Beyond Quirky Chic: A Review of Chris Adrian’s A Better Angel
February 8, 2010
Beyond Quirky Chic: A Review of Chris Adrian’s A Better Angel
by Raul Clement
Let’s start with the obvious. Chris Adrian writes autobiographically. Or maybe that’s not so obvious—not obvious at all if you aren’t familiar with his biography. The stories in A Better Angel, his first fiction collection and third book overall, feature murderous children and out-of-body experiences, drug-addicted doctors and, yes, angels. Not seemingly the stuff of autobiography.
But read some press on Adrian and it’s clear where his material comes from. A pediatrician and former seminary student, his second novel and best book to date, The Children’s Hospital, is about a biblical flood that consumes the earth, leaving only a children’s hospital to float, ark-like, on the seven-mile-deep waters. Another big theme is loss and grief, and so it’s unsurprising to learn that his brother was killed in an automobile accident. In fact, several of the stories in the collection feature dead or dying relatives.
Adrian writes in a style I would call magical realism, though I can imagine the stories in this collection being described as fabulist, allegorical, and occasionally even sci-fi. Whatever you want to call it, the way a standard Adrian story works is this: the magical, supernatural, divine or surreal sit squarely on top of the real, buoying it and giving it a kind of mythical importance. The effect is pretty darn cool, honestly. Seductive.
But is that always a good thing? Sometimes this technique can feel like a crutch, something to truss up an otherwise psychologically unconvincing story. “The Vision of Peter Damien” describes a plague in 19th-century village. The character Peter Damien contracts a sickness that makes him hallucinate falling people, a pair of silver towers, birds racing through the sky. The other children in the village begin to have similar hallucinations. Gradually, it emerges that the towers are the Twin Towers, and the birds the two planes that crashed into them. There is a further 9/11 allusion in the fact that Peter’s brother, Tercin, ends up hiding in a cave. It’s pretty clear what Adrian wants us to get out of this: 9/11 was a sickness, but one that may prove uniting and redemptive. Adrian is big on the redemptiveness of suffering.
This is not and of itself an uninteresting suggestion—though I do think it forces a positive meaning on an event that, regardless of your interpretation of world politics, has none. But the main problem is that the characters are mere vehicles for the theme. Why is the story set in a 19th-century village? Why is it Peter who is first blessed or cursed with the vision? If there was something unique about him—some special sensitivity—it might make sense. But he seems like an ordinary little boy. And why does Tercin, though admittedly a tormenter of his brother, play the role of Bin Laden? There is no suggestion that he precipitated the sickness. Due to these unanswered questions, this story doesn’t work as allegory, and yet it doesn’t present enough depth of character for us to want to read it otherwise.
At other times, Adrian falls in love with his own quirky conceits, language, and images, becoming just another contemporary writer of a style you might call quirky chic. If you’ve read journals like McSweeney’s or seen any recent “indie” romantic comedies—Juno, Little Miss Sunshine, Away We Go (the latter written by McSweeney’s founder Dave Eggers)—you’ll know what I mean. These works make a fetish of the odd detail—the hamburger phone Juno uses, the bizarrely-themed restaurants in the works of George Saunders—sometimes at the expense of real character work. Again, “The Vision of Peter Damien” is a perfect example of this—perhaps all the more egregious an offender because the 19th-century setting allows Adrian more wiggle room. And so within the first paragraph we have “the pearly botch,” “the oak gall,” and “the yellow flux.” Now, no doubt there were diseases with these names (it’s not hard to guess that “oak gall” is poison oak), but one example would have sufficed.
These details are supposed to make the story more believable—because as every good liar knows, it’s the unexpected that convinces—but in reality they do the opposite. They are either too outlandish to be believable or draw too much attention to themselves, and once having done so, don’t bear up to our scrutiny. Or they just feel arbitrary. Should I care that a character always wears a particular quirky article of clothing or would my time be better spent learning how she feels about her father’s death? In the case of “The Vision of Peter Damien” Adrian is trying so hard to prove that he knows what he’s talking about that, paradoxically, we end up less convinced. And other stories, like “Stab”—about a Siamese twin grieving for his other half by murdering neighborhood animals—go so far over the top that we lack an empathetic reference point.
Here’s a typical Adrian story, and given the fact that it’s the title story, one might think that Adrian or his publishers thought it was one of the better one’s in the collection: a drug-addicted pediatrician reluctantly returns home to take care of his father. Since childhood, he has been visited by a harpy-like angel, who has tells him he “will be great and do great things.” So far, he has not done so: he is incompetent as a doctor, having cheated his way through medical school, and has since coasted by in the relatively undemanding world of family care. Now that his father is dying, the angel’s injunctions take on a more specific theme: he must cure his father and all his sins will be absolved. “Just put out your hand,” the angel tells him. “Touch him and make him well.” The laying-on-of-hands symbolism should be obvious. Nor is it the first time he’s used it. In The Children’s Hospital, the female protagonist, a semi-incompetent intern, is given the ability to cure all the children in the ward simply by touching them.
But Adrian’s miracles are complicated, ambiguous. In The Children’s Hospital, the cure is only temporary, a postponement of Judgment Day. And in “A Better Angel” there is no miracle at all. The father dies; the son does not save him. Or maybe this a miracle, after all. The father has been released from his misery, with his estranged son there to comfort him in his last minutes. That the son falls asleep with his hand on his father’s shoulder and his head on his chest—and that it is after this that he wakes up and finds his father dead—suggests that death was the cure. And maybe this small redemption is miracle enough.
Back to the angel, though. What does she—for it is female, though it can take on any form—represent? Is she the hallucination of a drug addict in withdrawal (she grows calmer and less demanding when he self-medicates)? But if so, why has he seen her since childhood? Is this merely a case study of a lifelong schizophrenic? Is she his conscience made visible? Or is she a literal agent of God come to command him? Or is she just a convenient literary symbol for things like duty, kindness, charity, and redemption?
To Adrian’s credit, he never answers these questions. But at the same time, I have a hard time deciding whether all this scaffolding is richly ambiguous, in the way good literature should be, or just distracting. Because the thing is, the character in “A Better Angel” never really emerges, for all the originality of his conception. Does he want atonement? Does he even care? Or does he refuse it because he’s too afraid? The latter is closest, I think…but why? What is the root of this fear? Instead of delving into the narrator’s head, all his problems are externalized in the form of this angel—who, even if she is a product of his subconscious, still seems a little too forceful a way of presenting the same. As a reader there’s a joy in discovering— through subtext, through telling contradiction, and through concrete action—the secret part of a character, the part that he doesn’t even fully admit to himself. Like dream sequences, the angel in this story deprives the reader of a lot of that joy.
And I think this goes to the heart of my problems with this collection—inventive, seductive, thrilling and just downright bad-ass as it sometimes is. It’s rhetorical technique—this mashing together of the everyday and the divine, most notably the worlds of medicine and childhood and loss against the worlds of angels and prophecy—distances us when it should draw us closer. I don’t think this is necessarily a mistake on Adrian’s part—in fact, it feels pretty intentional—but it does seem like Adrian doesn’t trust his base material enough to let it be. If he adds angels—and when I say angels, I mean any of the supernatural or surreal elements of this collection—then it will be important. Never mind the fact that a story about a doctor helpless to save his father, and written by someone with intimate medical knowledge, carries its own interest. In the world of quirky chic this is not enough.
I am probably being a bit unfair lumping Adrian’s writing in with the rest of the quirky chic. The best Adrian stories use their techniques to explore things they could not otherwise. My personal favorite in this collection is “The Sum of Our Parts.” In it, a suicide victim is maintained on life support in a hospital. Her spirit hovers in a kind of limbo, unable to leave the hospital until her body dies. She floats from room to room and in this out-of-body state discovers a new capacity to read minds. She is privy to the secret lives of doctors—their thoughts about each other, their lusts and petty grudges—as they go about their rounds. The inner workings of a hospital are described in fascinating, authoritative detail while the story is moved forward by Beatrice’s ghostly wanderings. The title, at first just a reference to Beatrice’s multiple organ transplants, takes on a richly layered meaning as we come to understand how humans as a whole are more than the sum of our parts—all of our actions spread out in a web of consequence not unlike the invisible net that pulls Beatrice back whenever she tries to leave the hospital. Each person is an organ, humanity a body. Adrian might have arrived at this idea through a simpler omniscient story about the people in a hospital ward, but in the creation of Beatrice—a literalization of the omniscient narrator, disembodied, outside the action, able to go anywhere—he has given himself justification for the technique and added levels of metaphor that wouldn’t exist otherwise. The story was written this way because it had to be; it was the only way of saying what Adrian wanted to say. That is not true of all the stories in this collection.
For better or worse, Chris Adrian is a writer of high moral seriousness: even when the conceit overwhelms a story’s effect, his aims are large. He is concerned with no less weighty subjects than grief, loss, redemption, and the apparition of the divine. Maybe to tackle those subjects, a bold, elevating technique is what’s required. At their very best, Adrian’s stories allow us to hover, angel-like, above the action, observing it all with the cruel, tender detachment of God.
And that in itself is pretty divine.
Raul Clement is a fiction writer, musician, and poet living in Greensboro, NC. His work has appeared in various literary journals.
Sunday Literary Series Presents: David Bowen
February 7, 2010
ONE MORE BANANA
by David Bowen
Cheetah’s sister, Marie, chose a banana from the kitchen table, where Tarzan had thrown the day’s take. He fell into his easy chair with a growl and a wave of his hand. Marie repeated the dismissive gesture with her banana, but silently.
“I’m sick of it too, kid. Banana stew, mashed bananas, banana chowder.” Tarzan held up his hand. “Jesus—I think my skin’s turning yellow.”
Marie held the banana to her forehead, as if divining a hidden message.
“If that thing has any secrets left, you let me know,” Tarzan said, pushing his weight out of the easy chair toward the small wet bar at the other side of the room. He poured banana vodka, half a gourd, and lifted it in the air. “Prost!”
Marie placed the banana over her eyes and shook her head. She stuck out her tongue.
Tarzan wiped his mouth. “Don’t get saucy with me, sweetheart. A working man can have a drink before dinner.”
Marie ambled to the kitchen table and selected two more bananas. She scratched the back of her head with one of them before offering it to Tarzan, who accepted it with the expression of a man condemned. He peeled the rubbery skin, exposing the soft, familiar fruit inside. Marie broke her banana in two pieces, chuckling.
Tarzan looked out the window as he chewed, the vines and branches heaving to the scenic porch he had built around the treehouse just about this time last year, shortly after Cheetah had gotten his big break in the movies. Two or three dusty postcards had arrived from LA since then—the horrors of entertainment, the pitfalls of fame—but Tarzan had his own problems.
On the porch, Tarzan leaned over the railing and watched his banana peel spin like a star until the sea of green swallowed it below.
He felt better in the kitchen, where water boiled and Marie chopped bananas into sections before frying them in coconut oil for soup. Tarzan whistled as he took the banana bread from the pantry and cut thick slices, slathering them with pineapple jam.
At the door of the bedroom, Tarzan watched Jane sleeping. He had come to wake her for dinner, but now he drifted through the humid semidarkness until he was lying behind her, his arm encircling her until his hand rested on her swollen belly. She inhaled deeply, as if pulling him inside her lungs. Tarzan imagined his unborn daughter waiting somewhere in there, listening.
Outside, the world chirped and rattled.
David Bowen is a fiction writer, musician, and the managing editor of New American Press. He currently teaches at Colorado State University. The above flash fiction piece originally appeared in The Salt River Review and is reprinted here by the author’s permission.
SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: MARY OLIVER
February 6, 2010
THE SWAN
by Mary Oliver
Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?
Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air -
An armful of white blossoms,
A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
Biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
A shrill dark music – like the rain pelting the trees – like a waterfall
Knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds -
A white cross Streaming across the sky, its feet
Like black leaves, its wings Like the stretching light of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?
© Mary Oliver. From The Paris Review # 124, Fall, 1992.
Mary Oliver’s poetry is grounded in memories of Ohio and her adopted home of New England. Influenced by both Whitman and Thoreau, she is known for her clear and poignant observances of the natural world. Her poems are filled with imagery from her daily walks near her home in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Maxine Kumin calls Oliver “a patroller of wetlands in the same way that Thoreau was an inspector of snowstorms” and “an indefatigable guide to the natural world.” Oliver has also been compared to Emily Dickinson, with whom she shares an affinity for solitude and interior monologues. Her poetry combines dark introspection with joyous release. Oliver is also known for her unadorned language and accessible themes.
The author of more than a dozen books of poetry and prose, Oliver’s first collection of poems, Voyage and Other Poems, was published in 1963. She has since published numerous books, including Thirst (Beacon Press, 2006); Why I Wake Early (2004); Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays (2003); Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems (1999); West Wind (1997); and White Pine (1994). In 1992, her volume, New and Selected Poems (1992), won the National Book award. She won the Christopher Award and the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award for her piece House of Light (1990). Her volume American Primitive (1983) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1984. The first and second parts of her The Leaf and the Cloud were selected for inclusion in The Best American Poetry 1999 and The Best American Poetry 2000, respectively. (Annotated biography of Mary Oliver courtesy of Wikipedia.org, with edits.)
Editor’s Note: A decade ago, when I set out to study poetry, I sat down with my professor and he asked me who I read. The only poet I read at that time was Mary Oliver. My professor taught me how truly important reading is to the act of writing, and in my time with him my library significantly grew. But Mary Oliver was my first, and her poetry is as accessible and timeless to me today as it was ten years ago.
When I recently began taking music lessons, my new music teacher was so excited to hear that I am a poet and poetry editor. “I read poetry nearly every day!” She exclaimed. When I asked who is among her favorite poets she replied, “Mary Oliver.” And so my study of poetry has come full circle.
I dedicate today’s post to the poetry professor who changed my life ten years ago, and to my new music teacher who I believe will do the same. For my readers, I hope you will be inspired by Oliver’s message: “And have you changed your life?”
Want to read more by and about Mary Oliver?
The Poetry Foundation
Poets.org
Modern American Poetry
FRIDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: DONALD REVELL
February 5, 2010
THE SIEGE OF THE CITY OF GORKY
by Donald Revell
I have no trouble staying inside the lines
and small corners of things, wanting only to be with you
as the storm abates, as the household animals
stop whining and go out into the streets.
There are so many good mouths in corners, such sirens.
And I have no trouble speaking as they speak
now that the sky is clear and the dark mist
of police and animal noise has rolled on.
I am not with you. I hate no government.
I hate only those with no eyes for the weather.
Over the back wall of the garden
all the cool shapes of the storm tumble
into other worlds where you are still not waiting.
Imagine their disappointment, the hard outline
of their lives there. I have no trouble saying,
in the lawless, half-baked language of those lives,
that I have studied hard, more than the police,
more than the animals, to be prepared
for what comes–storm, drought, or the famine of mouths
opened to heat lightning and no word from you.
Late autumn. Hearing a noise, I look outside.
Over the back wall of the garden
a storm the size of a small woman gathers
leaves in a pretty funnel. I watch
until the hard ground is cleared and the funnel
choked with leaves. I want a wife badly,
knowing that there will be no word from you,
that the police, animals, and storms of the beautiful
city of Gorky are the only mouths on my mouth,
my mother tongue the whirling noise of leaves.
From The Gaza of Winter
Don Revell is the author of ten collections of poetry, most recently of A Thief of Strings (2007) and Pennyweight Windows: New & Selected Poems (2005), both from Alice James Books. Winner of the 2004 Lenore Marshall Award and two-time winner of the PEN Center USA Award in poetry, Revell has also received the Gertrude Stein Award, two Shestack Prizes, two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the NEA as well as from the Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim Foundations. He is also the author of three volumes of translation: Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell (Omnidawn, 2007), Apollinaire’s Alcools (Wesleyan, 1995) and The Self-Dismembered Man: Selected Later Poems of Guillaume Apollinaire (Wesleyan, 2004). Revell’s critical writings include Invisible Green: Selected Prose (Omnidawn, 2005) and The Art of Attention: A Poet’s Eye (Graywolf, 2007). He is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at UNLV, a school noted by Atlantic Monthly as possessing one of the top 5 PhD programs in Creative Writing in the country.
Want to read more by and about Donald Revell?
Poetry Foundation
Poets.org
Sunday Poetry Series Presents: Raul Clement
January 31, 2010
by Raul Clement
Doxycycline, Ciprofloxacin, Ranitidine—
SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: THE POETRY FOUNDATION
January 30, 2010
Editor’s Note: While I am often harping on how poetry is a dying art and how hardly anyone reads poetry in America today, the Poetry Foundation is out there actually doing something to try to be the change I want to see in the world.
To celebrate the Poetry Foundation’s fifth anniversary, and to spread the word to you about their cause, I am sharing with you today a letter from John Barr, president of the Poetry Foundation written to its readers and supporters.
Read the letter by clicking here.
Today I want to pay homage to this great organization that is working every day to make poetry a part of the day-to-day lives of Americans. Please visit the Poetry Foundation, donate to their cause, subscribe to their magazine, and help make poetry thrive.
Friday Poetry Series Presents: Walt Whitman
January 29, 2010
Excerpt from the Preface to the 1855 Edition of Leaves of Grass
by Walt Whitman
The fluency and ornaments of the finest poems or music or orations or recitations are not independent but dependent. All beauty comes from beautiful blood and a beautiful brain. If the greatnesses are in conjunction in a man or a woman it is enough….the fact will prevail through the universe….but the gaggery and gilt of a million years will not prevail. Who troubles himself about his ornaments or fluency is lost. This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body….
Walt Whitman was a poet, essayist, and journalist. The bold honesty and sensuality of Leaves of Grass shocked readers of his time, although some recognized his genius immediately. Emerson enthusiastically wrote, “I greet you at the beginning of a great career,” after receiving his copy. We go to Whitman’s poetry to rediscover the best in ourselves.
Photo taken courtesy of www.chadcheverier.com
Sunday Poetry Series Presents: “A Hot Minute” by Okla Elliott
January 24, 2010
A HOT MINUTE
by Okla Elliott
-for S.P.
What a strange phrase.
We’ll stop by the bar for a hot minute, you say, or:
Talk with me for a hot minute.
As if what I had to say was so burning
a minute’s explosion would release it all.
Or that the seats at our favorite bar were heated
beyond comfort, guaranteeing a brief stop,
not an elongating evening with a friend’s
friends, whom we can’t stand.
As if time itself suffered a feverish longing.
Or after the bar—as the stop signs
blur by like ambulances—
and I’m facedown on your front lawn,
my eyelids flame-red membranes,
you lean over me, coaxing,
and I paw at your breasts like a blinded bear.
[This poem originally appeared in the International Poetry Review]
SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: SHARON OLDS
January 23, 2010
THE GLASS
by Sharon Olds
I think of it with wonder now,
the glass of mucus that stood on the table
next to my father all weekend. The cancer
is growing fast in his throat now,
and as it grows it sends out pus like the
sun sending out flares, those pouring
tongues. So my father has to gargle, hack,
spit a mouth full of thick stuff
into the glass every ten minutes or so,
scraping the rim up his lower lip to
get the last bit off his skin, then he
sets the glass down on the table and it
sits there, like a glass of beer foam,
shiny and faintly golden, he gurlges and
coughs and reaches for it again and
gets the heavy sputum out,
full of bubbles and moving around like yeast–
he is like some god producing food from his own mouth.
He himself can eat nothing anymore,
just a swallow of milk sometimes,
cut with water, and even then it
can’t always get past the tumor,
and the next time the saliva comes up it’s
chalkish and ropey, he has to roll it in his
throat to form it and get it up and dis-
gorge the elliptical globule into the cup–
and the wonder to me is that it did not disgust me,
that glass of phlegm that stood there all day and
filled slowly with the compound globes and I’d
empty it and it would fill again and
shimmer there on the table until the
room seemed to turn around it
in an orderly way, a model of the solar system
turning around the gold sun,
my father the dark earth that used to
lie at the center of the universe
now turning with the rest of us
around the bright glass of spit
on the table, these last mouthfuls.
Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco in 1942 and grew up in Berkeley. An alumnus of Stanford University and holder of a Ph.D. from Columbia, Olds was thirty-seven when she published her first collection of poems, Satan Says (1980). Her work, which graphically depicts personal family life as well as global political events, has won several prestigious prizes, including the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Editor’s Note: Sharon Olds’s alcoholic and distant father played a large role in her earlier work. “The Glass” is from her collection The Father, and, like many of the poems from this collection, in this poem Olds describes her father’s illness, final days, and death utilizing a graphic, narrow focus. While I find this poem vile, it is clear to me that it is meant to be vile. That it is meant to be gritty, real, and core-shaking, much like the experience of watching a parent die from cancer, especially a parent with whom one had such a contentious relationship. While this poem may not be palatable upon first reading, it is also not soon forgotten.
Want to read more by and about Sharon Olds?
Poetry Foundation
Poets.org
Modern American Poetry
Sharon Olds’s Open Letter to Laura Bush in the Nation
Friday Poetry Series Presents: Srikanth Reddy
January 22, 2010
Corruption
by Srikanth Reddy
I am about to recite a psalm that I know. Before I begin, my expectation extends over the entire psalm. Once I have begun, the words I have said remove themselves from expectation & are now held in memory while those yet to be said remain waiting in expectation. The present is a word for only those words which I am now saying. As I speak, the present moves across the length of the psalm, which I mark for you with my finger in the psalm book. The psalm is written in India ink, the oldest ink known to mankind. Every ink is made up of a color & a vehicle. With India ink, the color is carbon & the vehicle, water. Life on our planet is also composed of carbon & water. In the history of ink, which is rapidly coming to an end, the ancient world turns from the use of India ink to adopt sepia. Sepia is made from the octopus, the squid & the cuttlefish. One curious property of the cuttlefish is that, once dead, its body begins to glow. This mild phosphorescence reaches its greatest intensity a few days after death, then ebbs away as the body decays. You can read by this light.
Srikanth Reddy’s “Corruption” is a prose poem from his first book, Facts for Visitors: Poems. A scholar and professor at the University of Chicago, Reddy is currently working on a book-length poem called Voyager. He counts Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, and St. Augustine among his influences.
