McSweeney's Issue 35 (Mcsweeney's Quarterly Concern) [ペーパーバック]

Maybe by Issue 95 McSweeney's will have all of Scandinavia covered. Following Issue 15's focus on Iceland, this issue focuses on contemporary fiction from Norway.

First, the art: courtesy of Jordan Crane, the art is surprising and cool. What at first appears to be a pretty bland image of two people walking through some rain turns into something else in the reader's hands, as the heat-activated bottom half of the image shows another world entirely. It's a great trick that's pure fun to play with.

There're more letters here, which I guess the editors are reinstituting for good, which is a shame, because they only feature good authors at their least likable. But onward.

This issue isn't all Norway: first we have three stories and a novella from elsewhere. The best of these is Steven Millhauser's wonderful "Phantoms," about a town whose residents are beset by a plague of harmless but unnerving phantoms. It's written as a scientific report, and shows off Millhauser's great talent for bending genre and style to his whim.

Patrick Crerand's "The Glory of Keys" is an absurd blast, about a car who goes to high school in lieu of its teenage driver and enters into a hilarious rise to fall. As the editors say in the intro, it's an example of "the literary humor we used to publish in greater quantity," and how much more of that I wish they were still publishing.

Then there's Hilton Als' novella "His Sister, Her Dialogue," about Richard Pryor's porn-scoring sister. About it Als himself says, "Well, it's unconventional," and my is it ever. It is a monologue, and a brassy, in-your-face one that deals with sex, race, and porn with refreshing candidness. At 66 pages, though, it's just too damn long. It goes from being entertaining to tiresome to endless. Which is a shame, as there's a superb mini-story about a willful cuckold buried at the end, which makes the 45 pages preceding it look like an elaborate throat-clearing.

Then there's Roddy Doyle, who botches it again with 30 wasted pages of his exact same story, altered not an iota from previous issues. This one's about a mistreated Nigerian in Dublin who has race issues, a childish fable with a transparent agenda and a double-underlined moral that goes "Racism Is Bad." At this point Doyle is just committing unwitting self-parody, insulting readers' intelligence and writing the same story over and over, sullying every second or third issue with this boilerplate choir-preaching. What's worst is that he does the characters he's trying to champion the disservice of reducing them to idiots, stereotypes, and Traits. Doyle can be good if he steps down from his soapbox, but he hasn't stepped down from there in some time now.

As an interlude, Robert Barnes gives us 16 pages of lunchbag doodles to skip. Some Guy's Doodlings have been a pestilence in McSweeney's issues at large (see 27), and these are as ignorable as them all.

But then there's the Norwegian fiction. First, the best: Gunnhild yehaug's story "Two by Two," about a woman going off to catch her husband cheating. Flukes strike one after the next, and the nature of finality, forgiveness, and chance are explored with brevity and perception. What's also great about this one is that the woman is a Plath and Hughes reader who struggles NOT to see symbolism in every movement, but can't ignore this habit when happenstance aligns against her.

There are also good stories from Johan Harstad, about a man who swims through a hole in a pool to find himself in a pleasant kaffe-klatsch hell, and Roy Jacobsen, about an old man who, defying his own stubbornness, demands from gunpoint a home security system, and Per Petterson, about a child's interpretation of his parents' separation.

I found the Norwegian stories better than the Icelandic ones in Issue 15, mostly because the Icelandic stories were content to describe pastoral atmospheres and be done with it. The Norwegian stories here are well-selected in that they show (apparently) the nation's stylistic nuances and its interest in the natural as both burden and haven. The characters here are more optimistic and louder on the page than what is usually seen in American fiction--sure, there's some resorting to soap-opera histrionics and naveté--but their stories come through strongly, more adherent to traditional storytelling forms, more focused on simple beauties. Also, they're enjoyable stories, and strive to be, and bless their writers for that. If nothing else, the illumination this issue provides into Norwegian writing (at least a tiny slice of it) shows them to be quite singular and is very eye-opening.

There are a couple duds, including some tiny flash fictions and some post-millennial, technophilic poems that sound like love letters to the poets' ADHD. Somehow even a drug-trip description "story" makes it in there, dear heavens. But oh well. As always, it's a balance, and the scale tips toward the favorable. Although they were on the best run of the journal's lifetime with Issues 29-34, 35 still has plenty to recommend it.

This edition of McSweeney's is a normal paperback issue but with a cute twist - the black part of the cover is made of invisible ink. That is, the black area disappears when you apply body heat to reveal fishies beneath, so when you're holding the book you get some interesting designs when you set it down.

Though you won't be doing much setting down as this is a great issue for fiction. Roddy Doyle contributes a funny story called "Local" about a black psychic woman who decides to get involved in the local election as a candidate. Patrick Crerard's delightfully batty "The Glory of Keys" tells an absurd story about a Pontiac Sunfire going to high school and becoming a successful football player. The artist Robert Barnes shows some drawings his did for his daughters' brown lunch bags when they went to school in the '80s and Dan Kennedy sends some letters detailing an encounter with a possible lunatic who's created a homemade submarine.

The real jewels in this excellent issue though are the Norwegian story contributions. A newly discovered witches' skull and a centuries old song about love is the subject of Hans Herbjornsrud's "On a Farmstead in Europe", while Johan Harstad's "Loophole" is about parallel universes at the bottom of the ocean. There's some great humour in Roy Jacobsen's "Alarm" which is about an old man out to get a help alarm for the elderly - and the shotgun he uses to get it. Ingvar Ambjornsen's "Another Star" is a great anti-christmas story about two drunks who dress up as WW2 Italian pilots, fall asleep in a snowdrift, and eat christmas dinner with the family who unearth them. It's got a really funny ending I loved. Gunnhild Oyehaug's "Two By Two" is a poignant and well written story about a married couple experiencing trouble with fidelity. There's a memorable discussion about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes' marriage included.

There's also some Norwegian new poetry from Flamme Forlag - "Computer Love" is poetry written by those born in the early 80s and have always had computers in their lives. There's a great poem written from the perspective of a Sim from the game, "The Sims" and a poem about combo moves from the NES classic "Kid Icarus".

It's a greatly enjoyable and fun issue from the folks at McSweeney's. A lot of fantastic fiction from Norway means you can get hours of rewarding reading from the book and discover some interesting new writers. Recommended.