Finite Thoughts

Next to my bed is a bookshelf full of all the books I intend to read or have begun reading or enjoyed so much that I feel the need to keep close to me as I slumber. For a good while, Infinite Jest occupied the “plan to read” shelf, sitting there in its immensity, spine taunting, the book clearly aware that I am a slow reader and an easily distracted reader, the kind of reader who has five or six books going concurrently and is reading none of them with any expediency. At a little under 500,000 words and notoriously dense, Infinite Jest seemed very much like the kind of book I wouldn’t finish. So I didn’t start. Until, of course, I did (no book gets away with taunting me forever). And an unexpected thing happened: I didn’t once put the book down to pick up something else. I finished it. Every word. Sure, it took a good, long while and lots of hauling around, the book occupying entire compartments in my luggage whenever I traveled, the thing sitting prominently on nightstands in ways that felt a tad ridiculous. But I finished the novel, damn it. I persevered.

If it sounds like the book was a bit of a struggle for me, that’s because it was. Don’t get me wrong; I quite enjoyed Infinite Jest. The language is astounding and the ideas are huge and the effect is penetrating. This is not a novel about which I will soon stop thinking. I would very much like to write a novel as grand. But, good God, the thing can get tedious. David Foster Wallace has no patience for my impatience. It’s his world and he’s going to reveal it in as much intricate detail as he can. Even when that detail lacks any sort of internal propulsion, narrative or otherwise (save Wallace’s enthralling voice).

Plot? This novel has no traditional plot. It has moments that may or may not be part of a greater plot but are, just as often, nothing more than temporal segments extracted from the lives of fascinating characters. These moment/segments interrelate, but the interrelations occur most often in the gaps between sections (i.e.: in the spaces within the reader’s mind) as much as they occur on the page. The last tenth of the novel is mostly flashback and summary of flashbacks of things that occurred well before the events of the novel. The first chapter occurs after the events contained in the rest of the novel. We have here not a story told from beginning to end, but a rain of fragments, a splintered meteor ablating into luminescent parts that incandesce in loose formation, streaking towards us and begging to be assembled back into their whole. Of course, such an assembly is not fully possible, not for this novel and certainly not for life itself where our own moments come and go and end up contained in remembered fragments, some possessing great significance, some merely absurd, and some waiting unattended within us until recalled at a later time and imbued with a new meaning.

Infinite Jest occasionally teases with the possibility of a grand plot, but it ends right before everything seems ready to coalesce. The first chapter gives us clues as to what happened after the “end,” but all we really get to see is the effect those events had, not the grand events themselves. Those events are transformative, but Wallace chose not to write them. I think I like that. Much of our lives are about those things that come “before” and those things that come “after.” The events that change us are just that: events. They are not the change itself. Change is something else. Change is the thing that transpires inside all the other moments. Even the ones that feel mundane.

I have a feeling that reading Infinite Jest has changed me. Many books do. But this one may eventually get a place back on my bedside shelf. Alongside those other favorite with which I like to sleep.

Talking About He Is Talking to the Fat Lady

When I heard xTx was releasing a chapbook, I jumped. Glad I did because I’m now the proud owner of one of the few printed versions (#36 in fact) of He Is Talking to the Fat Lady; and I love owning printed things. I don’t even have to feel guilty for hording words. The chapbook is digitally available here at Safety Third.

This isn’t a review. This is a suggestion that you get a hold of the stories contained within He Is Talking to the Fat Lady. While a lot of writers are flitting around the edges of ennui and introspection, xTx is driving straight into the gut. The result is a collection of stories that combine physical violence and various kinds numbness to create a beautifully desperate look at emotional frailty and our attempts at resilience.

I often think we live in an overwhelming time, where none of us truly has the capacity to bear or even process the stories of horror and loss and struggle that flood into our lives through all these connections. xTx is capturing that overwhelming experience in a way few writers can.

That sounds like a review. Maybe it’s a review. But I intend it as a recommendation.

Finding Meaning in How They Were Found

The first time I read a collection of David Foster Wallace’s short stories, the depth of his fiction reminded me of the depth in great essays. The man had a point to everything he wrote; his fiction doesn’t just tell a story (in the same way his nonfiction doesn’t just, say, report on a lobster festival). He was always needling at something more important, something worth examining, something worth trying to understand even if understanding is/was impossible.

While reading How They Were Found, Matt Bell’s excellent new collection of stories from Keyhole Press, I saw Bell engaging in a similar process of digging. Bell – while a very different writer than Wallace – doesn’t keep to the surface. The stories in How They Were Found dig into essential questions. How do we organize our life after tragedy? How do we comprehend that which has no explanation? How do we uncover what matters amidst so much that seems so meaningless?

Confession: a lot of modern fiction bores me. Truly. Many of the short stories I encounter are well-written and nicely controlled, but ultimately unimportant because of their smallness in consequence or because they travel such well-trodden terrain. Bell doesn’t write that kind of fiction. Bell writes fiction that roils with a desperate want to comprehend this world, a burning desire to seek out and grasp some truth, even if it's small, even if it vanishes in a breath.

From the very first story that follows a man using a system of cartography to seek out a lost love to “The Receiving Tower” where the main character is losing his memory (in a possibly post-apocalyptic world, nonetheless) to the structural experimentation of “Wolf Parts,” “The Collectors” and particularly “An Index Of How Our Family Was Killed,” Bell has assembled a collection filled with characters yearning for understanding and propelled by a belief that such understanding is actually possible. It’s that yearning – that hope – that pushes us to care and makes us want to read more, even when the stories turn disturbing (helpful tip: read “Dredge” on an empty stomach).

Writers enamored with inventive structures and rich language sometimes produce impenetrable work that is more literary artifact than meaningful story. Fortunately, despite the complexities in many of Bell’s stories in this collection, they are still stories. Which is to say: they are good reads. Nothing feels overly forced; nothing feels done just for the sake of showing off writerly abilities or messing around with language for the sake of messing around with language. The structural choices within How They Were Found are the product of specific characters and their specific need for understanding. Bell allows his characters to present information in whatever ways are most meaningful to them. Sometimes, that’s linear with traditional flashbacks, but sometimes that’s in the form of an alphabetized list. The result is a collection of stories that feels born from the characters and not from the mind of some overly playful writer.

The collection, of course, is not perfect. The best stories (“Collectors” and “An Index Of How Our Family Was Killed” being my personal favorites), so outshine some of the smaller stories in this collection that, when going back to write this review, I came across a couple of stories I’d completely forgotten. This is not an uncommon problem in story collections. But, with Bell, I get the sense that it’s a consequence of him being a writer just beginning to come into his own. The collection is certainly well-assembled and well-paced, but there are softer spots, stories that lack the openness of some of the collection’s best stories, as if Bell is still working to find a balance between his desire to cross literary boundaries and his desire to make his stories meaningful. The stories that make this collection brilliant are the ones that Bell allows the reader to move through and explore. The stories that shine less so are the ones where I felt Bell leading me by the hand (i.e.: “Hold Onto Your Vacuum” loses some of its whacked-out strangeness once the sadistic Teacher explains the purpose of his violence. I would have liked if the meaning of the story had been much less tidy.).

Nevertheless, How They Were Found is an excellent collection and is worth reading by anyone who enjoys good stories. Even more so, it’s a collection worth reading for those who want their fiction to contain deeper meanings. Fiction, at its best, is a submersion into the questions of its age. And in a world of random violence, cultural wars and proliferating “truths,” I’m not sure there are too many questions more important than: how do we find meaning in all of this? Matt Bell explores that very issue. And it’s what makes his collection a true standout.