Miss Wyoming, Douglas Coupland: January 27, 2000, Icon

I was so excited to have an opportunity to interview Douglas Coupland. It turned out to be one of the more unusual experiences I have ever had with an author. The phone interview, as I recall, got rescheduled because of a hiccup in his travel schedule. During the interview itself, he told me a story in response to one of my questions…but said it wasn’t for publication. It was a shocking and moving story, and to this day, I don’t know if it was true. (This hole in the publishable material from the interview may account for the excess of plot description in the piece.)

He also told me how little he liked media escorts, and I found myself volunteering to ferry him around when he was in Iowa City. It was my pleasure to do so. He encouraged my own writing (all that time ago, I was working on the little project that I hope to be finishing reasonably soon), we went antiquing and book shopping, we had an odd stop at McDonald’s, and I made sure he got settled into the Iowa City Sheraton prior to his reading at Prairie Lights. I believe he called the hotel “the worst hotel in North America” in his blog. I was both disappointed and relieved not to earn a mention in the blog.

This review ran under the headline and subhead “Dreams of flood and fame: The guy who invented Generation X graduates from ‘parlor tricks’ to latest novel.”

Douglas Coupland has only set foot in Iowa Cithy once. During the summer of 1993, he gave a reading at Prairie Lights as part of a tour to support his second novel, Shampoo Planet.

“Everyone kept saying, ‘We’re really sorry about the flood,'” Coupland recalled in a phone interview. “How can you be sorry about a flood? If you’d actually broken the dam, then I would understand.”

That infamous flood made quite an impression on the Vancouver native, best known as the man who named a generation with his 1991 novel, Generation X.

“You know how we’ve all seen tens of thousands of hours of TV and yet we don’t dream TV?” Coupland asked. “Well, I’ve only seen that one flood–I particularly remember riding past a grassy area where the water was just about over the r0ad–and I’ve had hundreds of dreams about it.”

Coupland is returning to Prairie Lights to read from his latest novel, Miss Wyoming, a book that hinges on a quite different sort of dream. The story focuses on 27-year-old Susan Colgate, a former beauty queen and washed-up TV actress, and John Johnson, a 37-year-old hotshot movie producer. Much of the back story for the two characters is developed in a series of flashbacks interwoven with the “here and now” action of the book.

Both Susan and John, for very different reasons, have spent a period of their lives detached from the worlds they usually inhabit. Susan dropped out of sight after a plane crash from whcih only she walked away. She allowed the world to believe she had been killed in the crash and she set out to recreate her life.

John embarked on an ill-considered walk out of Hollywood and into the American landscape after recovering from an illness reminiscent of those he suffered as a sickly child. Far from the romantic wanderings of a Jack Kerouac character, John’s journey was marked by hardship and ended with him in the hospital where he had a near-death experience featuring Susan Colgate, whom he doesn’t recognize but whose voice was the last he heard on his room’s television set before he slipped away.

Susan and John have resumed lives reminiscent of, though fundamentally altered from, those they lived prior to their disappearances when they happen to meet at a restaurant. They form an immediate and powerful connection that is threatened when Susan disappears again just hours after they’ve me, leading John to embark on an extremely high-tech search for her.

In the flashback portions of the narrative, Coupland introduces us to a variety of characters who have influenced the lives of the two main characters. Most notable is Susan’s domineering and manipulative stage-mother, Marilyn, whose one desire was to see Susan climb to the top of the beauty pageant ladder. Among myriad other machinations, Marilyn moved her family to Wyoming so Susan would face less competition in her quest for a state crown. While that incident gives the novel its title and seems to highlight Susan’s story, John’s tale is equally central to the narrative and to its happy, if provisional, ride-into-the-sunset ending.

Miss Wyoming is Coupland’s first novel for Pantheon. He left HarperCollins after realizing that his fiction writing “wasn’t a parlor trick anymore.”

“My editor (at HarperCollins) was great but she was an acquisitions editor,” Coupland explained. “My books went from the laptop to Barnes and Noble almost untouched.”

The folks at Pantheon have been a bit more demanding, encouraging Coupland, who was a sculptor prior to writing Generation X, to work on some of the technical aspects of his writing.

“It was like living in East Berlin and then the Wall comes down and you’re allowed to see your Secret Police file and all the things your neighbors have been saying about you,” Coupland joked. “I discovered I’d been making mistakes with things like point of view and tense that if I’d ever taken English 101 I wouldn’t have made. I thought, ‘After six books, I’m still doing this?'”

The actual composition of Miss Wyoming was a departure for Coupland, as well. Until recently, he has been an obsessive note-take looking for emergent patterns and themes by cutting up his notes into individual pieces to construct “quilts made linear.” He abandoned that method for the current book, writing Miss Wyoming start to finish with no notes at all.

While the reader may not notice any great change in Coupland’s characteristic style, his sincere commitment to growth as a writer ensures that he will remain the leading voice in Gen. X literature–a position in which he is somewhat surprised to find himself.

“I’m convinced there’s this parallel universe,” he said, “where I’m the night clerk at the Ramada and I’m thinking, ‘There’s something I should be doing.'”

The Coupland of this universe is anxious to get started on the next book a tale of an unraveling family, the kind of family Coupland thinks most everyone will recognize.

“I’m thinking of calling it, Everyone’s Family is Psychotic,” he said. “Of course, then I’d have to explain to my mom that I mean it in a nice way.”

The Fishermen, Hans Kirk: January 20, 2000, Icon

UI law professor Marc Linder translated several Danish novels, and I think I may have reviewed all of them, beginning with this one. Because the portrayal of the religious in fiction is a particular interest of mine, I found this book rather fascinating. I always enjoyed interviewing Linder (though we never talked about this cleverly titled book featuring his legal research).

This review ran under the headline and subhead “The Great Danish Novel: Classic Danish novel finally finds its way into English thanks to a Hawkeye law professor.”

This spring, University of Iowa law professor Marc Linder was walking by his bookcase when an old birthday present caught his eye. The present was Danish novelist Hans Kirk’s The Fishermen, given to Linder back in 1975 while he was teaching in Denmark. Linder’s initial reaction to the book, the best-selling Danish novel of all time, wasn’t very positive.

“I read about 50 pages and I thought, ‘What is this? I’m not interested in these religious freaks,'” Linder said in a phone interview.

A year later, however, Linder gave the book a second look and his entire perception of the work changed–from distaste to what he calls, “fanatic passion.” Part of that passion was a desire to translate the book, written in 1928, into English. An English translation had never seen the light of day for a variety of reasons, not the least of which many have been Kirk’s membership in the Danish Communist Party.

Linder made some preliminary inquiries to Penguin Books, the company that had originally obtained the rights for an English edition but had never actually produced the book. Though a translation was evidently prepared in the late ’40s or early ’50s, Penguin never released it. Linder had no success getting information about the status of the rights when he contacted the publishing house in the ’70s.

“Evidently, I was not resourceful or persistent enough,” he said. “I couldn’t get anyone’s attention there.”

So the translation was put aside and Linder headed to law school. For the past decade he has taught labor law at the UI, and while he completed a couple translations of German fiction, The Fishermen languished on his shelf.

Until that day in March

“I was walking by my bookcase and there was the book,” Linder remembered. “I said to myself, ‘There’s a loose end in your life.'”

He began a translation of the work and once again set out to unravel the mystery of who controlled the English rights. A phone call to Tina Nunnally, herself a translator of Danish books through her Seattle-based company Fjord Press, led to a new contact at Penguin. Eventually Linder confirmed with a rights manager at Penguin that the company no longer held the rights to the book. Linder contacted the Danish publisher and at long last–“It evidently wasn’t important enough for them to expedite it,” Linder said–gained the English rights to the book.

He spent the summer of 1999 translating the book, revising his work more than 20 times and putting in as many as 16 hours a day.

“You can’t lavish this kind of attention on a translation if you’re doing this for a living,” Linder said.

Among the many challenges to overcome was how to deal with the dialect spoken by the fishermen. “It’s not like a southern accent,” Linder explained. “It’s a dialect; it’s like another language. You can’t reproduce that.”

Linder also searched out a professor in St. Paul, Minn., who translates hymns, a Danish/English Bible on the Internet, and the help of several native Danish speakers in an effort to accurately present Kirk’s work in English. Readers of excellent literature should be profoundly grateful.

As you might guess, The Fishermen tells the story of a group of fishermen who move from the North Sea coast of Denmark to the west coast in an effort to improve their lot in life. There, the transplanted families must adjust to a new lifestyle while struggling to remain faithful to the pietistic form of Christianity.

Kirk (1898-1962) himself was far from being a member of the Church Association for the Inner Mission, the movement to which his characters belong. “He was a godless Marxist,” Linder said. “There’s no doubt about that.” Nevertheless, the beauty of the book is it sympathetic portrait of the fishermen and their wives and children. Indeed, according to Linder, even member of the Inner Mission find that the book casts them in a fairly favorable light.

“Although Kirk was someone with very decided political views,” Linder explained, “he had a very deft hand for drawing characters.”

A prime example of Kirk’s gift is the character Tea Ron, a woman desperately devoted to her religion but also blind to her own self-righteousness. Tea is confronted by the local pastor when her daughter Tabita becomes pregnant out of wedlock. At first humble and ashamed, Tea quickly comes to regard the pastor’s condemnation of her daughter and of herself as too strong to allow. Tea’s subtle shift from a rigid legalist to a more compassionate soul is one of the most effective passages in a novel made up of exceptionally moving moments.

It is rare to find a novel that so carefully examines the lives of people of faith and their struggle to live by that faith as mores and morals change over time. Kirk avoided the snare of condescension that often trips up non-beleiving writers who tackle questions of religion. Kirk’s fishermen may never see God, but neither are they made to look like fools for believing in God. Rather, The Fisherman offers the reader a moving tale of true faith facing growing challenges both from within and without.

The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh, January 13, 2000, Icon

What I remember best about reviewing this book is the heft of it in my hand, its odd texture and odor, and my relief at how bad the “Juvenilia” section turned out to be. I hardly felt qualified to offer up criticism on the work of Evelyn Waugh, but the editors of this collection did me a tremendous favor. I particularly like phrase,”which are at least gathered together where they can be easily ignored.”

This review ran under the headline and subhead “Complete Waugh a little too complete: New volume of Evelyn Waugh’s work even includes stories the author wrote as a child.”

At its best, The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh, published this fall by Little, Brown and Company as part of its Back Bay imprint’s repackaging of Waugh’s novels, delights the reader with the sharp satire and crisp writing to which fans of the late English author’s works are accustomed. At its worst, the collection offers up extremely early stories and sketches that most readers would have happily had left out of the book.

Bright spots in the collection, and there are many, include “The Man Who Licked Dickens,” “An Englishman’s Home,” and “Scott-King’s Modern Europe.” The last is in many ways similar to Waugh’s wonderful novel, Scoop, in which a freelance garden writer for a London paper quite amazingly finds himself chief war correspondent reporting on a bizarre war in Africa. The title character in “Scott-King’s Modern Europe” is a scholar whose life work deals with a hopelessly obscure country. The story traces his adventures after he accepts an invitation to visit the country to celebrate the work of the long-dead writer. In both the novel and story, Waugh’s gift for satire shines through as he relates the bizarre customs and labyrinthine bureaucracies of the counties in which the main characters find themselves.

Two chapters from the unfinished novel Work Suspended are another high point. Titled “My Father’s House” and “Lucy Simmonds,” the chapters begin the story  of a successful mystery writer whose work comes to a halt upon the death of his father. In the second chapter he falls in love with Lucy Simmonds, the pregnant wife of a writer friend–he also comes face to face, in a number of bizarre settings, with the man responsible for his father’s death. The opening paragraphs of the first chapter set a wry tone: “In three weeks I should pack (my latest novel) up for the typist, perhaps sooner, for I had nearly passed that heavy middle period where less conscientious writers introduce their second corpse.” But the two chapters are full of poignant moments as well, particularly after the birth of Lucy’s child.

The chapters are quite successful and one wonders why Waugh abandoned the project. Unfortunately, The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh is devoid of quality notes. While the book does contain bibliographic information about the stories, the book’s introduction is scanty and does not address the stories in any detail.

Readers unfamiliar with the social and political landscape of the England Waugh describes may also struggle with some of the stories, including “Charles Ryder’s Schooldays,” which provides a glimpse into the early days of the narrator of Brideshead Revisited, Waugh’s most famous book. The story revolves around the internal politics of the student body at Ryder’s school, and the American reader of the late 20th century may not be armed with the necessary knowledge of such a school’s hierarchy to glean all the piece offers. The story that opens the collection, “The Balance,” offers similar challenges, as well as an unusual narrative style that might put off readers not familiar with the bulk of Waugh’s work.

The reader is not left entirely without signposts, however, as there are a couple of divisions made in the text. The first section of the book, which contains the stories mentioned above, is labeled “The stories of Evelyn Waugh,” followed by sections called “Juvenilia” and “Oxford Stories.” While the stories in the last section may be of some passing interest to devoted fans of Waugh’s work, the juvenilia section might have been better left out. It contains stories Waugh wrote as a child and preserves not only the text of those stories but of all the various writing errors a young author makes. Witness this first chapter of “The Curse of the Horse Race”:

“I bet you 500 pounds I’ll win. The speaker was Rupert a man of about 25 he had a dark busy mistarsh and flashing eyes.

I shouldn’t trust to much on your horse said Tom for ineed he had not the sum to spear.

The race was to take place at ten the following moring.”

These stories offer little to the casual reader of Waugh’s work; indeed, it is difficult to see what they offer any reader save, perhaps, the most serious of Waugh scholars. Though the collection would have been less “complete” without them, it would have been more consistently enjoyable.

Aside from these pieces, which are at least gathered together where they can easily be ignored, The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh brings together an assortment of fine writing by one of Britain’s top talents of this century. Fans of Waugh, as well as all those who enjoy deftly constructed satire, will be pleased with the collection.

Ahab’s Wife, Sena Jeter Naslund: October 14, 1999, Icon

For the longest time, I’ve thought of this as the most embarrassing review I’ve ever written. Happily, looking over it now, I see that I misremembered it. I thought I had suggested the Ahab’s Wife was as good as Moby Dick. Turns out, that’s not what I wrote. Rather, as you’ll see, I suggest that the title character of the Sena Jeter Naslund’s book is a fitting companion for the mad captain. Whew. I feel better.

I felt deeply under-qualified to review this book when I first accepted the assignment. I hadn’t read Moby Dick. Shocking really, given that I have an English degree and was presuming to review books. There was a simple solution to my feelings of inadequacy: I read Moby Dick before I read Ahab’s Wife. Given that this review ran in the same issue as the Shelby Steele review and just one week after the James Galvin review, I’m not sure how I pulled that off. It was certainly obsessive behavior. But I felt better.

This review ran until the headline and subhead: “Call Me Una?: Author gives great American novel a feminist, hopeful spin.”

In a chapter titled “Shakespeare and Company,” Una, title character and narrator of Sena Jeter Naslund’s newest novel Ahab’s Wife, muses about literature and asks herself the very questions that led Naslund to write her story: “(I)f one wrote for American men a modern epic, a quest, and it ended in death and destruction, should such a tale not have its redemptive features? Was it not possible instead for a human life to end in a sense of wholeness, of harmony with the universe? And how might a woman live such a life?”

Drawing on a few short passages from Herman Melvilles’ master work  Moby Dick, Naslund has created what she calls “a companion piece” to the book many consider already the great American novel. Ahab’s Wife tells the story of the woman, unnamed in Melville’s book, Captain Ahab leaves behind to pursue his obsessive revenge upon the great white whale. Though mentioned only briefly in Moby Dick, Naslund clearly recognized the great love Ahab had for this woman.

“She doesn’t have a name or any life,” Naslund said in a telephone interview, “but she is treated ver well in Moby Dick. It is clear that Ahab loves her. If I’d had evidence that Ahab had mistreated her, I probably wouldn’t have been interested in pursuing it, but I felt that Melville had planted this idea (of Ahab’s love for his wife) and then not developed it.

Naslund develops that idea and a host of others in a text that rivals Melville’s in both scope and beauty. Inspired rather than awed by Melville’s work, Naslund, a 1968 graduate of the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, imagines Una as a magnificently resilient woman who faces and overcomes tragedy throughout her life as she seeks to define herself. Every but a match for the larger-than-life Ahab, Una arguably faces many more trials and tribulations than her husband but chooses a different path.

“Melville’s vision was a tragic and Shakespearean vision–the destruction of a great man,” Naslund said. “Ahab does create his own downfall and that’s grand and tragic. But in Ahab’s Wife, the vision is not tragic. It’s a narrative which ends in triumph…My book, instead of ending in death and destruction, ends with a sense of hope and of a having a place in the universe.”

Though the title defines the book’s main character in terms of her relationship with Melville’s creation, by the book’s end Una no longer seeks her identity in her relationships to others.

“In the roof walk scene (which ends the novel),” Naslund said, “she defines herself for herself in relation to the universe rather than waiting for a husband to come home and define her. She begins her own spiritual quest.”

In addition to creating a compelling equal for Ahab, Naslund also does a fine job recreating many of the characters, both major and minor, who inhabit Ishmael’s narrative in Moby Dick. The author has tackled this sort of challenge before in her book Sherlock in Love, a novel featuring Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous creations. In both Sherlock in Love and Ahab’s Wife, she sought to bring something new to familiar characters while retaining their essential identities.

“I wanted to be consistent with what was in the canon,” she said of both books, “but rotate (the characters) just a bit to show a different side of them.”

But Una herself is at the heart of this tale. The reader follows her from her early days with a father obsessed with religious dogma to her adolescence spent living at a lighthouse with her aunt and uncle to her sudden decision to join the crew of a whaling ship disguised as a boy. Her ship is destroyed by a huge black whale, and she and two companions survive in a small whaling boat by turning to cannibalism, a subject hinted at but never directly addressed in Moby Dick. That passage, central to all that comes later in the book and linking Una to Ahab (who refers to himself in both Melville and Naslund’s books as “cannibal old me”), was among the most challenging to write, according to Naslund.

“I wrote it almost in a trance,” she said. “It wasn’t the language that was difficult; it was the experience (of writing about cannibalism).”

Naslund’s work, which follows Melville’s example by not sticking strictly to a first-person narrative–“If my great model could do it,” she argued, “I felt that I had license”–manages to emulate the form of Moby Dick without ever crossing the line into parody. Instead, Naslund had created a fitting mate for one of literature’s most fascinating characters and enriched his story while telling hers.

Fencing the Sky, James Galvin: October 7, 1999, Icon

When folks ask me what kind of books I review, I tell them that for the most part I review literary fiction. As this blog develops, I think that will be prove to be true. At this early point in my reviewing, however, the evidence might have suggested that I was primarily going to review genre fiction. To this point, I had reviewed a historical potboiler, three mysteries, and a non-fiction book. This review marks my first foray into literary fiction (though a contrarian might argue with some legitimacy that the book under consideration is, at heart, a Western).

Where better to get initiated into the literary world than at the Dey House on The University of Iowa Campus, home of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, an institution I have revered since I was child? I was both thrilled and terrified to enter the hallowed halls of the world’s most respected writing program.

This review ran under the headline and subhead, “Big sky, hard truth: Poet James Galvin enlists fiction to address the dilemma faced by today’s ranchers.”

James Galvin, respected poet and University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop instructor, doesn’t take prose writing lightly. Indeed, he is well aware how difficult it is for a poet to also write quality prose. “Historically speaking,” Galvin said, alluding to but not mentioning any poets-turned-prose-writers by name, “it’s almost a suicide mission.”

Nevertheless, Galvin’s latest effort, Fencing the Sky, is his second prose endeavor and his first work of fiction. In the case of both books, a sense of responsibility led the poet to don the prose stylist’s hat–a send of responsibility to tell the truth about a way of life that is quickly disappearing in the American West.

In 1992, Galvin’s critically acclaimed nonfiction work The Meadow addressed some of the issues facing ranchers in today’s political and economic environment. He continues that work in Fencing the Sky. “This time around, it’s more political,” Galvin said of the new book. “It’s not about the past so much as it’s about the present.”

That present sees entrepreneurs buying up huge tracts of land and parceling out small “ranchettes” to unsuspecting buyers who think they are grabbing their own piece of the American Dream. Unprepared  for life in that environment, most of the buyers become disillusioned; at the same time, their very presence disrupts the lives and livelihoods of those who make their living from the land. Having spent his childhood on a ranch, and as an individual who spends seven months of his year working his own ranch in Montana, Galvin feels a special calling to bring attention to these problems and believes, as an artist, he is in a unique position to do so.

“The only important thing about art in general, and fiction in particular, is that it is one of the ways we have to express the truth,” he said. The idea of fiction as truth-telling may, at first glance, seem paradoxical, but Galvin argues that fiction allows hard truths to be explored in ways otherwise not available.

“Fiction gives you some more precisely ambivalent way to express what you have to say because it is too difficult, too ambivalent to tell any other way,” he explained.

Fencing the Sky opens with rancher Mike Arans killing Merriweather Snipes, a man who has been buying up land and reselling it, by roping him around the neck and pulling him off his ATV. Arams leaves a note accepting responsibility for the killing and goes on the run. Through his journey, as well as via a series of episodes from his life and the lives of his fellow ranchers, the plight of the rancher is brought to life in a style that draws heavily from Galvin’s poetic roots.

“I tried to write something prosy,” Galvin joked, “but I couldn’t get it done. There are habits of form which I get from poetry which resist the idea of plot and which are probably a liability.”

Quite the contrary. Fencing the Sky is fashioned as a collection of memories told in a lush language that heightens the reader’s sense of the land’s beauty, the dangers that threaten it, and the desperation of those who are clinging to their way of life. As we ride with Mike Arans, Galvin convinces us that something must be done to save this way of life–and makes it clear that such a task won’t be easy, if it can be accomplished at all.

“If you’re writing about the environment and Western culture,” he said, “you’re writing about a culture where, no matter how virtuous the choices [individuals make], things are disappearing anyway.” To combat this, Galvin said ranchers will have to join forces with environmentalists, a group with which, historically, they have not been able to cooperate due to mutual animosity. Environmentalists, he said, still cling to “the well-outdated notion that ranching damages the land,” while ranchers continue to resist the sort of political solutions environmentalists are adept at seeking.

“Ranchers are temperamentally adverse to legislation and rules,” he said. “It’s time to get over that a little bit.” Even with cooperation and public support, the effort to protect the family ranching operation won’t be easy, said Galvin, because one misstep can undo all the work that precedes it. “You can vote 1,000 times to protect it,” he maintained, “but if you vote one time to destroy it, it’s over.”

“If I’d written a book of poems about this,” he continued, “I’d have been assured that no one would read it.” But don’t  look for more prose from his pen any time soon.

“I won’t do it again  unless more responsibility descends on me,” he said. “I don’t enjoy writing prose nearly as much as I enjoy writing poetry.” That’s the readers loss, as Fencing the Sky clearly establishes Galvin as a sure-handed novelist committed to revealing truth through beautiful and compelling fiction.