New England Review

New & Recent Books from NER Authors & Staff

Winter 2021-2022

New reads for the New Year! Here are four new and recent books from New England Review authors to add to your to-be-read pile.

Not Yet Transfigured (Orison Books) is the latest poetry collection from Eric Pankey. Seeing itself becomes a metaphysical activity in these poems, whether the object in view is the unmediated natural world or a work of art. Concluding with a major new prose poem, “Landscape in Theory: A Meditation,” Not Yet Transfigured is an essential volume for every lover of contemporary poetry. Pankey’s poems have made multiple appearances in the pages of NER, most recently in NER 34.1.

During lockdown, poets Marilyn Hacker and Karthika Naïr began writing Renga—a collaborative form of Japanese poetry—to each other, eventually building the collection A Different Distance, out now from Milkweed Editions. At turns poignant and playful, the seasons and sessions of A Different Distance display the compassionate, collective wisdom of two women witnessing a singular moment in history. Their poem “Renga Summer 2020” appeared in NER 42.2.

The stories in Hisham Bustani’s The Monotonous Chaos of Existence (Mason Jar Press) explore the turbulent transformation in contemporary Arab societies. With a deft and poetic touch, Bustani examines the interpersonal with a global lens, connects the seemingly contradictory, and delves into the ways that international conflict can tear open the individuals that populate his world—all while pushing the narrative form into new and unexpected terrain. Bustani’s story “Packing for a Trip to the Sea,” appeared in NER 42.3.

NER Nonfiction and Drama Editor J.M. Tyree’s latest book, Wonder, Horror, Mystery (Punctum Books) is a dialogue between two friends, both notable arts critics, that takes the form of a series of letters about movies and religion. One of the friends, J.M. Tyree, is a film critic, creative writer, and agnostic, while the other, Morgan Meis, is a philosophy PhD, art critic, and practicing Catholic. The question of cinema is raised here in a spirit of friendly friction that binds the personal with the critical and the spiritual. What is film? What’s it for? What does it do? Why do we so intensely love or hate films that dare to broach the subjects of the divine and the diabolical?

Visit our page on Bookshop.org for cumulative seasonal lists of NER author releases.

J. M. Tyree

Unsuitable for Literature: An exchange with NER author Lou Mathews

Nonfiction Editor J. M. Tyree interviews Lou Mathews about his new book, Shaky Town, taking a sidelong look at LA and suggesting that “laughter is the only reasonable response to a hopeless position.”

The stories Lou Mathews has contributed to NER over the years often take up the dark underbelly of Hollywood, in which writers live on scraps from the studio system. They tell hilarious but heartbreaking stories of not making it big in La La Land. In “Tutorial” (41.2) an adjunct screenwriting prof attends an awards ceremony for a rich ex-student at a Malibu college campus from which he himself had been banned. His “Some Animals Are More Equal than Others” (35.2) transpires amidst the madness of a disastrous location shoot in Nicaragua that sometimes resembles a cross between Alex Cox’s Walker and Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo.

Lou has also tirelessly aided other writers throughout his career as a creative writing teacher and mentor, and has sent many writers our way, including Kate Kaplan (39.1), Ella Martinson Gorham (39.4), Chelika Yapa (37.3), Marilyn Manolakas (40.4), and Emily Hunt Kivel (41.4), some of whose stories were selected for Best Americans and Pushcart Prizes. He also hosted and helped arrange our first-ever Los Angeles reading, in 2014 (photos here). And his red enchilada sauce, jars of which are highly sought after in the NER offices, is a joyful elixir.

I caught up with Lou after reading an advance copy of his new book, Shaky Town, from Tiger Van Books. Lou’s interconnected stories here delve into the complexities of working-class LA, exploring the lives and worlds of teachers, shopkeepers, Lorca-loving janitors, and retired park-bench storytellers.

In the moving “A Curse on Chavez Ravine,” the narrator relates the story of his Aunt Lupe’s one-woman battle against the redevelopment of her neighborhood to make way for Dodger Stadium. After going to court and chaining herself to her house during the demolition, she commissions a spell to be placed on the players that will last for generations.

The story is characteristic of Mathews’s wry, compassionate, and deeply felt writing, but it stands as much more than a local rebuke to the film-industry version of Los Angeles promoted by that company town. His refreshing vision is ultimately restorative and recuperative of a different image-bank entirely, by avoiding much mention of Hollywood at all.

JMT: The interconnected stories in Shaky Town explore a more real LA. Hollywood really only appears as the location of the DMV and a liquor store, I think! Here, you’re focused on working people and communities of color. How do you meld your personal and artistic connections to your material?

LM: These stories are personal. As Carolyn Chute once said, of writing The Beans of Egypt, Maine, “this book was involuntarily researched.” That’s the best way I know to explain Shaky Town. That neighborhood was where I grew up, and how I grew up. Nobody was writing about my family, my neighbors, my classmates, where we lived and how we lived.  We were not considered suitable material for literature. I didn’t learn that until later, so I wrote the stories.

I also didn’t understand that we were poor, and that was one of the benefits of growing up in southern California. My mother was a widow, raising five boys on a Catholic school teacher’s salary, but when you lived most of your life outside, and the city you lived in had great parks and libraries, it didn’t register in the way it would if you were living in Chicago, ten floors up with a broken elevator. Years later, I read an essay by Albert Camus, on growing up in Oran.  He wrote about the sun, the beach, the waves, the water. Those cost nothing.  “I lived in destitution,” Camus said, “ but also in a kind of sensual delight.”

JMT: I think my favorite section of the book is about Aunt Lupe’s “curse” on the Dodgers as a result of having been evicted to make way for the building of the baseball stadium. I sense that hidden history—the violence inflicted on people and the land—lies at the heart of the book. But also a sense of potential recuperation through memory and storytelling. What do you think all this says about the city, the Golden State, and (for lack of a better shorthand) American dreams of various kinds?

LM: Most religions, political systems, and personal philosophies can be reduced to a single concept: Some day my prince will come. Your talents will be recognized. Movies, TV, advertising, our historical myths feed this dream. After a while you figure out that not only is there no prince, but if he did exist, he wouldn’t give you or yours a second glance. I think storytelling is the only way that the working poor, the landless, taxpayers but not participants, the voiceless, ever get to win. That’s probably why storytelling has a long history among all peoples.

The story of “A Curse on Chavez Ravine” started with a tale from one of my brothers’ padrinas (godmothers), something she’d heard from a friend in Chavez Ravine. Was it true? Probably not, but we wanted it to be.

JMT: Is there a film of LA that called to you while writing this book, or did you feel more defiant towards Tinseltown? I thought of Charles Burnett and Sean Baker, and their films in which the characters struggle to make ends meet and the city is itself a character in the story as well as an oppressive setting that is liable to tragic outcomes…

LM: This city isn’t only about the movies and the manufacture of myths, but if you live in Los Angeles, movies are always in the background. One of the characters in Shaky Town, Emiliano Gonzalez, the self-proclaimed Mayor of Shaky Town, worked for the studios as a skilled carpenter, building balsa wood chairs for John Wayne to break over other actors’ heads. That’s as close as most Angelenos get to the actual business of movie-making.

That said, there are a ton of movies that inform and coincide with my vision of Los Angeles. Like White Heat, with Jimmy Cagney’s transcendent epitaph: “Top of the world, Ma!” Every movie that Charles Burnett has made, but particularly Killer of Sheep. The Exiles (1961), directed by Kent Mackenzie, about the Navajo community living near Bunker Hill, is remarkable. Absolutely uncompromising, gritty, and sad, its uncomfortable honesty has always been a model for me.

Then there is a movie that no one knows by one of my neighbors, Ben Maddow, The Savage Eye. Ben was a blacklisted screenwriter, he did around ten movies using fronts. He’s best known for Asphalt Jungle and Intruder in the Dust. The Savage Eye was a personal project, a movie made over three or four years. It catches downtown LA and its denizens in a way that no one else ever did.

The other movie that needs to be mentioned is Alex Cox’s Repo Man, the only movie to make every top-ten list of movies made about LA. It’s there for a reason. It catches the humor and spirit of the place and focuses on the east side. It’s one of the few times I got to see the places and people I grew up with in the foreground of a movie.

JMT: Speaking of Repo Man, your stories for NER and in this new book share in common the poignancy of living in LA, this supposed paradise where life is ever so slightly less glamorous than advertised. How do you see the role of laughter in coping with the various nightmares of history, family, work, and relationships?

LM: Over the course of his life, Rembrandt painted numerous self-portraits, each one with increasing age demonstrating increasing dignity. Then, shortly before his death, in his final portrait, he shows himself stripped of finery and laughing. Laughter is the only reasonable response to a hopeless position.

Somewhere in his essays, Camus quotes an old Spanish proverb—something to the effect that, if it is nothing that awaits us, let us so act that it is an unjust fate. Laughter is a way to do that. An act of defiance.

JMT: There’s a long novella-like section, from which the book gets its title, devoted to the story of an alcoholic Catholic high school teacher who goes totally off the rails. Your compassion towards your characters doesn’t save them from facing the abyss, but it does evoke a necessary hope that change is possible, however unlikely or implausible. Do I read that right?

LM: “Shaky Town,” the novella devoted to Brother Cyril, a man who has lost his faith when he realizes that the church he has served for decades is covering up the sexual abuse of children, was the hardest part of the book to write. The last section took me more than three years, because I was convinced that Cyril had to die, at his own hand. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t kill him. When I finally understood that he didn’t have to die, that he understood that he had touched bottom and that some hope might be forthcoming, the last chapter wrote itself in a couple of days.

One reader, my friend Carter Wilson (Crazy February, Treasures on Earth, The Times of Harvey Milk), has compared Cyril to the Consul in Under the Volcano, a character for whom you should have no sympathy: “I was reminded strongly of Under the Volcano, the palpable misery in the still active mind—the mind that won’t shut up —and how we come to care about the fate of Cyril, the way we care about the Consul too.”

I’m not an optimist. But to the extent that we can recognize each other’s humanity, there’s hope. I think any hope on that basis is being tested in the world we live in now, but maybe I’m optimistic on that score and maybe the stories reflect that.

Lou Mathews has written seven books and published two of them, Just Like James and L.A. Breakdown, an LA Times Best Book. He has taught in UCLA Extension’s acclaimed creative writing program since 1989. His stories have been published in ZYZZYVA, New England Review, Short Story, Black Clock , Paperback L.A., and many fiction anthologies. Mathews is also a journalist, playwright, and passionate cook, as well as a former mechanic, street racer, and restaurant critic. He has received a Pushcart Prize and a Katherine Anne Porter Prize, as well as California Arts Commission and NEA Fiction fellowships, and is a recipient of the UCLA Extension Teacher of the Year and Outstanding Instructor awards.

J. M. Tyree is a nonfiction editor at NER, a contributing editor at Film Quarterly, and teaches at VCUarts. He is the coauthor of Our Secret Life in the Movies (with Michael McGriff), an NPR Best Books selection, and BFI Film Classics: The Big Lebowski (with Ben Walters). He is the author of BFI Film Classics: Salesman, Vanishing Streets – Journeys in London, and The Counterforce, from Fiction Advocate.

The Counterforce by J. M. Tyree

A New Book from NER’s Nonfiction Editor

We are thrilled to announce the release today of a new book The Counterforce by NER‘s Nonfiction editor—J. M. Tyree—just published by Fiction Advocate. Congratulations, Josh!

From the publisher: The Counterforce is “a lucid guide” to Thomas Pynchon’s detective novel, Inherent Vice. Each chapter of The Counterforce is arranged after something Pynchon stands against: Los Angeles, Celebrity, Real Estate, Smiling, Reality, Sobriety, Sanity, Werewolves, etc.

“J.M. Tyree’s The Counterforce, unlike so much literary scholarship, is brilliant and hilarious and stamped with style on every page. This wonderful book is a skeleton key for unlocking both Pynchon’s novels and our own fictional futures.” —Jim Gavin, Creator/Executive Producer, AMC’s Lodge 49

In addition to The Counterforce, J. M. Tyree is the coauthor of Our Secret Life in the Movies (with Michael McGriff), an NPR’s Best Book Selection, and of BFI Film Classics: The Big Lebowski (with Ben Walters), from the British Film Institute.

Read an excerpt—”Against Sobriety”—on our site here.

The Counterforce can be purchased from Fiction Advocate or from your local bookstore.

J. M. Tyree

Editors’ Notebooks—The Counterforce

  • Photo by Ben Walters

Read an excerpt from The Counterforce: Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice—a book publishing tomorrow by Fiction Advocate.

Against Sobriety

Fiction, viewed as a kind of hallucinogenic drug rather than a vitamin supplement, doses our metaphorical pineal gland, that “seat of the soul,” as Descartes called it. In some frogs and sharks such a gland contains a light-sensitive “third eye.” In humans it is connected with the production of melatonin, and, in the 1960s context, it was also associated with research into the effects of psychedelics. Welcome back to Pynchon.

The questions asked in this regard by John N. Bleibtreu (a rather Pynchonian surname) in his 1966 essay in The Atlantic, “LSD and the Third Eye,” remain relevant to the medical, cultural, and literary inheritance of the counterculture in general and the drug culture in particular:

The principal question concerning psychedelic estates remains: How much disruption can the system tolerate? […] The problem of how to maintain a certain madness while at the same time functioning at peak efficiency has now captured the attention of many psychiatrists. There seems to be a point at which “creative” madness becomes degenerative, impeding function rather than stimulating it.

Pynchon wishes to deal out altered states that defamiliarize the world and creatively disrupt how we see. To quote two standard taglines of the 1960s: Another world is possible—all power to the imagination.

 In The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa Maas’ disc-jockey husband Wendell “Mucho” Maas sees the light when he takes LSD and listens to rock and roll:

When those kids sing about ‘She loves you,’ yeah well, you know, she does, she’s any number of people, all over the world, back through time, different colors, sizes, ages, shapes, distances from death, but she loves. And the ‘you’ is everybody. And herself. Oedipa, the human voice, you know, it’s a flipping miracle.

This way of seeing the world or hearing the voice of the human person could be associated with the paradoxical and slippery notion of “The Counterforce” broached by Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), at least as expanded and writ large in the zeitgeist of the counterculture. The counterforce, viewed in a “lower case” variation, so to speak, can provide a doubled-edge metaphor for the process of creative resistance to various types of oppressive power, while at the same time darkly evoking its mirror image in the world-ending terminology of nuclear strategy.

The counterforce is not actually an organization you can join and it might not even exist (let’s face it). It is both illusory and necessary as a provisional and mobile concept that advances storytelling – fiction – as one way to envision alternatives to the present, and, therefore, for the future. In this specific sense, Pynchon proposes that facts alone cannot save us from our current predicaments – we need better stories.

The Pynchon Wiki usefully lists some of its quotations from Gravity’s Rainbow on the “counterforce” as follows:

“Suddenly there was a beach, the unpredictable… new life”
“a nova of heart that will … change us forever to the very forgotten roots of who we are”
“the possibility of another night that could actually … light the path home”
“Enough to make you believe in a folk-consciousness”
“love, dreams, the spirit”
“love that can even make the oppression seem a failure”
“some promise of event without cause, surprises, a direction at right angles to every direction his life has been able to find till now”
“the living green, against the dead white”

Here we see the more positive side of Pynchon’s imagination nicely condensed. Love; the fight against oppression, the “dead white” and what Against the Day (2006) calls “the wrong people”; the ecological mythology of Vinland as a fictional Eden in the green New World; the realm of dreams; the possibility of a new or alternative life reached through uncovering the beach—the beach beneath the paving-stones, as the Paris slogan of 1968 had it.

Mucho Maas adds the prospect of mind-altering substances to this book of love, while Doc Sportello, the burn-out private investigator protagonist of Inherent Vice (2014), uses marijuana to see an alternate America that contains his stoned vision of what is described in terms echoing Gravity’s Rainbow‘s counterforce as “the night… about to turn epic….” To be “against the dead white” is to be against the day and for “the living green.” And this flaky eco-sensibility of regeneration and redemption, a “nova of heart,” is perhaps Pynchon’s clearest definition of the counterforce as a perceptual change that carries other potential forms of liberation within it. We need fiction to help us see how to see.

The counterforce of love is inherently political insofar as it “can even make the oppression seem a failure.” (Note the careful wording here: seem.) And one might add laughter into the mix along with love, since it heralds the promise of embarking on what we hope for and risk on a good trip. The same old world awaits us upon return, of course. It is heartbreaking to consider the failure or pollution of a generation’s optimism about the power of love, music, art, and politics to change the world. But, according to a certain way of thinking, or a certain lens on the potential contained in the subversive elements of the past, that heartbreak suggests the possibility that something like the counterforce cannot ever be eradicated entirely, even if it seems to lie dormant during reactionary eras, like the 1970 of Inherent Vice, or more recent times, for that matter. Pynchon’s novels are highly cognizant of the dangerous collapse of the counterculture and its replacement by forces of exploitation and surveillance, but Pynchon refuses to give up on the failed but perennial ideals of a more loving, less greedy world. Inherent Vice mourns the loss of alternatives in the culture but it doesn’t stop there—like any good private detective, it supports the hopeless cause.

In her fascinating book Thomas Pynchon and American Counterculture, Joanna Freer connects the political with the psychedelic in Pynchon’s novels. She champions Against the Day as Pynchon’s “most psychedelic novel” and argues that it “works specifically to problematize the ‘real’,” in the process suggesting “the potential multiplicity of perceivable realities.” Along somewhat similar lines, David Cowart argues in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon that the “visionary moment” so valued by Pynchon is “commonly occulted by sobriety.” As Pynchon critics often note, all this is largely intended in a figurative sense, one that needn’t involve real drugs, necessarily, which in any event are never portrayed by Pynchon as the only answer to the problem, and are as often as not depicted in the novels as adding further tools of exploitation to the arsenal of oppression. (In Inherent Vice, heroin and cocaine, in particular.) This, then, is something more like a wider challenge to the so-called “discourses of sobriety” – history in particular – from the critical perspective of a particular form of historical fiction that foregrounds its own fictional status.

Equally, such trips, whether literal or metaphorical, cannot be reduced to the private, apolitical experiences that seemed to dominate the drug culture when it became detached historically from countercultural radicalism. Instead, consciousness expansion and various forms of political consciousness-raising are inextricably linked for Pynchon in a mode of analysis that exceeds the boundaries of sobriety. So Freer argues productively that there’s “a warning elaborated throughout Pynchon’s oeuvre against allowing imaginative or visionary experience to become an end in itself, dissociated from a critical, interpretative practice aimed at alleviating suffering and escaping oppression.”

Indeed, on this view, imaginative work forms a prelude to other forms of engagement. In order to build a different world, we first must envision that it might be something other than what’s there at the moment, and to cast off the claim that this is how things always must be. Pynchon attempts to re-enchant the everyday mundanities of American life by recasting the New World as a puzzling map whose legends do not point only to exploitation, a map within the map featuring a fictional territory, with treasures open to lovers and losers, loners and flakes, amateur sleuths and paranoiac novelists. Viewed through this powerful fictional lens that both magnifies and distorts, our mental map begins to wobble as we fall under the influence of this spell or drug.

Baudelaire notoriously recommended that one remain “continually drunk,” but, he asked immediately afterwards, “on what?” The answer: “Wine, poetry, or virtue, as you wish.” It’s also true that Baudelaire wrote up his experiences with hashish in his ambiguously titled Artificial Paradises. Is it OK to admit that paradise is always artificial? Does its fictional status make it any less valuable? Is it enough of a consolation to see things in a slightly different way—to imagine those alternative versions of oneself that try harder to love and do better at fighting back? 

No, not quite. On one hand, it’s a start; on the other hand, it can trap us into doing nothing, just as Bleibtreu noted about psychedelics like LSD and their “degenerating” effect of diminishing returns. So, hallucinogens are optional here—all of the above can be taken as metaphorical content about the power of love, ecology, fiction, and good critical prose. In The Crying of Lot 49, it’s Oedipa who points out to her psychiatrist, Dr. Hilarius, who wants to hook her on LSD, that “I am having an hallucination now, I don’t need drugs for that.” In a pointed turn, it’s revealed that Hilarius began his career at Buchenwald.

That said, Walter Benjamin, responding in part to Baudelaire, connected his own experiments with hashish to his early notion of “genuine aura,” which he described in almost spiritual terms as an inherent bit of magic waiting to be discovered in “all things, not just certain kinds of things, as people imagine.” Inherent Vice‘s Doc Sportello might identify with this experience of expanding one’s consciousness by one means or another, especially since this vision of the fragile, interconnected world is radically opposed to smashing things to pieces. What sounds New Age or proto-hippie is more deeply ecological and philosophical insofar as it places something that might be divine (or something like that?) in a coextensive relationship with everything that exists in our beautiful, sad, hilarious, tragic, bizarre, lonely, hopeful, tender, fucked-up, and fantastic world.

Buy a copy of The Counterforce – Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice from its publisher, Fiction Advocate. The book appears in the Afterwords series featuring new takes on contemporary classics.

J. M. Tyree (Twitter: @textplusimage) is the coauthor of Our Secret Life in the Movies (with Michael McGriff, from A Strange Object/Deep Vellum), an NPR Best Books selection, and of BFI Film Classics: The Big Lebowski (with Ben Walters), from the British Film Institute and Bloomsbury. He also wrote BFI Film Classics: Salesman and Vanishing Streets – Journeys in London (Redwood/Stanford University Press). His essays and short stories have appeared in Brick, Lapham’s Quarterly, Sight & Sound, Film Quarterly, American Short Fiction, Guernica, and other magazines. He currently serves as a Nonfiction Editor at New England Review and teaches at VCUarts.

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