If you’ve been thinking you might want to read some of those Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award entries but don’t know where to start, may I recommend The Stars Here Are Mostly Planes, about a woman named Katie who’s been thrown out of graduate school for some unnamed offense:
We didn’t stop for food. It would have been unbearable to face each other over a table, so we all stared forward and resigned ourselves to packaged peanut butter crackers from my mother’s purse. Bright orange crackers with that synthetic cheese tang. Not their usual thing, for sure. In fact, my mother managed to nibble about half of one before she began to cry. The crying went unacknowledged for several miles. I ate my crackers without complaint. This is the kind of thing I would have to start enjoying, out here among the American masses where people own lawnmowers and eat squirtable cheese and struggle to insure their saturated hearts. I should be the one crying.
In the excerpt, Katie goes on to re-befriend (refriend?) a buddy from adolescence who now lives in semi-squalid, semi-alcoholic circumstances in Chicago. Her friend’s apartment “has carpeting like the pelt of a garage-sale Care Bear.” I can see it — and I’m not taking off my shoes. What’s more, the excerpt leaves as many questions as it answers (what did Katie do, exactly? what kind of trouble is she getting herself into now?) and it’s got that witty, sarcastic voice.
Katie is a painfully funny loser-in-denial the likes of Teabag in Home Land by Sam Lipsyte, or maybe Charles Ossining of TC Boyle’s Road to Wellville. So far, though, she’s only skirted unrespectability — she is a repressed Tennessee Presbyterian, after all.
Sarah Harris, who is witty (as you can see), smart and talented, is in my program at Pitt, and she is most deserving of your attention. In fact, consider this a shameless plug for her work. With 1,000 finalists, popularity snowballing to favor the most-rated, and Sarah’s work buried 8 pages deep within the general fiction category, I can’t help but tell you about how terrific it is. I urge you to read and rate The Stars Here Are Mostly Planes. You’ll love it. Vote for Sarah Harris in ’08!
It may be some comfort to know that the PW review and the opinions of Penguins’ editors will have more of an effect than votes in this stage of the contest. It’s only when they pick the final 10 that the votes will determine the winner.
Still, it’s useful to know what’s good, because it is hard to pick one out of the 800 entries.
“Befriend anew” might be the bottle you’re trying to pull off the shelf.