Reading Recommendations

To those of you who have known me as a bookseller, let it be known that my interest in the printed page began long before I owned a bookstore. I was the best customer of the local library. I can describe bookstores that have not existed since the sixties. Now that the bricks-and-mortar are gone, I have the impulse to share some titles that I feel are above and beyond the average quality you find in the mix. As a Michigan resident, I am proud to say that there are quite a few writers based in my state who have published fine work in the last year.

Steve Amick's Nothing But A Smile is a fine novel that combines a finely-tuned WWII home front story with enterprising characters who survive by turning a small, failing camera shop into a secret studio that produces naughty photos. Set in Chicago and later in Michigan, the plot centers around the problems created by stepping outside accepted morals. The world of racy pinup production and distribution is only one piece of this time capsule, but Amick does retro well, avoiding cliche and taking the reader back without blinking at conditions much like ours: economic slump, small businesses struggling, soldiers returning to few jobs. Those who lived through these times should particularly enjoy the ride, which ends in postwar Ann Arbor.The author credits his late father-in-law for providing him with the material for the novel, but once again, he reveals his talent for stories that move beyond the superficial, as he did in
his first novel, The Lake, The River, and the Other Lake.

Bobbie Jo Campbell's American Salvage is the second of her books that I have enjoyed. The first, Q Road, joins those of Charles Baxter, Janet Kauffman, Laura Kasischke, and Charles Dickinson in my hall of fame for novels depicting small town life in the mitten state. American Salvage is a collection of short stories; but each one contributes its part of the microcosm of the small town, which Campbell admits might resemble her hometown. The stories are tough and the characters gritty: they don't indulge the reader with a cutesy tone. Amazing things happen on these pages, but I won't give too much detail here. Just know that this writing was fine enough to have earned Campbell a spot as finalist for the 2009 National Book Award, which is saying something. American Salvage is part of the Made in Michigan Writers Series published by the Wayne State Press.

A note of full disclosure: although I attended graduate school in English at Wayne State, and could see the press from the not-very-fabulous teaching assistant office that I inhabited there, I am absolutely not compensated for writing this review and would love the series even if I had never been a Wayne student.

Two other books that bear mention here are from the same series: Michael Zadoorian's The Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit and Janet Kauffman's Trespassing:Dirt Stories and Field Notes. The former is written by Michael Zadoorian, with whom (again, disclosure) I attended grad school at Wayne. Zadoorian does urban wreckage in much the same way that Campbell does rural squalor: with an eye for the people and their noble attempts at survival in a storm of economic decline. He has the appreciation that I share for the wonders of a city that is generally thought to be beyond repair, including a number of commercial buildings (restaurants, bars, motels) that were built to resemble exotic Asian civilizations, hence the title of the collection. In the process of telling these stories, Zadoorian brings a humanity to the settings by noticing the smallest details and finding the oddments that make life as he sees it very real.

Kauffman's book is more non-fictional, though she has published many fictions that demonstrate her intimate knowledge of rural Michigan. Trespassing is actually two books: first, it's a series of stories and fragments, nearly non-fictional; then, it's an actual account of the environmental response when her Hillsdale County neighborhood is trashed by the introduction of a factory farm. If you don't care about one half of the book, you will find the other very interesting. If you are really lucky, you will enjoy both halves and be motivated to consider how you might support the movement to rid the planet of factory farms, having been shown their effects in Kauffman's deft fiction.

A final note on this series: it now includes two books that I have not yet consumed: Anne-Marie Oomen's collection of essays, An American Map, and Kasischke's novella, Eden Springs. If the series continues its fine eye for local talent, these will be on my reading list before long.