AHML Staff Choices

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Probably the most absurd book I’ve ever read, Saunders’ The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil is the story of the countries Inner and Outer Horner, which former is beautiful but so small that only one of its seven citizens can occupy it at any given time, which forces the latter to give up some of its abundant land as a temporary holding ground for the Inner Horner “refugees”, if you will. When a smitten, jealous, arrogant Outer Hornerite named Phil decides to levy immigration taxes upon the six Inner Hornerites living in Outer Horner’s Short Term Residency Zone–which is a misnomer, as the Inner Hornerites spend 6/7ths of their life in the STRZ–the Outer Hornerites declare that the Inner Hornerites have declared war on them (the Outer Hornerites).

Also, did I mention that Phil had been in love with an Inner Hornerite named Carol, and had “spent many hours casually circling Inner Horner, hoping to catch her eye, inflating and deflating his central bladder in order to look more manly and attractive” ? And that when Carol married fellow Inner Hornerite Cal, “a gigantic belt buckle with a blue dot affixed to it, if a gigantic belt buckle with a blue dot affixed to it had been stapled to a tuna fish can”, Phil had stood across the border, “passing bits of machine oil from his lower strata”?

The citizens of Inner and Outer Horner are silly, anthropomorphic, Frankensteinian, but somehow also intensely and innocently human. The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil is an allegory on power and nationality, plus also use of propaganda and preemptive war, disguised as a story almost childish in its simplicity and imagination.

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Consider the Lobster includes almost everything you could ask of a book of essays. The titular essay dissects  “the whole morality-of-boiling-lobsters-alive issue” for the discomforted readers of Aug. 2004’s Gourmet Magazine. “Big Red Son”–Hollywood’s pejorative sobriquet for adult film industry–exposes us to  the U.S.’s  “$3.5-4 billion/year” porn habit, and what it means. “Up, Simba,” more relevant now than ever, follows Arizona Senator John McCain on the 2000 Republican Presidential Primary trail and shows us, ultimately, why he lost to then-Governor G.W. Bush.

My favorite essay in the collection is “Authority and American Usage,” which, in addition to reviewing Bryan A. Garner’s Dictionary of Modern American Usage (since re-released as Garner’s Modern American Usage, which you can find in our Reference section, call number: REF/423.1/GARNER, B), informs us of the on-going “grammar war” and its significance to us. This essay alone is over eighty pages, with footnotes, and leaves the reader feeling surprisingly accomplished at its completion.

But the best part of this book is that after you finish it–or before, if you prefer–you can check out the audiobook Selections from “Consider the Lobster”, read by the author, and found at call number CD/FIC/WALLACE, D.

Links:

Original, truncated essay, Consider the Lobster.

Authority and American Usage.

Host, profile of conservative radio host John Ziegler.

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Nathan Nelson is, as a child, involved in a terrible car accident, dies briefly, and awakens from a coma “gifted” with synethesia (sort of like a permanent acid trip: hearing colors, tasting sounds, smelling television, etc.) and an Eidetic (or photographic) memory. His father Samuel had for years, to no avail, tried to coax out Nathan’s genius, only to discover that his son was average, normal, unremarkable.

But after the accident, Nathan’s parents send him to a special school for special children, including: a teenaged girl who is “medically intuitive” and can diagnose cancer, tumors, multiple sclerosis, by the tone/timbre of one’s voice; a blind, sex-obsessed piano prodigy; a savant who can’t tie his shoes but knows what day of the week 12 October 1843 fell on; and a man who replicates citiscapes in his head and then builds them.

The book explores how the children’s gifts isolate them from the rest of the world, and how their parents’ expectations shape and preclude certain paths before they (the children) have any say in the matter. It’s a beautiful novel that verges on poetry at times, due to the narrator’s synesthetic descriptions and the writer’s rhetorical brilliance. It is a novel about the Permanent Search, the sort of hyper-stringent expectations we have of life that preclude happiness and keep us forever Outside of what we need desperately to be In.

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The following excerpt best summarizes the novel’s conflict. It is an apostrophic letter written by the protagonist Nathan’s father to a Higher power he (the father) doesn’t believe in, yet nevertheless dedicates his life to chasing, in a way.

Samuel Nelson’s Letter to God

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David Rhodes named his book, Driftless, after the Driftless Area, which comprises Southwestern Wisconsin, Northwestern Illinois, Northeastern Iowa, and Southeastern Minnesota, and is bereft of sediment or glacial drift left behind as the last ice age’s glaciers receded into Canada. And both the novel’s topography and that of its characters reflect this.

The book portrays the forgotten, driftless (and ficticious) town of Words, Wisconsin, which has been left behind by all of the technological and societal advancements the United States have made in the last fifty years. They are a rustic, reclusive people. They are Rusty Smith, whose dilapidated house he needs to repair before his wife’s family visits, and the Amish men he hires begrudgingly to help him; they are Grahm and Cora Shotwell, who run a small dairy farm in cooperation with American Milk until Cora finds evidence that A. M. sells tainted, watered-down, and biogenetically “enhanced” product and they are forced to decide between dignity and prosperity; they are the spinster Violet Brasso and her physically handicapped sister, Olivia, devout Christians in an insincere and unbelieving world. They are the rural separatist militia, who test their guns daily and warn of the U.S. government’s imminent demise. And they are July Montgomery, the man who connects them all, a man who all but materialized out of a cornfield one day and decided, hey, why not here?

This novel shows how rural people deal with a world they can’t quite control; it echoes the late 19th century’s Naturalism, in that sense. It’s a beautiful novel that captures the essence of the Midwest perfectly.