The Glister by John Burnside

I've liked the handful of poems I've read by the Scottish Writer John Burnside. Burnside's poems often convincingly evoke nature as a portal to, a sign of, a supernatural presence. I recall them having moody, dream-like settings, lush and exalted diction, and wonderfully insistent rhythms. Yet for all their atmospherics, Burnside's poems still work to get an idea across.

Burnside's latest novel, The Glister, shares many of these aspects with his poetry. However, unlike the Burnside poems I've read, this book has a desolate and despairing tone that I never encountered in his poetry.. This is a dreary tale set in a dreary, name-less place. It is rightfully name-less place, a place nobody cares for and in which the citizens live in a kind of fearfully complete isolation from each other. Being buried alive is a central obsession of one of the novel's characters and serves as a nicely descriptive metaphor for the lives of the folks living in this town; they are trapped within themselves, their natures.

The town's parts bear a name. Their is the part of town where the wealthy live, outertown; the bulk and inner portion, innertown; their is the headland upon which sits a vast, derelict chemical plant that has poisoned the city and its surroundings. Nobody knows for certain how or with what the plant poisoned the city, but

"for as long as the plant existed, the people themselves had not been right. Suddenly, there were unexplained clusters of rare cancers. Children contracted terrible diseases, or they developed mysterious behavioral problems. There was more than the usual share of exotic or untreateable illnesses, a sudden and huge increase in depression, a blossoming of what, in the old days, would have been called madness"(7).

Yet a worse malady afflicts this name-less town. Several years prior to the story's start, an adolescent boy goes missing. Constable John Morrison finds him murdered in the woods, in what looks like a ritualistic way. However, Morrison's ordered to keep the murder quiet by the town's bigwig who didn't want any undue attention from the outside world out of fear that outside eyes might detect his misappropriation of public funds dedicated to cleaning up the site of the chemical plant and rejuvenating the city. So, the weak Morrison, owing his job to this bigwig, keeps mum and slowly lets his guilt and well-earned self-hatred eat away at him.

Meanwhile, every year or so, another boy goes missing. Unable to locate any bodies, The police tell the public that the boys must have simply decided to pick up and seek greener pastures. This lame explanation actually seems to suffice for the town. The young boys in the town are more than a little suspicious and angry. Whenever a new boy goes missing, they engage in random acts of petty vandalism: "[wandering] around the town or the wastelands, stealing anything that looks valuable and breaking everything else. It is a mark of the authorities' shame that, no matter what we do, there are no reprecussions. They are guilty, because they know they have failed us"(116-117).

So says the preternaturally wise and poetic Leonard Wilson, the central voice of this novel. Aspects of Leonard are a bit implausible. He is presented as a juvenile delinquent, an adolescent product of the innertown slums. Yet, when we're given the privilege of his thoughts, we encounter an old, wise and poetic soul prone to philosophize in an existentialist vein. Early on in his narrative, Leonard argues, "if you want to stay alive, you have to love something"(51). Leonard once loved his friend Liam Nugent, one of the missing boys. He loved his father, till his father fell into some kind of physical/psychological/spiritual funk rendering him silent. Although he has at one point two girlfriends, he doesn't seem to achieve a loving bond with either. When it comes to finding something to love, Leonard is seeking bigger game.

A searching sort, Leonard reads voraciously. He also develops a mentor type of relationship with the Moth Man, a mysterious and mystical person who visits the headland every couple of months, ostensibly to catch moths. It is Leonard's "impression that he hasn't got a proper home, [but]...just seems to drive from place to place in his van, camping in fields and setting up his nets, his only companions the moths he catches then releases or curious kids like me that he attracts along the way"(107).

The Moth Man also comes to finish what his father started. His father was an engineer who helped build the chemical plant and also assisted when it was 'decommissioned.' Leonard also is led to believe that the Moth Man's father was working on a machine, deep in the unexplored, locked-away recess of the plant, that has abilities to radically transform ... It's a mystery as to what exactly this machine is capable of, but the Moth Man's here to finish it and make it available.

The Moth Man is a father figure to Leonard who is in search of human connection. He calls him by his full name, asks after his welfare, introduces him to nature. He also makes Leonard's more aware of his alienation. With the help of a mysterious, natural tea, Leonard experiences moments of absolute connection, not to those around him, but to the entire universe. Under the influence of this tea, Leonard

"can see everything around me in perfect, almost dizzying detail, but I can also feel how one thing is connected to the next...or not connected, so much, but all one thing. Everything's one thing. It's not a matter of connections, it's an indivisibility.....It's all continuous and I'm alive with everything that lives."(113)

Of course, the downside to this moment of transcendence is the first non-transcendent moment after, when Leonard is again forced to confront his limited and isolated self.

It is this scared, little, alone self that seeks out a gang of delinquents led by Jimmy Van Doren. The wise and sweet Leonard is a little too wise and sweet to ever fall entirely into the bond uniting this group of disaffected numbskulls. Still, when Jimmy's cousin goes missing, Leonard goes along when the group decides a local outcast, Andrew Rivers, is responsible for the abductions and seeks revenge.

River's end is gruesome. However, he's the most affecting character in the book, albeit his moment is limited. Rivers is not the sicko the kids take him for. Instead, he's a bit of a sad-sack. Shy and alienated, he lived as his beloved father's caretaker for many, many years. Now that his father has passed, he's lost all human connection to the world. Painfully shy but in search of connection, he desperately seeks to start a communication with a celebrity mass-murderer.

It is Rivers who most clearly articulates the thematic thrust of the novel: in a world without community, our selves grow too large and monstrous to bear, to the point where death comes to seem a viable relief. River's believes "we tire of the self, of the shape of it, and its slightly exaggerated colors; most of all, we tire of its constant noise and just long for a little quiet"(146). Although he's too meek to seek it, Rivers cooperates quite nicely when death comes for him.

Unfortunately, while "The Glister" intrigues as a novel, it fails as a mystery. Although one gathers that Burnside wishes to not say for certain, it's pretty hard not to conclude that the Moth Man is the child abductor/killer. Burnside doesn't quit trying to throw out decoys in the hopes of distracting the reader, but to little effect. In the end, he never really creates an effective whodunit. Worse, the novel fails to adequately address the more important question: why?

Our wise-beyond-his-years narrator is conflicted when it comes to the general possibility and precise utility or benefit of explanation. Speaking of the town's lost boys, he claims, "It's unforgivable not to know where they are, even if it's impossible to know"(223). Yet, he pooh-poohs explanation as well; speaking of the Moth Man, Leonard says "He didn't sit me down and run through the plot....He didn't explain the mystery because he was the mystery"(220). I find all of this frustrating and murky.

Of course, Leonard believes he has discovered something more about the Moth Man. He comes to suspect he is a supernatural being, in part the angel of death sent down to punish, in part a summoner/gatekeeper who absolves/punishes and delivers his charges to a higher plane. Of course, Leonard is presenting this conception after what appears to be his death at the hands of the Moth Man, and Leonard's story/conception seems a creation/explanation designed to block the horror of his end.

His conception/story seems every bit as facile as the town's official explanation for all the preceding disappearances. Of course, it might be Burnside who is re-imagining this child-killer as the angel of death. One can only hope not. Such a misconception is perhaps excusable in a child and something one is willing to grant a victim. Adults should know better than this. Leonard eloquently argues for proper cognizance. He comes to condemn his town for "the sin of omission, the sin of averting our gaze and not seeing what was going on right in front of our eyes. The sin of not wanting to know; the sin of knowing everything and not doing anything about it. The sin of knowing things on paper but refusing to know them in our heart"(223).

Laura Rider's Masterpiece by Jane Hamilton

It's impossible to imagine Jane Austen writing in and of our day. Yet, Jane Hamilton comes close in her new novel, "Laura Rider's Masterpiece." She brings an Austen-like wit and perception to Austen's interest: manners, love and romance.

The surface details of Hamilton's story are clearly of day. "Laura Rider's Masterpiece" is the story of a threesome that is initiated and conducted in part through email. It is in part an e-pistolary novel? The chief instigator and architect of the romance is Laura. Officially, she and her goofball/hippy husband Charley run a successful nursery/garden in a small-town between Madison and Milwaukee. In truth, domineering Laura is the brains and drive that have made it a success. And, everyone knows it, including Charley. On the surface, she stills loves handsome and lovable Charley, but...she's grown tired of his insatiable sexual appetite and the two sleep in separate rooms. Still, she loves him, she's convinced.

Laura's restless. Something's missing. Although she's never really written, or even really read a whole lot, she keeps fantasizing herself as a writer, an artist, a thinker. The sort of person who might be taken seriously by her idol, public radio talk show host Jenna Faroli (who bears more a passing resemblance to Wisconsin Public Radio host Jean Feraca). Faroli is a pretentious, misanthropic know-it-all, who hides her huge ego, just barely, behind a facade of culture, tolerance and down-to-earthiness. Laura's bought into her personae. She views her as the epitome of sophistication, culture and thought. For Laura, Jenna is a feminine ideal to which she would aspire.

In an effort to get next to her idol/crush Jenna, Laura slowly and subtly maneuvers circumstance so that the charming and handsome Charley is thrown into Jenna's path. She basically arranges an affair between Jenna and Charley. At first, this simply means sitting in on and often ghosting an email exchange the two start up. The pretentious Faroli terms this "an epistolary relationship"(66).

In the end, the most remarkable thing about Charley and Jenna falling in love is Charley and Jenna falling in love. They are not a likely couple. Reversing the gender of Austen's poles, Faroli is the queen of sense. Faroli has never fallen in love, or even experienced too many rich emotions outside of those mediated by art. As to passion and lust, Faroli harbors an unconscious aversion. She's a bit above such vulgar, human foibles. She fashions herself, "Jenna Faroli of the sexy mind...if the multitudes wanted to fuck her, it was her brain they wanted to penetrate, the luscious cranial fruit on those broad shoulders of hers-what hidden folds, so soft, so moist, so yielding. She considered that big fruit, and then the rest of her, the drag of her body, to be the ultimate product of the feminist revolution"(73). Of course, for the sake of appearances, she would claim there's more to her than her mind,that she was whole. But, deep down she doubts it.

In stark contrast, Charley is the simple man of feeling, prone to wonder and emotion, and keenly interested in sex. He thinks of it as a "wordless miracle, just as music was, a dissolving happiness into the cosmos...it was essential, then, to keep singing, to keep making love, to keep creating the songs note by note as the sound, note by note, vanished"(29). In Hamilton's telling of romance, she makes sensibility male and explicitly erotic.

Charley is simple to the point of simplistic. He apparently got through high school due to the kindness of teachers. He is extraordinarily childlike, creepily so. While Laura eats a salad and chicken patty, Charly dines on two corn dogs, a "bowl of tater tots, baby carrots, and a glass of milk(49)" and tosses "his Tater Tots, one by one, into the air,...seeing if he could land them in his mouth"(50-51).

Without ever being fully conscious of it, Laura initiates a relationship between Charley and Jenna. Laura conceives of coupling them as a project, an experiment. Her project/experiment is a study from which she hopes to gain insight into romance (primarily into what Jenna, a woman she admires, thinks of men and romance) so that she might write a romance.

Yet, Laura is also interested in getting close to Jenna via Charley. Laura's Jenna idolatry partakes of a crush, a female version of Eve Kosofsky's homosocial continuum of desire. In this case, that desire is expressed and mediated through a man who seems a blank slate on which they consciously and unconsciously to each other. Charlie brings more to the table than his male anatomy; yet, on some level, both women are interested in him for what he can tell them about the other.

Laura expresses/protests uncertainty as to her intentions in setting up the relationship. In large measure though, she sees Charlie, especially as he expresses himself via emails she authors, as an expression of herself which she offers in hopes of gaining Jenna's love. She gets a charge out of Jenna paying attention to Charley, to her bothering to reply to the emails she authors/co-authors in his name, and "had to remind herself that she was not Laura who was writing, she was Charlie"(103). Jenna's wanting "to communicate with Laura/Charlie was definitely a boost to Laura's self-esteem"(108). In Laura's mind, "Jenna was falling in love with the writer, Charlie, who was actually, in large measure, herself"(130).

By her lights, Laura instigates and observes the relationship in hopes of writing a romance featuring and appealing to a modern, powerful, every-woman such as Jenna, such as herself. She clearly views Jenna as a modern, every-woman: evolved, cultured, confident, self-possessed. Her writing project is intended to test the possibility and potential for such a romance.

What sort of role remains or is born for the modern man in her conception of romance.
In Laura's telling, "in traditional romance, the heroine was supposed to be socially, intellectually, and financially inferior to the hero, so that in all areas the love was lifting her up. If Jenna fell for Charlie, it wasn't going to have anything to do with a wish to improve her [Jenna's] status, and it might not be about self-improvement, or self-knowledge"(107). Laura tells herself the "tables could very well be turned in her romance, the woman, by her love, raising up the man to his fullest potential"(109). Laura has clearly fallen out of love with Charlie.

Indeed, Laura's fallen out of love with love. She looks on love, romance and sex with disdain, as a foible and a foolishness, and a vulnerability she hopes she's outgrown. However, another part wonders if one can sensibly fall in love, fall in love but keep a modicum of dignity, self-respect and sanity? Or, as she puts it to Jenna, "I've been trying...to study what....an ideal woman..actually wants in a man, what kind of hero she needs when she's already sort of perfect"(176).Can a modern woman fall in love and be bettered by the experience? In setting up Charlie with her idol of feminine sense, Jenna, Laura seeks the answer to all these questions.

She is bitterly disappointed by Jenna's answer, even if she never is able to admit it to herself. Jenna in love proves to be like most people in love; foolish, sentimental and vulnerable. In reading over their email exchanges, "what struck Laura most was the banality of the exchanges....they were saying things to each other that had been said by lovers through the ages, and yet they seemed to think they were inventing the concepts"(144). Yet, she can't her writing, her research is contingent upon their being a better answer, a sensible romance. So, although Jenna and Charley end up "exposed as...perverted, shallow, obsessed sex-maniacs," Laura the writer believes that they can still get through this stage and via their romance "reclaim their best selves"(196).

Laura is more than simply disappointed that Jenna has failed to present a convincing romantic pathway for the modern woman. Deep down, she is downright pissed-off and seeks revenge. While she would never own her anger, nor the satisfaction deriving from it, it is there. One could argue that it's prompted by more than Jenna's failure to fall sensibly in love with Charlie and reveal his charms to Laura. Although never explicitly stated, Laura clearly harbors a long-standing grudge against her idol, and it's not hard to see why she might wish to take down the arrogant and contemptuous Jenna.

Throughout the novel, Laura acts with an incredible blindness. She is driven by a truly destructive hatred and resentment of her ostensible idol and yet is oblivious to this. Hamilton skillfully brings the reader into Laura's experience on this front. When she blows at the end, it surprises at first, but makes perfect sense upon reflection. As readers, we detect the wrath she harbors without it's ever actually registering in our conscious thoughts.

Despite it's sensational story, Hamilton's book has conservative strains. Laura treads close to a traditional female stereotype: the woman who sees anger as unfeminine, denies it in herself, and in so doing feeds it till it grows into a rage that will be expressed. There is also an implicit conservative nod to traditional values in Hamilton's depicting both women as failed mothers.

Pretty Monsters by Kelly Link

Kelly Link's new collection of stories offers surprise and delight at every turn. Nobody I can think of writes like her. Her writing is a stew mixing magical realism, horror/science fiction, twilight zone, Marx brothers slapstick, and YA angst. Add a dash of Dashell Hammet's flair with words and your getting close to the pleasure of Link's writing. She achieves wonders.

Link is intrigued by the border between fiction and reality, the powers and limits of imagination. Her stories are often double, made up of strands with one strand serving as art and entertainment for the characthers in the other. In the novella length "Magic for Beginners," characters include "a renegade librarian and magician named Fox [who] is trying to save her world from thieves, murderers, cabalists, and pirates. Jeremy is a geek, athough he's a telegenic geek. Somebody should make a TV show about him."

By placing fiction alongside reality within a fiction, Link highlights our assumptions about art, reading, and stories. Within the world of the story above, Fox and her story are a television fiction; geeky, teenage Jeremy is the "real" character. After all, he's geeky and a teenager who finds girls a total mystery and worries about his parent's fragile marriage.

The "real" Jeremy is watching the fictional Fox; she isn't watching Jeremy, or anybody else for that matter. In distinguishing between reality and fiction,those who watch are real; those who are watched are the fictions. TV characters (and characters in stories, often enough?) seem to live lives of unrelieved excitement and drama and possibility.

Like most YA fiction, this is a novel in which the main character gets wise. Thus, Jeremy wonders "about what kind of television shows the characters in television shows watch. Television characters almost always have better haircuts, funnier friends, simpler attitudes toward sex. They marry magicians, win lotteries, have affairs with women who carry guns in their purses. Curious things happen to them on an hourly basis"(81).

Just when all seems clear in any story, Link mixes it up. In "Magic," Jeremy begins to receive calls from the fictional characters on the TV shows. In "The Surfer, after subtly and gently ridiculing a quasi-religious group awaiting the coming of UFO's, Link has UFOs appear. And, wondrous, erotic and new (at least to me)the UFOs prove: "The aliens' ships were lustrous and dark and flexible; something like sharks, if sharks were a hundred feet long and hung in the air, moving just a little, as is breathing"(274). These sharks from outer-space appear at the end of a story, while the narrator is using the latrine. Link has knack for putting the sublime right upside the daily and dreary.

Her characters share a vague religious yearning and impulse which seeks satisfaction from various "Gods". In "The Wizards of Perfil," in a post-apocalyptic environment, a young boy is sold as a servant to a mysterious band of wizards who live in a colony of high, story-book towers set in a marsh. He is assigned a specific wizard; he lives outside the tower and brings the wizard water every morning, but never sees him. Instead he leaves his offering outside the door of the room at the top of the tower. He stares through the key-hole. He leaves messages. He knocks "but no one answered. So obviously he's hard of hearing"(43). Halsa nevertheless begins to talk to him through the door. He begins to offer up his wishes to the wizard, until at the end of the story he discovers our gods are sometimes found in the strangest of places.