Taylor Materne’s Holiday Gift Suggestion

Still have a few people left on your holiday shopping list? I don’t envy you this weekend, but Taylor Materne, one of the three co-authors on the Upper Class series of YA novels, can help. (Watch out for that link; it’s a MySpace page, and you know how those can set off your computer’s speakers with their soundtracks!) His tips will come in handy for any teenagers on your list—and more than a few adults, too.

If the eggnog and mistletoe are too sweet, and you need to cut it with some bitters, A Fan’s Notes is for you. It is a darkly funny and beautiful story. This is the American dream (or at least the East Coast version of it) dropped on its head. Sadly, it is a classic that’s often stuck in the back row of a double-stacked shelf. It’s a book you almost don’t want to meet, a man you don’t want to know, but who better to visit for the holidays? Frederick Exley is a brilliant monster, and in his fictionalized memoir we find a braid of truth and imagination as he laments his failed marriage, alcoholism and the 1950s notion of celebrity. If nothing else, it may just take your mind off the more tangible challenges of the celebratory season. So take a seat on the ratty couch with Exley and suckle on some stunning failure.

If Exley’s bitter-high-school-teacher virulence doesn’t strike the right chord, perhaps something else from the over-addressed world of prep school will suit you. There is no shortage of novels of late with Harry Potter, Gossip Girls, Prep, Academy X—and us, for god’s sake. But perhaps you would be better off visiting the classics. There are the obvious choices: A Separate Peace and The Catcher in the Rye. Or you could look deeper at overlooked gems like the collectible Chalet School series, about a boarding school in Austria (subsequently moved) from the 1920s. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair begins at Miss Pinkerton’s Academy for Young Ladies. Looking for something more relevant? Try A Good School, a sexually frustrated tale by Richard Yates—who himself went to Avon Old Farms, a boarding school in Connecticut.

21 December 2007 | gift ideas, guest authors |

Don Waters Recalls “A Distant Episode”

When Robin Romm emailed me her essay for Beatrice about her favorite Grimm fairy tale, she mentioned that her partner, Don Waters, was also a short story writer—in fact, he’d just won the Iowa Short Fiction Award for his collection, Desert Gothic. Would I be interested in an essay from him as well, she asked? I wrote her back almost immediately with my assent, and the following essay came soon after that. It will almost certainly send you off to a bookstore or a public library to track down not just the Bowles story Waters has chosen to write about for us, but his own collection, to see just how the influences have played out in his prize-winning stories.

Language is at the center of “A Distant Episode,” Paul Bowles’s magnificently brutal tale that guides its reader, along with its protagonist, from the “high, flat” country down into a hot desert hell complete with a “flaming sky,” “sharp mountains,” and odors that reek of “sun-baked excrement.” It has come as no surprise, years after reading “A Distant Episode,” and now returning to it, that I’ve carried this story inside me. It is a story to learn from and be frightened by. Such is the strength of Bowles’s story worlds.

My tastes in character types run similar to Bowles’s. He digs into fevered human psyches. He writes of solitary figures. (No frilly lace or restrained Victorian intrigue for him.) He likes to spin myths that unfold a half a world away, in lands with words like ‘qaouaji’ and ‘mehara’ in them. Like Bowles, I write about the desert. I enjoy the gothic quality of pushing characters off onto strange journeys. And now and then, a touch of cruelty enters my stories. The cruelty is not meant to elicit a stock response. Cruelty happens, as Bowles might agree, because sometimes it is in our nature.

Nature is not a commercial, as many Americans are trained to believe. Nature is a brute force, and as nature’s brainy, opposable-thumbed spawn, human beings long to contain it in order to make sense of it. We make do with what we have: neurological chemicals, brain circuitry—a mish-mash of evolutionary confluences that somehow produced in us language. Language is our miracle. But as creatures of the natural world, we also have the capacity to exact the most deliciously creative horrors upon each other, which brings us to “A Distant Episode.”

Bowles wastes no time setting up his protagonist, a linguist known only as “Professor,” a traveler in a remote, sun-stroked land—supposedly Morocco, where Bowles was writing at the time. The Professor has come to this desert outpost to visit a long-lost friend, a “café-keeper,” whom the Professor quickly discovers has died.

The Professor is a stranger in this place. He’s unfamiliar with the language, the customs, the small signals that would otherwise keep him safe back home. As the Professor ponders his dead friend’s fate, the moon replaces the sun in the sky. He strikes up a conversation with an unlikable waiter, and our Professor grows interested in buying camel-udder boxes. He wants to own a collection of them. A nomadic tribe known as the Reguibat makes these camel-udder boxes, and the waiter says that he will show the Professor where to find them. And so our journey, and the Professor’s, begins.

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17 December 2007 | selling shorts |