Declan Tan's M Against M: A Book Review

I think it goes without saying that as the Big 5 publishers were motivated more and more by profit that which qualifies as literature would more likely come out from small and university presses. I don’t want to get into the whole “what is literature?” debate. I have my own definition. Let’s just say I’m not a part of the “It’s all literature!” crowd. That’s like saying that the painting in your hotel room of a vase of flowers and a painting of flowers by Georgia O’Keefe are equivalent in risk, effect, and importance. Some people are making “art” and some people are making “Art.” Some people are writing “books” and some people are writing “literature.”

This is all to get to the point that I want to make. Declan Tan’s novel, M Against M (Montag Press) is literature. It’s an important book. I truly believe more people should be reading it.

I read quite a few books by small presses. More often than not, I find them serviceable. Good reads, really, with even moments of excellence. I will admit that it took me about 40 pages to really get into M Against M. Narratively, it doesn’t quite offer up the challenges of Joyce’s Ulysses (thank goodness) but, for a dystopian novel, it doesn’t share too much in common with its brethren like Fahrenheit 451 or The Handmaid’s Tale. It has a very challenging narrative structure that invites the reader to engage in a way one wouldn’t with a more spoon-fed plot structure.

M Against M is something unto itself in the best possible way.

I’m not even certain that I fully understand what happened in the book… again, in the best possible way. I just know that as I was reading it, I kept finding myself thinking, “This is big stuff though, right? It is. This isn’t just another novel out from a small press.”

I know I need to read it again.

I don’t think this is the place to get into plot, but it’s got the standard stuff of a dystopian novel, but perhaps in a more quiet and satisfying way. Unlike Guy Montag or Winston from 1984, the characters in M Against M do not have some moment that suddenly awakens them to the flaws of their society’s structure. Tan’s characters, like most of us, both reject and long for the rewards that society has to offer.

Even though it’s there plot, at least for me, was not the most satisfying part of M Against M. I was much more drawn to the thought and philosophy in the book. One of our protagonist’s in the book is Arthur Sonntag, a writer trying to say something in a world that could care less about his words.

I’m usually not a big fan of books that feature protagonists who are writers, but Tan makes it work. And it’s because Sonntag is a writer that we get passages like this:

“In this life we have everything backward. Born into death. Politeness before truth. The suicidal earth sets itself alight. And just as how death comes before his life for some of us, man does not work because he has something to offer the world. Instead he is forced to work because he is told something can be offered to him. Forced to cultivate a personality beneficial to the slow suicide of the Earth. And where do we find acceptance? Always in another, always external. Rarely in these conditions could we hope to find it within.”

I was often taken by the poetry of the words in M Against M, but the poetry was never just for the sake of pretty words or experimental language. I found observation of the world in the words. It was all really quite a symphony, as in this passage:

“Neon tubes filled with futile, absurd wants. Set on edges of welfare we will all fall deep. But it will be more than giving up. I have not known purity for any of my moments. Sentimental alleviations and sympathies out of pouring wine jugs. Complex marionettes dried in karma and destiny. If you believe in that sort of thing: Play the strings to the march of brass and gold. And watch it all shine under water.

Do the crackheads and junkies still have more in common with me than these silent suited armies? I do not know. Opened minds to realities of shadows and what sleeps in gutters and under bridges. Under ground. And earth.

Sleep in arms this night and see. Play a hymn for this hundredth requiem. A last note for the big bad word.

Soft eyes and transparent windows to beliefs clay-set but gratefully flaking.

I need rest from these artificial glows and false auras. Set me apart and treat me so. Leave me if I do not respond.”

Sometimes passages from the book read as though Walt Whitman had returned to observe our modern condition.

I recall that as I was reading the book, I needed to know what others were saying about it. I was surprised to find only three ratings on Amazon. I was surprised by the sales rank. Sure, the book came out in 2013 but, seriously, people should be talking about it. People should still be reading it.

Books, unlike batteries, do not have a shelf life… and books like M Against M hold more juice than any lithium battery ever could.

One reviewer on Amazon wrote: “Declan Tan writes like a futuristic old soul. The book begins with a lot of keen social observations and philosophical insights that catch you off guard. Then it quickly turns into an awesome adventure with well charted twists and turns. Highly recommend!”

Truly, a very concise and accurate review of the book, albeit too brief to really catch one’s attention. The “Highly recommend!” isn’t emphatic enough. I don’t know how to say it otherwise because everything, every platitude and hyperbole, has been said about other books.

So maybe, I just say it plainly and honestly and hope that you trust me: 

If you’re curious about what I’m calling a significant work of literature, you need to purchase and read a copy of M Against M.

As I write this review, I realize my own words are failing to do the book justice… to express everything I felt I wanted to say. What I realize is that I just want to include as much of the book as I can in this review, knowing that Tan’s facility with language will entice more than mine.

There’s one section that just floored me when I realized what Tan was doing… or at least imagined that I understood what he was doing. It’s a section of the book I would call the “Here” section, and I felt as though the writing was trying to capture all of life in five pages, as witnessed in this excerpt:

“Here is the world, here are the poems here, the brushes of paint. Here are the songs, the sung, the yet to be, the lung. Here is an eye, a lip, a new way to embrace. Here is the water breaking on the beach. Here are parasols shielding the sun’s fighting rays. Here are the days and coming morning. Here is the bed we share the coffee you make the food you prepared. Here are clothes and the changing fashions. Here is consistency. Here is the way a man is taught to live. Here is the broken pencil. Here is distance growing with age. Here is pretending. Here is power and the way it lays, where it lies and how it thinks. Here is faith. Here is penetrating. Here is the population, expanding and dying. Here are apologies and bathtubs, falling water hot and made for steam. Here is liquid, here are the lakes, rivers the seas and the ocean and the journey they make inland. Here is ferocity. Here are the stoics. Here is Empire. Here is the darkness. Here is the light, the sun and how one day it will all shatter. Here is the beginning. Here is the middle. Again, Here is the beginning. There is no end…”

And here, most importantly, is the link to M Against M: here

Jeff Vande Zande is an English professor at Delta College in Michigan. His latest collection, The Neighborhood Division: Stories, is now out through Whistling Shade Press and available: here.

Pete Stevens' Tomorrow Music: A Book Review

Before reviewing Tomorrow Music by Pete Stevens, I need to fully disclose that Pete is a former student of mine. True, he was a student of mine over ten years ago. We’ve remained in touch here and there, but largely not. To some extent, Twitter has brought us into more contact than we have been in a long time. It was through Twitter that I’d learned that Map Literary had awarded him the Rachel Wetzsteon Chapbook Prize for his Tomorrow Music manuscript. I subsequently purchased the book, read it, and am now reviewing it.

The chapbook itself is beautifully published with great care taken by the designers and editors over at Map Literary. It’s a thin book (tall, too… both adjectives that also accurately describe Pete). In total it is 37 pages, not unusual for a chapbook, but don’t let the length fool you. It’s pages are packed with some stunning wordsmithing, but also substance. And it’s the substance with which I am most pleased.

I remember one of the last times I saw Pete, we were in a train station in Flint, MI. Like many there that morning, we were on our way to Chicago for the AWP conference. Pete was very excited about going. For myself, I was lukewarm about it. I don’t care much for that whole scene and, the two times I attended an AWP, I ended up feeling lonely, even while surrounded by thousands of writers. I would later learn that Pete went on to pursue an MFA in fiction writing.

I’m also lukewarm about the whole MFA scene. I don’t want to paint in broad strokes, but I’m going to make bold to paint some generalizations. I’m not certain how significant MFA programs have been in the advancement of literature. I’m fairly old school when it comes to literature and, for me, that which I call literature has to be after something. It must be in pursuit of some Truth. It’s not just style and artifice, but the style is serving to support some greater substance, some greater truth.

I will admit that much (but not all) of what I see coming out of MFA programs seems to be artifice over art. Style is king, even if that style supports little actual substance. Experimentation is co-king but, again, the experiment is for experiment’s sake. MFA programs are churning out what I would call “creative writers” but not always “writers.” For myself, when I read a story, I think, “Could I teach this in my lit course?” Usually the answer is no. Most I could teach in my fiction writing course because, for would-be writers, there’s always something to learn about craft from any published writing. As to the substance of what I find in much of what passes for a short story… well, I think of Gertrude Stein and her saying, “There’s no there there.”

When I think of literary writers, I think of people fascinated with life and trying to say something about it. They are students of life. Their means for saying something about it is writing… so the writing serves the purpose of ruminating on or commenting upon some aspect of the human condition. Literary fiction writers, for me, lie to tell the Truth. The human condition comes first, and the writing serves it. 

It strikes me that in much MFA writing the writing is the thing by itself. The writing serves the writing. When I strip away the shiny artifice of the story’s style and craft… well, I find little there. They are like a fireworks display -- beautiful, fleeting, and with no resonance. So, like a fireworks display, not lasting (try to remember the details of any fireworks display you’ve attended. You might remember the people or events that happened, but you don’t remember the display itself. They blend together in your mind with all the other fireworks you’ve seen. That’s kind of the feel I get from a lot of MFA writing). It’s fleeting and without resonance, and so I don’t need much of it in my life, in the same way that I’m good with about one fireworks display a year.

I think the issue is that in the end, you can't teach somebody to have something to say. They either have something to say or they don't. And so, the MFA professor is left teaching what can be taught... style and experimentation. Craft. But the crafting of what?

But, this could just be the kind of MFA writing that I find myself exposed to through certain venues rather than be indicative of everything that comes out of such programs. I don't know...

This is all a very long way of saying that it was with trepidation that I started to read Pete’s book. I knew that he was drawn to the AWP/MFA scene. That’s not all bad, but I’ve seen many with something to say forget to say it once they are sucked into the world of style over substance, artifice over art. I knew I was going to be impressed with Pete’s wordsmithing (and I was!) but I worried that it might just be another fireworks display.

I can say this much, and I don’t say it lightly… I could teach Pete’s stories not only in my fiction writing course, but in my literature course.

Pete Steven’s Tomorrow Music contains just two short stories, but they are developed and earn their space. The first, “Inventory of a Collapse” tells the story of Sara and James. It is a story about relationships and it deals well with expectation versus experience/dreams versus reality. It is wonderfully written, broken up into vignettes that involve the couple in various stages of their relationship… and might even represent alternate realities of what they could have been. What is at the heart of it is two people bringing their own expectations to the table and how something that starts in promise runs the high risk of being twisted into something like a drowning.

In the following passage, you can experience Stevens’ prowess with words and sentences and style, but the last line also hints at that dream versus reality theme that he explores so well:

“At the foot of a mountain we found our cave, our home. We cleared the brush with broad strokes and you laughed at the growth of my beard. We talked about cocoons and how to swaddle. We talked about bottles and when to feed. You said we were like bears in a den, that all we needed was our cub. Your belly was so swollen I wondered if it might burst. At night I wrote in a journal so I could show you the steps that we took, how we learned and how we settled. You said you never wanted to leave and our roots began to take hold. This was before the cries under the moonlight, before little Quinn, before we knew what we had.”

The dream? Living like no other couple… an existence of sucking the marrow from life.

The reality? All of those other couples with babies… they aren’t choosing to live a mundane life. The fragile child’s existence needs the mundane.

Later in the story, in another vignette, Sara invites a hitman to brunch. The man is dismissive of James and downright sexual with Sara. For a minute here, my believability trigger went off. I thought, “What are you doing here, Pete… you’re going too far.” But, then, I realized… the hitman is a metaphor. He’s a symbol. It’s something I don’t see a lot of in much contemporary writing… the use of symbol. The hitman stands for the hitman that is baked into every relationship. Every relationship contains within it the future misunderstanding, betrayal, or indifference that could kill it. Whether or not that’s what Stevens meant, it’s there. There’s there there.

The second story in the collection is by far my favorite, entitled: “Oral History of the Lansing Motors Second Annual Truck Touch (as Transcribed by Lisa Poole, Assistant Manager)”

It is a tour de force in the exploration of our preoccupation with material things over the deeper things of life. Six people stand at a car dealership with their hand on a brand-new truck. The winner of the truck is the last person still touching the truck. They get ten-minute breaks every two hours but otherwise must keep their hand on the truck.

The story is wonderfully told through each person’s point-of-view. Quincy, for instance, works at a Taco Bell, but dreams of selling the truck to help fund the production of his screenplay. He tells us:

“Any project needs funding, grease. My production is no different. And my eyes are still open, my legs aren’t sore. Twenty hours have passed with my hand on this truck. I’ve worked twenty-hour shifts at a twenty-four-hour Taco Bell. I’m the John Wick of this bitch, can’t be fazed. Better realize and take notice. This is the impetus, my origin story, and everyone here has killed my dog. They’re trying to steal my car.”

The story is artfully and entertainingly told, but also has much to say about a society driven by the pursuit of material things. Even in the passage above we see how material goods turn fellow human beings into adversaries… something to compete against rather than to love. At one point Sofia catches  Derrick popping with his free hand what she guesses is some kind of upper for staying awake. She asks of him, “Don’t you think we should play by the rules?” He defends himself without acknowledging his drugs by saying, “My hand hasn’t left the truck.” Like so often happens in a capitalist society, the rule breakers aren’t punished, and even the judge of the Truck Touch contest defends Derrick’s innocence. 

Stevens’ story is a microcosm representation of our capitalist society and shows how its values can turn us into terrible human beings unless we somehow discover what’s truly important.

Tomorrow Music was a true pleasure, and you can purchase your own copy: here.

Jeff Vande Zande is an English professor at Delta College in Michigan. His latest collection, The Neighborhood Division: Stories, is now out through Whistling Shade Press and available: here.

Kelly Fordon's I Have the Answer: A Book Review

Currently, at fifty years old, I find myself really reflecting on decisions I’ve made and what maybe I thought I wanted for myself versus what I really needed for myself. When I was in my thirties with young children, I always imagined fifty being a period in my life when I had everything figured out. I imagined contentment, peace, and some satisfaction with what I’d done. It surprises me how discontenting being fifty years old can be. Just today my daughter texted me pictures of apartments near Grand Valley State University. She plans to attend in the fall. She texted, “I’m so excited” and, even as I texted back that I’m excited for her, I was thinking with melancholy, “But didn’t you just get here? Do you have to rush off?”

I suppose I find myself experiencing ennui (and maybe even a mid-life crisis of sorts) and though it’s not universally the case with the collection, many of the stories in Kelly Fordon’s I Have the Answer deal with the ennui and disillusion of middle age. So the book arrived to me at the right time, even if sometimes its comfort was simply the idea that I’m not alone in my feelings.

It’s fitting that I recently taught Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” to my literature students. The wallpaper with its confounding patterns can stand in as a metaphor for society and its expectations. Like the main character, we can get trapped behind those patterns and never discover who we were truly meant to be. Society can even shame us into avoiding who we were meant to be. But, society also lays out a pretty clear-cut path, if not a narrow and diminishing path. We are told: go to school, get good grades, go to college, get a career, get promotions, buy houses, have children, get luxuries, etc, and many of the characters in Fordon’s collection are slowly realizing that such a prescription for existence has its limitations and disappointments. I often tell my students, “You are asked to make some of the most significant choices of your life when you have the least wisdom to make them. The unexamined choices of your twenties will come home to roost in your forties.”

I know, I sound like such a fun professor.

Doesn’t make what I said less true.

Many of Fordon’s characters are finding their unexamined choices coming home to roost. In “The Shorebirds and the Shaman” Corrine navigates the loss of her fifty-five year old husband, something that her prescribed path had never foretold: Yes, that person you married could get sick or die relatively young. What does that do to all the plans you made for the future? For Corrine, she becomes nearly a recluse until a concerned friend tricks her into an experimental group therapy session that practices an intriguing technique called Constellation Work:

“Dan explained that Constellation Work is a tool for uncovering unhealthy family dynamics, which sometimes span generations. It was created by a German man named Bert Hellinger, who had modeled the technique after a tribal ritual he’d witnessed in Africa.”

The therapy scenes are fascinating. Eventually, Corrine is able to speak to her husband again as his spirit (supposedly) embodies a woman named Oonan, a shaman. Both Corrine’s reaction and the ending of the story are wholly satisfying, leaving the reader wondering, “What would Constellation Work reveal about me?”

Fordon’s story “How It Passed” follows a collection of couples as they begin to move through the cycle of society’s prescribed path. We find them as they start to have babies, and we are moved through sixteen years of their lives together. They struggle as couples, they struggle with their children, and they struggle with themselves. And as one reads, one realizes that what these people are doing is simply following blindly the well-lit and poorly-examined path that was laid before them from the moment of their births. In the section of the story titled Year Four, we get:

“We have more babies. No more nap time for mom. One baby bellowing all morning. Another ramming into walls all afternoon. This constant racket is getting to us. We yell and scream and curse and then we gather at the park for mass absolution.”

In many of Fordon’s stories, the promise of children is juxtaposed with the reality that when we bring children into the world, we are actually bringing in human beings with all of their potential glories, foibles, and tragedies. They aren't guaranteed to save us.

In the section titled Year Fifteen we read:

“Steve and Margery pick up their son at TCBY after the eighth-grade mixer, and he’s drunk. At the Dinner Club we all shake our heads.

'He threw up for four hours straight,' Margery says.

'He’s just a baby,' Steve says. 'He looked like a little wasted baby.'"

“How It Passed” has one of the most powerful ending paragraphs I’ve read in a long time. But I’m not going to quote it here. I don’t think a reviewer should ever give away the ending of a story, but its wisdom is worth waiting for your own copy of this book.

Fordon explores with honesty the actual risks and rewards of bringing children into the world. Society seems to say, “Well, that’s just what you do. They will be your greatest joy.” Fordon doesn’t set out to disavow this notion completely. Even in her bio at the back of the book, she mentions her own four children and describes them as “the best people I know.”

Fordon isn’t anti-childrearing, but she certainly wants to shed some truthful light on it. Many of the stories show parents struggling to understand their children as they come into their own adulthood. It makes me think that couples considering having children should read this book, not to dissuade them, but to simply say, “And this… this too could happen.”

In “Why Did I Ever Think This Was a Good Idea?” (a question her characters seem to be unconsciously asking throughout the collection), a woman struggles with her soon-to-be-empty nest. Her life revolved around raising her children, and the story suggests that she gave up her dreams of being an artist for them. Her absent husband fills his days with golf and she, to her dismay, bumps heads with her youngest who will soon leave for a “gap year” in China. She loved him so much as a baby but, in a moment of nostalgia when, by herself in her cluttered art studio, she dances to ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” she discovers her son watching her dance.

Children can be beautiful and cruel, and discovering her dancing the son simply says, before walking away, “You look sooooo stupid, Mom,” erasing her brief joy instantly.

And this… this too could happen.

Fordon’s stories are a wonderfully complex look at life and how our expectations can bump up against our realities. The stories are sobering and yet, as I wrote earlier, I found myself comforted by them.

Too much in popular culture deals with the finding of love, but then ends there. I think of the movie “Sleepless in Seattle.” Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan finally meet face-to-face at the top of the Empire State Building on Valentine’s Day. It’s romantic. Theirs, like any relationship, starts at such great heights of promise, magic, and potential. Then, they climb into the elevator and begin their descent into their future.

Then, the movie ends.

Fordon’s stories? They pick up right after the elevator has started its descent.

Purchase a copy of Kelly Fordon's I Have the Answer: here

Jeff Vande Zande is an English professor at Delta College in Michigan. His latest collection, The Neighborhood Division: Stories, is now out through Whistling Shade Press and available: here.