As usual the literary journal started by Dave Eggers, McSweeney’s, has introduced me to some new and original writers. This issue also has great pen and ink storyboards for every story and some really weird letters to Ray Charles in between the stories. Anyway, Issue 21 starts out with a compelling journalistic piece, “The Tall Man”, about a case of police brutality, at the hands of a white man, that lead to death of an aboriginal man on the aboriginal island community of Palm Island in Queensland Australia. The plight of the Australian aboriginal is similar to that of the America Native American Indian; they have been herded into small communities that are saturated with poverty, alcoholism, lack of education and employment, and violence. Chloe Hooper does an excellent job of providing the background, history, context, and attitudes of the community/police/government as well as a rendering of the events of the day that led to the death of an aboriginal man in the custody of the police. It is clearly a case of a death that could have been avoided, but due to inaction and precedent that has avoided acknowledging or punishing suspect behavior of the police guard. On a positive note, while I was on vacation I read a news story that provides a vindication of sorts. The “Tall Man Man” a.k.a. Chris Hurley has been charged for the death of Cameroon Doomadgee, this is a case that makes history for the rights of aborigines all over Australia. This is a fascinating and compelling look at race, politics, and justice in contemporary Australia.
There was also a really entertaining modern horror story, ”The Pram” by Roddy Doyle, included in this issue. It is a sort of modern mystery suspense tale that is well paced and full of exacting detail. A Polish nanny becomes bewitched by an invented horror story that she herself has created to frighten her charges. I haven’t read anything by Doyle in years, but it would appear as though he has still has it.
Another new discovery was Rajesh Parameswaran’s short story “The Strange Career of Doctor Raju Gopalarjar.” It is a strange, but compelling story of identity/self-deception, and ultimately redemption. The fact that it deals with naturalized East Indians in America draws comparisons in my mind to the work of Jhumpa Lahiri’s writing, although Parameswaran has his own individual style that is quite distinct from Lahiri.
There was a Miranda July story in Harper’s last month and I didn’t care much for it, but “Majesty” has all the same elements that made me want to see her feature film when I read an excerpt form her script for Me, You, and Everyone We Know: realistic dialogue, humorous situations, interesting characters, bizarre situations, and an obsessions with the posterior region of the body.
“Snakebite” by Arthur Bradford is another odd but compelling little story about salvation through a snakebite, saying things that shouldn’t be said, and doing things that shouldn’t be done.
I like it when stories incorporate an incongruous motif or theme from an outside source in a story like the life of Flaubert in Flaubert’s Parrot. Greg Ames does this with aplomb by using the life of Tolstoy in his story about a dysfunctional relationship in “I Feel Free.”
Meanwhile, Peter Orner has managed to compress pathos, bathos, loss, betrayal, revelation, acceptances and other unspoken observation about his father and life in a brief story about a tangential figure in the narrator’s life: “Pampkin’s Lament.”
An epiphany is realized in the afterthoughts of fight witness by a directionless boy in Mormon-country Idaho in Christian Winn’s “Rough Cut.”
The books finishes with a flourish as the collection’s most famous author, Joyce Carol Oates, presents a fictional account of Mark Twain’s last years by drawing on letters and scholarship. It’s not the picture I want of Twain, but obviously was a part of who he was. I find the mature writings of Twain to have amoral authority that isn't as fierce in his earlier work. Twain was above all a moralist, and I think Oates captures that in this story of an old man’s obsession with purity and youth.
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