Matt’s Movie Minutes for the Month of January

These minutes be a one-time thing, but it’s award season, so here’s my go at making ridiculous comments on films I’ve seen lately.

• Once: for fans of Irish indie band The Frames, this is your music music music answer to the talk talk talk of Before Sunrise. Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova. Maybe the best musical ever? (No votes for Dancer in the Dark, please.)
• No Country for Old Men: the obvious literary pick for best film of the year. Cormac and the Coens–a new band name? This is one two-hour long bad-ass chase scene. Best movie since last year’s Children of Men.
• I am Legend: Butterflies? What? How did that woman drive in and out of Manhattan when the bridges had all been blown up? Nonsense.
• Enchanted: I said I would never see this one, but sometimes you have to listen to your woman. Good when it’s making fun of itself. Bad when it’s not. That’s two musicals in the last month. I must be going soft. The ending here unravels what could have been a much better movie.
• American Gangster: Would have been better if they let Russell Crowe be more Gladiator, but Denzel pretty much makes up for it. It’s like the charisma show. And who’s got more of it than Denzel Washington?
• Me and You and Everyone We Know: the Miranda July film. Quirky, and just the right amount of talk about poop. Or maybe there should have been more? But I’m getting tired of the ensemble/see-how-all-the-characters-are-connected movies, even when this well-written. I’d rather read her fiction.
• Reign over Me: Why did I see this one? All it made me want to do was buy a motorized scooter. And see a better movie next time.

Seeing all these movies (and more actually, but I’m tired of typing now) is what happens when I’m in Korea with Cathreen and she works until 11 at night. Props to Laura van den Berg, winner of the Dzanc Prize and author of the forthcoming What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us.

This is the fourteenth of a many-part series written by the staff and editors of Fringe Magazine, who will be reviewing books from the Pool as part of the 25 Books Project

Greetings from Korea (insert postcard of neon crosses lighting up the Busan skyline here). I’ve been thinking, probably unsurprisingly, about communication. Maybe it’s that I’ve been reading Joy Williams’s The Quick and the Dead, with its fantastically strange dialogue (review pending), or maybe it’s just the whole idea of two weddings, one Korean and one American, or maybe it’s that I’m revising a story about cannibals that try to stop being cannibals after a little loving contact with a group of Europeans, I don’t know. But communicaton seems all the rage these days.

It’s a strange thing. We read so much fiction by authors who were ostracized in their youths and who write about ostracized characters, yet it seems especially true in stories that people need people to talk to. (Unless you like those stories with only one character–I generally don’t.) This doesn’t necessarily mean people really get to communicate, but it means they’re trying. I re-read Carver’s Cathedral recently, and what struck me about the collection is how much more grace seems offered to the characters than in his earlier stories, and how that grace comes through finding someone to communicate with. I don’t mean to say these stories are better–I actually prefer the earlier ones–but stories like “Fever” and “A Small, Good Thing” allow characters to connect in a way that some of the earlier stories don’t. This seems to give the book a more hopeful take on life.

So, since I’m in a hopeful mood, full of Christmas spirit and eggnog, I think I’ll give my cannibals a chance to connect . . . just before they eat each other. I guess what I meant to talk about was how giving your protagonist someone who will listen to him can be a great thing for fiction, but oh well. Instead, I’ll recommend some recent lit mag releases (shameless plugs and more!): Redivider, MAR, Black Warrior Review’s sad animal issue. Read.

So these days reading slush for Ploughshares and Redivider, as well as working for Fringe, I’m reading a lot of pour-water-over-my-head-to-wake-myself-back-up, clamp-jumper-cables-to-my-nipples-to-wake-me-back-up, boring-as-rust first pages. Lizzie talked about cover letters a gazillion posts ago; I thought I’d do a sequel. Here’s some thoughts on the first 300 words, because really, an editor can tell from page one whether the story is going to be good or not at least 90 percent of the time. So print this out, crumple it up, and eat it–that’s supposed to work for memory. Three simple rules:

1. do something new.
2. start the story arc.
3. write a brilliant sentence.

Why? Because (1) editors are sleepy and they’ve probably already read 20 stories by the time they get to yours, (2) the most tiring thing in the world–more tiring than Thanksgiving–is waiting for a story to begin, and (3) the editor carefully reading your opening sentences should be given a reason to continue doing so. I think if I don’t get two of these three things in the first page, the monster under my bed ends up finishing the story. He likes to eat paper too, but not for memory. He likes it because “it tastes like smart.”

In the Prologue to Strange Pilgrims, Gabriel Garcia Marquez talks about a dream where he goes to his own funeral and sees all his friends there, but when he wants to leave with them, he’s told he’s the only one who can’t go to the after-party. (That’s right, in dreams there are always after-parties.) Well, Marquez relates this being-left-behind to expatriation and isolation. Sounds heady, I know, but as a minority and an adoptee, isolation is all up in my writing’s business, so I thought I’d talk about it. I thought I’d talk about setting as well, so be prepared for the following mess.

So here’s what I’m thinking. Sure, Marquez uses the unfamiliarity of the setting to isolate his characters. Why not? They’re pilgrims, after all. But when they really feel isolated is when they run into things that should be familiar to them but aren’t. Like when the Prez in the opening story runs into people from his home country who lie to him about their motives.

Marquez also uses the ole pathetic fallacy, where the Prez’s thoughts are mirrored by the weather and place. This is okay if you’re going for the magical realism thing. Yet what is it Charles Baxter says about the pathetic fallacy–that a setting can be stronger when it doesn’t rely on the character? I think there’s something damn good to say for that. The character should experience isolation in spite of what’s around him. I’m just saying, it gets a little tiresome to see rain when someone’s sad, sunshine when happy, no one around when the character feels lonely. Why not let your characters feel lonely when they probably shouldn’t? It’s more lonely when you’re sitting next to someone and still feel alone.

Depressing and serious. I’ll try for something more ridiculous in my next post, I promise. Let’s just say my dreams are about dinosaurs and The Paris Review. Don’t ask.

So this is my first blog attempt and I’m assuming it’s going to suck, but stick with me. Good intro, right? Now I’ll talk about what kind of food got stuck in my teeth this morning (cinnamon apple sauce) and my favorite kind of toilet paper (whatever that commercial is with those red bears!)…. I thought that was how blogs worked? You see, I did a little research. Dwight Schrute’s blog is about a time capsule he sent to himself. No, really. I’m actually getting to something literary. Seems to me time’s a pretty mysterious mofo. Heard about this study about how people like to see, in their movie trailers, everything that’s going to happen in the movie? Not original. Flannery was doing that stuff ages ago. See “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” You know damn well they’re going to meet the misfit the moment the grandmother, and then the storeowner, mentions it. Or “A Circle in the Fire.” Fire’s in the title, even, and it’s the protagonist’s greatest fear. What she really pulled off is making us pant with anticipation (that’s right, like a dog) until we get there. Why don’t we see this in a lot of writing today (though, yes, there are exceptions like Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex–on our Best Books List)?

Actually, this isn’t what I wanted to talk about at all. What I wanted to talk about was dialogue subtext. In “A Circle in the Fire” (really one of O’Connor’s fastest moving stories) we’ve got this woman who’s convincing herself the invading boys are only hungry and will soon leave vs. the boys who know exactly what they are doing but pretend to speak politely. The suspense is in waiting for the subtext to come to the surface, for the woman to realize (or let herself realize) what exactly is going on, in opposition to what is being said. That’s a whole lot of suspense, a whole lot more than just wondering what physical action will play out. If you look back at pop culture, you’ll see this at work in shows like Heroes, where characters will have whole conversations full of disparate subtexts, disparate levels of knowledge (though this is probably easier to do when your characters’ identities/super powers are secret). Too heavy? My time capsule would include gay Albus Dumbledore, embryonic research, global warming in a tube, a copy of James Scott’s OneStory, an issue of the latest Redivider, my upcoming issue of Mid-American Review, other shameless plugs, etc. And yours?

This is the fourth of a many-part series written by the staff and editors of Fringe Magazine, who will be reviewing books from the Pool as part of the 25 Books Project.

How could you not love the opening to Chang-rae Lee’s PEN/Hemingway award-winning *Native Speaker,* in which narrator Henry Park’s wife, having decided to take a break from their marriage, leaves him with a note calling him a “B+ student of life… yellow peril… traitor, [and] spy.” Those first two insults are the best (if we’re judging on cruelty and humor) but the latter two end up scuba-diving Henry into the cove of his Korean-American identity. It turns out he *is* a spy, at least by profession, and this theme of spying, of cultural mask-wearing, of between-ness, is at the heart of the novel and of Henry’s shortcomings in life and marriage.

As the novel progresses, we learn about Henry’s job in cultural espionage, going forward in time, while delving into his problematic marriage to beautiful, white, speach-therapist Lelia, going back. Henry’s latest mission involves getting close to political up-and-comer John Kwang and taking notes on his activities for some unknown, but definitely shady, client, using their shared Korean heritage as bait. Henry, it seems, is quite good at his job, as his whole life has prepared him for this sort of obsequious fitting-in. The same characteristics that make him good at his job, however, seem to have annoyed Lelia to the point of her leaving to seek out one or more implied affairs in Europe. Henry’s faults have also been compounded, we learn, by the death of their only son under a pile of neighborhood kids.

While these plots are intertwined beautifully on a thematic level, the marriage does tend to be more engaging in terms of its emotional connection to the reader–even to this reader for whom the themes of the novel hit close to home–because the connection between Lelia and Henry is filled with a type of intimate longing that is lacking in the relationship with John Kwang. Kwang’s political intrigue lends the book forward movement and dramatic tension, but the real key to Henry’s character lies in Lelia, and the key to the book comes from the same deep well of humor and cruel truth as her opening note. In their falling apart and coming together is the clash of race and love and identity and understanding, handled with a prose that, at its best, hits hard and fast and can leave you stopping for breath. It seemed to me, turning the pages, that the times I looked away were when I knew Lee had caught me, returning in my head to the net of words and truths it sometimes hurt to read. No lie.

Matthew Salesses is a Fringe reader and assistant fiction editor at Redivider Journal. Google him. Name your pets after him. Seriously. Read books that matter.