Review: Charles Yu's How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

“Can you live your whole life at zero? Can you live your entire life in the exact point between comfort and discomfort?”

This question lies at the core of Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. It manifests in the relations between fathers and sons, between time machine repairmen and their managers, between a time traveler and his slightly melancholy time machine, whose pixilated face is forever burned into the time machine’s display, “leaving, frozen into the screen, a kind of history, a sum total of her expressions fixed into a retained outline...the melancholy algorithm of her soul averaged and captured and recorded as a function of time.” Everyone in this novel is somehow lost, frozen in some way or another.

Yu’s novel was first published last year by Pantheon and recently received a paperback release in Random’s Vintage Contemporary line, and for a book that at its core is both hopeful and melancholy it maintains a relatively light tone. The novel is brief, weighing in at less than 250 pages, and if anything could have been much longer. But that is part of the charm. This is a tightly wound narrative, one that doesn’t linger for too long in the world that it creates.

Which is not to say that the world is obscure, that time travel is just a gimmick. It is integral to the telling of this tale. The novel could not exist without taking the metaphor literally. As the narrator travels through his own life, he travels through his memory. This is the nature of time travel here, for “every time a user recalls a memory, he is not only remembering it, but also...literally re-creating the experience.” At its heart, Yu’s novel is about the relationship between a son and a father, and the ways it has gotten off course enough that the father has literally become lost in time. Somehow, the novel manages to straddle the line between monologue and narrative. Yes, it lingers in its digressions, in its explorations of the “rules” of this universe. But if it lags, it lags only for a moment. If the momentum of the piece is hindered in the flashbacks, it is hindered only for a moment, and the lighthearted tone more than makes up for this.

Because the tone is where this work shines. For a novel that begins with an epigraph from Hume, that begins with a description of its narrator’s isolation, that is concerned with grief, regret and loss, the tone is surprisingly light. Page 27 of this text contains a huge chunk of fine print. The narrator’s manager is “an old copy of Microsoft Middle Manager 3.0” who “thinks he’s a real person” and invites the narrator for a beer even after finding out it’s only a program. The book revels in its metatextuality, but not in a way that offends the reader—the narrator has a conversation with what is essentially himself halfway through the book (which is unfortunately better when experienced than when described), and the book that becomes so integral to the plot is How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. This is experimental fiction at its best; irreverent, purposeful, tasteful and poignant all at t he same time. The combination of these traits is difficult to pull off, but somehow Yu manages it. And the success lies in his ability to jump from a conversation with that manager to a scene in which a girl uses a time machine to try to save her dying grandmother, who can’t succeed without fundamentally changing her entire life, the entire universe. It lies in Yu’s ability to weave together a narrative about a father and a son that masquerades as a pure science fiction novel that, at its core, is about a far more human issue—which is something not only the best speculative fiction does, but something that the best writing does.

In which I am looping around to some kind of point about the holidays and being a writer

Production editor here.  I thought I’d take a minute to talk about what it means to me to be a writer while indulging in the melancholy that we’re all allowed a little bit of once the stores all start playing “Santa Baby” on a loop.

____________________________________

Thanksgiving is a tough one for me.  I like to think this is true of most writers, but then, I also like to generalize about writers in order to make myself feel better about my own troubles.  I do think a kind of emotional homelessness (or is it exile?) is a common trait of people who write fiction, given that we have a tendency to live at least one remove from the world, to have a keening need to make our lives, our arguments, our mistakes worthy of whatever it is we’ve settled on as worth, either there in the moment or after the fact when we’re trying to make meaning out of whatever stuff we’ve got to work with.  Plus we’re all kind of dissatisfied with our lives and want them to be better in ways that don’t exist.  We all want to be Gurov by the sea.

(As an almost-related aside, I was recently accused of being someone who drives a knife in just for the grace of doing it well [and even now, I’m cleaning up the accusation, making it my own], which is true enough.  I do everything that way.  It’s all performance with me, it’s all the crafting of words on a page as I go, but it’s not dishonest performance.  It’s just that the performance can get in the way.  And that’s the trouble as I saw it on my long drive back from Las Cruces today—I put the performance first.  But then I got to thinking, and I started to think that maybe it’s more about asserting my own sense of free will and identity, both of which I view as very fragile things [I’ve read theory, after all].  Which just loops back around to performance.  So.  Whatever.)

For Thanksgiving this year I went to see two of my best friends at New Mexico State.  I know I’ll always have a home with them; the trouble is it’s not my home.  The same is true of my parents’ home, of my brother and sister’s homes, of the homes of friends, of my own apartment here in Denton.  I’ve racked up a surprising amount of people who want to make me welcome, and though I don’t think they’re doing anything wrong, I rarely feel truly, you know, welcome.  When I talk to my friends about this kind of thing, they’re all quick to say “Oh, everybody loves you.”  Which is true as far as I can tell, but here’s the awful part: it’s something inside of me that keeps me from feeling it.  Doesn’t that make it worse?  Doesn’t that mean it’s something that I may never escape?  The fact is that they’re just looking through the keyhole that I’ve crafted for them into the big brown room of my brain, and so there’s always the assumption that what they love is the performance, the voice, the keyhole, and not the room behind it.  I think too much is what, I read too much DF Wallace, I linger too long on what it is to be authentic, and, in a way, I am terrified of a world in which I’m not an incessantly chattering voice.

You know where I feel welcome?  In an idea.  In a perfect sentence.  In that liminal space between thought and instinct that is going on in this very sentence right here as I’m putting it down.  Whoosh it comes and there it is.   This is what my good friend and teacher Miro Penkov meant when he said that writing poisons your life.  It’s touching the ideal, and then you’ve had it for only a second, you’ve been Gurov by the sea, and then what?

What I’ve decided you must do to mitigate this if you’ve chosen this abhorrent way to live (and it is an abhorrent way to live) is to find the people who understand as best they can and dwell among them as best you can.  The PhD program here (plus my friends in New Mexico, who are both writers as well) has provided me with that in a way that no other community has.  I’ve had conversations here that no other place I’ve been would abide.  The people in those other places would just turn up the TV if they heard me and my friends talking.  They would scoff at the way we love each other, they would say we are always either too oblique or too direct, too much bullshit or too much earnesty.  As for me, I would be nowhere else, with no other people than my fellow writers.

It will mostly be hard.  You’ll spend most of your time in your head, trapped there, maybe, which will sometimes make the community I just talked about seem incidental or barely there.  You will stay up late and wonder if what you are doing is worthwhile, which is precisely the feeling that makes you realize that it probably is.  In truth, most of you (and I am including myself in these odds) will fail in a very real, concrete way.  But we’re all going to fail.  We’re all failing right now.  Language is the very essence of failure.  And so what you must do if you’ve chosen this abhorrent way to live is to make it count: fail beautifully.

ALR Student Reading Series Saturday!

Dr. Fawzia Afzal-Khan on memoir

On Saturday, November 5th, Dr. Fawzia Afzal-Khan gave a reading and Q&A at UNT. Fawzia was in Denton to give a paper at UNT’s South Asia Peace Conference. She is a University Distinguished Professor of English and the Director of Women and Gender Studies at Montclair State University in New Jersey. She has published poetry, plays, and books of literary and cultural criticism. Her memoir Lahore with Love Growing up with Girlfriends, Pakistani-Style was originally published by Syracuse University Press in 2010, and received rave reviews from both magazines and notable individuals such as Nawal el Saadawi, Bapsi Sidhwa, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Mandy Van Deven. Syracuse University Press dropped the book after a “character” threatened a lawsuit that proved inadmissible. But despite this attempted censorship—which Fawzia details on her website and in an appendix to the new edition of her book—her memoir remains in print with Insanity Ink Publications.

Fawzia’s memoir is the story of the past fifty years of Pakistan’s political, cultural, and social transformations. The book is both global and local, personal and political, and, as Carole Stone states in her introduction, it is “both a paean and rebuke to Pakistan, the country of Fawzia’s birth. It is a witness to violence against women, strictures of a patriarchal society, and narrow-minded religion, and dictorial government.” The Pakistan that Fawzia and her girlfriends inhabit is a country continually in flux, struggling to define itself in and against the increasingly homogenizing forces of globalization. The hopes, fears, triumphs, and shifting inter-relationships of this close group of female friends reveals, as Fawzia detailed in an interview, both “nostalgia for that vanished secular past and promise of Pakistan” as well as an acknowledgement of the reality of the country’s present. Yet Fawzia’s life as an international literary figure and activist diverges from the lives of her girlfriends who have remained in Pakistan, causing her to feel that she is constantly on “that rusty see-saw” remembered from childhood, a traveler both at home and abroad.

Fawzia is not the first writer to face controversy in telling the story of her life. Memoir is a genre often fraught with conflicting demands: to tell the truth, but to also acknowledge that memory can never be entirely truthful. To depict, then, these conflicting truths of memory in the most honest manner, but to also render the events of the past in a meaningful way. To give “reality” an unreal and artificial narrative structure necessarily means foregrounding some truths and letting others fall by the wayside.

In the Q&A after the lively reading which included singing, a theatrical dialogue, and “love” poetry, Fawzia discussed the role of the writer in composing memoir, stating that she was surprised and shocked that the offended character protested her depiction in the book—a depiction that Fawzia herself thought was more praise than condemnation. Many of the female characters in Lahore with Love lead lives circumscribed by oppression, struggling to exist in a patriarchal society that places little value in female narratives and voices. Madina, the offended character in what Fawzia calls “the offending chapter,” stands out for being one of the few women in the book who are able to speak without being silenced. Physically and psychologically, Madina stands out, speaks out, and carves a place for herself in the world. Controlling her public image—an image evidently upset by Fawzia’s memoir, although Fawzia told us that no one had been able to identify her character’s real-life counterpart before the scandal—seems in character with the orchestrated dramatizations that Fawzia depicts in the book. But the attempt to squelch Fawzia’s voice—her memoir—does not.

In some respects, all press is good press, and Fawzia’s memoir is now more well-known than ever. Dr. Masood Raja, a professor at UNT and editor and founder of Pakistaniaat, A Journal of Pakistan Studies, published a cluster on Lahore with Love last summer, showcasing an outpouring of support for the book. You can purchase the book directly here or on amazon.com.

An Interview with Carl Phillips

Justin Bigos: One of my favorite poems in your latest book, Double Shadow, is “The Need for Dreaming,” which you read for us last night at the University of North Texas. The poem asks the question of the usefulness of love, of beauty: “useless? It gets harder to say.” The voice, in this difficulty -- over and over, throughout the book -- finds a way past the question into maybe not an answer, but a better proposition: “I think/ to be useless doesn’t have to mean/ not somehow mattering.” The poem can be read as a defense of poetry itself, but maybe more importantly as a private struggle over the point of living. The sharing of this struggle is a profound gift. This is a huge question, but what do you hope for your readers after they put down your poetry?

Carl Phillips: Partly, I hope that a reader might see that not only is there a private struggle that each of us is going through -- just part of being alive -- but that our struggles aren't always all that different from another person's. I'd like a reader to feel that I've been able to give some sort of language to what maybe the reader has felt but not been able to articulate. Or there's also just the comfort of knowing that you aren't alone in your quest for something like purpose in a life . . .

JB: Another poem you read last night was “Fascination.” The poem ends with the image of a dying fox beneath thick brush. After reading the poem you mentioned that someone had recently asked you where such a world exists -- and you quipped, “In my backyard?” Do we sometimes forget, or not see, the natural world around us, especially in our cities? Even when not in, say, the botanical gardens of St. Louis, are you thinking of foxes, dragonflies, star magnolia, yellow-crested night heron?

CP: I guess many people do, in fact, miss the natural world for the urban one that can seem so much more overwhelming. But it's everywhere. I do live in a city, but I can catch sight of a spider's web in the light of a lamppost at night, and stand for minutes, just staring at it. For me, the natural world is all the more stunning when it surprises us where we hadn't expected it. As for me, I don't know that I'm always thinking about these things, but I'm open to them -- so, when a chicken hawk flies right overhead as I'm walking my dog, I notice it. Which is different from looking for it. I think these things are around for us to see all the time -- we don't have to be looking for them.

JB: Before the reading you mentioned the T’ang Dynasty poets, in particular Li Po and Tu Fu, as early influences. Last year in North Carolina I taught a poetry workshop themed around the parallels between ancient Chinese and Appalachian poetry, and it was amazing to see how strongly the students responded to writers like Tu Fu, Wang Wei, and Li Po. What do you think these particular poets -- even in translation -- have to offer a young writer?

CP: I think they are proof that poetry can be powerful simply by being clear, straightforward, elemental. Because of the clarity, those poems seem to speak with an immediacy that feels very contemporary, which is to say, it immediately includes us as readers. There's also an intimacy to the poems, that also includes us. I return to the T'ang poets almost every night before going to bed -- what's strange about the apparent simplicity is that the poems seem to deliver something new each time . . . For young writers, I think the appeal is that poetry, in the hands of Li Po, Wang Wei, and Tu Fu, seems approachable, not just because of the clarity, but also because so much of it is about being human and flawed: getting drunk, being sad, missing a friend. When I was first shown poetry in school, it was nothing like this -- everything seemed to require translation, even from English, into something I could understand. It made poetry seem intimidating from the start.

JB: It meant so much to have you here with us in Denton. Thank you.

CP: Thank you, Justin -- I had a wonderful visit.

Carl Phillips is the author of eleven books of poetry, including Double Shadow, currently a finalist for the National Book Award. He is a Professor of English and African and African-American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

ALR Reading Series Excerpts

Shout outs to our wonderful readers, Young George for the wonderful photos, and Simone Lounge for hosting us yet again.

Poetry by Chelsea Wagenaar

"Matins"

This morning’s matins are dream-based, fear-infused,
a first groggy plea not to still be waiting tables,
not to have my teeth break off and spew out of my mouth,
not to be coiled and bound on a precipice, awaiting
the promised superhero. He’s probably been detained—
perhaps stumbling heat-ravaged through the furnace
of lower Texas, or on a South American vacation,
unable to turn his eyes from the glaciers of Patagonia,
cerulean and windswept, terrible. The city of ice
reminds him of another, a city of glass towers
they’d called it, which he’d swooped in to rescue
from gangs and mafias, only to find all the ornithologists
wandering the streets stunned, mute, gathering
the stilled bodies of white-throated sparrows
from the sidewalks. Their shattered anatomies.
A whistle trapped in each throat, the world
that much quieter.
                         Cold coffee this abandoned morning,
straggling rain, thumbed out sun. Vagrant tongue,
I’ve followed you here, your far-fetched horizons,
your tall tales. Too often you return empty.
O Lord, there are even elegies for the guilted sidewalks,
small laments that throb to be heard, so what
is your reply? Word made feather. Made glacier.
Made flesh—that your eyes are fixed here,
your ears lashed and ragged with the tatters of prayers.

Nonfiction by Courtney Craggett

from "The First Day"

We were travelers, all of us running, running either from or toward – running from a bad economy, family obligations that had become too heavy, religions that were no longer our own; running toward love, adventure, cheaper master’s degrees, cultural enlightenment. And there we found ourselves, bound together in a new culture, in a new language, trying to make sense of everything and find our place in a world that was suddenly much larger than it had ever been before.

There was Caitlin from Boston, never afraid to speak her mind and at first a shock to my Texas-drenched sensibilities. There was Kristin, who said she came to Mexico and felt like she’d found her true nationality. There was Sarah. She wore a brand new engagement ring and was planning for her wedding next summer. There were Cynthia and Nikki, both from Mexico and the US, neither one exactly sure of where she belonged, so both of them here for now. There were others, too – Shannon and Angela and Claritza and Caro and Sebastian. I didn’t know any of them then, but in the year ahead I’d go wedding dress shopping with them, watch three of them get married, attend baby showers for another three, help one down the stairs when she sprained her knee, road trip to Acapulco with a few others, bake cupcakes, make dinners, celebrate holidays, watch movies. But all of that came later.

The air was sharp on that first morning. Back in Texas my family was gearing up for another 105-degree day, but down here, two hours south of Mexico City, the mountains had snow on them and the wind raised goose bumps on my arms. Although my roommate Kay and I had been to the high school a few times, we’d never taken the bus. Up until now school administration had driven us around. Como podemos llegar a La Paz, we asked a few men on the corner of the 31. “How do we get to La Paz?”

Poetry by Mark Wagenaar

excerpt coming soon!

An Interview with Rose McLarney

Justin Bigos: Rose, there are many things to admire in your forthcoming, first book of poems, The Always Broken Plates of Mountains. The book contains voices, and yet I sense a voice; stories, and yet I sense a story. You have a poem titled “Ars Poetica,” and another titled “Poet,”but there are many poems in this collection that could stand for the whole, the way a leaf of a fern looks like a fern. It’s a big question, but can you talk a bit about how you see these poems speaking to each other? And how did that help you arrange them into the pages of a book?

Rose McLarney: These are my ambitions for The Always Broken Plates of Mountains: A cast of speakers, like a chorus, express the thoughts of people who share a rural background and landscape. The landscape is more than the physical setting in the Appalachian mountains—it’s an atmosphere created by weaving together stories of both personal and larger cultural loss. The poems are not only about romantic love, but perhaps more significantly, about faithfulness to place. Though the perspective in this sequence varies, the poems are united by a characteristic voice. The voices are alike in that they are understated and musical, with tendencies to defer and deflect, as were the voices around me as I grew up. The voices are also united because they speak of love and loss, experiences that are so utterly un-unique that perhaps the only way they can be interesting is to use them as points of commonality.

At least that’s what I hope happens in the book. A significant time for me as a writer was a morning when I was shuffling through my many poems and began to think that they weren’t necessarily redundant because they addressed the same themes, or necessarily at odds because their speakers were different, but that they could work together. Now, reading and writing poems in series and sequences is a kind of acknowledgment that, though poetry can look so concise and definitive, you can’t express a thing well enough all that quickly or easily. Or I can’t. Sequences give me a chance to make the admission that I may never articulate what I want to completely, yet show my continuing best efforts.

Of course, while series allow me to try out different iterations of an idea, they are also limiting. A number of the poems I write just wouldn’t fit in this book. (For instance, some of my greatest pleasures are rather exotic cooking and experimental music and those subjects have no home in The Always Broken Plates of Mountains.) I’m well into working on my second book and, for it, I am trying to write distinctly different poems about another country, another continent, from another point of view, and there will be poems that won’t find company in this collection either.

In answer to your question about how the poems are arranged in the book, they are grouped by and progress through an arc of tones (though nothing as neat as a plot triangle). My intention was for the book to feel as if it resolved—even if the resolution at which it arrives is a message about disappearing, keeping quiet, being still. (Those may be some of the predominant messages I got from mountain culture. I don’t want to romanticize it. Of course, that instruction in humility may have also prepared me to inhabit personas.)

ALR Graduate-Student Reading Series 10.21

Jaimy Gordon and the polyvocal world of Lord of Misrule

Award-winning author Jaimy Gordon visited UNT last Tuesday. In her Q&A with students and faculty, she described her writing as simultaneously "all about voice" and tightly plotted and carefully structured. She described the writing process as one which uses imagination to create or locate narrative in the raw material of the observable world. This creation comes though on the page via a "massaging" of language, sometimes using "a voice that's trying to replace the real world with its idiosyncratic output" in a technique that Gordon calls "heightened first person." Gordon also stressed grounding a story in the literal world and creating a plot that unfolds towards a central event that connects all of the characters. The story, she said, should function on two levels: a surface story that contains a deeper undertow or undercurrent of thematic depth. Although she draws from folktales, fairy tales, opera, and a host of writers stretching from present day to the seventeenth century, Gordon keeps her own writing in Lord of Misrule, winner of the 2010 National Book Award, solidly planted in the universe of its racetrack setting.

Author Andrei Codrescu, one of the fiction judges for the 2010 National Book Award, states that Jaimy Gordon has "an incredible command of other voices, and a sense of music in language that is unequaled.” Lord of Misrule is praised as “moving and lyrical,” possessing prose that is “moody, poetic, darkly funny,” with language that is “so textured that her pages seem three-dimensional.” In the world of Lord of Misrule, racetrack slang mingles with gangster dialect and the ingredients for “horse goofer dust,” a magical concoction that guarantees a horse to win—but also results in that horse’s destruction. A polyvocal novel, each section of Lord of Misrule shows us another facet of the world of horse racing: owners and trainers, groomers and jockeys, gangster financiers and, of course, the horses themselves, who speak though their intricately described gestures on and off the track. 

Lord of Misrule is also a page-turner, masterfully constructed of unexpected reversals of fortune. And as Jaimy Gordon states in an interview with Bret Anthony Johnston, she “believes deeply in plot, or rather in whatever attribute it is of novels that makes a reader need to know what happens in the end.” Horse racing presents an obvious arc: who will win? And in the hands of a lesser writer, a horse race’s outcome might be the central question of the book. But by the time we get to the arrival of the Lord of Misrule, the titular horse, we’ve already been through three races, and a kidnapping, and watched as each voice, gesture, and description, using language high and low, spirals around a tightly constructed core. The Lord of Misrule appears in the final section of the novel, a demon horse brought in to run a fixed race. The melee of Gordon’s close-third perspectives unites to watch him arrive in third person plural: “They were all looking for a van like a Chinese jewel box.” In this van— a vehicle in fact disappointingly ordinary—is the horse, who possesses a head that is “calm, black and poisonous of mien as a slag pile in a coal yard. He had a funny white stripe like a question mark on his forehead.” The horse’s arrival is big news, “they looked at each other and they thought, this is big, and how can we get a piece of it, we’ll take anything, even a hoof paring, sawdust, loose change.” But The Lord of Misrule could care less about their adoration, providing a stark contrast between the stuff of dreams and the more mundane ingredients of hard realities. Upon arriving at the run-down Indian Mound Downs, he throws back this same head and “snorted out dust and rolled his eye at the other cheap horses. His black tail arched and, ugly as Rumpelstiltskin, he let drop great soft nuggets, part gold, part straw, all the way down the ramp.”

Please join us on Thursday, November 3rd for our next visiting writer, poet Carl Phillips, who will participate in a Q&A in LANG 314 at 4 pm and give a reading in the Golden Eagle Suite of the University Union at 8 pm. Phillips' most recent book, Double Shadow (FSG 2011) was just named a finalist for the 2011 National Book Award in poetry.

Hey, here's some stuff I read

I think it's important in a literary landscape that seems sometimes obsessed with its own image as ever-dwindling and unnecessary to talk about and celebrate the success stories.  Here's one: Can Harper Perennial Reinvent Publishing

And if you're a fan of David Foster Wallace, Mary Karr, Jeffrey Eugenides, or Jonathan Franzen, or if you are the kind of person for whom lit. gossip is a weird kind of catnip, then you owe it to yourself to read this: Just Kids.

And... that's it.  I'm sure Laura will be by later to be a much better blogger than I.