After the Workshop… then what?
April 3, 2010
If you go through the archives, you’ll find out the shit that went down with my dad taking his own life last summer. Since then, I’ve struggled to read, and finish, so much as a short story. My mind just kind of wanders, and I lose interest.
But I just finished devouring John McNally‘s latest novel, After the Workshop. Somehow, it was the right book at the right time. I’ve got some writing that I need to do—I’m reading a story I’ve yet to write at a wedding in Iowa in two months—but I’ve felt like without writing through what my dad did, I couldn’t get to it. I needed a bit of a kick in the pants.
So I finished this book—a gorgeously rendered novel about a stalled writer who takes a gig as a media escort, carting writers from the airport to book signings in his mufflerless car, his unfinished manuscript taunting him from under a pile of phone books. And it occurred to me that I’ve got to set my issues with my dad aside and start something fresh. I’m itching to sit down at the keyboard again. I know what I’m going to write for the wedding.
John’s short stories from the award-winning collections Troublemakers and Ghosts of Chicago have always gotten me unstuck when I didn’t know what happened next in my thesis/novel, which is finally DONE done and ready to send out. McNally’s one of those writers who should be hugely famous. And to me, he is. Besides being a hell of a guy, and making my mom cry with his heartfelt inscription in her copy of After the Workshop, somehow, he’s the one whose work always gets me unstuck. And with this book, he’s done it in a huge way.
Buzz Aldrin’s “Magnificent Desolation”
August 18, 2009
The first two-thirds of this book are riveting, and there are some GREAT scenes on the moon. But walking on the moon and returning safely to home was the easy part. Buzz’s real struggle started when he got back—where do you go once you’ve walked on another celestial body?
For Buzz, it was the bottle— combined with crushing depression and his mother and grandfather committing suicide—that easily could have led him to taking his own life. It did for my father.
But Buzz took the hard road. Especially in the ’70s, seeking treatment for mental illness killed careers, more so in the military/NASA than any other industry, where astronauts were supposed to be supermen. It’s a page-turner, sad and light-hearted at once. But once Buzz the character dried out, so did the narrative.
The last third of Magnificent Desolation turned into a 100-page pitch for Buzz’s entrepreneurial endeavors. I slammed through it, but wish it had ended earlier. Still, a damn worthy read for anybody who’s had close contact with depression or alcoholism—and anymore, that’s everybody.
Some footprints last for thousands of years. Some only a few minutes.
Knockemstiff
February 7, 2009
Knockemstiff
by Donald Ray Pollock. Doubleday, $22.95. In paperback March 10.
**** out of *****
Sometimes it’s hard to feel sorry for people who end up living awful existences when they repeatedly make awful choices. But there’s no hemming and hawing among the characters in Knockemstiff, Donald Ray Pollock’s debut collection of stories.
A fictional representation of Pollock’s real-life hometown (named for a nasty fight outside the church), the easy out would be to call it a gritty, redneck Winesburg, Ohio.
But there is no easy out in a town like Knockemstiff.
Most everybody has designs to leave, but they all end up back in the holler. Over and over, Pollock puts their backs up against the wall. It’s eighteen stories span thirty years of the town, who’s characters are seldom, if ever, upstanding people. In “Real Life,” a father pummels a man in a drive-in restroom so viciously his teeth punch through his cheek, then makes his 7-year-old son beat the hell out of his victim’s boy. In “Blessed,” the narrator falls off a roof during a burglary and can’t feel his legs, and his partner kicks him onto the hospital parking lot, where his painkiller addiction starts. In “Lard,” teenagers give the fattest kid in Knockemstiff bong hits in exchange for letting them throw darts at his stomach.
The characters may not be upstanding, but they certainly are people, and Pollock puts us in their shoes; reading story after story involving drug use and violence and abject poverty leaves you with a visceral feeling of being trapped. That’s no small feat. You may not like the characters in the book, and you may not want to spend time with them, but among the depravity, they become real. Pollock writes with prose so authentic, so tight and engaging that you root for them even when they’re despicable, and that’s what keeps the pages turning.
