Feliz Lucia Molina, Ben Segal and Brett Zehner, The Wes Letters, Outpost 19, 2014.
excerpts
THE WES LETTERS is an epistolary novel written from three friends to the elusive Wes Anderson. The story begins on a train and multiplies, composes, and fragments itself across the United States to Finland. It's about personal memory, it's about gossip and philosophy, and it's about pop culture and late capitalism. It's (not) about Wes Anderson. It's a generational vacuum full of hope and embarrassment.
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Dear Wes, . . .Details aside, memory's a dodgy thing and if you don't remember me, well, I don't blame you. I imagine you meet billions of people every year and they're all impeccably dressed. One of my mottos - not that I am a motto kind of a guy - is to be memorable. At least, that's one of the secret performances I have in the works. I want to be ridiculously present, crystal clear without daydreams. So present I infect people's minds and all of the sudden everyone is performing outside-Brett. In this way, I can slip off and assume other identities, tricksterlike. . . |
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Dear Wes, I'm sitting on our living room futon while Brett explains the situation of meeting you on the train. Apparently, the person you were with writes children books. I hear words like aristocracy and kings. Our friend asks him questions like "did you tell him it's 'HUN-day'?" Apparently you and your girlfriend asked Brett what he reads and what he thinks about trains. Obviously you and Brett have a lot in common. How rustic chic, Wes, especially on a train while sipping chardonnay, poking at your duck, staring out onto the plains that speed past into a blur while talking about literature. . . |
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Dear Wes Anderson, I was thinking about you again because we all got together to celebrate Brett's birthday. There were a whole bunch of us and we made a fire at the beach and drank wine from the bottle. We bought two bags of Doritos and several pounds of grocery store fried chicken. Strangers also had fires going. Their fires were bigger, but ours lasted the longest. When the strangers left, we found a hooked metal implement and stole the burning wood from their abandoned fires. We walked the burning logs along the beach and fed them to our fire, and we caroused and, at times, we spoke of you. . . |
| "Writing into the sand hole that is 'Wes Anderson,' three friends write their way almost to the limit of their engagingly ambivalent and indisputably brilliant personalities, thereby calling into question the certainty of anything. Follow their quest to the Fin/n/ish line! A gripping read." - Chris Kraus |
| "THE WES LETTERS seems destined to find its place among other recent classics of the epistolary novel narrated by smart, anxious, and questing narrators. . . but its triangular structure is all its own, as are its particular obsessions: transference, celebrity, friendship, changing technologies of writing, and the various relations - be they pained, productive, or pleasurable - between performativity and 'something like honesty,' if not honesty itself." - Maggie Nelson |
| "Dear Wes Anderson - Each film you make is a secret letter to the viewer, and each letter in THE WES LETTERS is a secret view into you. These letters are innovations of you, the authors' lives chronicled through apostrophe, radiant stylistic gymnastics, philosophies in flight - these letters are relentless and resplendent. You won't regret reading this book, Wes Anderson, it's hardly about you at all." - Lily Hoang |
A few days ago I was sitting in a bar across the street from my house, listening to one of my former professors read poetry. Right before I graduated a few months ago he’d been diagnosed with cancer and had to pull a fast fade on the day of our final reading, which sort of stung us, to be honest, but cancer>complaints.
The point was I think we were all pretty curious what he’d read this past Sunday, what he’d been doing, what he’d been writing. He’d grown a fucking giant beard, but that was all we knew.
Alongside reading a lot about the food he’d been eating and the dogs he’d been walking and cancer and the desert, he read a lot about this book — this book that’s not about you, Wes, but it is about the people that wrote it, who I know, and who my professor knows. My professor read writing he’d written about what it was like being friends with these people, being writing peers, being envious and overwhelmed by their success.
I mean, something like that. It’s what it sounded like to me.
The point I’m getting at Wes, is that there’s always someone outside-looking-in. At the start of this book, it feels like Feliz, Ben, and Brett are outside, trying to access you; by the end, they are assuredly inside, accessing each other and themselves.
It’s impossible for me to write this like a real review, Wes. I knew Ben and Feliz and Brett the whole time they wrote this book, and probably the main thoughts I had about it in that time was that it sounded kind of more gimmicky than I thought they would have ever let themselves be, and also that I wished I’d been invited to write it with them. But I also wished, years later, that my professor would write a poem about me being his peer, or that he’d have come to my final reading. Comme ci, comme ça, Wes. There’s always an outside/inside.
I’ll tell you this, though. Of the three authors, I know Feliz the least. I think for most of our acquaintance we’ve mainly tried not to argue with each other too loudly at parties. Feliz’s is the preeminent voice here — I won’t hazard guesses about who did what kinds of work in the production of the book entire, but in terms of pure words-on-page it’s Feliz that’s guiding us, finding the book’s balance, performing the outsideness of writing to you and the insideness of divulging things about herself, of reaching out to Ben and to Brett in her letters.
To be honest, Wes, I’m going to guess it’s more likely that Feliz reads these notes about her than it is you read her notes about you. To be more honest, I actually have a feeling this book will eventually find its way to you, so to edit my prior statement, I’ll say that while I think everyone is going to eventually read everyone else’s everything with regard to The Wes Letters, I think it’s more likely that what I write here will get read first.
With that in mind, I’m going to pause in my letter to you and write to Feliz for a minute.
Dear Feliz,
I think the story/letters/section of book you’ve crafted here is really very beautiful. I don’t feel like I know you very well, but getting to know you here was a lovely thing.
Ben and Brett, who I do think I know pretty well, chime in less on-the-page: Ben and Feliz begin with two distinct voices and eventually seem to merge, so that I’d often skip ahead to figure out whose voice I should be assigning to each letter. Perhaps that’s destroying some element of intent, but everything is so meta at this stage, with me and with this book, that Wes I really think you should just kind of back off with the directionality here. Just let me do this my own way.
As I was saying — Ben’s voice, often dismissive and anecdotal but still centered and warm, stands in opposition to Feliz’s more personal and emotionally wrought letters. Feliz’s letters seem to use every rhetorical trick to evoke an actual response, or failing that, a gut reaction. Ben seems more amused by the idea of writing to you as a constraint, which is in keeping with what I know of him “for reals.” Eventually, Feliz’s urgency wears off, as she deciphers what it means to write to you, before seeming to lose herself again in the book’s final pages, which take place somewhere between Helsinki and the Swiss Alps.
Brett’s inclusions are more like interjections; it may be that his main function in this text was to meet you, Wes — to be the Kevin Bacon holding the theoretical framework of the book together. In practice, his written contributions are sporadic, and seem less like letters and more like what he happened to be writing in the time the book was written. If you meet Brett (again) Wes, I’ll posit that you will be least surprised by the difference between Brett OTP and Brett IRL. It’s an apt transference.
I’m writing all this like you don’t know it already, Wes — but the truth is that if you ever find this book review, you’ll probably have already read this book, and met these people (for the first or second time). Feliz’s suggestions for what you might eventually say to them seem believable and accurate, although I know you even less than they do.
But the funny thing is that you really are a guy who it seems like I/we/they already know — I honestly hadn’t even thought of it until this paragraph, but this whole writing-to-you thing comes pretty easy. I know what your movies look like, and you helped me appreciate The Who. What else is there, right?
I’m sorry, Wes. It’s just the cult of American celebrity that makes me flippant with you. I liked this book more than I’ve liked most of your movies, except for Rushmore, which I saw a few years after I’d ended a short affair with one of my high school teachers. I never thanked you for that — for making a film that spoke to me on such a specific level, at a time when I really needed it.
So thank you for that, Wes. I mean it. She was my first love, and that ain’t easy gettin’ over.
K - Keith McCleary
