I don't think it's a coincidence that American Innovations, like Atmospheric Disturbances before it, required an immediate re-read, feeling as it did like it had slipped through my grasp on first pass while at the same time intriguing me enough to make me want to tackle it again straight away.
Slipperily metaphysical, these ten stories of contemporary discontents, disquiet and discombobulation (...disturbances...) constantly evade easy understanding at every structural level - sentence often follows sentence seemingly as non sequitur, and while it's possible to say, on one level (indeed, on multiple levels), what the stories they comprise are 'about', there's a sense of endless interwoven layers of about-ness that's difficult to pin down with any precision. It's probably telling that it's as a whole - that is, as a collection of loosely thematically related stories - that these come closest to graspability.
My favourites - I think - are the two at the centre of the collection: "Wild Berry Blue", 'about' a nine year old girl's infatuation with a recovering heroin addict working at her local McDonald's, told in recollection and filled with terrific, vivid, slantways phrases and images (I had no idea what that meant, to OD, but it sounded spooky. "They slip out from under their own control," I heard the manager say, and the phrase stuck with me. I pictured the right side of a person lifting up a velvet rope and leaving the left side behind.) and "The Entire Northern Side Was Covered With Fire", which is really barely 'about' anything. Both of them have killer closing paragraphs too, in which Galchen is unusually overt (and which have much more of an impact in context):
He was my first love, my first love in the way that first loves are usually second or third or fourth loves. I still think about a stranger in a green jacket across from me in the waiting room at the DMV. About a blue-eyed man with a singed earlobe that I saw at a Baskin-Robbins with his daughter. My first that kind of love. I never got over him. I never get over anyone.
And -
Did I then take that movie meeting, all unprepared, after dressing in a way to accentuate my pregnancy, then to downplay it, then changing outfits again to accentuate it? Did I have no ideas? Did I start talking about the Kantian sublime, and about meteors and about love? A transgenerational love story with an old shepherd in Siberia, and a latter-day woman who knits, and a transfigurative event, and the sense that life is an enormous mystery but with secret connections that, you know, knit us all together? I did. All those things I so studiously knew nothing about. Meteors enter the Earth's atmosphere every day. I was betraying so many, I felt so clean.
Slipperily metaphysical, these ten stories of contemporary discontents, disquiet and discombobulation (...disturbances...) constantly evade easy understanding at every structural level - sentence often follows sentence seemingly as non sequitur, and while it's possible to say, on one level (indeed, on multiple levels), what the stories they comprise are 'about', there's a sense of endless interwoven layers of about-ness that's difficult to pin down with any precision. It's probably telling that it's as a whole - that is, as a collection of loosely thematically related stories - that these come closest to graspability.
My favourites - I think - are the two at the centre of the collection: "Wild Berry Blue", 'about' a nine year old girl's infatuation with a recovering heroin addict working at her local McDonald's, told in recollection and filled with terrific, vivid, slantways phrases and images (I had no idea what that meant, to OD, but it sounded spooky. "They slip out from under their own control," I heard the manager say, and the phrase stuck with me. I pictured the right side of a person lifting up a velvet rope and leaving the left side behind.) and "The Entire Northern Side Was Covered With Fire", which is really barely 'about' anything. Both of them have killer closing paragraphs too, in which Galchen is unusually overt (and which have much more of an impact in context):
He was my first love, my first love in the way that first loves are usually second or third or fourth loves. I still think about a stranger in a green jacket across from me in the waiting room at the DMV. About a blue-eyed man with a singed earlobe that I saw at a Baskin-Robbins with his daughter. My first that kind of love. I never got over him. I never get over anyone.
And -
Did I then take that movie meeting, all unprepared, after dressing in a way to accentuate my pregnancy, then to downplay it, then changing outfits again to accentuate it? Did I have no ideas? Did I start talking about the Kantian sublime, and about meteors and about love? A transgenerational love story with an old shepherd in Siberia, and a latter-day woman who knits, and a transfigurative event, and the sense that life is an enormous mystery but with secret connections that, you know, knit us all together? I did. All those things I so studiously knew nothing about. Meteors enter the Earth's atmosphere every day. I was betraying so many, I felt so clean.
