Wheedle on the Needle!

David Guterson is just too cute for words. Or at least the printed word. The novel is full of meanings struggling to be double. As if the title itself isn't enough to make anyone without a specific interest in Northwest literature cut and run, he shovels it on. Reading it is like watching one of those guys at the Wallingford Transfer Station run a piece of heavy machinery through the crap. Guterson isn't satisfied to be just the run-of-the-mill omniscient narrator. A flight instructor? Who warns Ed/Oedipus not to fly too high?? Named GUIDO STERNVAD??? And he still feels compelled go give his dumb-ass readers embarrassingly obvious clues to make sure they don't miss shuffling the letters to discover....wait for it....that Guido Sternvad reconfigured spells...DAVID GUTERSON.
Barf.

I am surprised that this piece has drawn so few comments.

1) To "gbowker": always cite a writer's best work - for everyone's sake, and that would be SNOW FALLING ON CEDARS, no?

2)I translated and published some great novels while in that line of work for a quarter of a century and so know a bit about the matter.
http://www.roloff.freehosting.net/index.html

Maria Semple's BERNADETTE appears to be the product of the sensibility of a L.A. T.V. writer which in coming down from that kind of ditzy high, departing that form of madness, then encountered the Seattle slug, and looks to have gone color blind in the process.

I for my part, after a mere 15 years in these parts, would not
presume to guess what a "great" Seattle novel might be like.
Perhaps one written by one of my/ our crows and in a post nasal
drip tone of voice? I wrote an account once of its seedy side about 10 years ago, but I would not say that the experience was prototypically
Seattle or Northwest. The mob during one of its more warlike moments
blew up blocks of streets in Kansas city. St.Louis had the Nickelodeon wars, blips on the shining city on the hill. I could go on about the seedy side of Seattle, which of course is far more interesting than the nouveau riche will ever be. However, I think MOSSBACK'S rhetorical is the wrong approach; for, this or any other kind of sociological approach is unlikely to produce a great novel of any kind out of this particular Amerian motley. This is simply not how it works.

Peter Handke, born 1942, wrote SHORT LETTER LONG FAREWEELL
[NYRB Books right now] after a 28 day 21 cities trip in 1971.
The likes of Greil Marcus think of it as one of the great American novels Prior to that Handke had been in Princeton in May 1966, spent a few days in New York and then paid his obeisance to Oxford
Mississippi. However, as you then find out, the genius
had been practicing writing in the ways of a wunderkind musician
since early adolescence, and had fine backing from
early teachers and via the cultural environs of Graz, Austria,
the Stadtpark Forum, and he had that great linguistic cultural
Austrian past to draw on and need to differentiate himself from,
and wrote his first novel age 24 in Krk/ Cordula, an Adritic
Island, while also having his first girl fiend and fathering an
illegitimate kid!

http://www.facebook.com/mike.roloff1?ref=name
Member Seattle Psychoanalytic Institute Society

http://handke-magazin.blogspot.com

I nearly forgot about my below "Seattle Novel" which Heather McHugh really liked, for its "green green green"... I don't know, I think I'm an Austrian writer, or became an Austrian writer now stuck in the North West. It's a piece of playful formalism, and I imagine if someone paid me I could actually turn it into a novel that would come round to the beginning.

"SEATTLE NOVEL
BY Michael Roloff
It was a rainy day in Seattle, the June rainy season, but it had almost ended. The June rainy season followed the April rainy season, and the April rainy season followed the October-February rainy season. It rained most heavily in December, so heavily that the papers recorded every day the sun peeked through the clouds as sunshine. It was 41 degrees and nearly as gray as in December and just as cold, courtesy of the Arctic jet stream across the north Pacific and across Puget Sound, two frigid bodies of water that did not milden the arctic air as a Gulfstream-warmed North Sea might, not enough, not that long before 9 am, as Cal "The Trudger," as I called him, not to his face, an ancient entirely unsuccessful worker joined me, Mike, a writer, who had arrived even earlier, because he lived closer by and got up early anyway, with the Robins at 4 A.M, and so could do some chirping, beneath the cantilevered overhang of the about 150 feet long and forty feet wide three story high, dark brown, rectangular building at the intersection of the gently sloping 35 th Ave and steep 65th Street NE to wait for Dr. Olaf Hansen’s, DDS, dental practice to open up.
The nameless dark brown building, beneath whose eastern overhang Cal, a Ballard Norwegian with a bit of an accent, and I were shuffling around its dry ground, with wrap around balconies, housed dentist office suites and the like where our dentist, who seemed to be falling on hard times with clients like us, had rented a small suite, and was keeping his first appointments waiting.
The overhang, in back, facing East, where Sad Cal and Bemused Me were congregating, looking out toward the Cascades, East, by an unpaved very rural alley, still plentiful in N.E. Seattle, that run north south, with some fruit trees overhanging from backyard orchards, cherries unpicked except by crows and me, meandering parallel to 35th Avenue, was as wide as the building and jutted about forty feet, almost like a prow or ship's stern, a tanker's, sloping from ten to about fourteen in height as the loamy, soaked, treacherous slope which anchored the building, dropped off sharply, gauze-light light-gray wasps hives, looking like baizés, on the ceiling, dry and earthen grey ground covered with dry dusty pine and spruce needles and a scattering of last year's brown and grey dried out pine and spruce cones at our feet. The eight four by four inch wooden pillars, sunk in eight by eight square grey cement blocks, supporting the overhang and the floors above, had been painted dark brown, the same color as the building like many in the neighborhood. Diagonally opposite the intersection, was an eatery that played a lot of Jerry Garcia and had excellent coffee, scones; on the other side of the street was a dry cleaner; directly opposite the other side of this avenue was an auto repair shop that itself in need of repair. The early morning fog had not entirely cleared, just the occasional disk, like a full moon, burnt through lens-like, not only was it raining, sort of, an ultra fine rain, "Gods nasal spray" "The Writer" called it, a mist, rain was dripping in fat, clear, tear drops off the ends of the long, young, green, new growth, five-inch needles of the bunches of needles, they came in bunches, the nearly weeping, drooping, heavy branches of huge, dark brown, coarsely barked evergreens as though all the needles had post nasal drip and the branches were as weighed down by the weather as Cal was by his lousy, seemingly irreparable teeth and infinite bad luck. It was dank and dark and dark green and dark brown and half a dozen rain- and wind-disheveled crows squawked and cussed overhead about the once again invasion of their dry spot, so I guessed, seriously pissed, and tried shitting on heads that peeked out from under their usual refuge. Their aim was true, but so far today they had missed. Traffic was oozing at the intersection, like the banana slugs on a nearby Rhododendron bush and like the thoughts in the minds of the Seattle drivers whose morning minds had already had a fresh dousing of platitudes form their various news organs. Not only that miasma, one of the articulated buses had inarticulatedy jack-knifed its two lengths when the overhead juice lines had snapped, and the hapless driver and his snaggle tool kept failing trying to re-attach the magnetic clamps to the wriggling overhead lines, they kept slipping off, the driver’s arms were becoming more tired by the minute in this inverted hauling of eels, DDS Hansen was not just driving in an ooze but into a jam; thus he got an excuse and would take it and proffer it once he would show up, that was just like him, and I decided to work my way across through the traffic to get Cal and me, two early morning regulars with long term care needs, a cup of coffee each. One hand of mine grazed the Rhododendron bush as I sought to dislodge the slug and I instantly broke out in hives, the mites and molds that fester so richly in temperate rain forests, and I scratched the itch which I knew would spread the hives and make them worse.
It was altogether all very Seattle, dreary. But as so often in June, the eighteen hours of daylight of summer solstice time would burn off the fog, the hot bright disk that seemed enfogged would turn from make believe moon into a high noon sun and both I and Cal with that prospect. We were prospective. Summers in Seattle were "the best" once, if ever, it got going which could take until it had nearly passed, that is until mid-August. There they were, DDS Hansen and his foxy dental assistant Kelsey, a fine Irish lass, a single mom, courtesy of a night of passion, whose car had once again broken down. DDS Hansen had double the usual excuse and they had parked elsewhere up the road and were walking, I decided to postpone the coffee and Cal and I trudged after them up the stair to the second floor wrap-around balcony and to his small office suite..."