The absence of plot leaves the reader room to think about other things.

With relatively few exceptions, the novel sacrifices too much, for me, on the altar of plot.

Plots are for dead people.

The novel is dead. Long live the antinovel, built from scraps.

A seemingly scatterbrained collage of quotes and one-liners, Reality Hunger will do two things: cause hissy-fits at your local literary social and add swagger to postmodernists desperate to usher in new forms with a stab. How can I best summarize it? Author David Shields contends that nonfiction books, in particular memoirs, are no more factual than novels, and argues the memoir belongs on the same shelf as other works of fiction.

Conversely, the lyric essay, to quote Shields (who quoted Deborah Tall and John D’Agata of the Seneca Review), “gives primacy to artfulness over the conveying of information, forsaking narrative line, discursiveness, and the art of persuasion in favor of idiosyncratic meditation. [...]The stories it tells may be no more than metaphors. Or, storyless, it may spiral in on itself, circling the core of a single image or idea, without climax, without a paraphrasable theme.”

From this, Shields posits a literary form more suitable to today’s neo-tastes than, say, The Corrections or A Million Little Pieces; the latter showcased as an indictment of sorts, but toward the reader, a sort of finger-point to the consumer as to say, “Well of course he lied. And your point??” Shields doesn’t defend Frey per se, but does prop Frey and his flogged ilk to suggest that the masses are primed for the literary equivalent of reality TV: slanted, self-centered brevity.

An altruistic desire, in my opinion, because it gropes at a future when “I” is a forwardslash between writer and reader, without the murky business of plot and expository filler stuffed in novels, short stories and memoirs. The writer uses himself as the protagonist, the world’s a stage and the words bring forth that catalytic jumpstart inside the reader’s mind. Fair enough.

There is, however, the issue of the book’s construction.

“The progress of artistic growth in many media,” Shields wrote, “is being hindered, like those poor pine trees in alpine zones able to grow only a few weeks each year. For writers and artists who came of age amid mountains and mountains of cultural artifacts and debris: all of this is part of their lives, but much of it is off-limits for artistic expression because someone ‘owns’ it.”

Well yes, if use of these “cultural artifacts” are pilfered without attribution. The creation of a copyright-less Wild West is tantalizing, though perilous and it is difficult to understand Shields’ true motives for offering the idea in the first place. Never mind compensation for cited works. Shields’ world supposes its citizens would do the right thing, a pinky swear to give a head-nod to the originator(s) of the source material.

More importantly, quoting ad nauseam, as the case in Reality Hunger, conveniently tucks away the author’s opinion on the matter at hand. So easy, so tempting to say in the face of legitimate criticism, or a simple question, “Well, those aren’t my words. That’s not what I meant.” Where is the risk associated with using one’s own words? Where’s the moral stiffness in one’s back when the author-as-character, the slanted “I”, chooses to explain (or not) the use of this word or that phrase?

A parry of literary and critical ownership, a case of “Yeah, I said it” versus “Yeah, I may have meant that through proxy” castrates the idea, the author. Or more colloquial, a reader is left to question if the author truly has the balls to stand on his own, cast aside the rhymes he bit off contemporaries and classic masters alike, and answer for his unfettered stance.

Though the book remained entertaining, this is my primary beef with Reality Hunger and the new era it investigates. Pages 211 – 219 contain the appendix, the bibliography, the primer needed to decode and reveal Reality Hunger as a provocative theorem rendered as a well-researched, painstakingly cobbled book of quotes, similar to those slim, flimsy, cheerful books given for Christmas when Best Buy is out of gift cards. I wanted Shields, I got musings from Nabokov, Walk The Line and DJ Spooky. Reality Hunger and its author had no balls.

A stylistic choice to illustrate the idea, not the word, as all important, the quotes thrust Shields into the realm of “unreliable narrator,” one that is readily available to fiction writers and poets, but not to lyric essayists or, in general, creative nonfiction writers. It raises the question: Why? Creative nonfiction, in all its forms, leaves room for restraint, to withhold backstory in the name of immediacy, while simultaneously inviting the nonfiction writer, the essayist, into the story, a “come hither” for personal expression beyond literary acrobatics.

So why the need for avatars—akin to characters in a novel—to assert an opinion wholly believed, if not entirely understood? Reality Hunger is a “spiral in on itself,” a display of the author’s certainty in what he feels, but not what he knows, as his truth. Creative nonfiction, lyric essay, at its finest.

Shields’ ideas will set the stage for much needed discussion into literature and its relevance to a world dominated by streams of image and sound. There is urgency in Shields’ work, a sense that writers must abide by the times, must find new in-roads to readers, and should consider how to navigate this new, interconnected world without compromise of one’s artistic integrity.

The quotes, however, blunts the message, buffers the messenger. Expression doesn’t blossom, it only sprouts as crabgrass. A simple “I think that” or “In my opinion” would’ve allowed the manifesto to bellow, rather than whimper amid a cacophony of voices foreign to the author. It’s not enough to hint at an idea and let others do the talking. The “I” in Reality Hunger was slanted until I realized I was looking at it, and Shields, sideways.

Book published by Knopf, 2010.

Memoirist Sue William Silverman: “It is voice, then, in all its manifestations, that examines multiple and mysterious facets of a persona: the real ‘you’ deepened into a character.” More @ creativenonfiction.org

Posting live from the Android…at my desk, in my cubicle, no less. I’ll add to this later, but I think I want an e-reader. There’s this growing suspicion that I could actually read more and, perhaps, faster with, essentially, a virtual library to supplement my personal, physical one. Just a thought for now. What do you think? Yay? Nay?

Upon further consideration, I’m less inclined to purchase an e-reader at this time. My spidey-sense for an undeveloped gadget market continues to tingle. Personally, I think we’re in the uncomfortable early stages, where the discerning customer waits while companies jockey, cajole or swindle their way into marketshare. The truth is no one knows what the future will hold for e-literacy, no matter the prognosticators constantly stampeding RSS feeds to offer a 50-50 bet. This past weekend, I had a choice: buy my latest books online or visit the brick.mortar store. I can’t get past it. The smell of the book. The rigidity of the paper. Even the author photo, complete with black turtlenecks. The switch from CDs to MP3s was so easy, yet there’s something unsettling about the arms race toward a worldwide digital library. Can’t put my finger on it. That aside, the need just isn’t there yet. E-books are the future, but physical books aren’t antiquated. Not yet.

Four journals. Three pens. A Macbook as my primary unit. Followed by the DROID. Up next, a netbook (tethered to the DROID for 3G web). Then, the desktop PC. A 1940ish typewriter I need to fix. My fiancee’s laptop if necessary. My work laptop (sometimes at work). The iPod touch. I funnel works-in-progress into the cloud. Work on the same project between four journals (remember those?). When the disease is full-blown, I consider reactivating one of two BlackBerry Curves for mobile writing (data-only plans, perhaps).

What are your weapons of choice? How do you decide? How do you manage it all? Are we supposed to be writing??

“In the past thirteen years since my novel has been published, I have talked to thousands of women who have been sexually abused… I’m not a social worker but an artist. I have took, and will continue to take, the stories of women I have listened to and turn them into fiction.” More at UWM.

“[Ralph]Ellison lived in the midst of his own success and sat down to write with, one imagines, something like the weight of the literary world on his shoulders.” More @ Salt Lake Tribune.

Ras @ 317am.net offers some thoughts on the idea of “idea” and theme in fiction. Parts One & Two.

“Most of us do think of character, plot, point of view, voice, and setting before we think of ideas when beginning to work on a story. [...] But there is something about ideas that seems alien to the unspoken assumptions of realism that underlie the mainstream of contemporary fiction.”

Elif Bautman’s The Possessed and David Shields’ Reality Hunger will be consumed and regurgitated into lit critic goodness here in March.  

My reviews of a Wu-Tang mash-up and Canadian emcee Chokeules courtesy of Okayplayer. Synopsis: keep your billfolds closed.

Novel published by Riverhead (Penguin) – 9.1.2009

And so it goes when one visits the bookstore, determined to leave with a purchase. While perusing the Fiction section with my wife-to-be, I stumbled upon Miles From Nowhere, the debut novel from Avon Lady-turned-Pushcart Prize-winning writer Nami Mun.

The book read like a short story collection or a novel-in-stories. Don’t worry, there is a narrative arc. Joon, a teenage Korean immigrant, runs away from home; her father’s own departure from the family triggers a mental breakdown within Joon’s mother. Roaming around the Bronx in the 1980s, Joon (age thirteen as the novel begins) ends up in situations you’d expect for a homeless girl in a borough: working at a “club,” befriending other runaways, dealing with eventual drug addiction and so on.

I’m deliberately leaving out pieces here and there, for sure, but Miles From Nowhere was a well-written, if mildly predictable, variation of the coming-of-age story. From the chapter “Avon”:

I sat across from a TV and my eyes throbbed too much, trying to follow all the magic in I Dream of Jeannie. Jeannie was too happy. Who was she trying to fool? She was crossing her arms and blinking, making a puppy appear and disappear, over and over again, right when a black girl with tight shorts and loopy earrings walked in front of the television set and slipped into the bathroom. The sign above the TV read: NO FOOD, NO DRINK, NO RADIO. It said nothing about shooting up in the bathroom. I’d been waiting for too long and now I was coming down fast, I needed to be high for the abortion.

Joon is a likable character at first; by the end of chapter one, “Shelter,” the reader begins to sympathize with her situation, an empathy that ramps up quickly in chapters two and three, “Nothing About Love or Pity” and “Club Orchid” respectively.

Nonetheless, Joon descends into the individual in the above excerpt, an observant addict dealing with a moral dilemma (flippant dialogue aside, “Avon” illustrates Joon’s desire to improve her life after, by this point, 4-5 yrs on the street). Mun steers clear of having Joon undergo a debauched, disconnected meltdown. Using a first person voice in the past tense, Mun allows her protagonist to reflect with detail, without self-deprecating judgment. It’s a voice that gives the reader a glimmer of hope for Joon throughout the novel. From the chapter “What We Had”:

Benny had round, wishful eyes, and he wanted everything from me. And when I gave him everything and was left with nothing, he wanted that, too. He was always hungry. His body was a long white candle of wax and bones, and he was always hungry. If that wasn’t love, I didn’t know what was.

[...]What did I know about love and fate and fortune back then? These were big words and you could only gain their meaning if you looked up at the sky but I could only look down and see myself in the wet grains of cement, in the cracks, in the moss that grew between the cracks.

Again, each chapter in Miles From Nowhere was a self-contained story, which, arc aside, gives the novel a disjointed feel. With control, Mun moves the reader forward and back through time, with a handful of chapters, maybe two-thousand words each, acting as glimpses or flashbacks into specific moments in Joon’s life, without the niggling need to answer fiction’s many craftwork queries (“But what’s at stake here???”). Mun forces the reader to feel as displaced as Joon and the other supporting characters: children, former and current, ambling through life without the privilege of home, in both the familial and nationalistic definitions of the word.

That said, Miles From Nowhere read, in whole, like a fictional memoir; this is my chief complaint with the book. Anyone who identifies himself as literate knows about the current climate of memoirs: a few, beautiful portraits amid a wasteland of drugs, sexual confusion and eventual redemption. Mun’s writing skills notwithstanding, little separates Miles From Nowhere from other actual memoirs; additionally, little separates it from other novels. A good book, slightly above average, stuck between two genres. Perhaps a stylistic choice on the part of the author, but this netherworld, this blurring of the line between fiction and memoir, mutes the novel’s potential: a case of attempting to do too much. For what it’s worth, kudos to Mun for trying; I can think of a few authors who would benefit from some balls.

Regardless, coming in at two-hundred-eighty-six pages, it’s a novel with enough tension, humor and emotion to entertain and engage the reader. A solid effort from a new talent, Miles From Nowhere thrusts the reader into a messy side of life without heavy-handed sermonizing: a careful, measured choice by the author that shows her attention to craftsmanship. Nami Mun has what it takes to stake claim in the literary world. For its shortcomings, Miles From Nowhere left me excited to see what Mun does next. Can’t ask much more from a debut novel, even one with a bit of an identity crisis.