Unexpected Heft
Ashton Politanoff, You’ll Like it Here
Dalkey Archive Press, 204pp, $14.95, ISBN 9781628974034
reviewed by Jim Henderson
Walter Benjamin once made the point that journalism had weakened our capacity for storytelling. For him the mark of a real story was ‘chaste compactness which precludes psychological analysis’. A good storyteller knows that some things have to be left tacit: 'It is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it. . . The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the events is not forced on the reader.'
This ambiguous quality is what draws people in. It impresses a story on their memory and makes them tell it to others in turn, and so on across time. Newspapers aim to be immediately understandable, and so they fit the events they report into an explication. The result is that their articles are forgotten after they’re read, and the rise of the press has meant the attenuation of storytelling, which has been displaced by mere information. The starting point of Ashton Politanoff’s book, You’ll Like It Here, is this ephemeral medium: it pieces together modified old clippings from local newspapers into a history of sorts of Redondo Beach, California, during the first two decades of the 20th century. But it turns all this quotidian stuff from a century ago into something strange. The events common to local journalism and their familiar surface of newspaper verbiage are given the sort of mysteriousness that Benjamin thought was dying out.
In the book’s short introduction, Politanoff says that he has spent most of his life in Redondo. The death of his mother prompted him to spend time in the archives of various libraries in the area. He went through regional newspapers from 1900 to 1919 and became especially interested in the period between 1911 and 1918, which Politanoff claims is when Redondo took off. You’ll Like It Here consists of altered versions of this material: Politanoff explains that ‘while I have used historical situations and newspaper clippings as the basis of this project, names have been changed, dramatic structure has been favored over historical accuracy, and facts have been expanded, all with the aim toward fiction and my own poetic and aesthetic concerns.’ It’s made up of a bunch of sparse faits divers, each of which consists of just one paragraph; in most cases, they don’t go over a single page. At times the stories are broken up by photos: a boy on a shore looking right into the camera as fully dressed adults play around in the ocean behind him, a block engulfed in flames, a portrait of the unsmiling members of a men’s water polo team. These are not illustrations of what happens in the text but decontextualised images whose story can only be guessed at.
Being drawn from official repositories gives these documents an air of facticity, but the way they succeed one another is downright oneiric. Names are listed off in a genteel style (‘Mrs. Karl Schroeder of Redondo,’ ‘Mr. Oliver Tucker, proprietor of the blacksmith shop on North Catalina Avenue,’ etc.) only to disappear; there are no recurring characters, just people coming and going who are as eerily insubstantial as ghosts. What’s more, although You’ll Like It Here follows a loose historical arc of modernisation — it begins with a for-sale notice for a house with a barn and ends with references to World War I — it’s often hard to tell when something is happening. Markers of technological development are mixed together: in one story a horse-drawn buggy pulls up alongside a limousine. Events are situated within days of the week (e.g., ‘a man-eating shark on display at Pier No. 2 attracted a swarm of tourists Monday and Tuesday’), but one hundred years on, we have become unmoored from the frame of reference that readers of these papers shared, and so these words only heighten the sense of estrangement. And some of the stories have a parable-like quality that puts them outside of time altogether: one of them reads, ‘Miss Edith Jones sails around the harbor in a large wooden tub with an umbrella for a sail.’
Patterns gradually emerge from this register of cryptic names and dates. Certain situations play out again and again over the course of the book. People in psychic distress vanish inexplicably. Dead bodies wash ashore. Domestic life turns violent or splinters apart; children run away and are abandoned by their parents. There are shootings. The police are a shadowy, menacing presence throughout and collar people under opaque laws. Denizens of the town hunt animals, kill them, and disfigure their bodies. Fires break out, and diseases spread. Readers are exhorted to try quack cures, like applying a potato to scalded flesh. Christmas trees are flammable, watermelon seeds are poisonous, and Redondo’s environment appears to be full of inbuilt hazards that can be set off by anything. A series of accidents runs through the book: a fruit truck’s wheel breaks, two bikes crash into each other, a man falls off a roof. Often these are caused by the urban infrastructure that was getting underway in the early years of the 20th century, like streetcars. The overall impression is of a city pursuing modernisation, but its efforts give rise to the degradation of nature, complex technological systems whose failure results in cascading disasters, and various forms of psychosis.
That sounds more or less like how things are nowadays, and such comparisons are there for those who want them. Politanoff invites them when he says in the book’s introduction that the era he focuses on was ‘strangely analogous to our own’. But it would be a waste to press too hard on these similarities and use You’ll Like It Here as just another occasion for presentism. The stories in the book are too richly enigmatic for that. Their power comes from the suppression of causality. Things happen, but there’s no attempt to explain what brought them on, the relationship between them, or the motives of the people behind them. Instead, there are actions relayed without abstract or figurative language that unfold murkily. The effect is compelling. A good example occurs midway through the book:
The time scale implied by eating lunch at 9:30 is one thing. (Do the two men work through the night and sleep in the day?) What’s most inscrutable is the moral code the robber seems to have. To say ‘I don’t take the watches of working men’ is maybe a gesture toward working class solidarity, but if that’s what it is, then obviously it’s undermined by sticking up the conductor. And why is taking his watch a worse offence than taking his money? Each story piles on details like these, then ends; they are never subsumed under any kind of explanation. This feature becomes even more pronounced in the occasional chapters that abandon journalistic impersonality for the first person. Their narrators are never identified, and they come across as pieces of a larger story that has been lost. Here is one in its entirety: ‘After a midnight dip, we returned to the car to find our clothes gone. Chip wrapped me in an auto blanket and drove us home. Looking back now, this was a jinx for us.’
This strangeness is deepened by the way Politanoff bends the turns of phrase deployed by journalese into something unfamiliar. Looked at superficially, each story seems to be a succession of concrete details. But Politanoff applies this quality of sober reportage to dreamlike imagery, which becomes even more uncanny for being treated as if it were ordinary: one story says flatly that ‘small boys in town reaped a harvest of grasshoppers from last week’s stormy skies. They caught the chirpers in their milk buckets and sold them to their parents for chicken feed.’ Sometimes the baldly factual style conceals literary flourishes, like the weirdly beautiful assonance in ‘Oscar Frishey, a sailor on the steamer Fair Oaks, loading for Redondo, fouled the winch line Wednesday.’ Elsewhere, cliches are given unexpected heft. A story about a woman who accidentally cuts her left eye while chopping wood includes this line: ‘This has been the time of my life, she said of her solitary recovery sitting in a dark room with a bandage over her eye.’ By transposing it to this unfamiliar context, Politanoff uncovers new depths beneath what seems like a platitude. Her remark suggests that the greatest moment of her life was ascetic renunciation of all sense impressions, or that her injury didn’t matter because her life was already like sitting alone in a dark room.
You’ll Like It Here excels at this sort of subtle disorientation, through which the acts and utterances that make each day like the one before suddenly become unfathomable. That effect is due in part to its basis in local newspapers, which persist in our world but belong to an earlier one. They are shutting down; as a mid-level institution mediating between private individuals and the state, they don’t have much of a role in an increasingly atomised and post-democratic America. Coverage of their slow death has been a feature of their successors, outlets working out of the non-place of the internet that trade in ‘high arousal content’ — stuff calculated to get you mad enough to click on it so that you can then be shown ads. The overheated moralism of these sites is even less conducive to experiencing the mysteriousness latent in the everyday than the journalism that Benjamin wrote about. But maybe one day someone will use it to make a book as good as this one.
This ambiguous quality is what draws people in. It impresses a story on their memory and makes them tell it to others in turn, and so on across time. Newspapers aim to be immediately understandable, and so they fit the events they report into an explication. The result is that their articles are forgotten after they’re read, and the rise of the press has meant the attenuation of storytelling, which has been displaced by mere information. The starting point of Ashton Politanoff’s book, You’ll Like It Here, is this ephemeral medium: it pieces together modified old clippings from local newspapers into a history of sorts of Redondo Beach, California, during the first two decades of the 20th century. But it turns all this quotidian stuff from a century ago into something strange. The events common to local journalism and their familiar surface of newspaper verbiage are given the sort of mysteriousness that Benjamin thought was dying out.
In the book’s short introduction, Politanoff says that he has spent most of his life in Redondo. The death of his mother prompted him to spend time in the archives of various libraries in the area. He went through regional newspapers from 1900 to 1919 and became especially interested in the period between 1911 and 1918, which Politanoff claims is when Redondo took off. You’ll Like It Here consists of altered versions of this material: Politanoff explains that ‘while I have used historical situations and newspaper clippings as the basis of this project, names have been changed, dramatic structure has been favored over historical accuracy, and facts have been expanded, all with the aim toward fiction and my own poetic and aesthetic concerns.’ It’s made up of a bunch of sparse faits divers, each of which consists of just one paragraph; in most cases, they don’t go over a single page. At times the stories are broken up by photos: a boy on a shore looking right into the camera as fully dressed adults play around in the ocean behind him, a block engulfed in flames, a portrait of the unsmiling members of a men’s water polo team. These are not illustrations of what happens in the text but decontextualised images whose story can only be guessed at.
Being drawn from official repositories gives these documents an air of facticity, but the way they succeed one another is downright oneiric. Names are listed off in a genteel style (‘Mrs. Karl Schroeder of Redondo,’ ‘Mr. Oliver Tucker, proprietor of the blacksmith shop on North Catalina Avenue,’ etc.) only to disappear; there are no recurring characters, just people coming and going who are as eerily insubstantial as ghosts. What’s more, although You’ll Like It Here follows a loose historical arc of modernisation — it begins with a for-sale notice for a house with a barn and ends with references to World War I — it’s often hard to tell when something is happening. Markers of technological development are mixed together: in one story a horse-drawn buggy pulls up alongside a limousine. Events are situated within days of the week (e.g., ‘a man-eating shark on display at Pier No. 2 attracted a swarm of tourists Monday and Tuesday’), but one hundred years on, we have become unmoored from the frame of reference that readers of these papers shared, and so these words only heighten the sense of estrangement. And some of the stories have a parable-like quality that puts them outside of time altogether: one of them reads, ‘Miss Edith Jones sails around the harbor in a large wooden tub with an umbrella for a sail.’
Patterns gradually emerge from this register of cryptic names and dates. Certain situations play out again and again over the course of the book. People in psychic distress vanish inexplicably. Dead bodies wash ashore. Domestic life turns violent or splinters apart; children run away and are abandoned by their parents. There are shootings. The police are a shadowy, menacing presence throughout and collar people under opaque laws. Denizens of the town hunt animals, kill them, and disfigure their bodies. Fires break out, and diseases spread. Readers are exhorted to try quack cures, like applying a potato to scalded flesh. Christmas trees are flammable, watermelon seeds are poisonous, and Redondo’s environment appears to be full of inbuilt hazards that can be set off by anything. A series of accidents runs through the book: a fruit truck’s wheel breaks, two bikes crash into each other, a man falls off a roof. Often these are caused by the urban infrastructure that was getting underway in the early years of the 20th century, like streetcars. The overall impression is of a city pursuing modernisation, but its efforts give rise to the degradation of nature, complex technological systems whose failure results in cascading disasters, and various forms of psychosis.
That sounds more or less like how things are nowadays, and such comparisons are there for those who want them. Politanoff invites them when he says in the book’s introduction that the era he focuses on was ‘strangely analogous to our own’. But it would be a waste to press too hard on these similarities and use You’ll Like It Here as just another occasion for presentism. The stories in the book are too richly enigmatic for that. Their power comes from the suppression of causality. Things happen, but there’s no attempt to explain what brought them on, the relationship between them, or the motives of the people behind them. Instead, there are actions relayed without abstract or figurative language that unfold murkily. The effect is compelling. A good example occurs midway through the book:
The conductor and motorman were eating their lunch on the Del Rey car about 9:30 Tuesday night during a layover at Clifton-by-the-Sea when a gun muzzle was pressed to the conductor’s forehead, and he was ordered to hand over his wallet. The bandit secured $12 in cash, and another $.50 in pocket change. I don’t take the watches of working men, the bandit said. Allegedly, he is the same bandit responsible for holding up another interurban train a fortnight ago in San Pedro. All passersby are advised to stay on the lookout for a tall, slender man dressed in a gray suit, a dark slouch hat, and a blue handkerchief mask.
The time scale implied by eating lunch at 9:30 is one thing. (Do the two men work through the night and sleep in the day?) What’s most inscrutable is the moral code the robber seems to have. To say ‘I don’t take the watches of working men’ is maybe a gesture toward working class solidarity, but if that’s what it is, then obviously it’s undermined by sticking up the conductor. And why is taking his watch a worse offence than taking his money? Each story piles on details like these, then ends; they are never subsumed under any kind of explanation. This feature becomes even more pronounced in the occasional chapters that abandon journalistic impersonality for the first person. Their narrators are never identified, and they come across as pieces of a larger story that has been lost. Here is one in its entirety: ‘After a midnight dip, we returned to the car to find our clothes gone. Chip wrapped me in an auto blanket and drove us home. Looking back now, this was a jinx for us.’
This strangeness is deepened by the way Politanoff bends the turns of phrase deployed by journalese into something unfamiliar. Looked at superficially, each story seems to be a succession of concrete details. But Politanoff applies this quality of sober reportage to dreamlike imagery, which becomes even more uncanny for being treated as if it were ordinary: one story says flatly that ‘small boys in town reaped a harvest of grasshoppers from last week’s stormy skies. They caught the chirpers in their milk buckets and sold them to their parents for chicken feed.’ Sometimes the baldly factual style conceals literary flourishes, like the weirdly beautiful assonance in ‘Oscar Frishey, a sailor on the steamer Fair Oaks, loading for Redondo, fouled the winch line Wednesday.’ Elsewhere, cliches are given unexpected heft. A story about a woman who accidentally cuts her left eye while chopping wood includes this line: ‘This has been the time of my life, she said of her solitary recovery sitting in a dark room with a bandage over her eye.’ By transposing it to this unfamiliar context, Politanoff uncovers new depths beneath what seems like a platitude. Her remark suggests that the greatest moment of her life was ascetic renunciation of all sense impressions, or that her injury didn’t matter because her life was already like sitting alone in a dark room.
You’ll Like It Here excels at this sort of subtle disorientation, through which the acts and utterances that make each day like the one before suddenly become unfathomable. That effect is due in part to its basis in local newspapers, which persist in our world but belong to an earlier one. They are shutting down; as a mid-level institution mediating between private individuals and the state, they don’t have much of a role in an increasingly atomised and post-democratic America. Coverage of their slow death has been a feature of their successors, outlets working out of the non-place of the internet that trade in ‘high arousal content’ — stuff calculated to get you mad enough to click on it so that you can then be shown ads. The overheated moralism of these sites is even less conducive to experiencing the mysteriousness latent in the everyday than the journalism that Benjamin wrote about. But maybe one day someone will use it to make a book as good as this one.