Beginners (Raymond Carver)

First of all, dear readers, I must apologise for the lack of posts recently. Although I finished re-reading Raymond Carver's 'Beginners' over the Atlantic Ocean on the way home from Chicago at the end of October, I simply have not found the time to write about it. Ok, obligatory blogger's apology done with. Now, to business!

This is a very special book to me for a number of reasons. I first read it in October 2009 on a train home from Birmingham, having bought it from Borders in the Bull Ring, after I had visited a very dear friend of mine for the first time in an age. The seventeen stories contained in the volume held me, obsessed me, and inspired me to change my own prose style. Revisiting it two years later seemed a no brainer.

Moreover, the story behind this book is a fascinating one. When Carver submitted these stories to his editor and mentor Gordon Lish in 1980, they were cut down to the "linguistic bone" and became Carver's most famous collection 'What We Talk About When We Talk About Love'. Some of the original drafts were cut by as much as 78% for publication. Character names were changed. Titles were changed. Tess Gallagher, Carver's partner, who had loved the original stories, was horrified at the changes. Carver dedicated 'What We Talk About...' to Gallagher and promised one day to republish the original stories. As of Carver's death in 1988, this had not happened, and so Gallagher put her trust in William L. Stull and Maureen P. Carroll to restore the text. This process took twenty years, with the text finally being published in September 2009.

Having read 'What We Talk About...' many years ago, I was struck by how much richer and more human the extended versions of the stories are. From the first story 'Why Don't You Dance?', I preferred the 'Beginners' versions to the 'What We Talk About...' versions. In these restored narratives, Carver has the space to develop the motivations of his characters, the breadth to run the gamut of emotions. There is a wisdom and a profound sense of dignity about 'Beginners' that I think 'What We Talk About...' lacks. It isn't that the stories in 'Beginners' are of a completely different style- he was naturally a writer with an instinctive sense of economy- but they are less extreme in the staccato sentence structures and more assiduous about letting the reader know who these people are.

The themes presented by Carver include divorce, alcoholism, death and relationships. It is interesting that many of the concerns of America in the late 1970s and early 1980s are represented so frequently, with characters attending analysis and Alcoholics Anonymous. There is a sense of middle America and its fears, the way security can be ripped away in a moment. Several of the best stories are extremely dark and sombre in tone. In 'Tell The Women We're Going' a pair of men who grew up too quickly turn an afternnon of pool and drinking into one of rape and murder. 'So Much Water, So Close To Home' concerns the discovery of a body and the suspicions and rifts this creates in a small community. One of the very best stories, 'A Small, Good Thing' tells the story of parents who unexpectedly lose their son in protracted circumstances against the backdrop of menacing phonecalls from the baker who made their son's uncollected birthday cake. The ending to this one, however, is markedly more humane, heartwarming even.

Elsewhere, 'Gazebo' is an extended dissertation on alcoholics in relationships with each other, the title story 'Beginners' contains a masterful and extended dialogue section from which Lish first found the "what we talk about, when we talk about love" line, and 'Where Is Everyone?' is a first person narrative from the perspective of an alcoholic divorcee who hates his ungrateful children and takes refuge with his mother. All of these stories are incredibly subtle and moving, masterfully paced and beautifully written. Only a couple fail to satisfy: 'Pie' doesn't seem to go anywhere and 'Distance' seems to drag a little.

I found this to be a deeply satisfying re-read. The stories were certainly as good as I remembered them being, and it certainly helped pass the time on a long and tedious plane journey, just as it had originally helped pass the time on a long train journey...at any rate, this book comes highly recommended, particularly if you are a fan of Carver and his spare style...I'm convinced that if you read this, you'll see that his original uncut stories are in fact better, and that Gordon Lish did readers a disservice with his swingeing cuts of 30 years ago.

Babylon Revisited (F. Scott Fitzgerald)

F. Scott Fitzgerald has long been one of my absolute favourite writers, both for the economical beauty of his style and for the sense of slow burning tragedy that ghosts through the pages of his books, a kind of prophetic spirit warning that fast times cannot last forever; sooner or later, somebody has to pay the bill. However, I'm far more au fait with his novels ('This Side of Paradise', 'The Beautiful and Damned', 'The Great Gatsby' and 'Tender Is The Night') than the huge array of short fiction he produced between the early twenties and his premature death in 1940. It was therefore entirely serendipitous that I discovered this collection of three of his most bittersweet stories in the book cupboard at school and decided to take it for the for the train journey home a couple of weeks back.

The titular story concerns the aftermath of the Lost Generation's sojourn in Paris during America's boom years. During this time, Fitzgerald reminds us, tips of hundreds of francs were thrown to waiters and bell hops with gay abandon, and life was one long boozy lunch that never ended. The crash in 1929 has changed this as the protagonist of the story, Charles West, returns to Paris, sober and now living in Prague, where he has gone into business. His daughter, Honoria, has been under the care of his wife's sister and her husband since his wife died as a consequence of one drink filled night too many. Fitzgerald masterfully rouses the reader's sympathies as a contrite Charles spends a heroic amount of energy trying to convince Helen and Lincoln to grant him his daughter back. Nobody will believe he has changed, not them and ironically, not his old drinking buddies, Richard and Lorraine, who spend the entirety of the story trying to get him back into bad habits. The whole story is a masterpiece of subtle and controlled tension.

'The Cut Glass Bowl' concerns a marriage gone wrong, society beauty married to a careless and brusque older man. The tension inherent in the partnership is symbolised by a wedding gift, an enormous cut glass punch bowl which becomes a motif of pure ostentation and excess, and ultimately a vehicle for tragedy, as it claims something from each of her beloved children. This story is perhaps less subtle and more direct, but it captures the feeling of entrapment in domesticity and societal convention very nicely.

The final story, 'The Lost Decade', absolutely reeks of poignance, with a man being shown around an office he used to work at and wondering at the advancements in architecture since he first left the company. Fitzgerald elucidates the feeling of dislocation felt by the man concerned and also the confusion of the youngster showing him around, until it becomes clear that the new/old man lost an entire decade to alcoholism, a fact that is especially poignant given that Fitzgerald himself fought and lost a battle against the bottle himself.

These three stories give an incredible insight into The Jazz Age which is the backdrop to all of his literary works. What I found most interesting was the parallels between the post-crash years presented here and the current financial crisis our own world finds it in, all of the soul searching and reflection on the wastefulness of the boom years. These stories are the flip side of 'The Great Gatsby', tales of diminishing returns as opposed to ostentatious largesse; small tragedies as opposed to giant ones.

Palo Alto (James Franco)

It's difficult in many ways to know whether one should admire James Franco or hate him. Not content with being annoyingly handsome, in possession of a very well respected acting career, hosting this year's oscars, studying for a Phd at Yale and dabbling in the LA visual arts scene, he's now turned his hand to writing as well. The gorgeous silver and blue design of the cover image actually drew me to leaf through this book before I realised who it was by. When I clocked the name on the front, I thought it was a coincidence (bear in mind I once taught a kid called Michael Jackson). But no, flick to the back and the author photo stares back in black and white, the son of the Green Goblin cast as brooding writer. I nodded sagely and proceeded to the counter.

It's worth pointing out at this juncture that Franco is published by Faber and Faber, which should be proof enough that he is serious about this storytelling lark. Read the first story and it'll become clear that this is no mere Hollywood vanity project; this is seriously good stuff. 'Palo Alto', set in the suburbs of the eponymous northern Californian city, is a short story cycle following a loosely connected group of teens through the trials of budding adulthood, which of course primarily revolve around intoxication, sex and violence, in that order. Put that baldly, I admit that this premise sounds horribly clichéd, but the Carver-esque poetry of the prose carries a great deal of profound message behind the seeming simplicity of the narratives. The short, clipped syntax, married to a darkly cinematic tone makes for a book that I found exceedingly difficult to put down, and certainly one that I will return to again and again.

Franco very much shows himself to be a worthy successor to the likes of Bret Easton Ellis (whose own short fiction collection, 'The Informers' works in a similar way) and J.D Salinger in chronicling just how disaffected and morally ambivalent middle class America can be. Self interest is the primary thematic marker, with each character utterly self-absorbed in a fashion I found very realistic, at least from my own recollections of teenage thought patterns. The darkness in these stories is never far away, yet never does it seem melodramatic or self-pitying, and never does the denouement to each story seem forced or obvious. It's hard to get attached to any of the narrators, but that's the point, they are a passing voices of their generation that form a chorus of flat noise. It works beautifully.

I particularly enjoyed the first story 'Halloween', which rather put me in mind of 'Donnie Darko' minus the Physics and Psychosis. The final story, 'I Could Kill Someone' is another mini-masterpiece, a profound study of homophobic bullying and the ever present nature of guns as a solution to American problems. The only story I didn't like was 'Chinatown', which I found was trying to be sexually unpleasant for the sake of being sexually unpleasant. The early nineties setting of all of these stories massively resonates with me, having grown up in that era too (I was particularly thrilled by a reference to the overdose of River Phoenix) and I was definitely pulled into the meta-world created by Franco.

James Franco is clearly a Renaissance Man in an age of cave people, and he should be applauded for embracing the arts so completely and for continuing to push himself. I truly hope that this book is the first of many, because he has an acute eye for detail and the ability to deliver a truly devastating kiss off. Although I would never go so far as to say that this book comes close in quality to the likes of 'Less Than Zero' or 'The Rules of Attraction', it's certainly no bad stab at the overall impression of those books.