Author Archive
Kevin Brockmeier’s fiction deftly, uncannily and poignantly treads the delicate lines that connect and separate fantasy and science fiction; dream and nightmare; fable and parable. 
Brockmeier grounds his fiction in reality, but turns reality inside-out or at least slightly askew, asking readers to look around ordinary corners into odd angles where small but potent revelations stand illuminated. In the touching novel, “The Truth about Celia,” for example, a father attempts to deal with his sorrow and guilt about the disappearance of his daughter by writing a series of widely divergent short stories in which she figures (more or less), only to find that the truth about Celia is more complicated than his imagination can grasp.
Brockmeier lives in Little Rock. His new collection of stories is “The View from the Seventh Layer” (Pantheon, $21.95). The author will be at Davis-Kidd Booksellers Tuesday at 6 p.m. to read from and sign the book. His previous efforts are the short story collection “Things That Fall from the Sky”; another novel “The Brief History of the Dead”; and the children’s books “City of Names” and “Grooves: A Kind of Mystery.” The store is at 387 Perkins Ext. in Laurelwood. Call 683-9801.
The following interview with Kevin Brockmeier, presented here in excerpts, was conducted by Corey Claireday, a student of creative nonfiction in the English department at the University of Memphis.
I remember where I was when I learned that Frank O’Hara was dead. I was sitting in the reading room of the library at the University of Iowa, in August 1966, my first semester of graduate school. The New York Times Book Review ran a memorial essay about the late poet, except that I didn’t know that he had been killed, run down by a Jeep on Fire Island on July 24. One of my favorite and essential poets had been dead for two months, and I hadn’t known. It felt as if I had lost two months from my life.
A massive “Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara” was published in 1971, followed by a “Selected Poems of Frank O’Hara,” derived from the first volume, in 1974. More of O’Hara’s work came to light, however, in the intervening years, and was published in various editions that editor Mark Ford drew upon for this handsome new “Selected Poems” (Alfred A. Knopf, $30) that expands, to some extent, our awareness of O’Hara’s achievement, especially in the early phases.
I read a story once that when the young Stephen Spender met T.S.Eliot in the mid or late 1920s — and Eliot was a renowned literary figure by that time — Eliot asked Spender what he intended to do with his life, and Spender replied, “I want to be a poet,” to which Eliot said, “I don’t know what you mean” or something like that. To Eliot, writing poems was something that someone did; as a vocation, it did not define you. To Spender, writing poetry meant being a poet; it was a state of existence and consciousness . Frank O’Hara, along with poets like Keats, Shelley and Hart Crane, embodied the idea of being a poet. Poems poured from O’Hara with the intoxicating scintillation of a martini from a silver shaker. He could scarcely stride along the sidewalks of his beloved Manhattan — he calls Whitman “my great predecessor” — without thinking of a poem, writing a poem in his head or rushing back to his office at the Museum of Modern Art after lunch to roll some paper into his typewriter and compose a poem. Significantly, his little book published in 1964 by City Lights was called “Lunch Poems.”
Jonathan Miles’ debut novel “Dear American Airlines” is due to be released by Houghton Mifflin on June 5. However, if you go to www.dearamericanairlines.com, you can download the complete novel for free; the offer is good for a week, according to an ad that ran in this morning’s New York Times.
Why do we care?
Because Miles grew up in Oxford, Miss., hung out, drank tons of beer, attended a few classes at Ole Miss but never graduated and was a prodigious protege of the novelist and short-story-writer Larry Brown, who died in 2004. In fact, Miles became such a part of Brown’s family that he is listed on Brown’s tombstone along with his other children. Not that “Dear American Airlines” is like anything that Brown wrote; oh no.
Miles, who lives north of New York City, is a prolific freelance writer, books columnist for Men’s Journal, as well as writing the weekly cocktail report in the Times’ “Sunday Styles” section. O supreme gig! Two weeks ago, at The Oxford Conference for the Book, Miles served as moderator for a panel on the art and the state of print book-reviewing; I was a member of that panel, along with Dwight Garner, senior editor at The New York Times Book review, and J. Peder Zane, former book review editor for the News and Observer, in Raleigh, N.C., now that paper’s “ideas” columnist — another supreme gig — and editor of “Remarkable Reads: 34 Writers and Their Adventures in Reading” and “The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books.”
Heady company, indeed, and it got headier when, after the conclusion of our panel discussion, we met at Ajax on the Oxford town square for a lunch of chicken and dumplings, country fried steak and the restaurant’s signature pimiento cheese po-boy. Joining us were Miles’ wife Cat, who works for the wine importer Bartholomew Broadbent, and their three amazingly well-behaved children, and Zane’s wife Jeanine. Many beers and Bloody Marys were consumed. It was a long, hilarious lunch, but somehow not long enough.
There’s an excellent (and pretty hilarious) interview with Jonathan Miles at popmatters.com.
One has to be careful reviewing a novel by Patrick McGrath. From the first page, he begins laying clues and dropping hints about the bomb he’s going to drop on readers at the end of the book, though he’s also clever enough that some of his hints and clues lead to false trails, a feat particularly easy when he manipulates the device of the unreliable narrator as well as he does (and perhaps turns that device inside out). So a reviewer constantly has to parse what he’s revealing to make certain not to give away the multi-layered game.
Let’s say this: Patrick McGrath’s new novel “Trauma” (Alfred A. Knopf, $24.95) is narrated by a psychiatrist — as was “Asylum,” his fourth novel — who cannot follow the dictum, “Physician, heal thyself,” though he understands that some horror hidden inside is making his life increasingly untenable. The setting is New York in the 1970s and ’80s; Charlie Weir specializes in treating Vietnam veterans and other patients suffering from post-traumatic syndrome. One of the most traumatized of his clients is Danny Magill, whose terrors brought back from Vietnam leave him almost silent, strenuously alcoholic and severely depressed.
The session at 1:30 this rainy afternoon at the 15th Oxford Conference for the Book featured two poets, Van Jordan and Rob Griffith. The poets were introduced by Beth Ann Fennelly, author of the poetry collections “Open House” and “Tender Hooks”; she and her husband, short story-writer and novelist Tom Franklin (”Hell at the Breech,” “Smonk”) teach at the University of Mississippi.
It turns out that Griffith is originally from Memphis. After the readings and question-and-answer period, I asked him about his background. He grew up around the Park and Perkins area and attended Harding Academy for high school, 
followed by college at University of Tennessee, Knoxville. “Poetry wasn’t really on my mind then,” he said. He worked “for years” for Lockheed in Knoxville and “got tired of writing yet another technical brochure,” so he went back to school, this time to get a graduate degree from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, studying under such well-known poets as Jim Whitehead and Miller Williams.
Now 38, Griffith is associate professor of English at the University of Evansville in Indiana. He is editor of the poetry journal Measure and author of three collections of poems, “Necessary,” “Poisoning Caesar” and “A Matinee in Plato’s Cave.”
His fellow-reader is assistant professor of English at the University of Texas in Austin. He, too, has three collections of poems, “Rise,” “M-A-G-N-O-L-I-A” — about the first African American women to be admitted to a national spelling bee — and “Quantum Lyrics.”
There’s a phrase: “You could hear a pin drop.”
That’s what it sounded like this evening at the Thacker Mountain Radio recording session in Oxford, Mississippi, when Kevin Brockmeier, of Little Rock, read one of his uncanny, evocative short stories, the one that begins “Once there was a man who happened to buy God’s overcoat.” The story is called “A Fable with Slips of Paper Spilling from the Pockets.” It appears in Brockmeier’s new book, “The View from the Seventh Layer” (Pantheon, $21.95)
The reason that this silence was interesting in that Thacker Mountain Radio is a raucous affair. Usually, the event is held at Off Square Books, the used books annex to the well-known and beloved Square Books, an institution in the literary town. Tonight, however, Thacker moved to larger quarters in the old Power House, two blocks off the old town square. The facility features a huge industrial space with a stage and lights and rows of padded seats. And to add to the audience for this debut, this is also the first day of the 15th Oxford Conference for the Book (which is why I’m in the town Faulkner made famous, to serve on a panel Saturday), so the audience swelled to unprecedented proportions; staff members brought in more chairs and still people lined the side walls and crowded at the back. As master of ceremonies Jim Dees said: “One can only hope that the fire marshal is under sedation.”
The Library of America was launched in 1982 with volumes devoted to Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman, Twain, Harriet Beecher Stoew, Jack London and William Dean Howells, a venerable group of classic 19th Century authors. Twenty-six 
years later, the series encompasses 181 volumes, most clad in the now-familiar black dust jacket bisected by narrow stripes of red, white and blue.
The roster of American authors represented is a mind-boggling pantheon of greatness; as well as the writers previously mentioned there are Henry James and Williams James, Stephen Crane, Poe and Thoreau, Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, Cooper, Edith Wharton, Henry Adams, Eugene O’Neill and on and on. Founding Fathers like Franklin, Washington and Jefferson are included, as well as prose from political, 
military and cultural figures like Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, generals Grant and Sherman and Theordore Roosevelt.
Deeper into the 20th Century, we get Sinclair Lewis and John Steinbeck, Gertrude Stein and James Thurber, Nathanael West and James Baldwin and Richard Wright, Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens. There are some surprising inclusions: Three volumes of Vladimir Nabokov’s fiction in English; three volumes of I.B. Singer’s stories; two volumes for Paul Bowles. And, in an unusual innovation, the LOA began a series of volumes of the novels of Philip Roth in 2005.
And the non-profit series has not hesitated to move into genre fiction; there are two volumes devoted to American crime fiction of the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s, as well as collections of the works of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. H.P. 
Lovecraft was recently admitted, and Jack Kerouac shortly thereafter. Last year, LOA published “Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s.” Well, O.K., I thought, that’s fine, but I will admit being brought up short on learning that as well as adding Elizabeth Bishop and William Maxwell to the fold this spring, LOA is bringing out another collection of Dick’s novels in July.
Does Philip K. Dick deserve this attention when the series has not included such essential figures as Emily Dickinson, Ernest Hemingway and T.S. Eliot? Read the rest of this entry »
It’s not often that I wish a book were longer– well, if it made more sense – but at 210 small pages, Charles Baxter’s new novel “The Soul Thief” (Pantheon, $20) lacks flesh and bone. Oh the details are beautiful, lovingly and acutely described, as we expect from Baxter, but the questions of identity and narrative into which the novel delves are too complicated to be dealt with so 
quickly. And far from being “creepy” — an adjective too many reviewers of the book have used — “The Soul Thief” merely skims the surface of the uncanny.
Baxter’s irresistible quality, well-known to fans of “The Feast of Love,” “Saul and Pasty” and other books, is a deeply imbued sense of compassion for his characters and their woeful, wounded lives, a compassion so complete and empathetic that it pervades every sentence of his narrative, every metaphor he deploys; the result is prose that is simple and straightfoward yet possesses remarkable limpidity and emotional resonance. In “The Soul Thief,” however, that prose leads the author close to sentimentality and to characters that feel shaped more by the strategies of television and movies than the inevitabilties of good fiction.
Nathaniel Mason, an aimless graduate student in Buffalo in the early 1970s, balances affairs with two women, the beautiful, seductive, quirky and callow Theresa, and the intelligent, artistic, ambivalent lesbian Jamie. Nathaniel is also beset, hampered and persecuted by the eccentric and somewhat sinister young genius Jerome Coolberg, who not only insinuates himself into Nathaniel’s life but at first slyly and then more blatently appropriates the hapless Nathaniel’s life for his own, from stealing and wearing his clothes to confiscating one of his lovers.
Years later, having lost contact with Jerome, Nathaniel, now a grant writer for a local arts agency, is married to the patient Laura, a dealer in quilts; at this point the novel switches from third-person to first-person narration, and the change in tone, from objective to personal is fatal to the enterprise. Nathaniel and Laura have two sons, Michael and Jeremy, and the way Nathaniel describes the boys is sweet and clever and loving and way too cute for any reality other than a TV sit-com or a movie that stars Greg Kinnear (who as it happens was the star of the hapless film of “The Feast of Love).
Jerome, of course, shows up or erupts in Nathaniel’s life again. He is the host of an NPR interview program, “American Evenings.” When he calls Nathaniel and Nathaniel goes to meet Jerome in L.A., he finds his old friend/nemesis living in squalor, perhaps on the edge of insanity. Jerome leaves a manuscript in his car for Nathaniel to find, which he does, and he opens it and reads … and when Baxter revealed that the heart of the novel is a narrative device, I said, “Oh, that old trick,” and wanted to drop-kick the book into the next county.
The film of “Beowulf,” packed with grandiose special effects and awash with deluges of digital blood, somehow misses the tone of one of the scariest scenes in world literature. We’re 
quoting from Seamus Heaney’s splendid translation of the Old English epic published in 1999.
In off the moors, down through the mist bands
God-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.
The bane of the race of men roamed forth,
hunting for a prey in the high hall.
Under the cloud-murk he moved towards it,
until it shone above him, a sheer keep
of fortified gold.
The monster, more monstrous because of his humanoid form — and “greedily loping” is perfect — reaches the great hall of Hrothgar, king of the Danes.
Then his rage boiled over, he ripped open
the mouth of the building, maddening for blood,
pacing the length of the patterned floor
with his loathsome tread, while a baleful light,
flame more than light, flared from his eyes.
It’s the flame in Grendel’s eyes that transfixes us, a malevolent blaze that, as the poet implies, seems to project awful sentience beyond mere light.
My note on page 51 of Sarah Arvio’s exhilarating and exhausting second book of poems, “Sono: Cantos” (Alfred A. Knopf, $15, paperback) — the poem is “John” – goes like this: “Wow — tough, sinewy, naked, brave, vulnerable.” If that description doesn’t make you want to read this book, I don’t know what to do with you. Arvio writes poems in passionate 
detonations of words, metaphors, puns, rhymes and cross-rhymes and off-rhymes, alliteration and repetition and rich allusion, phrases and motifs passing from poem to poem, yet she maintains strict control over the form of the poems, writing in three-line stanzas (usually nine per poem). These rigorous vessels compress and intensify Arvio’s brilliant, self-lacerating, wit (John Donne crossed with Eve Ensler), making her razor-edged forays into shame and mortification (the subjects of course involving love and romance), almost unbearable; the risk — effervescent, exciting, numbing and sexy — is not merely to the success of the poem but to language and the poet herself. After all, ”Sono” means “I am” in Italian, and ”sono,” from the Latin for “sound,” is also the root for such words in English as “sonorous” and “sonority.” That is to say: The utterance of the poem and the being of the poet are inseparable. Read the rest of this entry »
