MFA in a Box by John Rember. Downers Grove, Ill: Dream of Things, 2010. Review by Sharon Harrigan

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MFA in a Box is a “why to write” not a “how to write” craft book. If you are looking for instruction on technique, such as point of view, pacing, and plot structure, see Julie Checkoway’s terrific Creating Fiction: Instruction and Insights from Teachers of the Associated Writing Programs. But if you are ready to plunge into the depths of your writer’s soul and uncover the secrets that you might be holding back, then MFA in a Box could change the whole way you think about the process of writing.

The book unfolds through stories—from the author’s life, books, and world events—to illustrate hard-to-understand truths. The chapter “Writing Violence,” for example, uses the story about Jack Henry Abbot and his prison memoir and relationship to Norman Mailer to show a number of ideas, such as the need for irony in writing. Irony is the “struggle against the absurdity of having a god’s mind in an animal’s body,” and without that struggle stories die. Irony is “the difference between the way things are and the way things are supposed to be.”

This chapter was especially relevant to my writing, because I see the need for more violence in my plots, not necessarily physical or actual but a recognition that the world is a violent place, an insistence on not ignoring the Cold War artifact that is the world we live in (which Rember also calls “writing in the Now.”)

“Violence” can mean conflict pushed to its boiling point. Rember says, “When I advise new writers, I encounter people who find it difficult to resolve the conflict in their stories. . . If the conflict has to be resolved by violence, the writer often as not leaves the scene. . . nobody’s life—least of all the writer’s—is transformed.”

Two points at the end of this chapter also made me look at my work in a different way: “You wouldn’t want to write if you didn’t have criminal tendencies” and “Writing will run into taboos that are deep in your genes.” Writers write, and I’m no exception, to question the world because we don’t accept everything at face value or we don’t believe that what’s on the surface is all that there is. And we are cheating our readers and ourselves if we don’t face up to taboos.

The chapter “Writing Shadows” is about images (“if an image sticks in your mind, it will generate a story if you let it”), about Ezra Pound, and about going deeper into scary places–the Valley of Death–in the writing process and hoping we can find our way back. “If I could change the past so it were less embarrassing, my present would be less substantial than it is, because I would have had no need to develop the sort of moral heft that lets me live with shame,” Rember says, making me (almost) grateful for so many embarrassing moments in my life. He tells Ezra Pound’s morally complicated story to show that Pound’s “lack of moral heft might be related to his lack of shame.” These two quotes made me vow to take my writing to a deeper and darker place: “Writing moves you toward a consciousness of everyday life as being just the surface layer of froth on a dark sea of reality.” And: “Faulkner says it’s the writer’s duty to delve deep into grief and  scars, in order to lift humanity’s collective heart.”

The chapter “Writing Family” has this brilliant quote from Kurt Vonnegut: “If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts.” This chapter gives me the courage not to worry about offending my family when I write (or, perhaps, just the resignation that it’s going to happen, and to try to avoid it is to accept bad writing). Rember says,  “Writing is one of the rare professions where a dysfunctional family can help your career.” Because if the family rules are crazy and don’t work, it’s more likely you’ll see them, figure out that they’re arbitrary, and be able to break them.

The chapter gives a number of examples of ways authors have taken family dysfunction and turned it into art. But the only way to do this is to confront the secrets that are easier to keep hidden. Rember says: “Once you have the courage to look at the secrets your secret-keeping machine is keeping, you can gain tremendous energy for writing.”

“The Writer as Witness” chapter tells the story of Rember’s admission into the College of Idaho and transfer to Harvard. It also tells the story of the power of good writing. He found that he could get an A or B in any class as long as he wrote good papers, explaining: “I’ve learned that if you can write well, people believe what you say, because there’s an implicit cultural understanding that when you write something down, it’s like having an extra brain out there.”

The power of writing is even greater than that, he says. It can change the world. Rember says: “When I begin working with a new writing student, I tell her: ‘You’re going to be a witness for mute and suffering people who lack your ability to perceive. Your writing is going to make the world a better place.’” The writing needs to “cross a threshold into a deep and painful place.” “You don’t have to live there,”’ he says, “but you have to be able to go there. And you have to be able to get back.”

I’ve only covered half the book. The rest of the chapters discuss grief, writing depth, and writing mom. I have been lucky enough to study with Rember as part of the Pacific University MFA program, and he is one of the best teachers I’ve ever encountered. Writers not fortunate enough to work with him personally can still learn from the decades of teaching experience that went into this book.

If you are ready to peel away the layers of secrets you are keeping from yourself and your readers, to confront the dark side of writing and stop worrying about avoiding narrative conflict and saving face, then you will be finish this book a changed person. Reading the book is a kind of spiritual experience. It is a Pandora’s box as much as an MFA box, one you will want to keep opening every time you find yourself compromising your writing by hiding the world instead of revealing it.

The Patterns of Paper Monsters by Emma Rathbone. New York: Regan Arthur Books, 2010. Review by Sharon Harrigan

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The Patterns of Paper Monsters is a coming of age novel about a seventeen-year-old boy from the wrong part of Northern Virginia. His father abandoned him early in life, his mother is an infantile alcoholic, and his stepfather is a chronically unemployed wife beater. All the present action takes place in a juvenile detention center, where Jacob is being held for attempted armed robbery of a convenience store. But Rathbone manages a tricky feat: she turns this dark material into a hilarious trip through the twisted mind of a teenager with a sharp wit and enough attitude and energy to power a whole novel.

The book is framed as journal entries Jacob writes every evening, and the action covers the last few months of Jacob’s time as a prisoner, ending with a short narrative of what happens to him after he is released. It is written in the first person and present tense, which gives it an immediacy that pulls the reader in. Jacob uses a lot of sensory information, which makes us feel like we are in the room with him.

As with most first person narratives, the driving force of this book is the voice. It’s defiant and  judgmental of people and things that don’t seem authentic, sincere, or fair. It’s confessional, unrepentant, sarcastic, clever, and honest. It is never self-indulgent or self-pitying. With his honesty and perceptiveness, Jacob gains our sympathy.

Because Jacob is a nonconformist bent on seeing the world in his own way, he allows himself a lot of word play and inventiveness, which makes his journal entries surprising, refreshing, and funny. I started to underline the funny lines to pull out for quotes, but I had to stop, because I was underlining the whole book.

The humor helped cushion the jagged edges of the book’s theme: how to escape from a childhood of violence and neglect and come out intact. The violence is not just in the back story; while Jacob is in the detention center, his stepfather beats his mother so badly she goes into a coma. By the end of the book, she hasn’t recovered and may die or have permanent brain damage. Jacob also has to deal with the threat of violence at the detention center. David, a new boy, hatches a plot to blow the place up, and tries to force Jacob to help him. Without humor, I probably would have found these events difficult to read. This book showed how much humor and darkness can work together.

Even the gestures are funny, like this one: “My mom broke a cookie in half and tried to dislocate a chocolate chip from its socket.” It’s not just funny, though; it also reveals a lot about the characters. Jacob filters in the violence from his life and puts it into his descriptions of everything, including something as benign as watching someone eat a cookie.

Rathbone perfectly captures Jacob’s tone. It’s odd and jarring but precise. Instead of “Who’s that?” Jacob says: “Fuck is that guy?” Even with this tough way of talking, Jacob gets away with a multitude of metaphors and similes, while still sounding authentic and conversational. The analogies work, because they are not clichés, and they all serve to deepen our understanding of the characters. For instance, “All the anger, all the resentment I feel that day knocking around inside me like sneakers in a washing machine.” The analogy works because it’s so goofy, because the quotidian quality of washing machines and sneakers linked with something so abstract and complex as anger is startling. It also works because it’s sensory: we can hear the sneakers pounding on the metal.

I love metaphors and similes but usually have to cut them because they are more decorative than functional.  I am going to try to learn from the way weaves analogies into this book to add to the meaning. Jacob’s mixed metaphors give us a window into the way his mind works, for instance: “like everyone is writhing in some cinematic rinse cycle of redemption.”

When Jacob acts like he’s from Mars and all our Earthling rituals are new to him, it’s funny but it also reflects his feeling as a true outsider. For instance, he calls a cell phone “a shiny black miniature communications device” or when he calls Christianity “some religion where you can’t have sex.”

Rathbone does an impressive job using setting as character and portraying class differences. Jacob’s hometown is remarkable both for what it is and for what it is not: “It’s not the northern Virginia of freshly painted highways and wincingly bright glass buildings. It’s not the northern Virginia of tailored town centers with marble walkways and aggressive-looking plants. It’s a land of deserted concrete plazas, slumping strip malls, and schools with losing sports teams.”

Rathbone makes us empathize with Jacob, even though he is rude and defiant of adult authority. This is a problem for my teenage characters, too. I want them to be sarcastic and arrogant in a way that I think is true and captures the energy of someone at that age who really wants to live a life that isn’t boring and ordinary. Part of how Jacob gets our sympathy is by using grandiose phrases like: “If there was one message I could write in the sky with clouds, it would be . . .” You have to love somebody who sees his job as never expressing something in the expected way.

One way Jacob keeps his expression out of the ordinary is to replace a word out of a colloquial phrase with one that evokes an image, such as substituting “swab” for “take”: “meeting them, having them swab some impression of me.” Or he adds an adjective, usually visual, such as: “they are supposed to reach out an offer me some carpeted guidance.”

What’s interesting about such a rapid-fire observation machine as Jacob is that he does almost no talking at all. In fact, he makes a great effort to talk as little as possible. The dialogue that we do get is a study in how a teenager can be as aggravating as possible to an adult. The follow is one example, after he signs an “honor slip” in microscopic letters:

“That’s too small.”

“It’s my signature.”

“It’s unreadable.”

“You can’t read it?”

“No.”

“I can read it.”

Jacob hates the juvenile detention center, but he is not eager to live in the outside world, either. He has contempt for what he considers normal. But halfway through the book, he starts to change. He is cracked open by a girl he meets, a fellow juvie named Andrea. As time goes on, they have more intimate conversations and, he says, “it’s like we have day passes to each other’s souls.”

Patterns is a classic coming of age story, because its protagonist starts the book with a big dose of immaturity and arrogance, imagining that he is much wiser than he actually is, then later realizes he doesn’t know as much as he thought. At the beginning, he acts as if he’s already an old man: “I know something already that most people learn only once they’ve reached the end of whatever personal disappointment corridor they’ve started on . . . everything . . . is totally sad and completely pointless.”

At the end, Jacob is not transformed into a heartwarming greeting-card message spewing automaton, but at least he is trying to figure out how to live in the world without committing any more crimes. His “second cousin” (a kind of “Big Brother” the center assigns him) finds him a part-time job, and on the last page Jacob is sitting at his desk, trying to figure out “what it is that people do.” But the transformation is huge, because he knows that he doesn’t know. He is going to stop pretending he knows everything and instead try to learn.

I liked this book so much I recommended it to my book group (of nonwriters). I can’t remember the last time they enjoyed a book so unanimously. I recommend it to all readers, writers or not, young and old. If Jacob won over a jaded parent of a teen like me, he can win over anyone.

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower. New York: Picador, 2009. Review by Sharon Harrigan

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Not since Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America has a short story collection excited me so much with its irrepressible, in-your-face humor and rule-breaking anti-heroes. Towers made me want to try doing what he does. It looks like so much fun.

The stories are about hopeless losers who don’t find redemption. Most are in first person, from the loser’s point of view, which usually inspires empathy. But it doesn’t in this case. These characters blithely follow their own excesses to a wild ride of self-destruction. It’s amazing that Towers manages to keep us turning the pages, anyway, faster and faster. He does it by making the language inventive and clever, by weaving in a deft thread of suspense, and by making the characters insightful and funny.

Tower shows a remarkable versatility. In addition to the first-person stories, he has a story in the second person (“Leopard”) and third-person omniscient (“On the Show”).  The title story, historical fiction from the point of view of a Viking plunderer, stretches his versatility the furthest and is the only one in which the novelty became too apparent for me.

The narrators range through a middle aged real estate developer in a hate-hate relationship with his brother and the world, a twenty-four-year-old engineer/inventor, a nine-year-old boy who chronically lies and dreams of beating up his stepfather when he turns sixteen, a sixteen-year-old girl who would rather put herself in danger of rape than suffer the embarrassment of being seen with her father, and a seventy-three-year-old man who knocks on his neighbor’s door hoping she’s a prostitute and discovers she’s a drug dealer. What these characters have in common is their obnoxiousness, which stops just short of evil.  But because they are rude, sarcastic, and unfiltered, they can say anything they want, and what they say is often extremely funny.

Two of my favorite stories were “On the Show” and “The Brown Coast.”

“On the Show” includes multiple plot threads and gets into the heads of several different characters, making for a complex architecture. It’s omniscient, so it juggles readers’ attention from character to character. Towers pulls it all together by making it clear by the end that one plot line dominates (the question: who is the pedophile who lured the seven year old boy into the bathroom?) I thought it was Ellis, one of the carnies, but we only find out at the very end that it is the cattle contest judge, an icon of civic fortitude flown in from out of state, who did it. No one in the story finds out, but we are privileged, through omniscience, to get in the perpetrator’s head. This was the most complicated story of the collection, and it left me breathless.

“The Brown Coast” I found interesting because of its inverse climax. Unlike the traditional arc (building to more and more tension and rising until the conflict bubbles over, then coming down to equilibrium), it starts out with tension and conflict, builds to a climax that is a rare moment of euphoria, then the falling action leads us back to the pile of shit we started in. The narrator has invited his estranged brother to visit him in his cottage in Maine. They have a history of cruelty to each other, which is undiluted by maturity.

But something happens that promises to change all that. They go hunting and, miraculously, the narrator shoots a moose. The narrator, his buddy, and his brother clean and dress the beast in an operatic ritual of male bonding. The brother–a failed classical composer forced to eek out a meager living as a music therapist–considers moving out to Maine, which promises to enlarge his soul with manliness. They all expend a hero’s effort to haul the animal back to the cottage, and nothing will ever by the same, we think. Until the meat starts to rot. The animal was sick, and his virus is spreading fast after his death. The brother and buddy refuse to eat it, but the narrator, always in denial, ends the story by taking a big bite of rancid meat.

Meanness can be funny, and this book is hilarious. Partly it’s the juxtaposition of unexpected words in the same sentence, like “with sunset still smoldering behind the molars of the Appalachian range.” The self-loathing is funny, too, such as “Matthew, he repeated, in the way you might say ‘cancer’ after the doctor’s diagnosis.”

But the book is more than funny. When you read: “The land here met the water in a steeply sloping apron of mud that sang with mosquitoes and smelled terribly of fart gas,” you know you’re in for a lyrical roller-coaster ride that is dark, metaphorical, sensual, complex, hilarious, profane, and rollicking fun.