YALE REVIEW

Fiction In

Review
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Patrick Ryan

    Authors fortunate enough to have them are grateful for loud publicity departments and for publishers both willing and able to pay for space on the "new release" tables in major bookstore chains ─ that's real estate, in case you didn't know, and it's not cheap. Those things sell books, as do good and even bad reviews in major newspapers (I don't care what anyone says to the contrary). Here are some other things that sell books: buzz, hype, prizes, hotlists, gutter-column ads, Oprah, the Today show, and making a lot of people believe you're something or someone you're not and then saying, "Fooled you!" It also helps if the publisher prints and ships out, say, eight or ten thousand copies (or ten times that) so that even people who otherwise wouldn't have looked twice at a particular book might at least see it again and again so that it gets into their brains. (When Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full came out, I accidentally tipped over a wall of copies in a Barnes and Noble, and one of them fell on my foot; I noticed that book.)

There's an irony in the fact that the smaller presses are often the risk-takers in the publishing business. By "risk," I mean that they're the ones who regularly are willing to publish work they believe in and admire but know full well they aren't going to make a mint on. They generally have small print runs, and work with limited advertising budgets, which means that you probably won't be knocking over stacks of any one small press book in Borders or Barnes and Noble. You won't (often) see reviews of small press novels or story collections in The New York Times. And unless a bookselling search engine grabs one of these books out of some four million titles and links it to a book you've already heard of (with shaky, results: "If you liked Wonder Boys, you'll also like Boy Wonder: My Life in Tights"), you might never know that these small press books exist.

But there's always word of mouth. And, thanks to Al Gore and the Internet, word of mouth can lead to finding and purchasing any book in print in less than a minute (though I'm in favor of abusing the Internet for information and then ordering the book from an independent bookstore). So here is some word of mouth about three books you may or may not have heard of, published by small presses: Mack Friedman's Setting the Lawn on Fire, Tennessee Jones's Deliver Me from Nowhere, and Eric Karl Anderson's Enough. Each is a work of debut fiction.

Two other books reviewed.

    Eric Karl Anderson's novel Enough is another example of clean, economical writing. Here is the story of Lucy Summerson, a woman nearing middle age and looking back at the first half of her life, trying to figure out exactly who she is and what transpired in her short-lived marriage to a troublesome actor named Paul. Anderson is a daring young writer. He makes the most of Lucy, even as she makes less and less of her own reliability as a narrator. The chapters in Enough alternate between first-person accounts of Lucy's childhood merging into adulthood and her third-person imaginings of what, exactly, led to Paul's abrupt departure.

Both narrative voices are convincing, and both are dubious in terms of their content. Evoking Graham Greene and Barbara Pym, Anderson dwells in his characters' minds as much as they themselves dwell in their scenes, and he gives those scenes plenty of breathing room. This is Lucy on her mother's religious temperament:

Mom doesn't exist in a reflective state. Her self and her reflected image of herself are one. She is a Christian and she will promote the intentions of this religion until her death. Her religious duty was acquired steadily over years of disap­pointments. Every new difficulty faced was a new prayer learned. The gospel slowly filled her mind, until she literally believed she was accompanied by holy majesties. The Father and the Son each hold an arm. I compete with the Holy Spirit for attention.

And on her father's demeanor while attending a baseball game: "Father never became overly excited. He stretched his neck to see the runners and the signs of the umpire. He nodded in satisfaction when a Red Sox player made it to home. But he never yelled and swore at the opposite team like the other men. He clenched the ironed legs of his gray trousers."

The insights and descriptions are no less admirable in the chapters that re-create Lucy's imagined history of her ex-husband. In fact, there's even more to admire here, for you can sense in these intervening chapters Lucy's (as opposed to Anderson's) reaching for the poetic a little too self-consciously: "The house lights went on and off four times as if the great body of the theater were lying down to sleep and blinking its eye before slipping into an unconsciousness filled by recurring dreams."

The reader is never quite sure how much credence to lend this narrator (whether she's speaking in the first or third person), and because of that, this unique novel manages to put the reader in a position of higher authority over the subject matter than Lucy Summerson herself. We're onto her more than she thinks we are.

Enough actually feels like two interwoven novels rather than one novel telling two stories. It has the impact of a much longer book and yet is over almost as soon as it begins, which is to Anderson's credit. This is a restrained and ambitious debut, and with it, Anderson has opened a door to what I hope will be a long and varied writing career.

     Terrace Books and Soft Skull and Pearl Street Publishing are to be commended for making available to us such wonderful work by young and promising writers. These and many other small presses are well worth keeping your eye on (via their Web sites and catalogues).

Recently, I was talking about the late Sam D'Allesandro with a friend of mine who's an editor at a large publishing house. Years ago, I'd read a great collection of D'Allesandro's stories called The Zombie Pit (now out of print), and I suggested that my friend consider re-publishing it. Later that same day, I walked into the Oscar Wilde Bookshop, and there in front of me was The Wild Creatures: Collected Stones of Sam D'Allesandro. I picked up the book and looked at the spine. Suspect Thoughts Press was way ahead of us on that one, and - lucky me - I bought the book and was reading the stories (and Kevin Killian's riveting and insightful introduction) that night.