by Todd McKinney | Nov 3, 2023 | Book Reviews
By Glen Retief
Part bird book, part Native Great Plains history, part meditation on the author’s mixed Irish American and Lakota background, and part exploration of how cultures conceive the relationship between humans and other sentient beings, Birding While Indian provides a thoughtful contribution to Native American and environmental studies. It deserves to be widely read, particularly as we battle the twin global crises of structural racism and environmental collapse.
The book is organized as the kind of chronological list that will be familiar to any serious birder, with chapter-essays headed by month, year, place, and species. In a preface, though, the author warns readers that despite this form, not all the essays will be about birds: “[I]t may turn out that this book is as much about birds and birding as Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is about motorcycles.” He adds, “As a crossblood person, I feel inordinately pulled towards such a cross-genre form.”
Indeed, particularly in the early chapters, the bird encounters can seem somewhat marginal. For example, “June 1970, a Fort Pierre Slough: Wood Duck” is barely about a duck, but rather focuses on an uncle’s alcoholism—a moving meditation on a trope familiar from many memoirs and novels, including, of course, Irish and Native American ones.
Other essays skillfully blend the book’s political and environmental concerns, mostly by developing striking ornithological metaphors for colonialism (settler colonists are an invasive species, like starlings), racial and cultural hybridity (mixed bloods are both water and forest birds), and spirituality (raptors bridge earth and heaven).
Yet more essays, especially those from the middle of the collection, are pure birding notes. Meanwhile, the last half dozen essays return to autobiography, most notably the death of the author’s mother, and a final coda offers a critique of American birding culture as an overwhelming white subculture.
One key early moment prefigures the book’s core narrative and philosophical preoccupations. As a young boy, Gannon attends a Jesuit elementary boarding school for Native Americans, called Holy Rosary. In “January 1968, Rapid Creek: Common Golden Eye,” Gannon and his mother are here participating in a depressingly familiar ritual of the Native child who gets sent away to frequently abusive boarding schools, there to be assimilated into white culture.
Granted, at this particular school, there may not be, as has been discovered elsewhere in Canada, corpses of children buried who died from disease or mistreatment and whose families were simply never told what happened to their kids. Nuns may not literally pour hot water on their students, like Erdrich’s Sister Marie.
Nevertheless, Holy Rosary is a bastion of what Gannon calls “Christo-Custer colonialism,” church and ideology on a mission of “social genocide and deicide.” All the students attend daily mass, where they are threatened with future hellfire. Gannon gets taught white history, in which anti-Indian massacres are “battles” and settler-colonists are the heroes. When the author swears, a nun feeds him a bar of soap.
Amid all this, Gannon sees “. . . a common Goldeneye, swimming on the still open, snow-banked creek.” He thinks, “What a lone, brave sonofabitch,” which also seems a fair summary of his own position at this point in his story. Later, reflecting on the goldeneye’s significance, Gannon quotes a passage from Darcy McNickle’s novel, The Surrounded, where a Native boarding school student is forced by a Jesuit to kneel in front of a cross-shaped cloud. Then Archilde, the student, sees a bird fly past: “[W]hat seized Archilde’s imagination was the bird’s unconcernedness. . . . He felt himself fly with the bird.”
The relationship between humans and birds proposed here is paradoxical. On the one hand it is the radical otherness of avians that allows both Gannon, and the fictional Archilde, relief from Christian-colonialist indoctrination: birds have neither theology nor ideology. On the other hand, Gannon and Archilde also attribute a quality of freedom to birds, which in turn seems to inspire an all-too-human longing for liberation.
The intellectual tension proves sustaining. For example, in the essay, “April 2003, U of Iowa English-Philosophy Building: Northern Cardinal,” Gannon summarizes a portion of his doctoral dissertation on Native American literature. In this work, as he comments on tales of the ancestral Lakota chief Black Elk listening to talking kingbirds, Gannon calls for “cross-species semiotic communication based upon listening to birds’ sounds.”
Next, he shares an anecdote. Gannon, standing outside the building where he must defend his dissertation, “[a] cardinal began singing from the tree beside me, fitCHEW, fitCHEW, fitCHEW, fitCHEW, fitCHEW. That’s what it sounded like on one level. On another, it was saying—I swear—‘Don’t worry, Tom. It’ll be fine.’”
The moment is touching. Yet how, exactly, is it different from the anthropomorphism of white writers, say Walt Whitman’s “Dalliance of the Eagles,” quoted in “May 2003, Clay County Park: Bald Eagle”? While acknowledging he is drawn to the poet’s description, Gannon nevertheless smiles at Whitman’s “Hallmark sentiments” when he describes eagles mating as “rushing amorous contact.”
Like Gannon, I enjoy both the cardinal’s solace and the eagles’ friskiness. Yet on the Hallmark sentimentality scale, a songbird reassuring a nervous student surely ranks at least as high as two lusty raptors. So, what kind of interspecies literary or imaginative engagement is Gannon arguing for?
An answer comes in “June 2010, Spirit Mound: Dickcissel”:
It is the Western worldview that found it necessary to impose spiritus upon mundus, to forever make a mental metaphor of matter. . . . A worldview so marked by the division between the physical and the metaphysical is ultimately alien to most American Indigenous cosmo-ontologies. . . , [T]he typical Native view is much more about the mundane—and yet wonderfully magical—reality of . . . Dickcissels and swallows and meadowlarks.
Put differently, a Whitmanesque admiration of bald eagles, however heartfelt, nevertheless implies a self-centeredness: the observer is reminded of human feelings. By contrast, when a Lakota shaman spiritually inhabits the body of a falcon, he does so because he senses the indivisibility of the world.
Or again, the difference between interdependence and appreciation: Gannon needs the cardinal. Without it, his anxiety may cause him to flub his defense. For Whitman, the eagles add majesty to his world, but do not fundamentally sustain it.
If the traditional Indigenous worldview seems ecologically superior here—more in tune with humans’ dependence on the rest of nature—then that seems congruent with Gannon’s thesis. Yet one great strength of Birding While Indian is that the collection nevertheless resists slipping into simplistic moralism. After every dose of anticolonial critique, it’s notable how Gannon instinctively circles back to the self and its moral ambiguities, the way, say, in “Notes of a Native Son,” Baldwin quickly pivots from the horrors of racist discrimination he experienced to the toxins of hate he detects in his own psyche.
Thus, Gannon may be, to use his term, a bit of an “eco-Indian.” But he is also a modern Westerner, with his eBird apps, his obsessive and acquisitive list-making, and his off-reservation, academic job.
Like many of his readers, he is trying to heal psychic wounds in himself—an absentee father, an abusive schooling. Even more, he is trying to do right by his family, especially his mother, whose life was “so much more a suffering and struggle and triumph” as opposed to his own “latter-day ‘philosophical’ pissed-offness.”
So maybe Gannon is indeed, like many of us, angry at a racist, eco-destructive status quo. But while his irritation certainly shows, it also doesn’t dominate a tender, thoughtful book, full of vulnerability and joy. For Birding While Indian is no polemic screed. Rather, it’s an honest memoir with sensitive nature writing, a testimony to the non human world’s ability to provide human solace.
Birding While Indian: A Mixed-Blood Memoir by Thomas C. Gannon
Ohio State University Press
$19.95 paperback | Buy Now
Glen Retief’s The Jack Bank: A Memoir of a South African Childhood won a 2011 Lambda Literary Award. He teaches creative nonfiction at Susquehanna University. Reach him at www.glenretief.com.
by Jay Kibble | Oct 11, 2023 | Book Reviews
By Lara Lillibridge
Alyssa Graybeal begins her memoir with a list of acronyms for a host of medical conditions, the central one of which is Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. This inherited disorder affects the ability of one’s connective tissue to hold the blood vessels, organs, and bones together, which does not cause problems for 99% of humans. For Graybeal it does. Ehlers-Danlos makes her “floppy”; she is prone to accidents as this disease degenerates her tissues. These beginning acronyms are certainly helpful—I was familiar with a few of them, but not all—but it’s also a succinct way to set the stage for the narrative to come as they slowly unfold in her life. We enter the book braced for an obscure experience—though perhaps not as unusual as we might think.
One of the benefits of creative nonfiction is that it allows us a window into another’s experience and rescues us from asking nosy awkward questions of people in real life. I was curious to read this book because a friend with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome is in and out of a wheelchair. Of course, each person’s experience with a shared disability is different just as every queer person’s experience is different—another aspect of this narrative that drew me in. Graybeal has two distinct marginalized identities to contend with, both resulting in vulnerabilities and marginalization. Yet her memoir has little self-pity or anger. Frustration, certainly, but she’s also humorous and self-deprecating, traits very relatable.
Floppy alternates between the child narrator’s experience and the older, reflective narrator. This contrast lets the older narrator shows us how the child couldn’t realize the severity, and really needed to, of her condition. But more than a disability or a queer story, it is also about living with loss, growing up different, and finding one’s place in the world—something the narrator didn’t fully expect since she believed the world would end on December 22, 2012, according to the Mayan calendar’s prediction, when she was thirty. She found comfort in the end-times, writing, “I’d be okay after all. The apocalypse would get me before I degenerated. […] With good luck we’d have a few years of quiet, off-the-grid living before we finally died from nuclear fallout or environmental catastrophe.”
I related to the narrator as a clumsy child who never quite fit in—though I was lucky in that my normal awkwardness only resulted in bruises and cuts, not hundreds of stitches and scars. Graybeal writes, “By ten, I’d made half a dozen trips to emergency rooms for little black stitches on my shins, losing count after 329.” I pictured myself as well tripping on the stairs, banging into furniture, or having one of a zillion other mishaps that landed Graybeal in the emergency room. So, too, did I relate to the emotional wounds of a child with divorced parents, growing up in the shadow of a new family, left out of family photos and not fully included.
I was also excited to see a kind of queerness close to my own—something not as traditionally butch as I see in many memoirs (not that we don’t love our butches)—but the sort of feminine tomboy seems underrepresented. Just as there are many ways to inhabit a body, there are myriad ways to perform gender, and Graybeal’s child-self mirrored mine, except my pajama-like outfit was blue floral, not pink, and my sport was kickball. Graybeal writes: “Just because a girl wears pink floral pajamas to softball practice doesn’t mean she’s not a good player.” “Flowers are freaking pretty.”
Beyond differences, many will recognize in Graybeal’s coming-of-age narrative ways they, too, fretted over the perfect date outfit or struggled with the loss of a love or a divorce. Additionally, I related to the “good girl” conditioning evident in Graybeal’s behavior—the desire not to make a fuss, not to be too needy, not to be too much work for anyone else. As she writes, “No matter my injury, it was good of me to put other people first.” And it is in her eventual coming to terms with her condition that we witness how self-acceptance leads to creating a life of fulfillment and meaning—something we all aspire to.
But don’t just read Floppy for the story—read it for the writing. Winner of the 2020 Red Hen Nonfiction Award, Graybeal’s book can be funny and poignant, her voice clear and unusual.
She writes: “The disabled and chronically ill have a resilience advantage in that we have always had to develop self-awareness and creativity. When systems are not built for us, creative problem solving becomes necessary for staying alive. No one is going to figure it out for us.”
This creativity shows in her sharp descriptions: “I sunk my head to let the hot water shiver my ears.” And “Anything dropped got dipped in the winter floor sauce of dirty melted snow, salt, and gravel.” And “City soundwaves wafted like a gas leak, and I suffocated in them.”
My favorite chapter, craft-wise, was “Spinning a Tale of Chest Pain.” Here, Graybeal braids facts about the make-up of collagen and genetic mutations with a narrative about spinning wool and chest pain. The stark facts of those mutations lie in juxtaposition to the skepticism of the medical professionals while the explanation of collagen fibers melds nicely with the description of how wool fibers behave, all with the narrator’s distinctive voice, “Would doctors take me seriously if they knew I was a badass married queer spinster? Probably less.”
And this combination of disabled and queer renders Graybeal twice exceptional.
Floppy: Tales of a Genetic Freak of Nature at the End of the World by Alyssa Graybeal
Red Hen Press
$18.95 paperback | Buy Now
Lara Lillibridge (she/they) is the author of The Truth About Unringing Phones, coming in March 2024, with Unsolicited Press; Mama, Mama, Only Mama: An Irreverent Guide for the Newly Single Parent; Girlish: Growing Up in a Lesbian Home; and co-editor of the anthology, Feminine Rising: Voices of Power and Invisibility. Lara is the interviews editor for Hippocampus Magazine and a creative nonfiction editor for HeartWood Literary Magazine. She has an MFA from West Virginia Wesleyan College.
by Jay Kibble | Sep 8, 2023 | Book Reviews
By Richard Terrill
Blackwood’s homage to early black music begins and ends in an imagistic but unlikely fashion. It’s December 1933, one of the worst years of the Great Depression. The Paramount Records of the book’s title, actually a furniture making company in a small Wisconsin town, has gone bust. It had entered the recording business with the hopes of profiting not from records, but from sales of its much more expensive phonograph cabinets. As Blackwood details in the pages that follow, Paramount backed into—and lucked into—the recording and distribution of what were known as “race records,” music of black artists marketed to a black audience, a business model that had proven successful in better times.
On this December night, though, the factory’s all-white working staff ascend to the roof of the building, having just been told they’ve completed their last day of employment at the firm. The newly unemployed workers fling most of the company’s inventory of records and recording masters off the roof, into the Milwaukee River below. Jelly Roll Morton, Alberta Hunter, Blind Blake, Son House—all disappear into the dark waters.
The Paramount company itself is more the occasion for this book than the central player in it. It’s the common element among the many artists profiled here. While Paramount did indeed “rise and fall” in fifteen short years, the narrative is not structured by that arc. Neither is this primarily “A Great Migration Story,” as claimed, though many of the company’s artists came from the Deep South to Chicago, and Wisconsin, to record.
Instead, the book offers a compendium of short biographical sketches of those masters of early Black music, which, as recordings, the disgruntled factory workers were disposing of, angrily, cavalierly, that winter night. In Blackwood’s telling, we learn, for instance, that Alberta Hunter wore Turkish harem pants and a red scarf, and she didn’t tolerate crude language from the boys in her band. We read that Blind Lemon Jefferson could detect the sound of a penny dropped into his tip jar and insulted, he’d throw it away. What’s more he carried a loaded pistol with him on trains.
Other principals include such people as J. Mayo “Ink” Williams, the first Black executive and producer of race records at a white record company, who joined Paramount in 1924. From Black minstrelsy, there’s Billy Kersands, who could contort his mouth to hold a billiard ball or an entire cup of coffee with saucer.
On a thematic level, the book is about loss. It’s about how music intended primarily to entertain and thus make a living for its purveyors also rises to the level of artistry. This business of lost masters and an era of Black music we know precious little about informs Blackwood’s task. No easy one either, given all that’s missing. The artists were Black and marginalized, though they were popular among the “race.” There are few written records of their creation. The players, then and after, were the subject of mythmaking, sometimes of their own doing. Blackwood entertains rumors, often beginning a sentence with “It is said.” Or as in these examples (the italics are mine):
Reports by contemporaries mention [Blind Lemon Jefferson] wrestling professionally to supplement his income.
The Reverend Gary Davis said he’d heard [Blind Blake] was run over by a streetcar.
Charley Patton . . . died on April 28, apparently in the company of the last of his wives, Willie, though his singing and fighting partner Bertha Lee, would claim otherwise. . . . Like so many things about him, it’s simply hard to tell.
At the date of Blackwood’s writing, of course, witnesses and principal players are dead. The most important source for Blackwood’s research appears to be the similarly titled Paramount’s Rise and Fall: The Roots and History of Paramount Records. A quick check online yields exactly one copy of the book available. It could have been mine for only $2999. I passed. My point is that Blackwood likely dug as deeply as he could researching the book. He didn’t find much new. I suspect it was more a labor of love.
The challenge for the writer, though, is how to fill in these gaps. Or more accurately, since there may be more missing than preserved, how does one portray what’s not there. Blackwood’s stylistic choices may speak to this dilemma. His previously published books are fiction and, at times in Paramount, he invents scenes and details, so as to construct a narrative present: a young trombonist rides the train to Chicago, nervously leaving New Orleans for the first time. Mayo Williams encounters two boys in the all-white small-town home of Paramount, Grafton, Wisconsin. “Can we touch your hair?” one boy asks. The scenes are cast in the present tense so it’s clear enough when the author crosses the line into fiction. Given the romantic nature of the content, it feels permissible.
Blackwood also turns to the tool kit of the creative nonfictionist. Other scenes or assertions are qualified by speculation: maybe, might have, must have. The author poses questions more often than a reader might find in a strictly expository account. Fragmenting the narrative is constant. The book’s 183 pages are divided into 24 short chapters, and most of the chapters deal with multiple characters and anecdotes. Indeed, if information on a subject is limited, Blackwood changes the subject. Makes sense. Literary references to sources like Faulkner and Ralph Ellison, and as far afield as Melville, Joyce, and Graham Greene, are attempts to add layers to the story.
All of these choices are made, I suspect, to fill in those gaps with what at one point Blackwood calls “an anecdotal history.” But he also seems interested in creating an impression of the music, the players, and the times in a more vivid and personal way than one would find in an academic treatment.
Then there is the challenge that all writers who write about music face. That is, writing about music. I’ve always liked the dictum, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture (credited, variously to Martin Mull, Frank Zappa, and . . . submit your choice here). But I like the notion because I think dancing about architecture, if one could pull it off, would be interesting. Nevertheless, there are problems in trying to describe the most abstract (the purest?) art form by using words.
Perhaps for that reason, Blackwood rarely chooses to describe the music, or to explain a player’s technical innovations. The fact that the blues is harmonically and formally simple may mean that there’s less to say about the music itself. More often he describes the blues through its lyrics.
This from Papa Charlie Jackson:
I ain’t crazy about no yellow ain’t no fool for no brown
But you can’t tell no difference when the sun go down.
Or this, from Blind Willie Davis:
People I want to tell you
Just how your friend will do.
They’ll wait to get your secret
Then dig a pit for you.
Or from Ma Rainey:
My head goes ’round and ’round, babe, since my daddy left town.
I don’t know if the river’s runnin’ up or down.
Finally, it’s the life experiences of the players and their supporting characters that Blackwood uses to tell us something about the culture surrounding the music. Here his account is strongest. These thumbnail sketches will likely delight readers who are already fans of the music, even if the subjects may not stand out as individual characters for the general reader.
I confess, on that account, that as a reader whose interest in popular music as a listener and a performer begins with the jazz of the late 1950s, I hear in early blues music and lyrics less the individual players and more the genre itself. (Some people think jazz of the late 1950s and beyond all sounds alike, too. Fair enough). Do I wish Blackwood had shifted gears (tone/techniques/subjects) a little less frequently in the book? Do I wish he had put most of the references to say, Mayo Williams, in one place rather than scattered throughout? I do, in both cases. I confess further that in this highly fragmented book, loaded with the names of dozens of performers, their biographical details, incomplete as they’re bound to be, also started to run together in my mind. All the blues figures became one meta-player.
But then this might be the point—or part of it. It’s not individuals but the figure of the unknown man of humble origins, playing the guitar and wailing in irony and sorrow that we remember. Or the archetypal tough and streetwise woman belting out her complaints with the world and her unfaithful man. More than the individual performers, we remember the music itself. That music has lasted, evolved, and been flattered by much imitation.
There is, indeed, so much that’s been lost, so much we don’t know about the music and the musicians Paramount recorded. And this book, in Blackwood’s telling, amounts to most of what we do know.
The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records: A Great Migration Story, 1917-1932 by Scott Blackwood
Louisiana State University Press
$34.95 hardcover | Buy Now
Richard Terrill is the author most recently of Essentially: Essays and What Falls Away Is Always: Poems and Conversations. Previous books include Fakebook: Improvisations on a Journey Back to Jazz; Saturday Night in Baoding: A China Memoir, winner of the Associated Writing Programs Award for Nonfiction; and Coming Late to Rachmaninoff, winner of the Minnesota Book Award for Poetry. He is professor emeritus at Minnesota State University, Mankato and currently works as a jazz saxophonist. His website is www.richardterrill.com.
by Jay Kibble | May 5, 2023 | Book Reviews
By Reneé E. D’Aoust
Anne Pinkerton’s Were You Close? explores the complexities of grief after the death of her adult sibling, her older brother, David. This memoir-in-essays brings David into focus as Pinkerton tries to understand their early bonds and their family dynamics. By adopting the initially painful question of her title as her own, she becomes a seeker, attempting to integrate memories of him more fully into her life.
From the outset, Pinkerton’s memoir presses against how we process grief and render it on the page. Our impulses to categorize grief are often impulses to deny it. Is this essay collection a species of cathartic writing or a reclamation of history? Grief remains shattering, shocking, and unbound. So, from the initial worried phone call from her mother, Pinkerton becomes a reporter.
David had stayed in Colorado to climb mountains by himself. Later, I would learn these were part of a large mountain range called Blanca Massif, home to a number of Colorado’s famous fourteeners, fifty-four peaks statewide that stand over fourteen thousand feet in altitude. Apparently, his newest athletic quest was to bag them all. No one knew where he was.
They will soon learn that David fell off a mountain, to his death. He chose the thrill of solitude, pitching his stamina against rock, and he lost.
About their childhood in Texas, Pinkerton recalls a dedicated and loving older sibling: “David helped me learn how to swim and ride a bike and water ski. He encouraged me to be myself no matter what anyone else thought.” As a kid, she knew he “would have done absolutely anything” for her. Yet after she moved away to attend college in Massachusetts and her brother built his life in Texas, he only visited her twice in twenty years. Why? She kept inviting him, suggesting hikes they could do together, things he might like. After he dies, this lack of time together—the unaccepted invitations—complicates her grief.
Pinkerton initially conceals her brother in the narrative because sudden loss scrambles her ability to think through questions that swirl through her neural pathways. Her sympathetic nervous system zings between a state of collapse and a state of frenzy; she is unable to contextualize the trauma. It’s a familiar whiplash to all of us who have experienced tragic, sudden loss. Death requires that we answer this question: How do we function in a world with our loved one no longer in it? Tragic death often means it takes years to find answers.
Pinkerton writes: “In the months immediately following David’s death, I had a new remarkable lack of fear, coupled with a great urgency. I started telling people I was forming a new band even though I hadn’t played in one for nearly a decade. I even had all the players picked out and they kindly committed.”
When traumatic loss is that of an adult sibling, the past, present, and future vanish. In a rhetorical move that educates the reader and shares her pain, Pinkerton writes of what “we expect” of “our siblings.” They “are the people we know, typically, our whole lives. They come of age with us, they survive marriages, dislocation, job woes, babies, and divorces with us, and long after our parents are gone, we expect they will grow old with us.” The older brother whom Pinkerton thought would walk with her through her entire life—is gone: “I expected, at the very least, we’d outlive Mom together. Of all assumptions I could make, that one seemed reasonable.”
According to Pinkerton, “Though eighty percent of Americans have at least one brother or sister, the majority of whom will die in adulthood, most of us end up sensing we are alone in our suffering or that we are mourning improperly—for too long, with too much emotion.” The memoir thread in Were You Close? is anchored in Pinkerton’s response to her brother’s death. The reflective thread, however, is anchored in Pinkerton’s sense of why she feels disenfranchised from society in her grieving. She attempts to encompass tragedy and the vagaries of memory through a renewed commitment to her life.
Via interrelated essays, we see David’s better side—an elite athlete, a caring radiologist, and an all-around truly amazing human. How well did she know him? Were they close? Well-intentioned people ask her the inane questions. It seems impossible for acquaintances to sit gently with her in her time of need; they need to quantify Pinkerton’s loss. Let’s put the intensity of her emotions in a box, they seem to say, so the same doesn’t happen to us. Grief might be catching, like chicken pox.
Nevertheless, Pinkerton uses the inane questions as encouragement to learn more about her brother. She knew he was accomplished, but she didn’t know how accomplished. His medical patients love him, but he also has an entire group of elite athletes who love him. She asks unsettling questions of herself, of her family. She didn’t even know her brother was on a hike the weekend he disappeared. How could she not have known?
Or, just as valid, why should she have known? Adult siblings frequently lead parallel lives; they no longer are in regular contact with each other. Yet the closeness is there, born of a little sister’s admiration for her big brother’s kindness toward her: David, though distant, always made Anne feel valued and loved.
So while her brother plays a significant role, it is Pinkerton who must take center stage as the narrator. Her grief is the driving force behind this memoir-in-essays. Those who experience the loss of an adult sibling often mourn in private; by sharing her search, Pinkerton’s grief becomes transparent but no less wrenching.
One consequence: Her other brother Tommy steps into the void; Pinkerton and Tommy become closer, as they never were before. As the oldest, David had been the focal point for each of the younger siblings. Pinkerton’s powers of investigation—her ability to look clearly at her life and her loss—is both a burden and a strength. “In retrospect, the way David died was completely predictable,” Pinkerton reflects. “In a way, it was even poetic. If I were writing the perfect way for him to go out, it might have been exactly the way it happened. Except for the guesswork and worry.”
Were You Close? is a painful yet rewarding read, tragic and hopeful. It illustrates how adult-sibling loss has a lasting impact on the way we relate to others. In a poignant acceptance of her new reality, Pinkerton references her title: “I was certain that one day David and I would be not just close—in any and every way it can be described—but very close. I wasn’t entirely wrong. I just didn’t have any idea about how it would happen.”
Were You Close? A Sister’s Quest To Know the Brother She Lost by Anne Pinkerton
Vine Leaves Press
$6.99 ebook | Buy Now
Renée E. D’Aoust is the author of Body of a Dancer (Etruscan Press). D’Aoust teaches online at Casper College and North Idaho College.
by Jay Kibble | Apr 7, 2023 | Book Reviews
By Briana Avenia-Tapper
In Moscow, where I taught English in 2001, Americans were rare. This meant we enjoyed a certain celebrity. I was often the first American my students met. At least, that’s what they told me. But not Yulia. I was Yulia’s second American. When I explained to her, over a hot bowl of schi in her mother’s kitchen, that I dreamed of being a famous actress someday, she informed me this is exactly what her first American had said. “Do all Americans want to be actors?” she wondered.
At the time, I thought that the confluence of Americanness and desire for fame was a coincidence. But since reading Typical of the Times / What Was the Question? by Jamie Clarke, I’ve been wondering about causal links between my early thespian ambitions and the culture in which I was raised. Maybe there is something about our materialism, individualism, arrogance, and transience that makes us Americans lonely and longing to belong. What if this loneliness and longing to belong makes Americans focused more on fame than their counterparts in other countries? Like most people, we want to be special, to be known, to be loved. Jamie Clarke’s experimental coming-of-age memoir explores this question of notoriety, perhaps unique to American identity.
One cover of this unusual book displays the title Typical of the Times. However, this text peters out into blank space two-thirds of the way through the book. After Typical of the Times concludes, there is a page on Clarke’s biography and praise for several of his previous novels. Then, there’s an announcement that the protagonist of Clarke’s novels is named Charlie Martens. The rest of the book, What Was the Question Again?, about a third, consists of a text that Jamie Clarke has chosen to attribute to Charlie Martens.
Sound confusing? Not if you read it in one direction, turn it over, then read it in the other direction. It’s just not clear which end to begin with. I was asked to review Typical of the Times. So I began with that one and cannot unsee it as the primary story. I can’t shake the sense that What Was the Question Again? is the ending for Typical of the Times. However, I wonder how my understanding and impression of the book as a whole might have changed if the initial order of my reading had been reversed.
Typical of the Times is a story about a boy growing up, about a young man moving from Phoenix, Arizona, to New York City, about a writer learning to write. It is about belonging and becoming in a society that overemphasizes the importance of media, fame, social class, and the connection between our individual and collective unconscious. Clarke begins with his late childhood and teen years. He remembers girlfriends, teachers, jobs, concerts, publications, a brief and ill-fated stint on a fishing boat in Alaska, his low-residency masters in creative writing at Bennington, and his eventual move to New York where he works in publishing, sleeps on friends’ couches, and writes. Typical of the Times ends when Clarke publishes his first novel, and Mr. Rogers—that icon of American childhood—airs his final episodes.
His is not a new story. In fact, it’s a story that constantly references and retells many old and familiar stories. With obsessive repetition, Clarke returns again and again to events from the news of his youth, to famous people, to famous people doing or enduring terrible things. The O.J. Simpson trial, Pee-wee Herman’s arrest for masturbating in a theater, the overdose death of half of Milli Vanilli, Rodney King’s beating, Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress—all this and more appear in the tale of Clarke’s youth. The constant intertwining of events in the narrator’s life with events he learned about on TV underscores Clarke’s point that our individual minds are shaped by our shared, often media-driven narratives.
The book’s epigraph is a quotation from Haruki Murakami: “Our memory is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories. The two are intimately linked.” Typical of the Times is an exploration of that idea.
Clarke’s media motif shows how our minds are cultural products. His most compelling use of the motif may be positioning pop culture as a mirror for his emotional reality. For example, when Bloomsbury is poised to make an offer on his first novel, Clarke tells us about the soaring ratings of the reality show Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire, creating a sense of muted elation, his thrill filtered through pop culture. In that moment, we feel his triumph, but also his separation from it. When he runs out of money in New York and leaves to stay in a friend’s basement in Boston, he tells us about Jeff Buckley drowning and about a judge ruling against Joe Camel ads.
As he goes, we feel Clarke’s sense of loss regarding the city he loves, but not directly. This use of popular media to evoke the experience of that loss creates a sense of dissociation that I found uncomfortable, but also insightful and unique.
Clarke launches Typical of the Times—its prose simultaneously urgent and meandering—by stressing from the very first page an off-hand reference to the 1984 shooting that killed twenty-one people in a San Diego McDonald’s; then, the widespread fear that Tylenol had been poisoned; then, his family’s move from Rapid City to Phoenix; then, a reflection on the “master-planned” “geometric marvel” of Phoenix’s streets. These ideas, events from his personal life and stories he hears in the news, are strung together in a single, unbroken sentence, an utterance intense and rambling.
When I say “unbroken,” I mean unbroken—there is no ending punctuation anywhere in Typical of the Times. One idea disappears into the next, objects becoming subjects as we read, connections so multifaceted that they cannot be contained within a single declaration or interrogative. For example, about the move to Phoenix, Clarke admonishes himself to
remember all the new names easier to make friends if you seemed like you were always there call out someone’s name make them feel known so that you can be too first calling attention to yourself in some way that wasn’t too obvious was always the next step not like ozzy and the dove or lawn chair larry in montana it was reading the most books and winning lunch with your teacher . . .
The stream-of-consciousness style evokes the author swimming in a swirling vat of ideas or, perhaps, floundering in our cultural milieu.
Reading his prose reminds me of conversations with a child, in which the needs and prior knowledge of the interlocutor are often irrelevant to the speaker. My young daughter begins talking to me after several utterances have already been made inside her head, speaking as though I, too, have heard the beginning. In these interactions, I am left scrambling to put the bits together to make enough sense that I can respond. I attribute this behavior to the narcissism of youth, the way children are still learning that others cannot see inside their head. Clarke’s choice to forgo ending punctuation, combined with his purposefully linking multiple ideas together into chaotic, looping reflections, evokes this kind of youthful narcissism. The text made me feel as though I was inside a child’s brain.
Sentences are exclamations (Hurray!), commands (Go away!), declarations (I want to be famous.), or interrogatives (Why do people hurt each other?) To make these commands, declarations, and inquiries implies a positionality, the sense that the speaker or writer has a place to stand, a starting point from which he or she can assert his belief about the world or question someone else’s. Complete declarative sentences bounded by the finality of ending punctuation suggest a narrator who is grown and whole enough to plant both feet and make a claim.
In this way, Typical of the Times is a text whose narrator has not yet found solid ground; he seems to be floating on the edges of his life. For a substantial section of the story, he lives with no rental lease or his own bed. Again, he is a child who was “a new kid yet again after being new again and again and again memories in boxes.” The story morphs into one about a teen who feels “like a fish out of water,” living a “surface life,” and about a young adult who relates to a sense of “being on the outside looking in.”
In addition to the stream-of-consciousness, punctuation-less style, Clarke uses the second person throughout Typical of the Times. The second person is usually employed to make a story feel immediate, to create the sense that the reader is experiencing the events described in the text. However, in Typical of the Times, Clarke combines the second person with a distinct lack of embodied experience and with the aforementioned narcissism. In this context, the second person becomes alienating. Because most scenes lack immersive sensory detail, the frequent use of “you” is distancing, holding the reader at arm’s length.
As I say, Typical of the Times takes up two-thirds of the whole. What Was the Question?, the other book, features the fictional narrator Charlie Martens, perhaps a faux Clarke, who is funnier than Clarke. Martens’s voice also feels older—which is good and bad. His story and its style are more conventional than Clarke’s in Typical of the Times. The prose in the latter is more constrained by literary precedent, less experimental, and, as a result, easier to read.
One amusing tic is Martens’s distaste for people he calls “Magnolias.” The narrator manages to turn, effortlessly and endearingly, Magnolias into a shorthand for “the annoyingly pretentious,” using this insult to disparage groups of people repeatedly.
There are links between the two texts. Both revolve around similar themes—fame in particular, the connection between our individual and collective consciousness, but also social class, writing, legacy, mortality. Both explore urban environments, Phoenix, Arizona, and New York City. Both narrators are shaped by early experiences, which, common for novelists and their protagonists, may be a commentary on the hazy line between truth and fiction. After Clarke describes a childhood of moving time and again, Martens shows himself as someone who has “lost the sinuous connection to the everyday human condition that binds people together.”
The two texts use different tenses. The majority of Typical of the Times is written in the present while What Was the Question Again? is written in the past. The novelist Ann Beattie writes that the use of present tense can make writing “cinematic, like a camera,” and this effect is illustrated nicely in Typical of the Times. Its cinematic quality accentuates the sense of being outside looking in and serves as a link between his experimental form and its other-focused content. Reading it feels like watching action unfold on a screen while the text also repeatedly explores different ways our lives are intertwined with and constructed from what we watch on screens.
What Was the Question Again? does important work of its own for the book as a whole, however, because Martens’ adult perspective emphasizes deep interiority and for emphatic statements and pointed questions. The themes and arguments wandering through Typical of the Times become more explicit and easier to chew on than those in What Was the Question Again? It is Martens who ultimately names the functions of Clarke’s obsession with celebrity violence and death. That author describes his society as one where “we have to overlook a lot of stuff to merely function.”
We get spooked when tragedy befalls those who lead quote-unquote charmed lives. It confirms our vulnerability, that we’re out here on our own, without the advantage of wealth or pedigree, and that more likely than not we won’t escape tragedy.
Typical of the Times / What Was the Question Again? is a book composed of two complementary stories that tackle similar themes, both exploring the idea that our individual experience is shaped by the media we consume. Both texts are stories about alienated narrators who grew up in an alienating society. Putting the two texts together like this feels especially intentional.
Typical of the Times: Growing Up in the Culture of Spectacle / What Was the Question Again? by Jaime Clarke
Roundabout Press
$15.95 Paperback | Buy Now
Briana Avenia-Tapper serves as a profiles editor at Literary Mama and creative nonfiction reader at Longleaf Review. Her work is published or forthcoming in Tahoma Literary Review, Barrelhouse, Pigeon Pages, Chicago Review of Books, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She is currently revising her first memoir, Carrying Heavy Things: Babies, Backpacks, and Bolsheviks, a book about birth, control, and birth control.
