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Book publicity frequently is an exercise in the art (or artifice) of puffery. So, when a book is described as a “genre-busting” work, I tend to approach it with a bit of caution. Generally, though that term is a fair description of The Universe in Miniature in Miniature, Patrick Somerville’s collection of short stories. Some of the stories could be described as science fiction while others defy categorization. Granted, genre-spanning could also be used to describe the stories. Despite their variety and at times unusual subjects, common elements and themes connect most of the stories.
 For example, the opening tale, which gives the collection its name, introduces us to the School of Surreal Thought and Design. SSTD makes an appearance in other stories that do not involve the characters of the first. Similarly, the random stabbing of a young man on the street plays a role in at least three of the stories. Characters, meanwhile, make an appearance in seemingly unrelated stories, serving to provide a common thread. More important, virtually all of the stories are at heart about their characters, characters often broken in one way or another. Those who are damaged often are, as one says, “stuck in time” or, in the words of another, represent “the human mind trapped by itself in a vacuum but there’s a very small window somehow within this empty and airless prison.”
Thus, “People Like Me” is about a mercenary trying to return to normal family life but who is being recruited for another job (one which will play a crucial role in a later story). How far he’s been removed from normal life is reflected by the fact that after returning home from an anger management class he sleeps in a closet holding an assault rifle. “Pangea,” meanwhile, consists of the supposedly therapeutic journal ponderings of a man in a mental health facility. For Tom Sanderson, the central character in the novella “The Machine of Understanding Other People,” self-hatred and a descent into alcoholism aren’t as recent as his second divorce and losing his job as a corporate attorney.
On the surface, the book is somewhat reminiscent of Steven Millhauser’s Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories. Somerville’s characters, however, provide an edge that gives his work its own character keeps the stories from becoming perhaps too precocious.
Although the book contains 30 stories (including a closing novella), a couple are vignettes of moments or events in two pages or less. That includes “Mother,” on a per word basis perhaps the book’s strongest piece. In it, a mother recalls the day her son was killed in that random stabbing. Not quite a stream of consciousness, the story traces her thought process from shock and dread to anguish and pain. (Later brief stories give the perspective of the son, a police officer who walks past the assailant shortly before the stabbing and the killer himself.) Immediately following “Mother” and nearly as strong is “The Wildlife Biologist,” in which a high school girl learns through her parents’ separation and her biology teacher of the failed dreams and compromises that can accumulate over the course of a life. In fact, Somerville’s frequent reliance on generally strong female narrators helps give the collection a breadth of perspective one might not expect a male author to carry off quite so well (or well from the perspective of a male reader).
As with any collection, not everything in The Universe in Miniature in Miniature will not resonate with every reader. In fact, this is the type of work where a group of readers can quite legitimately differ on which are their favorites and which stories are stronger than others. The closing novella, though, will likely provoke every reader into considering which stories tie together and in what fashion. Some may also wonder about the significance to be attached to any perceived connection between or among any two or more stories. Combining a light touch of science fiction with greater emphasis on the characters, “The Machine of Understanding Other People” also helps epitomize Somerville’s “genre-busting.” Yet it also reminds us that the work as a whole may be its own machine of understanding other people, one that tends to give insight into not only the empty prison but, more important, the window.
He had just enough imagination to make great failure possible.
Patrick Somerville, “The Wildlife Biologist,”
The Universe in Miniature in Miniature
Some writers end up being put in a box because their style and subjects seem to forever place them in a particular category or genre. Paul Auster usually ends up in the box labeled “Postmodernist.” Yet the more Auster I read, the more convinced I am that he ends up with that label because his writing defies easily placing him in convenient boxes. His latest novel, Sunset Park, adds to my belief.
 Some of the labels most often placed on Auster’s work aren’t present here. There’s no real metafictional element. In fact, depending on how you define postmodernism (if it can be defined), Sunset Park may not fit in the box. Yet the book still relies on literary devices to explore themes common to his writing and, perhaps, some new ones. A group of damaged characters trying to survive the effects of this century’s economic downturn become a method to explore the search for identity, existential angst and the concepts of home and family.
The novel is built around Miles Heller, a 28-year-old living in self-imposed exile in Florida when the book opens. Miles has not spoken with his family since he dropped out of college seven years ago. He still struggles with what led to him leaving, thoughts of guilt over his role in the accidental death of his step-brother when he was a teenager and the impact of that death on himself, his father and stepmother. After dropping out of college, he becomes a hermit of sorts, moving from place to place and holding odd jobs. His current one is “trashing out” foreclosed homes, cleaning up after and removing all the possessions left behind by the former owners. Miles falls in love with a teenage girl but doesn’t even tell her about his father, who runs a small publishing house in New York City, or his mother, who left shortly after he was born and is now a famous actress.
Once events force Miles to return to New York City, he moves in with three other twenty-somethings squatting in an abandoned house in a Brooklyn neighborhood called Sunset Park. Here, Auster shifts the narration in turn to each of the them, and Miles, as they relate their past and the present. Bing Nathan, the self-appointed leader, was a high school friend of Miles who plays in a jazz group on weekends and runs a shop called The Hospital for Broken Things, where he repairs old items like manual typewriters and rotary telephones. There’s Alice Bergstrom, a grad student writing her dissertation on relations between men and women from1945 through 1947 largely through the prism of the 1946 film The Best Years of Our Lives. Finally, there’s Ellen Brice, who has struggled psychologically since a mistake while in college and seems to be finding an outlet creating erotic drawings. Their problems and aberrations — and a variety of sexual undertones — don’t require a great leap to see the house also may well be another hospital for broken things.
As Bing encourages Miles to renew contact with his parents, something Miles wants to do, Auster again changes the perspective. Miles’ father becomes the narrator and, again, we may well be encountering a broken thing. In addition to the years spent worrying about Miles and understanding generally why he left, Heller pere is confronted with a damaged marriage and economic threats to his publishing house. As a round-robin narration brings the book to a couple climaxes, we also hear from Miles’ mother. Although she seems to have thrived more than any other character, she is perhaps the least interesting. While she struggles with the impact her leaving may have had on Miles, her struggle is primarily dealing with returning to the Broadway stage after years on the big and small screen.
The use of multiple narrators and their different perspectives and stories is not Auster’s only interesting approach. While the four twenty somethings are plainly the main vehicle of telling a story about recent American life, various thoughts and concepts are explored through devices that aren’t as focused on the present. While some readers might find the analysis and discussion of The Best Years of Our Lives overdone, it is not often a six decade old movie becomes a mechanism by which characters contemplate contemporary disquietude. Similarly, Auster again invokes his love of baseball as historical items and trivia, some dating back decades, factor in as both Hellers assess their family and personal relationships.
Yet, for me, the characters, the story and the themes are undermined by another common element of Auster’s writing, his resistance to closure. While I don’t always insist on resolution, Sunset Park rather abruptly ends as a main character’s thoughts run away over the consequences of a conflict every reader will know is coming.the book’s ending. Perhaps this is simply Auster allowing a particular character’s existential angst, an issue difficult to resolve in even the best circumstances, to emerge in full force. Yet from my standpoint not only do readers deserve better, so do characters whose quirks and flaws give them authenticity.
…in the end books are not luxuries so much as necessities, and reading is an addiction he has no wish to be cured of.
Paul Auster, Sunset Park
Bulletin Board
- Ken Blanchard has launched JazzNoteNSU, a “Jazz Collector’s station devoted chiefly to Hard Bop & Avant Garde Jazz,” on Live365. The first program is devoted to music by members of the first two Miles Davis quintets.
Blog Headline of the Week
Bookish Linkage
Nonbookish Linkage
If they act too hip, you know they can’t play shit.
Miles Davis, Musician (March 1982)
Canadian lawyer “considering class action suit for moose-car crash victims.” (via)
“A Florida man who says he was injured from eating the leaves of a grilled artichoke has filed a lawsuit that may test whether a restaurant has a duty to explain to patrons how to eat unfamiliar food items.”
Sorry, judge, that $994,000 in cash in the closet just slipped my mind.
Thankfully, it’s “abject” laziness that is cause for concern.
As a colleague of mine once put it, “I never met a man who didn’t think he was a great lover or a lawyer who didn’t think he was a great writer. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, they’re deluded.”
Theodore L. Blumberg, The Seven Deadly Sins of Legal Writing
To be honest, I was surprised at the length of Keith Richards’ autobiography, Life. And, all in all, it is far from an insipid celebrity memoir. To the contrary, it provides interesting insight into the guitarist’s life and some of the exaggerated tales of his life. It does ramble a bit but there’s far more detail than I would have expected and is worth reading if for no other reason than his insights into music..
One thing, though, struck me perhaps more than almost any other celebrity/music memoir I’ve read: how abnormal a life becomes when most of it is spent in the spotlight.
It’s something I’ve wondered about in connection with the occasional goofy question about the five people you would invite to dinner if you had the chance. Although names like Dylan and Springsteen come to my mind, I’ve wondered if the years of attention, adulation and being surrounded by an entourage means they can’t really relate to people who lead a “normal” life. Certainly they can discuss politics, music or the weather with anyone that doesn’t fill our discussions with our friends and acquaintances. I can’t help but think, though, that Nor do we have plenty of we may encounter.
I don’t know about Dylan or Springsteen but there’s no doubt Richards has little in common with most of his fans. In fact, he freely describes an often self-indulgent and libertine lifestyle. Life treats his excesses as what they became for him — run of the mill. Of course, it helps to have plenty of fixers available to resolve or ease the problems they caused. And sure, some parents might be on the road for work when their infant child dies. But how many of them have no clue where or if the child is buried?
I’m not knocking Keith Richards. It would be impossible not to be affected when two-thirds of your life or more is spent living in the spotlight and with the lifestyle, temptations and opportunities success afforded him. As the book details Richards’ life after The Rolling Stones were on the road to stardom, there is little doubt that the benefits include a life of privilege with which the average person could never identify. To believe those privileges don’t permanently color a person’s attitudes and persona is to ignore reality.
By law you have to be conscious to be arrested.
Keith Richards, Life
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