The Gospel of Anarchy: A Novel by Justin Taylor
Recommended

I, too, knew Gainesville.

I went to Gainesville because I was ISO a change: at 22, I’d been living in New Jersey my entire life, and living in my mother’s house since my senior year of college and though I liked the money I saved, I wanted more. And so I applied to graduate school, and in every case sought out the kind of crunchy little college town I’d always dreamed about, places with exotic, foreign names. Eugene. Madison. Gainesville.

I thought I might stop wearing deodorant there. I thought I might drop acid at last or maybe stay up until dawn talking about poetry with poets. I thought I might write long, cryptic letters to my long-distance boyfriend and be the kind of person I’d hoped I’d grown into when I was sixteen.

What did I find in Gainesville? Some of that, and none of that. Gainesville was Spanish moss, sure, and termite swarms and burritos and dancing to Laid by James in a house with a name. Gainesville was Blue Highway Pizza and Payne’s Prairie and bottle rockets. Gainesville was babysitting a baby named Bug and many, many coffee klatches.

But it was also awkwardness. All those nights I did not dance. Realizing I wasn’t a true poet, whatever that was. Feeling shy and out of my skin.

And eventually Gainesville was a job where I wore clothes I hated, where I felt just as numb as I did when I lived at my mom’s house. Eventually, Gainesville was calling the cops on the kids downstairs who played their accordions at 3 a.m. on a weeknight, damn it. Gainesville, for everything it was, was also getting older.

Sometimes I think I should have gone to Gainesville, or a place like Gainesville, when I was younger—just out of high school, maybe, when I was filled with magic and light and potential, when I had not yet hardened.

And Justin Taylor’s The Gospel of Anarchy makes me think I might be right.

I found in his pages Gainesville—my Gainesville, the very specific, very strange geography (it’s like an island, really. An island in a sea of mosquitos and deep south), the colors and the smells. The churches on University. The houses that are always, for some reason, named after fish. He talks of a Fishgut; I knew a Screaming Marlin and a Shrimpfest. This was my Gainesville, too.

But Taylor’s Gainesville is also a place I never knew. A place of transcendental threesomes. A place of dropping out. A place where the consciousness is nearly collective, because even in Taylor’s prose it jumps from person to person but this makes utter sense, even though I never knew this to happen in my Gainesville because I was still, utterly, irrevocably myself.

His book made me miss Gainesville. But it made me miss a Gainesville I never knew.

His book is also not my kind of book, not anymore, and I have Gainesville to thank for that, too, in a way. In Gainesville people asked me what I was reading and I got nervous (the truth? Licensed novels and books about aliens). Now I’m a literary hedonist; I read what thrills me and make no excuses. And Taylor’s book is the kind of storytelling that frustrates me. I mean, I get it. These kids start a cult and wait for the messiah, and you’d be a fool if you thought the messiah ever showed or, worse, if you thought you’d get to see the climax. That is the climax. The not seeing. I get that.

And usually, I’d be gruff about it. Do not want, I’d say. Give me satisfaction; give me story. Give me that thing I never found in Gainesville. But the truth is that here, I’d be sad if the story went any other way. This book is the quintessential Gainesville novel, and to be quintessentially Gainesville, it can’t give us what we want. Because for some people places like Gainesville are like the Jerusalem we speak of at Passover. Though we always say we’ll get there next year, when we finally do, it kind of has to leave you wanting.

I suspect this book will be important. I hope this book will be important to seniors in high school in the way that, say, Douglas Coupland’s Generation X was once to me. Because, in the same way that I wanted to go find myself in the desert, I think they might pack it up and decide to go find Gainesville. And they’ll be young and full of hope, poised to find something—maybe meaning—in a place where it eluded me.

Of course, they probably won’t. It is Gainesville, after all.

Disclosure: I received a review copy of this book from the publisher and netgalley.com

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Looking for Alaska by John Green

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A few months ago, I reviewed John Green’s Paper Towns on here. I was disheartened by the clever distancing, the self-conscious cheekiness, the manic pixie dream girl paired with the bland narrator. I’d heard that Green’s first book, Looking for Alaska, was similar, but better. That’s very true.

There’s this phrase I’ve read about that’s used in Thailand, “same same, but different”. I’d say that’s the case with Paper Towns and Looking for Alaska. Superficially, they’re pretty much the same books. Hell, thematically, they’re pretty much the same books. Looking for Alaska manages to delve deeper, though–it’s a much more meaningful exploration of the same themes.

Still, if you’re not into clever distancing, self-conscious cheekiness, and manic pixie dream girls who are paired with bland narrators, this still might not completely win you over–I’m not sure it did, me.

Looking for Alaska is apparently semi-autobiographical. It’s set at a bordering school that bears a striking resemblance to the school that Green attended. The narrator, Pudge, is, like Green, from Florida, and is into memorizing the last words of famous folks (a trope I found, like the use of literature in both this book and Paper Towns, not nearly as brilliant as I suspect I was supposed to). And mid-way through the novel, Alaska dies–this is not a spoiler; I am not spoiling; the back cover gives it away–in a manner quite like some of Green’s classmates. Perhaps this is why the narrative is that much more convincing. For the most part, the setting rings true, and is quite vivid–and most of the characters ring true, too. They are much more people-ish than the characters of Paper Towns, who were more like caricatures than human beings. And there were a few scenes–for example, one where Alaska and Pudge explore the abandoned dorms during Thanksgiving, searching for porn–that hit very deep, indeed.

But when it comes down to it, I still don’t really love stories like this: stories where better, more interesting girls exist only as a means to bring brilliance to the comparatively unbrilliant lives of unbrilliant boys, and especially stories where they have to martyr themselves to do so. Green’s heroines resist this somewhat actively–Alaska is, supposedly, a feminist; she tells us as much, but it’s never really reflected in any of her actions–but he still defaults to the manic pixie stereotypes over and over again. I honestly don’t think this would bother me if I were younger. In fact, when I was younger, I found the idea of being some man’s Marla or Clementine quite appealing. But now, as an adult, I find myself wanting to shake the Joel’s and the Pudge’s of the world by the shoulder and repeat to them Clementine’s words, which are never, ever heeded: “Too many guys think I’m a concept, or I complete them, or I’m gonna make them alive. But I’m just a fucked-up girl who’s lookin’ for my own peace of mind; don’t assign me yours.” And I want to shake my head at the girl who I once was and tell her that taking a bit part in someone else’s life is not nearly as romantic as these clever boy authors always make it seem.

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I’m usually not to good at this internet networking stuff, but I got a GoodReads message from soon-to-be debuting author Kirsten Hubbard about a review I wrote awhile back and was so glad I did. And not just because I later ran into her on metafilter (gotta love those mefites). She just released the cover image for her first book, Like Mandarin, and it’s just as exciting as the blurb/premise:

I want to be beautiful like you, I thought, as if Mandarin were listening.

I want apricot skin and Pocahontas hair and eyes the color of tea. I want to be confident and detached and effortlessly sensual, and if promiscuity is part of the package, I will gladly follow your lead. All I know is I’m so tired of being inside my body.

I would give anything to be like Mandarin.

It’s hard to find beauty in the badlands of Washokey, Wyoming. Fourteen-year-old Grace Carpenter knows it’s not her mother’s pageant obsessions, or the cowboy dances and pickup trucks adored by her small-town classmates. True beauty is wild girl Mandarin Ramey: seventeen, shameless and utterly carefree.

Grace would give ANYTHING to be like Mandarin.

When the misfits are united for a project, they embark on an unlikely, explosive friendship, packed with nights spent skinny-dipping in the canal, liberating the town’s animal-head trophies, and constantly searching for someplace magic. Grace even plays along when Mandarin suggests they make a pact to run away together. Blame it on the crazy-making wildwinds that plague their badlands town.

But all too soon, Grace discovers Mandarin’s unique beauty hides a girl who’s troubled, broken and even dangerous. And no matter how hard Grace fights to keep the magic, even the best friendships can’t withstand betrayal.

I love books about complicated female friendships, and I don’t think there are nearly enough of them. So, in short, I’m jazzed about this book and this author. Keep an eye out for her, okay?

Editing is rough stuff.

I’m starting to think there may have been a reason that I’ve been letting my previous manuscripts fester stew. Editing, it seems, is hard work. I began editing what was then known as Convocation the day I finished it–November 30th. Then, it was just over fifty-thousand terse words long, in ten sprawling chapters.

Now–February 1st–it’s a different beast. Now, it’s The Stone Sorter. Chapters have been reordered, passages added. The beginning was massively rewritten. There’s now a new epilogue. It currently weighs in at 62,000 words, in twenty-three chapters plus an epilogue and prologue. Miranda’s motivations have been refined, her daily life clarified. I couldn’t have gotten this far without my three most-prompt beta readers: Pat, Tarah, and Michele. Their advice was all succinct, clear, and, amazingly, it largely agreed. The book was too short, they said. What didn’t work for one didn’t work for any of them. These are three very different readers; I wasn’t anticipating such a consensus. But I’m glad they agreed. It’s sure made my job easier.

Because it’s hard enough already. I’ve moved into line edits now, smoothing my rumpled, messy sentences, fixing typos (my favorite? “He turned crispy” for “He turned crisply.”), moving, I hope, from the functional to the artful. It’s slow, painful work, but necessary work. I’m not sure that I’ll leave any sentence as it was at its inception, untouched and unedited. This is a good thing. But it’s a difficult thing. It’s so much easier to let words tumble from you, especially once you know your characters. Because they write the book. I close my eyes, ask them what they’re up to, and they tell me. My job, I guess, is to make sense of it–to make it good. That’s not an easy task.

Since, I’ve found, setting deadlines here in the blog consistently lets me beat them, I’ll say right now: my goal is to start querying by the Ides of March. Any writerly types have any thoughts for agents? I have a couple in mind, a few I’m following on the internet, but I don’t want to leave any stone–pun intended, of course–unturned.