There is a book I read at the beginning of the summer that I can’t remember having read. I must have read it because it says so in the notes I scribble. It mustn’t have been a bad book. I remember when I have read a bad book because, invariably, a bad book makes me angry for having misrepresented itself as a good book. At the same time, the book in question mustn’t have been a good book because I can’t remember it. I won’t name the book here. Thanks to the miracle that is google, the author could well discover my comment and it might embarrass us both.
Maybe I can’t remember having read the book because my mental powers are waning. About ten years ago, they hit their zenith or nadir or apogee or whatever you call it, and my brains have been turning to mush ever since. Then again, it could have something to do with the writing (although, as I already noted, the writing was perfectly passable). Or, and this has been weighing on me for some time now, it could have something to do with the more general condition of contemporary fiction. In a piece called “Reader’s Block”, Geoff Dyer writes:
Some books, obviously, are a waste of one’s eyes. To feel this about airport blockbusters is perfectly normal, but I feel it is beneath me to read Jeanette Winterson, for example, or Hanif Kureishi. In fact, most so-called quality fiction that is story-driven seems a waste of time.
In the same paragraph, Dyer uses a surprising (for Dyer) economic term—”opportunity cost” to describe why he resents much of what he reads, or why he avoids reading altogether. If he has to read a perfectly passable work of fiction, it is keeping him from reading something good.
James Wood has a term to describe the “quality fiction” that Dyer decries. He calls it “commercial realism”. It’s the stuff you find vying for shelf space at the entrance to your local big box book retailer. It’s good. It’s solid. It’s safe. It’s utterly forgettable.
What else is there to read? It can be difficult to imagine what an alternative fiction could be or could become without having examples of it readymade and thrust into our faces. To produce alternatives to commercial realism, or whatever you care to call it, writers need space to experiment. Or maybe what they need is space to play. Play incorporates experimentation, but experimentation doesn’t necessarily incorporate play, and both seem important to the growth of fictional forms. In the context of experimentation and play, the notion of creating space has mostly to do with an allowance for failure. If something doesn’t work, do we subject the writer to a critical crucifixion, as often happens in the world of commercial realism, or do we treat it as part of a larger process? And if something does work, how do we know?
We like to use the metaphor of the sandbox to describe the play of writers who have strayed from the big box conventions. But some of those writers use mud puddles. Take Peter Markus, for example. His book, We Make Mud, is one big mud puddle. Released today by Dzanc Books, We Make Mud is a collection of short pieces about “us brothers” who live beside a dirty muddy river where they fish. They cut off the heads of the fishes they catch and they nail the fish heads to a telephone pole. There is an idle steel mill on the other side of the river and that is where their father used to work. “Us brothers” create Girl from the mud. There is also Boy and a mother lurking somewhere in the background. There is the threat that the parents will sell the house, but “us brothers” are death against moving because their lives are wrapped up in the dirty muddy river. Sometimes, to keep from moving, they nail each other’s hands to the telephone pole where the fish heads are nailed.
The stories are told in a language that has a recursive quality to it. Certain phrases crop up repeatedly until they acquire an almost liturgical tone. For example, whenever the boys look at one another, we have some variation of this: “There was this look that us brothers, we sometimes liked to give each other this look. It was the kind of a look that actually hurt the eyes of the brother who was doing the looking. Imagine that look.” The story is sublimely non-linear. If it were music, maybe it would be a theme and variations—recurring bits that undergo subtle changes from one section to the next.
The writing has a distinctive linguistic quirk, maybe to convey the fact that the telling of this mud comes from children. It’s what I call the “I know thee who thou art” syndrome (from Luke 4:34), an acute piece of bad translation in the King James version of the Bible where the translators used the object of one phrase even though it was implied by the relative pronoun that introduced the next phrase. Children do this kind of thing all the time but lose the habit as they grow up. Markus uses that linguistic habit to evoke the childlike out-of-time way of telling things that “us brothers” carry almost to the end of the book.
I say “almost” to the end of the book, because just as the book is ending, we catch a glimpse of “us brothers” as men, come back to sit by the river and argue about which of them Girl liked best. The scenario has an almost mythic quality to it – a place of idyllic harmony is shattered by a discord sown, not by the parents who always had the power to shatter things by selling the house, not by the river which once dried up, but by the brothers themselves and, more to the point, by something they created from their own imagining. Girl goes one further by suggesting that the brothers are deluded if they think they created Girl; it’s Girl who created the brothers from the mud. It’s your basic Frankenstein story, only told through the eyes of twelve-year-olds.
Like Frankenstein, We Make Mud can be read as a reflection on creativity. The mud is sometimes used to hide things, sometimes to protect things, sometimes to create things afresh. Writing is like that too.
So is We Make Mud any good? To be truthful, I don’t know. It’s different, which means the usual rules don’t apply. Ask me again in three months. If I remember having read it, and if I still have a distinct impression of it, then maybe I’ll give it the nod. For now, let me say that it’s muddy. It makes good mud.