Shhh! I'm Reading.

I don’t put much stock in jacket flak. It’s is the land of abstract nouns and mutual ass kissing. But I only had to read Tom Franklin’s endorsement of Frank Bill’s Crimes in Southern Indiana and I was fully committed: “planning a summer trip north from Mississippi, these stories caused me to reroute to avoid Southern Indiana.” Just as Winter’s Bone inhibits me from taking out that Groupon for the Ozarks, I’m not going to be heading to Southern Indiana any time soon either.

By page 2, the body count is already mounting. Meth addiction, dog fights, rape and premeditated patricide…this is Frank Bill country. It is brutal and sinister but always imminently human. You could draw parallels to Cormac McCarthy or Daniel Woodrell. Maybe a dash of Harry Crews. There is that same unrelenting eye. And as with Woodrell, you come out the other side feeling as though the borders of Indiana were laid down solely so that Frank Bill might one day come to tell the story of its people.

And on that, oh what people he’s given us. We’re talking women named Carol who drive Irocs and guys named Crazy, Pitchfork and Cross-Eyed Chucky. I fell particularly hard for the women in Bill’s stories: young Knee-High fighting for her life in a field after having been sold for prostitution by her grandfather, and Conservation Officer Moon’s estranged wife Ina who, having summoned the courage to leave her emotionally barren marriage, discovers she’s capable of surviving far worse and indeed she does. True, the women in these stories are almost always victimized but they are never passive; they’re wild and fighting and looking for vengeance.

As a short story collection, each set piece works beautifully on its own. They are laser cut, spare worlds unto themselves. Together, there are lovely little crossovers and shifts in perspective that throw earlier narratives into a new life. The shift in vantage points privileges the reader. We often know more than the narrator of a given story and that authorial sleight of hand heightens the discomfort we’re already feeling as we ride shotgun into the asshole of America. 

It would be so easy to write a crime story collection that reduces the people of impoverished, rural America to hill country caricatures. But Bill’s characters are tough as nails prizefighters, rendered with poetry and affection. Easily the best thing I’ve read this year, Frank Bill’s Crimes in Southern Indiana is criminally good writing of the rarest sort. 

(photo via Will139)

There are plenty of ways to imagine the apocalypse. You can go the zombie route; very de rigueur. You can go environmental catastrophe which has a kind of Jerry Bruckheimer bent to it. Let’s see, alien invasion? Unnamed manmade catastrophe. Artificial intelligence takeover a la H.G. Wells. Social-scientific engineering run amok. Rotisseried infants shouldn’t be attempted unless your name is Cormac McCarthy. Plenty of writers have made admirable work of each of these approaches. Colson Whitehead’s recent addition to the canon, Zone One, was particularly worthwhile (and is heartily recommended). 

Something you don’t see all that often however is an end of times narrative that is both totally banal and deadpan funny. Tom Perrotta might be the only writer working today capable of pulling off that heady mashup and his latest novel The Leftovers does not dissapoint. It is both a playful exercise in upsetting the expectations attendant to apocalypse genre fiction and a very personal family drama. And Perrotta delivers his usual one-two-punch of sardonic wit and sentiment (if you’re new to Perrotta I urge you to add Election to your holiday reading stacks as well.)

In Perotta’s hands, the apocalypse / end of days / whatever you want to call it is a kind of Rapturesque event: no one is really sure what happened except to say that a lot of people suddenly disappeared. It is infuriatingly indiscriminate as far as the spiritually inclined are concerned - some right bastards were taken and plenty of godly folk were left behind - and totally boring. There are still mortgages to be paid, classes to attend, groceries to be purchased in legitimate ways. There was no cataclysmic event to mark the moment when people’s loved ones were taken; one minute they were there and the next they just weren’t. There’s a great moment when one of the characters recollects that she went to the kitchen to get some paper towel to clean up her child’s spilled apple juice - annoyed at having conceded to the child’s insistence at drinking in a regular cup rather than a sippy cup - and returned to find the spill waiting for her but her family gone. The book is peppered with such gems, poignant and remorselessly funny in equal measure. 

There’s something peculiar going on with the environments apocalyptically inclined writers are partial to setting their tales in. The alien invasion narrative seems most at home in rural spaces: all the better for crop circles and spaceship landings. The zombiepocalypse is most often an urban affair. Perhaps because you’re more likely to be cornered by a zombie in the back alley of a city than in a cul-de-sac. There’s probably a whole logic having to do with the rapid spread of pathogens in urban environs as well but I’ll leave such speculations to the Walking Dead fans. There are penty of exceptions of course, especially in film. Dawn of the Dead went all suburban mall nightmare to genius effect. Either way, I can recall few examples of a novel about the end of times that was quite so Norman Rockwell Main Street idyll in its setting. Which is a large part of why the novel works so well. It’s so deliciously unthinkable. Apocalypse in Mapleton! How very David Lynch!

Perrotta seems most interested in how it is that we get on with our lives in light of how utterly unforgiving the job of being human is. The rapture is a convenient trope to explore what happens when we become untethered; the choices we would make if we didn’t have to worry about fulfilling the role of wife, mother, brother etc.

Perrotta gives us some of what we would expect of an end of days experience in the various cults that populate the novel: the Barefoot People (a kind of extreme hippy sect with serious issues regarding footwear), the Holy Wayne / Healing Hug Movement (who fall in behind a prophet who starts out as a kind of sincere self-help guru but who goes all David Koresh pretty fast), and the Guilty Remnant who have taken a vow of silence but who follow the citizens of Mapleton around and watch them intently to what end we’re never sure. While cult movements are perhaps a natural offspring of the end of the world, they also serve to answer at least one of the questions this book poses. If we were pulled free of our moorings and if, as any grieving person knows all too well, we couldn’t reclaim what was lost, where would we seek refuge? Daringly, Perrotta suggests that it might not be where those that love us expect us to find it. The lives we’ve chosen, when forced to take stock, might not make sense anymore. 

(photo via A Seattleite in Paris)