A somewhat oldie but goodie

There Is No Other

by Jonathan Papernick

Exile Editions

179 pages

 

Note: This is actually a resuscitation of a commentary I wrote on this book of short stories, at my discontinued blog, thomasgagnon.blogspot.com.   I have made a few changes.

Many years ago, a rather Buddhist supervisor of mine asked me, “What are you believing?”  A momentous question, it stayed in a corner of my brain.  The question re-emerged as I read There Is No Other, a stunning collection of short stories by Jonathan Papernick.

Initially, the first short story of the collection (“Skin for Skin”) reads like a letter to the (now defunct) “Ask Beth” column in The Boston Globe.  Girl arranges to be alone with boy, who, thereupon, wants to do more than make out.  She does not want to do more than make out, but she does not want to be a “cocktease,” either.  What’s a girl to do?  Especially—and here ends any resemblance to “Ask Beth”—when the girl is Jewish and the boy is not.  This matter of faith is neither light-weight nor easily surmounted.  The girl defines herself as “not Jewish” but rather “a secular humanist [who believes] in self-determination,” and yet she is shocked to see the boy’s uncircumcised penis against his thigh, “like the emergence of a sea monster from a bathtub.”  (11)  Indeed, she is so shocked that she feels compelled—well, never mind the particulars—the point is, what she believes compels her toward what she ends up doing.

If the first story is like “Ask Beth” with a twist, then the second story (“There Is No Other”) is like NCIS with a twist: the suicide bomber is a black Jewish 7^th grader, Junius Barker, who promises not to blow up the classroom if someone can tell him why the Jews are the Chosen People!  The “someone” who could tell him is the teacher, Aaron Needle, but the boy has decisively turned on him.  Rising tension between Junius and Needle is dissolved in a prayer:

“You shall know today, and take to heart, that Adonai is the only God in the heavens above and on earth below.  There is no other.”  (27)

The word “other” is what resonates.  The concept of “the other” meaning “the alien”—a concept crystallized by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex—is at the heart of this story.  Despite the prayer uniting Junius and Needle, Junius still feels very much like “the other,” a feeling he pours forth in this rant:

“I want to know which half of me is chosen, the top half or the bottom, the inside or the outside, or the other way around?  Why is it so hard to figure out?  If God separated Jews from the other nations and gave them a different destiny, which half of me is chosen, which half of me bows down before the King of Kings, and which half can go fuck himself?”  (29)

After throwing his arms around dynamited Junius in an embrace—which Junius resists, calling Needle a “homo” (yet another “other”)—Needle whispers, “I believe in God.  There is no other.”  (32)  Meaning, quite possibly, two things: there is no other god besides God, and there is no alien being in a God-governed universe.  Needle’s belief leads him to an ecstatic moment, then death.

Another story in this collection (“The Miracle Birth”) brought to mind a piece of Nurse Apple’s Cookie Speech in the Stephen Sondheim musical Anyone Can Whistle:

“My name is Apple, A-Double P-L-E, a fruit well-mentioned in the Bible, that best seller of many miracles.  I cite the Ten Commandments and the Burning Bush, to name only two.”

And I cite the Immaculate Conception, which is preceded, in the Old Testament, by the miraculous birth of Isaac to the exceedingly post-menopausal Sarah.  Unquestionably, childless Shira Bavli in “The Miracle Birth” feels the weight of Biblical history:

“Every time Shira came up to Jerusalem, she realized that [its] gravitational pull…was a hundred times that of the rest of the world, rendering even the simplest encounter as heavy as a stone cut from Solomon’s Quarries.”  (50)

Or, is Shira believing something about Jerusalem that endows it with this “gravitational pull”?  In any case, Shira does give birth, at age 40, to a girl whom she names Vered.  At age 18, Vered gives birth to a boy who, Vered believes, is the Messiah.  Either of these births could be “The Miracle Birth” of the title, but, what I’m wondering is, does Vered really believe that her mother has “no faith that tomorrow can be better” (71), or is that just an angry retort in a mother-daughter spat of Biblical proportions?

In all these stories, belief in someone or something surely transforms the believer.  All these stories repay the reader’s belief in the transformative power of stories.

 

 

Pause for station identification

Self-published work gets a bad rap.  As the author of a self-published book of poetry, I have felt this keenly.  About a year ago or more, a friend of a friend, Benjamin, told me that he wanted to buy my book of poetry.  I was pleasantly surprised—the book had not been selling anything close to vigorously—and so soon I signed a copy of the book and sold it inexpensively to him.  He commented, after reading a few of my poems, “These are really good.  Why didn’t you—?”  I knew what he had been going to ask: why didn’t you go the route of traditional publishing?  As if, I thought, self-publication ipso facto indicated poor writing.  My heretofore happy heart sank.

A year or so later, I was munching and mingling at a gathering of poets called the Bagel Bards, when a woman, whom I hadn’t seen there before, addressed herself to me.  Out of the lengthy conversation that ensued, a few facts stood out.  Her name was Jenny Hudson, and she owned a self-publishing book company, which was re-locating from the North Shore (thus, the company’s name, Merrimack Media) to Cambridge, close by.  She was looking for people to review the books published by Merrimack Media.  If I were interested in reviewing books—especially if I had an online presence already—here was her card.

I was interested.  My online presence was minimal, but a new presence was readily manufactured.  Meanwhile, Jenny gave me two books to review: Telegraph Hill (crime fiction) and Sex with a Married Woman (counseling/self-help).  She also suggested that I post my review of a book given to me by Doug Holder, poet, small press publisher, and co-founder of Bagel Bards.  The book (God’s Naked Will and Other Sacrilege) was published—but not self-published—by a small press, Burnt Bridge.  Doug Holder, I recalled, ran a blog titled The Small Press and Poetry Scene.  I decided to devote my blog to self-published books and small press books.  And then I broke my own rule.  Goldenboy by Michael Nava was not self-published.  (In fact, self-publishing did not exist in 1988.)  Alyson Publications, currently Alyson Books, was not a small press.

But, I assure you, that misdemeanor will not happen again!  I am too invested in the underdogs of the writing world.

It’s a bird…it’s a plane…its SuperNava!

Goldenboy

By Michael Nava

Alyson Publications

215 pages

Over the weekend preceding Hallowe’en, I was looking for a book published by Alyson Publications.  Just a few weeks before that, I had read a short short story in a book a friend of mine was reading called The Femme Mystique, by Leslea Newman.  (N. B.:  A femme is a lesbian who takes a traditionally feminine sexual role.  The Femme Mystique is apparently a play on Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which sparked a wave of feminism in the ‘60s and afterwards.)  It was a funny story, in which the femme shopped ‘til the butch dropped, but I wasn’t inspired to read more lesbian literature.  I was inspired to investigate Alyson Publications, which had published The Femme Mystique.

My investigations led me to the Calamus Bookstore, near South Station in Boston, and a mystery called Goldenboy, by Michael Nava.  Several blurbs leapt out at me from the back cover.  Granted, blurbs are meant to leap out at you, but these especially spoke to me.  One blurb promised a blend of mystery and romance—a rara avis in my experience of mysteries.  Another blurb asserted that Nava wrote well on tough subjects—suggesting some substantive theme, or themes, that transcended the plot.  A third blurb assured me that Michael Nava was a “notch above Joseph Hansen in quality”—wow!  Could any of this be true?  The sale price of the book spoke to me and so, in short order, I was on my way to find out.

The blurbs were true.  For one, Nava does effectively blend mystery and romance, two genres that have not, traditionally, got on well together.  About halfway through the book, the lawyer-detective, Henry Rios, switches from an m.o. of cool competence to sudden sexual entanglement.  At first, it’s a shock—why is Rios having sex with a witness?!—and it could have become a disaster.  But it doesn’t.  It becomes a successful relationship, on existential, romantic, and crime-solving levels.  And a believable success at that.  Nava never yanks on the leash of my credulity.

He is a good writer on tough subjects, and so he gains the reader’s trust.  Two of these tough subjects are AIDS and coming out of the closet—subjects that come up immediately between Rios and his sudden boyfriend, Josh.  When Rios meets Josh Mandel at a gay bar, Josh declares, “You probably think I should be more out.”  (117)  A little while later, Josh says wistfully, “You gave me the courage to be who I am.  But it didn’t last.”  Then—“My life’s a lie…No one knows who I really am…I can’t live this way anymore.”  (119)  This is definitely not meet-cute.  This is sad.  As sad is the specter of AIDS hanging over Josh and Rios the following morning and keeping them apart.  Meanwhile AIDS has long since shown up in the narrative.  It is apparent at the start of the story that Rios’s old friend Larry Ross—who requests Rios to defend a gay teenager accused of murder—is dying of AIDS.  In fact, it is because Larry is dying of AIDS that he wants Rios to save the gay teenager.   The reader is reminded towards the end of the story that Larry is dying of AIDS—and all that means.

As to that comparison with detective novelist Joseph Hansen—it’s kind of a matter of apples and oranges.  Yes, both set their crime fiction in California.  Yes, their main characters, including their detectives, are gay men.  Both plot skillfully and write well.  For all that, Hansen is more focused on the unraveling of plot than Nava, who weaves into his plot a number of overarching themes, such as the impact of AIDS or the uses and abuses of the law.  You could say that Joseph Hansen is more like Agatha Christie and Michael Nava more like P. D. James.

In any case, the blurbs were not hype that led me astray.  They led me to a reading experience that was enjoyable and sobering, suspenseful and thought-provoking.  Long live Michael Nava and his creation, lawyer-detective Henry Rios!