Compression

In a word, Tim Cundle’s Compression is gritty. The novel follows quasi rock-star Michael Flanagan as he returns to the seaside town of his youth for a class reunion. Complicating matters is the fact that he, band-mate Elliot Kurtz, and a handful of other friends witnessed and participated in the cover-up of a killing ten years earlier. Haunted by his crime, Flanagan has spent years on the road evading his ghosts in a haze of music, drugs, and pornography. As a result, he’s never quite grown up. As such, Compression is as much a late-bloomer coming-of-age novel as it is a crime novel, and the narrative is all the richer for it. Though an act of manslaughter haunts the proceedings, it’s learning to confront his past and embrace life in the here-and-now that gives Flanagan’s story it’s heft and arc.

What gives the novel added depth and texture is Cundle’s skill at describing the ins and outs (mostly outs) of Flanagan’s rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle. Throughout, the protagonist weighs his own real-life experiences against the myths, images, and expectations fans associate with their hedonistic heroes. Despite rumors to the contrary, he’s a lonely guy whose life consists largely of long stretches of time spent in planes and hotel rooms. Any pretense of glamor has long since departed from his life. That he fancies himself a punk only adds to his existential dilemma. Among his greatest fears is that his anti-corporate attitude is all bark and no bite — in essence, that he’s a fake.

But the novel itself is certainly not a fake. Cundle clearly knows his stuff, particularly with respect to music. Part of the fun is picking up on the hidden and not-so-hidden references to music of the 80s and 90s that punctuate the novel. Is the observation that God’s got a sick sense of humor a nod to Depeche Mode? The reference to someone being touched by the hand of God a reference to New Order? The name-checking of Darby Crash a reference to… well, the late Darby Crash of the Germs? (Okay, so that last one was a little more obvious.) Even the conceit of the novel — a rocker returning home for a high-school reunion — itself feels like a page out of Janis Joplin’s tortured life.

All told, Compression is a gritty, smart, and surprisingly sensitive tale that spans the divide between crime and coming-of-age novels and, in so doing, underscores the universal necessity of coming clean — if only to oneself.

Review by Marc Schuster.

 

The Sensualist

This week’s review appears in the Conium Review.

The Universe in Miniature in Miniature (and the future of books)

As is well-documented, there’s been a lot of anxiety in recent years about “the future of the book.” Lately, that anxiety has focused on e-books and whether they’ll supplant traditional books as our preferred literary medium. Maybe they will, and maybe they won’t. But one thing’s certain: e-books can’t do the kinds of things that titles from Chicago-based Featherproof do. Scorch Atlas, for example, has the look of a book that’s been through hell and back. Daddy’s looks, at first glance, like a fishing tackle box. And Patrick Somerville’s The Universe in Miniature in Miniature can, if the reader is ready, willing, and able, be converted into a working model of the solar system (see diagrams below!). You just can’t do that with an e-book no matter how hard you try. Yes, these titles are available in e-formats, but half the fun of owning them is just plain looking at them — or “accidentally” leaving them out on your coffee table for your guests to admire and enjoy. To put it another way, these books are cool.

The other half of the fun inherent in Featherproof’s titles, needless to say, is reading them. As reported in an earlier post, Christian Tebordo’s The Awful Possibilities is a mind-bending roller-coaster ride of a read, and Patrick Somerville’s aforementioned The Universe in Miniature in Miniature follows in the same vein. Indeed, the works in Somerville’s collection display a colossal range of imagination and emotional depth. He is an author who is as comfortable depicting the end of the world (as in the apocalyptic “No Sun,” which sees the Earth stop in its tracks without cause or explanation) as he is following the burgeoning passions of a teenage girl (as in the coming-of-age tale “The Wildlife Biologist”).

Significantly, Somerville is also funny, as initially evidenced by the book’s dedication to Slartibartfast (of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fame) and borne out through subsequent tales of wayward, incompetent aliens, grad students in unaccredited MFA programs, and a balding man desperately seeking matriculation into an overseas institution known only as Hair University. The humor in all of these situations is, of course, balanced with pathos, underscoring the exquisite ambivalence of the human condition in ways reminiscent of both Kurt Vonnegut and Woody Allen. Our struggle for happiness, these stories suggest, will always be undercut by our tendency to screw things up, yet it’s our tendency to screw things up which, ironically, makes us keep trying (and failing, and trying again) and, not coincidentally, also makes us human. We are flawed, and we are beautiful, and we are funny. Patrick Somerville sees all of it (and then some), and reports lovingly on our shared humanity throughout The Universe in Miniature in Miniature. It is, in short, an amazing collection of stories.

Most likely, we’ll be debating the future of the book until the Earth does, in fact, stop in its tracks, but as long as small presses like Featherproof — which is to say, people who care deeply not only about storytelling but about books themselves, the very experience of reading a book, the thrill of regarding a book as more than a medium for conveying information but as a work of art in and of itself — have anything to say about it, the printed word will continue to thrive. If you or someone you know is a book lover, do yourself a favor and check out this wonderful press.

Build your own solar system with Patrick Somerville's THE UNIVERSE IN MINIATURE IN MINIATURE!