Controlled Burn: Stories of Prison, Crime, and Men Book

Skip all the rambling and head to the last three paragraphs of this "review" for an actual reflection on the book.

I'm not usually all that rigid in what I am going to order at a restaurant or which hiking trail I am going to follow. I'll gladly listen to other recommendations and I'm open to changing my mind. However, I keep all of my books in those plastic milk crates and the crate at the top holds the books that I plan to read next. I don't budge on these reading plans. If an old friend or a new acquaintance or a complete stranger tells me about a book that I must read, I acknowledge their enthusiasm and I appreciate their recommendation but I don't usually rush off to the library or even give it consideration. This is not a quality that I like in myself. I should be more open to book recommendations. However, I have this ridiculous backlog of books that I've been desperately wanting to read and so I just don't feel like I can justify the time to read something that isn't worth reading. But of course, every book is worth reading to the right person.

There was a copy of Scott Wolven's Controlled Burn in my mailbox last month, and I opened it up to find a note inside from a very generous friend telling me how much he adored this book and, convinced I would feel the same way, sent me my own copy. If someone is going to purchase a book and then ship it to me with a thoughtful note - sure, I'll put my rigid reading schedule on hold. I mean, how could I not?

The subtitle of this collection is Stories of Prison, Crime, and Men. The cover is black with a grainy, rain-slick highway vanishing into the blackness. There are blurbs by Nelson DeMille and Richard Ford and George Pelecanos. I looked it over and then I did that thing that you're not supposed to do: I judged the book by its cover. And I judged it harshly. The subtitle alone might as well have been the epigraph from House of Leaves: This is not for you.

There seems to be a strain of American fiction that tends to be focused on violence and manliness to such a degree that sometimes it almost rubs shoulders with parody. I think the lineage goes something like this: Hemingway begat Cormac McCarthy begat Raymond Carver begat Thom Jones begat Denis Johnson.....and begat Scott Wolven. Maybe that sort of makes sense. Anyways, the style that connects this strain is sparse. And the properties that emerge are usually based around men facing challenges in very manly ways. This lineage of fiction contains characters that are often drunks, sometimes convicts, usually adept at fighting, they frequently carry guns and they will occasionally use methamphetamines, and they are generally men of few words. You'll meet truckers and loggers and drug-dealers and welders and boxers. The protagonist is often a real hard case and usually lost and comes across some hard earned wisdom along the way.

Now, it's not that I don't think these people exist in real life. We know they do. And it's not that I feel that are not worth reading about. They are. Everyone is. It's just that this style, which is often overly-macho, wears out its welcome for me very quickly. And that is clearly just idiosyncratic on my part. It's a matter of taste or preference or something along those lines. The word "gritty" gets used, often overused, to describe this tradition and it's a fitting word. But usually the grit gets stuck in my teeth.

This style regularly uses very taught dialogue. The sentences can be clipped. The prose is generally pretty lean. Descriptions use just enough to create a mood or a visual and then pull back. Seldom, if ever, the language erupts into rhapsody. All in all, it's really interesting the way that so much can be built out of those deliberate limitations. And it can be a good technique for making the tension just sort of simmer. Again, it just isn't for me.

And so I guess I try to think about books that I'm not much into in the same way that I think about eating pizza with pineapples on top. I don't much like pineapples on my pizza - not one bit. But if I, through some strange circumstance, end up eating a pineapple pizza, I know what I'm going to be tasting. I can't get mad that it's not like the pizza that I prefer to eat as it's not trying to be that at all. But certainly I can differentiate between really good pineapple pizza and really bad pineapple pizza. I would not have ordered it myself, but I can appreciate a really good pineapple pizza for what it is. And likewise, I can leave a really bad pineapple pizza on the plate uneaten without a twinge of guilt. Most importantly, I must be open to the possibility that I will one day crave the very thing that I now avoid.

And so, to the book: It is death that forms the connective tissue throughout these stories. In fact, the narrator in the story "Tigers" reflects:

"Death connects everything. All things that are alive have the same end. The fragility of things, the wish that a parent or spouse has to keep a child or spouse safe. The prayers, religious or not, spoken or silent. These things have their own freezing point, where they turn to ice-death. And that freezing point is only one degree away from life, and often moves faster than blessings and prayers."

Scott Wolven sits comfortably among his forebears. Each story in Controlled Burn is cloaked in that dark shade of noir where each decision a character makes is not between a good choice and a bad choice, but between a bad choice and a slightly less but still pretty bad choice. Many of the stories overlap and share characters or situations or settings. The first half of the book is set in New England; the second half, in the West-mostly Idaho. Every story is staggeringly severe as men continually find themselves trapped - whether in prison, in addiction, in dangerous work, or in depraved psyches. And the creation of the character Red Green, a fellow that cooks meth and speaks in a drug-induced flurry, added some nice absurdity amongst the stoicism of most of the other characters. Wolven does have that touch where he can give you just enough imagery that scenes stay in your mind long after you've read them.

I did feel enclosed in the bleakness of these stories and, taken together as a collection, I was impressed by the consistent mood that built on itself to the final page. Controlled Burn was indeed controlled, as it managed to be pretty even throughout. All the more impressive, knowing that it was his debut. Still, nothing exactly knocked my socks off, but I didn't expect it to. It's not my flavor. And, although I'll not likely read this again, I am glad I gave it a shot and spent time in Wolven's hard-bitten world.