McSweeney's Issue 36

McSweeney's 36th issue, like issues 19 and 17, is a collection of stuff issue. Unlike the disappointing issues 17 (junk mail that doesn't fit on a book shelf properly) and 19 (cigar box that fits okay on a book shelf), issue 36 is an interesting collection of stuff. The stuff comes in a box shaped like a sweaty head. Well, maybe not shaped like a sweaty head. It's actually shaped like a box, but the box has drawings that make it look like a sweaty head. Inside the head box is is collection of stories, plays, screenplays, abridged novels, and artwork that, like most of McSweeney's quarterly outputs, range in quality from brilliant to space-wasting. I figure I'll just go through the box piece by piece.

The Domestic Crusaders

A play about a Pakistani-American family. In the introduction by Ishmael Reed, he writes something about the play not just being about Pakistani-Americans, but about all families. I suppose that's true, but that doesn't make The Domestic Crusaders any more interesting. And it certainly doesn't make it comparable to Eugene O'Neill or Arthur Miller, as Reed tries to claim. The Domestic Crusaders, if you'll pardon my sounding like local newspaper movie review, is rather domestic.

Fountain City

A fragment of an abandoned novel by Michael Chabon, with facing annotations and commentary. This is something that any aspiring or struggling writer could find solace in. Although some of his commentary is mundane (former names of airports, which friends of his mother's his characters are named after, etc.) Chabon gives rare insight into the working process of a novelist. He points out ideas that started to work well, those that didn't, and tries to explain how a novelist creates and how a novelist fails to create. It's super-interesting, but I suppose only for those who are interested in writing.

Ma Su Mon

A booklet from a forthcoming Voice of Witness series about life in Burma. It tells the story of Ma Su Mon, a college student imprisoned for a year and eventually forced to leave her family in Burma because of her association with opposition party organizations. The booklet provides an informative look into the life of the Burmese people, although it's very blandly written, which makes some sense considering the book is a collection of narrativized interviews. There's been so much good creative nonfiction coming out the last couple of years, that this journalistic approach seems trite and borderline uninteresting.

Jungle Geronimo in Gay Paree

The title pretty much nails exactly what this book is about: a low-rent Tarzan knockoff in Paris. The story reads like a Dinosaur Comic where every character is T-Rex. If that's your sort of thing, you'll probably be a fan of Jungle Geronimo.

Bicycle Built for Two

A screenplay about old-timey baseball and tandem bicycles, written for Mike Myers and Dana Carvey. It's not nearly as funny as The Love Guru.

The Instructions

I've written about Adam Levin's The Instructions before and the 40-page sample included in McSweeney's 36 is a perfect example of everything I found great about the novel and everything that frustrated me about the book. Great dialogue, including a tour-de-force recreation of a post-fight middle school locker room cacophony, but the sample also displays the violently unlikeable aspects of the characters that exasperated me over course of the novel's 1000 pages. Still, a good addition for those who might not be entirely sold on a such a massive undertaking of a novel.

Stories and Letters

A good batch of letters this time around, especially those by Steve Delahoyde. Most of the collection is taken up by Colm Toibin's longer story, continuing what seems to be a trend in the recent quarterlies of including a longer, generally disappointing story. Two of the other three stories, however, really shine. John Brandon continues to be one of my favourite authors, as it seems like everything he writes is gold. And Imet Prcic's “At the National Theater” was a story so wonderfully strange that I had to immediately read it a second time.

Final Thoughts

When McSweeney's sticks to its guns–literary storytelling–is still puts out tremendous writing by talented authors. When it tries to be hard to be clever and churns out the wink-wink-nudge-nudge so-bad-it's good silliness (which is better suited for the Internet Tendency than the Quarterly Concern) it still has a tendency to fall flat. The quality of McSweeney's 36 lies in two stories and the sweaty head box.