The story’s protagonist Cardigan is profoundly damaged, and burns and kills his way across the country in search of redemption or revenge for events long past. That the reader ends up identifying with and caring about such a reckless and even murderous character testifies to the way Pulver’s narrative technique takes the reader inside Cardigan’s head. The story’s events seem like something you’re living through, not simply reading. Like the most daring works of art, no summary can do justice to what’s happening here. The blurb on the back cover does almost nothing to convey what this book is like. The story is dreamlike, told in language ranging from vivid poetics to a hard-bitten shorthand to incantatory near-ravings. Frequent use of repetition gives a sense of the shattered reality Cardigan inhabits. The effect is cumulative, so that repeated elements and phrases take on a different meaning and carry more weight as the story advances. 

An energetic mix of noir/crime and surrealistic dark fantasy verging on horror, The Orphan Palace feels more like “cinema of the mind” than narrative fiction, and it may be for that reason that I find myself thinking more about filmmakers when I try to find something to compare it to. Pulver’s surreal dreamscapes seem to have some precedence in David Lynch (especially Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire), Alejandro Jodorowky (El Topo and Holy Mountain) and Lars Von Trier (especially Antichrist). I was even reminded of Guillermo Del Toro in some of the novel’s more fantastic sections, especially the “night library” scene, which left me wanting more. 

Any narrative so inwardly-directed and uncompromising is bound to leave the reader scratching their head in a few places, but that is more than compensated-for by the vivid effects which simply would not be possible with a more straightforward storytelling style. The Orphan Palace feels like being led by the hand (scratch that — led by the brain is more like it) through a dark and surreal nightmare, an experience both powerful and disturbing. I can’t wait to see what Pulver does next. Highly recommended, at least for readers open to a more experimental storytelling approach.

This is ne of the strongest and most promising debut novels I can remember Interesting weird characters in a convincingly insane milieu, and truly fantastic writing. I’m impressed, and can’t wait to read the rest of Baer’s work.

Better today, maybe, but not better enough yet. Most things are going well in this life of mine, so don’t get the wrong idea. Just one major thing rose up, gave me a smack, and took my full attention for this week. Writing and music and all the rest are set aside for now.

Because Barthelme’s life and career were cut short (it shouldn’t be a “spoiler” to anyone interested in this book if I say he died of cancer in his fifties) this biography dwells mostly on his formative years and the build-up in his career to where he began to have some success and recognition. Many biographies of artists provide a lot of background about parents and the subject’s environment as a child without this information having much relevance to what the artist eventually became. In this case, though, Daugherty gives us information about the home Barthelme grew up in, and the aesthetic philosophies and architectural work of his father, which help clarify where Donald Barthelme the developing writer came up with his daring, modernist approach.

This book is overall quite successful in what it tries to accomplish. This is essential reading for any serious fan of Barthelme or even modernist American literature, and if you’re interested in American fiction from after mid-century, you’ll probably find much to enjoy here as well. Rated 4 out of 5 stars.

Otherwise things are a bit overwhelming at the moment. I’m afraid the only way I’m going to keep to my plan of blogging something every weekday is to take a moment to say, “Yikes, I’m so buried!” My to-do list is gruesome and my inboxes are overflowing. I was already busy, then my co-worker’s wife had her baby ten days early, so I’ve got his work to deal with, along with the usual end-of-year stuff.

So then, rather than goof around blogging, I’ll get back to it.

If you’ve found your way to this along the trail of more interesting, surprising and entertaining books on human knowledge and behavior as Outliers or Freakonomics.

If you approach this as a sort of “human psych 101″ you may enjoy this more than I did, but there are better books than this on the same and related subjects.

Even more pronounced than this, though, is the difference between how I edit using a pen, compared to how I edit on the computer. It’s almost as if a different part of my brain engages.

Lately I’m trying to get a handle on how to take advantage of these variances for different effects. Recently I work with pen and paper more and more. I still love Scrivener, and consider it my most important tool, but I’m shifting my stories in and out of Scrivener. To my mind it’s similar to an artist stepping back from a painting to get a look at it from too far away to actually work on it. When I’ve come to some kind of better understanding about the what’s different about my writing or editing processes when I write by hand rather than when I type on a computer, I’ll post about it again.

I’ve seen other writers who say they always do first drafts by hand and then type them in, or they always re-type every new draft from a new, scratch document (rather than editing into an existing document). I’m going to go back and forth for a while and think about hos the process is affecting what I’m doing.

My take-away from the review was that Glen Duncan came from the literary mainstream and wrote a fantastic werewolf novel, and the fancy-pants NYT book review hired him to write about another mainstreamish writer who wrote a zombie novel. And lots of genre people are talking all about Zone One, just like they talked all about The Last Werewolf. So maybe Zone One is just as good?

No, not really. Where The Last Werewolf is as entertaining as it is literate, Zone One is more solemn and introspective. In fact, I had to give up my “This is gonna be like Last Werewolf but with zombies, yeah?” preconception before I was able to see what Zone One really is. It’s much less about story and even less about character, and almost entirely concerned with lamenting a lost way of life. At its most cheerful, the book is melancholy nostalgia, and more often it dwells in a sort of numbed, cheerless enervation.

The main character (the amusingly nicknamed Mark Spitz, whose real name is never given) keeps moving, trying to survive. Sort of. I like the narrative voice, but kept hoping for the guy to kick it into gear, to encounter either some truth or some transforming circumstance, or meet some compelling human counterpart to move him. I wanted him to care about what’s ahead of him more, and not just obsess over what he’s left behind him. He seems much more caught up in his thoughts, in a free-associative expository swirl unstuck from time.

The prose here is strong, at times even extremely impressive. I wonder, though, if readers who picked up this book wanting a well-written zombie tale aren’t going to mostly going away disappointed at the slowness and even occasional stagnation of the plot. Colson Whitehead crafts a nice sentence, and comes up with some intellectually compelling images and connections, yet having read this I don’t quite feel driven to explore his other work. In fact if the writing weren’t so technically proficient I’d grade this only three stars rather than four. This one’s not so much about what happens as it is about a character’s look back, and inward.

So now I’m back to work, catching up with a big backlog of to-do stuff and several overflowing inboxes. For this reason, today’s blog entry will be of the “I’m back but there’s nothing too interesting to say beyond that” variety. Regular weekday morning bloggging should resume tomorrow.

I’m really grateful to have seen my fiction published for the first time (thanks again, Electric Spec). I’ve signed up for “writing intensives” and workshops. I’ve joined and quit three different online critique groups. I even hired an editor to give me one-on-one critique. I’ve started getting up earlier and earlier every weekday morning to give myself more time to write.

This last thing, making more time to write, doing it more consistently and very nearly every day, has had a greater effect on what I’m doing than any of the rest of it. I think critique groups and workshops can be useful, but I’ve become skeptical of them. They’re most useful at drumming into the beginner’s mind a lot of “thou shalt not” rules, which can be great for the beginner so clueless he or she really has no idea where to start. The closer your writing gets to being publishable, though, the less useful such groups really are. If you want to make that transition from competent fiction-writing technician to confident literary artist, it’s probably more useful to shrug off the “thou shalt not” list. Push yourself to color outside the lines a little.

Yes, getting published is hard. It’s absurdly hard, really. There are few endeavors I’ve encountered in life that require such hard work for such uncertain feedback and such distant rewards. If you set a goal of running a marathon, or becoming a great copier salesman or learning to cook desserts, you’re likely to find easier ways to measure your success and fewer frustrations between commencement of diligent work and the achievement of your goals, than if you set the goal of getting your stories out there into the world. This is a goal more like aspiring to become an astronaut, or an Olympic decathlete, or an actor in motion pictures.

Far, far more applicants than available positions.

But once your heart and mind are fixed, even knowing the difficult odds, you just keep pushing forward. Another rejection doesn’t make you think “Maybe I’m not cut out for this.” You just file it away, and you don’t stop. You do what you have to do.