Above the Literary Underground

Above the Literary Underground Alex Ruskell The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005 Edited by Dave Eggers Houghton Mifflin http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com 368 pages; paper, $14.00 One frigid winter night several years ago, as my girlfriend and I were poking around Widener Library's literary journals to see what was going on in current fiction, I happened upon an issue of McSweeney's. I brought the McSweeney's back to my girlfriend, and we flipped through it, settling on a series of letters allegedly written by a dog to the CEOs of several Fortune 500 companies. Most of the letters were about how the dog could "run like an f-ing hovercraft." Several had received responses. My girlfriend and I read the letters over and over, giggling and getting progressively sillier. Five years later, we still quote the letters when one of our chocolate labs tries to chase down a deer or a particularly tricky ball. I have no doubt we are happier for having unwittingly stumbled upon them. That's what I like about the concept ofthe Best American Nonrequired Reading. Its cartoon cover denotes childish weirdness, while "nonrequired" makes the book sound slightly scandalous—the kind of thing you don 't have to read and, most likely, the kind of thing The Man doesn 't want you to. Nonrequired contains twenty-four pieces— fiction, nonfiction, and even a few cartoons— and all of the writing is dead-on and exciting. George Saunders contributes two typically fine stories, "Bohemians " and "Manifesto." "Bohemians," a story of urban culture clash between a group of children and their older Eastern European neighbors, is replete with Saunders's classic quirky, comic, and altogether real observations, such as "At dusk [her parents] stood on their porch whacking each other with lengths of weather stripping" and "Whenever [Dad] saw one of the Bohemians, he greeted her by mispronouncing the Czech word for 'door.'" Similarly, "Manifesto" is styled as a press release written by People Reluctant to Kill for an Abstraction , a group announcing to the world that "[a]t precisely nine in the morning, working with focus and stealth, our entire membership succeeded in simultaneously beheading no one." Al Franken and Tish Durkin both contribute nonfiction pieces on the Iraq war; Franken's piece follows his eight-day USO tour, while Durkin's profiles a private mercenary named "Wolf as he goes about his daily business. Both are compelling slices of current event, providing insight into the types of people who find themselves inside a modern war zone. Here's Durkin on Wolf: Beneath [Wolf's] vest, covering every inch of his back, is a tattoo that [Wolf] considers "a good representation of myself and my ideals in a nutshell"—a full-color, full-face rendering of a wolf about to pounce. "If you look into the eyeball," he tells me later, "you'll see a hunter with his hands up." In his piece, Franken provides copies of complete routines that he used in entertaining the troops, indicating which ones the troops thought were most hilarious, such as a skit where Saddam Hussein expresses his excitement at seeing his deceased sons, Uday and Qusay, again, and another actor quips: "Well...let's just say that everybody here is hoping you and your sons can be reunited very, very soon." Every one ofthepieces in this collection bursts with afurtive energy and restless passion. Daniel Alarcón's "Florida" is a gritty, urban tale of two guys wasting their lives away making photocopies while running into bits of their past lives. Even so, the men still hold onto hope of a beautiful escape: "Outside, a train barrels by, unsteady on its tracks. There is no sound more hopeful ." Jessica Anthony's "The Death of Mustango Salvaje" uses the classic bait-and-switch structure of One Hundred Years of Solitude (1970) to great and startling effect. Finally, Aimee Bender's "Tiger Mending" is replete with strange, horrible, and terrifyingly beautiful images: I did not expect to see the tigers themselves , jumpy, agitated, yawning their mouths beyond wide, the wildness in their eyes, and finally the yawning so large and insistent that they split their own back in...