The Insomniac Reader / Orphans

[February 9th, 2005]

^The Insomniac Reader

Edited by Kevin Sampsell

(Manic D Press, 240 pages, $13.95)

Kevin Sampsell and Monica Drake will read at Powell's on Hawthorne, 3723 SE Hawthorne Blvd., 238-1668. 7:30 pm Thursday, Feb. 10. FREE Kevin Sampsell appreciates the raw quality of the voice that cracks as it exclaims. Readers who seek gentle intonation and snuggly wrapped plots will find their favorite bedtime stories elsewhere. Sampsell's collection offers the insomniac an ode, not a cure.

Desperate to defy expectations, the young authors featured in the Reader doff formalities and pin their audience against the barroom, chat-room or emergency-room wall. All too often, however, these storytellers then retreat, turning coyly away in a poetic flurry. Portlander Monica Drake contributes one of the more developed pieces to this series of abrupt starts and stops. In "Gymkhana," Drake tells a familiar coming-of-age story with a voice that is a cool breeze through this cramped collection.

Aimee Bender and Dave Eggers lend star value to the volume (even disguised as "Lucy Thomas," Eggers can draw a crowd). Unfortunately, the stories they toss Sampsell are little more than cryptic leftovers—lyrical bites that deny hungry readers a heartier meal. Meatier prose comes from Todd Pruzan, who (thankfully) demonstrates a more intimate knowledge of his characters than of crafty turns of phrase.

On the whole, the collection is short on fiction that makes its way outside a single neurotic narrator's head. Richard Rushfield's "Stalker's Paradise," in which a woman uncovers a network of good-natured stalkers, stands out as relatively old-fashioned for actually creating a fictional world, not just a fictional frame of mind.

The insomniac's diet of dark, narrow visions is ultimately dissatisfying. But Sampsell's aim is to give restless fiction a forum, not to medicate it so that it might function in the light of day. Johanna Droubay

^Orphans

By Charles D'Ambrosio

(Clear Cut Press, 232 pages, $12.95)

The launch party for Orphans will be held at the New American Art Union, 922 SE Ankeny St. 7:30 pm Thursday, Feb. 10. FREEOrphans isn't a book to be read at lightning speed. But then again, this essay collection, Charles D'Ambrosio's first book in nine years, wasn't written that way, either. This montage collects nonfiction published by the Portland fiction writer in a variety of venues, ranging from Seattle's The Stranger to the genteel New Yorker.

One weakness of the book is its miscellaneousness, with odd juxtapositions of rangy pieces that don't add up to any greater collective theme, imposed or serendipitous. Another is its size—5 1/2 inches by 5 15/16 inches, the signature size of this first series of Clear Cut Press books—which seems simply too elegant, too cute, to contain the heft of this writer's ideas. For this is a dazzling collection, bristling with thoughtful urgency.

D'Ambrosio's narrator is in the intellectual "mind in motion" tradition of Montaigne. And the Seattle native is worth following near and far, from manufactured model homes near Woodland, Wash., to a crumbling orphanage in Svirstroy, Russia. "I'd like to come back some night and fuck in one of these modular houses," D'Ambrosio writes. "The perfection is inviting but really I just want to soil the sheets. I want to bring exhaustion into the equation. All these houses are waiting for the future to come and haunt them."

The book is haunted, as well, by the writer's consideration of failure, such as in the breathtaking "Documents," which includes snippets from his younger brother's suicide note. But throughout, this is a writer who is gambling on something else, always attentive to the grace notes, always willing to listen to the possibilities that can be found even—and especially—within loss. Ellen Fagg