Shakespeare and Co. Booksellers

Here I have a confession to make. It’s not something that’s easy to explain, but here goes. After two days of nearly constant religious instruction, songs, worship, and praise — two days that for me meant an unending regimen of forced and fake responses — a funny thing started to happen to my head. There is a transformational quality in these external demonstrations of faith and belief. The more you shout out praising the Lord, singing along to those awful acoustic tunes, telling people how blessed you feel, and so on, the more a sort of mechanical Christian skin starts to grow all over your real self. Even if you’re a degenerate Rolling Stone reporter inwardly chuckling and busting on the whole scene — even if you’re intellectually enraged by the ignorance and arrogant prejudice flowing from the mouth of a terminal ambition case like Phil Fortenberry — outwardly you’re swaying to the gospel and signing and praising and acting the part, and those outward ministrations assume a kind of sincerity in themselves. And at the same time the “inner you” begins to get tired of the whole spectacle and sometimes forgets to protest — in my case checking out into baseball reveries and other daydreams while the outer me did the “work” of singing and praising. At any given moment, which one is the real you?

You may think you know the answer, but by my third day I began to notice how effortlessly my soft-spoken Matt-mannequin was going through his robotic motions of praise, and I was shocked. For a brief, fleeting moment I could see how under different circumstances it would be easy enough to bury your “sinful” self far under the skin of your outer Christian and to just travel through life this way. So long as you go through all the motions, no one will care who you really are underneath. And besides, so long as you are going through all the motions, never breaking the facade, who are you really? It was an incomplete thought, but it was a scary one; it was the very first time I worried that the experience of entering this world might prove to be anything more than an unusually tiring assignment. I feared for my normal.

– Matt Taibbi, The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, & Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire (Spiegel & Grau; $24)

Augusten Burroughs has made me laugh several times. His teenage memoir Running With Scissors, very different from the atrocious film, has a self-awareness and humor only an author like Burroughs can bring to the table. He is biting, blunt and whether or not he’s completely honest with the outlandish episodes of his childhood, Burroughs gains the reader’s trust within the first few paragraphs.

His new memoir A Wolf at the Table depicts, through the use of startling set-pieces, Burroughs’ relationship not only with his father, the predominant theme of the book, but also his fragile interactions with his mother and brother. Darker than Burroughs’ earlier memoirs, A Wolf at the Table adopts a more serious tone which still won me over in the end but was definitely a departure from the typical black humor I have come to expect from him.

“I stood outside on the deck, careful to watch my step because the rot had spread farther and so many of the boards were soft - you could fall right through. I held my father’s heavy binoculars up to my eyes, working the focus dial with my index finger. I could see the moon, blue-white and swirled with shadows, rutted with mystery. But I could not see the astronauts. Unless the astronauts were floating in the sky exactly above the rotting deck, I would have no hope of seeing them, because our house was surrounded by tall pine trees pressing in on all sides.

I slid the binoculars off the moon and scanned the sky. Even the stars were just luminous specks, the resolving power of the binoculars deeply disappointing. I’d begged my father for a telescope but he’d said, “That’s too expensive. You can see the pictures of the universe in the encyclopedia.”"

Another good memoir from Burroughs. Without a doubt.

I am so happy to see this book, first published in 1965, back in print from HarperCollins. Don Robertson (who died in 1999) wrote fiercely, with great clarity and bravery and love of character. His stuff is absolutely unlike anything else I have ever encountered in American literature — but distinctive and fully realized on a par with John Updike or Steinbeck. Robertson, who wrote 19 published novels, some of them quite densely packed (whole towns, whole populations come to life), seemed possessed of a monstrous imagination. But rather than turning his outsized imagination to horror or sci-fi or some other kind of genre extremity, Robertson turned it back on the American scene — with often devastating results. As bleakly stark as some of his stuff could get, he always wrote with a sense of humor and a huge heart, and with great courage, and with a love for his creations that beamed off the page. He never phoned it in. Everything he wrote was 100% full tilt, and you either liked it or you didn’t, but it was never ordinary. Most of his stuff is out-of-print and hard to get, but now, miraculously, you can get this one. The story deals with a nine-year-old boy, his vivid conscience, and a horrific gas tank explosion that really took place in Cleveland, OH, in 1944. The book starts out like this:

The legless man was wise enough to understand that heroes can be found in the damnedest places. Which was why he didn’t hesitate when he called the boy the greatest thing since sliced bread.

For the boy, though, the big thing wasn’t his bravery. As far as he was concerned, too much fuss was made over it.

For the boy, the big thing happened before the explosion. It happened at the moment he saw his old buddy Stanley Chaloupka. The exact moment.

Why? Because it meant that the boy had accomplished what he had set out to do.

Which helped him come to terms with the things he felt badly about. Stupidities, for instance. Betrayals.

The explosion was just something that happened to happen.

Funny about that explosion. It really never should have happened to happen. Those gas tanks were the safest in the world. Everyone said so.

They were built in 1941 by the East Ohio Gas Co., supplier of natural heating gas to all of the great city of Cleveland and northeastern Ohio. There were four of them, and they were designed for the storage of natural has in its liquefied state. Three of them were spherical. The fourth was tubular and about as large as the other three combined. Their capacity was 400,000 feet of liquefied gas, which was the equivalent of 240,000,000 feet of gas in its natural state. The gas company’s publicists were proud of these new tanks, and photographs of them were run in all the newspapers.

A great deal of money was spent in assuring people there was no danger.

The campaign was successful. Those gas tanks were the safest in the world. Everyone said so.

But then one day the explosion happened to happen.

A lot of people were killed. The boy encountered the legless man. And the poor burnt lady. And the pretty Red Cross lady. And many other people.

When the day was finished, two things had happened to the boy.

First, and most important, he had accomplished — in seeing his old buddy Stanley Chaloupka — what he had set out to do.

Second, he had behaved in such a way that the legless man had called him, for whatever it was worth, the greatest thing since sliced bread.

(HarperCollins; $12.95)

From The Gathering, by Anne Enright:

Some days I don’t remember my mother. I look at her photograph and she escapes me. Or I see her on a Sunday, after lunch, and we spend a pleasant afternoon, and when I leave I find she has run through me like water.

‘Goodbye,’ she says, already fading. ‘Goodbye my darling girl,’ and she reaches her soft old face up, for a kiss. It still puts me in such a rage. The way, when I turn away, she seems to disappear, and when I look, I see only the edges. I think I would pass her in the street, if she ever bought a different coat. If my mother committed a crime there would be no witnesses — she is forgetfulness itself.

‘Where’s my purse?’ she used to say when we were children — or it might be her keys, or her glasses. ‘Did anyone see my purse?’ becoming, for those few seconds, nearly there, as she went from hall, to sitting room, to kitchen and back again. Even then we did not look at her but everywhere else: she was an agitation behind us, a kind of collective guilt, as we cast about the room, knowing that our eyes would slip over the purse, which was brown and fat, even if it was quite clearly there.

(Black Cat; $14)