Rage Is Back by Adam Mansbach

Published by Viking on January 10, 2013 

About a third of Rage Is Back is an excruciatingly irritating mix of ultra-hip cultural references and D-list celebrity name dropping. I was indifferent to another third. The remaining third approaches brilliance. Stray sentences, random thoughts, sometimes entire pages shine like polished platinum.

Kilroy Dondi Vance is a nineteen-year-old mixed race drug dealer. His mother's family is from Trinidad and his father is half-Jewish. Having attended Manhattan's third-most-prestigious prep school on a scholarship, he's now an Angry Young Man whose mother, Karen, has kicked him out of her apartment. Dondi's also something of a graffiti historian. Karen is worried that Dondi is turning into Billy, Dondi's absent father. Back in the day, Billy (a/k/a Rage) and Karen (a/k/a Wren 209) tagged trains together. Before he fled to Mexico, Billy got himself into a mess with a transit cop-turned-demon named Bracken, the man who killed Billy's friend and fellow graffiti writer. When Billy returns to Manhattan sixteen years later, Bracken is running for mayor and Dondi ... well, as you'd expect from an Angry Young Man, Dondi is none too pleased with Billy.

Still, after Dondi gets together with Billy and his old crew of graffiti writers, a plan to take revenge against Bracken takes shape, and therein lies the plot. The writers embark on an Ocean's Eleven scheme, complete with ensemble cast, designed to thwart Bracken's ambition. When the novel stays focused on that scheme, it's fun and lively and supremely entertaining. To the extent that the novel serves as a fictional history of (and tribute to) graffiti writers, it is fascinating. To the extent that it relies on time travel portals and other supernatural weirdness, it derails.

When a novel screams "Look how modern and literary and determinedly ironic I am," it generally isn't a novel I enjoy reading. Some writers, Adam Mansbach tells us, can't rely on a straightforward narrative because they're too "busy trying to prove how smart they are." Exactly. Mansbach is one of those annoyingly intrusive writers who talks to you about what he's writing while he's writing it ("You recall a few chapters back when I ..."). Being up-to-the-second cool means Mansbach can rag on Hunter Thompson and Tom Wolfe because their psychedelic prose is passé in an age where up-to-the-second fiction is inspired by designer drugs that Timothy Leary could only dream about. And Mansbach can smugly dis Bob Dylan because, you know, dude is old and Mansbach isn't (yet).

Most of the novel is written in the first person from Dondi's perspective. For reasons I can't fathom, a character named Cloud 9 takes over the narration in chapter 10. His voice is a bit more "street" than Dondi's, but not much. In another literary affectation (Mansbach seems determined to try them all), Cloud 9 doesn't bother to set off dialog with quotation marks. Chapter 11 returns to Dondi's perspective ("hey, it's me, Dondi again"). Ugh.

In addition to being artistic, the characters are impossibly erudite. Dengue Fever, for instance, places the three-dimensional letters he builds in the context of hieroglyphics and illuminated manuscripts and the mystery vowels of ancient Hebrew. My eyes glazed over when Dondi started talking about Theseus and Pirithous and "my man Odysseus." That's just a little too precious for me. On quite a few occasions, I was less than convinced by Dondi's voice, particularly when he's nattering on about the uncoolness of white boys. The voice just didn't seem authentic, you feel me?

Despite my griping, I enjoyed much of Rage Is Back. Mansbach incorporates a short story into the plot that was supposedly written by a drug dealer. It contains the best sustained writing in the book. The story forsakes the literary trickiness that mars the surrounding novel, opting instead to tell a straightforward, powerful tale. When Mansbach turns his talent to descriptive writing, he paints expressive pictures of dank subway tunnels and captures the mixture of artistry and audacity required to tag trains. And underlying all the nonsense is a good story, almost a great story, that for significant stretches is well told and nonsense-free. It also delivers an important but well-buried message about the nature of fame. Patience is rewarded as the initial struggle to connect with the narrative pays off in the final chapters.

RECOMMENDED

Driver's Education by Grant Ginder

Published by Simon & Schuster on January 8, 2013 

Driver's Education is a multigenerational story in the sense that the primary characters are a young man, his father, and his (mostly unseen) grandfather. As is common in modern novels, both time and point of view shift frequently.

In sections of the novel labeled "What I Remember," Colin McPhee talks about his life. He starts in 1956, at the grand opening of a theater called the Avalon. Movies and the Avalon play a large role in his young life, particularly after his mother dies. Colin's love of movies apparently motivates his desire to write screenplays and in 1974, after he moves to Hollywood and sells one, he rather improbably reunites with Clare, a former Avalon co-worker who is now an aspiring actress. When Finn is born, Clare comes to resent Colin's love for his son (she actually tells him that he should love Finn less). At this point, believing not a word of Colin's story, I was asking "Who are these people?" They certainly aren't people I recognize.

The screenplay, Colin's only successful writing venture, is followed by twenty years of writers' block. At some point Colin begins taking care of his father (largely absent from his life after Colin's mother died) who had a stroke and apparently suffers from a form of dementia. Nearing the end of his life, Colin's father feels the need to drive his car (Lucy) again, so he calls Finn and asks him to bring the car from New York to San Francisco.

Finn is an assistant story editor on a reality TV show that resembles The Real World.  His job is to "guide" the reality. Finn and his friend Randall recover Lucy and begin a road trip. Along the way Finn tells Randall some tedious stories that his grandfather used to tell. Finn wants to document those stories and brings along a video camera for that purpose. They go to Pittsburgh because Finn's granddad has a story about saving a man from a collapsing building in Pittsburgh. They crash a medical supply sales convention in Columbus because Finn's granddad fell in love with a female pilot in Columbus. They track down a baseball in Chicago because Finn's grandad told a story about nudging a ball hit by Ernie Banks from foul into fair territory. The road trip eventually turns into a movie. Toward the end of the novel, Finn interviews Randall (again on film) so that Randall can complain about how Finn edited reality when he made his movie. We also learn from Randall that Finn has been an unreliable narrator.

The novel's theme, as expressed by Randall, is this: Colin values realism (or at least he values cinéma vérité) and hates Finn for choreographing reality while Finn wants Colin to be a better liar. That conflict is apparently meant to supply dramatic tension while saying something weighty about the way people create their own realities. Neither goal is realized. Driver's Education creates an emotional distance between the reader and the characters simply because the reader doesn't care one way or another about contrived experiences that we aren't meant to believe. It's ironic that a novel about the fabrication of reality fabricates reality so poorly.

The description of the trip through Ohio -- "Everything is extremely pretty in a very un-pretty way; interesting because there's a phenomenal lack of interest" -- could stand as a summary of the book. Grant Ginder's prose is pretty while the novel's content is uninteresting. Taking a road trip to document an old man's stories might be an intriguing premise for a book, but not this book. Grandpa's stories are dull, there are only a few of them (it's surprising that a cross-country trip would hightlight only three cities), and the discovery that Finn's versions of his grandfather's stories aren't entirely truthful is hardly a world-shattering revelation.

It's a shame that Ginder didn't tell a better story because he has a nice sense of literary style. Unfortunately, he's fond of writing inane sentences like "Half of loving someone is being okay with hating her" in the apparent belief that readers will mistake nonsense for deep thought. His characters are constantly engaged in profoundly witty conversations that are neither profound nor witty. Did I believe that Clare rented a private booth in a porn arcade so that she could have "a private place to cry"? I did not. Did I believe that Finn and Randall brought a fifty-year-old cat along on their trip? No. The novel is littered with nonsense like this in a failed attempt to add heft or interest to an empty story. While some sections of Driver's Education provide momentary entertainment and would probably work well as short stories, the novel fails to come together as a convincing, meaningful whole.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Nightfall by David Goodis

First published in 1947

Vanning is hiding out in Greenwich Village. He doesn't know Fraser is watching him.  Neither does he know that two men who robbed a bank in Seattle are in New York, but he knows those men are after him. They think he has the $300,000 that was stolen from the bank. Fraser thinks Vanning might be the third robber. The evidence suggests that Vanning, using the name Dilks, met with a man named Harrison, killed him, and fled with the $300,000, cash that Harrison was supposed to launder. Yet Fraser can't wrap his head around Vanning's participation in a bank robbery, much less a murder. Vanning is a commercial artist, a former naval officer with no criminal record. Fraser doesn't want to arrest Vanning until he knows he can recover the money, but his doubts about Vanning's guilt haunt him because the evidence is probably sufficient to send Vanning to the electric chair.

When the two robbers catch up with Vanning, he claims he doesn't know where the money is. Is Vanning telling the truth? In a plot worthy of a Hitchcock movie (Nightfall was filmed but not by Hitchcock), Vanning is the traditional figure who finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Vanning is torn between his desire to go to the police and his certainty that the police will always follow the easy path. The evidence points to Vanning's guilt and Vanning knows that nothing he can say to the police will convince them otherwise -- especially given his inability to produce the $300,000 that he knows he once had. It's the missing money that makes Nightfall different from thrillers that follow the "innocent man trying to prove his innocence" formula.

This isn't David Goodis' most suspenseful novel, but the plot is intriguing. Nightfall is the kind of low key crime novel that modern authors, obsessed with martial arts and car chases, seem unable to replicate. The novel's thrills come from tension rather than action. Its focus is on psychology rather than gunplay. The story's violent moments are explosive but contained, usually related in a paragraph or two. Goodis tosses a love story into the mix that I thought was unconvincing, but that reaction was tempered by the knowledge that Vanning isn't capable of thinking clearly.

Goodis gives the gift of realism to his characters. Responding to the stress of an untenable situation, Vanning slowly comes unglued. He behaves foolishly and can't understand why. He feels himself being dragged down in "a whirlpool of defeat." He's disappointed in himself ("I can't get a practical thought in my head," he says), but as Fraser tells him, if we really knew ourselves, "we'd be adding machines instead of human beings." Frasier suffers from crippling self-doubt as he worries that Vanning has either escaped or been captured by the robbers. A small-minded robber with big plans is motivated by the desire to escape the crushing force of ordinary life. The female character, Vanning's love interest, is a bit thin, but the other primary characters have full personalities.

Noir is dark by definition, but Goodis filled his novels with the contrast of color. The interiors of apartments have paintings of orange sunsets over gray-green water hanging on sky blue walls. Goodis changes up his prose style, sometimes writing stark sentences, sometimes rambling. He tells the story in the first person but Vanning occasionally talks about himself in the third person, a symptom of his deteriorating mental status. Dialog is snappy. The resolution is satisfying, although perhaps too bright for a true noir tale. In short, although David Goodis wrote better books than Nightfall, the solid prose, tight plot, and insightful characterizations make Nightfall an enjoyable read.

RECOMMENDED

Tenth of December by George Saunders

Published by Random House on January 8, 2013

Sometimes morbid, sometimes zany, often touching, and always original, the stories collected in Tenth of December are written in a light, conversational style -- typically the kind of conversation you'd have with someone who is a little dim -- that conceals their deeper meaning. Many of the characters are like the parents or children you're glad you never had.

My favorite story, "Victory Lap," begins in the mind of Alison, a fifteen-year-old girl whose internal commentary on Eleanor Roosevelt, her ethics teacher's husband's affair, her own ignorance, and the dorkiness of Kyle Boot is, to use Alison's favorite word, awesome. The story then shifts to the scattered mind of Kyle Boot (favorite word: "gar"), whose chance of pleasing his anal-retentive father is nil and whose thoughts are filled with imaginative curses that he would never dare say out loud. When Kyle sees a man trying to kidnap Alison, he must choose between intervening and finishing his chores. The story develops a new layer of oddness when we enter the mind of the kidnapper. The ending is surprisingly sweet as humor and horror give way to karma.

The title story is another standout. Robin is a pale, blubberish boy who invents his own martial arts system (Deadly Forearms) to fight the Nethers. Eber, old and rail-thin, no longer seems real to himself. Both Robin and Eber constantly engage in silent, imagined conversations. When Robin spots Eber (thinking he may be a Nether) walking around a frozen pond, Robin makes it his heroic mission to deliver Eber's coat to him without realizing why Eber left the coat behind. The story is a bittersweet combination of humor and sorrow and inspiration.

In another close contender for my favorite story, Mikey comes "Home" from the war after a court-martial, just in time to watch his mother and her new boyfriend being evicted. The mother of his kids has taken up with a new boyfriend in his absence. His barely contained rage results in low-level violence, but his actions are inevitably greeted with the ubiquitous (and thus meaningless) phrase "Thank you for your service." None of that sounds amusing, but this serious story provokes unexpected laughter. It's better, I guess, to laugh than to cry.

I first read "Escape from Spiderhead" in The Best American Short Stories 2011. Saunders' futuristic take on chemically enhanced language and love was one of my favorite stories in that volume.

The remaining stories are all worth reading. More a vignette than a story, "Sticks" describes the way the narrator's father decorates a pole to commemorate Christmas, the Fourth of July, Veteran's Day, the Superbowl, Groundhog Day, an Earthquake in Chile, his wife's death, and, ultimately, his life. "Al Roosten" worries that noboby will bid on him at the anti-drug celebrity auction -- in fact, he worries about all sorts of things when his mind isn't buzzing with nonstop grandiose fantasies. A janitor in a medieval village is promoted to Pacing Guard after he witnesses his boss engaging in a sexual dalliance with another employee, a happy event that leads to "My Chivalric Fiasco" when he gets carried away with the role. The lives of two moms who are each doing their best, albeit in very different ways, intersect in "Puppy." Saunders takes a comical look at the power of positive thinking, in form of a memo from the boss, in "Exhortation."

Every story in Tenth of December is the product of a delightfully strange imagination, the work of an accomplished writer with a distinctive style. This is a collection of small gems that perfectly balance plot and character development. There isn't a dud in the bunch.

RECOMMENDED

The River Swimmer by Jim Harrison

Published by Grove Press on January 8, 2013 

If you've read Jim Harrison you know what to expect (gentle humor poking fun at the hapless male) and what not to expect (commas) from his writing. The River Swimmer is a short volume consisting of two novellas. The first addresses the familiar theme of Harrison's recent work: the aging man's need to renew his life, his eternal struggle to understand women, and his slightly ridiculous response to sexual desire. The second concerns a young man who endeavors to swim through the bewildering array of obstacles and opportunities that life presents.

In "The Land of Unlikeness," a man must choose between "the world's idea of success" and his love of creating art. Twenty years divorced and three years estranged from his daughter, Clive still hasn't gotten his life together. A former artist who abandoned painting for the financial security of academia, Clive is taking an involuntary leave of absence following an unfortunate encounter with an Art Tart. At his sister's insistence, he is using the time to visit his elderly bird-watching mother at his childhood home in Michigan. Since this is the mother who, years earlier, made a speech at dinner that ended with "You failed us, son," it's easy to understand why Clive doesn't want to go home again. Clive's thoughts are occupied by missed opportunities and mild regrets, some of which pertain to a childhood flame who still lives in town. Still, in his less sullen moments, Clive displays the guarded optimism that is common in Harrison's characters: "He had the happy thought that he had zero percent financing on the rest of his life because no one more than nominally cared except himself. He might be going mad as a hatter but it hadn't been that bad so far." At the age of sixty, well into life's third act, can Clive stop "toting around his heavy knapsack of ironies" and find a way to allow "a little light ... to peek into his beleaguered soul"?

"The River Swimmer" tells an offbeat story. Thad grew up on an island in the middle of a river. When he wasn't working on the family farm, he was swimming. "If there were indeed water spirits they had a firm hold on him like love eventually does on young men, an obsessional disease of sorts." After brawling with Friendly Frank, his girlfriend's father, Thad swims the hundred miles from Muskegon to Chicago. He hooks up with a girl he meets along the way. To Thad's embarrassment, the girl and her wealthy father become involved in his family drama when Friendly Frank's employees put Thad's father in the hospital, an outgrowth of the confrontation between Thad and Frank. Thad doesn't want to hate Friendly Frank, but "surely part of the greatest evil of evil men is that they make you hate them." Soon he finds himself back on the farm, in the company of Frank's daughter, the wealthy man's daughter, and another girl he's bedded. Women and employers and swimming coaches have plans for Thad. With his whole life ahead of him, Thad doesn't want to be pinned down like a butterfly in a collection. As Thad transitions to adulthood, he is desperate to retain his freedom, his sense of adventure, his profound link to water. Yet in the end, he learns that life can't be planned.

Both stories are populated with quirky characters. The earthy characters in "The River Swimmer" are particularly engaging. As always, Harrison's writing is filled with sharp insight as he gently dissects his characters, exposing faults and revealing quintessential goodness. It would be difficult to read these stories without a smile, although "The River Swimmer" turns out to be the more serious of the two.

RECOMMENDED