Publishers Weekly's glowing assessment of IMPOSSIBLE LIVES OF BASHER THOMAS a novel by Robert Detman

Here, in its entirety, is the review from PUBLISHERS WEEKLY on the novel:

"Detman pulls together various forms and styles in an ambitious novel composed of transcripts, letters, and footnotes, told in sharp prose. On August 17, 1982, renowned photojournalist Nathan “Basher” Thomas is fatally shot. Decades later, Harry Ogletree, one of Basher’s closest friends, decides to write a screenplay about the murder. Harry visits Basher’s mother to speak with her about the project and collect a box of Basher’s personal effects. The contents of the box spur recollections of a road trip across the Mexican Baja peninsula, arguments in Michigan, and drug abuse in Paris, and also provide insight into Basher’s death. Harry follows these clues to Rancho Nacon, a mysterious Guatemalan jungle villa with an enigmatic caretaker. On his pilgrimage, Harry hopes the people he questions and memories he uncovers will help to deconstruct the mystery of Basher Thomas. Because of the book’s unconventional structure, the narrative is fragmented. Although the disjointedness complements Harry’s fractured search for information and meaning, the story’s momentum is often slowed by passages that are needed to prevent confusion and explain earlier elements of the novel. The best scenes focus on the intimate details and relationships between the characters. Detman’s stylistic choices succeed in the moments when Harry’s memories and Basher’s documents blur into the present, layering various methods of storytelling to create a fresh and intriguing work." 

Link to this review: http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-692-24349-7

Please help me out and go to the link, link back, tweet, and like. 

How to Use Your Short Work to Get Your Long Work Published

The exciting Akashic Books has a regular feature on their website, Thursdaze: Original Flash Fiction Under the Influence, and they have kindly selected a piece from my novel Impossible Lives of Basher Thomas. (This novel is also forthcoming from Figureground Press in October--cover at left--more details to come as they develop.) This excerpt, "First Time, Last Time", goes live on September 11.

Also, Em: A Review of Text and Image will be generously publishing my piece, "Anger Management", in the upcoming issue, slated for the fall.

Links for all of these to follow.

Return To Form?

I’m getting ahead of myself before I’ve even had time to read the new Banville, but I enjoyed what Maureen Corrigan had to say on Fresh Air in her review of The Infinities:

“I used to put a lot of stock in an adage about writing. It went roughly like this: "If a student says he wants to be a writer because he has something to say, discourage him. But if a student says she wants to be a writer because she likes to play around with words, well, that student may have what it takes to be a writer.

I don't believe in absolutes about writing anymore: People write out of all sorts of longings and take many roundabout paths to producing good books. But I thought of that axiom as I was reading John Banville's new book, The Infinities.”

I usually find her gloating reviews annoying, but this time she’s whetted my appetite.

Books Once Loved

The idea that I can’t love a book forever feels despairing to me. Or formative.

There are a handful of books I claim to love. So it’s odd to go back to them. Does the love fade, or did my taste change, or is a book love good only for one brief moment in time? Mating, by Norman Rush, is feeling like that. When I first read the novel in 2001 or so, I remember feeling a lot more giddy with the book--the classic recognition that the book was written for me. That idea is fast approaching a cliché--but this is how I feel when I find a book I can’t wait to keep reading--only hoping it won’t end. Re-reading Mating now, though I can see what is compelling in the writing, I also find the first person narrator too self-conscious at times, the writing clever in the manner that I’ve been criticized for, and am now, post-MFA, overly conscious about.

As much as I enjoyed and was sucked into Dan Chaon’s Await Your Reply, at the end of the book, I wasn’t as in love. The prose is crafted but doesn't attain an untouchable category for me. The novel is certainly well plotted, and masterfully executed, but the prose is largely getting from point A to point B. There isn’t much that I take away from the characters or the prose that will stick with me.

And maybe that’s the point: the love has to take hold from the start. At the end of Chaon’s book, I thought, it is good, perhaps even brilliant. I could learn from this book. But do I want to re-read it again? Doubtful.

The beloved category books work a magic that is maybe from a combination of where I was in my life when I read it, and as much from what I brought to the work.

For awhile now I’ve been disabusing myself of the notion that I can go back to the books I once loved and feel the same frisson all over as if I hadn’t read dozens if not hundreds of book since, enough to have altered my tastes and views (as well as what time will effect) so that I could never go back and find the same experience again of a book.

But as I’ve been finding fewer new books I’m eager to read, I’ve become so desperate that I’ve even gone back to ones I read a year or two ago and really liked, if not quite loved, and re-reading them. The trouble with this practice is that I still know the story too well, and so I have to look for something else to draw me into the narrative. Often then, I get caught up in the surface (having glided across it, perhaps, initially). Because if the surface isn’t smooth, or is reflecting something I didn’t notice before, suddenly that’s all I see. I might forget the depth I easily found in the first read through.

This is not a definitive list, but among the handful of books I’ve gone back to and found richer and more rewarding the second or third read--and that I loved from the start--would be The Lover by Marguerite Duras, and The Sea by John Banville. (I eagerly await Banville’s The Infinites, which is being touted as a return to form, which I welcome.) I’d add to this Saul Bellow’s Adventures of Augie March, Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theatre, and Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch. Most of Beckett’s novels I can re-read forever, too.

Still, maybe the idea that that book love is unchanging is one best jettisoned. Why would I ever need to keep trying to find the next one, otherwise? I may say, “This is a perfect book,” or, “I loved it,” but maybe that’s just infatuation.

Vox Not Popular

To write to be read--to be published, in other words--is to make an appeal. There are probably reams of psychological studies about the personality types that are drawn to fiction writing (to say nothing of writing in general). Could this also manifest in the types of characters one writes--where the impulse to make a likable character has a direct correlation to wanting the work to be liked?

I learned the habit of appealing to readers from writing fiction, but only so far. If you write enough fiction, your hidden agendas take over. At some point, I stopped thinking about who liked my work or not. I’ve probably been unwittingly revealing my subconscious. But this reminds me of the maxim that Charles Baxter mentions more than once in Burning Down the House: “Characters don’t have to be likable, they only need to be interesting.” I’m not inclined to always be polite and ingratiating with my fiction, but for some reason my work has often elicited vehemence.

You have to be bold as a fiction writer, with the courage of your convictions behind your words, otherwise you aren’t going to interest yourself in the writing enough to keep at it. I remember one of my advisors once saying that she was often afraid she might write something that would embarrass her. For the longest time I tried to figure out what I might write that I would feel embarrassed by. I never fully understood what she meant by her statement, but I concluded that, at the very least, I’m always going to stay true to myself. How I do that is by pushing myself and not worrying about what people think. Maybe that’s my superego writing from the point of view of a snake.

Voice is a tack in fiction that I’ve lately become fond of utilizing. More specifically, to find the voice of a first person narrator who will cajole a reader into staying with the narrative. Or, better still, perhaps, a first person narrator who can hook the reader and perform all the mise en scène that can lead to surprise, to make the reader eager to find out what happens next. Several writers I’ve been enjoying lately have a mastery of that voice (for example, the narrators in Jim Shepard’s great collection of stories, Like You’d Understand, Anyway, or Nam Le’s gun running youth in “Cartagena”, and several of Richard Lange’s misanthropes in Dead Boys) . Although I read it for an entirely different reason, voice is what stood out for me in John Banville’s The Sea.

What is voice, exactly? Nabokov, whom Banville is often compared to, to my ears (because voice comes out in the reading-- you can hear it, whether or not you read it aloud--maybe that’s the simplest definition) sounds a consistent voice through his books, a stately, avuncular, often on the fringes of crazy, man of privilege and tired sophistication. Nabokov created this voice, arguably, or parodied it so well, with such consistency that it is a gold standard. In The Sea, Banville appropriates this voice in the character of Max Morden.

Max Morden is not a really likable character. Perhaps pitiable. Yet his idiosyncrasies make him interesting. When he confesses “I have always suffered from what I think must be an overly acute awareness of the mingled aromas that emanate from the human concourse”, I’m intrigued. Maybe voyeurism compels me. Although I wouldn’t want to sit at the Pier Head and have a whisky with him, at the safe distance of the page, I’m curious enough to want to see where he’s going.