Campus Sexpot
Campus Sexpot: a memoir is not a title that I would normally pick up, except that I already knew the author. I mean that in two ways. David Carkeet is the author of the Edgar-nominated Double Negative, as well as one of the best (and out of print, alas) baseball novels: The Greatest Slump of All Time. I can also recommend I Been There Before, that relates the return of Mark Twain to Earth, when Halley's Comet came by last time.
I also knew him as a student in a course on English linguistics that he taught, at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. I can't even remember what the course was called, but he got me started on Old English, firmed me up on Middle English, and introduced me to Anglo-Saxon riddles, the Pearl poet, and quite a number of other things that influence me to this day.
For a while, we lived on the same street in Parkview. (This was when I was neighbors with Stanley Elkin and William Gass, both of whose houses I worked on as a carpenter, but that's another story.)
Anyway, Campus Sexpot. Whatever you're thinking, it's not what you think. It's a stitch, though, and also thoughtful and also charming. In part, it's a book about a book. When Carkeet was just a lad in Sonora, California, a high school teacher had to get out of town right quick. That teacher then wrote a smutty novel, which only thinly disguised the setting and real people of Sonora. Carkeet's mother read a copy, allowed him to read it, and insisted he burn it thereafter. Carkeet got his hands on another copy in later life, and we get a critique and close reading.
I have never read a careful critique of a smutty novel before, but that's not all this Creative Non-Fiction award-winner is. It's also a memoir of high school, and how young folks find out about s-e-x; with a tad more detail than I would ever write in a memoir. (I'm glad somebody writes honestly about that part of their lives, but I'm even more glad that the somebody isn't me.)
But wait, there's more! The book is also a love letter to a father that he didn't communicate love to when the man was alive, and then finally a discussion of the father's flaws, and defeat of some of those flaws. I cannot tell you how refreshing it is that Carkeet gives it to us in that order, rather than the typical other-way-around. We come to respect the father first, then we learn about the struggle.
There's a lot going on in this short, 137-page memoir. It will stay with me for a long time, as will my disbelief that he could pull off this odd mash-up. Recommended.
If you're a writer, it's the moment where I give our secret sign. David Carkeet is one of those names that folks who take the quality of writing and of the imagination seriously will know, even though they aren't "famous" writers. One can judge a writer, in part, on the basis of whose shelves his or her books are on. I've had a habit of Carkeet-spotting in my life, and he rates pretty dang high.
CBIP: Life of the Empress Josephine, anonymous (Cecil B. Hartley?)
The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai
The Year's Best Science Fiction, Twenty-ninth Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois, ed.
The Monitor Boys, John V. Quarstein