Apparently, Colm Toibin's book New Ways to Kill Your Mother, published by Scribner this month, doesn’t provide any instruction on how to actually kill your mother. While this might be a grave disappointment to some, I’m inclined to smirk (with both glee and a bit of friendly mockery) at Toibin’s recommendation to put mom on ice—at least in fiction. Dwight Garner, reviewing the book for the NYTimes, explains: “His essential point, driven home in an essay about all the motherless heroes and heroines in the novels of Henry James and Jane Austen, is that ‘mothers get in the way of fiction; they take up the space that is better filled by indecision, by hope, by the slow growth of a personality.’”

Really, aren’t fiction mothers just a pain in the ass? If a novel has a mother in it, she’s usually too complicated and infuriating to develop in a half-assed way, and so the whole book ends up being about her. She’d just love that, wouldn’t she?

If you're a writer, you’re stuck having to acrobat around a reader’s wondering, “Where is the character’s mother? Does she know what her son’s doing?” every time you want a character to do something bad. Raskolnikov was gonna kill that landlady but then his mom came home. Groan. Guess he’ll never be friends with that prostitute.

Toibin points out that orphans are great characters in fiction, and really, how could they not be? Without all of that guidance, nourishment and guilt-mongering, orphans are free to find their own way in a world devoid of preconceived notions. Plus, devastation and an incurable longing are great ways to secure a far-reaching and easy sympathy from readers. Oh, the poor dear, that’s why this character’s acting up.

Still, I find this proposition of parentless fiction a little weird. Possibly indicative of a handful of bizarre psychological ramifications. Do we have a hard time imagining mothers without pillows clutched in their fists, coming to snuff us out? Do we really think that kids raised in two-parent households are so adjusted as to be boring? Are your parents making it hard for you to develop a personality or experience indecision and hope?

I love a little mom in my fiction. I say the more mothers, the better.

image: bbc.uk.co

Ben Marcus, writing in the New Statesman, proposes the idea that the new fascination with apocalyptic fiction is partially in response to a need to raise the stakes of American drama after 9/11. Apocalyptic fiction is a playground realist writers can now traipse through because such fears and expectations are no longer considered mere fantasy. Marcus writes: “Nothing of the 9/11 attacks even remotely suggested an apocalypse but they certainly helped expose the troubling fiction of our immortality. Which might mean that fictions of our end times are now, through bad luck or comeuppance, however you wish to view it, among the truest and most realistic stories that we can tell.”

To begin with a small, but important, clarification: I do not intend here to suggest how or what novelists should write about. Novelists are under no obligation to anyone for how or what they write. I am interested only in examining further Marcus’ observation of the historical and psychological conditions in America post 9/11 that some novelists and readers might be responding to. I agree with Marcus when he says “If this is a new development, it is worth considering why the end of the world is poised to join the suburbs and bad marriages as a distinctly American literary fascination.”

A question that comes up for me is to what degree end times fiction is a reconciliation with the present (coming to terms with what American life is now), and to what degree it foretells our larger attitudes about the future. If we’re willing to consider the notion that some psychological need is being fulfilled – at least tapped – through literary means, I think it’s interesting to look at the difference between this new end times phenomenon and Cold War paranoia. In the Cold War, dropping the atom bomb always remained a threat. After the Cold War was over, school children huddling beneath their desks and families cowering underground in bomb shelters seemed like an overreaction. We most definitely understood the terms of the engagement during the Cold War – we knew the nature of the conflict and could identify the enemy. Even if the Commie was infiltrating your neighborhood, there was still a very clear sense of that Commie’s motivation. Then think of Orwell, Huxley, Bradbury (not all American writers but surely read widely by Americans) warning us of what society might become if we’re not careful. Those writers were responding to the changes and possibilities that were apparent in their time, all focused on the implications of larger societal structures and all very much imbedded with a sense of democratic responsibility.

In the decade leading up to 9/11 major events were the very swift Gulf War, Rodney King and the LA Riots, Bill Clinton spilling on a dress. America was not living in fear – uncertain or otherwise – at the time. The 1990s top seller lists were riddled with Steven King, Michael Crichton, and Tom Clancy. Regardless of where ‘serious’ lies on their list of priorities, King, Crichton and Clancy were all writing to thrill. This new insurgence of serious, literary writers tackling end times is likely due to the observation that we are more willing to take such things more seriously. Now, the subjects of thrillers are not solely relegated to fantasy. What is new is our sense of the reality of such fears. For the most part, the general public had no real or accurate conception of who was responsible for 9/11 or why America was attacked. The nature of this new threat remains slippery, intricate, complicated – elusively grand. We now fear everything. It’s also partly our fault, but there’s a sense that it’s too late to fix it. The new end times fiction isn’t about precaution, it’s the aftermath. These tales are post-culture, post-society.

If we don’t have a clear sense of ‘the enemy,’ we also don’t have a very clear sense of ourselves. To be American now seems to mean to be privileged, ignorant, shitty. Self-interested to a harmful degree, at every level of interaction. The freedom we hold dear to be the freedom to make and spend money. America contains much more than that but American identity is now so often talked about in such imprecise ways by people trying to sell something that it’s hard for someone not trying to sell something to join the conversation. Or at least be heard among all the noise. Marcus points out that the American suburban drama can now seem indulgent, irresponsible – how smug and lucky we are to pout over our incredibly safe, decadent, awesome lives: “To call the novel irrelevant because it couldn’t top 9/11 – that seemed strange, a botched diagnosis. But it did not prevent a shame from settling over writers who favoured domestic literary subject matter that could very well be deemed minor.” No serious, deep consideration of any subject should be considered minor, but there is now a compulsion to raise the stakes. I think it’s quite valuable to consider the new end times fiction as being a response to that. The levels of perceived and potential devastation have been turned up a notch or two.

I think it should also be noted that much of the current end times fiction is still largely domestic: in Marcus’ The Flame Alphabet and McCarthy’s The Road the protagonists are both fathers whose concerns are still centered on family. Family is, after all, what we have left (hopefully) once every other structure has collapsed. And American fiction does have a quite excellent tradition of rugged individualists. The drama of the end times is no doubt reassuring in that most end times stories are to a great extent survival stories. Even if everyone dies at the end they do so heroically – they have proven great spirit, valor, and humanity in their fight and thereby given meaning to their existence. These stories are in some way telling us that we can indeed persevere – even after it’s all gone to shit – and do so with something like integrity. Or, if not integrity, we will at least learn something valuable about ourselves.

I have no doubt that apocalypse fiction, in addition to vampires and werewolves, will be around for quite a long time, but I also sense end times fiction will lose its newly celebrated appeal. Literary fiction isn’t often that popular – and I think the perceived ‘anomaly’ of serious fiction taking on genre characteristics actually helped literary fiction writers get more attention – and the American imagination, for writers and readers both, demands reinvention quite often. My question then is: what comes next? Will novelists continue to feel the need for high drama? Can we stop quibbling over the distinctions between high and low subject matter? What will now be the course of American fiction?

image: www.ep.tc

I have been an admirer of Brian Evenson’s prose ever since I drooled over the stories in his first collection, Altmann’s Tongue—one of the top influences in forming my literary aesthetic, and one of the most crucial collections to come out in the last twenty years. His new collection,Windeye, just out from Coffee House Press, continues the same dark, titillating work I first fell in love with.

In very economical ways, and in a very short space, Evenson creates great rifts of uncertainty for his characters and for the reader. In “Angel of Death,” the narrator, wandering a desolate landscape with a group of eight others, is given the task of writing down the names of those who die along the way. But even this concrete task is complicated—made slippery—by larger forces just underneath the tangible world:

The difficulty comes in knowing what is real and what is not. There is no agreement on this. What I am nearly sure is real are bursts and jolts and the smell of singed hair, but others recall none of these effects, recall other things entirely. And how we came to slip from one dim world and its dim deeds to the place where we are now, none of us are in any position to say. And why we are together, this too I do not know.

What I admire most about Evenson is his ability to arrest me in an extreme state of vulnerability. Whether the narrative is in first- or third-person, it never intrudes to provide concrete orientation. I am as lost, as consumed by disorientation, as the characters. In a cinematic sense, it's as if there is no widescreen shot, no panoramic lens, with which to get a sense of any outside environment. I'm pulled into in this great, unresolved tension that becomes the general atmosphere in which the events of the stories take place. Which is horrifying. And delightfully so.

There is also great physicality in Evenson’s vivid descriptions. His landscapes, while mostly spare, contain specificities of texture that make them come alive. Great attention is paid to the scratches and marks of violence upon bodies. These exquisite details are made all the more terrifying for being the only details to really trust.

If you happen to be in New York, I recommend experiencing Evenson firsthand. He’ll be reading with Dylan Hicks and Ben Lerner at the KGB Bar this Sunday, May 20, and at The Center for Fiction on Monday, May 21. I can assure you: horror might await the characters in these stories, but what's even more delightful is the horror that awaits the reader.

image: coffeehousepress.org

A New York Times review of Would It Kill You To Stop Doing That?, a new book on manners by Henry Alford, got me thinking about how much of my social grace I’ve gleaned from works of fiction. Beyond the more obvious social dramas of Austen or Fitzgerald, books can provide useful advice on how to act in certain situations—and warn of the consequences when certain behaviors are found undesirable.

I figured, if James could look to literature to gain a little perspective on zoophiles, I could consult the bookshelf to learn how to behave. What follows is a brief guide to help you get started.

• All little children should be given Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Sure, it’s a little violent, but unimaginable horror never killed an eight year-old. The lesson here is embodied in the boy: at the end of days, walking around starving, the little guy hardly ever complains (or talks, for that matter), and he's spectacularly polite and loving towards his father. Does your kid whine about not getting the candy cereal at the grocery store? Hand him or her a copy. Maybe read it at night before they go to bed. See what happens.
• Do you know any sexual deviants who just need to shut up about it already? Give them a copy of Mary Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior. One of the beauties of Gaitskill’s short stories is how remarkably calm everybody is about how messed up their sex is. As uncomfortable and sometimes harmful as her characters can be, Gaitskill narrates in a way that shuts down all the annoying, gossipy shock value and allows the perverts to be precisely what they are: just humans.
• Even though it was published way back in 1962, I think Another Country by James Baldwin should be handed out to every white, liberal-leaning heterosexual along with their organic oats and fair trade coffee. Have you ever referred to someone else’s partner as their "roommate"? Do you decorate with the aim of exhibiting your knowledge of cultural difference? Maybe you’re super well-intentioned but don’t understand what all the fuss is about. Mr. Baldwin can tell you.
• Is there anything worse than the plethora of man-children running around today? Guys in their twenties and thirties shirking the responsibilities of career, family, haircuts, bathing. Maybe it’s time for a good look at one of the prototypes of the modern man-child: Rabbit, Run by John Updike. The book should be read not to shore up men's juvenile mindsets, but to show them that their very special feelings of entrapment and angst are anything but new. Besides, until you can narrate your life at the level of Updike’s prose, your angst won’t even get you any attention.

But the best reason to pick up a book of fiction? It might not even be the wisdom between the covers, but that your chances of fucking up decrease if your nose is stuck in one.

Image: tylershields.com