Book 2 of 2019: White Dialogues by Bennett Sims

The first story in this collection, “House-sitting,” blew me away. It’s told in the second person (you have been hired to house-sit a cabin in the woods), and it’s a masterpiece of slow-burn psychological horror. Just completely original and terrifying and so so good. My other favorites were “The Bookcase,” where the narrator is asked to re-tell the story he always tells at parties on ‘This American Life’ and gradually comes to question whether it’s really as funny as he always thought, and “Two Guys Watching Cujo on Mute,” which is an all-dialogue story meditating on the theme of what separates the domesticated from the wild. The whole collection feels very fresh and new, even though (or perhaps because) there’s this 19th-century flavor to the writing, with its endlessly long sentences and heightened diction. I’m definitely going to check out Sims’s zombie novel, A Questionable Shape. 

BENNETT SIMS

September 20, 2017 - 7:00pm Prairie Lights

We Recommend: A Questionable Shape by Bennett Sims (ebook available) "A novel -- about family, memory, the evolution of relationships, growing older, longing for the past, and what it means to be alive -- that just happens to use The Undead as its vehicle. For fans of DFW and Colson Whitehead."

Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

Early and incidental, the main character’s mother talking in front of Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson; she goes on to talk about all of the various non-naturalistic effects in the painting, the corpse used as a light source to draw the eye, an arm rendered the wrong way around. Our narrator can’t really see the picture, doesn’t really care because he’s spotted a girl, and it’s a nice moment, an interesting reading of a painting, and a technically nice transmission of a monologue.

This also reminds me of Bennett Sims’s A Questionable Shape, which also opens with a consideration of the non-naturalistic in Dutch golden-age painting; both incidental bits -- Sims was making a point about vision and perspective, I expect Tartt is even more tangential here, to the point that reading this as commentary on realism is probably justifiable but also grad-school stretching it -- that demonstrate a certain kind of practice while carrying forward. I really liked Sims’s book; his reading of his painting, though, was intense, crabbed, close and impacted. Tartt, on the other hand, has this clean open paragraph, which easily circles in and out of direct speech and narration, part of a longer looping disquisition on an exhibition: calm and assured and glowing.

Episode EIGHT of Our Talk Show

Is that what you do to force yourself to write, make jokes?

Yeah. At some point I internalized this ethos of sitting at a desk and forcing myself to be at a laptop for a set number of hours in a workday. I’m suspicious of how productive this actually is, though, because I tend to just while away the hours writing a bunch of dumb jokes, then pat myself on the back for putting in a full day.

But when I make myself sit at the desk, the things I end up writing—just to amuse myself and keep from going crazy—are these little set-up/punch-line jokes. Probably the single line I’m proudest of would be: What did the doctor prescribe the mutant for constipation?

I don’t know. What did the doctor prescribe the mutant for constipation?

Milk of Magneto.

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