Librarian in the Living Room

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There are books I read for their profound depth and the book’s great Art (with that coveted capital “A”). Then there are those “other books” … the ones I can hear my mother saying, It’ll warp your mind! Chuck Palahniuk immediately comes to mind along with Warren Ellis and Frank Miller. These are stories — manly stories even – I never thought I would find myself reading. But I have been reading them with deep pleasure and now I openly and publicly cut the red dedication ribbon to this place in my heart, opening it especially for these bad boys of contemporary fiction. I am riveted by them. I am at once oddly offended and quietly captivated like a politician near a vat of stem cells.

Women writers also come to mind … Katherine Dunn with her genius book, Geek Love. Then there’s Monica Drake, author of Clown Girl. And there’s always Joyce Carol Oates’ story collection, Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque and Mary Gaitskill’s story collection, Bad Behavior. But there is indeed something to be said for the difference in the male and female temperaments. Though these women write edgy and truthful and shocking and superb stories and novels, they don’t make you reconsider having dinner due to the gross-out factor so often hard at work in the work of Palahniuk, Ellis, and Miller (and many more of course). Women are gentler in their delivery and not as overtly visual as these male writers. Even if Frank Miller didn’t write comics, his stories would be equally visual … and darkly and grotesquely violent.

But I go through books like this like underwear. I now could not imagine a day at the beach without reading about a very very sexually talented serial killer who kills with the Rabies virus as families flit around me thankfully unaware in those moments together of the darkness of the human mind and the world in which it lives. I could not imagine my nights alone in my apartment with two slumbering cats in my lap without reading about a rat pissing in the coffee of the unluckiest guy in the world. This is my form of television I guess, my nightly broadcast, told in a more eloquent way.

These books have also given me a bizarre understanding of men. Not that men are sick and dark and evil, but that they are visual, sexual and tortured in their own ways. It may even be possible that men internalize more than women … quite the riddle. A riddle worse than the 550 piece Andy Warhol puzzle I battle nightly.

But now I will return to my mutilated supermodel and my Andy in pieces (they’re both in shambles I guess) and then to sleep, hopefully to dream …

This was my first Amy Hempel experience even though she has come highly recommended to me for some time. I look forward now that I have read The Dog of the Marriage to her other work mostly because of her intuitive and pointed ability to dissect a relationship via an engaging (and sometimes funny) narrative. The unsettling thing for me though was how long it took me to read this slim short story collection. At times it seemed difficult to get through …sometimes it lost its momentum and read slow. But this Hempel collection was nonetheless an interesting read with intriguing observations on the self and relationships. I will read more Hempel for sure. And would recommend her to any lovers of contemporary fiction.