Customer Reviews

The Jiri Chronicles & Other Fictions

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As with much literature that thinks of the book as an art form rather than a product, it's hard to characterize Debra Di Blasi's The Jiri Chronicles. Though fiercely literary, and literate, on first sight the book appears to be a first cousin to The Onion, or The National Enquirer. Interspersed between smiling models in ads for Helliburton ("If you think you have to take responsibility for your actions, think again"), or Face It ("150 years of history and romance won't help you get laid") and others, are what used to be called short stories that make a reader wonder, Why isn't more lit like this? If it were, it wouldn't find itself increasingly becoming (at best) the stodgiest, and most conservative, art form, or (at worst) relegated to the irrelevant dust-heap of culture. Instead, it would find itself where the coolest of music and visual art resides: funny, with-it, funny, socially engaged, funny. Did I mention how funny this book is? But it's much more than funny: doing what fiction has traditionally done best, the stories within this collection are by turns moving, cuttingly intelligent, and ultimately profound. Unlike so much mainstream fiction today, they go beyond the trials and tribulations of what Don DeLillo once called `around-the-yard-and-in-the-house' fiction even if they might take as their starting point the memory-evoking, sepia photos in "Mrs. Conner and Her Six Children, 1883" or the farm boys and girls of "William Wesley Pickens, Sr. 1910", a series of one-page stories gathered as a section titled "Snapshots: A Genealogy in Flight." The opening section of a collection that reads as much like a novel as a hybrid story collection shows Di Blassi at her most poetic: an author who can evocatively capture the land and its people, as she has in previous works like Drought and Prayers of an Accidental Nature.

But readers quickly realize this book is more ambitious than the normal fiction of home-and-hearth, the second section being titled "Hyperfictions," and containing stories where Di Blasi begins to use the full range of talents she brings to the page: the lyricism of a poet, fused with the savviness of a visual artist, showing herself to be an author who is aware of the history of literature and her place in it today, creating works of narrative art that are in synch with today's political, artistic, and cultural moment, both in terms of their themes and form. The more straight-forward stories of the first section are juxtaposed with stories like "Ways a Father Dies" or "Haunted" where line breaks, visuals and other page architecture begins to creep into the narrative, bringing a level of associative logic that make these stories speak in ways to a readers who were brought up in the world they describe, a world not captured in sepia tones, as were the people of "Snapshots," but one where a series of images of trees fade, as in "Haunted", as the protagonist contemplates dying alone. By the last section of the book, "The Jiri Chronicles," we are firmly in the NOW. Here Di Blasi gives free range to her imagination (and reportage), creating fictions that are as fresh as many of the current events they draw on, mixing fake ads, sketches, photos--and importantly, the same intelligence and high degree of literary writing that runs through the book--to create narratives that both stand on their own, and contrast with stories in the earlier sections. In place of the hominess of the characters in "Snapshots", we have Jiri Cech, a vampiristic, cement contractor, poet wannabe, supporter of all things hyper commercial, including [...] implants, Republican talk radio, and endless war (good for business). The conclusion of the book is comprised of ads for Jiri Cech tee-shirts, CDs and other products.

The sum effect of reading this collection/novel is astonishing: as though one has just had a fast-forward tour though not only the last hundred years of the art of American fiction, but also the last hundred years of American culture. It may be the best answer out there to the question, "How did we get where we are from where we had been?" It should be required reading for anyone interested in that question, as well as the current state of fiction, and how writing can remain a relevant, perhaps the most relevant, art form in a multi-media age.