You can also download a .pdf of the book here, from Wordpress.

(FYI: I am currently in the first stages of writing another, similar book, on the fiction of Stanley Elkin, if there is enough interest in this current one.)

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This is the introduction, as it were, to a short book I will shortly make available entitled Gilbert Sorrentino: An Introduction. As explained in the prologue, the book is an attempt both to introduce Sorrentino’s work to readers less familiar with it and to re-introduce a body of experimental fiction to those who might have forgotten how consistently committed to the continuous renewal of literary art it was.

This book is not a biographical study of Gilbert Sorrentino’s life and work. Although it became more evident to me while trying to write about Sorrentino’s whole career as both a poet and a writer of fiction that understanding a writer’s intentions can be relevant to a well-grounded interpretation of a literary work (as long as they are not regarded as the final authority), and that the writers’ attested experiences can be useful to the critic if they are used to judge how experience has been aesthetically transformed, I have no background as a biographer, and it is Sorrentino’s work that needs renewed attention, not his life circumstances. Still, the dearth of biographical information about Sorrentino beyond the most cursory is a significant hurdle for a critic to clear, and a proper biography to mitigate error and certify facts would certainly be welcome.

But neither is this book an exercise in academic criticism—certainly not as currently practiced in what’s left of literary study in the academy, and not really even as it existed prior to the advent of theory and its subsequent metamorphosis into various versions of cultural studies. My focus is on explication of text, but my readings of Sorrentino’s works are close readings only in the sense that they give unqualified attention to the formal and stylistic qualities of those works. They don’t necessarily provide exhaustive analysis that attempts to take the measure of a literary work’s aesthetic dynamics in the way some New Critics set out to do. There is attention to context, related both to Sorrentino’s work as a whole and to literary practices in general, as well as some citations to external sources when such sources can lead to a further appreciation of the text at hand.

Readers will probably notice, however, that “context” of the kind academic criticism presently emphasizes the most is largely missing here. I do not dwell on the historical, sociological, and political implications of Sorrentino’s fiction, nor do I attempt to subordinate that fiction to its utility as historical analysis or cultural diagnosis. Readers expecting that sort of emphasis will surely be disappointed with my approach, and this examination of Gilbert Sorrrentino’s writing is probably not going to be their sort of thing. What is most “old-fashioned” about my approach is probably its underlying assumption that “literary criticism” names a mode of critical writing that seeks to account for the literary effects of literature, which it does not view as secondary to the critic’s real concerns beyond it. Literary criticism exists to help us understand how a literary work achieves its own integrity, not to direct our attention elsewhere, to something else the critic finds more important (these day, that would usually be politics). We should read Gilbert Sorrentino’s books because they offer us a distinctively rewarding reading experience that expands our appreciation of the possibilities of literary form, not because they instruct us about history or might lead to our moral and political improvement.

While the tone of this study is prevailingly analytical, the analysis is “technical” only if you believe that any attempt to disturb the surface purity of the literary text with any critical concepts (perhaps including the characterization of what we are reading as “text”) is an undesirable imposition on the pristine act of reading. The terminology I use should be immediately familiar to anyone who takes literature seriously to begin with (or at least its denotation clear from the context of its use) and is always employed to explicate and clarify Sorrentino’s strategies. Since Sorrentino is a writer who habitually invokes unconventional strategies, any critical effort to comprehensively cover all of Sorrentino’s published work will necessarily venture interpretations requiring extended explication. And that is indeed what is offered here: sustained exposition of a body of work that systematically defies established precepts about the nature of prose fiction accepted in mainstream literary culture. If the reader finishes this short book believing that Sorrentino’s project as a writer has been coherently elucidated and that the aesthetic achievement of individual works of his has been cogently described, I would consider my effort a success.

If the scope of that effort does not encompass the biographical particulars of Sorrentino’s career as a writer, a thorough reckoning with what he wrote (and to a more limited extent what he said about what he wrote at various times) certainly does leave a vivid enough impression of a writer with very strong opinions and an unequivocal commitment to his understanding of the demands of art. Absent more widely available biographical information about Sorrentino’s personal and professional life outside the writing of his books, only idle speculation would have that these somewhat cantankerous traits carried over to his interactions with people, although based on stray reports from scattered sources it seems likely that he was willing to accept the consequences of being faithful to his vision (losing friends over his portrayal of them, for example). He was certainly willing to bear the consequences of his intransigence in adhering to the principles of aesthetic experimentation that motivated his work as a fiction writer and that resulted in a kind of hand-to-mouth existence in the publishing world, often circulating his manuscripts among numerous publishers before finally securing one willing to take a chance on his latest offbeat offering.

For those of us who think that the urge to trace the features of a writer’s work to their source in the writer’s life us too often indulged in strained interpretations and ought to be resisted, perhaps we know enough about Gilbert Sorrentino to judge the work efficaciously: born to an Italian father and Irish mother in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn (where he befriended fellow writer Hubert Selby, Jr.) a stint in the Army while attending Brooklyn College, where he returned after his discharge and founded the literary magazine, Neon, although did not finish his college degree. After beginning to publish his own poetry, he became associated with the journal, Kulchur, which focused on literary criticism and in which Sorrentino published many of his own critical reviews and essays (later collected in Something Said (1984). At this time he also began writing his first novel, The Sky Changes (1966). (He wrote an earlier, more conventional novel—described by Sorrentino as “very, very long”—that was never published, presumably consigned to oblivion.) After The Sky Changes was published, Sorrentino wrote his second novel, Steelwork.

In the second half of the 1960s, Sorrentino worked as an editor at Grove Press, which he left in 1970 after completing Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (published in 1971). (Among the books he worked on as editor were Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, as well as The Autobiography of Malcolm X.) During the 1970s he seems to have subsisted mainly on fellowships and occasional teaching jobs. (Unfortunately, his early novels didn’t sell so well). In 1979, the publication of Mulligan Stew seemed to finally promise a degree of commercial success, but, unfortunately, while this novel did establish Sorrentino’s reputation as an important experimental writer (and remains his best-known and best-selling book), that promise wouldn’t be fulfilled, as Sorrentino couldn’t really adapt his talent to the kind of conventional thinking that writing a “successful” novel would entail. Thus, the most consequential development affecting the course of his subsequent career was the offer to join the creative writing faculty at Stanford University in 1982, an appointment that ended only with Sorrentino’s retirement in 1999. This job may have restricted his ability to pursue writing full-time, but it also allowed him to write the sort of fiction he wanted to write without concern for publishers’ disapproval or financial uncertainty.

This condensed biography shows that Sorrentino was more or less able to live an outwardly literary life, despite being from a working-class neighborhood in Depression-era Brooklyn. But the “literary” assumptions accompanying Sorrentino’s career were always heterodox and antipathetic to the prevailing consensus about acceptable literary practice; in his reviews he was often openly hostile toward the writers who he believed profited from this consensus. Perhaps what we can most readily take from surveying Sorrentino’s life as a writer is that his primary commitment was to the integrity of literature itself—to its reclamation as a vibrant art that doesn’t just repeat the inherited formulas and lifeless gestures that dominated a literary culture characterized more by the pretense to seriousness than to its actual pursuit.

A superficial reading of Sorrentino’s work might suggest that he is essentially an iconoclast, a writer who overturns existing literary forms simply for the sake of doing so. Although there is truth to the claim that Sorrentino’s fiction is iconoclastic, his approach is not to flagrantly ignore the demands of form, or to reject outright the influence of literary history. Sorrentino wishes to replace traditional narrative structure as the default formal principle of fiction with new forms invented or adapted for the work at hand. In this way, he actually pays more attention to form than most novelists, either conventional or “transgressive.” Similarly, Sorrentino does not dismiss the literary past, although the writers he invokes may not always be the most obviously canonized. That Sorrentino takes preceding literary achievements seriously is made explicit in his criticism, but it is equally clear in much of his fiction that his writing originates in a far-ranging familiarity with the forms and tropes supplied by literature itself and by particular writers he admired (even if Sorrentino’s use of them often tended to parody and burlesque). Sorrentino was “alt lit” only in that he offered alternative strategies beyond simple storytelling, not because he disdained the appeal to aesthetic order altogether.

Sorrentino’s iconoclasm is perhaps more apparent in the “content” of his work, not just in his lampooning of bohemian attitudes or academic pretension or middle-class sexual mores but in his radical skepticism about human nature and the crass sensibilities that dominate American culture. Sorrentino is an iconoclast most clearly in his criticism, which on the one hand champions writers Sorrentino believes are undervalued, but on the other also unleashes some uninhibited attacks on those he thinks are not just overrated but degrade the artistic standards of literature. These strong opinions, which can seem peevishly dismissive, along with his portrayals of unredeemed human degradation, no doubt for some readers conveyed the impression Sorrentino’s work was even more formidable than his unfamiliar formal strategies already suggested it must be.

But idol-smashing was not in itself the primary goal motivating Sorrentino’s work. It is the necessary initial gesture implicit in his larger project of reorienting the aesthetic expectations of readers who assume that narrative form is the only form that might give shape to a work of fiction. To rebuild the formal structures of fiction, the old structures must first be razed, but Gilbert Sorrentino’s fiction is ultimately more about what can replace the structure that was leveled than the mere act of subverting existing arrangements. It doesn’t go too far to say that Sorrentino would like us to take delight in the formal variations he offers in each of his novels. In this sense, Sorrentino’s fiction has an affirmative purpose, but it is an affirmation of the capacity of art—specifically literary art—to renew itself through the exercise of imagination.

This was certainly what most captivated me when I began reading Sorrentino’s fiction. I found Sorrentino after I had already discovered other postmodern innovators such as John Barth and Robert Coover, but encountering Mulligan Stew made me think I had come upon a writer who upped the metafictional ante over even Barth and Coover and had dazzling comedic skills that encompassed satire but went beyond the merely satirical to create a kind of absolute comedy that takes nothing seriously, including itself. (Later, upon reading M.M. Bakhtin, I found the critical perspective that would accurately describe this kind of comedy as “carnivalesque.”) While none of Sorrentino’s post-Mulligan Stew novels quite attempted to replicate its audacious structural complexity, nor to repeat its outrageous devices in the same encyclopedic way (although the latent comic attitude would always remain), Sorrentino’s subsequent work continued consistently to challenge literary convention, each new release promising its own sort of originality and surprise.

What I also discovered is that most mainstream reviewers did not really know how to account for Sorrentino’s literary project. Most seemed to expect that a Sorrentino novel would violate the established norms with which they were familiar, but, while critics would usually acknowledge Sorrentino’s writing skills in general, the typical response to the formal provocations encountered in his work was that he was engaged in “playing games,” that he seemed disdainful of the imperative to be accessible to ordinary readers. Although there were certainly critics who appreciated Sorrentino’s adventurous ambitions, very little effort was made in the prevailing outlets of literary journalism to ponder his alternative literary strategies more deeply or to consider seriously the notion that the norms observed by most writers of fiction might be deficient and in need of revision. Sorrentino was left to assume the reputation of an incorrigibly eccentric writer little interested in appealing to the general reader, and his later novels, although in some ways indeed more accessible to the average reader, were not really much reviewed in the most popular mainstream publications at all.,

Sorrentino had his champions, and he did rather better among academic critics, at least in depth of analysis, if not in the amount of attention paid to his work in comparison to other writers perceived as “postmodern.” Indeed, only one book by an academic critic, Louis Mackey’s Fact, Fiction, and Representation, has been devoted entirely to Sorrentino’s work (and it examines only Crystal Vision and the three novels comprising the Pack of Lies trilogy). William McPheron’s Gilbert Sorrentino: A Descriptive Bibliography usefully lists critical essays written about Sorrentino (as well as reviews of Sorrentino’s books), but this book was published in 1993 and has not been updated to cover all of Sorrentino’s career. Many of the critical considerations by academic critics are more interested in using Sorrentino’s work to exemplify broader philosophical issues that his inveterate self-reflexivity and breaking of form (especially in Mulligan Stew) tangentially raise, or in placing Sorrentino’s fiction in a taxonomy of postmodernism, so that neither the full range of Sorrentino’s aesthetic strategies nor the distinct progression of his work as a whole are as well-appreciated as they should be for a writer of Sorrentino’s accomplishments.

My current effort here, then, is to contribute in some small way to advancing this more complete view of Sorrentino’s career as a writer. It isn’t as expansive as a critical biography might be, or as detailed in its close readings as a more focused analysis of an individual work can be, but it attempts both to survey all of Sorrentino’s published writing from his beginnings as mostly a poet through to his final, posthumous, novel, The Abyss of Human Illusion, and to consider the various aesthetic objectives informing Sorrentino’s approach to the creation of literary art. Although Sorrentino is most often described as an “experimental” writer (and this is the category in which I myself initially placed him), the longer view of Sorrentino’s body of work reveals that his aesthetic purposes are in fact multifarious, if ultimately all unified in an effort to discover the still unrealized potential of fiction as a form of verbal art. Sorrentino is indeed an experimental writer, but that word in itself does not describe the specific strategies, accentuated to different degrees in different works, by which he effects his distinctive manner of experiment.

Thus this book is organized more or less chronologically (some slippage with the final books), but also according to an analysis of these multifarious purposes as they are manifested in particular works. I have identified what I believe are the separable but ultimately integrated aesthetic modes that are prominent in Sorrentino’s practice, each of which is more predominant in some of the novels but are also present in many of the others. This allows the opportunity to emphasize the panoply of strategies Sorrentino employs, while acknowledging his underlying commitment to formal innovation and the self-sufficiency of literary language. These commitments are what unites all of Sorrentino’s fiction and mark it as among the most distinctive in postwar American literature, but they do not determine the specific narrative devices—or whether narrative is even present—that Sorrentino chooses to use, or preclude the possibility that an individual work might pursue specific kinds of effects that Sorrentino’s formal designs also make possible, as I hope my discussions of each of Sorrentino’s published novels will show.

Some of Sorrentino’s works, of course, have been more widely discussed than others, and while I give ample attention to books such as Mulligan Stew and Crystal Vision, I also try to give extended consideration to all of his books, in some cases more extended than is generally available through extant critical commentary on Sorrentino, especially the later ones (after the Pack of Lies novels). While Mulligan Stew will no doubt remain the Sorrentino novel most likely to find its way onto reading lists dedicated to postmodern fiction, and his early work up through Crystal Vision will likely attract most new readers, familiarity with the shape of his whole career can only enhance appreciation of Sorrentino’s strategies in those novels, as well as perhaps encourage interest in the lesser-known titles (some of which are out of print). The subtitle of this book promises an “introduction” to Sorrentino’s work, but it is really more accurately an attempt to re-introduce a writer whose work arguably most purely embodies the practice of “experimental fiction” in postwar American writing.

(This post is also available at The Reading Experience.)

For American readers, in considering the development of "experimental" fiction during the 1960s and after, we are most likely to focus mainly on American writers- the postmodernists and their successors (the latter probably less well-known than the first generation of postmodernists such as John Barth or Robert Coover.) In this domain of English-language fiction, British writers have been less dominant, with fewer "name" writers or specific groups inclined to develop experimental forms or challenge stylistic norms, to the point that many readers (and critics) no doubt assume that postwar British fiction did not really produce a notable contingent of experimental writers of fiction.

Joe Darlington's The Experimentalists (2022) informs us that the view that British fiction ought not to encompass such a practice was (and likely still is) an article of belief within British literary culture itself. The Experimentalists unequivocally confirms the existence in 1960s England of not just a few barmy writers dabbling in experimentation here and there but a quite cohesive group of writers seriously committed to experimental writing who recognized each other as fellow travelers on the experimental path and, for a few years, at least, established a network of reinforcement that attempted to instill some respect for experimental writing in the staid confines of a stuffy literary culture. But the resistance was considerable. In that literary culture in the early 1960s, "many readers and writers had sourced on literary experiment and sought a return to Victorian values" Indeed, "writers like C..P. Snow, Angus Wilson, and Kingsley Amis trod a path that. . .would later [be] describe{d} as 'neo-Victorian,' novels about moral conflicts, usually involving an institution of the establishment such as universities and government departments." Experimentalism was "decadent" and un-British.

This situation was especially frustrating to B.S. Johnson, probably the best-known of the British experimentalists. (Darlington also includes lengthy discussions of Anthony Burgess and Angela Carter, although neither of them were really part of the self-identified group of experimental writers, for whom Johnson, as well as, perhaps, Ann Quin, stand as the representative figures.) If there was a revolutionary voice among the group, ready to defend the cause to the unconverted, it was Johnson, which, as a result, gave him a reputation for being strident and, at times, unpleasant, even to his ostensible friends and allies. Johnson was also arguably the most financially successful of the experimentalists, although Quin's Berg (1964) also did quite well, even though his experiments were probably the most audacious--in particular, his infamous The Unfortunates (1969), the "book in a box," consisting of separately bound sections which can be shuffled in any order the reader wishes. The failure of the experimental movement to extend itself much beyond the early 1970s strongly contributed to Johnson's suicide in 1973, which unfortunately kept his published legacy fairly small: six published novels during his lifetime, plus one posthumous novel, as well as some poems and nonfiction.

Johnson's suicide, of course, followed shortly on that of Ann Quin, whose experimental ambitions were perhaps as bold as Johnson's but whose mental fragility ultimately prevented her from fully realizing those ambitions (four published novels, plus a posthumous book containing a novella and some stories (see my review of the latter). Her Berg may have been the first novel to really call public attention to the rise of a new experimental novel in the U.K., but she was never really able to follow it up with work that was equally successful, either commercially or critically. Her story as cumulatively told by Darlington is a pretty sad one. Although the nature of her mental illness seems never to have been quite diagnosed, she lived a life marked by periods of restless exploration followed by a collapse into confusion and uncertainty Her work may have been the attempt to integrate her psychological experience in a way that avoided conventional expression but that achieved its own artistic order nonetheless. Both the formal devices she employed and many of her characters seek a more adequate means of organizing an unstable reality.

Darlington's account includes numerous other writers either loosely or more directly allied with an emergent movement of which Johnson and Quin are the most visible representatives. Among them are Brigid Brophy, Alan Burns (a close friend of Quin's and author of The Angry Brigade), Giles Gordon, and Maureen Duffy. (Most of these writers are also discussed in Francis Booth's Amongst Those Left: The Experimental Novel 1940-1980, published in 2012. Booth's book is much longer and more discursive than Darlington's, but it also features such writers as Anna Kavan, Nicholas Mosley, and Rosalind Belben, all of whose work surely has some salience to postwar British experimentalism.) Darlington also devotes substantial attention to Eva Figes and Christine Brooke-Rose, the latter of whom surely belongs on any list of important 20th century experimental writers in any language. These discussions of writers such as Figes and Brooke-Rose (and obviously Quin) underline the centrality of women writers to the British experimental movement of the 1960s, a phenomenon that significantly contrasts with the postmodern episode in American fiction during the same period. Almost all of the major figures associated with the initial wave of postmodernists were male, although in their immediate wake (70s and 80s), notable women experimental writers certainly did begin to assert themselves. Women seem to have been at forefront of literary experiment in the U.K., and most of them saw their commitment to experiment in fiction as closely connected to their noncomformity as feminists.

In general, the British experimentalists saw their unconventional fiction as a manifestation of their broadly radical politics much more directly than the American postmodernists did. This is a conceptual difference that continues to characterize approaches to experimental fiction. For those, like many of the British writers, the disruptiveness to established practice represented by experiment in the literary work is analogous to the disruptiveness of dissenting political views. And while there were politically-charged fictions offered by the American writers (Coover's The Public Burning, for example), for the most part American experimental fiction in the 1960s and 70s devoted its ambitions primarily to challenging the hegemony of unexamined literary conventions per se. This distinction between what might be called the aesthetic mode and the political mode doesn't necessarily imply a difference in quality or scale of experiment, although it does suggest a divergence of motive in the pursuit of experimental goals. Perhaps the main reason the British experimental movement faded from public view after the early 1970s (aside from the loss of Quin and Johnson, which was admittedly crushing) is that, once the topical concerns and political causes many of these writers embraced began to seem dated, so did their work.

However, it is also the case that the American postmodern movement crested at about the same time, although arguably the American writers had more successors who continued to write adventurous fiction that followed the model the first-wave postmodernists established. There are certainly current British writers writing unconventional fiction (Ansgar Allen Paul Griffiths, the writers published by Grand Iota press), but, along with the admirable service the books by Booth and Darlinger provide by highlighting these writers and this period in British fiction, they also remind us that the attention that was given to experimental fiction in the postwar era was short-lived, and British fiction since then has not really been a notable source of experimental writing. Of course, we are also currently in a period in which mainstream literary culture is arguably less hospitable to experimental fiction than it has been in a century.

The Experimentalists is a well-written and informed book that chooses to tell a story about British experimental fiction briskly organized through narrative. For this reason, it should serve as a very effective introduction to readers less familiar with the writers and the movement it chronicles. For those already familiar with some of the figures included, it illuminates the cultural context in which the movement rose and fell and clarifies the relationships among the various writers in a way that confirms that they did share a collective ambition to revitalize literature by developing new literary techniques during what they perceived to be a period of stagnation in British literature. But the story Darlington tells is inescapably elegiac, as a group of gifted writers with admirable intentions are ultimately defeated (as a group, at least) by an indifferent literary establishment, but also their own human weaknesses.

The Limits of Coherence

It is hard to imagine that many readers of John Trefry's massive novel, Massive, would attempt to read every word in the book (There really are neither sentences nor paragraphs to "read" in the conventional sense, so it finally is a question of registering each word before moving to the next, assuming some sort of sequential relationship between them.) It doesn't take long to realize that the deviations and discontinuities we encounter in negotiating the text of Massive will make arriving at the "sense" of the words in any linear order both time-consuming and ultimately fruitless. One might continue to scan the pages for the occasional burst of syntactic coherence or the repetition of certain names and subjects (as I did), but finally even the notion that we are "reading" the text doesn't seem quite an accurate description of the experience.

But nor is it entirely clear that Trefry expects us to read his book in the usual way. The text is nor formatted as conventional prose but is presented in columns (three per page) and, while there is associational overlap among the three columns by which we are invited to read across them, each column essentially develops on its own, although such development is fitful and often interrupted. Occasionally the text is merely strings of names and other words that, absent any consistent narrative or discursive context, convey no meaning beyond their manifestation on the page. These deliberate subversions of the continuity of thought and expression we usually expect the writer's prose to exhibit might be taken as a direct challenge to conventional reading habits, implying a call for a different kind of reading, but Massive seems rather to erect a barricade to the normal act of reading altogether as part of its formal/rhetorical design.

Amidst the work's seeming structural chaos, more coherent references to characters and situations intermittently emerge, apparently related to the circumstances and fate of the modern Russian poet, Osip Mandelstam, whose persecution at the hands of Stalin is evoked in irregularly appearing passages drawing on his experiences (as well as those of his wife, Nadia, and fellow poet Anna Akhmatova), substituting for the Soviet Union a fictional state identified as the ADA. These passages could hardly be said to constitute a "story," but they do allow for a minimal representation of what the book is "about," further allowing us to speculate that other of the book's ostensible subjects might be connected to this larger one, even if such connections remain oblique. We might be further led to perceive a more palpable aesthetic order in Trefry's additional manipulation of the text's typography through alteration of font types, so that the different font types might be aligned with a particular perspective or character (Mandelstam, Akhmatova), but this device is not really carried through clearly and consistently, or at least in a way that readers less familiar with the lives of the Russian writers and other cultural figures whose lives are invoked could fully appreciate.

Readers at all familiar with John Trefry would know that he is an architect by profession and is also the publisher of Inside the Castle press, which publishes both his own books and other formally challenging literary works. Applying principles related to architecture seems to be a central strategy in Trefry's previous novels, Plats and Apparitions of the Living, especially the former, the text of which is "built" on the verbal plats laid out in balanced proportions on each page. The word structures assembled on these plats are both self-sufficient, not paragraphs so much as prose poems, each of which develops a set of images or perceptions, and cumulative, serving together as a more unified impression of a consciousness (perhaps more than one) registering the external environment in which it is situated. The environment is urban Los Angeles, but while we are offered a kind of representation of this urban scene, it is an obsessively subjective one, marked by the disturbance that seems to afflict this perceiving consciousness. We are presented with an architecture not of material structures but of feelings and mental awareness.

Apparitions of the Living is less overtly designed through an association with architecture, although our attention is still conspicuously drawn to page layout--some sections of the book are printed in narrow columns with wide margins, while others are expanded to the usual left/right margins but with bigger margins at the top and bottom (taking on more of the appearance of a square) and extra spacing between the lines of the text (which alternate italicized and unitalicized type.) The latter device is employed to draw a distinction between perspectives and sometimes to highlight speech, but otherwise the typographical arrangements don't seem to serve any particular formal function except to attract attention to space--and the novel does feature in its settings a notable divergence of space. Parts of it takes place in the Western desert, while the other main setting is a multilevel hotel. (Some of the desert scenes move into a motel room, providing yet another contrast with the greater dimensions of the hotel.) Perhaps we could say that the novel seeks to offer an alternative to the inherent linearity of most narrative prose by accentuating the space of the pages as available aesthetic territory for the novelist to explore (although Trefry is not the first writer to attempt this.)

Nevertheless, Apparitions of the Living does offer the reader a discernible narrative, more so than either Plats or Massive, although the events of the story often remain indistinct and the characters involved in the story enigmatic. We are introduced first to the desert landscape, where the body of a young boy lies buried in the sand. The remainder of the book essentially relates how the boy got there--apparently the victim of a kidnapping, aided and abetted by the boy's own mother, Connie. The other participants are two men, Jack and Gyre, the former of whom we meet first and whose sections of the narrative predominate most of the novel. The purpose of the kidnapping is never exactly revealed, but it is not really the point of the narrative, anyway. Most attention is given to the circumstances in and around the motel room in which the boy is held. Although surely the boy suffers, rendering that suffering is also not really the ambition of the novel. Trefry is greatly influenced by the writers associated with the French nouveau roman, and he has cited Michel Butor as the primary inspiration for Plats, while Apparitions of the Living attempts the sort of detached objectivity we find in the fiction of Alain Robbe-Grillet. If the characters in Apparitions seem distant to us, their emotions concealed, it is because, while the objects of their perception are often intently scrutinized, the emotional content of those perceptions are inaccessible to us.

Still, Trefry's tentative appeal to a discernible story and at least some degree of recognizable character creation doesn't really prepare us for the radical rejection of such conventional methods (however unorthodox in their application) in Massive. Apparitions of the Living suggested that Trefry might be making an accommodation of sorts with the traditional elements of fiction that aren't really present in Plats, retaining a clear enough distance from mainstream literary fiction while making room for readers with the expectation that character creation and narrative (as well as setting) will be important features of a work of prose fiction, but Massive makes no such concessions to conventional reading habits and goes even farther than Plats in challenging the authority of these practices as the default mode of writing fiction. It is an audacious effort, to be sure, but if it has produced a work that is effectively unreadable for other than the most devoted enthusiasts of Trefry's kind of experimental text-building (few of whom are likely to read the entire book cover to cover, either), one could ask whether attempting to extend the underlying thematic and formal ideas on such a monumental scale serves those ideas most fruitfully. There are, of course, many long, dense novels that succeed through the "art of excess," but Trefry doesn't really seem to be trying to be "artful." Massive becomes massive through the invariable accretion of its textual shards. It grows, but doesn't develop.

However, this is the case only if you expect the text to develop in some perceptible way, either through linear narrative or some other suitable formal arrangement. Trefry deliberately frustrates the reader's expectation of some kind of orderly progression, so perhaps a different sort of approach to such an intimidating text as this would result in a more satisfying experience with it. Perhaps my approach, a kind of unhurried browsing, is what is called for (ultimately I did not think I had failed to read the book carefully because the book doesn't want to be read with the usual sort of care). Or perhaps one could abandon altogether the notion that such a text can be read consecutively and instead choose passages and pages at random, or seek out passages that seem to have associative resonance, leaving the rest. One might repeat such a strategy as often as is necessary to comprehend how the text works, or, indeed, essentially repeat it endlessly. It seems pointless to ask whether either approach leads to a thorough enough reading of Massive, since a thorough reading hardly seems possible--even reading every word in the sequence in which they are presented would ultimately leave behind a maelstrom of verbal noise.

Of course, one could attempt to confront the edifice of words that is Massive through any of these means, but is any such effort more than an improvised expedient to negotiate this one particularly imposing, idiosyncratic work, to avoid being defeated by its apparent determination to remain unfathomable? Perhaps it does challenge us to be less complacent in our assumptions about what it means to "read" a work of fiction, although this is the challenge set by all truly innovative works of experimental fiction, and it might be said that Massive merely poses the challenge in an especially unequivocal way. Perhaps then Trefry wants to persuade us that genuinely "experimental" fiction pushes against the boundaries of what is considered acceptable practice in ways that might be confounding, that should be confounding. The question becomes whether what initially confounds can ultimately be more fully recognized, the boundaries reconfigured.

Not everything about Massive is difficult to assimilate. The typographical rearrangements are not really an innovation and could certainly be further adapted and extended as an aesthetically effective device. (Other novelists have done so.) What is unique to the novel is the way they have been allowed to fragment and divide its verbal substance into discursively incompatible pieces. An intrepid reader can develop strategies for sorting through these pieces, but while such dynamic reading provides a welcome challenge to the indolent reading habits encouraged by much literary fiction, the inclination to devote most of one's attention to a work as extreme in its call for such readerly fortitude as Massive must be restricted to a select few. Massive isn't quite just a curiosity, but it is hard to envisage a book that more resolutely tests the limits of creative incoherence without becoming altogether incoherent.

It might be tempting to dismiss a work like Massive as an experimental fiction so anarchic in spirit that it simply defies ordinary reading. Yet perhaps it might be most compelling as an effort to contest our ordinary conception of what it means to "read a book." If Massive can't really be read as a single unified experience, it may in fact be a book that can only be reread: after attempting Massive for the first time, by whatever method, we try it again, adopting a different method, but of course this will result, in effect, in reading a different version, even a different book. Who knows how many different books we could find in it. I'm not sure I find the subjects treated in Massive sufficiently engaging that would want to this, but it seems an intriguing conceit for an adventurous writer to pursue--many books in one.

It has been 60 years and more since the first writers we have now come to identify as postmodernists began to make their presence known in American literary culture. The term, "postmodern," has been applied narrowly, to classify this particular group of writers, and more broadly, to name an entire "era" that is said to entail a distinctive political and philosophical orientation to knowledge and perception separating it from the "modern" assumptions that preceded it. Over the last 10 to 20 years, its application to literature has been very loose indeed, as a way of characterizing any work of fiction that breaks from convention or seems at all "experimental." In the process, the term, and more generally the concept of innovative fiction, has become less tied to the original set of writers whose work prompted the coining of the term--Coover, Barth, Barthelme, etc.-- and used more simply to separate non-realist works of fiction from mainstream "literary fiction."

This broader assimilation of the postmodern as a discernible tendency in contemporary fiction has, however, entailed, perhaps paradoxically, a diminished awareness of the specific practices and identifiable achievements of the original postmodernists and their immediate successors--a loss of historical context. Thus work by writers of otherwise conventional fiction that departs even modestly from the most conservative expectations of the form is reflexively applauded for its daring and originality, even though whatever strategy or device has prompted such praise is actually at best a modification of a an already existing approach, at times just plain derivative of a move made more persuasively by an earlier, genuinely experimental writer. The notion that unconventional approaches to form or style deserve critical respect (when done well) presently seems to be a common enough assumption in most literary commentary, but this apparently is not accompanied by a recognition of the development of such strategies through the efforts of adventurous writers of the relatively recent past.

Even when some writers are ostensibly challenging conventional forms and language more radically, beyond the enhancements of realism for which many putatively experimental devices tend to be employed, these writers themselves often simply recapitulate strategies devised by writers in the previous generation of postmodernists, or, indeed, essentially reiterate an existing form created by an earlier writer. Frequently enough we can surmise that such borrowing is to some degree a tribute to the precursor, an acknowledgment that the formal strategy invoked is a compelling substitute for conventional strategies. It is not per se an invalid approach, since arguably one of the objectives of experimental fiction might be to make available alternatives to conventional storytelling that other writers might additionally develop, but again such alert distinctions are not likely to be made in a literary-media culture that discounts historical perspective and is impatient with nuanced judgments--if more adventurous fiction manages to attract any attention at all.

Although occasionally I come across a review of a new work of adventurous fiction that draws my interest, most of the time I become aware of potentially interesting adventurous/experimental books when I am offered review copies by authors, author's agent, publicist, or publisher. This is how I came to read Ben Segal's Tunnels (published by Scism Press), a work whose experimental intentions are immediately revealed when first looking inside, where we find on each page a grid of squares (nine, in rows of 3), each containing a snippet of prose, rather than a continuous prose text. A second book by an author with whom I was previously unfamiliar, Fictions, by Ashley Honeysett, did in fact become known to me through a review, in an online journal known for its focus on independent presses. This work announces in its title that it is likely to be unconventional, but one has to read it for a while before recognizing the sort of alternative strategy it is pursuing. If it announces its "experimental" intent less obviously than Tunnels, it serves just as readily to illustrate a dilemma adventurous writers can face when attempting to escape the constraints imposed by the accepted formal conventions of literary fiction.

Segal's formal device locates his book among those works generally categorized as prose fiction but that attempt to redirect the reader's attention away from "prose" as traditionally defined and toward a more expansive conception of "text" as something that exploits the material features "book" and "printed page." This approach can be seen in such works as William Gass's Willie Master's Lonesome Wife (1971), as well as, most audaciously, Raymond Federman's Double or Nothing and Take It or Leave It (both 1976), but the most direct expression of the goals animating the approach can be found in Federman's essay, "Surfiction--Four Propositions in the Form of an Introduction," the first entry in Surfiction: Fiction Now and Tomorrow, which Federman edited and published in 1975. The future of fiction, Federman maintains, will reject "the traditional, conventional, fixed, and boring method of reading a book" linearly and consecutively in favor of "innovations in the writing itself--in the typography and topology of [the] writing." These innovations should replace "grammatical syntax with 'paginal' syntax that grants to the reader a new "freedom" that will "give the reader an element of choice (active choice) in the ordering of the discourse and the discovery of its meaning." 

Although this is not the only kind of innovation inwhat Federman calls "surfiction"--which covers writers such as Beckett, Borges, and Calvino, as well as American postmodernists such as Barth, Barthelme, and Sukenick--it is most conspicuous in the experiments of Federman's own early fiction (as anyone who has even dipped into Double or Nothing or Take It or Leave It, their "texts" roaming the page in endless configurations and unruly fonts, knows) and is arguably the most radical of his four "propositions." The implicit appeal to visual effects in the notion of "paginal syntax" was exploited further by such successors as Steve Tomasula and Mark Danielewski (Tomasula more effectively), and various other "illuminated" novels incorporate visual elements as well. Tunnels could be said to feature a prominent visual device in its use of the grid whose divisions govern the page, although its uniform appearance on each page eventually becomes less noticeable in and of itself as a purely visual object of attention. Instead, this novel follows Federman's proposal by giving the reader a role in assembling the text, literally a "choice in the ordering of the discourse."

The novel does not offer a single narrative but rather a succession of narratives, often using the same character names but occurring at different times, although all of them have a common setting, in, or around, or associated with a complex of tunnels somewhere in the California desert. The grids thus themselves represent a metaphorical version of the tunnels, which the reader is invited to navigate according to his/her own inclination: "There is no 'correct' order of reading," we are told in a brief preface, and we are advised to approach the text in a way that "treats the space of the book as something to be explored rather than exhaustively or systematically read." The reader's discovery of the work's "topology," to again invoke Federman, finds the "space" of reading to be as meandering as the tunnels the characters inhabit, the intent being, presumably, to collapse the distinction between the "content" the novel presents and its form as thoroughly as possible, but also to assert the space of the page itself as the medium of fiction, not the organization of language into compelling prose per se.

The strategy animating Tunnels is probably closer to the method employed by Julio Cortazar in his novel Hopscotch than to the experiments in typography and illustration in Federman or Tomasula. It asserts a certain aleatoric procedure into the discursive organization of the novel, so that the reader is allowed to create a narrative structure of his/her own. For such a strategy to work, the narrative (in this case, multiple interlocking narratives) should, it would seem, have some intrinsic interest (if not necessarily the sort of interest usually attributed to traditional stories). Unfortunately the truncated narratives in Tunnels, no matter how one might order them, are not long enough to be compelling in themselves, nor are the characters given the sort of development that might make them a consistent source of the reader's concern, while the language in most of the narrative fragments distributed in the squares is predominately functional and expository, advancing the briefly  unfolding and often crisscrossing storylines without much stylistic embellishment. This leaves the governing formal mechanism and its appeal to active reading as the dominant object of the reader's attention, and the novel struggles to sustain that attention.

Eventually this narrowing of the reading experience threatens to make the novel's structural device seem too much like a gimmick rather than an attempt to adapt and extend an experimental approach to freshly conceived purposes. I believe that Segal's ambition is indeed to extend and not merely to repeat already existing strategies for challenging conventional thinking about fiction, but the realization of the strategy in Tunnels, given the length and the constricted focus of the novel does leave the reader (this reader, at least) with the impression that the "freedom" granted to order the discourse leads mostly to a repetition of a formal conceit carried out more audaciously and propounded more cogently by various predecessors. Certainly, even an effort to break convention that comes up short on originality but is clearly enough sincere is a welcome alternative to the usual run of literary fiction that settles for the currently approved practices or sacrifices aesthetic complexity in the name of "saying something." Still, if an objective of adventurous, experimental fiction is to extend the formal potential of fiction itself beyond its current confines into yet unmapped spaces of aesthetic possibility, Tunnels unfortunately doesn't quite venture that far.

Something similar could be said of Honeysett's Fictions. In this case, the writer offers a version of metafiction, literally fiction about a writer writing fiction--as it turns out, writing the book we are reading. It is tempting to regard the book also as a memoir of sorts, since the narrator does indeed seem to be the author, not a separately named "character" who is a thinly disguised version of her, but the narrative so insistently focuses on the effort to write stories that the author's identity as living person collapses into her role as writer and the distinction between life and work becomes irrelevant as well. However much we learn about the various issues in the author's life (especially the problems experienced by her sister), the emphasis is finally on the process of storytelling, understood as the struggle of one writer to produce stories that can be published and meet with the approval of readers. While most of those stories about which we are told or allowed to sample do not seem particularly experimental, the chronicle of her progress in becoming a successful writer does finally result in a book that evokes one of the most identifiable experimental strategies in American fiction of the 1960s and 70s.

But Fictions is no Lost in the Funhouse or Universal Baseball Association. The book echoes the approach modeled in such classic works of metafiction, but its ambitions are much more modest. It isn't attempting to challenge preconceptions of the required transparency of fictional narrative--but it couldn't, since that challenge was issued decades ago and has been regularly renewed in the interim--but is appropriating the gestures associated with that challenge in order to suggest the metafictional, while also endeavoring to smooth the edges of self-reflexivity as an unconventional device so it might blend into something closer to autofiction. This latter mode could actually be taken as the offspring of metafiction, but at the core of most autofiction is a mistaken assumption about the intention behind the work of such writers as Barth or Coover, or at least about the presumed message readers should take from their work.

The self-reflexivity of metafiction deliberately disrupted the inherent presumption that in approaching a work of fiction the  reader will suspend disbelief and accept the artificial reality invoked by the work for the duration of the reading experience. It made the reader aware of the artifice, as well as the implicit presence of the writer in creating it. The autofictionists for the most part seem to have interpreted this acknowledgment of the writer behind the text not as the first step in granting fiction a greater freedom in formal arrangement beyond the requirements of traditional narrative, but as a move made to focus more attention on the writer as the ultimate subject of the work. Thus autofiction's emphasis on the author's life as source of interest, often examined in great detail. While this approach often does call into question the distinction between fiction and life, it does this by playing coy with details that may indeed be untransformed autobiography but presenting them in a work still  labeled "fiction." It has become memoir for writers who would rather forego the stricter conventions of that form. 

I would still call Fictions metafiction rather than autofiction, but, while the book is not without interest and does not lack craft, the craft is applied to help forge an alternate path to realism, with just enough roaming into the discursive underbrush along the way to complicate the journey. The book reminds us occasionally of the more adventurous route once followed by its more experimental forerunners, but ultimately doesn't really want to go there. In this way, the innovations of metafiction really have become more established, available to a writer like Honeysett to achieve goals different from those that motivated the original innovators. Fictions is a lively enough account of one writer's perseverance in achieving artistic success, but its rebellion against conventional narrative is muted, evoking an avant-garde practice only as a way of being more punctilious in depicting the protagonist's concrete circumstances. Similarly, Tunnels enlists a disruptive strategy because, paradoxically, it helps to bring a kind of mimetic authenticity to the depiction of both character and setting.

As someone who tries to keep up with the the publication of new experimental fiction, I would observe that a majority of the works that appear are something like these two books, adapting existing techniques and approaches associated with postmodern or experimental fiction either for purposes that turn out to be surprisingly conventional or that simply repeat what has come before. There are certainly writers who authentically try to extend the boundaries limiting what "experimental" might mean, writers like Gabriel Blackwell, Christian TeBordo, or Evan Dara, whose formal and stylistic challenges to both conventional and pseudo-adventurous fiction are both credible and refreshing. But while these writers have their fervent admirers (me, for one), they are also writers without a high profile in mainstream literary culture. Perhaps this is the way it should be, but previous innovative writers such as John Barth and Donald Barthelme did arguably change literary culture, for however fleeting a time. Literary culture at present may just be impermeable to this kind of change. Literature itself may have to cling to the margins, if it survives at all.

The Fictional Self

Sheila Heti is known as a writer who seems to blur the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction in the three novels that brought her to prominence: How Should a Person Be? (2012), Motherhood (2018), and Pure Colour (2022). This strategy underpins the mode that has commonly come to be known  "autofiction," and of the writers associated with it, Heti is arguably the exemplary figure. Yet while the term itself is now pervasive in discussions of fiction that at one time might simply have been called "autobiographical," Heti's novels don't altogether seem autobiographical if we expect such fiction to not merely borrow various details from the author’s life but to provide a credible depiction of a character’s actions and circumstances that we could imagine also derives from the author's life--in other words, we expect an autobiographical fiction to be essentially realistic. Heti's novels don't really meet this expectation.

The first two certainly seem to meet the initial criterion, as the characters are preoccupied with issues that Heti has verified were also her own concerns. (In How Should a Person Be?, the character is even named "Sheila," although we still could (and should) question how absolute is the connection between author and character). In both novels, form is loosened up considerably in an apparent effort to accommodate the protagonists' ruminative way of thinking, and emphasize the drift of their experiences as they ponder the ramifications of the questions they are asking and the answers they seek. But in each novel there is a kind of willful naivete or a kind of deliberate ingenuousness shared by the protagonists that makes these characters more caricature than lifelike representation--not quite surreal, but exaggerated versions of a woman seeking to discover the key to becoming an authentic self or sort through the benefits and risks of motherhood. This seems deliberate, not a deficiency of craft.

If anything, Pure Colour departs even more obviously from the protocols of realism, veering into outright fantasy--at one point in the novel both the protagonist and her deceased father find themselves trapped inside the leaves of a tree! This novel may draw on the author's youthful experiences--in particular Heti's relationship with her own father--but they are thoroughly transformed into fiction, indeed a patently artificial kind of fiction. But if Pure Colour is more overt in its divergence from reality, all three of these novels strike me as pretty unmistakably fictions, however much the critical response to them emphasized the "auto" qualities, thus establishing them as among the integral works in the category of autofiction, a category that has grown to encompass practically any work of fiction that leaves the impression it originates in the author's life circumstances. At some point it becomes difficult to see how any work of ostensible fiction doesn't somehow derive from the writer's experiences in some way, but since no other trend or movement in current fiction has arisen to capture critics' fancy, "autofiction" has expanded sufficiently to become the defining literary mode of the early twenty-first century. 

Alphabetical Diaries (2024) would seem to take autofiction away from fiction altogether into pure personal confession. Literally a selection from Heti's diaries over a ten-year period, the book actually turns out to be less directly personal in its effect and more artificial in its form than the three previous novels. It seems to present more personal revelations than the novels, but these revelations ultimately seem instead attached to a fictional character the diaries have created rather than to Sheila Heti, the putative author of the book, whose method of constructing the book has rendered her youthful self in a discontinuous, fragmented way that decreases identification of that self with the autobiographical Heti and refocuses our attention on those patterns, repetitions, and mannerisms we more commonly track in our apprehension of invented characters. One suspects that Heti herself experiences a certain distance from this version of herself recorded in the diaries, and the randomly ordered method with which the diary entries have been assembled contributes to a kind of distance between reader and protagonist that most memoir writers likely would not seek to create.

Instead of presenting the diary in the normally expected chronological order (or perhaps some thematic adaptation of chronology or narrative), Heti has arranged them alphabetically according to the first letter of each sentence. This eliminates ordinary coherence, but the technique provides an alternative sort of coherence based, again, on repetition and the appearance of patterns that might not be as readily perceptible in a conventionally published journal. Some words are lengthily repeated--the sentences beginning with "I" and "We," for example, occur for multiple pages in a row--and certain names as well are not only repeated serially but reoccur frequently throughout the book. ("Lars" seems to reoccur the most.) At other times the juxtaposed entries are humorous in their unexpected resonances, either through some unintentional connection or in some cases what seems to be directly contradictory statements. ("The book feels arid and empty to me now, like a shriveled arm that can't raise itself to shake your hand, a withered arm and hand. The book is beautiful and practically perfect.") As a whole, the entries don't always seem to express a unified personality: partly this is the effect of mixing and matching utterances composed at different times (at a relatively formative stage of developing a personality), but such variety in sensibility surely also means to suggest that a human identify isn't so easily integrated.

Thus while the choice to reconfigure the diary according to a pre-set scheme initially does seem random, the experience of reading Alphabetical Diaries conveys the strong impression of deliberation and design. Where How Should a Person Be or Motherhood seem casually organized, without overarching structure, Alphabetical Diaries is all structure Form in those two novels threatens to undermine the feel of "life";  this book really only exists because of its form. Not only is it doubtful we would have that much interest in Heti's diaries if they were published "straight" (she has herself said in an interview that she would have never considered publishing them this way), aside from the salacious details provided about her sex life, the "content" of Alphabetical Diaries really has minimal interest. Witnessing a writer anguishing over her romantic relationships or worrying about the progress of her work neither contributes much to our understanding of the progress of love, nor are we given enough detail about what worries her about the work (what she is working on is always just referred to as "the book") for our appreciation of Heti's literary achievement to be enhanced. The significance of Alphabetical Diaries lies entirely in its status as an unorthodox (and arguably innovative) exercise in form.

Heti previously enlisted chance as a compositional method in Motherhood, in which the narrator/protagonist flips a coin in a form of divination to get answers about the pressing questions she is asking about herself and her life. But here the strategy doesn't provide the novel itself with its organizing principle but assists the protagonist in her process of self-examination, otherwise offered as a more or less conventional first-person account. It acts to reinforce the protagonist's uncertainties and ambivalence, contributing in this case to the unity of characterization--the protagonist is defined by her doubts and her prolonged inability to finally resolve the dilemma she believes she faces. The question-and-answer sessions with the coins (or whatever metaphysical presence it is that speaks through the coins) make concrete the novel's questioning of the expectations society places on women (and often enough women place on themselves, as the protagonist increasingly discovers) that is the ultimate unifying element in Motherhood, although this larger thematic exploration requires a plausibly consistent--in this case consistent in regarding her questions as important--protagonist character exploring her conflicted feelings.

It is surely not the accuracy of the answers she gets in response to the coin flips (which are only "yes" or "no"), but the salience of the questions she poses that help this protagonist (and us) to judge the wisdom of her ultimate decision. Nevertheless, one suspects that Heti wasn't entirely confined to actual coin flips in determining the answers, that she massaged the results somewhat for the occasional surprise or other dramatic effect. Likewise, it seems more than likely that some entries in Alphabetical Diaries were trimmed away or alphabetical order fudged a bit in arranging the contents of the diaries for extra continuity or for humor's sake. Both books involve artifice, even though Motherhood (as well as How Should a Person Be?) ostensibly tries to conceal it while Alphabetical Diaries announces it. Moreover, although Motherhood presents without equivocation as a novel, it pretty clearly mirrors Heti's own experience struggling with the question of motherhood, and for all practical purposes could pass for autobiography. Superficially, at least, Alphabetical Diaries presents as nonfiction, but in its aesthetic order ("aesthetic" partly by design and partly contingent) finally it fulfills the expectations we have of works of fiction as much as, or even more than those of memoir or autobiography, or, indeed, those now associated with autofiction.

In this way, I myself found Alphabetical Diaries more satisfying than any of her previous books, even if in general I don't much care for memoir and don't read writers' diaries. The book refurbishes the concept of "creative non-fiction," although it is almost certainly not what the creators of that label had in mind. I am tempted to say it is not nonfiction at all but in fact a novel, if we understand the distinction between a novel and a work of nonfiction to be less the presence of a made-up story vs. the recording of literal truth and more a question of the attention paid to form and prose style, not just as the means for addressing a subject but for making the reader aware of language as the writer's medium, the ultimate subject of any writing we want to call "literary." However, I recognize that there is nothing inherent to nonfiction that precludes this approach to literary language, so perhaps Alphabetical Diaries could be regarded as that "hybrid" of fiction and nonfiction that does manage to inhabit a space precisely in-between the two modes, justified in claiming admittance to both.

If this is the direction in which "autofiction" has taken Sheila Heti, toward a genuine contestation of the separate domains assigned to fiction and nonfiction, and Alphabetical Diaries stands as its current, albeit provisional, expression (more to come), then I think it is legitimate to consider her an "experimental" writer. "Autofiction," given the presently broad applications of the term, would seem to be at the limits of its utility as a critical tool in explicating a practice in contemporary fiction. It has become so conflated simply with "fiction that draws on the author's real-life experiences" that it is essentially meaningless--the concept has become so capacious that it potentially includes everything that isn't avowedly fantastic. The relative popularity of autofiction (to the extent  "literary fiction" can be popular) is no doubt attributable mainly to its exploitation by publishers as a publishing gimmick, as well as its compatibility with the congruent rise in popularity of creative nonfiction and social media. (These may not be mutually exclusive explanations.) Still, the idea of autofiction might have developed into a weightier endeavor if it had explicitly sought to undermine long-established beliefs about the connections between "life" and literary "art": Isn't fiction always already a reflection of "life?" To what extent is life governed by fictions in the first place? How much does form itself always distort life? Such questions are perhaps implicit in the early works to be designated "autofiction," but most critical discourse about it, at least, has stopped asking them.

Alphabetical Diaries makes me think that Sheila Heti had them in mind when she wrote How Should a Person Be? and Motherhood  and wants to renew them with this latest book. Her interest in employing nonconventional literary devices is clear enough in all of her books, and if she no longer has much interest in producing "autofiction" (if she ever had any), it would be surprising if her subsequent work reverted to workshop narrative strategies or a regressive realism. In a literary culture that has otherwise lost interest in experimental fiction, that would be worth something.

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James Elkins, Weak in Comparison to Dreams (Unnamed Press)

John Madera, Nervosities (Anti-Oedipus Press)

Christina Tudor-Sideri, Schism Blue (Sublunary Editions)

Babak Lakghomi, South (Dundurn Press)

Zombie Zoo

It is hard to say whether Samuel Emmer, the protagonist of James Elkins's Weak in Comparison to Dreams, should be regarded as a "reliable" narrator of his story. On the one hand, there is no reason to believe he is telling us a false story about his experiences as a municipal employee in Guelph, Ontario, assigned to make a series of visits to various zoos to ensure the new Guelph Zoo avoids their problems with neurotic animals, or even that these experiences are being distorted (especially where the narrator's behavior is concerned). Yet we also can't finally be certain that we have perceived this character's true nature, because he may not possess a true nature--the enigma that persists even after we have come to the end of the narrative presented in this novel may just be an artifact of the protagonist's mutable personality.

The novel begins normally enough, the first chapter an apparently conventional first-person narrative, as Samuel recounts one of his zoo visits, although the setting does seem a bit unusual: the city zoo in Tallinn, Estonia. After a brief flashback to the circumstances surrounding his assignment to the Zoo Feasibility Committee and to his first such visit, to the Bronx Zoo, Samuel goes on to relate his encounters in Tallinn with the zookeeper and her assistants, as well as his observations of the conditions in which the animals are kept. As he continues to make these visits (Finland, Germany, Salt Lake City and Knoxville in the United States), his obsession with the animals and their inhumane imprisonment intensifies. This is not conveyed to us directly through internal deliberation but in the narrator's depicted behavior in the narratives of his visit. The narrator not only becomes more strident in his insistence to his hosts that their animals are expressing deep-seated distress, but in doing so he increasingly affects a knowledge and expertise he does not possess. It is not so much that he is trying to be more forceful in his disapproval of the treatment of zoo animals but that in each of his zoo experiences he is becoming a different person.

His metamorphoses in these scenes are aided and abetted by a series of "reports" provided to him by his Guelph laboratory assistants (although one of them is actually a former assistant), papers and case studies ostensibly meant to add to Samuel's knowledge of animal behavior but that are also intended, we discover, to provoke Samuel into noticing that his own behavior, as observed by the assistants, shows some of the same disturbances exhibited by captive zoo animals (repetition -compulsion). The graphical elements included in these reports--charts, tables, drawings--are paralleled by many photographs that appear throughout the text, especially photographs that accompany Samuel's reports of a series of dreams that alternate with his accounts of the zoo visits. At first, the dreams, invoking his childhood in Watkins Glen, New York, seem harmless enough, but eventually they begin to obsessively revolve around fires in woods and mountains. The dreams seem to reinforce Samuel's erratic conduct during his interactions with the zoo personnel to suggest a psychological breakdown, toward which the novel seems to be heading.

But after losing his job in Guelph due to his erratic behavior, Samuel essentially runs away, driving north ("toward the Arctic"), where apparently we leave him. He reappears to us as a much older man, living in northern Ontario but shortly to move to live with daughter. Here Samuel's narration is more lucid and controlled, but still obsessive, except that in this case his obsession is with the music he plays on the piano, most of it written by obscure modern composers whose methods of composition are likewise at times repetitive and compulsive, like both Samuel and the animals he observed many years previous. It it is unclear whether Samuel is himself aware of the correspondence between this music and his own personality traits, but it seems likely that he is, and his incessant playing of the music both continues to manifest the protagonist's obsessive-compulsive behavior and also allows him to express it in a way that brings a degree of satisfaction not evident in the earlier scenes. If compulsive behavior is in part a full immersion in the present, in the here and now (or a way of coping with that immersion), Samuel Emmer seems poised in the present, quietly situated between the turbulent events depicted in his previous narrative and the change that awaits (at the end of the novel, Samuel is preparing to move out of his home).

He has been living in the home for 40 years, but this novel passes over those 40 years in silence. Samuel occasionally alludes to these years, but we never get a fully articulated account of how he spent this large portion of his life (or, for that matter, why this elision is significant.) Such a discontinuity in Samuel's story has the effect of suggesting a discontinuity in the personality of Samuel Emmer, a suggestion that is not fully realized in the depiction of the character in Weak in Comparison to Dreams but becomes more visible as both character trait and formal device in the many documents relating to other volumes in the Samuel Emmer saga that Elkins has made available on his website. This novel is merely one in a series of five that, as we are also told on the website, Elkins has mostly completed but remain unpublished. Our current lack of access to the further context and elaboration these other books would provide ultimately presents the biggest obstacle to a full appreciation of Weak in Comparison to Dreams: the portrayal of Samuel Emmer and his life presumably requires all of the volumes in the series to be complete so that interpretation based solely on this novel is itself incomplete--not just a question of creative ambiguity but a constraining uncertainty. If it is finally a part of a larger whole, surely we do need to comprehend the whole in order to properly comprehend this portion.

Nevertheless, Weak in Comparison to Dreams still provides a rewarding reading experience. Although it is no longer such a novelty to encounter a work of fiction that incorporates photographs or other visual imagery, Elkins integrates them with his verbal text very dexterously, and ultimately text and visuals seem fully complementary, both of them necessary to the story the writer wants to tell, not an exercise in ornamentation. That story is certainly not a conventional one, but its mysteries and surprises are revealed in a skillfully calibrated way that keeps the narrative lively enough that the novel's length does not seem excessive and maintains the oddity in the protagonist's character that justifies its formal indirection. (In addition to the photos, drawings, and diagrams, the novel also includes numerous interpolated documents, as well as several extended fantasias in which Samuel imagines the interplay between his two assistants.) Overall, the novel exhibits laudable ingenuity and manifest intelligence. I hope to hear the other four novels have found their publishers. 

Damaged by Reality

John Madera's collection of stories, Nervosities, is not "experimental" in that it rejects most readers' expectations of form in fiction: Most of the stories feature well-developed characters from whose relatively accessible points of view (both first-person and 3rd-person "free indirect") the events in the stories are related. Although these are not "plot-driven" stories with carefully laid-out scenes contributing to a narrative "arc," they are indeed stories; things happen to and through the characters, and these things have dramatic significance, especially in the conclusions to many of the stories. What is dramatized serves the stories' thematic purposes, which in most cases are relatively apparent, although they are not insistently accented, instead realized through setting and character interaction.

But all of these elements are mediated through Madera's dynamic style, which does take the stories out of the ordinary, marking them as separate from conventional "literary fiction." At its most adventurous, this style seems a kind of untamed amalgam of Gary Lutz and Thomas Bernhard: 

Here is my brain: a swollen sewage grate after rainfall--inkbled newprint, leafy bits, had-it twigs, mucosal drift bunging up the holes. Listing in my mind different things that fall (like petals, leaves, and pinecones; like acorns, berries, and other fruit; samaras, and seed pods; like shushing rain and silent snow; like sleet and hail, pellets, a perpetually whisked beaded curtain, clattering up the ground; like massy meteorites mussing up the mud) was, perhaps, superfluous; and thinking about how human beings (who are, in one sense, natural objects themselves, subject to all the causal laws of the physical world), if dropped from a height, will fall at a rate of thirty-two feet per second per second, until the rate of their fall reaches terminal velocity, was not an adequate replacement for the pernicious idea of the so-called great fall of man; but these thoughts, of falling things, while perhaps so much belly lint-picking, kept me from thinking about other things I should have been thinking about but did not want to think about. . . . ("Bees Build Perfect Hexagons with Their Spit")

More controlled than Bernhard's headlong expository monologues, less obsessively focused on surprising verbal devices than Lutz (although evoking each of these strategies), Madera's style isn't simply the vehicle for relating character and event, and doesn't serve as the kind of verbal decoration that often passes for "good writing." Language in most of these stories doesn't serve their conventional elements at all but instead makes manifest something like the reverse: plot, character, setting are a function of the use of language, its particular qualities invoking the illusions of plot or character in a particular way. This is actually true of all works of fiction, but Madera's stories are most unconventional in their rejection of the usual attempts to conceal the artifice of language, to make language transparent to the needs of narrative.

The book's first few stories are rather more verbally constrained than some of the later stories, which suggests a process of discovering a more audacious prose style, although these stories still do not rely on familiar sorts of characters or ordinary situations. Indeed, "Some Varieties of Being and Other Non Sequiturs" and "Notes Toward the Recovery of Desiderata." the first two stories, incorporate uncommon settings (not to mention story titles), the first featuring a man who has moved to an Indian city on the Ganges, where apparently he hopes to die, the second recounting the story of a Cuban girl who becomes a participant in the Mariel boatlift, a notorious mass emigration to the U.S. Both stories introduce a background of political turmoil, hints of which also recur in later stories but never really become a primary focus of the book's concerns. "Some Varieties of Being" does present us with a character whose general type--alienated both from his circumstances and from himself--recurs in later stories and whose predicament more nearly illustrates a dominant theme in the book ("Nervosities" seems a coinage particularly applicable to these characters.)

Although many of the characters in Nervosities are dissatisfied with their lives (some more consciously than others), two stories ("Anatomy of a Ruined Wingspan" and "An Incommodious Vehicle") feature a protagonist who has essentially given up on conventional social existence, drifting without a fixed abode or much desire for remunerative work. In each case the character accepts temporary lodging with friends, but the events in the stories really only reinforce the protagonists' social estrangement, although in the first the character does strike up a friendship of sorts with a local homeless man, with whom at the story's conclusion he shares a convivial home-cooked meal. In some stories there are indications by story's end that the protagonist has come to a decision that might alter his/her circumstances (a man abandons his "dingy apartment," clearly an emblem for the dinginess of his life, a woman finally ends things with the boyfriend she clearly doesn't love), but in others no such decision seems possible. (In "Nature Under Constraint and Vexed," a man suffers a ruptured appendix that is going to kill him.) The characters in Nervosities inhabit an American culture that is hostile to their well-being and for which they have little affinity.

Perhaps the grimmest story in the book is "To Have Done with the Division of Moving Bodies," featuring a man, an Iraq War veteran, who has just killed his girlfriend’s dog in a fit of rage against the girlfriend for breaking up with him. Although the story circles back to depict how the man (called simply "the killer") was affected by his experiences in Iraq (three deployments) and his difficulties in adjusting to life back home with the girlfriend, it nevertheless doesn't hesitate in showing the merciless brutality of the man's action. The story both maintains a clinical distance from the compromised protagonist (partly by never giving him a name) and takes us far enough into the man's mind that he doesn't become merely a brute, his behavior entirely unaccountable. There is no sentimentality in Nervosities: the stories concern characters who are damaged by reality, but they don't make excuses for the characters. They just register the damage in Madera's kinetically alert language.

Although these stories are by no means formally conservative (several feature unconventional formal devices), for the most part all of them could really be called works of a particularly disabused kind of realism, depicting a mostly broken culture. However, this realism is itself a route on the way to style, not vice-versa. Through reminding us that the reimagining of reality through the devices of language is the essence of literary art, Madera's stories both heighten our impression of the disenchanted lives they portray and challenge our passive reading habits.

The Shape of His Departure

Many readers of Christina Tudor-Sideri's Schism Blue would likely find it initially to be somewhat static and abstract, perhaps even obscure. The two figures who will be the novel's characters--the only characters--are rather indistinct at first, and where such qualities as their appearance or their manner of speaking are concerned, they remain indistinct throughout. There is no story of any conventional kind, except for what could loosely be called the story of the main character recollecting (and recreating) her now dead lover, Few concrete events aside from this recollection are related in present narrative time (it could  be said that part of the main character's motivation is to, in effect, annul narrative time altogether), although eventually we are presented with brief episodes of more concrete activity occurring in the past. The novel seems to be set nowhere in particular, but wherever it is it is cold, and it seems to snow quite a lot.

These formal features are reinforced in the novel's style, which is highly metaphorical but doesn't provide a lot of close figurative description, the language more philosophical and rhetorical than lyrical:

    Between them, the night, its shadows, ambivalent as to whom to protect, him or her; the night that cannot tear itself asunder, the night that cannot offer itself to both of them; the night, its shadows in disarray, from her steps to his hesitations and back again, from the idea, no from the essence of a god, the god of this painting in reverse, this painting that shows her leaving when it was, in fact, that reality took the shape of his departure; from this essence of a god to the rest of the world, in throes, to the world immersed in petty passions and ebbing desires and folding of the senses.

This language is employed to disclose the efforts of the main character, who is a writer, to not merely remember her lover, who was a painter, but to in effect keep him alive in her continuing acts of imagination. It might be said that the novel as whole comprises this character's attempt to meld past and present through a kind of perpetual visionary projection.

Thus, while Schism Blue never does develop the drama or narrative movement of the kind readers might expect, it does acquire its own sort of fascination as a contemplative metafiction that ruminates on the process of fiction-making--or on the process of fiction-making as it unfolds within the consciousness of its main character. This character is not relating her experience in her own voice, so it as if the larger narrative voice observes these cerebral acts of creation, although it is more like this voice reports on the character's awareness as she creates, while the actual creation--the fictional character that is the lover, and the specifics of his actions (his "story")--remains unavailable to us, tucked inside the writer's desk. The "narrative" offered by the novel, is indeed the story of the storytelling, without access to the story told.

Because of this odd narrative structure (a narrative that is a supplement to another narrative that is hidden), the pleasures to be found in Blue Schism are realized in individual passages of writing rather than the architectural whole to which they nominally belong. In an extended reverie in which she summons the lover by thinking about the image of a red house (presumably an image in one of his paintings), the main character reflects: 

     A beautiful echoing, this memory now for assembling all that she has gone to assemble; a house amidst spruces; a house he made for her; a house on the beach; a house, emergent, on the highest of crests, in the deepest of caves, a house from the hands of a painter, from the mind of a writer, from a beautiful creator of tiny red houses.

     She is able to apprehend the nature of this red house. And that is happiness. That too is paradise. She is able to situate this house inside the human space of the mind. She is able to create correlation and contain absence and presence and coming-into-being inside of its redness. She is able to carry this house.

The novel is best at offering this sort of insight into the aesthetic transformation of experience, expressed metaphorically and rhapsodically, ultimately making such transformation what the novel is actually "about," acting as both the object of its discourse and the engine of that discourse. Schism Blue pushes against the tyranny of the conventions of plot, character, and setting as strongly as any novel I've read, even though I wouldn't really call it a work of experimental fiction. It is more like a prose poem than a formal or stylistic experiment.

Still, I wouldn't call Schism Blue "poetic" as that term is usually applied in reference to works of fiction. Its metaphorical language is used not as lyrical embellishment but as a formal pattern that  brings a unity to the novel that usually comes from plot. The novel does depict characters, even if they are less explicitly delineated than in most novels. And if the setting is also mostly nonspecific, it actually figures into the living memory the protagonist is attempting to create by serving as evocative imagery. This novel definitely blurs strict boundaries between fiction and poetry, but it works most provocatively as an unorthodox work of fiction.

No doubt some readers would find it too unorthodox, too dependent on its elaborate prose, providing too few of the usual signposts by which we navigate most works of fiction. For those who absolutely require those signposts in order not to lose their way, perhaps Schism Blue would prove too perilous. For those willing to get lost once in a while but trusting that the work itself will ultimately guide them back, the effort is fully worth the risk.

Gone South

On the surface, Babak Lakghomi's South takes on the characteristic features of conventional allegory. Predominantly emphasizing narrative, it tells the story of a quasi-innocent protagonist (innocent in his understanding of the true dangers lurking in the world he inhabits) who undertakes a journey (in this case, to the "south") that, should he successfully complete it, will bring him good fortune (since the protagonist is a writer, the reward will be publication that will presumably bring more financial stability and help heal his troubled marriage). The novel's allegorical framework is reinforced by the cast of characters and the way they are portrayed: in the protagonist's first-person account, only his wife is given a proper name (Tara), while he is himself referred to simply as "B." All of the other characters are identified by their relationship to B. and their function in his story--"the Editor," "the Publisher," "the Assistant Cook,"-- or are described only vaguely--"the man with the deflated face." Finally, the novel's pared-back style de-emphasizes extended sensory description or other lyrical flourishes and focuses our attention resolutely on what happens, even when what is happening seems hallucinatory or surreal.

Ultimately we indeed might read South as broadly allegorical, a story about one man's confrontation with a reality more precarious than he had imagined, but it in fact winds up undermining the fundamental mechanism of allegorical narrative. A classic allegory is a narrative that proceeds on dual levels: the manifest, literal level on which the directly depicted events take place, and an impalpable, symbolic level of secondary, augmented meaning to which the first level alludes, but does not articulate. In this sort of allegory (as in, say, Pilgrim's Progress or some of the short stories of Hawthorne), that secondary level is charged with specific, relatively fixed meaning, although such meaning must be filtered through a reader's act of interpretation. But in South, the meaning is finally indeterminate, especially to the protagonist whose experience the narrative relates.

B. is a mostly unsuccessful writer whose most recent effort, an "essay about the extinction of painted storks," has failed to  be published, although he has also written a book about his father that is being considered by the Publisher. As the novel begins, he has been given an assignment by the Editor to visit an oil rig in the South and report on labor unrest reputed to be occurring there. B. is not entirely sure why he has been given the assignment (and by the end of the novel, we're not sure, either), and when he arrives at the rig, he discovers that although the powers that be have been informed of his task and are prepared to allow him access, no one, including the workers supposedly threatening to strike, welcomes his presence. He receives no cooperation, except from his bunkmate, the \Assistant Cook, a veteran rig worker who provides him witb mostly general information about the Company, owners of the rig, and about the history of the rig's operation. He is also unable to communicate directly with anyone outside the rig, compelled to instead write brief notes to Tara and the Editor that are then relayed by the Secretary through Company email. 

Gradually B.'s situation degrades from mere non-cooperation to more actively sinister actions taken against him, presumably at the behest of a white-haired man with whom B. meets several times and who seems to be the man in charge (at least on the rig). B. is held in increasing isolation, and seems also to be administered certain mind-numbing and mind-altering drugs. Most likely, B.'s increasing paranoia is an effect of these drugs, although it certainly seems to be the case that someone in the power structure is definitely after him--but by this time B. has also become an unavoidably unreliable narrator, so it becomes all but impossible for us to come to any definitive conclusion about what is actually happening. Eventually B. is able to escape the rig with the help of a woman he has managed to befriend, although it turns out she has also been an agent of the Company. Whether her assistance in enabling B to swim from the rig to a nearby island is a sincere gesture of kindness to B. or is still part of her collaboration with the Company is something neither B. nor we can decide, but B. does finally manage to get back home (to the City), where we next find him being tended by Tara.

B.'s experiences on the oil rig are prefaced by his initial account of driving to the south, in which he stops to witness a ceremony performed by locals, apparently an exorcism of wind spirits. Being haunted by the wind becomes a recurring motif  in the novel, broaching the possibility that B.'s dilemma might involve such a haunting, a fate that might, as well, have afflicted his father, a poet and activist who disappeared when B. was a small boy. (Excerpts from the father's dream journal are provided at intervals during B's narration.) The man with the white hair strongly suggests that his interest in B. is as much an interest in his father's activity as in B.'s own, which further suggests that the line between the Company and the government is thin indeed. Exactly what B.'s father might have done to warrant the government's concern remains unspecified (it is suggested that among his reputed offences could have been that he was a homosexual), and it is additionally unclear whether its interest in B. himself extends beyond the information he might provide about the father.

Perhaps the offence committed by both B. and his father is simply that they are writers, naturally and therefore dangerously inquisitive. To the extent that the novel does point us toward some sort of unified allegorical meaning, this might be it: the writer's indulgence of curiosity and imagination is always a threat to the reigning powers.. Yet even this interpretation is not unambiguously supported by B.'s narrative. B., while still mostly a sympathetic character, does not always show a great sense of purpose or determination: his commitment to writing seems hesitant, and he hardly seems a stalwart defender of artistic freedom or a seeker of the truth.  Even at the novel's conclusion, when he does seem prepared to persist in writing about what he has seen, his life (not to mention his memory) has been sufficiently impaired that the reader must wonder how successful he will be. But we may also end up feeling even more disturbed about a world in which even such a tentative truth-teller as B. is considered subversive.

What is communicated most forcefully in the story of B.'s journey to the south is how elusive meaning can be, how fragile our grasp of the truth. If it is becoming clearer that we in the putatively civilized world are not invulnerable to the dissolution of democratic norms and long-held assumptions, South provides a bracing glimpse at what living in a world in which arbitrary authority prevails is like.

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Reviewed in this issue:

Dave Fitzgerald, Troll (Whiskey Tit)

Matt Bucher, The Belan Deck (Sideshow Media Group)

Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture (Black Cat)

You, Asshole

There are no doubt fictional protagonists more reprehensible than the main character of Dave Fitzgerald's Troll (Humbert Humbert comes to mind), but most of these do not necessarily consider themselves morally blameworthy--they are often self-deceived or simply blind to their own shortcomings. The unnamed protagonist of Troll (not quite the narrator) knows very well that he is an impossible jerk; being an asshole is, in fact, at the very core of his identity, the condition to which he relentlessly aspires in order to give his life purpose. Although occasionally we get fleeting glimpses of the better person he might have been (but probably can no longer be), his role in the novel is to perpetually demonstrate his lack of concern for others or, if he does momentarily try to reassert some latent dignity, to inevitably revert to a fundamental boorishness he can't suppress, 

This strategy of character development is a fairly radical move at a time when "likability" in characters has been elevated to an inviolable principle among readers (and too many writers) of fiction, even more so in a novel of more than 500 pages in which the protagonist is really the only important character. Fitzgerald should at least be given credit for chutzpah in this effort, but in fact the very audacity of his extended exposition of objectionable behavior is itself compelling and gives the novel its own kind of narrative drama ("will he ever wise up?). For those who value fiction that unsettles expectations of the form rather than reinforces the reader's self-contented comfort, a novel like Troll provokes us to reflect on the relationship between reader and character in fiction: can we hold the character in contempt and still enjoy the writer's way of creating the character? We would not likely want to interact with the protagonist of Troll in real life, but a novel is artifice, an illusion summoned through language, and to judge such a character by degrees of "likability" seems an unnecessarily restrictive perspective on the value of a work of fiction.

Often a novel featuring a morally dubious or otherwise unsavory character confronts us directly with this character through the use of first-person narration. (Again Lolita comes to mind, or Celine's Journey to the End of the Night.) Simple proximity to the character through extended, intimate acquaintance with the narrative voice can deceive us into overlooking the character's more deplorable qualities or to seize on those better qualities we think we perceive beneath the surface of the character's literal actions. We are in effect tricked into feeling some affinity with the character, perhaps to later learn the depth of our gullibility. Fitzgerald denies himself the use of this trick in favor of what seems an even more brazen one: Troll directly implicates us in the actions of its protagonist by adopting second-person narration. This presumably would imply that we should restrain our impulse to despise the narrator because we too might share some of his human flaws. Except that such an interpretation can't really encompass passages such as this: 

Your attention to hygiene is close to laughable. You bathe only when you've accumulated a noticeable filth, deodorize only when you can actually smell yourself, and brush your teeth only when they start to hurt (a task which reliably makes your ill-defined bicep sore before you reach your back molars). Your razor makes but cameo appearances, usually after your beard has already overgrown your neck and invaded the softer allopatrics of your chest hair. . . .

This still seems to be the representation of a particular person, so particular that surely most readers would find it difficult to regard the character as a kind of Everyman figure close enough to themselves that they could be included as his shadowy surrogate simply through being addressed as "you." The better account of this novel's point of view would take it as a kind of internally split perspective: The protagonist addresses himself in the second person, perhaps to avoid fully claiming the behavior related, as would happen with a first-person narration--perhaps it is the protagonist-as narrator's only way of maintaining his moral scruples in the face of the evidence he presents of moral degradation. While some of the protagonist's errors--most conspicuously his immersion in the worst excesses of online culture (thus the most immediate derivation of the novel's title) and his slackerly wallowing in the mindless comforts of pop culture--are certainly shared widely enough by some in the protagonist's generational cohort, satire of our current cultural follies, although present, is not the novel's exclusive ambition. Its protagonist is finally not a cautionary figure only.

Is the online troll purely a product of the ubiquity of online culture, a creature summoned through the simultaneous visibility and anonymity it allows? Were these creatures always already out there, waiting for this opportunity to show themselves? Or has the internet in its assorted varieties simply created them ex nihilo? In some ways the protagonist of Troll is a quintessential troll, trollish online and off-, but while his behavior finds its specific expression in the forms promulgated by the wired world, surely it is not simply the product of those forms. Online culture has given him the opportunity to postpone adult responsibility, to waste whatever writing talent he might possess on a clickbait factory called GRUNDL, where he composes the lists of top ten this and top then that of the sort that blights online discourse, and to inhabit porn and dating sites where he might indulge his libidinal inclinations without ever much encountering actual women in person (when he does, the encounters work out terribly, especially for the women).

It seems unlikely that this character would have turned out to be an accomplished writer, or even a well-functioning grownup, if the internet hadn't screwed him up. We might say that Troll shows us exactly how current electronic media warps vulnerable personalities, or how easily it can do that,  but at its core the novel is the story of a failed writer and would-be intellectual with poor social skills who really doesn't even seem to get much pleasure out of his self-indulgent profligacy. He might seem to belong to the line of modern antihero protagonists, except that there's really nothing "roguish" about his actions. He does stay true to his antisocial disaffection, but this is because finally he can't resist giving in to his worst impulses. Even after he apparently does come to a final reckoning with the fatuity of his life at the end of a long essay he writes as a farewell to his readers at GRUNDL, he can't avoid further perpetrating an entirely gratuitous offense against public decorum that nearly gets him killed.

The quality of thought and style on display in this farewell essay (the longest but not the only sample of the protagonist's writing incorporated into the narrative) suggest that the protagonist is capable of sustained analysis and not without writing skills. Indeed, the writing throughout Troll (which is wholly consonant with what we find in this essay, again suggesting the authors are one and the same) is fluent but colloquial and often pungent, and is finally the main reason why this long novel about an unpleasant character continues to reward our attention. It is part of the protagonist's dysfunction that he devotes his critical efforts to evanescent pop cultural distractions such as the tv show, Friends, but the accomplishment of Troll is to make this dysfunction artistically functional.

Glimpses and Asides

Is it possible for a writer to emulate an innovative technique developed by an important precursor, or is that technique necessarily sui generis, its attempted repetition by the follower a contradiction of the purpose of experimental fiction? At what point might this gesture go beyond mere imitation and become instead a legitimate expression of influence that in some way advances the literary experiment introduced by the predecessor? When is it simply derivative? 

These questions likely present themselves to anyone reading Matt Bucher's The Belan Deck who comes to recognize (probably early on) the formal echoes of the fiction of David Markson, particularly the series of late novels that have come to be called The Notecard Quartet, in Bucher's novella. Beginning with Reader's Block (1996), Markson developed and refined a collage method that dispensed with plot, setting, and character (except for the implied character composing and arranging the discursive fragments), instead juxtaposing an assortment of short observations, quotes, and notations of facts, most related to art, artists, writers, and writing, that impressionistically convey a latent "story" about the narrator, variously called "Reader," "Writer," and "Novelist," as a kind of "Every Artist" figure pondering the conditions attending his art. Along with Markson's earlier Wittgenstein's Mistress, these books taken together arguably challenge the conventional definition of "novel" more radically than any other work of fiction by an American author, without finally escaping the definitional boundaries entirely. Our conception of what a novel might be is inevitably altered after reading them.

The Belan Deck is similarly composed of disconnected snippets of prose, although the disconnection is more a function of shifts in the narrator's awareness than the deliberate discontinuities imposed by Markson's method. Bucher's narrator is an identifiable character waiting in an airport to catch a flight out of San Francisco. He works for a tech company, and his most pressing current project is to produce a set of power point slides (the "deck") for his boss, the titular Belan. As he waits, he ponders his situation--he is vaguely dissatisfied with his job, and does not share his boss's enthusiasm for the development of AI technology. The prose fragments presented to us could not really be strictly described as the flow of thought, however. When occasionally the narrator suddenly interjects a kind of factoid--"A year after JFK's assassination, Canada named a 14,000-foot peak in Kluane National Park after him: Mount Kennedy. It had never been climbed"--it is difficult to take this as actually a representation of a thought--a part of the "stream." Surely the narrator is not carefully composing these passages in his head, and there is no indication that he might be writing them down.

It is this halfway status between the depiction of thought process and fully-formed expository prose--although some of the fragments do straightforwardly fulfill the narrative function of moving the story along--that makes Bucher's formal scheme both something more than an outright imitation of Markson and something less than a true extension of Markson's innovative approach to something equally new. Bucher is using the collage method as an alternative to linear narrative, to portray what is essentially a static situation (at least in terms of narrative "action") so that the focus of attention may be on the narrator's ruminations rather than on what happens  during his layover in the airport. This is a perfectly legitimate strategy, and The Belan Deck is surely no routine rendition of "psychological realism." It shares with Markson the impulse to controvert the default association of "novel" with "story" and to focus the reader's attention not on the accoutrements of narrative but on language itself as the fundamental medium of fiction. In these ways Bucher's novella is manifestly a welcome alternative to the prevailing norms of most current literary fiction.

Still, the novella's effort to present its protagonist thinking makes what he is thinking about assume greater importance in maintaining the reader's interest. Mostly he thinks about work, but the work of course is also currently a subject of great concern among not just the tech community but also writers, artists, and academics, who worry that artificial intelligence applications threaten the integrity of intellectual life. Bucher's narrator shares this worry, although he never directly articulates a comprehensive position against the development of AI. His cumulative portrait of his boss, Belan, which is presented in the glimpses and asides Bucher's strategy affords us, suggests he is a relatively familiar sort of tech lord, interested in the technology to the extent it brings in profit but otherwise disengaged from the practical effects it might come to produce. While the narrator is not entirely preoccupied with his work for Belan, this episode in the airport clearly enough has the narrator taking stock of his circumstances, which gives The Belan Deck a thematic focus that is not far removed from what we might find in a more conventional novel featuring a similar sort of protagonist.

The collage method of course precedes Markson's innovative use of it, and it is perfectly well-suited to narratives that preserve an underlying unity of character, setting, or even of plot while still maintaining the surface fragmentation collage allows. If Bucher seems mainly to be influenced by Markson's version, this is mostly through the similar intermixing of discourse about the nature of art and the travails of artists. But Markson is really interested in performing a rendition of this discourse for its own sake, as an exercise in formal experiment. Bucher in effect pays homage to this previous innovation, but otherwise uses it for purposes that are more aesthetically restrained. There's nothing inherently wrong or misguided about this move. In The Belan Deck it results in a consistently engaging short book. Bucher doesn't merely imitate Markson, although neither does he push against many boundaries that Markson hadn't already breached.

A Lecture is About to Begin

A brief "prologue" in Martin Riker's The Guest Lecture, informs us that the entire scene of the novel takes place in "a dark hotel room somewhere in middle America," where a man, woman, and child lie on a "single king-sized bed." The woman is awake, and "inside her head, things are busy." Indeed: "A lecture is about to begin." 

It would seem that we are being prepared to find out what is going on "inside" the protagonist's head, to encounter her in the process of thinking. And literally there is no physical action depicted in the novel outside of this character's ruminations both about the lecture she is scheduled to deliver the following morning and about the course her life has taken that has brought her to this particular moment. But we do not experience what amounts to an existential crisis the protagonist--Abby, an economics professor--is enduring as the processing of thought but instead as a fully articulated and dramatized account of the circumstances of her life, along with numerous passages in which she, for example, explicates the economic theories that have preoccupied her career. While Abby's story is not related as a chronologically continuous narrative (it develops associatively, in a way that is consistent with the movement of thought), most readers would likely find it a fairly recognizable sort of episodic first-person narrative.

Riker's purpose, then, is not to represent the operations of human thought, its "flow." Few novels, in fact, actually do manage to capture the act of thinking, at least in any consistent or sustained way. The mental phenomenon we call "thought" is, arguably, only partially verbal, and doesn't always occur in full-phrased sentences. Some writers have of course attempted to produce a version of this unprocessed cerebration in prose--most famously in the "stream of consciousness" technique whereby thought is approximated through discontinuous and unpunctuated language--but the success of this technique in leaving an impression of greater realism by introducing an internal perspective on narrated events led to the conflation of a literary strategy with the actual reality of thought. "Stream of consciousness" is unavoidably artifice, no less a device for creating specifically literary effects than any other figuration of language. Nevertheless, what was at first a modernist innovation in storytelling influenced many subsequent writers (and critics) to value psychological realism above all, leading to the widespread believe that the capacity to go inside human consciousness is one of the distinctive attributes of fiction among all other narrative arts.

Fiction may well be able to create the illusion of representing a character's mental state, but then creating illusion is one of the defining presumptions of fiction to begin with, so making the reader accept that a story's devices are providing access to "thought" is finally just one sort of illusion the writer hopes to produce. Moreover, The Guest Lecture demonstrates, it seems to me, that human thought is of value to writers for its content, not the form in which it might be expressed. To get the latter "right," even if it were possible to do so, might count as an achievement of documentary realism, but this in itself is not an achievement of literary art. Such art could indeed be made from a character's internal reflections and ruminations, but not simply by recording them. And in The Guest Lecture Martin Riker does not endeavor to record the thoughts of his insomniac protagonist, despite presenting us with a narrative situation in which thinking is precisely what she seems to be doing. The novel gives form to this thinking, but it is the aesthetic form that converts the raw materials of experience into the artfulness of literature.

Most immediately on Abby's mind is the lecture on John Meynard Keynes she has been invited to give the following morning, but this impending event seems to have brought her to a crossroads of sorts, an occasion that unavoidably compels her to contemplate where she has arrived, in both her personal and professional life, and to determine what comes next. The most immediately troubling problem she faces is that she has recently been denied tenure at her university and is uncertain if she still has--or wants--an academic career. We learn the circumstances of her plight: although she is a specialist on the life and thought of Keynes, instead of writing a conventional academic tome on her subject she wrote a more personal, general-interest book based on an essay she published online that attracted a wider audience. Not surprisingly, the senior (mostly male) faculty in her department did not regard this effort altogether kindly and declared her work unworthy of tenure. The speech she will be giving is for a popular organization, not an academic one, so that it looms, perhaps, as a portent of whatever scholarly relevance she will manage to retain following on from this debacle.

Keynes plays a larger role in the realization of Abby's story than as just the subject of her intellectual interests. The novel's formal conceit mirrors the mnemonic device that Abby uses to memorize her speech: associating each of the parts of the speech with a room in her house and then visiting each of the rooms in the appropriate order. Thus does Abby take us on a tour of her home, but accompanying her on the tour is none other than the ghost of John Meynard Keynes, who acts also as a kind of advisor to Abby as she tries to sort through not just her feelings about Keynes's legacy but also her general crisis of confidence in herself. In keeping with Abby's generally favorable view of Keynes as a historical figure, the ghostly version of him seems a rather jolly nice fellow who counsels Abby in her winter of discontent--but of course he is a projection of Abby's distressed imagination, so he is presumably fulfilling the role for which he has been invoked in the first place. As an economist, Abby is most interested in Keynes's optimistic speculations about economic prosperity in the future, perhaps reflecting her need to believe in her own future.

Abby needs a good dead of encouragement, as her sense of self-worth, while understandably damaged by her recent setback, seems always to have been fragile. Working in a male-dominated field, she has further isolated herself professionally by concentrating on Keynes as rhetorician rather than the hard date of economics (or even the economic theories for which Keynes is most remembered). She earnestly wants to belong to the world of serious intellectual discourse, but although her deliberations on various ideas (scattered throughout the novel) show that she is entirely able to hold her own in this world, she also has chosen an approach that emphasizes the direct incorporation of personal experience in academic writing. Abby struggles with these self-created dilemmas: she knows that her intellectual project is valid, but she also berates herself for failing to get official endorsement of her efforts. 

Abby's mingling of the personal and the analytical is reflected in the sleepless reverie producing the account we are reading. She interrupts her rehearsal of the presentation she is to give, and her exchanges with Keynes, to recall important episodes from her past, those which played an important role in determining her direction. Many of these episodes end in disappointment or loss, for which predictably enough Abby often blames herself. She seems relatively content in her marriage to her sleeping husband, Ed, although she confesses that part of Ed's appeal is that he is reflexively supportive of her, which in her insecurity she badly needs. These very insecurities, however, make Abby not just the victim of an unwelcoming system but  a recognizably imperfect character with whom we can all feel a vicarious sympathy. Her struggle to reconcile herself to her situation is really the only plot in the novel, but we do find ourselves compelled by her predicament: will she ultimately overcome her self-doubts and be able to move on?

It might still be accurate to say that the source of our interest in the novel's protagonist lies in the depth of her thinking, although this is not conveyed through direct exposure to it as depicted thought. Instead the author exteriorizes the substance of that thought in the form he has devised and the at times anxious but always articulate voice he has given the character. He has, in short, transformed thinking into writing. It is not the sort of writing that attempts to replicate the manner of thinking itself but instead shapes and organizes it into a manifest aesthetic order. If this gives us a first-person narrator speaking cogently to us about her life experiences, her narrative has more of the characteristics of a lucid dream than of waking reality, while at other times it blurs the distinction between narration and critical exegesis. In its way, perhaps it models the hybrid blend of imagination and intelligence that Abby will likely continue to practice in her writing as part of her new professional identity.

Corona/Samizdat is a (more or less) one-man non-profit literary press founded and operated by the American expatriate writer, Rick Harsch. Physically located in Izola, Slovenia, the press publishes both new unconventional, formally adventurous fiction and out-of-print works by neglected writers--in the press's own formulation, "old works dismissed too early" (website here). This issue is dedicated to recent releases from Corona, although the first review is of a novel by Harsch himself, which at one point was going to be available on Corona but was subsequently picked up and published in 2022 by Zerogram Press, another publisher of nonmainstream fiction (and operated by Jim Gauer, author of Novel Explosives).

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Although Corona has existed only since 2020, it has already published a significant number of books, so of course the selection here is just that, a selection. I hope to include reviews of other Corona releases in subsequent issues of Unbeaten Paths.

One Tongue, Many Way

Rick Harsch's The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas is a large-scale, digressive novel that is also quite formally meticulous. It could be called a historical saga, and it has some of the more leisurely pace we might expect of such a narrative, although the novel doesn't allow us to settle in for an "immersive" reading, since it doesn't develop through the forward momentum of a linear story. Still, once we grasp that the various characters are part of a unified narrative, being related to us in a disunified manner, the novel still has the appeal of a family saga that reflects the movement of history, although in this case that movement probably can't be called "progress". 

But if Eddie Vegas is in part a historical novel, it is of the sort closer to Pynchon's V or Coover's The Public Burning, not a realistic narrative that attempts first of all to invoke "what it was like" at some point in history. to "recreate" history. Instead it defamiliarizes and dislocates the historical, making it sufficiently strange that we might recognize it as essentially alien territory rather than simply reflecting a fixed and already known order. In the work of these writers, history becomes a fictional world that is itself "real," not the attempted facsimile--with a few added flourishes of fancy--of the real world as it was once. Paradoxically, we wind up learning a great deal about history from such fiction--its carefully concealed secrets, not its acknowledged facts--even though achieving accuracy of historical detail is not an essential goal, as it seems to be in much conventional historical fiction,

The novel tells the multigenerational story of the Gravel family--although the original scion of the family is an early 19th century "mountain man" and fur trapper, Hector Robitaille, and the title character is also a Gravel, who has changed his name for reasons the novel eventually gets to. In the novel's initial chapters we meet Eddie Vegas (real name, Tom Gravel) and his son, Donnie. Soon enough, we are returned to the first episode in the family chronicle, Hector's encounter with a bear. It takes a while for the story focused on Donnie, who becomes friendly with a wealthy young man named Drake, to clarify its direction, but the story of Hector being mauled by the  bear ("Old Ephraim"), surviving the attack, and crawling his way back to civilization (literally) compels attention on its own, simultaneously a riveting adventure narrative and a hilarious sendup of the American frontier ethos. This sets the tone for the rest of the novel, which often renders scenes of brutality and horror in a manner that is also caustically funny.

As we move back and forth from the exploits of Donnie and Drake to the development of the family line initiated by Hector and a Native American woman after he has recovered from his traumatic odyssey in the woods, both the structural and the thematic connections become more apparent, although the parallels and echoes that emerge are subtle and suggestive rather than insistent (Hector making his way through the wilds of the western American mountains vs. the story of Drake's father traversing the jungles of Vietnam, the father himself, a corrupt security specialist paired with Fitzpacker, the lawless frontier lawman and gold hunter who menaces both Hector and the first Tom Gravel). Card playing and gambling pervade the novel (Donnie and Drake meet during a game of poker), and it seems likely that the deck of cards plays a role in the the arrangement and development of episodes (the author, who makes appearances throughout the novel, dealing the cards). The author's presence, through the third-person narrator attempting to relate this unwieldy narrative, is also palpable in the novel's unconstrained, idiosyncratic language.

Perhaps what holds together the various episodes of the narrative most firmly is the continuity of its setting in the intermountain region of the western United States, especially Nevada but also including parts of California, Oregon, and Idaho. This is the general area in which we find Hector Robitaille at the commencement of the family saga, and the novel concludes with the last Tom Gravel and Donnie fleeing from Las Vegas through Death Valley. Throughout the novel the region is implacably present, the characters attempting to accommodate themselves to its extremes of topography and climate, when they aren't participating in the depletion of its resources. The latter is most directly evoked in the episodes taking place during the Gold Rush, including one depicting the mining of a canyon in Nevada, in which Fitzpacker and the first Tom Gravel have a showdown of sorts. Fitzpacker is surely the precursor to those interests that will later exploit the West for its minerals and other natural assets, the exploitation of nature having an even more horrific culmination in the development of the atomic bomb (with which a later Gravel is involved). The Gravel story's culminating scenes in Las Vegas show us the final tawdry embodiment of the values and attitudes underlying the "settlement" of the West: the casual corruption, the lurking violence, the aimless sprawl.

There are portions of the novel that break away from the predominant regional setting, episodes that introduce us to and track the activities of Donnie and Drake and Donnie's father. (Donnie knows himself as Donnie Garvin, as his father, who is in fact the last Tom Gravel, had changed his named to Garvin after a term spent in prison as a younger man.) Donnie and Drake are initially presented to us as rather aimless young men, but Drake, whose father we learn is the shady owner of Blackguard, a private security company currently involved in the Iraq War, invites Donnie to accompany him on a trip to Belgium, where the two of them more or less continue their aimless ways, but also meet a barkeeper named Setif. They refer to her by the derogatory name "Picasso Tits," but eventually both young men fall in love with Setif. Their idyll in Belgium ends when Drake learns that both of his parents have been assassinated, and he and Donnie fly to Las Vegas (without Setif, who nevertheless joins them later).

Donnie has become estranged from his father, who has managed to establish himself as, of all things, a creative writing professor, married to a celebrity poet whom Tom Garvin/Gravel/Eddie Vegas has come to despise. This situation allows Harsch to interject into the novel some fairly broad academic satire--Tom gets into some trouble, abetted by the wife, for reputed acts of insensitivity toward his students--before Gravel leaves for Las Vegas in search of his son, who he has learned is there with Drake. While The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas might loosely be called satirical, the episodes devoted to the politics and personalities of academe seem more narrowly targeted (no doubt reflecting Harsch's time at the Iowa Writer's Workshop) than the mordantly dark humor of the rest of the novel. Among other thinks, it makes Gravel's wife (named "Languideia") a more cartoonish figure--we see little of her other than through Gravel's unfavorable ruminations about her--than Setif, who turns out to be one of the novel's most self-possessed characters and wisely frees herself from entanglement in Drake and Donnie's increasingly turbid affairs by story's end.

The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas has appeal as a demythologized comedy of American degradation, but ultimately this is a novel that makes its greatest impression through its verbal virtuosity. Harsch is a stylist, although in Eddie Vegas, it is a style based in verbal invention rather than through shapely sentences or figurative decoration. Sometimes it is as if Harsch's sentences can't be contained: 

   How horrible to report the return of Hector to the likely mortambulatories of the knuckle walker, a re-descent of a man who, upon determining to descend straight to the river he knew was there and would both nourish hum and lead him to westward succor, stepped north at too brisk a pace, gaining a false sense of strength of mine as well as speed, moving from step to stride to lope to leap to running loping leap from mound to rock to mound to rock to root to stone to mound to depression up root over ditch to mound, all in a a dementium of glee as if the river were but a ghostflight off and not perhaps two dozen miles. . . .

If at times the neologisms and runaway syntax threaten to overwhelm sense, the novel's prose has the effect of carrying the reader along on a dynamic current of language for which literal sense is less important than a certain breathless rhythm (although the story gets told, nevertheless). The reader's immersion in language is further sustained by the frequent use of long lists that conspicuously call attention to the artifice of the novel's narration, also further reinforcing its essentially carnivalesque comic vision (reviews refer to these lists as "Rabelaisian," but Gilbert Sorrentino seems to me a more immediate inspiration). 

Perhaps we might find a convergence between Harsch's accentuation of language as medium and the historical material with which he is working in Eddie Vegas in the vernacular argot spoken by the frontier characters--"Drop the char erall drop ya raht thar, ya English fartpig mother of devilswine!"--which includes an Indian character who is able to communicate with a white man like Hector Robitaille in a polyglot Native/English/French/Spanish he has ingeniously put together from various encounters with the white interlopers: "Moi no belle sauvage, pero damn real grande. One tongue, many way. Ass felt. Beaverspelt," Such strategies mark The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas as a novel of farcical fantasy and ironic invention that nevertheless speaks something that seems like the truth about America.

An Illegal Book Writing Program

I feel confident in asserting that no one who ventures to read America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots: A Diagnostic will be quite prepared for the wild sort of book it is . Of course, this could just as easily be said of a uniquely bad book as of a uniquely good one, but in fact this book is much closer to the latter than the former. It could stake a fair claim to being the most self-reflexive novel ever written, but arguably it also evades the charge commonly made against metafiction that it is too preoccupied with "playing games" by enlisting the strategies of metafiction to dramatize ideas that could hardly be more weighty.

Perhaps calling the devices used by author Phillip Freedenberg (in collaboration with the illustrator Jeff Walton) simply "strategies" belies how radical they often are: The animating conceit of the novel is that its two protagonists--"Phillip Freedenberg" and "Jeff Walton"--are composing a novel--America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots: A Diagnostic--into which they themselves retreat as a way of escaping the tyrannical conditions that have overtaken America, ultimately finding their way to the "unified field" that is a utopia of liberated creativity. This journey is framed as the story of the novel's inspiration, ongoing creation, and ultimate publication with--wait for it--Corona Samizdat Press. "Phillip" writes the novel after he is prompted to order--also wait for it--Rich Harsch's The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas and while he waits for it to arrive. (Slow mail from Slovenia.) Part of the quest for the unified field will find Phillip and Jeff tracking their way through the text--through the sentences, made materially visible--of Eddie Vegas, although first they have to make their way to it after wandering through the words of every other story ever told.

Given this outrageously inverted premise--the novel is literally about itself--it almost seems superfluous to note the other, more recognizable metafictional flourishes, although there are plenty of these. The text of the novel is not merely supplemented by Walton's evocative illustrations, but also comes to us in changing fonts and multifarious arrangements, reminiscent of Raymond Federman or Mark Danielewski. Phillip and Jeff frequently confer about the novel as they are creating it, making us hyperaware of the artifice supporting the book we are reading--indeed, the book is artifice all the way down. The narrator (mostly Phillip, although occasionally other characters are allowed to take over to tell us a story) is not at all circumspect in concealing the artifice of the novel's own language, either: much of it is taken up with faux-philosophical and quasi-scientific jargon strung together in chains that seem to make surface sense yet soon enough reveal themselves to be something close to gibberish (often very funny gibberish, however). 

But the formal and stylistic antics are related to the novel's "content" in a way that goes beyond simply its unrelieved self-reflexivity. Phillip and Jeff are engaged in an exercise of unfettered imagination as a way of resisting the increasing tyranny of the American government--the novel seems clearly enough to extrapolate from the depredations of the Trump presidency--which has increased its surveillance of American citizens to the point of actually intruding on their cognitive processes to induce a state of blissful narcoticization.  A complete "consciousness replacement" is offered so that the burdens of real life might be removed entirely. This is the next step beyond what is already available through the "NeuroFORM Screen Sync 6 face screen," which diverts attention and occupies everyone's time with trivialities so they remain compliant to the wishes of  President RALPH and his administration, a conceit which takes the threat to human awareness posed by digital technology to its logical extreme. Phillip and Jeff have been targeted as enemies of the administration through their unauthorized activities with language, and are actively pursued after they begin writing America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots, accused by a government agent of being "antagonistic, subversive agents, conspiring and colluding to perform an illegal word manufacturing program identified as an illegal book writing program."

The "Cult of the Cactus Boots" itself represents both the vehicle for remaining resistance to President RALPH and, once the twin protagonists have completed their quest and been successfully initiated into the cult (along with Rick Harsch), its fulfillment in an alternative state of being in which human beings seek "the enigmatic, eternal creativity." As might be expected, the final arrival at the threshold of the unified field promised through the precepts of the cult is somewhat anticlimactic, the main point being the "creativity" employed in getting there. But while the imagination on display in America and the Cactus Boots is indeed manifest, the iterations and reiterations of the canons of the cactus boots cult eventually become wearing, especially given the novel's considerable length and discursive structure. That the significance of "cactus boots" and "unified field" is mostly rhetorical. without much actual substance, is not really an obstacle to enjoying the immoderate formal machinations as well as the humor that is derived from them. (We might think of these occluded images as verbal MacGuffins in the novel's narrative strategy.) There are times, however, when the humor is drawn out enough that is starts to seem labored.

America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots could be classified as a work practicing the "art of excess" (as elucidated by the critic and literary scholar Tom LeClair in his book of that name), so that the excessiveness of some of its rhetorical turns might seem to be an intrinsic feature of this work. What should be the limits to the excessiveness of an approach deliberately intended to be excessive? At what point does a literary device or verbal performance wear out its welcome, ceasing to be an effective strategy for eliciting laughter or provoking delight and instead becoming tedious, even an excuse for skipping over and ahead? In Cactus Boots, for example, we are offered an initially very funny travesty of the "extreme sports" contest, in the form of "extreme competitive ironing." The goal of the championship match is to iron a series of designated items ("one Peter Pan Blouse," "one Kevin & Howlin Irish Wool Tweed Blazer," etc.), but interposed between the competitor and the successful completion of ironing is a bizarre and byzantine set of limitations and requirements (increasingly byzantine from match to match) the competitor must overcome to be declared champion. At first the preposterous "rules" directing the participants to sing a pair of pop songs while wearing a contraption that houses "eight free-roaming Rabidosa rabida wolf spiders" or begin a competition "positioned standing on top of the center car of the Japan Railway Company SCMaglev magnetic levitation train" are hilariously ludicrous, but during six consecutive recitations of such rules, the humor becomes more difficult to appreciate.

Does this mean I would prefer that Freedenberg and Walton had exercised more editorial discretion in settling on the final form of their massive opus? Not necessarily. If a writer is going to embrace excess for its own sake as an aesthetic principle, perhaps better just to go for it. But some readers no doubt will balk not just at this sort of excess, but also the novel's surface discontinuities, its repetitions and its accumulated oddities (for a while Phillip and Jeff carry around a "Rick Harsch homunculus," who is ultimately united with the full-sized Rich Harsch), so that the audience for America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots: A Diagnostic is likely to be confined to those who (like yours truly—and perhaps most of the readers of this review?) have an ingrained curiosity about emergent varieties of adventurous fiction. I don't know whether Phillip Freedenberg and Jeff Walton would find that prospect disappointing, but certainly their book is not designed for the preferences of most casual readers.

But finally America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots is not just an outrageously unconventional novel concerned with its own coming-into-being, nor a speculative narrative projecting a future society of total surveillance, although it is both of these things. It also seeks to be a story of spiritual renewal, even of utopian transcendence. Whether it plausibly succeeds in the latter goal might, perhaps, be debated (I think not, although I'm not sure how seriously the effort is intended), but we don't have to accept the message that a commitment to "non-dominant text structures" will give us access to "a new world and a new cosmos" to think that the authors' commitment to this particular non-dominant text has provided us a legitimately new kind of reading experience through the sheer force of invention. Taken individually, all of the devices employed by Freedenberg and Walton have a precedent in previous works of innovative fiction, but this novel orchestrates their use in a singular performance of a kind undreamt-of in mainstream literary fiction.

Characters Thinking

On one level, W.D. Clarke's She Sang to Them, She Sang is a relatively simple story of a failed real estate deal, the circumstances of its genesis and its aftermath. A young married couple, Katie and Jason, are enticed into a proposed deal in which they will sell their current home and buy the home of the woman proposing the deal--Jo, a local realtor. Jo assigns an employee, Manny to assist in making the deal happen, although the likelihood that it will is dubious from the start. The deal falls through (partly through Manny's ineptitude, but not entirely), and shortly afterwards Manny is arrested on a fraud charge (not connected to his work on this deal), while Jo suffers a stroke, which apparently leaves her permanently incapacitated. Katie and Jason wind up buying Jo's house, after all.

The goals and motives influencing the behavior of each of these characters, are, of course, much more complicated. The novel is set in Orangefield, outside of Toronto, around the time of the '08 financial crisis. Jo's business is in trouble, her personal life's discouraging, and she's on the outs with her now-grown daughter. Manny has mother issues, and isn't exactly flourishing as a real estate agent. Katie is all aswoon over Jason, even though he doesn't really have a very dynamic personality and isn't a take-charge kind of guy, and it seems pretty obvious, to us if not to Katie, that something's going on between him and Susan, their tenant (the "downstairs girl"). The story is related to us in chapters alternating the perspectives of Katie, Jo, and Manny--Jason remains more of a background presence, as does Susan. 

Even more complicated is the way in which these characters' perspective is conveyed to us. Very generally the novel's narrative point of view is what Henry James called 3rd-person "central consciousness," although these days it is more likely to be identified as the "free indirect" method--the character is not the narrator but the narration is closely inflected with the character's process of thinking and perceiving. We overhear the character's thoughts so that it is what the character makes of events or how events prompt other modes of reflection that are the objects of narrative interest, not the events themselves. In this novel, Clarke doesn't settle merely for one layer of "thought" but digs even deeper into the substrata of consciousness, at times interrupting its "stream" to follow tributary channels:

But yes, and uh-oh, the Kazans out there were now getting into their frickin' Mercedes, they were

     (and ever after this incident he vowed to forswear all drivers of that-now-        loathsome brand, no matter how dearly it cost him professionally

          --that is to say, commercially---

      for this was now a vendetta worthy of his forebears

          --e.g. his grandmother Mariyam, his mother's tormentor and the                                    grandchildren's champion, who never forgave a shopkeeper for shortchanging            her or for selling her anything less than the choicest cuts of meat, the most                  unblemished produce, the etc., etc., etc.--)

and his feet were not only betraying him, their owner. those feet were also betraying the girl here, the renter, and betraying what she might possibly think him, Manny capable of!. . . .

This strategy ultimately converts what has traditionally been called a stream of consciousness into something closer to an excavation of consciousness. Clarke would seem to reject the metaphor of "stream" as an overly simplistic conception of the way introspection occurs, and in She Sang to Them, She Sang represents it as something more shifting and disjointed. This may indeed be a more plausible rendering of human thought in fiction than conventional indirect discourse, but the ambition still seems to be to present an essentially realistic depiction of characters thinking. Further, the novel's approach both seems fully to proceed from the assumption that the representation of characters thinking has manifest aesthetic value and reinforces the commonly held belief that the advantage fiction has over other narrative arts is its capacity to probe human thought.

Clarke does this with skill in She Sang to Them, She Sang, as well as with a sufficiently light touch that the effect of its narrative method is to produce a kind of humor--the novel is essentially a comedy, although a highly ironic sort of comedy--that more or less substitutes for the drama of plot. The discrepancies between the characters' ambitions and the fragilities and frustrations as revealed in their internal deliberations are the real subjects of interest in the novel's portrayal of the shadiness of modern real estate speculation. In Katie's case, they reveal a woman whose upbeat innocence is in fact quite sincere but also begets a naïve gullibility that potentially makes the reader feel not sympathy for her vulnerability but something closer to condescension or even contempt. In other words, Clarke creates some compelling characters through his use of a form of "psychological realism," even though the psychological account of what goes on in their minds may or may not be altogether plausible.

However much the method in this novel does attempt to register a greater complexity in the processes of human awareness than is usually portrayed in exercises of free indirect discourse, surely the emergence of thought as enacted in passages such as the one quoted above is not actually the way the conscious mind works. Just making an inventory of my own thought process in ordinary circumstances, I cannot recall any instances in which it unfolded like this. (I don't think my thoughts "unfold" at all.) Of course, W.D. Clarke himself may not believe that his digressive but still rhetorically coherent technique for representing mental activity is actually an accurate reproduction, just a useful illusion that signifies thinking but more importantly acts as a unifying device in his multiperspective narrative that otherwise has no strongly linear story.

If She Sang to Them, She Sang doesn't really give us an "authentic" rendering of the human mind in action, no other literary device would be able to, either--perhaps it's best to regard all such efforts at psychological realism to be a search for the serviceable means of suggesting human thought, but not an end in itself. (I don't think Clarke is presenting it as an end in itself.) As such, Clarke's strategy helps give the novel's satire of the casual corruption induced by capitalism as it intersects with middle class aspiration--which no doubt represents its dominant ambition--a greater continuity and cogency, but also works to keep attention on character, so that the satire does not merely disappear into plot or, by the end of the novel, melodrama. What the novel wants to "say" about the decadence of capitalism, while evident enough, does not overshadow an accompanying comedy of psychological confusion that is perhaps even more telling.

Down on the Farm

Although my sampling of the fiction being published by Corona/Samizdat  is limited here to the four works I have included, this fourth novel by Lee D. Thompson, Apastoral, would seem to further confirm that Corona is a press interested in publishing work that challenges the formal and stylistic norms dominating most literary fiction (in English, at least), but also engages with cultural and political themes that are very much of current concern (Cactus Boots most insistently, She Sang to Them, She Sang more quietly). None of these novels are straightforwardly, or even primarily, political works (not even Cactus Boots, which is primarily about its own existence), and the political "content" in each is greatly mediated not just by style and unconventional form but by an essentially comic vision, which is explicitly satirical really only in She Sang to Them, She Sang. 

The humor in Apastoral might be called satirical, except that it is actually something closer to absurdist, and the novel itself might be identified as a kind of speculative or dystopian fiction, a science fiction novel with laughs. "Kafkaesque" would not be an unwarranted label, if Kafka had as one of his major influences The Three Stooges, and the novel's title suggests it was likely conceived in part as a parody of the pastoral genre. All of these elements are relevant in considering the effect of Thompson's novel, which, far from making it unfocused or incoherent, is in fact what makes the novel compelling: ultimately the impression it leaves is that the writer has taken the basic premise--a method of transferring a human brain to an animal body has been devised and is being used as a form of judicial punishment--and let the premise develop as it will rather than forcing it to act as the vehicle for predetermined meaning.

The novel's first-person narrator, called Bones, is a small-time crook who is the victim of one such surgical procedure, his brain removed and implanted in the body of a sheep. He has been transported to a prison farm whether other criminals have been subject to similar transformations into various animal bodies and shipped out as part of a program called "Constock." (Beginning with one Sylvester Moll, a serial killer of children who was the first person to receive the surgical sentence, his brain placed in a pig.) The novel chronicles Bones's attempts to adjust to his new transmogrified state, alternating with the story of the botched robbery attempt by his hapless gang of criminal cronies that resulted in Bones's trial and conviction. Eventually Bones manages to escape from the farm and makes his way back to the city, where he meets up again with an animal rights activist who had previously tried to help him and who now offers him refuge on a farm she has purchased. There we leave Bones to whatever rustic fate awaits him.

Bones is narrating his story, of course, from his present incarnation as a sheep, which immediately complicates our efforts to interpret the story he tells us. Even before we consider the various visions and dreams he increasingly experiences in his sheep-human state, Bones is inherently an unreliable narrator. His memories of the criminal milieu in which he previously resided, of the events leading up to the robbery-gone-wrong and the subsequent application of "justice" in his case, seem oddly free of the effects of the brain transplant--brains need to be "shrunk" to fit the size of the cranium into which they are being loaded--to which he seems to be subject in the episodes chronicling his new life as a sheep. Putting aside questions about how Bones is able to compose his narrative in the first place, since he is, indeed, a sheep, the very idea of a character like Bones implicitly asking to be taken seriously as the narrator of a credible work of fiction is sufficiently preposterous that we should expect the humor to be more broad farce than purposeful mockery.

Regarding the novel as neither satire nor an absurdist comedy but instead a version of a speculative science fiction narrative might help us in interpreting it as the projection of a future dystopia in which technology has continued to advance but its moral intelligence has continued to decline. But again the novel's comic exaggeration makes it hard to really take its projection into the future seriously as a plausible prediction of what might befall us if present tendencies continue on their course. The depiction of the circumstances attending Bones's apprehension, trial, conviction, and sentencing is a very funny lampoon of the attitudes and procedures already latent in the American justice system, but the fatuity on display among supposedly trained professionals (lawyers, therapists) actually clashes with the notion that technologies might also have advanced to the point that brain transplants are possible. Unless we assume that all of the elements in Thompson's story, from the ditzy lawyer who obtained her law degree after a "six-month intensive" and a one-week apprenticeship, to the animal rights organization, PETABBY, long on ideals and short on competence, to the investment of authority in the penal farm to wolves implanted with the brains of prison guards, have been invoked as devices that further the novel's essential buffoonery.

Which is not to say that Apastoral has nothing to communicate about the practices of incarceration or animal rights, the two "issues" to which it most immediately calls attention. But the carceral state is not a direct target: what seems unjust in Bones's case is not the form of punishment per se, but the process by which that punishment is ultimately declared. Bones is in fact innocent of the crime for which he is convicted, but the incompetence in the system in which he is thrust insures that this can never be discovered and that his fate is foreordained. He is imprisoned in the new body into which he is placed, but his actual physical circumstances are, well, pastoral, however threatening they still are from his new animal perspective. (The novel might be taken as a satire of a certain kind of "humanitarian" prison reform rather than imprisonment itself, a reform that in this case only allows society to mete out punishment without confronting the implications of it at all.) Paradoxically, Bones's "incarceration" might ultimately be a blessing, as it seems likely he will find greater happiness on the farm with his sheep girlfriend, Heather, than he ever would in his former life as a small-time crook. (If the wolves don't come after him.)

Thus Apastoral certainly could lead the reader to reflection on the subjects it treats, even though in my view they are subjects that inspire the novel's humor and invention rather than serve as its center of interest. It shares with the other books under review here this joining of conceptually adventurous, verbally resourceful fiction with politically resonant subjects in a way that inevitably raises the question of what the writer is trying to "say." Gilbert Sorrentino proposed that the appropriate way to think of "content" in a literary work was its realization through "something said"--the literary art itself says what it must, not the artist. Novels like Apastoral are mostly content with the something said, but the focus on politically charged topics does cheat a bit by making it more likely that the "said" is heard.

Considering:

1) Mauro Javier Cardenas, Aphasia

2) Thalia Field, Personhood

3) Alta Ifland, The Wife Who Wasn’t

4) Gil Orlovitz, Milkbottle H

5) David Ohle, The Death of a Character

Inside Game

(This review appeared in American Book Review.)

Whether through “stream-of-consciousness” or the less strict adherence to continuous thought of psychological realism, it has become an almost reflexive assumption among many writers and readers that the job of serious fiction is to penetrate the veil of speech and action and reveal the human mind at work. It is often said, in fact (think James Wood), that what separates the art of fiction from all other modern narrative practices is precisely that it is able to “go deep” beneath the surface of ordinary reality and to capture the role of consciousness in processing and shaping that reality, thus enhancing the ostensible story a work of fiction relates with, in effect, an additional story (even the “real” story): an account of the mind attempting to make sense of the world it confronts. But is it really the case that this is therefore the presumed goal that writers of fiction should pursue if they want to fulfill fiction’s artistic mission? Is stream-of-consciousness literary fiction’s consummate achievement?

Reviewers of Mauro Javier Cardenas’s first novel, The Revolutionaries Try Again (2016), as well as his most recent, Aphasia, have referred to his narrative strategy in both as stream-of-consciousness, and it seems an accurate enough characterization. While the term is often used very loosely in describing almost any attempt to suggest “what’s happening” inside the mind of a fictional character, in Cardenas’s case the effort is not just a routine exercise in “free indirect discourse” or the creation of an especially introspective first-person narrator. Each of the novels, most emphatically Aphasia, with its focus on the consciousness of a single character, offers propulsive but meticulous renditions of subjective states of rumination and perception, not always reflecting a habit of strictly linear thinking—indeed, Aphasia really does seem to evoke the “flow” of mental awareness.

The notion that narrative discourse in fiction might be shaped to mimic the human thought process is of course most familiar from the work of the early modernists (perhaps also encompassing Henry James’s emphasis on a “central consciousness”). In its historical context, this strategy can be regarded as part of the broader modernist search for alternatives to the reigning assumptions of realist fiction: Stream-of-consciousness implicitly proposes that reality is to be discovered in its most essential manifestation in the phenomenon of perception, while at the same time in enacts a radical experiment in point of view, effectually  inverting the synoptic vision of the third-person omniscient perspective employed by many 19^th century novelists, in favor of the subjective outlook of the created character’s understanding. This paradigmatic version of the stream-of-consciousness technique, if not the technique itself, has been profoundly influential in the widespread appeal to what is more broadly called “psychological realism” in the years following on high modernism.

Missing from most criticism considering the devices that produce psychological depth is the acknowledgement that the impression of such depth is indeed an illusion created by the writer successfully exploiting artificial devices. It seems highly unlikely that most—if any—emulations of Mind in fiction actually resemble the phenomena of consciousness as understood by psychologists and neuroscientists. What the best psychological realism brings to the treatment of human thinking in fiction is art, the verbal artistry we should expect from novelists and poets, not some special insight into the way the brain works. Unfortunately, the moves required to invoke the illusion of a perceiving mind have become sufficiently routine through repetition that they have come to function more as shorthand than as expressions of literary art, although for this very reason writers who do manifestly bring literary art to the portrayal of a character’s internal state are perhaps all the more noteworthy. Happily, this is precisely what Mauro Javier Cardenas brings to his account of the experience of Aphasia’s harried protagonist, Antonio.

Antonio is a Colombian-American immigrant writer and database manager attempting to manage several ongoing and overlapping dilemmas in his own life. He is a divorced father of two daughters attempting to preserve a relationship with them by living in an apartment in the same building in which they and Antonio’s former wife live. Although he is trying to maintain a civil relationship with the former wife, he is also seeing a number of (mostly younger) women through a “dating service” called Your Sugar Arrangements but hoping to keep this hidden from the wife. Most stressfully, he is doing his best to avoid thinking about his mentally ill sister, who has fled the institution to which Antonio and his mother have confined her and is currently subject to arrest.

These strands, as well as others related to them—scenes of Antonio speaking to other characters, passages in which he considers other literary works he is reading—braid through and around Antonio’s consciousness, combining seamlessly together in continuous passages of unbroken paragraphs consisting of multiple phrases and clauses fused into a single sentence.

God will punish you, my mother would say, the lord said that what you inflict on your mother and father will return to you fivefold, so now you know what awaits you in life, my god what’s going to happen to me, I would say, what will I have to endure later in life, everything magnified through a child’s imagination, of course, if I’d said to my mother, for instance, I am running away from this house because I can’t stand it here anymore because my parents are unjust, and my mother would reply your words will be punished by god because a son or a daughter can’t say this to her parents, and later the night mares I would have my god what’s going to happen to happen to me, what will I have to endure. . . .

The audacity of this strategy is admirable, but more so is the way in which Cardenas is able to achieve a kind of dramatic momentum while also maintaining clarity and recognition for the reader through syntactical linkages and variations. Readers must slow down while negotiating Cardenas’s prose in Aphasia, but this serves the illusionist goal of mimicking the “flow” of Antonio’s active awareness.

Although the effect the story gains could be called realist, the effort to simulate this awareness seems almost as much a kind of convenient camouflage for an exhibition of the prose style in and for itself. The meandering sentences, approaching a conventional end point but refusing it in favor of the next turn of thought or expository element, might seem reminiscent of Thomas Bernhard, or the Garcia Marquez of The Autumn of the Patriarch, or Mathias Enard’s Zone, although Aphasia is more concentrated in its scope, less rhetorical than a Bernhardian “rant” and less dependent on narrative than Garcia Marquez and Enard (even the nested, retrospective narrative of Zone). Discursive as they are, Cardenas’s long sentences in a sense seem more crafted, more deliberately composed to signify the presence of consciousness. If writers such as Marquez and Bernhard are among the writers who first challenged not just conventional narrative form or the protocols of realism but the structural and syntactical expectations of fictional discourse itself, Cardenas is able to adapt their practice to a self-sufficient verbal strategy that uses this disrupted discourse as an available aesthetic resource.

What is most admirable about Aphasia is the way in which he does in fact execute this strategy not just for the purpose of depicting his protagonist’s stream of consciousness but to realize what turns out to be a fully developed and conventionally recognizable crisis narrative in which the protagonist faces the various causes of his crisis and in the end manages, if not a solution to all of his problems, at least a reprieve. Along the way, much is revealed about Antonio and his past, contributing to the creation of a “well-rounded” character, as at the same time we are provided an account of his present actions (principally his interactions with his former wife and daughters, but also his “arrangements” with the women from the dating app) and his ultimate reunion with his sister, who is again being treated for her mental illness. In addition to these channels of Antonio’s direct experience, the separate chapters focused on Antonio’s reading of various works of fiction (presumably as a substitute for his own current inability to write much himself) are integrated into the novel’s narrative structure, incorporated into Antonio’s ongoing reckoning with his circumstances.

Cardenas’s endeavor to create the appearance of stream-of-consciousness, then, is not simply carrying out the imperative to provide psychological depth (to “get inside” for its own sake) but is another means of accommodating the breadth of Antonio’s experience, through something other than usual formal and stylistic conventions. In short, Cardenas uses stream-of-consciousness as an aesthetic device, not as a revelation of the human mind at work. The former, I would argue, is what makes Aphasia most worth the reader’s attention, what signals to us an author taking his medium seriously as literary art, not the novelist's putative authority to probe the human mind. Indeed, to the extent that the impression of Antonio’s mind at work is largely created by the writer’s loosely joined, onrushing sentences, Aphasia could be called an exercise in style, albeit one absent the standard sort of decorative lyricism that often passes for style in American fiction.

It is through style that we come to know Antonio, even though the novel is not a first-person narrative. Being a writer, not his routinized job as a data analyst, clearly seems an essential ingredient in his sense of identity, and it is more likely that the novel’s prose is a reflection of Antonio’s own writing than a facsimile of his thought process. Such a presumption is only reinforced by those parts of the book that are not in fact representations of thought but include Antonio’s transcriptions of tapes of his mother speaking, his conversations with former girlfriends, and his reunion with his sister. These sections employ the same elongated sentences as those depicting Antonio’s solitary deliberations, indicating that Aphasia’s focus on the protagonist’s internal state provides a suitable context for Cardenas to effect the sort of prose style he favors, not the subject in service of which a prose style has been fashioned.

Rendering the internal perspective is not finally the most serious task that a work of fiction might undertake. At best it can fool us into believing we have access to a character’s inner self (and by analogy to human inwardness in general). This is not an inconsequential feat, if not the form’s raison d’etre. Even if you think that pulling off such a feat is the preeminent achievement of fiction, however, Aphasia would surely be judged a success in satisfying this goal. But in this case it would hardly suffice in acknowledging either the novel’s ambition or its value to say it is a successful work of psychological realism. Yes, we might say we are provided with a vivid portrayal of Antonio’s state of mind, but that is not really the point. What Cardenas has really done is in a sense to merge style and form so that style actually produces form, a move that is seriously impressive.

On Thalia Field

(This review appeared in Full Stop.)

Among all writers whose work might be cited as experiments in “hybrid” writing, Thalia Field is arguably the most deserving. Her first book, Point and Line (2000), is a more or less indeterminate synthesis of fiction, essay, poetry, and drama, a fusion of genre that becomes only more pronounced in subsequent books, which also add photos and graphic illustration. Her work still seems classifiable as fiction, but to call individual pieces in her collections “stories” or her full-length work Experimental Animals (subtitled “A Reality Fiction”) a “novel” also seems inexact, if not misleading.

Without question Field’s work can also justifiably be described as “experimental,” if we understand “experiment” in fiction to be the testing of limits: How far can the effort to find alternatives to conventional practice while still retaining a place within a form’s ostensible boundaries be taken? Not only does Field challenge conceptions of conventional literary elements such as plot, character, or setting, but as well the linguistic and notational presumptions of writing itself and the customary logic of reading. In Point and Line we find arrangements of words in almost every possible configuration except sentences organized into traditional paragraphs (including one piece presented horizontally across its pages rather than vertically). Incarnate is perhaps the book that most fully crosses over into poetry (many of the reviews discussed it as “prose poetry”), while Ululu (Clown Shrapnel) most explicitly invokes theater — a performance piece that can’t really be performed.

If in these early works the author seems primarily engaged with the exploration of forms, beginning with Bird Lovers, Backyard (2010), Field’s formal variations are more directly put into the service of a single subject, treated with a fairly obvious polemical purpose. However, while all of the pieces in Bird Lover, Backyard evoke the human relationship with animals (especially birds) and often destructive interactions with the natural world, the focus on animal welfare in this book is more restrained and unobtrusive than it would become later, in some cases secondary to other, more portentous concerns, such as the legacy of American nuclear testing in the Pacific Islands in “Crossroads” or the inflated reputation of the naturalist Konrad Lorenz in “A Weedy Sonata,” which focuses on the implications in his scientific work of his documented Nazi sympathies, which have largely been ignored.

Experimental Animals (2016), an examination of the controversies surrounding vivisection in nineteenth century France, of course makes animal welfare the explicit subject, but the ingenuity with which this work is constructed allows it to avoid becoming too heavy-handed, although its sympathies with the anti-vivisectionists are clear enough. Moreover, the novel does not treat its ostensible antagonist, the celebrated French anatomist Claude Bernard, as a cartoon villain. While he is certainly haughty and self-absorbed and seems callous in his treatment of his wife (although we must keep in mind that this impression is created from his wife’s point of view, as her narration is the one completely fictionalized element of the novel’s discourse, the rest being an arranged collocation of historical documents), Bernard is not a wanton torturer of animals but a committed scientist who sincerely believes in the scientific importance of his work. His defense of experimentation on live animals is not the rationalization of a singularly cruel man but represents the collective ethical mindset of scientists (at least 19^th century scientists), which Field subjects to an exacting critique without sentimentality or rhetorical manipulation.

Field’s latest book, Personhood, like Bird Lovers, Backyard a collection of shorter pieces (but like Experimental Animals with some graphical embellishment), is her most accessible, but also most transparently didactic, the two qualities undoubtedly related. The first four stories in the book especially make the thematic emphasis on animal rights unmistakable. Perhaps if we could say that in this book Field has adjusted her hybrid approach more to the formal procedures of the essay, then the polemical weight of these pieces might seem less heavy. But this is not really the case. While three of the selections (“Unseen,” “Liberty/Trees.” and “Glancing Backward”) might be described as poems, the rest, although as anchored in “reality” as Experimental Animals (one piece is an arrangement of transcripts in a legal proceeding), in their artifice and deployment of point of view are best regarded as fiction. The formal dexterity displayed does provide some welcome variation in a book with an otherwise monochrome thematic character, but it is less formally adventurous than either Point and Line or Bird Lover, Backyard.

The didactic tone of the book is set in the first story, “Hi Adam,” a second-person narrative that follows a visitor to an exotic bird sanctuary around the menagerie. Individual birds (such as Adam, who turns out to be female) become the characters in the story, as we are provided with the parrots’ direct speech and much of their backstories (how they came to be in the sanctuary). The appeals to sentiment are quite strong in this piece: we learn of parrots’ complex emotional lives and the damage done to them by living in captivity as a companion to humans — even when they are ostensibly “well-treated.” The second story, “Happy/That You Have the Body (The Mirror Test)” restages the court case concerning Happy the Elephant, whom an animal rights organization has tried to free from captivity in the Bronx Zoo by having her legally declared a person because she is self-aware, having passed the titular mirror test, and is entitled to release via a writ of habeas corpus. The narrator directly declares outright, abstracting from the legal briefs:

Yet doesn’t the very will to autonomous life grant a right not to be deprived of it? Or suffering at the hand of another confer a right to be relieved of it? Don’t inflicted damages give standing, and once standing, doesn’t a form of law evolve along with every animal who stands in the shadow of those laws?

“Turns Before the Curtain” and “True Crime/Nature Fakirs” shift the focus somewhat from animal rights to the insidious influence of human activity on the equilibrium of the natural environment more generally. The former is a kind of meditation on the phenomenon of “invasive species” cast in the form of a theatrical entertainment, although gradually this conceit recedes in favor of a serial recitation of the history of such invasions: tumbleweed, fungi, feral pigs, rabbits. In all of these cases human intervention is the ultimate source of disharmony, making humans the truly “invasive” species. “True Crime/Nature Fakirs” is a variation of sorts on this same theme, in this case taking the form of an absurdist crime story — complete with invitations to the reader to fill in some of the details — about home invasions by wild animals. “Is it possible they still thought they lived here” asks the narrator at one point, highlighting the artificial conception of “home” employed by the human species, one imposed on all other animals to constrict their own natural rights.

Both of these stories surely employ lively and innovative forms, which again gives them an aesthetic interest that could stand apart from the appeal of the subject, but if anything the uniformity of theme we continue to find in Personhood almost makes the aesthetic invention Fields genuinely displays start to pall, as it seems to be employed as a kind of ornamental contrivance meant to serve the theme but otherwise superfluous. The remaining pieces in the book to a degree modify the prevailing subject — although environmental degradation and its malign effect on animals is still the abiding concern — and ultimately Personhood really does little to detract from Thalia Field’s achievements as an innovative writer. But in this book the unorthodox formal devices seem less adventurous, made more “readable” by subordinating them more obviously to the communication of “message.” Certainly writers can find their way to innovative forms because a subject has in effect compelled unconventional treatment. However, here Field’s already well-established formal virtuosity at times seems imposed on a favored topic.

Which is not to deny that some of the pieces in the book work considerably, even powerfully, well within the more limited play of form and content Field has allowed in Personhood. “Liberty/Trees” is a hybrid Whitmanesque poem/reality fiction organized around the image of the famous Boston “liberty tree,” but it also ranges more widely to relate the story of liberty trees more generally (several other revolutionary-era communities planted trees in commemoration of the Boston tree), and riff on the fate of trees over the course of American history. Most notably, we are given the details behind the spread of the Dutch Elm Disease, which wiped out so many elm trees across the world, as well as the longer-term effects on the environment this blight helped to produce. Neither is the association of trees with liberty dropped from the story, and it concludes in bitter irony with a consideration of a lynching tree:

Men surround, again, a tree, to lose their wits

                                       to drink their brains, to lean against the trunk

to drag a boy over, and beat a man [two names, to cross

out, to map]

                          a mob enjoys a picnic on the designated day

                                        yelling, lemme see! at others

                           laughing. . . .

Perhaps “The Health of My Stream or The Most Pathetic Fallacy” best represents both the strengths and weaknesses of Personhood — strengths if you think that works of literature can bring descriptive and narrative specificity to a cause in a way that advances that cause beyond sloganeering, weaknesses if you note that in this piece Field’s formal idiosyncrasies have been smoothed out almost entirely, leaving only a fairly ordinary mode of fragmented narrative. The narrator of the story owns a property through which a stream flows. The narrator uses the stream for irrigation during the dry season, creating a luxurious, plant-strewn riverbank. Soon enough the narrator begins to observe the fish in the stream, deciding to intervene in the water current to create a more flourishing environment for them. This does not work out well, and the narrator learns about the well-being of streams and the dangers of human meddling with nature. The depiction of the ecology of river environments is vivid and engrossing, but, especially in a collection that takes up the same theme more or less repetitively, “The Health of My Stream” is also entirely predictable.

Experimental fiction (or poetry) ought to be predictable only in being unpredictable. Most of Thalia Field’s books have indeed been characterized by their aesthetic ingenuity and variety. She is, in fact a writer about whom it is justified to say that her work so blurs the distinction between forms and genres that it could be regarded simply as an integrated practice of “writing.” But Personhood suggests that her audacious verbal imagination has started to become merely the available instrument for promulgating an increasingly familiar message.

Uncorrected

(This review appeared as a standalone review at The Reading Experience.)

Although we are perhaps invited to regard as the novel's protagonist the first character introduced to us in Alta Ifland's The Wife Who Wasn't--Sammy, a Santa Barbara widower whose decision to import a mail-order bride from Moldova does indirectly set off the chain of events the novel chronicles--the character soon enough blends into a much larger cast of characters who in effect vie for our attention in a series of short chapters focusing on one or, in many cases, a group of them. Indeed, Sammy turns out to be one of the less significant characters in the novel, beyond his initial decision to obtain a foreign wife, although the wife herself certainly does assume a central part in the narrative burlesque that ensues when she attempts to adjust to her new surroundings among her upscale California-style bohemian neighbors--and they unsuccessfully try to accommodate to her unexpected presence.

Yet it would not be accurate, either, to say that the wife, Tania, instead takes on the role of protagonist, the novel's title notwithstanding. Not only does she essentially disappear in the novel's final section--her ultimate fate revealed rather anticlimactically--but she really acts more as a catalyst of the increasingly absurd events that transpire than a a lead character in her own right. The introduction of both Sammy and Tania, however, does work to establish the novel's twinned satirical focus: on the pretensions of the prosperous Santa Barbara set and on the still essentially peasant ways of the Moldovans (represented by additional members of Tania's family), during the time depicted in the novel (early 1990s) only recently released from their country's postwar occupation by the Soviet Union. The first section of the novel takes place in Santa Barbara after Tania's arrival, while the second moves to Moldova for a fuller portrait of Tania's family--her mother, brother, and daughter Irina (about whose existence Sammy is initially unaware). Eventually both Irina and the brother, Serioja, manage to obtain visas and travel to America as well, causing even more turmoil in Sammy's neighborhood than did Tania by herself (although she causes quite enough on her own).

The absence of a stable center of reader identification ultimately reflects the fluidity of Ifland's treatment of the two groups and their social and cultural assumptions. Because much of the first part of the novel consists of letters Tania writes home to her mother, we are probably inclined at first to think the force of the novel's satire is directed primarily at Sammy and his cohort, with Tania's more clear-eyed perspective revealing their affectations and artificially induced attitudes. ("I've been asking around about where and how to meet other women here, and everybody advised me to go to "yoga." If you want to meet women in California, they say you have to go to yoga.") But while these characters are certainly insufferable enough, Tania and her plebeian family come to seem mercenary and acquisitive in their own boorish way, when they are not, in the case of Serioja, entirely dissolute. If the Americans are made to seem a self-important, joyless lot when set against the earthier ways of the Moldovans, their sojourn in America suggests that the latter have essentially been stripped of their dignity by the existence they were forced to endure under the Soviet occupation.

Thus, while the escalating sense of calamity this clash of cultures produces makes the story consistently compelling, we are left with a cast of characters who are also consistently unlikable, providing the reader not even the sort of fixed perspective from which to appraise the narrative situation afforded by a more conventional approach. In this decentered narrative space, we are left to drift among its various characters, all of whom can seem equally obnoxious. In its way, however, such an effect is invigorating: We are not presented with the usual of sort of corrective satire with its implicit moral instruction critiquing bad behavior; instead, The Wife Who Wasn't highlights a covetous human nature in general, depending for the sustaining of the reader's engagement not an attachment (however tenuous) to a protagonist character through whom we might get our bearings, but the maintenance of the reader's curiosity about how this culture clash will ultimately sort itself out.

Here Ifland's narrative disappoints somewhat. At the novel's conclusion some time has passed, and the Santa Barbara neighborhood is consumed in a conflagration, leaving only Sammy's house standing. Meanwhile, we have lost track of Tania and her daughter, whose reckless behavior finally goes too far and they are in effect forced to flee. We discover, but only through photos now carried around by Serioja, that the two women are in Reno, Irina a stripper and Tania a hostess in a casino. (Serioja himself has returned to Moldova and moved back in with his mother, splitting his time between drinking and mopping the floors in their apartment building.) Although it is perhaps appropriate that most of these characters are treated to something less than a flourishing future, their fates seem rather arbitrarily determined, the story simply halted and the ramifications of the encounter between the unsophisticated and the "advanced," the poor and the prosperous, muted if not obscured.

One of the novel's characters, however, does seem at the narrative's end to be thriving. Maria is a Moldovan icon artist who is first introduced to us as Irina's teacher. (Irina has artistic talent and hopes to profit from it when she reaches America.) After Irina has left to join her mother, Maria takes up with Serioja, ultimately marrying him so she can accompany him when he too embarks for America. Maria, of course, has no intention of returning home with Serioja when he quickly enough wears out his welcome with Sammy and his neighbors, and so she remains in America, almost immediately finding success both in her personal relations with other men and in her art ("her paintings sold so well that, reluctantly, she had to make some changes to her wardrobe in order to appear somewhat presentable at the numerous receptions held in her honor.") Maria resolutely pursues her own interests, but those are dedicated above all to the practice of her art. To the extent this makes her selfish, heedless of others' feelings, it is a selfishness cultivated on behalf of artistic integrity, not personal gain or social standing. Maria prizes her independence, but this is ultimately to ensure the independence of her art. 

Perhaps we are to identify with Maria. It seems likely that Alta Ifland does (although no doubt there is also some satirical commentary on the American commercial art world and its eagerness to embrace "exotic" art without really understanding it). Like Maria, Ifland is an eastern European immigrant (from Romania) attempting to take advantage of the wider exposure America seems to offer the artist. In Ifland's case this also involves writing in what is essentially a third language--after Romanian and French--a challenge she meets quite impressively. Her efforts presumably resist both the temptation to unbridled opportunism exhibited by the likes of Tania and Irina and the self-satisfied, etherealized hedonism in which the faux Bohemians of Santa Barbara indulge themselves. We might regard Maria as someone capable of redeeming the offer of freedom America is supposed to extend without succumbing to the "sacred commerce" (the official philosophy of a cafe at which Tania tries to find a job) such freedom has too commonly become.

In her previous volumes of short fiction, Elegy for a Fabulous World (2009) and Death-in-a-Box (2011), seems to be a writer of lyrical tales or fables (again set both in Europe and in America). The Wife Who Wasn't certainly seems like departure from the earlier mode, not just in its satirical approach but in its greater emphasis on creating realistic characters and stronger reliance on narrative. This does not exactly make it a conventional novel, however. If the characters are realistic, it is in the sense that the their attitudes and behavior, even though they mostly provoke an unfavorable impression of them as social beings, are believable, not that they are the product of an effort to create characters that are "well-rounded" as an end in itself. The narrative is greatly refracted through the episodic alternation of perspective, putting at least as much stress on the actions related in the individual episodes as on the larger narrative progression of which they are a part. Ifland is not telling a story but several stories that also form a narrative whole.

Most of all, Ifland manages to write a satirical novel that is able to elude the usual limitations of satire. It doesn't reduce the conduct it surveys to an exercise in moral theater, and it offers a depiction of its characters' inveterate egocentrism that does not seem exaggerated but is a constitutive part of their orientation toward the world. These characters aren't so much violating social norms as demonstrating in their own way that their lack of empathy and self-restraint is all too normal.

No Apology or Cuteness: On Gil Orlovitz

(Originally appeared in Review of Uncontemporary Fiction)

To even the most well-informed readers of fiction and poetry who reached their age of literary maturity after, say, 1970, Gil Orlovitz is no doubt a mostly obscure, if not totally unknown figure. Orlovitz died in 1973—although he had achieved sufficient obscurity even by then that his body was not actually identified until several months following his passing—after a nearly 30-year career as poet, playwright, screenwriter, and novelist, and while some effort was made in the years just after his death to appreciate and preserve his achievement, in particular through a 1978 special issue of American Poetry Review, in the years since then his books disappeared from sight and his name dropped out from most discussions of postwar American literature.

In addition to pathos there is some irony in Orlovitz’s fading from view, since he became something of a ubiquitous presence in American literary magazines in the 1950s and 60s, although he never really found a place in the most prominent publications, his work generally regarded as overly “difficult” for mainstream tastes. His novels Milkbottle H (1967) and Ice Never F (1970) certainly did little to connect him more firmly to those tastes, as both were conspicuous failures, both commercially and critically, although the critical response was decidedly more positive in the U.K. and Europe, where Orlovitz established a favorable reputation as an innovative successor to the great modernists. Whether these failures significantly contributed to what appears to be a subsequent downward spiral (he had especially invested some hope in the mammoth and ambitious Milkbottle) is somewhat uncertain 50 years later, but by 1973 he was more or less down and out, when he died in what remain rather murky circumstances.

As I look at the whole of Orlovitz’s available work (Tough Poets Press has commendably republished most of the fiction, including the novels, as well as some of the poetry, although much of the latter is still essentially inaccessible after a half century of neglect), it seems to me that the contemporary writer he most closely resembles is Gilbert Sorrentino. Both writers fundamentally were poets, both loosely associated with the poetry of Pound and Williams through the Beats, and both went on to write radically iconoclastic and disruptive fiction, Sorrentino on a more sustained basis and successful enough to maintain a relatively long and productive career. Sorrentino’s fiction is more uninhibitedly comic, ultimately more unruly, than Orlovitz’s, but both Milkbottle H and Ice Never F, like Sorrentino’s novels, are full-on aesthetic deconstructions of novel form, although where Sorrentino reconfigures the form with his own skewed versions, Orlovitz comes in these two works as close to formlessness in fiction as may be possible while still maintaining a connection to the genre.

Both Sorrentino and Orlovitz in their different ways expose “form” in fiction as at best a transitory convenience, a provisional invention always subject to modification and metamorphosis, insisting that the only constant in literary art is the imaginative play of language. Thus it is indeed that fiction has its origin in the poetic impulse, although in Orlovitz’s case this means that his two novels are as idiosyncratic in their verbal manner as his poetry. A newcomer to Orlovitz’s poetry is no doubt likely to identify it as hermetic, or perhaps surreal, but further reading reveals it to be less surreal than radically informal and heterogeneous in its imagery, less self-enclosed than veiled in its personal references, invoking characters and scenes at times parallel with or abstracted from the poet’s direct experience, at others more fully displaced, closer to Orlovitz’s practices as a writer of fiction. While some of Orlovitz’s poetry could appropriately be called “lyrical,” it is a lyricism of strange juxtapositions, colloquial diction, and punning wordplay, not the usual sort of figurative expression.

The most illuminating analysis of Orlovitz’s poetic practice is an essay by Gerald Stern, part of the special section on Orlovitz in the 1978 issue of American Poetry Review. (“Miss Pink at Last: An Appreciation of Gil Orlovitz.”) Stern groups Orlovitz’s poems into three categories—lyrics, sonnets, and satires. To the extent Orlovitz is still remembered as a poet, it is probably first of all for the sonnets, although his most striking use of language is arguably in the satires. (Sterne’s use of this term may be a little too capacious to really encompass all of Orlovitz’s poems outside the lyrics and the sonnets, two categories that themselves have a good deal of overlap.) As Stern himself says, the matter of Orlovitz’s satirical poems arises not from a motivating “idea” but grows “inevitably out of the language”:

As such, there was no satirical “mask”; there was instead the haunted satire-riddled face, or voice, of Gil Orlovitz himself, nothing now standing between him and his subject. I mean myths, yes, “poetic” masks, metaphors, echoes, ditties—because he was a poet—between him and his reader, or among him and his readers, but nothing between him and his subject, no apology or cuteness.

This seems an apt characterization of Orlovitz’s writing (poetry and fiction) in general, not just the explicitly satirical poetry. The poems are indeed strongly engaged with their subjects—often framed as seemingly direct personal experiences, but even those poems employing a persona seem like pretty thinly displaced vehicles for the poet’s experience as well. However, the treatment of those subjects depends not on their inherent lyrical connections but on the verbal connections (or disconnections) the poem leaves in its unpredictable turns of language. The poem “Hymn” begins, “fivethirty a.m./the electricgenerator/started off like an immortal scream,” presenting us with a coherent if clamorous aural image, only to abruptly mix it with a discordant and somewhat grotesque visual one: “whelped in low key and smothered in thin snot/and exploded into a sickbelly throwup of fiery/eels. . . .” After a pause (the first of several caesuras in the poem), as if preparing the reader for the change in orientation and focus about to occur, the poet’s own perspective is suddenly altered: “and there was my woman/my love/outside my window. . . .” But before we can adjust to this strange development, mid-line our attention is again disrupted as the speaker avows that “god in the alleyway/went infinitely upstairs in a striped prisonsuit/of irondrunken firescapesteps. . . .”

Although we return to “my woman/my love” (who beseeches the speaker, “don’t let me die”), by the time we reach the end of this relatively short poem our contemplation of its imagery has become so thoroughly unsettled that it is indeed tempting to declare it a piece of surrealism that deliberately resists our full assimilation—or even to consider it simply incomprehensible. Perhaps we could interpret it as a species of dream—although the poem’s title seems oddly inappropriate for this sort of exercise—or, somewhat more fruitfully, that it represents the movements of the poet’s consciousness at a particularly fraught moment. But while either of these perspectives might afford a kind of cursory coherence to a poem like “Hymn,” since many of Orlovitz’s poems unfold according to similar sort of discontinuous logic (or nonlogic), it seems more applicable to say simply that his poetry consists more in self-contained flares of veiled expression than in the subordination of such expression to the broader development of a poetic “thought,” a more visible unified aesthetic construct.

            Probably the most conspicuously indulged display of verbal excess in Orlovitz’s poetry is the frequent use of puns, most often in the satires, as in the very first stanza of “The Rooster”:

the rooster crows in my belly

an old hangout for the billiard cues of the morning

and table-hopping hail hail the ganglias all here

after sunset like a mouthwash last yesterlight

and the white tails of the gorillas on television

and that liberal politician stumping for twilight supremacy

down by that old

                    shill

                    stream

As I buttonholed the Ancient Auctioneer

how goes America going

                           going

But Orlovitz just seems to ignore any strictures against punning as a disruptive or self-indulgent gesture. His poems cultivate the disruption as another turn of language, the introduction of disparate elements to form another brief image—the politician both creating and standing beside the “shill stream”—that reinforces the poem’s reliance on adjacent figurative and imagistic verbal devices rather than continuous elaboration of thought.

The insistent punning in Orloviz’s poetry seems most reminiscent of Finnegans Wake (it and Ulysses continue to be a dominant influence on Orlovitz’s fiction as well), and perhaps the dream language of a work like this could itself be taken as a further analogue to Orlovitz’s practice as both poet and writer of fiction. Certainly the perpetual juxtaposition of disconnected images in the poems creates a background of distortion comparable to dreams, but it seems to me that Orlovitz is less interested in mimicking the unconscious mind that in reorienting the conscious mind—the reader’s. The poems ask us to not presume that the poet’s language is a representation of a recognizable reality, nor even an attempt to cloak that reality in a misrepresentation that might still be reclaimed for interpretation, but is instead a transformation of the poem into a source of reality itself, which the reader experiences through the multiplicity and incongruity of its images.

The discontinuities of Orlovitz’s writing not only undermine whatever expectation we might have that it will resolve itself into a completed thought (a thought about something outside the poem, not a concrete experience of the poem) but makes interpreting a poem’s images as potential symbols mostly fruitless and beside the point as well. Indeed, Orlovitz himself, in an essay entitled “The Ubiquitous Symbol” (What are They All Waiting For?. Tough Poets Press) tells us that “my intent is quite simple: to transmit through images the paradoxes of experienced phenomena.” However, the image “will contain the paradox of the experienced phenomenon, but it will go further: it will try to convert the experienced phenomenon into an experience itself. For me, symbols in poetry do not simply connote reality: my intent is to make the symbols pieces of reality themselves.” Orlovitz may seem to be conflating “symbol” and “image,” but what he is really doing is attempting to explicate the way in which his poems are enclosed in the poet’s digressive language, which seeks to realize the “paradox” that only the verbal turns themselves can signify.

Few writers are as radical in their determination to make language itself both the form and content of the literary work as Gil Orlovitz, in his poetry and his fiction alike. For this reason alone it is perplexing that both the poems—or at least the best of them—and a novel like Milkbottle H have so thoroughly fallen out of the collective literary memory. The latter especially remains a prodigious achievement, as notable a product of the late modern/postmodern sensibility as any written by an American novelist, even Sorrentino, Gaddis, or Pynchon. Perhaps, however, what those writers provide in addition to their formal audacity is something that Orlovitz’s work may be lacking: Each of them substitutes for the more conventional pleasures of traditional narrative fiction—familiar plot devices, recognizable types of characters—alternative formal and stylistic strategies that work to offer not “entertainment” in the most reductive sense of the term, but certainly an experience of aesthetic delight that ultimately redeems whatever “difficulty” the work at first seems to present the reader. Both Orlovitz’s poetry and his fiction may seem to some readers to cultivate difficulty for its own sake.

This impression is no doubt especially strong for the reader who takes up Milkbottle H. It was certainly the impression left with contemporaneous American reviewers, one of whom declared that “it is written in a pseudo-Joycean manner that is relentlessly monotonous, persistently garbled, unendingly devious, a manner that lacks the humor of Joyce’s that unlike Joyce’s obfuscates rather than reveals” (Carleton Miscellany, Spring 1968). This reviewer likely means by the Joyce comparison no more than that Milkbottle H is an unconventional work that lacks the usual markers of a proper novel, markers of plot and character that allow the critic to assess the work according to the usual formulas, without needing to more closely examine the actual strategies the writer might be using, or consider the effect those strategies may be designed to produce. If the critic were in fact interested in pursuing the connection to Joyce, he might have noted that the “manner” of Milkbottle H only superficially resembles the conceit structuring Finnegans Wake: Milkbottle H may indeed depart freely from the constraints of time, space, and consistency of character, but not because Orlovitz is casting his narrative as a dream. Instead, Milkbottle H treats reality as if it already possesses the mutability of dreams.\

Thus the reader is given a few ostensibly stable features consistent with most novels’ narrative trajectory—a protagonist, named Lee Emanuel, a setting, in the city of Philadelphia, certain recurring images such as the street sign that gives the novel its title—but those features do not reinforce expectations of conventional development. The novel does loosely follow the life experiences of Lee Emanuel (who is a not very heavily disguised version of Gil Orlovitz), especially focusing on his love affairs and marriages, yet the chronological displacement in the novel’s rendering of his experiences is so thoroughgoing  and extreme (in a novel of over 500 pages) that even his identity at times wavers, while the other characters so frequently transmogrify into each other that ultimately it is questionable whether we should finally even identify them as specific characters at all. Given the novel’s disarticulated structure, with its seemingly random fluctuations of scene, we might regard Milkbottle H as a synoptic view of Lee Emanuel’s life all at once, blurring the distinctions of story and character that normally a work of fictions seeks to clarify.

Although the novel can seem largely formless, ultimately we could say that this formlessness contributes to a more encyclopedic kind of form. This promise of an ultimate unity of sorts, however, doesn’t quite provide a plot. Indeed, the novel’s amorphous formal quality serves it best if it deflects the reader’s interest away from the prospect of formal or narrative resolution and draws it to the execution of the discrete episodes in their acts of metamorphosis and displacement. Many of these episodes are in fact very funny, although it is true that Orlovitz is not necessarily trying to be a comic writer. (Sometimes anger seems a primary motivation.) He is instead attempting to be all-encompassing in his accounting of Lee Emanuel’s life (an effort which is supplemented by Orlovitz’s other published novel, Ice Never F, also featuring Lee as protagonist), and this necessarily involves the more embarrassing moments in Lee’s life—such as his cuckoldry, brought about by his unfaithful first wife, or an extended scene (extended in fact throughout the novel) in which Lee attempts to take a bath without letting any of the dirt that he washes off touch him again.

Lee Emanuel is not really portrayed as a foolish or hapless figure, but it would also be difficult to describe him as a “sympathetic” character, either. So fragmented and so subject to shifts in time and perspective is Lee Emanuel as presented in the novel that we can’t finally get close enough to him to really judge him at all. He is not a coherent character of the traditional sort (“flat” and “round” seem beside the point) but is mostly an artifact of the author’s insistently discontinuous method of composition. He is neither sympathetic nor unsympathetic but acts as the novel’s discursive point of attraction around which its narrative transfigurations swirl. To an extent, these transfigurations do serve in their very distortions to illuminate Lee Emanuel’s experience and evoke his personality, although they are not designed first and foremost as an alternate means of creating character. Something like the opposite seems predominantly the case: Lee Emanuel, his perceptions and experiences, is the vehicle for the work’s formal and verbal variations.

Certainly Lee’s experiences include the sort that most readers would expect to find in a more conventional chronicle of the ordinary circumstances of its characters’ lives—which is essentially the focus of concern in Milkbottle H, however much that focus is prolonged beyond the scenic confines of most realistic fiction. Perhaps the most prominent of these would be Lee’s interactions with his family, especially with his parents, as well as his efforts specifically to reckon with the relatively recent death of his father. The glimpses of the parents at various stages of Lee’s life do actually provide a kind of summative account of family influence, although as with all of the other episodes depicted in the novel, it is an elliptical account that asks the reader to hold immediate meaning in abeyance, to allow that a literary work can accrue meaning through juxtaposition and contiguity rather than asserting it through linear progression. Perhaps it is here where Orlovitz’s fiction shows the greatest affinity with his poetry: It is not so much that the language of the novels is conspicuously “poetic” (although neither is the poetry itself poetic in any conventional way), but that image in the poetry and narrative time and space in the fiction are set loose from the imperative to unfold according to a sequential logic that essentially renders literary language invisible. In Orlovitz’s work, language is indeed “real.”

This attribute is also on display in Ice Never F, published after but actually written before Milkbottle H, although its structural dislocations are somewhat less radical, and thus at its briefer length Ice Never F is arguably more accessible. It also involves Lee Emanuel, as well as most of the cast of Milkbottle H. (The two extant novels seem to have been at Orlovitz’s death part of at least a trilogy set in Philadelphia and centered on the life of Lee Emanuel, but the existence of third unpublished novel in the series, while the object of rumors in the years since, currently seems uncertain.) While no conventional work of narrative fiction, Ice Never F nonetheless ventures less into the mixing of identity, and its scenes are often more fully sustained, although still sharing with Milkbottle H a paradoxical kind of narrative scheme, offering a constant flow of narration subject to incessant and unannounced time shifts covering all phases of Lee’s life (including a good deal about his childhood). Also as with Milkbottle H, the actions and events depicted in individual episodes work less as pieces of an ongoing narrative than as the parts of a larger verbal and discursive mosaic registering Lee’s presence in the world that has made him.

Perhaps Ice Never F might serve as a less intimidating introduction to Orlovitz’s fiction (in something like the way Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 has been a more compact alternative to the meganovels), but it is Milkbottle H that will be the center of attention in any widespread reconsideration of Gil Orlovitz’s achievement as a writer (if such a thing could plausibly happen). The poems certainly reward the effort to understand the aesthetic principles motivating their discordant imagery and seemingly capricious wordplay, but it seems unlikely that Orlovitz’s variety of “difficult” poetry sufficiently stands out against, say, the work of John Ashbery or the Language poets to find a place among their company. Milkbottle H, although surely an experimental novel by any definition of the term, is not exactly “postmodern”; it does not interrogate the authority of fiction as a mode of representation but seems more like an extension of the modernist aspiration to represent reality at a more fundamental level than surface realism. In this case, Orlovitz’s novel seeks to eliminate all constraints of narrative and place in the name of a more comprehensive rendition of experience. There really is nothing else in American fiction, that I can think of, at all like it.

Moldenke and His World

(Originally appeared in Big Other.)

Readers encountering David Ohle’s work for the first time through his most recent novel, The Death of a Character (2021), will indeed find the depiction promised in its title, but those familiar with Ohle’s previous books, especially his first and eventual cult favorite, Motorman (1972), will know that the character whose dying the narrative chronicles is the protagonist of that novel as well. Called simply Moldenke, he makes additional appearances in the long-delayed follow-up to Motorman, The Age of Sinatra (2004), as well as its successors, The Pisstown Chaos (2008) and The Old Reactor (2013). (In The Pisstown Chaos, Moldenke turns up as a minor character in a story focusing on others, but The Death of a Character marks the fourth time his picaresque existence has been the focus of an Ohle novel.) Moldenke has been the principal conduit to the singularly bizarre and often grotesque world Ohle invokes in his fiction, and thus his demise seems more a consummation of that world’s creation, its full achievement perhaps, than merely the portrayal of a fictional character’s death.

To some extent, however, Moldenke in this novel is not exactly the same Moldenke featured in Motorman (or each of the sequels, for that matter), which makes The Death of a Character comprehensible enough to the uninitiated reader, but also potentially conveys an incomplete impression not just of Moldenke as a character (or characters), but of the nature of what became a multi-book project expressing a vision of an alternative reality that incorporates enough fractured and rearranged pieces of our already wrecked world that it seems intelligible, if freakishly distorted. Like Moldenke himself, this reality is never quite the same from book to book, although its oddities are generally of a similar sort and the discontinuities seem part of the process of decay and instability its inhabitants experience: At some point in the future (how far or near is never quite specified), America has degenerated—perhaps with the help of an external catastrophe—into a conglomeration  of what people remain, concentrated in a few scattered places in what might be the Midwest (the names of these places vary) and reduced to a fairly primitive state of existence, although some vestiges of the old technology linger (a decrepit nuclear reactor, a barely functioning mechanical “pedway”). The novels centering on Moldenke generally portray him attempting simply to survive the circumstances in which he finds himself, to evade or elude the capricious forces arrayed against him. The Pisstown Chaos is a departure from this pattern only in that these same conditions afflict the Ball family rather than Moldenke.

These forces include, in addition to the entropy besetting the remnants of a degraded culture, the explicit dictates of what passes for authority in this ramshackle civilization. This authority is at times invested in a government of sorts (mostly dominated by a single autocratic figure), but essentially it is claimed by whoever can seize it and maintained through nonsensical and arbitrary edicts and directives that ensure obedience by keeping the people as confused and unsettled as possible. (Literally unsettled: often the population is compelled to relocate or individuals are consigned to detention facilities on the flimsiest, often quite absurd, pretenses—at one point in the The Old Reactor, Moldenke is shuffled off to a prison camp for defecating in a graveyard.) Control is further reinforced in The Age of Sinatra and The Pisstown Chaos (and now in The Death of a Character as well) by the imposition of a “great forgetting,” whereby history is erased, keeping everyone in a perpetual present haunted by vestiges of the past, which are vaguely known but about which most people ultimately know nothing. In The Blast (2014), a non-Moldenke novella, nevertheless quite clearly in the same fictional milieu, the protagonist, a boy named Wencel, a student at “the only school still open,” is taught the version of history that remains available, a scrambled-up construction anchored in figures from popular culture (“the age of Sinatra,” “the age of Nerds”) and fourth-hand distortions of events surrounding the Kennedy administration. (In another class, Wencel studies “Emoticonics,” an emoticon script underlying Emo, “the language of our ancestors.”)

The Blast also comes as close to an explanation of the source of the prevailing conditions in Ohle’s fictional world as we find in his published work, or at least the conditions specifically depicted in this short novel. As its title betokens, at some point in the recent past, a terrible explosion, referred to simply as “the blast,” occurred—recently enough that some people, including Wencel’s father, have some recollection of it. It is of course tempting to conclude that this was a nuclear blast, but Ohle merely leaves this as an implication. Neither The Blast nor any of the other books could really be adequately described as post-Apocalyptic narratives. They don’t seem to depict a future world to which our own present is possibly heading so much as create a facsimile of a future that figures elements of present reality into an absurdly sorry excuse for a social order. If they are science fiction, it is a reverse-image rendition of science fiction that inverts the standard association of SF with futuristic advanced knowledge and technologies into an entropic civilization reduced to crank radios and pedal cars. One of Wencel’s teachers presents the class with a drawing representing what she believes a motor may have looked like, prompting Wencel to inquire about “flying motors”: “Like the one you drew, except in the sky?”

Although it introduces us to Moldenke, as well as other characters who will appear in subsequent books, and establishes the signature impassive tone with which Ohle’s narratives are related, Motorman offers a different, while still profoundly aberrant, sort of invented world. Here the future has become more synthetic than dilapidated, although Moldenke still encounters plenty of ruination. This world has telephones, motorcars, and electricity—Moldenke throughout the first part of the novel is menaced over the phone by a man named Bunce, whose identity and authority remain nebulous but whom Moldenke fears, nonetheless—but when Moldenke decides to leave the apartment in which he has concealed himself and to meet up with Dr. Burnheart (a beneficent counterpart to Bunce, although just as shadowy), he and we have a more sustained encounter with the deformed environment he inhabits, as a picaresque journey ensues.

Soon after he begins his journey, Moldenke contemplates his surroundings:

He sat on the seawall, chewing stonepicks, and watched the first artificial sun break apart and burn out. A slow, dry rain of white ash persisted through summerfall. By winter, a second was up, blinding to look at and almost warm enough.

It turns out that in Moldenke’s world there are a number of additional suns and moons (perhaps up to seven of the latter), which appear at irregular intervals (a steady stream of weather reports attempts to keep track, although apparently Bunce is able to manufacture the weather he wants, instructing the “weatherman” to send out the appropriate forecast.) This augmentation of climate conditions is attributed to government scientists, although its purpose—for either the government or the scientists—is never made exactly clear, but then the purpose of the government itself is not at all evident, either. As in all of the subsequent novels as well, government is something effected through whim. In Motorman, it would seem, technology has not regressed to a derelict state, but it does seem to be deployed in an indiscriminate, uncontrolled way that seems as senseless as it does sinister.

The essential absurdity of Moldenke’s reality is further manifested in his own personal circumstances. Apparently the victim of heart disease (in other of the novels he is afflicted with various digestive problems), Moldenke is the recipient of a transplant, but he has been given not one heart but four, and they are animal hearts, not human, the operations performed by the same Dr. Burnheart. Again the motivation behind this procedure remains murky—Moldenke may just be the victim of human experimentation, although he is grateful enough to Dr. Burnheart for the service. Moldenke is also a veteran of a “Mock War,” a war in name only in which one might play one’s part by “volunteering for injury,” as Moldenke does,

writing his name down on a piece of paper and dropping it into a metal box outside the semi-Colonel’s office. At morning meal the day’s injury list was read. . .When they read his name he reported to Building D, stood in line at the door. Every minute or so the line shortened by one. The mock soldier in front of Moldenke turned and said, “I’m proud that I gave for my country. He opened the fly of his trench pants and showed Moldenke a headless crank.

Fortunately for Moldenke, he is able to do his part for the cause by enduring only a fractured kneecap.

Such madness is native to Ohle’s fictive world, conveyed through the sort of deadpan expository prose characterizing a passage such as this. Ohle’s fiction accentuates narrative—description is evocative and acute, but generally concise, without forced lyricism—although formally Motorman, as well as the subsequent novels, can also be fragmented and discursive. Motorman, for example, incorporates numerous letters, both from and to Moldenke (his interlocutors tend to refer to him as “Dink” or “Dinky”), but they work either to fill in gaps in the ongoing narrative of Moldenke’s adventures or to provide suitable context. What happens (or what has happened) remains the focus of attention, even if what happens is goofy or preposterous. Ohle’s narrative manner seems most influenced by Kafka, except that where Kafka’s impassive narrator leaves an impression of foreboding and inscrutability, Ohle’s produces something closer to farce. Moldenke seems finally a type of antihero: an almost hapless figure whose senseless circumstances make us want to sympathize with his plight, while those very circumstances make it virtually impossible to conceive he might be able to overcome them.

While in the following novels featuring him as protagonist Moldenke is still a comic character (made comic by the lunacy of his surroundings), he is less purely the victim of a system uniquely subjecting him to its insanity. In The Age of Sinatra, Moldenke must again negotiate the lunacies, but their source is somewhat more identifiable in the reigning political system, headed up by one Michael Ratt, the President of what remains of the U. S. Moldenke, in fact, rather involuntarily becomes involved in a plot to assassinate Ratt, for which Moldenke is assigned complete blame by the powers that be when the plan actually succeeds. (Moldenke almost avoids punishment but comes up one “waiver” short—waivers are granted arbitrarily by the government and exempt perpetrators of crime from responsibility for their actions—when he goes before the judge, who sentences him to a prison camp, after all.) This wider focus on the visible social and political structure in which Moldenke abides perhaps removes from the follow-ups to Motorman the mixture of hilarity and disquiet that emerges in the tone of the novel as an effect of the opacity of motive and causality, but it also makes the follow-ups more than simply sequels to the first novel, attempts to re-create a “cult classic” thirty years later.

The Age of Sinatra leaves Moldenke in essentially the same position in which he found himself in Motorman, however—that is, in ambiguous circumstances and still in a state of radical uncertainty about his future well-being. The same is true of The Old Reactor, which has Moldenke sent to a prison camp that inverts our customary conception of a prison. The facility is actually an entire town, Altobello, and the prisoners are sentenced to be “free”: There is no confinement, no oversight by prison authorities, no institutional structure at all. Prisoners are literally condemned to be free—a telling comment, perhaps, on the highly regulated society outside the prison, one that would conceive of life inside such a prison as its opposite and therefore punishment. Most of the inhabitants of Altobello seem better off then they would have back in Bunkerville, the locus of the social order outside, but they have been conditioned thoroughly enough by the irrationality of that order that they can’t quite appreciate it. (The slop they have for food seems delicious to them.) Moldenke, in fact, seems to appreciate it, more than the others, but even he is concerned to get back to the house in Bunkerville he has inherited from his aunt, where he finds, after Bunkerville itself has been “liberated,” that the situation is very far from liberating.

The Death of a Character literally brings Moldenke to the end of his journey, and, to the extent we are to perceive continuity in Moldenke’s portrayal across the Moldenke saga, clearly he has found neither reward nor enlightenment. The very first paragraph succinctly evokes Moldenke’s predicament as he approaches what will be the terminal phase of his life, as well as the sort of world he now faces:

On a scorching winter afternoon, Moldenke stopped at the Dew Drop Inn for a Chinese whiskey. He’d been limping along China Way, a newly named street, wondering what to do with the remainder of his life. The sound of distant riots rattled his half-deaf ears and the air smelled of sulfur. He’d been homeless now for months, sleeping in the park with other jobless, hungry souls, spending his days in the library reading and using the toilet when it was working.

The details here give us a vivid impression of the scene and situation Moldenke confronts, but they also reiterate for readers not as familiar with either the Moldenke novels or Davie Ohle’s work as a whole some of the more predominant motifs and conceits to be found in Ohle’s fiction. We are immediately made aware of the fundamentally absurd conditions that prevail in Moldenke’s world—“a scorching winter afternoon,” one of many manifestations of arbitrary weather phenomena that plague Ohle’s characters—and the sound of the distant riots further signals the ubiquitous threat of instability that seems always present and serves for the characters as a constant source of reference (the “Pisstown Chaos”). Food and drink (usually of some very bizarre and/or repulsive variety) are a special focus of attention in Ohles’s fiction—a dissertation could be written about Ohle’s use of food in these novels as an objective correlative of cultural devolution—and some such establishment as the “Dew Drop Inn” is a focal point of communal experience. The source of authority is usually undefined and precarious, so that now when Moldenke finds himself drinking “Chinese whiskey” and traveling on “China Way,” it would seem that a more determinate sort of regime has come to be in charge.

This is indeed the case, as we discover when Moldenke enters the Dew Drop, encountering a “Chinese official lost in her own thoughts, jotting notes in a daybook.” Moldenke’s zone in dystopic quasi-America has been occupied by the Chinese—who claim it has been ceded to them voluntarily—although very little that is culturally or politically “Chinese” (not even the food) is attributed to the representatives of the Chinese administration, mostly soldiers, who interact with Moldenke and his companions. They are mostly the latest representatives of preemptory and indiscriminate power that operates in Ohle’s fiction, ultimately working to inflict gratuitous hardship. Perhaps the domination by China in this latest rendering of Ohle’s fictional landscape is inevitably a commentary on the dynamics of current geopolitical arrangements, but as with Ohle’s larger fictional project as a whole, neither forecasting the future nor critiquing the present seem the likely motivation for the details of setting or the cast of characters. The Chinese play the same role as Bunce or President Ratt or the mad religious leader, and their presence contributes to the effort to defamiliarize the iconography of an America that has mutated into a funhouse world of the writer’s own invention.

The Death of a Character also resembles Ohle’s other books in that it is a variation on the road novel. Moldenke determines to avoid the local turmoil and travel “south,” to a cabin he believes he has inherited. The bartender in the Dew Drop suggests that Moldenke take with him a “neutrodyne” named Wheaton. Neutrodynes are humanoid beings (perhaps alien, although again Ohle retains a degree of ambiguity by leaving their origins murky) that alternate in their roles in Ohle’s fiction with other similarly quasi human creatures: jellyheads, Stinkers, and necronauts. All of these groups live among the human characters, generally looked on by humans as “other” and treated accordingly (although the necronauts are also considered somewhat spooky—dead people still alive). It, too, is tempting to take such creatures as the product of human manipulation (or at least as a way of representing human tampering), the exact disaster or technology gone awry long erased through a “forgetting,” but Ohle maintains a consistent weirdness in his work by withholding explanation, here leaving the neutrodynes and jellyheads to be just weird.

Wheaton is probably the most individuated neutrodyne in Ohle’s fiction, although paradoxically he becomes a persuasive character by devoting himself to Moldenke’s service: Wheaton is “programmed” to serve human beings (the source of the programming again mysterious), and he does indeed vigilantly attend to Moldenke’s needs, from providing food to assisting with Moldenke’s less than efficient toilet habits. Wheaton appears to be without emotions, although after he and Moldenke arrive at the family cabin Wheaton meets a female neutrodyne, Darleen, who shortly after moves in with them and, in the parlance most often used in Ohle’s world, they “mate.” However, their mating also has a utilitarian purpose: it seems that neut women give birth almost immediately after becoming pregnant, and she and Wheaton begin to make babies continually, Darleen selling them to the Chinese. They do this in part to raise the money they need to keep the household functioning, but they are able to carry out this rather mercenary task because they are less subject to emotional attachment than humans.

Nevertheless, Darleen and Wheaton do manage to keep the household functioning, although, being neutrodynes, they don’t require the gratitude of either Moldenke or Bertie (a woman Wheaton and Moldenke encounter on their trip south and invite to live with them), who, being human, don’t offer it. While it certainly could not be said that neutrodynes such as Wheaton or Darleen are exemplary moral beings (as defined by human standards to be sure, and perhaps Ohle’s depiction of neutrodynes and the other non-human beings in his fiction alongside human beings and the wreckage they have made of their world has the ultimate effect of travestying those standards), they surely do emerge from The Death of a Character as more resolute and self-possessed than the human characters. As the Chinese gradually become less and less tolerant of the household’s presence on the property—they do not acknowledge Moldenke’s claim on it, but for a while allow Moldenke and company to remain in the cabin—Wheaton and Darleen, with the help of a local hunter, Ernie, who has long sustained the property in the absence of other residents, continue to provide themselves, Moldenke, and Bertie with the means of subsistence.

Bertie is a character first introduced in Motorman, where she is known as “Cock Roberta” and is nominally Moldenke’s girlfriend, even though they are rarely in each other’s company. While in The Death of a Character she does help to maintain Moldenke’s spirits enough for him to persevere for a while, Bertie doesn’t really play a memorable role in the novel, although her abrupt and entirely coincidental encounter with Moldenke as he and Wheaton are on their pedal bus trip south is one of the more absurdly amusing moments in the story:

“It’s me. You haven’t forgotten, have you? We were sweethearts? So odd to run into you after all this time.”

Moldenke turned further despite the pain in his neck. “Roberta. I remember.”

“I go by Bertie now. You don’t look well, Moldenke.”

There are strong women characters in Ohle’s fiction (Moldenke’s mother, Agnes, Ophelia Balls), but Bertie/Roberta mostly just declines along with Moldenke.

That decline structures the novel’s episodic plot. Eventually, the Chinese decide that the four occupants must leave, the cabin itself to be demolished. What’s left of Moldenke’s health begins to ebb. (“I don’t feel good,” Moldenke tells Bertie. “You’ve never felt good,” she replies. “I feel bad, then.”) In accordance with Moldenke’s wishes, before he finally succumbs the others take him to a tree and leave him in its branches. There is little dignity in Moldenke’s death—on the way to the cart for the trip to the tree, Wheaton drops Moldenke into the mud—but being placed in the tree while alive does allow him to avoid the final indignity of Wheaton’s posthumous hatred: neuts despise the dead, and are known to assault dead bodies. “Goodbye, all,” Moldenke calls out weakly, as his own funeral procession walks back to the cabin.

If Moldenke’s death seems to be in some measure an ignominious one, we must remind ourselves that what is depicted in this novel is the death of a character, a character whose fictional life has indeed been extended now over multiple installments over a wide expanse of time, thus perhaps indeed bestowing on him (for both readers and the author) more “life” than a typical protagonist. Readers of all four of the Moldenke books likely would find his death especially meaningful—although that it verges on the farcical will likely not come as a shock or surprise. In this way, at least, The Death of a Character leaves an impression of Moldenke and his world entirely consistent with and representative of their importance in Ohle’s fiction as a whole. Still, the Moldenke books play their part in the formation of that larger work, and thus it would be worth readers’ time to read not only Motorman as well as its direct spin-offs featuring Moldenke, but all of Ohle’s published work—including City Moon (2018), ostensibly a compilation of the issues of a satirical newspaper published for a number of years in Lawrence, Kansas that Ohle co-edited, but that in its remodeled, collage-like form still integrates well with the more conventionally composed novels and novellas to help evoke his surpassingly strange fictional world. Fifty years after the appearance of Motorman, the strangeness only seems all the more believable.

Under Review:

Emily Hall, The Longcut (Dalkey Archive)

Ansgar Allen, Wretch (Scism Neuronics), The Sick List (Boiler House Press), Plague Theatre (Equus Press)

Mark De Silva, The Logos (Splice/Clash Books)

Observing Herself Observe

How we respond to the unnamed protagonist of Emily Hall's The Longcut is primarily determined by how we adjust ourselves to her first-person narration. From the beginning, it almost seems she is speaking more to herself than to us:

I was always asking myself what my work was, I thought as I walked to the gallery. As an artist I knew I should know what my work was, I thought as I walked, still I did not know what my work was, could not stop asking myself what my work was, it being impossible to think about anything else

The near obsessive-compulsive repetition might suggest that this is meant as a "report" of sorts of the narrator's ongoing thought process (a form of stream-of-consciousness), but she is clearly recording, not merely reporting or signaling disjointedly ("I thought as I walked"), although it does remain unclear exactly how her account is being recorded. The narration seems to exist in some gray zone between and among speaking, thinking, and writing: the narrator seems to be interrogating her own "cognitive space," as she puts it, but this involves perceptions of her physical space as well, both of them often invoked in language that is both insistently detached and often hyper-aware, as if observing herself observe, or thinking about herself thinking.

What she observes and what she thinks about are relentlessly focused on coming to some resolution about "what my work was." This initial conundrum, the protagonist's confusion about what kind of artist she is or will be, is the motivating force driving her actions, as well as the narrative as a whole--the "plot" itself doesn't really move beyond the search for a solution to this conundrum, so what we are left with is the narrator's ultimately very peculiar manner of articulating her dilemma.

The central action of the novel, such as it is, does indeed take place mostly as the protagonist is walking through the streets of a city (unnamed) on her way to meet with an art dealer, although a final episode follows her right after what turns out to be a very consequential meeting indeed. During her walk we are also provided flashbacks to the various circumstances that have led her both to this interview with a "gallerist," who she hopes, of course, will exhibit her work, as well as to her radical uncertainty about the nature of that work, which she also hopes the gallerist will help her overcome. These flashbacks are highly recursive and digressive, which might tempt us to regard them as her "thoughts," but they are thoughts fully-formed and often intricately arranged. They also function as exposition, filling us in--if at times obliquely--on her artistic aspirations, as well as her experiences in a dreary office job she must endure until, presumably, those aspirations are achieved. Here she must expend her energies making sure she has "answered my share of questions and moved them into the 'completed' column," all the while suffering "slant looks" from her boss.

Even when she arrives at the gallery (for a conversation arranged by her friend, "the well-known artist who set up situations"), there are additional lengthy passages in which the narrator meditates on the efficacy of listening to music while making art, on what she has chosen to wear, on a satchel carried by a man on the subway. When she finally begins to speak to the gallerist, she suddenly utters

a torrent of open questions about bodies inhabiting garments or buildings. Most people, it had to be said, finding themselves willingly or unwillingly subject to my torrents, found themselves unprepared, the torrents producing in them --the willing or unwilling listeners--expressions of shock or immediate exhaustion. What if I photographed the expressions of shock or exhaustion, I had asked myself on several occasions. So much for my plan of avoiding blurting, I thought, even as I was torrenting along, evidently not having routed the plan sufficiently thoroughly through my cognitive apparatus.

Perhaps The Longcut itself could be taken as a "torrent" of the narrator's language, except that it is not really a torrent flowing headlong but on its meandering and serpentine way. The torrent isn't really slowed--or at least made less turbulent--until the gallerist actually does suggest to the narrator what her art is (assuming that it is an understanding the protagonist has had all along). But the gallerist's observation  that what the protagonist has been showing her has an almost algebraic quality to it ("solving for x") is clearly something that the protagonist has not before considered, and what she seems to conclude is the accuracy of the gallerist's description temporarily disorients her. 

After a day of brooding on the implications of this (for her) revelation, she is able to assimilate this new self-knowledge and musters her resolve to act on it, having satisfactorily, it would seem, clarified her artistic purpose, which is to proceed as if the question of purpose is always open, undecided: 

to do anything I could to unfind the answer to the question of what my work was, to unaccept the fact of knowing the answer, to unknow, to uncomplete, unaccept, unclose. I would unsolve for x, I would deny there was an x to be solved. I would arrange things to my dissatisfaction in all cases, every case would be the case, I would botch every transition, every border crossing, botching every border between categories or realms, dwelling in the botched transition, the hiccup, the glitch. . . .

This seems like a perfectly good credo upholding a practice of art as radical possibility, but these final flourishes of refortified purpose, so quickly following the protagonist's moment of recognition with the gallerist, at the least seem rushed, so much so as to verge on melodrama. Some such rededication to art lurks beneath the novel's attenuated quest narrative all along, and the terms of the protagonist's pledge to avoid narrowing her scope is conventional enough that it doesn't escape coming off as predictable.

Perhaps to extend the narrator's monologue much farther risks decreased readerly patience with the narrator's eccentric discursive habits, although at a time when the prose of a writer like Thomas Bernhard has become increasingly influential, such a move would not seem particularly extreme. However, even if the protagonist's enlightenment occurred less abruptly, the fulfillment of the narrator's quest for artistic direction as the primary conceit seems inherently slight in a novel that introduces itself as more radically unconventional in its verbal density and formal convolution. However much the protagonist wants to "unaccept" the answer to which her initial question led her, a better answer might have been that it is less important to rhetorically interrogate one's art than it is simply to make it, rendering the question superfluous to begin with.

Still, pursuing the question has certainly prompted Emily Hall to write a novel whose narrator (and her narration) are compelling creations, reservations about plot aside. If finally her way of grappling with the imperatives of art is rather more interesting than any conclusions she reaches about art itself, this should not deflect attention away from this art the author of The Longcut has made.

Making Sense of the Thing

The fiction of Ansgar Allen could be called "academic" in an almost literal sense, except that it seems designed to provide an alternative of sorts to academic writing per se--an opportunity to engage with abstract ideas and to contemplate the role of education and the intellect while leaving behind the prescribed forms of expression required by academic writing. This fiction is somewhat reminiscent of the work of Lars Iyer, although while Iyer's novels take the form of quasi-Platonic dialogues in which the characters talk about philosophical ideas, Allen's seem more like parables or fables, in which the narrator-protagonist does directly invoke specific books and ideas but which also themselves embody or dramatize the implications of ideas and ways of thinking.

Allen has published three short novels and a novella since 2020 (a fourth novel is due to be published at the end of 2022). The first, Wretch, is the most purely fabular, and could very loosely be called a post-apocalyptic narrative, although no specifications of time, place, or context are ever given. The narrator relates his experiences as a prisoner of sorts, locked in a small room and instructed to make copies of documents that are slipped to him under the door. The documents seem to be reports submitted by teams of explorers who venture to the outskirts of the "known city" and beyond, investigating what is out there--the "dark regions," although the copyist also at times alters the documents, "providing some measure of clarification, a degree of reordering in order to render what is heard, or what was written, into fresh print." Still, the job takes its toll, as we find the narrator at the beginning of the narrative recovering from a "derangement," an incident in which he destroyed the "machine" with which he carries out the copying: "The full medical report was described, briefly. The machine bore the imprint of chaos, they said. It demanded rehabilitation."

That he now be regarded as an "ordered mind" is obviously of great importance to the narrator, and this imperative seems to reflect an overriding need for order and fear of disorder in the world he inhabits. Whether this outlook accounts for the narrator's situation to begin with is unclear--the narrator finds himself confined as a threat to established order--but the incursions into the unknown regions seem motivated both by a perception the existing order must be extended due to inadequate resources and an absolute terror of what lies beyond the limits of the known. The circumstances described by the narrator (as filtered through the reports he copies) bespeak a society reduced to a kind of subsistence level and attempting to, in effect, start over, but finally nothing about those circumstances can really be certain for the reader, since the narrator's rendition is inherently unreliable. Certainly the entire narrative could be a projection of the narrator's precarious mental state.

Or perhaps the text we are reading is an assemblage of the documents he has copied--if in fact copying is what he actually does. The strength of Wretch partially consists in its open-endedness, its spareness giving the narrative an allegorical structure that might be read in multiple ways, or that may have no emblematic significance at all. Allen's second novel, The Sick List, is less purely metaphorical in its narrative manner, more discursive. Its philosophical ideas are brandished outright, although again whatever specifiable meaning it might all "add up" to is equally indeterminate. Its narrator, a graduate student or instructor at a generic university, tells us of his obsession with the ideas and reading habits of a fellow academic named Gordon. Gordon has a scathing, skeptical attitude toward academe itself, an attitude he has instilled in his acolyte--except that the narrator is never portrayed meeting or actually talking to Gordon. Instead, the narrator closely tracks the books Gordon checks out from the university library, inspecting them for underlines and comments Gordon has made in the margins as well as reading the books carefully himself in order to illuminate the worldview he attributes to Gordon and that the narrator earnestly shares.

In addition to the narrator's chronicle of Gordon's activities and of his own inspection of Gordon's books, he also tells us of a strange condition that overcomes faculty across multiple university campuses. At his own university, two researchers in the education department are discovered sitting in a stupor at their desks. "One had been sitting there from Thursday to the following Monday until she was found. The other had been sitting at her desk from Wednesday to Friday. Both were dehydrated. . .Reports were coming in from other institutions of similar goings on. Sociology departments in neighboring cities seem to have been first affected. . .In the hard sciences it was hardest to detect, since there was very little difference between the slack-jawed behaviour and the usual behaviour that goes by the name of hard science." The primary occupant of "the sick list" is the University itself, which is both the object of Gordon's obloquies ("It is impossible to think at work, in the university, Gordon would say. Its offices are not places of thought") and is now apparently the generator of some literal intellectual malaise. 

The author to whom Gordon increasingly turns as the narrative progresses is Thomas Bernhard, whose blunt hostility to the modern world naturally enough would appeal to Gordon, who seems to direct a similar antipathy specifically to academe and its enervation of the intellect. Given the novel's own formal and stylistic resemblance to Bernhard (a single extended paragraph using the same sort of long and discursive sentences), we have to conclude that Ansgar Allen also identifies with the Bernhardian outlook, although perhaps we might say that the author's sympathies with the narrator's allegiance to both Gordon and Bernhard meets its limits at the novel's conclusion, when the narrator literally begins to stalk Gordon in fear that no more wisdom from Gordon's second-hand books will be forthcoming. If the university is sick, the narrator himself joins the sick list with a sickness brought about by a certain kind of analytical learning.

Both Wretch and The Sick List could be called metafictional, since they so directly concern themselves with acts of reading and writing (Wretch could plausibly be taken as an allegorical rendering of the status of the bedraggled modern writer). Plague Theatre continues this strategy, if anything even more conspicuously, as the decoding of text and the process of notation become the story told: an again unnamed narrator (probably an academic, although the university itself does not play a role in the narrative) is given an old, water-logged manuscript that has been discovered during a digging project in the cellar of a hotel (a swimming pool is to be installed). The owner of the property believes it might be valuable (giving the hotel a little extra cachet as an historical site) and asks the narrator "to make some sense of the thing." This proves to be challenging indeed, as the manuscript disintegrates even as the narrator turns its pages, so that he must copy out the manuscript--or what survives of it--by hand.

What emerges is a version of the manuscript, which tells the story of a plague that hit the English coastal city of Scarborough in 1720, but which does not simply present a cleaned-up (so to speak) narrative of those events. In the process of deciphering the manuscript, the narrator expands the text with interpolated reflections on two writers whose work helps illuminate the concept of "plague."  The novel begins, in fact with a quotation from Antonin Artaud's "Theatre and the Plague" (later the narrator tells us he decided to do this after beginning to read the manuscript, becoming convinced that the essay was "the key to understanding the manuscript") and, perhaps inescapably, Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year also comes to seem related to the Scarborough plague. Artaud's assertion that plague is finally "a feature of mind, and is passed on by way of the mind" not only provides the events in Scarborough with a larger, more figurative significance, but also affects the interpretation of those events the narrator offers, lending them an air of menace and mystery that perhaps the manuscript's narrative doesn't altogether corroborate.

But this is the advantage of treating what could be an abstract subject--the metaphysical implications of "plague"--through fiction, which doesn't abandon the intellect but operates by a different kind of logic, one of association and particularity. Becoming concrete, the implications of plague are both less grandiose and more disturbing than when grasped only in their intellectual formulation. The narrator regards museums--where the manuscript might otherwise be placed--as an institution where intellect can only be destroyed, something that The Sick List maintains is also true of the university. Yet the protagonists of both The Sick List and Plague Theatre  are largely preoccupied with the intellect, which is also shown to be hazardous: at the end of each novel the narrators have been driven toward something like madness. In all of his fiction so far, Allen incorporates ideas by subjecting them to the transformations induced by literary invention, which works to illuminate the hazard.

A Voice from Nowhere

Perhaps the most formidable obstacle to an unequivocal appreciation of Mark de Silva's The Logos is exasperation with the novel's narrator/protagonist. Actually more than exasperation: the narrator is an unlikeable, often unpleasant fellow. Of course, literature is replete with unlikeable or morally suspect protagonists, and in itself this does not invalidate the aesthetic merits of a work of fiction. But The Logos is a prodigiously lengthy work (over 1,000 pages in the U.K. version published by Splice, 728 pages in the edition now published by Clash Books), and abiding with a character and voice that are often enough obnoxious but also at times simply dull is a fraught exercise for any reader.

That de Silva is deliberately presenting us with an obnoxious narrator would certainly be a plausible enough assumption, although presuming the reader's continuing patience with such a narrator over the course of a narrative of such mammoth size seems an overly sanguine expectation unless the novel offers interest of other kinds that reinforce a more compelling aesthetic vision. But while the narrator of The Logos--a prominent artist whose girlfriend has left him--provides plenty of talk about art, the novel itself is formally and stylistically more or less conventional. de Silva has skillfully created a fully rounded, consistently believable character, and in his role as narrator this character relates a sometimes odd but abundantly detailed narrative, but there really isn't much about either the character or the story that is sufficiently innovative or compelling they would overcome a reader's antipathy to a narrator as insistent on his presence--other characters play their parts in the novel, but always subsidiary to the protagonist and his concerns--as our not-so-humble narrator in this novel. Thus, even if we decide to stay with the narrative despite our discontent with his presence, doubt about its ultimate purpose remains.

The narrator (unnamed throughout the novel) certainly takes his own art very seriously, and is very opinionated about artistic practice and art history, concerning both of which he admittedly seems very well-informed, even learned. Yet his expressions of these opinions, while never less than intelligent, are highly discursive and expository:

     Painting, I came to realize, was almost an apology for the nakedness of drawing, a way of glossing over its conceptual blading of the world. It was a way of seeing blindly, so to speak, or passively, without the critical powers of the mind. Photography only heightened this tendency; that's why so many painters have been entranced by the lens, optics, the camera obscura, and the photograph. In contrast, drawing was without doubt an analytical art: the mind's contribution was obvious, and there was no attempt at representing a sensory given--as if such a thing were possible. . .

      Drawing, then. began to feel like the intellectual height of the two-dimensional arts, its essence, its philosophy, not some rough-and-ready starting point toward rendering surfaces, as the pervasive notion of the sketch would suggest, but the ultimate product, fully distilled. This is why, for me, photography poses at least a prima facie problem for painting, in its competition for surfaces, whereas it offers no difficulty at all to drawing, properly understood.

These passages are interspersed throughout the narrative, slowing  down the already rather slowly developing plot with what is essentially critical commentary--although the narrator's prose style when relating the story he has to tell does not differ drastically from that which he employs when dilating upon art. Perhaps the commentary gives the narrator some credibility in our consideration of his artistic habits, but often they seem like set-pieces that eventually contribute to an increasing weariness with both the narrator's actions and the digressive way he recounts those actions.

These set-pieces seem even more peculiar when considering the novel's narrative perspective. It is a first-person narrative, but the rhetorical situation seems free-floating, detached from any plausible point of origin: never are we told the narrator is actually writing down his account of himself after Claire, his now ex-girlfriend and fellow artist, has departed, or even that he is speaking aloud (on a tape recorder, for example).Thus we encounter this voice from nowhere whose exposition is nevertheless carefully and strategically composed, which accentuates the character's status as the verbal artifact of the author's literary ventriloquism and ultimately makes it harder to dismiss the narrator's more unpleasant qualities as just the flaws of an otherwise "well-rounded" character. The narrator's verbal manner flattens out the fictive discourse to an obsessive, self-involved monologue that almost inevitably comes to seem an exercise in narcissism.

But does the author want us to judge this character a narcissist, or are we to find that the portrait of an artist that emerges from his narration to some degree mandates that we overlook his more prosaic character flaws? After all, artists are infamously opinionated and self-absorbed, known to exploit other people to their own benefit. Indeed, for an artist who specializes in portraiture, as does the narrator of this novel, such exploitation may be unavoidable. But in The Logos, what the protagonist seems most eager to exploit is his own talent, not on projects commensurate with the artistic principles he articulates throughout the novel but on an opaque publicity campaign sponsored by a wealthy capitalist who professes an interest in the narrator's art. For this campaign the narrator is tasked with making a series of drawings of two people selected by the capitalist, a troubled but talented young football player and an actress known so far for her roles in obscure independent films and theater. These drawings are reproduced in a variety of forms and displayed around town, apparently at random but actually according to a strategy devised by the capitalist and his advertising adviser. The project is ultimately judged a success (by the capitalist, but others aren't so sure), and our narrator is well-compensated for his work, but for the reader this whole endeavor remains murky in its purpose and sporadic in its interest.

In his interactions with the football player and the actress (Duke and Daphne), we do learn a great deal about the narrator's attitude toward black people and women--much of it not very laudable. He is not directly racist or sexist, but he clearly harbors views reinforcing the usual kinds of stereotypes (about the dangers posed by black people or the sexual availability of women, for example). Perhaps these views are themselves just a function of the narrator's egoism and his complacency about the world beyond its relevance to his work, but those qualities over the course of a novel so extended become manifestly apparent as well, so that finally the chronicle of the narrator's encounters with Duke and Daphne, his participation in the hybrid art/public relations project more generally, doesn't really reveal the narrator's character defects so much as confirm the alienating effect that his presentation of himself induces from the very beginning.

I remained as uncertain about whether provoking such alienation from his protagonist is one of de Silva's objectives for the novel as when I felt the first stirrings of hostility toward the narrator. If a profound ambivalence about this character is part of de Silva's design, it seems to me aesthetically questionable to prolong the reader's discomfort over the entire course of such a protracted narrative. If instead we are meant to some degree to experience some empathy for the narrator in his attempt to rebound from romantic disappointment, all I can say is that I had a very difficult time mustering it. Perhaps de Silva's intentions don't fully encompass either of these options: the protagonist embodies the artist's quest to be faithful to his vision despite his own limitations and the triviality of the culture he confronts. I am unable to interpret the novel this way myself, but I don't want to discount the possibility I may be misreading it.

Fantasias of Familial Unease

The stories in Marcus Pactor's Begat Who Begat Who Begat situate themselves in the domain of domestic realism--family responsibility, particularly on the father's part, underscored by the book's title--but they are realistic only in their underlying emotional fidelity to the complications and anxieties induced in both parents and children by ordinary family life. They are fantasias of familial unease, transformations of recognizable family dramas into askew parables of parental confusion. Although there is certainly a palpable sense of urgency connected to the various characters' attempts to cope with the attendant obligations of their circumstances, ultimately these situations seem to serve more as the sources of the stories' narrative flights of fancy and formal variations than of novel insights into prevailing family dynamics.

The fathers in these stories are engaged in the most mundane sort of fatherly activities: installing toilets, mowing lawns, sorting screws in the garage. But the toilet somehow starts flushing up toys, jewelry, and other favors, the lawn mower begins speaking to its rider, and the screws, it turns out, are for a box inside of which the narrator is attempting to preserve the family's dead dachshund. Several of the fathers construct elaborate defenses against thinking directly about their parental fears. One engages in a disquisition on artificial intelligence (especially android bodies) as a way of displacing his anxiety about his daughter's budding sexuality. Another thinks constantly about food as a distraction from thinking about the loss of his family through a divorce. One is obsessed with bugs and other vermin after moving in to a new home, which seems a manifestation of insecurity in his masculinity (his wife appears to be the sexual aggressor in the relationship, and his neighbor, Dave, treats his lack of household handiness with some condescension). Some such implicit apprehension, in fact, seems to beset most of the protagonists in Begat, which Pactor adeptly exploits throughout the book for its comic effects.

Quite a few of the stories conspicuously employ unconventional structures and adventurous formal devices, although a focus on family dynamics and paternal equivocation remains prominent. "Archeology of Dad"--in this case recounted by the son about the father--departs from a present-day setting and relates the story of the narrator's father, a lesser-known neoconservative writer and intellectual of the Reagan-Bush era. The story of the father's rise and fall from grace as an influence at the Reagan White House is punctuated with textual "holes," which the narrator son uses to, in effect, spy on the otherwise unspoken "backstory" of the recollected narrative he is assembling. In "My Assets," a college-age daughter takes stock of her life by toting up her "assets" while reading her Econ 101 textbook. In an equally indirect manner, a father in "Do the Fish" considers his own rather confounding circumstances: his daughter has forsaken him for the mothering of a trans woman, Olive, who until recently had been the father's lover. The story is coaxed out of the father as responses to a questionnaire of sorts, although it remains uncertain just who is directing him to respond--quite likely himself. In a story that combines the graphical insertions of "Archeology of Dad" with the question-answer format of "Do the Fish," "Remainder" presents a dialogue between two men, Q and P, who discuss "American daughters" (as well as their recently deceased neighbor) in a less than fatherly way.

The father in "Sponsors" is also somewhat less than fatherly. "While his daughter was out on a date," it begins, "Berg went to her apartment, slept with her roommate, and left with his head shaved to skin." We don't really get much in the way of follow-up to Berg's introductory transgression, as the story depicts his generally aimless activities in its wake--related by a friend, who by the end of the story actually usurps attention away from Berg to his own concerns. "More Fish than Man" is not the only story in the book to hint at same-sex attraction on the father character's part (in one story, more than just a hint), in this case seeming to directly link it to the doubts about the performance of masculinity expressed to a greater or lesser degree in numerous stories in Begat. The final story in the book, "Known and Unknown Records of Kip Winger," appropriately enough recapitulates some of the more prominent motifs employed throughout Begat Who Begat Who Begat: a protagonist uncertain about his masculine libido in contrast to his more sexually adventurous wife, a problematic relationship between the protagonist and his own father, a father anxious about his own parenting skills. At the story's conclusion. the protagonist (here named Bergen) envisions three scenarios for his future, in each of which his wife leaves him. "He understood that Eva would leave no matter [how much he endeavored to keep the marriage intact]", leaving perhaps a final, sobering impression of the fragility of family.

By the time we have reached this concluding story and its concluding flourish, the book's title has come into clearer focus: the biblical chronicles of family lineage serve as elemental testimony to the ancient human imperative to create families, an imperative that has had as a secondary effect the creation of literature to register the influence of family life on human experience. Marcus Pactor's book both exemplifies the perennial relevance of stories about familial complications and demonstrates that such stories can be told in inventive and unexpected ways.

The Artifice of Story

It seems accurate to call Jen Fawkes, at least on the examples offered by her first two books, Mannequin and Wife and Tales the Devil Told Me (the former published in 2020, the latter in 2021) a fabulist, in a line of fabulist writers that has been joined by more and more writers over the past 20 years or so. Perhaps the emergence (or reemergence) of the fanciful and dreamlike in American fiction--to call this sort of fiction "surreal" would tie it too closely to the 20th century literary movement that made the term popular, with which it really shares only a preference for the distortion of reality--can be understood as a reaction to the rise of minimalist neorealism as the prevailing practice in the 1970s and 80s. But while among those adopting fabulation as an approach could be counted a writer such as George Saunders, the practice seems to have been especially appealing to a burgeoning number of women writers, who have found it more compelling than realism as a way of representing women's experiences, especially as way of challenging social, cultural, and psychological stereotypes.

Although the current writers we immediately identify with such a tendency might include, say, Aimee Bender and Karen Russell, arguably the real precursors to this mode of contemporary fiction are, arguably, Angela Carter and Rikki Ducornet. Their work directly invokes fables and fairy tales, evoking female sexual desire in a way that seems in tune with the liberatory cultural energies of the times (1960s/70s) but also, given expectations of women writers before them, still seems truly transgressive. Their fiction has a complexity and allusiveness that transforms the elemental simplicity of the fabular into a poetically suggestive kind of tale that retains the allegorical ambience of the fable but conveys meaning indirectly through the beguiling potency of the imagery. Subsequent writers showing the influence of the approach taken by Carter and Ducornet have affirmed the pursuit of an "alternate reality" as a valuable strategy in evoking facets of women's lives largely glossed over in American fiction, but the depth of vision to be found in the earlier writers is more difficult to emulate.

Jen Fawkes seems more inclined to the complexity of perspective found in Carter and Ducornet, even if at first glance the stories in a book like Tales the Devil Told Me might be characterized as simple reversals of the viewpoint associated with traditional fairy tales (substitute as protagonist the evil character for the good one). The first book, Mannequin and Wife, does not so explicitly cross over into the fabular world of make-believe but instead injects elements of the fabulous and the uncanny into what might otherwise be ordinary situations, as in "Sometimes, They Kill Each Other," the first story in the book (told in the plural first-person by the secretarial pool), in which the executives in a corporate office express their competitive impulses by literally engaging in duels staged in the office for the spectatorial pleasure of everyone assembled. In "Iphigenia in Baltimore," the "strength" of the title's mythical character is again literally figured in the story's protagonist, a fourth-grade teacher described as the "strongest woman alive" who must refrain from romance out of her fear she may unwittingly injure her partner, as once she had done in the throes of passion, wrapping her legs around her would-be lover and crushing his pelvis. 

Other stories in Mannequin and Wife are less fanciful, although still disposed to the odd and eccentric. In "Rebirth of the Big Top," the owner of a drive-in theater begins to hire the former employees of a defunct Sideshow Carnival ("Miranda the Elephant Girl," "Julius the Lobster Man"), whose presence begins to revivify his business. The protagonist of "Call Me Dixon" (ultimately an  unreliable narrator, to say the least) assumes the identity of a code-breaker (whom the narrator tells us he found dead by suicide) during the London blitz of World War II, but discovers that he is not the only one who might be suspected of operating under a counterfeit identity. In general the stories in this book effectively contest the boundary between the real and the fabulous, but ultimately they are somewhat various in tone and structure, ranging from paragraph-long flash pieces to longer stories (such as "Call Me Dixon") that have the looser discursive structure (if not the length) of a novel rather than a more strictly controlled linear narrative.

The stories in Tales the Devil Told Me also vary in length (the longest story in the book, "The Tragedie of Claudius, Prince of Denmark," Fawkes's retelling of Hamlet from Claudius's perspective, is almost novella-length), but the stories are thematically and structurally unified by the book's underlying conceit: the stories are essentially "twice-told tales" by which well-known fables, fairy tales, and other famous narratives are retold from the point of view of the stories' ostensible antagonists or narrative foils. The recompositions include the stories of Rumpelstiltskin (of a race of creatures called "rumpelstilts), Peter Pan, and Hansel and Gretel, as well as more modern works such as Moby-Dick, The Jungle Book, and Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca. Some of the narratives retain their original settings, while others are updated to a more contemporary scene ("Never, Never" is a sequel of sorts to Captain Hook's sea adventures, after he marries and settles down in an American suburb). Almost all of them intelligently and provocatively explore the potentially more complex and ambiguous imagined realities of characters who in their original incarnations played the narrower and more reduced role of villain.

Especially effective in realizing this ambition are "The Tragedie of Claudius" and "A Moment of the Lips," the latter the story of Polyphemus the cyclops and his encounter with Odysseus and his crew on their voyage back to Ithaca. It could be said that "Claudius" humanizes Claudius just by showing that, perhaps, there is another side to the story of Hamlet père's  betrayal, necessarily inaccessible to the son, but the effort doesn't really critique Shakespeare's lack of interest in this other story; rather, it illuminates the way in which Shakespeare had to ignore this part of the story so that his play could focus on the psychological deterioration of the title character--and thus fulfill the requirements of tragedy. As with many of the other pieces in the book, by providing us with an alternative version of an established story, Fawkes highlights the artifice of story, perhaps prompting reflection on the contingencies in narrative, the varied purposes that determine both what is built into a story and what is left out. "A Moment of the Lips" makes us especially aware of the stark differences between the requisites of epic narrative and those of modern psychologically-directed fiction. Polyphemus doesn't mean to eat Odysseus's men: he just can't seem to escape his cyclops nature. His actions appall, but his sincerity appeals.

Fawkes reports that she will be following up these two collections of short fiction with a novel that sounds like it will continue in the fabulist mode but also be formally adventurous in a somewhat more conspicuous way (Tales the Devil Told Me in particular relies necessarily on essentially traditional narrative conventions). This surely is something worth anticipating, after this very engaging pair of first books.

Explosions

If we identify as an "experimental" literary work one that avoids almost all of the customary markers of established form in works of fiction, Michael Winkler's Grimmish would indisputable qualify as experimental. In the mock review of the book we are about to read that acts as a preface--the first sign that this will not be literary business as usual--the anonymous reviewer notes that it has "no narrative arc, close to zero love interest, skittish occasional action, incident rather than plot, and a narrator who is intermittently compelling but prevaricates and self-deludes like a broody prince at Elsinore," but such observations don't really begin to encompass the unorthodox qualities of Grimmish, which actually do begin in determining exactly what literary genre should claim it.

The book's publicity copy calls it a work of "experimental non-fiction," while the introductory faked review refers to it as "fictionalized history" (in a metafictional excursion in the middle of the book, the narrator identifies it as an "exploded non-fiction novel"). Reviewers have referred to it variously as fiction and nonfiction, and in an interview Winkler himself called it a "hybrid of fiction and non-fiction, memoir and whatever else is in there.” It seems to me that a "hybrid" of fiction and nonfiction is perforce fiction (a little bit of fiction goes a long way), although to be sure it is indeed its gallimaufry-like assemblage of a verifiable historical record (as far as it goes) and a clearly fictionalized frame-tale both reconstructing and transmuting it that works to make Grimmish such a distinctive sort of work.

Thus if Joe Grim, an immigrant Italian-American boxer on tour in Australia during the early years of the 20th century, is the ostensible protagonist of this novel, it could be argued that the actual protagonist is the narrator's Uncle Michael, a sherry-guzzling old man holed up in a book and paper-filled room who as a young man knew Grim and who relates Grim's story to the narrator over the course of several drink-fueled sessions. Uncle Michael's story is--to say the least--unreliable, featuring, among other dubious details, a talking goat and a Joe Grim who often sounds more like a professor than a rough-and-tumble prizefighter. The narrator himself, a barely disguised double for the author (or is "Uncle Michael" a version of Michael Winkler?), holds the text together as the inquisitive examiner hoping to compile a full portrait of the somewhat mysterious Grim, but ends up providing an even fuller picture of his uncle (who's probably not actually his uncle) and of his own authorial effort to redeem the years sitting "in a room alone writing words no-one wants or will ever read" with this unorthodox amalgam of history and audacious fancy.

The fanciful conceits, however, do not muffle the impact of the book's depictions of hypermasculinity and its attendant violence, which are the necessary corollaries of its more direct meditation on the experience of pain. Joe Grim is not much of a boxer, except for his apparent ability to endure pain, to the point that no other boxer, not even the great Jack Johnson, has been able to take him out: Grim always gets back up, even if he rarely wins. Not only are we witness to the punishment Grim takes in several of his bouts, but while traveling with him and the young Uncle Michael across Australia we are also treated to an extended and quite brutal scene in a bar depicting a head butting contest (which Grim wants to join but is refused) that on the one hand would seem to encapsulate a certain sort of Australian macho culture that fetishizes pain, but on the other also renders most forcefully the social and cultural degradations more generally prompting human beings to inflict pain (and enjoy seeing it inflicted). Ultimately Joe Grim himself is less a martyr to these degradations than someone determined to exploit them to his own advantage, even as he remains their victim.

Such a perspective on Grim is of course an impression created by his portrayal in this book, not a verifiable fact about him that can be gleaned from the historical record. Grimmish does incorporate information about Joe Grim derived from secondary sources (primarily newspapers), and this is supplemented with citations to other sources (historical and otherwise) that do reinforce the book's tentative identity as nonfiction, but the episodes arising from Uncle Michael's narrative are plainly fictional (it is unlikely the historical record documents a visit by Grim to the "Ladies' Lounge," where he observed a head-butting contest). Perhaps we could still regard Grimmish as a nonfictional work of historical recreation if the fictional flourishes were simply attempts to fill in lacunae with a sort of speculation, but this book clearly goes beyond such minor manipulations: the attributable history is really just the foundation for a work of imaginative fiction whose value is not directly determined by questions about its historical authenticity or fidelity to fact. 

But it is precisely this melding of the historically situated and the freely invented that is itself the most compelling achievement of the book, more so than the evocation of the character Grim (who emerges as an appealing comic grotesque but who doesn't seem to have much to do with the "real" Joe Grim) or the ruminations on the human capacity for pain (which, in my reading, at least, eventually become somewhat routine). If "exploded non-fiction novel" doesn't finally seem a particularly meaningful label for a work like Grimmish, in its very inadequacy as a genre marker it signals what is most impressive about the book as a literary provocation.

Hashtag Good Guy With a Gun (Sagging Meniscus Press), by Jeff Chon

Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino (Graywolf Press), by Julian Herbert

Thick Skin (Kernpunkt Press), by N/A Oparah

Wiki of Infinite Sorrows (Kernpunkt Press), by Matthew Burnside

Meiselman (Tortoise Books), by Avner Landes

Capturing the Times

Although Jeff Chon's Hashtag Good Guy With a Gun has been published after Donald Trump was voted out of office, it is clearly intended to evoke the Trump era, even if the action of the novel takes place just before and just after the 2016 election. It is not a political novel, or is only indirectly, in the way it depicts the cultural conditions that help to explain Trump's ascendance. It offers a literary snapshot of the kinds of behavior that accompany the political turbulence that Trump seemed to foment, while also revealing in the attitudes of its cast of characters that the genesis of such turbulence derives not from Trump himself but from already turbulent currents roiling through American culture.

While the ostensible protagonist of the novel is Scott Bonneville, a disaffected former teacher whose violent confrontation with a would-be shooter in a pizza restaurant provides the novel's narrative axis, numerous other characters also receive close attention as we circle around this incident, tracking its aftermath, as well as learning more about the circumstances that brought about such an event in the first place: Scott's abusive family background--he is a Korean-American adopted by white religious fanatics--and his later failures at both love and career (the former involving the mother of one of his students), his slide into conspiracy thinking that leads him to the "Pizza Galley" on the fateful night, where he believes he will be breaking up a pedophile ring located in the basement. Among the characters associated with Scott and his story, we follow the fortunes (misfortunes) of Scott's troubled student, Blake Mesman, who joins up with a hyper-masculine incel group, the "Company of Men," and Scott's brother Brian, who, as it turns out, has dealt with the abuse he experienced in their father's milieu even less constructively than Scott.

The protagonist's plan to expose the pizza restaurant as the locus of an operation for kidnapping children is of course drawn directly from the 2016 attack on a Washington, D.C. pizza parlor supposedly harboring sex slaves, according to a QAnon-like conspiracy theory focused on the Hilary Clinton campaign and spread on social media. Chon provides a twist on this real-life occurrence by making the would-be perpetrator not an obvious alt-right nutjob but a seemingly mild-mannered Korean-American teacher whose life setbacks prove too much for him. Similarly, the grievances, anxieties, and disappointments visible in the actions of many of the other characters take on their own particular expression but are recognizable manifestations of the traits that came to seem more widespread during the Trump years. It might be tempting to regard what Chon is doing in Hashtag as a form of satire, except that nothing of what happens is very amusing, and there is little suggestion that the situations and behaviors depicted can very easily be corrected.

Two of the other important characters, Yu-jin Walker, manager of the Pizza Galley, and Song Jae-dong (identified throughout the novel as Jae), are also Korean-American, and especially through Jae, the influence of Korean culture further enhances the perspective on the stories we follow. We first meet Jae, a currently homeless man, outside the Pizza Galley, where he encounters Scott, brandishing his weapon on his way inside. Jae has a vision of Scott as Jeoseung Saja, "Korean folklore's emissary of death," but this notion of Scott as a folkloric grim reaper (a connection Scott himself seems to accept) creates an unsettling resonance as the novel progresses: Is Scott the reaper, or is he the subject of Jeoseung Saja's mission who proves himself unworthy of crossing over? Jae is himself an uncertain source of enlightenment about about this conundrum, as he is clearly not of sound mind, a state of affairs that led him to leave his wife and daughter and live on the streets in the first place. 

By the novel's conclusion, attention has largely shifted away from Scott Bonneville (except for his ultimate role as victim), in favor of Jae, Scott's brother Brian, and Blake Mesman, the latter two of whom lead Scott into the literal inferno that decides Scott's fate. The ending seems in keeping with the novel's overall portrayal of a society cultivating failure, with those experiencing the loss of cultural coherence and its attendant personal disappointments ill-equipped to respond beyond paranoia and undirected antagonism. In this, Chon surely does accurately evoke the disarray in which America has recently found itself (made even more intractable by the ubiquity of social media), a state of confusion Donald Trump certainly exploited for his own narcissistic purposes. But somehow simply mapping this cultural dissolution finally seems perfunctory, a superfluous gesture. In many ways, Hashtag Good Guy With a Gun provides what we would expect from a "novel of the Trump years," which seems to me an inadequate rationale for writing a novel. This is not so much a judgment of this particular novel (which maintains interest well enough) as dissatisfaction with the whole notion of "capturing the times" in a work of fiction. I don't really want the Trump years to be captured in the first place; I'd prefer they be released and sent on their way.

The Life You Dream Of

Although Julian Herbert is the author (or co-author) of more than 20 books published in Mexico, he is available in English translations through only three of these, Tomb Song (translation published 2018), The House of the Pain of Others (translation 2019), and now Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino (translation published in November of 2020). Since half of Herbert's books are collections of poems, those of us reading Herbert through these translations are already getting an unavoidably limited and distorted perspective on his work, but the three translated books are also considerably different from one another, making a comprehensive assessment of the work essentially impossible.

Of course it might be said that these very differences signify a writer willing to take risks, to experiment with forms and the mingling of forms. This would unquestionably be true (an impression only reinforced if we consider that he is also the vocalist in a rock and roll band): The House of the Pain of Others is some combination of journalism, history, and a travelogue as it chronicles the 1911 massacre of 300 Chinese immigrants in the Mexican city of Torreon (150 miles or so from Herbert's hometown of Saltillo), while Tomb Song combines fiction and autobiography in something close to what is now called autofiction, although there are interludes in the book so thoroughly invented they veer toward fantasia. These are both very good books, but lack of context from Herbert's other published work could lead readers of the available translations to find them overly various, unmoored from the author's broader tendencies and concerns.

Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino is a somewhat more recognizable sort of book, a series of short fictions and a concluding novella. The collection displays a degree of unity in its frequent focus on the violence associated with the Mexican drug cartels (perhaps an unsurprising focus given the book's title), although it also has sharply drawn characters and a good deal of humor (in the title novella especially). This conjoining of violence and comedy has the effect both of actually heightening the violence when it does occur and making the comic outlook underpinning all of the stories more disturbingly funny. The first two stories in the book, "The Ballad of Mother Teresa of Calcutta" and "M.L. Estefania," establish the prevailing tone. In the former, absurdity prevails: the narrator, a self-styled "personal memories coach" who helps people enhance (i.e. fabricate) memories relates a false memory he urges on a client writing his memoir, an anecdote in which the client, during a long wait at the Charles De Gaulle airport to fly back to Mexico City and feeling ill (he's been accused of theft on top of it), accidentally throws up on Mother Teresa, who has just arrived. In the latter, what starts out as farce (the protagonist is hired to impersonate the title character, a famed Mexican writer of Western novels) turns deadly, as the narrator witnesses his companions being shot to death by a drug gang. The narrator is spared only because the leader turns out to the narrator's former student.

"White Paper" and "The Roman Wedding" do not depict violence directly, but instead evoke the propinquity of violence and its aftermath, in the former through a kind of Barthlemean burlesque in which a group of forensics students conduct an ineffectual crime scene investigation, in the latter by focusing on the funeral of a drug lord whose son at the end of the story finally walks away from the family business. Other stories are not directly engaged with the sociopolitical realities of Mexican life, and show Herbert more freely indulging in acts of imagination. In "There Where We Stood," the narrator (apparently Julian Herbert) sees a manifestation of the deceased Mexican writer Juan Rulfo, who informs the narrator he is the devil. "Caries" is about a man who discovers his mouth is full of sheet music (the story provides us with several pages of the scores). "Z" is a speculative, post-apocalyptic story related by a man whose city is being ravaged by an infection that causes people to crave human flesh. The narrator is seeing his psychoanalyst, who has the infection but hasn't yet come down with the worst symptoms.

No doubt, however, the title novella is the book's feature attraction, and it certainly does validate both the impudence of the title and the work's place as the book's capstone. It reinscribes the blending of the humorous and the terrifying, as well as the entanglement in the anarchic absurdity of protagonists with artistic and intellectual credentials (or at least pretensions), who wind up the victims of circumstances they both abhor and covertly relish. In "Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino" the protagonist is a film scholar of sorts (focused on Tarantino, of course), who is kidnapped by a drug lord and brought to his mammoth underground lair, where he discovers that the drug lord is obsessed with Quentin Tarantino and wants the narrator to help track him down. After dispatching his thugs to find the director in Los Angeles and bring back his head (a separate narrative strand tracks their hapless efforts to do so), the drug lord retains the narrator's services as an interlocutor in discussions of Tarantino's oeuvre (of cinema in general), and the narrator finds himself increasingly content with his lot--until the police raid the hideout after tracking his own abduction. Later the narrator visits the kingpin in prison, discovering that the latter's resemblance to Tarantino had motivated his rage, reminding him of his own lost ambition to be an actor: "He's kind of like me in the movies, but in real life I wanted to be like him. . .And you can bear having your appearance stolen, champ, but not the life you dream of."

The dollop of pathos added at the conclusion of this novella doesn't mitigate the social realities depicted in the book, but perhaps does make them more perplexing.

Sharing Words

Probably N/A Oparah's Thick Skin treats its subject about as successfully as can be done, at least in a novel (or perhaps novella) of relatively modest ambitions. The subject is the narrator's attempt to get over a breakup with an ex-boyfriend. The narrator's account might be called a story of heartbreak, but it isn't really so much about lost love as it is an effort by the narrator, Nneka, to interrogate her emotional allegiance to the relationship, to process the trauma the breakup has caused her, even though she knows that allegiance was rooted in more than love, that the trauma comes from a breach in the identity she had claimed for herself until then.

Composed of fragmentary reflections, memories, observations, and reveries, Nneka's account makes it clear enough that this identity was partly grounded in an irresistible need for acceptance, both as a woman and as a Nigerian-American born of immigrant parents with exacting standards. This need has instilled a sense of inferiority in Nneka, which both led her to endure mistreatment from the boyfriend, Jacob, and now makes her effort to cope with the end of the relationship even more painful as she also struggles to finally overcome the fears and anxieties that have conditioned her dependence. The novel's dominant trope is invoked in the title: Nneka's initial strategy for coping is to develop a thick skin, either literally, by adding various substances to her body (including extra weight) or figuratively, through a questionable mode of therapy (her best friend likens it to a cult). Although ultimately it could be said the novel is about "healing," there is little dramatic progression to a revelatory moment, no final reckoning with the old self and creation of the new, although the final scene suggests perseverance, as Nneka walks down the street drinking a cup of tea, a drop of which spills on her hand: "I slow down, burn, and keep walking."

What makes the reader persevere through a novel without much forward movement is Oparah's evocative language. "You taught me to write us," Nneka apostrophizes Jacob at one point, but if anything it is in her attempts to reckon with her new life without Jacob that Nneka's powers of recall and observation become even more verbally acute:

On the deck, sun against skin. I am bones on your ground. No way is comfortable. I am the pea under mattress. There is no escape. You sit on the porch futon, saturated and dried too many times. Brown and heavy, burden and rot. You sit anyway, make new imprints. Ignore the ruin. Your right holds a cigarette. Your left, a beer. Something is always approaching your lips. I watch you, simmering, too dark to burn. We don't share words, but we're not silent. . . .

Throughout, the prose style manages to arrest our attention through its effective balance of clarity and suggestion, out of which does gradually emerge an austere kind of narrative development. If Nneka's account is being recorded in a diary or journal of sorts, perhaps we could say that it is this writing that in its aesthetic precision bids to become her most valuable form of therapy.

But while the novel's prose does maintain the reader's interest, finally it is harder to muster a lot of complementary interest in the ostensible object of Nneka's obsession, Jacob himself. That he ultimately seems a shallow man, an ordinary, self-centered and thoughtless male hardly worthy of Nneka's agonized retrospections might indeed be a conclusion Oparah intends for us to reach, but this not really make reading about him any more invigorating. The book's genuine merits thus can't entirely redeem its inherently banal subject.

All Work, No Play

I want to think that my inability to fully appreciate Matthew Burnside's Wiki of Infinite Sorrows is due not to its palpable flaws but because finally I am not really part of its intended audience. The book is apparently a reworking of a text that originally appeared as an online hypertext work called In Search Of, and although I am not altogether unfamiliar with (or unsympathetic to) electronic texts, this work seems to have been composed primarily for a community of readers especially attuned to the possibilities of digital storytelling. (Burnside teaches "cross-genre and digital writing.") In addition, this form appears to be heavily indebted to the conventions of the video game, with which most of the members of this community are intimately familiar but which, suffice it to say, is entirely unexplored territory for me. (The last video game I can remember playing was Pong.) Surely this audience understands Burnside's objectives better than I do.

Still, presumably Burnside would not have adapted the original work to print unless he believed it could stand on its own in this medium. While its origin as a hyperlinked text to be read on a screen could give us clues as to how the print text is organized and the effect it is intended to have, its form and devices ought to succeed or fail by the standards we are accustomed to using in judging traditional print fiction. Certainly Burnside should be free to experiment with the conventions of fiction, to unsettle reader's expectations, including expectations of what "experimental fiction" might do. To the extent that in Wiki of Infinite Sorrows (as well as his previous book, Postludes (2016)) Burnside is indeed searching for a form to accommodate a vision of form expanded by the elasticity of digital narratives, then each book merits reading, but the former, at least, more as a failed experiment than a compelling adaptation of digital storytelling.

My first problem with the novel is that it doesn't really seem consistent with its title, or the publisher's description of it as "a collection of fictional wiki entries." Even if this merely means that the individual entries were initially composed online, the notion that the interactive qualities associated with "wiki" have been reproduced in this novel is inaccurate and misleading. The core narrative in Wiki of Infinite Sorrows enlists the characters and setting of In Search Of, although necessarily this narrative does not have the indeterminacy of the hypertext version. It concerns the Cress family, living in the town of Brownleaf, whose youngest son dies suddenly but apparently continues to live deep inside the cyber world. Later, his sister searches for him and ultimately joins him in his world. This narrative, however, is supplemented with various other scenes, interludes and stories, most of which have no directly discernible relationship to the Cress family story. 

The temptation, of course, is to search for interpretive connections among all of the included fragments, for a coherent integration of the book as whole, and while no doubt some such integration is always possible given a suitably sweeping generalization, this effort finally seems antithetical to the work's origins and its reconceived purpose. If the goal is to invest print-bound fiction with something of the digressiveness and multivalence of electronic fiction, then imposing a synthetic unity on a motley succession of vignettes simply because they are unavoidably serial would surely be misguided. Some of the segments do indeed link up with other segments in a fairly straightforward way (besides the Cress family narrative, there are also a number of episodes concerning "Sal" and his problematic relationship with a court-appointed android "companion"--known commercially as a "Sidekick"), but many others bear no apparent relationship to these stories or to each other. This discontinuity may be not only deliberate but ultimately the book's underlying warrant. But does this move work?

The original title of In Search Of identified it as a "Sandbox Novel," which apparently was meant to identify it as a work accentuating the reader's participation, allowing the reader to "play." This is a perfectly fine idea, but it seems to me that readerly play in relation to print text must be directed to different ends than it would be with a hypertext work, which explicitly solicits the reader's participation in determining plot. Merely to disconnect the book's individual parts from an expected structural whole to make them more disparate and divergent does not really ensure more active and productive reading. It just makes it more likely that we will find a work like Wiki of Infinite Sorrows a frustrating reading experience.

Loser-man

Several reviewers of Avner Landes's Meiselman: The Lean Years have had trouble reckoning with the novel's titular protagonist. One reviewer acknowledges the novel's effective humor, but suggests that the comedy arises because the protagonist is "a lot of fun to laugh at." Another suggests that Meiselman is "incapable of empathy or any other emotion aside from envy and resentment," making him a proto-MAGA guy," while yet another dismisses Meiselman as "an asshole with no redeeming qualities." This reviewer would prefer instead a "redemptive novel" featuring something other than an "utterly repellent everyman" as protagonist.

It is certainly the case that Meiselman, an "Events and Programs Coordinator" at a suburban Chicago library, is a profoundly flawed human being who has trouble empathizing with others and can only negotiate the world by attending closely to his own sense of well-being, but this really makes him a figure to pity rather than "laugh at" (when we're not wondering if there's a little bit of Meiselman in ourselves). And he is indeed often motivated by envy and resentment, but these feelings are really no more deeply experienced than any other of Meiselman's emotions--Meiselman seems to be most driven by a propensity to dwell on his most immediate sensations and most exigent impulses, especially after he determines that he has in fact spent too much time keeping himself in line and avoiding conflict. His emotional and intellectual superficiality may not be "redeemed" by a more healthy self-awareness at the novel's conclusion (although he does seem chastened by the "trauma" he has endured during the week in his life the novel chronicles), but this seems part of the novel's design: Meiselman's affliction does not seem to be of the sort that can be easily reversed through moral revelation; it seems likely Meiselman will continue muddling through in his own blinkered way.

In his unremitting libidinal urges, Meiselman might seem reminiscent of Philip Roth's obsessive protagonists, but he is much less determined to consummate those urges. His lusting is all in his head (except for an embarrassing interlude at his wife's bedside--literally--when according to custom she is supposed to be off-limits to him). He is both impulsive in scrutinizing his sexual desires and reluctant to indulge them. For several days he becomes preoccupied by a "pink-haired woman" (actually a high school student) he espies in the library, and to whom he is obviously attracted, but while he does scheme to be in her company, to help her out with a paper on Shakespeare she is writing, the scheming goes no farther than that, and she winds up pairing off with Meiselman's rival, Izzy Shenkenberg, a former classmate turned important writer, who has been invited to speak at the library by its director, Ethel Lewinson (also the object of Meiselman's erotic interest). Meiselman is sexually attracted to his wife, Deena, as well, but in this case he has reduced his sexual relations with her to a matter of ritual--every Sunday night--the anticipation of which actually makes him neurotic about it. By the novel's conclusion, Deena is on the verge of leaving him because she has started to find him creepy.

Finally, Meiselman seems more comparable to the protagonist of Bruce Jay Friedman's Stern, the loser who desperately wants to be a winner but hesitates to take strong action, worrying over his problems rather than seeking to resolve them. Meiselman advances toward what its protagonist conceives to be a confrontation between himself and Izzy Shenkenberg, who has written a novel that purportedly includes an unfavorable portrayal of a local rabbi. (Meiselman reads Izzy's book, but doesn't really pay close enough attention to say whether it's a fair criticism or not.) But in his capacity as moderator of the discussion with Shenkenberg, Meiselman mostly avoids confrontation, sticking instead to questions written by Ethel. For his more or less obedient behavior, Meiselman is rewarded at the end of the night by an announcement that Ethel has resigned her position as library director and that Meiselman, ostensibly in line for the job, has been passed over as her replacement. It is a humiliation Stern would appreciate.

But Friedman's character undergoes his travails as a clash between himself as a Jew and a suburban environment still laden with Anti-Semitism. Meiselman traverses an entirely Jewish domain, a Chicago suburb in which the Jews flourish. Stern is to an extent afraid for his life (however overwrought that fear might be); Meiselman feels disrespected within his own community (and by his own family). This makes for a different kind of humor, less "black" and not exactly satirical. If it were true that we are encouraged primarily to "laugh at" Meiselman, such laughter would indeed be cruel, since Meiselman cannot easily alter his behavior--he's a rebellious personality and a dutiful member of his community, and given the familial and cultural constraints to which he customarily defers, it's difficult to see how he would effectively untangle this knot of conflicting influences. Meiselman's behavior is often risible, but we are really laughing at this intrinsic predicament, of which Meiselman himself is only fitfully aware.

Perhaps we would feel more benignant toward Meiselman if he were narrating his own story, but it is told by a third-person narrator, who, although sticking closely to Meiselman's perspective and hewing closely to his thoughts and perceptions, approaches Meiselman's actions with a scrupulous detachment. Meiselman's state of mind is reported fully and accurately, even as these introspections can encourage an unflattering view of our protagonist. This technique contributes to the novel's complex comic tone, and helps to produce a character who, despite a kinship with preceding American Jewish protagonists, is really a singular creation.

The Ancestry of Objects (Deep Vellum), by Tatiana Ryckman

Sea Above, Sun Below (River Boat Books), by George Salis

The Posthumous Works of Thomas Pilaster (Sublunary Editions), by Eric Chevillard

Ire Land (a Faery Tale) (Spuyten Duyvil), by Elisabeth Sheffield

Fucked Up (Expat Press), by Damien Ark

The Experience of Extremity

What makes Tatiana Ryckman's The Ancestry of Objects more than a familiar story of an adulterous love affair are the troubling circumstances of the unnamed narrator who finds herself involved in the affair and the extraordinary language she uses in relating it. Although the narrator isn't exactly expansive in providing us the details about her circumstances, we do gradually learn that she never knew her parents, raised instead by austerely religious grandparents, that those grandparents have died, that she has just lost her job, and that she is currently suicidal. She is in fact quite blunt about that--when she meets at a bar the man who will be her lover, she is contemplating the means of her death: electrocution, asphyxiation, or pills?

We also learn immediately that, although we are reading an ostensibly first-person narrative, the narrator refers to herself in the plural first person.

When he sits at the bar, waiting for his table, and his woman, we see from the corner of our eye that he will speak to us, and when he asks what we are reading we resent him for kicking the crutch of loneliness out from under us like the job, gone, and one day the house, gone, and soon, life, gone. Us, gone.

It would seem we are not to take this eccentricity as a sign of a literal dissociative disorder--indeed, throughout the novel the narrator's identity seems quite consistent--but nevertheless as an expression of her psychological confusion. Whether because of the lingering effects of her quasi-abusive upbringing, the reality of her solitude (living in the same house in which she was raised), or simply a depressive personality (likely a combination of these, although the first surely has conditioned the last), the narrator/protagonist does have a faltering sense of her own self-worth, and her affair with "the man" seems simultaneously to be an invitation to obliterate her self-respect altogether and an opportunity to take the first tentative steps, at least, toward claiming it.

But while the narrator seems to subsist in a state of emotional and psychological drift, her powers of observation and recall are extraordinarily keen, her verbal resources abundant. In the midst of a conversation with the man (who does have a name: David) in which the narrator tells him what she knows about her parents, supposedly dead in a car accident, she begins to feel the presence of  the grandparents:

The house takes in these new unnamed faults, filling the cracks between poorly fitted pieces of counter and narrow passageways behind furniture that cannot be pressed flush against the wall, the voices of our grandparents behind closed doors, whispering to each other while we choke our breath in the deep, soft mattress of our mother's old room. We make an island in the sea of tiles and listen for their holy guidance in the emptiness we've always moved through. Nothing is right for a young woman to do/say/think/be.

This language is not especially figurative (except for the personification in the first sentence that triggers the recollection of the grandparents), but it nevertheless provides revelatory insight into the narrator's circumstances, the way her house seems to her alive, still animated by the presence of her grandparents, even if she can now only access that presence through memory and the articulation of that memory in scrupulously articulated but slightly aslant language. Often we get isolated bursts of such verbal acuity: "When he straightens, our hands drop to our sides as if they'd expected to be left empty all along," the narrator tells us after a first embrace with David.

Because of the atmosphere of impending failure the narrator's chronicle of her liaison with David also creates through her relentless self-examination and painstaking descriptions, the reader is perhaps tempted to move swiftly through her account to get a confirmation of that failure. But a full appreciation of the novel's achievement requires that we slow down and parse her sentences, allow their evocative indirection to register fully. The protagonist of The Ancestry of Objects is ultimately a memorable and somewhat enigmatic character, but this impression comes not simply from the extremity of her situation but in the way as narrator she finds the language to express her experience of extremity, managing to illuminate it rather than capitulate to it.

Arguably the novel falters at its conclusion. As the affair with David comes to its (inevitable) end, the narrator makes a fresh connection with her absent mother (through a shoebox full of objects that had belonged to her, found in the grandparents' bedroom) and begins to move all of the household objects associated with the grandparents into the basement, ultimately leaving the house essentially bare. The symbolism of all of this is pretty obvious, and the suggestion that the narrator may be on the verge of beneficial change seems rather pat. But to an extent, this is the expected ending to this sort of narrative, and the plot isn't really the point in The Ancestry of Objects. We don't learn anything new about the geometry of a love affair, but we can come to appreciate the author's way with words.

Echoes and Correlations

It can seem while reading George Salis's Sea Above, Sun Below that the novel is somewhat formless, a series of episodes moving back and forth in time and place rather loosely tied to what seems to be the main narrative, concerning a group of skydivers about to attempt a record-breaking dive. But gradually it becomes more clear that it is a very tightly structured, even explicitly formalist, work. Each of the seemingly disparate characters are subsequently braided into the narrative, so that they all have some association with the novel's protagonist, Adam, whose eccentric father founded the skydiving event for which Adam and other members of his skydiving club are preparing. This strategy allows the novel ultimately to provide a coherently extended narrative but also allows for additional sorts of unifying devices that make the novel more structure than story.

Salis reinforces the novel's formal scheme through recurrent images and motifs, beginning with the protagonist's name and the situation portrayed. The primary motif in the book is the act of falling, but it is Adam's literal fall from an airplane at the novel's beginning (and again at the end) that provides the controlling image, although allusions to Icarus are also prominent. The novel doesn't so much metaphorically portray Adam's fall from grace, or impute a kind of hubris to skydiving, as simply use the idea of falling, as well as associated phenomena, such as being upside-down (signaled first of all in the novel's title), as a conceit that in a sense takes precedence over the story being told, or at least gives to the story to an additional level of connotation. Salis does not, however, insist on the underlying allegorical "meaning" such a move might entail. The novel seems less concerned with symbolic implication--the motif is brandished too overtly for anything to seem cloaked--and more with creating a pattern of allusions that also reinforces the novel's aesthetic order.

Certainly many of these allusions are Biblical, and the novel does explicitly invoke religion, although the emphasis is on the effects of religious beliefs, and the Biblical iconography seems to mostly reflect a concern with the mythopoeic in general. Adam and his wife, Evelyn, might be described as subsisting in a state of innocence of sorts, although it is really a fragile paradise of true love induced by Adam's protectiveness toward "Evy," the daughter of an abusive minister whose severe theology is on display in separate sections devoted to him. Two other characters, a brother and sister, captive to a bizarre religious fanaticism, store their dead father in a bedroom and await his resurrection. (One of Adam's fellow jumpers, Charles, comes to believe his missing wife, Hellen, also has been resurrected when her body is not discovered along with her car's wreckage after an accident, a possibility the novel doesn't exactly discredit.) Later, after Adam publishes an essay recounting a jump (a jump with which the novel begins) during which he has a vision of "an angel with a sun for a head, two pairs of wings composed of blue and gold feathers, and a body adorned with silver scales," the brother begins to regard Adam as a kind of prophet. 

So pervasive are all of these echoes and correlations that they not only substitute for plot (successfully) but they also to an extent impede the full development of dynamic characters. Ultimately the characters seem to exist to serve the novel's web of metaphorical figurations, not because they are of great interest in themselves. This is not necessarily a flaw in conception (characters need not be of interest in themselves if making them so is not one of the writer's artistic goals), but the primary mode of characterization in this novel is through dialogue, and too much of it goes on for too long, especially the attempts at waggish banter among the members of the skydiving club. The club, in fact, is less compelling than it needs to be if it is to bear the weight of mythic and at times metaphysical implication it is enlisted to carry. Sea Above, Sun Below thus has its laborious moments, but as an aesthetic whole, it is an admirable creation.

Syntactical Deductions

Eric Chevillard has described himself as a writer attuned first of all to the effects of his sentences: "Everything comes together in my sentences, in the moment of their writing, driven by a hopscotch logic, by syntactical deductions. My stories are born out of sheer energy" ("A Conversation with Eric Chevillard.")  A first sentence is especially important in opening up "a wholly unexplored space" that the following sentences proceed to occupy.

This focus on the dynamics of the sentence in determining the shape and direction of the story seems somewhat reminiscent of the notion of "consecution" as promulgated by the American writer/teacher Gordon Lish and put into practice by many of his students. Chevillard does not appear to emphasize the purely sonic qualities of the procession of sentences in quite the same way, but unfortunately, the reader of Chevillard's fiction in translation can't really appreciate the full range of possible effects put into play by the writer's method of composition, no matter how diligently the translator tries to reproduce or recreate them. This is the inherent limitation in approaching a writer's work through translation--one that most of us can only accept--but it becomes especially apparent when the writer is as solicitous of literature as a "language act" as Chevillard avows himself to be.

Luckily, Chevillard is also a writer whose manner of filling that "wholly unexplored space" invoked by language still registers distinctly and distinctively, the "sheer energy" scarcely diminished. In particular, the "hopscotch logic" of Chevillard's novels seems their most essential characteristic, making them both manifestly peculiar and frequently hilarious. This logic is especially evident in a work such as The Crab Nebula, which might be said to "hop" randomly from vignette to vignette in the story of "Crab," except that there is no story (or rather there are many stories), Crab is never quite the same person, and sometimes not exactly a person. The tonal effect is really neither surreal nor absurdist, but rather a near-total disregard of "sense" as a goal the novelist should strive to achieve. Yet one does come to have some feeling for poor Crab in his effort to cope with the senselessness we all come to suspect is our inescapable reality. Demolishing Nisard has more continuity and coherence, centered around its narrator protagonist's obsession with obscure 19th century pedagogue Désiré Nisard, although it too threatens to teeter over into nonsense. In this case, the "hopscotch logic" is embodied in the narrator, who allows his neurotic belief that the opinions of  the man he reviles epitomize the vacuity of the modern age to in effect turn himself into just another version of Nisard.

Each of these novels at first might seem both aimless and formally chaotic, but ultimately their collage-like structures bring about a congruity of sorts in the evocation of character (even if Crab is only a provisional sort of character in the first place). On the other hand, in The Posthumous Works of Thomas Pilaster, the latest Chevillard novel to now be translated (by Chris Clarke), form is conspicuously present: the novel purports to be a collection of unpublished writings by the recently deceased writer Pilaster, with an editorial apparatus by Pilaster's fellow writer (and supposed friend), "Marc-Antoine Marson." The pieces included do indeed seem like odds and ends--diary entries, a very brief detective story, a collection of haiku, an unperformed one-act play, among others), but Marson does his level best in his introductory and editorial notes to make them seem even more marginal--while also damning Pilaster's published oeuvre with the faintest of praise.

If the editor's impatience with the author's works begs the question of why the book has been assembled in the first place, eventually it becomes clear enough that Marston has come to bury Pilaster, not to praise him, that his enmity against the writer goes back a long way indeed (to their student days together) and has only deepened through jealousy, both professional, due to Pilaster's more exalted reputation, and the more traditional kind: Marson reveals himself to have been in love with Pilaster's wife, Lise, whose own death preceded Pilaster's 15 years earlier. The novel bears an undeniable resemblance to Nabokov's Pale Fire, although the "backstory" the reader must piece together is rather less exotic than Nabokov's. Still, the reader does come to suspect that the undercurrent of jealousy that seems to propel the editor's compilation of Thomas Pilaster's posthumous works might also have risen to murder; the murky circumstances of the deaths of both Lise and Pilaster himself point to Marson as the likely perpetrator.

The Posthumous Works of Thomas Pilaster, like the Chevillard novel translated most immediately before it, the metafictional The Author and Me, is a more recognizably "postmodern" novel than The Crab Nebula and Demolishing Nisard, which to an extent seem like more singular creations. On the whole, however, Chevillard is an audacious and insidiously entertaining writer, and the reader new to his work (as I was) might just as well read these books all together (as I did).

An Unruly Woman

Elisabeth Sheffield's novels feature women who are "difficult" "unruly," at times resolutely unpleasant--at least to readers who expect a fictional protagonist (especially if it is a woman) to be at heart "likable." They are otherwise dynamic characters who just don't observe the rules of propriety or decorum. Stella, one of the protagonists of Sheffield's first novel, Gone (2003), is a disaffected and dissolute adjunct community college English instructor who goes on a fruitless quest, accompanied by her ex-student lover, to track down what she believes is her inheritance, a valuable Winslow Homer painting. Along the way we read from letters written by Stella's deceased aunt, Juju, who in her own, different way, is as incorrigible as Stella. The protagonist of Fort Da (2009), a 38 year-old neurologist, relates (in a dissociated and displaced way) an account of her reverse-Lolita obsession with an 11 year-old boy. One of the dual protagonists of 2014's Helen Keller Really Lived (the other protagonist is a ghost) is a quasi-grifter (she dispenses "healing") who ultimately becomes involved in a theft of embryos from a fertility clinic.

It is likely that these portrayals against the grain of conventional assumptions about appropriately feminine behavior help account for the dearth of critical attention given to Sheffield's work in the mainstream literary press (or even what was once called the blogosphere), although the adventurous formal structures of the novels also no doubt bother less adventurous readers and critics as well: it would seem that difficult women require more unorthodox, more ostensibly difficult methods of aesthetic representation to adequately render their experiences. If in Fort Da the main character offers her version of events through a misleading, pseudo-scientific "report" and much of Helen Keller Really Lived comes to us as a ghost's communications to the protagonist (his ex-wife) through her computer, in Sheffield's 2021 novel, Ire Land (a Faery Tale), the narrative consists of a sequence of emails written by the protagonist, Sandra Dorn--although they actually come packaged as an edited and annotated manuscript sent to the now deceased Sandra's daughter.

The status of the text has--or should have--an immediate effect on our perception of the narrative it relates, making it, of course, an inherently unreliable source of truth or accuracy, especially since the story that emerges from Sandra Dorn's email chronicles (sent as responses to the unknown recipient "madmaeve17") involves the intercession of Gaelic faeries and Sandra's transformation into a hare. That story is essentially a picaresque recital of Sandra's fortunes after losing her home in Denver, where she is a professor of gender studies whose disorderly behavior has left her an older woman without friends or defenders among her colleagues, a wretched outcast. She first finds refuge with a younger sister, and when that ends up badly, she lives for a time with a brother and his girlfriend, but that too comes a cropper. Finally she is granted a reprieve of sorts with an offer of a temporary teaching position in Belfast (where she had lived previously in a relationship that ended badly), and the novel concludes--after a bizarre interlude in the classroom--with the intimation that Sandra has been taken away by the faeries ("[we can] fix ye up and kit you out" the mysterious editor--or some other shadowy figure usurping his role--declares in one of the editorial insertions).

While it is somewhat hard to know how seriously to take all of the particulars of Sandra Dorn's account (or at least the version we are presented), finally the plot details are less pivotal for an appreciation of the novel than our response to Sandra Dorn and her recital of her life experiences. It would be very easy to recoil from her, given some of the bad behavior to which she confesses (abandoning her first-born son) or we witness her perform (hurling invective at a child), but it's also hard to not admire the unapologetic candor of her admissions, her acceptance (not without an implicit sneer) of her dismal circumstances after a lifetime spent insisting on personal autonomy and disregarding convention. If Sandra Dorn were the male protagonist (Sandy Dorn, say) of a male-authored novel, he would surely be considered a "rogue," defiant of norms but to a degree laudable for that. Perhaps such a roguish personality is still regarded as objectionable in a female character, but at this stage in her life, while it might be salubrious for Sandra to be with the faeries in their mounds, that Sheffield affirms as her protagonist such a morally unkempt character as Sandra Dorn in the first place is arguably the novel's most praiseworthy achievement.

Sheffield would be high on my list of unjustly overlooked writers in current American fiction, but fortunately she is still able to attract publishers to her work. Ire Land would certainly be a good place to start with that work for the uninitiated, but really all of her books are equally worthwhile.

Down and Sideways

The publisher of Damien Ark's Fucked Up has called it "as extreme as it gets," and he's probably right. The depictions of abuse, sexual obsession, sadism, and grotesque violence are straightforward and relentless, and pretty clearly the author intends to overwhelm the unsuspecting reader with his novel's ugliness and horror. The author should perhaps be applauded simply for the audacity of the effort to carry out such a task so resolutely (and the publisher as well for taking the risk of publishing it, even if it isn't likely to reach a large enough audience to provoke widespread outrage).

It seems to me that Fucked Up really highlights the difference between "experimental" and "transgressive" fiction. It is a first-person narrative that proceeds more or less linearly, although it is leavened with flashbacks and, because the narrator is schizophrenic, endeavors to incorporate the disembodied voices with which he is plagued and to evoke the hallucinations to which he is inevitably prone. But the narrative otherwise unfolds directly enough, and the prose style is neither elliptically pared-back nor ostentatiously ornate. (We are to believe the narrator is very intelligent, so he is generally quite articulate, perhaps more so than his relative youth and traumatic experiences might suggest.) The novel transgresses in its content, not its form--although that transgression is uninhibited indeed.

If Fucked Up is not formally complex, it certainly could be called excessive, again deliberately so. The novel's scenes of, at some points, detailed sex acts (mostly, but not exclusively, same-sex) and, at others, brutality and chaos recur almost without surcease for 850 pages. The novel essentially takes as its mission to portray both the protagonist and his environment (personal and social) as "fucked up," and thus it does, attempting to add another twist of perversity or cruelty to the already considerable number of such twists previously provided. Suffice it to say that it doesn't always succeed in this mission, and the shock value of such repetition wanes, eventually becoming wearisome. Suffering at the hands of one child-abusing serial killer is horrific enough the first time, but when the narrative makes its way to another such predator, who in effect repeats the depravity of the first one, the effect is closer to numbness than fear or trembling. Of course, this recurrence is intentional, as it reinforces the implacability of the protagonist's fucked upness, but by the novel's end the presumption that he will never escape the legacy of his early abuse has long been verified.

Many--probably most--readers will not make it to the end of this novel, either because some particular episode or action is too much to take, or because trudging through to the end doesn't seem worth it. Some might find the narrator and his extreme self-destructiveness at such great length too oppressive. My problem with the narrator has nothing to do with his behavior or  attitudes but rather with his narration's conditions of possibility, so to speak: At no point is it suggested that the narrator is in fact writing down his account, even though it comes to us as a fully articulated, verbally cogent whole (it's a monologue, not a "free indirect" report from an outside narrator). It is as if he is speaking to us directly; we don't get fragmented thoughts or inchoate perceptions. This device, a narration from nowhere, floating in the narrative ether, especially on the scale with which it is used in this novel, eventually becomes too artificial, too convenient, to be credible. An additional layer of artifice is added by setting the story in some near future in which global warming and a heightened authoritarianism has brought the U.S. to the brink of destruction (we're all fucked up). These strategies work to undercut the novel's transgressive force, taking the story too far into the land of make believe. If we're irretrievably fucked up, better to make it real, not the subject of a dystopian fantasy.

Too much artifice renders this sort of transgressive fiction, if not tame, then strangely ineffectual. I'd like my transgression neat, please.

The books included here are:

Rituals Performed in the Absence of Ganymede (11:11 Press), by Mike Corrao

Unidentified Man at Left of Photo (corona\samizdat), by Jeff Bursey

Ezra Slef, The Next Nobel Laureate in Literature (Tartarus Press), by Andrew Komarnyckyj

Babel (Splice), by Gabriel Blackwell

If I plan my reading schedule more sensibly henceforth, I hope to include 5-7 books per issue.

From Is to Are Not

Although Mike Corrao's Rituals Performed in the Absence of Ganymede, as well as his previous Gut Text, a prequel of sorts, audaciously reject just about all of the recognized conventions of prose fiction--down to the placement of words on the page, and even the expectation we will find words on the page--unfortunately the idea motivating both of these books is more interesting in conception than in execution. The effort it makes to render text-as-object, to reconfigure our notions of "text" in the first place, is certainly a worthy one (albeit not a wholly original one), but as a reading experience it does not really engage the reader, either in its language or its interpolated graphical elements, in a way that persuades us that regarding a literary text as something to be perceived as much as read can be compelling in its own way.

Gut Text features four text-fastened "characters" aware of their status as merely textual beings and attempting to reckon with their fate. Rituals Performed in the Absence of Ganymede focuses on one such character, except that this character is the text itself, grappling with its own instability, its own lack of corporeal being. Thus:

Waiting here there is little to do. I am alone. I am empty. My contents have shifted from is to are not.

Swarms of air and heat. The oxygen discolors my skin and weakens my frame.

Let sinews sew me together again and return my eyes to open and my appendages to the ground or sky.

Most of the book is devoted to chronicling this character's attempts to, in effect, get his sinews sewn together again, which, of course are doomed to failure. The reader is also drawn into this drama: at times the text-character directly addresses us, while at others the character and the reader ("you") seem to merge. Other characters are introduced by name ("Nathan Carpenter," "Thelma Gibbs"), but there is no character development as such aside from the protagonist's continuous metamorphosis. None of this is related in a conventional linear narrative, or even through standard paragraphing, but arranged into something closer to stanzas, some longer, some shorter (sometimes a single line). "Arranged" is arguably a better description than "written" of the method used for the book as a whole, as the written text itself is frequently enhanced by situating  it in various places on the page, sometimes put into boxes or different kinds of typeface. Purely graphical elements--various geographical shapes--are also often included, seemingly at random.

Indeed, both Rituals and Gut Text are really assembled rather than composed as conventional prose fiction. This is not in itself a criticism. The notion that the printed page, which is, after all, traditionally the medium fiction writers work in, can be treated as malleable, subject to manipulations that challenge the protocols of writing as embedded in the customs of printing, is perfectly valid, although the gestures made in these books are certainly not new. The sort of experiment Corrao ventures seems to me to be prefigured in Barth's Lost in the Funhouse, in such pieces as "Frame-Tale," "Autobiography," and "Glossolalia," and is especially indebted to Raymond Federman's novels Double or Nothing and Take It or Leave It, probably the first extended experiments in the cartography of the page in American fiction. Finally, neither Rituals Performed in the Absence of Ganymede nor Gut Text seem to significantly advance the efforts to reshape our expectations of "text" begun by these writers.

However, the most serious impediment to a full appreciation of Rituals Performed in the Absence of Ganymede, at least for me, is not a lack of originality but the book's relentless expository prose (despite the typographical maneuvers), which essentially turns it into a series of mini-narratives relating, in generally bland language, the progressive changes the protagonist/text undergoes:

The water evaporates from your blood. Leaving behind a metallic syrup. Oozing from the cuts under your knees and ribs.

This vessel quickly loses its usefulness. You perform and incantation and create a new one. Gathering mounds of geological debris. But the bindings that you have dressed yourself in do not act reliably.

The actions described in this work are inherently disturbing, as the character's transformations often involve images of bodily rupture and dismemberment, but the language used to describe them remain detached and purely denotative. Perhaps the concept of fiction-as-assemblage requires that words and sentences themselves be treated as "materials" to be fitted into place, but this doesn't make the repetitious and often colorless prose any more fun to read. It isn't enough merely to subvert formal conventions; an innovative work needs to offer the reader some additional source of pleasure or interest--in this case a more adventurous style could have helped.

The idea of fiction as verbal architecture is a potentially fruitful one, and surely future writers will produce imaginative and compelling works in redeeming it. Mike Corrao may be one of those writers, but I don't believe he's there yet.

Writing This Yourself

If a book like Rituals Performed in the Absence of Ganymede might be described as a kind of apotheosis of metafiction (not only are we aware of the text as text, we are witnessing the text's coming-into-being), then Jeff Bursey's Unidentified Man at Left of Photo adopts the more "classic" metafictional conceit: a writer writing a novel about writing a novel. The narrator forthrightly acknowledges he is making things up as he goes along, at times providing the moves a novel is expected to make but more often warning the reader such moves have been rejected:

Writing is hard work, often unrewarding, so there's not going to be much effort here to convince you that you're in a version of the so-called real world. Things are told, not shown. Everything's so open-ended you'll soon believe you're writing this yourself. . . .

As it turns out, however, the effort the novel does make proves quite consistent with evoking a semblance of the "real world," precisely because its portrayal of both characters and setting remain "open-ended." As we accompany the narrator through the process of creation, we indeed watch the novel's "world" come into view, but since this is not purely an invented world but the author's recreation of Prince Edward Island (which, indeed, might seem largely uncharted to everyone except Canadians--and perhaps even to many of them), based on his many years as a resident of PEI, the effect is of gaining a slowly developing, ultimately synoptic view of the place (although the novel is more specifically set in Charlottetown).

The characters as well seem both tentatively presented, as if the narrator is not entirely sure what he is going to do with them once they are introduced (with some of the minor characters there are even slippages in identification, the character's name changing even as he/she is invoked), and ultimately part of a broader cross-section of Charlottetown (somewhat more emphasis on the arty/bohemian side of town) that seems all the more convincing because they seem to have been created for no reason other than to be themselves--no "arcs," no moral fables attached to their fates. By the end of the novel, it can't be said the characters have undergone any dramatic transformation, any inner "growth," but this refusal to engage in any of the usual tactics of literary fiction turns out to be the novel's greatest strength.

In addition to the novel's self-reflexive premise, Bursey also incorporates various formal and stylistic stratagems that mark Unidentified Man at Left of Photo as unconventional. One chapter consists of a series of suggestions the narrator has received about what to put in his book, but, he says, "I don't have the ingenuity or energy to work them up," so he presents them as notes. Two chapters, with the same title, are blank. Another chapter is narrated entirely  through questions, and photos are inserted at numerous points in the text. None of these gestures are especially radical, but Bursey's ambition seems clearly enough not to break previously untouched formal ground but to enlist an array of unorthodox formal devices in realizing his novel's subject without falling back on the usual novelistic clichés, an ambition the novel does fulfill, although such a strategy arguably threatens to reduce these devices to just more "tools" a writer might use to raise the same old sort of structure.

Bursey resorts to a more traditional type of device--personification--at the novel's conclusion, although the result is decidedly not a typical kind of ending for a novel. (Krasznahorkai's Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming might be a recent analogue, however.) Bursey brings to life a hurricane, Bruce, who exults in the havoc he wreaks throughout the Atlantic basin before he finally makes his way to Prince Edward Island. Bruce is an especially savage hurricane--RAGE! RAGE! RAGE! KILL!KILL!KILL! is his refrain--as he ignores the advice given by the ghosts of hurricanes past to "stay away from Nova Scotia," but retains enough strength to reach Prince Edward Island, anyway. Thus Bursey essentially destroys the fictional PEI he has endeavored to create, perhaps a final reminder that the setting has been a composed illusion all along. Some readers might regard this inverted deus ex machina as trivializing the achievement of that illusion, but the author might retort: this is a novel, and the end is the end.

The Postmodern Aura

Andrew Komarnyckyj's Ezra Slef, The Next Nobel Laureate in Literature is an academic satire, but it's finally not much about the academy, and the satire seems broad enough (more like farce) that ultimately it has only the bluntest of edges. This is not necessarily in itself a criticism of the book: Although it has some of the features of academic satire, its target is not the academic literary study but the practice of "postmodernism" in literature, and the comedy does not really aspire to outright mockery but is more like an amiable spoof of various affectations of postmodern fiction. The real question is how worthwhile such an endeavor turns out to be.

The novel at first seems to be an exercise similar to Nabokov's Pale Fire or Coetzee's Summertime, narratives masquerading as critical or biographical commentary, but relatively quickly the pretense of writing a biography of the "great" writer Ezra Slef is dropped, and the putative biographer's own story takes over. "We must therefore of necessity turn to my own experience," he tells us after determining he can't relate Slef's experience as a doctoral candidate, and effectively this is the last we hear of Slef's life aside from the way it impinges on the narrator's own. The narrator is Humbert Botekin, a professor of postmodern literature and specialist on Slef at Oxford. The narrative of his own experiences that he provides is a series of absurdities and outrages that shows Slef the writer to be mostly a conman and Botekin himself a narcissist and thief. Very little in Botekin's story actually has much to do with academe. Although the city of Oxford is portrayed in some detail, both the college and Botekin's job at the college are invoked mostly for their value as names--"Oxford," "Professor"--that enhance our perception that he is a pretentious twit.

Much of the story hinges on a Slef manuscript entitled--you guessed it, Ezra Slef, The Next Nobel Laureate in Literature--that Botekin steals when Slef is a guest lecturer at Oxford. While he claims he intended to return the manuscript after poring over it to his satisfaction--in fact he treats it with a creepy, fetishizing cupidity--eventually he contrives to pass it off as his own work. It becomes a runaway success, although as with every other positive development in Botekin's life, it is soon enough followed by its disastrous reversal. I kept waiting for Komarnyckyj do more with the metafictional mirroring of Ezra Slef/Humbert Botekin's book and the book we are reading, but the intricacies of such a conceit are never really pursued. The book-within-a-book device is really just used to allow Botekin to render a first-person account of his own eminently preposterous adventures. 

These adventures have their entertaining moments, but gradually Humbert Botekin really does wear out his welcome. And as his name suggests, the novel heavily leans on references to--at times outright appropriation of--other reputedly postmodern writers. However, it is a stretch to view some of these writers--Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Will Self (even arguably Nabokov and Borges)--as plausibly "postmodern," which betokens the novel's most serious limitation. Its comic energy is dispersed so widely and at times indiscriminately that ultimately its purpose is somewhat obscure. Are we just having a little fun with avant-garde writers and writing (or at least with the idea of the avant-garde)? Is the lampoonery to be taken seriously as a critique of postmodernism? Is it all just a ruse to tell a "rollicking" story? I don't really require an answer to these questions, but posing them does highlight a disappointing obstacle to understanding the book's intended effect.

Undreamt Daydreams

Gabriel Blackwell's novels could be regarded as exercises in creative collaboration--collaboration with known works and writers, the latter generally dead. Shadow Man evokes the the tropes and the manner of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised-Men appropriates both the work and the life of H.P. Lovecraft, while Madeleine E attempts a kind of synthesis of the criticism relating to Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. The stories included in Babel (Splice, 2020) are less exclusively devoted to this particular method of metafictional rewriting--although one of them does center around a nonexistent book by Borges that nevertheless shows up on Google Preview--more surreal or absurdist than metafictional, more focused on character and incident (however askew).

Perhaps this difference in tactics is itself a function of the book's thematic focus on family conflict and especially on the relationship between fathers and sons. Particularly in the first half of the book, the stories depict this relationship as fragile and a source of anguish for both fathers and sons. In the  story called "Fathers and Sons," as well as the one immediately preceding it, "The Invention of an Island," the situations are especially fraught, as the narrators' young sons appear to suffer from developmental afflictions with which the fathers clearly have trouble coping even if their distress is displaced, expressed through curious plot devices: In the  latter, the narrator's wife has taken the son and gone, but not before installing mirrors everywhere, leaving the narrator essentially immobilized. The narrator of the former investigates the disappearance of his grandfather, Rudolph Fentz, as related in a curious letter his own father has sent him. "How was I like Rudolph Fentz," the narrator asks at the story's conclusion, waiting outside his son's school. "Was there time to change? Was there really the will to?"

The incongruities in these two stories are only amplified in some of the other stories that are less focused on a father's anxieties, although images and tropes related to family still predominate. One of the more disturbing stories is "A Field in Winter," in which a young narrator worries about the status of his "brother," who appears to be some amalgam of vegetable, alcohol, and "pickled" human. His father is depicted growing (making? siring?) other brothers whom the narrator (otherwise an only child) once found buried in the field of the title. Additionally, the narrator may be a ghost, or his father may be, although at the story's conclusion they both may be, as they wait in "Mr. Strick's pavilion," where the narrator anticipates that "soon something dark will rise up out of Mr. Strick's pond." The temptation is to try and make this story make some kind of conventional sense, to interpret the grotesque images and strange goings-on as perhaps allegorical, but it is a surreal sort of symbolism that subverts its own figuration, implying meaning that remains just beyond our grasp.

This impression is left as well in stories such as "Leson" and "The Before Unapprehended," In the former, the title character, an ex-soldier now living in a "colony," is feeling "stuck," stagnant. When doctors are unable to help him (aside from being told that "what is wrong must be inside") he begins to take a regimen of pills and other "medicaments" that soon start to work: he literally begins to grow from the inside out, his bodily fluids breaking through the skin, depositing  "bits that had once been Leson, leavings, outpourings of his slow flood." Eventually he empties out completely, reduced to the flow of his bodily substances. The story teases us with unexplained details--what is this colony? what are these "passage wo/rms" the characters keep seeing?--but again seem to promise more meaning than they deliver. The same is true of the latter story, narrated by a man marching and reciting verses with a procession of other men (their destination and purpose unexplained), who has noticed that one of their "brothers" has disappeared (although he doesn't actually know which brother it might be). Thus an element of mystery is set up at the very beginning of the story, but the narrator doesn't so much solve it as dissolve it in quasi-metaphysical speculation, surmising that the missing brother escaped through a hole in language:

There must be a reality that does not obtain, but does exist, and it seems to me that brother must have found it. What if he found a way to follow the steps given by these subverses instead of the steps the rest of us were taking, the steps given by the verses being recited? Where would such a path lead? Wouldn't it take him into regions that exist in the same way undreamt daydreams exist?

Blackwell's stories are elusive enough that perhaps it is unwise to extrapolate from any specific passage to a broader generalization about his assumptions, but perhaps this narrator's speculation concerning the whereabouts of his missing companion does provide a perspective that can help orient us to the particular (but satisfying) kind of strangeness we find in Babel. Reading these stories, the world they invoke does start to seem like "a reality that does not obtain, but does exist"--at least here, in this reading experience of them. And it is as if the stories as a whole have indeed exited, if not language itself, then through a hole in the conventional representation of "reality" in literary language, emerging into "undreamt daydreams" (or nightmares) that Blackwell has obligingly gone ahead and dreamt for us.