Customer Reviews

Glory Goes and Gets Some

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

These funny, wise, irreverent, at times brutal, always insightful stories are an antidote to the light and fluffy trend of single-girl-looking-for-love-in-urban-America stories. Instead, Emily Carter gives us Glory B., a rich girl fallen from a life of privelege in Manhattan, journeying through the dark night of drugs, alcohol, HIV, and addiction, to emerge in passive/aggressive Minnesota, where all the kids are above average. Carter's fluid sentences and ironic perspective are reason enough to read this captivating book. Glory is a hip and trendy New Yorker transplanted by fate and failure to the midwest, where she discovers that there IS life after death and where she falls in love with the people there for all the right reasons.

The opposite of "self-destructive" is "I want to live," and that is what the stories in "Glory" are all about about. Some of the pieces are fragmented, like shattered glass--and in the powerful voice of Emily Carter, you can hear the sound of breakage. The stories are about the will to not only stay alive, but to "get some," and the "some" is not merely sex or fulfulling physical needs. The "some" is Life itself. The glimpses of a woman defiantly striking out on her own to get off drugs are unforgettable. So what's it like anyway to come from a background of comfort and culture and end up HIV positive and a drug addict? This is what it's like. Emily Carter has created many, many brilliantly illuminated bits and pieces of what's essentially a survivor's story. Everyone will have favorite bits--mine is the nun who stole Jesus and the two ex-lovers who go on and on about a war movie, to find they were talking about the wrong war. Everything is sharp, vivid, heartbreaking, brave. The voice throughout is unrelenting in its honesty. You understand the main character's descent into self-annihilaiton; then you understand even better her other, second descent--into staying alive. None of it is easy; none of it is less than brilliant.

Glory Goes and Gets Some is a great read, but also absolutely shocking. Some of the things this narrator does are incredible. As she narrates, she takes us through her life, instead of through a rose tinted view of the world, we see things as reality hits her at the moment. Her ups, and her downs, and her journey as she spirals towards the darkest parts of herself, at the end, still trying to understand who she is. Emily Carter does a great job with this book, I found myself able to see the character through her eyes, although some parts I found rather personally distasteful (like the part where she mentions having had faked at least 100 orgasms before she hit her mid-twenties is horrible! And having sex with some guy just for [$]! Whoa!) and some parts I was left wondering why it was even mentioned, but it was all still part of what made the reading so unique and the main character so refreshingly different.

I was an Emily Carter fan when she wrote articles for Twin Cities Reader (before it was eliminated by the Village Voice Corporation who went and bought both weeklies in Mpls and decided that they didn't want to compete with themselve) because she was funny, insightful. She would say anything. Her movie reviews actually reviewed the movies (not always an easy thing to do in an "alternative" weekly where most movie reviewers are trying to write their deconstructionist masters theses) and they were always funny even when there was a dopy undercurrent (I still laugh at her movie review of Moonlight & Valentino where she gave a very positive review to Jon Bon Jovi's [...] On the other hand, several friends hated the way she gave the ending to Heat) and her articles about Judaism, stripping and AIDS doctors were brilliant.

Unfortunately, success at one writing style does not translate into success at another (compare Stephen King's novels and his dreadful screenplays) and Carter's humor doesn't survive the transition from articles to fiction.

The character of Glory is one of the more unlikeable creatures in literature. While many confessional writers (Grahame Greene for example) like to write themselves as horrible people, it's still not fun to read. Glory is a jerk that refers to her rich family and her life on the edge. The story "The Bride" is at the center of the book with her journey from private school outcast to punk club creep to HIV-positive recovering addict in Minnesota. It's riveting, but the other stories that use the same elements fall flat.

There are some exceptions. The one where she doesn't want to date a guy from AA because she's HIV-positive and where he slips back into old habits is great. The trilogy that begins with "Glory Goes and Gets Some" that chronicles the beginning, middle and end of Glory's marriage works. Other stories not so much.

As much as I like Emily Carter as a writer, this book just flounders about. So I recommend buying it used, because it is a fast read, but I do hope she releases a book of essays next.

A creative magician of seamless similes and metaphors, Carter's voice often finds a flow that carries the reader along outside of time. When your eyes eventually rise up to your bookshelf or cold cup of tea, you realize you've been taken to places you might not ever reveal had you been where she's been; and it's way past bedtime. But Carter's a brave writer who pulls back most of the curtains on her life. What you see will disturb you, but by the last page you're left grateful for her blood honesty and for the bit of humanity she's added to your life.

For the author: A simple plea. Please write more.

If you want to read a book narrated by protagonists who have suffered for their nonconformity, sensitivity, and intelligence, you will undoubtedly have many choices. But if you want your protagonist to be all this and FEMALE, you do not have many choices. Most female-narrated books fall into a few tiresome categories. To name a few: 1. The long-suffering wife/mother drama,involving abusive husbands, messed-up kids, elderly parents...basically the protagonist has little to distinguish her personality from the million other relationally-obsessed women going through these issues, resulting in a tame and tepid narrative voice 2. The irritating 'chick-lit' genre, in which the narrator drones on and on about her weight, shopping, and boys 3. Morality tales of 'bad girls' who've engaged in the same societally-disliked activities that many men do (drugs, sex, alcoholism, gambling, theft, etc.) but because they are female, their activities are considered less edgy and more sleazy/appalling. The book therefore, in order to teach this lesson (that men can misbehave but women can't without paying a dear price mostly due to their gender), involves the protagonist getting raped, pregnant, prostituting herself--all gender-specific maladies--before entering some treatment program and eventually (years down the road) becoming the sort of tame woman who would narrate #2. The narrator will feel guilt over her 'misbehavior', often blaming her poor treatment at the hands of men on her drug use rather than on her own personality, her ways of dealing with men, society's norms regarding male/female interactions, or on the individual men themselves. That being said, Glory Goes And Get Some is the ONE NOVEL I HAVE FOUND that doesn't fall into this tiresome trap. She is a complex character with conflicting motives (to be glamorous, to be controversial, to be liked, to be the one doing the liking, to be a participant, to be an adored spectator, to connect, to obliterate her desire for connection). Her analysis of others' similar contradictions (particularly the 'feminist' mother whose entire life is ruled by manipulating men to her own ends) is particularly brilliant. While Glory's acceptance of treatment center idiocy is a bit unlikely, even this itself is explained through her character's desperation for anything, no matter how silly, to cling to during difficult times. The reader will find some of Glory's choices infuriating, yet will cry at the direction her life takes, knowing it could not be otherwise. Upon finishing this book, I thought to myself, "Had Glory been born male, she would have been a celebrated character in one of the pantheons of druggie lit; perhaps a great writer or musician. As a female, her unconventional looks and disturbed brilliant mind condemns her to a life working non-skill jobs in Minnesota, battling HIV and enduring Narcotics Anonymous homilies." This is the true tragedy of the book. Those who dislike this book because of Glory's character--not because of their own adherence to societal views regarding sex and illegal drugs--cannot appreciate a female protagonist who is every bit the disturbed debaucherous genius as many, many male protagonists.

I bought this book in a second hand shop in Freemantle, Austalia and am happy to have discovered this writer. Her prose is beautifully crafted overall. Even the pieces that are a bit too whimsical for my taste ("Minneapolis", intro to "Falling Friends") have gorgeous bits. "Zemecki's Cat" and "Parachute Silk" are masterpieces that sucker punch you in the gut with their honesty and humanity. This writer has rare insight into human nature and respects her characters-- like Nelson Algren who is quoted at book's beginning. The stories flow and give a good sense of main character Glory's life, complete with spans of lost time, regrets, and hopes; a more conventional structure would have deadened this piece. Carter's voice is original; her work may appeal to fans of Algren and Raymond Carver.

Despite Carter was a new writer, she already sounded like a master in this collection. Her first person accounts are confessional prose poem like, yet entirely objective, fearless and pitiless self-exposition. They are told in brutality of her candor, at times with the entirely collected self-awareness.
Even though there are some dull moments in her too remote and uninvolving handle in the third person narration, you still know this was Carter's tour de force that you would never run into again.

"Glory" is an amazingly twisted tale of a twenty-something woman with everything and nothing at the same time. With humor, sadness, drama and randomness, the author takes the reader on a thrill-me roller-coaster, with lots of slow climbs and plummeting throw-your-stomach-into-your-throat falls. She challenges us to follow Glory down the paths she and she alone chooses, and Glory thereby becomes the anti-heroine we so desperately seek in other fiction. I loved every minute of this book, and can't wait to see more from Ms. Carter.

The writing is fairly decent and the circumstances of the author's self-destruction are certainly interesting to those of us who can't imagine sliding into that kind of lifestyle. She does a good job of answering the inevitable question: Why did you do it?

Yet I tired of the book half way through and was forced to put in down a few chapters later. And I rarely leave a book unfinished. I think Carter is just obsessed with herself and her family's "status". OK so she's a well-off jewish girl who grew up in manhattan with "intellectual" parents. And ironies of ironies, some slimey working class muslim guy gave her HIV. WOW. How many times does she need to discuss her background and how ironic it was that she became a junkie/prostitute? After a while it sounds more like pride than an explanation.

Ultimately, one wonders if Carter is really a writer or has simply done a decent job in telling her outlandish autobiographical odyssey. If she really thinks she's a writer, than she should undertake the task of writing something that's less of an act of narcissm.