Merritt Tierce is another brilliant new American voice like Smith Henderson, Junot Diaz, Wells Tower, Miranda July and Donald Ray Pollock. There's some kind of golden age going on right now. I don't think anyone has noticed!
Merritt plunges you into a very intense world of coke & alcohol & very very casual sex and single waitress motherhood; but it’s not the waitress stuff of let’s say Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More, it’s at one of Dallas’ very top restaurants where some of the punters will tip $300-800 and think it’s money well spent. So, you know, out of my league, I don’t know about your league. The staff do these frantic high pressure shifts but they get good money for it. In their time off, if Love Me Back is anything to go by, they’re sleazeballs and dope fiends and no one keeps their underwear about their persons for very long.
A few quotes may give you the jist of the thing. Took me until page 119 to find some that I could quote without being flagged as grossly inappropriate (“we made a sandwich on the carpet and I was the middle. I” – stopppp!!).
He was the one who had it worst for Shaila, even worse than Ahmed. You could tell by how they sat at the table – she’d be leaning back giving off this all-balls safari-guide vibe and Matt would sit forward in his chair to catch the invisible gazelles of wisdom leaping out of her mouth.
I wish I didn’t want the exotic man who knows the entire history of jazz, and instead wanted the teacher, who has flaws but whose kindness is as rare as genius.
In that restaurant all of us were off. Chipped. Everybody on the way to the curve. Maybe it’s the same in a law firm, a nail salon, whatever high or low. Maybe that’s just what it is to be alive, you’ve got that broken sooty piece of something lodged inside you making you veer left.
(Who would think of sooty?)
The Baron was this Turkish guy who pretended to be Italian and dropped by The Restaurant once or twice a year. He’d show up like we’d been waiting for him and no one else through all that intervening time, each of us frozen in uniform, in place, until his presence disseminated some magic dust to make us come alive so we could fulfil our destinies of serving him.
So my main problem, and it’s just an aesthetic puzzle, is well, is this a memoir once again wrote up and called a novel – like Dept of Speculation and The Wallcreeper? And if so, does that matter?
From an interview with Merritt Tierce:
I don’t really have a pat answer for “Is this autobiographical?” Because that is a question that I’m always asked in some form or another. I’m interested in why that is such a fascinating thing. I mean, anytime I read something—like, Junot Díaz stories, for example; I know enough about him, the person, to think, Is this based on his life? Did he do this? Is he like this as a lover? How can I find out? It seems like a really instinctive human response … I don’t know why that is. If you find out that yes, it’s totally autobiographical and they’re just calling it fiction, how do you feel? As compared to: if you find out no, they made up every word, it just happens to be like them in some ways. Are you asking that question because you think it’s evidence of greater talent or more skill as an artist, to invent things, or are you asking that because you just want to fulfil your voyeuristic urge to know? Or you want to find out if the person standing in front of you did the things you read about in this book—
Yes, she nails it. Does it matter? And yet, Diablo Cody’s excellent book Candy Girl (subtitle: My Year as an Unlikely Stripper ) is given to us as a memoir, it could just as easily have been served up as her first novel. I don’t know if it matters, it just bugs me.
Some women are going to be smiting their brows at some of this stuff, the self-harming is a little bit corny I agree (but hey, I just thought of why this is called a novel and not a memoir – it’s so Merritt can faithfully record every true detail of her former life and when someone chokes on this or that incident she may then say hey, it’s a novel you know...)
My ex punched the wall the one time he wanted to hit me, and I probably deserved it.
Conclusion:
This whirling bitter dazzling account of a life falling zigzaggedly between several reasonable possibilities into high unreasonableness is a modern American must read .
I wouldn’t let myself look away from what I was doing and to punish myself for seeing it I wouldn’t let myself fix it.