Personal Days.  Ed Park.  Fiction

First, let’s talk about this badass cover.  LOVE IT.  Though it should be noted that my mother couldn’t tell me what the title was…so I guess it depends who your audience is.  If it’s me, you’re golden.  If it’s my mother, you’re dead in the water.

I really liked this book, though I couldn’t come quite around to love.  Park’s book, especially the beginning,  has a lot of similarities with Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came To The End, if only because of the first person plural voice that he uses in his first section (and which Ferris uses almost throughout).  And I had the same reactions to both of them – I loved the voice – a corporate we – that envelopes both all of the characters and none of the characters – and it worked so well from a humorous standpoint and as a unifying cry (i.e. ‘boy do I know how THAT feels’).  However, that same point of view also distanced me and made it impossible for me to really care about the characters.  Both books worked better for me as fascinating well written experiments than as engaging emotional tales.  The cast of characters in both books is large, and because of the voice (among other things) it’s often hard to tell them apart, which is perhaps done on purpose – when we all work in a cubicle aren’t we all the same worker bee drone?  But ultimately I felt held at arm’s length in both books and while it was successful in it’s experimental task,  it’s an experiment that left me wanting more.

In Then We Came To The End, Ferris switches his novel’s voice just when I was about fed up with it and used a third person POV for one of the characters much speculated about through the rest of the book as she struggles with illness.  It was a brilliant maneuver, and one that saved the book for me personally.  But because we had never been with that character until that point, and we never revisited her in that way again it still felt removed and kept me from embracing the book fully.

[SPOILERS]

In Park’s Personal Days, he does a totally different but equally as risky trick in his third and final section.  Part three is one massive (40 page plus) email written from one character to another.  I’m still on the fence as to how I really feel about it, but regardless of what I decide, it remains a brilliant experiment.

It should also give writers everywhere some hope – since we are constantly told – from readers, agents, editors, and other writers “SHOW DON’T TELL” –  that tell can totally work if done effectively.  Park’s part three is the definition of tell.  One character relaying through email to another character, everything that was under the surface and unsaid in the previous two sections.  Brilliant and risky.  But I still couldn’t really connect with anyone.  And so I remain conflicted.

Parks novel, without a doubt is for anyone that toils (or has toiled) in an office (especially a corporate one) and also for anyone that has faced layoffs (which in this market is just about everyone) so Park’s book should be wildly successful.  I think anyone that has worked in an office can thoroughly enjoy this book and relate, and it’s great for a laugh as you recognize yourself and your annoying office and even more annoying co-workers in the pages, but for me at least, it lacks a final ability for me to be able to connect and empathize with the poor souls trapped in the pages.  It should be easy to empathize because they’re me, but something doesn’t quite click on that level and so for me it remains mostly a brilliant experiment.

3.5 Stars

If you want to read a REAL review of Personal Days, check out the New York Times Book Review of it.  I remain, as ever, not even close to the level of the NYT.  <le sigh> Someday.

Things That Pass For Love.  Allison Amend.  Short Fiction Collection

This is a solid and lovely collection of thirteen stories that flow together beautifully, unlike many of the collections I’ve read.  It’s no small feat to make all your stories both unique and also connected in some way, and Amend does it here, perhaps solely through her writing style.

Overall though, I was disappointed in about half of the stories.  They skated the edge of brilliance for me, but never quite got there.  The first story, Dominion Over Every Erring Thing,  is a perfect example of this.  From the first line I was absolutely riveted (and it was actually that first line that convinced me to buy this book over another) however, I don’t feel the story finished well.  At all.  It was not as significant as it should have been, or as powerful as it could have been.  Other stories in the collection finished better – The People You Know Best; And Then There Was Claire; and A Personal Matter finish particularly well while others What Was Over There Is Over Here and  Sometimes It’s Like That were filled with potential, but ended unsatisfactorily for me like the first story.

In the end I loved about half of the collection and felt only mediocre about the rest.  For me, Amend’s strongest were:  The World Tastes Good; A Personal Matter; Bluegrass Banjo; The People You Know Best; and And Then There Was Claire.  These were all powerful, emotionally resonant, beautifully written, and had earned endings that felt real to me.

The rest, for me, came very close, but ultimately fell short.   However, the fact that some of these stories did not work for me personally should not imply that I don’t think very highly of Amend.  She has a beautiful and haunting style that I will actively seek out in the future and I look forward to her next collection to see how her work evolves.

3.0 Stars

Tea and other Ayama Na Tales.  Eleanor Bluestein.  Short Fiction Collection.

Today 1979 Semi-Finalist is featuring a stop on Eleanor Bluestein’s Blog Tour for her debut short fiction collection, Tea and other Ayama Na Tales.  Today’s post is my review of Bluestein’s book, but please come back on Monday, April 20th, for my interview with her.

On Monday I will also be announcing the winner of a free copy of her book courtesy of Ms. Bluestein,  BkMk Press and TLC Book Tours.  Enter to win by posting the name of your favorite short fiction collection (or stand alone story, or novel if you’re not big on short fiction – yet!) in the comments below and come back Monday to see who won.*

Bluestein’s Ayama Na is an amazing and intricately drawn world, so well conceived and elegantly plotted that if she didn’t admit straight off that it was fictional I would have spent hours online searching for the tiny nation, wondering how I’d missed it in the history and geography classes of my youth.

I don’t know what inspired Bluestein to create such a layered and fascinating nation for her fictional tales, but it’s a stroke of genius.  I loved how her stories flowed together, they were arranged in the perfect order, one flowing into another flawlessly, the characters connected by their Ayama Na heritage, but not connected so closely that our journey through Ayama Na was small.  I felt through the stories a complete sense of the entire nation of Ayama Na from its war torn countrysides to its teeming and shaky urban development.

I thought Hamburger School, AIBO or Love at First Sight, and North of The Faro were incredibly well crafted tales – beautifully written character studies within her fascinating world.  They were the true standouts for me of the collection.

Read the rest of this entry »

Like You’d Understand, Anyway.  Jim Shepard.  Short Fiction Collection.

I feel a little bit like I’m the guy Shepard is talking to in the title.  Because, sometimes, I just didn’t understand (anyway?).  There were stories in this collection that I absolutely adored (The Zero Meter Diving Team; Proto-Scorpions of the Silurian; The First South Central Australian Expedition; Eros 7;  Courtesy for Beginners; and Sans Farine) but others left me bored and frustrated.

I don’t blame Shepard though, he’s a beautiful writer,  and I suspect that it’s more my failing as a reader. Shepard deals largely in this collection with brotherly relationships – and I certainly don’t have a problem with brotherly relationships, but as a woman, it’s not my most relatable subject matter…and so when most of the stories trend this way (as they do) I found myself a little bored.

Additionally, Shepard writes in a fantastically descriptive way and I just generally prefer a more sparse style.  For example, in Eros 7, which turned out to be one of my favorite stories, the first line that really truly drew me in was:

“I will become, then, the tenth person, the sixth Russian, and the first woman in space.”

Great sentence, but it comes three paragraphs in, and buried at the end of one.  Now, this doesn’t matter too much when I’m reading a collection, because I’ve already committed to (and likely purchased) the book, but if I’m reading a story in a literary magazine, then if you don’t have a line that draws me in before the third paragraph, I’ve probably already put your piece down.

Chalk it up to a short attention span and (relative) youth I guess and I’m happy to take the blame for it…but as a writer of both full length and short fiction works I guess I feel like it’s asking for a lot these days to make me wait three or four paragraphs for the great sentence that maybe just should have been the first line.  Perhaps more established writers like Shepard (he’s previously published the novel Project X and Love and Hydrogen: New and Selected Stories as well as a handful of other works including five more novels) have the clout, either through name or reputation that better readers than me will hang in there with him regardless of when the hook comes in the story.  Certainly all of the pieces in this collection were published by incredibly prestigious publications (including McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, and Tin House) – but I don’t honestly believe that a less established writer would be given such a long rope…and that pisses me off a little bit.

In the end, I can’t condemn the collection, beyond having a fantastic title and cover (which are two of my “should I buy it benchmarks”), the stories, even the ones that didn’t wow me, were still incredibly well crafted and strong – telling tales that quite frankly – may be beyond me.  But it just did not speak to me personally or emotionally.  I got bogged down in descriptive details that I didn’t care about and even had trouble understanding and connecting to the various relationships Shepard presented.  When it worked for me (Courtesy for Beginners) it worked so very well, but when it didn’t (My Aescheylus) I was epically disappointed.

I’m going to log it at 3 Stars – solidly in the middle – with the knowledge that it probably deserves better.  Maybe I’ll try it again in another couple years and see if I’ve matured to Shepard’s level.