The fall 2011 issue of KROnline included Jensen Beach’s review of Kevin Wilson’s The Family Fang. In Beach’s words, this is a book that “tells a multifaceted story about family, art, and the tricky business of making those disparate things work together.” I was excited to read Jensen’s review, especially because when I think of questions of the artist and the family, I think of him—in graduate school, I was lucky enough to be neighbor to Jensen and his family for a year, living one duplex wall away, sharing a backyard and chatting porch to porch.
I asked Jensen to come to the blog and talk about some more great works of fiction that take “the family” as their subject—a subject that is so ubiquitous it can seem assumed, invisible, in American fiction; and yet there are works, like The Family Fang, that in bringing their attention to it can still enlighten, unsettle, make it new.
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Abbott Awaits, Chris Bachelder (LSU Press, 2011)
In his third novel, Bachelder moves away from the high wire conceits of his previous books. There isn’t a Darwin Dome or a resurrected Upton Sinclair to be found anywhere. What we have instead is Abbott, a humanities professor on summer break from the state university wherehe is overworked and untenured. We follow him over the summer as he watches his daughter, runs errands, cleans his gutters, shops for furniture, encounters broken traffic signals. The novel is remarkable for its engagement with the everyday. Bachelder has replaced plot with arrangement, action with a true sense of Abbott’s life. The book is organized simply. One day (and often only a single event or thought in that day) is one chapter. This is both what grounds and shapes the novel and what propels us through it. There are some “plot” elements that keep the clock ticking—the start of the new semester, the approaching birth of Abbott and his wife’s second child—but the real pleasure here isn’t found in plot, it’s found instead somehow in between plot. There’s artifice here to be sure, but the book seems as honest and deeply realistic a look at a man and his family as I’ve read.
NowTrends, Karl Taro Greenfeld (Short Flight/Long Drive, 2012)
This collection, out last month from Hobart’s Short Flight/Long Drive books, isn’t all about family. Though I think some of the stories (“The Gymnast” most especially) speak to thematic issues that might useful for our discussion here. In that story a 15-year-old gymnast runs away and joins a group of street performers, where she finds a family of a new kind. In many ways, the story has all the elements of a story about a nuclear family, just a little out of order. There’s the young daughter, the father figure, a mother, and later a lover and finally a child, a future. Two other stories in particular deal directly with family. “Toddy M” is about an aging former pro surfer who lives with this daughter in Indonesia; and “Copper Top” about a writer in the Pacific Palisades who, in preparation for some medical tests, is forced to carry around a jug of his own urine. This burden is reflected in the challenges he faces trying to come out from under the shadow of his more successful father. Overall, this collection is excellent—it reaches into familiar territory, but in new and startling ways. These stories are assured and solid.
Safe from the Neighbors, Steve Yarbrough (Vintage, 2010)
Safe from the Neighbors is a novel of big ideas. I think it’s safe to say that, and I think I feel comfortable saying it, though I also think it doesn’t describe the book very well. It oversimplifies, reduces a complex and human novel to something smaller than it is. Here’s what the book’s about: high school history teacher, Luke May, becomes involved in a love affair with a woman, Maggie, whom he knew as a child and who has recently moved back home to the small town in the Mississippi Delta where she and Luke both grew up. Luke is married, unhappily in the way that middle-aged people sometimes can be. That is to say, not violently or even particularly tragically, but naturally. He and his wife have two daughters both of whom have gone off to college, leaving the couple to see for the first time that they haven’t got much left between them any longer. In any case, Luke takes up with Maggie, and the novel looks back, particularly through the violent and tragic events of Maggie’s childhood, at the upheaval of the civil rights movement and the way the town and many of its citizens dealt with the changes civil rights brought to the south. It’s a big novel, not necessarily in length but in scope. And pleasingly so. More important than what the book’s about, though, is its aboutness: it’s about family. It’s about community. It’s about how we fail one another and how, miraculously, we sometimes manage not to.
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Hilary Plum:
Some Instructions to My Wife Concerning the Upkeep of the House and Marriage and to my Son and Daughter Concerning the Conduct of their Childhood by Stanley Crawford: I am reading this right now, and every day marveling at it. This dark homage to Victorian marriage manuals was first published in 1978, and is one of the truly funniest—profoundly, insistently funny—novels I’ve ever read. Its satire is never simple, though: we’re caught up in laughter, and then just as swiftly we’re unsettled, exposed, as the novel sharply needles away at the ideology of the American family in the age of advanced capitalism. The novel is beautifully wrought, hilarious, condemning, sinister, and page after page offers treasures such as this:
The Goats. The animals of the barnyard, particularly the goats, may be said to represent the animals or herds of the Marriage but in a way which is perhaps not normal in our Marriage, given the fact that most people keep only cats and dogs. But in our case the goats are the true animals of the barnyard, thus of the Marriage, because of their substantial contribution to the household and the garden as well as the amount of care they require in order to yield at full capacity. And as it is with the goats of the barnyard, so it is with those of the Marriage, by which I mean the genitalia, which the Husband and the Wife must keep confined or penned up most of the time while also taking care to feed them well with daily rations of fodder of the appropriate kind so that they yield up and produce the protein-rich products which they manufacture out of mere grasses and dried leaves—milk and manure.
A Quiet Life by Kenzaburo Oe (translated from the Japanese by Kunioki Yanagishita and William Wetherall): I read this ten years ago, and have not revisited it, but it lingers in memory, a work that offered then a new sense of the novel’s possibilities. In this novel Oe offers a complex commentary on the act of fictionalization: the novel is narrated by the daughter of a famous novelist (K—thus, it seems, a stand-in for the author); K has gone off on a fellowship to America, leaving his daughter in charge of her siblings, including the care of her intellectually disabled brother. And in reading this, we know that Oe too has a son who is severely brain damaged and who has figured much in his writing—here as well as in his novel A Personal Matter and nonfiction work A Healing Family. In this way Oe uses the novel as a means to imagine his own family as it might be without him, creating a work that shimmers on a line between fiction and memoir, and which quietly exhibits great empathy and a forceful self-awareness.
VAS: An Opera in Flatland by Steve Tomasula—The hybrid text/image novel VAS nods to the satirical classic Flatland by Edwin Abbot, in interspersing a domestic fiction set in “Flatland” (here, suburban America) with a sweeping essayistic reflection on humankind’s manipulation of its own reproduction. At the novel’s center is Square, a man contemplating whether he should get a vasectomy, as his wife, Circle, desires. This inquiry expands and mutates, using textbook illustrations, graphic novels, printouts of DNA, and myriad art and design elements to map the very history of human reproduction, its articulation in language, manipulation by science, and the cultural forms and strictures to which it’s been subject. The result is bold and singular, a work that offers more on each rereading. (And which is, for all you creative writing teachers out there, a killer novel to teach.)
Touch by Adania Shibli (translated from the Arabic by Paula Haydar)—In the spirit of full disclosure, I should note that the press where I worked published this novella, the debut work by Palestinian writer Shibli. Reviewers have often described Touch as a prose poem, which is something of an exaggeration—it is a work of fiction—but on encountering its haunting, strange and beautiful style, one can see why. I have written about the novel a great deal, so for now I’ll just note that it is in many ways about family: the profound alienation of an individual within a family. The novella centers on a young girl who is the youngest of nine sisters; she goes to school, rides in the car with her father, fights with her siblings, endures the death of a brother, falls in love—all the quotidian activities that are made unfamiliar in Shibli’s prose. The larger events of history, the question of Palestine, cast a shadow over the narrative, never quite present or absent. It’s quite a book.
Lastly, I’ll point to two works both of whose authors I know—and so am not unbiased, if that’s an important standard—but whose work I always turn to when thinking about art and about family: Pamela Thompson’s Every Past Thing, which begins with Edwin Romanzo Elmer’s Mourning Portrait and from there offers a novel of Elmer, the painter; his wife Mary; their deceased child, Effie; and Edwin’s brother Samuel. The novel is set during a week in New York in 1899, as Edwin and Mary travel to New York for him to study, and while he paints Mary explores the city, in particular one of its anarchist haunts. I’ll say no more except to note that the novel is stunning, one to read and reread. And let me also echo Joseph Cardinale in his recent interview, as he discussed Noy Holland’s story “Rooster, Pollard, Cricket, Goose.” This is one of my favorite short stories, one I never get over but study continually, and it appears in Holland’s masterful short-story collection What Begins with Bird, which investigates the beautiful and violent incarnations of family.