Austin Nights and Trillin On Texas [Book Reviews]

Image from Tiny Toe Press

Seventy-one pages into his book Austin Nights, Herocious (a pen name for Michael Davidson) confirms what the reader has most likely been suspecting - “What you're reading reading is trying to stay formless and free, without limitations and plot.” The book floats from present to past, but the gist of it is this - Davidson, or a character he inhabits in these pages - has left Miami Beach with his girlfriend Bridget to move to Austin. Like so many others, the University is the impetus for their move, and Austin presents both difficult and happy challenges to their worldview. Bridget is also a narrator in Austin Nights, but the story is primarily told through Michael's words. Davidson is prone to the “occasional digression,” as he puts it, and his narrative is quick-moving, often familiar, and occasionally frustrating.

Though non-linear, the presentation of Austin Nights curbs what can be a frustrating stylistic choice with its straightforward and lean writing style, allowing the reader to bite into the couple's experiences without getting pulled under by a series of events that don't follow in any particular order. Most of us are Austin by way of Somewhere Else, and depending where you're from, the experience of Austin differs greatly. It's interesting to note our protagonist’s first impressions of this city. The amount of homeless and mentally ill inhabitants shock and confuse our couple, and even the whine of police, ambulance and firefighter's sirens seem above the norm. One leering mumbler at the Twin Oaks public library they've dubbed the “leprechaun” turns out to be a local of some import, which proves (if nothing else) that Austin's demarcations between freaks and bigshots is inherently fluid and possibly confusing to a transplant.

If the pacing and specialized viewpoint of the novel are its best qualities (and there's a fine ending as well), it's those “digressions” and an occasional sense of claustrophobia that bog the book down. Davidson (the character, anyway) is not immune to a sense of superiority that creatives sometimes dump on the working classes. In St. Petersburg, he searches for Jack Kerouac's house and is disturbed that the locals aren't as well read as he, noting even their “cancerous guffaws” at his expense. And like an in-joke, cigarettes are constantly referred to as “cancer sticks” or just “cancer,” giving our characters an air of haughtiness that isn't desirable. The claustrophobia alluded to is made of similar stuff, as the reader feels somewhat bombarded by the close and personal intimacies that make up Michael and Bridget's day to day. Throw in more than a few arguments related to Bridget's (excellently-named) feline Honeyed Cat, and you may want a little breathing room from this tight-knit duo.

An interesting read no matter how you slice it, Austin Nights is also part of the Tiny Toe press imprint in the '04 started by Davidson. Look for more independent literature from the outfit, including Davidson's sophomore novel, Crassitude, in the hopeful near future.

Tiny Toe Press: [website]

Image From The University Of Texas Press

The face framed on the cover of Calvin Trillin's Trillin on Texas is a focused growl, but the longstanding New Yorker writer and novelist/comic verse composer/non-fiction author fills his latest - a book about his “Texas connection” - with work that is anything but world-weary and grumpy. Instead, this insightful and far-reaching collection of essays tackles race relations, bar-b-q, and larger than life characters with erudition and balance.

Unearned or not, The New Yorker has a reputation as much for fine writing as the cultivation of a foppish and pretentious subscription base, though Trillin's writing is generously enjoyable for a broad readership. The best piece in the collection, “Making Adjustments,” details the life and times of immigration lawyers in Houston circa 1984 that manages to jump off the page even today. What characters! Beaumont Martin, for one, is a six-foot-five attorney who only wears jumpsuits (which he orders through the mail from California) and whose caseload is, by his own admission, purposefully “mundane and repetitious.” Also, the “dominant design element of Martin's office is provided by statues of bare-breasted women.” People like this exist outside of fiction?

Trillin's journalistic patience nets him a cast of similarly fascinating portraits. We're there while Larry McMurtry camps out for the night to be first in line for a rare book sale, we meet the reporter and intellectual John Bloom as he metamorphosis into the the full-time politically incorrect good ol' boy film reviewer Joe Bob Briggs, and Trillin's memorial of Molly Ivins is warm and memorable. Though he calls this book “accidental,” in that he never really set out to write about Texas, by all accounts he turns up gold whenever he does.

Calvin Trillin: [wikipedia]