Stone Arabia is Dana Spiotta’s third novel. The time has come to call her one of our best writers.

In Stone Arabia, a woman named Denise describes the slow deterioration of her family: her aging mother, daughter Ada, and her brother, a musician named Nik Worth, who rejects a career as a pop star to create an endless artwork called the Chronicles, which consists of journal entries, interviews, articles and musings, all invented, which amount to an imagined, parallel life. Stone Arabia is anecdotal, intellectual, fleet and frightening and humane, but never acts like love does anything it doesn’t actually do. It is utterly unique.

The slow deterioration of the mind—in other words, forgetting—is an obsession of the novel. Denise’s easygoing mother is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and becomes, in effect, another person, spewing racist epithets and hoarding receipts and paperwork while forgetting what these papers represent, as if the records of transactions are the only way to know that they occurred. (As Nik says, “Self-curate or disappear.”) The evidence of dementia spreads to other characters, and it gets hard to differentiate just what constitutes senility, since everyone has the symptoms. When her mother is diagnosed, Denise herself begins to suffer from aphasia—the forgetting of common words—as when she spends an entire chapter trying to remember the name “Jayne Mansfield.” She takes her mother’s medication, along with pills she finds on the internet, all of which have terrifying names—memextend, mindroids, braintonics—and while she drives, she listens to memory-boosting tapes. This is Dana Spiotta’s frightening mimesis: sitting traffic and helplessly forgetting.

Denise’s daughter Ada attempts to seize her family’s past before its vanishes, but the documentary film she tries to make antagonizes Nik and even Denise, who are weirdly unforthcoming and defensive, as though their memories are better lost than embarrassed into narrative. And Ada is aging, too; she “…looks tired in tiny ways.” Nik’s Chronicles are probably the best solution to this seeming epidemic—though they mirror the mother’s obsession with receipts—for in such transient conditions, where everything is temporary, his fantasy is no more fake then everyone else’s truth.

Because Nik is a musician, Stone Arabia has been described as a novel of rock and roll. In the book, rock music functions as a cultural activity that titillates desire without rewarding it, and imbues its best practitioners with a both a sexual authority and the respect accorded anyone who is successful at their job. The irony, of course, is that Nik’s job is to slack: to drink and take drugs and make music nobody will hear, which somehow only makes his piety more devout, and thus admired. His family never tells him to give up and get a real job: they admire his faith, a dignified abjection close to sainthood, insofar as it has exempted him from worldly, bourgeois pleasures like insurance and a decent house and so forth. The more devoted to the cause of making art one is, the more one stands to lose, which is why Nik is ravaged more than any other character, but also why his family, and the novel, love him so. Because music is a kind of condensed expression of life, Nik comes closest to possessing that which life “half-seriously offers with one hand and pockets with the other,” to paraphrase John Ashbery. Spiotta sees rock music as a realm of pure desire unfulfilled. Stone Arabia is not a great rock novel because it makes up funny bands names like The Demonics—anyone can do that—it’s great because it thinks very critically about what actually happens to the mind of the rock-and-roll listener. To Spiotta, music acts like it will give, but it actually takes away. It doesn’t mediate isolation, it increases it, and the characters apprenticed to it are ruined. Nik keeps records of his loss because he lost the most, though he also possessed the most, stood the closest to desire. This argument is Romantic—and familiar—but because the book is focused on the facts of Nik’s demise, it’s also painfully unsentimental, and redeems what would have been a cliché.

Another, better way to look at Stone Arabia is as a kind of hi-brow horror novel made of the banal. Nik makes certain his career is unsuccessful, and for most of the book, he’s a bartender whose “…lifetime of abuse could only have come from a warped relationship with the future.” In caring for her brother, Denise herself veers toward insolvency, and, when Nik gets ill and has no health insurance, she treats his painful toe infection with Preparation H after vainly searching Google for solutions. Spiotta knows that anyone who looks for closure on the internet is doomed to add an existential panic to their symptoms. Later, as Denise applies for a credit card just to cover her costs, she reads the little print and thinks, “The first time you actually read the words printed on these things was to feel the last connection to your childhood die.” That night, she takes pills to go to sleep, “what we used to call sleeping pills but can’t anymore because it sounds too tragic.”

The end of Stone Arabia, which reconciles Nik and Denise’s fantasies with their real lives, may be predictable, but that doesn’t mean it’s not affecting, the way that any kind of bad but inevitable news is. If the book sounds too depressing, it should be said Spiotta’s prose is clear and intimate; as Faulkner would say, “Less claw than velvet.” The reader always feels as though a reasonable human being is speaking to them, even as the fodder of daily life is re-described in terrifying ways that may well keep you awake forever. Stone Arabia does not speechify or engage in fantasies of power. It may act like it seduces but the reader never feels they were deceived, except perhaps by their own self, and that’s how all great parties end. This grave and elegant little novel is a masterpiece.

Event Factory, by Renee Gladman, is a devious little science fiction book about a woman who visits a fictional city called “Ravicka”—which may also be a planet—where only commonplace banalities occur and everyone is uncomfortable and mystified. It’s a reticent gem of poise and subtle humor, and, at only 126 pages, it punches—or, more accurately, frowns—way above its weight.

Most of the joy in Event Factory comes from watching the unnamed narrator puzzle out how to behave amid Ravicka’s opaque social conventions. “I wanted to protest, but thought that would require why I had come, which I had not yet discovered.” The narrator is exceedingly polite, but her unusual choice of words makes her nearly as mysterious as the planet she is visiting. Some of her declarations are utterly cryptic, as with, “Getting off the desk proved a challenge: you could not trust the floor.” Other comments are dryly observant: “After a while, so much time of non-interaction had passed between us that she was a stranger again…” while some are hilariously deadpan: “‘Hello,’ I said trying to find my sexy voice, in case it was time to fuck.”

The narrator tries to find her way around Ravicka with even less success than one expects in a book about social bumbling. Her attempts at communication fail hilariously: “[T]here was a gesture I was to make upon entering a place that was already peopled, something between ‘hello,’ ‘sorry,’ and ‘congratulations I’m here,’ and I could not remember what it was.”  She finally makes a friend, another foreigner named Dar who doesn’t get Ravicka, either, and they search the old part of the city, trying to “…experience the muscularity of the present diminishing in me as it was replaced by a past I could never have known myself.” And yet, while they encounter natives and try to interact with them, “Listening to them was like gathering water without a pail.”

She and Dar have pretty good sex: “A fist entered me…The fist lingered there; my muscles clutched it.” Still, she seeks out other partners, and falls in with a group of revolutionaries so laconic that the reader can’t tell why they’re angry. Addled by ennui is more like it. Instead of finding some great purpose to contribute to, she works on speaking the language. “I worked on my libsling, that peculiar Ravickian method of transposing verbs and proper nouns to account for a speaker’s ambivalence.” Even in a world as unusual as Ravicka, Renee Gladman doesn’t act like life is less banal than it is, a brave decision for a novel with pretensions toward science fiction.

There are passages in Event Factory which are furiously beautiful. The evening air is “tender;” the light is “yellow;” the morning is a “greener yellow at the start of the day but very moment growing golden.” Everything the narrator tries to do ends in failure, but experience somehow happens anyway. And while it’s probably important for the critic to preserve the oddness of Gladman’s project, it must be said that Event Factory, for all its challenging images and language, is cheeky and hilarious. It makes great, unpredictable company.

Adam Novy is the author of The Avian Gospels. He lives in southern California.

O Fallen Angel (Chiasmus) is the first novel by Kate Zambreno, and, if she continues in this vein throughout her career, she’s going to start a lot of fights.

The novel describes a older suburban woman named Mommy, her suicidal daughter Maggie, and a homeless and insane man named Malachi. The characters don’t have conversations, and there is no conventional dialogue at all, but Zambreno uses what amounts to different languages for each of them. Mommy gets the longest, most complex and satisfying sentences, such as “Mommy wept tears and tears for Laci more tears than she has ever wept for her own daughter but Mommy doesn’t want to think about that no Mommy doesn’t even want to talk about that Maggie has dug herself into her own hole and she will have to dig herself out of it it’s called Tough Love! It’s a parenting technique. Like guilt and manipulation.” (7-8) The long, rhythmic and unpunctuated switchbacks of these lines will be compared to Thomas Bernhard and Elfriede Jelinek—and their frequent, joyous obscenity reminds of Kathy Acker—but the sheer inflammatory shallowness belongs exclusively to Zambreno, as does the comic timing of lines like, “There are angel soaps and little angels on the guest towels (which you are not supposed to use)…” (27) One expects a novel’s major character to be sympathetic, especially one named “Mommy,” but the biggest impression of O Fallen Angel’s Mommy is how utterly loathsome she is. In other words, Zambreno quite deliberately slays one of our era’s most sacred cows.

Maggie’s section is perhaps a bit schematic in comparison, but it better represents the book’s agenda to obliterate received wisdom about everything: character, gender, the so-called traditions of the novel, etc. Instead, for example, of writing scenes with Maggie’s therapist and developing them both over time, she opts for “Maggie is broken because Maggie cannot articulate why she feels sad or why she feels angry and that’s why therapy does not go too well.” (32) This scorn for narrative convention stumbles when Zambreno wanders into cliché—“Because the first cut is the deepest”—or tautology—“Maggie is Ophelia”—but succeeds when it remembers to be ironic, as with the line “Maggie fucks boys and pretends it doesn’t matter because Maggie is empowered!” (34) At such times, O Fallen Angel lays waste to swathes of phony consolation, and feels  genuinely troubling. It doesn’t give us tools to build a better world so much as show us how the tools we do have suck.

The third section reads like a mix of holy rage and paranoia, and seems like an unexpected middle ground of the other two. One’s enjoyment of O Fallen Angel depends on how much provocation a reader can take, but it’s a virtue that Zambreno spends exactly zero time making her book seductive. Her idea is to make a work free of empty solace, and this, as we know, is exceptionally unusual, especially for rookies. The book does not make one feel better, it shows how feeling better is a deception, and it asks, why this need to make one’s self a fool? Not everything we read will act like this—and if this book came up in a workshop, the instructor would spontaneously combust—but those that do perform the essential social task of undermining piety. O Fallen Angel is absolutely fearless, and, in its way, it is devilishly fun.

Adam Novy’s first novel, The Avian Gospel, is forthcoming from Hobart.

Above Image: Lighthouse, Beheaded, by Adam Frelin

Fire At the End of the Rainbow, the first book by Shawn Vandor, is a poised and unusual performance, an autobiography made of very brief chapters which eschew the typical surreality of short prose forms in favor of a less experimental, more vernacular directness. It begins with jokey pieces about men confronting men, but steadily gets grave, until the violence—and the critique of masculinity—becomes extreme. In the story Man of the House, Vandor bickers with the father of a friend about where to take a shower: the bathroom, or outside on the new back deck, where the weather is uncomfortably cold, and the fight, although trivial at first, grows unbearably intense. Later, in Man of the House II, Vandor endures a dinner at the home of actor Michael Madsen, a threatening and unpredictable man who almost hits the narrator and just quickly offers him a movie deal. In Subway Ride, Vandor sees a man beat the crap out of his girlfriend; in You Look Nice Tonight, a female friend describes how she was humped on public transportation by a stranger, an anecdote that ends ambiguously when Vandor discovers his own manhood poking from his shorts. In the title story, his mother’s boyfriend chokes her after a miscarriage, “…like a million men before him throughout all time.”

Vandor seems the prisoner of a useless, almost dangerous vulnerability, and undergoes humiliations worse than those endured by other people, as when, for example, he shits his pants in the company of his dream girl and her father in a motorboat, or when a middle-school classmate named Jill seduces him and then kicks him in the balls. Nearly every passage comes down to a gendered battle for dignity, and he emerges from this youth both ambivalent—often juggling several girlfriends at once—and impulsive to the point of liability—moving back and forth across the country to be with women who don’t seem interested in him. The Shawn Vandor of Fire At the End of the Rainbow is an extremely complicated literary creation, and while the book provokes a long and fierce analysis of him, it does not leave him reduced by diagnosis, a considerable achievement for an autobiographical work.

Vandor’s technique is clear, concise, often funny, but never desperate for laughs, and exhibits the same perplexed, defensive reticence as his character. He would like to leave the reader troubled, and doesn’t nervously over-entertain or end on strange, obliquely evasive notes. He is forthrightly ambivalent. He lets a girlfriend cry in his arms without knowing how to comfort her, because “…I was too far away from myself and I didn’t know how to get back,” and he feels nonplussed toward the advances from a gorgeous woman named MaDora, asking “Where’s the mystery? Where’s the suspense?” as though he prefers the uncertainty of courtship to actual fucking, and loneliness to intimacy. As the title suggests, the book ends, not with a solution, but a permanent state of mind.

Fair or not, first books are not often noted for their control. Fire At the End of the Rainbow is uncommonly accomplished and harrowing.

Adam Novy’s first novel, The Avian Gospel, is forthcoming from Hobart.

Photograph by Stephen Rose

At the unimagined crossroads of 1,001 Arabian Nights and Truly Tasteless Jokes stands The Book of Jokes, by Scottish songwriter Nick Currie, who goes by the pen-name “Momus.” The speaker of The Book of Jokes, “Sebastian Skeleton,” finds himself in prison, where he’s targeted by a Murderer and a Molester—those are their names—whose dreadful intentions can only be suppressed by Sebastian’s storytelling, which makes him a Scheherazade figure, whose subject is almost exclusively his own family. When Sebastian was a boy, the Skeleton family performed—embodied? experienced?—a particularly gruesome and hilarious array of dirty jokes, as when, for example, Sebastian’s father falls in love with a duck, and then grows jealous of this duck’s duck boyfriend, whose barn he sets on fire, and then parades his mistress duck before his wife, announcing, “This is the pig I’ve been fucking.” (33) And when his wife protests, he says, “I wasn’t speaking to you.”

As Sebastian escapes prison with the Murderer and the Molester, the stories he tells grow complex, self-referential and oblique, and while each one takes the shape of a joke, chapters do not necessarily end there, they press on in unexpected, melancholy forms. Sebastian’s mother, Joan, leaves his father and dates another woman named Joan, while his father subjects him and his sister to escalating abuses I had better not describe, and entertains a priest who tries to exorcise his demons, and who also tells the one about the butcher and the human-eating cat. The Molester and the Murderer confess that they are innocent of their crimes, and later turn out to be lying. Everyone goes chasing their desires and never quite achieves them, and they never really understand themselves, which Momus echoes formally by having the Murderer and the Molester argue throughout the book over whether a man can really be his uncle’s uncle. The Book of Jokes is not a collection of punchlines or tension-building schemes, it’s a flexible and sensitive solution to the problem of how to invigorate conventions like the novel using overlooked materials.

Momus is a slyly articulate stylist with a lovely flair for syntax and the lexical. An example: Sebastian’s mother’s lawyer wears “…a fibule-fastened chiton surmounted by a himation, itself topped off by a jaunty chlamys…” (124) He also has a sensitive instinct for ethics: of Sebastian’s father, he says, “He was consummate hypocrite. Or, as he preferred to put it, a dialectician.” (150) And he finds a way to blend the funny and the horrid into the banal: “My father, meanwhile, spends his time making highly detailed technical drawings with a mechanical pencil. The drawings depict utopian improvements he intends to make to the estate. We know he will never implement these plans, and soon he admits it to himself, turning to his feathered friend instead.” (49) This passage wouldn’t be out of place in Thomas Bernhard; substitute the internet for the duck and you have almost every father in the world.

The Book of Jokes contains scenes of sexual violence that are genuinely shocking, which is Momus’s goal, of course: to transcend every barrier of taste, good and bad. On the other hand, the book offers chances to debate all sorts of questions we don’t usually get to ask, such as, is it worse to describe your father’s coitus with a duck, or your son’s? The Book of Jokes is an absolute gem.

Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s Camera defies so many sacrosanct laws of fiction that the critic hardly knows where to start, but among its most disturbing propositions is the notion that narrative itself is a kind of overstatement, that turning points in life don’t actually exist, that life is nothing more than one bloody thing after another.

Toussaint is hailed in France as a comic genius, and there’s a lot to laugh about in Camera, which at first seems like a fresco of triviality. A man, let’s call him the narrator, goes to renew his driver’s license, and soon returns to the driver’s ed office to seduce the woman who works there, whose life he seems to quickly, if obliquely, commandeer, somewhat in the manner of Harpo Marx, “… slightly moving objects on her desk, opening random drawers,” and sending her to buy him coffee. At this point in the book, all is lightness and irreverence; she yawns, he also yawns, and he travels to Milan for no reason, where he soon develops corns. Later, he is thrilled when she spills a box of parking cones. We don’t learn her name—Pascale Polougaievsky—until page forty-eight. In its immunity to plot, the book is practically autistic, but it—and, by extension, the narrator—stays in happy ignorance as long as its routine is unspoiled.

But the book’s banal idyll is disturbed when the couple is joined by Pascale’s father, a bossy man of overwhelming teleological nullity. Mr. Polougaievsky insists on being busy, and his man-of-action attitude turns a trip to buy some propane into a doomed and circuitous search for purpose. The trio fail on their mundane quest, lose their way, and seem to drift around for days, in awful weather. The narrator bristles at Mr. Polougaievsky’s need to act, and is massive on the virtues of his own passivity—he’s a kind of monk of indolence—but it’s part of Camera’s critique that assertiveness and meekness add up, in the end, to same damn nothing. As long as no one battles this futility, no one fails, but the moment that the world is engaged, paradise is lost. As Mr. Polougaievsky carries groceries, the narrator sulks behind, “…indifferent and aloof, with my collar raised, and Pascale still further off, nonchalantly dragging a dead branch that she had picked up along the way.”

Not everything is bleak to Toussaint. He has an ear for the preposterousness of names, as when the characters change trains in towns like Reuilly-Diderot, Daumensil, and La Motte-Piquet. And yet, London can never have seemed as gloomy as it does when the narrator and Pascale go there for vacation, and lay in bed watching unexciting sports on TV, while an announcer “…whispered with an obsolete seriousness.” When the narrator initiates sex, Pascale says she has a headache; later, he plays a slot machine, where “…two eternal mauve prunes, ambivalent and testicle-shaped, recurrently appeared before me as an image of my personal fate.”

Because this book is overstuffed with meaningless vacations—from what, you may ask, since the narrator doesn’t work—the end of Camera finds the narrator on a boat that’s going nowhere. As invisible as death, Camera does more than ventilate the novel, it subjects it to a sheepish, languid sandblast.

Adam Novy’s first novel, The Avian Gospel, is forthcoming from Hobart.

Like almost every Roth protagonist, Marcus Messner is the son of a Newark shopkeeper — in this case, a butcher — but the violence and sheer gross-out he encounters with his father sets Indignation apart. “It was my job not just to pluck the chickens but eviscerate them. You slit the ass open a little bit and you stick your hand up and you grab the viscera and you pull them out…Nauseating and disgusting, but it had to be done. That’s what I learned from my father and what I loved learning from him: that you do what you have to do.” The butcher, after all this stabbing and gouging, becomes obsessed with the idea that the boy will die of contact with the world, which means he must be hidden from it. The farther Marcus runs, the stronger his father gets; the boy is alienated from everything.

He flees Newark, but at tiny Winesburg College, he can belong to nothing else—not the Jewish fraternity or the bohemian fraternity, not his roommates, not the baseball team, and not the damaged WASPy dreamboat Olivia Hutton, whose eagerness to blow him leaves him as estranged as the evil hyper-Christian Dean of Men does. The Dean is a kind of stock villain whose moustache-twisting wickedness burns a hole through any kind of credible representation, but this is not a realistic book, it’s an anti-sentimental Frankenstein kept alive by its own seething. Marcus and his mother flirt with freedom — she by divorce, he with Olivia Hutton — but their fear of abandoning the crazy kosher butcher leaves them chained to the madness of convention. It won’t be long before the kid is cut up like a chicken.

And now, a word on Olivia Hutton, and her effect on the book. She is pretty much the same ruined goysche angel from all the other Roth books, with all the good and not-so-good that that implies. Marcus is alarmed by her sexual aggression, but finds himself repeatedly drawn back to her. In doing so, he perpetuates a pattern of abuse he never quite comes to recognize, which deepens both their characters, and drags them unexpectedly into pathos. It’s not the sex that’s transgressive in this book, it’s the intimacy. Had Indignation been longer, Olivia and Marcus might’ve worked it out like the sweet kids they are, but instead, she gets knocked up by someone else and disappears into a void of purest doom. Then we get the canon’s most apocalyptic panty raid. Reading it, we wonder: What the hell is Roth thinking?

To sum up: Two noble children, damaged by their fathers and an almost Kafkaesque police state of the mind, attempt to come together on their own terms, but the world will not allow it, so the children are destroyed. In other words, the best of us are fucked. Indignation lacks the cunning — and, indeed, the professional coherence — we expect from so-called great writers. Instead, it has the vehemence of a nightmare. Unlike the rest of us, Philip Roth can publish anything he wants, and uses that privilege here to scream his head off. This is a really good book. Long live the king.

Adam Novy’s first novel, The Avian Gospel, is forthcoming from Hobart.