatalists, listlessly drifting into the probable storm. One hopes that they, like the possum with which the collection concludes, are only playing dead; and that they, unlike this possum, which is beaten to death with a rock, will awaken before life gets much worse.

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The Avian Gospels

If providing readers with hope for the world is one of the great dishonesties of contemporary fiction, then Adam Novy is as honest as they come. Novy’s first novel, The Avian Gospels, is a cruel parable of waste and degeneration, set in a rough hybrid of the American Midwest and post-Kosovo Eastern Europe. Given in two volumes, and handsomely bound in red and gold, The Avian Gospels is a strange and unsentimental epic of a post-war city-state that wages war against its own population while struggling with a city-wide infestation of birds.

Our hero is Morgan, born at the end of an earlier war and raised by his father, Zvominir, an anxious and conservative immigrant. After seventeen years of peace and poverty, the birds arrive: “a hundred thousand cardinals in the Square like a sea of dried blood.” They flood the city, blocking the streets, drowning the sky, filling shops and houses. The gypsies, an immigrant population, think of them as miracles. To the suburban bourgeoisie, however, the birds are an irritant, a danger to business, something that needs to be shooed away.

But there’s something you should know: Morgan can control these birds with his mind. So, as it turns out, can Zvominir, though he keeps his miraculous talent a secret and urges his son to do the same. But Morgan, always rebellious, begins to manipulate the flocks of birds as street theater, guiding them into formation, creating living portraits and depictions of historical scenes. And, as his father feared, the state takes notice.

In these early pages, Novy introduces all the novel’s major characters: the city’s sadistic tyrant, the Judge, and his wife, Mrs. Giggs; the Judge’s idiot son, Mike, who chases Morgan around the city with his gang of bullies; and Mike’s sister, Katherine, who pines after Morgan from afar. Behind them, Novy’s city is sparse and barely detailed, full of generic mobs and crowds: “Bystanders knew he was the Bird Boy, and looked at him with fear.” So much for the outside world. And the inside world is given in equally broad strokes: “It won’t be long now, she thought. I’m scared, he thought. What was he going to do without her, she wondered.”

Adam Novy

Morgan’s firebrand politics soon emerge. “I want a revolution, I want justice,” he tells his father, after a violent meeting with the Judge’s family. As they walk home, they meet a band of RedBlacks, the city’s police-force, and are beaten nearly to death. This is one of many examples of institutional brutality in The Avian Gospels. The city, we learn, is like a camp: there is always the potential for the vicious RedBlacks to beat or kill gypsy or gypsy-like bodies.

As Morgan becomes more radical, he falls in love with Jane, a true insurgent. After Jane’s brother is killed, she plots to “overthrow the city.” At first Morgan helps her steal from supermarkets and department stores; eventually, Jane convinces him to help blow up buildings. In one night, she destroys a bank, an armory, and a doughnut shop. “I used to believe in pacifism,” Jane declares. “Now I believe in this.”

Jane and Morgan come to live, with the rest of the gypsies, in a network of underground tunnels. Like a more successful version of Germany’s Red Army Faction, she is soon using Morgan’s mythic abilities to inspire a citywide insurgency. Morgan, still performing for the public during the day, follows her lead in the evenings and urges other gypsies to mimic her violence: “Get off your ass and blow shit up.”

Novy zips through the plot. Over several exhausting pages, we follow Jane as she robs a department store; then we see Morgan declared the messiah of the gypsies; then, Morgan lies to Jane to appear more sexually experienced; consequently, Morgan and Jane almost break-up; and after everything, “they finally fucked.” At the end of this slim chapter, we see that Morgan has learned a lesson, “that he had friends, he had a girlfriend, and the family he hadn’t known he’d wanted.”

Oh boy. But this cliché, given the glorious mess of plot which lies behind it, is barely more than a joke, a code Novy playfully throws into the mix. Novy’s approach is consistently tweaked. Following the promise of his title, the novel begins with a soaring gospel, full of bathos: “[I]f you could witness His wondrous methods you surely would fizzle in awe, so decent and grand is He.” That rude, un-Biblical “fizzle” gives it away: while there might be lessons in The Avian Gospels, Novy isn’t giving us any lectures.

This is a recklessly inventive novel. At times, Novy’s careful artlessness can seem sloppy. When the Judge orders Zvominir to keep the birds from his property, the dialogue is rough, tin-eared:

You will come to my house, and do your birdshow for my daughter, on a trial basis. Make it rated G, keep her happy, and don’t piss off my wife if you can help it, I know I can’t. Keep in mind how hot I am to kill you. I live about an hour from the center of town.

This craftedly implausible dialogue may seem, to less sympathetic readers, like bad implausible dialogue—but given the horrors this book contains, the violence, the carefully paced plotting, and the strategic destruction of sentiment—it’s safe to say that Novy is in on the joke.

And yet, if there is a joke in these sections, a parody of seriousness, then it’s an open question how much Novy is laughing along. The Avian Gospels is a novel of bodies thrown around by power, and of the violent responses such power often compels. Sometimes, there is no possibility of peace. The police state Novy gives us is about as familiar a political organization as one finds in the 20^th century, and the “terrorist” resistance which follows is no more or less brutal than any other. But as historically familiar as all this might seem, Novy has still written a cruel book—less about birds than about the simple failure of statehood. This is a strange, compelling, and relevant work of art.

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Among the many throwaway putdowns of creative writing degrees, one often hears that while these programs might well help with competence, they can never make talent. The old antinomy arrives like bad, expected weather: We see the third rate toiler, the talentless try-hard, the burned-out failure; and then beside him or her, gleaming in the dust, is the effortless genius, the prodigy, the born master who spits out classics between cigarettes. That this is all bullshit is often acknowledged, but the myth persists.

In this vein, to call Gregory Orfalea’s debut short story collection, The Man Who Guarded the Bomb, supremely competent might come across as one more uptight literary insult. But Orfalea, approximately a generation older than most of today’s MFA students, has competence to burn, and these carefully refined stories are master classes in craft. If this still sounds a little backhanded, it is; but given that the collection contains 1) a heartwarming story of adolescent romance in multicultural America, 2) a post-9/11 story of racial intolerance, and 3) a story entitled “All I Have in This World,” it is no small gesture to say that I liked it.

Take this passage, from the first page of “A Portrait of the Artist in Disneyland’s Shadow”: “Before I introduce the young lady at the hub of this ruckus, and the gang that surrounded the terrible ardor, let me part the dust.” Putting aside the urgent need for a moratorium on bad parodies of Joyce titles, I should say that Orfalea, a professor at Georgetown and author of two well-received histories, knows how to put on a voice that conveys the energies and tics of a character. But the phrasing and the cadence baldly announce these chops: not only those glaring chunks—“hub of this ruckus,” “the terrible ardor”—but the awkward rhythm of this self-consciously comic piece of pretension.

George Orfalea

But Orfalea’s builds better stories than sentences, and this first story is about the best in the collection. A quick and compelling narrative about adolescence in the California suburbs—with all the horny fantasies, best friends, front lawns, as well as some happy potshots at the old and ridiculous arithmetic of Catholic sin—it closes with a flash of sentimental warmth and leaves no hangover. The stories which follow are variously successful. In “The Chandelier,” a boy treks across a starving Lebanon in World War I, looking for food. Cut against the contemporary plenty of Pasadena, he comes across a city where his mother is said to have bought the last cup of flour. In “Get Off the Bus,” Frank Matter is ejected from a bus for looking vaguely non-white and discussing terrorism after 9/11. Where “The Chandelier” succeeds in being both political and singular, “Get Off the Bus” reads like a polemic, stumbling under the heavy importance of its politics.

But The Man Who Guarded the Bomb hums along, pleasant and sometimes lovely. Orfalea writes with the journeyman’s wisdom that conventions are there for a reason, that it is usually harder to follow the rules than to break them. The refreshing strangeness of “Vivi in Hell” is excused because the title character is insane. Although weighed down by some clichés and generic crazy-woman lyricism (“How does the moon avoid its eclipse? How does the grass avoid its trampling?”), this story does show Orfalea trying to move past vanilla sentimental forms. A counterpoint to the opening story of suburban banality, Vivi, unhinged, references Clytemnestra and Lady MacBeth and J. Alfred Prufrock—and dreams of revenge.

Though marketed as an Arab American writer, Orfalea’s stories creep across the West Coast. As it travels, the trauma of the central family, the Matters, unfurls across several disjointed stories. Orfalea sets up a series of shocks, a gradual revelation in monologues, slips, and asides, in an attempt to bring a novelistic plot into a loosely connected series of stories. But the collection hasn’t even finished its foundations when the final drama descends, and so readers might not be coaxed into the final shudder the author intends. But as much as Orfalea might pretend otherwise, his view of America is not dark, nor strange, nor even angry; and within the various dramas of The Man Who Guarded the Bomb there is a pleasant and worldly sentimentality which, as Eat, Pray, Love frolics its way back up the charts, seems important to reclaim.

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Let me begin by saying that it would be a mistake to judge Don LePan’s dystopian novel Animals solely on its prose. Whatever joy or interest one might find in Animals, it isn’t in the shock of language, the seduction of narrative, the pleasure of the text. Set after the widespread extinction of animal life on earth, Animals is a sometimes believable satire on the limits of factory farming, in which physically and intellectually disabled people are grown for the taste of their flesh. Re-categorized out of humanity, these “mongrels” or “chattels,” when they are not eaten, exist as pets for the bourgeoisie or as agricultural slave labor.

In proper novelistic fashion, LePan approaches this dystopia through the life of a chattel, Sam. LePan relates how Sam was abandoned by his overworked mother at the doorstep of Zayne and Carrie Stinson, a generic middle class couple nagged, by their daughter Naomi, into raising Sam as a pet. It is from here that the novel’s infernal machine unwinds, as Carrie begins to resent Sam and his influence on her daughter. While Carrie plans Sam’s disappearance, Naomi discovers that Sam is not a mongrel at all, but only deaf. The rest is rather tragic.

But LePan is not really devoted to this tragedy. He is more interested in politics. This story, provocative as it is, is perpetually interrupted by the novel’s fictional editor, Broderick, who gives us, in broad strokes, the history of how humans came to be “chattels.” Written with quasi-academic clarity, these interruptions carry the novel’s message—that factory farming is an outrage. In what might be read as a confession from LePan himself, Broderick declares, “I am unashamedly a man of fact rather than of the imagination.” Later, after another eight-page interruption, he admits, “I have no doubt spent far too long on the history and the economics—the big picture—when I know what many of you are interested in is the narrative of individual lives.”

Don Lepan

Nevertheless, it is the big picture—the economic incentives for factory farming—to which Animals is committed; and as LePan shuttles between history and fiction, he refuses to let a disturbing and tragic story speak for itself. E.O. Wilson and Ralph Nader, two other admirable public moralists, have also recently tried their hand at novels; like those books, Animals sometimes comes across as intellectual slumming, a nonserious supplement to the real work of political nonfiction.

To be fair, this is something LePan admits: The ancestor of this novel, mentioned directly at least three times, is not Orwell or Huxley or Zamyatin or Atwood, but Peter Singer’s great work of nonfiction, Animal Liberation. So LePan is not an aesthete—in this case, good for him. Animals reminds us—or teaches us—what most of us should already know: that it is possible (and even necessary) to speak of the genocide of animals. Like its equivalent outrage, sweatshop labor, factory farming seems to be awfully resistent to activism; but even if it seems unlikely to go away any time soon, we should at least know it for what it is.

As LePan tells us, the line between what is human and what is animal, often assumed to be natural or “scientific,” is always shifting to accommodate or exclude genders, sexualities, bodies, or races. Animals angrily rejects the legitimacy of these arbitrary lines, which strangely oppose one species against millions of others and justify an industrialized violence that seems to be getting worse. At a time when the only public criticism of a bacon burger with chicken breasts for buns is that it might be harmful to human health, I honestly wish that there were more writers like Don LePan.

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Let’s begin with something we can all disagree on: There’s nothing beautiful about nature. Gardens can be nice, I suppose, as are farms, zoos, and domesticated, furry animals. But nature itself, in the wild, is violent, ugly, and cruel. It grows by overrunning what already exists, by destroying life and overwhelming the order of things. This is something the Romantics understood: At their worst, they wrote about daffodils, dead legends, and the banalities of young love; but at their best they knew that nature, like history, was in essence terrifying and sublime.

What would Ali Shaw, the author of The Girl with Glass Feet, say in response? Set in the former whaling outpost of St. Hauda’s Land, a cold, wild and ugly island, Shaw’s novel is plump with nature writing. It begins with Midas, whose nerdy, allusive name fits his nerdy, elusive personality; and for much of the book’s opening we follow him snapping the local bogs and forests with his digital camera. He has two friends, the all-around good-guy Gustav and Gustav’s precocious offspring, Denver. Otherwise, it’s clear Midas doesn’t like society, or ordinary human interaction. In a clear figure for this disinterest in the human, Midas is described as seeing the world in photos—“they haunted the woods and lurked at the end of deserted streets.” As with the mythical Midas, modern Midas refuses to allow the real world to irrupt; it must all be representation.

This drab, self-contained existence is disturbed by the limping Ida McClaird, a mainlander. They flirt, in an awkward, adolescent way, and later she asks him out for a coffee. What follows is a drawn out, wonderfully frustrated courtship, where every approach by Ida makes Midas, who soon reveals himself to be an emotionally crippled fool, run away. As he concludes later, “He was plainly incapable of human interaction.” Though they’re in their twenties, their relationship is that of eighth-graders, each too shy to make a proper move. It’s a torturous climb to the eventual thrill of holding hands and sucking face. Shaw’s insights into the reclusive Midas are painful and ring true.

Ali Shaw

Oh, did I forget to mention that Ida has feet made of fricking glass? These glass feet, like nature, sound pretty, but in Shaw they read as a mix of the cybernetic posthuman—glass is a technology, after all—and the primal horror of fairy tales. Ida’s body, we learn, is slowly becoming infected with glass; glass cuts across her stomach, it spreads up her thighs. This mystical disease is a transparent metaphor for terminal illness—but unlike actual terminal illness, there is no real medicine here, no doctors, no hospitals. Ida never gives herself to science, never allows herself to be studied. The fact that Shaw gives us glass feet (instead of, say, cancer) testifies to this novel’s wariness of institutional knowledge, the brand of reason that reduces human life to utility.

Thus, Shaw gives us magic. But the magic of The Girl with Glass Feet is something less than the magic of Ben Okri or Salman Rushdie. Shaw’s imagination and writing tends to the unusual, but it’s tempered by rather ordinary dramas. “The rain,” he writes, “was a gray woollen join between the land and the sky.” But despite the elements of fantasy and the unceasing catalogue of strange perceptions, Shaw never gives us the surrealist jolt. He gives us little smiles, minor reactions, small reforms, rather than the revolutions demanded by more aggressive aesthetics. The juice of the plot, in the end, amounts to a nicely told love story, as well as the familiar tension of what Freud called the “family drama” of Midas, struggling with and against the shadows of his parents.

Indeed, Shaw all too often subordinates his obvious talent to the demands of his chosen form. This is not unintentional: while nature is excessive, this novel is not. The apparently obvious moral of The Girl with Glass Feet—that we should risk ourselves, that we should face down the sublime and take our place in the social and natural world—is belied by the formal restrictions the novel places upon itself. While Midas comes out of his shell, seizes the day, finds himself, etc, this becoming is always represented in terms of violence, and it’s not always clear that Shaw endorses it. Protecting the ego against the world, the book suggests, is a mistake, because the ego is already suffused with the world—by rejecting the world, you reject yourself. Yet Shaw, a writer after all, is clearly cynical about the ability of some people to leave their locked rooms and secret projects, their camera lenses and computer screens. He is cynical, that is, about any aesthetic of excess and risk, as we see throughout The Girl with Glass Feet, which is littered with suicides, hermits, and shattered lives, among a very small cast of characters.

It’s no accident that the action of The Girl with Glass Feet takes place on an island, away from cities and the unavoidable pressure of social life. This is a novel that rejects glamour and beauty in favor of that noticeably British aesthetic of shabbiness. “I think places take hold of us,” Midas concludes, towards the novel’s end—and St Lauda’s land is a dark and violent place. But this conclusion, one feels, is only tentatively accepted by the novelist himself, who sees the risks involved in such an admission: the loss of control, the threat to the ego, not to mention the threat to the novel’s form. Maybe it’s better, after all, if one doesn’t fall in love with a terminally ill woman; maybe Midas would be better to stay close to his camera, to stick to what he knows.

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There’s a lot to smile at in The Bigness of the World, Lori Ostlund’s Flannery O’Conner Award-winning collection—but there aren’t a lot of jokes. In fact, over the course of a dozen stories, Ostlund presents all kinds of suffering: death, self-mutilation, jail, child abuse, poverty, and an overabundance of breakups. As the title suggests, Bigness is full of characters confronted with the unmapped and unexpected, with newness and unthinkable difference; even as Ostlund’s characters wish for stillness, shit happens. As the narrator tells us at the end of the title story, “the familiar terrain of our childhood would soon become a vast, unmarked landscape.”

In depicting this unpredictable world, Ostlund is forced to leave behind the short story’s generic punch-line structure. While her stories often end with surprises, these endings, happily, never really seem to be the point. In one story, for instance, a character dies—but Ostlund ends not with some poetic meditation on the sadness of death, but with a table full of tourists, people who didn’t know him very well, who have a drink, make a few jokes, then change the subject. In two other stories, parents depart; the children, as they must, get on with being children. As Auden suggested in “Musée des Beaux Artes,” and The Bigness of the World repeats, in moments of suffering “someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.” In Ostlund’s fictional worlds, there are always other people—with their own stories, their own plots and themes—who can’t be expected to understand or even care about the central character’s sadness.

But this openness to difference, to other characters and other lives, is not as easy as it seems. To be sure, for a collection concerned with otherness and newness, Bigness contains an improbable number of Minnesotan lesbians travelling overseas, or teaching, or teaching overseas. Ostlund, though, doesn’t pretend that we always give a shit about others—while is full of difference, this is not the celebrated difference of the harmonious postcolonial soup. Ostlund’s characters are generally repulsed by the cultures they face: A hotel room in Belize has “the smell of raw sewage,” because “the toilet stood shamelessly out in the open.” In Malaysia, a wounded man sits outside the couple’s hotel, “groaning day and night, no doubt from the pain caused by the gaping wound that ran from one of his nipples to his navel.” On a bus in Morocco, three young kids are made to lie beneath their parents seats; while two Minnesotan lesbian teachers watch, the children are soaked by vomit that flows from the front of the bus. Ostlund’s characters are disgusted with other bodies, as well as the abhorrent and uncivilized aspects of other cultures.

Lori Ostlund

In this way, Ostlund rubbishes all the usual clichés about the wonders of travel. In one story, set in Southeast Asia, a group of Americans drink only with other Americans, because, “The truth of it is, they are all tired of dealing with non-Americans, tired of having to explain themselves and of having to work so hard to understand what others are explaining to them.” In Morocco, two women are disappointed by the desert because it is exactly what they expected. In Belize, another pair visits a community of Mennonites, to find that they are not entirely welcome. In the Malaysia of “Bed Death,” the characters’ apartment building is used for suicide attempts.

As dark as all this seems, Ostlund also provides consistently quirky, deadpan stories. “And Down We Went,” a story of nostalgia, loneliness and breakups, opens with, “I have been defecated on three times in my life.” Another breakup story, “Upon Completion of Baldness,” begins, “My girlfriend returned from Hong Kong bald, thoroughly bald, the bumps and veins of her skull rising up in relief, as neat and stark as the stitching on a baseball.” Later in that story, we read of “Mr. Matthews, who had gone on to post several signs in the teachers’ lounge announcing that he was interested in acquiring used Tupperware, the word used underlined thrice.” In “Nobody Walks to the Mennonites,” we are given the story of “Sara and Sarah, who, because they were visual people, did not think of themselves as having the same name.”

This antimony of the quirky and the somber, which runs throughout the collection, is introduced in the title story. We find, on the one hand, the narrator’s very serious mother and father, a bank vice president and a “PR Czar.” On the other hand, we have the narrator’s babysitter, Ilsa, an imaginative, constantly crying, Chinese opera-imitating, toothbrush-borrowing lunatic. Crazy people, of course, are useful, because they help us perpetuate the myth that there is an us, a community, a common sense, into which they don’t fit. In Ostlund’s stories, though, the pervading theme is the failure of community, a failure to understand or empathize with the lives of others. Such failures are most interesting and most tragic not between cultures, but between lovers—Bigness is full of women who share beds but little else. Ostlund masters the sadness of breakups—not the melodrama, but the empty inevitability of doors closing between people. “For at each turn,” she writes, “the people we hold close elude us, living their other lives, the lives that we can never know.” Relationships, she suggests, are profoundly easy to fuck up.

Writing-wise, Ostlund never loses control. Characters, too, never engage in dramatic battles, or throw temper tantrums, or wax lyrical. Instead they wax analytic: They give reasons for their behavior, they interpret their lives. These stories are tragedies without tragic heroes. Whatever her characters feel, whatever passions are roiling beneath the surface, Ostlund expertly leaves alone. But beneath her theme of unintended offense, of unbridgeable difference, there is always the threat of disruption, unreason, the return of the repressed. It is this threat that gives these careful, precise stories their force.

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Some novels seem to exist at the end of history, in unchanging, ossified worlds, worlds present like the static props of a cheap stage-play. This is not the case for The Boy Next Door, Irene Sabatini’s rushed but affecting first novel about the life of a young woman in Mugabe-era Zimbabwe. The story is told by Lindiwe, a middle-class teenager from Bulawayo, and runs from the beginning of the reign of “Bob” (as white Rhodesians liked to call Mugabe) in the 1980s to the inexorable tragedies of the 1990s. “Fuck Francis Fukuyama,” Sabatini seems to say, as every attempt by Lindiwe to slip into the dull dramas of the confessional relationship novel—she gives us teen crushes, domestic battles, inter-generational melodrama—is violently defeated by history. Mugabe, in short, is ever present in this first-person narrative.

This isn’t really what you’d expect: the novel’s ordinary title seems to be on loan from sub-Judy Blume Y.A. fiction. The first sentence, though, gives the game away: “Two days after I turned fourteen the son of our neighbor set his stepmother alight.” What follows is a fragmented quasi-diary of Lindiwe-filtered gossip, which relates how her neighbor Ian, the boy of the title and a white Zimbabwean (known as “Rhodies” for their nostalgia for white-governed Rhodesia), is briefly jailed for murdering his stepmother. When Ian is released, the then not-quite-sixteen Lindiwe falls in love. They have a brief relationship, which ends when he leaves for South Africa. For a moment it seems like she’s going to follow him—but this is the 1980s, and Lindiwe, classified as colored, is made to stay at home. A lot happens after this. The Boy Next Door is plump with potential spoilers, revelations and reunions, major and minor shocks, surprise turns of events. The first sentence, again, says it all: Sabatini clearly (and somewhat unfortunately) plots for the market. Everything is arranged for the impending jolt.

Without giving too much away, the central arc of The Boy Next Door is of Lindiwe building a life, and a voice, from the fragments of her parent’s world. She does this alone: she finds little parental guidance, no community support, no one to give her models of how to live. Lindiwe’s parents are both ruined by the civil war; and her childhood community of Bulawayo is, by the end of the novel, a wasteland of starving civilians and ZANU-PF thugs. Despite this ruined homeland, Lindiwe does find her voice—and what a voice it is. Sabatini, with her trick-free, cliché-and-all writing style, charms you.

Irene Sabatini

But here’s the problem: The Boy Next Door is not your average airport novel. It’s trying to be more, heaps more. It takes up the task of nothing less than narrating the postcolonial nation. For such a stupendous challenge, an author needs more than an engaging voice and a surprising plot: she needs to slow down. The Boy Next Door worries too much about the reader’s good time. For example, some time after Ian is released from prison, he finds himself helping Lindiwe and her father start their car. As Lindiwe tells it, “In the car, Daddy looked at his windscreen mirror and sighed. I was thinking of his hands. I was thinking of the lighter in them. The lighter that said Rhodesian army on it. Hot and burning.” Here and elsewhere, The Boy Next Door can read like a series of emotional highlights. Small, chronologically arranged fragments of narrative often jump from event to event, suggesting impatience, or uncertainty about how much should be revealed. Sometimes, we get too much, as in the rushed section-bridging device of Ian’s letters to Lindiwe from South Africa, spanning the last years of apartheid and into the 1990s. It amounts to three pages of pure plot, full of character signposts and historical fact-dropping: “So you’re at Varsity now… Lots of heavy shit happening in Soweto… So now you’re hanging around Frenchies and Italians… What, now you’re touring?… So now you’re a feminist… Don’t laugh I’m sitting my O-levels… now I’m taking pictures… THEY’VE FRICKEN RELEASED MANDALA… Sorry about the old man… I’ll be in Zimbo next Friday.” Later in the novel, Ian and Lindiwe talk about returning to Bulawayo, and again, over the course of a single page, we see Sabatini’s incessant signposting: “I wish I could drive you, Lindiwe…” “It’s fine, Ian…” “Lindiwe, they’re our parents…” “How is she, Ian?” “I don’t think I’ve ever told him I love him, Ian.”

Having said that, this is a serious novel, by a serious and ambitious writer. With great spirit, Sabatini has attempted an epic. She teaches us that Rhodesia’s new name and new mythologies—the Zimbabwe of Robert Mugabe—can’t erase the memories of the “dirty war. Notorious for it. Civilian planes shot down. Survivors hacked to death. Whole villages mortared. Babies shot. ‘Ancient history,’ Ian said.” Sabatini, moreover, seems aware of the impossibility of writing these horrors; while The Boy Next Door is full of violence, it’s mostly given through second-hand accounts: photographs, confessions, memories.

It is also a bluntly political novel—and like many such novels, it tends to announce itself as such. We have all the big political themes, often crowbarred in: racism, feminism, poverty, AIDS, human rights, the World Bank, the UN, globalization, the post-nuclear family. The jobs of the two central characters in the 1990s sections of the novel—Lindiwe is a student who works in rural areas with NGOs, Ian is a rugged photojournalist with an international reputation—appear rather obviously contrived to meet these themes.

It might sound strange, but you finish The Boy Next Door wishing Sabatini cared less about the reader. Then, she might be tempted to relax the impositions of plot-advancement and give us, slowly and carefully, the real story of The Boy Next Door: the everyday tragedies of the ruins of Zimbabwe. Sometimes, she does this perfectly. Towards the novel’s end, Lindiwe returns to Bulawayo with her son and sees in the cityscape the horrific scale of Zimbabwe’s decline. She visits the aviary, where she used to come with Ian, when they were teenagers. She is struck by the silence: “There are no birds anymore. I would like to think that they have finally been set free, but its more likely that those tame birds have all been eaten.”

In such moments, Sabatini reminds us that history returns, that it interrupts our clumsy ideas of the ossified, ahistorical present. We need more of these reminders.

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It isn’t lyrical, it isn’t fun, it isn’t a spectacle, it doesn’t beg for your attention—Nog honestly considers the absurdity and sadness of everyday life.

It’s enough to put most people off: A self-described cult classic and symbol of the 1960s counterculture, full of echoes from Beckett, shamelessly horny, periodically misogynistic, and set in a strange man’s mind—Rudolph Wurlitzer’s Nog is no airport novel.

Republished this year by the admirable independents at Two Dollar Radio, Nog has many of the usual features of the dreaded Experimental Fiction. Nog contains multitudes, it jumps in time and space, is stylistically unusual, insists on mixing fantasy and reality, and is utterly unsentimental. It also got a good review from Thomas Pynchon.

But in what sense is all this experimental? Pynchon’s much-quoted announcement that with Nog “the Novel of Bullshit is dead” gives the misleading impression that Nog is somehow sui generis, as though Wurlitzer came out of nowhere, as though his book singlehandedly changed the way we write. Nog, of course, did no such thing; and despite reviewers’ claims that this is a “singular” book, there is no page of Nog in which one isn’t reminded of the voices of Samuel Beckett’s Watt and Murphy. Far from coming out of nowhere, Nog is very much of the tradition—even the genre—of post-war avant-garde aesthetics.

Pynchon is right, though: It is surely not a bullshit novel. The multi-voiced narrator, whose name may or may not be Nog, completely rejects middle-class society and its values; Wurlitzer’s exploration of his unsound mind is careful and extensive. Early on, Nog (as we may as well call him) is invited by his neighbors to a party. Their nickname for him is “Dr Angst.” It’s raining, and he is soaked through by the time he arrives, so the host leads him away to dry off. Left unsupervised, Nog strips down before a random dinner guest and throws all the household medication into the bathtub before hopping into bed for a snooze. Later, tormented by the usual dinner-party insincerities—“What do you do?” “Having fun?”—he walks back into the storm to help an old maniac arrange driftwood and junk against the rising ocean.

Nog’s great dream is to control the content of his mind; and his tragedy is that “Memories crouch inside me, ready to spring.” Like Beckett’s Watt, he has a habit of listing objects in the world, in order to simplify and control it. But these simple, often childish descriptions are poor barriers against the persistent interruptions of other times, other places, other desires, and other voices. The interruptions are the usual interruptions of everyday life—but Nog wants nothing of everyday life. He wants to sit in a room and slowly construct his world: “If only nothing would grow, nothing change, nothing take hold and join where things take hold and join.”

Rudolph Wurlitzer

Because of this, Nog is a novel full of “I” sentences, simple statements of intent and feeling. But in the end, there is no “I” to Nog. He has no control. He can’t even manage Beckett’s great existential decision: “I am not thinking about going on and not going on,” he says. Nog’s voices and thoughts wander away from their source, refusing to come together and make sense. There’s nothing certain to Nog, nothing solid, no definite structures, no identity.

Wurlitzer’s aim, one can safely assume, is to undermine the great myths of rational, self-sufficient, economic Man, and to expose the suffering such myths produce. But what about rational, self-sufficient Woman? The novel begins with Nog enjoying the “thin ankles” of a girl walking on the beach, “her large breasts under her faded blue tee-shirt, the quick way she bent down, her firm legs…” Oh boy. As with Pynchon, Wurlitzer has a habit of using female characters to make theoretical points about male desire and the limits of male rationality. So, we have Meredith, the principle female character, who is always fucking, or naked, or getting naked on film. “I like it when someone just takes me,” another female character confesses. There’s no female character who isn’t described as attractive, whose ankles don’t inspire the narrator’s lust, who doesn’t end up fucking, or sucking, or talking about fucking and sucking.

These fantasies, like the fantasies of Pynchon’s Tyrone Slothrop, with their obvious debts to popular psychoanalysis, seem to me more out-of-date than misogynistic (note also the continual references to caves and slits and cupboards). For all its apparent counter-cultural chops, the core of Nog isn’t the endless fucking, the pill-popping, the communal living, or road-tripping. All this problematic plotting seems incidental to the simple and terrible drama of a man trying to live in his own mind.

Like Gravity’s Rainbow, Wurlitzer’s novel might be read for its place within the mythology of the American counter-culture, for its generic avant-gardisms; but that’s not why Nog is worth reading. It isn’t lyrical, it isn’t fun, it isn’t a spectacle, it doesn’t beg for your attention. Instead, it honestly considers the absurdity and sadness of everyday life: “There’s an emptiness, but then there’s always an emptiness.” Nog is a subtle and nomadic book, a great counterforce to the loud, sentimental, novels of bullshit that take up so much space in today’s literary landscape.

Still, like many of the great novels of its era—novels which explicitly confront or challenge hegemonic power and the limits of experience—Nog is spectacularly unable to imagine the lives of women outside of the porno-norms enforced by the heterosexual male voyeur.

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Spanish author Javier Calvo’s novel critiques pop culture by embracing its stereotypes

As everyone knows, Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” is a terrible song, probably the worst music Armstrong ever made. Sentimental in the worst way, well deserving of the dishonor of being the go-to background music for Hollywood romances, “What a Wonderful World” is a genre-stamp, a repetition-guarantee: as soon as you hear those strings, you know what you’re in for.

This song is one of two obvious allusions in the title of Spanish novelist Javier Calvo’s new novel, Wonderful World. The other is to an apocryphal Stephen King novel, also called Wonderful World, several chapters of which interrupt the central story. Right from the title, then, Calvo announces what he’s up to: he’s playing with genre. But that play seems to get the better of him, and the novel is riddled with generic characters, generic storylines, generic parodies.

The story takes place in an exemplary genre setting: the criminal underworld. It begins with Lucas Giraut, a kid with an advanced degree in art history, inheriting his father’s fortune. Lucas always knew his father was a strange man. The elder Giraut had a fear of sunlight. He spent much of his time in a windowless attic apartment and was a founding member the mildly mystical and definitely criminal “Down with the Sun Society.” Over the course of Wonderful World, Lucas explores his father’s criminal connections, discovering more and more about his father’s life and death.

Our sympathies are with Lucas from the beginning—but sympathy is complicated in Calvo’s world. After all, who is more likable? An overeducated rich kid like Giraut who puts his effort into stealing high art—or Manta, a fat thug, a self-hating dupe, who spends his days painfully translating his favorite Marvel comics from Italian into Spanish? Young Valentia, Giraut’s prepubescent friend, might obsess about killing her family and all the children at her school, but she loves Stephen King; Saudade, the utterly gross misogynist, is a connoisseur of pornography; poor, shallow Iris spends a night analyzing the relationships in Friends. Their chosen art forms are expressions of self, and Calvo’s characters mirror their genres. Most disturbing is Saudade, the misogynist, who has a “perfect penis” and love of prostitutes; in her approach to life, Iris seems to believe in the horrendous simplicities of Friends. For these characters, taste is as personal as other politics or philosophy might be to others: something worthy of obsession. It’s a form of rebellion, a way to assert themselves against the symbolic violence of everyday life.

Javier Calvo

Calvo’s novel is heaped with examples of the abnormal, the “insufficiently serious,” the subcultural—everything that rebels against the dominant culture. But here’s the rub: in Wonderful World, rebellion itself is commodified. The novel is scattered with references to the industrialization of culture, whether it’s the porn set, the art gallery, the bookstore, or the omnipresent billboards for Stephen King. Calvo wants to show that all art is, to varying degrees, exploitation: The bookstore is the endpoint for unpaid labor; the set of Friends was a factory floor.

For a comic novel, the world of Wonderful World is tough, full of violence and humiliation. But it’s not the violence that gets to you—the profoundly sad thing about Wonderful World is that the characters, in their urge to escape, turn to the generic comforts of industrial culture. Calvo seems to dare the reader to make the (somewhat snobbish) connection between culture and character, stooping to unsophisticated arguments against pop culture. Saudade watches porn, so he must be a misogynist prick; Valentina reads Stephen King, so she must be a psychopath. But, as Wonderful World ultimately argues, culture doesn’t determine anything. Genre is symptomatic, less important for what it does than for what it says about the society that produces it. And what Wonderful World says, amid all its violence and suffering, ultimately comes back to the corrupting force of market values.

While he isn’t optimistic about the possibility of an outside to, or an escape from, the market-based culture industries, Calvo sympathizes with the rebellious instincts of the abnormal and the outcast. In playing with genre, though, he dooms his novel to repeat tired generic conventions. The women in Wonderful World, for example, all have long legs and perfect bodies and are humiliated by men in various ways. Iris is a rejected porn actress; Hannah Limus is fucking the misogynist, Saudade; Valentina’s mother is a desperate old “cougar.” Calvo, a literary writer, would probably say that these characters are parodies, winks to the knowledgeable reader. And parody, it seems, means never having to say you’re sorry.

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