Book Report(s)

Two books I happened to read recently and would like to tell you about:

Frank Hinton I Don’t Respect Female Expression (Safety Third Enterprises, 2011)

Frank Hinton is an enigma wrapped in a mystery on a bed of lettuce. A construct, possibly of/by a real person named Frank Hinton, possibly not. His/her limited edition chapbook contains twelve short discrete pieces that defy nomenclatural classification (story? prose poem? flash fiction?), some of which are about a character named Frank who may or may not be the same Frank as the constructed Frank who writes the unclassifiable pieces in this chapbook. I’m not sure there’s any useful difference.

One of the first few stories is called “Make a Man,” and it instructs either the reader or the writer, or both: “Make a man and name him Frank.” The story ends with “Give him a psychic anchor. Give him yourself. Your name is Lili. Fuck him.” The next story is about a couple named Frank and Lili who do not fuck—though Frank seems to want to, and Lili, too, the story is mostly about the closely related processes of cooking and writing.

My favorite piece in this brief collection is called “All of the People In These Pictures Are Dead Now.” It’s about what it says it’s about, and though it (intentionally?) misspells Friedrich Engels as Frederich Engles, the piece ends with the author him/herself lying dead/not dead in a field, waiting to “see what animals come to pick me apart and carry me away.” While that sounds like an unsettling image, in fact, because of the masterly build-up throughout the story of a pervasive melancholy that the title perfectly expresses, it’s a beautiful and beautifully sad image.

Scott McClanahan Stories V! (Holler Presents, 2011)

Stories V! is set in the same Appalachian wasteland as McClanahan’s earlier collections, Stories I and Stories II. The main character in many of McClanahan’s stories is named Scott McClanahan, and the way he presents his pieces the reader is led to believe, or at least this reader was, that these are not fictions but things that actually happened, and it’s quite possible that some if not all of these things did actually happen, but that’s quite beside the point.

There’s a story in the beginning called “Invisible Ink” where the narrator explains that as a child his mother wrote him a message in invisible ink, that only appeared when he believed there was a message in invisible ink on the paper he held. The message was: “Thank you for believing.” The narrator then asks the reader “So I ask you now, “Do you believe?” There follow several apparently blank pages, at the end of which, at the top of the page is a message in all caps: “THANK YOU FOR BELIEVING.”

I think it would be a mistake, then, to call McClanahan’s hardscrabble characters and stories “realistic” or “gritty” even when they are realistic and gritty. Beckley, West Virginia is a place that exists. It is real. The characters Scott writes about, including the Scott who’s a character, seem real. But none of the stories in this book are real. They’re stories. McClanahan seems determined to blur the line between fiction and reality so thoroughly that one can be substituted for the other without anyone the wiser. But it’s not the job of fiction to make you wiser. The job of fiction is to put a spell on you that you can never again shake.

Both of these books, in different ways, perform that difficult magic trick. If I were you, I would go out of my way to read them.