Firework Paperback – June 1, 2010

Do yourself a favor. Don't read this. Google "Gordon Lish" + "Eugene Marten." Watch and hear Lish on Marten. That's what impelled me to read him. Lish is not easily wowed. He published, edited, or ghosted, among others, Raymond Carver, Don DeLillo, Cynthia Ozick, etc. For Lish to say Marten belongs in the corral with DeLillo and Cormac McCarthy was astonishing. I had to get one of Marten's books under my eyes. What could this man possibly be doing with words to merit that praise? Lish is right. He does it all. Each sentence is masterful. None are showy for the sake of being showy. He takes liberties with traditional narrative structure but the book is not a postmodern headfest, it's a jarring, unnerving, enthralling modern masterpiece as good as anything I've read and better than most.

I wasn't sure during the first 200 pages of this book of how much I like it, or whether I'd be interested in reading any more of Eugene Marten's books. His prose is terse and somewhat removed. It feels like the work of non-fiction, or journalism (which is not always non-fiction, of course). He also employed a lot of purposely vague language that forced the reader to fill in the blanks--I ended up liking that bit of literary trickery, in the end. However, the last 100 to 130 pages of the book really take off and take twists and understated turns that left me surprised and, frankly, a little weirded out. While the story, as a whole, doesn't exactly have a plot, it all comes around in the end to be a complete novel, and a strange one at that. Especially strange given the detached nature of the narration, which is not in first person, but you almost forget that it isn't. In any case, I plan on picking up another of his books eventually.