The Wavering Knife

Rating:
Summary: Brutal and Funny
Review: A few stories miss their mark, but otherwise THE WAVERING KNIFE impresses with its multiplicity of narrators and the astounding predicaments they get themselves into. He has the invention of Wodehouse, but a grimmer state of mind, though one story combines both modes of writing, the tale of the "Promisekeepers," a coterie of heterosexual rednecks who meet at a tavern with a man's name on it (so women won't distract them) to jaw over their problems with the opposite sex. When one of them confesses a shocking secret, the others react in amusing ways and the scene ends with a frightening shivaree. Though many of the stories are in the first person, he is often able to make these voices sort of different from one another. You wind up finishing the book with a great deal of respect for Brian Everson, as a writer and as a thinker--for there are some tales which ask to be judged on their teleology alone.

THE WAVERING KNIFE is a book so good it makes you wonder what kind of person Everson is. For more inspiration I turned to the jacket copy. Hey, he looks good all cleaned up. The line of darkness turning his nose aquiline, that cloudy mass of backlit hair in the photo on the back cover reminds us of Clarence Bull's photos of Joan Crawford, Garbo, and other MGM goddesses of the 30s. (I can't find the name of the photographer to credit, but he or she is darn good.)

Rating:
Summary: The Quentin Tarantino of Fiction
Review: The easiest way I can think of to give a sense of Brian Evenson's fiction, since I am less inclined to give a sense of it than to say: just read it, is to compare it to Quentin Tarantino's work in film. Both, in their concern with torture and sociopathy, are informed by the kind of sensibility one most often sees in Asian films about torture like /Audition/, /Tetsuo/, /Cyclo/ and /Old Boy/. In /The Wavering Knife/ there is violence, and a kind of affectless affect in the medium of which people's loves and hates are like the vaguely disturbing emotional attachments and aggressions of children.But unlike Tarantino's films, Evenson's fiction continues to be informed by a socio-political and historical sensibility. No author is better equipped to criticize evangelical hypocrisy as he does in several places through his book, nor to (somewhat sympathetically) diagnose the morbidly grandiose ambitions religion can both enable and conceal. Aside from this, his range is amazing: there are several art-fiction tales of a minimalist flavor dealing with issues of representation, one fantasy story, "The Progenitor", which seems like it could open a whole new terrain both for the "genre" and Evenson's future explorations. I had the luck to read this book around Halloween, but it will give you the eerieness of late-October no matter when you read it, for the language and structure are that good.

Rating:
Summary: Evenson Enters Darker, More Affective Terrain
Review: With this new collection from the author of the masterful ALTMANN'S TONGUE, Evenson brings his readers face to face with the same beauty and terror of his uniquely constructed universe that we've seen in CONTAGION and THE DIN OF CELESTIAL BIRDS. Only, with this book, Evenson has gone further into the emotional and phenomenological landscape of his characters, and this somehow makes his fiction even more powerful, more e/affective, more vicious. I feel that this is an improvement upon the work begun in ALTMANN'S TONGUE, that we are witnessing, with THE WAVERING KNIFE, a moment of astonishing growth. This from a writer whose talents were already quite formidable to begin with. Brian Evenson is on his way to becoming the most powerful and original voice in contemporary American fiction.