Capsule Reviews: 4
Small-press check-in
It’s time again for me, the small-press author, to support the team. Let’s take a look at what the small presses have been putting out in this century!
The End of the Book by Porter Shreve
In this novel published by Louisiana State University Press (specifically, its defunct “Yellow Shoe Fiction” line – don’t ask me what that name means), we have a two-track story. One track, set in the present, is about a writer in Chicago who is struggling to balance the demands of art and commerce. The other track, set in the past, is about a writer in Chicago who is struggling to balance the demands of art and commerce. The most novel aspect of this novel is that the second writer is George Willard, the hero of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio – a book I’ve mentioned before. At the end of Anderson’s book, George leaves his native town. Shreve’s book recounts his life in the big city:
When he left Winesburg in spring 1896, George had planned to find a newspaper job, and after that to become a writer. But he’d arrived in the fastest-growing city the world had ever known only to find that this place of a thousand tongues had one universal language: commerce.
A frequent drawback of two-track novels is that one track turns out to be much more interesting than the other. Shreve does pretty well here. Both tracks are interesting enough to keep me absorbed in them without wishing to switch to the other track. But if I had to choose, I would say the Willard track has a slight edge because of its historical interest. Shreve does a great job bringing boomtown Chicago to life, with its vile slaughterhouses, ambitious entrepreneurs, and budding literary scene.
The present-day track deals with a frustrated writer and ex-academic named Adam Clary, who works for a company that’s engaged in a massive project to digitize the world’s books (hence the title). Family drama plays a large part in this section, such drama mainly being furnished by Adam’s dad, a retired scholar of American literature whose life is falling apart. The father, who managed to write one volume of a projected two-volume biography of Sherwood Anderson, also provides the most direct link to the other track of the story.
The End of the Book serves as an imaginative extension of a 20th-century classic, as well as a thoughtful dramatization of the eternal struggle between artistic aspirations and real-world commitments. As is typical in cases like this, I don’t think your reading experience will suffer if you haven’t read Winesburg, Ohio; Shreve fills you in on what you need to know.
Stumbling in the Public Square by James L. Merriner
Full disclosure, I supplied a blurb for this historical novel when it was published by Auctus Publishers in 2023. It was a bit of a surprise how much I enjoyed it, since its subject matter – political corruption – is something I usually find depressing and frustrating to read about. In this case, it helps that the story is set in the 1920s; since the past can’t be fixed, I don’t feel that I’m being ripped off.
One reason the book works is the author’s background. Merriner was a longtime writer and editor for the Chicago Sun-Times, and in that capacity, he wrote several books about corruption in Chicago, in Illinois in general, and in Washington DC. I probably don’t need to tell you that if you’re looking for stories about corruption, these places are hunting grounds that will provide you with an endless supply of game. It’s possible nobody knows more about this sordid topic than Merriner.
Another reason the book works is – somewhat counterintuitively – its central character. That personage is no less than Warren G. Harding, one of America’s least respected presidents, regarded by many historians as the nation’s all-time champion in the corruption sweepstakes. Harding presented a rather bland façade to the world while all kinds of shenanigans were going on behind the scenes. Against the odds, Merriner manages to make Harding somewhat sympathetic. He is portrayed as a man possessing well-meaning instincts, but too weak and compromised to resist and control the vipers that infest his administration. These vipers provide most of the book’s entertainment value. While poor Harding is “stumbling in the public square” (Isaiah 59:14), trying to figure out which way is up, various rogues and scammers (almost all of them real historical figures) are using his administration as a casino to enrich themselves.
The story is told with appropriate attention to period detail. While the novel does indeed feel heavily researched like so many literary novels nowadays, I never got the sense that the author was showing off or dumping information without a clear purpose. I’m tempted to say the book would make a great Netflix miniseries, and why not? Their recent production centered on another obscure president (James Garfield) was highly successful.
In a historical note at the end, Merriner says: “Even after a century of constant political scandals, the corruption of the Harding administration still strains credulity.” Unlike explicitly reformist writers like Upton Sinclair, Merriner doesn’t suggest that there’s a magic bullet for this. Human nature is the ultimate reality here, and it’s something that can only be managed, not cured.
The Ways We Get By by Joe Dornich
This book, a collection of thematically similar short stories published by Black Lawrence Press, made me moderately angry. It’s not the fault of the book, which is mostly excellent. There are other reasons, which I’ll discuss below.
With regard to subject matter, Dornich appears to owe something to George Saunders. Both authors write about sad-sack characters who, usually due to circumstances beyond their control (economic, medical, or other), are forced into absurd situations that make it almost impossible to live in a dignified manner. The cartoon-like worlds they find themselves in are generators of malign and despairing humor, like a circus of crying clowns, which only makes things worse by covering the tragedy with a patina of laughter. Here’s the opening of Dornich’s story “Cry on Command”:
Somber, graceful mourning, with maybe the occasional tear or two, that’s one hundred. We call it a Dry. Hysterical crying, with the wailing and the moaning and the classic rhetorical questions screamed to the heavens – the How could you’s, the Why now’s – that’s going to cost you two-fifty. We call those, and really any tear-related mourning, a Wet.
It’s told from the point of view of a professional mourner at the funerals of strangers; she’s had to master different levels of crying to do the job properly. She used to run a restaurant, but for reasons outside her control, she had to close it down and take any job she could find. Now, she gets paid to mourn for other people – to put on a performance. Gogol spoke of “laughter through tears,” and that’s a good summary of the effect Dornich achieves, in this story as well as others. It’s hilarious, but it hurts.
So why did I say this book made me angry? Let’s go back to that Saunders comparison. I’ve only read one book by Saunders – Pastoralia, widely considered one of his best – and I mostly enjoyed it. But doing a book-to-book comparison, I find that I prefer Dornich. His characters are more relatable, his situations more precisely and plausibly rendered, and he’s funnier. Yet Saunders is only about a million times more famous than Dornich. Saunders publishes with Penguin Random House and gets his stories in The New Yorker and comparable venues, and he’s won a load of prizes. Joe Dornich has published one book, and that was with a small press; its current Amazon sales rank is way down in the millions. It doesn’t seem fair.
It would be nice to believe that the best-quality stuff eventually rises to the top, and maybe it does, but I don’t have space here to open that particular can of worms. You may raise the objection that what we like and dislike is a subjective thing. I’m glad when I can find a hidden gem, and I encourage interested readers to take the Dornich vs. Saunders test and see who wins in your own mind.