Monday, February 18, 2019

Sick: A Memoir by Porochista Khakpour

That is Porochista Khakpour (@PKhakpour) pictured on the cover of her new book, Sick: A Memoir. If you’ve been following her on social media or know someone who has, then most likely you’ve seen her post about the struggle to diagnose and treat her illness(es). Among pictures of her poodle and writer friends she has shared photos of herself much like the one on the front cover, lying in a hospital bed with tubes running along her arms. I was peripherally aware of her situation (coming from a graduate creative writing program), but I did not experience her story in real time as so many of her friends and followers did.
What I have experienced vicariously through friends and family is the state of healthcare in the United States that Khakpour documents meticulously throughout her narrative. In particular, the systemic disbelief, dismissal, and disregard for women experiencing chronic illness and pain. Healthcare in our country is expensive, not only in terms of money but also time and energy. The years Khakpour had to put in with numerous hospital visits, doctors, and specialists (including New Age alternatives) before receiving the correct diagnosis are harrowing. Much like Sinclair’s The Jungle or Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, Khakpour is reporting on the reality we all experience, but fail to acknowledge to our own detriment.

For this reason alone, Sick is must read. But it’s also an intensely personal narrative, one that isn’t afraid to be honest. The author is far from perfect, going so far to admit at one point that she makes herself sick with her choices and behavior, and I immediately wanted to thank her online for that passage. Each of us is guilty of taking poor care of ourselves, whether physically or emotionally or some elaborate combination that also damages our relationships or our futures. Our culture and communities (and complex systemic factors therein) enable these choices and this behavior, which is further complicated by our need to live fully. Experiencing the mistakes and recklessness of life often conflicts with our responsibility to be the best caretakers of our own health. In this respect, Khakpour is being more courageous than most authors I can name in terms of owning her own role in how she has suffered through a lifetime of illness. She herself says that she sets a bad example and shouldn’t be followed. Many people in my life and I would say the same, making this the kind of self accounting we all need.

There’s no happy ending to the book. She allows that the story is maybe in the middle of being told, and the ending may not be as pleasant as she intended in the original book proposal. But her memoir is also a triumph because it speaks a truth we must hear. Her book diagnoses the sickness of a country that is not providing proper healthcare to its women nor providing an environment of support and acceptance for people of color. And she wrote it with the unflinching examination at what a difficult and even sometimes ugly account it is of illness, addiction, and suffering.

Please contribute to Khakpour's crowdfund if you are able. She details in her book and online how immensely expensive it is to treat late stage Lyme Disease, so every contribution matters. As a reader who borrowed a copy from my public library, the least I could do was donate the full retail value of her book. If you're reading this, and you read her memoir, then this is a simple, significant good you can do.
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Sunday, February 10, 2019

The Unfinished World and Other Stories by Amber Sparks

In every review of short story collections I’ve read, there isn’t space to review each story. This is 
true even for shorter collections of 8-10 stories. But some are so remarkable that each story 
deserves to be highlighted, however briefly. The Unfinished World and Other Stories by 
Amber Sparks (@ambernoelle) is one such collection. Below I’ve listed the title of each story in 
the order it appears in print followed by a brief description meant to entice you into obtaining 
and reading this collection.


“The Janitor in Space” - a working class woman finds perspective cleaning up a space station 
orbiting earth.

“The Lizzie Borden Jazz Babies” - first of similarly themed stories about odd, precocious children 
with eccentric parents.

“The Cemetery for Lost Faces” - Louise and Clarence become a taxidermist and artist like their 
parents who are tragically killed, and end up living in a big old manor house that they keep up 
by doing taxidermy for a mob boss.

“The Logic of the Loaded Heart” - John’s painful, impoverished life (and his cycle of bad choices) 
told in the style of a college exam.

“Thirteen Ways of Destroying a Painting” - a women from the future encounters difficulty 
changing the past when she fails numerous attempts to prevent an artist from painting his 
masterpiece.

“Lancelot in the Lost Places of the World” - Lancelot is resurrected for corporate greed and 
surprisingly manages well on a modern day (con)quest into the jungle.

“And the World Was Crowded with Things That Meant Love” - poignant, long distance love affair 
between a sculptor and a wood carver. Think art-pals instead of pen-pals.

“Birds with Teeth” - enthralling story about warring paleontologists during the bone rush of the 
late 19th century.

“For These Humans Who Cannot Fly” - told from the point of view of the inventor of German 
waiting mortuaries whose wife killed herself after he institutionalized her.

“Take Your Daughter to the Slaughter” - coming of age story for girls who become werewolf 
hunters.

“We Were Holy Once” - a family of grifters travel from town to town to con people out of money, 
eventually murdering the wealthiest bachelor for his inheritance before moving on.

“La Belle de Nuit, La Belle de Jour” - in this fractured fairy tale a cursed princess--whose brothers 
are turned to swans--lives out in the wilderness weaving shirts to bring them back until she’s 
‘rescued.’ There are even more interesting details I won’t spoil for you.

“The Men and Women Like Him” - another time travel story, where a sort of janitor cleans up 
time travelers’ messes when they go back to save lives. He empathizes by way of a great aunt 
murdered during the Holocaust.

“Things You Should Know About Cassandra Dee” - a present day Cassandra ignores her own sight 
in order to look and feel beautiful, even though it leads to her own death.

“The Fires of Western Heaven” - tableaux of images connected with war and its inevitable 
devastation.

“The Process of Human Decay” - what it says on the tin, in sumptuous prose.

“The Fever Librarian” - a librarian of fevers succumbs to it in more ways than one.

“The Unfinished World” - novella chronicling the lives of Set and Inge, two post-WWI kids that 
grow up to be extraordinary people and eventually find one another. Their idiosyncratic families 
are central to the two main characters.

“The Sleepers” - story as Rorschach inkblot. I could tell you what I read, but you will read 
something completely different.


Each of these stories is founded in a narrative idea powerful enough to sustain a novel. The 
incredible merit of Sparks’s prose is that she realizes the full potential of these ideas in the short 
story form. One of my personal favorites, “Birds with Teeth,” constructs the rivalry meticulously 
through explorations of mentorship, ambition, competition, love, and betrayal. Each line is rich 
with historical details, characterizations, and insights into the limits of human knowledge and the 
breadth of human frailty. Likewise, I learned and ached so much from “For These Humans Who 
Cannot Fly” in less than a dozen pages that I was sure it must have been longer than it was. The 
lazy reviewer will often lament, “this should be a novel!” but overlooks that the short story form 
can do more justice to a narrative than a sprawling, engorged book. Like a poem, the care crafting 
each sentence and choice of word in a short story creates a singular experience that resonates 
profoundly in its immediacy. With her originality, her voice, and her craft, Sparks has managed a 
career in the short story to rival the greatest masters of the form: Katherine Anne Porter, 
Flannery O’Connor, Joy Williams, and Jorge Luis Borges. Read and rejoice.
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Friday, February 2, 2018

In Persuasion Nation by George Saunders



I’ve been reading George Saunders for a while now. I started with Pastoralia (2000) and then went back to CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996) before going forward in time with In Persuasion Nation (2006). I have strong feelings about Saunders and his writing, which I will share with you now. For one thing, he is reliably terrible with titles. Not since Barry Hannah has an author so angered me with his short story titles. Here’s a brief selection from In Persuasion Nation: “Jon,” “Adams,” “93990” and “Commcomm.” These are essentially cyphers, they are place holders for a title and have no real meaning or effect on the story until after I have already read it. Perhaps it is me being old fashioned, but a really excellent story title gives me just enough to work with, just enough hint of what I may find in store for me when I embark upon a reading. What’s even more infuriating is that Saunders does execute the occasional good title, almost all of which become the title stories for his collections. My favorite title is also attached to my favorite story of his, “The Falls,” but I’ll get to that.

I place Saunders among the movement that comes closest to what David Foster Wallace anticipated as ‘The New Sincerity.’ He often gets put in a literary lineage with Kurt Vonnegut (a personal favorite of mine) and while they share some key similarities, I think Saunders is ultimately more of a lyricist than Vonnegut. Ultimately, all of Vonnegut’s narrators sound the same (like Vonnegut himself) but it’s what they’re saying that’s more important than how they are saying it. Don't get me wrong, Vonnegut’s voice is a good voice, perfected over a short but crucial period of his career (between his first and second novels, if you can believe it), and works across the various books. But for Saunders, every character’s voice is different. Many are ignorant, uneducated, or just coarse with language and thought (my dissertation chair told me that Saunders' humor often comes at the expense of his characters who are uniformly poor, uneducated, and down trodden, and he's not entirely wrong there). There’s a cadence that captures how his characters feel and behave and thus there is more nuance and room for gray areas. Three of the stories from In Persuasion Nation are told from the point of view of a character who is directly responsible for 1.) the murder of an entire family 2.) inciting and supporting mob violence that leads to several deaths and the extermination of most small animals kept as pets, and 3.) the cold, objective analysis of the experimentation, torture, and execution of a collection of primates. These were all painful stories to read, and each sickened me in its own way. But that’s part of the point, because each of the narrators in these stories believes himself to be in the right in his actions. There’s also some savage irony at work, particularly in the primate experimentation story (which has the god-awful title “93990” mentioned above). In this particular example, the irony is that we as human readers feel for the primates who are made to suffer under this inhuman experimentation (which borders on torture, especially for the primate with the number that shares the story’s title), while the narrative voice maintains a cold, objective distance through expository reporting. Yet the exposition of the one primate that survives begins to accrue an intense feeling to it, almost like by focusing on this one animal and his resilience to all attempts to destroy him, we still feel the emotional connection that allows us to sympathize and empathize with him. It’s not exactly what Wallace predicted, with ironic narrative looping back around on itself to allow for sincere feeling, but Saunders has made his career out of this kind of postmodern lyricism.

I got to hear Saunders read in 2000 as part of promotional touring he was doing for Pastoralia. He read “Sea Oak” which is the big, showy piece from that collection, and it was a transformative experience to hear him read it aloud. I had read it as part of a creative writing workshop I was enrolled in at the time and I'll confess that I hadn’t gotten the story. Hearing him do voices, and the cadence of his speech as he said certain lines communicated all the comedy that I had been missing. It’s satiric, yes, but also absurd, and extremely delightful to hear Saunders say in a performative old lady zombie voice, “Show your cock!” It’s a good story, and a sad one. Almost all of his stories are sad, even the ones that end well enough (like “My Flamboyant Grandson” and “Bohemians” from In Persuasion Nation). The best from Pastoralia, though, is “The Falls.” While this blog post takes In Persuasion Nation as its reference point for Must Read, I would amend that Saunders as author period is must read, in particular “The Falls.” In that story, two characters are walking along the bank of a river that leads to the falls of the title and both observe a boat of young girls travel past them toward the falls. One character is very relatable and forthright, an overtly good person, and the other is mean and suspicious and aggravating, an unpleasant person if not a bad one. They both realize that the girls are in trouble and each has to make a decision about what to do or the girls will go over the falls and die. As you might expect, each character behaves antithetical to how we’ve been made to feel about them up to this point. The aggravating character, who you would never want to live next to or have to eat a meal with, begins pulling off his clothes, in tears, because he knows that while he must try and save these girls, he will fail and they will all die. But in this moment of true courage, facing his fear of an inevitable death that has humiliated and broken our likable character, this aggravating character transforms into a real human person, one I would do anything for because he values the need to do the right thing in a hopeless and impossible situation. The story ends with him in that moment, and I’ve read few like it that is utterly beautiful in capturing what miraculous good even a terrible person is capable of (see also Sherman Alexie’s “What You Pawn, I Will Redeem”(which, by the way, is a fantastic title)).

I didn’t weep at the end of “The Falls,” though I could now if I read it again. I was emotionally withdrawn due to the end of a thirteen and a half year relationship when I read it for the first time a couple of years ago, and the fact alone it got me to acknowledge that the meanest and lowest among us might be capable of true courage to save another person’s life was miraculous to me in its own right, tears not included. It’s for this reason, then, that I am a fan of Saunders, despite my problems and issues with particular aesthetic choices he makes. There is a sincerity at the center of each of his stories that evokes the best in me emotionally. What we feel is at least as important as what we think, and depending on the day, maybe it’s more important.

I did cry twice while reading In Persuasion Nation: for “Jon” and “Commcomm.” The first is something of a retelling of Flowers for Algernon, but in this case Jon (standing in for Charly) has no memory of his life before his upgrade. That makes the choice he faces of being downgraded all the more poignant, and his reasons for ultimately choosing to do so left me sobbing with a broken heart. The second story is too convoluted to explain, but it’s a familiar Saunders story of a poor loser living with the ghost of his parents in a world familiar but oddly parallel to our own who dies at the end but then becomes something finer than he was after being killed. The idea of redemption after death is as old as the Bible, but for some reason there was such hope and inspiration to be found at the end of that story (and like “The Falls” in Pastoralia, “Commcomm” ends In Persuasion Nation) it left me inconsolable for a solid ten minutes. The ending put me in touch with my own need for redemption, a desire to do something that will allow me to be forgiven, if not by some higher power or another person, then by allowing me to forgive myself. For Saunders, unlike Vonnegut, the language and lyricism is the heart of feeling with and for these characters and what happens. Like Vonnegut, Saunders writes deceptively simple stories, infused with dark humor, but his power to evoke pity, charity, and empathy is undeniable. And on this day and in this age, I know I could use more feelings of pity, charity, and empathy than I’ve managed up until now.
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