brief book reviews

here are the 4 books i most recently read and my thoughts:

Wallop by Nathaniel Kennon Perkins (House of Vlad): i generally like the books brian alan ellis puts out on house of vlad and bought this one without having read any excerpts. the story takes place over a few days where our protagonist learns that his girlfriend is pregnant and then goes hitchhiking to see some of his punk rock friends in kansas city. there's a lot of emphasis on the scuzzy, heart-of-gold, alcoholic coke-addict life lived by the protagonist and his punk rock friends. i thought the writing was relatively compelling - i never felt bored, aside from a couple paragraphs of straight-forward exposition, which i was surprised to see. it's a very short, quick read, but relatively uneventful. i enjoyed reading it but felt it could have been longer. it is written in such a way that things feel like they might happen, but i think it's designed to focus on the protagonist ruminating on the idea of potentially being a father in contrast with his current life of getting drunk and sleeping on couches and kind of almost cheating on his girlfriend and stuff, as opposed to there being a 'plot'. there is an emphasis on everyone being, ultimately, a good person, in a general, baseline way, and there aren't really any conflicts, mean people, overly-bad decisions, or changes in opinion/character growth, etc. For example, I got the sense that the ruminations on fatherhood during the trip were meant to be set against the ambiguity of whether or not the girlfriend would have an abortion, but it never actually felt ambiguous about whether she would ultimately have an abortion or not. I think maybe, based on the recurring refrain of the protagonist asking people for "their abortion stories" which were all very short/uneventful, that the book, as "an abortion story", is similarly short/uneventful by design. If that's the case, I think it's clever. I felt most interested in the descriptions of hitchhiking and people drinking cheap beer and fancy cold brew.

A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness by Kathy Fish, Amy L. Clark, Elizabeth Ellen, and Claudia Smith (Rose Metal Press): bought this primarily to read the elizabeth ellen section and learn about kathy fish's writing, who is someone i've known about sort of peripherally online because of her status as like an important figure in flash fiction (teaching workshops, getting into Best American Non-Required Reading because of her story in the jellyfish review) and loose association with bud smith (i think he published one or more of her books via unknown press), but who i had never read aside from the BANRR story, which was about school shootings. anyway, this is 4 chapbooks that were submitted for some kind of publishing contest and then put together into one book. the kathy fish stories come first. they mostly center on family life and femininity, or the experience of being a girl/woman, with emphasis on pregnancy, motherhood, 'that weird aunt', unwelcome relationships with men, etc. They also almost all are written in 3rd person and have what i feel to be a kind of typical 'flash fiction' pacing and twist, which isn't very compelling to me, currently, based on my exposure to/focus on flash fiction in the past few years. i think my favorites are the more inexplicable ones, e.g. one about being delivered a baby instead of a vintage radio. next is amy l. clark, who i had never heard of. these stories are similar to the kathy fish ones in terms of themes and topics but i think are generally less interesting and more clunky, with garden pathing, unintentional pronoun ambiguity, that kind of stuff. they are also more 'angsty'/anti-authoritarian and i think more autofictional (due to certain recurring topics/ideas). i felt a strong desire to skip the last few stories but didn't, ended up generally enjoying them, i think, as a departure from the kathy fish stories. next is elizabeth ellen's collection, which i realized, maybe 2 stories in, have all been (re?)published in Fast Machine and so i had read them all already. felt largely disappointed in myself for having not done any research into the contents of ee's various printed collections prior to purchasing this book. last is claudia smith's stories, which i think are the most unique of the collection, although there is still an emphasis on domestic/relationship stories, there is greater ambiguity and strangeness throughout the stories which i appreciated in the context of the rest of the collection. i never felt like these were attempting to be 'clever' in the way a lot of flash fiction, i think, tries to do, but were more evocative, which appeals to me more, in terms of style/approach, although i felt that it was a disservice to her to include her collection last, because i felt like the similar topics made it hard for me to appreciate their uniqueness; by the middle of her collection i felt tired of reading flash fiction about relationships.

Shelters, shacks, and Shanties by Daniel Carter Beard (Public Domain/Breakout Productions): this book is from 1912 and is about how to build various kinds of shelters, primarily out of fresh cut timber, scrap wood (e.g. barrels) and earth/sod. it ranges from how to bundle pine boughs for bedding to planning/constructing multistory log cabins with an emphasis on 'scouting' and small temporary shelters for camping, although includes some sort of anthropological/architectural studies of different types of semi-permanent structures built by e.g. italian immigrant railroad workers and different native american tribes. jessica read a book recently about outdoor play for children and this book was referenced a few times, so i got a used and random copy off of thriftbooks. it's often very gender normative (it is addressed to/about boys/boy scouts) and racist against native americans, as one would expect for a book about camping from 1912, but the racism is, in my opinion, only in a couple short passages, which is much less than i expected. i found the personal narratives, which were scant, pretty engaging, particularly a short passage about traveling through the wilds north of quebec city with a native american chief and a short passage shittalking other authors who ripped off his illustrations for derivative books. the majority of the book consists of actual instructions for cutting, measuring, etc. for the various structures, but there are interesting sketches and drawings on every other page or so and discussions of where certain kinds of structures were popularized/used/etc. I feel like i have internalized some basics on constructing shelters, e.g. how to layer shingles/boughs to prevent leaks, how to square angles, and how to construct basic components, and i enjoyed the experience of daydreaming about building them, and thinking about how i probably never will build any of them. there are passages emphasizing conservationism, only cutting trees in unpopulated and densely wooded areas, etc. which i feel like are now impossible to encounter, in the sense that i don't think, in north america, maybe, that there are any densely wooded areas where it would not be illegal to cut down some trees as part of making your own camp. in this sense i enjoyed the book as an artifact of the past. there are also funny passages (e.g. one where he shittalks a guy who wrote him a letter to complain that one shelter required too much physical effort, whereas young boys had written letters praising how fun the shelter was to build) and strange/antiquated turns of phrasing i was unfamiliar with.

Ninety-Nine Stories of God by Joy Williams (Tin House):  this is a very short book of 99 vignettes - some are only a sentence, some are a couple (small) pages. i read it over 3 sessions before bed. i like how 'loose' she defines the qualifier "of God" in that many stories don't, in my opinion, have a very clear emphasis on God, but rather cover things like coincidence, life/death/love, and nature, which i think is the 'point', this idea of God being whatever God is, everywhere, whatever. and there are several stories where God is a character, interacting with animals and people in a non-God way, which was funny - it felt like at times joy simply wrote a very short story and then changed the character's name to God so it would fit in the collection, and these were, i think, my favorite stories, for example the one about God adopting a tortoise. so there are some like the above, and some of the stories are like little parables, and some are short 'news reports' (unsure if any of them are true), so there is a variety of the type of story throughout. it never felt repetitive. the ones i enjoyed most were the ones that felt autofictional or repurposed for the collection, which emphasize small details, the range of human quirk, and the strangeness of conversation. the prose/style reminds me of The Voice Imitator by thomas bernhard, and is a style i've seen recently in some stuff online, eg jordan castro's recent shorties on muumuu house and the recent sebastian castillo story on new york tyrant, which i can only really explain as a sort of semi-whimsical reporter voice, a sort of affectless affect, undynamic sentences, passive voice and clunky relative clauses for exposition/background. the idea, in my head, is that this approach foregrounds the story or idea and less the prose, but in reality i end up paying attention to the prose, i think, and i don't like it, really. i'm sure there is a term for this and some other more well-known books that do it which i haven't read. i think it's effective at times but reading it, and thinking about other short fiction that does it, has made me rethink instances where i've done it in some unpublished work, i think because of the novelty of it, and i felt briefly embarassed/disappointed in myself, and committed to rewriting those stories.

 

i'm still reading The Sellout, slowly. it's hard for me to focus, i think, when reading the sort of maximalist approach to jokes/references within long digressions, and i get tired when reading it, especially at night. i'm also taking my time with On the Mountain and i plan on starting a frederick barthelme novel next. i forget which though. i want to read another joy williams novel, i think, form the 80s.