Tag Archives: novel

Arts & Entertainment, Literature

Joshua Mohr’s Damascus and Keeping on the Sordid Side of Life

Novelist Joshua Mohr talks with novelist Jonathan Evison at the University Book Store, on November 17, at 7 p.m.

Joshua Mohr

Joshua Mohr is sort of a handful. His debut novel, Some Things That Meant the World to Me, has the title of a poetry chapbook, and the soul of one as well, though on the spectrum it’s more Bukowski than Wordsworth, as the the blurb from O, The Oprah Magazine, clarifies.

It’s hugely ambitious, in that Mohr wants to tell the story from the point of view of someone with dissociative identity disorder, and you probably do not want to listen to this person tell you about what exactly happened in their childhood. It’s against your better judgment that you keep turning pages, even as “Rhonda” makes staggeringly poor life choices.

Mohr writes out the sordid heart of San Francisco–specifically, the Mission District–and if you’ve spent much time by the Bay, you’ll recognize that unsettling warm-sewer-whiff-in-the-street urbanity that permeates his books. It’s a radical empathy with, or even in preference for, the stinky side of life that, mostly unseen, underlies everything.

In Damascus, Mohr returns you to a down-and-outer Mission bar with the shards of twenty mirrors glued to its painted-black ceiling, “transforming Damascus into a planetarium for drunkards: dejected men and women stargazing from barstools.” In the first two pages you meet Owen, the bar’s owner, who has a Hitler-‘stache birthmark beneath his nose; Shambles, the patron saint of handjobs; and No Eyebrows, a middle-aged man dying of cancer and on the run from responsibility of any kind.

So far, so San Francisco. You simply have to make your peace with the fact that San Francisco’s human flotsam and jetsam (Rhonda makes a cameo appearance) is of a more captivating sort than many places–and with Mohr’s penchant for mixing ripped-from-the-journal reportage with prose poetry:

And other things were happening in the world, of course. Because there always are. There has to be. A couple who’d tried to conceive a child for years finally succeeded. A son estranged from his mother for almost twenty years picked up the phone and called and apologized for his role in their corrupted history. A seventeen-year-old girl’s cancer when into remission. Separated spouses decided to keep struggling through their knot of marital woes. A sunflower bloomed in Fargo, North Dakota. It rained in Orlando, Florida.

The book is bipolar, in that partly it tracks the unlikely, hermetic romance between no-strings Shambles and no-hope No Eyebrows, and partly it observes how the Iraq War intrudes into the  Mission District of 2003–a performance art installation meant to honor dead soldiers (but featuring dead fish) attracts a more muscular critique than anticipated.

“Screw the critics,” Revv said, pushing the beers across the bar to them, then coming back around and planting himself. “You made real deal art so don’t worry whether any academic dimwits get it or not. Let them snicker at cartoons in The New Yorker. The joke’s on them.”

It’s not the academic dimwits who object, though, but returned-from-Iraq soldiers, hypersensitive to civilian slights to their honor. It doesn’t seem like it can end well, yet, again, you keep turning pages.

Mohr’s writing is appealing because it is raw and unfiltered, overheard on the street or from the next bar stool, but it can also seem merely unvarnished, with its joints showing. I’m of two minds about that artlessness, but there’s no denying the effect, that it conjures a reality that stains you with the underarm sweat of the Mission, and the naivete of 2003, when no one would have believed eight more years of war were in store.

Arts & Entertainment, Literature

Angel-Headed War Hero: Josh Ritter’s Bright’s Passage (Review)

People more clued in than I will already know of singer-songwriter Josh Ritter, whose biography reads a bit like Doc Savage‘s: born to two neuroscientists in Moscow, Idaho, his first instrument was the lute. Glen Hansard invited him to open for The Frames, and in 2006, Ritter was named one of the “100 Greatest Living Songwriters” by Paste magazine.

He’s now written a novel, Bright’s Passage, that Stephen King says “shines with a compressed lyricism,” and Robert Pinsky applauds for its “penetrating emotional colors. (He’s in town for a reading at Elliott Bay Book Company on Friday, July 15, at 7 p.m.)

The story of Henry Bright is told in three interleaved narratives throughout the novel: Henry’s West Virginia youth and his family’s feud with a neighboring Colonel, his time away in the trenches of the first World War, and his attempted flight from home upon his return, guided by a life-saving, horse-inhabiting angel he acquired during the War.

From the opening sentence, when a baby is described as “a warm, wet mass, softer than a goat and hairier than a rabbit kit”–later it meeps and mews–there’s very little flatly told about West Virginia. Every word seems to have evangelical tongues of fire in it, and mud, and blood. It’s in the World War passages that a more terse poetry emerges:

They entered the War like men stepping out from beneath an awning into a torrential thunderstorm. The first man that Bright saw die fell back down into the very trench from which he’d just climbed. His uniform was still fresh and the tops of his boots had been shined. Only the soles looked muddy.

What war does to people and families is a fascination of Ritter’s–the neighbor Colonel’s sociopathic, martial airs infect Henry’s childhood, and his love. And Henry himself behaves like a wounded animal drunk on Revelation, the chapters on his experiences in the War interrupting like trauma flashbacks.

Ritter has clearly done his homework–his acknowledgements mention four books on World War I, not least of which is Tuchman’s The Guns of August–but in some ways the compelling specificity of his trench warfare fights the fable-like outlines of his story. It is strange that anyone who’s seen and survived what Henry has would be so unnerved by the Colonel and his two, on the evidence, idiot sons. It’s a question the Colonel himself raises about 100 pages in: “And anyway,” he asks, “how would you propose to kill Henry Bright, who has recently returned home from the War and is well practiced in the taking of life?”

In fact, Henry’s angel is more bloodthirsty than he is. Bright is so muddled between shell shock and his wife’s death in childbirth he can hardly distinguish between poison ivy and mustard gas rash, he stumbles forward with his babe in arms, and Ritter distracts you from nagging questions with a succession of people gathered at a hotel to evade the forest fire that Bright has set. One, Amelia, seems a little too glib and disparaging about her impending marriage; she confesses to Bright that she herself had been engaged to a Henry who went to the War .

He died. I was there with his family when the man came. He said that Henry–yes, that was his name, H., Henry: horrible isn’t it?–had perished a hero. ‘Perished?’ I asked the man. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Perished.’

It’s a reversal of Bright’s story, his counter-death, and it seems to have a salutary effect. Life is too hard in these pages to hope for much, but Bright, at the eccentric edge of his wits, may have arrested his velocity enough to be a father.

Arts & Entertainment, Literature

Way Out West with The Sisters Brothers (Review)

Novelist Patrick deWitt speaks at the University Bookstore on May 18, 2011, at 7 p.m.

Patrick deWitt’s novel The Sisters Brothers opens in Oregon City in 1851, and from the first words there’s something head-tiltingly odd to the scrupulously “authentic” narrative–“I was sitting outside the Commodore’s mansion, waiting for my brother Charlie to come out with news of the job and I was cold and for want of something to do I studied Charlie’s new horse, Nimble. My new horse was called Tub.”

It’s possible that the narrator, Eli, doesn’t realize how drily funny his recounting of the horrific events that ensue are, but I think deWitt probably does. (John C. Reilly liked Eli so much he optioned the story and will star as the character.)

Eli and Charlie Sisters are two hardcases for hire, mostly hired by the Commodore to erase people he makes the appearance of having been done wrong by. By page 8, the Sisters brothers have their job in front of them: to travel to San Francisco, California, and kill a prospector by the name of Hermann Kermit Warm.

Their intelligence on the matter states that while Warm is small in stature, “he will not be teased about his size. I have seen him fight several times, and though he typically loses, I do not think any of his opponents would wish to fight him again. He is not above biting, for example.”

Because it is 1851, there are no direct flights from Oregon to California, and so some 200 pages pass in picaresque adventure just getting to San Francisco, where the mystery of Warm’s death sentence is revealed, and, if you can easily envision someone scratching through their skin, you may hurry along more than usual.

People are calling the book “cowboy noir,” which is close but doesn’t quite get to the unique assemblage deWitt has managed. The heart of the book is taken up by the uneasy but close relationship Eli and Charlie have, the sibling rivalry and private judgements. Charlie is the more suited to shooting people remorselessly; Eli is enraged by any attack on Charlie. Yet, except for the slaughter and thievery, they seem like good guys–dogged in their pursuits, tough on a bottle.

Eli is a soft touch, as such things go: “I had never been with a woman for longer than a night, and they had always been whores. And while throughout each of these speedy encounters I tried to maintain a friendliness with the women, I knew in my heart it was false, and afterward always felt remote and caved in.”

He also thinks very little of the man who has brought his son to see a duel, so he can see a man killed. Still, his main concern is what their employment is doing to the both of them, and he has time–in between run-ins with crazed prospectors who brew dirt for coffee, trials in dentifrice and dental surgery, and a short-lived experiment wearing a blue sash–to ruminate on what has made the two of them what they are (a difficult childhood, for one).

DeWitt has a way of parceling out these clues to the brothers’ characters amid the muck and guts of an earlier, much rougher time. Sometimes they come during a droll attempt to order a meal with vegetables. Sometimes while he’s working on gouging out Tub’s infected eye with a spoon. In the end, the book achieves a sort of triangulation: it stinks like history, though it’s an invented past, to suit a modern sensibility perhaps not quite sure of the present.

In connecting these points for his corpse diorama, deWitt creates an allegory inverse to The Pilgrim’s Progress. Here, you are constantly reminded that this world is the world to which you have come:

Crows and gulls fought over what was left, hopping and pecking, the clammy flesh gone purple, the wind coating it in sand, and the flies insinuating themselves where they could. I felt San Francisco standing behind me but I never looked back, and I thought, I did not enjoy my time here.