Dear writer,
Speaking of Milwaukee, in spring 2005 I was in my final semester as an undergrad English major at UWM, full of grandiose plans to publish stories in the Paris Review and become a famous novelist by the time I turned 30 (I was 28 at the time...), but not putting in much of an effort in my classes or, you know, at writing.
In a postmodern fiction class my professor, Cam Tatham, assigned a 2001 novel called The Savage Girl by a
writer named Alex Shakar. Tatham and Shakar were acquainted, and Shakar had agreed to participate in discussions on a class message board, earlyish-internet style. We would read segments of the book, ask Shakar questions on this board, and he'd reply.
Access to a HarperCollins novelist! Cool,
right?
Well, I didn't really think so. Or I pretended not to. The conversation between my classmates and Shakar went on for weeks, but I didn't follow it, and I contributed one comment, which I did only because it was a requirement to post at least once. I.e., I thought I was wayyyyyy too cool for school.
In a semester's end evaluation, Tatham wrote to me, "[Writing] is something you supposedly want to do, but then when given the chance to interact with a writer, you ignore the opportunity."
The stupid thing is, I really liked the book. Which I'm reminded of now as I reread it for what I'm surprised to learn is the first time since I started keeping track of my books in 2010.
It has an interesting backstory, too, which Shakar wrote about in this fascinating essay in the Millions. The piece is well worth the read, and offers a glimpse of what it's like (or used to be like -- the book came out in 2001; the essay came 10 years later) to be the author of a book
carrying a lot of pre-pub hype.
Long story short: The Savage Girl is in part a critical look at consumerism and irony and trends.
Its release
date: September 18, 2001.
With George Bush & Co. telling us all to go shopping after the 9/11 attacks, whatever interest there may have been for what Kirkus described as "A bitterly funny broadside on market-driven contemporary life" disappeared almost entirely. The book sold poorly and
HarperCollins dropped Shakar.
But he got a second chance a decade later, when SoHo published his follow-up novel, Luminarium. It won the L.A. Times Book Prize for Fiction in 2011.
I got a second chance, too. A few years after that pomo class, I emailed Shakar on a whim. Cam Tatham had died recently, so we talked
about him, and about writing, and about this new novel Shakar was working on.
By the time Luminarium came out, I was writing for the Texas Observer. Shakar was coming to Austin to do a reading, so we met for coffee, then went to the reading. I wrote about the book and Shakar for the magazine. A blurb from that piece appears on the paperback version of Luminarium.
I think Cam Tatham would have found that to be pretty cool.
So is The Savage Girl. Read it and tell me what you think.
A
brief excerpt, where a trendspotter shares his vision of the near future, what he calls "the Light Age" (remember, Shakar wrote this in the late '90s):
"In the Light Age we'll be able to totally customize our life experience -- our beliefs, our rituals, our tribes, our whole personal mythology -- and we'll choose everything
that makes us who we are from a vast array of choices."
Uh huh.
