The Widow and the Tree by Sonny Brewer

In a connected world, where every place is right next door to every other place via cell phones, airplanes, and the internet, it was really lovely to read a novel that was truly of a very certain place. The Widow and the Tree takes place in extremely rural Alabama, and the disconnected nature of the location separates the reader from any particular time, or any invasive modern influence. Without the ringing, buzzing, and informing, what's left is a quiet book that ends up booming, a small story that resonates.

A five hundred year old live oak is the central character, as it frames the lives of a few strange characters who also inhabit this swampy and wild backwater. If you told me before I cracked it open that I would be deeply engrossed in a novel which is essentially about a tree, and tangentially about a couple of hermits, I would have been skeptical. However, the scene that Sonny Brewer paints is compelling and surprising in its depth. Rather than limiting the book, the narrow scope propels the reader farther into the landscape, so it's possible to read a chapter about the noises a bird makes tapping on the branch of a tree and actually still stay engaged. It's possible to really be quietly present in this dangerous, haunting world of the Ghosthead Oak and start to know it, or at least to know how much you don't know about it.

The book is small, but it penetrates like a bullet. It's as specific as a fingerprint, and as unforgettable as a face. I'm impressed with Brewer's restraint, both in language and in characterization. There is nothing goopy and romantic about this widow, nothing drearily tragic about her hero either. The wilderness is hard, and the book is hard, but it's also beautiful in its simplicity.

The Widow and the Tree is a prime example of why MacAdam/Cage is great and would be sorely missed.

Water for Elephants: a Master Class in Craft

Water for Elephants was a runaway bestseller, a breakout book for author Sara Gruen, and a book club darling. The comments you hear in reaction to this book range from "Loved it" to "It blew my mind, changed my life, and I chewed my own wrists open when it was over." Not everyone likes every book, but I have to say that this one has met with universal approval from readers of every stripe. Writers, take heed. Water for Elephants is more than a good story; it's a seminar in technique from which aspiring writers could definitely benefit.

Lesson #1: Milieu. Choose to write in a world that people want to read about. Gruen set her book in a traveling circus during the depression. I wanted to read it before I had any idea what the plot might be like just because of where it was. For this book, you could almost write the pitch just based on the setting: the time, the place, the freaks, the violence, the hidden world, the desperation... it is automatically interesting just because of where and when it is. Want to write another book about someone who lives in an apartment in a trendy neighborhood in a modern city? Good for you. Have fun tweaking that one. Sure, Gruen had to research the hell out of her book, but she wisely chose a deep deep deposit of fuel in which to sink her well.

Lesson #2: Pacing. Water for Elephants has no down time. There is no break in the plot, no difficult middle section, no long period of rising action and building complication. The story goes from peak to peak, escalating constantly from the day the main character sets foot on that train to the very end. Gruen provides relief from the action by switching from the main plot in the past to the framing story in the present, but she never gives us a slow chapter in the circus plot. Looking at the structure and pacing of WFE, you realize that the thing about writing a novel is, you really don't have time for those slow chapters. Are you sitting on a middle section that kinda drags, just because things are "developing"? Are you happy with a plateau in the center of your book? Don't be lazy. Ratchet up the slope of that line that takes you from low start to high finish. Steeper is better. Don't waste time on low energy chapters.

Lesson #3: Transparency. In this book, there are no distractions from the characters, the story, and the world that Gruen is revealing to us. Her prose is not glamorous; it's not fancy. It is effective because it disappears. It's the kind of book you forget you're reading. You think you're listening, and not listening to some pretentious twat rhapsodizing just to hear herself talk, but listening to a story urgently told, every detail important. Instead of witnessing the construction of a narrative, it's like we're seeing a curtain pulled back. The focus is only the story, only the work, and it's so clearly rendered it's like a pane of glass. Any imperfection and you know you're looking through a window. So when you're writing away and you're falling in love with a turn of the phrase, a bit of something you think will be called "lyrical" or whatever, think carefully about whether what you're adding in there is going to show up in that pane of glass, or whether it's going to work to make the view more clear.

Writers, if you're waiting to read Water for Elephants, don't wait any longer. There are more than a few ways to tell a story, but here is a very successful formula for you: 1. Write in an interesting world. 2. Write without pause, relentlessly, every scene amplified and alive. 3. Write transparently. You're not the focus, the words aren't the focus, but the story is the focus.

Ten Questions to Ask Your Friend Who Just Read Your Novel

An aspiring author recently asked me to help him figure out what to say to his friends before he gave them his novel to read. He wants them to read critically, give him honest feedback, but he's afraid they'll just phone it in because they like him.

When you hand your friend a novel you've written, he or she knows you've slaved over it for months, maybe years, and how much it means to you, and how devastating it would be if he told you "Oops, it's terrible." He doesn't want to be critical, or hurt your feelings, which is why the most common response from a friend who critiques you is something along the lines of "It's good!" or "Good job!" Hearing "I liked it" presented as a critique is not helpful to you at all. But how can you get your friend to be honest when she only wants to make you feel good?

Here are ten questions to ask that will not put your friend in a tough spot, but will still give you some useful input on your novel:

1. At what point did you feel like “Ah, now the story has really begun!”
2. What were the points where you found yourself skimming?
3. Which setting in the book was clearest to you as you were reading it? Which do you remember the best?
4. Which character would you most like to meet and get to know?
5. What was the most suspenseful moment in the book?
6. If you had to pick one character to get rid of, who would you axe?
7. Was there a situation in the novel that reminded you of something in your own life?
8. Where did you stop reading, the first time you cracked open the manuscript? (Can show you where your first dull part is, and help you fix your pacing.)
9. What was the last book you read, before this? And what did you think of it? (This can put their comments in context in surprising ways, when you find out what their general interests are. It might surprise you.)
10. Finish this sentence: “I kept reading because…”

Your friend is probably still going to tell you, "It was good!" However, if you can ask any specific questions, and read between the lines, you can still get some helpful information out of even the most well-meaning reader.

Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls by Lucy Corin

That's no catcher, and this is not rye.

Everyday Psycho Killers: A History for Girls

Lucy Corin's first novel, Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls, published by FC2, begins as a wild, unapologetic mess. The story of a young girl in southern Florida, Psychokillers reminded me initially of Lynda Barry's Cruddy, Kathy Acker's Blood and Guts in High School, or a number of other ragged, jagged narratives yanked out of confused teenaged women. It's messy in that way, in that essentially female way, and its zigs and zags are almost familiar to me, this unpredictable, non-linear tempo.

It's the kind of book that leads reviewers and jacket copy writers to create lists of disparate elements: a Ted Bundy reject, the God Osiris, a Caribbean slave turned pirate, a circus performer living in a box, broken horses, a Seminole chief in a swamp, and a murderous babysitter. And the book is good in this way; it's inventive, fresh, out of control. You spend most of the first half asking yourself, "Where is she going with this?"

But ultimately what's interesting about the book is not the way it's fragmented. The story is told in mad, intense chunks, increasingly so disconnected from the central narrative of the young girl. We go from a fairly chronological account of a home life, a school life, of this main character, into digressions that start as anecdotes or asides from the character herself and evolve into separate stories -- stories of death and killers, murders, fear. That aspect of it is great, and Corin pulls together a very bold collage.

The interesting thing, though, is how it isn't fragmented, how the book spirals back on itself, revisiting ideas, images, and even sentence structures, so that while in some ways time, characters, and realities are fractured, the idea of the book spirals inward to a point, and comes together where the book blows apart. There are six or seven absolutely tight and monstrous pages toward the end that clearly express the book's central theme. I realized, reading them, the path I had to take to get there, to be told I am a killer, and that I am being killed, and that both are me. That realization is at the center of the spiral.

Looking at it from the top, a spiral moving outward looks the same as a spiral moving inward. It's not immediately obvious how Corin's book functions in this way, but the destination is worth the journey, and the investment in the book, you will find, sneaks up on you. Along the way, you'll find chapters that work as short stories, you'll see a dazzling slideshow of images you definitely have not seen before, and you'll find yourself falling into suspense over this character. Yes, in the middle of a novel built of formal experimentation, you'll be worried about this girl, and the question central to her psycho psyche -- will she kill or be killed?

Elegy for a Fabulous World by Alta Ifland

Elegy for a Fabulous World by Alta Ifland

Publisher: Ninebark Press

For its second offering to the hungry world of literary fiction, Ninebark Press brings us Alta Ifland's short story collection, Elegy for a Fabulous World. From the very first story, Ifland had me in her grasp with merciless, darkly funny tales from her childhood in communist Ukraine. In bleak, unapologetic images, she shows us the gypsies that camped outside her town, the gravedigger the children all harrassed, the way the trash collectors failed, and the magic of one coveted bottle of Coca Cola. You can read the titular story online at AGNI Magazine. Not my favorite example, but the strange picture of what constitutes a seaside vacation for Soviets will give you an idea of what the rest of the book has to offer.

Ifland's gift is control. She shrugs at absurdity with the measured pace of a female Nabokov. Yet just as you're sinking into a mild rhythm of predictable slice-of-life revelations, she jerks the image just a bit, skews it enough to remind you: this is foreign. So, the mute adopted sister you're accustomed to seeing, with her iconic silence and her mild beauty, may not stop as a symbol of some unknowable aspect of childhood. She may suddenly go jetting off into space as the story takes a sudden flinch outside the deftly drawn limitations of the village, the family, the characters, the way of life. Ifland injects just enough of these blank surprises to elevate her work from competent memoir into the realm of contemporary craft.

The second half of the book delivers more typical contemporary short stories. Well crafted, interesting, satisfying, but lacking the depth and impact of the first section.

A few stories into the collection, when I was so enchanted with the voice, the landscape, the complex dark shadows of it, it occurred to me how impossible, how thin it would all seem if these same stories were set in modern times, in the loud, plastic American world. Is it possible for her, I wondered, to create this same kind of elegant starkness without the exterior starkness of village life, without cell phones or televisions or that brisk cacophony a more contemporary set of characters would be wading through. There's a timelessness to the childhood that Ifland renders that would be, maybe, fractured by the introduction of technology, information, something faster and less private. The second half of the book answered, to some extent, my question, as the stories that took place in office buildings and other less austere locations didn't have the same effect on me as those in the sort of anti-fairytale settings of the earlier pieces. So the mute sister could only fly away into space out of the house without wires attached to it, and the man crying in the graveyard could only be as profound if his life existed in rumor and legend, instead of a newspaper story.

The best thing about the book is the way the identities shift and change, particularly the mother and the main character herself. One can find these common characters in the earlier stories but not necessarily pin down a "she" throughout, or even an "I." A great example of this is a story where the main character takes her husband back to the old country to meet her parents, whose desire to feed him and nurture him and impress him with food nearly kills him. Her return to her homeland, accompanied by the uninitiated American, made me think of my experience reading the book, how hopeless it was for the husband to understand her family, or for her to show him to them properly. Ultimately, there is only the reality of what they are, and what he is, physically, to show for it. And this was what impressed me about Elegy for a Fabulous World. Ultimately, it is in surreal images and what facts and memories can be clearly delivered that this other, fabulous world exists. And if this old, communist life can only be understood in fragmentary, shifting narratives, looped through with the myths of the old country and the realities of the new, then Ifland's atttempt is a success.

For more information: Purchase Elegy for a Fabulous World, visit Alta Ifland's web site, read more about Ninebark Press.