Round 1: Calvin v. The Smell of Other People’s Houses

Yikes. This whole Smackdown thing is going to be tricky; I’m going to disagree with Adrienne. And I hope that this doesn’t end up in fisticuffs, because, as we all know, Adrienne would wipe the floor with me.

The Smell of Other People’s Houses has the better title. More useful. More devastating. That olfactory imagery was the best damn part — I, consistently and viscerally, smelled the setting: the Salvation Army, the flood, the Cedar house. I almost garbaged all of the Cedar soap in my bathroom at one point (but Marianne still likes it, so it remains). The book also did a damn good job of making me feel cold and isolated, which is a triumph in itself since I read Calvin first. But, too often, the book kept me that way — cold and isolated — and I didn’t feel that way about Calvin.

I agree that Calvin is gimmicky — don’t get me wrong. Hell, the book breaks every piece of advice that I give to creative writers: respect the conventions of your form; never start writing a letter and then move into narrative; write dialogue like a novelist, not like a playwright; avoid cliches and heavy handed allusions; utilize deus ex machina only when it is absolutely and totally unavoidable and necessary. By that list, I should hate Calvin. But I don’t. I found the whimsical nature of the form to be a refreshing framework for the serious implications of schizophrenia. The whole thing may be too Vonnegutian, but Slaughterhouse-Five and Calvin and Hobbes were my childhood. Our Calvin may be little more than a thinly veiled Billy Pilgrim, but I will wholeheartedly admit that Calvin hit me firmly in the nostalgia bone.

Since I already claimed that Calvin is guilty of many of the egregious errors that I volley at poorly written Personal Responses (“A letter that turns into a play? Come on!”), I will suggest the same for The Smell of Other People’s Houses; they both employ techniques that are, potentially, irksome. I just think that those techniques pay off in Calvin. In The Smell of Other People’s Houses, I appreciated the multiple narrative perspectives, but the temporality confused me and I was a little irritated by inter-narrative serendipity and gestures (you know, Jack’s “two months old” newspaper clipping with the anonymous “sixteen-year-old native girl” winning the “Ice Classic”). At one point, I threw the book, and not in the good way: when Chapter Six started with “It reminded me of a poem we read in English class,” that sentence brought up too much emotional baggage from marking superficial student writing and, I’m sorry, I just couldn’t keep it in my hands.

So Calvin is my winner. I found it simultaneously childish and profound—and the book, the characters, the aesthetic has lingered. It still follows me around like (dare I say it?) some ethereal children’s toy. (Let the booing commence.)