When you begin reading Benjamin Percy’s debut novel, The Wilding, you might imagine you are in for a riff on the classic theme of nature versus culture, modernity as alienation, primitivism or transcendentalism or whatever you like to call it, which has such a rich history amongst rural American writers (Kittredge, Bass, Abbey, Leopold, Stegner, Thoreau and Moon, to name a few with obvious influence on young Percy).

We are introduced to a set of characters whose relationship to modernity is problematic, and who all in their own ways yearn for a deeper connection to the primal forces which are usually lodged in a nature existing beyond the dominant human realm. The novel’s setting, a small city in central Oregon, is the ideal scenario for such dynamics, as the community is itself teetering between an old-school natural resource-based economy and subsequent culture and a more contemporary, Californicated tech and tourist economy (Percy eloquently details the stands of ponderosa razed to make way for McMountain homes with granite counter tops and trapezoidal skylights). As much as the Stegner style is in evidence, Percy actually has more in common with the rawness of Wells Tower, the narrative ambiguity of fellow Oregonian Peter Rock, even a Diaz or a Johnson, than he does with the old guard (despite the fact that he opens his piece with a Kittredge quote).

Wildness, it turns out, need not be sought in the geographical remoteness of an Ochoco Mountains’ hunting trip, or even on a military tour in the Middle East; rather, it is present in every rugged encounter between subject and object, more a question of perspective than context. Some of the grittiest moments in the book are quite quotidian, or at least domestic. A nutritionist’s experiences in a school cafeteria, a locksmith’s encounter with a customer on a housing tract street, a lunch date at a micro-brewery, these are instances of extremity equal to bear fights, cold creek crossings, Red River-style father/son masculinity feuds.

Hemingway was famous for his ability to bring the same narrative gravity and intensity to descriptions of a night of fine dining and big game hunting, and Percy has the same knack. His previous publications (two collections of shorts, the strongest of which, Refresh, Refresh, was read on Selected Shorts) demonstrate the same thematic concerns and the same mechanical discipline, but Percy seems better suited to the scope and cadence of the novel. I would expect even better performances from this author in the future. This is definitely a first novel.

John Cheever observed the “learning writer can be seen clumsily learning to walk, to tie his necktie, to make love, and to eat his peas off a fork,” and Percy isn’t through learning yet. But said sense of imperfection is appropriate for a book like The Wilding; we can see even in the writer’s encounter with the page the potential for abandon. Peter Rock wrote a novel a few years ago entitled The Bewildered and it tells a similar story in a very different way. Rock’s story is urban, and concerned specifically with young people. Percy is in the woods and his characters, even the kids, are decidedly adult. But both novels are imbued with a sense of danger, material and metaphysical. Darkness and disinformation are everywhere, communication and representation are bound to fail, the forces underlying the world are beyond control. As scary as such a message is, I think Percy wants us to take heart, as such wildness insures us that—no matter what—our lives will be full of reasons to live.

The Wilding
by Benjamin Percy
Greywolf Press
258 pp, $23

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Joshua Willey is a writer from California. He’s currently working on a novel about hitchhiking.

Bolaño mixes memoir, criticism, journalism, and fiction freely, and the resulting hybrid texture recalls a Herzog documentary or a DFW essay collection. Many of the pieces read like straight book reviews, and unless you are a scholar of Spanish and Latin-American poetry and prose, you’ll likely find yourself frequently opening your web browser. But even these are not to be trusted. Bolaño claims sections of James Ellroy’s memoir “are the best things written in the literature of any language in the last thirty years.” (223) Either he’s never read Sebald or he’s joking, right? Bolaño paints pastoral portraits of Blanes, the Costa Brava town in which he spent much of the last part of his life. In “Beach” he offers a four-page sentence which might be most touching description of overcoming heroin addiction ever written, in any language.

For Bolaño fans this is obviously essential, but the author’s love of literature and his faith that it can save us all, can redeem us, makes it a worthwhile read for anyone still clinging to the transformative power of the humanities. He describes the lives of countless writers, wretched and saintly. He loves Phil Dick and Aristophanes with equal fervor and trepidation. He pokes fun at Isabella Allende and Chuck Palahniuk. There are travel essays, acceptance speeches, half-cooked ideas on geopolitics. In a word, as with most good collections, particularly those curated by talent on the level of Echevarría and Wimmer (who translated 2666), there’s something for everyone. It will be nearly five months until FSG drops Wimmer’s translation of Bolaño’s early novel The Third Reich, so make this one last.

People who are confused or even angered by the Bolaño fad might find some answers here as well. Bolaño does not offer the narrative complexity of modernism nor does he deliver the philosophical or meta content of postmodernists. He is not looking to entertain or educate. His approach to fiction is almost phenomenological, existentialist, concerned not as much with literature as an art as with literature as a tool to pierce the spatial-temporal constrictions of material reality, and inaugurate a realm of pure possibility, where contingency is as much a blessing as it is a curse. After reading Between Parentheses one might return to fiction with new eyes. Bolaño does not front, he is interested in what is most important and nothing else. By refusing to kowtow to a literary world mired by hype, distraction, identity politics and businessmen, Bolaño maintains a critical purity and playfulness which is rare. He was in the game for all the right reasons.

Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles and Speeches, 1998-2003
by Roberto Bolaño – Ignacio Echevarría (editor); Natasha Wimmer (translator)
May 2011; New Directions (390 pg.)

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Joshua Willey is a writer from California. He’s currently working on a novel about hitchhiking.

Indie publishing is a tricky thing. As an indie publisher myself, I feel a sense of camaraderie with those who self-publish and create their own platforms from which they can spring. Vanessa Libertad Garcia does this with her first book, The Voting Booth After Dark: Despicable, Embarrassing, Repulsive, and yet I still find myself questioning the effort. Is it successful? Shall I recommend it to you, dear reader, or tell you not to bother?

It’s not as straightforward to answer these questions for self-published works as it is for those that have gone through the meat grinder of The System. Books that have been chosen from on high—and then vetted by editors, agents, publishers, fact checkers, spell checkers and an army of analysts—are not the same as those that have bypassed this literary gauntlet. Having not been scrutinized by dozens of eyes, having not been scrubbed and properly dressed before presentation, independently produced books are much more raw. Libertad Garcia’s book is certainly that, weaving and stumbling like the drunken characters she chronicles, veering from one topic to the next, often within the same sentence.

The trajectory of the book follows a cast of mostly unnamed characters*, through the 12 steps of an alcohol recovery program—here expanded to 23 steps, both moving forward and backsliding along the path—with chapters entitled “Anxiety,” “Realization,” “Acceptance,” “Surrender,” and finally ending on “Trust.” Many of these chapters seem to be misleadingly titled; “Anguish,” for example, seems to be more about a subtle despair or emptiness than the full-on existential crisis implied. It’s also far too humorous a piece for its melodramatic title, but perhaps this is a pointless quibble when there are larger issues at stake.

The collection as a whole is quite hit-or-miss, thanks to its very loose thematic ties. According to her press release, Libertad Garcia views the book as “a collection of short stories and poems interwoven into a gripping narrative that follows a group of gay & lesbian Latino club kids during the course of the 2008 presidential elections.” While this sounds like an excellent premise for a book, it is difficult to follow this narrative through the book itself. Few of the pieces seem tied to any particular time or place, and “Effort” is the only one in which the election is actually referenced, plot-wise, as the character heads toward the voting booth to make her choices. The rest of the pieces only occasionally project political awareness, idly referencing the Obama/Hillary debates or simply name-dropping candidates. Unfortunately, these chapters do not take up any particular cause for long, with the characters more drawn to drinking and clubbing than casting ballots. It is this thematic confusion that makes it difficult to understand the author’s decision to link the pieces together.

What exactly is meant by the phrase “the voting booth after dark”? The book’s cover suggests erotic tales of political scandal and debauchery, with a pair of pantyhose shown halfway down a pair of legs. This promise is not delivered, and readers are left to wonder what they are meant to make of the tales offered instead.

If the book is truly meant to chronicle the uneasy relationship that gay and lesbian Latinos and Latinas have with modern American political life, I would like to see much more in the way of character development. As it stands, I sincerely doubt that any of the characters in the book have a clue about politics, outside of a dim understanding that They Must Vote. The whys and wherefores of this need to vote, however, are not explored. No particular issues stand out as important to these people, and the most pressing decisions they face seem to be choosing the type of drugs they will ingest each night. Where is the political understanding in that?

Even if readers project the possibility that the “voting booth” is America itself, the club kids in these stories are deeply unaware that any ballots are being cast by their actions. They lack the self-awareness to be ashamed of their behavior or see that there is a bigger picture being drawn by their nightly parties and anonymous sex. All they want to do is to keep on partying, hoping that somehow they will make it to work on time the next day. This is hardly the milieu in which political understanding can be achieved.

In the end, I think that all readers are the same on one point: if a book fails to deliver what its marketing or back cover promises, the reader will not feel satisfied. The Voting Booth After Dark, despite its best intentions, leaves readers disappointed like a Change that has yet to come.

* Perhaps they are all the same character; it’s difficult to determine, as the third person narrative usually refers to females merely as “she” and the rare males as “he.”

There is so much information the narrative balances between the thick description of the transcendental high modernists (Beckett, Woolf) and the structure of a phone book. Without a doubt, TPK is unrivaled in its elucidation of the fabric of the post-’68 America (most of the narrative is pre-’net, which is significant in that DFW locates the “fall” of some sort of American idealism in post-war industrialism, not in globalization or the rise of communications technologies), but beyond a certain coolness; there’s a certain grace in chaos (think Cy Twombly). It’s a cold hard world, bereft of authenticity, and it’s not surprising the man himself chose to bow out early. Infinite Jest might be the greatest American novel of the last quarter century, but there’s very little love in it. TPK suffers the same absence.

Ansel Adams said “there’s nothing worse than a sharp picture of a fuzzy concept.” Étienne Balibar speaks of an instance when the reader, becoming too theoretically sophisticated, ceases to be a good reader; she is unable to “not know” (à la Barthelme), unable to blur her eyes at ideas which require the singular lucidity of ambiguity or indeterminacy. DFW was the greatest postmodernist—the Zizek of fiction, a Zuckerberg of the word—but he could no longer (or maybe never could) “play” in the sense Derrida warned us we must never forget to do. The nation itself follows him, daily drawing closer to becoming the type of image that Adams disdained. For that reason, TPK is not only the best novel you will read this year, it’s also the most important.

I had a friend who once attended a DFW reading, and during Q&A he asked the man in the white bandana if he liked to work out, which is admittedly cheeky but at the same time pertinent to the author’s corpus as well as his personal life. DFW, however, was obviously annoyed by the question, and declined to answer. Why? Was my friend too ironic? Was there something about exercise he didn’t want to engage?

In David Lipsky’s DFW profile, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, we meet a literary genius with an almost religious love of culture, of that peculiar, textually invariable magic which occurs when a work of art attains perfection (think of Dennis Hopper and Christopher Walken’s dialogue in True Romance). Said magic is not so much a product of content as it is of form; any content could potentially produce the glow, or as DFW called it in Fate, Time, and Language, the “click.” My friend believed exercise was a means by which to click more commonly and completely. Perhaps the very contextual invariability of this clicking was what got the writer down. If everything under the sun has the potential to be coached into brilliance, it is also all perpetually at risk.

For all its sprawl, it’s a fragile world. Tread lightly.

The Pale King
by David Foster Wallace
April 2011; Little, Brown and Company (548 pp.)

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After growing up in Oakland, California and studying literature in Portland, Oregon, Joshua Willey flew to China and commenced working a perennial series of day jobs. He’s currently moving to Mexico City and writing If I’m Not Back By Morning, a novel about hitchhiking.

While most of the poems in Coiled and Swallowed are written in free verse and sprawl enthusiastically like a drunk sorority girl across a bed, Crawford flirts with form in a few poems. This serves as a reminder to the reader: Crawford’s not just a young woman jotting down her thoughts. These poems are well-made—each one is crafted the way Crawford, also a musician, would piece together the lyrics and chords of a song.

Her skill as a poet is evident from the beginning. The book opens with “Spinning,” a pantoum, a rigid form that consists of a set pattern of repeating lines. Poems like this aren’t easy to write—Crawford’s success is proven by the way the form and content are
intertwined. The form is almost invisible.

Here, the personal situation of the speaker parallels what she hears on the news. Lines like “Westerners are fleeing war-torn Lebanon” are followed with the personal:

Suddenly, I have become estranged
My head spins with thoughts of you.

It’s not clear who the “you” is—perhaps it’s a friend who’s actually in Lebanon, perhaps not—but I don’t mind the ambiguity: it illustrates the speaker’s connection with her world. Tragedy is tragedy, even if it’s not her own.

Crawford sets up the reader to make other surprising connections throughout the book. Often, she uses the little things in life—a certain color, a song, the antics of a cat, jigsaw puzzles, even a spot of carpet—to help the reader understand a particular moment or a bigger concept.

It would be easy to dismiss a poem with a title like “Ode to Carpet” as a silly meditation on the stuff that covers our floors, but like Pablo Neruda’s “Odes to Common Things,” Crawford’s poem uses a common thing as a centerpiece to take a look at larger ideas—in this case, the sensation of growing up. The carpet that “provide[s] little comfort / from the stone foundation” reflects
traces of adulthood as well as vivid memories of childhood:

My hand slides across
stains of coffee and red wine.
…
I remember you from nap time,
awake in a class room,
staring at blue paint,

Crawford’s whimsical side emerges confidently in “I Hope Vampires Like Loud Music.” The title alone is enough to love this poem. Reading on, one discovers that the rest of the poem is equally filled with wild humor.

We used to be in love,
but now she’s undead.
…
“We’re not like Bram Stoker,” she tells me,
“or Anne Rice or Stephanie Meyer.” She rolls her eyes.
…
(But I catch her skin
glittering in the sun . . .)

It’s fitting that Coiled and Swallowed ends with “Music,” a poem that celebrates this musician-poet’s love for music. In the final two lines—

All of the time I was searching,
It was always you.

—the “you” is not a boyfriend or girlfriend. It’s not a pet or person. It’s music. The poet has found redemption.

Sara Crawford’s confessional poems capture youth in a way that’s delicate, authentic, and will break your heart. While Coiled and Swallowed would have been well-loved by a younger me, I am nonetheless grateful for the opportunity to be entranced by Crawford’s poems today. They give me a glimpse not only into her experiences, but into my own past as well.

Coiled and Swallowed
by Sara Crawford
2010, Virgogray Press (39 pp.)

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After spending her twenties exploring warmer places like Honduras, Ecuador, and Tybee Island, Amelia Cook has returned north and is settling into her third decade of life in her home state of Wisconsin. She spends her days as Assistant Director for International Admissions at Madison’s Edgewood College and her evenings freelancing and teaching creative writing. Since 2007, she has been a regular contributor to Isthmus, Madison’s arts and entertainment weekly, covering local theater and other miscellany. She is currently pursuing her long-neglected love of poetry as part of University of New Orleans’ low-residency MFA program.