8# Stephanie Vaughn: ''Dog Heaven''

I ignore the ongoing debate about MFA programs in the United States. There are too many courses; over 8,000 new MFA students come out certified Writers every year. There have been all those long caustic analyses of the phenomena by acidic people like Anis Shivani in the Huffington Post- a phenomenon which is actually pretty simple. Take human restlessness, a desire to be good at something, a natural unwillingness to work in an office or have bosses, and there you have the mass applications to MFA programs. During its inception places like the Iowa Writers Workshop inspired some great stories and novels, it attracted some brilliant writers, and now it is trying to relive its golden years. As many great writers come out of the fog of an enthusiastic 8000 as came out of an inspired few hundred. The economy of great work is not altered by how many people are taught how to write. Anyone going into a writer's workshop is either someone that would have written anyway or can't write either way. But before I trail into yet another discussion of the discussions I have claimed to ignore, let me present one of the truly glittering golden nuggets from a golden era in creative writing programs, one of the great successes along with Denis Johnson, T C Boyle and George Saunders: Stephanie Vaughn. Her collection ''Sweet Talk'', called ''Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog'' in the first UK editions, is one of those rare works that live up to every bit of praise but never has enough people praising it.

Thankfully many people, including myself, have come to know the story ''Dog Heaven'' through Tobias Wolfe's reading on the New Yorker books podcast. And there is something attractive about the other titles he mentioned, like the other story featured, along with Dog Heaven, in The Picador Book of Contemporary American Stories, called ‘Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog’.

So even before I was familiar with any of the other stories there was that intrigue, the curiosity about this writer I’d never heard of who wrote pitch perfect short stories, who’d never written anything since, who had a novel set in Italy coming out, sometime; it all took on a mythical quality. But then when we read the illusions closely they unearth one of two things: something deceptive, something stringing you along. Or something authentic, the truest rendering of experience possible on the page, and it is the latter in which these stories fall. They are each crafted within the limits of our time and place but transcend the earthbound on a trajectory to great art.

7# T C Boyle ''Tooth and Claw''

There are those authors who remain well known names to readers, whose key book - in this case Tortilla Curtain - remains the one title readers know whether they've read it or not. But then when readers decide to dip further into the works they are surprised, awed, inspired by the results. In this case it was for me discovering the short stories of T C Boyle. This revelation came to me in the form of a recent collection called Tooth and Claw. I was aware of T C Boyle, I had read some of his stories in the New Yorker and heard him read Tobias Wolff's story in the New Yorker podcast, knew he was one of the successful Iowa group but beyond that I just knew the titles, Tortilla Curtain, Water Music, the World’s End and a few others.

I was happily duped into buying the collection based on the somewhat misleading blub in which the characters are described as deadbeats and bar crawlers. It was the sort of book I was looking to read without laying any great importance on it. But after the first line ''he was on a tear'' there appear many more colours, nuances, so much more variety than the blub has you believe. For me T C Boyle is interesting because of his ability to draw any part of the world into his own stratagem and to mould and weld that into something unique. South America, small town on the English Coast, suburban America - they are each treated with a force of imagination and, to use the Greek word, Ekstasis, they come alive in ways that bear on the cinematic.

I associate T C Boyle not so much with the Iowa group, he seems a generation or two away from Carver and even the younger Denis Johnson, but more with filmmakers like the Coen Brothers, Wes Anderson, Jim Jarmusch – representing an era and attitude transcending the ideals and ideologies of so many film makers and writers than came before them. I would define it as a sort of quietness, a humour and stoicism you see in so many Wes Anderson characters, noticeable in so many scenes in The Big Lebowski and Fargo and encapsulated so well in Jim Jarmusch’s early Night on Earth or later Coffee and Cigarettes.

What also makes T C Boyle so interesting to read is that each cannibalised era is weighed with equal authenticity. The cultural pivots in this one book alone- 70s fashion and music, housing projects reminiscent of the 80s and 90s corporate climate in Jubilation and even 17thC New York. Some stories are of the Carver-esque human-in-crisis theme but styled in a much more vigorous, erratic and broad way. Some stories are near pastiches or parodies, or perhaps better to say grotesques (in the best possible sense), such as Dogology and Tooth and Claw. Others blend the very real with the ethereal, such as in my favourite story in the piece: The Kind Assassin.

Some may say that T C Boyle's weakness is that there is no one T C Boyle, that his characters are often divisive and at worst a crude tool to move the action along. But he is advancing an aspect of writing fiction that seems to have gone by the wayside after Nabokov and Barthelme died - the idea of the artifice, the idea that the reader is well aware they are participating in something unreal. T C Boyle may well be one of the last great tonics to a pervasive American realism, but on his side he has George Saunders and Ben Marcus and hopefully these authors will, like Boyle has over the past few decades, diversity fiction in many directions and defy the stifling Jonathan Frazen straight-jackets handed out to prospective authors as the 'real thing'.

6# William S Burroughs: ''Cities of the Red Night''

A few years ago, while I finishing my own treatise – badly written and rushed – on Burroughs, I started seeing a new wave of serious Burroughs scholars and admirers taking a stand. They were refreshingly dismissive of the Burroughs' myth. Timothy Murphy, Oliver Harris and even the ubiquitous Will Self seemed to bring Burroughs in from the cold cult frontiers to a warmer, welcoming foreground of criticism. It suddenly seemed possible to write about Burroughs and leave out all the anecdotes about heroin, Tangiers, boy love and murder – it finally seemed ok to just read Naked Lunch as a book devoid of its author’s overpowering identity.

But since then about five years have passed and very little has changed. If anything he seems to have become less popular. Now grunge has been phased out there doesn’t seem to be any current cultural waves to shore Burroughs up and claim him their own. Nor does the stream of serious criticism and appraisal appear to have carried on into anything more substantial.

But aside from all that the books remain as brilliant, as enviably unlike anything else written before or since, and quietly people are realising how incredibly well written books like Cities of the Red Night really are. Because when you take away the image of the man the words remain and we realise it is in the words we are captivated, not the man. In books like the Red night trilogy – Cities of the Red Night, Place of Dead Roads and Western Lands – you can’t deny that Burroughs was first and foremost a writer. And it wasn’t just at the end of his career that he fine-tuned this relatively (relative to the cut-ups I mean) straight prose, in Junky and the earlier works we read a writer whose voice is fully formed, undeniably powerful, incisive and confident. I think Burroughs is at a crossroads in terms of his path into the literary firmament. He could either go the way of the cult hero or the way of the original genius with something important to say about the 20th Century. Let’s hope that the façade of his image falls away and the books remain intact.

7# Somerset Maugham ''The Razor's Edge''

By Aley Martin


There is something rather special about W Somerset Maugham. Maugham's works offer a detail into the life of a man who struggled with his sexuality and his choice of career. Utilizing both, one can find his misogynist tendencies in the characterizations of men and women in his tales, from "Razors Edge" to one of his best works "Of Human Bondage". One can also find astute understanding of the foibles inherent in human living in some of his lesser known works, including "Christmas Holiday" and "Mrs. Craddock".

Delving into the works of Maugham carries the reader to another time and another state of mind, one in which the reader acknowledges how difficult life can be. Maugham lays out the most complex characters and asks us to forgive them for their frailties. Often, we can see the direct correlation to his own life in his dramatic imagery. For instance, it is said he used his landlady as a model for the character of Mrs. Craddock and he indicates her glorified idea of romance and marriage in his depictions. His "Christmas Holiday" characters, a rich young man who visits Paris during Christmas, and the lady of the evening who holds a sad secret, come across like a mystery unfolding before ours and the characters eyes. Maugham sets the scene of intrigue, and sexual tension and does the unlikely thing, he leaves it smoldering.

The writer offers us a more spiritual journey in "The Razors Edge", a more metaphysical experience that leads the character into strange and new, wondrous places and spaces. Using his experiences as an ambulance driver in this novel, we find the character living that life for a period of time. And as he was also an undercover agent for British intelligence, we can see he knows how and what to reveal and what to keep hidden in his characters minds.

Maugham also offers some of his fascinating thoughts in his "Writer's Notebook" which he explains are fodder for possible works and things he just felt necessary to jot down just in case one day he might use them in something he writes. As a writer, I can attest this is the most interesting piece of work he left behind. Looking deeply into the thought and ideas Maugham dictates to himself offers the reader a fresh new look at the writer to who I am gratefully indebted.

There are many works still on the shelves awaiting my bleary eyes. There is something comforting knowing that, and also relishing the idea that taking time to read the words of such a great writer makes the journey well worth the bumps in the road.

6# Gogol: ''The Nose''

To try and estimate how brilliant, how overwhelmingly influential on all 19th and 20th century literature was Gogol is near impossible. It would be very interesting to see a sort of scatter chart, demonstrating which authors read Gogol and subsequently which authors read them, and down to today - and I am confident we would find Gogol bearing on the majority of writer's ideas, style, comedy - all the things that characterise modern fiction.

Gogol is a mystery himself, and that he wrote short stories so incredibly ahead of their time gives Gogol the air of a cosmonaught, someone stranded on earth and condemned to writing parables, fables, farces and something unnameable - a precursor to the absurd, existentialism and surrealism (among other things). He can be found almost everywhere in modern literature having made branches from these formidable schools of thought.

He stands alone, as much as he has been branded (ironically) with realism, magic realism, surrealism, black comedy, the absurd - none of these catchphrases figured in his writing, none of them existed in the 1800s. He was without the framework that so many writers, who cited him as their style's progenitor, depended on. He acted freely within nothing but the restraints of his imagination. And there are few author's who could claim to imagine with such depth, humour and at times with such feverish, hallucinatory power which Gogol pulled off with apparent ease. Even of the early stories, the majority of which used Ukrainian folk tales and customs as their launching pad (Little Russia was a fashionable export at the time)were imbued with something otherworldly, unliterary in some senses, crude, elegant - defying all the rules of literature at the time.

Greatly enhanced by Pushkin's endorsements and praise Gogol went on the write full time and created the greatest body of short stories and one novel, Dead Souls. The story that has garnered the most attention has been Diary of a Madman. Approaching the story for the first time readers are forgiven for thinking this would be a standard unravelling of a mind got awry. But in Gogol the pace, the slow development of the narrators madness is both extremely, very, very funny and artful to the point that Gogol disappears from the story. When I read it first I kept expecting to run into clichés, but on each new date (which in themselves are ingenious indicators of the narrators state of mind, with things such as 'There is no date today' written as the header) Gogol manages to notch the level up a little higher, until the story reaches its exhaustion point. In the first post on D Barthelme I mentioned the formula used to diagram the short story format, rising tension, resolution etcetera ... It seems that Gogol was the one that both created this formula and simultaneously dismantled it.
He could also be a traditional tall tale teller, in stories like The Portrait, which are told in a very standard form. But even in these more conventional stories the content is where Gogol expresses Gogol, where we find the Gogolisms.
The Nose is one of my favourite stories. It seems to reach the heights of the absurd that would only re-emerges decades, even over a century later in its matured form - in writers such as Bulgakov, Kafka, Beckett - even today Pelevin can be seen as a linear successor to the Russian Absurdist seat.
For all his thousands of (often unwittingly) of followers none can exactly match the impact of The Nose or Diary of a Madman, simply because it was so utterly, unconventionally new and unheard of and original.
In The Nose, a baker wakes up to find a nose in his morning bread. Across the city another man, someone of very minor officialdom, find his nose missing. It is revealed, after the baker fails to dispose of the nose on a bridge, that the nose has gone off and tried to pass itself off as a titular Councillor, and is actually quite successful.
It ends with the reunion of nose and face. Some say it is symbolic, some find political indications in the story - others just enjoy it for what it is and are happy not to define it (Surreal, Absurd etcetera, etcetera), myself being one.
Gogol's other well known story is The Overcoat. Rightly it takes its place among Gogol's most masterful and mature works, but at the same time it is equally absurd, funny and original. I will not go into the plot, in the hope that you will read it if you have not already. But to say that its protagonist (poor, poor man) can be viewed as the archetype for decades, coming onto centuries of anti-heroes and the classic Bartleby type character, unfortunates and geeks would not be going too far.
It was not with any sort of high minded nepotism that Nabokov said Gogol was the greatest prose writer in Russian, with Tolstoy following behind. Many would agree, and Nabokov made the statement with authority - few understood the art of Russian prose better than he. So much of what Gogol wrote is without a doubt the blueprint for so much of what followed, and is still to come. And we have to wonder, if we go further, if that world dominion of all online search engines took its name from the world’s greatest short story writer. Someone should look into that.

5# Delmore Schwartz: ''In Dreams Begin Responsibility''

Regardless or the era, the social climate or other cultural ephemera there are those authors that remain obscure but highly esteemed simultaneously. I mentioned Donald Barthelme in a previous post, he is an example, very popular but elusive. Another author, who since publishing his two great works - one a collection of poems - Summer Knowledge - and one celebrated collection of short stories - In Dreams Begin Responsibility, Delmore Schwartz seems never to have exceeded a cult following of readers while at the same time being anthologised in both short story and poetry collections of American Greats. It is a problem of output in Schwartz's case I think. Following the praise he got from both collections very little emerged after that, the odd story or poem but nothing matching the magnitude of either of those famous works. A couple of avid fans and friends have gone a long way in consolidating Schwartz's place in literary history. First there was Saul Bellow's fictional portrayal in Humboldt’s Gift, and later Lou Reed was mentored by Delmore and later immortalised their relationship in his song on Blue Mask - The Ghost of Delmore Schwartz. I'm sure that Lou Reed's presence in Delmore Schwartz's legend has lent him a rock and roll layer that did not really exist, but for all Delmore was and wasn't he has been gradually pieced together by legend.

But if we have anything besides the legend we have the work. The title story, In Dreams Begin Responsibility has become a classic American short story. Although it is not often cited in lists of American greats, it has been consecrated by a plethora of author's and scholars as being one of the most original examples of at the tail end of Modernism. Of them probably Vladimir Nabokov was the story’s greatest endorser – saying it was the greatest short story written in English. Schwartz plays with form in the story. There is no direct protagonist in a sense, as the focus of attention is the protagonist's reaction to watching his parent’s first courtship on a cinema screen, and the more he watches the more despairing he appears to grow.

Masterly in its minimalism at time, that the story barely reaches ten pages and he was able to say so much is a true example of the short story art, the condensed and sculpted work that could not have one word less or one word more without destroying the effect.

Its famous last lines, the infamous ''lip of snow'' brings our protagonist back onto the street where he has been dreaming. This is by no means the ''and he woke up, was all a dream'' ending. It is unsure, it is speculative - we are not sure if he's really been asleep. Other stories in the collection equal the ice-pick language and evoke New York, the people, the familial torments and intellectual conflicts with unwavering precision. But in the title story an extra layer lets us into something else, something less intellectual and more humanist, something more painful and beautiful, pitiful and brilliant than the others - it is more honest but loses not of its artifice.

If I were ever given the opportunity to reprint a book and distribute it using my own marketing plan and design, this would be the book. It should be on the free time syllabus of any short story reader or writer and it's a story likely to turn many readers into writers, as it shows how with so few words and with such imagination a near perfect work of art can emerge.

4# Mark Twain: ''Huckleberry Finn''

By J E Moss

I was forced to read Huckleberry Finn in high school for one of my English classes. I had become a good reader through a point system implemented in early elementary school. They had books we could take from a shelf that were worth 1 to 5 points and if you read them, you got to take a test on them, and if you answered most of the questions right, then you were awarded the points. Through a process of “buzzsawing” where I read as quickly as I could through the 1 and 2 point books, and took the tests for them, I quickly wound up with the most points of my class.

I did not look forward to this book by Mark Twain because the books I had been forced to read were terrible. Perhaps the stand-out book in my mind would be The Old Man and The Sea by Ernest Hemmingway. Even the title of that book is enough to elicit a sharp yawn. In fact, up until I read Huck Finn, I was absolutely sure that my path would not be English at all. But I read it, and it hit hard. The vernacular couldn’t be understood unless read out loud. The characters were charming and exhibited a kind of low-life wit. The word “nigger” was used upwards of 200 times. Hamlet’s famous soliloquy gets butchered. A family gets in a dustup with another family over something both of them forgot long ago. Huck fakes his death. This was definitely my kind of book.

I read through it ravenously, and then read through it again just to make sure I picked everything up (I didn’t). I even got a sweet edition of it with explanatory notes, a glossary, and maps at the end. There was no way I was going to let go of the book’s brilliance. I even went out and found Mark Twain’s other books and read them, too. It’s not strange that his works began to show a distinctly darker tone after this stunningly mature piece. With A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger, Twain would look into an unyielding abyss from which he would never return.

The river was Mark Twain’s favorite subject. A traveling man, Mark Twain wrote about and found no greater pleasure than those of the river. It’s no wonder that what is perhaps his greatest book is all about the river (and I’m talking about the Mississippi here). It’s also clear that he knew what would turn out to be his best book as it took 5 years to complete and he actually completed four other books in the process including Life On The Mississippi which not only functions as a discussion of his experience on the river as a steamboat captain, but also most likely prepared Twain himself for the writing of his magnum opus.

The river was home for Twain, and naturally he felt most comfortable in that habitat. Perhaps his discomfort outside the river could be seen in his next book, A Yankee. It’s perhaps telling that he doesn’t take the river at all in this book, but crosses the entire Atlantic as his hero gets transported all the way to medieval England. Even if this work is heavily contrived, I would count this as a close second to Huckleberry Finn in the masterpiece department. The book is savagely funny at parts and poignantly heartbreaking at others. Perhaps Twain knew he was in uncomfortable territory as his climax and denouement are about as chilling as Twain would ever get. Perhaps the ocean into which he would set sail swallowed him up at that moment and kept him within its clutches to the very end with his final work, No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger, which has been said to be his most unrelentingly dark piece of work. It’s true that Twain never threw away his humor up until this magnificent and strange piece- after all, he was still able to write a Pudd’nhead Wilson and a couple of new Tom Sawyer adventures, Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective, both appropriately narrated by Huck Finn.

But the damage had been done. The mark of Yankee stayed with Pudd’nhead Wilson, labeled a tragedy after its title character hijacked the story from Those Extraordinary Twins- the original title. Notable is the fact that Twain wrote his fair share of bad literature also. Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective (especially) have all the markings of your average pulp novel of the day. In fact, the latter of these so clearly plays off the dichotomy of Watson and Sherlock Holmes that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would have undoubtedly lifted an eyebrow. And let me tell you, Twain wrote this kind of stuff with vigor. Many of his works aren’t even in print any more, and I’m referring to a small bevy of plays in which he apparently put quite a bit of effort.

3# Samuel Beckett: First Love

First to dispel the myth: Beckett is not difficult to read. Not easy, but going into it without that mythical presumption the experience is so much more enjoyable. He is not easy, but he is not impossible, difficult or cryptic. Reading Beckett is fun.

I knew. Beckett would be in my acre. I’ll never finish reading Beckett.Something I’ve noticed recently while reading Molloy is that there is a kind of post-Beckett effect on other books. For example the way I read certain authors in the past suddenly changed after reading Beckett, he teases out the bullshit factor and any tint of insincerity appears guiltily on the gallows. He manages to strip other authors bare by presenting his work so brazenly naked. He does not hide the artifice and therefore exposes the badly structured artifice of other books. Another way of putting it, perhaps more clearly: in this acre he is one of the authors (they are scarce) whose roots eventually start to infiltrate other author’s spaces, filling them up with something that wasn’t there before. I don’t know if that makes much sense. After reading some of Beckett, Murphy and Molloy alone may suffice, the meaning should be clearer, perhaps.

When I thought of which of Beckett’s shorter fiction to include here I first considered some of the early work collected in More Pricks than Kicks, but at the same time I knew that none of the stories, brilliant, cryptic, hilarious as they are were exactly emblematic of the larger body of work to come later. But then I read the short collection First Love, and in these stories – The End, The Expelled, The Calmative and First Love I found prototypes worthy of the novels Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable (although admittedly my personal favourite Murphy was written before all of them, shortly after More Pricks than Kicks). It is in these short stories that Beckett first dismantles the conceptual backbone of what a story/novel is meant to be, dissects the idea that what a novel or story is: more than a series of fictional events, more than character, plot and all the ingredients that make a story recognisable. Although Murphy has always been one of my favourite novels, reserves a centrepiece in my acre, it still maintains the outline of novelistic methods, characters follow the author’s instructions, go from here to there, this happens, this coincides with that and it all resolves – each character tied up, cast off, our protagonist sees his end and all things fumble (ingeniously) into bed, the end. It should always antagonise a creative writer, this formula – Beginning, Middle and End – it is as insightful as saying life is Birth, Living, Death.

In First Love you get what’s good in Murphy, the comedy, the descriptive ingenuity, pointed irreverence and the intuitive poetry. But what you don’t get is the narrative unravelling, from beginning to end with all the events of Murphy’s life spread out in between. With First Love we get Beckett’s first prose montage. A man, unnamed, recalls his life at a certain period, or many – forgetting and remembering as he goes – beginning to end, end to middle, middle to beginning until what we get is a mind – whether sane or insane is completely irrelevant although some reviewers see it as the main point – from every angle, point of view, point of beginning and end. It is empty but furnished with such detail, it is the effect of nihilism but at the same time Beckett cannot properly be called a nihilist. He is nihilistic in the sense that his characters find no real meaning in anything, but he cannot really be called a nihilist. There are too many observations, too many gags, wordplay – his novels are too full to be nihilistic.
It is the moments in Beckett that stick with you. In The End the destitute character settles in a shed, dilapidated and full of shit and used (some unused) condoms, bequeathed him by a cave dwelling man with a donkey. In the shed a cow wanders in, the unnamed man tries first to milk it traditionally but resorts to suckling direct from the nipple and is dragged along out into the open in this position. There are so many of these incidents that when recounted lose most of their impact, as so often the events seen so plausible and absurd in equal measures when reading it in Beckett. The woman who adopts the character in First Love, takes him home, lets him remove all the furniture from his room (he is revolted by all furniture but beds) and lives on doted by this woman who later we discover is a prostitute. The unlikely, the implausible become as absurd and plausible as anything else.

Hardly do I get halfway through summing Beckett before I realise it doesn't do any justice. It is one of those cases where you can only finish with either a quotation, something I'd prefer not to do, because every page of Beckett is so infinitely quotable, or just say 'read it for yourself.' But I will leave you with a quotation from Molloy that has been bouncing around my head recently. It is I suppose a good summing up quote as it could apply to this human condition at large: ''For in me there have always been two fools, among others, one asking nothing better than to stay where he is and the other imagining that life might be slightly less horrible a little further on''.
In fact, let's go against what I said in typically Beckettian (should say Molloyan, Malonian, Murphian?) indecision, and end with a few pointed quotes from First Love, since I have really said very little about the story itself (read it, please, please.) I can’t finish this thing. There are plenty of reasons why. It’s impossible to sum Beckett up, thankfully. But I will let him do it himself:

'Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards, I take the air there willingly, perhaps more willingly than elsewhere, when I take the air I must'

The narrator's choice tombstone inscription: ''Hereunder lies the above who up below/ So hourly died that he lived on till now.'

'... not to mention not long now, not long till curtain down, on disturbers and disturbed, no more tattle about that, all that, her and others, the shitball and heaven's high halls.'

'I didn't understand women at that period. I still don't for that matter. Nor men either. Nor animals either. What I understand best, which is not saying much, are my pains.'

2# Vladimir Nabokov: Signs and Symbols

‘Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme.’

The above quote could easily be something Nabokov would use to untangle a literary chess move, describing Gogol’s Madman perhaps, or even his own invention: Pnin. But it fact it’s a quote directly from the story, collected in Nabokov’s Dozen, Signs and Symbols. It is a story that bring the idea of Fabula, in the uniquely Russian sense of a story lying beneath a story (in a pretty lame nutshell), to a conclusive point. Everything hidden beneath the texture of the story in fact becomes the major theme of the story. But let me untangle this all a little first.

The story beings with a couple deciding what to choose as a birthday present for their son, who happens to be ‘incurably deranged in his mind.’ In that opening quote it is this same son, at the time closed away in an institution. He is suffering from a form of schizophrenia. It is much more commonly thought about today, the type of paranoid delusion in which everything around the sufferer becomes part of a message, a form or persecution, a sign and symbol relating and addressed to them alone. The couple visit their son, leave having not seen him – he attempted suicide – and decide to bring him home at any cost. Later that night they receive two mysterious phone calls. The last, in which we only hear the ring, may or may not be the hospital to tell them that their son had killed himself. We don’t know, but it is overtly implied that it is one of the possibilities. It may also be another missed call. We don’t know, but we are told the answer may lie somewhere else in the text.

Nabokov was always a master tactician; it could often be infuriating but only in the sense that enemies become confused by an opponent breaking all the rules and winning. ‘Never emulate a former victory’ – a badly quoted aphorism from ‘The Art of War’, illustrates how this dynamic works. For Nabokov the reader-writer relationship means more than entertaining, enlightening – for Nabakov there was as much emphasis on the reader as the writer, to interpret, understanding nuances, spot indicators, signs and symbols. When you let yourself participate it makes reading something more than registering, it becomes more like re-writing the piece yourself, placing this sentence here, that reference there and in this story Nabokov condenses this interplay into one 6 page story.

There are exhaustive notes and analyses of this story online, many of which seem to get caught up in their own investigation to the point we lose any site of the remaining story. Some illuminate parts of the text and enhance a re-reading. Nabokov always said that there is no such thing as reading, only re-reading. And in a story like this we can understand perfectly what he means. Although we may read this story once with no knowledge of an underlying story, then read it a second time and learn a little more but are still puzzled, then gradually – after reading it over and over – this is a story that will only ever become more and more interesting, will transmogrify magically as we are more aware of the Signs and Symbols flittering beneath, the marine life of the story beneath the Mum, Dad, deranged son coming home, not coming home story.


Aside from the chess master’s clever two-games-at-once theme of the story there are also some beautiful passages, many reminiscent of all Nabokov’s immigrant’s new to America. The awe and wonder, desperation and thanks all combined. But stories of other characters, summed up better in one sentence than many other author’s characters in a novel, like the aunt for instance:

‘Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths – until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about’

Note here the ingenious exclusion of the word ‘cared.’ What a different woman she becomes when we learn that she had ‘worried’ about people, not so much cared. In this one sentence we can see the Nabokov of perfect, unrivalled character dissection, where in one word we are told enough to know the person entire, or as much as Nabokov wants us to know.

Other glimpses (I read Nabokov for these glimpses), such as ‘a tiny half-dead unfledged bird was helplessly twitching in a puddle.’ The bird could be any one of the main characters, twitching in their own struggles but blindly, unconditionally, helplessly hopeful.
Another one, a summary sentence, one that speaks for each character – through their son:


‘What he really wanted to do was to tear a hole in his world and escape.’

Such a simply constructed sentence and capturing so pointedly the one big shape, the big fish of a symbol of the entire story – escape.

Listen to Signs and Symbols on the New Yorker Podcast.

1# Barthelme: ''The Balloon''

Donald Barthelme fans experience infrequent hopes of a new resurgence of popular appreciation for the man, usually precipitated by other authors claiming his brilliance, originality, eccentricity and mastery. He will always, thankfully, be an enigma. There is probably no other author who was so prolific, ubiquitous: he was a regular New York Times contributor, three collected works (60 stories, 40 stories and Flying to America: 45 stories), four novels, a children’s book and various non-fiction publications; but still he is so markedly concealed from a general readership.
It’s not too difficult to understand though. His work is impossible to embody in one work. So many different Barthelme’s are writing that nobody knows which the real one is. That is disconcerting for many readers, they feel uneasy. Read The School and think, ‘ah this is Barthelme’ – but then you see a different author walk through the doors of your imagination when you read The Mechanical Age, Indian Uprising or The Balloon. It’s like getting friendly with someone and then every time you arrange to meet a complete stranger sits down opposite you. This is why I think Barthelme is so popular with other writers but largely ignored by a more general readership outside of America (where he is more popular, though still not as recognised as you might think).
Authors that have famously proclaimed his genius in the past have been Thomas Pynchon in his ‘Barthelmismo’ essay, his own attempt to bring Barthelme to a wider audience. George Saunders also recently highlighted the incredible workings of the authors thought process when writing ‘The School’ in his essay The Perfect Gerbil: Reading Barthelme’s The School collected in The Braindead Megaphone. Both place Barthelme firmly on a pedestal that only he could stand on, with a base big enough only for him, rungs customised for his eccentricity, a swivel function operable only by his magic hands.

But onto the story itself: The Balloon

To begin with there is no placement, we are not given any history of where the balloon came from, why it is there, if it served any civic function; all we know is that a large balloon is expanding across Manhattan: ‘The balloon, beginning at a point on Fourteenth Street, the exact location of which I cannot reveal, expanded northward all one night, while people were sleeping, until it reached the Park.’
The narrator is not a passive observer. We learn early on he is involved in its inception, as he instructs engineers to ‘see to it’ that the balloon is restricted to expand outward but not upward. It is inevitable that the reader/writer mind, fed so frequently on the proteins of symbol, meaning and pathetic fallacies, starts to wonder what ‘the balloon represents, what does it symbolise, what does it mean?’ It is a simple, contextually impotent but reasonable question. Barthelme even teases the question out:

‘Now we have had a flood of original ideas in all media, works of singular beauty as well as significant milestones in the history of inflation, but at that moment, there was only this balloon, concrete particular, hanging there.’

It is a key phrase there – ‘there was only this balloon’, and if I were delving into the realm of meaning I could probably sum the story up there, express that people are prone to think up ‘works of singular beauty… significant milestones’, when really there is nothing there at all, just ‘this balloon.’ But that is not really the point. And Barthelme lets us know in the very next paragraph that it would be useless to try and find meaning in the balloon:

‘There was a certain amount of initial argumentation about the "meaning" of the balloon; this subsided, because we have learned not to insist on meanings, and they are rarely even looked for now, except in cases involving the simplest, safest phenomena.’

So we can relax. There is no meaning. We can comfortably read without wondering what this balloon means. It doesn’t matter. For some, for the sort of readers and writers that cannot accept a work of art without the undercurrent of saying something else, a surface without a gaping hole that leads to infinite passages into infinite theories into infinite confusions, they will feel much as some of the residents felt: ‘the apparent purposelessness of the balloon was vexing (as was the fact that it was "there" at all).’ That it is "there" at all is what I enjoy most about this story. The balloons apparent purposelessness is enough to ignite myriad reasons for it to be there in the first place. It induces ‘ideas of "bloat" and "float" in the closing paragraph, it forces its Manhattan residents to understand it, some thought ‘what was important was what you felt when you stood under the balloon’, others, its detractors, claimed they felt ‘constrained, a "heavy" feeling.’

‘There was pleasure in being able to run down an incline, then up the opposing slope, both gently graded, or in making a leap from one side to the other.’

That is my closing quote. That is how I read Barthelme, without inhibition, without having to understand every word but simply leaping from one to the next, running down the incline of his pages – not wanting to understand, finding in him what Francis Bacon saw in his own work ‘sensation without the boredom of conveyance.’ You won’t be bored.
Listen to Donald Antrim read Don B.'s ''I bought a little city'' on the New Yorker Podcast here.

The Acre, The Idea

Our Private Acre

First of all, just to explain the slightly cryptic title of this series of short introductions to short fiction (which will hopefully include your own input eventually). It’s bouncing off T S Eliot’s concept of a sacred wood, in which great works of literature – the canon – unfolds in a literary firmament. Imagine literature as a large web (the firmament) and this large, critical spider who is forever arranging flies (books) from the most edible (Shakespeare) to the least edible (insert your own author). As with the woods these flies are constantly changing, some get fixed in the web forever, others dominate the centre and vanish inexplicably; others remain on the precipice for decades then find themselves snugly cocooned in the middle.

In my head I imagine the organic, painfully slow evolution of this wood/web changing through history, altering with each generation, each new breed of writers. I am not academic though, not in the way Eliot stolidly was. I’d happily mess up the divisions of schools of writing to make space for some of my own preferences, cut the overgrown Dickens shrubbery for some flowering T C Boyle, plant the roots of Barthelme next door to Tolstoy – who will object? It is my acre. In the way I see things, we each have a version of our sacred woods, and as much as I agree that there is a thin objective firmament of literature that does not alter (Chaucer, Shakespeare, Cervantes etc) we each allot our authors their own plots in our private acres.

My choice of short stories to write about are subjective, but at the same time they’re chosen because I’m confident every writer of short fiction can learn something from them – and every reader can at the very least be entertained and hopefully find a free flowerbed to fill.

Call to Action: I want this to be a motley garden of tastes. I want you to submit your own Private Plantings to me, and I will include it in the Acre. (Email me your submission to acesnova@msn.com).