[BA7]≫ Read Gratis Four for a Quarter Fictions Michael Martone 9781573661638 Books

Four for a Quarter Fictions Michael Martone 9781573661638 Books

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Four for a Quarter Fictions Michael Martone 9781573661638 Books

For those of you who are disinclined to read long reviews: Buy this book. It is good.

For the rest of you: Buy this book. It is full of thoughtful musings presented as fiction, flash fiction, and micro-fiction. As a bonus, each one of these "fictions," in one way or another (often apparently only incidentally), interestingly complicates any ordinary understanding of the line between "real" and "fiction." Thus, taken individually, each fiction is a kind of snapshot of ephemeral reality, cropped and framed by some hand, a fictional or fictionalized moment frozen in time, carefully examined, contemplated, remembered by some narrator or other. Taken together, these images accumulate a kind of complex weight and form, a substantive reality that I want to say emerges as a snapshot-collage of the writer's mind, fractured and filtered through dozens of lenses (most of which are other minds).

Martone is a master at revealing the extraordinary in the mundane, the strata within the superficial, the complexity of the simple--not the reality behind things so much, but, through little shifts in perspective, or the gaze of an innocent, alien eye, variations on a theme that somehow add up to what Hopkins called "inscape," the dynamic becoming of a thing into its essential self. His inspirations are those little nuggets of news, pop culture, and everyday encounters that make you think, "Huh?" or "Huh!" Like, postcards and the places they celebrate, like cows, and like weather. But, also that kid (we all saw the story) who horrifyingly lost his hands in the combine but managed to dial the operator with a pencil in his teeth and then get to the bath tub without staining his mother's carpet, or the first four deaths of the writer's high school class, or "Four Dead in Ohio." There is profound and serious stuff in this volume. There are belly laughs, too. And there are many many gems of writing here that manage to be both simultaneously.

I will confess at this point that I am a Michael Martone fan, and have been ever since sitting in one of his graduate classes many years ago. I'm probably not his only former student to suspect that some of his best writing has appeared in the margins of my own weekly offerings. Happily, however, some of Michael Martone's best writing also appears in this latest effort, which, like all his efforts, makes clever writing and deep insight seem effortless.


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Four for a Quarter Fictions Michael Martone 9781573661638 Books Reviews

Michael Martone's latest jeu d'esprit is a marvelous, mysterious, sustained meditation on foursomes--in keeping with his practice of unleashing his imagination by means of selecting a format. As he explained in a prepub interview

"...when one abandons plot, one realizes that the structure of plot is simply an arbitrary collection of rules, suggestions, protocol. So you just find another set of arbitrary armature. Number. I often use numbers--the hours in the day, the weeks in a year. The number of planets. I am writing a whole book of short fiction now based on the number four. Fictions employing the four seasons, the four winds, the four corners, the four chambers of the heart, the four humors, the 4H Club, the Fab Four, the Fantastic Four, the four railroads on the Monopoly Board, Four Calling Birds."

In other words, anything goes Martone ranges, to pick just one sequence, from the death of high school classmates to houses he's lived in to versions of Audie Murphy making "To Hell and Back"....

He inhabits minimonologues as Achilles, Byron, Jackie, Thucydides...

...several sets of lovers in groping, graphic detail....

He recalls jobs, relatives, places he's toured....what it was like to teach a writing class while the Blue Angels were pummeling the skies....

Wonderful surprises, terrifically poignant, infinitely spun-out combinations and permutations.

Because Martone's takes are quick, he does not offer high drama, like suspense or tragedy. He purveys poignance. The postcard is his role model.

He is an experimentalist with a heart. And a sense of humor. And a deep feeling for the strangeness of the ordinary.

He hails, after all, from Indiana and is an expert on the peaks and abysses of the flatlands.

He believes that the world is full of miracles.

He writes with the sprezzatura of the Guarneri, the power of Murderers' Row.
No secret this is one of my favorite contemporary writers, and he doesn't disappoint in Four for a Quarter. Everything in this book deals with the number or quantity or concept of 4. I was worried it would be gimmicky. How much good writing can come from such a forced constraint? I should have known...Martone is one of our finest writers. He's a master of rhythm and words and setting. From "The Sex Life of the Fantastic Four" to the ethereal, lyrical recounting of a miscarriage in "Diagnostic Drift," this writer can entertain us, educate us, and illuminate our smallest, deepest, most personal moments.
For those of you who are disinclined to read long reviews Buy this book. It is good.

For the rest of you Buy this book. It is full of thoughtful musings presented as fiction, flash fiction, and micro-fiction. As a bonus, each one of these "fictions," in one way or another (often apparently only incidentally), interestingly complicates any ordinary understanding of the line between "real" and "fiction." Thus, taken individually, each fiction is a kind of snapshot of ephemeral reality, cropped and framed by some hand, a fictional or fictionalized moment frozen in time, carefully examined, contemplated, remembered by some narrator or other. Taken together, these images accumulate a kind of complex weight and form, a substantive reality that I want to say emerges as a snapshot-collage of the writer's mind, fractured and filtered through dozens of lenses (most of which are other minds).

Martone is a master at revealing the extraordinary in the mundane, the strata within the superficial, the complexity of the simple--not the reality behind things so much, but, through little shifts in perspective, or the gaze of an innocent, alien eye, variations on a theme that somehow add up to what Hopkins called "inscape," the dynamic becoming of a thing into its essential self. His inspirations are those little nuggets of news, pop culture, and everyday encounters that make you think, "Huh?" or "Huh!" Like, postcards and the places they celebrate, like cows, and like weather. But, also that kid (we all saw the story) who horrifyingly lost his hands in the combine but managed to dial the operator with a pencil in his teeth and then get to the bath tub without staining his mother's carpet, or the first four deaths of the writer's high school class, or "Four Dead in Ohio." There is profound and serious stuff in this volume. There are belly laughs, too. And there are many many gems of writing here that manage to be both simultaneously.

I will confess at this point that I am a Michael Martone fan, and have been ever since sitting in one of his graduate classes many years ago. I'm probably not his only former student to suspect that some of his best writing has appeared in the margins of my own weekly offerings. Happily, however, some of Michael Martone's best writing also appears in this latest effort, which, like all his efforts, makes clever writing and deep insight seem effortless.