Customer Reviews

Michael Martone: Fictions

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Michael Martone was my favorite professor well over a decade ago at Syracuse University, and reading this unique short story collection reminded me why he was so popular. It's clever, witty, entertaining, warm and vaguely eccentric, just like him.

This has to be one of 2005's best, most interesting and hilarious collections of short stories, not only because of its bizarre, deconstructionist format, but --- for true lovers of literary fiction --- its unique narrative as well.

Presented as 190 pages of "contributor's notes," one "vita," one "about the author" and an "acknowledgement," MICHAEL MARTONE tells of the many unrelated lives of various Michael Martones, most born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, most with some connection to literature, and most with adoration, praise and recognition of Michael Martones' mothers. Close readers will note that the number of "contributor's notes" in the table of contents do not match the actual content of the book, and there is even "a contributor's note" hidden among the stories in the collection. Collection? Novel? Memoir? Biography? Autobiography? Autobiographies? Metafiction? New realism? It is hard to tell, really, what this book is, though radical, alternative press FC2 assures the reader that the book --- and it is a book --- is indeed fiction. The author writes that many of the "contributor's notes" have been previously published; a list of journals is provided.

So who is the real Michael Martone? After enjoying the first few "contributor's notes," the reader soon learns an important lesson, one that makes the book all the more compelling, and one that may just be the key to solving the mystery of life and the problem of identity: fact and fiction cannot be separated. From the notes, both funny and touching, it is learned that the real and fictional Martones were first published in Life magazine, worked for the Gambino family, had mothers who died young and lived long, healthy lives, met other people named Michael Martone (though Martone's father assured Michael that he was the only Michael Martone), had a connection to the Kinsey Report, were mistaken for both John Gotti, Fred Flintstone and Paul McCartney, worked at International Harvester, taught at Harvard, married and divorced many times, suffered numerous maimings, suffered a Catholic education, worked the night shift at a hotel where Vernon Jordan was shot, purposely injected untruths in journals that have published his stories, obsessed over water glasses while organizing literary readings, had John Barth as a mentor, was photographed by Jill Krementz, was a childhood TV star, and turned into a bug.

In re-reading MICHAEL MARTONE, one discovers that the format of the book permits accidental chapter skipping so the reader may find other Michael Martones hidden among the ones already discovered.

While all of the "contributor's notes" are ironic and worthwhile reading, one standout concerns a university lesson in which each student is a country and must manage the politics, economy, and future of that country. Michael Martone is a small third-world country so gripped by war, pollution and famine that he disappears (leaving for a drink of water!) and does not return, thus proving the predicted outcome of the professor's lesson: "No one even noticed as a whole nation vanished."

After reading twenty or so times the identical opening line of each chapter --- "Michael Martone was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana..." --- readers will find that they begin to mentally replace Michael Martone's name with their own, following the introductions with their own life details. Brandon M. Stickney was born in Lockport, New York, where he attended public school before going to college to become a journalist. Timothy McVeigh was born in Pendleton, New York, and attended public schools before joining the Army. Stickney and McVeigh's lives intersected when McVeigh killed 168 people and Stickney wrote a book about him.

While I, your reviewer, have socialized and exchanged correspondence with a few of the real people Michael Martone uses as characters in these "contributor's notes," including Jay McInerney (his third sudden cameo as a character in a fiction this year, after Rick Moody's THE DIVINERS and Bret Easton Ellis's LUNAR PARK), Joyce Carol Oates (her first appearance as a character), and David Kaczynski (the Unabomber's brother), this reviewer has not previously read any fiction by Michael Martone. Though, after reading MICHAEL MARTONE and being gripped by the author's prose, I will read his other books and hope that, someday, some way, I, Brandon M. Stickney (the M. stands for Michael), will have the honor of being mentioned in a future story by Michael Martone. In fact, since Martone has been known, like Edgar Allan Poe, to review his own books under assumed names, I feel that we may have already met.

--- Reviewed by Brandon M. Stickney

I read Michael Martone's book knowing him only as the author of the hilarious spoof BLUE GUIDE TO INDIANA. Like my wife, he was a graduate from Indiana University in Bloomington, famous as the place where the cult film BREAKING AWAY was filmed, a fact to which Martone alludes in his imaginative recap of the different paths memory takes us when we are asked for a simple contributor's note. It is difficult to convey the skill with which Martone parlays the tried and true formula of the contributors note into what must be dozens of short story masterpieces on the order of Borges and Chekhov. There are two kinds of contributors' notes, he claims, one the traditional resume kind in which you say where you were born, tell where you teach, and perhaps add the name of your latest publication. Sometimes would-be wise guys try to torque up the contributor note by writing something surreal, something with the flavor of the "non sequitur" in it.

"These clever digressions always strike Martone as simply that--clever digressions--and it seems that feeling is shared by the majority of contributors who remain loyal to the understated and, one might say, elegant form that encapsulates a charming modesty and simple efficiency." You can't pin down slippery Michael Martone to one point of view or another, for he deliberately tries to blur the lines between fact and fiction, so that by the end of his book, we know less about him than we did before, except for one thing, that before reading MICHAEL MARTONE I thought he was gay, and here he makes it amply clear that he is heterosexual in a big way. There is also a blurring of the boundaries between celebrity and obscurity, so that the poignancy of the contributors' note, in which basically nobodies are always trying to link themselves to figures of greater note, is analyzed and parsed. Martone, for example, used to be compared to Paul McCartney in looks, and now he finds people saying he looks more like Joe Mantegna, while when he looks in the mirror he sees Fred Flintstone, particularly Flintstone's primitive five o clock shadow.

You can't believe how many ways he finds to spruce up his one trick pony of a book. He has the protean imagination of Aesop coupled with the postmodern flair of Shelley Jackson, and yet if there is a fault to be found with the book, it's that halfway through I got a little bored, despite the continual fireworks of prose and great gusts of Johnsonian high humor. Otherwise I wish it had been longer, but, everything else being equal, it might have been a bit shorter. My students love the essay in which he discusses the first time he had sex with a woman and then gets caught by his own mother, three times, as if once was not enough. Students love it and, I imagine, in the classroom he must be a hoot.

This quirky book lingers in the mind long after others fade. Martone has taken a neglected form -- the author's note -- and turned it into art. Each successive note doesn't so much build on the one before as undermine all the ones before, gently teasing the reader who might hope to know the real Michael Martone -- even as each note gently teases the very presumption of disclosure, and the presumptions of Michael Martone. The series of gems comprise a jewelry piece quite unlike any you have seen before.

Michael Martone's got a imagination that ticks, one in which the manifold cogs & springs crank up something extra at each revolution of an idea. The idea in the case of MICHAEL MARTONE BY MICHAEL MARTONE, a canny & disturbing exercise -- disturbing in best sense, the sense that doesn't interfere w/ the man's quick finger on the pulsing detail or w/ his wit, capable of fluxing up to laugh-inducing fullness & then down to a sobering diminuendo in the space of few perfectly-ironized lines -- the idea, anyway, or should I say ideas, anyway it's self & society, or the empirical, historical life & the dreamed-of, maybe-better alternatives, or the multiply-reflecting mirrors of who we are & what we say we are, we & others, plus the ultimate definition provided by death as well... Yes, at its most serious, this is a book about death, & in particular the death of Martone's mother, so that MM b MM constitutes a lovely valedictory for the woman, a compendium of all the lives her son might've lived. Or then again, maybe I should speak more plainly, & say rather that the book collects some 45 two- or three-page riffs, largely but not wholly jocular, each a variation on the "Contributor's Notes" that run at the back of every literary magazine. In the process this author comes his closest to the novel form (closer certainly than in my other favorite of his, the sparkling BLUE GUIDE TO INDIANA), though the result has got nothing Aristotle would recognize as a drama, & no tragic hero either. Hey, everybody dies. Everybody has a career, w/ some interesting intersections along the way -- & this one's also all about those intersections, moments when MM's life was briefly redefined, yet again, by a Kurt Vonnegut or a John Barth or Amanda "Binky" Urban (a so-called "famous" NY literary agent, she already needs a footnote). So there's still another way to put the idea that rachets through such fascinating changes, here: it's a portrait of US literary life, over the last generation, w/ nearly every entry beginning in middle-American Ft. Wayne, Indiana, & developing, eventually, all the options of success & its opposite a writer might think of. To imagine, this brilliant experiment reminds us, takes the best of us to rendering another world: on the page, the book, the object... the art.

In this entertaining read, Michael Martone slowly reveals himself in a series of Acknowledgements that begin with "Michael Martone was born in..." That is, until information starts to conflict, and the reader is not sure which information is biographical and which is fiction! It makes for an interesting read that is like looking at a collage and figuring out the whole story. You've never had an experience like reading this book, where each chapter makes your brain interrupt with, "Haven't I read this before? Oh, wait, this just started with the same sentence..."