Books I Liked in 2010 (Part 2: 2010′s Books)

Posted by Tobias Carroll

And here, following last week’s list, are thoughts on the eight books released in 2010 that affected me the most. If they had anything in common, it’s a tendency to stay lodged in my head, whether by tapping into a relevant anxiety or finding something even more primal to evoke. They all haunted me, in their own way; they still do.

Sam Lipsyte, The Ask
Jami Attenberg, The Melting Season
Here’s my dilemma: what I really want to [...]]]>

Books I Liked in 2010 (Part 2: 2010′s Books)

Posted by Tobias Carroll

And here, following last week’s list, are thoughts on the eight books released in 2010 that affected me the most. If they had anything in common, it’s a tendency to stay lodged in my head, whether by tapping into a relevant anxiety or finding something even more primal to evoke. They all haunted me, in their own way; they still do.

Sam Lipsyte, The Ask
Jami Attenberg, The Melting Season
Here’s my dilemma: what I really want to do is find a non-intrusive way to talk about middle-class economic anxiety and, more specifically, how it looms large in both of these novels, and yet how neither of them feels especially like the sort of social novel in which one might expect to find such things. The Ask is an academic comedy of manners; The Melting Season is about escape and redemption and community. And sections of both are hilarious: Lipsyte’s descriptions of unexpected breastfeeding; Attenberg’s inclusion of one character’s less-than-satisfactory encounter with cosmetic surgery. But as much as I want to volley out the term “comic novel” to describe both, there’s white-knuckle fear to be found in both, and it’s what helps make both resonate long after their stories have come to an end.

Lindsay Hunter, Daddy’s
In all honesty, Daddy’s would be on here even if the book consisted of the story “Kid” — about a sex-obsessed teenager who encounters a pregnant woman in a convenience store parking lot — and 150 blank pages. It’s that good — funny and creepy and oddly life-affirming. Thankfully, the rest of the stories to be found in here are also terrific: transgressive and wise, they shape their own geography.

Grace Krilanovich, The Orange Eats Creeps
A hallucination, a horror story, a travelogue, a chronicle of transgression. Grace Krilanovich’s first novel is indescribable and uniquely tactile and brutally evokes a particular subcultural corner, then spins a whole world from it.

Patrick Somerville, The Universe in Miniature in Miniature
When you chart it out, Patrick Somerville’s second collection (and third book overall) probably shouldn’t work. It blends psychological realism with unabashed homages to pulp fiction, veers into dreams, and shifts tones from the impeccably mannered to the heartrendingly honest. And yet it gets inside your head, coming at you from so many angles it’s near-impossible to resist. It’s a haunting book, and its imagery remains embedded deeply in my mind.

Emma Donoghue, Room
I’m tempted to volley out Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time as a reference point here: both are stunning examples of writers exploring trauma through the perspective of a narrator deeply unqualified to be objective. Where Donoghue excels, however, is in the low-key quality of her plotting: certain images and moments that seem minor towards the start of the novel end up returning with a massive emotional impact by the book’s end. And the voice of Donoghue’s narrator, Jack, is pretty much etched into the back of my brain as of now.

Paul Murray, Skippy Dies
First things first: this book made me laugh harder than anything else I read this year; in particular, there’s one character’s riff on Robert Frost that nearly brought me to tears while riding the subway. It’s also broke my heart at least a half-dozen times. Murray’s plotting and thematic juggling is precise, and he seems at times to be engaged in a race with his characters, a game to see whether they can pinpoint the themes that he raises before he moves on to the next invocation.

Justin Taylor, Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever
In the best of the stories in his debut collection, such as “Estrellas y Rascacielos”, Justin Taylor excels at describing the conflict that emerges between tradition and radicalism — specifically, how one reconciles the two. Alternately, if you’ve ever found yourself wondering about the lack of a correlation between political liberalism/conservatism and artistic liberalism/conservatism, you’ll find plenty of thematic food for thought. Taylor knows punk rock and leads off this book with epigraphs from Shakespeare and Lutz and….he pretty much pulls it off.

Alyssa Knickerbocker, Your Rightful Home
This novella charts the sudden end of a childhood friendship, and the lifelong consequences for one of the friends in question. Over the course of its seventy-odd pages, it hones in on a central question: to what extent are we defined throughout our lives by actions we took before we knew the consequences? And the answers it raises, through cycles and decisions good and bad, are thoroughly heartbreaking.

(Not pictured above: The Ask, as my copy is presently lent out.)

I was shimmering drunk. I was coming from Shabbos dinner at a stranger’s house, and afraid like I always am of opening up, of showing too much of myself to well-meaning but inexorably straight-laced people who were being kind to me—the kind of people who volunteered at the end of Friday night services when the rabbi asks that, if anyone has extra seats at their Shabbos dinner table to please let him know. I’m not the sort of person most of these people want crashing their family meals.

I’m in the Pico-Robertson [...]]]> Meet the Parents
by Matthue Roth

I was shimmering drunk. I was coming from Shabbos dinner at a stranger’s house, and afraid like I always am of opening up, of showing too much of myself to well-meaning but inexorably straight-laced people who were being kind to me—the kind of people who volunteered at the end of Friday night services when the rabbi asks that, if anyone has extra seats at their Shabbos dinner table to please let him know. I’m not the sort of person most of these people want crashing their family meals.

I’m in the Pico-Robertson district of Los Angeles, five blocks east of Beverly Hills. I’m unkempt. I’ve been living on a couch for a month. I don’t even own a suit. But these Jews, these Orthodox Jews, take me in anyway.

They meet me after services, introduced by the rabbi with me standing next to him like I’m helpless, like I need a translator, either that or a wheelchair. They look peaceable and innocent. The husband with a clean-shaven baby face, a paunch rolling out over his belt, covered by a white short-sleeve button-down shirt. He looks pregnant, but it’s a cute sort of pregnant. You know he will be the type of father to pull his own weight with chores and never ignore the kids. The wife has a young face, a pretty face, even though they’re both my parents’ age. She wears a glorious, monolithic pillowcase of a dress, loud purple and yellow paisley, a matching head scarf.

They nod politely when I say I’m a professional poet and they inquire politely how I became Orthodox, because they can tell from the way I look that I sure as sugar didn’t grow up this way. I tell them I just sold a book, and the title sounds like a joke, “Never Mind the Goldbergs” I say, but they recognize the name of the publisher. This gives me a momentary legitimacy—I’m not a bum, I’m really not, I just don’t know many people and the place where I’m staying doesn’t have a kosher kitchen—but how impressed can these people be? I mean, this is Hollywood. Their congregation president has won Emmys. The fact that I wrote a novel about punk-rock Orthodox Jews and somebody actually published it doesn’t make me famous. It makes me one-time lucky, a loser who’s just been asked to prom. Only now, I’m a loser in a tux.

So I drink.

Shabbos dinner, when we feel obliged to talk about the Torah, alcohol gets pulled out of the liquor cabinet and passed around. It makes the pretense of God go down easier. We say l’chaim, which we say means “to life” but really means “to lives,” as a way of wishing each other good health, when really we’re hoping that the drink doesn’t kill us, that we will behave with some amount of honor once it goes to our heads or, failing that, that we won’t remember what went down. What is it about us, a normally tight-assed and mind-your-own-business people, that so inclines us to feeding each other and getting each other trashed? Perhaps it’s an outgrowth of this hospitality toward strangers. Or perhaps it’s just we fear alcoholism, and this is a way to avoid drinking alone.

I sit there looking restless, squeezed next to the candle tray and poking at my food. The husband is talking about the Torah portion that week. It is Vayera, right at the beginning of the Torah, where Hagar left her infant son Ishmael to fend for himself in the desert. There is a meaning, some G-dly point that he is talking toward, but I can’t quiet my mind enough to get there with him. Tiny plastic tokens, black and orange, dangle from candlesticks. They had legs. They are spiders. I flick one of them with my finger.

The table gives a general sort of laugh. That couple and their two sons, white-shirted and black-pantsed, and the family of guests, are all smirking at me. It hadn’t even made a sound.

“You’ve found out our little secret,” says the husband, dropping out of his Torah talk without missing a beat. “It’s Shabbat erev Halloween. We tend to go, uh, a little overboard.”

“Spooky Shabbos,” the smaller of the boys explains to me.

Everybody laughs generously.

The wife pulls herself up in her seat, stiff-lipped. “Are you insinuating that I only hang spiders from my candlesticks on Halloween?” she demands, not unkindly.

“I’ll be right back,” I say.

I wander through the dining room and walk the length of their place. It was as big as a house but it tried to be a mansion, with oversized couches crammed into every room. All I remember is that every piece of furniture and shelf was beige. There were chandeliers that shone rainbows and should have pulverized the rest of the room in color, but didn’t. It was like the beige won.

I stand alone in the living room like a burglar, feeling even more stiflingly awkward than usual. Even when there’s no one watching me. I look at their family pictures. Jealous of the size of their house in the pictures. Jealous of its size in real life. The boys with perfect skin, the girls in their tight but long-sleeved sweaters and big boobs. Jealous especially of the father and his sons all wearing yarmulkes, which just doesn’t seem right in my head. How could they all be religious? I felt like it was always supposed to swing one way or the other. Either the parents don’t know anything or the kids don’t care. I wished for an Orthodox family.

My eyes zoom in on the daughter. She is the oldest, you could tell: shorter than the boys, but more comfortable in her body, I know her. Her name is Rebecca. She lives in New York, in Washington Heights; she went to Shabbos meals at my friend Alej’s house. She wears glasses and had long thick hair as curly and bright as a Hasidic rabbi’s sidelocks. She is out-of-my-league beautiful.

And now that I knew her parents, and that they liked me, I knew that I would never stand a chance with her.

Standing in that living room I felt more lost and pathetic than I had in a while. I was going to live like this forever, a stranger at synagogue, drifting through the houses of kindly strangers. Even if I was rich, or famous—even if my book became a bestseller, and a movie, and it caused half the Jewish population of the continental United States to question why they were living an empty meaningless existence and become Orthodox, I would still be the same person. I would always be the kid who showed up at her parents’ for Shabbos dinner at random. It wasn’t a money thing. It wasn’t even a power thing. It was just being that kid, the one who doesn’t fit into the established schematic of normative Jewish life. I was a charity case. No matter what I did to change that, to these people, I would always be a charity case.

I returned to the dinner table and took my seat. They were just starting to hand out the prayerbooks, singing the song that comes before the prayer after meals. It was the polite way to ask you to leave. It was the holy way.

Matthue Roth is the author of Losers, a novel about Russian Jewish immigrant geeks who take over the world. He lives in Brooklyn and keeps a secret diary at www.matthue.com.

Books I Liked in 2010 (Part 1: Non-2010 Books)

Posted by Tobias Carroll

Reading is a solitary activity. That’s part of the appeal: the isolation, the willingness to be overtaken with plot or characters or information, to allow something else to be evoked and to give it the time to grow, to expand, for another space to surround and immerse us.

And yet. Sometimes, communities can be the best ways to find work that a reader will end up loving. What follows are thoughts on books that impressed me in 2010 but were not [...]]]>

Books I Liked in 2010 (Part 1: Non-2010 Books)

Posted by Tobias Carroll

Reading is a solitary activity. That’s part of the appeal: the isolation, the willingness to be overtaken with plot or characters or information, to allow something else to be evoked and to give it the time to grow, to expand, for another space to surround and immerse us.

And yet. Sometimes, communities can be the best ways to find work that a reader will end up loving. What follows are thoughts on books that impressed me in 2010 but were not originally released this year. I was directed to many of them through social means — some via book groups (I’m presently in three), others via staff recommendations at a quality bookstore. (Credit where credit is due: Brooklyn’s WORD, Manhattan’s McNally Jackson, and Seattle’s Elliott Bay Book Company.)

Reading may be solitary, but the ways in which it can touch on the communal can’t be underestimated.

Javier Marías, Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear
Javier Marías, Your Face Tomorrow: Dance and Dream
Javier Marías, Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow, and Farewell
The single most impressive work I read this year was Javier Marías’s novel in three parts. In many ways, this was a year in which Marías’s work dominated my reading; besides the 1,200 pages of Your Face Tomorrow, I also devoured the collection While the Women are Sleeping; the novella Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico; the novel A Heart so White; and the “anti-novel” Dark Back of Time. Your Face Tomorrow feels like the pinnacle of certain elements of his style: the almost musical summoning of certain themes and images; the horrific momentum that builds and builds over the course of the novel’s plot; the exploration of translation, hyper-awareness, and voyeurism. And the plot here, which explores the legacy of the Spanish Civil War and delves into the invasiveness of our current geopolitical condition, feels brutally, ecstatically relevant.

Nick Harkaway, The Gone-Away World
How intensely readable is Nick Harkaway’s The Gone-Away World? En route home after a wedding in DUMBO in early October, I opted to take the subway over a cab so that I could spend more time with it. It’s the kind of novel for which you put aside many a practical consideration — there’s a terrific rush of ideas, abundant action, and a nicely intricate plot. What makes The Gone-Away World more than simply a fine adventure novel, though, is its thematic handling of friendship and identity. At the heart of things, beneath the post-apocalyptic landscape and Gong Fu and conspiratorial intrigue is a very real inquiry into the lines that blur in certain friendships — of what can occur when your own identity is deeply tied to someone close to you. Without this at its center, The Gone-Away World would still be a terrific read; the fact that it’s there, however, makes this a winner on all fronts: its thrills are numerous and genuine, but its emotional heft is what resonates in your soul long after it’s been read.

John D’Agata, Halls of Fame
John D’Agata’s essay collection Halls of Fame is a structurally bold and emotionally resonant work. D’Agata here has the ability to be innovative in his construction of pieces — sometimes exploring the unfamiliar, sometimes making the familiar foreign — without losing the emotionally resonant heart at their center. Also recommended is About a Mountain, in which D’Agata dissects Las Vegas, exploring topics such as the city’s urgent modernity and the impossibility of envisioning certain quantities of time. D’Agata’s essays help us to recognize the impossible and the plausible.

Jessica Mitford, Hons and Rebels
Jessica Mitford’s memoir of growing up between two world wars is at once a portrait of an unconventional family, the charting of the development of a political consciousness, and a love story that overwhelms. It’s charming, disarmingly funny in places, and incredibly moving in others.

Don Carpenter, Hard Rain Falling
I don’t entirely know how best to introduce this book. It might be enough to say that the effect of reading it was not unlike a steady series of punches to the gut, or that it touches on issues of race and class without feeling like a novel self-consciously wrestling with Weighty Themes. It’s a haunting, haunted novel, and the way in which it zig-zags across years, its characters’ fortunes waxing and waning unexpectedly, feels terrifyingly true-to-life.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Beautiful Struggle
I’ve been an admirer of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s work for The Atlantic since he started writing for them a few years ago. He’s a fine reporter and a comprehensive essayist, and the blog that he maintains for them covers everything from little-covered areas of the Civil War to late-80s hip-hop to online role-playing games. The Beautiful Struggle is his memoir of coming of age in Baltimore; it’s smart, funny, politically resonant, and boasts an abundance of left-field nerd-friendly references.

Patricia Highsmith, The Tremor of Forgery
The Tremor of Forgery is an elusive novel. Its premise — a writer isolates himself in Tunisia in order to work on a screenplay even as a series of unexplained and upsetting dispatches arrive from back home — suggest tides of violence waiting for a trigger. And while there is one act of violence here, its end result and consequences are left hauntingly ambiguous. In fact, most of the novel forms a sort of case study of ambiguity, in myriad forms — geographic, sexual, and political.

2010 was also the year that I first encountered the work of Flann O’Brien and Muriel Spark. I suspect that, a year from now, their names will feature prominently on my “favorite non-2011 reads of 2011″ list. In the case of Ms. Spark, I would also highly recommend Maud Newton’s take on her Memento Mori over at The Millions’ essential A Year in Reading.

I also read Ulysses for the first time. To say that I was left reeling would be an understatement. That said, listing it here feels a bit odd — something akin to talking about this great band you just heard, capable of writing simple, immediately-catchy pop songs and more ambitious work. “Great! What’s their name?” you might ask. “The Beatles!” would be the enthusiastic answer, and the obvious would be stated. But, yes: it’s almost unsettling to read a book whose influence courses through so much of the literature that’s followed it. Yet it’s singular enough that reading it never ceased to be exciting; it never felt like a historical exercise; instead, it was thoroughly, unpredictably, thrillingly alive.

(Note: The Beautiful Struggle is not pictured above because, well, my copy is currently being lent out.)

Susan and Michael had a good marriage, for some time. But one day, after things had become stiff and passive aggressive, Michael got down on one knee and asked Susan if she would like to divorce him. She never thought he’d ask, she told him, though she had hoped, and they decided to get divorced on the first day of autumn.

Of course a divorce takes a lot of planning. They felt lucky they had good lawyers and no children. In May they sent out “Save the Date” notices to their friends and [...]]]> The Divorce Party
by Deenah Vollmer

Susan and Michael had a good marriage, for some time. But one day, after things had become stiff and passive aggressive, Michael got down on one knee and asked Susan if she would like to divorce him. She never thought he’d ask, she told him, though she had hoped, and they decided to get divorced on the first day of autumn.

Of course a divorce takes a lot of planning. They felt lucky they had good lawyers and no children. In May they sent out “Save the Date” notices to their friends and family. In June they booked a banquet hall and a band. In July Susan purchased a sexy black cocktail dress and in August they found a suitable caterer and flower arrangements. In September they had a pre-party–a last salute to lackluster couplehood–with their closest married friends: a dinner party followed by Scrabble. After a dispute of whether Susan could play the two-letter word “Aa” even though she didn’t know what it was—it’s a Hawaiian type of lava, Michael knew but refused to tell her—they went to bed together, stiffly and passive aggressively, for one of the last times. It wasn’t great and they both felt relieved that they would no longer have to pretend they weren’t sleeping with other people.

Still, Susan and Michael enjoyed their last weeks of marriage and felt sad about the things they would miss, like half of their belongings. They set up a registry, two registries actually. Hers included a food processor, a flat-screen TV, and a Nintendo Wii because he would be keeping those things. His included high quality Tupperware, an ab roller, and an espresso maker because she would be keeping those.

Friends and family came to the divorce and sat on appropriate sides of the rented chapel, his or hers. Many couples sat separately to show their alignment. Most people knew immediately where to sit, but a few deliberated for a moment and then chose. Michael’s best friend Arnold, for example, eventually decided to sit on Susan’s side because he wanted to go home with her that night. “Bros before hos” was not a slogan at the divorce party. Guests brought gifts accordingly, many from the registry, but sex toys, memberships to online dating sites, and strip club gift certificates were also in tow. The cards said, “So you’re single…” and when opened, “Let’s mingle!” or they said, “If at first you don’t succeed…”

At the ceremony Susan and Michael said their vows. Susan, her hair in tight curls and her eyelids aflutter, began, “It’s been great, but, you know.” Michael, sucking in his I’m-not-even-trying beer gut, began with a Groucho Marx joke. “I’ve had a wonderful time, but this wasn’t it.” People laughed because they knew it was true. Their quirky friend “Bobo,” whom they had asked to officiate the ceremony, told Susan to take the ring off Michael’s finger and then told Michael to take the ring off Susan’s finger. They threw the rings into a silver urn, which would be sent off to be melted and sold and the profits would be split evenly. Then Bobo told them to shake hands and they did so with gusto, each admiring the empty spot on his/her own ring finger.

The party was a great racket. Close friends gave toasts saying they knew this wouldn’t last and were surprised it lasted as long as it did. People laughed. People cried too. And, as often happens at divorce parties, people drank too much. This led some couples to contemplate their own break ups, in not so subtle ways. The band played “Different Drum” and “These Boots Are Made For Walking.” Susan danced with Michael’s best friend Arnold; she had spotted him on her side of the chapel and felt flattered. Michael danced with Susan’s sister Shelly because he had been sleeping with her for four years. The lawyers, who had also been invited, danced the hardest.

A car waited to take Susan and Arnold to a special hotel suite and another car waited to take Michael and Shelly to a different one across town. Everyone waved as the cars drove off. The air was charged with possibility and the promise of something new.

In which several Vol.1 editors discuss what they’re currently reading (and, in some cases listening to, watching, drinking, and eating.)

Nick Curley
A dark and lonely place: thirty pages into three different books.  How does this happen?  Blame it on the chilly air striking frenzy into my heart.

Of the three, I’m most likely first finish Mark Harris’ Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood (Penguin, 2008).  It’s the shortest and non-fiction, which I always get through quicker than novels. Different tone altogether than Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: Harris’ is less quote-heavy, with less [...]]]>

In which several Vol.1 editors discuss what they’re currently reading (and, in some cases listening to, watching, drinking, and eating.)

Nick Curley
A dark and lonely place: thirty pages into three different books.  How does this happen?  Blame it on the chilly air striking frenzy into my heart.

Of the three, I’m most likely first finish Mark Harris’ Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood (Penguin, 2008).  It’s the shortest and non-fiction, which I always get through quicker than novels. Different tone altogether than Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: Harris’ is less quote-heavy, with less gossip and greater interest in film theory.  This leads to some tenuous comparisons between the French New Wave and everyone else, but so far this is a new, insightful take on a well-worn topic.

After reading some amazing David Foster Wallace essays and hearing his outstanding archived radio interviews, it seemed time to take up his great monolith.  A friend who’d recently started it decided it had too much tennis for her taste, and gave me her copy.  The cover of her San Francisco used bookstore first edition hardcover of Infinite Jest looks, quite understandably, like a 1995 screensaver, or what greeted you on Netscape.  In an effort to not be the fifty thousandth loser on the Internet to prattle on about this book without having really read it, I need to get deeper in and make substantial progress before I start in with the grand pontification.  It is something that can be written about in mid-read, as if reporting from the trenches.

Was given a copy of Franzen’s Freedom as an early gift.  Why its cover also looks like a 1995 screensaver is a far bigger mystery, though Franzen has said that much of it was written with DFW on his mind, while gobbing Wallace’s fave brand of chewing tobacco in memoriam.  So far I’m getting introduced to a lot of characters, and the strings are showing, but the character of teenage son Joey has the potential to hit Chip Lambert’s levels of intrigue.

December distractions keeping me from all of these titles: realizing I can still read Hipinion without being a registered user; Black Swan and The King’s Speech; winter curries, soups, and pho; new records from Kanye, Frankie Rose, and Greg Cartwright; 30 Rock on Netflix and Hulu; latkes; morning flurries; holiday parties where the wine flows like wine; the merriment of children.

Tobias Carroll
I’ve just finished reading Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. Like her earlier The Keep, it’s structured in a way that shouldn’t really work and yet does: The novel jumps around in time over the course of forty years, shifting from third person narration to occasional sections written in the first person (and one memorable use of the second person). There are at least three characters here who could easily carry a novel of this length entirely on their own, and Egan gets her details right, whether her setting is the Bay Area punk scene circa 1979 or NYU in the mid-90s. And she’s able to both pull off a section written as a PowerPoint presentation and make it the novel’s emotional center.

As this choice might indicate, it’s now the time of the year when I attempt to catch up on assorted acclaimed novels of 2010; as of this writing, I’ve just begun Paul Murray’s Skippy Dies; recently completed Tom McCarthy’s C, and plan to read Joshua Cohen’s Witz before the year is over.

Jason Diamond
I’ve been on a Don DeLillo kick and I don’t think I even realized that until I began typing this.  I just read White Noise for the first time since high school for no real reason whatsoever.  I definitely appreciated the book far more than when I was sixteen, but it was funniest to see the reactions of strangers when they saw the book I was carrying.  At least three commented, “oh, Don DeLillo, I LOVE Underworld!”  One of the people was sitting next to me at a coffee shop, another was on the train, and the third was this woman on a plane ride who had a really rambunctious four-year-old.  I don’t think I’ve had a random stranger ask me about my book since the time a Hasid asked me what The End of The Jews by Adam Mansbach was about.The inadvertent DeLillo kick continued when I picked up this newest issue of Harper’s, which has a story, by Mr. DeLillo.  Hammer and Sickle is about life in a white collar prison.  I think I like it.

Also read two novellas this week.  The first was Lore Segal’s Lucinella — which is part of the Melville House “Art of the Novella” series, and also Diamond as Big as the Ritz by Fitzgerald.  I read both of those drinking really good bourbon I bought on sale.

by Tobias Carroll

My hometown was not designed to be walked through. The characteristics of the towns in which my parents came of age seem archetypal now, but alien to a younger version of me: sidewalks, stores within walking distance, a general sense of accessibility running throughout the community. The neighborhood in which I grew up has no sidewalks; just wide suburban roads with a span hopefully allowing cars to pass one another with room for walkers or runners on either side. I didn’t become used to walking longer distances until college, [...]]]> Walking Bookstores and Bars: Red Bank, Late November

by Tobias Carroll

My hometown was not designed to be walked through. The characteristics of the towns in which my parents came of age seem archetypal now, but alien to a younger version of me: sidewalks, stores within walking distance, a general sense of accessibility running throughout the community. The neighborhood in which I grew up has no sidewalks; just wide suburban roads with a span hopefully allowing cars to pass one another with room for walkers or runners on either side. I didn’t become used to walking longer distances until college, and now it’s something of a compulsion: on a visit to Seattle earlier this year, I made a miles-long trip from my hotel to Capitol Hill and back twice in the span of one day. It seemed like the easiest thing to do.

Next to my hometown is a town called Red Bank, a name that’s likely familiar if you’ve seen the film Chasing Amy or — and this might be more of a stretch — listened to the band Monster Magnet, whose frontman once worked the front counter in a comic book store long since shuttered. Red Bank has a downtown, has a music shop and a couple of bars and — this was news to me — an Urban Outfitters, down the street from a tuxedo shop I’d last visited at the age of eighteen. I’d had an idea circulating for the better part of a year: I wanted to walk the streets of Red Bank for a while, to look back at places that I used to frequent, to see what had become of storefronts and shop windows I once knew by heart.

I also wanted to see what new places had arisen since I’d last gone wandering there. Via Word Riot’s Jackie Corley, I’d heard of a reading series now held in Red Bank, and the process of looking into that gave me some new spaces to investigate. This walk would have a literary component because many of my memories of trips to Red Bank end with trips home, reading material in hand. And so, on a Friday in late November, I borrowed my dad’s car for a few hours, drove down Shrewsbury Avenue, and parked next to the train station.

My first stop was the Frank Talk Art Bistro and Bookstore, which I’d heard about in the context of the River Read Reading Series. They were closed when I approached the store, but in the windows I saw a selection of literary magazines along with titles from James Baldwin and Jonathan Franzen. I walked further north, past the building that once housed the AAUW Used Book Sale, where I spent many a Saturday losing myself in dusty shelves of 70s science fiction paperbacks and paperback collections of comics from MAD magazine. Said book sale — now held in Middletown, to the north — was one of a few places in which I started working my way towards the areas of interest that I still call home. Alternately: never underestimate the role of a used bookstore in the nascent years of a young nerd.

Even so, the Used Book Sale was always the most esoteric of the three used book shops that I visited in Red Bank — the shelves high and imposing and industrial, the books disparate in age and condition, the range of titles on hand spanning genres and areas of interest. Memory tells me that I was ten, eleven, twelve years ago when I was there. Most of the books on display seemed alien to me then, out of the realm of my general interest — not science fiction or fantasy or comics, and so irrelevant.

Across the street from the train station, I walked briefly into Novel Teas, which (I later learned) now serves as the home for the River Read series. If I’d brought along the novel I was reading at the time (Adam Levin’s The Instructions), I would have gladly sat there for a while, drinking coffee or tea and making my way through the book. As it was, I bought a couple of small pecan rolls for my parents, walked back to the car, and made my way to a parking lot near Red Bank’s small movie theater.

I parked in sight of a bar called The Dublin House, one of the few constants in my time spent in Red Bank. Their upstairs level was once a coffee house, and in high school I’d gather there with friends — sometimes to hear music played, sometimes just for coffee. In more recent years, it became a regular spot to get a low-key pint and, occasionally, stare at the television sets behind the bar, unsure of what the sport we were watching actually was. (Gaelic football, it turned out.) Across the street from the Dublin House sat a New Age shop. I remembered a bookstore having been in its vicinity when I was in middle and high school, but I couldn’t remember the specific address. Had the bookstore shifted its focus, changed its name and appearance? Or was I looking in the wrong place, at the wrong storefront? I crossed the street and walked past a few windows, looking up at archways and trying to find something that triggered a memory, that brought back recall of a younger me, standing there and waiting to go inside. Nothing came to mind; blame it on the vagueness of memory, or — more charitably — some structural remodeling.

From there, I walked to Broad Street, perpendicular to White. Twenty years earlier, there had been a used bookstore on that corner, Twice Sold Tales, with a copious science fiction section and bookmarks that still turn up on shelves at my parents’ home. Twice Sold Tales was a shop I would generally visit with my mother in tow, or possibly vice versa. It existed before I was old enough to drive, and my trips there were never made alone. I would walk through the door and to the left, up a short flight of stairs and — nascent nerd, remember — stand in front of their science fiction section to see what was new on the shelves. There would be brief forays into the horror section beside it, and to the general fiction section on the opposite side of the shelves, but by and large, my take on the store came from one section and one section alone.

A block and a half away was the former site of The Book Pit, a used bookstore that opened, I believe, around the time I left for college in 1995. By contrast, this was a store I generally visited alone, under my own power, or sometimes with likeminded friends. There were stacks of books on the floor, resting against already-crowded shelves, and by this point, most of the store’s sections held work of interest. Their selection was broad, and I can remember seeking out everything from Neil Gaiman-penned graphic novels (specifically, a trifecta of Sandman collections) to George Pelecanos’s The Big Blowdown.

There was a stop I wanted to make outside of Red Bank before the afternoon was over — a bookstore to the east — and I knew that my time for wandering was winding down. I wandered into Jack’s on Broad Street, a cavernous space covering both the musical-instrument and recorded-music sides of things. I walked up and down the aisles, looking at CD section dividers and an impressive selection of vinyl. (Their buyer is, I daresay, quite fond of the wares offered by Sacred Bones Records; looking at Moon Duo records in Monmouth County made me just a bit homesick.)

Steve Earle’s “Copperhead Road” was playing as I noted the store’s Built to Spill/Caustic Resin/Doug Martsch section.  It seemed tailor-made to indie rock fans of a certain age — an age that is not dissimilar to my own. A thought crossed my mind: “If I lived here, this would totally be where I’d shop for music.” It’s a thought that I’ve also had in record stores in Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, and Chicago. As I stood there in a record store five minutes from the house in which I grew up, I realized that I no longer felt much claim to the region. I was walking through Red Bank as though I might walk through any city that I visit every couple of years, finding spaces that looked intriguing, mapping out what a life living there would be like; finding places where I might be a regular. Standing in a record store one town away from my hometown, I realized that I felt like a tourist. Maybe it was inevitable; maybe, after so many years gone and no plans to return, the time for it was right.

Coda
I left Red Bank and drove two miles east to River Road Books in Fair Haven. I parked down the street and walked inside, paging through fiction, looking in their YA section for Paolo Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker, eyeing Amis and Waugh in their classics section, and settling on Zadie Smith’s essay collection Changing My Mind. I walked out onto the street with the book under my arm and walked back to the car, past cafe tables on the corner and piles of leaves at my feet. The familiarity may have passed, but it was a fine autumn day; there was a book in my hand and a chill in the air. And, for that short walk, where I happened to be was irrelevant.

Interview by Tobias Carroll

Last month, I reviewed The Universe in Miniature in Miniature, Patrick Somerville’s second collection (following Trouble) and third book overall. Since then, The Universe in Miniature in Miniature has been getting inside my head — its use of dreamlike logic, wrenching situations, and thoroughly flawed characters combined to create a bold and resonant whole. (It shares an unconventional use of science-fictional images and devices with Charles Yu’s fine How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe; the two would make for an interesting pairing, I suspect.)

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