Customer Reviews

McSweeney's At War for the Foreseeable Future and He's Never Been so Scared (Quarterly Concern Issue 14)

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McSweeney's is always a mixed bag, and this installment is no exception. Overall the offerings range from the insufferably longwinded and trying ("The Doubtfulness of Water"), to wonders inconceivable in any other venue. I found "A Child's Book of Sickness and Death" to be walking the edge of being socially acceptable, but entirely redeemed by the purported illnesses of the animals involved, such as the cat who suffered from feline leukemic indecisiveness, which has interesting symptoms, my favorite of which is that he has a feeling at the tip of his tail the same time each day like someone is putting it in their mouth and chewing. (There is also a pony with dreadful hoof dismay and a peacock with crispy lung surprise, to name but a few.)

I enjoyed the foray into art by Lawrence Weschler, "Convergence: Thumb in Eye," which details the history in modern art of giant sculpted thumbs (including those of Saddam Hussein). The entire piece can be neatly summed up by the Zen teaching "When I point my finger at the moon, don't mistake my finger for the moon." (Or so it is claimed.)

"What I Ain't" linked, for the first time in my consciousness, Patti LaBelle, Chaka Khan, and navel string, while "Convergence: Torso as Face" dealt with the contemporary influence of Magritte's art. I also took relative delight in the songs noted in "Pigs in Space," which include "Strap on the Toilet Song," "Making the Omelette Song," and, of course, the "Semolina Song." The article goes into a certain detail regarding "two pig-sized stasis chambers," and their influence on colic, gas, bloat, and explosion of pigs.

Without question, though, the best work in the book is "Rodent Disaster in Xinjiang," which details a Great Gerbil invasion plaguing parts of China. I was hooked as soon as I read the unabridged title of the piece: "An Investigation Into Xinjiang's Growing Swarm of Great Gerbils, Which May or May Not be Locked in a Death-Struggle With the Golden Eagle, With Important Parallels and/or Implications Regarding Koala Bears, The Pied Piper, Spongmonkeys, Cane Toads, Black Death, [and] Text-Messaging." This is an absolutely stunning work and I recommend the entire volume highly on the basis of this one piece. The Chinese gerbil invasion is followed from start to finish in a historical framework, and includes official viewpoints of the Chinese Regional Headquarters for Controlling Locusts and Rodents, as well as noted gerbil researchers like Helga Fritzsche, who notes that "when gerbils excrete their dusty pellets of rare urine concentrate, they do so entirely without sound." (Ponder that, please.) It turns out that these gerbils are not ordinary pet store sized, they are about 16 inches long from snout to tail, and are causing environmental havoc, which, naturally, has led the Chinese government to introduce breeding pairs of Golden Eagles to eat them. They chose Golden Eagles because they have multiple anti-gerbil attack modes, the most useful of which is "contour flight with short glide attack." The zoo curator of the Los Angeles zoo offered up that the Great Gerbils might be "what's in those Quizno's commercials." I endorse any article that can cite the history of Spongmonkeys as a footnote as a result of a bona fide zookeeper's comments. (He offered only this practical advice "If you're planning on going to China with all those gerbils, be sure to tuck your pants into your boots.") We also learn that Chaos theory is responsible for the boom-bust cycle in rodental disasters involving lemmings, voles, marmots, and gerbils as their breeding cycle is non-Newtonian, but we can rejoice since now (as of November 19, 2003) the Chinese Autonomous Region Locust and Rodent Elimination Command Post is on the case, but so far all that has been conclusively determined (after much debate) is that Great Gerbils do not wink at people.

Although uneven, I give the volume four stars overall, if for no other reason than the greatness (and lunacy) of the detailed account of the duel with the Great Gerbil.

First of all, McSweeney's 14 is an almost total loss for art, having nothing but very small pictures of failed airships to go along with the stories. But so be it.

You get a lot of pieces here, is the best part: 20 of them, 14 stories, 4 nonfiction essays, and 2 plays. Many of the pieces are quite long, and there's plenty to pick and choose from. It's a curious issue, filled with a lot of really good authors, some of whom hit it out of the park, some of whom slip up royally.

First the good: The best pieces are "Hadrian's Wall" by Jim Shepard, about a reluctant Roman wall sentry whose laziness causes a skirmish, "The Death of Mustango Salvaje" by Jessica Anthony, about an abused and adored female matador, and Wells Tower's "Executors of Important Energies," which is hugely different from the version that later appeared in his excellent collection and is thus a hidden gem, like finding an actually different Different Version on a B-sides compilation.

Also great are T.C. Boyle's "The Doubtfulness of Water," about a hydrophobic Englishwoman journeying from Boston to New York on horseback in 1702. It follows the Quixotic model of travel being a series of repeated tests as she encounters problem after problem; Boyle shines as always. Then there's Chris Bachelder's "Deep Wells, USA" a fun play about a baby in a well, sort of, that's great fun to read. Kate Braverman has a good one about a realist daughter and her hippie mother attempting a reconciliation, and Melinda McCollum writes a suspenseful crime story about a woman who seduces and robs lonely men, and who gets in trouble when her hideout is invaded by some other ne'er-do-wells.

Joshuah Bearman provides a nonfiction essay on a little-known west China great gerbil population explosion. Bearman's voice is pretty obnoxious ("Cold jacking rodents with a quickness!") but there're loads of great facts about plagues, pestilences, and epidemics, and the piece's nonstandard structure is refreshing.

The so-so stories are only two, with Pia Z. Ehrhardt's story about infidelity as a game in pre-Katrina New Orleans and Claire Light's conceptually interesting but realistically taxing and overly technical portrayal of pigs in space.

If that were it, this issue would be a five-starrer, no problem, but there are duds to consider. The first is the first: Chris Adrian's "anti-cute" cute story of a sick child who deals with her sickness via sass and writes about farcical animal diseases, a bid to be adorable that misses its mark. Adrian is a good writer, but this one is gloomy, depressing, and rewardless, Emily the Strange young and bookish.

Robert Olen Butler's quick pieces about decapitations would be good if they weren't concerned with being more referentially accurate than good. And Lawrence Weschler's "Convergences" (seen in a couple issues now), being slightly odd coincidences, are fine enough but don't need to be read; the pictures tell the story.

Then there's Ryan Boudinot's "Civilization," which is like a younger, dumber version of "Harrison Bergeron." Pity again because Boudinot is a good author, but this one feels like it's written by a 10th grader who's just discovered CNN. Mood pills, the """""American Dream""""", the president--all the easiest targets are hit; it's a wonder he didn't outright say "Organized religion is bad." It's a lazy, gauche story with a feckless agenda.

Jessica Lamb-Shapiro has a story about nothing at all (I can't describe it it's so lacking in anything), Susan Straight has a bland exercise in dialect, and Lindsey Carleton has a nuance-devoid speech from a Poor Person to a Rich People, and you know everything about the story from that description alone. As any op-ed piece, it doesn't champion anything if it relies on vulgar stereotypes.

Then there are the true terrors: Another 41 pages (41 pages!) are dedicated to Denis Johnson's out-and-out terrible play "Soul of a Whore." It tries to be Beckett, it tries to be poetic, but it only ends up unreadable. Again, Johnson is a great writer, but this...THIS. Also unforgivable is Silvia DiPierdomenico's first-person account of her hospital days, a wreckage of self-pity, solipsism, and dull factoids. It's not that her story isn't sad, it's that her being sad isn't a story. The whole thing screams with "Who cares?"

The good stories do outweigh the bad, and the bad, if nothing else, are fun to skip. Issue 14 follows McSweeney's model from Issues 1-11, which they'd get away from in their teens and beyond: just throw everything in and let the audience sort it out. There's nothing wrong with this strategy, it just produces a greater skepticism when going in to any story.