# 12 - James Joyce - ''Dubliners''

It becomes a richer, nuanced thing when you read Dubliners as something other than a precursor to Ulysses. It's inevitable, of course. Dubliners is usually read before with Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and/or Ulysses (daresay Finnegan’s Wake) and with that knowledge comes a kind of ease, as though we're reading apprentice stuff, straight prose without much thought, the work of a writer about to write something spectacular. But. Dubliners is a lot more than James Joyce's apprentiship work. There are parts that reach the pitch of Ulysses, that reach down into a character and pull up their life whole. Much is made of the word Paralysis when discussing Dubliners. But to make one cloth of Dubliners misses the point completely. It is a book of variety, even if the variety of human desire, struggle, impotence, risk and despair on display is always flecked with frustration, there are is no less sprawl of city life in Dubliners as in Ulysses; the main difference really being one of compactness. We find many of the characters walk into Ulysses, and the transition is natural. These are the same people. But whereas in Ulysses a character has that fractal quality, in these short stories each character is solid. By this I mean Joyce gives them a fuller page to stretch out on, and the details of their life is declaratory, rather than suggested through anecdote, passing thoughts or subtexts. Take, for example, this opening line from 'A painful Case.' ‘’MR. JAMES DUFFY lived in Chapelizod because he wished to live as far as possible from the city of which he was a citizen and because he found all the other suburbs of Dublin mean, modern and pretentious.'' This sort of factual bring-in marks the difference between what we have here and what came later. And though opposites, neither one are exactly more or less authoritative than the other. I think the way we think of Dubliners now is tempered by the 'naturalism' and 'realism,' even the much later 'dirty realism' - as we tend to measure it with the same instruments. But consider, Dubliners was written in 1914 (it took nine years to actually get published.) The grit of the stories, the range of these private lives are as much a precursor to the street-level fiction that grew - largely in America - and was made into something else, and made famous, by the likes of Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, Richard Yates and before them, Sinclair Lewis, John Steinbeck (I'm in no mood for long or comprehensive lists, but you get my drift) - and so it seems like the slower, quieter influence of Dubliners has as much claim as Ulysses does over the novel, over the short story. These are obviously some passing thoughts, so I fished around for something that could serve anyone with a hungrier mind and found this site which is definitely worth the effort and makes a lot of what I say sound, stupid, and any form of authority I managed to simulate sound, stupid (per paraylsis). Thanks to the people at the Gutenberg Project you can get a copy for free here.

# 11 - Tony Earley - ''The Prophet from Jupiter''

There is a certain type of fiction which excites me, a type of fiction that works best in a shorter form - and which I find hard to define without citing a few examples. A full, teeming, multi-dimensional type of story such as Barthelme's ''Indian Uprising'', Roy Kesey's ''Wait'', Gogol's''Nevsky Prospect'', a big canvas story which intends to give light to each and every element on its surface, giving life to every face, a narrative for every event, a Hieronymus Bosch kind of work: busy, ecstatic, without predudice to any one object, teeming, teeming with life. Without warning I came across one of the finest examples of this type of story in Tony Earley's ''The Prophet from Jupiter.'' I'd never heard of Earley before, and it was a dramatic introduction. Things in the story unfold quickly, layer upon layer of detail, character, time all crash into each other brilliantly. It reminded me of what Captain Beefheart managed in Trout Mask Replica. When I was 13 and learning to play guitar my teacher, probably bored of showing his students the same Manic Street Preacher numbers - showed me how Beefheart combined different tempos and rhythms that would come i line with each other before veering off into what a less discerning ear would hear as manic, untrained noise. Every minute or so the various elements of a song would synch and sound as though they were running right alongside each other. This is how Earley's story works. It's disparate elements - floods, infidelity, ghosts, madmen, drunk men, a pervasive dam, mayors, Floridians - all of these have their own melody and beat. The genius of the story is to bring them all together, tie them up in places, then let them veer off again. If it were a painting it would be huge. It would have many rooms, people, couples, landscapes. It would require a painter of obsessive powers of perspective and with the ability to extract the figurative in the abstract. In his commentary at the end of the anthology Tony Earley writes that he found it impossible to write anything after he'd finished. And I can understand that. It is an exhaustive piece of work, crammed full as it could be. I love this story, it fires up those synapses of the imagination in my brain that makes me want to take a very large wall and write all over it and write everything on it. Tony caught his own big fish here, and if ideas weighed as much as the catfish the main character is harnessed to the Dam night on night to catch, I can see Tony sat in a large reinforced chair hurling his typewriter at incoming ideas.

#10 - Sherman Alexie - "This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona"

I've recently received a copy of The Best American Short Stories 1994, edited by Tobias Wolff. The great thing about these anthologies is that you're faced with a compilation of some well-known names, whose stories you have probably already read or at least heard of, along with some unfamiliar writers who you wonder after reading how you'd never come into contact with before. I am constantly on the lookout for writers that, for no other reason that a little bad luck (my bad luck) and not stumbling into the right places, have managed to steer free of my radar. If I hadn't already found Jim Shepard and Barry Hannah this anthology would have brought them to my attention (both Jim's ''Batting against Castro'' and Barry Hannah's ''Nicomedus Bluff'' were both anthologised here). But already, halfway in, I've come across two writers whose work I wish I'd found sooner and I'm sure it was always inevitable I would find at some point, as their work seems to fit within the milieu of everything I look for in good fiction, and the fiction that spurs me on, makes me wonder in awe at its execution and give myself over to it fully; both Sherman Alexie's "This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona" and Tony Earley's ''The Prophet Of Jupiter'' have done all that.

To begin with Sherman Alexie's story; I had never read anything quite like this. As an Englishman with little real experience of living in the US - a few months in the Midwest - my own ideas about what being a Native American Indian today means was riddled with misconceptions. I really fell into this story, and it is Sherman Alexie's skill and heart in drawing the Reservation, the people, the history, the way the people live in a reservation devoid of much else but each other, it is his masterly craft that allows me to fall into a world I am otherwise so unfamiliar with. Victor is the main character, a poor young Indian whose father has just died of a heart attack in Phoenix, Arizona - and it is up to Victor, with no money and only a ride home in his deceased father's truck, to go and pick up what remains packed away in a trailer.

The story begins really when Victor meets Thomas-Builds-The-Fire, an old friend cum foe cum non-entity. Thomas-builds-the-fire is a tragic figure, a true loner, without parents, and with a penchant for telling people stories when they don't want to listen. He is also an emblem of a spiritual centre lost in the furnace of a modern reservation. But Thomas-builds-the-fire offers Victor the money he needs and reluctantly Victor agrees and they set off for Phoenix, Arizona. This is where the story goes from being an interesting story to a beautiful, fluid thing, a story that has real impact and can stand for so many things. Sherman Alexie has been accused before of getting attention and credit because he represents an under-represented culture, but this seems like a ridiculous claim to anyone who has read this story, or any of Alexie's best like ''What you pawn I shall redeem'' which you can find in the New Yorker. The effect created in this story is almost cosmic thanks to Thomas-builds-the-fire, a combination of Thomas's old world mysticism and Victor's hard boiled, hard done-by reality that smacks you round the face with its dichotomy and beauty.

On the plane on the way to Phoenix Thomas-Builds-The-Fire talks to a woman on the plane, and this great scene takes place:

"I mean, you used to be a world-class athlete?" Thomas asked.

"My husband still thinks I am."

Thomas Builds-the-Fire smiled. She was a mental gymnast, too. She pulled her leg straight up against her body so that she could've kissed her kneecap.

"I wish I could do that," Thomas said.

Victor was ready to jump out of the plane. Thomas, that crazy Indian storyteller with ratty old braids and broken teeth, was flirting with a beautiful Olympic gymnast. Nobody back home on the reservation would ever believe it.

"Well," the gymnast said. "It's easy. Try it."

Thomas grabbed at his leg and tried to pull it up into the same position as the gymnast. He couldn't even come close, which made Victor and the gymnast laugh.

"Hey," she asked. "You two are Indian, right?"

"Full-blood," Victor said.

"Not me," Thomas said. "I'm half magician on my mother's side and half clown on my father's."

Suddenly Thomas-builds-the-fire is not such a crackpot, he has a sense of humour and understands his own absurdity and his reality comes seeping out, painfully for the reader, because then for the first time we are aware of how much Thomas-builds-the-fire must be hurting himself, so pointedly aware of his own lot in life and so stoic with it at that. Victor, on the other hand, without much sympathy to begin with, slowly seems the understand the same thing. After discovering nothing much in the truck they start the long drive home, with his father's ashes in two boxes, and these scenes are some of the most touching and unforgettable - especially this scene which I can't help quoting:

'Thomas Builds-the-Fire slid behind the wheel and started off down the road. All through Nevada, Thomas and Victor had been amazed at the lack of animal life, at the absence of water, of movement.

"Where is everything?" Victor had asked more than once.

Now when Thomas was finally driving they saw the first animal, maybe the only animal in Nevada. It was a long-eared jackrabbit.

"Look," Victor yelled. "It's alive."

Thomas and Victor were busy congratulating themselves on their discovery when the jackrabbit darted out into the road and under the wheels of the pickup.

"Stop the goddamn car," Victor yelled, and Thomas did stop, backed the pickup to the dead jackrabbit.

"Oh, man, he's dead," Victor said as he looked at the squashed animal.

"Really dead."

"The only thing alive in this whole state and we just killed it."

"I don't know," Thomas said. "I think it was suicide."

Victor looked around the desert, sniffed the air, felt the emptiness and loneliness, and nodded his head.'

For me this is a scene that aches like only the best writing can, and I think the skill comes from both a deep, deep understanding of that sort of loneliness and what it takes to live with that sort of bad luck. Victor has nothing, no job, his father's ashes in the back of the truck - which was all that was left to Victor - and now the ''only thing alive in this whole state and we just killed it.'' The important word there is ''we''. Since Thomas-builds-the-fire was the one driving, and Victor had avoided everything for miles, but Victor is willing to share in the death of the rabbit and I get the feeling that before they took off together for Phoenix Victor would have not hesitated in saying ''You killed it.'' But he doesn't, the redemption here, the solace, is that they've shared all this together, the pain and the miles, the truck and the ashes, they did it together and this counts for everything. Back at the reservation things become a still-life again, a quiet, tense place bristling with a fractured sense of community, bad history, bad blood. The final words echo long after you finish reading the story:

''Victor stopped the pickup, leaned out the window, and shouted back. "What do you want?"

"Just one time when I'm telling a story somewhere, why don't you stop and listen?" Thomas asked.

"Just once?"

"Just once."

Victor waved his arms to let Thomas know that the deal was good. It was a fair trade, and that was all Victor had ever wanted from his whole life. So Victor drove his father's pickup toward home while Thomas went into his house, closed the door behind him, and heard a new story come to him in the silence afterwards.''

The 'deal was good', a kind of compromise, meeting Thomas-builds-the-fire somewhere halfway, which is more than he has ever got before.

9# Jim Shepard: ''Like You'd Understand, Anyway''

''The sensation of the modern'', a phrase Timothy Murphy memorably used in relation to W. S. Burroughs, is the locus of fiction - in Delillo, Pynchon, Vollman - the writers of the Big Moronic Inferno (to steal another great metropolitan quote, this time from Bellow) use history, Mason and Dixon, Libra, but we do not refer to this as ''Historical Fiction''. The definition, like much concerning the difference between Literary (art) and Genre (reproduction), is all about intentions. Pynchon's Mason and Dixon is not historical fiction because it is not about history, it pilfers from history. Dellilo's Libra is not a biography of Lee Harvey Oswald; it reaps and gleans the times, the media, national reactions, The Warren Report. In the same way Cormac McCarthy is not a writer of Westerns. Good writing transcends its surface subjects.

In the past few years there has been a shift in the short story. On the waves or Carver and his ilk the short story has rarely strayed further than its own century or decade, it usually concentrates on one or a few individuals, but the wide-angle sweep of history has come into its own in recent stories by David Means and Wells Tower, two prodigal New Yorker writers. We have had Viking domestics and 30s FBI stakeouts. In Jim Shepard's Like You'd Understand, Anyway, Russian cosmonauts, Roman family strife, Nazi Yeti hunts in the Himalayas, the first Australian frontiersmen, Revolutionary Paris from the executioner’s point of view and other widely diverse areas are used as the setting for some of the most master-crafted, un-gimmicky, authentic and poignant short stories published in recent years.

Jim Shepard is by no means obscure. His recent story Boy's Town also featured in the New Yorker. But once I read Eros 7 and Ancestral Legacies so much of Wells Tower - such as his celebrated Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned - reads as conceited both of its own design and its use of historical subjects. Part of what makes Wells' story captivating is simply the minor histories, the day to day Viking exploits - but looking any deeper brings no real riches. In stories like The Roof of the World the subject, context, subtexts and plot are inseparable. At no point can you stop and think - Why the Himalayas, why Australia, why Russian Cosmonauts? I did wonder - Why Vikings? And the answer that seemed to come up was: Viking's are cool. Part of this may be because I heard Tower read it in the Guardian books podcast, so perhaps if I read it closely I'd find more to grab onto.

Will Self in his introduction to Ridley Walker said that writers using history are taking the easy way out. For so much fiction - especially novels - this is the case. But when a writer like Shepard can take a character as in so many of these stories and give them a voice so direct, central and significant, without ever resorting to a kind of fiction-fun-fact-finding trope, there should be a division highlighted between 'Historical Fiction' and 'Literary Fiction with a historical setting.' It is essentially the same difference as between Pynchon and Catherine Cookson: one uses history as clay, the other uses history as glitter.

In the New York Times review of Like You’d Understand, Anyway Daniel Handler finds two sides to Jim Shepard's fiction: ‘the realistic kind (in which one of a small quiver of psychological tropes is played out quietly in a few scenes) and the experimental kind (in which an unusual premise or point of view that would grow tiring in a novel is explored, often with a sudden twist).’

Combining The Sensation of the Modern with artfully and dynamically drawn historical settings nudges both the realistic and the experimental into the future, scuffing the dividing line like it was just a rut in the sand.