Welcome to the Golden Age

by Jeff Jackson

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July 30, 2011

With massive bookstore closings making headlines, publishers struggling to earn profits while facing an uncertain digital future, and newspapers shuttering book review sections, sometimes it can seem like there’s nothing but bad news out there for serious readers. Yet paradoxically, we’re living through a golden age for American literature. There’s never been such a large crop of exciting young writers or so many small presses releasing a rich variety of exceptional work.

Unlike, say, the minimalist boom of the 1970s or the Brat Pack phenomenon in the 1980s, today’s younger writers aren’t producing content under the sway of a dominant school, style, or subject matter. There’s a healthy diversity of voices and approaches. You’ll encounter everything from plainspoken realism to typographical experimentalism, whimsical surrealism to genuine heartbreak. The common denominator seems to be a desire to present fresh stories in ways that disarm expectations.

Many of these writers would appeal to a wide audience, but you’ll be hard pressed to find their work stocked in superstores and even indie booksellers. This lack of distribution and media coverage is one of the reasons that the current literary landscape appears so bleak to many readers. In our homogenized corporate climate, some digging is required to uncover to the work of these adventurous authors, most of whom are published by industrious small presses.

The following recent releases are by American fiction writers who may be unknown to many readers but whose reputations are on the rise, each of whom showcases a distinct sensibility.

STORIES V!

by Scott McClanahan (Holler Presents)

Scott McClanahan is the author of the excellent and aptly-titled short story collections Stories and Stories II (Six Gallery Press). The latest volume in the series skips several numerals, adding an exclamation point and a salacious cover model. Stories V! earns these extra features as it’s his best volume yet and one of the most purely enjoyable collections of the year.

Anyone who’s seen McClanahan read his work knows that he’s a born performer, combining the cadences of a backwoods evangelist with the understated wit of David Sedaris. You can expect everything from magic tricks to affecting songs thrown into the mix. Stories V! is structured subtly like a sustained performance, the various stories linked in ingenious ways through unexpected sequels, coming attractions, tests of the reader’s belief, lists of things the author is ashamed of, and notes about his wife. This gives the collection an unusual cohesion and narrative momentum.

All the stories feature narrator Scott McClanahan and his dealings with memorable situations, including a young classmate’s funeral, a friend’s awkward sex tape and a stolen motorcycle. The author addresses the reader and seems to insist on an autobiographical core of his tales, going so far as to include detailed driving instructions to his house in West Virginia. But this is also a sly aesthetic strategy to make the pieces feel more resonant and immediate - and it works.

Stories V! is such an effortlessly enjoyable read that it’s easy to miss the sophistication of the simple but finely tuned prose and the way the stories employ wild humor and genuine emotion without resorting to cheap snark. These tales would be right at home on a less somnambulant NPR. The collection ends with a goodbye, but while this may be the final volume of Stories, it’s hardly the last we’ll hear from McClanahan. In 2012, he’ll release both Hill William, a novel, and The Nightmares, a book about his worst dreams.

Us

by Michael Kimball (Tyrant Books)

Originally published in England in 2005 under the title, How Much of Us There Was, it’s surprising that Michael Kimball’s  remarkable novel only now is appearing here. What’s even more shocking is that no U.S. publisher was interested in this deeply affecting book until Tyrant Books, a new small press, stepped in to fill the void. Slightly reworked since its initial publication and now simply titled Us, this examination of love, grief and family makes these universal themes seem achingly fresh.

The basic story follows an elderly married couple as the wife falls into a coma and the husband cares for her. Kimball avoids filling in the usual biographical details about their life – how they met, their courtship, the ups and downs of their marriage. Instead, he focuses solely on the tactile events of their present moments together. The husband’s helplessness and devotion in the face of this dire situation. The wife’s slow recovery in the hospital and at home. Cutting to the core of the situation, Kimball makes both the couple’s love and sense of isolation feel more genuine and palpable.

This plot description makes the novel sound grim, but that’s not the overall effect. Kimball is a master stylist who deftly keeps the story from sinking under the weight of its subject. The couple’s story is written in extremely short chapters that keep the narrative moving and are intercut with lively reminiscences by narrator Michael Kimball about his experiences with his grandparents. It’s no surprise that in the short time this book has been out, it’s deeply connected with readers and recently was touted on Oprah’s website. Us delivers a powerful emotional experience, one that will inspire you to hold your loved ones a little bit tighter.

A Heaven of Others

by Joshua Cohen (Stacherone Books)

Written when he was just 23 years old, Joshua Cohen’s first novel, A Heaven of Others, has just been reissued. Barely thirty, Cohen has already penned five other books, including last year’s Witz  (Dalkey Archive), an acclaimed 800-page epic chronicling the life of the last Jew. For those who aren’t ready to invest the time in Witz or his ambitious Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto (Fugue State Press), this short novel is an excellent place to make Cohen’s acquaintance.

The book’s expansive subtitle lays out its controversial conceit: “Being the True Account of a Jewish Boy Jonathan Schwarzstein of Tchernichovsky Street Jerusalem and his Post-Mortem Adventures in and Reflections on the Muslim Heaven; as Said to Me and Said through Me by an Angel of the One True God Revealed to Me at Night as if in a Dream.” The 10-year-old Jonathan is blown up by a Palestinian suicide bomber who’s about his age. He narrates the book from the beyond the grave as he finds himself struggling to navigate the Muslim heaven, surrounded by harems of virgins and caravans of camels.

Cohen deftly explores the collision of different religious traditions and assumptions. There’s a premium placed on philosophical word play, underlined by the book’s opening sentences: “How did I get here, if I still am an I? If how and where is here? can still be asked and why?” But amidst the cleverly mannered language and fantastical visions of heaven, it’s the everyday details of Jonathan’s life with his parents - his shopping for shoes, bedtime routines, meals, and dreams - that get the most weight, grounding the reader in this singular fantasia.

There Is No Year

by Blake Butler (Harper Perennial)

Ironically, the most radical book in this round-up is published by a major house. Modeling itself after the legendary Grove Press, Harper Perennial has sought out work that’s challenging and exciting in equal measure. It makes sense the publisher would be interested in Blake Butler, who runs the popular literary site, HTML Giant, and is the author of the visionary novella, Ever (Calamari Press), and the apocalyptic novel-in-stories, Scorch Atlas (Featherproof Books), which was short-listed for the Believer Book Award. His latest novel, There Is No Year, is his most extreme work yet.

Forget trying to experience this on an eReader. It’s beautifully designed with smeared photographic images, paper stock that changes colors, and typography that keeps rearranging itself into new patterns. It’s a book that wants readers to embed themselves into the very pages.

At its heart, There Is No Year is a negative image of the suburban domestic novel. It opens with a family moving into a new house and finding a copy of themselves already living there. Butler boils elements of ordinary life down to a nightmarish essence: The father’s increasingly endless commute to work, the son’s cryptic computer chats, the egg the mother finds in the lawn, the family’s doomed attempt to sell the house. The book explores entropy as people bleed into the structures they live in and the real family becomes a warped mirror of the copy one.

Some critics have complained that nothing happens in the novel, but in fact it’s bursting with incidence. Sometimes it feels as if too much happens, and certain resonant images are immediately smothered by the next unusual occurrence. The novel demands the reader plunge into its shifting narrative and then keeps pushing them to the very brink of overload. There Is No Year reads like a fever dream and when you finally close the book, it feels as if your senses have been scrapped clean and you’re experiencing the buildings and people around you on some alien frequency.