Book Review: Mermaid in Chelsea Creek by Michelle Tea

The first recommendation for this book is its publisher: McSweeney's.  No other publishing house today - or in any time - is so serious about literature, so quirky, so willing to invest in promising young authors, and so darned successful at doing so.  Dave Eggers is their flagship writer, and their periodicals - the Quarterly Concern and The Believer - define innovation in both writing and design. And if you enjoy laughing so uncontrollably that chocolate milk shoots out of your nose even though you're not drinking chocolate milk, you must check out their Internet Tendency.

Michelle Tea's Mermaid in Chelsea Creek is perfect for McSweeney's because it defies categorization.  Much like Neil Gaiman's last book, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Mermaid has all the trappings of a young adult title but is far more disturbing than what we'd want our young ones reading (at least I think, but in these days of Twilight and such, maybe that red line has shifted as well).  We have a young girl as the main character, an ordinary girl who discovers that she actually comes from a secret lineage of magical beings - a pretty common theme from Harry Potter to, um, other stuff like that.

However, the story owes a much larger debt to Neil Gaiman, and through him, to Diana Wynne Jones - indeed, even the main character's name, Sophie, comes straight from Howl's Moving Castle.

Stranger, though, was when I jumped to Michelle Tea's wikipedia page to learn a little more about the author.  At first I thought, oh, this must be someone else with the same name because this person "toured with the Sex Worker's Art Show" and "is the co-writer of the weekly astrology column Double Team Psychic Dream."  Couldn't possibly be the author of this delightful YA novel, however disturbing it may be at times.  But it is the same person.  Oh.  Interesting.

On an unrelated note, my one gripe with this book - surprising given the publisher's high standards for design - is the horrendous quality of the illustrations.  They appear to have been drawn by someone who simply cannot draw - each depiction of Sophie looks rather different from the rest, and his depictions of pigeons are so strained you can see the sweat drips on the page.  Illustrator Jason Polan's wikipedia page brags that he has been published in The New Yorker, but that was a single cartoon back in 2006 - something I'm sure his mother was quite proud of, but he's no James Thurber, and that's saying an awful lot.

But back to the book.  Mermaid is best suited for adults like you and I who now and then need to put aside Syria and global warming and our tribulations at work and home and indulge in a sweeping, gripping fantasy.  It veers off course unexpectedly and ends up galaxies away from where it seemed to be headed.  And it starts right on page one.  Sophie and her quasi-friend Ella are playing the pass-out game, where they take turns helping each other asphyxiate into unconsciousness.  While buzzing back to the world, Sophie sees a mermaid in the horribly polluted creek, and then is struck by a strange desire:

Suddenly, Sophie craved salt.  In the dry cave of her mouth, down her throat, which felt strange and thick, into her tumbling tummy, she craved a bag of pretzels, the rocky salt collected at the bottom, tipped straight back into her mouth - the reward, she thought, for polishing off the snack. ... Faster than her best friend could cry out in disgust, Sophie tugged her still-shimmering body to the edge of the water and plunged her face into it, mouth open, inhaling the dirty creek into her, the perfect, necessary salt of it obliterating the darker flavors of things she'd rather not think about.  The sharpest taste, salt; she felt it travel through her like a delicious knife, the shock of it cutting through her, making her want more more more.  She sucked at the creek hungrily, like a wild animal digging into its kill ... 

So right on the first few pages we have several things we wouldn't want our daughters doing, but written in the most captivating manner imaginable.  And that's the core of this book - the story truly captures your imagination and leaves you hungering for more; like Sophia and her salt craving, you'll find yourself tipping back the pretzel bag to enjoy the last, sharply stinging bits of this book.  Fortunately, Tea has promised this to be the first in a trilogy, so we have those tangy treats to look forward to.

Book Review: Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Telling my son about Neil Gaiman's latest book, I struggled to come up with the essential adjective - you know, the way (Southern) "Gothic" describes Flannery O'Connor or "piquant" describes Christopher Hitchens.

I tried "eerie," but so much of the book was filled with hopeful longing, and the sweetness of childhood, that the word wilted the second it left my lips.  All of its synonyms failed, as well: unearthly, otherworldly (though that one comes close), creepy, odd, freakish.

Yet Gaiman has given us scenes like this between a once-affectionate father and his seven year-old son:

     He didn't say anything in response.  The bath was full, and he turned the cold tap off.
     Then, swiftly, he picked me up.  He put his huge hands under my armpits, swung me up with ease, so I felt like I weighed nothing at all.
     I looked at him, at the intent expression on his face. He had taken off his jacket before he came upstairs.  He was wearing a light blue shirt and a maroon paisley tie.  He pulled off his watch on its expandable strap, dropped it onto the window ledge.
     Then I realized what he was going to do, and I kicked out, and I flailed at him, neither of which actions had any effect of any kind as he plunged me down into the cold water.

I almost used ellipses to omit the paragraph describing the father's clothing, but realized that it was elemental to the scene's brilliance (and terror).  The details: light blue shirt, maroon paisley tie, and the care he takes to spare his watch though not his child - these heighten the tension, as we already suspect that something horrible is about to happen.  That descriptive break slows the pace and lets us inside the boy's innocent thoughts.  And his feeling of weightlessness contributes to the effect, both thrilling and chilling, yet also hearkening back to his younger years when his father would have swept him up and carried him more often, and more affectionately.  Brilliant.  And terrifying.

Yet those adjectives, even in combination - or ghastly, shocking, appalling, and so on - ignore all the tender scenes refulgent with the beautiful innocence of childhood, as on the narrator's seventh birthday:

     My parents had also given me a Best of Gilbert and Sullivan LP, to add to the two that I already had.  I had loved Gilbert and Sullivan since I was three, when my father's youngest sister, my aunt, took me to see Iolante, a play filled with lords and fairies.  I found the existence and nature of the fairies easier to understand than that of the lords. ...
     That evening my father arrived home from work and he brought a cardboard box with him.  In the cardboard box was a soft-haired black kitten of uncertain gender, whom I immediately named Fluffy, and which I loved utterly and wholeheartedly.
     Fluffy slept on my bed at night.  I talked to it, sometimes, when my little sister was not around, half-expecting it to answer in a human tongue.  It never did.  I did not mind.

So we'd have to pair up contrasting descriptions, such as "warmhearted" and "eerie," but even then the pairing fails to show how tightly Gaiman interweaves the beauty and terror of the narrative.  I suppose resistance to simple description makes a work worthy of our praise.  And praise this work we must.

Book Review: The Icarus Deception by Seth Godin & Make Good Art by Neil Gaiman

This type of book thrives by stating the obvious emphatically.  Advice tomes, self-help manuals, life & business inspiration.  Have a taste, and see if you can guess which quotes are from Seth Godin ("one of the most popular business bloggers in the world") and which are from Neil Gaiman ("one of the creators of modern comics").

1. "If you don't know it's impossible, it's easier to do."
2. "An artist is someone who uses bravery, insight, creativity, and boldness to challenge the status quo."
3. "Something that worked for me was imagining that where I wanted to be ... was a mountain.  A distant mountain.  My goal."
4. "When you speak your truth, you have opened a door, allowing others to speak to you, directly to you, to your true self."
5. "Life is sometimes hard.  Things go wrong, in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong."
6. "Art has no right answer.  The best we can hope for is an interesting answer."
7. "So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can."
8. "Artists fail, and failing means that sometimes you need to change your mind about what you thought the best path might be."

The odd numbered ones are from Gaiman; the even from Godin.  But they all sound like they came from the same barrel of platitudes, from the shelves of AphorismMart.  They're all true and yet like keys you find on the street - they don't open any doors you have to open.  I like that metaphor: these self-evident truths are someone else's keys that don't work on your locks.

And yet I just read - eagerly - both of these works, and paid close attention, searching for ways to move closer to my distant mountains.  I suppose there is something of a useful thrill, then, in finding someone's keys on the street, knowing that they open some door somewhere, taking hope that your keys must also be somewhere around here.

Book Review: Diana Wynne Jones, "Reflections On the Magic of Writing"

I came to Diana Wynne Jones's work in a roundabout way.  Already a fan of Hayao Miyazaki's movies when Howl's Moving Castle came out, I was surprised to find that someone else's book lay behind the story, since Miyazaki has a way of owning everything he uses - his style and vision are so engulfing.  The book was so, well, magical, that I went on to read three more of her novels.

Now we have a collection of essays and various other pieces by Jones, Reflections On the Magic of Writing, that, even for a casual reader of her work like me, not only exposes the influences and thinking behind her own writing, but solidifies her place among major 20th-century English writers of fiction.

Neil Gaiman contributes a heartfelt introduction, but his star power fades swiftly when Jones takes the stage and reveals her approach to writing children's literature, a method like that of a research psychologist:

     From my window I can see a steep stretch of woodland ... I have watched it for five years now.
     It is full of children who appear to be mad.  A group of girls totter down the slope. ... anyone
     who watches this wood, or anywhere else where children habitually play, will quite soon notice
     a number of things, all of which ought to have great importance for anyone who is interested in
     writing for children.

But Jones doesn't analyze: she embraces.  She writes about Tolkien, Narnia, learning to read Anglo-Saxon, and a favorite of mine, the somewhat obscure but startlingly brilliant poet Mervyn Peake.  She takes each in her arms as one would a child one adores, but without sentimentality or stooping to hero-worship.

What sets this book apart from all other posthumous essay collections is that it shines - these are no leftovers, or some last scraping at sales by a publisher.  This collection sparkles, it crackles, it burns with life like the fiery burning bush that not only burns without consuming, but provides a place for the voice of the divine.