Jonathan Evison: While my livelihood insists that I consume as much current fiction as possible — and the same can be said of all four Three Guys — I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss reading my dead guys. Last week, even as my galley pile grew four books higher, and my five-hundred-pound-gorilla of a novel required much editing, and my lovely pregnant wife was nagging me (I mean reminding me!) about something neglected (the unfinished floors? the nursery? the taxes?), I managed to carve out a little time between petting my bunnies and drinking my beers to revisit Frank Norris’s 1889 classic McTeague, which was among my favorite books as a young alcoholic misfit. Some things don’t age well. Foreigner, for instance. I swear they sounded cool in 1978. It didn’t matter that all their songs were about physical ailments (hot-blooded, cold as ice, double vision). The point is, I heard them on KISW the other day and they sucked major ass. I’m pleased to announce that this was not the case upon dusting off McTeague, which was, in a word: McAwesome. JR, this strikes me as your kind of book. Norris and you share a lot in terms of outlook. I guess I think you have the makings of a naturalist. You should read it. Or re-read it. It’ll make you want to pinch your wife. It’ll also make you want to stick a cue ball in your mouth (I almost peed my pants at that part!). You’ll wanna’ drink some Steam Beer, too. And you’ll be really grateful for the many wonderful advances in modern dentistry!
McTeague is the story of Mac, a slow-witted red-haired giant who is perfectly content pulling teeth and drinking beer in turn-of-the-century San Francisco, until the day Trina, his best friend’s cousin, enters his life. Let the unraveling begin! McTeague falls for Trina while working on her teeth, which I find both perversely divine and totally disgusting. At any rate, it’s a great place to begin this lurid and eccentric tale. Don’t hate me, but that’s the last detail I’m going to provide you plot-wise. If you’ve read it, you already know. If you haven’t, I’m not going to rob you of the experience. And I’m not going to reduce Norris to the isms which inevitably seem to attach themselves to discussions of his work, and I’m not going to talk about the shadow of
Zola. I just wanna’ talk about Frank Norris the writer.
There is a gorgeous brutality to Norris’s prose which is perfectly harmonious with the brutality of his tale. Norris dresses down language like he dresses down humanity, unsentimentally. At his best, his sentences can pulverize language like bones into dust. Even when they’re riddled with passive forms, his sentences are never static; they’re alive, because Norris knows how to move them. Why? Because Norris is not a sentence writer. Norris is a natural story-teller. He’s decisive. He knows exactly what he’s trying to say. He knows when to linger and when to pass. He knows how tho make his exposition serve him. He knows how to choose his details, and makes his choices seem inevitable. And above all, he knows how to build and indestructible scene — and lordy, some of the scenes in McTeague, from the aforementioned cue-ball scene to the epic finale in Death Valley, are seriously unforgettable.
If I ever finish these floors, and these taxes, and this nursery, and these galleys, I might take a run at Vandover the Brute.
Well, that’s all I’ve got for today. My nephew just asked me if I was done writing my
Chuck Norris blog. God, that made me happy!
JE
Jonathan Evison: While my livelihood insists that I consume as much current fiction as possible — and the same can be said of all four Three Guys — I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss reading my dead guys. Last week, even as my galley pile grew four books higher, and my five-hundred-pound-gorilla of a novel required much editing, and my lovely pregnant wife was nagging me (I mean reminding me!) about something neglected (the unfinished floors? the nursery? the taxes?), I managed to carve out a little time between petting my bunnies and drinking my beers to revisit Frank Norris’s 1889 classic McTeague, which was among my favorite books as a young alcoholic misfit. Some things don’t age well. Foreigner, for instance. I swear they sounded cool in 1978. It didn’t matter that all their songs were about physical ailments (hot-blooded, cold as ice, double vision). The point is, I heard them on KISW the other day and they sucked major ass. I’m pleased to announce that this was not the case upon dusting off McTeague, which was, in a word: McAwesome. JR, this strikes me as your kind of book. Norris and you share a lot in terms of outlook. I guess I think you have the makings of a naturalist. You should read it. Or re-read it. It’ll make you want to pinch your wife. It’ll also make you want to stick a cue ball in your mouth (I almost peed my pants at that part!). You’ll wanna’ drink some Steam Beer, too. And you’ll be really grateful for the many wonderful advances in modern dentistry!
If I ever finish these floors, and these taxes, and this nursery, and these galleys, I might take a run at Vandover the Brute.
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