Culture Surfing

Augusten Burroughs

Augusten Burroughs doesn’t want to be confused for a trained writer. “I don’t write like an MFA grad. I write from a subconscious place. I don’t think while I’m writing. It’s like going into a trance,” he says. “That’s the way people should write.”

The serial-memoirist is capable of speaking from trancelike states, too. He can orate breathlessly for minutes at a time, verbally wandering around subjects like brain chemistry or The Diary of Anne Frank, only to stop himself and ask, “How did I get here?” Like his books, Burroughs’ mouth is both vulgar and charming, the circuitous ramblings only making his monologues more authentic.

While discussing Christmas (his favorite holiday), Burroughs says he sees one common thread throughout his memories, “Each one has been horrible, worse than the last.” He’s recounted those laughably miserable memories in his latest book, You Better Not Cry, a loose collection of Christmas stories spanning from his youth until just a few years ago. Because so much of Burroughs’ personal life has already been published, it’s easy to plug his new stories into that public timeline. The drunken ones fit in before the sobriety of Dry; the earliest childhood recollections pre-date his life with the Finch family in Running With Scissors; and the latest stories come after his publishing success.

Continue Reading “Augusten Burroughs gets personal with Santa in You Better Not Cry“

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What if I told you Padgett Powell’s new book, The Interrogative Mood, is nothing but questions? Would that intrigue you? Or would the mere mention of the idea give you cause to keep your distance? For the people remaining, would you still be interested after learning the questions don’t necessarily relate to one another, at least not in a traditional narrative or linear fashion? Would you stick around with The Interrogative Mood for 164 pages? Can I stop now?

The book’s spine asks, “A novel?” rather than declare the form. It’s a fair question. Flipping through the slim volume, The Interrogative Mood is both hard to define and easy to dismiss. You’re likely to land on questions such as “Can you change a tire by yourself?” or “Would you eat a monkey?” It looks more like experimental poetry inspired by Facebook personality tests than a novel. Even worse, it has the faint odeur of imitation Dada — work that might have been clever if it had been performed at a café in Switzerland 90 years ago.

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Somewhere near the end of Colson Whitehead’s first novel, The Intuitionist, the first black female inspector of elevators sits on a stakeout in an unnamed city in the not-so-distant but indistinct past. It’s one of the book’s many metafictional moments, where the tropes of pulpy crime fiction are used to express larger themes of race and racism. As she holds watch and notes the noir-ish sight of a man in a red cap leaning against a lamppost, a stick-ball game breaks out in the middle of the street. It’s as if the Pynchonesque machinations of allegory and genre-bending are no match for “Ten screaming kids, half a broom, a stained canvas ball.” The kids are a quick reminder that Whitehead’s story takes place in a real world where the childish taunts of “You’re mama’s so black she, you throw like a girl, nuh-uh he didn’t tag me I got there first” can’t be drowned out, and “The stickball game disappears as fast as it came.”

It’s been a full 10 years since Whitehead published his debut, and the intervening decade has been full of successes. His second novel, John Henry Days, was shortlisted for the 2001 Pulitzer Prize. The following year he received the MacArthur Foundation’s Genius Grant at the age of 33. His fifth novel, Sag Harbor, was published earlier this year to mostly glowing reviews, despite being a major departure from his style and approach.

Continue Reading “Colson Whitehead sees things in noir and white”

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The prospect of hell has at least one comfort for unrepentant sinners: We’ll be with all our friends. If Robert Olen Butler’s latest novel, Hell, is any indication, we can also assume it’s a very funny place. Butler has written hell as a dizzying, vast expanse populated mostly by public figures suffering clever forms of torture: George W. Bush eternally searches for WMDs (“Wings Made Divine”), William Randolph Hearst is a ridiculed blogger who can’t turn off the caps lock, and J. Edgar Hoover gets to wear all the lipstick he wants. Atlantans should be pleased to learn that almost every street in hell is named Peachtree. Satan has a thing for flannel shirts, Armani jeans, and shooting hunters while they run naked in fields.

Butler employs Hatcher McCord, anchorman for the “Evening News from Hell,” as the book’s guide. Hatcher is an old-fashioned everyman set adrift in a sea of fire. He doesn’t seem to have done much wrong to end up here and, even though he’s in hell, he’s trying to make the best of it. He and the decapitated Anne Boleyn are dating, despite that sex in hell always ends in frustration. His role as a journalist provides some relief, as “he is part of the suffering humanity all around him but really he is not, he is an observer, his pulse quickening at the pain he observes, his deep brain sparkling in delight at the possibility of a story.” Hatcher’s journalism is also Hell’s plot. Could there be “a back door out of Hell?” Does Satan have daddy issues? Why does Jerry Falwell think he’s here? Hatcher throws himself into his work and digs stories up from the brimstone.

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In terms of literary significance, Milledgeville, Ga., has but one claim to fame. Flannery O’Connor, the oft-misunderstood master of short, gothic Southern lit, lived the last half of her brief life there, writing her stories in solitude at a farm a few miles north of town. The town, which counted less than 20,000 residents at the 2000 census, is all but synonymous with her name. So when Warren Spooner, the protagonist of Pete Dexter’s new book, Spooner, is born in Milledgeville in 1956, just a year after O’Connor published A Good Man Is Hard to Find, the significance is hard to ignore. Like the Christ-haunted South of O’Connor’s work, Spooner is woven into a world of comic tension and life-altering violence. Salvation, on the other hand, is suspiciously absent.

Spooner isn’t just born, he arrives after 53 hours of labor with a stillborn twin brother and “the umbilical cord looped around his neck, like a bare little man dropped through the gallows on the way to the next world.” The attending doctor, who loses his cool and starts drinking during the marathon delivery, drunkenly repeats himself saying, “Sometimes with twins, they isn’t either one of them that wants to come out first.”

Continue reading “Spooner’s honky-tonk happenstance”

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Professor Jack Griffin is having a midlife crisis and he doesn’t want to admit it. By the time he realizes “his dead parent, his living one, his old profession, and his boy-hood self [are] all clamoring for attention,” he’s knee deep in dissatisfaction. In That Old Cape Magic, author Richard Russo uses Griffin’s reflections to embed a clever chain of stories within stories for a fast-paced and funny personal history of domestic conflict and familial strife.

Griffin was born to a pair of perpetually dissatisfied academics, parents who fought with and cheated on each other every school year. Their cycle was only broken by summer break, when they’d drive to a rented house on Cape Cod and make amends: “As if happiness were a place.” Griffin and his wife Joy made a honeymoon pact three decades ago — an agreement meant to avoid their parents’ mistakes — but their lives (and vacations) have taken a familiar turn.

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In his eloquently raucous confessional My Booky Wook, English bad-boy comedian Russell Brand describes what he calls “Simon Says” for junkies. Discussing his first stay in rehab for drug addiction (as opposed to his subsequent stint for sex addiction), Brand says that in recovery meetings, “You can get away with any admission, however appalling, so long as it’s preceded by the words ‘To my shame.’” For example: “I used to exploit women because I couldn’t cope with being alone…” “He didn’t say ‘To my shame!’ You bastard! You vicious, selfish bastard!”

Shamelessness proves to be an advantage for comedians, and an absolute requirement for the ones who get paid to say the things average people would find unthinkable. Some shock comics temper what they say through the way they say it: The right delivery can either alienate audiences or make them complicit with a performer’s naughty notions. New books from three such comedians reveal how their voices change before a microphone vs. a word processor, while turning a different spotlight on their shameful admissions.

Continue reading “Comedians scrawl self-portraits with poison pens”

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Creepy houses have a way of showing up in gothic novels. Whether a crumbling, cobblestone castle or just a cobwebbed suburban ranch, the creepy house is no less than a beacon, a neon, flashing symbol that something dark and violent awaits. “The houses have grown out of the woods like tumors,” says Samuel on the second page of Sang Pak’s Wait Until Twilight while riding through the backwoods of Georgia. When Samuel Polk and his friend David actually arrive at the house they’re looking for, his observation becomes more explicit: “It’s almost as if I’ve seen it somewhere else, maybe in some bad horror movie.”

Samuel is a bookish but friendly teenager, stressed out by the SATs and talented on the basketball court. His mother died a year before the novel begins and he repeatedly tells everyone he’s “completely over it.” If that sounds unconvincing, it should. Samuel bears the stresses of adolescence and the weight of his mother’s death without much support. His brother Jim has all but disappeared since going to college, and his father is emotionally absent.

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Anyone who has spent significant time struggling with weight will tell you how pervasive and frustrating that internal voice can be. The voice that tells you you’re ugly. The voice that chastises you for enjoying food. The voice that congratulates you for abstaining, that picks apart every culinary decision, that fixates on clothing sizes, that wears you down until you hate yourself for being so predictably sado-masochistic.

It’s this voice we become privy to in Frank Bruni’s new memoir, Born Round: The Secret History of a Full Time Eater. Bruni, who has spent the last four years as restaurant critic for the New York Times, has written a book that chronicles in detail his lifelong tussle with his weight. Bruni recounts every self-doubting thought, every fluctuation in pants size, and the tortured conflict of emotions surrounding every mouthful of food.

In many ways, it’s a powerful story, highly relatable and familiar to many of us. But the book belabors in 368 pages what we know in the first few chapters – this man has a fraught relationship with food and self-image. The meticulous detailing of that relationship seems self-indulgent at best, at worst an unhealthy excuse to feed his neuroses.

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Most bibliophiles will tell you that the book is always better than the movie. For the most part, they’re right. Robert Redford’s charming blue eyes could never compete with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s timeless prose in The Great Gatsby. Nabokov’s linguistic acrobatics will always mesmerize more than any woman chosen to portray Lolita. But what about books that aren’t so classic? The narrative voice in Palahniuk’s Fight Club is hardly as interesting as Brad Pitt’s pectoral muscles or Edward Norton’s malnourished gaze. And does anyone actually think The Godfather was better the way Mario Puzo wrote it?

Jonathan Tropper’s new book, This Is Where I Leave You, won’t be confused for canonical lit, but it will probably make a decent movie. Warner Brothers thinks so — the company contracted Tropper to write the screenplay adaptation before This Is Where I Leave You ever even hit a bookshelf.

This Is Where I Leave You is narrated by Judd Foxman, an out-of-shape thirtysomething whose life is quickly unraveling around him. His wife, Jen, has left him for another man, he’s lost his job because the guy Jen ditched him for also happens to be his boss, and his father has died. Now, his driving purpose is to fulfill his father’s deathbed request to sit shiva, the Jewish tradition of gathering a family together in the home for a full seven days after the funeral.

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The title South of Broad, Pat Conroy’s first novel in nearly 15 years, refers to the informal name given to a section of Charleston, S.C., almost exclusively inhabited for generations by the city’s de facto aristocracy. Living south of Broad is a point of pride for Conroy’s hero, Leopold Bloom King. Leo comes from truly common stock. His father is a science teacher; his mom a former nun. Leo, however, sees himself reflected in the neighborhood’s gorgeous cityscape. The fact that he’s also the ringleader of an audaciously diverse group of friends suggests a kind of redemption for this former seat of the Confederacy. It’s a well-intentioned moral that could have been more affecting if South of Broad didn’t fall apart at the end.

South of Broad begins with the suicide of Leo’s older brother Stephen in the late ’60s. The 10-year-old’s death nearly destroys Leo. His parents send him to a sanitarium where he experiences psychological horrors only a handful of people might ever understand. Leo manages to befriend other damaged psyches, though, and together they grow up, grow apart, and reunite in an attempt to save one of their own from a dark end. Most of the novel comprises episodes that illustrate and re-illustrate how people of such diverse backgrounds could become lifelong friends. And how friendships like theirs could withstand unfathomable acts of pure evil. Unfortunately, Conroy’s band of brothers and sisters proves fairly cumbersome.

Continue reading “Pat Conroy overcomplicates the South“

(Image courtesy Nan A. Talese/Doubleday)

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Howard Dean needs no introduction. He’s universally known as the guy who made that weird shrieking noise during a 2004 presidential campaign speech, and subsequently lost any chance he ever had at the Democratic nomination. Imagine for a moment that shrieking never happened — perhaps Dean would’ve been nominated by the Democratic Party, elected to the highest executive office, and succeeded in his attempts to socialize health care. In that highly imaginary world, my good friend “Scott” wouldn’t be buying Vicodin from a drug dealer to abate the pain caused by an abscessed tooth, because said tooth would’ve been treated under public health care. And in that world, Dean definitely wouldn’t have needed to write Prescription for Real Healthcare Reform.

Prescription for Real Healthcare Reform is by all standards of measure a typical politician’s book: a stump speech transformed into 150 pages of glossy paperback by a couple of authors credited in the fine print. We start off with a few anecdotes about “real people,” in this case “Claire” and “Patrick,” who’ve been severely shafted by insurance companies. The book quickly moves on to numbers-and-statistics talk about private health care’s massive failures. Having lent the crisis a face, Dean then puts forth a solution best summed up by the title of Chapter 6: “Reform Without a Public Health Insurance Option Isn’t Real Reform.”

Continue reading “Howard Dean hollers back”

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For his second novel, Crossing the Lines, Atlanta author Richard Doster resurrects small-town sports writer Jack Hall. When Hall interviews for a job at the Atlanta Constitution in the fall of 1955, he expects to end up covering the Atlanta Crackers, a team he calls “the New York Yankees of minor league baseball, the best team ever assembled in a Southern city.” Outside of some experience helping a black baseball player sign to an all-white team (the subject of Doster’s first novel, Safe at Home), he’s less than concerned about the burgeoning set of conflicts materializing into a Civil Rights Movement outside his front door. Being a white, middle-class guy means he doesn’t want to be bothered by it all, it seems. But Ralph McGill, his new editor at the Constitution, doesn’t give him that option.

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We all know we shouldn’t, but it’s tempting to judge a book by its cover. But looking at the soft focus and pastel colors on the cover of Where the River Ends, it’s easy to imagine the sort of heartfelt sentimentality contained within the novel. Author Charles Martin shows up on the back in a glossy portrait of a square-jawed young man with short hair and a bright, white smile, like an embodiment of traditional Southern charm. On this occasion, what you see is what you get.

The readers who might be drawn into the gauzy romanticism evoked on the front of Where the River Ends will indeed find a story fit to their tastes — a tale of two lovers, a terminal disease, and one last romantic canoe trip through southern Georgia. Cynics, who should feel properly warned by the back-cover portrait of Martin’s earnest grin, won’t find much to appreciate here. Stories like Where the River Ends, not unlike the tear-jerkers of Nicholas Sparks, aren’t written for the bitter at heart.

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