Overwhelmed with the endless brainwashing advertisements and memes that society has pumped into her psyche since childhood, a woman sits down on her couch and doesn’t get up for years. What is real? What is normal? Is it possible to have a single original thought? Rather than accepting her mental break as something that must be fixed, she embraces the moment and refuses to go outside until she is ready—which may be never. Chaise is available now: ST Bookstore | Amazon

 

R E V I E W   O F   C H A I S E :

Becci Noblit Goodall's novel Chaise is an anthemic example of why fiction, all fiction, should possess at its heart a sense of creative freedom. There are authors who would use this freedom badly, to be sure. Some authors put so much of themselves into a story that it becomes a snarky wink-fest. Others are so distant that you wonder if the story was written by someone at a computer with a carefully-programmed set of Word macros with labels like "cowboy with a troubled past" and "hooker with a heart of gold". But every once in a while, if left to his or her own devices, you'll get something from an author that rings true like the edge of a well-made glass. Long after you finish reading Chaise, you'll hear the faint echoing ring of truth in your ears.

It's slightly difficult to describe to someone who hasn't read Goodall's prose how uniquely human it is. Her style of writing can seamlessly present ten pages that go nowhere and then one line that goes further than some entire stories. All the while the language darts and tangles itself poetically in meaning and metaphor that are sometimes delightfully indistinguishable. Her work is pointed at people smart enough to notice the changes in tempo, tone, and theme, but the prose is also sophisticated to the point where someone reading it line-by-line and analyzing it as such would quickly become bogged down and lose sight of the overall direction of the narrative. In other words, Chaise is a book written for smart people who enjoy reading, but not necessarily for people who convince themselves that they are smart because they read. As such, we get a glimpse of some value beyond the hilarious, touching, incisive subjectivity that is this novel. There are many things that Chaise is not, but one thing it certainly is is an example of how to write yourself into a novel.

There is less to say about the plot of the story, because it is one almost every reader will already know. The presentation of a person for whom life has become intolerable is not a new plot device, but this is one of the two or three best examples I've seen of it. Chaise manages to be sincere without being livid, insightful without being trite, human without being cheesy, and grave without being depressing. The story feels like a poker game of aces on eights and a flush on a full house. The strategy is there, the structure is there, but it feels refreshingly unrehearsed, which is the qualitative watermark (and the disappointing cutoff, sometimes) of narratives of this type. Chaise even dances at times into the territory of meaning and moral. We can tell that there is a moral to the story, we know unequivocally that it's there, but hell if I could tell you what it is. In this, I can see not only Becci Noblit Goodall's characteristic thematic ambiguity, but also Paul Hughes' editorial wizardry.

As all good things are, Chaise is imperfect. I am at a strange disadvantage here because I was able to read some of the original text of the book before it was finished or edited and it is here that I think the imperfections are more visible perhaps to me than to others who did not experience the book first the way I did. In the finished book there are segments where the story doesn't move along and you get the feeling that you are reading someone's email rather than a cogent narrative. This is not a fatal flaw, since even the meandering segments are still highly creative and interesting, but the frenetic nature of the story was inconsistent in the finished version. Also, even though the story is packed with cleverness on every page and almost every line, I feel no real compunction to re-read it. From this, it's possible to deduce a couple of potential flaws. The first possibility is just that the editing of the book-format Chaise took some of the urgency and likable quirkiness and traded it for the solidity of pacing, structure, and a sort of global, indefinable but tangible quality I'll call "book-appropriateness". This is a lesser evil. The more serious possibility is that the story itself is just not as compelling on a second read as the first. This will not hurt people's enjoyment of it the first time around, but Chaise the novel may not do as well in terms of lasting and growing readership as it deserves, which would be a shame given its overall brilliance.

 

I N T E R V I E W :

Mark R. Brand: One of the most unique facets of your stories, and Chaise in particular, is how dense the narrative is. This is something that few authors can do and even fewer do well. It reminds me slightly of the scene in The Matrix when Neo says "Guns, lots of guns" and all of a sudden the entire world turns into a huge labyrinth of carefully stacked rifle racks. The narrative of Chaise goes in so many different directions at the same time that it achieves a sort of precarious hurtling motionlessness. I and every other author want to know exactly how you do this so we can steal the technique and break into the Times Bestseller lists.

Becci Noblit Goodall: I wish I could answer that in a way that could be used by other authors, but I don't think I can. What I can say is that this is the way my brain works and what I wanted to do was to put that down on paper because I had never read anything remotely close to my thought patterns. To do this I allowed any thought, no matter how bizarre, to come onto the page in the form that I first thought of it. In many ways I feel like my writing resembles mental Tourette's in that the things I say are backed by some serious thought, but they come out in zippy squawks of fucks and wrinkles. Maybe the writing came out like that because I didn't allow myself to analyze Chaise as it came to me. It was just me putting the mental racing and the "lots of guns" onto the page. Most of this is based on my times of mental duress, which were extremely immobilizing. That's the thing I wanted to portray most—that when a person is going through this mental thing—a break—a meltdown—whatever you want to call it—there is a physical thing that happens. Body sort of shuts down because brain is going in so many directions that it can't really function. So in a convoluted way, I guess I would say that allowing yourself to access that part of your brain and thoughts that probably make no sense to anyone but you is a start towards authentic and dense writing.

And then of course after all of the helter skelter you've got to sit your ass down and edit. I'm sure there are authors who don't have to write and rewrite, but I'm not one of them. What sounds good and feels exhilarating from brain to page doesn't always read well and that's where the grunt work comes in. I've gone over that bitch so many times, I've lost count. And then with Paul going over and over and trying to compartmentalize and make it readable and still I don't feel like it's done or good enough and maybe I never will. I think it is what it is, which is my first book. It has the feel of raw to it and there are points where looking back now I cringe and wish that maybe I'd have gone over it and taken some more stuff out and maybe added more stuff in.

MRB: Some authors use systems of diagramming or outlining to keep the throughline of stories intact and cohesive in longer works. Chaise isn't exactly long, but there's so much going on, so many tangential ideas and half-open doors, that I wondered if you had any sort of strategy when it came time to create a story out of this gigantic nest of plots, subplots, themes and subthemes?

BNG: There was no plot. There never was a plot. It was just me at the end of three long years of virtually no sleep and much drink. I'd just put myself through school while bartending at night with two kids and found my body wanting to completely shut down and crash and so I sat down and thought about how my life was so crazy and wondered what the most boring thing was that could be written about. I thought this—what I'm doing now—must be it. This sitting and staring and thinking and doing nothing. And so I wrote a short story and then found myself tacking on bits over the course of three years. I could have kept writing Chaise until the end of my days, but because it was so dense I felt that the short length was best. I think that anything more would just irritate readers and become something you'd want throw against a wall.

MRB: I'm sure everyone who has picked up this book has driven you up the wall with questions of how much the narrator resembles you in real life, so I won't torture you with more of that, but what about the other characters? Are they amalgams? Are they real people?

BNG: There aren't any real people in the book, but I did put a ton of my friend's names in as characters because, well, I'm a dipshit and had no imagination for names at the time. The crabby bartenders are based on the crew I bartended with on the beach in south Florida. In fact, the bitchiest tender is now known round the world due to a stint on Oprah as one of the country's best burger joints (LeTub in Hollywood, FL). My friends tell me he's become intolerable. Some of the drink concoctions were made up or used in various bars or by my friends. The part where the chick does the tequila body shot off of the nasty assed bar owner was straight from my life. I did that after drinking half a bottle of tequila, resulting in alcohol poisoning and a newfound retching hatred for that nasty stuff. The grandmother in the end is based universally on a batch of women who've reached out to me in various ways. Everything else is pure fiction but, as in all fiction, is based on some kind of experience or real thought that I had at some point.

MRB: Like many Silverthought authors, you're a parent. Being a parent myself, I know exactly the sort of costs that writing entails, as time comes so dear. My question though is what do you imagine your kids will make of this book when they're old enough to read it and start to pick out meanings from it?

BNG: Well, I've given that some thought because of the content, and when it all comes down to it, there are two parts of me. There is the mom me that does all the decent family stuff 99% of the time and then there is that other part of me that I only let out here and there but is me all the way. Erin has read the book and said it reminded her of Running with Scissors, which was cool because although it's nothing like that work as far as storyline, it is a mentally fucked up piece, so the fact that she got that and that I know she loves Augusten was cool. On the other hand, she and Pat have heard me read parts out loud over the years because that's part of my editing process and are damn sick of the book. They appear to be proud, but have voiced that it might be nice if I could write something that would make a shitload of money. Of course, I don't know how to write like that, so...

MRB: Finally, what's up next on the horizon for you? Many of our Silverthought authors shoot us teaser information about things they're cooking up on their desks, but we get very little/none from you. Care to give us any spoilers?

BNG: I have an experimental memoir that is written from the voice of me and my brother as we both experience things at the same time but in different ways. I plan to shop that sometime soon. Of course there's the night.blind stuff, which we'll be working on over the next year. Honestly, I haven't been writing anything other than poetry here and there for the past year. Over at megans-closet.com I'm hoping to put out two books of poetry in 2008. One will be a book done by Dave LaBounty and I, and the other will be themed around sex and food in a cookbook type form using the best poetry from MC.