In search of a clean, well-lighted place
Geoffrey Brown
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Waste by Eugene Marten (Ellipsis Press) 132 pp
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Making literary weather between the drops
There's no time like the summer to hunker down with a good book, and with that in mind here are five of them that have already made my summer better and that will, hopefully, do the same for you. The lovable losers that populate the stories in Wells Tower's debut collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux), may be beaten down and broke, but they aren't yet broken - not completely anyway. From marauding Vikings to carnival runaways and failed inventors, Tower's crisp sentences and savage wit fuel the stories, propelling them - and us - to places unexpected and, in some cases, places heretofore not experienced. A bracing début, Tower's prose will appeal to readers who appreciate the words and worlds of writers such as Barry Hannah and Mark Richard. Sample sentence: "Bob Munroe woke up on his face."
Eugene Marten's slim novella Waste (Ellipsis Press) details the day-to-day existence and experiences of Sloper, a janitor in a big-city office building. With unnerving clarity and precision, Marten starkly executes a chilling portrait of loneliness and anonymity, reminding us, in the process, that that which we might ever so casually discard and dismiss may not necessarily respond so casually in kind. Sample sentence: "Sloper kept his hard tile mopped, and he was good about glass."
Charles Bowden's sentences in Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) shimmer with hard-earned grace as Bowden grapples with "a single question
and a single hunger: How can a person live a moral life in a culture of death?" Bowden, who spent much of the past decade reporting on the dark business world of drugs, is as unsparing as he is unforgiving in his attempt to answer his question, resulting in an honest and searing work, one that leaves us with the answer on the page, "as best I can see it or feel it or taste it or say it," Bowden writes. Sample sentence: "Something is ending, something is beginning, and this present cannot continue."Last year Denis Johnson won the National Book Award for his novel Tree of Smoke. This year he returns, somewhat unexpectedly perhaps, with beach blanket material in Nobody Move (HarperCollins), a novel first serialized in Playboy and one that is, in many ways, a tribute to classic American pulp fiction novels of yore. Gambler Jimmy Luntz is behind on his debts, and when it comes time to pay, Jimmy unwisely decides to escape. The cat-and-mouse game that ensues makes for a breezy and entertaining afternoon of reading. Sample sentence: "Jimmy Luntz woke at the Log Inn Motel and spent twenty minutes sitting upright in his bed, smoking a Camel and staring at the woman asleep beside him."
Finally, readers interested in contemporary art and, in particular, contemporary photography, should consider Michael Fried's Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (Yale University Press) required reading. Featuring thorough discussions of work by more than 15 photographers, including Jeff Wall, Cindy Sherman and Thomas Struth, Fried's thesis centres on the advent of large-scale photographs in the late 1970s and the attendant issues concerning the relationship between the photograph and the viewer that photographers were then forced to address, issues previously addressed only in painting. A powerfully argued book, this is the new benchmark against which future discussions of photography must stand. Sample sentence: "I have always liked photography, and in a low-key way I was always interested in it."
