I heard Ann Beattie read once, years ago, at the New York State Summer Writers Institute in Saratoga Springs. I was new to writing as craft, and to the short story, and what stories I knew had sky in them.

Beattie's latest work - the novella Walks With Men - sets its lens at that same close and skyless angle to the city, a familiar, unromanticized view of Manhattan that has served as a source of myopia for her characters before: "Sailors know to train their eyes on the horizon to avoid seasickness. When you're landlocked in New York City, look at the farthest curb, which, in its own way, is the horizon line."

It is 1980 and the narrator, Jane Jay Costner, is a young writer and a self-proclaimed "overnight sensation" who comes into quick fame after an interview with the New York Times in which she criticizes her Ivy education. When she meets Neil, the older professor assigned to respond to her in the Times, he promises to teach her some things--"he'd tell me anything, anything, as long as the information went unattributed."

Costner accepts the deal and the affair that follows. Already, Beattie has created a very small world, which contracts further as Jane moves in and marries Neil, then survives him. Despite her credentials, there is very little structure to Jane's days, and she seems for much of the story to be bored, or at least without direction. Readers who prefer books with GPS-worthy movement may find themselves in a similar mood. But what about the Walks? one asks. To which I say: sometimes they go to the diner down the street.

If the space circumscribed by the story is made smaller by this ennui and Jane's ready absorption into Neil's life, it is equally bounded by vanity. Jane reminds the reader regularly why they might have heard of her--her academy-award winning screenplay, her novel made into a movie (as Beattie's own was), perhaps--but probably not--that first callow Times interview.

Yet as a narrator, Jane preempts our judgment over and over, in little postscripts that ask us to recalculate the value of what just happened:

You see through this; understand I was too naïve, even if you factor in that I was young...I didn't introspect; I didn't ask enough questions...If you think for a minute, you might guess what happened next, because clichés so often befall vain people. (13)

In fact, Walks with Men can be read as a study of the triangle between self-consciousness, self-awareness and self-centeredness, and Jane rattles between these three points, never lighting fully in one corner. Listening to Chet Baker on the radio, she finds herself "wondering how someone with so little talent, so clearly only seductive, could have become so famous." This is Beattie's game.

One of the joys of reading Beattie is that she builds so many layers without disrupting the surface. The bouquet of flashlights Neil teaches her to keep by the bed is a beautiful object, without any symbolic assignation. But as a writer, Beattie permits her narrator to lay down arrows elsewhere, as she does in this lovely recitative:

Blood oranges (And also the novel, by John Hawkes.)
Rain. (And also the poem, by Robert Creeley.)
"Stella!" (And also the Italian cookies: crumbly Stella D'oro).

Unafraid to invoke art, she lays down the whole narrative of Jane's relationship with Neil and his disappearance in these three lines (from Creeley's poem: What am I to myself/that must be remembered,/insisted upon/so often?) As a form, the novella allows Beattie to work with the same lyric range of motion she has mastered in her short stories.

But this novella, perhaps paradoxically, departs from Beattie's earlier stories in its thinness. Though her stories are frequently driven by their characters' heaping interior struggles--and Walks With Men is no exception--earlier collections like The Burning House and Perfect Recall have richer casts, scenes, and entanglements. There are horse trailers in them, and wild animals, and river-swimming. Often we are introduced to five characters on the first page. Read against those, Walks feels a bit like listening to an accomplished pianist rehearsing one hand at a time.

But it's Beattie, and so one takes even this as a choice, one made for effect, or structural irony. "Italics provide a wonderful advantage: you see, right away, that the words are in a rush," Jane explains in the first pages. "When something exists at a slant, you can't help but consider irony." And such soft-pedal irony is perhaps the persisting pleasure of reading Beattie's work--like realizing someone has been trying to catch your eye across the room, the reader begins, after every confession and exit, to notice the author, leaning against the white space, biting her lip, trying not to smile.

***
KATE PETERSEN, a current MFA candidate in fiction at the University of Minnesota, writes for PostScript and Health Policy Hub. Her writing has appeared in The Iowa Review, Quarterly West, Brevity, and Best of the Web 2009.

That established, I'll just come out and say it: Justin Cronin's The Passage is not the book I wanted it to be.

2.
The thing is, it's summer. Any reading I'm doing is for pleasure; at temperatures above 80 degrees I don't want much to do with novels about WASP divorce or life in the developing world or any of those other highbrow, New Yorker-type topics. I want action, darnit--some battle scenes!--and a love interest, and plenty of intrigue and snappy dialogue and hey, why not a vampire or two? Too bad I found almost none of that in The Passage, the first book in a three-volume epic centered around a young girl (Amy) tapped to save the world after a deadly "vampire" virus infects most of the population.

Here's what I actually did encounter in the course of 784 pages. First, Tissue-Thin Characterization and its bedfellow, Stilted Expository Dialogue. Then, vampires that are actually zombies (sorry, teen-aged ladies--it's not sexy) and the too-detailed description of equipment, combat, field medicine, military rations, etc. (note to self: film is still the best vehicle for action sequences). There's the superfluous trip to Las Vegas and the epigraphs from Shakespeare and Paradise Lost. There's the constant cringe-worthy future jargon that means everyone's always going on about "Virals" in a manner that suggests the artful dialogue of a James Cameron movie. And to top all of that off, there's a "magical negro" character that's so tone-deaf and discomfiting that it made me wonder if this manuscript was submitted in 1955, an overly precocious child, a whore with a heart of gold, and a partridge in a pear tree. Just kidding! There are no partridges in THE NORTH AMERICAN QUARANTINE PERIOD.

Most irritating to me, on a craft level, is the book's baffling reliance on "found documents" inserted in the text. First example: not eighteen pages into the book, we're sidelined from the main character's story and suddenly plunged into a pages-long email exchange between two biologists we've never met and will never see again. Sample correspondence:

The trip down was uneventful--sixteen hours in the air to La Paz, then a smaller government transport to Concepción, in the country's eastern jungle basin. From here there aren't really any decent roads; it's pure backcountry, and we'll be traveling on foot.

This kind of stuff isn't even interesting when your college crush who's in Ecuador on a Fulbright emails you about it. Sure, one of these guys is eventually going to be exposed to the Vamp Virus (TM), but he'll never show up again, so why not just summarize the outbreak in a few workman-like sentences? ("Reports had been filtering in from South America of a strange virus. A team of scientists had been exposed somewhere in the jungle.") Even the likes of Stephenie Meyer and J.K. Rowling, while heavy on the adverbs, manage to avoid momentum-killing passages like this.

To summarize: this book begins one hundred pages before the story gets started, ends almost the same distance after the plot's real finish, and in between has too many characters, too much exposition, and deploys so many tired tropes of this type of novel that you begin to wonder if Cronin had a bingo machine full of them and just cranked it around each time he was in need of a new cliche. It's impossible to connect with any of the characters because there are so many of them, and too often the book tries to be about a whole world of humanity instead of settling on a protagonist or two. It's like reading the transcription of a Spielberg film.

3.
In the end it's kind of amusing to watch the promotional hoopla for The Passage (not a result of the book's quality, of course, but rather Cronin's this-is-why-publishing-is-a-dying-industry sky-high advance), and to picture the frenzied business team that's responsible for making a profit on the book saying, "You paid this guy HOW MUCH, NOW?" Good on Cronin, I suppose, for pulling the wool over everyone's eyes. And the campaign is working; people are reading the book, or at least they're pretending to. As of this week, The Passage has 616 reviews on Amazon. Cronin's previous, beautifully reviewed literary novel? It's got 52.

I cracked The Passage's spine looking to be transported, looking for the kind of immersive summer reading experience that would help me forget that my apartment isn't air-conditioned. Sadly, The Passage only made my living room seem hotter. The book's greatest sin, for me, is not that it is bloated--and dear Lord, is it bloated--it's that it is unforgivably self-serious. It's not fun. It's dead on the page. Every sentence is ponderous, every idea tired, every scene belabored. It isn't literary, but for my money, it doesn't work as a commercial dystopian thriller, either. You just wish somebody had taken Cronin by the shoulders in the draft stages and said, "Look, buddy, this isn't The Road. This isn't even The Giver. You're selling out. It won't work if there's no joy in it."

Here's an actual blurb from the cover of The Passage:

"Every so often a novel-reader's novel comes along: an enthralling, entertaining story wedded to simple, supple prose, both informed by tremendous imagination...Read fifteen pages and you will find yourself captivated; read thirty and you will find yourself taken prisoner and reading late into the night. It has the vividness that only epic works of fantasy and imagination can achieve. What else can I say? This: read this book and the ordinary world disappears." --Stephen King

With all due respect to Mr. King, I think the following copy is more accurate:

"If The Stand and a George Romero movie mated and had a baby that was one of those really ugly bug-eyed infants that you coo over anyway--because what kind of person admits a baby is ugly?--that would be this book, and the publishing industry's desperate peddling of it." --Me

"The Passage is the first book in a trilogy, so it's kind of like Star Wars: A New Hope. It's like Star Wars, if, instead of hiring Han Solo and dressing up as stormtroopers and getting caught in a garbage compactor on the Death Star, Luke and Obi-Wan had spent eight hours in that cantina on Tatooine, and the movie had ended right after Obi-Wan cut off that dude's arm." --Me

"This book weighs 4.2lb." --Also Me

***
Sara Joy Culver holds an MFA from the University of Minnesota. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Puerto del Sol, The Rumpus, and 300Reviews.com.

My plan is to venture out into the island wilderness alone at first, to be later joined by my friends after they finish work. The first section shall be Discovery and Careful Study, and the second Festivities and Merrymaking.

4:29 - Fitzroy Tavern
The Fitzroy Tavern was a place native Artists and Intellectuals like Dylan Thomas and George Orwell used to frequent in the early- to mid-20th century to spend their evenings imbibing large quantities of beverage. The Transitive Principle of Mathematics and Drinking tells me that if I imbibe large quantities of beverage at the same place as the historic imbibing, mayhaps I should become an Artist or Intellectual myself.

A mild hilarity which I have observed upon my stay here is the Island's use of the antiquated institution of the Newspaper. Indeed, there are not only two Newspapers published each morning and distributed free of charge, but a similar Newspaper is published in the afternoon as well, besides Newspapers available for purchase. I may have to show the locals my computing Machine, inside which I have brought the Internet with me all the way from America. I am not sure whether they are aware that it exists. They seem to be making some small advances towards modern times, however; the Fitzroy Tavern's "Writers' and Artists' Bar" has been re-purposed, and is now the "Furniture Storage Area."

The tradition among the islanders is to imbibe alcohol quietly and alone in the afternoons. Some purchase a pint and read their Newspapers (and I find that a state of inebriation is the only proper state in which one should consume the news), while others look at the bottoms of their glasses and think about the children they are neglecting, or about the children they could be neglecting but never had. The Fitzroy is quiet, not yet taken to drunken arguments on art or literature at this time of day.

4:59 - I have found a use for the Newspaper: to hide my Map behind while standing in the street, so that I look as though I am an educated gentleman simply reading for pleasure rather than a gape-mouthed stranger turning in circles attempting to find street signs which are affixed high up on buildings seemingly at random.

5:02 - Marquis of Granby
According to local legend, this would be George Orwell's favorite bar to end his nights. Being across a certain line of jurisdiction, it was allowed to stay open half an hour later than nearby public houses (shortened by the locals to "pub"), which the Marquis of Granby still boasts about today.

This Establishment shows the most promising signs of commercialization, as the owners have pleasantly stripped away much of the old-time charm. Indeed, a man who must be wealthy charges his iTelephone with an outlet in the corner. He is probably having a literary or political discussion here just as Orwell did, only this man is by himself in a corner talking to the Internet. Fascism vs. democratic socialism is now Mac vs. PC. But, really, he and Orwell are essentially the same.

There is not as much of a sense of exotic native history here, so I decide to make my way toward Fleet Street, hoping to avoid any demon barbers that may reside there.

5:43 - A somewhat long ride on the primitive, rickety subway system gives me an opportunity to reflect on what I have seen so far. I notice a poem written in some type of pidgin American posted like an advertisement. It makes me wonder about the difference between my beautiful poetry and the island's rather more base and ugly style. I know from a dubious but growing-in-popularity concept known as "science" that ceiling height and floor surface can affect decisions while one shops--why couldn't the same be true for writing? The islanders must endure dirty brick buildings with dark and cramped interiors when they go out, while back home I enjoy the comfort of open, bright, and spacious Tacos Bell, in and sometimes about which I write my poetry. Something about where I write--and that I have an infinitely refillable 44 oz. Baja Blast Mountain Dew--must influence my stylistic choices.

6:17 - Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese
This remarkably old public House where Charles Dickens, Alfred Tennyson, and Samuel Johnson were regulars abuts Fleet Street; a small, covered alleyway splits off, leading to its entryway. Inside, there is no natural light; the entire building is lit with electricity--no candles at all! Perhaps this environment influenced Dickens in his writings about the underbelly of London, best captured in his character Oliver Twist, the infamous villain of his novel Oliver Twist, or so I have heard.

My friends join me outside the entrance, as they have finished their exhaustive studies of the native work culture for the day and must be refreshed with a bit of food and drink. On the ground floor, there is a bar immediately inside the door as well as a chop house, but these have little floor space. The rooms are dark and cramped, like the City itself. Further along is a passage to another bar in the back of the building and a staircase off to the side. Descending the staircase reminds one of entering a crypt: the Ceiling is extremely low, the walls are made of bare stone, and the temperature gets colder and colder as one descends. I feel as though we will find Charles Dickens' skeleton leaning on the bar down here, covered in spider webs and frozen in the middle of ordering a pint.

Instead, at the end of labyrinthine corridors that split off into many small seating areas as we go deeper underground, we find only near-death locals who must be doing some research here on where they would like to be buried. This is by far the most history-steeped drinking Establishment in the city, having been rebuilt just after the Great Fire in 1666 and not changed since. But, as it is probably true that History and Books have failed to hold the current youths' interests, the clientele here are more advanced in age, some possibly having known Dickens personally. I can feel the weight of history down here, from the bare walls to the old furniture to the hidden-away seating areas in weird nooks to the electronic pager the bartender hands me after I order my food. "When that buzzes, come down and get your food." I take a minute to reflect: maybe at one point long ago, Alfred Tennyson received the exact same food buzzer! I return to my table and excitedly tell my friends my revelation.

That most of the bars and seating areas are in the Cellars downstairs probably saved Charles Dickens much embarrassment, as the lack of reception underground most likely prevented many a drunk SMS text Message. I imagine they would have been long messages sent 140 characters at a time over even intervals, each ending just before a crucial piece of information is revealed in order to keep his friends reading the message.

We eat, drink, and are merry, and in the lulls I think even more about Deep Issues. I wonder how drinking with friends instead of alone influences my thoughts. And then I wonder whether thinking with friends or alone affects what I think, and how I write. Sometimes I prefer the peace and quiet of a Taco Bell to write in, but other times, the conversation of others gives me more satisfaction than even a Chalupa could. I wonder how much of Dickens' writing was actually ideas or phrases stolen from conversations with drinking friends--and from conversations conducted in this very pub. How many characteristics of his drinking friends did he swipe for his novels? And how many should I swipe for my own classics of literature?

Approx. 7:45 - Ye Olde Cock Tavern
This unfortunately named building is tucked neatly away on Fleet Street, but Ye Olde Cock is anything but tiny. Rather, it stands tall and firm. My Companions and I have a bit of trouble getting in, as it was our first time. Earlier in the week, we had tried getting in close to 11 pm, but they had turned us away, using the excuse that "it was getting late," and then they closed up. We wondered to ourselves whether we needed to be members in order to enter. A trickle of customers was leaving Ye Olde Cock as we approached on this evening. We truly thought it was a stroke of Luck that brought us the pleasure of this tavern, one which Dickens used to go in and out of all the time.

As we ordered, we could feel Ye Olde Cock swell with the blood of history; knowing that literary masters are here in three of four dimensions (although not being there in time is a bit of a snag) lends this place vitality. The seating area contained a mezzanine, and we could not decide where to sit--we went down, then up, then partway down, then decided to go all the way up, finding that the topmost part of Ye Olde Cock was indeed the most pleasurable.

The intercourse between my friends and I was intellectually stimulating, but interrupted by periodic shouts, as I watched a Soccer game on the pub's television over my friend's shoulder. At around four pints in, our conversation could not have been the most illuminating, but we reflected at length on the natives' general incompetence with Credit Card Swiping Contraptions. As most public houses close by 11, we must end this part of our evening, but we had had a full experience and departed spent and ready for sleep.

Later - I have had some time to reflect on my travels tonight. The first thing I noticed is that the natives' food, especially at places which have a great deal of history, is nearly as good as fine American food like the Crunchwrap Supreme. The second is that I may have to buy a new set of 30 Rock DVDs. But the next things to cross my mind were the Deep Thoughts that had occurred to me throughout the night. How many nights spent out drinking did these famous Authors later mine for their writing, subconsciously and consciously? Should I lobby for alcohol to be served in my favorite American gathering place, Taco Bell, so that I could be similarly productive and creative? Could I really find more inspiration in a pint of beer than in a half gallon of high-fructose corn syrup? Or was all of this musing on the influence of social gatherings and alcohol an excuse for getting drunk, making merry, carousing, speaking loudly, and other un-Christian behavior? Did the great alcoholic writers have their potential unlocked by the drink, or did they squander some of that potential by drinking?

More importantly--since this night was about discovery and education--when I become a famous writer, will it be because I learned craft from the greats or because I learned drinking from the greats? And one final question occurred to me, one that plagues writing students across the country: can true alcoholism even be taught?

In the digital sci-fi short Mister Green (2009), a discouraged undersecretary for the U.S. Department of Global Warming, Mason Park (Tim Kang), is biochemically transformed to take in energy directly from the sun just like a plant. The fifteen-minute film is director Greg Pak's insightful visualization of a near future where the environment as we know it has buckled under the strain of global climate change.

It's important to note that the film's success does not arise from its tapping into some kind of collective fear that we might be infused with plant fibers in the close future (it is a sci-fi film after all). Instead, I believe the film conveys a fruitful (no pun intended) environmental message because it repositions and reimagines the physical value and integrity of plant life.

We have been debating the intelligence of animals for such an unreasonably long time--a pig, they say, is more intelligent than a dog (and, in my humble opinion, cuter)--that we have forgotten to turn our attention to a much more critical matter: What can they teach us about how to live (sustainably)? It is a similar case with the plant life around us. Plants know a life far different from any of our lives, but importantly, they know it as they have lived it for billions of years. In no uncertain terms, plants are the most efficient group of species on the planet. It's a shame we don't express more respect and awe for the beings that are the integral link between sunlight and everything we do, or can do (without plants, we wouldn't have the energy to do anything). The trouble is that few people with only human interests and concerns in mind consider that fascinating fact.

***
Mister Green is part of a collection of films jointly called FUTURESTATES commissioned by the Independent Television Service that "asked 11 renowned and up-and-coming filmmakers to take the current state of affairs in the United States, and extrapolate them into stories of the nation in the not-so-distant future." (You can view Mister Green and all other episodes at futurestates.tv.)

I was first introduced to the FUTURESTATES series in late spring with Director Ramin Bahrani's Plastic Bag, a short film which follows a plastic bag on a first-person "existential journey" from its creation until it ends up in the North Pacific Ocean "trash vortex." Plastic Bag anthropomorphizes a plastic bag--a commonly employed method that aims to extend the circle of compassion to nonhuman entities--and it successfully elicits viewer participation to consider the lifespan of a superfluous, everyday object. But I see Pak's Mister Green working in a different way to elicit viewer involvement.

Mister Green overtly poses an ethical dilemma: If we had the capacity to engineer our bodies to accept energy directly from the sun, should we do it? That's definitely something worth considering, but to get at what strikes me most we need to sidestep the overtly expressed dilemma and look at the film's depiction of the transformative change in Mason, because the film takes place in a period where the ecosystem has already collapsed (Mason tells us Canal Street in New York City is underwater).

As they stand to face the sun's rays, you can see the changed characters in the film express a deep, recognizable--dare I say, side-splitting--joy. The doom of environmental collapse is allayed by harnessing the powers of photosynthesis. The solution is simultaneous return and advancement. It is expressed literally as a scientific fusion of plant and human body. In an understatement of form, the human grows no plant-like appendages; nor does a stalk shoot out from the neck. Metaphorically speaking, Mason internalizes the change he seeks to create. In a display of solidarity with plants, Mason bears a yellow flower on his suit's breast pocket.

Pak, who wrote, directed, and edited the film, echoes these sentiments as he speaks about the film's origins: "Mister Green was born from the compulsion to explore how incredibly hard it is to genuinely change on an individual level--and to consider just how extreme that change might have to be in order to confront the massive environmental transformations that threaten the world. . . . With Mister Green, I gave myself the challenge of telling a different kind of story to explore that loaded promise of actually becoming the change we were waiting for."

In the depicted world's only successful attempt to alleviate human strain on the planet--Mason is unable to do so working for years in the government's global warming program and we learn the nation's people have not risen up to demand it of the government--we see that we ourselves must transform. I do not interpret this as a case against the valuable systems approach to resisting environmental destruction but rather as a call to also internalize that resistance.

***
Upon realizing the inevitable reality that he is changing, Mason follows Gloria to an open field where she convinces him to take off his shoes and walk into the bright field with her.

"C'mon Mason. When was the last time you ran barefoot through the grass?" Gloria pushes.

"I don't want to. I don't want to lose myself."

"Yes . . . you do."

The camera zooms in on Mason's bare feet, then focuses on his hand as he touches a tall stalk of grass.

"That's it. You're becoming a part of everything now. And, in another few weeks, you'll be able to grow roots, if you want . . . You said we have to make you."

Our annual contest will be announced in September; check the website for updates, or follow us on Twitter.

We look forward to reading your work!

But the miracle of Orringer's novel, on which she worked for seven years following her lauded story collection, How To Breathe Underwater, is that it manages to be both weighty and riveting. As Andras Lévi, an architectural student, prepares to leave Budapest for a scholarship in Paris, he is entrusted with a letter to one Madame Morgenstern, a mysterious ballet teacher nine years Andras' senior who harbors a hidden past. The two Hungarians strike up a passionate and complicated relationship, which is made even more fraught by the rising tide of anti-Semitism in Europe.

Orringer subtly weaves the pivotal events of the time (Kristallnacht, the Sudetenland's annexation) into her narrative, and one cannot help but carry a sense of doom. France passes xenophobic laws that cause Andras' visa to be revoked, and he must return to Budapest for its renewal. Klara travels with him and the two are married, yet marital bliss remains out of grasp. Andras, along with his two brothers, is immediately drafted into the Hungarian work force and subjected to hard labor for months at a time in Transylvania, Carpathia, and the Ukraine. Subjected to horrific conditions and brutalizing commanders, only the thought of his family keeps Andras sane. Hungary's leadership attempts to stave off Hitler's "final solution," but succeed for only so long. Ghettos are formed, boxcar trains appear, and whispers of work camps drift in from the frozen tundras of Mitteleuropa.

Orringer, armed with her formidable research and natural empathy, deftly paints an accurate portrait of the creeping insidiousness of Hitler's end game, and through the eyes of Andras and his family one experiences the desperate hope of most Europeans that war can be avoided and life returned to normal. The novel greatly improves as it goes on; though the years in Paris are romantic and sumptuous, the love story tends toward the melodramatic and cannot compare to the harshly compelling tribulations of wartime.

The best of World War II fiction (Ursula Hegi's Stones From The River comes to mind) opens a door to a reality that in its horror is unimaginable to those of us from younger generations. "In the end, what astonished [Andras] most was not the vastness of it all - that was impossible to take in," Orringer writes. Yet through her masterful storytelling, one glimpses the vastness of Europe's suffering through this particular suffering, and this particular family. Cities fall, families perish, yet life goes on. And an epilogue set in present-day New York lends a measure of redemption to an otherwise heartbreaking ending.

The idea for The Invisible Bridge emerged from Orringer's own family history: her grandfather was an architecture student at the École Spéciale and worked in the Hungarian labor army. In writing this book she has done a great service to both her family and the rest of us. ("This is what we have lost, this is what is left, what we have to live with now.") It is a powerful reminder of the not-so-distant past, and a meditation on the importance of history, lest it repeat itself.