First, a brief bio:

Nick Arvin, American Author (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Nick Arvin is an American engineer and writer. Born in North Carolina, he was raised in Michigan, and graduated from the University of Michigan and Stanford University with degrees in mechanical engineering, and from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He has worked in forensic engineering and accident reconstruction.

Now, on to the questions.

1) They say that all writing is autobiographical. What made you decide to tackle forensic engineering or accident reconstruction – something you have direct experience with – in your second novel?

I did work in accident reconstruction; I sort of stumbled into it. I had worked as an engineer for Ford, but I quit that to do an MFA in creative writing, and then ended up living in Denver on some grant money for a year after the MFA. When the grant ran out, I started looking around for a job in engineering. I’d worked in the automotive industry, but there isn’t much of an automotive industry in Denver. Then I realized that there were a couple of forensic engineering companies that did automotive accident reconstruction. So I sent them my resume, and one of the resumes happened to land on the desk of a guy who’s a reader and was impressed that I had published a book of short stories. Soon I had a job.

I knew from the first day that I wanted to write a novel about the work — the work itself was basically a process of creating little mini-stories about the accidents we were working on, and these accidents were dramatic and tragic, and the process of creating these mini-stories was really interesting, but also discomforting in the way that it required applying cold, analytical techniques to examining terribly human situations. So, the work had all these interesting layers of narrative and emotional disconnect, and I knew I couldn’t cover all of it in a short story. So I collected material from the job in a notebook for a couple of years, and then began to try to figure out how to structure it into a novel. Writing the novel took about seven years altogether.

2) Engineer and writer seem like such very different careers – like they would bring very styles, perspective and different world views. True? Did you bring similar skill sets to both jobs or was writing a break from your “day job” (when you had a day job)?

Actually, I still have a day job in engineering. Most writers need a day job. Nowadays I work on the design of power plants and natural gas facilities. I tend to think that my involvement in engineering is good for my writing — it keeps me out in the world on a daily basis, meeting new people, seeing new things. And it’s corner of the world that most writers never see.

As for the first part of your question, I recently wrote a short essay for the Wall Street Journal on the topic of how writing and engineering mesh. I won’t rehash it all here, but suffice to say, I believe there’s more overlap between the two careers than people might think.

3) What is it about car accidents that they seem to touch our lives in such important ways?

Your life is going along the way it always does, and then all the sudden an accident comes in sideways, creating terrible death and injury and remorse. Abruptly, the path of your life is very different. It forces the people who survive these events to look at themselves and who they really are, what is important to them, and who they want to be, for good or ill. It has a huge effect. And it’s happening all the time, somewhere. We all know someone who it has happened to.

4) Why are accidents so hard to explain – why do people have such a hard time getting details right? Do we over-value eye-witness accounts?

Accidents are by definition unexpected, so it’s not like anyone ever says to a witness: here, watch these two cars smash into each other and remember as much as you can. Instead, something happens at the corner of vision, or you hear a sound and then turn to see the aftermath. And then, in one of these terrible cases where litigation arises, a hundred detailed questions are asked of the witness. And the witness feels maybe just because he was there he should know the answers, and he wants to please the questioner by giving the right answers, so his brain tries to fill in the missing information with a story that makes some sense. None of this needs to happen consciously, of course. Our brains make up all sorts of stuff all the time to fill in for the things we don’t know. Most of the time it doesn’t matter.

There are a ton of studies out there showing that, basically, witnesses suck. They’re polluted by biases and they make up stuff. But to reconstruct events from physical evidence is time-consuming and expensive, and that process too can be polluted by biases. Probably we’re just stuck living with a large degree of uncertainty about the nature of factual truth.

5) It seems there is a little meta-fiction or the very least some literary references weaved into the story. Was this a way to note the influences or just an interesting way to explore the ideas the characters were wrestling with? Or neither?

Or both! Definitely both. I think you’re referencing the way that the character Boggs blasts audiobooks at top volume from his convertible. That Boggs did this came to me very early in the writing process, and it helped me to get a handle on who he is. That being so, I needed to give the reader some idea of the kind of books he listens to; it’s kind of like when you look at a person’s bookshelf to try to figure out who they are. And it also gave me an opportunity to allude to some writers in the past who have touched on the book’s themes.

6) There is an awful lot of time spent driving in cars in the story. Was it a challenge to convey a real sense of what long distance driving is like without obviously letting it unduly bog down the book?

Yes… I wrote a lot of material about driving that I later cut, and there’s still plenty in the book. The nature of long distance driving has always been fascinating to me — it’s at once dangerous and meditative and maddening. I wanted to explore that. And I wanted to explore the roadside landscape, because we spend so much time in that landscape, and yet we hardly look at it. But I was aware, too, of the need to keep the story moving and the characters developing, and I did my best to balance all of those elements.

7) It struck me that you were really trying to depict the interior lives of your characters and how their exterior lives don’t always match up to their interior assumptions and beliefs or how these worlds often collide with unintended consequences. Are novelists like psychologists in some sense? What do you find interesting about your characters?

I suppose that novelists are amateur psychologists in a sense, although I try not to think of it in those terms much, for fear of reducing my characters to psychological constructs. The danger, I think, is that you could lose the contradictory elements of surprise and mystery that make characters feel real.

As for the characters in this book, I think you put it very well. The real world keeps refusing to conform to their assumptions and expectations, it eludes their attempts at analysis. I think we all struggle with this, in different ways. How the characters deal with that disconnect between inner process and outer reality is what’s interesting to me.

8) You have also written short stories. What is the challenge in writing short stories and how is it different from novels? Do you plan to continue to write both?

Yes, I love both short stories and novels and plan to keep working on both — as well as the middle ground of long stories or novellas, which may finally have some opportunities for reaching readers via electronic publishing. The main difference, for me, is that with short stories I feel like I’m always starting at the beginning with a blank page again, which requires a burst of raw creativity that’s sometimes hard to find, while in a novel I follow the same characters and themes day after day, year after year, which can feel like a grind. It’s nice to be able to work in one mode until I get tired of it, then switch to the other.

One of the curiosities of this business is the way that MFA programs tend to push writers to write short stories, because they are easier to workshop; but once you are out in the world, the publishing industry pushes for novels. Write a collection of stories and send it to New York, and the response is almost always something like, “This is lovely, but do you have a novel?” Chad Harbach’s essay on this topic, “MFA vs. NYC,” is very smart.

But there are some writers, like myself, who have day jobs outside academia, which provide a certain freedom from those two pressures. I don’t teach in an MFA program, and to pay the bills I don’t have to make a ton of money off my writing (though, to be clear, it’d sure be nice!). I try to use that freedom to follow my interests and characters wherever they may lead, and let a story find its own form and length.

9) There are some TV or movie type elements in this novel (a sort of CSI subject). Have you been involved in screenwriting? Any interest in trying your hand at that? 

Generally, I tried to avoid making the book feel like it’s made-for-TV, because I tend to think that literature these days is already overly influenced by the conventions of screenwriting. But it’s also simply inherent in the material in this book that it has CSI, police procedural aspects to it, and I wanted to do justice to those parts of the story.

I’ve never attempted to write anything for the screen. Sometimes I think it might be fun to try it out, but to date I’ve never gone any further with the thought. I always seem to have a novel or short story that I’m more interested in. Maybe someday.

10) You have been involved in teaching writing. What is the best advice you were giving about how to succeed as a writer?

Read as much as possible. Write as much as possible. Work to find your inner voice and be true to it. Listen carefully to the advice of others, and then quietly reject most of it.

His relationship with her borders on kinship, and he admires and admonishes her as he would a family member, with whom he shares a bond both genetic and cultural.

When asked to choose a specific piece of writing that’s had a significant impact on him, Tom chose O’Connor’s short story Good Country People, but then he threw in two others — Everything that Rises Must Converge and Revelation. As Tom explains, these three stories chart O’Connor’s careful trajectory, her unique vision, and her genius.

Click over and give a listen if you are so inclined. And check out ThoughtCast it looks like an interesting resource.

Publishers Weekly

Unwellness is woven through these eight beautiful and brutal stories from Silver (The God of War), who gives readers finely wrought slivers of lives scarred by sickness and the intermingling of hope and despair. The characters in the first two stories, “Temporary” and “The Visitor,” carry scars from their mothers’ illness into adult life. In “In the New World,” a 14-year-old boy gets a classmate pregnant, leading his hardworking immigrant father to reflect on his son’s future and his own battle to get away from an overprotective father. In “Leap,” a pet-owner’s wounded heart heals along with her injured dog, who she believes tried to kill himself. “Three Girls” tells the story of sisters who have to raise themselves in the face of incapable parents, while the title story details the resolution, made while trekking through the Sahara, of a woman recovering from a nervous breakdown. While the stories contain woes that can befall anyone—addiction, brain tumors, heart disease, disability—Silver infuses her characters with a fatalistic resilience that’s revealed through tiny, perfect details.

Cover of Tales From Outer Suburbia

On one of our recent family treks to half-price books, I stumbled upon Shaun Tan‘s Tales From Outer Suburbia. This was one of those where both my wife and I were interested. She more for the illustrations and me for the short vignettes but both of us were intrigued by the combination.

I was vaguely aware of Tan but hadn’t read of owned any of his previous works. But the cover art and a peak inside pulled me in.

I was not disappointed. The book is full of mystery and whimsy; of foreboding and tragedy; of strangeness but joy as well. There is a unique combination of minimalism and depth to both the art work and the stories.

What works about these stories is what I find interesting about short stories, even though it is not my preferred format, they contain a depth that hints at “more” behind the story and yet they seem to capture just the right amount of the story on the page. They let the reader imagine what is off the page in a way that is thought provoking and satisfying somehow.

The opening story, “The Water Buffalo”, capture this quality. It is whimsical with a touch of both oddness and sadness.

“Eric” is surreal – the foreign exchange student that is the focus is a tiny leaf like creature – but it is sweet-natured and almost heartwarming.

While one of the longer stories in the collection, “Broken Toys”, seems to end on a happy note it has a sense of tragedy about it. It has that languor of summer in suburbia with the underlying sense that a lot more is going on in the world than is captured by two boys looking to cure their boredom.

Some of the stories seem like artifacts almost, pieces of stories that are “found” rather than created. “The nameless holiday” has this quality – the sense that there is more to the story than lies on the page; a truth to be found despite the few words. The black and white wood cut illustration hints at this deeper truth in some way too.

So if like me you have been largely ignorant of the work of this talented artist and wordsmith and you stumble on one of his book in the discount table – pick it up. Or better yet buy it new so he can keep our imaginations going with more books that blend illustration, art and literature.

Image via Wikipedia

My review of Gene Wilder’s last book, The Woman Who Wouldn’t, had this assertion:

I don’t think Wilder is seeking to be a great writer or hone his craft in some academic or literary way. Rather, I think he enjoys telling stories of a certain kind. He isn’t doing this to get rich or famous but because he enjoys it.

His latest release, What Is This Thing Called Love?, reflects this I think. And my reaction to this collection of stories was similar to my reaction to his novels.

The stories touch on the idiosyncrasies of love; falling in love, longing for love, seeking love, etc.. Wilder often paints men as desperate for love and companionship but on occasion too dumb and selfish to see it for what it is. But he is also a romantic and understands that love breaks through and strikes when we often least expect it.

The stories are not particularly deep or literary but they have a lightness and a tragicomic sense that comes from Wilder and makes them worth reading.

From my perspective Kirkus Reviews best captured the collection’s oddly entertaining style:

Another slim volume that should amuse the actor’s fans. There is no answer to the question posed by the title of this collection of stories by Wilder (The Woman Who Wouldn’t, 2008, etc.). In fact, many of the narrators seem more confused in the aftermath of their romantic misadventures than they had been in the beginning. But, as one of the pair of young lovers suggests in “In Love for the First Time,” “If you always knew the ‘why’ about such things, the meaning of life wouldn’t be such a mystery.” In this particular story, an exceedingly shy boy and the more assertive object of his desire, herself a virgin, eventually make love-somehow. And that’s pretty much it. In three of the 12 stories, the protagonist is the hapless Buddy Silberman (to whom Wilder dedicates the collection as his cousin, “who really wanted love, but settled only for sex”), bumbling his way through various seductions and receiving a big surprise with the punch-line revelation of “The Hollywood Producer.” Many of these stories play out like elaborate jokes, often with a bittersweet tinge to the humor, or extended vignettes. Within them, love typically seems like a byproduct of biological urges, a matter of chance rather than destiny. “The Kiss” concerns two young actors at the Milwaukee Community Theater, with the 17-year-old girl asking her 24-year-old co-star “why they couldn’t go to his house and touch each other and see each other’s naked bodies.” When he says that she’s too young, she switches her affection to someone younger and runs off with him. True love prevails, or at least what passes for it in these stories. Wilder writes in his prelude that he hopes these stories “might give you a little pleasure and alaugh.” They should.

I loved The Dart League King and so was interested in seeing Keith Morris work in short stories (I haven’t read any of his previous works) in his latest work Call it What You Want. I was not disappointed.

Although the stories share a similar form and focus – the “dreams and disappointments, good intentions and small triumphs, chronicles the lives of men lost in the liminal spaces between adolescence and adulthood” – each one has a unique angle and feel to it.

Morris has a honesty to his writing that comes from honing his craft so that just the essentials are left (isn’t that the essence of short story writing?) and a sympathy and humanism to the way he presents his characters. The surreal or absurdest nature of many of the stories adds a twist as well.

If you are a fan of the short story format – or just quality writing – be sure to check out Keith Morris.

From the Publisher

Marisa Silver dazzled and inspired readers with her critically acclaimed The God of War (a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist), praised by Richard Russo as “a novel of great metaphorical depth and beauty.” In this elegant, finely wrought new collection, Alone With You, Silver has created eight indelible stories that mine the complexities of modern relationships and the unexpected ways love manifests itself. Her brilliantly etched characters confront life’s abrupt and unsettling changes with fear, courage, humor, and overwhelming grace.

In the O. Henry Prize–winning story “The Visitor,” a VA hospital nurse’s aide contends with a family ghost and discovers the ways in which her own past haunts her. The reticent father in “Pond” is confronted with a Solomonic choice that pits his love for his daughter against his feelings for her young son. In “Night Train to Frankfurt,” first published in The New Yorker, a daughter travels to an alternative-medicine clinic in Germany in a gambit to save her mother’s life. And in the title story, a woman vacations in Morocco with her family while contemplating a decision that will both ruin and liberate them all.

From “Temporary,” where a young woman confronts the ephemeral nature of companionship, to “Three Girls,” in which sisters trapped in a snowstorm recognize the boundaries of childhood, the nuanced voices of Alone With You bear the hallmarks of an instant classic from a writer with unerring talent and imaginative resource. Silver has the extraordinary ability to render her fictional inhabitants instantly relatable, in all their imperfections. Her stories have the singular quality of looking in a mirror. We see at once what is familiar and what is strange. In these stirring narratives, we meet ourselves anew.

Do Not Deny Me: Stories by Jean Thompson

Publishers Weekly:

National Book Award-finalist Thompson (for Who Do You Love) delivers a deeply affecting collection that elevates the quotidian to the sublime. In the title story, Julia, a young woman “embarrassed” for “people [who] talked about guardian angels or spirit guides,” visits a psychic after her boyfriend dies. Faced with the ability to access the world beyond, she recoils sharply. The collection goes on to explore a bewildering array of experience, from a young wife denying her husband’s white-collar crimes in “Liberty Tax” to the concerned neighbor of “Little Brown Bird” who is powerless to help a little girl being molested by her father. In “Escape,” a man who has suffered a stroke finds himself at the mercy of his increasingly abusive wife. Determined to get away from her, he’s pleasantly shocked when she solves his problem in a way he never counted on. Thompson immerses readers in details and emotions so consuming and convincing that the inane vagaries of modern life can take on near mythic importance. This collection shows the confidence and power of a writer in her prime.

*Fixed typo in title.  Sad that I didn’t see it nor did anyone mention it.

I am not that knowledgeable about short stories – not my favorite from – and I knew nothing about Biller to coming across this particular collection (his first in English).  I am also not all that plugged into the themes and or subject BIller focuses on: Germany, being Jewish, sex/relationships, etc.

So I thought it might be interesting to offer some quotes from the wildly differing reviews the book has received so far.

First up, Joshua Cohen he no like:

Though he’ll never be as famous here as he is in Germany, the following should be said: Maxim Biller is a bad writer. One wonders which is more incompetent, his prose or his soul. Blurb that on the billboards. Broadcast at will.

And that is just the first paragraph!  He goes on:

When one is a budget Raymond Carver, it’s probably better to slip from the bed at midnight and leave minimalism behind. Biller has cuckolded Carver’s stripped prose, as well as his subject — the impossibility of men and women getting along — and has mixed two other ingredients into this lightest of cocktails (Biller mixes metaphors, too, when he doesn’t altogether forget them): exaggerated Jewish pride, which comes from living in a Germany so rapidly changed, and the culture of “emo,” which can be defined as a wounded but willed innocence, whether lazy or scared, and is too often a capitulation to counterforce, a refusal to recognize the difficulties of love.

Francine Prose had a different take:

Set mainly in Germany and the Czech Republic, with side trips to Tel Aviv, France, and New York, these wry, elliptical narratives chart the passions and the discontents of men and women who vanish from each other’s lives and reappear without notice, and whom Biller often catches at the moment of confronting the mystery of what keeps them together, or what has driven them apart … Deceptively transparent, Biller’s brief, gossamer fictions may remind you of narrative poems in their ability to simultaneously elude and haunt you.

Francesca Mari’s review in The New Republic is a great deal more in depth and deals with the Carver connection directly and at some length.  A snippet:

Yet Biller’s vignettes, however indirectly, draw an idiosyncratic taxonomy of contemporary relationships. Biller offers experiments in love, trial after trial of a few different types. The aesthetic is a control; and, as is the case with most fictional worlds, the characters share a general mentality, if not the same exact mind. Every writer fashions characters and settings of a particular time and place — in Carver, the motel or the tract house (now probably foreclosed); in Yates, the Greenwich Village apartment or the trim suburban home; and in Biller, the mod rooms and cafe lifestyle of a German- Jewish-Czech artist. Of each writer, one senses that his characters are of a single breed of mind, and that the plot merely tests them in different ways.

Biller’s fragments are fresh and terrible — terrible being high praise. They are terrible in their effect, in their severe style and harrowing ability to arouse awe and anxiety simultaneously. The collection is called Love Today, which should set off some internal alarms. The two words are — or at least should be — mutually exclusive. So before going any further, we should clarify that Biller’s episodes are actually about the pursuit of love rather than what can assuredly be called love itself. In fact, whether love ever exists is almost impossible to tell. That is the ambiguity that makes Biller’s texts so seductive.

Sam Munson faults American critics for Biller’s lack of recognition:

A German journalist, novelist, and crafter of short stories, Maxim Biller is a difficult writer in the sense that his works yield up their meaning only with focused, strenuous effort. This is the best possible sense of a term overused in critical praise, and which usually appears as cover for incomprehension in the face of pseudo-profundities and structural Baroquerie. And this species of difficulty – genuine difficulty – must play at least a part in Mr. Biller’s sad lack of reputation here: If anything engages our literary tastemakers, it’s thundering, galloping banality. Ably translated from the German by the eminent Anthea Bell, Mr. Biller’s stories are, by contrast, cruelly brief. They speak almost entirely in obliquities and allusion. The prose is pellucid, and the themes limited.

But, for all its strict economy, “Love Today” (Simon and Schuster, 216 pages, $23) is a rich and strange book. Mr. Biller was born in 1960, in Prague, to Jewish parents who emigrated to Germany two years after the suppression of Alexander Dubcek’s government and took up residence in Munich. And Mr. Biller’s stories are examinations of ambiguity and flight, the impossibility of genuine escape, of the eternal recurrence of the past. This is fitting. Mr. Biller is firmly in the line of those Central European writers who are themselves concerned with memory, history, and desire — cynical, lyrical, lustful, cerebral artists such as Milan Kundera and Joseph Roth. He shares with them, as well, a strong ambivalence about the spiritual conditions of modern life.

He is not, however, without his own criticisms

Mr. Biller does pay a price for his brevity and the surgical economy of his means. Reading “Love Today” cover to cover induces a mild but vertiginous sense of repetition: The basic lineaments of “The Right of Young Men” – man, woman, interloper, the inescapable past – recur continually. In the volume’s best stories, this continuity matters less: The finely mapped contours of the characters, their muted but charged exchanges, weave in and out of the over-familiar elements, and fix our attention … But in the book’s lesser stories, Mr. Biller’s obsessions begin to feel emptied and sterile, placed in the service of no larger aesthetic cause.

So where does all this leave me?  Where I all too often find myself: awkwardly in the middle.  I find Cohen too harsh and I think there are some cultural issue behind his attack not just critical disagreements.

I can appreciate what Mari writes but don’t have the background to understand or disagree with much of it.  I read the stories over a period of time.  I enjoyed some of them while finding others strange.  Perhaps I didn’t give it the attention it deserves, however, as none of the stories stuck with me or grabbed my attention.

I think Muson offers the best brief description when he says that “Biller’s stories are examinations of ambiguity and flight, the impossibility of genuine escape, of the eternal recurrence of the past.”

I figure sometimes it is best just to admit you don’t know.  So you will have to deal with my ambivalence and find solace in the strong feelings of the above reviews.