Largehearted Boy & the Combat Camera Playlist

Over at Largehearted Boy, A.J. Somerset offers his Combat Camera soundtrack:

In his own words, here is A.J. Somerset's Book Notes music playlist for his debut novel, Combat Camera:

I am always surprised at writers who say they don't listen to music when they write, or won't listen to music with vocals, as they don't want it to influence or distract them. Me, I won't write without music. Songs often express what we can't, or won't, put into words. We allow songs to be unabashedly sentimental in ways we do not allow to ourselves. The music I listen to when I write defines the internal worlds that characters don't get to express.

Lucas Zane had a career as a war photographer, and threw it away. Now he hopes to redeem himself through a documentary on Melissa, a stripper and porn performer looking for a redemption of her own. Combat Camera is a story about violence and its aftermath, about journalism, flim-flam, pornography, loneliness, the lies we convince ourselves to believe just so we can carry on, and the greatest sentimental lie of all, that you can somehow get a do-over on your life. These are some of the songs I had on heavy rotation while I wrote it.

"Nicotina (She's All That)" by Big Sugar (from Brothers & Sisters, Are You Ready?)

A wail on the high register of the harp, and the voice says "light it up." Gordie Johnson's guitar tone is a match meeting gasoline, the guitar riff crunching over a steady drum line, an insistent pulsing beat. The summer this song was released, I blew the factory speakers clear out of my cheap red hatchback. Loud, sexy, and brash, one hundred and twenty-five decibels of unabashed desire. You can hear Melissa dancing, strutting down that spotlit runway, topless. I'm her silver dollar, she's my, my slot machine.

"You're A Big Girl Now" by Bob Dylan (from Blood on the Tracks)

There is a clueless aspect to this song, an air of bewilderment. The singer has know idea what, if anything, he might do to fix things; he just wants it all not to be. And beneath it is resignation: things can't be fixed. Zane looks on Melissa with mixed feelings, a not untypical masculine reaction to the "fallen woman." I know that I can find you in somebody's room, howls Dylan. It's the price I have to pay; you're a big girl all the way.

For the rest of his Book Notes playlist please go here.

Conflicts of Interest: A. J. Somerset

Over at Open Book Toronto, Nathaniel Moore interviews A. J. Somerset:

NGM:
Do you think it's easier to market a novel over a short fiction collection?

AS:
I think that a novel is unquestionably easier to sell than a short story collection, simply because a novel is about something. A short story collection is about a dozen or so somethings, so it's hard to put a hook into the general reader. If you look at the success of Annabel, before the awards season, almost all of the discussion surrounded what it's about. People praised it first and foremost for its subject, called it necessary and essential. George Murray called it "dangerous," a risible remark. The book really doesn't challenge its audience, but they get to talk about how bold the subject is. How can a short fiction collection, no matter how accomplished, compete with this?

The readership of short stories, Alice Munro notwithstanding, is restricted to people who appreciate the short story as a form. It's a small readership, but dedicated. If you choose to write short stories, you simply won't get much sales unless you're shortlisted for an award. Mind you, the same seems to hold true of the novel in Canada's dismal literary culture.

The sad thing is that novels are sold on what they're about, when they should be about more than just one thing. You have three hundred pages to allow the story to expand and to swallow all of life, but our novels so rarely do this, because we don't demand it of them. Our best short stories do. I was reading Alistair MacLeod's As Birds Bring Forth the Sun recently. Those stories are huge. They encompass so much. And yet we let a novel get away with being so small in its concerns. The novel has so much room to breathe, and so often, it doesn't. We should hold the novel to a higher standard.

NGM:
What do you personally prefer to read?

AS:
I'm not sure that I have a preference. I'm fairly omnivorous, except that I don't really read genre fiction these days. That's what television is for, my genre fix. Also, it's only in the past couple of years that I've gone out of my way to read a lot of Canadian writers and keep up with what people are writing in this country. I'm suspicious of CanLit as a category, when you consider that Canada has the population of California; if Californians went on and on about their regional literature in the way some Canadians do, you'd rightly dismiss them as crackpots.

I do prefer short novels. I haven't read William Vollmann, and I'm not sure I can bring myself to. There's an unfortunate tendency in some quarters to rate a novel by its utility as a blunt instrument during a home invasion: if it's that thick and heavy, it must be good. Or, more accurately, if it was that much of a chore to read, then you must be real gosh-awful smart to have got through it. To me, every page over three hundred had better be worth it. If you write a 450-page novel, you'd better have a vision 450 pages wide. No number of sly pop-culture references can justify the longevity of The Simpsons; it's the same joke a thousand times. The same applies to books; the more time you take up, the more you should have to say. If you think you need 450 pages to get it done, try condensing it into a screenplay. You don't have that much time; people will walk out of the movie. Too many novels are sold by weight, not volume; you get the sense that there was some settling of the contents during shipping.

For the full interview please go here.

Encore Lit Reviews Combat Camera

Reading Combat Camera, A.J. Somerset’s brave and gritty debut novel, one discerns here and there evidence of influence from Nathanael West’s classic Miss Lonelyhearts: the disillusioned and powerless protagonist trapped in a job that threatens to destroy his soul; the amoral boss given to endless philosophical pontificating; the vivid depictions of the squalor and desperation of the lost and disowned. For West, all that squalor was easily found in America during the Depression. In Combat Camera, the sordid setting is the realm of hardcore internet porn. Any influence from Nathanael West, however minimal it may actually be, is of course a good thing, but unlike the great American satirist, Somerset offers his protagonist something Miss Lonelyhearts never gets: a viable opportunity for redemption, a possible second chance. West was never so cruel.

Once a prize-winning freelance photographer and first-hand witness to the bloody conflicts in El Salvador, the West Bank, and Chechnya, among other hellholes, Lucas Zane is lost. Damaged, in a number of ways, and burnt-out, Zane simply exists, alone and beyond hope, in a tiny apartment in Toronto. But Melissa, one of the porn “models” he photographs, presumably recognizing a decent person and potential ally beneath the numb exterior, begins to wake Zane up and starts giving him ideas. Not the usual ideas, not the kind you might expect, but ideas instead about reviving his career, returning to legitimacy. Zane even starts to act on these ideas, despite his better judgement.

...

For the rest of the review, please go here.

Reader's Discretion Advised

from the Stratford Gazette:

Combat Camera's subject matter will tempt some to steer around it. For readers of literary fiction who don't mind some grit, that would be a mistake. Somerset's language is pitch-perfect to the subject matter: the narrator has flashes of extreme wit and brilliance edged with self-deprecating sarcasm.

Zane and Melissa are sublimely aware of how ridiculous they are. ... For all the mockery, though, the characters and narrator are all stumbling toward something real ....

The book wraps up in just over 250 pages, leaving the reader feeling as raw as the characters left behind. Nor surprisingly, readers' discretion is advised. By turns wickedly funny, frustrating, and stunning, Combat Camera is a lean, mean read that will surprise you and leave you wanting more.

Globe and Mail Reviews Combat Camera

Calling it a "violent, funny, thought-provoking novel," and comparing it with the work of Ernest Hemingway, Jules Lewis reviews A.J. Somerset's Combat Camera in today's Globe & Mail.

From the review:

Combat Camera opens with Zane on the ropes: 46 years old, drunk, friendless and possessing “no detectable ambition at all.” To pay the bills, he works as a photographer at Diamond Blue Productions, a small Internet pornography company on the outskirts of Toronto. Zane is perfect for the job: As in war, he can detach himself from the subject and let the camera do the work. When one young woman gets her face punched in by her brutish co-star, Bill, for an unsatisfactory performance, Zane feels nothing. He simply continues taking photos, mentally congratulating himself “on his excellent shutter timing.”

Somerset – a one-time soldier and a freelance photographer – paints a convincing picture of Zane’s messed-up head: The reader follows as his mechanical eye scans a bleak, desolate Toronto, paying more attention to the lighting on people’s faces, their potential to become still images, than anything else. All that can puncture this barrier – his iron lens, as it were – are Zane’s horrifying war flashbacks.

Yet he maintains a consistent sense of humour – self-deprecating, gruff, curmudgeonly. Somerset’s prose illuminates this. In one scene, Zane looks at his cellphone with “loathing, as one might regard a coiled and dangerous snake.”

For the whole review, please go here.