This week something slightly different. A post by a friend of the substack. This is a review of a book called The Champ is Here by Nathan Dragon, written by my dear friend Lucie Elven.
If you are the kind of person who watched a Pedro Almodóvar film at some point in your life, perhaps when you were a young woman, and you thought: Wow this man is the only one who truly understands. And after that you would sometimes imagine what it would look like if Almodóvar made a film about your life when you grew up, then Lucie is the woman you would picture as your friend in this fantasy film.
She is very elegant in a very modern way. Like all Almodóvar women she has excellent hair. And like all Almodóvar women she is just a proper person with a real, original personality. So many people you meet don’t have one of those. She writes beautiful, strange short stories for places like Granta and Noon. She wrote a beautiful novel called The Weak Spot. And she writes brilliant criticism for places like the LRB and the New Yorker. Once when giving me advice about something she said: Sorry, I don't mean to sound like Rihanna. But am I wrong?
One frustrating thing if you care about literature is that a lot of the best fiction being published right now is on small presses, or is the small release on a big press. In practical terms this means that the resources spent on publicity and marketing are almost nothing. In practical terms this means that, even if you are always actively looking for new interesting books, you often don’t hear about these ones until a little bit after they are published. Mostly through word of mouth or because you see an interview with the author or something. This means it is very hard to review these books, since most publications demand that reviews be pegged to the release date of the book and you will be too late. I don’t think this is a good system. I think publications should drop the release date peg requirement, because we all understand how this works and the result is Big Message stuff full of drop dead awful writing gets wall to wall coverage while much better books get nothing. This is bad for literature and for all of our souls. (This is one of the reasons me and my friend Isis started our reading night New Work, which is on this Friday.)
This is frustrating if you write about books and ideally you would like to write mostly about good ones, because writing pans all the time is boring. Most people I know who are serious about criticism find themselves in this bind fairly regularly, where there is a genuinely excellent small book but they have missed the window to review it. If you place a piece and anything goes wrong with it, or it sits in edits for a while, this probably means you have missed the window to try and place it anywhere else.
Lucie recommended The Champ is Here to me. And I really loved it. We discussed it a lot. And when she said she was having some difficulties with this piece, having been in this situation myself before, I suggested we could put it here. The upsides being that it does not matter that we have missed the window, and also that this probably has more regular readers than some literary magazines. So here we go. Lucie and I strongly recommend that you read The Champ is Here!
Here is the review, which I have titled “A Seafood Freak”:
Nathan Dragon is concerned with whether life is experienced as conventionally represented, something like comparing reality to an animation. It often feels as if this American writer’s stories are measuring the distance between how things are and how we expect them to be. ‘He’d never seen one of those before,’ his beautiful debut collection opens, ‘one of the classic ones like in the cartoons.’ Several lines on, the story returns to this sentence to dwell on it: ‘Man, he thought, a classic woodpecker.’ Then the narrator thinks: ‘Like something out of a nature program.’ The rumination on expectations and templates continues when, later in the collection, a different man shows his colleague a different image of the same kind of bird. ‘That’s a woodpecker? That’s not what I pictured, the guy at work says. I pictured Woody the Woodpecker.’
In the 55 whittled-down fictions of The Champ Is Here, Dragon’s narrators try to grasp the smallest unit of thought or reaction or gesture. They sift through their experiences and search for a word, ‘put that up against whatever he thought he heard’, or ‘pit that against what he might’ve read’. Again and again the gap between expectation and experience appears. They pay attention to that gap. The smell of a lotion reminds a man of music, not ‘the fruit it says it seemed like’.
These narrators’ exacting, metaphysical minds set them at odds with the language they find. They try to make something true out of it. Often the result is comic. A restaurant specials board reads:
‘TRY OUR –
ON THE HOOK TUNA TARTARE!
SOFT SWEET-FRUIT SANGRIA!
GET FUCKED FOIS-GRAS!’
At other times, Dragon’s attention to language as an object — with sounds, syllables, rhythms — produces something more wistful. A story in which a narrator is remembering a manual job is infused with nostalgia, which runs through its repeated long vowels: ‘That was the summer I spent roofing. Hoofing bundles of shingles up thirty-twos most afternoons.’
His stories seem to be the product of a process of reassessing and reassembling experience, putting him in an American tradition that spans Raymond Carver and (most directly) his editor at NOON, Diane Williams. It is a form of seeking. One of my favourite stories here, ‘Parakeet’, is told through anecdotes of family parakeets, ‘All of them named after something that had to do with Elton John. Elton, or Benny, like “…and the Jets”, or Levon, after another Elton song’. It’s delivered so lightly that you don’t see it closing in on its deeper theme: the sight of dead bodies.
Repetition creates expectation. When the woodpecker moves on from the man’s tree, perhaps to someone else’s garden, the man misses it. The bird’s movements had reminded him of a boxer: ‘Bob and weave. Stick and move. Nobody fights like that anymore.’ He blames himself for the bird’s departure, and perhaps also for the loss of a form of masculinity. ‘There had to be something he could’ve done to have made it last or to make it come back and stay.’ With all hope of that continuation gone, the narrator tries to make a different kind of continuity, by drawing a general lesson, moving into the future tense: ‘Most things were like that. How it always happened, happened before and would happen again.’
Who is the man learning these lessons for? Like many of Dragon’s characters, he is alone for the duration of time the reader encounters him. In another story, a narrator remembers an acquaintance: ‘He’d like to phone that kid he knew from that one city who looks for the luck in things all day long. The clover kid.’ Or there’s the narrator of ‘Bud’, shown getting dressed: ‘I am cheering myself on the whole way – Keep going bud! And, I’ll help ya, bud.’ The use of a single person in an interaction where you’d expect a second produces psychological intricacy. This is a man who relies on imagined relationships, whether with supportive friends, near-strangers, rivals, or woodpeckers, to get through the day. In ‘Daily’, a person’s complexity is reflected by his clothes, which are worn as strategies developed through experience: ‘Layers are important, something that zips over something that buttons over something, crewnecks tucked in, hood and hat, depending.’
That search for the right customs, both personal and local, reappears throughout the book. As do birds, forgetting, Heaven, small towns in the off season, ladders, wood, the urge to physically defend something, fishing hooks caught in arms, and a girlfriend named B or Buggy, who in one story meets a neighbour who introduces himself ‘by saying that he hates deer and calls his wife the Secretary of War and he still fucks her’. The neighbour will only talk to B, not the narrator, but the narrator pictures a conversation the two men might have. He imagines that ‘in the middle of talking the neighbour might stop and about-face and head home. Like the Secretary of War had called him home’. In another piece, Buggy, ‘a seafood freak’, is taken out on a date to a lobster place. The narrator is trying to make up for ‘acting despicably’, as Buggy has described him. ‘She declared me non compos mentis and I asked how. I was letting a lot of things slip, she said. Eschewing all responsibility. I only made poor decisions and even poorer excuses regarding my decisions. I wasn’t even trying. I had nothing to do and I pretended that whatever it was I was doing was extremely important.’
Dragon has an instinct for rhythms, an honesty of voice, and a stubbornness in refusing to include anything he doesn’t want to say. In their recursive, considered ways, his stories get to the fabric of existence by new means. They show us people who are full of yearning for a more spiritual type of communication, the kind of communication we might need to believe in. ‘On rainy days,’ one goes, something like a song, ‘sometimes, I go into town. It’s usually so slow shopkeepers visit each other. They pop into the neighbouring shop to say, How’s it going? Or, Ready for next month? (…) Sometimes you catch two, three, four shopkeepers speaking candidly with each other. I want so badly to be let in on it.’
Till next time xxxxx