I am of two minds about Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers, which is fitting, because the Sisters brothers are of two minds about their life’s work. Charlie and Eli are cowboy thugs, the kind of gunslinging henchmen who shoot innocent townsfolk at their boss’s command. Charlie has always enjoyed the brutality that their work requires, while Eli just goes along with it, hoping to protect his brother. The year is 1851. The Sisters brothers are riding into the California Gold Rush for one last murder.

The Charlie Sisters in me slams a gold nugget on the counter and demands to be entertained with pistol fights, clever banter, and pratfalls; with frontier whores, mad scientists, and haggard trappers “speaking through their dirty beards.” And by God, this book delivers. The Sisters Brothers takes the language of pulpy westerns and elevates it to a beautiful picaresque, a revisionist cowboy noir told in quick, snappy chapters. “A rooster stood before me in the road, looking for a fight; I tipped my hat to him and he scooted away over the puddles, all brawn and feathers and brainlessness.”

But the Eli Sisters in me doesn’t quite see what the book is trying to accomplish. We already have the Border trilogy, Deadwood, and the hilarious nihilism of The Oregon Trail. We already have the genre-busting western madcap that The Sisters Brothers wants to be—it’s called Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, and it was written by Ishmael Reed way back in 1969. The Eli Sisters in me plops down in a rickety saloon chair and wonders why a book so scattershot and overly familiar was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize; why it won the Tournament of Books.

My only answer for Eli is that in addition to its whip-smart cowboy chatter, The Sisters Brothers offers fresh proof that violence is inherently ridiculous. A man takes a spoon to a horse’s eye, and the eye pops out, “huge, nude, glistening, and ridiculous.” Another man is repeatedly pistol-whipped until his face becomes slick with blood. “He stuck out his lower lip and was attempting a show of bravery, but he looked ridiculous, like something in a butcher’s display, blood running down his chin and neck, soaking into his collar.” Violence and comedy are closely related, like brothers. In the end, Charlie and Eli abandon violence, but not comedy: They move back in with their mother.

- Brian Hurley

J. M. Ledgard was born in the Shetland Islands. His first novel was Giraffe. He is a thinker on risk and technology in Africa and a political and war correspondent for The Economist.

As a correspondent for The Economist you belong to a rich tradition of journalists-turned-novelists. Do you find that your role models as a novelist tend to have backgrounds in journalism, too?

No. I am a hack and loyal to hacks, but hacks are not particularly interesting for literature; journalists fire arrows which pierce only the present and are crudely barbed to the past. I am averse to self-celebration among hacks, of the kind seen on television networks, as if they are stars. In Submergence, my main characters are a spy and a scientist—two fields which are more enduring and suited to reflection and perspective.

In Submergence you write about African jihadist fighters. Where do you find the empathy, as a writer, to depict people whose aims are so different from you own?

Everyone is human, and inhumane humans are more so than humane humans. Zealots are very different from me and from you, and sometimes repulsive in their brutality, and their paradises must always be stillborn, but nevertheless there are many points of contact. When I was sent to Afghanistan after 9/11 for a year or so, I met with an intelligence officer who dismissed the terrorists as “puerile”. He went on to explain his view that most Al-Qaeda operatives joined the jihad because they were younger brothers not able to get married: They blew themselves up because they couldn’t get blown in other ways. At the time, I found this point of view unfathomable, but as I spent more time tracking Al-Qaeda operatives and (in a limited way) assessing them, I came to see it was much closer to the truth than many more complicated explanations. Men, and it is often men, want to have their principality, and to dominate this small land sexually and physically. Besides, the jihadists are not immune from crises of faith, or from commonplace enthusiasms for soccer, film and the rest. There was a jihadist commander I interviewed in South Somalia. He was a very hard man, in other circumstances he might have considered decapitating me, but when I met him he sat under a tree stroking a dik-dik, which is a kind of dwarf antelope found in drier bits of eastern Africa. Now dik-diks are usually shy and nervous, they bolt at the slightest shadow, their lives are lived in fear. But this little dik-dik was like a child next to the commander; he stroked it and it demanded to be stroked. He explained that when his men had been living in the bush to escape being hunted down from the air by the Ethiopians and their allies, they had killed a dik-dik for meat. It was a female dik-dik and when they slaughtered it the unborn calf came out of the womb alive and walked. The commander took this as a sign from Allah and adopted the calf; it became attached to him; it was in a sense his child. By which I mean to say, everyone is more explicable and multifaceted than they would prefer to be.

The main characters in Submergence are on radically different journeys—one is a British spy being tortured by Somali fighters, the other is a biomathematician studying the bottom of the ocean—but they are linked by a love affair. Is this more than a plot device? Do you mean to suggest that love is somehow the answer?

Well, regardless of our religious or atheistic beliefs, this reality we have in common is mysterious. Our consciousness is born out of nothingness, it dies into the unknown, and so very quickly, and our lives bookended thus are necessarily contrary. On the one hand in the cosmic time and space we are by a factor of ten to the fourteen, say, less significant to the solar system than the shortest lived fruit fly is significant to us. We are almost nothing. Yet, we are everything to ourselves. This is what I wanted to explore in Submergence. The spy, James, is living in the moment, captured, brutalised, becoming more animal in the hot dark and with every kicking. The scientist, Danny, she has a vertiginous sense of another world in our world which resides on the ocean floor in the absolute darkness, a chemosynthetic life which far outweighs life on the surface of the world, which has been stable in evolutionary terms for a billion years, whereas we homo sapiens are so fragile it is not clear that we will make it as a species. But yet, we live these few days, and the very shortness of our span, if we manage to acknowledge it, makes choice more precious, every yes and no; love is the most powerful choice of all these because it implies an attempt at union. Love is no kind of answer, but it is the most meaningful response.

The Fall of the Rebel Angels by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, which is discussed in Submergence

You’ve said that you consider Submergence to be an example of “planetary writing.” (There’s a line that I loved: “Oh, the scale of things was planetary for him then.”) Could you elaborate on what you see as the writer’s obligations and opportunities with respect to the state of the planet?

Thanks, and what a tremendous question. I have been really fortunate to have travelled geographically, and also from the apex of power down to the bottom, and what those travels have led me to believe, is that we are living in a moment of maximum acceleration. If you prefer to render it visually, we are in a clapped-out VW Beetle, our foot on the floor, the steering wheel loose, the brakes with no bite, and we are trying to make it down a mountain pass, and, oh, it’s a gravel road. We are not talking about the precision instrumentation of Iron Man. The human population of Africa is doubling. The ratio of African youth to European youth will rise from 2.2 to 1 now to 4 to 1 by 2025. Stand back for a moment, wherever you are reading this, and imagine the political, economic, cultural and environmental implications of just that change in the world. We are entering a post-industrial age which will lack jobs and meaningful lives—we can talk about Zygmunt Bauman’s Wasted Lives, the infrastructure of bridges and sewers falling apart in some western countries, climate change will have an effect as will the rising competition for water and food, the seasons and the journeys of birds are not something that are paramount to human experience anymore, we are apparently indifferent to the destruction of habitat and the annihilation of species, so my belief is that literature must have a voice in understanding and locating ourselves in the acceleration. If as novelists we don’t have much to say about this scale of change on our place, then we reduce ourselves to entertainers and escapologists from reality. I feel that is a bitter loss, because literature is sometimes enduring and instructive for those yet to come.

Can you give us any hints about your next book?

I can say that I managed to wander across an uninhabited bit of South Sudan recently. No roads, no villages, no shelter; a world untouched by humans, yet so alive with beasts and birds. That will be my starting point.

- Brian Hurley

Fiction Advocate Art Director and award winning designer Matt Tanner is featured this week in a New York Times slide show about the process of book jacket design. Matt talks through his process and the various iterations of a recent project, the first draft of which appears above. View the slideshow to see the final design.

As always, Matt’s work is incredible and thoughtful, and we’re just proud to know him. Check out more of his awesome work in the Fiction Advocate store, where you can pick up a whole slew of books featuring his excellent covers.

- Michael Moats

]]> http://fictionadvocate.com/2013/05/14/my-boy-does-wicked-art/feed/ 0 michaelmoats WiseMen http://fictionadvocate.com/2013/05/13/early-american-pastoral/ http://fictionadvocate.com/2013/05/13/early-american-pastoral/#comments Mon, 13 May 2013 13:00:46 +0000 Brian http://fictionadvocate.com/?p=5620 Continue reading →]]>

Pamphlets like Thomas Paine’s Common Sense sparked the American Revolution, so it’s fitting that a pamphlet should rekindle our sense of patriotism. The second issue of the New Directions Poetry Pamphlet series features a diptych of American poems unearthed and reassembled by Lydia Davis and Eliot Weinberger.

Davis offers a retelling of the diary of Sidney Brooks, her great-great-great uncle, who lived in the village of Harwich on Cape Cod in the early 1800s. With its anthropological attention to the landscape and its people, Davis’s poem could serve as an origin myth for America.

When the immense glaciers

transported from the north

the material that forms the surface of our peninsula

and the stranded icebergs

gave rise to the currents and eddies

that piled up our hills and scooped out our valleys,

there was formed that miniature plateau,

half a mile long,

lying east and west on the sunny side of Harwich,

overlooking the sea

and sheltered from the north by the interminable forest,

which is now the site of our village.

As a diarist Brooks is remarkably attuned to the land itself—the shape of a farm, the distance from a house to the town, the weather in a given year. Davis finds ample poetry in his accounts of “Grandfather’s cattle” and the death of “Little Sidney,” an older brother who died in infancy.

we took our first lessons in astronomy

by observing the transit of the stars

through the telescope of the sooty chimney.

If the Harwich of Davis’s poem is an idyllic place, with sunlight raking the fields and children crawling in the attic rafters, this is Brooks’ fault. Reflecting on his childhood near the end of the century, he can’t help but sound nostalgic. Davis makes a canny choice to revive such a sentimental document. Depicting an American Eden that had already vanished when it was first written about, over a hundred years ago, she suggests that paradise is not impossible, but it’s always in the past.

Weinberger mines a different vein in the same historical era—John Wesley Powell’s exploration of the American West in 1869, which included the first successful trip down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. He assembles his poem using “found” diary entries as well as Old Testament verses, hymns, Negro spirituals, even a bravura passage from Robert Southey’s “The Cataract of Lodore”—anything that might have been on the tongues of the explorers themselves.

Though in a bare and rugged way,

through devious, lonely wilds I stray

Bad rapids. Bradley is knocked over the side; his foot catches under the seat and he is dragged, head under water. Camped on a sand beach, the wind blows a hurricane. Sand piles over us like snow-drift.

As Powell’s expedition moves across this “unstable land,” Weinberger shows a war of attrition between the beleaguered explorers and the awesome desert riverscape. It’s hard to choose which side to root for. By journey’s end the men are hardened but uplifted. Having woven themselves into the fabric of the epic texts that have been on their minds, they seem astounded and thrilled to be alive.

Both poets remind us that American history is rich with material for contemporary artists, and that the seeds of patriotism are simple and enduring—a patch of land, a handful of human beings. But like all good patriots, they have their disagreements. Davis reveres the American landscape for all that it gives us. Weinberger reveres it for what it challenges us to become.

- Brian Hurley

Slate’s Dan Kois picks his winners in the latest edition of the Critical Hit Awards.

Electric Literature: If your reviews carried no identifying marks—no Slate logo, no byline—would a reader be able to guess that they came from the Slate Book Review? Should they be able to?

Dan Kois: Every review I edit contains hidden within its text the name of my daughter, Nina.

Electric Literature: ‘Critical Hit Awards’ is really just an anagram for ‘Rad Satirical Witch’. What kind of editorial balance do you try to bring to the Slate Book Review overall? Balance between what and what?

Dan Kois: I’m looking to achieve a balance between old and new books; books from big houses and books from small ones; traditional reviewy reviews and critical essays that use the book as a diving board. And I want a balance of fun books and serious books and great books and not-so-great books.

Electric Literature: You have reviewed books, movies, graphic novels, and music. There’s a guy at The Awl who reviews the weather and a guy at The Rumpus who reviews the world. Is there anything that can’t be reviewed? Anything that you would not review?

Dan Kois: I imagine anything can be reviewed. When was the last time your fellow human beings didn’t have an opinion about something?

Read the full Q&A and check out Dan’s winners here.

- Brian Hurley

Click to view full size.

Book covers are from Hard Times by Charles Dickens and Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë.

Back issues: 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

- Brian Hurley

TheGlossary.com has created the best presentation of it you’re likely to ever see:

.
Watch it today, and it will brighten your time in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence.

- Michael Moats

And then there’s Kathryn Schulz at New York Magazine, who doesn’t think any Gatsbys are worth a damn:

…Gatsby is in a class by itself. It is the only book I have read so often despite failing—in the face of real effort and sincere ­intentions—to derive almost any pleasure at all from the experience.

Schulz finds The Great Gatsby to be “aesthetically overrated, psychologically vacant, and morally complacent,” and believes that “we kid ourselves about the lessons it contains.” Experience the full brunt of her dislike here. Feel free to let us know if you agree or disagree in the comments.

More of Fiction Advocate’s Gatsby coverage here.

- Michael Moats