The Morning News

Saturday, March 20, 2010

Currently: "I am old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised." http://tmne.ws/14845
1 day ago

Reading • The Killing Circle

Book Digest As little attention as is paid to literature in the United States—apparently we have greater matters with which to deal—Canadian writers are rarely acknowledged (Alice Munro excepted) down here in the lower 48. Andrew Pyper has a good chance of breaking through the caribou curtain with his fourth novel, The Killing Circle, not the least of reasons is that his first novel, Lost Girls, has been optioned—as well the above-mentioned fourth novel. Add some appealing 60-second miniatures (formerly called advertisements) and one might predict some serious currency in the new-attention economy. And that’s before the merits of Pyper’s work is considered.

In this new opus, we are presented with widowed with young son, Patrick Rush, former National (read: Toronto) Star book critic reduced to wasting type on pop-culture television. Rush, having artistic ambitions, joins a writer’s group—in a flailing attempt to turn around his disenchanted and unproductive life. As his participation in this group (led by a bent literary figure, Conrad White) commences, a rash of murders become the second thread of this narrative. Pyper’s prose—bursts of sentences with less than three words—can be a little caricaturishly noir, but his sensibilities are acute:
There is an aggression in the streets now, the suggestion that comes with insatiable desires. Because there is more on offer now, there is more to want. This kind of change, happening as it’s happening here, fast and unmanageable, makes people see others in ways they hadn’t before. As a market. A demographic. Points of access.
As Rush’s artistic struggles are one of the main, if not the main, thrusts of The Killing Circle, his commentary operates on the meta-literary level—a character who is a writer describing all sorts of writerly matters and concerns. It’s not a bad approach to take, though I leave it to you to decide if some of his commentary is a bit obvious:
The dawning millennium, we were told, was ushering in a new breed of “user friendly” newspaper, one that could compete with the looming threats of the internet and cable news channels and widespread functional illiteracy. Readers had grown impatient. Words in too great a number only squandered their time. In response, the Arts section became the Entertainment section. Features were shrunk to make room for celebrity “news” and photos of movie stars walking, sunglassed, with a barbell-sized latte. Memos were circulated directing us to fashion our stories so as to no longer appeal to adults seeking information and analysis, but to adolescents with attention-deficit disorder.
Obvious. And sad. Indeed. —Robert Birnbaum, Oct. 1, 2008
Discuss This • Tweet this • Post to Facebook • FILE UNDER: Alice Munro, Andrew Pyper, Lost Girls, The Killing Circle

Reading • Anthology 101

Book Digest Receiving an advance copy of The Best American Mystery Stories 2008—guest-edited this year by George Pelecanos—reminds me that Houghton Mifflin’s onslaught of its franchise The Best American Series anthologies is not far behind. What started in 1915 as simply The Best American Short Stories now has every stripe of superlative excessive collections, including the imaginative and contrived The Best American Nonrequired Reading. But the 21st century is all about exploiting Brand, right? So let me move on. If not the “best” stories, Pelecanos’s 19 selections are certainly quite wonderful, as he is certain to upset purists by including fine writers like Elizabeth Strout, Alice Munro, Thisbe Nissen, James Lee Burke, Robert Ferragamo, Michael Connelly, Chuck Hogan, and Joyce Carol Oates. My favorites are a poignant, flashback-filled story by Kyle Minor (“A Day Meant to Do Less”), Scott Phillips’s well-modulated nostalgia (“The Emerson, 1950”), and Stephen Rhodes’s Wall Street morality tale (“At the Top of His Game”).

For many years, Shannon Ravenel edited the New Stories From the South anthology; she’s turned over the reins to Kathy Pories and yearly guest editors: Alan Gurganis in 2006, Edward P. Jones in 2007, and Z.Z. Packer in 2008. As expected, these anthologies do feature many of the South’s favorite sons and daughters (which, if you are out of touch with that region’s rich literary tradition and culture, is a major public service); in this instance, Packer’s introduction is an intriguing, smart, and provocative essay entitled “The Double Indemnity of the South”:
And as backward as we’ve been portrayed—or as backward as we’ve sometimes portrayed ourselves, slipping behind a curtain of innocent and naïve agrarianism, rural somnolence, and sleepy everlasting vowels—the truth is that every awful and beautiful thing that has happened in America happened in the South first.
Kudos to Dan Wickett and Dzanc Books for finding a need and filling it well with the initial Best of the Web 2008. The volume’s editor, Nathan Leslie, writes:
This anthology does not attempt to capture some very vital aspects of the online experience—no multimedia experience, no interactive texts, no surfing here. We limited ourselves to four genres—poetry, fiction, flash fiction, and creative nonfiction. There are others; this isn’t our attempt to build Rome in a day… Rome will come. It will take time. For now I simply hope you like the anthology we put together. Read, enjoy, savor.
 —Robert Birnbaum, Aug. 21, 2008
Discuss This • Tweet this • Post to Facebook • FILE UNDER: Alan Gurganis, Alice Munro, Anthologies, Best of the Web, Chuck Hogan, Dan Wickett, Dave Eggers, Dzanc Books, Edward P. Jones, Elizabeth Strout, George Pelecanos, James Lee Burke, Joyce Carol Oates, Kathy Pories, Kyle Minor, Michael Connelly, Nathan Leslie, New Stories From the South, Robert Ferragamo, Scott Phillips, Shannon Ravenel, Southern Literature, Stephen Rhodes, The Best American Series, Thisbe Nissen, Z.Z. Packer
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