duffie-loory

ben-loory-review-graphic

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/documenting-fantastic-ben-loorys-tales-falling-flying/"></div>Near the end of Ray Bradbury’s life, friends visited him at home. He was 90 years old, eyesight failing, and so his friends read to him. One of those friends was Christine Bell, co-owner of the aptly named Mystery and Imagination Bookshopin Glendale, California. And some of those stories were by Ben Loory (rhymes with story, another apt name). I like to imagine Bradbury, leaning back, eyes closed, smiling as Loory’s poetic, strange, and lovely tales unfold. Later, when Loory’s first collection, Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day, went into a third printing, the cover included Bradbury’s statement: “This guy can write!”
I bought Loory’s first book because of Bradbury’s enthusiastic claim. I bought Loory’s new collection, Tales of Falling and Flying, because it was the only place to get more. No one else writes like Loory. He treats fantasy like a journalist, relating the details in such bare, clear language that even the most whimsical stories feel like news from a Lake Woebegon all his own.
Loory’s ability to deliver the impossible like a FedEx envelope right to your door is evident in the very first line. Here are the opening lines from five of his tales. Notice how matter-of-fact he sounds:
A man wakes up one morning to find that both his feet are missing.
One night, the woman has a dream that the ocean moves in next door.
Once there was a squid who fell in love with the sun.
A boy is cleaning out his closet, when he finds a tiny monster cowering in the back.
A lady goes to church one Sunday morning and notices Death sitting beside her in the pew.
The originality grabs you first. In just five lines, there’s absurd humor, subconscious longing, pure fantasy, childhood fear turned on its head, and mortality. In a Loory tale, anything can happen to anyone: man, woman, child, squid, even Death himself.
This fable-like quality is one of the great pleasures of reading Loory, but he’s not a modern Aesop or a more surreal James Thurber. Some of Thurber’s Fables for Our Times may start like a Loory tale: “Once upon a sunny morning a man who sat in a breakfast nook looked up from his scrambled eggs to see a white unicorn,” or “A young and impressionable moth once set his heart on a certain star.” But Thurber (like Aesop) bends story and character to a moral. Fables never sail very far before dropping anchor. Loory takes the opposite approach: he cuts his stories loose.
In one of my favorites, “The Squid Who Fell in Love with the Sun,” a squid is born with a lazy eye and deformed tentacle. He’s teased by the other squids, so he spends a lot of time alone. One day, swimming near the surface of the ocean, he sees the sun. He’s never seen anything so beautiful. He tries to grab it with a tentacle, but “the sun was always out of reach.”
The other squids taunt him even more but he doesn’t give up. Noticing that birds get closer to the sun, the squid realizes he needs to fly:
So the squid set out to build himself a pair of wings. He did some research into different kinds of materials. He’d found some ancient books in a sunken ship he’d discovered, and he read the ones about metallurgy and aeroscience.
And, in time, the squid built himself some wings. They were made of a super-lightweight material that also had a very high tensile strength. (He’d had to build a small smelting plant to make them.)
Soon the squid is messing with physics and dark matter, energy reactors and propulsion systems, all in a quest to reach his beloved sun. There might be a moral here, or a dozen, or none, but if I need that, I’ll have to find it for myself. Loory doesn’t ask his characters (animals or human) to serve any purposes other than their own, and he never passes judgment on the decisions they make.
In fact, his characters seem to escape his influence entirely, finding their own way through a world where apples grow on lemon trees, swords arrive in the mail, sloths look for jobs, and aliens stop on earth to ask an ostrich how to find “the Promised Land.” This gives his fantastic tales a documentary quality. It’s wonderfully unsettling, as if Walter Cronkite is reporting from the Twilight Zone.
This kaleidoscopic reality is deepened by the everyday struggles the characters endure: finding your true identity, coping with tragedy, dealing with guilt, chasing your dreams, resisting (or surrendering to) your obsessions, breaking from society, confronting absurdity, facing death and what, if anything, may lie beyond. The very first story in the collection is about a dodo with an identity crisis. He knows he’s a dodo, but everyone tells him he’s just a chicken. He gets so discouraged, he surrenders to society’s expectations and pretends to be a chicken. He even gets good at it. After a few pages you realize you know just how that dodo feels.
Loory often begins his stories in motion, for example, “The city is in the midst of an epidemic — giant spiders are everywhere.” He rarely spends time on setup. No backstory, no detailed descriptions. The tales are already moving when you open the book, rising past you like an escalator to the unknown. All you can do is step on.
This motion is a big part of Loory’s genius. There’s a rhythm to his stories that carry you along so steadily you never stop to question the landscape. That rhythm is in the length (most stories are under five pages) and the language itself (words and sentences are beautifully carved down to the bone). “I like the way the meter adds this beat, this pulse to the story, that propels readers along,” Loory said to Steph Cha. “I think it’s kind of hypnotizing.” (For a close-up on Loory and his craft, see their <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/like-winesburg-ohio-but-in-the-twilight-zone-a-conversation-with-ben-loory/">recent interview</a>.)
That rhythm is even in the layout on the page. For example, in “The Man, the Restaurant, and the Eiffel Tower,” a man longs to go to Paris, but he can’t: he has to run the family restaurant. On his birthday, his children give him plane tickets to Paris.
But, said the man, I can’t go to Paris! I can’t go see the Eiffel Tower! You know I can’t possibly leave the restaurant! I can’t accept this — though really, I do appreciate it.
But then the man’s children explained their whole plan. The man would take the plane to Paris, and they would stay home and run the restaurant.
Wasn’t it the best birthday present ever?
But you don’t know howto run a restaurant, the man said.
Of course we do, Dad, his children said. We’ve been watching you for years! We know everything! We know it all!
And finally, in the end, he was persuaded.
These breaks appear in every story, in the middle of scenes — even (like above) in the middle of conversations — until the page looks more like a sacred text than a fairy tale. It’s as if the story is breathing, or maybe this is where Loory knocked out the unnecessary chunks. And yet, the unusual spacing, like everything else, feels completely natural.
Reading these startling tales, you can’t help but wonder: how does Loory look at the same world we do, but see an entirely different dimension?
One of my favorite stories begins, “One time Picasso came and stayed in our town.” The narrator knows Picasso is a famous painter, but Picasso didn’t bring canvas or easel. Instead, he walked around with a big magnifying glass, looking at bugs. “And when he found a bug — one I guess he considered good — he’d pick it up and put it in a jar.” Picasso rented a room, arranged the bugs on the desk, and just stared at them.
The day Picasso left, his bugs went with him. Most of them, at least — some stayed. I remember we examined them, tried to figure out why — what was wrong with them, why they’d been left behind.
But to us they were just bugs, like all the other bugs.
You had to be Picasso to know.
Years pass. The narrator gets married, has kids, grows old. One day, he reads that Picasso has died. He travels to the town where the artist was born. “And as I was sitting there, a thought came to me. In my pocket, I found an envelope. Then I took a pencil and started to draw. I’d never drawn anything before… First I saw the legs, then the thorax and the head, then the antennae and the eyes, and then the wings.” As he stares down at the bug he drew, it comes to life, says “Thank you,” and flies away.
How does Loory see the world? You have to be Loory to know. But if you take the trip, if you sit down on a bench in his town, just across some invisible border, amazing things will happen.
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Documenting the Fantastic in Ben Loory’s Tales of Falling and Flying

Documenting the Fantastic in Ben Loory’s Tales of Falling and Flying

duffie-mcilvain

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/radicals-ryan-mcilvains-new-novel-closer-wed-like-admit/"></div>I’m not a radical. I wouldn’t even call myself an activist. And yet, in just the first three months of 2018, I added my presence to the Women’s March in Los Angeles, my name to petitions on behalf of DACA, my voice (or voicemail) urging senators to stand against the travel ban. My family marched in the March for Our Lives, and my daughters walked-out in the National School Walkout to end gun violence. These events gave me concrete hope. I felt empowered. Tides were turning.
But after each protest, I watched our President and Congress pay lip service at best, or worse, act as if nothing significant had happened at all. So how do I sustain hope in a country where, as Ryan McIlvain writes, “predatory capitalism has never been more invisible, more inevitable-seeming”? How do I make a difference when my protests and signs and petitions feel like “just theater”?
That’s the dilemma facing the narrator of McIlvain’s eloquent and penetrating new novel, The Radicals. Eli is a hyper-educated young Socialist working as a teaching assistant at NYU: “I looked like my Russian Jewish father — dark hair, easy five o’clock shadow, a certain basset hound wariness about the eyes.” After years in grad school reading “abstruse Marxist polemics,” Eli has lost his feel for it. He finds himself adrift, still publicly committed to the cause while privately wondering what he’s actually doing with his life. Through McIlvain’s alchemy, Eli becomes a modern Everyman.
The novel begins when Eli meets Sam, an ex-Mormon MFA poet looking for a more radical form of expression. They become unlikely friends, playing tennis and talking politics. Sam jokingly calls Eli “comrade” while Eli casually offers Sam leftist literature. “I couldn’t have known,” Eli reflects, “I was standing across the net from a murderer, and neither could he.” McIlvain lands that hook on page two, and proceeds to draw the reader across a landscape of idealism, despair, greed, love and loss. But don’t expect a conventional thriller. McIlvain is heading into deeper waters.
Eli invites Sam to Phoenix where a group of activists are trying to stop a bank from foreclosing on Maria, a single mother. They camp in the backyard, make signs, canvas the neighborhood. The campaign is led by Alex, Eli’s charismatic ex-girlfriend:
She was smiling the smile of a Mona Lisa, cryptic, distracted, beautiful. I’d forgotten how beautiful she could be in her tossed-off, anti-beautiful way: the tomboyish hair that she cut herself, the dark straight bangs that boxed in her round olive face, the large eyes, the strong and aquiline nose, a little ebony stud at the line where the nostril began to rise. Ancient people survived in her face, some of the Aztec blood this country and others had worked so hard to wipe out.
At first, Alex is amused by Sam, calling him Eli’s “Mini-me.” She takes Sam for a “tourist” in social justice — until Sam initiates abrupt action on his own. Without consulting the group, he meets with the bank and arranges for “partial debt forgiveness”: Maria will still lose her home, but won’t owe the bank nearly as much money afterwards. Alex is furious. The whole point of the protest was to raise awareness, not make the banks look like good guys. Sam doesn’t buy it:
“I live on earth,” Sam said. “Maria and her family live on earth, in the real world […] You’re waiting for the revolution to come and in the meantime a family’s about to lose their house and gain a toxic load of debt in its place. […] A hundred thousand dollars in debt forgiveness is real — whatever we’re playing at here is not.”
This moment introduces a central tension of the novel: how far do you push belief into action? Eli has lost faith in his academic idealism because it feels disconnected from the real world. When a bank forecloses, what good are books, debates, and disserations? But even Alex’s strategic activism, once fierce and thrilling, feels self-serving now. Isn’t she just using people like Maria to draw attention to her political agenda? Only Sam is willing to compromise both ideals and strategy to get results, but that very willingness may lead to more violent confrontations. Eli feels paralyzed by these choices.
Back in New York, he struggles to maintain interest in his post-grad studies. His advisor, Dr. Linda Hahn, “grumpy, graceful, small-toothed, bob-cut, lithe,” does more than help him stay afloat in the program. Hahn is a role model for Eli and represents one way to merge idealism and reality. She is a writer, organizer and protester, yet lives in a penthouse apartment; she’s an unrepentant Stalinist, yet tenderly cares for her husband as he folds down into ALS (Lou Gerhig’s Disease). Hahn has learned to live with contradiction. She is Eli’s proof that a radical can be conventional, that you can live in and love the world and dismantle it at the same time.
Eli has the opportunity to find this balance when he falls in love with Jen Daugherty, a talented pianist graduating from NYU. Eli realizes that love and rebellion use the same tactics, but instead of one side trying to tear the other down, love is a shared disarmament:
I think the real excitement lay in the mutual taking down of barriers, guards, insecurities, uncertainties, hesitations, fears […] We lay in bed naked and simple and conducted our lives for each other, our pasts, our desires, everything — or almost everything. We didn’t go in for total disclosure, honesty as blood sport. We weren’t foolish enough to think that the heart’s dark corners look good under a klieg light.
That openness, that generosity, promises to nourish Eli as he toils in the trenches of justice — if he can only commit it. His efforts are derailed when Sam and Alex reenter his life. Since their last meeting, they’ve become a power couple in the resistance and formed a more radical branch called the Group. They invite Eli to join. “What are you accomplishing with all those motions and sober discussions at ISO meetings, all that impotent talk?” Alex asks. “We’ve got actual plans in the Group.”
When Eli visits, he finds the Group bunkered in a nondescript house on a nondescript street. “Only on the inside did the House distinguish itself as the sort of punk pad-cum-commune it aspired to be: Trotsky beside Lenin beside Baraka on the sagging weathered built-ins […] the obligatory red fist, a Sharpied encouragement to FUCK THE POLICE! It was the signature decor, the feng shui of another, older time, only now it belonged to our time, too, by sheer insistence.”
As much as he longs for a conventional life with Jen, there’s something in Eli that responds to this too, though he’s afraid of where it could lead. His foreboding is beautifully evoked in the change Eli sees in his old tennis partner, Sam:
He ran hot and cold sometimes in the space of a single sentence, and the cold could stop your heart, as if you’d swum out with him into the warm shallows of his old enthusiasm, his old joie de vivre, only to feel the bottom drop out at the continental shelf’s edge.
McIlvain shorts us a bit on Sam and Alex’s journey. I would have loved to witness their transformation more directly. But like a child you only see every few years, these magnetic characters evolve mostly off the page. When we see them again, there’s a sense of having missed something essential.
Nonetheless, the stage is set. As an Enron-like company makes headlines for bankrupting millions of lives, and the Group plans to take some form of extreme action, and Eli realizes Jen is the love of his life, we know we’re on a collision course. By the end of this novel, none of the characters will be the same.
Through it all, McIlvain never loses sight of Eli’s humanity. Part of the secret, of course, is in the language itself. The prose is fluid, filled with quick poetic imagery, as if Eli isn’t using words so much as telepathy. But the real accomplishment is McIlvain’s restraint, his determination to stay inside Eli’s skin.
Some might argue that not enough happens in The Radicals, that it needs to be more explosive or timely in some way. That certainly would have been easier. But I think McIlvain is after something more personal. He’s not holding a mirror up to society; he’s holding it up to you and me. How do you, as a basically honest person, respond to intentionally corrupt power? How can you fight on one side of your life and love on the other? How do you live now?
Like Eli, I feel torn between the comforts of life and the injustice that seems necessary to support it; between ideals and reality. And like Eli, I don’t know what to do about it anymore. I’ve protested. I’ve donated. Such actions exerted pressure on the power structures in the past. But now? As Eli observes, “Marches and protests were the release valves a militarized state let the people pull.” So what do you do? Do you give up, keep grinding away, or take more extreme action? The Radicals is a heartfelt exploration of questions that may be impossible to answer.
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The Radicals in Ryan McIlvain’s New Novel Are Closer Than We’d Like to Admit

Charles Duffie is a writer, designer and illustrator based in Los Angeles. He is the author of&nbsp;The Mole and the Owl&nbsp;and the&nbsp;Kid, Inc. Comic Strip&nbsp;series.&nbsp;