The Metaphysical Ukulele

March 28, 2016
Carswell (Train Wreck Girl) returns with a humorous collection of short stories bound by a common object: a ubiquitous ukulele that appears in the hands of various well-known writers. The stories skillfully blend true anecdotes and fictitious tales of the lives of authors including Herman Melville, Flannery O’Connor, Jack Kerouac, and Thomas Pynchon, and some of the events described will have readers looking online to separate fact from fiction. The results are mixed; the best of the bunch is “The Bottom-Shelf Muse,” which relates how Raymond Chandler held up shooting of the film The Blue Dahlia with a bad case of writer’s block. Carswell emulates the writer’s hard-boiled style effortlessly. Then there’s “The Incognito Players,” where Kristiani (a Pynchon fan so devoted she has a tattoo that’s an homage to The Crying of Lot 49) joins a New York City–based ukulele group that may or may not include the notoriously publicity-averse author. Though the ukulele conceit seems a little forced at times, Carswell excels at composing compelling, whimsical tales that reveal the human side of canonized authors, gently bringing them down from their pedestals.

March 1, 2016
In each of these 12 stories, Carswell imitates the style and/or preoccupations of another author, using real events from the writers' lives...and also inserts a ukulele--literal, metaphorical, or metaphysical. The authors Carswell chooses to imitate include, among others, Herman Melville, Jack Kerouac, Chester Himes, Flannery O'Connor, Raymond Chandler, and finally (with a glance at a literary legacy of his own making?) Carswell himself. The stories aren't told from the points of view of the authors, but rather, the authors are characters in the stories. We are informed, for example, that Melville was a "brilliant ukulelist" and that he's erotically transfixed by Fayaway, a character from Typee, his first novel. In "A Place Called Sickness," Flannery O'Connor is enamored of Erik Langkjaer, Danish textbook salesman, who visits her as she's playing bluegrass songs on her ukulele. One of the most successful stories involves Raymond Chandler, whose distinctive noir idiom Carswell comes close to capturing. It seems a ukulele is missing, and Chandler needs it to overcome writer's block as he's trying to finish his script for The Blue Dahlia. The narrator is a sleuth, hitting a bar and trying to find the ukulele and "get the writer writing." The final story is about a 7-year-old named Sean Carswell, and it's a bagatelle concerning misbehavior at school, especially involving a mildly indelicate version of Mother-May-I that all children have indulged in. Paradoxically both wacky and thoughtful--an odd mix.

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April 15, 2016

Cofounder of Gorsky Press, Carswell (Madhouse Fog) has great fun pulling off his intriguing idea: using a ukulele to link stories featuring admired authors. Herman Melville absconds with the ukulele given him by a possibly cannibalistic Polynesian girl, Jack Kerouac strums along with farmhands as he travels the open road, Chester Himes swindles an instrument from a Parisian house band while consorting with Richard Wright and James Baldwin, and Flannery O'Connor leaves behind her ukulele after a short-circuited evening with a beau. In each, the ukulele is unobtrusive yet resonant; O'Connor's loss echoes others in her life, and the tale about Richard Brautigan's ukulele is as satisfyingly off-kilter as the author himself. VERDICT Unexpectedly entertaining; most readers will enjoy.

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