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20 DECEMBER 13, 2007
Potter books, Kenneth Oppel’s Airborne
or Philip Reeve’s Larklight, hand over Un
Lun Dun for the holidays and watch the
fun begin. — Suzi Steffen
July, July
NO ONE BELONGS HERE MORE
THAN YOU by Miranda July. SCRIBNER, 2007.
HARDCOVER,
$23.
WINNER
OF
THE
FRANK
O’CONNOR
INTERNATIONAL SHORT STORY AWARD.
Whimsical. Inventive.
Witty. Charming. Full of
wonder … yeah, yeah,
yeah; Miranda July’s
debut collection, No One
Belongs Here More Than
You, is all those things —
so were her performance
pieces and her records and her movie.
It’s great that July has the ability to
work in varying mediums, but it becomes
apparent early in the book that she isn’t
exploring new ground. She’s taken the
same routine — bizarre, naïve, characteris-
tically idiosyncratic outsider who doesn’t
feel loved — and transferred it from stage
to vinyl to film and now to the page.
Regardless of the age, gender or sexual
orientation of the protagonist, the voice
and tone of the stories are almost identi-
cal. If you look past a few of the premises,
the characters throughout the book might
as well be the same person.
That being said, I’d be lying if I didn’t
admit that July has some chops. There are
moments when genuine emotion breaks
through in spite of her insistence on over-
shadowing it with cuteness, particularly in
“The Sister,” “Birthmark” and “How to Tell
Stories to Children.” July can occasionally
balance wit and humor with a driving need,
which is without fail the desire for human
connection. Still, when every story hinges
on the reader falling for the protagonist’s
melancholy quirk, the result is that the col-
lection as a whole is more obnoxious than
the sum of its parts.
“What a terrible mistake to let go of some-
thing wonderful for something real,” one char-
acter remarks. I don’t know — it doesn’t sound
so terrible. Never has whimsical and inventive
felt so formulaic. But everyone loves you,
Miranda. You — darling of magazine covers,
critic’s year-end lists and literary awards — are
no longer the ignored, the overlooked. Time to
drop the unloved shtick and use your talents
for something genuine. — Tony Perez
Your Prime
Suffering Years
SOMEDAY THIS PAIN WILL BE
USEFUL TO YOU by Peter Cameron.
FRANCES FOSTER BOOKS/FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX, 2007. HARDCOVER, $16.
This book, which takes its title from a
line by Ovid, is novelist Peter Cameron’s
first venture into young adult fiction; the
author has said that it took him 30 years
to find the character of 18-year-old James
Sveck and to write about how he felt at
18. James lives in Manhattan with his sis-
ter, a student, and his mother, who owns a
gallery at which her son works. James is
supposed to be going to college in the fall,
but he’s spending his considerable free
time fantasizing about farmhouses in the
Midwest, about escaping from New York
and everything he knows there. Self-iso-
lating and prone to using his hyperliterate
speech and insistence on precision as a
defense, James is so cut off, such a loner,
that he’s hard to sympathize with. Without
realizing what he’s doing, he plays a joke
of heartbreaking cruelty on someone he
considers almost a friend; he turns his
psychologist’s questions around on her
and resists her every attempt to explain, in
any small part, his behavior. Cameron’s
beautiful trick, then, is that he makes
James sad, but not pathetic; sympathetic,
but dislikable; wrong, but almost right.
He’s a character so self-centered he’s lost
his ability to connect, to understand, to
even really consider the experience of
CROOKED LITTLE VEIN, fiction by Warren Ellis. WILLIAM MORROW, 2007. HARDCOVER, $21.95.
From the delightfully disturbing mind of comics writer Warren Ellis
(Transmetropolitan, Planetary) comes this dirty, giddy little book. It’s about the
other Constitution, the one that’s bound in alien skin and infrasonically forces
people to read it, and the hopeless private investigator, McGill, who’s hired by a
nasty presidential chief of staff to find said Constitution. Its trail leads McGill
and a feisty young woman named Trix through an eye-opening tour of under-
ground American depravity — except that, in comparison with a book that will
be used to reset the country’s morality, that depravity doesn’t seem so, well,
depraved. Ellis has said Crooked Little Vein is just a “little black book,” but
there’s something big and welcoming about his vision of the world, where
everybody’s normal, everybody’s fucked, and the geeks are going to save us all
in the end. — Molly Templeton
IN THE DRIVER’S SEAT, short stories by Helen Simpson. KNOPF, 2007. HARDCOVER, $22.
From a quartet of teens trying not to laugh at the imperfect bodies of adults to
a grown woman making the rounds in a park, considering death and change,
Helen Simpson’s stories trace the unavoidable condition of mortality. A husband,
thinking he’s dying, reforms, at least temporarily; a woman finds herself surround-
ed by seriously ill neighbors; a grown son grits his teeth as his mother loses her
grasp on her memory. In clear, crisp prose, Simpson simply outlines a concern, a
fear, and lets the scene stand on its own to echo in the reader’s mind; these sto-
ries are as brief and as pointed as the snap of a clean sheet. — Molly Templeton