Rachel's Library

Before Rachel left for a month-long trip to Salta, near Argentina's northern border with Bolivia, she gave us free access to her personal library.  It's a 2'x2' wall-mounted bookshelf in her graffiti-walled sharehouse, a winding maze of a building that used to be a radio station.  Old favorites like The Dharma Bums or Flannery O'Connor squeezed between colorful contemporary covers: Kelly Link, Michael Chabon, George Saunders.  I left all my story collections on a shelf in my parents' house, reasoning that they could send me books in the mail & all I'd really need were a few near-and-dear, philosophically potent picks like Cortazar's Hopscotch or my own Dharma Bums copy.  I hadn't realized that A) all bureaucracy is unreliable and corrupt in Argentina B) I would really need some contemporary shit to help me write.  Rachel, that clever minx, had thought of both.

"I keep about four books on my desk as I'm writing," she said.  Stuck for inspiration, she flips through Etgar Keret or Kelly Link to jumpstart her process, something I also used to do in grad school but I somehow forgot when packing for Buenos Aires.  Luckily, Rachel had---and she let us borrow as many books as we could carry.

I read Saunders' Braindead Megaphone first.  It's Saunders being Saunders, but in, mostly, nonfiction.  It opens strongly with the title track, then hits you with "The New Mecca," a heartbreaking and brilliant exploration of contemporary Dubai, as seen through the eyes of a famous, middle-aged creative writer.  I get a little choked up at the snow scene, I admit.  Saunders presents a few interesting opinions on the writing process (both the Vonnegut piece and the Bartholme explication are solid; his defense of Huckleberry Finn is not as successful).  Somewhere in the middle, he sneaks in some fluff garbage that doesn't even qualify in the essay category.  But the homestretch goes back to "New Mecca"-style strength, despite the fact that Saunders seems incapable of writing an essay he doesn't star in.

Next up: Etgar Keret's The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God.  I read the Israeli writer's first story aloud to J. and kind of hated it.  It seemed moralist and poorly constructed, with flat, absurd characters.  But I gave the rest of the collection a chance since it was so slim, the stories all short, and Rachel counts it as one of her desk-reference necessities.  With pieces like "Breaking the Pig" and "Uterus" ("The girls I dated always used to take it the wrong way when I'd peek at their uterus."), it's definitely worth the read.  And even when a story seems so-so, just read it---the average length of the pieces in this volume is about 3.5 pages.  It ends with a "novella" (only by Keret's standards) called "Kneller's Happy Campers," which I recognized only when I came to it that it was the basis for the film Wristcutters: A Love Story.  The movie version is surprisingly similar.

Looking for some sage advice, I picked Chabon's Maps & Legends essay collection next.  Holy fucking wow.  Is there a more brilliant contemporary American writer who isn't a senior citizen?  (I'm not dogging DeLillo or Morrison.)  Much of "Trickster in a Suit of Lights" I recognized from the introduction to McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, a book I'd included on my thesis reading list for exactly the arguments Chabon makes re: the blurring of borders between genre and literary fiction.  The memoir pieces are tightly structured and profound.  The book reviews are almost as good as the books themselves.  The historical context he gives to superhero stories, detective stories, horror, even post-apocalyptic or alternate universe fiction---it's an incredible collection, and one I will have to buy for my own well-being and sanity when I return stateside.

After that, I returned to fiction with Chris Adrian's A Better Angel.  Adrian, a pediatric oncologist in San Francisco, also happens to be a goddamned amazing short story writer, because being a talented physician wasn't enough.  These stories were published in Tin House, The New Yorker, McSweeney's---you know the list.  While I couldn't get into "The Vision of Peter Damien," the other pieces---especially "Stab" and "The Changeling" (who knew you could use the 9/11 tragedy in such a shocking and personal and Exorcist-ish way?)---are darkly funny and tightly written.  Fiction lovers, read this book. 

Several of Rachel's books still to read. I tried to get into Bernard Malamud's collected but it bored me.  Maybe I'll give it another shot.  I also read the introduction to Sherman Alexie's Lone Ranger and Tonto but the Spokane writer came off as so pitifully arrogant I couldn't stomach reading his stories.  That leaves Annie Proulx, whose books I own but never read; Flannery O'Connor, who I'll probably skip; The Yiddish Policeman's Union, which I might just read again because I have such a literary man-crush on Chabon; and Maile Meloy, a young writer I've never heard of.  A pretty solid stack of lit overall, and a much-needed infusion of contemporary short stories.  I am writing again.  And loving it.