winter I
READING
fi ction
k The Listeners
By Leni Zumas. Tin House Books, $15.95.
Portland author Leni
Zumas’ latest novel The
Listeners tells the story
of Quinn, a thirty-some-
thing ex-punk rocker,
whose band, once on the
verge of stardom, fell
apart at the last minute.
Now she works at a fail-
ing bookstore, otherwise
drifting through life, run-
ning into ex-bandmates
with names like Cam and
Geck, haunted by memo-
ries of childhood trauma
and observing the world
from a caustic distance.
Parallel to Quinn’s story is the story of her conservative
brother; by some measures his life is more on-track than
Quinn’s, but by others he’s just as lost, and locked in
orbit with his bottoming-out sister. Zumas’ prose is stark,
her chapters brief — many only a paragraph long. The
narrative jumps back and forth in time from the present, to
Quinn’s days on the road with her band and even further
back to her childhood, retelling a tragedy in Quinn’s family
with morbid and grisly detail. She paints the edges of the
event with imagery of violence, menstruation and death —
never quite clarifying detail. Zumas’ book is full of many
dark passages, so rich in dense imagery they’re best read
like poetry, gleaning feeling over substance, atmosphere
instead of narrative.
I love stories of damaged people hammering out family
on their own terms, sometimes with bandmates, drinking
buddies or actual relatives like Quinn’s brother, mother
and father (whom she dryly calls Mod and Fod.) Quinn
is fl awed but big hearted, and I loved getting to know her,
like the tattooed girl you just met at the bar: She drinks too
much, she smokes too much, you’re fairly certain half of
what she says is complete bullshit, but you’re falling a little
bit in love with her anyway. — William Kennedy
Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore
By Robin Sloan. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25.
Print is dead! Long live
print! Print is irreplaceable;
it’s destined to last as long as
humankind!
Thus is the age we live in,
the age Robin Sloan addresses
in his fi rst novel. Clay Jannon,
a graphic designer by trade,
begins work in Mr. Penum-
bra’s bookstore, and a mystery
meshing ancient lore, modern
technology, codes, puzzles
and a fun group of obsessive
friends. Through giggle-in-
ducing twists and turns, Clay and company try to solve a
puzzle to unlock the secret to immortality.
12
December 13, 2012 • eugeneweekly.com
f there’s one thing EW’s writers like to do it’s read. We’re selfi sh about it — unabashedly
so. We read what we love, and that’s what we offer to you. This year we tried, more
than ever, to read Oregon and Eugene authors, including those brave enough to self-
publish. This area is awash with rain all winter long, but it’s awash with literary talent
and good local bookstores, too. Head over to Tsunami, Black Sun, Smith Family, J.
Michaels or the unfortunately named but full of good books UO Duck Store, to name
only a few, and support books, local bookstores and those among us willing to put their
words and their selves onto page and out into the world. — Camilla Mortensen
Sloan doesn’t use the book to advocate for one side of
the print-digital divide. Instead, the lighthearted story gives
credence to that sane notion that owning a bookcase and a
Kindle won’t create a rift in the time-space continuum and
cause the world to implode. You’re not with us or against
us. It’s writing that’s really immortal. — Shannon Finnell
Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving
By Dean Evison. Algonquin Books, $23.95.
There’s a lot that’s not quite there in Dean Evison’s Re-
vised Fundamentals of Caregiving. But, you know, there’s
a lot not quite there in much of real life and Evison captures
that well: embarrassing jealous fi ts, crass jokes that fall fl at
and clumsy attempts at romance. The novel tells the story
of the repetitively named Benjamin Benjamin, a likeable
if somewhat schlubby former stay-at-home dad trying to
get back in the game after a divorce. Until now he’s let life
happen to him, dabbling in writing poetry but generally
fi nding purpose in taking care of his kids and being a hus-
band. Like a lot of divorce
stories, children involved
in trauma drives Benjamin
and his wife apart. In Re-
vised Fundamentals this
tragedy feels somewhat
hackneyed, a plot device
preventing petulant adults
from owning up to their
own shortcomings instead
of an actual trauma.
Benjamin fi nds work
after the split with his wife
taking care of a young
man with muscular dys-
trophy named Trev. In his
relationship with Trev, Benjamin owns up to his mistakes,
comes to terms with his divorce and begins to make early
and awkward attempts at fi nding romance again. When
Benjamin and Trev set off on a road trip to patch up Trev’s
relationship with his own dad, they pick up a motley crew
of characters on the way, helping Benjamin reestablish
himself as a gifted caretaker.
What redeems the novel’s occasional shortcomings
are well-drawn characters, laugh-out-loud scenarios and a
dead-on eye for what makes life hurt so much sometimes:
“Listen to me: everything you think you know, every
relationship you’ve ever taken for granted, every plan or
possibility you’ve ever hatched, every conceit or endeavor
you’ve ever concocted, can be stripped from you in an
instant. Sooner or later, it will happen. So prepare yourself.
Be ready not to be ready. Be ready to be brought to your
knees and beaten to dust. Because no stable foundation, no
act of will, no force of cautious habit will save you from
this fact: nothing is indestructible.” — William Kennedy
The Yellow Birds
By Kevin Powers. Little, Brown and Company, $24.99.
Amazon.com Editors’ Pick Book of the Year.
I’ve never shot a gun. I’m opposed to violence on many
levels. The act of enlisting in the service is totally foreign
to my being. Yet I fi nd stories of young men going to war
endlessly fascinating, stirring in me a primal thought,
a question central to the identity of many men: “Could I
march into combat?”
k = OREGON AUTHOR
I picked up Yellow Birds
because of the blurb on the
cover comparing it to one of
my favorite war novels, All
Quiet On The Western Front;
it stands up well to the classic.
Written by a veteran of the
Iraq war, Yellow Birds is about
friendships forged in impossible
circumstances between young
boys lured into war by romantic
notions of becoming men, much
like myself, clouded by too
much Hemingway. But as is often the case, idealistic boy-
soldiers come home profoundly broken men.
The slim novel opens with the brilliant line, “The war
tried to kill us in the spring,” and it continues to alternate
back and forth between life on the frontlines in Iraq and
stateside, showing how combat can make the foreign feel
like home and home feel strange. Depicting violence and
its aftermath in simple and graphic prose, Yellow Birds
is at other times lyric and almost beautiful, and should
be required reading for anyone interested in joining the
service. — William Kennedy
Canada
By Richard Ford. HarperCollins, $27.99.
Canada is not a happy story. The simple plot isn’t awful,
but alone it’s nothing to write home about. So what makes
it a good read? It’s the simple language, the clarity with
which the author builds isolation and the way he writes
loyally from 15-year-old protagonist Dell Parsons’ point of
view, even when the late-blooming boy’s interpretation of
the world feels improbable or frustrating.
At the onset, Dell explains that he’s telling a story:
fi rst about his parents’ ill-fated bank robbery and then the
murders that follow. It’s 1960, the Parsons live in Great
Falls, Mont., and their lives have been a chronology of
standard events for a family following a father’s Air Force
career. More and more, it becomes
clear that the Parsons are each
strange and isolated, both from
greater Great Falls and from each
other. No one is quite likable, and
Ford makes clear that nothing is
going to end well.
All the while, Dell is starting to
fi gure out himself and the world,
and that’s where the beautiful
writing and heartbreaking realities
arrive. Central to the bank robbery
portion are questions about relationships, questions that are
as hard to answer in fi ction as in life: Why do two miser-
able people stay together? What does love look like in the
absence of happiness and closeness? He says of his father,
whose only real relationships are with his family, “In truth,
we were never very close, although I loved him as if we
were.” — Shannon Finnell
The Age of Miracles
By Karen Thompson Walker. Random House, $26. National
Book Award Finalist.
Karen Thompson Walker’s The Age of Miracles tells
the story of 11-year-old Julia, whose arrival to adolescence