On "God's Lost in the Suburbs" by Kristin Kearns (4777 words) ***

In Kearns's world insignificance and significance switch places, much the way that the word dog is a palindrome for God. Bruce and Maggie have just moved to the suburbs, along with their dog, who has now gone missing. But these aren't just any suburbs. This is a gated community, where everything is ordered, where rules keep it looking pristine, and where strangers need not bother visiting. What have we lost in our communities when we shelter ourselves off this way? What have we lost in our world when we fail to call out to a greatness beyond? Our attempts to shelter ourselves off, Kearns seems to imply, leave us in longing. Read the story here at Failbetter.

On "Girls in the Grass" by Melanie Rae Thon ***

I came across Thon's writing years ago in literary journals and loved it, but I'd never gotten around to actually reading a collection of her until now. Here, in this set of stories, many of Thon's talents are on display, and some of the stories have a kind of sneaky power that left me wondering, "How'd she do that?" Perhaps, my long anticipation is what led me to be slightly disappointed with the collection as a whole--all the stories are competent, but only a few really stood out to me.

One of the best, as is typical of collections, is the very first. It's a simple piece, recounting a sleepover among girls who are just about to enter those years when boys means something to them. They wander around town, score a few drinks, find some boys and try to discover what all the fuss is about.

In "The Spanish Boy," Pauline is having man trouble. She's tired of her relationship with Nick, and the guys at her lousy job at a restaurant treat her with a disrespect reserved usually for women of low morals. Low morals also forge the basis for the story "Iona Moon," about a girl who gives sex out to her hot boyfriend, thinking she has love. And perhaps, in a way, she does, as we discover in another story, "Snake River," later in the collection. In fact, several of the stories here link with one another. I suspect that the sisters in "Sisters" are related somehow to the boyfriend, "Jay," in the previous two mentioned stories. "Sisters" is a fine story itself--one that seemed vaguely familiar and thus may have been one I'd read in a journal. It's about a "good" sister and a very "bad" sister and how they learn to cope with one another. Will they both be brought down by the bad sister's drug habits and profligate ways, or can the good sister somehow saver her? Or is it really about saving anyone at all?

Another set of linked stories involves a family who has just moved to Arizona from Montana: "Chances of Survival" and "Lizards." Of the two, I found "Lizards" the more compelling and moving. In it, a boy finally begins to enjoy school because of the gift of a great teacher, only to have her taken away for reasons unclear to him.

Random stories include "Small Crimes," about a college professor trying to seduce a student of his (not a very likeable character) and the sneakily powerful "Repentance." The latter story recounts the life of a child who has to grow old before her time because her grandmother requires her assistance, but sometimes, we aren't capable of growing old early, and the consequences can be devastating.

On "Bodies" by Matthew Vollmer (4172 words) *****

I'm thinking of a review for a movie called The Vanishing. The reviewer said the movie told you everything you wanted to know and yet somehow still remained interesting--and haunting. Vollmer's piece is kind of like that. We get all the details in pieces, sure, rather than up front, but it's still seems like more than a story should tell us. And it stays interesting. And really, we don't even want to know those details, in the end, just like the narrator of this story doesn't.

This is a tale about a drunkard, a man with death wish or a revenge wish. It's also a story of trying to start over. The narrator, from the first, is one of a kind. Fantastic lines drop like candy from burst pinata in this thing, each paragraph a feast. One of my favorite passages comes when the narrator goes on a date with a woman he meets, whose clothing he describes as "alive and trashy in a way that commanded attention but caused people to ask: did that just happen?" And to make sure we know what he thinks, he adds, "I placed my hand on her lower back, to let everyone know whose side I was on."

Oh, and the place they go? It's this strange tourist spot where muscle has been pulled off bodies so that you can see inside, which is a fitting metaphor for what is going on in the story itself. Take a peek here at r.kv.r.y.

On "The Athlete" by Ed Falco (5420 words) *****

A few years ago, I read a book of Ed Falco's stories, published by a small press. It was probably about the time it began to dawn on me how many good writers there are out there, and how many are consigned to the oblivion of an audience of a few thousand, if they are lucky to find even that.

"The Athlete" is a piece of sure writing from someone who writes like a master of the form. It's about a man, El, who finds a woman who promises to change his life--or to rechange it--for he was once a married man, with two kids. Having lost out on that, for reasons not fully explicated, and on a basketball career because he was too small, he can now make something of himself. The story seems peaceful enough, until we hit its center, when something goes horribly wrong, and El is faced with a challenge that tests both his manhood and his newfound love.

Perhaps what I like most about this piece, however, is the dialogue--it's so simple and yet so true. "It's cold," one person states at a point in the story. It's a toss-off line that means nothing, that states the obvious, and yet it is exactly what someone would say in the situation, the way that we toss these obvious statements out just to have something to fill the air between us with. Read the story here at R.kv.r.y.

On "The New Covenant: Does It Abolish God's Law?" ***

This free book explores in great detail an subject that over a decade ago tore the church organization I used to attend with apart. No Christian or Jew really doubts that God has a law. That is clearly established in the Bible. The question is what that law consists in. Many Christians probably don't give much thought to it. They do whatever their church does. If the church says it's wrong to dance or drink, they don't dance or drink. Wrong to watch movies, they don't watch movies. Okay to smoke, then they might well smoke. In other words, they do whatever anyone else of their faith does.

But there are Christians out there who debate what the scriptures actually say with regard to what the law is, who don't just follow the traditions of those around them or the authority of the pope or some other religious guru. These Christians either believe that the law consists of the things commanded in the Old Testament and renewed in the new or they believe that those Old Testament laws were done away with and replaced by a new law, the law of Christ. In such a case, the new law usually consists in loving each other as defined by the ten commandments minus the fourth one. The new law does not include things like clean and unclean meats. And given the right context (depending on how conservative one is as a Christian), it might not include sex outside of marriage or going to war.

This book attempts to show how the first position--that the law consists of the things in the Old Testament and that it is still binding on Christians today, only magnified in Christ. This book does not claim that animal sacrifice and other priestly laws are still in order; rather, those have been fulfilled in Christ, but the rest of the law, pertaining to one's personal morality, still is in place for Christians. The book goes into extensive discussions of how this could be, and then it discusses the views of the New Testament personages themselves--Paul, the apostles, and Jesus Christ.

I found the text to be well written and well researched but fairly technical. It was not what I would term easy reading. If I would like an answer to a particular point of view or scripture, it would be a good book to turn to; if I want a thorough discussion of this topic, again, it would be a great place to go. If I want a fun, breezy, or exciting read, well, that it's probably not. The text is available here.

On "The Quality of Life" by Christine Sneed (about 4200 words) *****

Here's a story that being at the start of Sneed's fine collection made me understand just why good but not great stories have trouble getting attention. How does one rival a piece like this? The story has a slow-motion punch, each word piling on the next so easily, so simply, that it's hard to see that any tricks whatsoever are being pulled here, and yet we stay captivated, because the situation is captivating. Like the rich man in this story, Sneed weaves a web we can't escape, even if we want to. Here, a young woman is given everything she wants--a great job, great pay, a man, friends, and yet, there's something missing. Call this a critique of materialism, a study in what makes for happiness, or whatever you will, but the one thing I'll call it is great writing. And you can read it here.

On "Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry" by Christine Sneed ****

Sneed's book of stories, like many a collection (in fact, on some level, perhaps all) revolves around people at the edge of relationships. Several of the stories have specifically to do with the relationship between the famous--the celebrity--and the not famous. Interestingly, in each of these encounters, the not famous are starstruck, awed into idiocy by the possibility that they might touch something that stretches beyond their small, known world. It's a theme that I occasionally touch on myself in my writing, though I do it a bit differently, with a kind of cynicism that Sneed, I don't think, throws at her readers (I think, in part, my cynicism for such characters comes from having grown up in Los Angeles: I tend not to think of celebrities as anything more than regular people, albeit generally like pretty women who would rather not be disturbed by me unless they are the ones to start the conversation). Sneed, by contrast, isn't laughing at the silliness of such behavior; rather, she gets down and mourns with them that their own lives aren't spent in Hollywood or on some stage in New York.

The title story, for example, involves a woman the granddaughter of a famous (now dead) painter and her relationship to his work, to her own nonfamous work (unwilling to take advantage of her grandfather's connections to get in with the right people), and to a man she is seeing whose interest at times seems almost more in her grandfather than in her.

A couple of stories involve connections to Hollywood. In "You're So Different" a screenwriter returns for a class reunion to great honors in her small town. She's had five films made, and everyone thinks she's beyond whatever she can offer them, most especially a couple who invite her over for lunch the next day, the day she is to depart. The story is, in part, about envy for lives not lived and about the desire just to touch someone who has lived them. Similar to this, but from the opposite point of view, is "Alex Rice Inc." about a actor who decides to return to college for a degree and the teacher who has him in one of her classes. Here, I was reminded of a coworker of mine who had the pleasure of taking classes with James Franco a couple of years ago--everyone in class agog at him because he's been on screen. How do you not play favorites? How do you refrain from dreaming he'll fall for you?

In "A Million Dollars," my second favorite story in this collection, Sneed conjures the voice of an incredibly insecure woman who hides those insecurities in bravo speech. It's the voice that makes the piece so special. As for the story, again, there is a tie to fame, this in the form of a man who offers the narrator the possibility of becoming a model.

"Twelve + Twelve" is a lovely piece about an older man falling in love with the friend of his dead daughter. "By the Way" involves a younger man falling for a much older woman, whose fame in the dancing world has been eclipsed somewhat by age. "Interview with the Second Wife" contains a woman's reflections on an interview she one submitted to regarding the famous writer boyfriend she lived with for ten years. And "For Once in Your Life" involves a woman who returns to small-town life after living abroad with her now-ex-husband and how she finds herself drawn into the town's circle of busybody women (can't say women come off looking very nice here--it's one story that makes me feel like I'm lucky to be a guy).

The finest story in the collection is the first, but I'll live that discussion for another review.

On "The Fireman" by Peter DeMarco (2924 words) ***

Someone you grew up with dies. He was a friend, and then he wasn't. But somehow you feel a tie to him. Your life, like most people's, doesn't go according to plan. Actually, you never had a plan. You've drifted for thirty years, reacting first to your parents deaths and then to memories that haunt you. Your uncle. Your best friend. What happened means more to you, it seems, than to anyone else involved. Your friend was your hero--and your friend, until . . . You can read about it here at Sunsets and Silencers.

On "The East Elevator" by Nicholas Rinaldi (5720 words) *****

This story is a haunting. I'm reminded for some reason of the end of a movie called The Vanishing. It's got a similar kind of eerie feel in places, and yet, this story is a whole lot more subtle than that movie, for we don't necessarily know where it will go.

The story is about an elevator. As a kid, I loved elevators. I think that's because they were like amusement park rides to me. I liked escalators too. But since elevators were rarer, I preferred those, looking forward to the trips to the local Bullock's department store to use that elevator, the only one I bothered to ride with any frequency, since most others were off limits to us kids.

By age twenty, the elevator had lost its appeal. Perhaps it's that I lived in an apartment building with one, and it was not a thing I enjoyed. Sure, using the elevator to move furniture is (somewhat) easier than pulling furniture up and down stairs, but there's the waiting for it, the noise of it, the people inside it, the boxed-in quality of it.

On weekends, at my current office building, one isn't supposed to ride the elevator, because if it breaks, you'll likely be there for two or three days. In a previous job, a two-hour stay in the elevator is exactly what happened to some coworkers of mine. The elevator is a trap.

This story is about elevators as well--good ones and bad--and elevators as traps. It's about a woman named Lily who finds herself boxed inside and how that changes her life once she gets out. This aren't large changes, but they're there, and we get a sense that the elevator isn't just about moving us up and down a building but also forward, into futures we don't necessarily want to know about. See what's inside the box here at Summerset Review.

On "Special Topics in Calamity Physics" by Marisha Pessl ****

I tried to read Jane Austen in high school, the book Sense and Sensibility. I got about fifty pages into it and had to give up. A few years ago, having read a passage from Pride and Prejudice in another book and loving it, I decided to try Austen again. And again, after the brief opening passage expurgated in the other book, her world seemed dry and dull to me. I labored on this time, however, until the midway point and then, like some kind of metal clamp, she got hold of me and wouldn't let me go. I was reading the second half every chance I got. It took 150 pages, but the long setup was well worth the last 150 pages.

I felt similarly about Pessl's five-hundred-page tome. For the first two hundred pages, I was somewhat bored; then for the next one hundred, I was at least interested in the characters if not exactly being drawn forward by the plot. Around about page 300, however, the story takes off, and it's a crazy ride till close to the end. Could she have cut the first three hundred pages? Somehow, I think not, because it is that long setup that gives us a little to feel for when the gal with all the gold starts to put her chips down for us.

I could make a lot of comparisons to other books for Pessl's text. Beyond Austen in its pace, it reminded me in ways of Nabokov, though as a poor imitation of that master, in its erudition. It reminded me of Pynchon in its interest in secret societies, in paranoia, and in the inability to provide us with a concrete ground for our feet to walk over. And it reminded me most of Donna Tartt's The Secret History, with its central concern around a particular set of friends and a crime, though with Tartt's great novel, I found myself arrested by the narrative from the start.

The text of Pessl's story is one of narrator Blue van Meer, a child of exceptional brains (whose smarts, I found, especially at first, to be cloying and annoying). Van Meer is the type to drop mention of specific books--even to cite them--at any remote suggestion that they might have some kind of relation to the narrative (e.g., Salinger, Catcher in the Rye). Many of these citations seemed dropped in for no real good reason (see example above).

Van Meer's father moves around the country a lot, a permanent adjunct teacher, but he decides to stick to one place for Blue's senior year. Soon after her entry into an elite private school, she is befriended by a group of five other kids, a clique called the Bluebloods. Early on, they seem actually not very interested in her, despite their invite: it is a teacher, Hannah, who has weekly get-togethers with the Bluebloods, who insists that Blue be allowed to enter this elite social circle.

And what a circle it is--not. Were the five teens incredibly smart or witty or out to save the world or something, perhaps my interest might have been stoked. But it was because they were, in fact, so unexceptional that my interest took such a long time to build. These are run-of-the-mill high school students, interested in being cool, in drinking, in partying, not terribly brainy--pretty unimaginative and dull. Why, I kept wondering, would Blue become so smitten with them, even if it is an elite club of sorts?

But with time, as we get to know these kids, they stop seeming to be such brainless twits, and we begin to care for them as, in a way, Blue does--and Hannah. And then, the real plot kicks in, and it is here, in the last half of the book that I was left spellbound, wondering how Pessl has managed to pull off such a complex and compelling storyline. Basically, at the book's center, the group goes hiking with their teacher Hannah, and something goes terribly wrong. The rest of the book tries to unravel what has happened, and nothing is as it seems. Or at least, it may not be--we can't really know the world in which we live, the text seems to be saying. (In the end, do we even know the brainless Bluebloods? Why their connection to Hannah? Is there some link even Blue hasn't managed to find?)

I forgot to mention one other book I was reminded of--Barthelme's Snow White. In that text, Barthelme presents readers with a questionaire about the novel itself, and Pessl does the same thing here. It's a fun way to end the book, fitting, I guess, for a character like Blue, but as I find with many a novel, I was left laboring through the last thirty or so pages, once things began to wrap up, feeling like I should have been done already.

On "The Titans of Camp Four" by Brian Trent (5474 words) ***

A lot of science fiction is primarily about ideas. All else one finds in literary fiction--characters, setting, plot--is placed below the general concept on the degree of importance. That's certainly the case here. Trent's idea, however, is so intriguing and so well put down that one can't help but read on and on.

A few years ago I saw an animated short film that was drawn as if the Victorians had discovered--or rather written about--space travel. Imagine, if you would, what "new" technology would have looked like to a Victorian, and imagine a Victorian pushing the limits of knowledge to project a future. Naturally, it seems likely a writer would put steam engines in space, and that's what this cartoon did.

Trent does a similar thing here. The story is based around the plot device of having a man go to work on the moon to find out what a particular "secret camp" is doing--and whether it even exists. But the alternative history behind the story is what intrigues here. He's got Grecians flying planes, Romans inventing trains, the inventions being forgotten with the centuries (and not widely adopted at the time for political reasons). Find out more about the camp here at Atomjack Magazine.

On "There Are No Right or Wrong Answers" by Christine Fadden (1602 words) *****

Fadden's story about questions and answers starts out like an essay. In fact, it could be an essay--or a letter--to you. It's one of those pieces addressed to the reader, or rather to a reader. We're just the person perching over the true audience's shoulder; we're just the voyeur (unless our name happens to be Matt, and we're in college and live with our mom, and we like older women). Fadden's piece is a flight of fantasy, started with those Internet quizzes that are supposed to tell us things we don't know about ourselves and our futures and following through. Just how accurate is the quiz? Does it matter? There are no right or wrong answers. Read the story here at Knee-jerk.

On "Backslide" by Meghan Austin (578 words) ***

So Austin tells love stories. We've been here before. This one is about all those conversations we have with other people about their breakups, about the people they keep going back to . . . or hearkening back to, how a relationship is so much better in our memory. Read this one over here at Wigleaf if just for the fun of listening in to all the sordid tales. Go on. I know you want to.

On "Matters of Breeding" by Douglas Light (1500 words) *****

Let's talk about crime. Let's talk about crime in fiction. Most of the time, crime is the focus. After all, crime is interesting. It's illegal. People get in trouble. There are high stakes. But that's what we expect. All of that is present in Light's "Matters of Breeding," but the bigger focus here is a marriage that is falling apart--oh, and the narrator's intense interest in trivia. It's the trivia, the banal, impersonal trivia, that makes this narrator seem like such a real and personal. Read the story here at Failbetter.

On "Pittsburgh" by Meghan Austin (1331 words) ***

What is love? This is one of the issues that Meghan Austin grapples with in Pittsburgh, the story of napper who lives with another napper, a dreamer of dreams that mirror those of the lover. People are crabby. People are upset. People are not very nice. But you love them. Maybe they love you. Maybe. Depends . . . on . . . what . . . they . . . do. Maybe. Read the story here at Failbetter.

On "Babylon and Other Stories" by Alix Ohlin ****

Most story collections, outside of omnibus collections by well-established authors, consist of eight to ten pieces, unless the pieces are almost entirely flash fiction. But Ohlin's first collection features a robust seventeen, and not a one of them feels like filler. This is a voice that is assured and confident. At the end of each story, I felt like she'd done something so well that she'd make it look easy. And in that is perhaps also a problem--it would be easy to discount Ohlin's stories because they do seem to fall so effortlessly onto the page. I assume they don't.

Another issue is that it's hard to pick highlights from a collection that is uniformly good--uniformly very, very, very good. Babylon and Other Stories, at least for me, doesn't have any incredible stand-outs the way that Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son does. In that collection, I found myself so awed by "Emergency" and "Car Crash While Hitchhiking" that the other stories paled in comparison, and I didn't realize just how amazing the rest of that collection was until I read some of those stories outside of the collection's context, on their own, among other people's stories. No longer washed out by stories that are absolute classics, the other pieces could show their bright shine of their own. I feel like in Ohlin's collection, we have seventeen of those brightly shining pieces, all shining uniformly, but not a one bloated star in its last hurrah before death.

Nevertheless, I will try to hit some highlights. As is typical of story collections, the first story itself is memorable. Called "The King of Kohlrabi," it is about a teenager whose father leaves the family for another woman one summer; left to support themselves, the daughter takes a job only to find her mom becoming attached to her new boss. "Babylon," the title story, considers a man who falls in love with a woman who turns out to have more problems than initially appears (I'm being deliberately vague so as not to ruin it for those who might want to read the wonderful story). "The Tennis Partner," one I just read today and why it probably sits so well in my head, regards a teen in love with a girl who is above his league and a father whose attempts to win the girl's father at tennis are miserably ineffectual.

Other stories consider a kid who takes up piano lesson to escape troubles at home even though his family can't afford a piano for him to practice on ("Simple Exercises for the Beginning Student"), a girl who pretends to be French when she becomes a freshman in college ("You Are Here"), a couple who rents a house from a landlord that won't stay away ("Wonders Never Cease"), a story with a very effective use of flash forward at its end ("Meeting Uncle Bob"), and a copyeditor who writes a novel for an author ("Ghostwriting"). Also in the collection is "I Love to Dance at Weddings," available also online and which I reviewed here. In fact, it was reading two of Ohlin's stories online that drew me to her first collection; I will likely at some point follow it up with her other collection and possibly her novel. She is that good.

What unifies this collection beyond the simple fact that the stories are all of quality was at first hard for me to say. This isn't some cycle with an easily stereographed theme or unifying device, and yet, I do think that the collection does have a kind of unity. The title of the title story is a big clue here (backed up with the ending of the final story in the collection). It seems that each of these pieces regards people who are dealing with a situation that is confusing--such as the name "Babylon" suggests--confusing to the extent that they are overwhelmed and often are drawn toward violence and more often toward their own imagination as a means of coping.

On "Break Up" by Douglas Light (1842 words) *****

Susan Minot's story "Lust" consists of a list of a series of incidents and men (much like Kidder's "Beds," discussed here on this blog). It's a technique that is deceptively difficult to pull off. I think the reason is that it's hard to formulate a plot in this manner, and in the end, no matter how interesting the list is, we as readers want it to add up to something.

Light's "Break Up" is another such story--a piece about all the women that this narrator has broken up with. Or, as we read longer, who have broken up with him. What makes "Break Up" work, I think, is that there is an agenda. This guy is talking to someone, trying to make something work out this time. We care. We're interested. We want to know if he will succeed. Something tells me not.

Credit the newly founded Pugilist Press, which is reprinting Light's novels, with bringing this author to my attention. I think I'll be reading more of his stuff. Read this story here at Failbetter.

On "Bad Boys and Dream Girls" by Tom Anstead ***

With all the news lately of self-published e-books, I thought I'd download a few to read. Anstead's is the first I've gotten around to reading. In part, that was because it was the best looking. The design on the thing appears more professional than many of the other self-published works, even if there are a few oddities and typos. The other thing is that Anstead was completely unknown to me, not someone whose work I'm familiar with from other online publications or by reputation (in other words, this wasn't a book formerly released by a publisher). I was going into this cold, to see just whether something like this might actually be decent or good.

And, on the whole, I found the book engaging. There were places I was tempted to put it down, but as the work moved forward, I actually began to want to complete it, to find out what happened next, which was not exactly what I predicted. Anstead's text is a good, light read.

What made me want to put it down at points? It was the narrator, the main character, a college student whose main interest in life is scoring girls and getting drunk. This is not the kind of guy I like spending even a few minutes with at a bar, let alone nearly 250 pages. (I'm reminded of a couple of drunk guys who I took a shuttle with to the airport a few years ago, how everything seemed so funny to them and how to me they just seemed like idiots. The airport is unfortunately ninety minutes away.) So this is our narrator. There's lots of vomiting in this book, in addition to the drinking. And it's all told with gusto. This guy truly enjoys his loser lifestyle. As for studying, he finds it boring. Classes are a waste of his time. He has no interest in learning anything. Spend a few hours with him, and you'll find . . . well, he's no deeper than what he appears to be. Life is party.

What made me keep at it? Herein is the catch. Anstead has got himself a decent plot, and the novel itself starts off well enough--we don't realize just how sophomoric the narrator is until a few pages in, and by then, the plot has kicked in.

But more than that, Anstead also has created a text that spells out in the form of an example what various dating advice books say about catching members of the opposite sex. And in this way, it was fascinating.

The narrator has women dancing all around him. He's an alpha male, even though he's got nothing up in the head. His best friend is a nerd (I'm not sure why the two of them would be friends--what they'd see in one another--but we'll skip over that), a beta who couldn't get a woman if he were the last man on the planet and the only way the woman could continue to live was by reproducing (I realize that situation is preposterous, but work with me).

Why are the women flocking to this guy who rejoices over a C+ rather than his typical F (and how did he even make it to his second year of college)? Why does no one seem to notice Jack, the guy who has his stuff together? The difference, the novel shows, is confidence. The narrator believes he's hot stuff, and he acts it, and the girls swarm, and the more of them that swarm, the more of a commodity he is. Jack, sans confidence, is not a commodity, even with all his good traits.

Meanwhile, which women are attractive? They're the ones who play hard to get as well. The narrator likes a woman best, it seems, the more she's out of his league, and so does Jack. But the narrator, because he mostly doesn't care about anyone other than himself (I wouldn't say it's exactly an act either), often manages to score these women, while Jack, who pines for the gal of his dreams, seems as if he never will.

Is this how relationships really work? I guess on some level, it's true--especially for the hooking-up crowd. We often want what others want, and we want what we can't have, even when these make no sense intellectually. Anselm does a great job of showing why. The book is available for download here.

On "Puppet's Prognosis" by Schuyler Dickson (1881 words) ***

I've long wondered a bit of analysts--psychologists, really. I've had a few friends that visited such professionals regularly. But I've wondered when is therapy over? The thinking on this varies. I've read that really all people need is someone--anyone--to talk with, and that's what analysts allow for. I've read that a person only needs analysis as long as he or she thinks analysis is needed (this from books on Eastern philosophy). And then there's the idea that analysis somehow cures something--but what exactly?

Dickson's story is about a man who doesn't quite know how to let go of his analyst. This itself creates the amusing central motif--a grown man visiting a child psychologist, asking to talk with the puppet assistant. You can read the nondiagnosis here at Bartleby Snopes.

On "The Real Pleasure in Life" (the novel) by Al Dixon ****

This unpublished book is the work of my friend Al Dixon. I have read two of his previous books before, both of them collections of stories, one of which shares the name of this novel. Both collections include a few stories that astound me. This is the first time I've read a full unpublished novel by any of my friends. And it was a good one to start with, one that will be hard to beat.

And yet, I find myself not fully able to process the work--not yet at least. I think it may take a year or so to settle out before I am more certain what I think of it. The issue is this: the characters in the novel bear a resemblance to many people I know (including me), and the places discussed are locations right around the town where I live. So on one level, I enjoyed reading the book just to see who showed up and how Al would characterize the people inside. Since I am a person who knows the much of the material from which the author is drawing, the settings and characters seem incredibly lifelike, incredibly well drawn. But I wonder if I would think the same as a person unfamiliar with the people and places--that is, unfortunately, a question I won't ever be able to answer. (It's also strange to read of one's self: some things, I was like, "I wouldn't do that," but then I had to remind myself this was fiction; and the egocentric part of me kept waiting for me to show up again.)

What the novel definitely has going for it is enthusiasm. It reminded me quite a bit of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. This is not to say that the book is about a road trip--hardly. It's more that the text has a zest for life that Kerouac's second book also has, and it has that kind of feel of letting you hang out with friends without being too obsessed about plot (though there definitely is more of a plot here than in Kerouac's book). I kept thinking, as I read, about how if I were twenty again and Al was a total stranger, I might very well be all over this book, wanting to do as the characters in this book do, to come and meet these people and hang out in this town. And maybe, just maybe, that might be true of other readers. We'll see, if the work ever sees publication (getting agented can be tough, especially when a work is more character driven than plot driven).

The text concerns a guy who one day finds a card in his home from a coffee shop where he has never been. For some reason, he feels drawn to the place and to finding out how the card got into his possession, so when his significant other takes off for a painting exhibit, the character decides to spend the weekend driving to the town in question to find the purveyor of the card. Problem is that his car breaks down when he gets to town, and suddenly he's stranded in this strange and friendly place--and drawn to it as well, so drawn, in fact, that a job has already been arranged for him at the coffee shop whose card he has and some people seem even to already know him, but no one will tell him why or from where.

You can read excerpts and learn more about the book here.