It’s election season! Of course, it’s always election season now. And for anyone young enough to not remember life before the internet, it’s pretty much always been election season, and maybe always will be. The very idea of it being a discreet “season,” separate from some other stretch of time in which elections are not happening or being talked about, likely makes little sense. I’m actually a few months older than current Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance (a first for me), and even I can only vaguely recall the pre-infinite-screaming-doomscroll-chyron version of our American Democracy in action. What’s more, the further we get from that simpler time, the easier it becomes to question my own memory of it. Were things ever actually better than they are now, or was I just younger and less cynical, with more future ahead of me to feel optimistic about? Were candidates actually more genuine and respectful toward the institutions of which they were vying to be a part, or were we just more susceptible to accepting biased official narratives as fact? Were things ever actually simpler, or did we just know less?
Today, implicit bias is a given. There is so much information not just available to us, but thrust upon us daily, and so many avenues down which we may pursue it further according to our own personal tastes and prejudices, that even if a truly objective news source did somehow exist in the world, it would be all but impossible to identify it. And though we have certainly seen a fracturing within my lifetime of not just information or “the news,” but of reality itself, such that political leaders and those who cover them are no longer operating in good faith, or even from a shared understanding of the issues, we’ve also reached a place where it feels like most people know that too, and it doesn’t change a damn thing. As one of the authors I’m discussing here today – David Leo Rice – has posited for a while now, the zeitgeisty notion that we can somehow escape the matrix is not a particularly useful one. The systems within which we live – vague enormities like society, identity, and reality – do not have meaningful exteriors; only waveforms we might surf; permutations we might engage. When even the once-unifying concept of common sense no longer has a common definition, there is no out; only through.
Enter Joey Truman.
If you told me that the original draft of Truman’s Etiquette was a single typewriter scroll delivered in a shoebox along with some scribbled-on diner napkins, bodega receipts, and NYC subway maps, I’d absolutely believe you. Truman’s terse, incisive prose reads unfakably off the cuff (likely of a thrift store corduroy jacket), and yet still feels as lived-in as a Lower East Side squat. In this loosely organized catalog of personal anecdotes and common social situations – each appended with numbered directions for, yes, proper etiquette in same – he nimbly identifies the cracks in our foundations – the infrastructural niceties that we’re letting crumble in the name of technological advancement and capitalism run amok – and sets about duct-taping, and plastering, and slapdash painting over them as fast as he can manage. This slim volume had me laughing out loud with both its seemingly simple observations about 21st century humanity, and its palpable impatience at having to explain such seemingly simple observations to anyone.
Covering everything from waiting rooms to crowded bars; cohabitating to co-parenting; dinner parties to book events (in between many, many screeds on common subway courtesy) Truman possesses a lowkey, DFW-esque gift for breaking down monolithic ideas about modern society into their most basic, component parts, such that they look so quaint and manageable that you’ll find yourself scratching your head in disbelief that no one’s ever quite addressed them in this way before. And more than that even, it feels as though he’s almost doing it by accident; like he’s not “writing” so much as just thinking on the page, and allowing us to watch as he dissects his daily routines – those of a proudly working-class small fish making his way in a big pond life – with a charmingly grumpy sincerity, and more honest-to-goodness heart than I’ve found in just about anything else I’ve read this year. With short, punchy chapters full of humor and ideas, Etiquette is a great book to read in those in-between moments, because every time you look up, you’ll see some way to apply its lessons right in front of you. It could just as easily be titled Don’t Be an Asshole: And Here’s How! Maybe take it on the subway.
Alright. I know what some of you might be thinking. “Hey. Wait a minute. Isn’t Joey Truman a Whiskey Tit author? And didn’t they publish this Fitzgerald guy’s book too? What the heck? Who’s feeding us biased opinions now?” And you’re not wrong. Etiquette was, in fact, the first book I ever read from what is now my beloved small press home, and the above two paragraphs constitute the first review I wrote, at least in part, in hopes of introducing myself to them while shopping my own debut novel Troll. Guilty as charged.
Now, none of that is to say I didn’t mean what I wrote, or that I don’t stand by it, because I absolutely did and do. I love Joey’s work. I probably wouldn’t make that Wallace comparison again today, but that’s more a product of my growth as a reader and reviewer than any kind of intentional deception or disingenuous flattery (knowing Joey, he’d probably prefer I hadn’t made it to begin with). But more than anything, I love that Joey doesn’t give a shit what I think. Or you. Or anyone. Just about any writer you talk to has a spiel about how they don’t care if they ever get famous – how they do it for the love, or the craft, or because they simply can’t do without – but deep down, I think most of us harbor at least small, quiet dreams of more traditional success.
I’m not sure Joey does though.
Having grown up in the DIY punk scene of Wyoming, Truman understands better than most what it means to have no audience, and no income, and just keep at it no matter what. He knows what he’s about. He lives his principles hard. And somehow, he still finds time to write like a busted fire hydrant. Etiquette is only one of nearly a dozen projects he’s published with Whiskey Tit, and that’s on top of his long-running SubStack Screed City. The dude legitimately can’t turn it off. And his bullshit-free brand of conviction can feel cleansing amidst the barking of the 21st century attention carnival. It’s not that he’s unbiased. It’s that he’s all bias. Which in the end, kind of amounts to the same thing. One gets the sense he’s not trying to convince you of anything except to think for yourself.
As for me, if I write about a book, it’s pretty much always because I want you to read it. I won’t deny a partiality toward Whiskey Tit, or a propensity toward reviewing kindly the work of people I know and like, but I’ve never written anything I didn’t believe, or couldn’t back up if push came to shove. Indie Lit is a community, and not a huge one. Nothing is automatically tit for tat – ask anyone you like about that – but we’re all out here hustling in very similar boats, and there is unquestionably an incentive to be our own rising tide. Indie publishers do yeoperson’s work on infinitesimal margins. Every book they take on is a bet against the Big 5 house. A surprise sensation on the order of B.R. Yeager’s Negative Space or Eric LaRocca’s Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke can single-handedly keep a small press afloat, and all of us would love to be that for both our benefactors and our peers. As such, praise tends to be effusive, and truly uncharitable reviews are rare – generally reserved for books whose hype and/or financial backing are perceived as being undeserved, if not disqualifying toward the “indie” label altogether.
All of which is to say, if I don’t like a book, I tend to just not write about it. As with our modern political climate, things can be simplistically binary in this regard, and there exists an ongoing discourse as to whether or not that’s a problem – the “praise or ignore” debate. If indie lit really is a community (as we so often claim), or an underground artistic movement of merit (as we hope to be seen), then how can we expect to be taken seriously when we’re not willing to provide each other, and our readers, with meaningful, nuanced critique? How will any of us become better writers – or even understand the ways in which we might need to – if we only ever talk about how great we all are? These are fair questions, to which I can see both sides. As an author, I’m practically a poster child for this conundrum. Having written a novel that courts controversy on every page, I fully braced for and expected some sort of negative feedback upon publication. I would, frankly, have welcomed the chance to engage. But a year-and-a-half later, I’ve yet to read a bad word about it. Another thing most any writer will tell you is that they want to “start conversations,” but again, just as with our us vs. them, all or nothing politics, honest, open-minded debate can be hard to come by.
As a reviewer, on the other hand, I totally get it. Writing negative reviews is no fun (and just as much work as writing positive ones), especially when it comes to books barely anyone’s reading in the first place. If that makes me biased, then I guess to a degree, I’m biased. There’s a reason this column is called “Recommends”.
Likewise, my fellow Whiskey Tit author Dan Hoyt wears his political biases right on his sleeve. His new novel Shit List is both an unapologetically broad, and line-item specific evisceration of the first 100 days of the Trump administration. Through barely-disguised caricatures of the whole unseemly cabal, as well as a kooky supporting cast that includes a clear stand-in for LeBron James, a hapless stand-in for that stand-in, and a guitar goddess turned unwitting cult leader, Hoyt attacks that tumultuous stretch of recent history like a man in the throes of an apoplectic trance (in NBA parlance, you might say he was writing lights out).
Evoking nothing quite so much as the cockeyed absurdity of the great Tom Robbins, Hoyt’s characters pinball madly around Cleveland and DC, their disparate stories periodically pinging against one another by way of that adorable little critter on the book’s cover: a Whitehead’s Pygmy Squirrel that elicits intense bouts of empathetic shame and remorse in any person it comes near. As the grotesque President Kukla and his satirical (but again, only barely) sycophants work feverishly to seal borders, separate families, and repeal healthcare laws, the book slowly but steadily reconstructs the relentless dread of its era – that low-simmering, “oh God, what now?” nausea that accompanied each new day – until even the funniest one-liners stop being funny.
And that’s the real power of Shit List. It may start off feeling a little goofy – a little immature even – but as it piles on the infuriating headlines, it reveals itself to be a honey-coated bear trap; an unhinged SNL sketch that drags on for months, until all the players have broken, and everyone just wants to go home. It’s not so much about parodying Trump as it is about the Trump Presidency marking the death of parody. No matter how many pointed jabs Hoyt takes at the Donald’s limited grasp of the NBA rulebook, or the Bible, or the English language, he never quite breaks through to a joke that feels outsized or over the top – a gag that goes “too far”. It’s all just a little too believable to laugh at, and that’s kind of the point.
For Gen X’ers like Hoyt, and millennials like myself, who’ve relied on detached snark and “Tweeting through it” for decades to manage our political ennui, Shit List demands that we examine ourselves, and the world we’re leaving to future generations, more deeply. To ask what it says about us if we decide, as a country, to run this particular experiment back. Sure, it’s ok to let through an incredulous, inappropriate chuckle from time to time – we all have to stay sane somehow – but at the dawn of this still-young century, where events that happened as recently as last week can already start to feel fungible, and the powers that be are constantly working to revise and shape “the narrative” – wrestling for that 51% controlling interest in our fractured, shared reality – Hoyt refuses to let us forget a single, despicable detail.
It’s hard to know how the extreme specificity of Shit List will play in another 10-20 years. So much has happened since that puts those first 100 days to shame, and even much of that has already been spun, spoonfed, compartmentalized, and forgotten by the endless churn of the 24-hour news cycle. For God’s sakes, the man was nearly assassinated twice in the last 100 days and we’ve already almost completely stopped talking about it. So if you’re having a hard time this election season laughing to keep from crying like Dan, or screaming on street corners like Joey, then perhaps your best bet is to step through the looking glass with the aforementioned David Leo Rice, and his revelatory The Berlin Wall (also from Whiskey Tit).
Rice notably remarked in an interview he gave to this very site a few months ago, that he has always endeavored to “be a genre” unto himself, and speaking as someone who’s read most of his work and written fairly extensively about it, I feel pretty comfortable coming right out and saying that The Berlin Wall is both his most expansive, and most accessible novel to date. Zooming out from the spooky small towns that populate his previous books, this latest finds Rice operating on an international scale, vacuuming up whole countries like a late-stage Katamari and folding them back in on themselves in service of his cycloramic grand design.
Indeed, The Berlin Wall could easily have swallowed up all 3,000 words of this article too, such is its ambitious, omnivorous scope, but to nutshell, in Rice’s alternate-timeline Europe, the non-italicized Berlin Wall is a living entity whose disparate chunks (including Uta, one of several rotating narrators) are working their way across the continent in hopes of reassembly. Whether their intention is to usher Europe into a newly divided era, or return it to an old one, is somehow beside the point. They simply feel drawn toward the accretion of solidity. Meanwhile, a wayward young man named Gyorgi is burrowing deeper by the day into a burgeoning eugenicist putsch (led first by a kind of method-acting troll demagogue, Ragnar, and later by the shapeshifting, teleporting, semi-corporeal figure of Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik), in search of his own version of the comfortingly concrete. Concurrent to these, we also get Anika, a history professor descending into a kind of self-imposed Bavarian nostalgia cocoon as she attempts to rewrite German history so convincingly that she effectively alters German reality. Lars Von Trier also makes a brief, memorable appearance. This book is nuts y’all.
With the fascism creep of the past decade clearly top of mind, Rice sets out to fasten signifiers to a whole host of ominous vagaries – to give form and shape to these nascent dangers in our midst, and in so doing, better map their ongoing self-sustenance. For regardless of all the reprehensible thoughts we read passing through the minds of his wandering players, with the exception of Breivik (who, despite his being a real person – or perhaps even because of it – behaves here more as the avatar of an idea than a functional character), none of them ever feels exactly evil – only lost, or compromised – and Rice finds a powerful empathy for all of them within the nexus of larger forces they’re simply trying to react to and survive. It’s a case not so much of the characters serving the plot as the characters being the plot – each of them a cog within wheels turning predestined, but which we still desperately hope to see them find a way to break.
Rice’s nonjudgmental rendering of Gyorgi in particular, with his hardcoded longing for a traditional masculinity the world no longer values as it once did – the ways in which leaders like Ragnar and Breivik prey on reasonable insecurities felt by many men in the 21st century, only to insidiously slow-walk them toward a darker radicalization – make for some of The Berlin Wall’s most moving insights. There are passages wherein Gyorgi despairs at his physical and intellectual limitations, and his more existential lack of purpose, that feel near-universal in their human relatability, and when he joins a mob of Ragnar faithful in chanting “All hail the absolute!” it drives home exactly what such movements offer people, and what all of the book’s characters are ostensibly looking for: clarity, simplicity, certainty in a time of constant upheaval and complex change. Despite the Eurocentrism of the narrative, it’s impossible not to see in Gyorgi, and his persistent suspicion that he is operating entirely within the framework of some kind of globalized VR game, the scores of people emboldened into storming the U.S. capitol four years ago, only to be abandoned, dumbfounded, by their perceived leader as their fever broke and they were met with real world consequences on the other side; shocked that anything they’d done might actually matter.
This breakdown between physical and virtual spaces, and the stratification of our shared reality, are themes Rice has explored throughout much of his previous work (most notably in his seminal essay “Long Live the Heroic Pervert” – maybe my single favorite piece of writing to yet emerge from this now half-cooked decade), but where the heroes of Angel House and The New House make their way toward enlightenment or ascension, the cast of The Berlin Wall seems harder pressed to find any path outside its deepening rabbit holes and rising seawalls. Tonally, the book can often feel like a psychedelic come-up – all rippling roots and skin and Déjà vu – that just refuses to peak. One gets the sense of being in the midst of something that hasn’t quite happened yet, and possibly never will. It sometimes takes characters hours to cross entire countries by car, while others walk for full days only to end up right where they started, their paths in physical space outlined behind them as though they were traipsing through Jell-O mold. As our existence becomes less concrete and more permeable, Rice’s writing grows ever less constrained by conventional narrative structure. At times, the book feels like it’s editing itself right in your hands.
With both the plot, and Europe, fast folding in on themselves, Rice nimbly weaves together the threads in his tightening web of homegrown semiotics – the hard and soft illuminati, the Black Forest and the taiga, the Iron Curtain and the Living Wall – every piece encroaching inward like Birnam Wood on their own inexorable timelines until, with one deft final pull of his drawstrings, he cinches everything up tight – a surrealist cat’s cradle of past and future collapsed into a single, perpetual present. No matter how far Uta travels, one gets the sense she’ll someday return, in one form or another. No matter how beautifully winners like Anika and the Chancellor write their latest revisionist history books, papering over the past only dooms us to repeat it. “The communal forgetting that it’s happened before mingling with the communal hope that, soon enough, it’ll all be alright.”
And so it’s election season. Still, forever, and always. There have been times in recent years when I felt certain that the rhetoric couldn’t get any uglier, the divisions any starker, the stakes any higher, but to hear the candidates and their most vocal opponents and supporters tell it, that never quite ends up being the case. Each election of my lifetime has been “the most consequential election of our lifetimes.” Each President we’ve ever elected has, for roughly half of us, spelled certain and irreversible doom. And yet, here we are, doing it all again. I’m not here to tell you who to vote for (though anyone who’s read literally anything I’ve ever written can likely guess my thoughts). I’m just here to tell you what to read to get through it. I may be biased toward Whiskey Tit, but that doesn’t mean our books don’t rock, or that I don’t rep other presses I love every bit as hard (anyone who’s read literally anything I’ve ever written knows that too). The indie lit review economy might be a little insular and self-congratulatory, but through the process of writing this article I think I’ve talked myself into being more mindful of that going forward. After all, at the level I, and the authors I write about, are all hustling on, pretty much all press is good press; all engagement is good engagement. And the kinda sad, but mostly common sensical truth of the matter is, everyone’s trying to sell you something here in late-stage capitalist America, pretty much all the time. All any of us can do is to take a cue from Dan Hoyt, Joey Truman, and David Leo Rice – to try to understand our own biases, and ride our chosen waves. Whether that means tuning in, dropping out, or burrowing on through to the other (which is also maybe the same) side. To quote Rice one last time, we can but hope that “The future will not resemble the present forever.”