Recommendations

Recommendation for Claudia Dey’s Heartbreaker

by Emily Carr

Lately, I’ve been asking writers I respect if they’ve read anything in the last year that they think everyone should read. A book that, given our limited amount of time on this planet, simply Must Be Read—regardless of whether everyone’s going to like it, learn from it, etc. I’ve been asking this question partly because I have an answer: Claudia Dey’s Heartbreaker: a Novel, which broke my heart open in all the right ways.

Why? To explain why I love this novel so much would be reductive: like saying I love my partner because he’s smart, has a good sense of humor, and is willing to clean up after me. These things are true, but as we all know, you can’t quantify love. For the purposes of this recommendation, however, I will attempt to get specific, and list four reasons you should read Heartbreaker. (But before I do: please, please, just read the novel and see for yourself. I promise it will be better that way.)

#1: A recent LitHub article titled “11 Books for Adults Featuring Talking Animals” inspired me to curate a reading list composed of literary fiction that incorporates an animal perspective in a way that’s nuanced, complex, and three-dimensional—novels that let the animals speak for the animal, that get at what Joy Williams really means when she lists “an animal within to give its blessing” as the fourth essential attribute of the story. Claudia Dey’s Heartbreaker was #7 on Lithub’s list; Emily Temple writes: “This novel has three narrators: Pony, a girl; Supernatural, a boy; and Gena Rowlands, Pony’s dog. The three live in the Territory, a place no one leaves—until someone does. It is, as is also true in everyday life, the dog who knows the most about what’s really going on.”

The novel is, indeed, broken into three sections, and told from three perspectives: Billie Jean’s pre-teen daughter, Billie Jean’s dog, and Billie Jean’s teenage lover, who turns out to be her husband’s illegitimate son. The perspectives layer, like a palimpsest or film that’s been exposed twice. We figure out what’s happened—why Billie Jean first fled to and then fled from the Territory—as one perspective builds on another. As Temple explains, the dog’s point of view is crucial, and an important reminder that, while we assume we are alone when spending time with our pets, they are in fact paying attention and we are never, in fact, truly alone.

#2: You might be wondering “what is the Territory?” The Territory refers to the legendary far-northern reaches of Canada, those places you can only reach by driving a hundred miles or so over a frozen lake. The Territory is populated by a cult that settled there in the 1980s. The story takes place as the first generation is exiting middle age; the leader has died (mysteriously, of course); and the cult members have had to improvise to keep the community afloat fiscally (via selling their children’s blood to the outside world). No one comes out. No one comes in. As a consequence, there are plenty of love triangles, love affairs, incest, and illegitimate children. Despite this premise, the people, the place, the compromises, the affairs, and the children have depth and breadth and Dey treats the situation without judgment; she draws us into the community so we can experience it from the inside out.

In a recent Instagram post, Dey writes: “I read many FLDS [Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints] cult survivor accounts when I was writing Heartbreaker. This photograph is from Rachel Jeffs’ ‘Breaking Free.’ The pastel line up of girls, soon to be made wives, under a neutral sun. It is one of the most sinister images I have ever seen. What is left when you are forced to give up your moral and physical agency in the name of God? Lorrie Moore writes: ‘Terrible world. Great sky.’”

#3: My recent reading spree has also, purely incidentally, involved contemporary fiction that focuses on mothers and their estranged daughters, or mothers who estrange their daughters, or mothers who have, with all of the best intentions, done motherhood “wrong,” or mothers who have, without quite meaning to, failed their daughters. I’ve been suffering from work-related stress and indulging in genre fiction, so most of these plots have all of the melodramatic gracelessness of reality television. Most of these mothers were abused, and in turn, become abusers, often of the passive-aggressive sort. Mostly, I (though my own relationship with my mother is, for reasons both personal and systemic, fraught) empathize with these mothers. Mostly, I get angry because I think that reductive narratives of blame and abuse don’t help us daughters, as we try to be both ourselves and mothers in our own rights. Mostly, what I want is story that turns this narrative INSIDE OUT.

The plot of Heartbreaker, for example, hinges on a thirty-three-year old mother who ran away from mostly absent, wealthy parents as a teenager, re-named herself Billie Jean, had a brief but intense love affair with the eighteen-year-old boy Supernatural whose true origins are unbeknownst to her, gets pregnant, has the baby, gives up the baby, deals with some more baby- and lover-related tragedy, and, in utter despair, flees, abandoning her fourteen-year-old daughter, Pony Darlene. (The names! Oh, the beautiful, heartbreaking names!) Later, Billie Jean recounts the story of nearly hitting a bison in the night. “You know the truth when you look into the eyes of something wild,” she concludes.

Despite this technically accurate yet completely misleading and melodramatic summary, Heartbreaker is, in fact, a nuanced exploration of mother-daughter relationships: all of the ways we get it right and get it wrong and have to be willing to start over, again and again.

#4: Advance praise on the dust-jacket of the hardcover includes Leslie Feist, who writes, “I want Van Halen to write the soundtrack and the Coen brothers to make the movie.” Lauren Groff is a “giant fan” of “Claudia Dey’s wild brain” and Sheila Heti says that Heartbreaker gave her “chills all of the way through. “Also,” Rivka Galchen writes, “it has one of the most awesome dogs in literature…”

All of this is true, and all of it is, necessarily, reductive. If I were invited to write an endorsement, I would say, “this novel is for the heartbreakers and the heartbroken, for the new hearts and the old hearts, the hearts we sometimes have to hold together, and the hearts that hold us together. By which I mean: this novel is for EVERYONE. Please read it immediately.”

Emily Carr writes murder mysteries that turn into love poems that are sometimes (by her McSweeney’s editors, for example) called divorce poems. These days, she’s Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the New College. Her newest book, whosoever has let a minotaur enter them, or a sonnet—, is available from McSweeney’s. It inspired a beer of the same name, now available at the Ale Apothecary. Emily’s Tarot romance, Name Your Bird Without a Gun, is forthcoming from Spork. Visit Emily online at www.ifshedrawsadoor.com or on Instagram as ifshedrawsadoor.

Ask the Dust by John Fante
Rebecca Donner
from Post Road 9

It’s not often that someone grabs you by the lapels and tells you that you must, absolutely must read a particular book. Not in my experience anyway. Usually my friends’ recommendations come with their fair share of disclaimers and qualifications, the sort of hedging we all engage in simply because we know that one person’s dog-eared treasure is another’s doorstop. But lapel-grabbing is what a friend recently did to me, and what I’m doing to you now, hoisting you up so only your toes graze the ground, and if your collar rips, so be it—hear me now, goddamnit: You must, absolutely must read Ask the Dust.

John Fante himself would have seized your hair by the roots and repeated the mantra until your eyes goggled, if you happened to be alive in 1939, when the publication of Ask the Dust went virtually unnoticed. Fante had the singular bad luck of being published by Stackpole Sons when the company was being sued for its unauthorized publication of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The Grapes of Wrath, The Big Sleep, and The Day of the Locust were also published that year—tough competition for any novel, especially one released by an obscure publisher on the verge of bankruptcy—and while Steinbeck, Chandler, and West received literary accolades, Fante went on to languish in relative obscurity for forty-odd years, squandering his talent writing hack screenplays. In 1980, Black Sparrow Press brought Ask the Dust back into print, and the 71-year-old author at last achieved some measure of the recognition that was his due. By then, Fante’s diabetes had taken its toll, and he was confined to a wheelchair, blind and legless.

Fante writes from his wounds, his fiction hewing closely to the facts of his own life. Ask the Dust—considered by many (including myself) to be his masterpiece—is the third in his quartet of books about Arturo Bandini, a second-generation Italian immigrant who flees his childhood home in Colorado for the gilded streets of Los Angeles, where he lives in squalor as a struggling writer. Fante’s hand-to-mouth existence during the Depression is vividly described through the eyes of Bandini, staving off hunger in his sordid hotel room with a nickel-bags of oranges. We meet a cast of desperate characters, among them Hellfrick, a drunk in the adjacent room who steals a live calf to sate his rabid desire for meat, and Camilla Lopez, the impoverished Mexican waitress Bandini pines after with a passion verging on madness, who repeatedly spurns his advances unless he insults the dirty huraches on her feet.

Like Céline’s Bardamu, Svevo’s Zeno, or Dostoyevsky’s “Underground Man,” Fante’s literary alter-ego is a stewing cauldron of nihilistic self-absorption, and every bit as memorable. He is given to febrile rants and arias of grief, often switching from first-person to second to a self-aggrandizing third within the space of a page, sometimes a paragraph. When he’s not chastising himself (“You are a coward, Bandini, a traitor to your soul, a feeble liar before your weeping Christ”), he’s indulging in delusions of grandeur (“I stood before the mirror once more, shaking my fist defiantly. Here I am, folks. Take a look at a great writer! Notice my eyes, folks. The eyes of a great writer. Notice my jaw, folks. The jaw of a great writer.”). For all his arrogance, Bandini is an endearing buffoon, and his confessional outpourings are shot through with black humor. Here’s Bandini walking the streets of downtown LA:

I took the steps down Angel’s Flight to Hill Street: a hundred and forty steps, with tight fists, frightened of no man, but scared of the Third Street Tunnel, scared to walk through it—claustrophobia. Scared of high places, too, and of blood, and of earthquakes; otherwise, quite fearless, excepting death, except the fear I’ll scream in a crowd, except the fear of appendicitis, except the fear of heart trouble . . . Otherwise, quite fearless.

The prose has the immediacy and colloquial fluency of the Beats, whom Fante prefigured by over a decade. Charles Bukowski, dogged champion of free-form verse, called Fante “my God,” and was responsible for bringing his work to the attention of Black Sparrow Press. In the preface to Ask the Dust, Bukowski describes the day he discovered the book in the Los Angeles Public Library, carrying it away “like a man who had found gold in the city dump.” Fante, he writes, “was not afraid of emotion. The humor and the pain were intermixed with a superb simplicity . . . [the] book was a wild and enormous miracle to me.”

Fante’s biography is the stuff of literary legend, the kind of story that makes you weep at the injustice of it all. It’s some consolation to know that Fante was buoyed by the attention his work at last received, and spent the last few years of his life dictating a novel to his wife. Dreams from Bunker Hill is the fourth and last in his Bandini series—the others are Wait Until Spring, Bandini; The Road to Los Angeles; and, of course, Ask the Dust. Read them in order, or begin with Ask the Dust, as I did, then devour the other three.

Testing

Lucy Gayheart by Willa Cather
by Mary Morris
from Post Road 8

I came to Willa Cather late. It was odd that she escaped me because as a girl and young woman I read books that grew out of my love of the heartland where I am from. I read Twain, Dreiser, and, of course, Laura Ingalls Wilder, but never Cather. In a sense I believe that books come to us at the right time and that’s how Willa Cather came to me. It wasn’t until I was married and living in New Mexico that I read Death Comes for the Archbishop. I was mesmerized by the gift of her storytelling, the cumulative effect of the narrative delivered with grace and ostensible simplicity.

A few years later when I was teaching at Princeton, I started talking about Cather with a friend who said, “But you haven’t read My Antonia?” It was her favorite book in the world and she told me how lucky I was—to read this book for the first time as a grown-up. I read it as one might listen to a person who is slowly coming to discover a life-long friend. Cather grew on me in that way, but it wasn’t until I caught a small squib in the newspaper that my bond was truly, irrevocably, formed.

A newspaper account said that for years Joanne Woodward had been trying to make a film out of the Cather novella Lucy Gayheart. I’d never heard of Lucy Gayheart, but I went out and got it. I opened it and read these lines:

In Haverford on the Platte, the townspeople still talk of Lucy Gayheart. They do not talk of her a great deal, to be sure; life goes on and we live in the present. But when they do mention her name it is with a gentle glow in the face or the voice, a confidential glance which says: “Yes, you, too, remember?”

I settled into my chair with a cup of tea and my dog at my side, because I knew that someone was going to tell me a story about a person’s life filled with all the tenderness and nostalgia I felt for the Middle West and a childhood I too had left behind. From the moment I began Lucy Gayheart, which opens with a touching, but portentous skating scene and ends with one of the most poignant images in fiction, I knew I had come home.

I found myself for days, living in a parallel universe with Lucy and Harry and the town of Haverford, the corrupting Chicago. The heartbreak of disappointment and mistakes that cannot be made right. Then I read the other short Cather novellas—A Lost Lady and Alexander’s Bridge. But Lucy Gayheart was the turning point for me. I had found my American Chekhov.

I realize I am not the first to feel this way about Willa Cather and I feel somewhat naive as if I am stating the obvious. But Cather came to me at a moment when I needed her. I had forgotten what it was that I loved about writing and being a writer. Why I’d begun this in the first place.

What has drawn me into Cather is the clarity of her uncluttered prose—as vast and lonely as the places she writes about. There are no pyrotechnics of language, no tap dancing turns of phrase. It is language stripped to its essentials; everything exists for the purpose of the story. When people speak of Hemingway and Raymond Carver in terms of clean, clear sentences devoted to the telling of the story I do not know why Cather is not mentioned in the same breath.

I have long been a fan of Midwestern Writers and intrigued by their migratory patterns and by the fact that from afar what they write about most is home. Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dreiser, Twain, Nathaniel West, and, more recently, Baxter, Dybek, Patricia Hampl. Writers of straightforward, no-nonsense prose whose goal is to create characters we care about who live inside a story we want to hear. It is what writers are supposed to do.

We read these writers. And by that I mean we don’t have to ponder them or explicate them or use the dictionary to understand them. We read them as if someone was stoking a fire or sitting on a front stoop and telling us something we had never heard before. We grow patient and the business of our lives comes to a halt as if we’ve got nothing but time and follow the story as if being led by the hand.

Alberto Moravio once said that life is chaos; only literature makes sense. It’s as if someone has come in and straightened up the house. And for me that someone is Willa Cather •

Kurt Vonnegut
by Sheila Heti
from Post Road 14

My friend Misha Glouberman, who is one of the smartest people I know, yet who never reads literature and knows nothing about world politics, and who has in his apartment only self-help books like Loving in Flow and feels no shame about this—he admitted to me this morning, when I went to his place to borrow his girlfriend’s copy of Bluebeard, that though he doesn’t like literature, he has always liked Kurt Vonnegut but is kind of ashamed to admit it.

In theory, I must like reading books, since I am a writer, but usually I find myself in a situation in which I’d like to read a book, but I go to my bookshelf, or I go to the bookstore, and a heavy feeling comes over me. For this pleasure I will have to be patient, is how the feeling goes. I’ll have to meet characters and accompany them into and out of their problems. I’ll have to see the world through their eyes, and what their living room looks like. Their problems I’ll have to experience as my own. And so on.

All these formal barriers! When all I want is something for the train or the plane or the bus or the day that will make me feel as though someone else feels what it’s like to be human. All I’m asking for when I pick up a book is a temporary salve for the human condition! When I am in dire need of a book, I do not want to wade through a bunch of literariness. It is in such moments of urgency that I see with horror that most books fall short of the single mark that matters to me when I step on a bus, or during nights of abject loneliness—for these books are often as self-absorbed and humourless as I am. Useless!

Then last night, don’t ask me how, I suddenly remembered: Oh my god. Kurt Vonnegut. The near hero of my teenage years! And now the near hero of my twenty-ninth year too. If I ever again forget how awesome he is, and how perfectly suited to hold my hand in moments of true desolation, then let my next lover have a virile seed that prevents us from fucking without a condom even during my period.

I know how fashionable it is for a writer today to explain how everything in society functions alongside every other thing—as though we’re not also living in society ourselves, as if the details matter so goddamn much! Oh, the author’s narcissistic desire to have every last detail of modern life reshaped by his subtle touch. But it’s not the painstaking elaborations of the MFA grad we long for in our darkest hours, or when we’re getting on a bus—but the simple help of someone who looks at the world and realises: “God never wrote a good play in his life.” Misha, I direct this at you. Isn’t it better to admit to our books, “Even the simplest things I cannot keep in my head. Even the simplest things I am too stupid to teach myself”?

Tell me, Mr. Vonnegut, that I am bound to people I don’t even like because we are doing God’s work, though we don’t know what it is. When I feel most bad, which is the only time literature matters, because for the other times there are friends—but when you feel the absolute worst, you don’t want to burden friends with your wretchedness.

At my most abject all I want in my hands is the work of a human who feels as much a stranger in this world as me, and who admits, without intensity or guile, When it comes to this unlikely planet, my guess is as good as yours is.