A short story by Donald Barthelme called “Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby” starts like this: “Some of us had been threatening our friend Colby for a long time, because of the way he had been behaving. And now he’d gone too far, so we decided to hang him.”
If your response to that sentence is a kind of harrumphing laugh — as is mine — I have some book recommendations for you: “Riots I Have Known” by Ryan Chapman, and “The Heap” by Sean Adams.
Barthelme is perhaps fading as a front-of-mind figure, but there was a period from the mid-’60s to mid-’70s where his short satires were a monthly fixture in The New Yorker. His work is simultaneously silly and intellectual, funny yet also menacing. His story “Game” opens with the narrator being bent out of shape that his colleague Shotwell does not allow him to play with his jacks. Soon, we realize that the men feuding over the children’s novelty are manning an underground nuclear silo, their fingers near the missile triggers.
I am about to date myself with this reference, but Barthelme’s stories trigger the sensation of watching TV back in the broadcast days when the horizontal hold would go briefly wonky, scrambling reality for a moment before righting itself. That interstitial moment of confusion is unsettling and alluring, a breaking of the world that makes you question reality itself.
Similar to Barthelme’s stories, “Riots I Have Known,” and “The Heap” are rooted in a mostly recognizable world similar to the one we live in, but they also follow their own internal logic in ways that are pleasantly head-scratching.
As “Riots I Have Known” opens, we find ourselves inside a computer lab as a prison riot roils just outside, the riot incited by a poem published in the prison literary journal, The Holding Pen, which has become an au courant favorite of the Brooklyn literary crowd. Our unnamed narrator is the editor of The Holding Pen, working on his introduction to the final issue, in which he will share the truth of his life story and argue that he is not to blame for the riots.
There is no discernable plot to any of this, but there are jokes about hipster literary culture, about artistic self-importance, about hoity-toity arts philanthropists, about the clichéd violence of prison narratives we’re willing to accept as true in order to not deal with the even darker reality.
I cackled my way through the slim volume, but like I said, I might be strange. If you’re the same kind of strange, you might really love this book.
“The Heap” is told in the aftermath of the collapse of Los Verticalés, what used to be an endlessly expanding building, growing perpetually both wider and taller, up until it becomes a pile of rubble. Among the “dig hands” probing the wreckage is Orville Anders, whose brother Bernard, a one-time DJ for Los Verticalés, appears to be broadcasting from somewhere in the debris.
I mean, does it make sense to describe the story further? It’s a very weird story that is also affectionately human as we root for a reunion between Orville and Bernard. Los Verticalés and its resultant heap are quite literally impossible, but Adams brings this off-kilter world to life, and in doing so brings some deeper understanding with the world we do know and live in.
As with Barthelme, there is a deep seriousness to the perceived silliness in these novels, but for the average reader, they can be a tough sell.
If you take the leap, you may experience great reward.
John Warner is the author of “Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities.”
Book recommendations from the Biblioracle
John Warner tells you what to read based on the last five books you’ve read.
1. “The Gown: A Novel of the Royal Wedding” by Jennifer Robson
2. “Karolina’s Twins” by Ronald H. Balson
3. “The Life She Was Given” by Ellen Marie Wiseman
4. “The Royal Nanny” by Karen Harper
5. “The Signature of All Things” by Elizabeth Gilbert
— Gail L., Charleston, Ill.
For Gail, a novel that goes pretty far back into the Royal Family: “Wolf Hall” by Hilary Mantel.
1. “Well Met” by Jen DeLuca
2. “You Already Know How to Be Great: A Simple Way to Remove Interference and Unlock Your Greatest Potential” by Alan Fine
3. “The Substitution Order” by Martin Clark
4. “The Giver of Stars” by Jojo Moyes
5. “Backlash” by Brad Thor
— Katherine P., Chicago
I feel as though Katherine will take to Carl Hiaasen’s Andrew Yancy, a detective-turned-health inspector who seems to find himself in very particular kinds of South Florida trouble. “Bad Monkey” is his first appearance on the scene.
1. “The Headmaster’s Wife” by Thomas Christopher Greene
2. “A Week in Winter” by Maeve Binchy
3. “The Rooster Bar” by John Grisham
4. “The Diary of Mattie Spenser” by Sandra Dallas
5. “My Antonia” by Willa Cather
— Arlene P., Chicago
I think Arlene will pleasurably sink into Stewart O’Nan’s “Last Night at the Lobster.”
Get a reading from the Biblioracle
Send a list of the last five books you’ve read to books@chicagotribune.com.
